‘I am only twenty miles, as the crow flies, from your border. Come and fetch me.’
‘Some day we will come,’ said the Government, ‘and hanged will you be.’
The Gulla Kutta Mullah let the matter from his mind. He knew that the patience of the Government was as long as a summer day; but he did not realise that its arm was as long as a winter night. Months afterwards, when there was peace on the Border, and all India was quiet, the Indian Government turned in its sleep and remembered the Gulla Kutta Mullah at Bersund, with his thirteen outlaws. The movement against him of one single regiment – which the telegrams would have translated as brutal war – would have been highly impolitic. This was a time for silence and speed, and above all, absence of bloodshed.
You must know that all along the north-west frontier ofIndia is spread a force of some thirty thousand foot and horse, whose duty it is to quietly and unostentatiously shepherd the tribes in front of them. They move up and down, and down and up, from one desolate little post to another; they are ready to take the field at ten minutes’ notice; they are always half in and half out of a difficulty somewhere along the monotonous line; their lives are as hard as their own muscles, and the papers never say anything about them. It was from this force that the Government picked its men.
One night at a station where the mounted night patrol fire as they challenge, and the wheat rolls in great blue-green waves under our cold northern moon, the officers were playing billiards in the mud-walled clubhouse, when orders came to them that they were to go on parade at once for a night drill. They grumbled, and went to turn out their men – a hundred English troops, let us say, two hundred Goorkhas, and about a hundred of the finest native cavalry in the world.
When they were on the parade ground, it was explained to them in whispers that they must set off at once across the hills to Bersund. The English troops were to post themselves round the hills at the side of the valley; the Goorkhas would command the gorge and the death-trap, and the cavalry would fetch a long march round and get to the back of the circle of hills, whence, if there were any difficulty, they could charge down on the Mullah’s men. But the orders were very strict that there should be no fighting and no noise. They were to return in the morning with every round of ammunition intact, and the Mullah and the thirteen outlaws bound in their midst. If they were successful, no one would know or care anything about their work; but failure meant probably a small border war, in which the Gulla Kutta Mullah would be posed in the English newspapers as a popular leader against a big, bullying Power, instead of a common Border murderer.
Then there was silence, broken only by the clicking of the compass needles and snapping of watch-cases, as the heads of columns compared bearings and made appointments for the rendezvous. Five minutes later the parade-ground was empty; the green coats of the Goorkhas and the overcoats of theEnglish troops had faded into the darkness, and the cavalry were cantering away in the face of a blinding drizzle.
What the Goorkhas and the English did will be seen later on. The heavy work lay with the horse, for it had to go far and pick its way clear of habitations. Many of the troopers were natives of that part of the world, ready and anxious to fight against their kin, and some of the officers had made private and unofficial excursions into those hills before. They crossed the Border, found a dried river-bed, cantered up that, walked through a stony gorge, risked crossing a low hill under cover of the darkness, skirted another hill, leaving their hoof-marks deep in some ploughed ground, felt their way along another watercourse, ran over the neck of a spur praying that no one would hear their horses grunting, and so worked on in the rain and the darkness, till they had left Bersund and its crater of hills a little behind them, and to the left, and it was time to swing round. The ascent commanding the back of Bersund was steep, and they halted to draw breath in a broad level valley below the height. That is to say, the men reined up, but the horses blown as they were, refused to halt. There was unchristian language, the worse for being delivered in a whisper, and you heard the saddles squeaking in the darkness as the horses plunged.
The subaltern at the rear of one troop turned in his saddle and said very softly:
‘Carter, what the Blessed Heavens are you doing at the rear? Bring your men up, man.’
There was no answer, till a trooper replied;
‘Carter Sahib is forward – not there. There is nothing behind us.’
‘There is,’ said the subaltern. ‘The squadron’s walking on its own tail.’
Then the Major in command moved down to the rear, swearing softly and asking for the blood of Lieutenant Halley – the subaltern who had just spoken.
‘Look after your rearguard,’ said the Major. ‘Some of your infernal thieves have got lost. They’re at the head of the squadron, and you’re a several kinds of idiot.’
‘Shall I tell off my men, sir?’ said the subaltern sulkily, for he was feeling wet and cold.
Tell ’em off!’ said the Major. ‘Whip ’em off, by Gad! You’re squandering them all over the place. There’s a troop behind you now!’
‘So I was thinking,’ said the subaltern calmly. ‘I have all my men here, sir. Better speak to Carter.’
‘Carter Sahib sends salaam and wants to know why the squadron is stopping,’ said a trooper to Lieutenant Halley.
‘Where under heaven is Carter?’ said the Major.
‘Forward, with his troop,’ was the answer.
‘Are we walking in a ring, then, or are we the centre of a blessed brigade?’ said the Major.
By this time there was silence all along the column. The horses were still; but, through the drive of the fine rain, men could hear the feet of many horses moving over stony ground.
‘We’re being stalked,’ said Lieutenant Halley.
‘They’ve no horses here. Besides they’d have fired before this,’ said the Major. ‘It’s – it’s villagers’ ponies.’
‘Then our horses would have neighed and spoilt the attack long ago. They must have been near us for half an hour,’ said the subaltern.
‘Queer that we can’t smell the horses,’ said the Major, damping his finger and rubbing it on his nose as he sniffed up-wind.
‘Well, it’s a bad start,’ said the subaltern, shaking the wet from his overcoat. ‘What shall we do, sir?’
‘Get on,’ said the Major; ‘we shall catch it tonight.’
The column moved forward very gingerly for a few paces. Then there was an oath, a shower of blue sparks as shod hoofs crashed on small stones, and a man rolled over with a jangle of accoutrements that would have waked the dead.
‘Now we’ve gone and done it,’ said Lieutenant Halley. ‘All the hillside awake, and all the hillside to climb in the face of musketry fire. This comes of trying to do night-hawk work.’
The trembling trooper picked himself up and tried to explain that his horse had fallen over one of the little cairns that are built of loose stones on the spot where a man has beenmurdered. There was no need to go on. The Major’s big Australian charger blundered next, and the men came to a halt in what seemed to be a very graveyard of little cairns all about two feet high. The manoeuvres of the squadron are not reported. Men said that it felt like mounted quadrilles without the training and without the music; but at last the horses, breaking rank and choosing their own way, walked clear of the cairns, till every man of the squadron reformed and drew rein a few yards up the slope of the hill. Then, according to Lieutenant Halley, there began another scene very like the one which has been described. The Major and Carter insisted that all the men had not joined ranks, and that there were more of them in the rear clicking and blundering among the dead men’s cairns. Lieutenant Halley told off his own troopers for the second or third time, and resigned himself to wait. Later on he said to me: –
‘I didn’t much know, and I didn’t much care, what was going on. The row of that trooper falling ought to have scared half the country, and I would take my oath that we were being stalked by a full r
egiment in the rear, and they were making row enough to rouse all Afghanistan. I sat tight, but nothing happened.’
The mysterious part of the night’s work was the silence on the hillside. Everybody knew that the Gulla Kutta Mullah had his outpost huts on the reverse side of the hill, and everybody expected, by the time that the Major had sworn himself into a state of quiet, that the watchmen there would open fire. When nothing occurred, they thought that the gusts of the rain had deadened the sound of the horses, and thanked Providence. At last the Major satisfied himself (a) that he had left no one behind among the cairns, and (b) that he was not being taken in the rear by a large and powerful body of cavalry. The men’s tempers were thoroughly spoiled, the horses were lathered and unquiet and one and all prayed for the daylight.
They set themselves to climb up the hill, each man leading his mount carefully. Before they had covered the lower slopes or the breast-plates had begun to tighten, a thunderstorm came up behind, rolling across the low hills and drowningany noise less than that of cannon. The first flash of the lightning showed the bare ribs of the ascent, the hill-crest standing steely blue against the black sky, the little falling lines of the rain, and, a few yards of their left flank, an Afghan watchtower, two-storied, built of stone, and entered by a ladder from the upper story. The ladder was up, and a man with a rifle was leaning from the window. The darkness and the thunder rolled down in an instant, and, when the lull followed, a voice from the watchtower cried, ‘Who goes there?’
The cavalry were very quiet, but each man gripped his carbine and stood to his horse. Again the voice called, ‘Who goes there?’ and in a louder key, ‘O brothers, give the alarm!’ Now, every man in the cavalry would have died in his long boots sooner than have asked for quarter; but it is a fact that the answer to the second call was a long wail of ‘Marf karo! Marf karo!’ which means, ‘Have mercy! Have mercy!’ It came from the climbing regiment.
The cavalry stood dumbfoundered, till the big troopers had time to whisper one to another: ‘Mir Khan, was that thy voice? Abdullah, didst thou call?’ Lieutenant Halley stood beside his charger and waited. So long as no firing was going on he was content. Another flash of lightning showed the horses with heaving flanks and nodding heads, the men, white eyeballed, glaring beside them, and the stone watchtower to the left. This time there was no head at the window, and the rude iron-clamped shutter that could turn a rifle-bullet was closed.
‘Go on, men,’ said the Major. ‘Get up to the top at any rate.’
The squadron toiled forward the horses wagging their tails and the men pulling at the bridles, the stones rolling down the hillside and the sparks flying. Lieutenant Halley declares that he never heard a squadron make so much noise in his life. They scrambled up, he said, as though each horse had eight legs and a spare horse to follow him. Even then there was no sound from the watchtower, and the men stopped exhausted on the ridge that overlooked the pit of darkness in which the village of Bersund lay. Girths were loosed, curb-chains shifted, and saddles adjusted, and the men dropped down among thestones. Whatever might happen now, they held the upper ground of any attack.
The thunder ceased, and with it the rain, and the soft, thick darkness of a winter night before the dawn covered them all. Except for the sound of running water among the ravines, everything was still. They heard the shutter of the watchtower below them thrown back with a clang, and the voice of the watcher calling: ‘Oh, Hafiz Ullah!’
The echoes took up the call – ‘La-la-la!’ – and an answer came from a watchtower hidden round the curve of the hill, ‘What is it, Shahbaz Khan?’
Shahbaz Khan replied, in the high-pitched voice of the mountaineer: ‘Hast thou seen?’
The answer came back: ‘Yes. God deliver us from all evil spirits!’
There was a pause, and then: ‘Hafiz Ullah, I am alone! Come to me!’
‘Shahbaz Khan, I am alone also; but I dare not leave my post!’
‘That is a lie; thou art afraid.’
A longer pause followed, and then: ‘I am afraid. Be silent! They are below us still. Pray to God and sleep.’
The troopers listened and wondered, for they could not understand what save earth and stone could lie below the watchtowers.
Shahbaz Khan began to call again: ‘They are below us. I can see them. For the pity of God come over to me, Hafiz Ullah! My father slew ten of them. Come over!’
Hafiz Ullah answered to the darkness in a very loud voice, ‘Mine was guiltless. Hear, ye Men of the Night, neither my father nor my blood had any part in that sin. Bear thou thine own punishment, Shahbaz Khan.’
‘Oh, someone ought to stop those two chaps crowing away like cocks there,’ said Lieutenant Halley, shivering under his rock.
He had hardly turned round to expose a new side of him to the rain before a long-locked, evil-smelling Afghan rushed up the hill, and tumbled into his arms. Halley sat upon him, andthrust as much of a sword-hilt as could be spared down the man’s gullet. ‘If you cry out, I kill you,’ he said cheerfully.
The man was beyond, any expression of terror: he lay and quaked, gasping. When Halley took the sword-hilt from between his teeth, he was still inarticulate, but clung to Halley’s arm, feeling it from elbow to wrist.
‘The Rissala! the dead Rissala!’ he gulped at last. ‘It is down there!’
‘No; the Rissala, the very much alive Rissala. It is up here,’said Halley, unshipping his watering-bridle, and fastening the man’s hands. ‘Why were you in the towers so foolish as to let us pass?’
‘The valley is full of the dead,’ said the Afghan. ‘It is better to fall into the hands of the English than the hands of the dead. They march to and fro below there. I saw them in the lightning.’
The Mark of the Beast and Other Fantastical Tales Page 36