O little hands that strain
A mother’s hand in vain
With terror vague and vast:—­
Parch’d eyes that cannot shed
One tear upon the head,
A young child’s head, too bright for such fell death to blast! 
Ah! sadder captive train ne’er filed to doom
Through vengeful Rome!

From Ganges’ reedy shore
The death-boats they unmoor,
Stack’d high with hopeless hearts;
A slowly-drifting freight
Through the red jaws of Fate,
Death-blazing banks between, and flame-wing’d arrow-darts:—­
Till down the holy stream those cargoes pour
Their flame and gore.

In feral order slow
The slaughter-barges go,
Martyrs of heathen scorn: 
While, saved from flood and fire
To glut the tyrant’s ire,
The quick and dead in one, from their red shambles borne,
Maiden and child, in that dark grave they throw,
Our well of woe!

Ah spot on which we gaze
Through Time’s all-softening haze,
In peace, on them at peace
And taken home to God! 
—­O whether ’neath the sod,
Or sea, or desert sand, what care,—­if that release
From this dim shadow-land, through pathways dim,
Bear us to Him!

But those fourteen, the while,
Wrapt in the present, smile
On their grim baffled foe;
Till o’er the wall he heaps
The fuel-pile, and steeps
With all that burns and blasts;—­and now, perforce, they go
Hack’d down and thinn’d, beyond that temple-door
But Seven,—­no more.

O Elements at strife
With this poor human life,
Stern laws of Nature fair! 
By flame constrain’d to fly
The treacherous stream they try,—­
And those dark Ganges waves suck down the souls they bear!—­
Ah, crowning anguish!  Dawn of hope in sight;
Then, final night!

And now, Four heads, no more,
Life’s flotsam flung ashore,
They lie:—­But not as they
Who o’er a dreadful past
The heart’s-ease sigh may cast! 
Too worn! too tried!—­their lives but given them as a prey! 
Whilst all seems now a dream, a nought of nought,
For which they fought!

—­O stout Fourteen, who bled
O’erwhelm’d, not vanquished! 
In those dark days of blood
How many dared, and died,
And others at their side
Fresh heroes, sprang,—­a race that cannot be subdued! 
—­Like them who pass’d Death’s vale, and lived;—­the Four
Saved from Cawnpore!

The English garrison at Cawnpore, with a large number of sick, women, and children, were besieged in their hastily made and weak earthworks by Nana Sahib from June 6 to June 25, 1857.  Compelled to surrender, under promise of safe convoy down the Ganges, on the 27th they were massacred by musketry from the banks; the thatch of the river-boats being also fired.  The survivors were murdered and thrown into the well upon Havelock’s approach on July 15.

One boat managed to escape unburnt on June 27.  It was chased through the 28th and 29th, by which time the crowd on board was reduced to fourteen men, one of whom, Mowbray-Thomson, has left a narrative equally striking from its vividness and its modesty.  Seven escaped from the small temple in which they defended themselves; four only finally survived to tell the story.