Rensselaer Republican, Volume 27, Number 14, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 November 1894 — MODERN MARTYRS. [ARTICLE]

MODERN MARTYRS.

Strength of Christian Heroes .in Times of Great Trial. Lessons Drawn From the Famous Beige of r ~~ Luckiaow—lir. Taiiiaiaire'B Sermon tor v the Press. The Rev. Dr. Talmage, last Sunday, began his series of round the world sermons through the press, the first subject selected being Lucknow, India. The text chosen was Deuteronomy xx, 19. "When thou shalt besiege a city- a long time in making war against it to take it, thou shalt not destroy the trees thereof by forcing an ax against them.” Theawfulest thing in war is besiegement, for to the work of deadly weapons it adds hunger and starvation and plague. Besiegement is sometimes necessary, but my text commands mercy even in that. The fruit trees must be spared because they afford food for man. "Thou shalt not destroy the trees thereof by forcing an ax against them.” But in my recent journey round the world I found at Lucknow, India, the remains of the most merciless besiegementof the ages, and I proceed to tell you that story for four great reasons —to show you what a horrid thing war is and to make you all advocates for peace, to show you what genuine Christian character is under bombardment, to put a coronation on Christian courage and to show you how splendidly good people die. It was my great desire to have some one who had witnessed the scene transacted in Lucknow in 1857 conduct us over the place. We found just the man. He was a young soldier at the time the greatest mutiny of the ages broke out, and he was put with others inside the residency, which was a clusters of buildings making a fortress in which the representatives of the English government lived, and was to be the scene of an endurance and a bombardment the story of which poetry and painting and history and secular and sacred eloquence have been trying to depict. Our escort not only had a good memory of what had happened, but had talent enough to rehearse the tragedy. In the early part of 1857 all over India the natives were ready to break out in rebellion against all foreigners and especially against the civil and military lepresentatives of the English government. A half-dozen causes are mentioned for the feeling of discontent and insurrection that was evidenced • throughout India. The most of these causes were mere pretexts. Greaked cartridges were no doubt an exasperation. The grease ordered by the English government to be used on these cartridges was taken from cows and pigs, and grease to the Hindoos is unclean, and to bite these cartridges at the loading of the guns would be an offense to their religion. leaders of the Hindoos, said that these greased cartridges were only part of an attempt by the English government to make the natives give up their religion. Thus unbounded indignation was aroused. Another cause of the mutiny was that another large province of India had been annexed to the British empire and thousands of officials in the employ of the king of that province were thrown out of position, and they were all ready for trouble making. Another cause was said to be the bad government exercised by some English officials in India. The simple fact was that the natives of India were a conquered race and the English were the conquerors. It was evident in Lucknow that the natives were about to rise and put to death all the Europeans they could lay their hands on, and into the residency the Christian population of Lucknow hastened for defense from the tigers in human form which were growling for their victims. The occupants of the residency, or the fort, were —military and non-combatants, men, women and children —in number about 1,692.

“Here to the left,” said our escort, “are the remains of a building the first floor of which in other days had been used as a banqueting hall, but then was used as a hospital. At this part the amputations took place, and ail such patients died. Amputations were performed without chloroform. All the anaesthetics were exhausted. A fracture that in other climates and under , other circumstances would have come to easy convalescence here proved fatal. “Yonder itohs Dr. Fayrer’s house, who was the surgeon of the place and is now Queen Victoria’s doctor. This upper room was the officers’ room, and there Sir Henry Lawrence, our dear commander, was wo unded. While he sat there a shell struck the room, and some one suggested that he had better leave the room, but he smiled and said, ‘Lightning never strikes twice in thejjame place.’ Hard’y had he said this wjien another shell tore off his thigh, and he was carried dying into Dr. Eayrer's house on the other side of the road. Sir Henry Lawrence had been in poor health for a long time before the mutiny. He had been in the Indian service for years, and he had started for England to recover his health, but getting as far as Bombay the English government ••equested him to remain at least awhile, for he could not be spared in such dangerous times. He came here to Lucknow and foreseeing the siege of this residency bad filled many of the rooms with grain, with-

out which the reaideaey-would have, been obliged to surrender. There were also taken by him into this residency rice and sugar and charcoal and fodder for the oxen and hay for the horses. But now, at the time when all the people were looking to him for wisdom and courage, Sir Henry is dying.” "Show me,” I said, "the rooms where the women and children stayed'during those awful months." Then we crossed over and went down into the cellar of the residency. With a shudder of horror indescribable I entered the cellars where 622 women and children had been crowded until the whole floor was full. I know the exact number, for I counted their names on the roil. As one of the ladies wrote in her diary, speaking of these women, she said. "They lay upon the floor fitting into each other like bits in a puzzle.” Wives had obtained from their husbands the promise that the husbands would shoot them rather than let them fall into the hands of these desperadoes. The women within the residency were kept on the smallest allowance that would maintain life. No opportunity of privacy. The death angel and the birth angel touched wings as they passed. Flies, mosquitoes, vermin in full possession of the place, and these women in momentary expectation that the enraged savages would rush upon them in a violence of which club and sword and torch and throat cutting would be the milder forms. : Our escort told us that again and again news had come that Havelock, and Outram were on the way to fetch these besieged ones out of their wretchedness. They had received a letter from Havelock rolled up in a quill and carried in the mouth of a disguised messenger -a letter telling them he was on the way—but the next news was that Havelock had been compelled to retreat. It was constant vacillation between hope and despair. But one day they ' heard the guns of relief sounding nearer and nearer. Yet all the houses of Lucknow were fortresses filled with armed misc reants, and every step of Havelock and his army was contested —firing from housetops, firing from windows, firing from doorways.

Tasked our friend if he thought that the world famous story of a Scotch lass in her delirium hearing the Scotch bagpipes advancing with the Scotch regiment was a true story. He said he did not know but that it was true. Without this man telling me I knew from my ownXservatibn that delirium sometimes quickens Some of the faculties, and I rather think the Scotch lass in her delirium was the first to bear the bagpipes. I decline to believe that class of people who would like to kill all the poetry of the world and banish all the fine sentiment. "Were you present when Havelock came in?” I asked, for I could suppress the question no longer. His answer came: ~ "I was not at the moment present, but with some other young fellows I saw soldiers dancing while two Highland pipers played, and T said, ‘What is all this excitement about?’ Then we came up and saw that Havelock was in, and Outram was in, and the regimepts were pouring in.” "Show us where they came in,” I exclaimed, for I knew that they did not enter through the gate ofc the residency, that being banked up inside to keep the murderers out.

‘‘Here it is.” he answered. “Here it is—the embrasure through which they came.” ■ As we stood there, although the scene was thirty-seven years ago, I saw them come in—Havelock pale and sick but triumphant, and Outram. whom all the equestrian statues in Calcutta and Europe cannot too grandly represent. “ What then happened?” I said to my escort. “Oh!” he said, “that is impossible to tell. The earth was removed from the gate, and some of us laughed, and some cried, and some prayed, and some danced. Highlanders so dust-covered and enough blood and wounds on their faces to make them unrecognizable, snatched the babes out of their mothers’ arms and kissed them and passed the babies along for other soldiers to kiss, and the wounded men crawled out of the hospital to join in the cheering, and it was wild jubilee until the first excitement passed." t “But were you not embarrassed by the arrival of Havelock and 1,400 men who brought no food with them?” He answered: “Of course we were put on smaller rations immediately in order that they might share with us. but we knew that the coming of this re-in-forcement would help us to hold the place until further relief should come. Had not this first relief arrived as it did, in a day or two at most, and perhaps in an hour, the besiegers would have broken in, and our.end would have come.” On the following day I visited the grave of Havelock. The scenes of hardship and self-sacrifice through which he had passed were too much for mortal endurance, and in a few days after Havelock left the residency which he had relieved he lay in a tent dying, while his son, whom I saw in London on mv way there, was reading to the old hero the consolatory scriptures. The telegraph , wires had told all nations that Have- | lock was sick unto death. He had received the message of congratula- | tion from Queen Victoria over his triumphs and had been knighted, and such a reception as, England never gave to any man since Wellington came back from Waterloo awaited his return. He declared in I his last hours: v 1

"I die happy and contented. I have for forty years bo ruled my life that when death came I might face it without fear. To die is gain.” Sir Henry Havelock, the son in whose arms the father died, when I came through London invited three of the heroes of Lucknow to mcetme at his table and told me concerning his father some most inspiring and Christian things. He said: "My father knew not what fear was. He would say to me in the morning as he came out of his tent. ‘Harrv. have you read the book?’ " ‘Yes.’ " ‘Have you said your prayers?’ " ‘Yes.’ " ‘Have you had your breakfast?’ " ‘Yes.’ " ‘Come, then, and let us mount to go out to be shot at and die like gentlemen.’ ” But I said while standing a?t Havelock’s grave, why does not England take his dust to herself arid in Westminster Abbey make him a pillow? In all her history of wars there is no name so magnetic, yet she has expressed nothing on this man’s tomb. His widow reared the tombstone. Do you say, "Let him sleep in the region where he did his grandest deeds?” The same reason would have buried Wellington in Belgium, and Von Moltkeat Versailles, and Grant at Vicksburg, and Stonewall Jackson far away from his beloved Lexington, Va. Take him home, O England! The rescuer of the men, women and children at Lucknow! His ear now dulled could not hear the roll of the organ when it sounds through the venerable abbey the national anthem, but it would hear the same _trumpet that brings up from among those sacred walls the form of Outram, his fellow hero in the overthrow of the Indian mutiny. Let parliament make appropriation from the national treasury and some great warship under some favorite admiral sail across Mediterranean and Arabian seas and wait at Bombay harbor for the coming of the conqueror of conquerors, and then, saluted by the shipping of all Tree nations, let him pass on and pass up and come under the arches of the abbey and along the aisles where have been carried the mightiest dead of many centuries. Some audiences and some readers are so slow of thought and so stupid that they need an application made of every subject. But the people who get this sermon have made the application for themselves already. I challenge you to say whether or not I have kept my promise when in the opening of this discourse I said I would show you four things—what an awful affair war is, what genuine Christian character is under bombardment, what is the coronation of Christian courage and how splendidly good people die. And here endeth my first sermon of the round the world series.