Hervey glanced across at the subedar. In his native dignity there was the stamp of Serjeant Strange. He looked back further along the column, seeing in a face here and there more than a vestige of that fighting spirit which the collector said was now dimmed. He found it hard to believe that men who wore their uniforms as well as these did, or who sat their horses so, were not as determined when it came to drawing the sword.
The collector strove at once to correct the impression he had given. ‘Captain Hervey, do not suppose for one moment that I am saying these men lack fighting spirit. It is only that by comparison Madras is not thought to have so martial a people. If you were to see the men of the northern parts — Rajpoots, Sikhs, Jats, Punjabis, Pathans — big men, not enervated by climate, you would understand my meaning. Have no fear: Cornet Templer’s men will fight as well as you would wish. And I for one am content to place my security in their hands.’
Next day
The sun had been up for only an hour, but in that cool, fresh, first sixty minutes of another Indian day the patrol had made ten miles. Chota hazree — sweet tea and a plantain — had been brought to the officers in their bivouac tents a half-hour before sunrise, and they had been in the saddle as the first shafts of light searched them out on the plateau from behind the hills to the east. Nothing that Hervey had seen before made him so conscious of his own insignificance.
The collector had intended to ride for another hour, at a reduced pace, before halting for a breakfast of cold chikor, of which they had bagged a dozen brace the afternoon before. But there was to be no burra hazree just yet. ‘Pindarees, sahib,’ exclaimed Subedar Thangraj, his eyes seeing clearly what Templer and Hervey could only confirm with the telescope.
From a mile away the village, which had no name that any in the patrol knew of, and none on any map, bore the signs of having been assailed. More than the usual number of vultures circled above, and there was a continual glide earthwards. And instead of the many wisps of smoke that would ordinarily have marked the cooking fires and ovens of a village of this size, there was a single, large pall of black smoke.
Cornet Templer’s face changed at once from ease to tautness. ‘Subedar sahib: extended line, draw swords!’
Hervey had to check his instincts. Templer intended, it seemed, to gallop straight to the village without any preliminary reconnaissance or indirect approach. This was dangerously more than audacity, surely? This was more than the boldness which Peto’s book advocated and which Hervey approved. It was recklessness, was it not? He looked at Henry Locke, who shrugged. ‘He orders the troop to form line and draw swords,’ he explained; to which Locke simply raised both his eyebrows.
‘Captain Hervey,’ said the collector with perfect calm, seeing his concern, ‘in the Company’s cavalry it is the practice to charge the enemy at once — instantly, without hesitation. He invariably outnumbers you and hesitation is fatal; by the very action of attempting to throw over the greater number there somehow comes the ability to do so. And the enemy, who in his rational appreciation would know that such a thing is impossible, is denied the time to think, and so is afeard that it must in truth be so. Rarely will he stand his ground — unless his escape is closed off.’
By the time the collector had finished his elegant if somewhat elliptical explanation, the troop had extended into line. ‘Draw swords!’ ordered the subedar. Fifty and more sabres came rasping from their scabbards. Hervey winced at the noise, as he always did — the sound of sword edges blunting. But he also suspected that these sepoys had begun the patrol with blades as sharp as razors.
‘Walk march!’ called Cornet Templer, his voice carrying easily to both flanks — in all a frontage of 150 yards.
All Hervey could think of was the duke’s instructions to his cavalry commanders: ‘Cavalry is to attack in three lines, four or five hundred yards apart when facing cavalry; a reserve must be kept of twothirds of the whole, to exploit a success or to cover a withdrawal.’ And here was Cornet Templer and his troop in one extended line, and open order!
He fell in by the collector’s side at the rear and drew his sword. The collector pulled his straw hat down firmly and reached inside his coat for the diminutive pistol he always carried (but had not thought to prime). ‘Keep an eye for any who wish to throw themselves on our mercy, Hervey. I should wish to interrogate them.’
Hervey smiled to himself at the collector’s absolute confidence in the outcome, struggling meanwhile with his gelding, which seemed to have had little by way of formal schooling and was reverting to its instinct for the herd. The line was soon in a brisk canter. Dust billowed, horses were pulling and blowing at the same time. Hooves drummed and bits jingled. He looked left and right at the half-hundred troopers: from behind they could have been from any one of the armies that fought Bonaparte. They could have been from the Grande Armée itself, except that they rode shorter than any regular cavalry he had seen before — and in open order and extended line! Yet it was not difficult to understand how these men felt invincible in that headlong rush at the Pindarees, of whose number they had not the slightest intimation, for there was dust enough to conceal a thousand cavalrymen.
‘Charge!’ roared Templer, with fewer than a hundred yards to run to the village. The line of sabres lowered to the ‘engage’, expecting to catch the enemy on foot.
Hervey could see nothing of what they were charging. He thought he saw horses but he could not be certain, for dust swirled everywhere. He was more anxious still: even if there were no ambuscade, the line, once it had collided with the village, would rapidly lose cohesion — when a half-capable enemy could take them from a flank.
And then they were in the village, and it was all he could do to keep his seat as his little gelding, effortlessly changing leg, swerved this way and that to avoid tumbling at an obstacle, any number of which would have brought down a less balanced horse. They jumped something he didn’t even see, and the gelding landed with its head still up and ready for the next challenge.
Some of the sepoys were far ahead, and he could see that the charge had become a pursuit. Here and there was a fallen horse, but mainly they were human shapes which lay sprawled and bloody — and none was wearing a French-blue tunic. He galloped on, looking about for the collector. The ground was rising slightly but there was no cover. As far as he could see in front of him there were sepoys furiously raising and lowering their sword arms. He began to check, for the gelding was blowing hard — when the best of horses could stumble. A lone Pindaree came towards him and threw down his sword, falling from the saddle to his knees and clasping his hands together, pleading. Hervey was trying to find the words to tell him he was made prisoner when one of the sepoys galloped up with a different intention. He shouted that the man had surrendered, but whether or not he was understood, it made no difference, for the sepoy sliced at the Pindaree’s neck from behind, severing the head as neatly as Hervey had seen Serjeant Strange cut a swede in half in the tilt-yard.
It was not his fight, he told himself, and the sepoy gave him a most respectful salute with his bloody sabre as he circled back to join his comrades. He turned and slowly trotted back to the village, recalling what the collector had said two nights before about the strongest stomachs turning. There were bloody bundles of flesh and homespun about the village, but no other human presence that he could see. He heard the bugle, and looked back to see the line at last rallying. Then the collector appeared, in a lather every bit as prodigious as that of his horse — and blowing almost as much — though he had kept up remarkably well. ‘A sorry business this, Hervey,’ he called, dismounting by one of the bundles and clasping a handkerchief over his nose.
Hervey said he did not expect there would be anyone for him to interrogate, to which the collector seemed not overly surprised, nor even very disappointed.
‘We had better begin searching the huts, however,’ he suggested, still clasping the silk to his nose. ‘There may be something that tells us what these fiends are next about.’
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They regretted doing so almost at once. The sight in the first hut made the collector rush out clutching the silk to his mouth, and throw up noisily. Inside, Hervey stared in disbelief. Here was a lesson in anatomy he had not seen even in a textbook — the womb hacked open and its full-grown contents ripped away and sliced like meat on a butcher’s slab. And, as if that could not have been enough to satiate the most depraved, the wretched woman had been impaled hideously and severally. Hervey now wished he had struck off the Pindaree’s head himself, for though he had seen the horrifying work of cannon, never before had he known sheer surgical brutality. He was numb with incomprehension.
‘You had better search the well, Mr Templer,’ said the collector as he recovered himself, seeing the troop coming into the village.
Before it occurred to Hervey why the well should be searched, one of the havildars revealed why. ‘It is full of bodies, sahib,’ he called.
Hervey, Templer and the native officers doubled over to him, covering their noses as they did so. The well was large, twenty feet across, with a three-foot wall, and it was deep. There were many bodies (perhaps fifty — it was difficult to estimate), and as far as Hervey could tell, peering into its darkness, most — perhaps all — were women. Those uppermost in the tangled mound were naked.
‘They were the ones who either had not the time or the courage to jump for themselves,’ said the collector.
‘What do we do now?’ asked Hervey, beginning to sicken at both the sight and the stench.
‘What do you think we should do?’ enquired the collector, with a mild challenge in his voice. ‘We roll up our bloody sleeves and get them out!’
The officers took turns to descend to the bottom of the well, to where the ordure was most nauseous, and tied ropes round each body, the sepoys hauling them to the surface. For over three hours they laboured thus, until the remains of every one of forty-seven women and girls — and eleven infants — were brought into the heat of the mid-morning sun. Meanwhile, the other sepoys had collected the bodies of a dozen men, mostly aged, and had lain them in the shade of the village’s banyan. Now they began building a massive pyre on which they might all be cremated according to the rites of Vishnu.
‘The village men would have been in the fields, by the look of things,’ said the collector, ‘and there they will have hid since. We shall not be able to tempt them in for a day or so.’
Hervey simply nodded.
The collector lowered his voice, until it had almost a note of despair. ‘This is an especially brutal raid. The women are always susceptible, but they are by no means always defiled, nor the men killed if they offer no resistance.’
‘It’s the mutilation and… the brutishness, the method of their violation,’ said Hervey, matching his tone.
The collector nodded grimly. ‘If I were to suppose what happened, I should say that the village was taken wholly by surprise — at about three o’clock yesterday. Some of the women would have screamed, gathered up their last-born and run at once to the well, throwing themselves in within sight of the marauders. This would have excited the worst of them — a freebooting band among freebooters without what passes for the discipline of some of the Pindaree cohorts. Some of the old men would have made a show of protecting the women and been cut down for their trouble. The first blood would have excited the appetite for more, until there was a frenzy of rape and slaughter. You are dealing with a savagery here, Captain Hervey, the like of which you would find hard to imagine even in your battles in Spain. I pray this cohort we surprised is not typical of what we may expect.’
‘And how many rupees might the Pindarees have supposed a village such as this would render up?’ asked Hervey incredulously.
‘Just so, just so,’ the collector replied, shaking his head again. ‘We are, as a rule, spared these sights in the Company’s territories, and half of me wishes to believe that this incursion was but a misjudgement.However, I fear this and the earlier forays have been somehow to test our strength, and that we shall see more unless we do something. Yet I can’t suppose that anything which is done in a small way shall have any effect. No, it must be something undertaken on a bigger scale — encompassing the whole of the country. I hold the extirpation of the Pindaree menace to be the greatest, and most pressing, necessity of the Company. And yet the Court of Directors in London will have no truck with it.’
Cornet Templer told off a jemadar’s patrol to follow the Pindaree spoor, then came up and saluted. ‘Do you have any further orders, sir?’
‘No, Mr Templer, I think not. How many did we account for in all?’
‘Villagers, sir, or Pindarees?’
‘The latter.’
‘Seventy, not fewer.’
The collector nodded approvingly, even though a prisoner or two would have been helpful. ‘You showed great address, Mr Templer. I shall commend your conduct this day to Fort St George.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ replied Templer, flatly, for there was too much otherwise to dull any satisfaction with his exertions.
The jemadar’s patrol left with little expectation of catching any more of the fleeing Pindarees. If they could trace their route of withdrawal from the Circars it would at least indicate something of what freedom of movement they enjoyed in the neighbouring states. Meanwhile, all that the remainder of the troop could do was wait in the hope that some of the ryots would return to the village, and that they would be able to say something which might help in any subsequent encounter. It was a mournful bivouac that night.
The first hour of daylight the following morning was given over to what Hervey’s regiment called ‘interior economy’. Saddles, bridles and other tackling were laid out with great precision for the scrutiny of Cornet Templer and Subedar Thangraj. And after inspecting every piece of leather they went to the horses with the farrier-naik. Hervey walked with the collector through the lines of country-breds, recalling as if yesterday the condition of his own regiment in Spain after a similar march.
‘What do you think of them, Captain Hervey?’ asked Somervile.
Hervey replied that he found them very much better than he had been led to believe, that they compared very favourably indeed with the remounts they were receiving towards the end of the campaign in the Peninsula.
‘The Company of late has been much exercised by the need of good horses. Left to itself, India breeds indifferent mounts, though there are a dozen or so native breeds. Seven or eight years ago — before my time here — the directors engaged a distinguished London veterinarian — a Mr Moorcroft. Do you know the name?’
Hervey said he had some notion of it.
‘It was he who began the reform of the Company’s stud department. And great work he has done, too. But much buying is still, perforce, in the hands of regimental purchasing officers.’
‘Then I perceive that the Madras Cavalry’s purchasing officer has an affinity for Arabs.’
‘You would be right,’ replied the collector, smiling. ‘Mr Blacker has bought many hundreds of pure Kehilans, and is most adept at putting them to native mares.’
‘You are very evidently an apostle of the breed,’ Hervey smiled back, conscious of the energy of the little horse the collector rode, though he had not yet become accustomed to its curious lines.
‘Yes, indeed I am. See how full-chested those troopers are, how broad across the loins, and how round-sided and deep-barrelled they are. You will not see one horse in ten in England as short-limbed yet with such qualities. That chest is what gives the Kehilan his endurance. You would scarcely ever be able to exhaust him, unless unreasonably. And he can live on air if needs be. The only inconvenience I perceive is that the entire needs considerably more bleeding than does an English stallion, and in this country he is more prone to miasmic fevers. You will see the farrier bleed as many this morning as he finds in need of a new shoe.’
Hervey expressed himself surprised at the number of entires generally. ‘I’m afraid we find them altogether too untractable. We
cannot pick and choose our remounts whilst on campaign, and they must stand side by side with the mares.’
The collector understood. ‘But there is none so brave as a stallion. I would not wish to surrender such an advantage were I a military man.’
Hervey smiled. He had to acknowledge the point. Though, as he explained, when considering the normal method of operation of European cavalry — in squadrons, knee-to-knee — some concession had to be made to the need for tractability.
‘But if you are pleased by what you see with our native regular cavalry, Captain Hervey,’ the collector added, ‘then you should see our silladar regiments.’
Hervey paused while he searched his mind for the meaning of the Urdu. ‘I do not know this word,’ he concluded.
‘A Maratha corruption of the pure Persian silahadar,’ said the collector quite unaffectedly, for he had studied both languages. ‘It means simply a soldier bearing arms, or wearing armour. In this case it refers most approximately to British yeomanry, except that they are more or less permanently embodied — and, I hazard, a great deal more effective. Each man provides his own horse and all necessities, except firearm and ammunition. And for his services he receives thirty rupees a month. We shall soon have one such regiment on the Madras establishment — one of Colonel Skinner’s Horse. They are at present in the north of the Circars where the first Pindaree band struck earlier this year. You would, I believe, approve of them!’
Hervey was intent on learning more. What, for instance, impelled a sowar to hazard his horse if this were the means of his livelihood? But Cornet Templer reported that the troop was ready to resume, and the collector was keen for the off. The jemadar’s patrol had already sent word that the marauders were a halfday’s forced march ahead of them and had crossed into the Rajah of Chintal’s territory. They would remain on the border to watch for a day and then rejoin. Hervey asked if Chintal was where they would take refuge, but the collector thought not. They would plunder the place and pass through with as much impunity as they had here, for the rajah’s forces were meagre and ineffectual. But Somervile wished nevertheless for a reconnaissance along a fair length of the border to be sure there was no doubling back, and so he asked to be left with an escort to conclude his business with the village — a business which, Hervey soon learned, was impelled by humanity rather than any actuarial concern of the Company’s — and pressed Templer to make a good show along the border en route for home.
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