A vagabond in despair, I lied about my age in Bristol and begged the recruiting sergeant to add an inch to my height so I might sign for India. He liked my miner’s muscles, but had never seen a boy so anxious to enlist. He feared I had done a capital crime. But twas only that I saw no hope in life. My love was all I knew or wanted then, and I saw that I could not have her, and even come to believe that I should not, for her own good sake.
I wrote her a letter. I was taken with the novels of Mr. Scott in those days, for I had little gravity of spirit, and I wanted to be a gentleman of the sacrificing sort. I wrote my goodbye to her in words bigger than I was myself, scarce knowing their meanings. Her mother, God bless her, sent it on to her, and for that one act I beg the Lord’s eternal salvation for Mrs. Griffith’s suffering soul. Eventually, an answer found its way to me on the banks of the Jhelam. But by then I was a changed man.
Chillianwala. Who has heard of that battle today? Yet it was a desperate business—and a blunder, to tell you the truth. Defeat would have meant our massacre, and we knew it. Twas my first big fight, and I remember it brightly, though the brightness was the crimson of blood. The shooting was the least of it, then we were well at it, with the green tangles all about us and no time to reload. The Seekh got into us, and us among them, and it was stabbing and clubbing and biting by all. There was killing beyond the counting, and mercy for none, with brave Campbell struggling to put right what a fool of a general had done wrong.
At one point, we pressed together so thick that a great yellow-robed devil and I crushed up against one another. His eyes were mad and his breath hot and stinking, his mustache slavered with gore. The brim of my cap pushed into his turban and we screamed into each other’s faces. So crowded we were that we could not raise our arms to the business of murdering one another. We must have gone like that a full minute, each cursing in his own language, hating and glaring and shameless. Then I worked my bayonet up under his chin and rammed it through his brain.
We were all of us covered in blood and even in the tumult of combat the flies would not leave us— black and biting and big as buzzards they were. Men fell to bullets and blades, and I learned how ugly we are beneath our bit of skin, how rancid. Others fell to the heat and thirst, or just to exhaustion. The lines were gone. Men in a crawling stupor clubbed one another to death. We screamed our throats dry and bloody, and we left our wounded behind to save ourselves. God forgive me, I loved it.
There began my second life, that of Jones the Bayonet. I was a small man, but found I did not lack courage. Perhaps it was sense that I lacked. I became a hard man, and a good soldier by the standards of the regiment, and the youngest of its stripers. I did not drink, and I had my letters soundly and could add. That I could fight, as well, and shame the big men to stand by me crowned it. I was cherished for qualities that shame me when I think on them.
I stopped answering my Mary Myfanwy’s letters after a time. We signed on for long service in those days, and I knew I would not see her again. Then there were other matters in my life that do not need discussion. But I will tell you that I caught the rich scent of India as only a young man can, the curry smells and the stink of the pyres, the softness of the old and the callous brutality of the present, the drabness and beauty so mixed up you soon stopped trying to make sense of it all and just lived. I would not return there now for all the loot of old John Company, but there was a time when I thought I would never leave.
I served in gleaming garrisons and in the dust and blood of the frontier, the youngest sergeant in the regiment’s records. I taught the bayonet, and kept the books for a gin-soaked quartermaster, and learned that the sins of officers do not want seeing by the other ranks. My beloved never stopped writing to me, or sending me books to read for my improvement. Her father died of a seizure and my Mary Myfanwy took a gentlelady’s position to an industrial family in Monmouthshire. She did not marry and swore she would not until I was hers for the marrying. I stopped reading her letters. I experienced a loss of my own that does not require description here, and it only hardened me. I was the devil’s infernal machine when it come to soldiering. Danger was my drink, violence under a flag my vice, and wasn’t I rewarded for it?
The Mutiny caught us unawares, for we had ignored the hissing in the bazaars. An Indian fellow I knew from the trader class as much as told me that doom was dropping upon us, but I paid no more attention than did the rest. We who served in India were Britannia’s bastard sons, yet we believed our superiority to the brown man so great that we were invincible. We thought our feet were planted on solid ground, but we were walking on the surface of the deepest of oceans. We had grown dependent on miracles.
Our siege was short and we broke it ourselves to link up with a column marching north. Twas then we heard of the massacres. Sepoys murdering their officers, safe conducts broken, women and children hacked up alive and stuffed down wells, and the slaughter of all white skins. It was a queer business, with both the Hindoo and the Musselman raised against us and only Johnny Seekh, so recently broken, steadfast beneath our colors. Cawnpore, Lucknow, Delhi… for months it was a close business whether we would last in India. But we regrouped, and London sent regulars.
That is when I met my fate. Oh, I was a good one for killing in those days. Yet, I was never a cruel man, see. My doings were on the field of battle, dutiful, and I do not recall meanness in me. I never killed a man who was not interested in killing me, and I was never one for inflicting punishments and the like. Now, it is possible that many things had been at work in my soul, not least a certain loss of the year before, but something happened to me.
We put down the rising with a thirst for blood no one would believe of civilized men. We slaughtered the natives whether they surrendered or not, then left the bodies for carrion. We burned villages and shot down those who tried to flee. Punishment slipped into torture. We stuffed the mouths of dying Musselmen with pig fat, and made your Hindoos lick the blood from the pavings, all to deny them the last comfort of their religion. Twas horror at the full, and many a man was brilliant in his cruelty. And all legal, it was. Under orders. In the name first of John Company, then of the Great White Queen. The records tell nothing of what we did, only of the sins of the brown men. Perhaps it is better so, for we must believe in ourselves if we are to rule.
Where we suspected fanaticism, we blew our prisoners from the mouths of guns. Beyond Delhi, we shot down so many of them we had only our emergency reserve of cartridges to see us through until the next resupply column arrived. In a rusty pot of a town, my detachment gathered up a dozen of their holy fellows. Perhaps they had preached Mutiny. We did not know for certain, but believed that most of them were guilty. The captain in charge judged them on the spot. He ordered me to use them for bayonet instruction.
I nearly did it, for twas orders. We tied the old Hindoos up well enough. And what with the tales of white maidens ravaged and all the natives’ butchery, I would not have lacked volunteers for the business. Twas a hot day in a poor place, with their women crying and not knowing how lucky it was that we were too sweated to kill them, too. I remember the face of one old holy buck. His skin was dirty canvas, unwashed for a lifetime, and his eyes were patient with all the stupidity of the East.
“Go to it, Jones,” Captain Barclay told me, “and we’ll get on to some bloody shade.”
I could not do it. My bayonet would not descend. Nor could my tongue give the order to the others. I do not pretend to any sort of revelation or experience of life’s higher meaning that day. My limbs and tongue simply would not obey me. Then my brain would not give my body any further orders. I was so gone into myself I forgot the soldiers around me.
“Sergeant Jones, what in the blue, bloody blazes—”
“No, sir,” I said.
I recall the shock on the captain’s face.
“I cannot do it,” I told him. “I will not do it, sir. And I shall not do it.” I did not throw my rifle down. It simply fell from my hands. And then I cou
ld speak no more. I could not even move. When Captain Barclay recovered from his astonishment, he had me bound up like the brown fellows. I’m sure he spoke further on the business, but I was gone out of it, and much that passed is opaque to me now. I was no longer in the world of regiments and bayonets.
They killed the poor niggers anyway.
I did not speak for days. Then, one morning, my senses come back to me and I was as normal as a cup of tea. The only thing different was that I knew I was done with killing.
The colonel was a good sort. He treated the men fairly and had done me not a few kindnesses over the years. His skin was as brown as any native’s from a career under the Indian sun. He spoke firmly, then all in a rage, then pleadingly.
“No, sir,” I told him. “I will no longer fight.”
A major, who claimed he drank for his fevers, shouted for all the world, “But… but this is mutiny! He’s as bad as the nigger bastards himself!” He was all for hanging me as an example, for he said that any other fate would have a corrupting effect upon the men.
There was a horrible fuss in the regiment, with some of them saying I had always been nothing but a puffed-up coward and that you never could trust a Welshman. A few of the boys offered pity when the other backs were turned. My rank was gone, of course, and they put me to navvy work to humiliate me. I carried sacks of meal in the plague heat. Then they put me to emptying the privies with the lowest of the natives.
I did my work in silence. To this day, I cannot explain the business. I only knew that I would not kill again, that I could be a soldier no longer. Had they burned me alive, I would not have changed my mind.
I asked for a Bible, but they would not give me one.
In the end, no one wanted to shame the regiment by making such a business public. Nor would the colonel hear of hanging me. He told me he was sparing me for all the good years of service I had done, and he got the surgeon to write me down mad of fever. That is how my service ended, shipped home as an invalid on cheap passage, “insane, but not dangerous.” Half starved I was, when that filthy boat touched England.
I did what men do. I ran to a woman. I did not even think on it. Nor was there the least shame in me. Only fear. That she was gone. Married in the last smattering of years. Or otherwise dead to me.
She was sitting in the garden of a fine house, reading to her charges, when I walked up on her. I was ragged and foul from marching over a great piece of Britain.
Dropping her book, she come running.
She hugged me and wept, and said, “You, is it? I knew you’d come… I knew…”
Her mother had died and there was nothing more to bind her to the valleys. I would have found work, but she feared the rumors that would haunt my return. She wanted two things, my Mary Myfanwy, marriage to me and respectability with me. She had become a chapel woman herself, I think from contrariness toward her father, and we were married by a good man with doubt written all over him.
Her savings and a little legacy went to buy two passages to America, where her uncle had prospered. She believed that talk would ever taint us in Wales, but that people in America had better things to do than bother about the likes of us and rumors out of India. For the Americans had their own red Indians to worry over. She was a brave one, my beloved, all for a new world.
Oh, she was right about America, this blessed place. Twas the land where every man started again. Her uncle set me to work in a coal company counting-house, down low at first. The books were scrambled and, despite the heavy business, the company was headed for bankruptcy. I fixed what I could, and that was enough to gain trust and a better position when the crisis passed. Pottsville was a boom town then, with collieries going up along the valleys like great wooden castles and immigrants fresh off the train every day and down the pits the next morning. I remember it as a place ever in motion, with locomotives pulling off long coal trains, and the canal still busy, too, and the beer wagons bold, and the miners’ wives down from the patch for their twice-a-year look in the shop windows. When we walked out, my love and I, upon the mountainside, rows of green ridges spread before us, lovely as Heaven on a Sunday. The blackness had not yet covered the hills and the wind blew down from Eden.
By the winter before the war, I knew everyone needful in town, and they knew me, and the miner with his cap held low and a question about his pay could come to me for a fair hearing—and theirs was a hard life, I will tell you. We had a worthy chapel, though the Americans called it a church, with a good man in the pulpit. We had friends. If the hours were long, the work was honest, and my beloved and I thought we were in Paradise in our house of three rooms and the kitchen. No young person could love as we did, nor share with heart so full. When we were alone, my Mary Myfanwy did not object to me reading the evening paper in my shirtsleeves, and the souls of many a chicken must have smiled down at the stews she made of their earthly remains. Twas that winter young John come to us. I could not tally my blessings.
I had become a solid one for religion, though not fanatical, and I got to believe my happiness was the Lord’s reward to me for turning from the soldier’s life. I knew one thing certain, and that was that I would never again raise my hand to another human being, unless it was a fist to protect my family. The scent of war was upon us that winter, and had been, and the worst cold could not kill the stink of it. It seemed a madness to me, that men so blessed must fight with one another. Yet I know enough of men’s hearts to understand there is more than simple goodness in them, and I know enough of their heads to know there is more in them than sense.
My Mary Myfanwy was a great one for raising up the Negro, as was the Reverend Mr. Edwards. I believe he preached Uncle Tom’s Cabin as much as he did the Bible. Now I was not against the abolition business, for slavery was a foul matter in any color, but there were no slaves in Pennsylvania, only the hard struggle of the mines, and I marked that none of those crying out for blood had ever seen blood shed. I would have freed the black man if I might have done so by command, but I would not have fought to free him. It seemed, in truth, a distant matter to me. My fighting days were behind me, and I wished no quarrel with any man. That was a hard business, keeping my temper while they blabbered about the purifying effects of righteous war, for they knew nothing of the matter.
Come a raw March Saturday, well I remember, and long in the afternoon. I had closed up the counting-house and wrapped myself warm for the walk home. The wind ripped down the valley from the high pitheads, and I thought on debits and dinner. Now there are sharp, cold days when it is a pleasure to be out only because you know what a joy it will be when you are back inside, and this was such a day. The world lay black, the wind howled as if a terrible hurt had been done, and spring seemed far away.
I saw them drilling in a field, men and boys in their work clothes. I knew them. A few were miners, but most not, for the miners were too weary for such a business. No, they were the fellows of the town, and when I did not know their names I knew their faces from the pews or shop counters. McDermott, the hotel keeper, read orders from a book, shouting as if to a cook in the kitchen. The responses were as inventive as they were varied. The boy with the flag could hardly keep it upright in the wind.
Would it have been better if I had not come upon them? It struck me deeply, seeing them like that, all youth, good intentions and ignorance. I knew of the militias, not least the fine Washington Artillery, but kept away. Now this lot set themselves in my path, a little orphan of a company. I watched them for a bit and would have laughed had the matter not been deadly. I knew what waited for them. They would not learn the needful from a book.
I turned away in anger. The wickedest place in hell should be reserved for those who paint war in glory and cause young men to dream of it.
But the business would not let me be. Over a fine pot pie—a Dutch affair learned from Mrs. Barrett’s housekeeper—my beloved noticed my change of temper. Twas not hard. For we were gentle talkers of the day’s events, sharing all our little matters
between us, but I held my silence that night. I feared to speak, see. There was such a rage in me. Of course, she marked it. And she asked. And I told her.
She did not reply, but I could feel the fear in her. I understood it as clearly as ever I have understood a thing in my life. For the same fear was in me. The war was not a distant matter of the Negro now.
Young John set to wailing and she put down her fork and went to him.
I saw them again the next Saturday, and they were no more skillful for the passage of time. If those boys had no idea how it all would end, neither had they any idea of where to begin. They had less order in their ranks than Irishmen lined up for free beer.
Still, home I went. April come in cold. I kept myself long at work. In the evenings, I would ask my beloved to play on her melodeon, song after song, as long as the infant allowed. I sang to the grace of her fingers, hymns or songs of polite matters, just now and again one of those risky tunes of Mr. Foster’s, which do have a lovely curl of melody to them. I did not want to read, though that had been our custom for the late evenings, after sleep had quieted young John. I did not want to read because I could not. I only sat there thinking about those boys drilling with their hunting pieces.
I wondered where the goodness lay, if I might be worse damned for sending them to their deaths unhelped by my bit of knowledge. They were the sons of the neighborhood, of our congregation, and I refused to reach my hand to them. I wanted to run to them and shout that war was a terrible, monstrous, unforgiveable thing, that none of us had need of it, and that men must learn to reason before their souls perish. I did not want them to go to war, but knew they would. It was coming, oh, it was coming sure. The newspapers were screaming for it. And those boys would go to the slaughter unready.
My thoughts were only safe when I lay wrapped in my nightshirt, holding my beloved to my breast.
The Saturday after Carolina fired on Fort Sumter, I stepped up to help them learn their drill. None of them knew I had been a soldier, for it was not a thing I spoke of, and they thought the matter humorous at first. I suppose I did not look a military man to them. But I can manage young men. By the end of the afternoon, most of the boys could face about without doing the next fellow in line a damage, and they knew when to speak and when not.
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