The Weary Generations (16 page)

‘What happened then?' Naim asked.

‘What do you think? Could you say no with a knife at your throat?'

‘You married her?'

‘We have been married for fourteen years.'

Confused, Naim blurted out the question, ‘But why?'

‘Why what?'

‘She had a husband, strong, a wrestler – I mean…' He ran out of words.

‘Yes,' Thakur Das said, himself confused, as if he did not understand what the question was about.

In another shop a soldier began to sing, in a low, dry voice, a song of bereavement and departure. Naim threw the corn stalks from underneath him on to the nearest sleeping soldiers and went back to his bed. Thakur Das followed him.

‘I know of women,' he said, ‘who have six babies with one man and then run off with another. Surindri got me at the point of a knife, got the pandit at the point of a knife to marry us. You know, the two of us were on horseback and the pandit, trembling with fear, led the horse by the reins and took us through the rounds. Ha ha! But listen, since that day she has not raised her voice to me. She misses me. I know it here,' Thakur Das patted his chest, ‘here. She speaks to me here.' He patted his chest again.

‘I am going to sleep,' Naim said, covering his face with the blanket.

T
HE
G
ERMAN ATTACK
came at Ypres. The battle continued until November. The Ferozpur Brigade marched to Belville where General French issued orders for the brigade to join the Second Cavalry Division. The 129th Duke of Connaught's Own was put under the command of Brigadier-General Vaughan who commanded the Third Cavalry Brigade. In the morning they reached the firing line and took over from the 5th and 6th Lancers. Naim's company was on the right flank by a vast wood whose dense trees, after running across the plain for a short distance, suddenly climbed a steep hill, looking like a herd of elephants going up to the top. Grass grew uncut everywhere, holding within it the fallen leaves of autumn.

Machine-guns were fixed in the trenches evacuated by the Lancers, who had left behind their empty ration tins, pieces of hard biscuit and cigarette ends. Eight men were deputed to each of the two machine-guns. Two more sections, with a gap of twenty yards between them, had taken up position, their four guns fixed in the already-dug foundations. The German attack had begun on the northern front, and sounds of artillery were reaching the southern positions. Ahead of the machine-gun positions, at a slightly lower level, were the trenches of cavalry units. The Second Cavalry Division occupied a three-and-a-half-mile area between Hollebeke and the canal bridge. The trenches were a mile-and-a-half long. The left position was taken by the Third Brigade.

All day the sun shone on them and they sat there, waiting for orders. The trenches were cold and wet, and strange-looking insects crawled in them.

‘Where is Havaldar Noor Mohammad?' Naim asked.

‘At the outpost, top of the staff headquarters building,' Thakur Das answered, carefully picking up an insect and releasing it on the back of his hand.

‘He was saying we will definitely attack this morning.'

‘Yes, everyone thinks he is Brigadier-General Vaughan,' Thakur Das said. ‘We will not attack, the enemy will. They did in the north too.'

In front of them the sun was going down on the broken landscape. The trenches camouflaged hundreds of soldiers' faces, red, brown and black, their ears cocked to the continuous low roar of artillery to the north, eyes glittering with the fever of a weary vigil.

‘Motherfuckers,' Naim muttered, crushing a whole line of insects under his boot.

Thakur Das looked at him in mild alarm. Then he called out, ‘Riaz, got the belts?'

‘Got them,' the soldier answered.

‘Gul Mohammad, you go now,' he ordered. ‘Riaz and Ram Lal, you two take out the bullets and put them back in again. Practise, practise. Two hundred and fifty rounds go in three minutes, remember.'

Naim was killing the insects with the flat of his bayonet which he had unhinged from his rifle.

‘Don't kill them, don't kill anything in your own trench,' Thakur Das said to him gently. ‘There are rules in a field of battle.'

Naim gathered the dead creatures with his bayonet into a small heap on one side and raised himself on his knees. Gul Mohammad, crawling away behind the trench, passed the section commander and saluted him in a lying position. The section commander went on to speak briefly to a lean white officer and then came straight to the trenches. He stopped at each of the machine-gun positions and spoke to the men.

‘Well done, men. We will attack tomorrow.' The officer tossed a packet of cigarettes to them before departing.

‘Tomorrow, tomorrow,' Thakur Das said. ‘This is the third time he has said it. The pig can't find some other place to go telling lies.' He took a cigarette out of the packet and gave one to Naim, throwing the rest to the others. The soldiers lunged at them. They lit their cigarettes. ‘No head rises above the trench now, boys,' Thakur Das warned.

They smoked in silence. The clouds were hanging low and a biting wind blew over the earth, swirling in the trenches.

‘You know,' Thakur Das said, digging the nail of his first finger into the mud wall of the trench in front of him, ‘it was a cloudy day the time that Surindri and I were married. You should have seen the face of the pandit …' He laughed.

A sudden hard knot of resentment – of unknown origin, a throwback to what seemed many ages ago – gripped Naim's stomach. ‘Fine place to talk
of women,' he said, anger showing in his voice. ‘What are you so happy about?'

Naim's reaction surprised Thakur Das. ‘Any place is good enough to talk of women,' he said plainly. ‘If you go looking for a place to be happy in, you will never find it.' Then with concern, ‘Are you feeling all right?'

With an effort of will, Naim calmed himself. ‘I am all right,' he said, pretending to cough. He spat. ‘Perhaps this tobacco is bad.'

‘English cigarettes, these are,' Thakur Das said.

About midnight it started to rain. It went on falling for four hours. There weren't enough tarpaulins to cover the trenches. Whatever they had – machine-gun covers, their coats – they tried holding up, wrinkling them to make channels for the rainwater to flow away. Nothing they did succeeded in keeping the water out. By the time the rain stopped they were standing in calf-deep water. They started to bail the water out with the help of empty ration tins. The section commander walked up and down the trenches, saying, ‘Well done, men. Buck up. Good show.' In the midst of this they heard a drone overhead.

‘Down,' Thakur Das shouted. ‘On the ground.'

They dived face-down, their noses buried in runny mud, while the red light above quickly crossed the sky and faded away.

‘Oh, get up, men, get up,' the section commander was saying. ‘Those things are not going to attack you, they only come to look.'

Then they were standing up with their boots full of water, heavy coats dripping and bodies shivering.

‘Come on, come on, buckets in and water out, buckets in and water out …'

The sounds of noses being blown and small tins being filled with water and emptied time after time arose all along the trenches that night until dawn came up, and the damp got into the soldiers' bones deeper than the Indians, reared in hot weather, had ever known before. A mile away they could see movement in the enemy lines.

The taste of the trenches had driven out the cheer that Naim had kept up for so long. He was in a nasty mood when Thakur Das told him to douse the small fire of damp twigs that he had managed to light in the trench.

‘Leave me alone,' he said to the havaldar.

‘We don't want to make too much smoke,' Thakur Das said as he went and crushed the half-lit twigs under his boots.

Naim tore off his helmet and flung it to the ground. Then he threw his rifle at the havaldar. The rifle brushed past Thakur Das and hit the mud, where it stood straight up against the trench wall. ‘Here, take it away,' he shouted.

Thakur Das looked at him with a steady gaze for a minute, then he shrugged his shoulders and turned away. A soldier sitting by the second machine-gun, his face lined with dirt, said to his companion, ‘The lance naik wants to be court-martialled.' The sun was up. The woods stood, peacefully green and still, above the sleepless, dirty, wet heads of the soldiers, and a thin steam was rising from the earth along the edges of the trenches. Some twigs were smouldering from an earlier fire where a soldier sat trying to dry his socks while Thakur Das chewed on a hard biscuit with mouthfuls of water from his canteen. When he had finished, Thakur Das picked up Naim's rifle.

‘Do you think there are not enough enemies already in the field?' He tossed the rifle to Naim. ‘Here, you will need this.'

Naim caught the rifle in the air and sat down in the trench to nibble on a biscuit.

The cavalry units were withdrawn that day, but no orders came for the machine-gunners. At night the sky became overcast, and soon afterwards it began to snow. It was the Indians' first sight of snow. Sticking their heads out of the trenches, they kept looking for half the night at the snow falling over the woods and settling there. They had covered the trenches with whatever pieces of cloth they could lay their hands on. When they tired of watching the snowfall in the still air, the soldiers sat and, in the slightly raised temperature, they felt encouraged to take off their shirts, vests and socks and hold them over the damp and dying fires, hoping to dry them. Thakur Das was trying repeatedly to scrape the mud off his boots with the help of his bayonet, unmindful of the fact that the mud had long been cleared and the bayonet point was beginning to score the leather. Naim stood, resting his weight on the bayonetless rifle stuck under his armpit, and looked out, remembering the time he first saw the snowfall in Simla when he was small. They were staying in the house of one of his uncle's friends during the long summer holidays. They had taken a trip one day up into the high mountains and he saw the snow falling there in the middle of August. Down in Simla, the house was built in the side of a hill and it has a wooden veranda overhanging a sheer drop of hundreds of feet. A cat had had kittens and lived on the veranda, and when it rained a kassi flowed right opposite the house with the water running from the top of the hill to the bottom and the water was so clear he could see the pebbles underneath from where he stood on the veranda. He had a friend his own age, the son of the house, what was his name? Yes, Deepak. As the rain stopped they would go down to the kassi to pick up coloured pebbles that had been swept down from the top while Deepak's sister Nirmal sat atop a boulder
and played the harmonica. At that age they were Naim's only friends. Where were they now? What might have happened to them? Standing there, surrounded by a vast, hidden sea of men, he felt utterly alone. A slow, unaccountable anger that had been rising and falling inside him all day had settled in the pit of his stomach. His legs were trembling under him from standing too long, and he found that he was starving.

The attack began the next day. The plan was to go like this: No. 3 Double Company, which was in possession of the Hollebeke trenches under the command of Major Humphrey, would advance and encircle six hundred yards of the front; No. 1 Company under Captain Adair would take Rumbeke, and as soon as No. 2 Company came alongside they would commence the attack, the right flank heading towards the farm on contour 30; two platoons of No. 3 Company, along with the machine-gun section now led by Captain Dell, would support the fire coming from the trenches around the farm; No. 3 Company, minus the two platoons, and No. 4 Company would wait in reserve behind the farm. The firing started at three o'clock. They faced the enemy machine-gun and rifle fire. The artillery was still silent on either side.

Captain Dell, binoculars to his eyes, was walking along the machine-gun positions. The noise of firing was echoing from the western hills, and the air was weighted with the smell of gunpowder.

‘Thirty-nine degrees south-east. Fire!' shouted Captain Dell.

Naim pressed the trigger. The bullets fell well short of the enemy trenches, throwing up small stones and larger pieces of earth.

‘Blast,' said the commander and turned to look towards the OP's position. ‘Idiot,' he said. ‘Cease fire!' He fixed his binoculars once again at the enemy. ‘Forty-two degrees south-east. Fire!'

This time their fire was right on target. The line of enemy heads disappeared below the trench line. A couple of arms were thrown in the air and a soldier leaped up as if he had been shoved powerfully from beneath. The second burst got him straight in the body. He rolled over for a yard and lay still and flat on level ground.

‘Well done,' shouted Thakur Das. ‘Fire!'

Naim felt the sensation of the blood circulating rapidly in his veins. He increased the pressure of his finger on the trigger. ‘Load up the belt,' he said.

‘Do not overheat the guns.' Captain Dell was speaking into his binoculars. ‘They are your best friends, do not let them melt away, give them a break …'

Rifle and machine-gun shots were piercing the air, the atmosphere was
hazy with dust and powder, and the sunlight reflected off the dead enemy soldier's helmet.

In late afternoon the artillery opened up from behind with rapid fire. The enemy fire stopped for a time. Adjusting and readjusting his binoculars, Captain Dell shouted the order, ‘Company, advance.'

Two soldiers pulled up the machine-gun while Thakur Das handed its tripod to a third. Naim's soldiers picked up their machine-gun and ran forwards, crouched over. A burst of fire whistled over their heads. One of Thakur Das's soldiers threw up his arms, rose momentarily on his heels and fell to the ground. The entire detachment dropped to their bellies. A second burst of fire came inches above their backs. Gripped by terror, they tried at first to hide behind small stones, then dug their heads into the earth, but in the face of heavy and accurate enemy fire they eventually had to retreat. Half-wet earth and grit entering and blocking their nostrils, they were slithering backwards on their stomachs like wounded snakes. They were almost back at their trenches when a soldier, propelled upright by the impact of a burst of fire, spun round and fell back into the trench. A bullet hit the magazine of a machine-gun behind which Naim had been sheltering his face and smashed it.