The Highlanders knelt down on being taken into the building and 'took a Highland oath that for every one of our poor creatures who were thus slain, 100 of the enemy should bite the dust, and I need not add that they kept their vow'

From The Great Mutiny by Christopher Hibbert. Page 211.

'No doubt this is strange law,' Neill commented, 'but it suits the occasion well, and I hope I shall not be interfered with until the room is thoroughly cleansed in this way ... I will hold my own with the blessing and help of God. I cannot help seeing that His finger is in all this.'

The 'strange law' - which operated against those who had no direct connection with the murders, as well as those few who might have had and could be found - continued in force for over three months. During this time piteous messages - such as 'Dear Jesus, send us help today, and deliver us not into the hands of our enemies' - were inscribed on the walls in order to increase the fury of the soldiers who were marched through Bibighar, on their arrival in Cawnpore, to witness the scene of their countrywomen's massacre. The floors of the house were left as Neill had found them. Private Wickins of the 90th Light Infantry, who passed through Cawnpore in October, said the buildings still presented 'a most horrid spectacle':

There were little children's socks and shoes and dresses of every description all covered with the blood and brains of the innocent. Even the trees in the neighbourhood bore evidence of the fiendish cruelty of the Asians, and outside the building, strewed upon the ground in many places, there was a quantity of females' hair, and I would have preserved some of it, but it was too rotten owing to its being exposed to the weather.

Private Metcalfe of the 32nd said that the Highlanders knelt down on being taken into the building and 'took a Highland oath that for every one of our poor creatures who were thus slain, 100 of the enemy should bite the dust, and I need not add that they kept their vow'.

Officers, too, took this oath. Garnet Wolseley, a captain in the 90th, who confessed on arrival in Calcutta that his sword was 'thirsty for the blood of these cursed women slayers', told his brother that after walking through 'that slaughter house at Cawnpore where all the marks of the late atrocities were still fresh', he made the vow that 'most soldiers made there - of vengeance and of having blood for blood, not drop for drop, but barrels and barrels of the filth which flows in these n*****s' veins for every drop of blood which marked the floors and walls of that fearful house'. Wolseley subsequently asked his company for a volunteer to execute a mutineer said to be implicated in the Cawnpore massacre. A similar request had been made in the Crimea where not a single man would agree to act as hangman though offered a discharge home and twenty pounds bonus. On this occasion, however, every man in the company stepped forward to offer his services.