Note

The British at the Military Stations.—The reader will have gathered, from the details given in various chapters, that the stations at which the military servants of the Company resided, in the Mofussil or country districts, bore a remarkable relation to the Indian towns and cities. They were in most cases separated from the towns by distances varying from one mile to ten, and formed small towns in themselves. Sometimes the civil officers had their bungalows and cutcheries near these military cantonments; while in other instances they were in or near the city to which the cantonment was a sort of appendage. Such, with more or less variety of detail, was the case at Patna (Dinapoor), Benares (Chunar), Cawnpore, Lucknow, Allahabad, Furruckabad (Futteghur), Agra, Delhi, Gwalior, Lahore (Meean Meer), Nagpoor (Kamptee), Indore (Mhow), Hyderabad (Secunderabad), Moorshedabad (Berhampore), Saugor, &c. The marked separation between the native and the British portions of the military stations has been described in a very animated way, by an able and distinguished correspondent of the Times, one of whose letters contains the following paragraph:

‘For six miles along the banks of the Ganges extend the ruins of the English station of Cawnpore. You observe how distinct they are from the city. The palace of the Victoria Regia at Chatsworth is not more unlike the dirty ditch in which lives the humble duck-weed—Belgravia is not more dissimilar to Spitalfields—than is the English quarter of an Indian station to the city to which it is attached. The one is generally several miles away from the other. There is no common street, no link to connect the one with the others; and the one knows nothing of the other. Here are broad roads, lined on each side with trees and walls, or with park-like grounds, inside which you can catch glimpses of gaily-painted one-storied villas, of brick, covered with cement, decorated with Corinthian colonnades, porticoes, and broad verandahs—each in its own wide park, with gardens in front, orchards, and out-offices. There are narrow, tortuous, unpaved lanes, hemmed in by tottering, haggard, miserable houses, close and high, and packed as close as they can stand (and only for that they would fall), swarming with a hungry-eyed population. The mosque and the Hindoo temple are near each other, but they both shun the church, just as the station avoids the city.... In the station there are hotels, ball-rooms, magazines, shops, where all the habits and customs of Europe, sometimes improved and refined by the influence of the East, are to be found; and when the cool of the evening sets in, out stream the carriages and horses and buggies, for the fashionable drive past the long line of detached villas within their neat enclosures, surrounded by shadowing groves and rich gardens. They pass the lines or barracks of the native infantry—a race of whom they know almost less than they do of the people of the town; and they are satisfied with the respect of action, with the sudden uprising, the stiff attitude of attention, the cold salute, regardless of the insolence and dislike of the eye; they chat and laugh, marry and are given in marriage, have their horse-races, their balls, their card-parties, their dinners, their plate, their tradesmen’s bills, their debts; in fact, their everything that English society has, and thus they lived till the deluge came upon them. We all know how nobly they stemmed its force, what heroic struggles they made against its fury. But what a surprise when it burst in upon them! What a blow to all their traditions! What a rebuke to their blind confidence! There is at the moment I write these lines a slight explosion close at hand, followed by the ascent of some dark columns of earth and bricks into the air. We are blowing up the Assembly-rooms of Cawnpore in order to clear the ground in front of the guns of our intrenchment, and billiard-rooms and ball-rooms are flying up in fragments to the skies. Is not that a strange end for all Cawnpore society to come to? Is it not a curious commentary on our rule, and on our position in India?’