Follow the Drum - (Leasor James)(Paperback)

Follow the Drum is a story of men and women caught in a cataclysm of mutiny, hatred, fear and passion. India, in the mid-nineteenth century, was virtually nun by a British commercial concern, the Honourable East India Trading Company, whose directors would pay tribute to one Indian ruler and the depose another in their efforts to maintain their balance sheet of power and profit. To back up their decisions they maintained an Indian native army with British officers helped, when needed, by British regular troops. But great changes were already casting dark shadows across the land. The electric telegraph, the steamship and the railway were shrinking distances, while missionaries were preaching new gospels. Indian soldiers feared that their ancient traditions were being eroded, and when a stupid order was given to use cartridges greased with cow fat and pig lard (one animal sacred to Hindus and the other abhorrent to Moslems) there was mutiny. Even then, the British senior officers, many of them drink-sodden and long past retiring age, did not realise the magnitude of the opposition to them. They responded by having sepoys fired from guns and disbanding whole regiments, which, instead of calming tempers, merely accelerated the eruption of the Indian Mutiny. In the terrible days of the burning summer of 1857, the British, outnumbered in some garrisons by ten to one, in others by a thousand to one, fought back for bare survival. Conventional leaders were thus frequently displaced b
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