Flashman In The Great Game fp-5

by George MacDonald Fraser

  "Company cavalry apka mangta?" which abomination of bad Urdu I took to mean: did I want to join the Company cavalry? So I showed my teeth and says: "Han, sahib," and thought I might as well act out my part by betraying some more military knowledge — I ducked my head and leaned over and offered him the hilt of my sheathed Khyber knife, at which he burst out laughing and touched it,14 saying that Gulam Beg was undoubtedly right, and I wasn't half knowledgeable for a chap who pretended never to have been in the Army before. He gave instructions for me to be sworn in, and I took the oath on the sabre-blade, ate a pinch of salt, and was informed that I was now a skirmisher of the 3rd Native Light Cavalry, that my daffadar was Kudrat Ali, that I would be paid one rupee per day, with a quarter-anna dyeing allowance, and that since I had brought my own horse I would be excused the customary recruit deposit. Also that if I was half as much a soldier as the Colonel suspected, and kept my hands off other people's throats and property, I might expect promotion in due course.

  Thereafter I was issued with a new puggaree, half-boots and pyjamy breeches, a new and very smart silver-grey uniform coat, a regulation sabre, a belt and bandolier, and a tangle of saddlery which was old and stiff enough to have been used at Waterloo (and probably had), and informed by a betel-chewing havildar that if I didn't have it reduced to gleaming suppleness by next morning, I had best look out. Finally, he took me to the armoury, and I was shown (mark this well) a new rifled Enfield musket, serial number 4413 — some things a soldier never forgets — which I was informed was mine henceforth, and more precious than my own mangy carcase.

  Without thinking, I picked it up and tested the action, as I'd done a score of times at Woolwich — and the Goanese store-wallah gaped.

  "Who taught you that?" says he. "And who bade you handle it, jangli pig? It is for you to see — you touch it only when it is issued on parade." And he snatched it back from me. I thought another touch of character would do no harm, so I waited till he had waddled away to replace it in the rack, and then whipped out my Khyber knife and let it fly, intending to plant it in the wall a foot or so away from him. My aim was off though — the knife imbedded itself in the wall all right, but it nicked his arm in passing, and he squealed and rolled on the floor, clutching at his blood-smeared sleeve.

  "Bring the knife back," I snarled, baring my fangs at him, and when he had scrambled up, grey-faced and terrified, and returned it, I touched the point on his chest and says: "Call Makarram Khan a pig just once more, ulla kabaja,*(*Son of an owl.) and I will carry thine eyes and genitals on this point as kebabs." Then I made him lick the blood off the blade, spat in his face, and respectfully asked the havildar what I should do next. He, being a Mussulman, was all for me, and said, grinning, that I should make a fair recruit; he told my daffadar, Kudrat Ali, about the incident, and presently the word went round the big, airy barrack-room that Makarram Khan was a genuine saddle-and-lance man, from up yonder, who would strike first and inquire after — doubtless a Border lifter, and a feud-carrier, but a man who knew how to treat Hindoo insolence, and therefore to be properly respected.

  So there I was — Colonel Harry Paget Flashman, late of the 11th Hussars, 17th Lancers and the Staff, former aide to the Commander-in-Chief, and now acting-sowar and rear file in the skirmishing squadron, 3rd Cavalry, Bengal Army, and if you think it was a mad-brained train of circumstance that had taken me there — well, so did I. But once I had got over the unreality of it all, and stopped imagining that everyone was going to see through my disguise, I settled in comfortably enough.

  It was an eery feeling, though, at first, to squat on my charpai*(*Cot.) against the wall, with my puggaree off, combing my hair or oiling my light harness, and look round that room at the brown, half-naked figures, laughing and chattering — of all the things that soldiers talk about, women, and officers, and barrack gossip, and women, and rations, and women — but in a foreign tongue which, although I spoke it perfectly and even with a genuine frontier accent, was still not my own. While I'd been by myself, as I say, I'd even been thinking in Pushtu, but here I had to hold on tight and remember what I was meant to be — for one thing, I wasn't used to being addressed in familiar terms by native soldiers, much less ordered about by an officious naik*(*Corporal.) who'd normally have leaped to attention if I'd so much as looked in his direction. When the man who bunked next to me, Pir Ali, a jolly rascal of a Baluch, tapped my shoulder in suggesting that we might visit the bazaar that first evening, I absolutely stared at him and just managed to bite back that "Damn your impudence" that sprang to my tongue.

  It wasn't easy, for a while; quite apart from remembering obeisances at the prescribed times, and making a show at cooking my own dinner at the choola,*(*Cooking-place, camp oven of clay.) there were a thousand tiny details to beware of — I must remember not to cross my legs when sitting, or blow my nose like a European, or say "Mmh?" if someone said something I couldn't catch, or use the wrong hand, or clear my throat in the discreet British fashion, or do any of the things that would have looked damned odd in an Afghan frontiersman.15

  Of course I made mistakes — once or twice I was just plain ignorant of things that I ought to have known, like how to chew a majoon*(*Green sweetmeat containing bhang) when Pir Ali offered me one (you have to spit into your hand from time to time, or you'll end up poisoned), or how to cut a sheep-tail for curry, or even how to sharpen my knife in the approved fashion. When I blundered, and anyone noticed, I found the best way was to stare them down and growl sullenly.

  But more often than not my danger lay in betraying knowledge which Makarram Khan simply wouldn't have had. For example, when Kudrat Ali was giving us sword exercise I found myself once falling into the "rest" position of a German schlager-fencer (not that anyone in India was likely to recognise that), and again, day-dreaming about fagging days at Rugby while cleaning my boots one evening, I found myself humming "Widdicombe Fair" — 'fortunately under my breath. My worst blunder, though, was when I was walking near a spot where the British officers were playing cricket, and the ball came skipping towards me — without so much. as thinking I snapped it up, and was looking to throw down the wicket when I remembered, and threw it back as clumsily as I could. Once or two of them stared, though, and I heard someone say that big nigger was a deuced smart field. That rattled me, and I trod even more carefully than before.

  My best plan, I soon discovered, was to do and say as little as possible, and act the surly, reserved hillman who walked by himself, and whom it was safest not to disturb. The fact that I was by way of being a protégé of the woordy-major's, and a Hasanzai (and therefore supposedly eccentric), led to my being treated with a certain deference; my imposing size and formidable looks did the rest, and I was left pretty much alone. Once or twice I walked out with Pir Ali, to lounge in the Old Market and ogle the bints, or dally with them in the boutique doorways, but he found my grunts a poor return for his own cheery prattle, and abandoned me to my own devices.

  It wasn't, as you can guess, the liveliest life for me at first — but I only had to think of the alternative to resign myself to it for the present. It was easy enough soldiering, and I quickly won golden opinions from my naik and jemadar* for the speed and intelligence with which I appeared to learn my duties. At first it was a novelty, drilling, working, eating, and sleeping with thirty Indian troopers — rather like being on the other side of the bars of a monkey zoo — but when you're closed into a world whose four corners are the barrack-room, the choola, the stables, and the maidan, it can become maddening to have to endure the society of an inferior and foreign race with whom you've no more in common than if they were Russian moujiks or Irish bog-trotters. What makes it ten times worse is the outcast feeling that comes of knowing that within a mile or two your own kind are enjoying all the home comforts, damn 'em — drinking *Under-officer barra pegs, smoking decent cigars, flirting and ramming with white women, and eating ices for dessert. (I was no longer so enamoured of mutton pilau in ghee,*(*Native butter, cooking-fat.) you g
ather.) Within a fortnight I'd have given anything to join an English conversation again, instead of listening to Pir Ali giggling about how he'd bullocked the headman's wife on his last leave, or the endless details of Sita Gopal's uncle's law-suit, or Ram Mangal's reviling of the havildar, or Gobinda Dal's whining about how he and his brothers, being soldiers, had lost much of the petty local influence they'd formerly enjoyed in their Oudh village, now that the Sirkar had taken over.

  When it got too bad I would loaf up to the Mall, and gape at the mem-sahibs with their big hats and parasols, driving by, and watch the officers cantering past, flicking their crops as I clumped my big boots and saluted, or squat near the church to listen to them singing "Greenland's Icy Mountains" of a Sunday evening. Dammit, I missed my own folk then — far worse than if they'd been a hundred miles away. I missed Lakshmibai, too — odd, ain't it, but I think what riled me most was the knowledge that if she'd seen me as I now was — well, she wouldn't even have noticed me. However, it had to be stuck out — I just had to think of Ignatieff- so I would trudge back to barracks and lie glowering while the sowars chattered. It had this value — I learned more about Indian soldiers in three weeks than I'd have done in a lifetime's ordinary service.

  You'll think I'm being clever afterwards, but I soon realised that all wasn't as well with them as I'd have thought at first sight. They were Northern Muslims, mostly, with a sprinkling of high-caste Oudh Hindoos — the practice of separating the races in different companies or troops hadn't come in then. Good soldiers, too; the 3rd had distinguished itself in the last Sikh War, and a few had frontier service. But they weren't happy — smart as you'd wish on parade, but in the evening they would sit about and croak like hell — as first I thought it was just the usual military sore-headedness, but it wasn't.

  At first all I heard was vague allusions, which I didn't inquire about for fear of betraying a suspicious ignorance — they talked a deal about one of the padres in the garrison, Reynolds sahib, and how Colonel Carmik-al-Ismeet (that was the 3rd's commander, Carmichael-Smith) ought to keep him off the post, and there was a fairly general repeated croak about polluted flour, and the Enlistment Act, but I didn't pay much heed until one night, I remember, an Oudh sowar came back from the bazaar in a tremendous taking. I don't even remember his name, but what had happened was that he'd been taking part in a wrestling match with some local worthy, and before he'd got his shirt back on afterwards, some British troopers from the Dragoon Guards who were there at the time had playfully snapped the sacred cord which he wore over his shoulder next the skin — as his kind of Hindoos did.

  "Banchuts!*(*A highly offensive term.) Scum!" He was actually weeping with rage. "It is defiled — I am unclean!" And for all that his mates tried to cheer him up, saying he could get a new one, blessed by a holy man, he went on raving — they take these things very seriously, you know, like Jews and Muslims with pork. If it seems foolish to you, you may compare it with how you'd feel if a nigger pissed in the font at your own church.

  "I shall go to the Colonel sahib!" says he finally, and one of the Hindoos, Gobinda Dal, sneered:

  "Why should he care — the man who will defile our atta*(*Flour.) will not rebuke an English soldier for this!"

  "What's all this about the atta?" says I to Pir Ali, and he shrugged.

  "The Hindoos say that the sahibs are grinding cow bones into the sepoys' flour to break their caste. For me, they can break any Hindoo's stupid caste and welcome." "Why should they do that?" says I; and Sita Gopal, who overheard, spat and says:

  "Where have you lived, Hasanzai? The Sirkar will break every man's caste — aye, and what passes for caste even among you Muslims: there are pig bones in the atta, too, in case you didn't know it. Naik Shere Afzul in the second troop told me; did he not see them ground at the sahibs' factory at Cawnpore?"

  "Wind from a monkey's backside," says I. "What would it profit the sahibs to pollute your food — since when do they hate their soldiers?"

  To my astonishment about half a dozen of them scoffed aloud at this —"Listen to the Black Mountain munshi!"*(*Teacher.) "The sahibs love their soldiers — and so the gora-cavalry broke Lal's string for him tonight!" "Have you never heard of the Dum-Dum sweeper, Makarram Khan?" and so on. Ram Mangal, who was the noisiest croaker of them all, spat out:

  "It is of a piece with the padre sahib's talk, and the new regulation that will send men across the kala pani — they will break our caste to make us Christians! Do they not know this even where you come from, hillman? Why, it is the talk of the army!"

  I growled that I didn't put any faith in latrine-gossip — especially if the latrine was a Hindoo one, and at this one of the older men, Sardul something-or-other, shook his head and says gravely:

  "It was no latrine-rumour, Makarram Khan, that came out of Dum-Dum arsenal." And for the first time I heard the astonishing tale that was, I discovered, accepted as gospel by every sepoy in the Bengal army — of the sweeper at Dum-Dum who'd asked a caste sepoy for a drink from his dish, and on being refused, had told the sepoy that he needn't be so dam' particular because the sahibs were going to do away with caste by defiling every soldier in the army by greasing their cartridges with cow and pig fat.

  "This thing is known," says old Sardul, positively, and he was the kind of old soldier that men listen to, thirty years' service, Aliwal medal, and clean conduct sheet, damn your eyes. "Is not the new Enfield musket in the armoury? Are not the new greased cartridges being prepared? How can any man keep his religion?"

  "They say that at Benares the jawans have been permitted to grease their own loads," says Pir Ali,16 But they hooted him down.

  "They say!" cries Ram Mangal. "It is like the tale they put about that all the grease was mutton-fat — if that were so, where is the need for anyone to make his own grease? It is a lie — just as the Enlistment Act is a lie, when they said it was a provision only, and no one would be asked to do foreign service. Ask the 19th at Behrampore — where their officers told them they must serve in Burma if they refused the cartridge when it was issued! Aye, but they will refuse — then we'll see!" He waved his hands in passion. "The polluted atta is another link in the chain — like the preaching of that owl Reynolds sahib with his Jesus-talk, which Carmik-al-Ismeet permits to our offence. He wants to put us to shame!"

  "It is true enough," says old Sardul, sadly. "Yet I would not believe it if such a sahib as my old Colonel MacGregor — did he not take a bullet meant for me at Kandahar? — were to look in my eye and say it was false. The pity is that Carmik-al-Ismeet is not such a sahib — there are none such nowadays," says he with morbid satisfaction, "and the Army is but a poor ruin of what it was. You do not know today what officers were — if you had seen Sale sahib or Larrinsh*(*"Lawrence" — any one of the famous Lawrence brothers who served on the frontier, and later in the Mutiny.) sahib or Cotton sahib, you would have seen men!" (Since he'd served in Afghanistan I'd hoped he would mention Flass-man sahib, but he didn't, the croaking old bastard.) "They would have died before they would have put dishonour on their sepoys; their children, they used to call us, and we would have followed them to hell! But now," he wagged his head again, "these are cutch-sahibs, not pakka-sahibs — and the English common soldiers are no better. Why, in my young day, an English trooper would call me brother, give me his hand, offer me his water-bottle (not realising that I could not take it, you understand). And now — these common men spit on us, call us monkeys and hubshis — and break Lal's string!"

  Most of their talk was just patent rubbish, of course, and I'd no doubt it was the work of agitators, spreading disaffection with their nonsense about greased cartridges and polluted food. I almost said so, but decided it would be unwise to draw attention to myself — and anyway it wasn't such a burning topic of conversation most of the time that one could take it seriously. I knew they put tremendous store by their religion — the Hindoos especially — and I supposed that whenever an incident like Lal's string stirred them up, all the old grievances came
out, and were soon forgotten. But I'll confess that what Sardul had said about the British officers and troops reminded me of John Nicholson's misgivings. I had hardly seen a British officer on parade since my enlistment; they seemed content to leave their troops to the jemadars and n.c.o.s — Addiscombe tripe17 , of course — and there was no question the British rankers in the Meerut garrison were a poorer type than, say, the 44th whom I'd known in the old Afghan days, or Campbell's Highlanders.

  I got first-hand evidence of this a day or two later, when I accidentally jostled a Dragoon in the bazaar, and the brute turned straight round and lashed out with his boot.

  "Aht the way, yer black bastard!" says he. "Think yer can shove a sahib arahnd — banchut!" And he would have taken a swipe at me with his fist, too, but I just put my hand on my knife-hilt and glared at him — it wouldn't have been prudent to do more. "Christ!" says he, and took to his heels until he got to the end of the street, where he snatched up a stone and flung it at me — it smashed a plate on a booth nearby — and then made off. I'll remember you, my lad, thinks I, and the day'll come when I'll have you triced up and flogged to ribbons. (And I did, as good luck had it.) I've never been so wild — that the scum of a Whitechapel gutter should take his boot to me! I'll be honest and say that if I'd seen him do it to a native two months earlier I wouldn't have minded a bit — and still wouldn't, much: it's a nigger's lot to be kicked. But it ain't mine, and I can't tell you how I felt afterwards — filthy, in a way, because I hadn't been able to pay the swine back. That's by the way; the point is that old Sardul was right. There wasn't the respect for jawans among the British that there had been in my young day; we probably lashed and kicked niggers just as much (I know I did), but there was a higher regard for the sepoys at least, on the whole.