“Three hundred and thirty-three long grains of rice?” he was shouting, “Then get them, idiot! Am I a storekeeper? Fetch a sack from the kitchen – run, you pervert son of a shameless mother!”
Close by the bridgehead was a curious structure like a huge beehive, about ten feet high and built of stone blocks. Before it, in full fig of gold coat, turbaned helmet, and jewelled sword-belt, stood Tej himself – he wasn’t above ten yards from the staff conference, but they might have been in Bombay for all the heed each paid to the other. Before him cringed a couple of attendants, a chico held a coloured brolly over his head, and at a table near the beehive’s entrance an ancient wallah in an enormous puggaree was studying charts through a magnifying glass, and making notes. Watching the scene with some amusement was an undoubted European in kepi, shirt-sleeves, and a goatee beard.
That is what I saw, through the drifting smoke and confusion; the following, above the thunder of the great battle in which India was being lost and won, is what I heard – and it’s stark truth:
Ancient wallah: The inner circumference is too small! According to the stars, it must be thirteen and a half times the girth of your excellency’s belly.
Tej: My belly? What in God’s name has my belly to do with it?
A.W.: It is your excellency’s shelter, and must be built in relation to your proportions, or the influence of your planets will not sustain it. I must know your circumference, taken precisely about the navel.
European (producing foot-rule): A metre and a half, at least. Here, this is marked in English inches.
Tej: I am to measure my belly, at such a time?
European: What else have you to do? The sirdars have the defence in hand, and my fortifications will not be overrun if they are properly manned. By the way, three hundred and thirty-three long grains of rice make about three and a quarter English yards.
A.W. (agitated): The measurement must be exact!
European: A grain of rice may be exact in the stars, astrologer, but not on earth. Anyway, three yards of stone will stop any missile the British are likely to throw at us.
A.W.: Not if the circumference is too small! It must be enlarged –
European (shrugging): Or the general must lose weight.
Tej (enraged): Damn you, Hurbon … And who in Satan’s name are you, and what do you want?
For by this time Sardul Singh was before him, saluting and then whispering urgently. Tej gave a start, and turned an uncomprehending stare at me, as though I’d been a ghost. Then he recovered, beckoned me urgently, and dived into the beehive.47 I followed and found myself in a tiny circular chamber, stuffy and stinking from a single oil lamp. Tej wrenched the door to, and the sound of battle died to a distant murmur. He fairly clutched at me, his chops wobbling.
“Is it you, my dear friend? Ah, thank God! Is this thing true? Is there a secret negotiation?”
I told him there wasn’t, that it was a lie I’d told Sardul on the spur of the moment, and he let out a great wail of dismay.
“Then what am I to do? I cannot control these madmen! You saw them out yonder – they pretend that I do not exist, and take my command away, the mutinous swine! Sham Singh directs the defence, and your army will be dashed to pieces! I did not seek this engagement! Why, oh why, did Gough sahib force it upon me!” He began to rave and curse, beating his fat fists on the stone. “If the Jangi lat is beaten, what will become of me! I am lost! I am lost!” And he subsided on the floor, a quaking blubber in his gold coat, weeping and railing against Gough and Sham Singh and Jeendan and Lal Singh, and anyone else he could call to mind.
I didn’t interrupt him. It may have been the sudden quiet of that little refuge, but for the first time in hours I found myself able to think, and was deep in fearful calculation. For here I was, by the strangest turn of fate, prisoner in the heart of the enemy’s camp, at the supreme moment of imperial crisis, while all yet hung in the balance – and a small voice in my coward soul was telling me what had to be done. Only to think of the risk set me shaking … anyway, it all depended on one thing. I waited until Tej’s lamentation reached a high pitch, slid quietly out of the beehive, closed the door, and looked about me, my heart racing.
Everywhere was choking confusion, with visibility a poor twenty yards, but round the command group was a cheering press of Sikhs, dancing and waving tulwars – so our first attack had failed, although the pounding of gunfire was as deafening as ever. A horse artillery team came clattering from the bridge; a wounded officer, his blue coat sodden with blood, was being carried past by servants; the European, Hurbon,48 was mounting a pony and riding off into the smoke; the old astrologer was still muttering over his charts – but the one thing for which I’d been hoping had come to pass: Sardul Singh and his troop, having done their duty by delivering me, were gone. And with all attention directed towards the death-struggle just up the road, no one was paying the least heed to the big Kabuli badmash scratching himself furtively outside the Commander-in-Chief’s funkhole.
It was my heaven-sent chance to act on the inspiration which had come to me while Tej blubbered at my feet. I braced myself, breathed a silent prayer, took a dozen flying strides, gathering speed as I went, and with one last almighty bound hurled myself from the bank and plunged into the boiling flood of the Sutlej.
According to the Morning Post, or the Keswick Reminder, I forget which (or it may even have been the Lincoln, Rutland and Stamford Mercury) I was pursued by “a horde of furious foes, whose discharges rent the waters about my head”, but the truth is that no one saw my “spirited dash for freedom” except a couple of dhobi-wallahs slapping laundry in the shallows (cool hands, those, to be doing the wash while the battle raged), which just shows that you should never trust what you read in the papers. Why, they even credited me with “breaking free from my bonds” and cutting down a couple of “swarthy foemen” in the course of my escape “from the jaws of the Seekh Khalsa”; well, I never said so. The facts are as I’ve stated, and while I may have embroidered ’em a little for Henry Lawrence’s benefit, the lurid press accounts were pure gammon. But it’s a journalistic law, you see, that heroes can never do anything ordinary; when Flashy, the Hector of Afghanistan, beats a reluctant retreat, there must be an army howling at his heels, or the public cancel their subscriptions.
You, knowing the truth of my inglorious evasion, may cry out in disgust at my desertion in the hour of need; well, good luck to you. I shan’t even remark that ’twould have served no purpose to stay, or pretend that if there had been a bomb handy I’d have paused to heave it at the Khalsa’s high command before lighting out – someone would have been sure to notice. I was intent only on flight, and the Sutlej called to me; as I ploughed frantically away from the bank I was prepared to drift all the way to Ferozepore if need be, rejoicing in the knowledge that the flood was carrying me beyond the reach of foe and friend alike. And so it might have done, if the river hadn’t been swollen seven feet above its normal level, developing currents that bore me almost diagonally to the northern bank; struggle as I might I couldn’t stay in midstream, for there was a terrific undertow that kept sucking me down, and it was all I could do to stay afloat. I’m a good swimmer, but a river in spate is a fearsome thing, and I was half-drowned when I found myself in the northern shallows, and struggled, spewing and gasping, on to the muddy shore.
I lay for a couple of minutes, taking breath, and when I peeped out from among the reeds, there before me on the far side was the extreme flank of the Khalsa fortifications, with the bridge of boats a bare half-mile upstream. Which meant that on the bluff directly above me were the Sikh reserve batteries we’d passed through on the way in – and if an idle gunner chanced to look over the edge, there was I, like a fish on a slab.
I burrowed through the reeds, cursing my luck, and crawled into the lee of the bluff, which was about thirty feet high. Above me, just below the overhanging lip, was what looked like a sandy ledge. If I could clamber up to it I should be hidden both from abo
ve and below, so I began to climb the almost perpendicular bank, gouging holds in the wet clay. It was heavy going, but my one fear was that at any moment a dusky head would pop over and challenge me. Nearing the top, I could hear them chattering in the emplacements, which fortunately were about twenty yards back from the edge; I scrambled the last few feet with my heart in my mouth, gained the ledge, and was overjoyed to find that it extended back a good yard beneath the overhang; in two shakes I was prone beneath the lip, safe hidden but with a clear view for a mile upriver and across the Khalsa position on the southern shore. And there before my eyes was the great Battle of Sobraon.
Any soldier will tell you that, in the heat of a fight, sights and sounds imprint themselves on your memory and stay vivid for fifty years … but you lose all sense of time. I can still see George Paget’s cheroot clamped in his teeth as he leaned from the saddle to haul me to my feet in the Balaclava battery; I can hear Custer’s odd little cough as he rocked back on his heels with the blood trickling over his lip – but how long those actions lasted, God alone knows. Balaclava was twenty minutes, they tell me, and Greasy Grass about fifteen – well, I was through both, start to finish, and I’d have put them at an hour at least. At Sobraon, where admittedly I was more spectator than actor, it was t’other way round. From the moment Sardul and I rode down to the bridge, to the time I reached my ledge, I’d have reckoned half an hour at most; in fact it was between two hours and three, and in that space, while Tej was bickering about the size of his hideyhole, and I was swallowing the Sutlej by the gallon, Sobraon was being lost and won. This is how it was.
The attack by our left wing, which I’d witnessed, had been beaten back with heavy loss. Our advance on the other flank and centre had been intended as a feint, but when Paddy saw our left come adrift he changed the feint into a pukka assault, through a murderous hail of fire; somehow our men survived it and stormed the Sikh defences along almost the whole curved front of two and a half miles, and for nigh on an hour it was a hideous hacking-match over the ditches and ramparts. Our people were repulsed time and again, but still they forged ahead, British and Indian bayonets and Gurkha knives against the tulwars, with shocking slaughter; no manoeuvring or scientific soldiering, but hand-to-hand butchery – that was fighting as Paddy Gough understood it, and weren’t the Sikhs ready to oblige him?
They fought like madmen – and perhaps that was their undoing, for whenever an attack was beaten back they leaped down into the ditches to mutilate our wounded. Well, you don’t do that to Atkins and Sepoy and Gurkha if you know what’s good for you; our people stormed back at ’em in a killing rage, and when the scaling-ladders wouldn’t reach they climbed on each other’s shoulders and on the piled dead, and fairly pitchforked the Sikhs out of their first line entrenchments, almost without firing a shot. Good bayonet fighters will beat swordsmen and spearmen every time, and they ran the Sikhs back over two furlongs of rough ground to the second line, where the Khalsa gunners made a stand – and then Paddy showed that he was a bit of a general as well as a hooligan.
From my eyrie to the Sikhs’ second line was a bare half-mile, and I could see their gunners plain as day, for the wind was streaming their smoke away downriver. They were working their field pieces and camel-swivels and musketry until they must have been red-hot; the line looked as though it was on fire, so constant was the roar of the discharges, sweeping the ground and almost blotting out in a dust-storm the outer entrenchments from which our infantry and horse-guns were trying to advance. Between the Sikhs’ second line and the river the Khalsa horse and foot were re-forming in their thousands, preparing to counter-attack if the chance arose. Gough made sure it never did.
Directly across from me there was a sudden colossal explosion in the flank entrenchments of the second line; bodies were flying like dolls, a field-gun went cartwheeling end over end, and a huge pillar of dust arose, like a genie from a bottle. As it cleared I saw that our sappers had driven a great cleft in the ramparts, and through it who should come trotting but old Joe Thackwell, as easy as though he were in the Row, with a single file of 3rd Lights at his heels, wheeling into line as they cleared the gap. Behind them were the blue puggarees and white pants of the Bengali Irregulars, and before the Sikhs knew what was up Joe was rising in his stirrups, waving his sabre, and the 3rd Lights were sweeping down the rear of the gun positions, brushing aside the supporting infantry, sabring and riding down everything in their path. In a moment the rear of the second line was a turmoil of men and horses, with the sabres rising and falling in the sunlight, and into it the Bengalis drove like a thunderbolt. Farther down the line our infantry were pouring over the ramparts, a wave of red coats and bayonets, and all in a moment the whole line had caved in, and the Khalsa battalions were falling back to the third line of entrenchments a bare two hundred yards from the river. They weren’t running, though; they retired like guardsmen, pouring volley after volley into our advance, while the Bengalis and Dragoons harried them front and flank, and our horse-guns came careering through the outer lines to unlimber and turn their fire on the doomed Sikh army.
For it was done at last. Solid as a rock it looked as it stood in the elbow of the river, squares formed, squadrons ordered, standards raised, and the ground before it heaped with its dead – but it was hemmed in by an enemy who had overcome odds of three to two by sheer refusal to be stopped … and it had lost its guns. Now, as the horse artillery and field pieces cut great lanes in its ranks, it could reply only with musketry and steel to the charges of our horse and the steady advance of our infantry; it swayed and fell back, almost step by step, contesting every inch – and I looked to see the standards come down in token of surrender. But they didn’t. The Khalsa, the Pure, was dying on its feet, with its sirdars and generals scrambling up on the broken entrenchments, willing it to stand firm. I even made out the tall figure of the old war-horse I’d seen directing the high command; he was up on a shattered gun carriage, his white robes gleaming in the sunlight, shield on arm and tulwar raised, like some spirit of the Khalsa, and then the smoke enveloped him, and when it cleared, he was gone.49
Then they broke. It was like a dyke bursting, with first a trickle of men making for the river, and then the main body giving back, and suddenly that magnificent host that I’d gaped at on Maian Mir had dissolved into a mass of fugitives pouring back to the bridge of boats, spilling into the river on either side of it, or trying to escape along the banks. In a few moments the whole length of the bridge was jammed with struggling men and horses and even gun-teams, vainly trying to win across; the sheer weight of them and the force of the stream caused the great line of barges to bend downriver like a gigantic bow drawn to the limit. It swayed to and fro, half-submerged, with the brown water boiling over it like a weir, and then it snapped, the two ends surged apart, and the milling thousands were pitched into the flood.
In an instant the whole width of the river beneath me was alive with men and beasts and wreckage, sweeping past. It was like a lumber-jam when great areas of the water cannot be seen for the whirling mass of logs, but here the logs were men and horses and a great tangle of gear bound together by the force of the current. Upturned barges, black with men clinging to them, were dashed against each other, rolling over and over to be lost in the spray or flung onto the mudbanks; for the first time above the din of the firing I could hear human sounds, the shrieks of wounded and drowning men. Some may have lived through that first appalling maelstrom when the bridge gave way, but not many, for even as they were carried downstream our horse artillery were tearing along the southern shore, unlimbering, and wheeling their pieces to rake the river from bank to bank with grape and canister, churning it into a foaming slaughterhouse. The Yankees talk of “shooting fish in a barrel”; that was the fate of the Khalsa, floundering and helpless, in the Sutlej. Farther up, beyond the bridge, the carnage was even worse, for there the water was shallower, and as the great close-packed mass of fugitives struggled neck-deep to cross the ford they were caught in
a murderous cross-fire of musketry and artillery. Even those who managed to reach the north bank were caught in the deadly hail of grape as they struggled ashore, and only a few, I’m told, managed to scramble away to safety.
Below me, bodies both still and struggling were being borne past or swept ashore by a brown tide hideously streaked with red, while the shot lashed the water around them; close to the shore, where the current bore in most strongly, the Sutlej was running blood.
Directly across from my position, I could see the red coats of our infantry, British and Indian, lining the banks, firing as fast as they could load; among them were horse-guns and captured camel-swivels pouring their fire into the stricken wreck of an army. Shots were slapping into the bank below me, and I huddled back into my refuge, flat on my face and instinctively clawing the soil as though to burrow into it. How long it lasted, I can’t say; ten minutes, perhaps, and then that hellish cannonade began to slacken, a bugle on the far side was blowing the ceasefire, and gradually the guns fell silent, and the only sound in my half-deafened ears was the river rushing past.
I lay for a good half-hour, too shaken to drag myself from the bosom of Mother Earth, and then I inched my way forward on the ledge and looked down. Below me, as far as I could see on either hand, the shore was thick with corpses, some on the bank itself, others washing to and fro in the crimson shallows, more drifting by on the current. Out in the stream, the low mud-banks were covered with them. Here and there a few were stirring, but I don’t recall hearing a single cry; that was the uncanny part of it, for on every other battle-field I’ve seen there’s been a ceaseless chorus of screams and wails above the groaning hum of the wounded and dying. Here, there was nothing but the swish of the stream through the reeds. I lay, staring down in the noon sunlight, too used up to move, and by and by there were no more bodies drifting down from the upper ford and the shattered bridgeheads and the smoking lines of Sobraon. Then the vultures came, but you won’t care to hear of that, and I didn’t care to watch; I closed my stinging eyes and rested my head on my arms, listening to the distant thump of explosions from the other shore as the fires burning in the Sikh lines reached the abandoned magazines. The hutments at the bridgehead were burning, too, and the smoke was hanging low over the river.
The Flashman Papers: The Complete 12-Book Collection Page 130