Many of the events depicted in this book took place as described. Although Jack Windrush and the 113th Foot are fictitious, the Indian Mutiny was one of the British Army"s most hard-fought campaigns of the nineteenth century. The reasons for the mutiny of the Indian soldiers – the sepoys – are many and varied and include beliefs that the British were violating their religions and decreasing their pay at the same time that the Honourable East India Company was taking over Indian-owned lands.
When many of the sepoys mutinied in 1857, there were 151,000 men in the Bengal Army, of whom only 23,000 were British. Thirteen thousand of the British were in the Punjab, many miles from the scene of disaffection. The remainder were stationed at Calcutta, Meerut and Delhi or scattered in small cantonm
