Belonging (16 page)

Having witnessed many deaths in the last years, it seems to me that it is not death itself that is terrible but the process of dying, and that is what haunts me about Father: that he died without comfort, with the sense that there was nothing left to live for. I cannot help feeling that I failed him by not providing him with a reason to live.

Often as I sat with patients, talking, they would ask me about the war. They were puzzled. A young Jat soldier asked me once if it was true that the Kaiser, the King and the Tsar were related and, if so, why they were fighting. ‘It’s just like
the
Mahabharat
,’ an older sepoy told him. ‘Cousins fighting each other.’

Some were so awed by the magnitude of the destruction, the shells that obliterated whole villages and destroyed fertile fields, that they thought it must be the final battle of the last age, the Kali Yuga, when Shiva opens his third eye and the world is destroyed before being reborn. Used to fighting face to face, and giving respect to the enemy, they could not comprehend the honour in a war where men fired shells at men they had never seen, and in turn cowered in ditches while bombs rained down on them. But all remembered the enthusiasm with which they had been greeted by the French when they’d arrived in Marseilles. Women had come out to greet them with flowers. Some had even embraced and kissed them. And on the hospital train they had been nursed by Englishwomen who had changed dressings and administered bedpans. ‘They were not like memsahibs but angels,’ an old N.C.O. told me.

And since they had arrived in England there had been more angels. As soon as the hospital opened, the ladies of the town descended bearing flowers, fruit and other gifts. The soldiers were invited home for tea, or taken for rides along the seafront. For most of them hospital was not a depressing place. They had spent the autumn and the first part of winter digging trenches in the pouring rain, while standing knee-deep in water; many had lost toes to frostbite and, to make matters worse, their winter uniforms had never arrived so they were still in their tropical uniforms, and would continue to be until the following spring. Remembering how cold I had been that first summer in England, even indoors, I could not imagine what the trenches in winter must be like for them. So to be in a warm, comfortable environment, with all their
needs supplied, playing cards and dice, or standing on the balconies waving at people passing on the trams, who waved back, was an enjoyable experience.

During that winter the Indians were involved in some of the heaviest fighting on the Western Front. As I later discovered, Jagjit and his brother were at Ypres, where almost half their regiment would be killed or wounded, but I learnt nothing of this from his letters, in which he addressed me with stilted formality, knowing his words would be read by his company commander.

As the months passed I found myself increasingly reluctant to expose my own feelings and our letters became more and more like those of casual acquaintances.

In March 1915, the Indians were involved in a huge battle at Neuve Chapelle and there were so many casualties that we ran out of beds; men were lying on stretchers on the floor. Unlike previous patients, who had been cleaned up and bandaged at casualty clearing stations or field hospitals, these soldiers had been put on the train straight from the battlefield, in muddy pus-soaked field dressings and stinking lice-ridden uniforms. The smell of gangrene hung in the air and the incinerators were struggling to keep up.

The wounded had started coming in the night before and, no matter how fast we shifted them, more kept coming. Most of us were well into a double shift, and it looked as though we would be there all night again, taking short breaks when we could no longer go on.

Having no set role, that day I was working as a general dogsbody, carrying cups of tea to the exhausted surgeons who gulped them down between operations, ferrying instruments from the operating theatres to be sterilised, carrying buckets
of discarded body parts to the sluice room, and doing anything that no one else was available for. Towards the end of the second day, when things began to settle a little, I was helping the orderlies to sort through piles of uniforms to decide which were worth repairing and which were fit only for the incinerator, when I picked up a uniform jacket which was so soaked in blood that whoever was wearing it must almost certainly have died of blood loss. It seemed astonishing that he’d survived long enough to be put on the train for England, and I was laying it on the pile for incineration when something fell on to the floor with a clink. I looked down and my stomach lurched as I saw a knobbly pendant on a cord, covered with dried blood. I picked it up and my fingers recognised the shape before my eyes did. It was Father’s lucky Sussex stone.

I have been at Father’s for almost ten days now. The rains started two days after I arrived here and it has been raining ever since. The noise on the corrugated roof is deafening but I find it strangely soothing – it is one of the sounds of my childhood. The scent of the night-flowering raat-ki-rani drifts into my room and last night I woke and thought myself back in my childhood bed and remembered the bibi’s cool hands on my fevered forehead.

Yesterday I screwed up my courage and raised the subject of my mother again.

Father sighed. ‘You must know what happened, Henry. Everyone knows what happened at Cawnpore in ’57. You must have learnt about it at Haileybury, surely?’

‘So you’re saying that my mother died at Cawnpore? That it wasn’t my fault?’

He looked astonished. ‘Your fault? How could it be? Did you really think that?’

I shrugged.

He stared at me for a moment then looked away, out into the darkness and the rain, and I thought he was going to
retreat into himself and shut me out, as he has done so many times before, but instead he said, ‘I suppose you have a right to know, and you are old enough now to understand. But it’s a long story.’

‘I have plenty of time, Father.’

He sighed. ‘The truth is, your mother shouldn’t have been here at all. She was supposed to return to England when we discovered she was pregnant, but things escalated before I had time to take her to Calcutta. When it was clear there was going to be trouble, I arranged for her to travel with my brother’s family but then Louisa – my brother James’ wife – refused to go, and Cecily decided it was her duty to stay. She got it into her head that her mother, who had died recently, would have wanted her to. Our marriage had not been easy and she was trying to be fair, to do what was right for me, but sometimes our best intentions lead to the worst consequences. I should never have allowed it, of course, but I was afraid if she returned to England I would lose her, and you. It was selfish of me, but I don’t think any of us expected the barrel to explode the way it did. And then it was too late: we were trapped. It was my fault, my selfishness. I should never have let her stay… let any of them stay.’

‘So what exactly happened?’

He took a deep breath. ‘Wheeler had built an entrenchment in Cawnpore. You must have learnt something about this at Haileybury…’

And of course he is right. I have known what happened at Cawnpore for years. It was hardly possible to avoid learning of it in England, for everyone who has relatives in India lives in fear of a recurrence. I have read Mowbray Thomson’s and Fitchett’s accounts, both of which came out while I was at school, but I did not know that my mother or I were part of
that story. ‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘The James Langdon in the Roll of Honour. He was your brother.’

He nodded. ‘We were all there together – your mother, pregnant with you, and James and his wife Louisa and their three children…’ His voice thickened and he cleared his throat. ‘Suffice to say it was unimaginably terrible, and through it all your mother was remarkably brave. She was very afraid, as anyone would be, especially in her condition, but she behaved with great courage, helping Louisa with the children and even volunteering to work in the makeshift hospital until it burnt down. It was very distressing – there were hideous injuries from the round shot and wounds got infected and we had very few medical facilities even before fire destroyed the hospital. The screams of the sick and wounded were dreadful to hear… I was concerned that in her condition she would find it too upsetting, but she coped admirably. In the end it was Louisa who fell apart… after James and…’ He paused and covered his eyes with his hand. ‘I’m sorry, Henry. Even after all this time I can’t talk about it.’

‘What were you doing during all this?’ I was trying to distract him but it sounded almost accusing. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean…’

He gulped his whisky. ‘I was serving under the commanding officer of a British regiment, a Captain Moore. He was junior to me but I had no men of my own to command – Wheeler had thrown all the native troops, except a few trusted officers, out of the entrenchment. My men were completely loyal, as would be proved later, but by then Wheeler didn’t trust any of them. It was a mistake that sealed our fate, because it turned even those who were loyal against us and allowed the Magazine and Treasury to fall into Nana Saheb’s hands.’

He took a breath.

‘It’s hard to describe… unimaginably hellish. It’s astonishing that we held out as long as we did. Any competent army could have taken us in a day, but of course they had no leadership… The entrenchment walls were so low that they provided no cover at all. We were effectively out in the open, in the blazing sun at the hottest time of year, and under constant fire, day and night. We didn’t even have access to water: the well was targeted by snipers even in the dark; they could hear the splash of the bucket and the creak of the rope. Those who volunteered to get water did so at the risk of their lives. We got used to drinking water with blood in it, and by the end all there was to eat was handfuls of gram flour mixed into a paste with a little water. When the hospital barracks caught fire, there was no time to evacuate the wounded and all our medical supplies were destroyed. It meant bullets could no longer be extracted and even the slightest wound was a sentence of death.

‘At first we were sheltering in the barracks, but we had to abandon them because the walls had great holes in them and they were in danger of collapse. After that we camped in the shallow trench under the walls – it had been dug so we could walk about without being picked off by snipers. Our clothes were just rags. We had given up our shirts for bandages, and the women had given their petticoats and were walking about half-naked… but we were past caring about things like that. You cannot begin to imagine, Henry, how degraded suffering can make people. We were filthier than the filthiest beggar.

‘Your mother was heavily pregnant by then and finding it hard to move around. I gave her what help I could, but during the day I was busy with the defence… We were under constant attack.’ He gave a staccato laugh. ‘I remember
your mother telling me that Colonel Ewart fumed at the incompetence of his sepoys after one of their attacks had failed: “Have they learnt nothing from me at all?” he said. He was in hospital then, having been wounded in the arm. But to answer your question – as I said, I volunteered to defend the walls under the command of Captain Moore. He was a good man, young but very competent. Later he sent me out to lead sorties against the enemy, which is how I survived. I wish to God now I had stayed behind. It’s foolish to imagine I could have saved her… but at least I would have shared her fate.’

I watched him struggle to hold back his tears. ‘It’s all right, Father. You don’t have to talk about it.’

He held his hand up. ‘No, I may as well finish. On that particular day I’d gone out with a party, including one of my native officers – a jemadar called Ram Buksh – to clear some mutineers away from a disused barracks. They’d been using it as a base from which to attack us. We had just managed to chase them out when we were charged by a group of sowars. One of them rode straight at me. I was on foot – we’d eaten all the horses by then. I shouted to Ram to get the others under cover and tried to dodge under the horse’s belly but the sowar brought his sword down… It gave me this – ’ he touched his scar ‘ – and sliced into my shoulder, breaking my collarbone. The next thing I knew, I was lying on a bed of grass in a hut. Some of my sepoys, who had been sheltering in a nearby ravine, had found me and carried me to a village where the villagers looked after me. The headman knew me because your mother and I sometimes rode out that way and she was popular with the children.’

Tears came to his eyes. ‘I wish you’d known her, Henry. She was so… so full of life. Rooms lit up when she walked into them. I used to watch her with the village children. They
loved her too. When I met her the world became a brighter place… and when she died…’

I looked away as he struggled to control his face. He took a swig of whisky to steady himself and went on grimly, ‘They packed my wounds with some native recipe and bandaged them up tight but the shoulder got infected and I was delirious for some days. When the fever finally passed I was too weak to move. But my sepoys kept visiting me and bringing me news. They told me that the relief column, which had left Calcutta at the end of May, was stuck at Allahabad, having halted all along the route to burn villages and erect gallows. They had created such terror that word of their approach emptied villages before them, so they could find no food or supplies, and no coolies to carry them. It was this time of year, and the rains had started. Hard conditions for a marching army.’

He paused and stared out at the sheeting rain, but I knew what he was seeing was then, not now. ‘I knew Wheeler could not hold out much longer because the walls would simply wash away. And sure enough I heard a few days later that he had surrendered to Nana Saheb and that the survivors of the entrenchment had been promised safe passage by boat to Allahabad.’

He was silent for a long time then, and I did not urge him to go on, for every English man and woman knows the meaning of the phrase
Remember Cawnpore!