Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “Soon,” he said, looking into my eyes beside the fire, “we shall meet opportunities for looting. Yet we have food enough for men and mules and horses for many a day to come; and as the corn grows less more men can ride in the carts, so that we shall move the swifter. But now this map of mine grows vague and our road leads more and more into the unknown. We need eyes ahead of us. I can control the men if I stay with them, but in that case who shall ride on and procure intelligence?”

  In a flash I saw his meaning. There was none but he wise enough to ride ahead. But who else could control the men — men who believed they had sloughed the regiment’s honor in a Flanders trench and a German prison camp? They were sloughing their personal honor that minute, fraternizing with Turkish prisoners. With their sense of honor gone, could even Ranjoor Singh control them? Perhaps! But if Ranjoor Singh rode forward, who should stay behind and stand in his shoes?

  I looked at the stars, that had the color of jewels in them. I listened to the night birds. I heard the wind soughing — the mules and horses stamping — the murmur of men’s voices. My tongue itched to say some foolish word, that would have proved me unfit to be trusted out of sight. But the thought came to me to be still and listen. And still I remained until he began again.

  “If I told the men what the true position is they would grow desperate,” he said. “They would believe the case hopeless.”

  “They almost believe that now!” said I.

  “Have the Turk and Tugendheim been kept apart?” said he.

  “Aye,” I answered. “They have not had ten words together.”

  “Good,” said he. “Neither Turk nor Tugendheim knows the whole truth, but if they get together they might concoct a very plausible, misleading tale.”

  “They would better have been bound and gagged,” said I.

  “No,” he answered. “If I had bound and gagged them it would have established sympathy between them, and they would have found some way of talking nevertheless. Kept apart and let talk, the Turk will say one thing, Tugendheim another.”

  “True,” said I. “For now the Turk advises plunder to right and left, and settlement afterward among Armenian villages. He says there are women to be had for the taking. ‘Be a new nation!’ says he.”

  “And what says Tugendheim?” asked Ranjoor Singh.

  “‘Plunder!’” said I. “‘Plunder and push northward into Russia! The Russians will welcome you,’ says he, ‘and perhaps accept me into their secret service! — Plunder the Turks!’ says Tugendheim. ‘Plunder the Armenians!’ says the Turk.”

  “I, too, would be all for Russia,” he answered, “but it isn’t possible. The coast of the Black Sea, and from the Black Sea down to the Persian frontier, is held by a very great Turkish army. The main caravan routes lie to the north of us, and every inch of them is watched.”

  “I am glad then that it must be Egypt,” said I. “A long march, but friends at the other end. Who but doubts Russians?”

  He shook his head. “Syria and Palestine,” he said, “are full of an army gathering to invade Egypt. It eats up the land like locusts. An elephant could march easier unseen into a house than we into Syria!”

  “So we must double back?” said I. “Good! By now they must have ceased looking for us, supposing they ever thought us anything but drowned. Somewhere we can surely find a ship in which to cross to Gallipoli!”

  He laughed and shook his head again. “We slipped through the one unguarded place,” he said. “If we had come one day later that place, too, would have been held by some watchful one, instead of by the fool we found in charge.”

  Then at last I thought surely I knew what his objective MUST be. It had been common talk in Flanders how an expedition marched from Basra up the Tigris.

  “Bagdad!” I said. “We march to Bagdad to join the British there! Bagdad is good!”

  But he answered, “Bagdad is not yet taken — not yet nearly taken. Between us and Bagdad lies a Turkish army of fifty or sixty thousand men at least.”

  I sat silent. I can draw a map of the world and set the rivers and cities and boundaries down; so I knew that if we could go neither north — nor south — nor westward, there remained only eastward, straight-forward into Persia. He read my thoughts, and nodded.

  “Persia is neutral,” he said, with a wave of his hand that might mean anything. “The Turks have spared no army for one section of the Persian frontier, choosing to depend on savage tribes. And the Germans have given them Wassmuss to help out.”

  “Ah!” said I, making ready to learn at last who Wassmuss might be. “When we have found this Wassmuss, are we to make him march with us like Tugendheim?”

  “If what the Germans in Stamboul said of him is only half-true,” he answered, “we shall find him hard to catch. Wassmuss is a remarkable man. Before the war he was consul in Bagdad or somewhere, and he must have improved his time, for he knows enough now to keep all the tribes stirred up against Russians and British. The Germans send him money, and he scatters it like corn among the hens; but the money would be little use without brains. The Germans admire him greatly, and he certainly seems a man to be wondered at. But he is the one weak point, nevertheless — the only key that can open a door for us.”

  “But if he is too wary to be caught?” said I.

  “Who knows?” he answered with another of those short gruff laughs. “But I know this,” said he, “that from afar hills look like a blank wall, yet come closer and the ends of valleys open. Moreover, where the weakest joint is, smite! So I shall ride ahead and hunt for that weakest joint, and you shall shepherd the men along behind me. Go and bring Abraham and the Turk!”

  I went and found them. Abraham was already asleep, no longer wearing the Turkish private soldier’s uniform but his own old clothes again (because, the Turkish soldier having done nothing meriting punishment, Ranjoor Singh had ordered him his uniform returned). I awoke him and together we went and found the Turk sitting between a Syrian and Gooja Singh; and although I did not overhear one word of what they were saying, I saw that Gooja Singh believed I had been listening. It seemed good to me to let him deceive himself, so I smiled as I touched the Turk’s shoulder.

  “Lo! Here is our second-in-command!” sneered Gooja Singh, but I affected not to notice.

  “Come!” said I, showing the Turk slight courtesy, and, getting up clumsily like a buffalo out of the mud, he followed Abraham and me. Some of the men made as if to come, too, out of curiosity, but Gooja Singh recalled them and they clustered round him.

  When I had brought the Turk uphill to the fire-side, Ranjoor Singh had only one word to say to him.

  “Strip!” he ordered.

  Aye, sahib! There and then, without excuse or explanation, he made the Turkish officer remove his clothes and change with Abraham; and I never saw a man more unwilling or resentful! Abraham had told me all about Turkish treatment of Syrians, and it is the way of the world that men most despise those whom they most ill-treat. So that although Turks have no caste distinctions that I know of, that one felt like a high-caste Brahman ordered to change garments with a sweeper. He looked as if he would infinitely rather die.

  “Hurry!” Ranjoor Singh ordered him in English.

  “HURRIET?” said the Turk. HURRIET is their Turkish for LIBERTY. All the troops in Stamboul used it constantly, and Ranjoor Singh told me it means much the same as the French cry of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity!” The Turk seemed bewildered, and opened his eyes wider than ever; but whatever his thoughts were about “HURRIET” he rightly interpreted the look in Ranjoor Singh’s eye and obeyed, grimacing like a monkey as he drew on Abraham’s dirty garments.

  “You shall wear the rags of a driver of mules if you talk any more about loot to your men or mine!” said Ranjoor Singh. “If I proposed to loot, I would bury you for a beginning, lest there be nothing for the rest of us!”

  He made Abraham translate that into Turkish, lest the full gist of it be lost, and I sat comparing the two men. It was strange
to see what a change the uniform made in Abraham’s appearance — what a change, too, came over the Turk. Had I not known, I could never have guessed the positions had once been reversed. Abraham looked like an officer. The Turk looked like a peasant. He was a big up-standing man, although with pouches under his eyes that gave the lie to his look of strength. Now for the first time Ranjoor Singh set a picked guard over him, calling out the names of four troopers who came hurrying uphill through the dark.

  “Let your honor and this man’s ward be one!” said he, and they answered “Our honor be it!”

  He could not have chosen better if he had lined up the regiment and taken half a day. Those four were troopers whom I myself had singled out as men to be depended on when a pinch should come, and I wondered that Ranjoor Singh should so surely know them, too.

  “Take him and keep him!” he ordered, and they went off, not at all sorry to be excused from other duties, as now of course they must be. Counting the four who guarded Tugendheim, that made a total of eight troopers probably incorruptible, for there is nothing, sahib, that can compare with imposing a trust when it comes to making sure of men’s good faith. Hedge them about with precautions and they will revolt or be half-hearted; impose open trust in them, and if they be well-chosen they will die true.

  “Now,” said he to me when they were out of hearing, “I shall take with me one daffadar, one naik, and forty mounted men. Sometimes I shall take Abraham, sometimes Tugendheim, sometimes the Turk. This time I shall take the Turk, and before dawn I shall be gone. Let it be known that the best behaved of those I leave with you shall be promoted to ride with me — just as my unworthy ones shall be degraded to march on foot with you. That will help a little.”

  “Aye,” said I, “a little. Which daffadar will you take? That will help more!” said I.

  “Gooja Singh,” he answered, and I marveled.

  “Sahib,” I said, “take him out of sight and bury his body! Make an end!” I urged. “In Flanders they shot men against a wall for far less than he has talked about!”

  “Flanders is one place and this another,” he answered. “Should I make those good men more distrustful than they are? Should I shoot Gooja Singh unless I am afraid of him?”

  I said no more because I knew he was right. If he should shoot Gooja Singh the troopers would ascribe it to nothing else than fear. A British officer might do it and they would say, “Behold how he scorns to shirk responsibility!” Yet of Ranjoor Singh they would have said, “He fears us, and behold the butchery begins! Who shall be next?” Nevertheless, had I stood in his shoes, I would have shot and buried Gooja Singh to forestall trouble. I would have shot Gooja Singh and the Turk and Tugendheim all three with one volley. And the Turk’s forty men would have met a like fate at the first excuse. But that is because I was afraid, whereas Ranjoor Singh was not. I greatly feared being left behind to bring the men along, and the more I thought of it, the worse the prospect seemed; so I began to tell of things I had heard Gooja Singh say against him, and which of the men I had heard and seen to agree, for there is no good sense in a man who is afraid.

  “Is it my affair to take vengeance on them, or to lead them into safety?” he asked. And what could I answer?

  After some silence he spread out his map where firelight shone on it and showed Abraham and me where the Tigris River runs by Diarbekr. “Thus,” he said, “we must go,” pointing with his finger, “and thus — and thus — by Diarbekr, down by the Tigris, by Mosul, into Kurdistan, to Sulimanieh, and thence into Persia — a very long march through very wild country. Outside the cities I am told no Turk dare show himself with less than four hundred men at his back, so we will keep to the open. If the Turks mistake us for Turks, the better for us. If the tribes mistake us for Turks, the worse for us; for they say the tribes hate Turks worse than smallpox. If they think we are Turks they will attack us. We need ride warily.”

  “It would take more Turks than there are,” I said, “to keep our ruffians from trying to plunder the first city they see! And as for tribes — they are in a mood to join with any one who will help make trouble!”

  “Then it may be,” he answered quietly, “that they will not lack exercise! Follow me and lend a hand!” And he led down toward the camp-fires, where very few men slept and voices rose upward like the noise of a quarrelsome waterfall.

  Just as on that night when we captured the carts and Turks and Syrians, he now used the cover of darkness to reorganize; and the very first thing he did was to make the forty Turkish prisoners change clothes with Syrians — the Turks objecting with much bad language and the Syrians not seeming to relish it much, for fear, I suppose, of reprisals. But he made the Turks hand over their rifles, as well, to the Syrians; and then, of all unlikely people he chose Tugendheim to command the Syrians and to drill them and teach them discipline! He set him to drilling them there and then, with a row of fires to see by.

  In the flash of an eye, as you might say, we had thus fifty extra infantry, ten of them neither uniformed nor armed as yet, but all of them at least afraid to run away. Tugendheim looked doubtful for a minute, but he was given his choice of that, or death, or of wearing a Syrian’s cast-off clothes and driving mules. He well understood (for I could tell by his manner of consenting) that Ranjoor Singh would send him into action against the first Turks we could find, thus committing him to further treason against the Central Powers; but he had gone too far already to turn back.

  And as for the Syrians-they had had a lifetime’s experience of Turkish treatment, and had recently been taught to associate Germans with Turks; so if Tugendheim should meditate treachery it was unlikely his Syrians would join him in it. It was promotion to a new life for them — occupation for Tugendheim, who had been growing bored and perhaps dangerous on that account — and not so dreadfully distressing to the Turkish soldiers, who could now ride on the carts instead of marching on weary feet. They had utterly no ambition, those Turkish soldiers; they cared neither for their officer (which was small wonder) nor for the rifles that we took away, which surprised us greatly (for in the absence of lance or saber, we regarded our rifles as evidence of manhood). They objected to the dirty garments they received in exchange for the uniforms, and they despised us Sikhs for men without religion (so they said!); but it did not seem to trouble them whether they fought on one side or the other, or whether they fought at all, so long as they had cigarettes and food. Yet I did not receive the impression they were cowards — brutes, perhaps, but not cowards. When they came under fire later on they made no effort to desert with the carts to their own side; and when we asked them why, they said because we fed them! They added they had not been paid for more than eighteen months.

  Why did not Ranjoor Singh make this arrangement sooner, you ask. Why did he wait so long, and then choose the night of all times? Not all thoughts are instantaneous, sahib; some seem to develop out of patience and silence and attention. Moreover, it takes time for captured men to readjust their attitude — as the Germans, for instance, well knew when they gave us time for thought in the prison camp at Oescherleben. When we first took the Syrians prisoner they were so tired and timid as to be worthless for anything but driving carts, whereas now we had fed them and befriended them. On the other hand, in the beginning, the Turks, if given a chance, would have stampeded with the carts toward Angora.

  Now that both Turks and Syrians had grown used to being prisoners and to obeying us, they were less likely to think independently — in the same way that a new-caught elephant in the keddah is frenzied and dangerous, but after a week or two is learning tricks.

  And as for choosing the night-time for the change, every soldier knows that the darkness is on the side of him whose plans are laid. He who is taken unawares must then contend with both ignorance and darkness. Thieves prefer the dark. Wolves hunt in the dark. Fishermen fish in the dark. And the wise commander who would change his dispositions makes use of darkness, too. Men who might disobey by daylight are like lambs when they can not see be
yond the light a camp-fire throws.

  But such things are mental, sahib, and not to be explained like the fire of heavy guns or the shock tactics of cavalry — although not one atom less effective. If Ranjoor Singh had lined up the men and argued with them, there might have been mutiny. Instead, when he judged the second ripe, he made sudden new dispositions in the night and gave them something else to think about without suggesting to their minds that he might be worried about them or suspicious of them. On the contrary, he took opportunity to praise some individuals and distribute merited rewards.

  For instance, he promoted the two naiks, Surath Singh and Mirath Singh, to be daffadars on probation, to their very great surprise and absolute contentment. The four who guarded Tugendheim he raised to the rank of naik, bidding them help Tugendheim drill the Syrians without relaxing vigilance over him. Then he chose six more troopers to be naiks. And of the eighty mounted men he degraded eighteen to march on foot again, replacing them with more obedient ones. Then at last I understood why he had chosen some grumblers to ride in the first instance — simply in order that he might make room for promotion of others at the proper time, offsetting discontent with emulation.

  Then of the eighty mounted men he picked the forty best. He gave Abraham’s saddle to Gooja Singh, set one of the new naiks over the left wing, and Gooja Singh over the right wing of the forty, under himself, and ordered rations for three days to be cooked and served out to the forty, including corn for their horses. They had to carry it all in the knap-sacks on their own backs, since no one of them yet had saddles.

  Gooja Singh eyed me by firelight while this was going on, with his tongue in his cheek, as much as to say I had been superseded and would know it soon. When I affected not to notice he said aloud in my hearing that men who sat on both sides of a fence were never on the right side when the doings happen. And when I took no notice of that he asked me in a very loud voice whether my heart quailed at the prospect of being left a mile or two behind. But I let him have his say. Neither he, nor any of the men, had the slightest idea yet of Ranjoor Singh’s real plan.