Where Soldiers Lie

Dave Jenkinson is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba and the author of the “Portraits” section of Emergency Librarian.

While few Canadian middle-schoolers have likely ever heard of the June
1857 three-week siege of Cawnpore, India, by mutinying Indian military
units, Wilson effectively uses this conflict as his story’s action
centrepiece while bookending it with a prologue and an epilogue, both
dated June 27, 1897. As he has done in other war-related historical
fiction, Wilson divides the book into sections, in this case five, which
are further subdivided into date-captioned chapters that flow
chronologically from Tuesday, May 12, to Thursday, July 12, 1857.

The military action is balanced by a character study of 16-year-old
protagonist Jack O’Hara and three principal secondary figures (Alice
Wheeler, Subaltern Tommy Davies, and Hari, an Indian stable boy) who are
all outsiders—the first three because of the rigid British class
system that had been replicated in this colonial setting, and Hari due
to India’s inflexible caste structure. In addition, Jack and Alice are
half-castes, their mixed English–Indian bloodlines placing them
outside both cultures.

The plot’s conclusion sees the four surviving. In actuality, the
siege ended with the British forces surrendering in return for the
promise of safe passage for themselves and the European civilians they
had been defending. However, the next day, the gallant soldiers were
betrayed, and virtually everyone—some 700 people—were massacred. A
map of 1857 India, plus a blow-up map of Cawnpore and a diagram of the
defensive position (Wheeler’s Entrenchment), help readers locate the
book’s events. In a closing historical note, Wilson clarifies where
his story departed from recorded history. Recommended.