Summary

[Illustrated with over one hundred maps, photos and portraits, of the battles, individuals and places involved in the Indian Mutiny]
Life for Katherine Mary Bartrum must have seemed to have been almost perfect in early 1857, wife of a well-liked and respected medical officer posted just outside Lucknow and with a new child in tow the many servants she had must have helped here enormously. However, her world was turned upside down by the Sepoy rebellion which was exploded in May 1857; living in perpetual fear that the revolt would reach them the slept with a sword and pistol under their pillows. Worse was to follow Mrs Bartrum was uprooted from her husband as the small military outpost that she lived on was deemed to be unsafe and she and her baby had to endure a horrible night march to the more well-defended Lucknow. Lucknow however proved to be a magnet for the murderous mutineers and they lay siege to the defended residency, the siege had begun in earnest. The conditions inside the ramparts steadily worsened, and Mrs Bartrum among many other was forced to endure appalling conditions as supplies ran out. The siege was lifted some months later and Mrs Bartrum looked forward to a reunion with her husband having managed to survive the awful privations of the cramped quarters she shared with 13 other women and their children. Then the heart-breaking news that her husband had been killed during the fighting arrived; leaving here alone in India with a small child with no resources to call upon. Somehow she managed to gain passage back to England, but the night before the journey home she was further shattered by the death of her child after months of stresses.
Her heart-breaking memoir, partially diary entries and partially letters, is a dramatic and tragic tale of loss amid the ruins of the mutiny.