The Weary Generations (17 page)

They refixed their guns in the trenches and, following Captain Dell's sharp, angry orders, opened fire. The wounded soldier, holding his stomach with both hands, cried, ‘Water.' Someone put their canteen to his mouth. He took a mouthful but the water flowed back out of the corners of his lips. He was looking with a fixed gaze at what seemed to be nothing at all. Casualties of the aborted attack: two men and a machine-gun.

A part of the company led by Captain Wilson lost its way and ended up to the right of 2 Company. At dusk the captain asked for assistance and was promised two platoons of 4 Company. But before they arrived he took a direct hit in the head and died instantly.

In view of more important events on the right flank, the break-up of the division became inevitable. The next morning the regiment was ordered to withdraw from their positions and go to the north of Hollebeke. In the evening two companies were called back to occupy trenches A and B again. For two days it went on like this. A third of the artillery, chiefly comprised of six-inch Howitzers, was knocked out. Then came the German attack.

The Second Bavarian Corps was massing its troops in the section where the Third Cavalry Brigade was dug in; 129's two companies were in the forward lines and were to be relieved at seven in the morning by the 5th and 6th Lancers, while No. 1 Company had just relieved No. 2, which was
pulled back into reserve. The enemy attack added to the generally unsettled situation, and in the face of heavy artillery bombardment No. 2 Company had to retreat to take refuge behind the farm. Captain Dell's company was still in position. It had lost half its men, enemy batteries were pounding the position, and it was some time since the section commander's last round of the trenches, which were largely blasted and broken. In answer to the enemy's Big Berthas, the smaller six-inch guns were proving to be no match. The enemy front lines were fast advancing towards them. Five hundred yards away they could see soldiers in unfamiliar uniforms. The company had five machine-guns, all firing. One by one they soon fell silent. It was still a couple of hours before sundown, and the wind blowing over the previous night's snow carried a smell of blood and gunpowder along with the groans of the wounded and the dying. The noise of the artillery's continuous barrage bored holes into the men's brains, driving them to the verge of insanity.

‘Put in a belt,' Thakur Das ordered.

Two soldiers quickly finished slipping in bullets and fitted the belt to the magazine.

‘Is that all?' asked Thakur Das, looking at the heap of empty belts.

‘Rahim has gone to fetch more.'

‘How long ago was that?'

‘About a half-hour.'

‘Riaz, you go,' Thakur Das said.

The soldier hesitated for a moment, looking around, his eyes vacant with fear.

‘Go on, only one gun's left. You want to die like a rat?'

Riaz heaved himself out and started crawling back to the ammunition hut. Thakur Das and Naim saw, along the barrel of their gun, the line of enemy soldiers showing signs of advancing towards them. Thakur Das hurriedly went over to the next machine-gun, where he found the bodies of four soldiers, their faces smeared with dirt and contorted in death. A half-spent belt hung by its magazine. Thakur Das tried its trigger. He swore and came back.

‘Jammed,' he said.

‘Can't we use that belt somehow?' Naim asked him.

‘Have you not had MG training?'

‘I have.'

‘Why do you ask then?'

‘Just asking,' Naim said, his silent gaze crowded with other questions.

A shell landed thirty yards behind the trench and Riaz flew up like a
jumping fish and lay still. Thakur Das and Naim kept looking at him for a minute and saw no movement. A second shell came down three feet away from their faces and a wall of earth lifted Thakur Das into the air. He fell back, still inside the trench, his mouth and nose full of dirt. He lay there for a few seconds, too stunned to breathe. Then he started coughing and blowing his nose. Rubbing his eyes furiously to clear them, he sat up.

‘Are you …?' Naim inquired.

‘Yes, yes, I am alive. I have tasted dirt in all my holes many times before.'

‘The gully is demolished,' Naim said to him.

‘I can see …'

A third shell dropped at a safe distance, but still buried them with clods of earth. The two of them dug the machine-gun out of the debris.

‘No bullets,' Thakur Das said. ‘Riaz is gone.'

Naim understood what he meant. Securing his rifle around his shoulder, he climbed out of the trench and started a slow crawl back to the ammunition dump. Rifle, machine-gun and artillery fire made a roof over his head. He passed the body of Riaz. Riaz's abdomen was open and part of his intestines was sticking out. Naim averted his face to avoid smelling the steam rising from the torn gut. Next he came across Rahim, who had been hit in the neck and blood had collected in a puddle, his sightless eyes staring from his head. Naim took a mouthful of snow from the ground and kept crawling. A few minutes later he approached the temporary hut erected with odd bits of wood and foliage from the forest hidden in a cluster of trees, where three soldiers were busy filling the bullet holes, taking the ammunition from wooden boxes and slipping them into the leather belts. Halting for a second outside the entrance, Naim heard them laughing. He made a noise that alerted the soldiers inside. They jumped up, rifles at the ready.

‘Who goes there?'

‘Friend,' Naim replied and stepped into the hut. He could see the laughter still hovering around their faces. ‘Belts ready?'

‘All ready, lance naik.'

‘What is the joke?' he asked.

The men burst out laughing. ‘Shams was telling us about this bull of his who used to kidnap cows and bring them home.'

‘You talk about naughty bulls at a time like this?' Naim said solemnly.

The men went on laughing. ‘Any time is a good time,' one of them said, ‘and this is the best time, ha ha ha ha!'

Naim knew then that these men, hearing the earth blasted for days, had stopped caring. He was grateful that they hadn't stopped working. He
slung four loaded belts on his back. ‘Keep working,' he said to them as he went out. ‘We shall need a lot more of these.'

The belts were one too many for him to carry. He gritted his teeth and kept crawling with them on his back up to the trenches. He passed an L-shaped trench where a machine-gun stood silent. ‘Friends,' he called out, ‘men, you want ammunition? You want bullets?'

He got no answer and carried on. Daylight was fading quickly. He was now in sight of his machine-gun, which was still firing. Thakur Das's head was bobbing up and down; he was using the last belt sparingly, firing short bursts at a time. Naim was exhausted but happy that he had enough ammunition on him to keep the gun firing for a good while. He knew that Thakur Das would be happy with his work.

He was a dozen feet away from his trench when he saw a whole line of soldiers from the opposite trenches spring up as if thrown out of the earth and come running towards him, their guns blazing. He dug his head into the ground and shouted, ‘Havaldar, don't get up. They are coming –'

Thakur Das's head bobbed up for a second. Naim felt his left hand going numb. ‘Don't get up,' he shouted, ‘stay in the gully, run to the right –'

Thakur Das stood up. ‘Naim, are you hurt?'

‘No,' he said. At the same time he saw blood pouring out of his arm. ‘I don't – know,' he stammered. ‘Get down, Thakur, run to your right –'

Thakur Das climbed out of the trench and ran towards Naim.

‘Ohh … go back,' Naim moaned.

At that moment Thakur Das was hit in the back by one bullet after another, his body jerking from head to foot three times in quick succession, until he opened his arms, as if to hug someone, and fell on top of Naim with all his weight. Naim remembered two things before he passed out: wishing Thakur Das would get off him, but Thakur Das, flat as a slab, wouldn't budge; and seeing, in the back of his mind, just as he heard a deafening explosion behind him in the cluster of trees, the laughing faces of three men talking of a kidnapping bull back in someone's village.

When he came to, he was still lying underneath Thakur Das and he realized that he had lost consciousness for only a few minutes. He also knew that their trenches were now occupied by the enemy. But no fire was coming from there. Behind him he could only hear the roar of his own artillery shelling the ground far beyond the trenches where he and Thakur Das had been. With a huge heave, he moved from beneath Thakur Das's body, threw off the ammunition belts and started a terrified crawl backwards, expecting the enemy fire to come at any moment. Night had fallen. In the dark, he reached a safe distance, stood up and started running until
he reached the artillery batteries. He saw a horse bleeding from the chest and two men tending to it. He approached an officer.

‘Friend,' he shouted. ‘Lance Naik Naim Ahmad, 129 Baloch, machine-gun detachment, section number –'

‘All right, lance naik,' the officer said, ‘speak.'

‘Our position has fallen to the enemy, sir. All the men are dead. The guns are in enemy hands.'

In the thin light of a sliver of moon, the officer wiped his brow with his white, faintly trembling fingers. ‘Report to the adjutant,' he said.

Pressing his hand on his bleeding left forearm, Naim went towards where he thought the brigade headquarters might be.

T
HEY FOUGHT ON
in Belgium and France for a year. In the month of July, the regiment was pulled out and ordered to go to East Africa. They spent a few days in Marseille where they were to board ship.

It had been a sunny, warm day and Naim had been out strolling along the city streets, which were crowded with men, women and children. A horse-cart, loaded with baskets of vegetables, passed. A few yards ahead, the horse's hooves slipped on the road surface and it fell awkwardly with its legs spread out in all four directions. People gathered on the roadside, women uttering small, brief cries of pity and horror. The farmer and his helper, putting the strength of their backs behind it, first helped up the horse and then started picking up spilled heads of cabbage, parsnips and other vegetables from the road. Some more people gathered on the other side. Suddenly Naim saw a figure in the crowd, walking away. He was a heavy-set man in a crumpled army uniform. There was something in the way he walked and the line of his shoulders that was recognizable. Naim caught up with him. The man turned round.

‘Mahindroo!' Naim cried in surprise.

‘Neem!' Mahinder Singh answered.

They grabbed one another's hands and kept pressing and shaking them for minutes on end without saying another word, their eyes twinkling with old warmth. Finally, Naim laughed and said to him, ‘You are alive! And dirty. Great!'

Mahinder Singh laughed. ‘I am going to have a bath today.'

‘Good. Then you will be alive and clean.'

‘What are you doing here?' Mahinder Singh asked.

‘We are going to Africa. I am in the 129th Baloch. A machine-gunner. And you?'

‘No. 9, Hudson Horse, Ambala Brigade.'

‘Have you been fighting?'

‘Yes.'

‘Where?'

Mahinder Singh pointed in an indefinite direction with his hand. ‘There.'

‘Against whom?'

‘Turks – Germans,' Mahinder Singh said vaguely, as if he was not sure who they were.

‘Are you all right?' Naim asked.

‘Yes. You?'

‘I got a bullet. But only in the flesh. Healed quickly.'

They walked on in silence.

‘You want to go and eat something somewhere?' Naim asked him.

‘Er – no, I am going back to my unit. Come, there is a place where we can talk,' Mahinder Singh said.

Walking alongside one another, they left the neighbourhood. People, especially children, stopped to gape at this soldier with a beard and a turban wrapped round his head. The two of them entered a vast cemetery. Concrete-slab graves with headstones spread out from narrow red stone pathways on either side of which stood tended fruit trees. Looking at Mahinder Singh out of the corners of his eyes, Naim noticed that the young Sikh no longer had the agility in his limbs; he had grown fat and moved ponderously, like an old bull – something unlikely to happen to a soldier in the midst of war.

‘Any news?' Naim asked.

‘There were floods.'

‘Somebody told you?'

‘Ramzan.'

‘The cobbler? He wasn't with us.'

‘No, he was away when we were taken. He was caught six months later.'

‘Where did you meet him?' ‘He was sent to our regiment.'

‘What else did he say?'

‘It came for four days non-stop after we left. Crops washed away. Many houses collapsed under the rains, Ramzan's too. After the floods foot-and-mouth spread and killed many cattle. But our two best bulls were sold by Juginder in good time. Chaudri Niaz Beg also sold most of his animals before the disease came, so you'll be all right.' Bad though the news was, Mahinder Singh perked up as he spoke to Naim of their homes. ‘After we came away many Roshan Pur girls ran off with boys from Jat Nagar who had hidden and escaped being taken. Ishtamal was done by the land
department. Our barley field by the pond was exchanged with one of yours by the graveyard. Our field is good soil, you have nothing to worry about. Everyone's land is in one place now, what more do we want? Good for animals too, they don't have to go from one field to the other …'

In the growing dark of evening, they were the only two left in the sprawling cemetery. Much of their talk had been exhausted in the first half-hour. Still reluctant to part, walking up and down the paths in silence like ghosts from another time and another place, only occasionally breaking the quiet of the place with a word from Naim or a grunt from Mahinder Singh, they kept repeatedly looking at one another without words. As light of the day died, Naim stopped and put his hand on Mahinder Singh's shoulder.