The author of this Journal was, l am sure, a very ordinary woman. You will search her pages in vain for any clue as to what the mutiny was all about. What lay beneath the surface she records. Yet as a writer she has one great and rare gift: the ability to write exactly as she speaks. This book is a personal journal of Maria Germon which is adopted and edited so to unfold a very rare version of the Indian mutiny.
By eroding detail, time gives to events like the Siege of Lucknow an impersonal, stylised quality. Big words like “heroism" and “privation", though just. do not help. Mrs. Germon makes us live with her through the siege and see it as she saw it; an affair of dirt and over- crowding; of hideous boils, lice and the death of friends; of mending Charlie‘s “unmentionables”; of small pleasures like a cup of tea; or singing in the evening; “Captain Weston joining"; of petty squabbles as to who fetches water for whom, who cooks what Food there is and who does the washing-up; all conducted to the accompaniment of shot whistling through the windows and walls.