"And now commenced the work of retribution at Peshawur. Courts Martial were sitting all day, and after all that had occurred here and down country, you may be sure that the officers composing them were in no very merciful mood. The first for trial were the Sepoys who had deserted during the night after the disarming. They were let off rather easily, only one native officer and twelve non-commissioned officers and men being sentenced to death. These were accordingly hung in the presence of the whole force. The remainder were sentenced to various terms of transportation and imprisonment. The next for trial were the mutineers of the 55th, who had been taken in the very act, with arms in their hands: of course, no court martial could arrive at any but one decision regarding them; they were all sentenced to be blown away from guns. A very proper sentence, and one that, in my humble opinion, should have been at once confirmed and carried out. Remember these men were soldiers - had all solemnly sworn fidelity, loyalty and obedience to their officers - and now they had been guilty of rank, open mutiny, the worst crime a soldier can commit. Guilty, too of robbery - and of what further atrocities they would have been guilty had they been successful, we can only judge too surely by the acts of their brethren down country. Remember too that there were 5000 men in Peshawur ready and willing to break out in the same way the moment they could get a chance, and to whom it was, of course, a subject of some interest to see how we were going to treat the crime of open mutiny. These men required an example - a terrible example - that would have struck fear into their souls, and effectually suppressed all ideas of committing the same crime, and incurring the same penalty. One would have thought that, taking these points into consideration, the just sentence passed on these men would have been carried out on all of them, without a single exception.
But no - Exeter Hall ideas and a dread of public opinion in England, were powerful even up here at the Khyber, and it was decided that two out of three of these justly forfeited lives should be spared, and only one in three should be executed. I gladly acquit the Peshawur authorities of this grand mistake; this squeamishness in inflicting due punishment on murderous mutineers emanated from a higher authority than any here. Well then, forty men were to be blown away. I presume, Ebony, that this is a sight which, in your manifold experience of the world, you have never witnessed. It was an awfully imposing scene! All the troops, European and native, armed and disarmed, loyal and disaffected, were drawn up on parade, forming three sides of a square; and drawn up very carefully, you may be sure, so that any attempt on the part of the disaffected to rescue the doomed prisoners would have been easily checked. Forming the fourth side of the square were the guns (9-pounders), ten in number, which were to be used for the execution. The prisoners, under a strong European guard, were then marched into the square - their crimes and sentences read aloud to them, and at the head of each regiment. They were then marched round the square and up to the guns. The first ten were picked out - their eyes were bandaged, and they were bound to the guns, their backs leaning against the muzzles, and their arms fastened to the wheels. The port-fires were lighted, and at a signal from the Artillery-Major, the guns were fired. It was a horrid sight that met the eye: a regular shower of human fragments of heads, of arms, of legs, appeared in the air through the smoke, and when that cleared away, these fragments lying on the ground - fragments of Hindoos, and fragments of Mussulmans, all mixed together, were all that remained of those ten mutineers. Three times more was this scene repeated, but so great is the disgust we all feel for the atrocities committed by the rebels, that we had no room in our hearts for any feeling of pity; perfect callousness was reflected on every European's face; a look of grim satisfaction could even be seen in the countenances of the gunners serving the guns.
But far different was the effect on the native portion of the spectators; their black faces grew ghastly pale as they gazed breathlessly at the awful spectacle. You must know that this is nearly the only form in which death has any terrors for a native. If he is hung, or shot by musketry, he knows that his friends or relatives will be allowed to claim his body, and will give him the funeral rights required by his religion: if a Hindoo, that his body will be burned with all due ceremonies; and if a Mussulman, that his remains will be decently interred, as directed in the Koran. But if sentenced to death in this form, he knows that his body will be blown into a thousand pieces, and that it will be altogether impossible for his relatives, however devoted to him, to be sure of picking up all the fragments of his own particular body; and the thought that perhaps a limb of some one of a different religion to himself might possibly be burned or buried with the remainder of his own body, is agony to him. But notwithstanding this, it was impossible for the mutineers' direst hater not to feel some degree of admiration for the way in which they met their deaths.
Nothing in their lives became them like the leaving of them. Of the whole forty, only two showed any signs of fear, and they were bitterly reproached by the others for so disgracing their race. They certainly died like men. After the first ten had been disposed of, the next batch, who had been looking on all the time, walked up to the guns quite calmly and unfalteringly and allowed themselves to be blindfolded and tied up, without moving a muscle, or showing the slightest signs of fear, or even concern. Whence had these men this strength? Their religion, bad as it may be and is, in all other points, at least befriends them well at the hour of death; it teaches them well that great and useful lesson, how to die. It is their religion that supports them, for there is no native, however low in the scale of society - however deeply sunk in vice, in debauchery, and in crime - but acknowledges and practices the form of some sort of religion. Even in the midst of his crimes he acknowledges that there is a God, and calls on that God to sustain him at the hour of his death."
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine Vol. 82 (505) Nov 1857 pp 610 & 611
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