man. who passed through that memorable epoch shall himself have passed away from the world. For there are thousands (Europeans and natives combined) still living who have a separate experience of their own to relate, and whose reminiscences would shed new light on yet untold incidents, or rather tragedies, of those eventful days. I need hardly add that I allude only to those men — like ourselves — upon whom the thunderbolt of the Mutiny fell, and not to those who subsequently aided in its suppression.
In fact, the stage on which that tragical catastrophe occurred was so vast in extent, and the actors on it so prodigious in numbers, that even at this distance of time numberless episodes of the Mutiny — all more or less laden with agonising sorrow — are unknown, and, alas! many never will be known; for hundreds of our unfortunate countrymen, who could have described harrowing and heart-rending scenes, perished; and their sad fate is understood only so far that to this day their unburied bones are strewn in remote jungles, or lie bleaching on many of the forlorn plains of Upper India.
And in corroboration of these cursory remarks, Sunker Tewāre’s story would probably have passed into oblivion, had not we met him through the merest chance. As he told it, so I now proceed to tell it, although clothed in my own matter-of-fact words, as embodied in the following chapter.
