response to the outbreak of violence was in no small part due to the distrust he had long held for the Bengal Army, telling his fellow officers; "For years I have watched the army and felt sure they only wanted the opportunity to try their strength with us. Mutiny is like smallpox. It spreads quickly and must be crushed as quickly as possible." Nicholson was awoken on 21 May to the news that the 55th Regiment of Bengal Native Infantry had mutinied at Nowshera. After taking part in the successful disarming of the remaining five regular Bengal regiments at Peshawar, Nicholson accompanied the force dispatched to Nowshera to deal with the 55th. Although the mutineers of the 55th retreated from Nowshera after hearing of the approaching force, Nicholson, upon his grey charger, was able to give chase with his mounted police and cavalry and successfully charged the mutinous sepoys. Nicholson continued to chase down the fleeing sepoys till nightfall, killing over 120 of them and capturing a similar number. Despite initial plans to kill all of the captured mutineers, Nicholson successfully pleaded with his superiors to grant clemency to the Sikh and youngest prisoners. His superiors concurred and executed forty by blowing them from a gun. One famous story recounted by Charles Allen in Soldier Sahibs is of a night during the Rebellion when Nicholson strode into the British mess tent at Jullunder, coughed to attract the attention of the officers, then said, "I am sorry, gentlemen, to have kept you waiting for your dinner, but I have been hanging your cooks." He had been told that the regimental chefs had poisoned the soup with aconite. When they refused to taste it for him, he force fed it to a monkey – and when it expired on the spot, he proceeded to hang the cooks from a nearby tree without a trial. Nicholson also called for the mutineers to be punished severely. He proposed an Act endorsing a 'new kind of death for the murderers and dishonourers of our women', suggesting, 'flaying alive, impalement or burning,' and commenting further, 'I would inflict the most excruciating tortures I could think of on them with a perfectly easy conscience.' After replacing Neville Chamberlain as the commander of the Movable Column, Nicholson left Peshawar on 14 June with his personal bodyguard of frontier horsemen, who took no pay and served the British only