Drums Along the Khyber

by Philip McCutchan

  Ogilvie lowered the glasses. What Ahmed Khan had just said, if it were true, put a very different complexion on the whole affair. The British would probably have to withdraw at once—indeed, would be bound to do so if thus requested by the Amir; their ground would be cut from under their feet and all the casualties would have been in vain. As to themselves, prisoners here in the fort...well, no doubt their disposal would be part and parcel of any agreement between the Amir and the rebel, but if anything other than handing back to their regiment was on the cards for them, then presumably the situation would alter yet again and Army Headquarters in Murree would press for a punitive expedition. But, in the execution of it, they would have the whole area, including the Khyber, against them. Such might well mean the effective end of Ogilvie’s career, or at least of any promotion beyond the rank of major; for no government was likely to look favourably upon an officer who, almost single-handed if not voluntarily, had stirred up an extension of the conflict, made it in effect into an Imperial war, by the stupidity of having allowed himself to be captured...

  Ahmed Khan went on, “In the meantime, Ogilvie sahib, I have a use for you and your men. It will have occurred to you already that I had ordered the taking of prisoners for use as hostages?”

  Ogilvie nodded; smiling, Ahmed Khan took his arm and led him on a perambulation of the rooftop. The native said, “But now there is a difference. I have been most exceptionally lucky. As I am sure you can see, the fact of your name, of your birth, makes this difference.”

  “A squeeze on my father?” Ogilvie gave a rather shaky laugh. “That won’t work, Ahmed Khan! My father is a soldier, a British officer of the old order, and a man well used to the ways of India and the frontier. He’ll never be moved an inch by any relationship.”

  “Yes, this I understand,” Ahmed Khan said quietly. “I know you are right. The General sahib is as you say—I know this—and would do his duty no matter what should happen to his son, as I myself would also, in similar circumstances.”

  Ogilvie was puzzled. “So?”

  Ahmed Khan smiled again and let go of his arm. He stood back. “You are not the only hostage, as you know. There are—let me see—twenty-three more, one of them your own havildar-major. I shall leave you to think about this, Ogilvie sahib. For now, I have said enough. I shall speak with you again shortly.”

  He nodded at the Persian, and turned away himself, walking back across the space to watch again from the northern battlements. Once more the escort surrounded the prisoners with their drawn swords and ushered them back down the spiral staircase. When they reached the passage Ogilvie found a young man waiting, a slim young man, an Indian, in white with a brilliant blue cummerbund. This man halted the escort, approached Ogilvie, bowed, and said in English, “Excuse sahib...come this way please,” indicating a door leading off to the left.

  “Why?” Ogilvie asked.

  “The orders of His Highness Ahmed Khan, sahib. As a British officer you are not to be put in the cell.”

  Ogilvie’s face hardened. “I prefer to be with my men,” he said.

  “An officer, sahib—”

  “Here we are all prisoners. I don’t want any privileged treatment. My duty’s to my men. I insist on being accommodated with them.”

  “I am sorry, sahib.” The young man clapped his hands and the door opened. Four men with curved swords came through and formed a close escort round Ogilvie. He shrugged, caught Cunningham’s eye and said, “I’m sorry, Sarn’t-Major, but there’s nothing I can do about this.”

  “That’s all right, sir.” Cunningham slammed to attention, disregarding the sword at his throat. “Keep your chin up, Mr. Ogilvie. I’ll see to the men.”

  “The havildar-major also will receive the treatment of his rank,” the young man said in his sing-song, Bombay-Welsh voice. Ogilvie was marched away by the new body of guards, but not before he had heard some choice and very bitter comment from Private Burns.

  *

  It was, of course, though James Ogilvie didn’t fully realize it, an old gambit, as old as the war game itself and played by all contestants. Chivalrously treat the officers and senior N.C.O.’s according to their rank and you automatically separated them from the men. It was, though perhaps no British officer would admit this, a rough-and-ready form of the ‘divide and rule’ principle. The men lost their leadership, the officers lost their support, escape became virtually impossible, at least in the circumstances of a frontier war. No officer was going to break out and leave his men behind and it was highly unlikely that the men would leave their officer either. Quite apart from considerations of honour, everyone knew only too well what would happen to the unlucky ones. Even taking the lowest view of human nature, everyone knew equally well what would happen when the me-firsters reached their own lines, if ever they did. They wouldn’t be the lucky ones any more.

  After Ogilvie had been taken over by the slim young Indian and the new set of guards, he was ushered politely into a long room, beautifully furnished, with a gold-draped divan bed at the far end. There was a thick Persian rug on the stone floor and the ceiling was ornately decorated with many-coloured tiles depicting what appeared to be scenes of debauchery from about the time of Ghenghis Khan. There were three windows opening on to a terrace, but these were heavily barred and outside two armed men marched up and down. And, naturally enough, the door through which Ogilvie had come had been locked and bolted once the Indians and the escort had withdrawn and more regular footfalls spoke of yet another sentry-post.

  On a beautifully inlaid table beside a Western-style armchair was a bottle of Scotch whisky, tumblers, a siphon of soda water, and a carafe in an ice-bucket. There was a solid gold canister containing cigars and cigarettes. As Ogilvie drank the water thirstily, he smiled to himself at the thought that he had far more comfortable quarters than even his father had, out there in the British siege lines. It was an odd situation; and it was also highly dangerous. Ogilvie walked up and down, up and down, trying to work out what could be in Ahmed Khan’s mind. If the pressure was not to be put on his father, who was it to be put on? Ogilvie scarcely presumed to imagine his personal fate would be of very much moment to Her Majesty’s Government in the comfortable seclusion of Whitehall, or indeed to the Government summering in Simla. Lord Elgin would hardly be disturbed to any great extent. And why, in any case, did Ahmed Khan bother with hostages at all if he were about to treat with the Amir? Was it just a form of insurance, in case the Amir wriggled out from under the negotiations? And again, what had Ahmed Khan meant by remarking so particularly on the fact that he was not the only hostage?

  The rebel leader had left him to ponder this very point, but from whichever angle he examined it, he could find no ray of light.

  He sat down at last in the armchair, his head in his hands. Then he looked at the whisky. That whisky could be one of Ahmed Khan’s ways of softening a prisoner up; a man who had taken drink might well speak of things that were better kept inside his own head. But by this time James Ogilvie had learned his capacity for alcohol and he hadn’t been long enough on Indian service to have a dangerous disregard for that capacity. He could trust himself. He was about to pour a couple of fingers of whisky, and light a cigarette, when he heard the bolts going back on the door and half a minute later a lithe, nubile girl in a flimsy veil came sinuously into the room.

  Seven

  “I’ve no doubt ye heard,” came Private Burns’ voice from the darkness of the stinking cellar, “what yon Ogilvie was sayin’ to the Sar-Major earlier on...before he was removed to a life o’ luxury in the harem?”

  Corporal Brown said, “Shut your mouth, Bums.”

  “I’ll do no such thing,” Burns answered back indignantly. “You can try an’ make me if you want! This isn’t the British lines. We’re all equal now...except the bloody officer and Mister bloody Cunningham.” He hawked and spat viciously. “I asked you, did you hear what Ogilvie said? If you didn’t, then I’ll tell you: he said the General wouldn’t be sending
out an expedition to get him out o’ here. Well, now, I reckon he’s right. The General won’t be wantin’ to have it said that he ordered men out to bring in his laddie, will he? Now, from that fact I make a deduction, Corporal, and it’s this: yon Ogilvie is stoppin’ us bein’ rescued—if he wasn’t here at all we’d be in a better situation, d’ye see—so it follows we’d be better off without him. And you can bet your stripes on that!”

  “I told you to shut your mouth,” Brown said. He listened to the dry scurry of rats in a corner of the cellar and felt his flesh creep. “If you don’t, Burns, you’ll be talking yourself into clink the moment we get back, and—”

  “We’ll not get back,” Burns shouted in a high voice, “while Ogilvie’s alive to prevent it, so you’d all do better to listen to what I say!” He failed to hear the movement of Corporal Brown towards him and he went on ranting till he felt the Corporal’s hands slide around his neck. Then he shrieked. Brown’s hands pressed and cut short the shriek. Brown said savagely, “You’ll keep your thoughts to yourself from now on, you bloody little worm, or so help me God...I’ll have you on a drumhead court martial charged wi’ mutiny just as soon as we rejoin the battalion. Which we are going to do! But only if we hold together and not try to get at Ogilvie behind his back.” He eased the pressure on Burns’s throat. “I’m in charge down here now and in charge I intend to stay. If anyone thinks differently about that, just let him say so, and I’ll smash his face to a pulp.”

  There was no answer; Brown was a big man with something of a reputation as a boxer. He flung Burns from him bodily, caring nothing for the man’s comparatively advanced years, and got to his feet, stood for a moment breathing hard through his nose, then, realizing there was nowhere else to go, he sat down on the earth close to Burns; closest to where the most likely trouble lay. Meanwhile there was nothing he could do but sit and think and listen to the busy rats, and one of his thoughts was that thinking was all the others could do as well unless he could keep them occupied. Thinking was dangerous; thoughts could easily run along the lines already so bluntly planted by Private Burns, and most of the men in the cellar were young, inexperienced, frightened, and impressionable. They could prove an all too fruitful nurturing ground for mutinous thoughts. Brown himself had to admit there was a grain, a tiny grain certainly but still a grain, of truth in what Burns had said, and the grain could grow to such an extent that it could fill the horizons of them all. Brown racked his brains, tried to think what the R.S.M. would find for the men to do in the circumstances. He could think of only one thing, the good old stand-by of British troops in difficult times, and he said with a show of heartiness, “Come on, now, lads, let’s have a wee bit of a song to keep us going, eh?” And in a strong and not untuneful bass he began, himself, with an army song of many years before when the ragged Highland regiments had come back to Glasgow after too long on foreign service:

  “March past the Forty-second,

  They were Hielan’ laddies braw,

  March past the Forty-second

  Comin’ doon the Broomielaw…”

  In no time he had them all at it, bellowing out the verses, the final words a roaring crescendo of sound in the constriction of the cellar:

  “March past the Forty-second

  March past the Forty-four,

  March past the bare-arsed buggers

  Comin’ frae th’ Ashantee war...”

  Temporarily at least, the subversion of Private Burns had been overlaid. Up top in the courtyard four Afridi tribesmen, on guard with their long-barrelled rifles, stared and listened and shook their heads in wonder at each other. Truly, the British were quite mad.

  *

  From the high roof where Ogilvie had had his meeting with Ahmed Khan, a heliograph winked in the sunlight, directing its reflections in dots and dashes towards the peak captured by the Royal Strathspeys. A signaller on the peak read and took down the message on a pad, tore the sheet off, and ran to the adjutant. Black scanned it briefly and took it direct to Lord Dornoch. It confirmed that the missing twenty-five men had been taken prisoner. It gave no other information beyond the fact, the potentially dangerous fact, that the identity of Second-Lieutenant Ogilvie was known to the rebels.

  “I don’t like this,” Dornoch said briefly, his face drawn and anxious.

  “Nor I, Colonel, nor I.” Black pursed his lips, and looked away towards the distant fort, whilst at the same time looking obliquely at Dornoch. “It seems a pity Ogilvie should have admitted his identity...the General will not be pleased at that, Colonel.”

  “I know that”

  “I wonder...I wonder how easily they got that in formation out of him, Colonel? The boy would surely have had the common sense to realize what he was admitting, what he was handing to the scum?”

  Dornoch said, “If he had that, he would also know what he was letting himself in for by the admission, wouldn’t he? Do you see any gain to himself in that?”

  “No, no, indeed...but I was wondering, d’you see, Colonel, if there’s to be some...shall I say, some cooperation on the part of young Ogilvie?”

  Dornoch drew in his breath, sharply. “You’re suggesting he might have cracked to the point of turning traitor?”

  Black shrugged. “Oh, I wouldn’t care to make such a concrete suggestion as that, Colonel.”

  “I think you would be well advised not to, indeed!” The Colonel’s stare was hard and his eyes level. Black flushed and looked away. “If you make the slightest suggestion of such a thing again, or make it to anyone other than myself at any time, I shall ask for you to be relieved of your duties and sent back to Division. Is that clear, Black?”

  Black inclined his head. “Very clear, Colonel. It will not be said again.”

  Dornoch turned his back and walked away without another word. He was furiously angry, and had only with the greatest self-control prevented himself from committing the utterly unforgivable military crime of striking his adjutant. He had absolutely no doubts in his mind that young Ogilvie had acted with entire innocence. He was a very sound young officer and entirely loyal—that went without saying, of course—and no coward, even though he was young and inexperienced and, because of this, apt perhaps to commit errors of judgment. Such as this. Dornoch gnawed. at the ends of his moustache. Oh yes, it was undoubtedly an indiscretion—damn foolish! But no more than that. And yet…

  God damn Black!

  Black with his insinuations—insinuations the man was only too clearly glad to be able to indulge in. It had not been lost on Lord Dornoch that the adjutant had had it in for Ogilvie in particular these last few days. Well—he would see, he would see.

  The Colonel halted and turned and looked back towards the fort beneath the sun, across the dusty dry heat of the burning Afghan plain. These were a cruel and ruthless people, currently with much at stake. Ahmed Khan would scarcely be the man to hold back on brutalities and no man could say how another man, or he himself even, was going to behave when under the kind of duress the Afghans were capable of inflicting. The Colonel’s mind went back over the years and he saw again some of the results of persuasion he had seen along the frontier in the old days. Men horribly beaten, maimed, mutilated. Some things they got the women to do...on the plains of Afghanistan a regiment never, never left its wounded behind, whatever the military situation. If they did that, the Pathans sent out their women...and far better not even to think about what the regiment would find when they marched back over the same ground again.

  And again God damn Black, who had started such thoughts going.

  *

  Fifty miles away, beyond the Khyber Pass in Peshawar, Mary Archdale had heard the news that the British columns had taken the peaks, and that the 114th Queen’s Own Royal Strathspeys, along with the rest of her husband’s brigade, had been badly cut up in the taking of one of them. And a little after that, having made a formal enquiry as to her husband’s well-being and having been informed that his name had not so far appeared in any of the casualty repor
ts, she went shopping in the market attended by a native servant and a dismounted trooper of the Bengal Light Horse. Mary Archdale bought her provisions carefully, and always personally because you simply couldn’t trust the native servants not to rook you; and with a due regard to her husband’s army pay, which was his sole means of support. Without private means, life for an army wife could be hard indeed. This morning she was much concerned with the price of such vegetables as were available, and she gave little thought to the goings-on outside Jalalabad until she happened to meet, quite by chance, an acquaintance, another wife who also lived on a husband’s unaided pay.

  “Why, Mrs. Archdale,” the acquaintance said gushingly. “How very nice to see you. I expect you’ve heard the news from Jalalabad?”

  Mary said, “Yes,” and smiled.

  “I do hope Major Archdale is safe?”

  She said, “Oh, yes, he is, thank you, Mrs. Ffoulkes.”

  Mrs. Ffoulkes, who knew the facts of the Archdales’ married life well enough, smiled happily and said, “I’m so relieved, I’ve been thinking about you such a lot. I hear the Mahrattas were simply splendid, but very badly cut about I’m afraid.” She edged away from a bespectacled, clerkly Indian who in his turn was agitatedly trying not to be touched by another Indian, a man of lower caste. “These filthy natives! I can’t wait to see England again, I keep telling my husband he simply must press for a posting back as soon as possible, but you know what the army is.” She broke off. “Mrs. Archdale, I’ve heard a rumour, and it is only a rumour, but my husband says it’s pretty certain to be substantiated, though he won’t say why, that poor Sir Iain’s son is missing.”