City of Ghosts (18 page)

‘Twenty-four,' said Gian. ‘And yet you have no wish to take a wife? Who will make your food for you, Bissen Singh?'

‘I have my mother and my sisters,' he told her.

‘But they have returned to your ancestral village. From what I hear you are alone here in the city.'

‘How do you know so much of my business?' asked Bissen.

‘Why,' replied Gian, winking at her husband, ‘you are the talk of the young women of Amritsar – despite your limp.'

Bissen half smiled and then thanked Gurnam for all the news. ‘I must be on my way,' he said. ‘Much to do . . .'

‘Will we see you at the Vaisakhi festivities tomorrow?' asked Gurnam.

‘Undoubtedly,' replied Bissen.

As he continued down the lane, the images flooded back into his head. Gian's mention of his limp had set his mind racing. And talk of wives had brought
her
back too. Bissen hurried back to his room, thankful that he had a small amount of
pheme
left. Tomorrow he would visit the priest at the
gurdwara
, and talk of dreams and sins. Today he longed only for the arms of Morpheus . . .

BISSEN SINGH'S UNIT,
the 1/39 Garwahl Rifles, reached the forward lines at nightfall, by which time he was exhausted, cold and dirty. Three days had passed since his last opportunity to wash, and his feet were blistered from having to wear boots a size too small. All around him his companions, part of Lahore Division, attempted to rest. Some cleaned their weapons while others began eating their meagre provisions. The trenches weren't particularly deep but the water had surfaced anyway, seeping through the rotten duckboards that had been put down. Rain added to the misery of their surroundings, particularly when it turned into a light snowfall. But Bissen had grown used to such discomforts in his time with the British Expeditionary Force. The trenches were hellish and only two avenues provided an escape – death or serious injury.

Bissen stepped around a large rat that sat up imperiously on one of the duckboards, seemingly unfazed by the arrival
of the men. It nibbled at a scrap of discarded food, eyes shining in the growing darkness. Bissen moved further along the trench, keeping his head low so that an enemy sniper wouldn't spot his turban. He found a dugout, shallow but relatively safe, and sat with his feet hanging down to the floor, his back arched, neck straining. Putting his Lee Enfield .303 rifle to one side, he searched the pockets of his jacket for cigarettes. Constantly aware of any danger, he turned towards the rear of the dugout and lit it quickly. Days earlier he had seen what happened when a Tommy enjoyed his smoke too openly. The bullet had entered the boy's head dead centre and blown his brains out of the back of his skull before his second drag.

Once he had finished his cigarette, Bissen turned and moved towards the front wall of the trench, below a thick line of sandbags. His eyes, growing more accustomed to the gloom, searched out the nearest fire-step. He crept across and, placing a boot on the three-foot ledge, peered quickly over the edge. In that instant he made out nothing except broken tree trunks and lines of barbed wire. He listened carefully for sounds from across the open ground but he heard only a few whispered words from his comrades and the squeaking of rats.

He made his way back to the dugout and was just sitting down on the damp earth when two of his friends, Jiwan and Bhan, joined him.

‘Do you have a cigarette,
bhai
?' asked Jiwan, a young man of nineteen years. His beard was not yet more than a few wisps of golden-brown hair and his turban seemed far too big for his head.

‘
Saleyah
– don't you know it is forbidden for Sikhs to smoke?' teased Bissen, smiling.

‘I doubt God is watching us here,' laughed Jiwan.

Bhan Singh clapped the boy across the back of his head, cursed, and then turned round to light his own cigarette. ‘God watches over us wherever we go,' he told the lad.

‘I was only—' began Jiwan, but Bhan cut him off in a show of authority – authority based on the fact that, at twenty-five, he was one of the oldest men in the unit.

‘I know what you were saying, you son of a goat herder: here we are in this man-made hell and God will forgive us our small acts of sin.'

‘That's exactly it,' replied Jiwan.

‘Three days ago I killed a boy younger than Jiwan,' said Bissen. ‘He was crying and wore no boots.'

‘
Bhai
, that is just what we have to do,' Bhan reminded him.

Bissen appeared not to have heard his words. ‘I took my bayonet and I cut through his guts until they spilled out into the mud,' he continued, his eyes glazed.

‘There will be much worse to come in the morning,' Bhan Singh told him. ‘Much worse . . .'

For the next few minutes they crouched in silence. It was Jiwan who eventually spoke up.

‘Do we know what the plan is?' he asked Bhan.

‘I do,' replied Bhan. ‘They gave me a map.'

‘A map?' Bissen looked surprised.

Bhan Singh pulled a scrap of paper from one of his pockets and showed it to his friends. ‘It even has coloured lines on it; targets for the battle.'

Battle plans on paper were rare. In fact Bissen had never even seen one. He took the map from Bhan and peered at it more closely. Their position for the start of battle was clearly marked. They would begin to the right of the British First Army, under the direction of James Willocks, commander of the Indian Corps. He looked at the position of the German trenches. They seemed so close, the first line sitting in front of the village.

‘Are we to take the village?' he asked Bhan Singh.

His friend nodded. ‘And there will be a surprise for our enemies,' he whispered.

‘What surprise?' asked an excited Jiwan.

Bhan shook his head. ‘I cannot say,' he replied as three huge rats slid across Bissan's boots and into the water at the base of the trench.

Bissen kicked out and caught rodent flesh. A shriek pierced the air. ‘Damn rats!' he said. ‘It's a wonder they don't try to eat us as we sleep.'

‘
Sleep?
' asked Bhan Singh. ‘I wish I could remember what that means . . . How I long for the village of my birth. Instead, here I am fighting a white man's war.'

Jiwan glanced at Bissen. When Bissen refused to return his look he shook his head. ‘We are fighting to keep the world free,
bhai-ji
,' he told Bhan.

‘For king and emperor – to help maintain this British Empire. I was there when Willocks made his speech too. It means nothing to me.'

‘But that is mutiny,' whispered Jiwan. ‘Court-martial . . .'

‘However I am killed,' replied Bhan Singh, ‘it will be here, fighting for these people so that they can continue to keep
our motherland in shackles. Or perhaps I'll die running away? Wherever it is, it won't be for the good of my own country.'

‘I think you need to rest,
bhai-ji
,' said Jiwan, his brown eyes darkening with concern. Bhan Singh was one of the most courageous and loyal men he had ever met. For him to be speaking of such things could only be explained by lack of sleep. Why else would he risk being courtmartialled?

‘Rest will come when I am back in my own land,' said Bhan. ‘Not until then. And if that means never, then that is the will of God.'

Bissen turned and lit another cigarette, thankful that the trenches they occupied were still so fresh. No battle of any consequence had taken place, which meant there were no rotting corpses for the rats and maggots to feast on. There was only the vile, putrid odour coming from the latrines, which were just deep holes covered with planks of wood coated in urine and faeces.

He thought about the impending death that dawn would bring. The lottery of leaving the trenches and charging with bayonet fixed at a line of enemy guns. Of not knowing how many seconds you had left on this earth. Of praying with the depths of your soul that the God you had learned to worship since infancy would indeed be waiting for you when you went to meet Him. Not the empty, lonely void of perpetual nothingness but a true heaven, angels and all.

‘I have not even kissed a girl,' Bissen said to himself absent-mindedly.

‘What's that,
bhai-ji
?' asked Jiwan, taking the cigarette Bissen offered him.

‘Nothing . . .' Bissen scratched the back of his head, where lice were nestling against his unwashed and flaking scalp.

Before he could say another thing, before he could move, Jiwan had lit his cigarette. The bullet was just a noise, a movement of air. Jiwan fell forward, dead before he hit the ground. The other members of the unit ducked even lower, one of them scrambling along the duckboards towards Bissen.

‘What happened?' asked the man, a sturdily built Muslim called Atar Khan.

‘Get that body out of the way!' a hoarse whisper ordered, this time in perfect English. It was one of the senior officers, crouching some ten feet away, eating from a tin can.

‘Yes, sir!' replied Atar.

‘He didn't turn round,' said Bissen.

Atar Khan shook his head. ‘At least he won't feel his stomach churn in the morning,' he said. ‘Won't have to spend the entire day walking around with breeches full of shit—'

‘I should have done something.'

‘
Allah
chose not to give him a brain,
bhai
. What could
you
have done?'

Between them they dragged Jiwan's body along the trench and round a traverse. They found a hollow and pushed the body into it. It was makeshift but it would do. The rats would eat well that night, Bissen Singh thought as Atar Khan began to chant.

‘
Allah hu Akhbar
,' the Muslim whispered over and over again.

‘
Satnam Waheguru
,' replied the Sikh.

About five feet from where they crouched, Private James Burton, aged eighteen years, tried to stop crying.

‘
Our Father who art in Heaven
. . .' he sobbed.

DAWN BROUGHT WITH
it a damp, muggy mist, which made it difficult to see what was going on. Although not quite a fog, in places it was dense enough to obscure anything more than ten yards away. Bissen Singh had been ready since four in the morning, along with his unit and the rest of the Indian Corps. To their immediate right were the massed troops of the First Army, under the command of General Sir Douglas Haig. Beyond them were the 7th and 8th Divisions of the IV Corps. Along the length of the two-thousand-yard-long front sat 342 guns aimed at the first line of the German defences. And up in the skies the Royal Flying Corps were on recon missions, preparing to bombard German reinforcements along the roads that led to Lille, some fifteen miles to the north-east.

In the short briefing Bissen's unit had been given, they were told that their job would be to take the enemy trenches before moving on into the village of Neuve Chapelle itself. Once this was secured, they would assist in
gaining the low ground to the east of the village while the rest of the troops attempted to gain the strategic foothold of Aubers Ridge. When Bissen had asked how high a vantage point the ridge was, the officer had shrugged and changed the subject. Now, as he peered through the early morning light, despite patches of thick, swirling mist, Bissen knew that there was no visible ridge beyond the village. He knew because an English Tommy called Charles had told him.

‘They want us to risk our lives to take a twenty-foot-high ridge,' he'd complained as he passed Bissen in the trench.

‘Twenty foot?' Bissen had asked with his ever-improving English. He was shocked.

‘Twenty damned foot!' repeated Charles. ‘Absolute folly . . .'

Before Bissen had a chance to ask him anything else, the Tommy had gone. He turned to Bhan Singh. ‘When do we go?'

‘The
sahib
didn't say,' replied Bhan. ‘I hope it's soon though. I am getting very cold standing here.'

‘Have you cleaned your rifle?' asked Bissen.

Bhan gave him a dirty look. ‘That is all I did last night. Over and over again. My rifle won't be getting stuck. Not like the rubbish those Germans are using—'

‘Mausers,' said Bissen.

‘Twelve rounds a minute I'll fire at the enemy,' boasted Bhan. ‘Just as we were trained to do. Let's see where the enemy gets with his five-round magazines.'

‘Just be careful,
bhai-ji
.'

Bhan Singh shook his head. ‘Let us be victorious,' he replied. ‘Let the
German
be careful.'

Bissen wondered what had occurred overnight to turn Bhan Singh back into a loyal servant of the emperor. Perhaps he had finally been able to get some sleep, as Jiwan had suggested. Bissen shuddered at the thought of his dead friend. And then shuddered some more, knowing that more of his fellow Rifles would be dead by the time the battle was over. He looked around at faces that had become so familiar, wondering which of them he would see again in the evening; which of them would join Jiwan as food for the rats. He realized how fleeting all his relationships had become, here in hell; how nonchalant his attitude to death and loss. There would be other Jiwan Singhs – lots of them. The trick was not to become one too.

Turning to face the back of the trench, he lit a cigarette, its harsh smoke coating the back of his already dry throat. But he held in the coughing fit that followed, letting his eyes water and barely making a sound. In the briefing they'd received they were told that there would be a long barrage of gunfire and shelling before the infantry attack began. The English officer had been bursting with pride when he'd described the new tactic.

‘A predetermined number of guns will concentrate on one target for a set period of time,' he'd said. ‘Then they will be raised and begin firing at target number two. At this point the infantry will attack the first target, which should by then be blown to smithereens. Any questions, men?'