Everywhere the British convinced themselves that the atrocities committed by the sepoys against their women and children absolved them of any need to treat the rebels as human beings: ‘Since they had butchered our defenceless women and children,’ wrote Colonel A. R. D. Mackenzie, ‘we would have been more .than human, we would have been less than men, if we had not exterminated them as men kill snakes wherever they meet them.’
