He no longer knew where he was. All he could do was kill.
The enemy were backing away from him, refusing to fight the butcher who killed with dreadful skill. Jack roared at them, daring them to come against him. He was covered with gore, his khaki uniform thick with blood and scraps of flesh. He cursed the men who would not fight him, his screams driving them back still further. His rage was fuelled by grief, the loss of Aamira more than he could bear. It sustained him, lending him strength, feeding his desire to kill. He went forward, stamping over the flesh of the dying and slashing his sword at any living soul he could reach.
The enemy had seen enough. They backed away further, and then, with a cry of terror, they broke.
Jack roared in frustration and made to go after them. A strong arm pulled at his shoulder.
‘Sir!’
He whirled on the spot. He saw the sergeant who had organised Nicholson’s litter. The man stepped back, lifting his arm, as if Jack was going to come at him with the gore-covered sword that had killed so many.
‘It’s over, sir. Time to get back.’
Jack staggered, his mind unable to grasp that the fight was finished.
‘Time to get back, sir.’ The sergeant gave the instruction for a second time.
This time it was enough to pierce the bloodlust. Jack lowered his sword. His boot kicked against one of the bodies that carpeted the ground around them. He could not recall ever seeing so many in one place. It was a charnel house. Grey-jacketed corpses lay intertwined with the bodies of the enemy, a sea of bloodied faces staring up at the sky. Some still moved, fighting against the rents and tears in their flesh, crying out for mercy, for aid, or simply for a bullet to end their agony. Others lay still, their eyes fixed open, their mouths stuck forever in the last gasp of life.
‘Fall back!’ Jack’s voice cracked. His mouth was parched, his tongue stuck against the roof of his mouth. He looked ahead. The enemy were pulling back to the Lahore Gate. He thought of leading the fusiliers forward, his instincts telling him to press home the attack, but he looked at the bloodied and exhausted men around him and knew they did not have the strength left in them. Somehow they had repelled the enemy attack, but there was a limit to how far grit and bloody-minded determination could take them. A limit they had surely left far behind.
‘Take back the wounded, then get into cover and reload.’ Jack barely had to raise his voice as he gave the orders. There were pitifully few men left to heed his command.
He forced his bloodied sword back into its scabbard before he bent down and hauled a wounded fusilier to his feet. He did not care that the man’s blood soaked into his jacket as he got an arm underneath his shoulder.
‘God bless you, sir.’ The fusilier grunted his thanks. Together they got moving, treading carefully past the ruined bodies, making slow and awkward progress back towards the Kabul Gate.
The great attack on Delhi was over.
They held the gate. The enemy launched a dozen attacks. Nearly all made it to the gate, the rebels and the wild fanatics who had swelled their ranks going toe to toe with the exhausted defenders. The fights were sharp and brutal, the men hacking at each other in vicious hand-to-hand melees. Each time, the rebels were repulsed. Somehow the shattered ranks of the 1st Bengal Fusiliers held on to what they had won.
There was no water. No food. Bodies were strewn everywhere, the wounded lying alongside the dead. Jack led them through it all, keeping them fighting and holding the ground they had battled so hard to win.
His rage was long gone, the wild emotion that had driven him into the first counter-attack long spent. He fought like an automaton, a machine of war quite without emotion. He did not know how many he killed. The blood had dried on his uniform and his arms were bloodied to the elbows so that he looked more like a butcher than a soldier.
The sun was setting when the first reinforcements reached them. To Jack’s mind they looked as battered and exhausted as the men from the 1st Bengal Fusiliers. But at least they had officers.
Jack said nothing as he slipped away. The reinforcements were under the command of a major, so he left the men he had commanded throughout the long, bitter afternoon to the care of a proper officer. He had no purpose in mind as he walked. His hopeless fantasy of finding Aamira had been washed away in the brutality of the fight. His anger had left him. The rage that had sustained him for so long was gone. Once again he was truly alone.
‘Jack?’
Fred Roberts was sitting on a wooden stool outside a peasant’s house no more than a hundred yards away from the fighting. He was meticulously going through the routine of reloading his revolver, but he looked up and spotted Jack staggering towards him.
Jack altered his path so that he could approach the young officer. Roberts had clearly been in the fighting, his face grey with a thick layer of dirt and powder smoke. But his uniform was nothing like Jack’s, and he blanched as he saw the thick layer of blood that covered his fellow officer’s arms and front.
‘Good grief.’ Roberts searched Jack’s face, his brow creased in concern as he understood the trial he had endured. ‘Sit here, man. You look done in.’
Jack did as he was told. He eased himself on to the stool, moving with the grace of an old man, every part of his body protesting.
‘Water?’ He spoke for the first time, summoning the energy to find the word.
‘Of course, here.’ Roberts rushed to get the soda bottle from around his neck. He handed it to Jack, who took it and lifted it to his mouth in one quick movement.
‘Nicholson is dying.’ The younger officer’s voice quivered as he gave Jack the news. ‘I found him. He was lying in a ditch. The bastard bearers had left him there so that they could go plundering.’ His voice caught and he cuffed at his eyes. ‘He knew he was dying. The sight of that great man lying helpless and on the point of death was more than I could bear.’ His head hung as he finished, his chin sagging so that it rested on his chest.
Jack tried to summon some emotion. He failed. He had seen too many men die that day. He could feel no more pity for a general’s death than he could for that of the lowliest redcoat. He would not measure one against the other.
‘Have we lost, then?’ The water had begun to revitalise him. For the first time in hours he felt a tiny bit alive.
‘No!’ Roberts was vehement in his reply. ‘We control around one quarter of the city. We will hold what we have taken. Even Wilson has agreed to that. We will gather our strength and then we will take the rest of this godforsaken place. We shall win through. We must.’
Jack envied the younger officer his certainty. His own hopes lay amongst the fallen. He levered himself to his feet. He did not know where he was going, but he felt compelled to move on, to distance himself from people he knew. He handed the water bottle back to Roberts.
‘Thank you.’
‘Where are you going?’ Roberts asked the question but his eyes stared at the ground. Jack was not the only one suffering that day.
‘I don’t know.’
Jack took a deep breath and walked away. He wanted to find a place to hide, somewhere he could bury himself in his grief. He wanted to be alone.
For Aamira was lost to him, and he did not know what to do.
Jack picked his way through the debris that littered the streets. Bodies lay in every direction. There were too many to collect. A rare few had been dragged to one side to be piled into grotesque heaps, but most simply lay where they had fallen. He walked through the quarter of the city that the British now controlled. The streets closest to the fighting were empty, the only living things the occasional officer or a lone runner on an errand. They were lit by fire, dozens of houses burning, casting a flickering orange light over the deserted alleyways and side streets. It was as though the city had been stripped of all life, the quiet spaces fit only for the dead.
He looked up as he walked. The fires lit much of the sky, but he still he found a skirmish line of stars in the darker patches. They stared
down, unperturbed by the bitter squabbles of man. He drank in their serene light, feeling it find its way through the gloom that smothered his mind.
Then he heard the screams.
A soldier staggered out of the nearest house and steered a course towards Jack, who stared back, unable to understand what he saw. The man carried a bundle of clothes. They could not have weighed more than a few pounds, certainly much less than the Enfield rifle that was slung over his shoulder. At first Jack supposed he had looted the house, the meagre findings a poor haul for risking the army’s punishment for the breaking of orders. But the look on the soldier’s face said something different.
‘I found him.’ The man spoke with an Irish accent. He searched Jack’s eyes as if seeking an answer, the words that would explain the brutality whose legacy he now cradled in his arms.
‘He’s just a bairn, a wee young boy. Who would do such a thing?’ The Irishman continued to stare at Jack as he asked the pointless question, his voice quivering with raw emotion.
Jack felt his exhaustion slipping away. He finally understood what the soldier had found. As he came close, he saw the tiny body of a dead baby, his head staved in by the callous butt of a rifle.
‘Put him down. You cannot help him now.’ Jack spoke gently, as if to a frightened child.
The Irishman obeyed. He placed the baby on the ground, gently patting its ruined head before sitting down heavily at its side.
Jack looked down at the bundle. He didn’t understood what he was doing, why he fought in a battle that would see a tiny infant slaughtered. He heard more screams, the dreadful sound of a city being put to the sword, and they drew him in like a moth pulled to the light of an oil lamp. He no longer knew who he was fighting; who was the enemy and who was on his own side. He left the Irish soldier behind and walked into the city of the damned.
The prisoners came out of the alley in a rush. They were crying, their dark faces streaked with tears. Their eyes shone white, their naked terror revealed. Some fell to their knees, their hands lifting towards the armed men who followed them. Their voices increased in volume as the prisoners begged for their lives, the frantic, pitiful bleats of the herd summoned to the butcher. The hard-faced men who had gathered the captives betrayed no emotion. They forced them into a huddle, their fists, boots and rifle butts used to encourage any who disobeyed.
More men were brought forward, the stragglers thrown into the pathetic crowd that keened with fear. Their capturers pulled back, forming a crude line to one side of the prisoners, who wept and cried out as they faced their deaths.
Jack saw that none of the men guarding the prisoners was wearing anything that could be considered a uniform. The civilians were all white men and their stained shirts were dotted with blood, their shirtsleeves rolled and bunched around their upper arms as they went about their vicious work.
He increased his pace. He knew what was about to happen. ‘Stop!’ He bellowed the order, knowing it would do nothing.
A few heads turned to look in his direction. But the men in the stained shirts paid him no heed. They shrugged their rifles from their shoulders and aimed them at the pathetic huddle of rebels, who cowered away from the threat.
They opened fire. At such close range, the bullets tore through flesh like a freshly sharpened knife would cut through silk. Bodies were torn apart, the captives cut down, not one left standing. The screaming stopped.
The prisoners lay in a heap of ruined flesh. A few bodies twitched or jerked, their groans and whimpers the only sounds left after the thunder of the volley. But their murderers turned away, deaf to the suffering, their jokes and banter the only eulogy the dead would get that day.
Jack would not be so easily ignored.
‘What the hell do you think you are doing?’ He felt the flames of rage beginning to burn once more. He loosened his sword in its scabbard and walked to do murder.
‘Who the fuck are you?’ A heavyset man stood in Jack’s path. Jack did not recognise him. He could only suppose that he was one of the hundreds of civilians who had attached themselves to the British troops. These adventurers, as they were playfully titled, followed the army, searching for plunder and for revenge. Many told terrible tales of children and women killed and defiled, and now the fighting had given them the opportunity to slake their basest desires.
‘Shut your foul muzzle!’ Jack snapped the reply and walked straight for the large man who was clearly the leader of the group.
The man hefted his rifle. A thin trail of powder smoke snaked from its barrel. Jack saw the blood caked to its butt, the gruesome stains the telling evidence that its owner had killed more men than just the ones Jack had witnessed.
‘Fuck off!’ The man snarled the words as Jack came close. He raised the rifle, twisting it in his meaty paws so that he was ready to use it to strike.
Jack stopped, no more than a pace away from him.
‘Now turn around and fuck off. It ain’t no business of yours what we are doing. These fuckers deserve to die.’ The man spat the words into Jack’s face. ‘We’re going to kill everyone we find, and there ain’t no one who is going to stop us. So shut your muzzle and—’
He never finished his sentence. Jack’s bloodied sabre whispered as he drew it from the scabbard and he cut hard, taking the man’s throat and cutting off the foul tirade.
The man fell to the ground, his body jerking in great spasms as he died. Jack stepped past him and stalked towards his cronies, his bloodied sword reaching for them.
They looked at his face. And they ran.
Jack felt no remorse at killing a man from his own side. He looked back and saw the Irishman still sitting peacefully beside the dead child. He had witnessed a mob beat a white mother and her child to death. Now he had seen the same vicious brutality brought down as retribution on any who happened to come to hand. His world had gone mad. The British might have captured this part of the great city, but it was the domain of the devil.
The flames rose high above the city. Huge clouds of black smoke swept up in the night sky, scraps of paper and burning embers caught up and blown far and wide. Jack felt the heat on his face as he walked through hell come to earth.
He was surrounded by madness. The streets were busier as he got further away from the fighting. Groups of soldiers staggered past him, some carrying loot, others drinking. All were engaged in an orgy of theft and debauchery on such a scale that Jack could not hope to curtail it.
He saw men being killed with casual disdain, the broken bodies kicked to one side. He watched a soldier from the 75th laugh as an old man begged for his life before the Highlander shot the man between the eyes. The old man fell back, his head shattered. The British soldier turned away, his face creased into a smile as he boasted to his mates of the accuracy of his aim.
A soldier dressed in the dirty grey coat of the 1st Bengal Fusiliers bayoneted an old woman who screeched at him too loudly, his face emotionless as she fell to the ground at his feet. He withdrew the bayonet and turned away as if he had done nothing more than stab one of the straw bodies used on the drill square.
There were soldiers aplenty in the streets closer to the breaches. Most were drunk, their officers too slow to destroy the stocks of beer and brandy the men had discovered in the streets that had been captured. The soldiers in the four columns had fought hard, braving the slaughter in the breaches and enduring the vicious hand-to-hand battles that had left close to one third of their number stretched out on the ground. Now they claimed their reward, any vestige of discipline collapsing as they drank themselves insensible. The officers could no nothing to stop them, and so they either retreated or joined the chaos.
A young officer staggered past. Jack recognised him at once. He had been in Barnard’s column that had marched through Alipore. He would have fought all those months ago at Badli-Ki-Serai before enduring everything the rebel army had thrown at the ridge in the months that had followed.
The officer lurched close. He was drunk, wafts of alcohol
surrounding him like a cloud, and he smiled as he recognised Jack.
‘Well met, old fellow. Well met.’ He reached for Jack’s hand, taking into his own before pumping it enthusiastically. ‘We are doing God’s work this day.’ He burped, and Jack pulled his hand away, sickened by the man’s touch. He saw fresh blood there, the gore transferred from the young officer.
‘I have killed the heathen.’ The officer’s words were slurred. ‘We are soldiers of the Lord and this is our divine vengeance on the godless heathen.’
Jack had heard enough. He punched the officer full in the mouth, knocking him to his backside.
‘I am a good soldier of Christ!’ The officer looked astonished. He spat the words at Jack, blood and spittle flung from his mouth.
For a moment Jack considered killing the foul creature in front of him, regardless of the consequences. To his eyes there was no difference between the horror being wrought on the citizens of Delhi by the British and the fate handed out by the mutineers when they had first arrived to tear the city apart with their madness.
He heard the sound of horses’ hooves. He tore his eyes from the bloodied face of the officer he had knocked to the ground and watched as a mounted party rode into the chaos.
They brought with them another group of prisoners. Jack watched as the riders dismounted and sorted the men from the women, the soldiers in khaki uniforms impervious to the screams and cries of their captives.
One man remained mounted. He controlled his troops like the leader of the battalion band conducting his musicians. Jack heard the braying voice as it issued the orders, a voice that he recognised in an instant.
Shots rang out. The male prisoners died in a hail of close-range rifle fire, their captors gunning them down without a qualm. The women were destined for a very different fate, and Jack heard the bellows of laughter as the men made their choices.
The Lone Warrior Page 33