August the second, the Year of Our Lord 18--; stationed at Sankheri.
If my writing is incomprehensible and my descriptions seem wild when I return to read this in later years, I can only attribute it to the terrible sights I have seen. This is a faithful account, insofar as it is in my ability to present, of all those things which occurred on the twenty-sixth of July, last month past, in the village of Sankheri, in Her Majesty’s territory of India.
My Regiment, HM 60th Rifles of the British Indian Army, was dispatched this month past to Sankheri, under orders to prevent any one from leaving, to recapture the village and to effect a rescue of the hostages taken from the raid on Sanchi earlier that month if possible. It was hoped that our presence might intimidate the rebel sikhs into surrendering, but this did not happen as we were greeted by cannon shells before we had come within two miles of Sankheri.
We arrived at our camping ground about three miles from the village of Sankheri, out of range of cannon-fire, and pitched our tents in a Banyan copse. It was an ideal place for the purpose, being as it was right next to a spring of fresh water, to which the men gratefully applied themselves. The watch was set on the encampment and the night progressed without incident.
In the morning the peace was disturbed, but not by the explosions of enemy shells as we had all expected and feared. There was a stir beside the spring, and the officers went to find the cause of it and meanwhile it spread through the ranks that the water in the spring tasted of blood, as if fresh meat had been washed in it. Much superstitious muttering ensued, but it was nothing to the outcry that arose when the major, using a clean white hand-kerchief, dipped some of the water from the spring and found that the water carried a faint yellow-orange tint.
At this discovery the men were restless and such a commotion arose that the officers were only able to restore order at the expense of many hoarse throats and promised floggings. I could only speculate at the cause of the contamination in the spring, but there was a runner sent to headquarters from Colonel Pickering and soon it was seen that he had received a reply. The men were formed up, I with my platoon in the right flank, and we marched on Sankheri.
We lost some men to cannon-fire. The man who marched next to me was cut in half by a cannon-ball, and I considered myself lucky that it was not a shell or I should have died along with him. As it was, he was the only casualty that my platoon suffered. His name was Mahomet Akbar and he was my second-best shot. The cannon emplacements firing on us were over-run around mid-day, and we turned them upon the village. After three hours of shells, Sankheri raised the white flag and we had won. We entered the village and the Regiment was split into companies to enforce order and take care of what duties were necessary.
The task given to the company of which I am a soldier was to search Sankheri for survivors of the raid on Sanchi. We fanned through the houses but nothing was found until one man gave a shout and stumbled out of the courtyard of a walled-around house. We could get nothing sensible from him and so I ordered my platoon to search the house.
My words cannot adequately describe the sight that met our eyes. It appeared that the walls had been painted in black paint, but it was seen when one of the men went to touch it that it was a covering of the flies that are ubiquitous in India. Underneath that choking mass the wall was covered in drying blood and it was only with the greatest courage that we steeled ourselves to enter the house. However our apprehensions were not met. There was nothing within the house of any greater horror than what was without. There was much blood on the floor and on the walls reaching to a height of about six feet in great splashes.
We did not find the bodies from which the blood must have come and a search was made through Sankheri. We found nothing more in any of the houses and out buildings and neither did we find anything in the few dry gardens, although all through Sankheri the stench of corruption was thick. When we expanded the search to include every thing in the village, we discovered the bodies inside a covered well.
I can only give the facts, but the facts do not carry half the horror of actuality of the discovery. The well was near-full, within five feet of the top, with the corpses of women and children, the late hostages Sanchi. They were all in pieces. Arms and legs, in some cases heads also, had been hacked from the bodies and thrown in around them to allow for more room.
We were a long time getting them out, and many men collapsed during the sorrowful task. I supervised the duty under Lieutenants Neville and Berks, and near the end we could only count on a man to make three or four trips into the well before he was too ill to continue. Eventually I was required to lower myself into that black hole, with a lantern and the swing to place a body in. I could not help but feel repugnance and despair, and though it was my duty to see that the women were brought up to receive a Christian burial, I thought of nothing but how soon I might be out.
The stench was suffocating at the bottom of the well. Even though most of the bodies had been removed the smell of mortification permeated the stones of the walls. I attached the body of a small boy, with all his limbs in place, to the swing and signalled for it to be lifted, and then while I was waiting for the swing to return, I noticed that nearly all of the bodies at this depth were whole. I supposed that their killers must not have realised that they would not all fit in whole yet.
The swing came down again eleven more times before the most dreadful thought struck me and I had to be pulled out myself. What I had realised was this; there was running water in the well. I had reached the layer in contact with the black liquid and had already pulled two bloated bodies from it, and in the light of the lantern they appeared pale and without blood in them. I could hear a small current in the water, and this led me to think on the contamination of wells and underground rivers which had been a problem when the 2nd of Rifles had camped in the province of Punjab.
I realised then that the contamination in the spring that morning had been the blood of these women, and I collapsed in an unseemly display of emotion, and had to be removed from my duty as the others.
I cannot write further on this at this time.