I took a deep breath, and prayed. “I’ve come from Lahore – from the Maharani. This morning I was with Raja Goolab Singh, who is now at Pettee, with his army. I was on my way to the Malki lat, with messages of the highest importance, when by ill chance these fellows took me for a deserter – thank God it’s you who –”
“Wait, wait!” says he. “You are from Lahore … on an embassy? Then, why this disguise? Why –”
“Envoys don’t travel in uniform these days,” says I, and pitched my tale as urgent as I knew how. “Look, I should not tell you, but I must – there are secret negotiations in hand! I can’t explain, but the whole future of the state depends on them! I must get across the river without delay – matters are at a most delicate stage, and my messages –”
“Where are they?”
“Where? Eh? Oh, Lord above, they’re not written. They’re here!” I tapped my head, which you’ll agree was an appropriate gesture.
“But you have some passport, surely?”
“No, no … I can’t carry anything that might betray me. This is the most confidential affair, you see. Believe me, Sardul Singh, every moment is precious. I must cross secretly to –”
“A moment,” says he, and my heart sank, for while the fine young face wasn’t suspicious, it was damned keen. “If you must pass unseen, why have you come so close to our army? Why not by Hurree-ke, or south by Ferozepore?”
“Because Hardinge sahib is with the British army across from Sobraon! I had to come this way!”
“Yet you might have crossed beyond our patrols, and lost little time.” He considered me, frowning. “Forgive me, but you might be a spy. There have been many, scouting our lines.”
“I give you my word of honour, I’m no spy. What I say is true … and if you hold me here, you may be dooming your army to death – and mine – and your country to ruin.”
By God, I was doing it purple, but my only hope was that, being a well-educated aristocrat, he must know the desperate intrigue and dealing that were woven into this war – and if he believed me, he’d be a damned bold subaltern to hamper a diplomatic courier on such a vital errand. Alas, though, subalterns’ minds travel a fixed road, and his was no exception: faced with a momentous decision, my dashing escort of the Lahore road had turned into a Slave of Duty – and Safety.
“This is beyond me!” He shook his handsome head. “It may be as you say … but I cannot let you go! I have not the authority. My colonel will have to decide –”
I made a last desperate cast. “That would be fatal! If word of the negotiations gets out, they’re bound to fail!”
“There is no fear of that – my colonel is a safe man. And he will know what to do.” Relief was in his voice at the thought of passing the parcel to higher authority. “Yes, that will be best – I’ll go to him myself, as soon as our watch is ended! You can stay here, so that if he decides to release you, it can be done without trouble, and you will have lost little time.”
I tried again, urging the necessity for speed, imploring him to trust me, but it was no go. The colonel must pronounce, and so while he trotted back to his squadron post in the village, I must wait under guard of the glowering daffadar and his mates, resigned to capture. Of all the infernal luck, at the last fence! For it mattered not a bean whether his colonel believed my cock-and-bull story or not – he’d never speed me on my way without going higher still, and God alone knew where that might end. They’d hardly dare mistreat me, in view of the tale I’d told; even if they disbelieved it, they’d not be mad enough to shoot me as a spy, at this stage of the war, surely … mind you, some of those Akali fanatics were bloodthirsty enough for anything …
On such jolly reflections I settled down to wait in that dripping little camp – for it was raining heavily again – and either the colonel had gone absent without leave or Sardul spent an unconscionable time gnawing his nails in indecision, for it must have been well into the small hours before he returned. By that time, worn out with wet and despair, I had sunk into a doze, and when I came to, with Sardul shaking my shoulder, I didn’t know where I was for a moment.
“All is well!” cries he, and for a blessed second I thought he was going to speed me on my way. “I have spoken with the colonel sahib, and told him … of your diplomatic duty.” He dropped his voice, glancing round in the firelight. “The colonel sahib thinks it best that he should not see you himself.” Another reckless muttonhead ripe for Staff College, plainly. “He says this is a high political matter … so I am to take you to Tej Singh. Come, I have a horse for you!”
If he’d told me they were going to send me on shooting leave to Ooti I’d have been less astonished, but his next words provided the explanation.
“The colonel sahib says that since Tej Singh is commander-in-chief, he will surely know of these secret negotiations, and can decide what should be done. And since he is in the camp below Sobraon, he will be able to send you to the Malki lat with all speed. Indeed, you will be there sooner than if I released you now.”
That was what I’d talked myself into … Sobraon, the very heart of the doomed Khalsa. Yet what else could I have done? When you’ve just been within an ace of being hanged out of hand, you’re liable to say the first thing that comes to mind, and I’d had to tell Sardul something. Still, it could have been worse. At least with Tej I’d be safe, and he’d see me back to Hardinge fast enough … flag of truce, a quick trot across no man’s land, and home in time for breakfast. Aye, provided the dogs of war didn’t come howling out of the kennel in the meantime … what had Goolab said? “A day or two at most” before Gough stormed the Khalsa lines in the last great battle …
“Well, let’s be off, hey?” cries I, jumping up. “The sooner the better, you know! How far is it – can we be there before first light?” He said it was only a few miles along the river bank, but since that way was heavy with military traffic, we would be best to take a detour round their positions (and prevent wicked Flashy from spying out the land, you understand). Still, we should be there soon after dawn.
We set off in the rainy dark, the whole troop of us – he was taking no chances on my slipping my cable, and my bridle was tied firmly to the daffadar’s pommel. It was black as sin, and no hope of a moon in this weather, so we went at little better than a walk, and before long I had lost all sense of time and direction. It was my second night in the saddle, I was weary and sore and sodden and fearful, and every few moments I nodded off only to wake with a start, clutching at the mane to save myself from falling. How far we came before the teeming downpour ceased and the sky began to lighten, I can’t tell, but presently we could see the doab about us, with wraiths of vapour hanging heavy over the scrub. Ahead a few lights were showing dimly, and Sardul reined up: “Sobraon.”
But it was only the village of that name, which lies a mile or two north of the river, and when we reached it we must turn sharp right to come down to the Khalsa’s reserve positions on the northern bank, beyond which the bridge of boats spanned the Sutlej to the main Sikh fortifications on the southern side, hemmed in by Gough’s army. As we wheeled and approached the rear of the reserve lines, fires were flickering and massive shadows looming in the mist ahead, and now we could see the entrenchments on either flank, with heavy gun emplacements commanding the river, which was still out of sight to our front. As we trotted through a sea of churned mud to the lines, trumpets were blaring the stand-to, the Sikh drums were beginning to rattle, troops were swarming in the trenches, and from all about us came the clamour and bustle of an army stirring, like a giant rousing from sleep.
I didn’t know, nor did they, as drum and trumpet called them, that the Khalsa was answering its last reveille. But even as we entered the rearmost line, from somewhere far beyond the grey blanket mantling the northern shore ahead of us, came another sound, stunning in its suddenness: the thunder of gunfire echoing along the Sutlej valley in a continuous roar of explosions, shaking the ground underfoot, reverberating through the mists of morning. B
eyond our view, on the southern shore, an old Irishman in a white coat was beating his shillelagh on the Khalsa’s door, and with a sinking heart I realised that I had come a bare hour too late. The battle of Sobraon had begun.
* * *
a Senior subaltern.
b Matter, affair.
c Cavalry commander of ten.
Chapter 17
The best way to view a clash of armies is from a hot-air balloon, for not only can you see what’s doing, you’re safely out of the line of fire. I’ve done it once, in Paraguay, and there’s nothing to beat it, provided some jealous swine of a husband doesn’t take a cleaver to the cable. The next best place is an eminence, like the Sapoune at Balaclava or the bluffs above Little Bighorn, and if I can speak with authority about both those engagements it’s not so much because I was lashing about in the thick of them, as that I had the opportunity of overlooking the ground beforehand.
Sobraon was like that. The northern bank of the Sutlej at that point is higher than the southern, giving a sweeping view of the whole battlefield, and miles beyond. I wasn’t to see it for another hour or so, for when the cannonade began Sardul called a halt, and left me in the care of his troop while he dashed off to see what was up. We waited in the clammy dawn, while the Sikh support troops stood to inspection in the trenches and gun emplacements about us, and the gunners stripped the aprons from their heavy pieces, piling the cartridges and rolling the big 48-pound shot on to the stretchers, all ready to load. They were cool hands, those artillerymen, manning their positions quiet and orderly, the brown bearded faces staring ahead towards the battle of barrages hidden beyond the river mist.
Sardul came spurring back, spattering the mud, wild with excitement. Gough’s batteries were hammering the fortifications on the southern shore, but doing little harm, and the Sikh gunners were giving him shot for shot. “Presently he will attack, and be thrown back!” cries Sardul exultantly. “The position is secure, and we may go down in safety to Tej Singh. Come, bahadur, it is a splendid sight! A hundred and fifty great guns thunder against each other – but your Jangi lat has blundered! His range is too long, and he wastes his powder! Come and see!”
I believed him. Knowing Paddy, I could guess he was banging away just to please Hardinge, but couldn’t wait for the moment when he would turn his bayonets loose. That must be soon, by the sound of it; even if he’d brought the whole magazine from Umballa, he couldn’t keep up such a barrage for long.
“Never in all India has there been such a fight of heavy guns!” cries Sardul. “Their smoke is like a city burning! Oh, what a day to see! What a day!”
He was like a boy at a fair as he led the way down through the silent gun positions, and presently we came to a little flat promontory, where a group of Sikh staff officers were mounted, very brave in their dress coats. They spared us not so much as a glance, for at that moment the mist lifted from the river like a raised curtain, and an astonishing sight was unfolded before us.
Twenty feet below the bluff the oily flood of the Sutlej was swirling by in full spate, the bubbling brown surface strewn with ramage which was piling up against the great bridge of boats, four hundred yards long and anchored by massive chains, that spanned the river to the southern shore. There, in a half-moon a full mile in extent, the Khalsa lines lay in three huge concentric semi-circles of ramparts, ditches, and bastions; there were thirty thousand fighting Sikhs in there, the cream of the Punjab, with their backs to the river and seventy big guns crashing out their reply to our artillery positions a thousand yards away. Over the whole Sikh stronghold hung an enormous pall of black gunsmoke, and above the widespread distant arc of our guns a similar pall was hanging, thinner and dispersing more quickly than theirs, for while their batteries were concentrated within that mile-wide fortress, our sixty pieces were scattered in a curved line twice as long – and Sardul was right, their range was too great. I could see our mortar shells bursting high over the Sikh positions, and the heavy shot throwing up fountains of red earth, but causing little damage; far to the right we had a rocket battery in action, the long white trails criss-crossing the black clouds, and some fires were burning at that end of the Sikh lines, but all along the forward fortifications the Khalsa gunners were blazing away in style – Paddy wasn’t going to win the shooting-match, that was certain.
Even amidst the din of the cannonade we could hear them cheering in the entrenchments across the river, and the blare of their military bands, with drums throbbing and cymbals clashing, and then the salvoes from the British guns died away, and the smoke cleared over our distant positions; the trumpets in the Sikh camp were sounding the cease-fire, and presently the last wraiths dispersed above their positions also, and Sam Khalsa and John Company looked each other in the eye across a half-mile of scrubby plain and patchy jungle, like two boxers when their seconds and supporters have left off yelling abuse, and each scrapes his feet and flexes his arms for the onset.
With the enemy snug behind his ramparts, it was for Gough to make the first move, and he did it in classic style, with a straight left. Sardul caught at my arm, pointing, and sure enough, far off on our right front, steel was glinting through the last of the mist; he had a little spyglass clapped to his eye, but now he passed it to me and my heart raced as I saw the white cap-covers and red coats spring into close vision in the glass circle, the fixed bayonets gleaming in the first sunlight, the officers and drummers to the fore, the colour stirring in the breeze – I could even make out the embroidered “X”, but it can only have been in imagination that I heard the fifes sounding:
The gamekeeper was watching us,
For him we did not care,
For we can wrestle and fight, my boys,
And jump o’er anywhere …
as the Tenth Lincoln came on in line, their pieces at the port, with the horse guns bounding past their flank, and alongside them the shakos and white belts of the Native Infantry, and then another British colour, but I couldn’t make out which, and again our guns began to crash as Paddy poured his last rounds of covering fire over their heads and the dust billowed up on the Khalsa’s right front.
The Sikh batteries exploded in a torrent of flame, and I saw our line stagger and recover and come on again before the clouds of smoke and dust hid them from sight. On the extreme right a great body of horse emerged from the entrenchments, swinging wide to charge our rocket batteries whose missiles were weaving in above the advancing infantry and exploding on the breastworks. The Sikh horse rounded our flank and went for the rocket stand like Irishmen on holiday, but the battery commander must have seen his danger and given the word to raise the frames, for he let them come to point-blank range before loosing the whole barrage at ground level, whizzing in to burst among the horsemen, and the charge dissolved in a cloud of white smoke and orange flame.
The staff men beside us were suddenly shouting and pointing: while Gough’s left wing was closing through the smoke on the Sikhs’ right front, out on the plain, beyond the scrub and jungle, there was a stirring in the heat haze; tiny figures, red, blue, and green, were coming into view, long extended lines of them, with the horse guns in the intervals between. I swung the glass on them, and here were the yellow facings of the 29th, there the buff of the 31st, everywhere the red coats and cross-belts of the Native Infantry … the red and blue of the Queen’s Own … on the flank the dark figures of the 9th Lancers and the blue coats and puggarees of the Bengali horsemen … the crimson-streaked plumes of the 3rd Lights … the little goblin figures of the Gurkhas, trotting to keep up, and even as I watched there was a flash of silver rippling along their front as the great leaf-bladed knives came out. The whole of our army was on the move towards the centre and left of the Khalsa’s position – twenty thousand British and Native foot, horse, and guns coming in against odds of three to two, and the Sikhs’ heavy metal was ranging on them, kicking up the dust-plumes all along the great arc of our advance.
Now all the forward entrenchments were exploding, sweeping th
e ground with a hail of grape and canister, blotting out the scene in a thick haze of dust and smoke. I caught my breath in horror, for it was Ferozeshah all over again, with that raving old spud-walloper risking everything on the sabre and the bayonet, hand to hand – but then the Sikhs had been groggy from Moodkee, in positions hastily dug and manned, while now they were entrenched in a miniature Torres Vedras, with ditch-and-dyke works twenty feet high, enfiladed by murderous camel-swivels and packed with tulwar-swinging lunatics fairly itching to die for the Guru. You can’t do it, Paddy, thinks I, it won’t answer this time, you’ll break your great thick Irish head against this fortress of shot and steel, and have your army torn to ribbons, and lose the war, and never see Tipperary again, you benighted old bog-trotter, you –
“Come!” calls Sardul, and I tore my eyes away from that billowing mirk beyond which our army was advancing to certain death, and followed him down the muddy slope to the bridge of boats. They were big barges, lashed thwart to thwart and paved with heavy timbers which made a road as straight and solid as dry ground – hollo, says I, there’s a white sapper in the woodpile, damn him, for no Punjabi ever put this together. We drummed across with the troop at our heels and came into the rear of the Khalsa position – their last line of defence where the general staff directed operations, aides hurried to and fro between the tents and hutments, carts of wounded rumbled through to the bridge, and all was activity and uproar – but it was a disciplined bedlam, I noticed, in spite of the deafening crash of guns and musketry rolling back from the lines.
There was a knot of senior men grouped round a great scale model of the fortifications – I caught only a glimpse of it, but it must have been twenty feet across, with every trench and parapet and gun just so – and a splendid old white-bearded sirdar with a mail vest over his silk tunic was prodding it with a long wand and bellowing orders above the din, while his listeners despatched messengers into the sulphurous reek which blotted out everything beyond fifty yards, and made the air nigh unbreathable. This was clearly the high command – but no sign of Tej Singh, general and guiding spirit of the Khalsa, God help it, until I heard his voice piercing the uproar, at full screech.
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