From Marseille they moved again. This time they were given the same kind of railway train that they got at the very beginning of their journey at Ferozpur: a goods train, the floor of the compartments covered with thick layers of hay. The train would stop at small stations for hours. They travelled for three days through beautiful country until they reached their camp in Orléans. They stayed there for sixteen days waiting for orders from headquarters, route-marching every day. The regiment consisted of nine British officers, eighteen Indian NCOs and seven hundred and ninety men. On the fifth day of their stay the Duke of Connaught’s own son, Captain Prince Arthur, visited the regiment in person. Riding a white horse and dressed in an impressive uniform, this good-looking young man addressed the officers and men in the weak morning sun.
‘I still remember the happiness I felt a few years ago when I visited the regiment in Hong Kong. To see Indian troops standing side by side with the British in Europe today makes me doubly happy. I will inform my father, the colonel commandant of the regiment, that you are in good form. I leave you now in the hope of seeing you again in a short while at the battlefront.’
Nobody saw or heard from him again until some time later when someone read in a newspaper that he had been killed in action.
On the seventeenth day they boarded another goods train and arrived at a place that abounded in paper-making factories. They found they were not alone there. Route-marching, they passed the camp site of 57 Frontier Force. Hawknosed and moustached Pathan soldiers, washing their utensils inside the barbed-wire perimeter, waved at the sight of passing countrymen and called out ‘Hooa, hooa!’ Next evening they saw a line of vehicles, crawling like ants, approaching from a distance. The 29th Connaughts, their excited hands on the wire fence, waited with a collective thumping heart. The lorries were not for them. Their hopes died when they saw the vehicles turning towards the Frontier Force camp site. They were to wait and continue route-marching for a few days yet.
‘We shall be at the front tomorrow,’ someone would say. ‘Our lorries are coming.’
‘I can hear the sound of cannon,’ another would announce.
‘Then you will die on the way,’ a third would laugh, ‘without ever seeing a bomb.’
‘You never see a bomb anyway. Nor a bullet that hits you.’
‘You may not see it but you will know it when it rips through your arse.’
The peasants, who had never seen a war, talked about it without terror or bravado, as though it were no more than a joke. One day the staff captain told them where the front was. ‘It is two hundred miles away from here. In Belgium.’
‘What, not in France?’
‘No.’
Eventually they got their share of lorries. The vehicles travelled slowly, crossing the Belgian border and reaching their destination in twenty-four hours. They were lodged in the ghost town of Hollebeke. The battlefront was three miles away.
The town had been totally evacuated. All the best houses were commandeered by the white military – cavalry and artillery companies made up of three different nationalities: the Belgians, French and British. Two-storey houses were occupied by them, with their cooks, kitchens and boxes of dry rations. A few of the officers had their favourite horses in the ground-floor rooms as well. Headquarters staff were housed separately in a good large building. Then there were the shops, cleared of goods and their floors covered with corn stalks. Half the shops contained the horses and mules of cavalry and supply companies; the other half were reserved for the Indians.
The night sky hung low over the treetops, their leaves shivering in a light, cold wind. It was a narrow rectangle of a room, once a small shop, where the sixteen men of a machine-gun section, having eaten their dry meat and cheese rations, were lying down for the night. Some had promptly fallen asleep. A dim lantern hung in an alcove and two machine-guns stood by the wall; the ammunition was with the section commander.
‘Are the mules safe?’ Havaldar Thakur Das asked.
‘They are,’ Naim replied.
‘Who is on the watch?’
‘Spahi Ahmad.’
‘Who will take over?’
‘Riaz. At two o’clock.’
‘Check it before you sleep.’
‘I will.’
Naim had the familiar smell of dry corn stalks in his nostrils. The warm, humid breath of slumbering bodies was slowly spreading in the room. He undid his boots beneath his blanket and pushed them out with his half-warm feet. Thakur Das, who had made a small tent of his blanket by lifting his knees inside it and wrapping it all round him, including his face, and could even be heard snoring for a minute or two, suddenly poked his head out and asked, ‘Have you a cigarette?’
Naim gave him a cigarette, requesting him to go and smoke by the door to avoid setting the dry corn alight.
‘Let’s go and sit there,’ Thakur Das suggested.
‘I am tired,’ Naim said.
‘Oh, come on, keep me company.’
The two of them, wrapped up in blankets, went to the door, half opening it, and sat there smoking.
‘The floor is freezing,’ Naim said.
‘Will your complaints ever stop? Pull up some stalks. Let them catch fire. Who knows what will happen to the place when the attack comes.’
Naim slid some corn stalks underneath him and, feeling their comforting warmth, settled on them. ‘I wonder why the front is so quiet. Only three miles away and jackals are barking.’
‘The Germans haven’t attacked yet,’ Thakur Das informed him.
‘Who is in our front lines now?’
‘White troops. They are up against a whole enemy division.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Captain Maclean told me.’
Thakur Das threw his cigarette out of the door and wiped a huge hand over his two-day growth of beard. From the next shop came the sounds of mules’ nervous hoofs on the floor, followed by one of the animals urinating noisily on the corn stalks. Naim stuck his head out of the door and called out in a controlled voice, ‘Spahi Ahmad Khan!’
The soldier struck his rifle with the flat of his hand and answered back, ‘Present.’
‘Very good,’ Naim said to the dark night.
A fine, silent rain was falling outside. ‘This weather is bad for war,’ Thakur Das said.
Naim quietly shut the door.
‘In the rain that does not make a sound you don’t know what is coming,’ Thakur Das said again. ‘The worst is snowfall.’
‘Why?’ asked Naim.
‘First, it gets very cold. Then you slip on it.’
Naim laughed out loud.
‘What is funny?’ Thakur Das asked angrily.
‘Nothing. Where did you see snow?’
‘In the North West Frontier region. Action against the Afridis.’
They were diverted by a low roaring sound up above. Thakur Das opened the door and looked up. The noise got gradually nearer. A moving red light appeared in the sky, crossing from left to right. Following the point of light, the two of them, forgetting their blankets, got up and stepped out into the street, their mouths open and eyes fixed above them. The light and the roar disappeared quickly over and behind the rooftops. They stood there in the rain for a minute, looking at the featureless sky, then came back into the room.
‘This was an aeroplane,’ Thakur Das said confidently.
‘Was it the Germans’ aeroplane?’ Naim asked.
‘Don’t know.’
‘It had a red light.’
‘They all have a red light,’ said Thakur Das; then less certainly, ‘sometimes a green light.’
‘It makes more noise than cannons.’
‘They do.’
‘Have you seen it before?’
‘No, they have only now started flying.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Why are you always questioning me? Do you doubt my word?’
‘No, of course not,’ Naim said.
Naim excitedly lit a cigar
ette.
‘Finish your cigarettes here,’ Thakur Das said to him. ‘You can’t smoke at the front.’
‘Why not?’
‘Why? Why? The bullet will come at the cigarette end and take your face away, don’t you understand? Give me a cigarette.’
They sat smoking at their place just inside the closed door.
‘Maybe we go up tomorrow,’ Thakur Das said after a while. ‘I am fed up with here.’
Naim looked at him with a smile.
‘Don’t try to be clever,’ Thakur Das said. ‘I feel worse than the mules in this place.’
‘Yes,’ Naim said, ‘they only stand and urinate when they feel like it.’
‘Listen, boy, I am really fed up. It’s no joke. A man has got to be either facing the bullets or back home.’
‘Do you miss home?’ Naim asked him.
‘I do. I miss my wife.’
‘Do you love her?’
‘I miss her, is that not enough? I know that she misses me as well. Missing someone is better than loving them. You know, we got together in a strange way. I used to be in the business of women.’
‘Business of women?’
‘Buying and selling them, that is what we used to do, Ram Singh and I. We lifted them from Ambala, Ludhiana, Rohtak and took them to Punjab. They fetched good money in Lyallpur, Sargodha, Multan, from bid landlords. We never had any use for them ourselves, we were well-known kabaddi players, only looked after our health and strength. But one day it happened.’
‘What happened?’
‘I heard that a kumhari had given out a call that should there exist a real man in the world, he may come and take her away. My moustache curled up at the sound of this. I found out that the kumhar, the woman’s husband, was a champion wrestler in the area and his mother used to lock him and his wife in a room and didn’t let them out till the morning. So going there at night was out of the question.’ Thakur Das’s voice was halted by phlegm in his throat. He cleared it and went on, ‘So, going there at night was no use. I sent word through a go-between woman that I would be under a pipal tree a half-furlong from her village on a certain day at the time that the sun begins to slip from overhead, and if she is a woman of her word she may come out and meet me. That day I waited under the tree for an hour and she didn’t come. I fell asleep from the heat of the sun. I was woken by the point of a stick being poked in my belly. I opened my eyes and saw a young man standing there. “What do you want?” I asked. “You send a message with pride and then you shut your eyes. Shame on you. It is not a man who sleeps as he awaits a woman,” said the young man. Except that it was no young man, it was her in disguise. We started off together from there and spent the night at a friend’s house in another village. In the morning she says, “Marry me.” I promised to do so just to silence her and took her to Amritsar. There I sold her to a customer for one hundred silver rupees and escaped from there in the dark of the night. That was that, I thought. But no. I was sleeping in my own house a few days later when I was woken up again. Can you believe it, woken from deep sleep twice in a row by the same woman? This time she was sitting on my chest with a dagger in her hand.’ Thakur Das stopped.
‘What happened then?’ Naim asked.
‘What do you think? Could you say no with a knife at your throat?’
‘You married her?’
‘We have been married for fourteen years.’
Confused, Naim blurted out the question, ‘But why?’
‘Why what?’
‘She had a husband, strong, a wrestler – I mean…’ He ran out of words.
‘Yes,’ Thakur Das said, himself confused, as if he did not understand what the question was about.
In another shop a soldier began to sing, in a low, dry voice, a song of bereavement and departure. Naim threw the corn stalks from underneath him on to the nearest sleeping soldiers and went back to his bed. Thakur Das followed him.
‘I know of women,’ he said, ‘who have six babies with one man and then run off with another. Surindri got me at the point of a knife, got the pandit at the point of a knife to marry us. You know, the two of us were on horseback and the pandit, trembling with fear, led the horse by the reins and took us through the rounds. Ha ha! But listen, since that day she has not raised her voice to me. She misses me. I know it here,’ Thakur Das patted his chest, ‘here. She speaks to me here.’ He patted his chest again.
‘I am going to sleep,’ Naim said, covering his face with the blanket.
CHAPTER 9
THE GERMAN ATTACK came at Ypres. The battle continued until November. The Ferozpur Brigade marched to Belville where General French issued orders for the brigade to join the Second Cavalry Division. The 129th Duke of Connaught’s Own was put under the command of Brigadier-General Vaughan who commanded the Third Cavalry Brigade. In the morning they reached the firing line and took over from the 5th and 6th Lancers. Naim’s company was on the right flank by a vast wood whose dense trees, after running across the plain for a short distance, suddenly climbed a steep hill, looking like a herd of elephants going up to the top. Grass grew uncut everywhere, holding within it the fallen leaves of autumn.
Machine-guns were fixed in the trenches evacuated by the Lancers, who had left behind their empty ration tins, pieces of hard biscuit and cigarette ends. Eight men were deputed to each of the two machine-guns. Two more sections, with a gap of twenty yards between them, had taken up position, their four guns fixed in the already-dug foundations. The German attack had begun on the northern front, and sounds of artillery were reaching the southern positions. Ahead of the machine-gun positions, at a slightly lower level, were the trenches of cavalry units. The Second Cavalry Division occupied a three-and-a-half-mile area between Hollebeke and the canal bridge. The trenches were a mile-and-a-half long. The left position was taken by the Third Brigade.
All day the sun shone on them and they sat there, waiting for orders. The trenches were cold and wet, and strange-looking insects crawled in them.
‘Where is Havaldar Noor Mohammad?’ Naim asked.
‘At the outpost, top of the staff headquarters building,’ Thakur Das answered, carefully picking up an insect and releasing it on the back of his hand.
‘He was saying we will definitely attack this morning.’
‘Yes, everyone thinks he is Brigadier-General Vaughan,’ Thakur Das said. ‘We will not attack, the enemy will. They did in the north too.’
In front of them the sun was going down on the broken landscape. The trenches camouflaged hundreds of soldiers’ faces, red, brown and black, their ears cocked to the continuous low roar of artillery to the north, eyes glittering with the fever of a weary vigil.
‘Motherfuckers,’ Naim muttered, crushing a whole line of insects under his boot.
Thakur Das looked at him in mild alarm. Then he called out, ‘Riaz, got the belts?’
‘Got them,’ the soldier answered.
‘Gul Mohammad, you go now,’ he ordered. ‘Riaz and Ram Lal, you two take out the bullets and put them back in again. Practise, practise. Two hundred and fifty rounds go in three minutes, remember.’
Naim was killing the insects with the flat of his bayonet which he had unhinged from his rifle.
‘Don’t kill them, don’t kill anything in your own trench,’ Thakur Das said to him gently. ‘There are rules in a field of battle.’
Naim gathered the dead creatures with his bayonet into a small heap on one side and raised himself on his knees. Gul Mohammad, crawling away behind the trench, passed the section commander and saluted him in a lying position. The section commander went on to speak briefly to a lean white officer and then came straight to the trenches. He stopped at each of the machine-gun positions and spoke to the men.
‘Well done, men. We will attack tomorrow.’ The officer tossed a packet of cigarettes to them before departing.
‘Tomorrow, tomorrow,’ Thakur Das said. ‘This is the third time he has said it. The pig can’t find some other place to go telling
lies.’ He took a cigarette out of the packet and gave one to Naim, throwing the rest to the others. The soldiers lunged at them. They lit their cigarettes. ‘No head rises above the trench now, boys,’ Thakur Das warned.
They smoked in silence. The clouds were hanging low and a biting wind blew over the earth, swirling in the trenches.
‘You know,’ Thakur Das said, digging the nail of his first finger into the mud wall of the trench in front of him, ‘it was a cloudy day the time that Surindri and I were married. You should have seen the face of the pandit …’ He laughed.
A sudden hard knot of resentment – of unknown origin, a throwback to what seemed many ages ago – gripped Naim’s stomach. ‘Fine place to talk of women,’ he said, anger showing in his voice. ‘What are you so happy about?’
Naim’s reaction surprised Thakur Das. ‘Any place is good enough to talk of women,’ he said plainly. ‘If you go looking for a place to be happy in, you will never find it.’ Then with concern, ‘Are you feeling all right?’
With an effort of will, Naim calmed himself. ‘I am all right,’ he said, pretending to cough. He spat. ‘Perhaps this tobacco is bad.’
‘English cigarettes, these are,’ Thakur Das said.
About midnight it started to rain. It went on falling for four hours. There weren’t enough tarpaulins to cover the trenches. Whatever they had – machine-gun covers, their coats – they tried holding up, wrinkling them to make channels for the rainwater to flow away. Nothing they did succeeded in keeping the water out. By the time the rain stopped they were standing in calf-deep water. They started to bail the water out with the help of empty ration tins. The section commander walked up and down the trenches, saying, ‘Well done, men. Buck up. Good show.’ In the midst of this they heard a drone overhead.
‘Down,’ Thakur Das shouted. ‘On the ground.’
They dived face-down, their noses buried in runny mud, while the red light above quickly crossed the sky and faded away.
‘Oh, get up, men, get up,’ the section commander was saying. ‘Those things are not going to attack you, they only come to look.’
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