Few would call Boswell an exceptionally wise man, F or even a sensible one. Yet it was given to him to write the greatest biography in the English or
perhaps in any--language. The author of this journal was, I 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. And this, I think, is what gives an extraordinary vivacity and charm to her journal. In it you will find even the slang of the period artlessly preserved, “light infantry” for lice, “big dogs” for “brass-hats”, “croaking” for getting the wind up. In it, as in conversation and in life, the trivial and the epoch-making are all mixed together: the agony of waiting for relief and of hopes deferred; the horror of finding “an enormous rat” in one’s bedding;
anxiety for the safety of a husband; grief at the loss of “dear little doggies”. By eroding detail, time gives to events like the Siege of Lucknow an impersonal, stylized quality. Big words like “heroism” and “privation”, though just, do not help. Mrs. German makes us live with her through the
siege and see it as she saw it: an affair of dirt & 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 scrabbles 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.