Flashman In The Great Game fp-5

by George MacDonald Fraser

  About two in the morning Rowbotham called us together and gave his orders. "There is a clear way to the Allahabad road," says he, "but before we reach it we must bear right to come in behind the rebel gun positions, no more than half a mile from the entrenchment. At precisely four o'clock I shall fire a rocket, on which we shall burst out of cover and ride for the entrenchment at our uttermost speed; the sentries, having seen our rocket, will pass us through. The word is ‘Britannia’. Now, remember, for your lives, that our goal lies to the left of the church, so keep that tower always to your right front. Our rush will take us past the racecourse and across the cricket pitch —"

  "Oh, I say!" says someone. "Mind the wicket, though."

  ` — and then we must put our horses to the entrenchment bank, which is four feet high. Now, God bless us all, and let us meet again within the lines or in Heaven."

  That's just the kind of pious reminder of mortality I like, I must say; while the rest of'em were shaking hands in the dark I was carefully instructing Ilderim that at all costs he must stick by my shoulder. I was in my normal state of chattering funk, and my spirits weren't raised as we were filing out of the wood and I heard someone whisper:

  "I say, Jinks, what's the time?"

  "Ten past three," says Jinks, "on the bright summer morning of June the twenty-second — and let's hope to God we see the twenty-third."

  June twenty-third; I knew that date — and suddenly I was back in the big panelled room at Balmoral, and Pam was saying "… the Raj will come to an end a hundred years after the battle of Plassey … next June twenty-third." By George, there was an omen for you! And now all round was the gloom, and the soft pad of the walking horses, and the reins sweating in my palms as we advanced interminably, my eyes glued to the faint dark shape of the rider ahead; there was a mutter of voices as we halted, and then we waited in the stifling dark between two rows of ruined houses — five minutes, ten, fifteen, and then a voice called "Ready, all!" There was the flare of a match, a curse, then a brighter glare, and suddenly a rush of sparks and an orange rocket shot up into the purple night sky, weaving like a comet, and as it burst to a chorus of cries and yells from far ahead Rowbotham shouts "Advance!" and we dug in our heels and fairly shot forward in a thundering mass.

  There was a clear space ahead, and then a grove of trees, and beyond more level ground with dim shapes moving. As we bore down on them I realised that they must be pandies; we were charging the rear of their positions, and it was just light enough to make out the guns parked at intervals. There were shrieks of alarm and a crackle of shots, and then we were past, swerving between the gun-pits; there were horsemen ahead and either side and Ilderim crouched low in the saddle at my elbow. He yelled something and pointed right, and I saw an irregular tumbled outline which must be the church; to its left, directly ahead, little sparks of light were flashing in the distance — the entrenchment defenders were firing to cover us.

  Someone sang out: "Bravo, boys!" and then all hell burst loose behind us; there was a crashing salvo of cannon, the earth ahead rose up in fountains of dust, and shot was whistling over our heads. A horse screamed, and I missed by a whisker a thrashing tangle of man and mount which I passed so close that a lashing limb caught me smack on the knee. Voices were roaring in the dark, I heard Rowbotham's frantic "Close up! Ride for it!" A dismounted man plunged across my path and was hurled aside by my beast; behind me I heard the shriek of some-one mortally hit, and a riderless horse came neighing and stretching frantically against my left side. Another shattering volley burst from the guns in our rear, and that hellish storm swept through us — it was Balaclava all over again, and in the dark, to boot. Suddenly my pony stumbled, and I knew from the way he came up that he was hit; a stinging cloud of earth and gravel struck me across the face, a shot howled overhead, and Ilderim was sweeping past ahead of me.

  "Stop!" I bawled. "My screw's foundered! Stop, blast you — give me a hand!"

  I saw his shadowy form check, and his horse rear; he swung round, and as my horse sank under me his arm swept me out of the saddle — by God, he was strong, that one. My feet hit the ground, but I had hold of his bridle, and for a few yards I was literally dragged along, with Ilderim above hauling to get me across the crupper. Someone cannoned into us, and then as I pulled myself by main force across the crupper I felt a sudden shock, and Ilderim pitched over me and out of the saddle.

  Even as I righted myself on the horse's back the whole scene was suddenly bathed in glaring light — some swine had fired a flare, and its flickering illumination shone on a scene that looked like a mad artist's hell. Men and horses seemed to be staggering and going down all round me under the hail of fire, throwing grotesque shadows as they fought and struggled. I saw Rowbotham pinned under a fallen horse only a few yards away; Cheeseman, his face a bloody mask, was stretched supine beside him, his limbs asprawl; Ilderim, with his left arm dangling, was half-up on one knee, clutching at my stirrup. A bare hundred yards ahead the entrenchment was in plain view, with the defenders' heads visible, and some ass standing atop of it waving his hat; behind us, the red explosions of the cannon suddenly died, and to my horror I saw, pounding out under the umbrella of light cast by the flare, a straggling line of riders — sepoy cavalry with their sabres out, bearing down at the charge, and not more than a furlong away. Ilderim seized my stirrup and bawled:

  "On, on! Ride, brother!"

  I didn't hesitate. He'd turned back to rescue me, and his noble sacrifice wasn't going to be in vain if I could help it. That was certain death bearing down on us; I jammed in my heels, the horse leaped forward, and Ilderim was almost jerked off his feet. For perhaps five paces he kept up, with the yells and hoof-beats growing behind us, and then he stumbled and went down. I did my damnedest to shake him free, but in that instant the bloody bridle snapped, and I hurled out of the saddle and hit the ground with a smash that jarred every bone in my body. A shocking pain shot through my left ankle — Christ, it was caught in the stirrup, and the horse was tearing ahead, dragging me behind at the end of a tangle of leatherwork which somehow was still attached to its body.

  If any of you young fellows ever find yourself in this predicament, where you're dragged over rough, iron-hard ground, with or without a mob of yelling black fiends after you, take a word of advice from me. Keep your head up (screaming helps), and above all try to be dragged on your back — it will cost you a skinned arse, but that's better than having your organs scraped off. Try, too, to arrange for some stout lads to pour rapid fire into your pursuers, and for a handy Gilzai friend to chase after you and slash the stirrup-leather free in the nick of time before your spine falls apart. I was half-conscious and virtually buttockless when Ilderim — God knows, wounded as he was, where he'd got the speed and strength — hauled me up below the entrenchment and pitched me almost bodily over the breastwork. I went over in a shocking tangle, roaring: "Britannia! Britannia, for Christ's sake! I'm a friend!" and then a chap was catching me and lowering my battered carcase to earth and inquiring:

  "Will you have nuts or a cigar, sir?"

  Then a musket was being pushed into my hand, and in shocked confusion I found myself at the rampart, banging away at red-coated figures who came out of the smoke and dust, and I know Ilderim was alongside me, relieving me of my revolver and loosing off shots into the brown. All round there was the crash of volleys, and a great bass voice was yelling. "Odds, fire! Reload! Evens, fire! Reload!" The pain from my ankle was surging up my leg, into my body, making me sick and dizzy, I was coughing with the reek of powder smoke, there was a bugle sounding, and a confused roar of cheering — and the next thing I remember I was lying in the half-light of dawn, with my back against a sand-bagged wall, staring at a big, shot-torn barrack building, while a tall, bald-headed cove with a pipe was getting my boot off, and applying a damp cloth to my swollen ankle.

  There were a couple of chaps with muskets looking on, and Ilderim was having his arm bandaged by a fellow in a kepi and spectacles. There were ot
hers, moving about, carrying people towards the barrack, and along the parapet there were haggard-looking fellows, white and sepoy, with their pieces at the ready. A horrid smell seemed to hang over the place, and everything was filthy, with gear and litter all over the dusty ground, and the people seemed to be moving slowly. I was still feeling pretty dazed, but I guessed it must all be a dream anyway, for the chap third along the parapet to my left, with a handkerchief knotted round his head, was undoubtedly young Harry East. There couldn't be two snub noses like that in the world, and since the last time I'd seen him I'd been pinned under a sledge in the snows of southern Russia, and he had been lighting out for safety, it didn't seem reasonable that he should have turned up here.

  I'll tell you a strange thing about pain — and Cawnpore. That ankle of mine, which I'd thought was broken, but which in fact was badly sprained, would have kept me flat on my back for days anywhere else, bleating for sympathy; in Cawnpore I was walking on it within a few hours, suffering damnably, but with no choice but to endure it.That was the sort of place it was; if you'd had both legs blown off you were rated fit for only light duties.

  Imagine a great trench, with an earth and rubble parapet five feet high, enclosing two big single-storey barracks, one of them a burned-out shell and the other with half its roof gone. All round was flat plain, stretching hundreds of yards to the encircling pandy lines which lay among half-ruined buildings and trees; a mile or less to the north-west was the great straggling mass of Cawnpore city itself, beside the river- but when anyone of my generation speaks of Cawnpore he means those two shattered barracks with the earth wall round them.

  That was where Wheeler, with his ramshackle garrison, had been holding out against an army for two and a half weeks. There were nine hundred people inside it when the siege began, nearly half of them women and children; of the rest four hundred were British soldiers and civilians, and a hundred loyal natives. They had one well, and three cannon; they were living on two handfuls of mealies a day, fighting off a besieging force of more than three thousand mutineers who smashed at them constantly with fifteen cannon, subjected them to incessant musket-fire, and tried to storm the entrenchment. The defenders lost over two hundred dead in the first fortnight, men, women, and children, from gunfire, heat and disease; the hospital barrack had been burned to ashes with the casualties inside, and of the three hundred left fit to fight, more than half were wounded or ill. They worked the guns and manned the wall with muskets and bayonets and whatever they could lay hands on.

  This, I discovered to my horror, was the place I'd fled to for safety, the stronghold which Rowbotham had boasted was being held with such splendid ease. It was being held — by starved ghosts half of whom had never fired a musket before, with their women and children dying by inches in the shot-torn, stifling barrack behind them, in the certainty that unless help came quickly that entrenchment would be their common grave. Rowbotham never lived to discover how mistaken he'd been: he and half his troop were lying stark out on the plain — his final miscalculation having been to time our rush to coincide with a pandy assault.

  I was the senior officer of those who'd got safely (?) inside, and when they'd discovered who I was and bound up my ankle I was helped into the little curtained corner of the remaining barrack where Wheeler had his office. We stared at each other in disbelief, he because I was still looking like Abdul the Bulbul, and I because in place of the stalwart, brisk commander I'd known ten years ago there was now a haggard, sunken ancient; with his grimy, grizzled face, his uniform coat torn and filthy, and his breeches held up with string, he looked like a dead gardener.

  "Good God, you're never young Harry Flashman!" was his greeting to me. "Yes, you are though! Where the dooce did you spring from?" I told him — and in the short time I took to tell him about Meerut and Jhansi, no fewer than three round-shot hit the building, shaking the plaster; Wheeler just brushed the debris absently off his table, and then says:

  "Well, thank God for twenty more men — though what we'll feed you on I cannot think. Still, what matter a few more mouths? — you sec the plight we're in. You've heard nothing of … our people advancing from Allahabad, or Lucknow?" I said I hadn't and he looked round at his chief officers, Vibart and Moore, and gave a little gesture of despair.

  "I suppose it was not be expected," says he. "So … we can only do our duty — how much longer? If only it was not for the children, I think we could face it well enough. Still — no croaking, eh?" He gave me a tired grin. "Don't take it amiss if I say I'm glad to see you, Flashman, and will welcome your presence in our council. In the meantime, the best service you can do is to take a place at the parapet. Moore here will show you — God bless you," says he, shaking hands, and it was from Moore, a tall, fair-haired captain with his arm in a blood-smeared sling, that I learned of what had been happening in the past two weeks, and how truly desperate our plight was.

  It may read stark enough, but the sight of it was terrible. Moore took me round the entrenchment, stooping as he walked and I hobbled, for the small-arms fire from the distant sepoy lines kept whistling overhead, smacking into the barrack-wall, and every so often a large shot would plump into the enclosure or smash another lump out of the building. It was terrifying — and yet no one seemed to pay it much attention; the men at the parapet just popped up for an occasional look, and those moving in the enclosure, with their heads hunched down, never even broke step if a bullet whined above them. I kept bobbing nervously, and Moore grinned and said:

  "You'll soon get used to it — pandy marksmen don't hit a dam' thing they aim at. It's the random shots that do the damage — damnation!" This as a cloud of dust, thrown up by a round-shot hitting the parapet, enveloped us. "Stretcher, there! Lively now!" There was a body twitching close by where the shot had struck; at Moore's shout two fellows doubled out from the barrack to attend to it. After a brief look one of them shook his head, and then they picked up the body between them and carried it off towards what looked like a well; they just pitched it in, and Moore says:

  "That's our cemetery. I've worked it out that we put someone in there every two hours. Over there — that's the wet well, where we get our water. We won't go too close — the pandy sharpshooters get a clear crack at it from that grove yonder, so we draw our water at night. Jock McKillop worked it for a week, until they got him. Heaven only knows how many we've lost on water-drawing since."

  What seemed so unreal about it, and still does, was the quiet conversational way he talked. There was this garrison, being steadily shot to bits, and starving in the process, and he went on pointing things out, cool as dammit, with the crackle of desultory firing going on around us. I stomached it so long, and then burst out:

  "But in God's name — it's hopeless! Hasn't Wheeler tried to make terms?"

  He laughed straight out at that. "Terms? Who with? Nana Sahib? Look here, you were at Meerut, weren't you? Did they make terms? They want us dead, laddie. They slaughtered everything white up in the city yonder, and God knows how many of their own folk as well. They tortured the native goldsmiths to death to get at their loot; Nana's been blowing loyal Indians from guns as fast as they can trice 'em over the muzzles! No," he shook his head, "there'll be no terms."

  "But what the devil — I mean, what …?"

  "What's going to come of it? Well, I don't need to tell you, of all people — either a relief column wins through from Allahabad in three days at most, or we'll be so starved and short of cartridge that the pandies will storm over that wall. Then …" He shrugged. "But of course, we don't admit that — not in front of the ladies, anyway, however much some of'em may guess. Just grin and assure 'em that Lawrence will be up with the rations any day, what?"

  I won't trouble to describe my emotions as this sank in, along with the knowledge that for once there was nowhere to bolt to — and I couldn't have run anyway, with my game ankle. It was utterly hopeless — and what made it worse, if anything, was that as a senior man I had to pretend, like Wheeler and Moore a
nd Vibart and the rest, that I was ready to do or die with the best. Even I couldn't show otherwise — not with everyone else steady and cheery enough to sicken you. I'll carry to my grave the picture of that blood-sodden ground, with the flies droning everywhere, and the gaunt figures at the parapet; the barrack wall honeycombed with the shots that slapped into it every few seconds; the occasional cry of a man struck; the stretcher-parties running — and through it all Moore walking about with his bloody arm, grinning and ailing out jokes to everyone; Wheeler, with his hat on his head and the pistol through the cord at his waist, staring grim-faced at the pandy lines and scratching his white moustache while he muttered to the aide scribbling notes at his elbow; a Cockney sergeant arguing with a private about the height of the pillars at Euston Square station, while they cut pieces from a dead horse for the big copper boiler against the barrack wall.

  "Stew today," says Moore to me. "That's thanks to you fellows coming in. Usually, if we want meat,' we have to let a pandy cavalryman charge up close, and then shoot the horse, not the rider."

  "More meat on the 'orse than there is on the pandy, eh, Jasper?" says the sergeant, winking, and the private said it was just as well, since some non-coms of his acquaintance, namin' no names, would as soon be cannibals as not.

  These are the trivial things that stick in memory, but none clearer than the inside of that great barrack-room, with the wounded lying in a long, sighing, groaning line down one wall, and a few yards away, behind roughly improvised screens of chick and canvas, four hundred women and children, who had lived in that confined, sweating furnace for two weeks. The first thing that struck you was the stench, of blood and stale sweat and sickness, and then the sound — the children's voices, a baby crying, the older ones calling out, and some even laughing, while the firing cracked away outside; the quiet murmur of the women; the occasional gasp of pain from the wounded; the brisk voices from the curtained corner where Wheeler had his office. Then the gaunt patient faces — the weary-looking women, some in ragged aprons, others in soiled evening dresses, nursing or minding the children or tending the wounded; the loyal sepoys, slumped against the wall, with their muskets between their knees; an English civilian sitting writing, and staring up in thought, and then writing again; beside him an old babu in a dhoti, mouthing the words as he read a scrap of newspaper through steel-rimmed spectacles; a haggard-looking young girl stitching a garment for a small boy who was waiting and hitting out angrily at the flies buzzing round his head; two officers in foul suits that had once been white, talking about pig-sticking — I remember one jerking his arm to shoot his linen, and him with nothing over his torso but his jacket; an ayah*(*Native nursemaid.) smiling as she piled toy bricks for a little girl; a stocky, tow-headed corporal scraping his pipe; a woman whispering from the Bible to a pallid Goanese-looking fellow lying on a blanket with a bloody bandage round his head; an old, stern, silver-haired mem-sahib rocking a cradle.