FernFolio

For sixteen year-old Jack O’Hara, a new life in India is both an exotic and fascinating departure from his previous life in the wilderness of Canada West and a return to where his Irish father and Indian mother met and married, and where he was born. With his parents both dead of smallpox, Jack comes to city Cawnpore to live with his aunt and uncle, and tries to adapt to the rigid and narrow confines of the British colonial society that frowns upon his rather easy Canadian ways and who whispers behind its hands about the dark skin that identifies him as ‘half-caste’.
Despite his frustrations with his very proper aunt Katherine and her blustering English husband, Jack finds that he has come to love India, and eagerly seeks out his friend Hari, the stable boy, to learn Hindi and begin to unravel the intricacies of Indian politics, history and culture, especially its caste system.
When Jack happens to mention to Hari, one morning in May of 1857, that someone has forgotten a stack of chapattis on the porch of his aunt and uncle’s bungalow, the stable boy’s becomes very concerned and eventually admits to his friend that he fears that trouble is coming. Within days, there are reports of uprisings among the native troops, and Jack and his aunt and uncle are ordered to move into the nearby barracks. Crowded into two long buildings surrounded by a hastily-dug trench, some one thousand men, women and children try to survive cramped conditions, blinding heat, and scarce food and water as Wheeler’s Entrenchment, as the compound comes to be called, comes under siege by native Indian soldiers determined to free their country of ‘feringhees’.
As the siege continues, Jack, his soldier friend, Tommy, and Alice, the General’s half-caste daughter, work valiantly under an almost constant barrage of cannon and gunfire to defend the entrenchment, help the sick and wounded, and dispose of the dead. As food dwindles and the dead toll mounts, they begin to despair of rescue by British forces and start to fear that no one will survive at Cawnpore.
Where Soldiers Lie is a moving account of what happened at Cawnpore in 1857, during the Indian Mutiny. Jack learns that, in terrible times, the weak can find the strength and courage to perform acts of great heroism while the strong can simply give up and die. He also learns that, in the midst of unspeakable violence and atrocities, ordinary people can act with extraordinary generosity of spirit. Once again, John Wilson has vividly brought to life a moment of our collective past. We are the richer for it.
FernFolio Editor