The Nizam's Daughters

by Mallinson, Allan

  They were more solid affairs than the barrackblocks, brick-built, with tiled roofs. Nevertheless, the galloper gun’s roundshot managed to dislodge many of the tiles, though it could make no impression on the doors. ‘Jemadar sahib,’ called Hervey, ‘we must get through the roof.’

  The notion of climbing to the roof now seemed no more impetuous to the jemadar than anything else he had found the courage to do that night, and he answered Hervey’s imperative with equal eagerness.

  The troop dafadar had rallied the rest of the sowars by the gun, keeping half mounted and half ready with their carbines. Hervey thought it unwise yet to take the assault deeper into the cantonment, for he could have little control once they were in more confined quarters. In any event, burning thatch had blown aloft from the barrack-house and set other roofs alight. He was well satisfied with the confusion as he and the jemadar now climbed through the smashed tiling into the eaves of the armoury. Private Johnson had detached himself from the fray, as so often in the past. His speciality was progging – with nothing express in mind, but with the happy knack of recognizing the potential in any removable device, solid or liquid. A building near the magazine, equally strongly built, looked promising. It had double doors, like a barn. Indeed, it looked as if it were just that. The doors were secured only by a padlock, and padlocks had never proved more than a fleeting hindrance to his work. A hoof-pick became a lock-pick, and in no time the doors were swinging open to reveal the spoils.

  The stench sent him reeling, and before he was recovered a press of sepoys loomed. He drew his sabre – a magnificent gesture of defiance in the face of scores of mutineers. But it checked their egress nonetheless, and for what seemed an age Johnson stood with his sword arm extended, holding at bay what he now supposed to be a whole company. At length, one of them stepped forward and bowed, making namaste. Johnson sensed a trick. Then another did the same, and another, and then more shuffled out, all silently making namaste. Private Johnson saw he had a company of sepoys his prisoner, but what he might do with them was not so obvious. Would they return to their quarters with as much docility as they had emerged? He took a step forward and gestured with his sabre for them to go back inside, but the leader bowed once more, held out his hands and spoke with sufficient entreaty in his voice for Johnson to know that something was not as he supposed. Why, after all, had there been a padlock on the outside? Was this the guardhouse? Were they defaulters? Surely not so many? He cursed them roundly for having no English.

  The same instinct for the potential in any booty now told him that these sepoys might be of use to his officer, for they appeared to have no weapons and seemed willing to obey his gestured commands – except, that is, to return to their stinking confines. ‘Coom on, then,’ he bellowed in his most stentorian Sheffield. They did. They formed fours and marched in step behind him out onto the maidan and towards where Locke and the gun stood steady as a Waterloo square. ‘Mr Locke, sir, I think these men want to be us friends,’ he called.

  The dafadar shot to attention and brought his tulwar to the carry. ‘Subedar sahib!’ he snapped.

  The sepoy who had been first to make namaste returned the salute with his hand. He said something unintelligible to either Locke or Johnson, but the dafadar relaxed and sloped his sword.

  Locke was quick enough to surmise these were no ordinary mutineers, but he swung the gun round at them nevertheless. The column gasped, and the sepoys began to waver, but their leader calmly made namaste again. ‘We are your prisoners, sahib; we are innocent of any offence,’ he protested in Urdu.

  ‘Go and get Captain Hervey from that building yonder,’ said Locke, indicating the roofless armoury.

  Johnson doubled across the maidan just as the armoury doors flew open to reveal Hervey and the jemadar about to torch a mound of kindling. ‘Sir,’ he shouted, quick to the mark, ‘there’s some ’Indoos as can use them muskets on our side!’ pointing out the piled arms.

  Hervey looked unconvinced, or at least puzzled.

  ‘Sir,’ insisted Johnson, ‘’ave found some prisoners! I don’t know what they’re saying but they seems to want to fight for us.’

  The jemadar pushed past him, looked towards the gun and began nodding his head vigorously. It was so, he assured him. ‘They are Rajpoots, sahib! The rajah has one company from Mewar. Rajpoots would not have mutinied like the others!’

  There was no time for Hervey to make sense of this difference of loyalties, only to exploit it. Neither was there time for any lengthy interrogation: he must either trust and arm them or fire the armoury at once – and, in any case, he could have no exact idea how many weapons were already in the hands of the mutineers.

  ‘Very well, Jemadar sahib, call them; let’s arm them and stand our ground in the maidan!’ He spoke, without thinking, in English, but the jemadar knew his thoughts by now, confident at last they could prevail.

  The Rajpoots numbered a little short of sixty. At first they had looked a rabble, easily held at bay by Johnson’s sabre. But as soon as they had muskets in their hands they were transformed. They were tall, proud sepoys again, even without uniform (for none was clothed above the waist). Their subedar barked a series of commands, and from this unpromising mass of half-bare disorder three ranks of soldierly-looking musketeers formed before Hervey’s eyes. A company of Jessope’s own Coldstreamers could hardly have had a profounder effect at that moment. He nodded approvingly to the subedar and indicated the direction from which at any minute he expected the mutineers to come like a great wave. The subedar barked more orders – Left-form at the halt! The three ranks pivoted half-left with speed and precision, and now Hervey too believed that winning was no longer dependent on an act of God. Locke took the gun off to a flank, supported by half a dozen sowars, to be able to sweep the maidan with enfilading fire. The armoury blazed, though they had been unable to make any impression on the magazine. But for the time being they commanded its approaches.

  Hervey himself stood, dismounted, with carbine and sabre, at last with a moment to contemplate their position. He soon wished he had not, for the odds against them were, perhaps, a little short of thirty to one.

  They did not have long to wait. They heard the wave before they saw it: howling, shrieking, wailing – chilling the blood quicker than the drumfire at Waterloo. And when the wave came, it was more fearsome than anything he had seen. Hundreds upon hundreds of sepoys, like the wildest beasts of the jungle. Not in any order, like a regular wave, but as a great foaming breaker about to pound upon a beach. The old feeling clasped at his vitals – the mix of paralysing fear and energizing thrill that came when life or reputation faced extinction. He had never faced an assault dismounted before, never had to wait at the halt rather than drive forward to meet it. His throat dried like parchment, and he swallowed rapidly to slake it sufficiently to give the order. Locke discharged the galloper gun as the wave rolled over the maidan. He had double-shotted it, and the two four-pound iron balls scythed through the mass of sepoys with brutal destruction. The great human wave had no knowledge of the gun, though. They heard its report, even in their lust to be about the little force by the gates, and they could hear the screaming and see the limbless and disembowelled. But none seemed to see the cause. Was it a part of their madness? Did any in that primitive swarm have any consciousness? The flames from the buildings dazzled them rather than lit their way, yet they slowed not a bit. Then came a flash like lightning in the face of the wave, and another loud report which for the moment overcame the animal clamour. And more men were writhing in agony. Then the same again as the Rajpoots’ middle rank discharged its volley, and then the same once more from the rear rank. There were dead and dying mutineers where, only seconds before, their leaders would have promised them the blood of the intruders. Locke’s gun thundered again and yet more roundshot felled lines of men in ghastly disorder. Then came the bugle, and the jemadar charged with his dozen lancers into the dazed mass, for whom now there was no hope of resistance, only flight or death.
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  For many it was both. No matter which way they ran – forward, left or right – they were met with fire or the lance. Or, for those who tried to clamber back over the bodies of their fellows, strewn across the maidan like pebbles thrown about the sand, there were the multiple bags of grape which Locke was now firing with double charges that sent the gun jumping ten feet in its recoil. Those sepoys who, in this economical yet lethal crossfire, were able to recover their individual senses began to prostrate themselves in abject surrender. One way or another, in a few more minutes there was no-one left standing in the maidan.

  Hervey knew what would happen next if he did not take action at once. The exhilaration – the relief – of being alive and in command of the battlefield would turn to a dangerous torpor. If he let go now he might never be able to rouse his eighty stout hearts again. They must not wait for the sun to rise, when those mutineers not prostrate before them would see just how few they were. He set about quartering and combing the maidan with the Rajpoots and corralling the surrendered in his new allies’ former prison, using the lancers as drovers – all the while covering the entrance with the galloper gun, though it had little ammunition left. As day broke – rapidly, as always – they had cleared the maidan of the living and halfdead, leaving the lifeless – already the object of swarms of ants and flies – to impede the next wave, and were braced for another attack. Of the infantry at Jhansikote, sixty stood with Hervey, three hundred were secured in the granary, and as many were lying in the maidan. There might be a thousand yet to account for. He knew he could not suppose his position as strong as before: the Rajpoots had plenty of ball cartridge, it was true, but the gun had next to nothing and they no longer had the advantage of night. Spirits were high, though: they had not lost a man. The mutineers had scarce fired a shot.

  Only now did it occur to him: why had they not fired? Why, indeed, were there no skirmishers harrying them from the walls? He ran forward, cursing, to examine a musket lying on the ground. It wasn’t loaded, or even primed. He picked up another – the same. And another, and another – all without charge or ball! So their leaders were going to issue powder and shot only as they marched, said Hervey aloud; or perhaps only when they reached Chintalpore. Such was the insurance that perfidy required! ‘The race is to the swift,’ said Hervey aloud.

  Johnson furrowed his brow. ‘Tha’s not quoting scripture again, sir?’

  ‘I am,’ replied Hervey. ‘Indeed I am challenging it – Ecclesiastes no less!’

  His groom looked bemused.

  ‘Ecclesiastes – Solomon’s great work on the vanity of man: “I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong . . . but time and chance happeneth to them all.” Time and chance happeneth to all, Johnson!’

  ‘Very pretty, Captain ’Ervey, but where does it get us next?’

  ‘It takes us into the cantonment. It takes us right into their lines. And we shall not fire another round! Fetch Jessye and ask the jemadar and his troopers to assemble!’

  XIII

  LOST SOULS

  Chintalpore, that evening

  With an escort of two sowars and Private Johnson, Locke rode hard for the palace, through the heat of the afternoon, and arrived as the sun was beginning its descent beyond the hills west of Chintalpore. He had ridden through the city, and it was not its customary bustle. The nervousness among merchants and beggars alike was everywhere evident, for fifteen hundred mutineers descending on them was not a fair prospect. The palace was even more nervous. The water level in the lake that now served as a moat around three sides was higher than when they had left – testimony to Selden’s address in attending to the defences – and the droog had piles of teak logs at intervals along its slope, secured by ropes which would be cut in the face of the advancing sepoys. A steady procession of elephants was still bringing logs as Locke and Johnson slowed their mounts to a trot for the climb to the palace gates. Once inside they found the rajah in his menagerie, alone, seemingly reconciled to the cataclysm about to befall his house. When he saw them it was with heightened despair, for their bloodstained clothes and grimy faces spoke of defeat. But they did not look like men who had fled slaughter, the enemy pressing hard on their heels. ‘Mr Locke,’ exclaimed the rajah, shaking his head in confusion, ‘I had imagined—’

  The raj kumari appeared, as close to running as a princess might. Locke saw little point in waiting on ceremony. ‘Your Highness, the mutiny is put down. The ringleaders are restrained, and the rest have been disarmed and are confined to the cantonment. A company of Rajpoots remained loyal. Their help was capital: without it all might have been lost. Captain Hervey remains with them. Are your cavalry returning, sir?’

  The rajah was speechless. His disbelief showed clearly as he turned to Selden, also come running, redfaced and sweating. ‘Do we yet know if they return, Mr Selden?’

  ‘We do, Your Highness,’ he replied, gasping for breath. ‘They will be here by dawn tomorrow.’ And then he turned anxiously to Locke: ‘Hervey – is he unhurt then?’

  ‘Yes, we suffered little but a scratch – the entire force.’

  The rajah looked even more incredulous (and Selden scarcely less so). ‘Please tell us of it, Mr Locke,’ he said, motioning him to a bower-seat close by and beckoning his khansamah to bring refreshment.

  Locke recounted the story with such vivid grasp of detail that neither Selden, the raj kumari nor the rajah made a sound during its telling. He spoke of himself only when it was necessary for narrative completeness, he praised the jemadar and the dafadar, and many sowars by name, gave honour to the Rajpoots, especially their subedar, and even included Private Johnson in the paean. But throughout his account shone Hervey’s resolution, his resourcefulness and courage. ‘When dawn came,’ he continued, scarcely able to believe it himself, ‘Captain Hervey rode with a dozen sowars deep into the mutineers’ lines and demanded they surrender and throw themselves on Your Highness’s mercy. He had concluded they had muskets but no ammunition – but, even so, they had bayonets enough to make pincushions of us all. He told them that discipline was the soul of an army and that they had lost their souls when they had set themselves against Your Highness’s authority. He told them they could never hope for paradise if they didn’t redeem themselves now as soldiers.’

  ‘And they took him at his word?’ asked Selden doubtfully.

  ‘He also said that if they did not surrender at once he would kill every one of them.’

  ‘A skilful reinforcement of his appeal to their nobility,’ smiled the veterinarian.

  ‘Yes: he led them onto the maidan in formed companies and made them pile arms before attending their wounded and building pyres for the dead. They even gave up their leaders and those who had killed the European officers.’

  The rajah expressed himself humbled by this account of the bravery of his loyal sowars and Rajpoots – and, even more, of those who were not his subjects but his guests. He turned to the raj kumari. ‘What say you of this, my daughter?’ he asked softly.

  ‘I say that we are ever in the debt of Captain Hervey,’ she replied, though without enthusiasm. Indeed, almost with a hint of discouragement.

  The rajah turned to Locke again. ‘And was there any indication of the cause that made my sipahis rise against my officers?’

  ‘There was, sir,’ replied Locke firmly.

  The rajah waited silently for enlightenment.

  Locke looked about to see exactly who his audience now comprised.

  ‘Come, Mr Locke,’ urged the rajah, ‘you may speak as you find. All here are my loyal servants.’

  Locke was uncertain on that point. Nevertheless he would conclude his report. ‘It appears that the sepoys’ batta has been withheld these past twelve months.’