‘Why’s it always us, sir? Why hasn’t Number bloody One Company done owt?’ asked Ormond.
Morgan was wondering the same. The plan was for the two 95th companies to fire and manoeuvre and pin the enemy’s reserve down. When Morgan had led his group forward, Carmichael and Number One Company should have done their damnedest to menace the enemy from the east end of the town, but there had been only the odd shot, not even a volley.
‘You know why as well as I do, Sar’nt Ormond.’
‘Sir, it’s that useless quim—’ But the NCO bit off the disloyal remark.
Useless quim’s about right, thought Morgan. I can see his blokes dithering about even now. No doubt he’s told them to ‘conserve ammunition’, the swerver.
‘What are we going to do, sir? We can’t fanny about out here.’ Ormond was right, they couldn’t stay out in the middle of nowhere whilst the battle ranged about them. ‘Best get back to the tree line, don’t you think, sir?’
Morgan would have liked nothing better. If he took them back to the relative safety of the trees and broken ground, they could rejoin the rest of the Grenadiers and sit there sniping safely until Colonel Hume called them forward. In other words, do just what that useless quim Carmichael was doing.
‘No, Sar’nt Ormond.’ Morgan pulled the cap from his head and mopped at the sweat on his forehead. ‘We’ve got to get into the bloody town.’
‘But, sir…’ Ormond began to protest.
There was nothing wrong with Ormond. Indeed, thought Morgan, he’d be lost without him, just like he would have been lost had the broad Sheffield man not always been on his shoulder in the Crimea. But that was the problem: Ormond had been in too many scrapes like this before and Morgan had no desire to leave Mrs Ormond and both nippers to the mercy of a sergeant’s pension – especially when there was another company that had, so far, hardly dirtied its barrels.
‘Send someone back to Mr Fawcett and the Colour-Sar’nt.’ Morgan was yelling now to make himself heard above the crash of the guns. ‘Get them to bring the rest of the company forward.’
‘Very good, sir,’ The professional NCO had taken over now. Ormond had had his say, but Captain Morgan had spoken – no matter how bloody dangerous the orders were. ‘James, on yer hind legs an’ get back to the company. Tell the officer to bring the whole lot up to us position ’ere. Got it?’
‘What, back there, through all this shit, Sar’nt?’ James, a solid twenty year old front Northampton, with a reputation as a runner, was as cowed by the flying lead and iron as anyone else. ‘I’ve got a sore leg, me.’ James had scarcely mentioned his encounter with a runaway howitzer round six weeks ago, but now was the time to cash in his credits.
‘You’ll have a sore fuckin’ conk in a moment, son,’ Ormond growled above the noise. ‘Do as you’re bloody told.’
James saw that it was pointless to argue, raised himself on his forearms, took another look at the sergeant in case he’d seen reason – which he hadn’t – and launched himself in a jerking, darting run, rifle trailing in his right hand.
‘Jesus, sir, poor old James: every bugger’s havin’ a go at ’im.’ Ormond voiced the lethally obvious, for as James had risen from a piece of ground where the Pandies had last been seen to swallow Morgan’s party whole, all of the attacking force had noticed him. There were rifle balls from Number One Company, showers of arrows came from Kemp’s irregulars, a shell from their own gunners cracked blackly over his bobbing head and even the mutineers joined in with a musket shot or two from the walls.
‘Can’t they see he’s one of us?’ asked Ormond rhetorically as missiles continued to fly.
But somehow, James got through. He dodged through bullets and darts, every ounce of his sprinting form alive with relief as he reached the clutch of riflemen crouching in the wood line – a wood line that had suddenly seemed a mile away.
It took an age – waiting for anything whilst under fire always did, thought Morgan – then it was all stamping, pounding boots, beefy, sweaty lads and bouncing equipment as McGucken drove the rest of the company forward with his voice, and Fawcett waved them on with his sword.
The guns ceased to fire as they recognised a host of red coats in their sights, but before they could throw themselves down beside him, Morgan was up and leaping along with the wedge of panting men, shouting, ‘Follow me. Go for the gate yonder,’ pointing to the low sallyport with the tip of his sword. ‘Come on, Grenadiers,’ every trace of doubt and fear gone as he was caught by the delicious, thrilling spur of leadership.
That same spur saw him right at the head of his men, halloing and cawing like the ‘eejit boy’ that he knew his father would have called him if he’d been there. All caution melted as he flung his shoulder against the flimsy door of the port, staggered as it flew open and exposed a dirty, puddle-filled lane flanked by houses. But there, not ten paces away, thirty or forty mutineers, armed with every sort of sword, pike and musket, were listening intently to someone in their midst. The men closest to the British glanced over their shoulders at the noise of the gate, looked back to the speaker, then whirled round, mouths open, moustaches hanging low as they tried to take in the sight in front of their eyes.
‘Them Pandies don’t need to see dinner-time, sir.’ McGucken said it almost matter-of-factly, but it broke the spell that had seized the handful of 95th who’d come flailing through the door before skidding to a halt, whilst the rest of the company piled up behind them like a demented rugby scrum.
Pushed almost bodily forward by the bawling troops behind him, Morgan couldn’t hesitate even if he’d wanted to. Some outer force seized him; he found himself pulling his revolver from its holster as he stormed along the alley with a clutch of demons either side of him, all of them shouting as hard as he was. The ten paces took an hour as rifles banged and his own pistol jerked in his fist, the nearest Pandies being mowed down by the lead balls, flung against their comrades by the sheer force of the rounds.
‘Get tore in, lads,’ McGucken bellowed. ‘Remember Cawnpore!’ And they were amongst them.
A spear was thrown at Morgan when he was close enough to touch its owner, but somehow it sailed harmlessly over his shoulder, as the Indian’s face changed from hate to grim fear when he realised that he was now defenceless.
‘Get as close to them as you can before you fire that goddamn pistol.’ Morgan remembered Colonel Kemp’s advice to him when he’d been given the Tranter just before he left Cork for the Crimea almost four years ago. ‘Best to touch him with the barrel first, if you can.’ Now, though, he didn’t even know how many rounds he had left in the pistol’s chambers – he hadn’t been counting in the mad dash up the alley.
But what brutish satisfaction it gave him as he poked the scrawny little Pandy in the cheek with the barrel of the pistol. He could even smell the man’s rank sweat as he pulled the trigger and watched a spray of blood fly out of the man’s head, just behind his left ear. All around him the troops were hewing their enemies with just the same savage delight – something that Morgan had never seen in these boys before. Rifles banged, smoke billowed, bayonets flashed and dug whilst butts were swung into yielding flesh with an urgency born of hate. Then it finished as soon as it had started. Those Indians who could, broke and skittered off round a bend in the alley, leaving a dozen of their comrades moaning and twisting on the ground, the panting British standing over them, surveying their brutal handiwork.
‘Wait you, sir.’ McGucken caught at Morgan’s elbow, just as he was about to set off after the fugitives. ‘Let’s get the rest of the company formed up first.’ The colour-sergeant was right, of course, for Morgan only now realised how few men were with him. Most of the Grenadiers weren’t even through the sallyport yet.
But then McGucken said something that Morgan had never expected: ‘Right, lads, finish ’em,’ and that set the bayonets jabbing methodically into the Pandy wounded, their cries of pain ceasing within seconds of the stark order.
Jesus, thought Morgan, wha
t are we becoming? I’ve seen McGucken with the enemy’s wounded before and he’s never done that. Why, at Sevastopol he was positively Christian with Russ, treated them better than our own boys. Have we learnt to hate just from what the newspapers have told us? What were the men shouting when we went for Pandy – ‘Remember Cawnpore’? But there wasn’t a man here who was at Cawnpore – they’ve just read about it. But if I’m so bloody appalled by the conduct of my own lads, why didn’t I put a stop to it?
Morgan was shaken from his reverie by McGucken.
‘Right, sir,’ the colour-sergeant was using a puggaree for which the owner had no further use to wipe the gore off his blade. ‘Reckon we can get after ’em now, if you’d care to lead off.’
Most of the company had now squeezed into the narrow alley, and the guns were firing low over their heads and the roofs of the buildings at targets at the far end of the town. But away to Morgan’s left, invisible behind the intervening walls of the houses, there rose the din of battle – the banging of firearms, the clash of steel and the great, wild shrieks of men putting others to death, a noise that he’d come to know and fear.
‘Yes, Colour-Sar’nt, sounds like the Tenth are hard at it over yonder.’
‘It does, sir, an’ judging by the numbers of Pandies we saw earlier, they could be hard-pushed.’ McGucken struggled to make himself heard above a salvo of nine-pound rounds that bustled low overhead. ‘But have a care in these snickets, sir. They’re canny buggers and they know every inch of the ground.’
The town was a mass of runs and alleys that bisected dried mud houses, mostly low and mean, but some of two storeys mixed with squalid little hovels. The ground was pitted and dank, dry in the middle of the paths, but flanked by noisome, scummy puddles and piles of rotting vegetation and filth. Dogs ran and yelped from the advancing British, disturbed in their rootling at slicks of animal and human dung, but of the civilian population, about whom they had been warned, there was no sign.
‘They don’t get any bloody cleaner, this lot, do they, sir?’ Sergeant Ormond wrinkled his nose in disgust.
‘No, they don’t,’ Morgan answered distractedly. ‘What’s that?’ Both sergeant and officer, leading the column of troops, nervously raised their weapons as a shadow fled round the corner in front of them, but offered no harm.
As the urgency of the 10th’s invisible battle had battered their ears, Morgan had quickly broken the company down into two columns, sending one half off under Ensign Fawcett with McGucken to help him, and taking thirty or so men and Sergeant Ormond with him. It was clear what had to be done. He’d simply said to Fawcett, ‘Get up that alley there as quick as you like and take the mutineers from the left; we’ll go to the right. From the sounds of things, Captain McGowan’s in trouble, but the Pandies shouldn’t be expecting us. Just get stuck in, but for God’s sake don’t fire into us or the Tenth.’
The youngster had simply nodded, asked no questions and leapt to the front of his newly independent command with admirable speed, the men and McGucken streaming off after him. But now, Morgan wondered, was Fawcett having any more luck finding his way to the fight than he was? The clash of weapons rose close by, but the alleys all led into the centre of the town, channelling them away, not towards the combat.
‘Where now, d’you think, Sar’nt Ormond?’ Morgan asked as the men behind him scanned the windows above and beside them, rifles ready, pausing only to wipe the sweat out of their eyes.
‘Boggered if I know, sir,’ Ormond replied. ‘’Ere, you two, cum ’ere,’ and he grabbed two frightened-looking privates and made them cup their hands and lift him up above the seven-foot mud wall that stopped them from seeing what was going on. The sergeant’s boots scrabbled at the dusty surface, his elbows pumped him up onto the top of it, and there he hung for a moment, his grey shirt sticking out between his trousers and the bottom of his scarlet shell jacket.
No sooner had Morgan seen Ormond claw his way up than he was back down again, pulling at his clothes and belts to restore his soldierly appearance, whilst immediately reporting what he’d seen. ‘There’s some sod tinkering with a bloody mine or summat, just the other side o’ the wall, sir. Big pots, all linked by fuse, an’ a Pandy trying to get it lit.’
‘Well, come on then, let’s get over,’ said Morgan urgently, and in seconds he, Ormond and a few others were being shoved up and over the wall by the rest of the men.
As soon as Morgan got his head over the parapet he could see the danger. In a gap in the next wall, only about six paces away over a filthy yard at the back of a wood-framed house, a cross-belted, turbaned man in muddy pyjamas was toiling with a tinder box and a bit of fuse that led into what the more lurid papers would describe as ‘an infernal machine’. Just beyond, Morgan sensed more than saw McGowan’s men and a press of mutineers, the grunts and screams suggesting a serious bout of blood-letting.
The uproar and his concentration distracted the man who was oblivious to the scratching and scrabbling behind him until a mangy little pye-dog came snarling from the reaches of the yard, bounding up at the wall and yapping at the British. Then, alerted by the noise, the mutineer turned, gasped, took in what was happening and tried to get at his musket, which he had slung over his back, just as Ormond, half on, half off the top of the wall, fired the oddest shot that Morgan had ever seen. With one toe hooked over the wall and his left elbow on top of it, Ormond somehow snapped off a round holding his rifle with just his right hand, the butt scarcely in his shoulder. So precarious was the sergeant’s balance, but so urgent was the need to shoot the rebel, that the recoil of the rifle knocked Ormond back over the other side of the wall – Morgan heard him swearing even as he fell. The ball flew wide, just over the man’s shoulder, throwing up a great puff of mud from the far wall before ricocheting straight back into the sepoy, hitting him – Morgan guessed by the way that he grimaced and clutched behind him – squarely in the spine.
This gave the British just the time they needed, and as the Pandy jigged in pain, with the blade of his sword Morgan whipped the fuses away from a series of three-foot-high earthenware jars that were brimming with gunpowder. Next to him, meanwhile, a bloody little cameo was being played out.
‘Dance on that, you fuck-pig.’ Private James – he of the sore foot – jabbed all fourteen inches of his bayonet through the man’s belly, stopping only when the point emerged through the small of the Indian’s back and ground into the gritty surface of the wall.
There the man hung – spitted – until that same sore foot was raised up and hoofed firmly into the mutineer’s groin, allowing James to pull the steel spike clear. Morgan saw how the dying man’s eyes bulged, how his tongue, red with blood, stuck straight from his lips as he slumped onto a pile of rotting vegetables. No sooner had James finished the job with a heavy blow to the man’s neck with his butt, than Lance-Corporal Pegg was searching the body for anything of the slightest value.
Then Morgan looked round. In the tiny yard there were just himself, two soldiers, a mangy dog and a cooling corpse; Ormond and the others were nowhere to be seen.
‘Leave the poor man, Pegg.’ Morgan knew that the Pandy deserved no sympathy whatever; why, he thought, he’s probably lost count of the number of memsahibs he’s ravaged, but the sight of the man’s face lolling above the neck that James had just snapped – his still open eyes already buzzing with flies – was indignity enough. ‘You can rob the dead when there’s a few more of ’em – don’t you ever learn?’
Morgan was suddenly aware of how much like a schoolmaster he sounded and how utterly pointless such a lecture was at that moment.
Lance-Corporal Pegg – and he was an NCO, who shouldn’t be upbraided in front of private soldiers, after all – hung his head with a muttered, ‘Sorry, sir,’ and stood up, taking his rifle in one hand but still trousering a couple of coins that had come from the dead sepoy’s purse.
‘Are you both loaded? Have you got plenty of shot?’ Morgan asked.
James nodded quickly – h
e was wiping his blade on the skirts of his victim’s clothes – whilst Pegg’s extra ammunition pouch hung down heavily on the waist belt that he’d failed to tighten properly.
‘Aye, sir, but there’s only the three on us,’ Pegg said shrilly just as another volley of shots and shouting erupted from beyond the next wall. ‘An’t we better wait for the others?’
‘Just come on, the pair of you,’ and Morgan dashed off through the gap in the wall, deliberately pushing over one of the great jars of powder as he went.
The party emerged into the next alley to find it obscured by dense yellow-grey smoke from the burning thatch of a house that lay next to the town wall. The firing had obviously caused the dry grass roof to catch fire and now the alley served as a funnel for the smoke, which billowed on the freshening morning breeze. In the next alley, coughing and holding a handkerchief to his nose, was Captain McGowan, surrounded by fifteen or so of his own sepoys and a litter of enemy dead and dying.
‘McGowan…McGowan, we’ve come to help you,’ Morgan spluttered in the fumes whilst tucking his sword under his arm and trying to knot his neckcloth around his face just as the native soldiers had done.
‘Well, I’m deuced glad to see you. Any more on the way?’ McGowan coughed and wiped his eyes. ‘Hello, Pegg – it is Pegg, ain’t it?’
Pegg had wrapped a native’s puggaree around his face.
‘No, sir, you know fine well it’s Corporal Pegg.’ But his bruised amour propre went unnoticed.
‘Where’s the rest of your company, Morgan? We could do with ’em just now.’ Desperation wasn’t quite the word, but there was real concern in McGowan’s voice.
‘I wish I knew,’ answered Morgan. ‘Half of ’em are somewhere over yonder under my ensign,’ he pointed in the vague direction from which Fawcett should have been approaching over a series of walls and roofs obscured by billows of smoke, ‘and the rest should be following up behind me, but I’m –’ he was interrupted by the shriek of artillery rounds loping overhead, which made all of them crouch low on the alley floor – ‘damned if I know where they’ve got to now. What of yours?’
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