Zemindar (84 page)

‘Well now, Mr Harris, and I’m not sure that I do. But I can see a lot of impropriety in allowing men to die without even the small amount of comfort we two could bring ’em. No, Mr Harris. Divil take it, but I can see no impropriety at all in Laura’s suggestion.’

‘Well … I …’ By this time Mr Harris had forgotten his nausea under the concerted attack of two determined females.

‘And anyway, Mr Harris, what about the Birch girls? I know they are still doing their mite in the hospital. No one can keep them away, isn’t that so?’

‘Yes … but well, they are a special case, after all; their own brother, and the fact that they have lost so much—their father and so on, and as you say—well, they can’t be kept away. In any event, they do not come regularly.’ As though this was a mitigating circumstance.

‘But they do go to the hospital?’

‘Yes,’ he sighed. ‘They do.’

‘Hm! Well then, there is a precedent to be followed. We will follow it!’

‘It is a waste of your time, Mrs Barry. The authorities will never hear of a single young lady helping in the place. You have no idea what it is like, or you would not even think of it. I can understand Miss Hewitt’s being carried away, but you, well, you know something of what is involved.’

‘Only too well, Mr Harris, only too well. But now, tell me, if by any chance we did get permission to help the sick, you would not really object to our presence, would you?’

‘If you mean, would I help you to get permission—I would not!’

‘But you won’t stand in our way if we do?’

‘The matter will not arise!’ said Mr Harris in a pontifical tone, and got to his feet. ‘A kind thought; indeed a noble thought, Miss Hewitt. But unfortunately, quite impracticable.’ And having raised his sweat-stained hat, he hurried away.

‘Hm! We’ll see about that!’ said Kate as we watched him go. ‘Now why ever didn’t I think of it earlier? Woman dear, you’re a genius!’

It took her several days to accomplish her purpose. She lobbied them all: Brigadier Inglis (now Officer Commanding the garrison), Father Adeodatus, the doctors, even Mr Gubbins. She wrote letters and waylaid the great as they hurried past our verandah, and at length she got her way. I never knew how she finally prevailed, but I imagine the doctors, harassed beyond conventions by the number and state of the wounded, were the first to succumb to her blandishments. However it was done, eventually the authorities relented so far as to allow the two of us to visit the hospital for one hour
per diem
in order to write letters and read prayers to the wounded. Nothing else was to be allowed us, and no more time. We were to go immediately after the midday meal, when the firing usually slackened a little while the pandies attended to their cooking, and should we be killed in the discharge of these trivial duties, no one would be held accountable but ourselves.

‘We can start tomorrow,’ Kate said joyfully when she had imparted these directions. ‘And now we must get Toddy to “come by” paper, pen and ink.’

When I had gone to the Resident’s House with Charles to find Jessie MacGregor on the day of the first assault, the sight of the tall building had recalled to my mind a happier occasion and I had been able to compare its condition with the way I remembered it nine months before. No such sentimental ruminations were possible as Kate and I approached the Banqueting Hall, which now housed the hospital, on that August afternoon; we were in too great a hurry to reach its shelter to waste time in reflecting on its past.

In the elegant colonnaded building, I had once waited for Captain Fanning to bring me iced champagne, and, while waiting, had heard a stranger’s voice enunciating unwelcome sentiments about the women who thronged its rooms. ‘Women mean emotion,’ that voice had said, and the equation I now knew was valid. Without women, Cawnpore would have been merely one more inglorious episode in a long history of martial ineptitude and civil ignorance. But because women had died there, every white woman in India, including ourselves, was potential victim, martyr and burden all in one. Had there been no women in Lucknow, the city would have been evacuated; no entrenchment would have been necessary, no leaguer possible. Men who were dead would be living, men dying would be well, men maimed would be whole.

I did not formulate these thoughts as Kate and I sped sweating through the heat, starting involuntarily at every shot which rang out as we went. The men were inured now to fire and never ducked, and even we, when we were in our rooms, noticed none but the closest explosions. But neither of us had ever been under fire in the open before. That night, however, safe again in my bed, I reflected on what I had seen and remembered Oliver’s words; and then, though I could grant the justice of his sentiment, I could have no inkling of the depth of indignation which would be fired in every English-speaking country and in Europe by the murder of a few score white women and children in a dusty Indian town. I could not know of the great endeavour being made on our behalf, or the frantic haste with which that endeavour was being turned to action. Who could have guessed then at the torrent of rage, revenge and bitterness that had its fount in the well at Cawnpore? But I had learned during that single hour in the hospital the extent of the sacrifice and suffering which our presence demanded from our men.

The long ground floor room which constituted the whole of the hospital since, for safety’s sake, the upper storey had been evacuated, was so dark that we had to pause at the door to allow our eyes to accustom themselves to the gloom. We knew that, in order to induce the pandies to spare the hospital, prisoners, including a couple of the Princes of Oudh, had been lodged in rooms in the north wing of the building; but, though the enemy was aware of the fact, the building was under constant attack. Every window and door was barricaded, a fact which banished light and raised the temperature, but had not prevented one man from being shot dead through the head, and several others from being wounded as they lay on their beds.

The room was crowded to suffocation with iron bedsteads, string cots, mattresses laid on the bare floor, and rush mats lacking even a mattress—all so close together there was barely room to pass between.

The air was appalling. The heat of the shuttered room served to accentuate the myriad horrid odours resulting from tropical diseases and the sweetness of gangrened limbs. The
punkahs
moved but could not freshen the evil effluvia, and the men lay sweating, gasping for breath, unwashed and unshaven, many still wearing the clothes in which they had been wounded. There were no sheets, no pillows, and the blankets on which they lay were stiff with filth. Bluebottles buzzed over pools of vomit and excrement on the floor; over plates of uneaten food, medicine glasses, mugs of tepid water and the tins in which leeches disgorged the blood of the wounded.

Perhaps, had we been able to discern all this as we entered, we would have turned back then and there. Our eyes, however, were slow to mark details, though our ears were immediately assailed by moans and sighs, the delirious ravings and unconscious mutterings which were to become the invariable accompaniment of our efforts.

Dr Darby looked up from a man he was attending as we entered.

‘Ha, Mrs Barry, you’re here,’ he said gruffly. ‘I don’t know that you should be, but I suppose I can’t keep you away now. Like those Birch girls. This is no place for women, but I can’t say I’m sorry to see you all the same. Mind, no meddling with the nursing. Write their letters, fan ’em, keep the flies off, give ’em water, and tidy up the mess, if you can face it. But nothing more. And don’t pester the poor devils with prayers. Save those for yourself. Who is this with you?’

‘Miss Hewitt,’ answered Kate serenely.

‘Well, mind you do as I say, young woman!’ he admonished me. ‘And keep away from this section. Not fit for you. Over there are some of the convalescents. See what you can do for them. Now be off, keep quiet and stay out of my way. And if you intend to faint, do it outside and don’t come back again. Haven’t time to bother with sensitive females.’

He turned back to his patient, and we picked a path towards the men he had indicated. Dr Darby’s pregnant wife had been in Wheeler’s entrenchment in Cawnpore, and it was not difficult to forgive him his brusqueness.

Most of the men were too ill and miserable to do more than regard us dully as we passed them, but one or two smiled and one waved a bandaged hand at us cheerfully. ‘What, no broth nor jelly?’ he enquired sarcastically as we passed.

We did not accomplish very much that afternoon. Only two men wanted letters written, and I believe they were accommodating us. The one I wrote went something like this:

Dear Nell,

The pandies got me in the left foot, but it is mended. If you ever get this, I wish you to know as how I often think of you and Ma and Pa. We have fought them off till now, and otherwise I am well and happy as I hope this finds you.

I looked up, expecting more, but the lad (he was no more) asked me to sign his name. ‘Can’t say much to ’em, can we, miss? Wouldn’t want them to worry. Anyway, where could we start?’

For the rest of the time, I moved among the beds with dippers of water, which I fetched from a bucket just inside the door. I felt self-conscious and responded shyly to the calls of ‘Water, ma’am!’ or ‘Please, miss, water ’ere,’ taking care to keep my eyes averted from the bare limbs and scantily bandaged wounds of even these so-called convalescents. More than once, only a quick drink from the communal dipper kept me from an ignominious retreat outside. An elderly man, who saw me pause before taking water to a man who had asked for it, gave me a smile and a wink. ‘You feels it more’n we do, miss,’ he whispered. ‘We got used to the smell, and it’s better’n bein’ dead after all! Don’t take on, miss. There’s worse things than this.’ I wondered if there were.

Kate did better than I. She knew many of the men, and could talk to them about their families as she fanned them. Her manner was forthright and easy, but pity and embarrassment constrained me to silence.

There were several doctors in the entrenchment, but too few medical orderlies. The few men who were on their feet did what they could for the others, and the smaller boys of the Martinière School pulled the
punkahs
, fetched food and water, swatted flies and fanned. Other help there was none—either for doctor or patient.

After a bare hour, we walked out into the sunlight in silence, too preoccupied with our impressions to bother about the bullets.

The next day we returned. And the next.

Gradually, the regulation hour became two, and we did more than keep the flies off and pass the dipper round. Soon we were washing the patients and feeding them. Then, emboldened by the Birch girls’ example, we watched the doctors dress wounds so that we could do the same. Before long, we were dressing wounds ourselves.

My embarrassment soon disappeared; we were in no position to value false modesty, and, though the doctors still protected us from the worst of the sights, nothing could guard us, or the other patients, from the sounds a man made as he underwent amputation. What was even more horrifying than the victim’s agony was the knowledge that it was useless. No man ever recovered from losing a limb.

Often, in the evenings, I stumbled back to our rooms nauseated and trembling, and swore that I would never set foot in the place again. Night after night, I left my food untouched and went to bed to sweat in anguish at remembered scenes. Then my mind would grow cruelly calm, and the worst scene, the one I feared most and fought most strenuously to forget, would crowd into my thoughts: Oliver cut down by a trooper’s
tulwar
, drowning in that river of blood. By morning, I was always ready to escape from it back to the hospital. I could forget him there—sometimes.

So the month of August wore on. It rained, and when the rain stopped we sweltered in the steamy heat. Our rations were cut; the tea was finished. The men were without tobacco or sugar. No one had seen white bread for nearly three months, and the
atta
(coarse wholemeal flour, ground in hand mills) with which we made our
chapattis
, induced an irritation of the bowels and consequent diarrhoea.

Twice in a fortnight the wall was breached, and twice we beat off the insurgents, but the danger that had at first seemed a joke, mining, had become a major preoccupation.

Evening after evening, the lookouts watched for the sudden flare of a rocket that would tell us General Havelock was really coming. But night after night, they watched in vain.

It would be fatuous to pretend that we became accustomed to the conditions of our life: rather we became, to some extent, inured to them. We could not disregard the heat, the boils, the noise, the lack of food, the evil smell and the fatigue. But we learned to minimize them in order to cope with the more acute distresses. Men got drunk, despite the fact that there was no longer a ration of liquor; they fought their friends, stole each other’s paltry possessions, went whoring when the opportunity offered, and cursed their fate with colourful energy. And they fought. Women wept and worked, nagged and bickered, gossiped and lied, and sighed for better days. And they suffered. The cohesion of interest and endeavour produced by the first fear fragmented as we became accustomed to living in it; we became again, but less pleasantly, our true, individual human selves.

To all this, the petty selfishness no less than the hidden heroism, I became a party now that I was free to move around the entrenchment. The men became accustomed to seeing the Birch ladies, Kate and myself running between our quarters and the hospital, and almost always we found ourselves accompanied for protection. What good our protectors could have done against a pandy’s stray bullet was beyond my comprehension, and certainly no one but the enemy would have harmed us. I had soon realized that it was easier to face the enemy’s fire for two brief periods a day than to endure the anxious monotony which was the lot of the other women, but the men insisted on treating us as privileged beings. Presents came our way, pathetic little wisps of paper containing a crumbled biscuit, or a little sugar; once, three buttons on a card! I think the fact that we were willing to talk to the men in the hospital did more for them than any of our other amateur ministrations. We heard many an unhappy story of unfaithful wives, dead children or anxiety for parents left alone in some small out-station overrun by the mutineers. We could do nothing, but we were willing to listen; and the look of relief that came into a man’s eyes when he had given verbal form to his sorrows and worries was worth all the time we spent in this way.