'Two battles, two victories,' Elliot said. 'Maybe the tide has turned.'
'Maybe.' Jack said. He looked up as one of the Volunteer cavalrymen trotted up to Havelock and spoke earnestly.
'Something's up,' Elliot said.
'Go and find out what's happening, Arthur,' Jack ordered. 'You're the best man for gathering information.'
Elliot was back within ten minutes. 'I asked the Volunteer,' he said. 'He's an ensign of the something-or-other Native foot, a man without a regiment since they mutinied.'
'Poor bugger,' Jack felt for a cheroot. 'I must get some smokes,' he said. 'What did your ensign say?'
'He said he was scouting ahead and the Pandies have reformed up the road at a place called Pandu Nadi. He said there's a stone bridge over a stream and it will be the very devil to take.'
Jack nodded. 'I doubt the general will have us fight two battles in the one day.'
'Maybe Holy Havelock will have us all kneel down and pray instead,' Private Armstrong said. Nobody laughed.
'The Mutineers are going to blow up the bridge!' The words spread through the camp, with rumour and speculation adding details and lies.
'They're looking for you, Thorpey,' Coleman said seriously. 'The pandies heard about how Queen Victoria is cross with you and how handy you were with your pig-sticker.'
'Have they heard that, Coley?' Thorpe looked up in alarm. 'How do they know my name?'
'All the women know your name,' Parker joined in. 'When we were in Gondabad all the bints spoke about you and your medal and how big you were.'
'They want a British soldier as a sacrifice,' Coleman continued. 'They're going to smear you in gun-oil and spread you across the bridge to show how much they hate us.'
'Never!' Thorpe scoffed doubtfully. 'They never said they want me at all.'
'True Briton they did,' Coleman nodded to Parker. 'Ask Parky there. Isn't that right, Parky?'
'As true as I'm from Manchester,' Parker said.
'God,' Thorpe unsheathed his bayonet. 'I'd better get this sharpened then. They're not smearing me in gun oil and sacrificing me, I can tell you.'
Coleman shook his head. 'I'm only saying what I heard.'
'If they blow up the bridge,' Elliot said, 'that could delay us for days. After all this rain the river's in spate, and there's no ford nearby. We'll have to find boats.'
'Up!' Havelock shouted back down the column. 'Up and march!'
'We'll soon find out what's happening,' Jack said as they continued the advance with the countryside cowering under the monsoon rains and their boots splashing through surface water on the road.
'How far is this Pandu Nadi?' Jack asked.
'About five miles,' Elliot said.
'Nana Sahib is doing all he can to prevent us relieving Cawnpore,' Jack said.
'He'll fail.' Elliot said. 'Have you heard the men? They'll march through Hades to avenge the women and children. The Mutineers don't know what devil is within British soldiers when roused.' He grunted, 'look at them.'
Riley was staring ahead, his eyes tormented as he thought of Charlotte. At his side strode Logan, as ugly as any mediaeval church gargoyle and a hundred times more dangerous. Thorpe was chewing on something with Coleman telling obscene jokes, Parker was hiding an animal he had rescued, and Williams was striding along, humming some Methodist hymn.
They marched on, with some men falling through heat exhaustion to lie on the road until the baggage waggons, trundling far in the rear, collected them. Jack glanced over his shoulder, hoping Jane and Mary were safe.
'They're waiting for us at the bridge.' The news passed along the column as men adjusted the slings of their rifles, searched for pipe tobacco and hitched up their trousers. 'Bloody pandies don't know when they're beaten.'
Despite their recent defeats, the Mutineers were confident of victory. They still far outnumbered the British and halted at the far side of a river, a natural defensive position that they soon augmented.
'They'll be hard to shift from there,' Prentice said.
'Maybe they'll run away when they see us,' Kent hoped.
A sender stone bridge leapt across a deep ravine, at the bottom of which a swollen river churned angrily over rounded boulders. On the opposite side, the Mutineers had mounted two heavy guns behind earthworks filled with men.
'It's like a miniature Alma,' Jack said. 'A river to cross under fire from artillery.'
'Except there are a lot less of us,' Elliot said, 'and these are not civilised European troops we are fighting. The Russians took prisoners; these brutes butcher anything white.'
'Helloa,' Prentice said. 'They've woken up!'
As soon as the British column appeared, the Mutineers' cannon opened fire. The long dirty-white jets of smoke revealed their position as the ugly flat boom echoed across the plain.
'They have a twenty-four pounder, sure as death,' Prentice said. 'Heavy metal. And the other,' he ducked involuntarily as a second gun roared. 'That is a carronade I think, a short-range smasher. They'll be the very devil to advance against.'
Havelock surveyed the bridge and the defences through a long telescope before giving sharp orders.
'Maude: we need your guns again. And I want men down there' he pointed to the lateral ravines, 'see if the rebels like more of our Enfields.'
'My men are good shots, sir,' Jack volunteered, and on Havelock's nod, he led twenty of the 113th into the ravine. 'I'll have your rifle, Riordan.'
'But sir, I'll need it.'
Jack ignored Riordan's protests. 'Elliot; you and Prentice look after the others.'
'Yes, sir.' Elliot gave the only possible reply.
The sides of the ravine were steep and defended by thorn bushes and rocks, but they also were screened from the Mutineer's fire. With O'Neill, Thorpe, Parker and Coleman at his back, Jack knew he was in good hands. He would have brought Logan and Riley, but he wished to leave some experienced men with Elliot in case the Mutineers decided to attack the British positions.
'We've already beat them today,' Coleman said, 'can we not have one battle a day in future?'
'I'll be sure and tell Tantia Topi,' Parker said. 'He'll listen to me.'
'Will he Parky?' Thorpe asked.
'Oh we're old friends,' Parker said. 'We used to go drinking along Scotty Road.'
'You never did!' Thorpe said.
'Every Friday,' Parker said and ducked as a Mutineer's bullet whizzed past.
'Watch your flanks!' Jack warned. 'The pandies might have skirmishers out.'
Fortunately, the angle of the ravine allowed the British to outflank some of the Mutineers' positions. Ignoring the roar of the torrent below, Jack nestled behind a rock and aimed his borrowed rifle, blinking away the sweat and peering through the heat-haze. 'Fire when you're ready' he said.
The sharp bark of the Enfields followed on his last word and Coleman's evil chuckle. 'There's one pandy who won't rape a white woman again.'
Although the Mutineers returned fire, they were outranged by the Enfield rifles and their casualties soon mounted.
The booms of the Mutineers' artillery continued until Maude man-handled his guns forward and brought them into action. After only a single British volley, the opposing artillery ceased. Maude subjected their positions to a heavy bombardment.
'Help the guns, boys,' Jack ordered. 'Target the Mutineer officers.'
'The Fusiliers are attacking, sir,' O'Neill reported as the Madras Fusiliers and the 78th Highlanders swarmed toward the bridge, losing men to enemy fire. As they neared the far side, there was a massive explosion and a huge plume of smoke. Pieces of masonry rose high in the air and began to descend through the smoke, some landing in the ravine among the men of the 113th.
'Oh Jesus, they've blown the bridge,' O'Neill stared at the mess.
'Watch your heads, men!' Jack watched with a heavy heart. If the Mutineers had destroyed the bridge, they could delay the British advance for days, giving the enemy time to gather more men and leaving Havelock's tiny arm
y very vulnerable.
The smoke flattened and eventually cleared. Jack saw that although there were ragged holes in the parapet and some British casualties, the bridge itself remained intact. The Mutineers' explosives had not succeeded.
The Fusiliers and Highlanders were cheering as they charged across the remains, faces contorted with fury. They reached the Mutineers' guns in moments and began work with the bayonet. After a few seconds of frantic slashing and stabbing the enemy was running again.
'That was a smart piece of work,' Jack said. He watched Maude limber up and haul his artillery across the bridge, unlimber in minutes and fire after the Mutineers. 'General Havelock knows how to defeat the enemy. What a pity we did not have him in the Crimea.'
'Thank the Lord we have him here,' Prentice said.
'I'm sure Holy Havelock would agree,' Elliot uncorked his hip flask and took a deep draught. 'We should thank the Lord.'
Chapter Ten
It took all day for the baggage train to cross the damaged bridge with Mary and Jane cheerfully waving as they passed the 113th.
'Wave back, then, Jack,' Elliot urged. 'She's your girl after all.'
'She's not my girl,' Jack said and ignored Elliot's amused grin.
'She's a better girl than Helen Maxwell ever was.' Elliot said softly.
Once they reached the far side, Havelock called for an overnight halt. After two battles in one day, the men lay in exhaustion.
'We're getting there, Riles,' Logan looked without appetite at the hunk of raw beef that was their food for the day. 'Every day brings us closer to your wife.'
Riley leant against the trunk of a peepul tree, staring northward. 'She'd better be alive,' he said. 'These pandy bastards had better not have hurt her.'
'You'd better eat,' Logan said.
'I'm not bloody hungry.' Riley bit into his army-issue biscuit and took a sip of beer to wash away the taste.
'You'll need your strength.' Without another word, Logan began to gather wood for a fire. With the ground sodden it was not an easy task yet for a veteran of the Sebastopol siege it was not impossible. Jack watched for a few moments and then extracted a few spare tent poles from a commissariat waggon.
'Here, Logan. Firewood.'
'Thank you, sir.' Logan's scowl may have been one of gratitude; it was hard to tell.
'How's he bearing up?'
'Riley?' Logan was immediately defensive. 'He'll be all right, sir. He's worried about his missus.'
'I know.' Jack felt for his non-existent cheroots. 'You take care of him, Logan and hopefully we'll be in Cawnpore soon.'
'Yes, sir.'
The heat and humidity of the night combined to make sleep impossible. Jack lay fully dressed on his cot with his arms folded behind his head and his mind full of possibilities and worries. Twice he unfolded Helen's letter and read the contents, and twice he refolded it and tucked it away.
He thought of Riley, suffering at the thought of Charlotte either dead or in the hands of the Mutineers. He thought of the rapid successes over the enemy of the last few days and compared them to the long-drawn-out agony of the Crimea. He thought of the massacre at Gondabad and the dead men hanging beside the Great Trunk Road out of Allahabad. He thought about Sarvur Khan.
This confused campaign was his third within five years and the worst. In Burma and the Crimea he had been facing a known enemy of his country; this was a civil war, fighting people who had been friends and colleagues only weeks before. It felt wrong, yet he knew his men hated these Mutineers even more than they had hated the Russians.
And then there was Mary and Jane. Jack knew he would probably never see either of them after this campaign, yet both remained in his head for completely entirely reasons. Jane had been open about her friendship with his father, and for that reason alone he wanted to ask her a thousand questions, yet did not know how. With Mary … Jack smiled. He felt extremely comfortable with Mary, yet there was also an edge of excitement he enjoyed. He had never been sure how Helen would react to anything he said or did; she had been impulsive, a devil-may-care youth who sought adventure. Mary was more considered; she was far more mature. Jack knew that even thinking about her brought a smile to his face. Elliot had been wrong though: she was not his sweetheart and never would be. He fell asleep with that certainty.
'We have twenty-three miles to march before we reach Cawnpore,' Havelock addressed his assembled officers. 'Nana Sahib is leading seven thousand men to try and stop us.'
He waited for comments. There were none.
'I have also heard there are two hundred women and children still held in Cawnpore.'
Jack looked up, thinking of Riley. 'That's good news, sir.'
'I agree, Windrush. The Lord has given us hope and with God's help we shall save them, or every man of us will die in the attempt.'
There was no cheering from the officers; Havelock was not a man to inspire cheers. Instead, there was a low fighting growl and the nodding of heads. Jack looked around the tiny band of warriors who were intent on defeating a much larger army, storming a city with a garrison of unknown numbers and freeing the captives inside. They did not look like heroes; only like ordinary British soldiers on campaign, yet they had already defeated larger armies of trained enemy soldiers and thrown them out of defensive positions.
'We are short of rum for the men,' Havelock continued, 'and more importantly, we are short of Enfield ammunition. I have requested both, plus another two hundred European troops from Colonel –now Brigadier General - Neill.' He looked directly at Jack with his sharp gaze. 'We will need more men, gentlemen; for once we have relieved Cawnpore, I intend to relieve Lucknow.'
Jack knew the sepoys had mutinied in that graceful city of palaces Sir Henry Lawrence commanded a garrison of British men, women and children in the Residency building. Lawrence was repelling massed rebel attacks and hoped for relief by somebody.
'Fight, march, fight,' Elliot had managed to requisition one of the scarce bottles of rum for himself. 'That's all we do.'
'It's what we're paid for,' Jack said. 'It's part of the soldier's bargain.'
The day brought a sixteen-mile march to Maharajpur with an unrelenting sun drawing sweat from the men until they were dehydrated and staggered with heatstroke and exhaustion. Somewhere in front was Nana Sahib's army, and beyond that was Cawnpore itself, and the suffering women and children.
'Captain Barrow,' Havelock ordered. 'Ride ahead and see what's happening.'
Sweltering in the heat, Barrow of the Madras Fusiliers touched a hand to his hat and spurred on, northward. Within half an hour he reported to Havelock with two loyal sepoys of the Bengal Army. Their nervous reserve did nothing to disguise their courage.
'Did you hear the shave?' Elliot asked.
'Tell me,' Jack said.
'Nana Sahib is in position ahead, waiting for us.'
'Does that man never give up? Thank goodness Havelock has his measure.' Jack's fingers fluttered toward his empty top pocket. God, he missed his cheroots. 'Where is he?'
'The road splits ahead,' Elliot said. 'The Grand Trunk goes straight on, and a smaller road leads to Cawnpore. Nana Sahib is about half a mile along the branch road with five thousand men and eight pieces of artillery.'
'Five thousand men!' Jack sighed. 'About four times our number. How strong is his position?'
'I don't know, yet,' Elliot said. 'Give me time, but these Indian lads know all about terrain. He'll have found a good spot to defend, depend on it.'
'We'll see.' Jack said. 'Make sure the men have ammunition, and they have all eaten. I don't like them fighting on an empty stomach.'
Nana Sahib had chosen his position with care with an area of marshy ground, watered by monsoon rains, acting as a defensive barrier for his centre.
'The marsh will slow down any advance,' Jack said swept the area with his borrowed telescope. 'Nobody could charge across that, and if they tried, the Mutineers have artillery.' He pointed to a baked-mud earthwork where a twenty-four -pound
er howitzer and a long nine-pounder poked their long snouts forward. 'Death in a brass casing. We can't try a frontal attack, then.'
He focussed on Nana Sahib's left, where a walled village crowned a wooded hillock a mile from the mighty Ganges River. The gaping muzzles of three twenty-four pounder cannon grinned evilly forward.
'We'll be outranged and outgunned as well as outnumbered by trained men,' Jack said. 'Perhaps Nana's right flank is weaker.'
The telescope revealed a mango grove, dripping with water, with another walled village inside, from where two more cannons angled across the front of the lines. The Mutineers' position was about a quarter of a mile in length, a great crescent of armed men, waiting.
'He's aimed his guns toward the road junction,' Jack said. 'If we try to advance that way he'll be able to dice us with concentrated fire. He's a sound soldier, this Nana Sahib.'
Well aware of the strength of the Mutineers' position and the numerical weakness of his force, Havelock did not waste lives with a frontal attack.
'Some of you men,' he addressed his officers, 'may be students of military history. Do you remember Frederick the Great at Leuthen?'
'He made a flanking attack.' Elliot said at once.
'Which is exactly what we will do,' Havelock said. 'We've beaten the Mutineers three times so far on this march. With God's grace we will inflict another, and then it's onto Cawnpore and the rescue of our women.'
The men ate first, sitting by the side of the road, knowing they were going into the largest battle of the campaign so far, knowing Nana Sahib had mustered his entire army to stop them but determined to win.
'One more battle,' Riley said. 'One more and I'll see Charlotte again.'
'That's the way, Riley,' Logan sat at his side, sharpening his already viciously sharp bayonet. 'We'll give these pandies a towelling and it's full speed to Cawnpore and rescue your wife, eh?'
Windrush: Cry Havelock (Jack Windrush Book 4) Page 14