God Is an Englishman (3 page)

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6 G O D I S A N E N G L I S H M A N

Standford-Green put his hoarded savings in railway stock and lost it overnight, but he was luckier than Badgery. Badgery caught a chill in a London fog and was buried within four months of the farewell party we gave him in the Mess. If the fog hadn’t killed him he would have starved, for at least Standford-Green could write a legible hand. They tell me he’s working as a clerk in the Law Courts.” The man in bed was at a disadvantage, but he had no intention of conceding Roberts his point. He never had and he never would. Respecting Roberts as a man he had never succeeded in exonerating him from bigotry. He said, deliberately, “I had no business in that last brush, Bobs. My contract expired more than a month ago. I could have asked for my passage before we moved up here, and because you and I are unlikely to dispute the claims of Queen and common-sense again I’ll remind you why I’m lying here trussed up like a chicken. It’s on your account, yours and ‘Circus’ Howard’s. You were the very last of them, and a man can’t travel as far as we have without incurring obligations of a sort. But those obligations are personal and private, to me at any rate. They don’t extend to Crown, Company, or the City merchants, who pay us small change to enable them to milk a sub-continent and install fat wives in four-storey houses, with cook, parlourmaid, governess and basement.”

“I know that,” Roberts said, unexpectedly. “With you there has never been any other motive but comradeship, has there?”

“None. Just a dwindling batch of three-card-trick victims, relying on one another to stay sane and alive!”

Over in the square the drums rolled and the cannon boomed again. Roberts said, with his back to the bed, “You feel pity for those butchers out there?”

“They’re not involved in what I’m trying to say, what I’ve always argued.”

“But they are. We can hang a few hundred, and blow a few more from cannon, but there has to be a new beginning, here and elsewhere. How could that be achieved without a trained army standing behind the law?”

“You still believe in law? After all you’ve seen since the Mutiny began?”

“Yes, I believe in it. English law. And in my experience it makes a bad joke of everybody else’s.”

It struck Swann then that he might be seeing Roberts for the first time, that what he had always assumed to be an impersonal passion for rule-of-thumb, for precedent, for good order and discipline, was really something far more personal and fervent, a private creed, imbedded in a man who saw himself more as a missionary than a soldier. If it was so then it added a new dimension to their differences, setting them as far apart as the savage and the city sophisticate. Curiosity pricked him as GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 6

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Man with a Casket: 1857–1858
7

he said, “Trade and barter on one side, we have a God-given mission here? Is that what you believe?”

“Implicitly.” He swung round facing the bed, fighting the terrible battle all Englishmen of his type enter upon when called to acknowledge idealism.

“Should I apologise? Is material gain essential to everything a man feels and thinks and needs? Great God, man, of course we have a mission! Did Cawnpore and Lucknow give you the impression these people could be left to themselves, to bloody-minded tyrants like Nana Sahib and the Ranee? Is this place, and every other place where we have a trading post and a missionary to be left to their dominion?”

“You’ll need more than trained officers to prevent the same thing happening again. It isn’t possible to uphold our kind of law by the Bible and sword, Roberts.

God knows, it was difficult enough in my father’s time, but today there are so many new factors. Empire building isn’t a matter of occupation and annexation any longer. You have to take these people one by one and train them. As administrators, as doctors, as shipwrights, as ironmasters. You have to bring them sanita-tion and check the endemic killer diseases in their filthy towns and villages. You need roads, telegraph systems and, above all, railways. Mercenaries like us don’t know a damned thing about any one of these bare necessities so what qualifies to deputise for God Almighty all over the world? Hand me that valise.” Roberts lifted the valise from the bench and set it on the bed. He said, tolerantly, “Why do I always let myself be drawn into this kind of discussion with you?

Marryatt said you needed rest and we march at first light.” He stood up stiffly, his back to the light, small, erect and indomitable, the way he had always appeared to Adam; Roberts, a man who, in thought and temperament, belonged more to the fourteenth century than the nineteenth. He was five hundred years behind the times but lovable for all that.

“Then this is good-bye, Bobs?”

“If you mean what you say, it is.”

“I mean it. This time I mean it.” For a moment the claims exerted by many years’

comradeship tempted him to confess about the necklace, but he checked the impulse. Roberts would see the rubies as loot, and both of them had seen troopers and sepoys hanged for looting. For other reasons he left the valise unopened, rejecting the means of hammering his point home. Even given plenty of luck on Roberts’

part it might be years before they met again. If seven years had not convinced Roberts that he was living in an age of steam and tremendous technical advances what could be achieved in the few minutes left to them? The heat went out of the GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 7

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8 G O D I S A N E N G L I S H M A N

day and out of their conflict of ideas. Roberts said, “It’s going to be lonely without you, Adam.”

“Not so lonely. Replacements will be coming in on every boat.”

“Ah, yes, but what kind of replacements? The real business is finished. From now on it will be pigsticking, whist, bandit-hunting.”

“Not for you, Bobs. Or for anyone else with a Victoria Cross.”

“You’ll write?”

“When I have something worth writing about.”

“You’re going home like that? Like a blind man?”

“I’ve had a dream, Bobs. A small one that might expand, but it required reconnaissance, of the kind our masters overlooked when they detailed me to block a beleaguered city with a single squadron. Study the ground. At least that’s one thing the Army has taught me.”

“The only thing, apart from how to ride, shoot, and live rough, and that won’t avail you much at home.”

“I think it will, given capital.”

“And where will a stray like you find capital?” Adam grinned. “I can smell it, and it’s a sweeter smell than blood, Bobs.” He held out his left hand and Roberts shook it, lightly. It was typical of the man, Swann thought, that he made so light of handshakes and partings. At the low door he paused, turned, and saluted with comic gravity.

3

Surgeon-Major Marryatt had been optimistic. It was ten days before Adam Swann could shuffle round his quarters without leaning on the shoulder of an orderly, or his gap-toothed servant, Trooper Dawkins. But the interval of solitude was worth the price in stiffness, soreness, and the stifling atmosphere of the sick bay.

The first thing he did when he could crawl across the floor was to root out his sabretache and secure the necklace, and sometimes, when he was unlikely to be disturbed, he would take it out and run it through his hands. The rich colour of the pigeon’s-blood rubies were atonement for his wasted years, but he did not see them as another might, as insurance against penury or drudgery, but as a tacit promise of overhauling lost time, almost thirteen years of lost time, from the day of his eighteenth birthday, when, at his father’s insistence, he had entered Addiscombe College as a cadet, to the final encounter with the casket-carrier on the plain outside Jhansi.

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Man with a Casket: 1857–1858
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It seemed much longer than thirteen years for, looking back, he now saw that only the last few months had sped, from the moment a fugitive had ridden into the barracks with the news of the 19th Native Infantry’s uprising at Berhampore, to the march on Jhansi and the storming of the Ranee’s palace. The interval between, garrison duty in Ireland, riot-squad action in northern towns, his improbable Crimea interlude, and, after reverting to Company service three years ago, endless sunsoaked days at a series of Indian stations, were but half-remembered, a trudge across a waterless desert, yet Roberts had been wrong in one sense. In addition to soldiering Adam Swann had wrung one other aptitude from the years, and here, in comparative isolation, he had leisure to assess its potential. It was the habit of steady, objective thought, the product of conscious application of a kind almost unknown to professional officers. Men like Roberts and ‘Circus’ Howard had always thought of fakirs as savages, and dirty savages at that, but Swann had learned something from them, perhaps because contact with them had nurtured an intellectual curiosity he had had since he was a child roaming the Fells. It was a curiosity concerned with the nature of existence, the individual destiny of Lieutenant Adam Swann, having nothing whatever to do with orthodox religion. Such residual faith as he retained in the Jehovah of his boyhood he had thrown into the well at Cawnpore, for a Deity who ordained that kind of outrage did not belong in a pulpit of civilisation but beside the altars of Baal and Mithras. His curiosity was concerned with human activity, with the mechanics of everyday existence, with the slow, painfully garnered store of human knowledge. Alone among the officers of successive messes he not only read but studied accounts of Parliamentary debates printed in the three-months-old copies of
The Times
that found their way into camp and had, whenever possible, supplemented their content with a range of technical journals so that his valise was stuffed with reading material his contemporaries would use to start a campfìre. Novels, poetry, and philosophy attracted him even less than theology.

He was interested in facts and, beyond facts, statistics. It was now more than five years since he had set foot in England, but he knew, approximately, what to expect when he did, and the prospect excited him in the way the promise of an attack on a fortified position would excite a man like Roberts. His intermittent spells of duty in the industrial north had done far more than familiarise him with the floodtide of technology. They had reconciled him, a countryman born, to the vast scenic and social changes that had followed what men were already calling the Industrial Revolution as it lapped over the shires in the wake of Stephenson’s iron roads. He had paid more attention to this phenomenon than GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 9

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1 0 G O D I S A N E N G L I S H M A N

to any single aspect of the social scene, for he did not see the spread of railways as his contemporaries did—the wanton destruction of good hunting country at the instance of men who had never learned to sit a horse. Alone in his caste he saw it as the inevitable by-product of improved technology, steam power, and metal processing, and its challenge, even at this remove, was irresistible.

For Swann’s heroes were not those of Roberts, or men like Roberts. He saw the Havelocks, the Nicolsons, the Outrams, and the Campbells as indomitable chawbacons. His awe was reserved for a man like Stephenson, unable to write his name until he was twenty, who had succeeded in forcing the greediest men in the world to finance his dreams. Stephenson, whose first passenger-carrying venture was launched when Swann was a child of five, dominated his imagination, but others had been canonised: Brunei, whose exploits he equated with those of Merlin; Hudson, the railway king; Watt, whose irresistible logic had revolutionised the mine and the factory, and other men whose articles of faith were set out in the manuals and blue books that found their way into Swann’s eccentric maw. In barrack and bivouac he had thought about them and assimilation of their ideas, even at a distance, had created tensions in him that made him as lonely as a European marooned among headhunters.

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paRt 1

encounter:

summer, 1858

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One

Fugitive in

a cRinoline

1

In the thirties and forties the river of enterprise had rolled due west from the slopes of the Pennines, engulfing Manchester and flowing on un-checked to empty its filth in the Mersey. Some of its stinking tributaries had forked north-west before the big city was overwhelmed and a good deal of the initial impetus had been absorbed in a triangle enclosed by Oldham, Burnley, and Preston. The fate of Oldham, for instance, was typical of most Lancashire villages in this particular area. Almost overnight, or so it seemed to the older inhabitants, the closely knit community of farmworkers and cottage craftsmen had been absorbed, branded, and delivered into bondage. In a year or so a dozen gaol-like factories were belching their bad breath to a sky that only a few years before had been washed clean by the soft rain of the Lake District not far to the north. Thousands of back-to-back two-room dens had been run up by the jerry-builders to house the operatives for the few hours they spent in them between interminable stints at loom and shuttle. Oldham was now called the biggest village in the world and its “villagers,” apart from the under-tens, and those too old or too broken to descend the steep streets to the mills, were absorbed in the task of unloading a gigantic flood of satins, sateens, fustians, and sheetings on the markets of the world. Pending the passage of the Ten Hours Bill ten years before, the working population of Oldham had been even larger than it was today. For in that period, the hour of the first onslaught of the flood, children of five, four, and even three had been taken on, and their casualty rate beside the unfenced machinery had been written off as normal industrial wastage. Mostly they had worked in shifts, and the foremen responsible for housing drafts of orphans and bastards recruited from country workhouses had been known to boast that their beds were never cold. One shift turned out, knuckling its bleared GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 12