Nightrunners of Bengal (35 page)

The sepoy regiments came on, separated by a wide gap where the Kishanpur infantry had been. Any minute now they would be within effective rifle range. Watching them, his mind saw again the hundred troopers of the Bombay Lancers who waited silent in the mango grove. He saw the old rissaldar’s pinched face, the blue and gold uniforms, the lances pointing upwards. Resting his hands on the wall, he stared dim-eyed at the oncoming sepoys, wading through water waist and neck high while Cable’s guns poured canister into them and hurled the men like broken branches into the stream. The six columns, scarlet and rifle-green, loomed nearer. The Fusiliers waited. Piroo stood up, taking a firm grip of his pickaxe.

The columns reached the shallows. On top of the bank a hundred yards away the gunners depressed the muzzles and fired with the desperation of lunatics. The Fusiliers jerked up their rifles. The roar of artillery could not quite blow away the shouted commands of their officers.

“Fire! Load! Rod! Home! Return! Cap! Fire a volley at one hundred yards, ready! Present!
FIRE
! Load! Rod! Home! Return! Cap! Volley one hundred, ready! Present!
FIRE
! …
FIRE
! …
FIRE
!”

Rodney heard his own voice gabbling. “
FIRE
! Oh, God, get out your skirmishers, man….
FIRE
! … Vishnu’s hit. The Fusiliers haven’t been touched yet by the guns. You crazy swine,
FIRE
! Retire; give the Fusiliers half an hour of shrapnel
FIRE
! and try again
with
the cavalry. Narain, what are you doing here?
FIRE
! Spread out—bayonets and charge!
FIRE
! Oh, Christ, oh, God….” He shut his eyes.

At last, under a swelling roar from the enemy artillery, the remnants turned and marched back for a second time through
the oily river. It took ten minutes; during that time the enemy guns, suddenly accurate, all but smashed the British line. The storm of shell cut the Fusiliers to ribbons; one of Cable’s remaining guns was shattered and Cable himself killed. Sir Hector watched the retreating columns through a telescope and as soon as the heads began to climb the far bank, turned and shouted a command down to Colonel Dempsey. The Fusiliers broke line and streamed back across the narrow strip of land and down the alleys into the town. The general stayed on his housetop, and at thirty-yard intervals along the wall single Fusilier sentries remained to watch the river. For a moment the enemy guns did not seem to notice the movement, then they all turned on to the general.

Sir Hector peered down on Rodney and called gaily, “Hot work, Captain. Let us hope they use up their ammunition on me. I doubt if they will have much left by now.”

As though the sense of the remark had carried across to the enemy, their guns one by one hiccoughed into silence. A haze of black smoke and pink dust surrounded the general, and a small fire had started in a house behind his. He said, “Come on up here, my boy.”

Swaying on his feet, Rodney climbed the single narrow flight of stairs. At the top he found that Sir Hector had been standing all the while on a pile of loose bricks, and still was. The little man looked round. “Do you think they will come again?”

“Yes,” he answered dully. Of course they’d come again.

The general said, “Faith, faith. You have a great regiment, sir.”

“They’d be in here now, with any sort of decent leadership. It’s murder,” Rodney broke out tensely.

Sir Hector raised the telescope to his eye and looked upstream, saying softly, “I know, Captain, I know. All quiet up there—no sign of their cavalry. Ours have a vedette at the edge of the grove—two men. Their chance will come. Victory or defeat will be decided there—two
Native Officers and ninety-eight rank and file of the Bombay Lancers.”

He put the telescope under his arm, thrust his head a little forward, and stuck one hand into the front of his frock coat. He continued, “In a few minutes, Captain Savage. Perhaps I have done wrong. But indeed”—his voice was metallic—“if we can trust no one in this whole country, after a hundred years of dominion, we deserve the annihilation our all-wise Father will certainly mete out.”

And Robin? And Caroline? Must your Father who is all-wise roast my darlings alive over slow fires because we are not wise?

“Here they come! Stand to! Stand to!” It was his own voice.

The enemy columns marched out of the scrub for the third time and quickly down into the water. They were still columns, but in a more open formation. There were only six of them, composed of the two sepoy regiments, and no band was playing. He saw the 13th bass drummer, six foot four inches tall, carrying a rifle in the front of the regiment’s centre column. The general waved his arm, messengers ran, bugles called. The press of Fusiliers tumbled out of the sheltering city through the few narrow alleys. Simultaneously the enemy guns opened fire and a torrent of shells burst over the openings. The Fusiliers quailed before it, and their dead and wounded began to pile up. The texture of the air thickened every second, so that it could hardly be breathed. The sepoys struggled on, murky figures in a shrieking grey-black panorama, splashed with orange fire. Their battalions had lost two-thirds of their men; the Fusiliers were losing heavily now, as they ran in confusion to their places under the shells. The two six-pounders cracked once, then four enemy shells, coming together, obliterated the crews. Men ran from the wagon lines to take their places. In a dark twilight the artillery flashes rippled and sparkled across the water.

“
FIRE
! … Load! Rod! …
FIRE
!
FIRE
!
FIRE
!”

The six columns, scarlet and rifle-green, loomed nearer and nearer. The Union Colour fell, and a sepoy snatched it up. Men turned their heads quickly in the desperation of their firing, looked upstream, and muttered to themselves. The sepoy skirmishers splashed out, fanning forward in half-moons; the ragged volleys of the Fusiliers had no effect now; there were too many targets, too many green and scarlet pieces darting forward. The sepoy centre began to form line. The crackling stopped. Dempsey screamed, “
Fix your
—
BAYONETS
!” The thin steel skewers clicked home.

Sir Hector ran down the steps, drew a sword nearly as large as himself, scrambled nimbly on to the wall and stood there, insecurely balanced, staring up the river. The mango grove was dark and quiet, the water smooth. Watching him, Rodney saw him open his mouth, hesitate, and shut it again. Here was the terror of decision. Only a bayonet charge could save the Fusiliers’ position now—and once it was launched nothing could hold enemy cavalry if the Lancers didn’t.

A shell blast blew the cocked hat off the general’s head. He brandished the sword and said politely, “We will take the bayonet to them now, if you please, Fusiliers.”

Rodney vaulted the wall and ran down over the fissured earth, levelled bayonets riding the slope to right and left and a dry harsh cheer echoing in his ears. The sepoys fired one scattered volley and came on too. Sir Hector galloped five yards in front of the Fusiliers, his bald head wet with sweat, his knees up and toes turned outwards; but no one could catch him up. Rodney heard distant music as he ran, and felt the charging Fusiliers sigh. Quickly he glanced to the right.

Shimmering above the reach of water, a silver and grey squadron of the 60th Bengal Light Cavalry debouched in extended order from the scrub and cantered down into the river. Their many trumpets gave out a wild sweet calling. Oh, Caroline! Caroline!

Then he could not look again but knew as he fought that troop after troop of the 60th followed the first. This was
insanity, to hack at Sepoy Rupchand, to shout “Hurrah!” as his bayonet slid through the green cloth of Naik Mahdev’s tunic, just below the third black button. No single thing, not even such a dawn as May the tenth, could wipe out eleven years. Madness, madness in nightmare! They all recognized him, so conspicuous in their dark green among the scarlet Fusiliers. He laughed crazily to see that in the moment of recognition some shifted their aim away, others turned deliberately to shoot at him. Those would be the leaders; there was Naik Parasiya, he wore a major’s coat, badly fitting—Weasel Anderson’s.

And to the right, the vivid snatched cameos: the water boiled at the chests of struggling horses; shells burst among them, broke the strong lines; one horseman turned back, another stumbled and fell and rolled helplessly down river. The light was iron-grey over all, and the heat increasing, and the mango grove silent.

Ten yards away he saw the Dewan’s brocaded coat. The lust to kill froze him, and he headed straight for the man, striking out silently with big swings of his rifle. No one heard the guns; the rifles were silent; the fight was a fury of grunting and gabbled swearing. He knocked Parasiya down, trampled him under water, and snatched his sword. A wedge of Fusiliers clubbed and bayoneted forward beside him. The Dewan showed his teeth, waved his jewelled sabre, and spurred his horse on. The Colours surged forward.

The maddened horse plunged over Rodney and he swung his weight back, his curved sword whirling silver against the black sky. They were like dogs snarling at each other. The Dewan’s single eye shone luminous and angry. The neck there, if he could reach it, the soft neck just above the collar …

Agony struck his right elbow and flashed in white fire through his body. The sword spun away in a glittering arc and he fell coughing, retching, and bubbling beneath the water.

Hands forced under his armpits and dragged him back. He
heard, ten miles away, an insistent bugle repeating over and over again the regimental call of the Fusiliers, followed by the Retire. He was on his feet, stumbling in giddy nausea between two bearded private soldiers. To right and left the sepoys re-formed their ranks and followed up, cheering in wild exaltation.

They would find Caroline and Robin back there, holding hands, waiting. He groaned, threw off the soldiers’ arms, and turned to face the enemy.

No one was moving. The hand of God pressed down in the cloud and held them still. Awestruck and dumb, the men who had been fighting stood together and looked up the broad reach of the Nerbudda to the east. They held their breaths and waited, poised like stiff puppets. The infantry waited in the river; on either side the gunners did not fire their guns.

Upstream there the leading troop of the 60th Bengal Light Cavalry came to the edge of the river. The horses shook themselves, neighed, and trotted out in the shallows. The riders shouted to the Lancers in the grove; the greetings echoed back from the walls of the city.

“Comrades! Brothers! Remember Mangal Pande! Join us! For your gods, join us!”

Rodney bowed his head. Not again, not again—not again Bhowani, and Kishanpur, and the execution, and the phantasmal arms of love, distorted, disfigured, which came to strangle him in the nights.

A single trumpet shrieked
Charge!
He raised his head. A blue wave galloped furiously out of the mango grove and down the slope. The golden strands of cap line and shoulder knot flew back and sparkled in the morning darkness. The horses stretched their necks, their hoofs struck the hard red earth in thunder. At the crest of the wave the upright lance points swept slowly down, the pennons whipped in circling arcs of red and white, bending down; the riders leaned into the long horizontal shafts, the trumpet screamed and screamed. The lances ripped through the grey and silver and scattered it and sent it rolling down the stream in a broken
jumble of wreckage. The charge went home, and the shock of it thudded along the banks.

Somewhere, a long way off, a gun fired. The soldier puppets moved sharply and sighed together. The men in the river moved. The sigh became a shout, swelled to a choking roar, and Rodney turned again to his front.

A single raindrop splashed on his bare head, and another. Huge slow warm drops fell thicker and faster, and danced on the river and on the baked earth of the bank. He turned his head and saw the general, back on the wall, wave his sword. The two black cannon mouths gaped at him. Vivid orange flames streaked from the muzzles, and an avalanche of canister roared inches over his head into the sepoys. All the Fusiliers, officers and sergeants and rank and file, danced under the solid rods of rain, singing and shouting like berserkers. He crept on his knees up the bank towards them. Piroo ran down to drag him in.

And always, upstream, the ceaseless battering charges of the Lancers, the single trumpet’s commands:
Charge!
Break! Retire! Re-form! Charge!
At first a hundred, then eighty, sixty, forty men.
Charge! Break! Retire! Re-form!
Charge!

The two six-pounders swept the slope at point-blank range, laying green and scarlet windrows at the water’s edge. A few sepoys ran forward and charged alone into the blast; a few crept back into the river; the Fusiliers fired in an utter disorder of fury. The Dewan’s primrose coat turned and vanished into the wall of falling rain. The 13th and 88th regiments of Bengal Native Infantry re-formed their ranks, struggled up the bank, were blown away by cannon and rifles, and came again, and again. The Union Colour of the 88th fell broken into the stream and floated away. The white Regimental Colour, woven of silk, bright with the Company’s crest and the regiment’s scrolled battle honours, came on, and the sepoys came on under it The ravenous guns devoured them all and scattered them in fragments of sodden hair and flesh and cloth over the foreshore.

Behind their wall the remnants of the Fusiliers joined in the slaughter with steaming rifles. At Rodney’s side a squat private soldier fired and fired, muttering all the while under his breath, “Filthy furching black bastards. You wite! You wite!”

Rodney laid his head on the wall and burst into tears. The warm tears splashed down with the raindrops while a heavy pain clenched inside his stomach.

The general said something. The cursing fusilier put a hand under his shoulder and walked him, unresisting, back to the house where the women were. The soldier’s voice murmured like a soft river.