'God grant I may have acted with justice,' Neill wrote on 17 June. 'I know I have with severity'

From The Great Mutiny by Christopher Hibbert. Page 201.

Neill lost no time. Although utterly exhausted and so weak that he could swallow nothing except water and champagne and had to be carried on a litter into the batteries, he issued orders for the bombardment of the town and for the retaking of the bridge which the rebels had captured; he bought up or destroyed all the liquor in the fort; he asked Brayser to persuade the Sikhs that they would have better chances of plunder if they camped outside the walls, and he sent out fighting patrols to intimidate the surrounding countryside into submission. Eagerly responding to his orders, European volunteers and Sikhs descended upon the town, burning houses and slaughtering the inhabitants, old men, women and children as well as those more likely to be active rebels who were submitted to the travesty of a trial. 'The gallows and trees adjoining it had each day the fresh fruits of rebellion displayed upon them,' admitted E. A. Thurburn who was appointed Deputy Judge Advocate General. 'Hundreds of natives in this manner perished and some on slight proofs of criminality.'13 'Every day ten or a dozen niggers are hanged,' Lieutenant Pearson of the 84th told his mother. Their corpses hung 'by twos and threes from branch and signpost all over the town . . . For three months did eight dead-carts daily go their rounds from sunrise to sunset, to take down corpses which hung at the cross-roads, and the market-places, poisoning the air of the city, and to throw their loathsome burdens into the Ganges.'

'God grant I may have acted with justice,' Neill wrote on 17 June. 'I know I have with severity, but under all the circumstances I trust for forgiveness.' The next day cholera broke out in the fort. There were no medicines to treat the symptoms or alleviate the pain, no punkahs to cool the sufferers in the appalling heat. Twenty-eight men died within two days. The screams of the sick were so terrifying that two women occupying a room over the hospital were said to have died of fright.