A Good Soldier

by Richard Townsend Bickers

  “Kitty... the children... the swine crept in and caught us in our beds.”

  “Oh, my God! Kitty...?”

  “They murdered her, Hugh...” Yeats’ voice rose to a shrill, insane note. “And our little darlings... every one... Christ have mercy on us all...” He began to weep.

  Ramsey, gripped his arm and led him off. “Come, old fellow, you need the surgeon.”

  “Sure, I’m blinded, Hugh, I’m blinded.”

  “No, it’s a bad wound and the skin has fallen over your eye.”

  “My God, man, you haven’t seen what’s under it.”

  With the muzzle of his pistol Yeats lifted the flap of skin and exposed an eye dangling from its empty socket.

  Sher Mahommed Khan quietly said, “Captain Verity Sahib, Huzur.”

  Ramsey looked down the road and saw Verity running towards them with his unmistakable lope, rolling from side to side as he came.

  Ramsey ran to meet him.

  “Ramsey! Thank God you’re alive. Is that Yeats I see?”

  “Yes, sir. But he’s lost an eye and he’s in a state of hysteria. They murdered his wife and all the children.”

  “Oh, good Christ!”

  “Is your wife all right... and Thomas?”

  “Yes, thank God. Eleanor was awake: she couldn’t sleep; her time is very near. I was awake too, in consequence. I heard men trying to break into the bungalow, a commotion in the servants’ quarters and the pankha qulis running away. I guessed what had happened and I ran to bring Thomas to our room, then took up arms. I shot two of the brutes, ran through and lopped the head off another. Come, we must get to the Colonel.”

  “What about Mrs. Verity and Thomas?”

  “I stopped one of the ensigns who was running past the house and ordered him to stay with them and with the women and children from both our neighbours. He had his orderly with him and another orderly whose officer had been killed.”

  They hurried towards Regimental Headquarters, Yeats trailing further and further behind.

  On the way they passed some of the Staff bungalows. One, a trifle isolated from the rest, was ablaze. Ramsey knew it well. Every young bachelor officer in the regiment knew it well and so did those in every other regiment on the station. They stopped and entered the garden. There were bodies on the lawn and one of them was Ashni Daphne’s husband.

  “Where is the memsahib?” Ramsey asked the Staff major’s Punjabi butler, who, with the other servants and their wives, was flinging buckets of water ineffectually on the fire.

  “In there, Sahib, grievously wounded.”

  Ramsey and his orderly ran round the house while Verity hurried on to H.Q There was no hope at all of getting in and while they stood for a frustrated moment swearing at their impotence to help, the roof subsided and the walls caved in.

  Bugle calls were sounding and Ramsey heard the heavy concerted thud of heavily shod feet as formations quick-marched and doubled across the cantonment, to the shouted commands of British officers. He was filled with grief and shame: not all the regiments had mutinied, then. How many others in addition to his own had dishonoured its name?

  At Regimental H.Q. several hundred men stood on parade: about two-thirds of their strength. Ramsey saw that at least a dozen British officers were missing. Lieutenant Colonel Howell waddled out and mounted his charger. He addressed his officers and men.

  “Every other regiment but the disgraced Forty-Seventh paid no heed to the evil words of those who spread lies. Every other regiment is at this moment seeking out our unfaithful comrades. I prefer that we cleanse our own midden. These men have to face fair trial and whatever punishment the court metes out. We therefore want prisoners. But any man who resists is to be killed out of hand. Is this well understood?”

  There was a few seconds’ pause before the concerted voices answered loudly and he led them off to hunt down the men whose credulity had ended in ignominy for the whole regiment.

  On every side fires raged and in their glare Ramsey saw the first squad of sullen, defiant prisoners rounded up by Verity’s company. He was proud to see that of their company no sepoy officer and only one man in eight had mutinied; prouder yet that in his own platoon the officers and every man but two had remained loyal; and among the mutineers there were neither Sikhs nor Muslims.

  He caught Sher Mahommed Khan’s eye and although there was no exchange of words a message passed.

  *

  It took a week to convene a court martial and only one day to pronounce sentence.

  For Ramsey the seven dragging days of waiting for the further horrors the course of justice would inflict were a time for profound reflection. There was no refuge for his bruised feelings, either in work, in strenuous exercise or in diverting his mind to other matters. On the night following the mutinies, after the burial service for its Christian victims, he made himself majestically drunk. He consumed brandy and claret in quantities which, he declared, were “enough to sh-shink one of those damned paddle shteamers.” Yet, apart from a certain slurring of sibilants, he remained astonishingly horizontal and steady: amazing — and disappointing, in a way — to himself. He had not succeeded in numbing his sensibilities; yet he was proud to demonstrate so convincingly that he possessed in abundance that quality of an officer and a gentleman which his father insisted was superior even to efficiency: the ability to hold his liquor.

  Eleanor Verity did not attend the mass funeral. The shock of the sepoys’ treachery had nearly killed her. It had brought on her labour while her husband was out of the bungalow and when he returned he found that the child — a boy — had been stillborn. Captain Verity took Thomas to the church and Ramsey, seeing the pale, troubled child, felt a stab of anger. But if he would have spared a five-year-old son of his such an ordeal, he was a father only in theory and perhaps the austere Verity knew what he was about. The gentle Eleanor, who had suffered so much at the birth of her surviving child and lost her second baby, might be accused of being too indulgent to him, Ramsey supposed. Verity was not a harsh man and probably he forced himself to treat his son more strictly than his instinct decreed, from some notion that he needed to compensate for maternal leniency and to demonstrate his own firmness. But demonstrate to whom? Ramsey wondered. To the boy, to the world at large — which meant the cantonment, as if that mattered! — or himself? What self-doubts did the narrow-skulled Verity harbour? It was a period of reflection for Ramsey, with Alec Lumsden, who came closest to being an intimate friend, gone, his own life spared only through the devotion of Sher Mahommed Khan, and his confidence in the regiment shaken to its roots.

  On the next evening, after he had rid himself of the hammering hangover which had seemed about to split his head open until tiffin-time, he called at the Veritys’ bungalow with a box of fondants for Eleanor and candied peel for Thomas. Captain Verity was in the Company Office, working on court martial documents. The Khitmadgar took delivery of the memsahib’s present and the ayah brought the little boy to receive his.

  “Mama says I’ll have to pos... pos... not have my birthday party yet.”

  “Postpone.”

  “Yes, pos’pone. But she says I can have my presents. The sais can take me out on my pony, because Papa is too busy just now to take me on a leading rein, so I’ll just have to go for walks with the sais.”

  “Would you like me to take you, Thomas?”

  “Oh yes, please, sir.”

  “I’ll ask your father.”

  Of the two, the child would bestow the greater favour, Ramsey was thinking as he walked away. Any new interest, anything to steer his mind away from so much introspection and disquiet, was a boon. He went to the hospital to visit the wounded. Yeats was bitter, morose and full of hatred. Almost the only words anyone could get out of him were, “Why did I have to be spared? What’s the use of living now?” Among all the officers, British and Indian, there was more anger against the mutineers than consolation in the loyal. Among the troops there was pride that they had stood fast; but mor
e understanding than shame of their comrades. The wounded mutineers were in a barrack on their own and under guard. No sound of talk reached Ramsey when he passed it.

  With each sunrise and morning gunfire he wished he could either set time back to before those hideous scenes and channel its flow so that they would never be enacted, or else leap forward to the trial and its inexorable consequences; get it over: for, in its fashion, the worst was yet to come because it would all be done in cold blood. What the immediate future held would be as terrible to witness as the raw memories it would evoke. Every morning now he felt like retching instead of swallowing his tea. At intervals through the day he would be conscious of the blood drumming at his temples and his mind suddenly sucked empty and left containing nothing but a cavernous echo, robbed of words. There were moments when the men, awaiting his command, stared at him as though he had been struck mute. The dumbness passed in a few second and he barked his orders at them to compensate for the truth that he had indeed been temporarily dumbstruck by the depth of his misery.

  His early evening rides with Thomas became the pleasantest part of his day. But the distraction was of short duration and the days soon ran their course.

  *

  In the 47th Native Infantry the accused Indian officers and men comprised some who had merely refused to embark for fear that they would be forced to cross the Black Water, and others who had attacked or murdered their British officers and those native officers who had opposed them. The former had doubled off the parade ground when the order to march to the loading ghat had been given, to dissociate themselves from the violence they knew was about to erupt. Breaking the ranks of every company, they were not in a solid body and therefore it was not possible for their commandant to order the artillery to open fire on them. They had, of their own will, reformed ranks on the far side of the square and it was then that the guns discharged round shot at them; before they laid down their arms and were marched off under escort. Some had not even succeeded in leaving the parade because they were arrested by those who had refused to join them.

  All those few who had committed murder had been shot, bayoneted or cut down by the sword, on the spot. Many of those who attacked their superiors had also been killed in the same way and by artillery fire. Only 14 of these remained alive to face trial.

  Those of the 47th found guilty of refusing to obey orders were sent to penal servitude for 20 years. The 14 convicted of attempted murder were condemned to death by hanging.

  Ramsey had sat in the body of the court throughout the proceedings, not from morbid fascination but from professional interest. As a witness at the trial of his own regiment’s mutineers he could not be present at the whole of the hearing. The court martial sat in one of the huge barracks, where pankhas had been rigged for the occasion. Matting screens hung outside the windows, onto which water was constantly sprinkled to cool the air. Despite the heat given off by the packed assembly, he felt a chill that was caused by more than the fans and the damp screens. The screens were known as tattis and made from a pleasant smelling grass called khas-khas. Ramsey had always found khas-khas tattis one of the few comforts in the Hot Weather, but today they reminded him of the stale odour of sickly flowers in a cemetery. The chill that pervaded him was reminiscent of the damp cold of the Fens early on a winter morning, but he knew the cause was within his mind and nerves and not outside his body: it could not be, in this temperature.

  From time to time he experienced a vertiginous sensation as though his senses had suddenly been tilted, and everything that he was seeing and hearing became blurred. If he shut his eyes it felt as though they were full of burning grit. He felt far removed from anyone or any circumstance that could give him comfort or support; at the most distant possible remove from everything he had learned to regard as reality. But this procession of horrors was reality and the life he had known for the past six years was only a surface through which such awful events could burst at any moment in this land where he and his compatriots were present on sufferance; despite more than two centuries of victory in war, commercial domination and dispensation of justice.

  The one extenuating plea came as a sour astonishment. The senior subadar among the accused produced religious tracts written in Urdu, Hindi and Punjabi, which had been distributed to sepoys of all creeds, urging them to embrace Christianity. This was the first that Ramsey or any of the other British officers had heard of such an intrusion on the sepoys’ privacy and rights. The pamphlets had appeared, they learned, on the day before the troops, already inflamed by the salt rumours, had “had no choice but to rebel in defence of their cherished Faiths”.

  The sentences of the court martial were that all those in the 69th, Howell’s regiment, who had participated in attacks on their superior officers or the latter’s’ families, whether or not they had actually committed murder with their own hands, were to suffer execution “by being blown from a gun”. The number condemned to this supremely abhorrent fate was 38. The rest of the guilty ones had died resisting arrest or contrived to escape from Barrackpore before they could be caught.

  To Muslims and Hindus alike this was the worst of all possible ways to quit this life. To the former, unless a man’s body were buried intact — deprived permissibly only of limbs lost in battle or accident — he could not enter Paradise. To the latter, with the same proviso, if it could not be laid on a funeral pyre its temporary occupant could not enjoy reincarnation.

  The date for all 52 executions was set for the day after the morrow.

  *

  Barrackpore was the Headquarters of the Bengal Presidency Division. An hour after dawn 8000 officers and men were on parade. A British regiment had marched from Calcutta on the day of the courts martial. This formed one side of the hollow square, with two batteries of artillery, loaded with round shot, in front of it. The 12 guns of two more batteries were ranged in the centre of the square, charged only with powder. The two mutinous regiments, both below strength, faced the saluting base. The remainder were massed opposite the gunners, infantry in front, cavalry behind them. Seven gallows had been erected in the middle, in front of the guns from which the men of Colonel Howell’s 69th were to be blown to pieces.

  The Adjutants of the 47th and 69th read out the court martial sentences. The words, stilted and severe, reduced what had been acts of desperation by zealots who believed they were defending the dogmas of their religions and their own salvation, to sordid crimes. Ramsey, hearing them delivered in coldly controlled British-accented voices which could not conceal an implacable hatred, sensed an indefinable alien presence which would haunt the parade ground every time he set foot on it. He had a bewildering urge to turn about and run from there, from some evil manifestation he could not ascribe entirely to the barbaric retribution he was about to witness. He raised his head and glanced, without turning it, to left and right. An hour from now, when all that had to be done had been accomplished, the monkeys would still be chattering and scrambling among the branches, the spiders would still be spinning their webs, the sun would still be shining from a cloudless sky, the trees and jungle undergrowth would have sprouted an infinitesimal mite further in the tropical heat and humidity. He felt that he had to cling to this realisation in order to endure the next hour. Life would go on, in spite of this ritual legal murder.

  Behind each prisoner stood a native officer, or N.C.O., with two sepoys. The gallows had been erected on two platforms. From one beam four nooses hung, from the other, three. Below them stood the two Chandala hangmen and their assistants, members of the lowest caste of offspring from the forbidden marriage of a woman with a man of caste lower than hers: their only occupation to carry corpses, act as executioners and perform other abject tasks in public service.

  The officers and N.C.O’s slashed away the buttons of the men who were going to the gallows, then ripped open the backs of their tunics and tore them off. With fettered ankles, arms bound behind their backs, the first seven men shuffled forward and with difficulty mounted the st
eps, side-drums rolling a tattoo all the while. The hangmen put the nooses in place and drew them tight, then descended to join their assistants. Each pair seized a rope and together gave it a mighty tug. The trestles supporting the front edge of each platform fell, the platforms, hinged at the back, crashed down. The seven criminals dropped, the ropes recoiled slightly, the bodies hung gyrating, swinging, twitching. Presently they were still, the four Chandale cut down the ropes and carried the corpses to a cart. They strung up fresh nooses, raised the platforms and stood ready to receive the second batch while the drums throbbed their eerie beat again.

  When the cart piled with the 14 dead men and drawn by a seedy-looking bullock rattled away, the artillerymen were given the order to prepare.

  Centrally behind each battery stood a linstock, a slow-burning match on the end of a pole. The Number Five of each gun carried a portfire, a cylindrical holder in which was an incendiary substance. The No 5’s ignited their portfires at the linstocks and took position to the left of the breech of each gun.

  The buttons and tunics were ripped off the 38 men of the 69th. The first twelve were marched to the guns to the accompaniment of the sombre drumbeat. They were turned about and backed against the muzzles of the nine-pounders, where ropes were bound to their wrists and ankles and the other ends lashed to the gun-wheels.

  On the command “Fire!” the gunners touched their portfires to the touch holes, the powder detonated and 12 bodies were blown asunder by the force of the blast. In a welter of blood which sprayed the gunners and the ground, heads and limbs flew high and wide, spinning, the heads bouncing and rolling when they fell; entrails and bones and torsos disintegrated into small fragments.

  The ritual was repeated twice more and then once again to despatch the last two remaining victims who had had to watch the dreadful deaths of their fellows.

  Ramsey emerged from the ordeal half-stunned, his senses reeling with revulsion; sickened by the stench of gunpowder and freshly spilled blood; his ears partly deafened and ringing with the tap of the drumsticks and the thunder of the guns. He looked quickly about him and saw the same reaction reflected on the faces of his brother officers: although on those of some, such as Verity and Yeats, there was an understandable grim satisfaction. All he wanted now was to march off and find some solace with the rest of them in the brandy bottle before he felt able to carry on with the duties of the day. But there was to be no relief yet.