Chapter 59

Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist
but you have ceased to live.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

Often, the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict
truth.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

We were driven over Sir Colin Campbell's route by a British officer, and
when I arrived at the Residency I was so familiar with the road that I
could have led a retreat over it myself; but the compass in my head has
been out of order from my birth, and so, as soon as I was within the
battered Bailie Guard and turned about to review the march and imagine
the relieving forces storming their way along it, everything was upside
down and wrong end first in a moment, and I was never able to get
straightened out again. And now, when I look at the battle-plan, the
confusion remains. In me the east was born west, the battle-plans which
have the east on the right-hand side are of no use to me.

The Residency ruins are draped with flowering vines, and are impressive
and beautiful. They and the grounds are sacred now, and will suffer no
neglect nor be profaned by any sordid or commercial use while the British
remain masters of India. Within the grounds are buried the dead who gave
up their lives there in the long siege.

After a fashion, I was able to imagine the fiery storm that raged night
and day over the place during so many months, and after a fashion I could
imagine the men moving through it, but I could not satisfactorily place
the 200 women, and I could do nothing at all with the 250 children. I
knew by Lady Inglis' diary that the children carried on their small
affairs very much as if blood and carnage and the crash and thunder of a
siege were natural and proper features of nursery life, and I tried to
realize it; but when her little Johnny came rushing, all excitement,
through the din and smoke, shouting, "Oh, mamma, the white hen has laid
an egg!" I saw that I could not do it. Johnny's place was under the
bed. I could imagine him there, because I could imagine myself there;
and I think I should not have been interested in a hen that was laying an
egg; my interest would have been with the parties that were laying the
bombshells. I sat at dinner with one of those children in the Club's
Indian palace, and I knew that all through the siege he was perfecting
his teething and learning to talk; and while to me he was the most
impressive object in Lucknow after the Residency ruins, I was not able to
imagine what his life had been during that tempestuous infancy of his,
nor what sort of a curious surprise it must have been to him to be
marched suddenly out into a strange dumb world where there wasn't any
noise, and nothing going on. He was