by Talbot Mundy
“But he hesitated. I, too, took my saber in the left hand. I am either- handed. He had never fought a left-handed opponent. Moonlight on his eyes revealed his fear that now he faced the very vantage he had thought was his. He checked. He kept his distance, waiting for me to attack.
“ ‘Not so easy,’ said I, ‘as to hew down a lad in the dark! Do you fear death, Yussuf bin Ibraim?’
“Then steel touched steel and sparks flew. Yussuf bin Ibraim knew, he knew full well his hour had come. The moment his blade felt mine, he knew it. It enraged him. Rather than die tamely, he outdid that stallion I had watched him conquer. He threw away caution, experience, skill. He came at me with thrice the fury of a panther, pitting youth against my years.
“I remembered my oath. I let him squander strength and wind until his lungs lost their vigor and his tricks their cunning. Then I disarmed him, with a twist of the wrist. His saber lay on the earth between us. He was well nigh breathless, but he found speech:
“ ‘Slay then. End my shame.’
“I, too, was breathless. ‘Which shame?’ I demanded.
“He looked down at his saber that lay between us.
“ ‘Then take it up,’ said I. ‘and let pride have its will.”
“I stood back. He resumed his weapon. And again he came at me. The pause had breathed him. He was less wild, more cunning, stalking me to make me face the moonlight. But the magic of my Guru’s teaching was upon me, and I wore him down. I wearied him as he had wearied that savage stallion, until he panted and drooled at the mouth, until he stumbled — and then suddenly leaped backward. He hurled the saber at me. It came flashing point-first.
“But I can split sticks in the air. The bread I eat is paid for by the people who buy my leave to hurl them at me. So I turned aside the saber. It struck rock away beyond me.
“ ‘Slay!’ he said then. ‘And may Allah curse your soul.’
“But I lowered my point. I said: ‘If Allah curses not, then what?’
“ ‘I am ashamed,’ he answered.
“ ‘Which shame now?” I asked him. ‘You may have your weapon. It lies yonder.’
“ ‘Nay,’ he said. ‘Slay!’
“I answered: ‘Who art thou, to give me leave to slay?’ And he was silent. So I asked him:
“ ‘Have I hunted you by land and sea to discover no deeper shame than makes a brute to treachery?’
“He answered: ‘My shame lies deeper.”
“I said: ‘Name it.’
“He stood silent. But I waited.
Presently he said: ‘Sirdar bahadur, I am ashamed that I slew your son.’
“Said I: ‘I knew that. Shaving and running and changing names is not an evidence of pride. I slay not. Why not?’
“ ‘Mash Allah,’ he answered. ‘I know not why, unless that your honor is higher than mine.’
“I said: ‘I, too, have slain men’s sons. I obeyed a law and my oath. You also. You obeyed the law that you knew, Yussuf bin Ibraim. Has it rewarded pride?’
“ ‘I am ashamed,’ he answered. ‘How many times shall I say it?’
“So I asked him: ‘Will you yield to a law that is higher than yours or mine?’
“ ‘Which law?’ he asked. ‘The hangman’s?’
“ ‘Nay,’ said I. ‘The law that brought me hither and that stayed my hand, which could have slain the slayer of my son.’
“And he said: ‘If I yield not?’
“ ‘Then,’ I answered ‘you shall go free, Yussuf bin Ibraim, to pursue the consequences of your own law.’
“He stood silent for the space of a minute, or longer. Then he said; ‘Sirdar bahadur, I yield.”
Quinn nudged me. “He may tell that,” he said, “to a jury. Yussuf bin Ibraim was found dead of a sword-wound.” He put a whistle to his lips. I don’t know why he hesitated.
The Sirdar stared at us. He drove his naked saber point into the earth and raised his hand high. “Did I speak truth?” he demanded. “Yussuf bin Ibraim! Stand up! Answer—”
Joe Abram got up from beside me. Joe — Yussuf; Abram — Ibraim. He strode toward the Sirdar. Together they turned seaward and walked arm-in-arm along the moonlit glade.
“I’ll be sugared,” said Quinn. “Well, I told you that identification was doubtful.”
“Corfey?” said Mr. Whittlesea.
COMPANIONS IN ARMS
IT was as a wave on the face of eternity that the Rajput Royal Horse went oversea, in 1914, to fulfill an immediate destiny, and to fire, in the shell- ploughed Flanders mud, its rifled requiem above the graves of its honored dead.
John Lawrence Burnham joined the regiment in Flanders, nineteen, green from an English public school and Woolwich, rushed through special courses for the war. He had been born in Rajputana. The first words he had ever learned to speak were Rajasthani. His father, who had commanded the regiment, was killed near Dargai, and the only son, aged seven, went to England with his mother, to be schooled and, if he pleased, to forget and to be forgotten. He remembered. He used Rajasthani in his dreams, that were all of turbaned, bearded horsemen, the smell of harness, and the thunder of lance-shod squadrons knee-to-knee.
So, since his name headed the examination list, it was his privilege to be gazetted to the regiment that his father had died leading. He arrived in Flanders when the German guns were devastating everything except the imponderable will to resist.
Burnham was a rather handsome youngster, with romantic eyes which only his mother knew were the masks of an iron will. He looked like merely one more victim for the guns and the gas and the smothering mud. They needed officers who might be safely strained beyond all human measure of manhood. So he was put under the merciless observation of a veteran Rajput Rissaldar-major, whose ironic eyes judged horse or man with equal candor, and who cared for nothing whatever on earth except the regiment’s izzat.
Burnham made good. He had not dreamed his boyhood dreams for nothing. The Rissaldar-major’s first confidential report of him was guarded, on a note of watchdog undergrowl:
“A boy of few words but a ready disposition, Colonel bahadur. The eyes of a dreamer. The heart, it may be, of a man.”
“Very well, Rissaldar-major. Rub his nose in.”
So the grim, ungracious business began, unmounted, in the teeth of the German drive. He had vigilant, sarcastic, courteously-worded insolence to take from one who was a subordinate in theory but in practise a merciless maker of men. Try how the Rissaldar-major might, and for the regiment’s sake he did his utmost with humiliating irony and subtly unbalancing praise, he could find no unsoldierly flaws in young John Burnham. With the aid of a hundred abrasive oriental irritants, he stripped off the racial surface, and looked, and found a man beneath it.
There was a second report, less guarded, made by night while a German barrage, short by a couple hundred no-man’s yards, exploded malice on the tortured mud:
“He is one of us, Colonel bahadur.”
“Let the men know.”
“Are they blockheads, Colonel sahib? They already know it. Of your honor’s favor, may my son be transferred to his troop?”
“Oh. Is he as good as that? Very well.”
The young sowar Kangra Gunga was the same age, almost to a day, as Burnham. They were born beneath the same sky, where the wandering Pilgreet River plunges from a mountain’s flank, nearby the war-wrecked fortress walls of Gaglajung. As children they had been sung to sleep by the self-same lullabies, that are ballads of ancient Rajput chivalry. Kangra Gunga was a tall, upstanding youth whose dark eyes smouldered with the ancient pride.
“My one son, Burnham sahib. Demand of him double, that he may honor the regiment’s name, and my loins also.”
The Rissaldar-major loved the regiment as Cromwell his ironsides: “Ye dead men, who are not yet dead, die clean at the appointed time — aye, die as I will!” Kangra Gunga loved the regiment as a watchdog its home, ferociously obedient, sullen with strangers, uncommunicative. Burnham loved the regiment as a knight hi
s mistress; nothing could be too good for her, no sacrifice sufficient. They were three iron men, allied by one and the same intolerance, and veiled by the same incomprehension of each other’s viewpoint. No effort of Burnham’s could thaw out Kangra Gunga’s occult strangeness. He remained an enigma.
Vigilant, attentive, sullen, the young rajput watched Burnham with a curious gaze that might mean oriental jealousy. It might be the unexplainable hatred, such as men and animals sometimes generate toward each other. There were times when Burnham even harbored the disturbing thought that the rissalder-major might have set the young sowar to spy on him. It felt like being watched by destiny.
The problem could only be pondered beneath the surface of routine discipline, in moments snatched from the incalculable gales of sudden death, in the night watch, or in rat-infested dugouts. A cavalry regiment was teaching itself how to burrow and fight like beleagured rats. Burnham, in addition to that, was studying the men whom he must make himself fit to lead. He was feeling his way toward that middle line between familiarity and arbitrary wilfulness that is the secret of command. In the ranks of death an officer discovers that line soon, or never. Burnham found it.
But whether in the front line or at the base camp, he could find no key to the puzzle of Kangra Gunga’s gaze — always the same, like the gaze of a caged and tameless panther. He gave it up, left the riddle to produce its own solution.
Then came the day when the Germans loosed their utmost hurricane of high explosive shells and hordes of men, to smash through to the Channel ports. Every available man was flung into the line; to plug gaps where the dead lay thicker than wheat in the blast of hail, and no man knew anything except that he still lived and must hold on.
It was spastic chaos, in a mystery of darkened days and shell-lit nights, where death slew at random. There was no survival of the fittest. They died who died. Flesh and blood, things and theories were buried in one havoc. Entire regiments ceased to exist.
But there remained the incredible, actual fact. The line held. Shattered, decimated, twisted, broken, there was an army still in being. Reserves of men awaited sunset to flow forward as the tide resumes dominion of a hurricane- swept beach.
Night. What was left of the regiment clung to a couple of hundred yards of shell-torn mud. It dug in. Nearly all the officers were dead or dying: it looked like the end of the Rajput Royal Horse. A wounded, semi-conscious orderly, drunk with pain, crawled forward through the flare-lit darkness, delivered his message and died.
“Hold on until relieved.”
Burnham was the junior of three British officers left living. He and the rissaldar-major, on the right wing, hurled by a bursting shell into the same mud crater, crawled out and grinned in the shuddering glare of gun-fire. Kangra Gunga crawled to them and crouched, awaiting orders, that being his job.
There was a hurriedly thrown-up breastwork. There were more or less ninety men. There was a ruined dugout, and no cover for the wounded or the ammunition. But a hundred yards ahead there was a well-made trench that had been taken and retaken before the guns had made it No-Man’s Land. It might be possible to seize that still unbroken refuge.
Burnham said what he thought, with his mind made up. He wasn’t asking advice, but the veteran, from war-learned habit, gave, with the blunt authority of mentor to a pupil:
“Nay, nay, sahib. Keep touch. Better retire leftward, rearward, lose a little ground but—”
“Oh, if you’re afraid, I’ll hold your hand!”
Burnham shouted it to make himself heard. It did not occur to him that his words were a graceless insult, and that Kangra Gunga must have heard them. Peril and responsibility demanded every faculty he had. He was aware of nothing but shuddering, shell-lit night and instantly determined aim. He gave his orders. He and the rissaldar-major bent united effort to the task of getting ninety men, in darkness, into the new position. Kangra Gunga was an undistinguishable detail in the stealthy, well-disciplined rush, until the trench was gained.
As soon as he could spare time, Burnham worked his way along the trench, speaking to each man by name as he passed. He wanted to consult with the rissaldar-major. He found the veteran dying, the only casualty in that well- handled move that he had ventured almost insubordination to prevent. Burnham knelt beside him:
“I insulted you without meaning to,” he said. “I’m sorry. I beg your pardon.”
“Granted, sahib. Speech such as that at such a time means nothing. It is forgotten. Does my son live? Send him to me.”
The message was passed from mouth to mouth along the trench, but the rissaldar- major was dead before Kanga Gunga could reach him. The young sowar knelt beside his father’s body. He looked up at Burnham. A guttering candle-end, and then a Very light revealed his face and the expression in his eyes. Burnham turned his back.
It was the wrong thing to do. An hour or so later, when he had had time to think, he knew it was wrong. But what is said and done, is said and done. Unsaying and undoing are a new beginning, on a new page of the Book of Problems.
The remainder of that night was torment. It swept the past into oblivion as if it were a peopled city buried beneath volcanic lava, only to be tediously excavated, piece by piece in course of time. No one who survived that night was what he had been. New essentials emerged. Burned like scars on Burnham’s memory were the unintended insult, the rissaldar-major’s forgiveness, and the unforgiving enmity in Kangra Gunga’s eyes.
Daybreak found the regiment still holding on, but its living were almost as lifeless as the dead. There was more life in Kangra Gunga’s hatred than in Burnham’s body. There was more sullen threat in the sowar’s patient gaze than there was promise in the pale sun peering through the gray rain.
It was their last view of Flanders trenches when some fusiliers relieved them and they dragged their wounded and themselves through miles of mud toward the waiting lorries and the base. It was the last of France. The last of Europe. They were too few to survive as a separate unit. They were sent to Egypt and brigaded with other remnants as emergency forced hurried improvisation. They were lost in the trackless fury of a world-wide war. When peace came, the authorities struck the regiment’s name from the rolls.
So the Rajput Royal Horse became one squadron of a mixed-race regiment, containing troops of almost every manly Indian breed that can become good cavalry. Accident, or someone’s sentiment, or, if the Rajputs were right, their destiny, attended to it that the new composite frontier regiment, of which they were only one not readily distinguishable unit, should bear the old regiment’s black, three-headed panther crest and the two-fold motto: “Always. No excuses.”
So the rebirth was not without good portent. At the first full parade, when the remnants of other decimated regiments and new, vainglorious recruits rode line on line with them, and all were one, within one discipline, beneath the ancient symbol, the veteran sowars jested low-voiced in the ranks:
“Lo, it is born with a caul, this mongrel! Bid the bard sing the Lay of Alha! Pay the midwife double!”
But it was double trouble for the midwife. Major John Lawrence Burnham was the last left living and undisabled officer who had served the old izzat and earned the name Companion in Arms. It was upon him that the brunt of the new beginning fell.
The hundred thousand gods of Rajasthan must have had a hand in it, for the new commander was exactly the man to get the utmost out of Burnham, just as Burnham was the man to lick the regiment into shape. Burnham did it in spite of his Rajputs. Their scorn of less lineaged blood than their own, and of chivalry less absolute than theirs, undid a hundred times the substance of the stuff that Burnham spun and wove with all the patience of a poet and the calculating vigor of a blacksmith.
But the core of the heart of the regiment, nevertheless, was those Rajputs. They refused to yield one fragment of their claim to be the regiment itself. On them all other men must pattern their behavior or be damned. They explained nothing. They excused nothing. They told no secrets. They would d
escend to no man’s level. Let the others reach theirs, if they had it in them.
So the sowars of several races in other squadrons, being soldierly and curious, used their imaginations. Burnham was a man about whom it was next to impossible not to invent such tales as Indians love to tell by firelight under the silent, star-hung sky. He was handsome. He rode like a centaur. He had medals, scars and the graceful modesty that maddens women and excites men to observant silence. Kangra Gunga was Burnham’s shadow.
Of Kangra Gunga, too, it was easy to imagine tales. He was a gentleman in arms, of harp-sung lineage, who refused promotion. Why? Kangra Gunga kept his thoughts to himself. But he shadowed Burnham, never insubordinate, but always watchful. Guesswork grew into a legend as unshakable as regimental pride, that Burnham had insulted the hot-eyed Rajput under fire, in the presence of death. The merest raw recruit could draw the inference that Kangra Gunga must have sworn by his father’s beard, and by his sword-hilt and by the hundred thousand gods of Rajasthan, to be avenged in an hour that destiny should grant.
It was perfectly understood why Kangra Gunga would await an hour of destiny. He was a Companion in Arms. His private feud was his, to be pursued to its end at his own discretion, subject to the regiment’s first, overriding claim on his allegiance. He would die ten million deaths and face their consequences rather than betray the regiment’s izzat. On that score there was nothing to argue about.
None knew, except Burnham and Kangra Gunga, what had been the nature of the insult. None even pretended to know. That Kangra Gunga never spoke of it was reckoned proof that it had cut to the heart of the Rajput consciousness that cherishes its wounds and keeps them unhealed for the day of vengeance.
An impeccable soldier, Kangra Gunga contrived, by the use of all the ingenuities that soldiers learn, to be detailed for every sort of special duty that enabled him to keep his eye on Burnham. With the quiet condescension of a born aristocrat he got on confidential terms with Burnham’s body-servant. There was nothing that Burnham did, and almost nothing that Burnham said, that Kangra Gunga did not know. And Burnham knew that. But there was nothing he could do about it. He grew used to it.