I don’t know any sound like it for shivering the soul. I’ve heard it in Dahomey, when the Amazons were after us, and in South American backwaters, and on a night on the Papar River in Borneo when the Iban head-hunters took the warpath – the muted rumble of doom that conjures up spectres with painted faces creeping towards you through the dark. They’re usually damned real spectres, too – as they were here, for I’d barely given my order when there was a whistle and a thud, and Grady, on the edge of the clearing, was staggering with an arrow in his brow, and with a chorus of blood-chilling screams they were on us – black, half-naked figures swarming out of the trees, yelling bloody murder. I snapped off one shot – God knows where it went – and then I was haring for the temple. I made it a split second ahead of two arrows which quivered in the doorpost, and then we were tumbling inside, with Delafosse and Thomson crouched in the doorway, blazing away as hard as they could.
They came storming up to the doorway in a great rabble, and for the next five minutes it was as bloody and desperate a mêlée as ever I’ve been in. We were so packed in the tiny space inside the building – it wasn’t more than eight feet square, and about that number of us had got inside – that only two of us could fire through the door at once. Whoever the attackers were – half-human jungle people, apparently, infected by the general Mutiny madness – they didn’t appear to have fire-arms, and the foremost of them were shot down before they could get close enough to use their spears and long swords. But their arrows buzzed in like hornets, and two of our fellows went down before the attack slackened off. We were just getting our breath back, and I was helping Thomson push an arrow through and out of the fleshy part of Private Murphy’s arm – and all the time we could hear our besiegers grunting and fumbling stealthily close under the temple wall – when Delafosse suddenly whoops out “Fire, fire! They’ve set the place alight!”
Sure enough, a gust of smoke came billowing in the doorway, setting us coughing and stumbling; a fire-arrow came zipping in to bury itself in Private Ryan’s side, and the yells of the niggers redoubled triumphantly. I staggered through the reek, and Thomson was clutching my arm, shouting:
“Must break out … two volleys straight in front … run for it …”
It was an affair of split seconds; there wasn’t time to think or argue. He and Delafosse and two of the privates stumbled to the door, Thomson yells “Fire!”, they all let blast together, and then we put our heads down and went charging out of the temple, with the flames licking up behind us, and drove in a body across the clearing for the shelter of the jungle. The niggers shrieked at the sight of us, I saw the man before me tumble down with a spear in his back, I cannoned into a black figure and he fell away, and then we were haring through the trees, my musket was gone, and no thought but flight. Delafosse was in front of me; I followed him as he swerved on to the path, with the arrows whipping past us; booted feet were thumping behind me, and Thomson was shouting, “On, on – we can distance ’em! – come on, Murphy, Sullivan – to the boat!”
How we broke clear, God knows – the very suddenness with which we’d rushed from the temple must have surprised them – but we could hear their yells in the jungle behind, and they weren’t giving up the hunt, either. My lungs were bursting as we ploughed through the thicker jungle near the river, tripping on snags, tearing ourselves, sobbing with exhaustion – and then we were on the bank, and Delafosse was sliding to a halt in the mud and yelling.
“It’s gone! Vibart! My God, the boat’s gone!”
The mudbank was empty – there was the great groove where the barge had been, but the brown stretch of water was unbroken to the wall of green on its far side; of the barge there wasn’t a sign.
“It must have slid off –” Delafosse was crying, and I thought, good for you, my boy, let’s stop to consider how it happened, eh, and the niggers can come up and join in. I didn’t even check stride; I went into the water in the mightiest racing dive I ever performed, and I heard the cries and splashes as the others took to the river behind me. I was striking out blindly, feeling the current tugging me downstream – I didn’t mind; anywhere would do so long as it was away from those black devils screeching in the forest behind. The far bank was too distant to reach, but downstream where the river curved there were islands and sandbanks, and we were being carried towards them far faster than our pursuers could hope to run. I swam hard with the current, until the yelping of the niggers had faded into the distance, and then glanced round to see how the others were getting along. There were four heads bobbing in the water – Delafosse, Thomson, Murphy, and Sullivan, all swimming in my wake, and I was just debating whether to make for the nearest sandbank or allow myself to be carried past, when Delafosse reared up in the water, yelling and gesturing ahead of me. I couldn’t make him out, and then the single shrieked word “Muggers!” reached me, and as I looked where he was pointing the steamy waters of the Ganges seemed to turn to ice.
On a mudbank a hundred yards ahead and to my right, shapes were moving – long, brown, hideously scaly dragons waddling down to the water at frightening speed, plashing into the shallows and then gliding out inexorably to head us off, their half-submerged snouts rippling the surface. For an instant I was paralysed – then I was thrashing at the water in a frenzy of terror, trying to get out into midstream, fighting the sluggish current. I knew it was hopeless; they must intercept us long before we could reach the islands, but I lashed out blindly, ploughing through the water, too terrified to look and expecting every moment to feel the agonising stab of crocodile teeth in my legs. I was almost done, with exhaustion and panic, and then Sullivan was alongside, tugging at me, pointing ahead – and I saw that the placid surface was breaking up into a long, swirling race where the water ran down between two little scrubby mudbanks. There was just a chance, if we could get into that broken water, that the faster current might carry us away – muggers hate rough water, anyway – and I went for it with the energy of despair.
One glance I spared to my right – my God, there was one of the brutes within ten yards, swirling towards me. I had a nightmare glimpse of that hideous snout breaking surface, of the great tapering jaws suddenly yawning in a cavern of teeth – and I regret to say I did not notice whether the fourth tooth of the lower jaw was overlapping or not. A naturalist chap, to whom I described my experience a few years ago, tells me that if I’d taken note of this, I’d have known whether I was being attacked by a true crocodile or gavial, or by some other species, which would have added immense interest to the occasion.33 As it was, I can only say that the bloody thing looked like an Iron Maiden rushing at me through the water, and I was just letting out a last wail of despair when Sullivan seized me by the hair, the current tore at our legs, and we were swept away into the rough water between the islands, striking out any old way, going under into the choking brown, coming up again and struggling to stay afloat – and then the water had changed to clinging black ooze, and Sullivan was crying:
“Up, up, sir, for Christ’s sake!” and he was half-dragging me through the slime towards the safety of a tangled mass of creeper on top of a mudbank. Delafosse was staggering out beside us, Thomson was knee-deep in the water smashing with a piece of root at the head of a mugger which lunged and snapped before swirling away with a flourish of its enormous tail: Murphy, his arm trickling blood, was already up on the top of the bank, reaching down to help us. I heaved up beside him, shuddering, and I remember thinking: that must be the end, nothing more can happen now, and if it does, I don’t care, I’ll just have to die, because there’s nothing I can do. Sullivan was kneeling over me, and I remember I said:
“God bless you, Sullivan. You are the noblest man alive,” or something equally brilliant – although I meant it, by God – and he replied: “I daresay you’re right, sir; you’ll have to tell my missus, for damn me if she thinks so.” And then I must have swooned away, for all I can remember is Delafosse saying: “I believe they are friends – see, Thomson, they are waving to us –
they mean us no harm,” and myself thinking, if it’s the muggers waving, don’t you trust the bastards an inch, they’re only pretending to be friendly …34
* * *
a Half-caste.
b Literally, “a tight man”.
c Dress of honour, usually on ceremonial occasions.
d Take care!
e To make clean – i.e., clean you up.
Chapter 11
Luck, as I’ve often observed, is an agile sprite who jumps both ways in double quick time. You could say it had been evil chance that took me to Meerut and the birth of the Mutiny – but I’d escaped, only to land in the hell of Cawnpore, from which I was one of only five to get clear away after the ghat massacre. It had been the foulest luck to run into those wild men in the jungle, and the infernal muggers – but if they hadn’t chased us, we mightn’t have fetched up on a mudbank under the walls of one of those petty Indian rulers who stayed loyal to the Sirkar. For that was what had happened – the new niggers whom Delafosse saw waving and hallooing from the shore turned out to be the followers of one Diribijah Singh, a tough old maharaj who ruled from a fort in the jungle, and was a steadfast friend of the British. So you see, all that matters about luck is that it should run good on the last throw.
Not that the game was over, you understand; when I think back on the Mutiny, even on Cawnpore, I can say that the worst was still to come. And yet, I feel that the tide turned on that mudbank; at least, after a long nightmare, I can say that there followed a period of comparative calm, for me, in which I was able to recruit my tattered nerves, and take stock, and start planning how to get the devil out of this Indian pickle and back to England and safety.
For the moment, there was nothing to do but thank God and the loyal savages who picked us up from that shoal, with the muggers snuffling discontentedly in the wings. The natives took us ashore, to the maharaj’s castle, and he was a brick – a fine old sport with white whiskers and a belly like a barrel, who swore damnation to all mutineers and promised to return us to our own folk as soon as we had recovered and it seemed safe to pass through the country round. But that wasn’t for several weeks, and in the meantime the five of us could only lie and recuperate and contain our impatience as best we might – Delafosse and Thomson were itching to get back into the thick of things; Murphy and Sullivan, the two privates, kept their counsel and ate like horses; while I, making an even greater show of impatience than my brother-officers, was secretly well content to rest at ease, blinking in the sun and eating mangoes, to which I’m partial.
In the meantime, we later discovered, great things were happening in the world beyond. When news of Cawnpore’s fall got out, it gave the Mutiny a tremendous fillip; revolt spread all along the Ganges valley and in Central India, the garrisons at Mhow and Agra and a dozen other places rebelled, and most notable of all, Henry Lawrence got beat fighting a dam’ silly battle at Chinhat, and had to hole up in Lucknow, which went under siege. On the credit side, my old friend the First Gravedigger (General Havelock to you) finally got up off his Puritan rump and struck through Allahabad at Cawnpore; he fought his way in after a nine-day march, and recaptured the place a bare three weeks after we’d been driven out – and I suppose all the world knows what he found when he got there.
You remember that when we escaped the massacre at the Suttee Ghat, the barges with the women and children were caught by the pandies. Well, Nana took them ashore, all 200 of them, and locked them up in a place called the Bibigarh, in such filth and heat that thirty of them died within a week. He made our women grind corn; then, when word came that Havelock was fighting his way in, and slaughtering all opposition, Nana had all the women and children butchered. They say even the pandies wouldn’t do it, so he sent in hooligans with cleavers from the Cawnpore bazaar; they chopped them all up, even the babies, and threw them, dead and still living, down a well. Havelock’s people found the Bibigarh ankle-deep in blood, with children’s toys and hats and bits of hair still floating in it; they had got there two days too late.
I don’t suppose any event in my lifetime – not Balaclava nor Shiloh nor Rorke’s Drift nor anywhere else I can think of – has had such a stunning effect on people’s minds as that Cawnpore massacre of the innocents. I didn’t see the full horror of it, of course, as Havelock’s folk did, but I was there a few weeks after, and walked in the Bibigarh, and saw the bloody floor and walls, and near the well I found the skeleton bones of a baby’s hand, like a little white crab in the dust. I’m a pretty cool hand, as you know, but it made me gag, and if you ask me what I think of the vengeance that old General Neill wreaked, making captured mutineers clean up the Bibigarh, flogging ’em and forcing ’em to lick up the blood with their tongues before they were hanged – well, I was all for it then, and I still am. Perhaps it’s because I knew the corpses that went into that well – I’d seen them playing on the Cawnpore rampart, and being heard their lessons in that awful barrack, and laughing at the elephant dunging. Perhaps that baby hand I found belonged to the infant I’d seen in the arms of the woman in the torn gown. Anyway, I’d have snuffed out every life in India, and thought naught of it, in that moment when I looked at Bibigarh – and if you think that shocking, well, maybe I’m just more like Nana Sahib than you are.
Anyway, what I think don’t signify. What mattered was the effect that Cawnpore had on our people. I know it turned our army crazy; they were ready to slaughter anything that even sniffed of mutiny, from that moment on. Not that they’d been dealing exactly kindly before; Havelock and Neill had been hanging right, left and centre from Allahabad north, and I daresay had disposed of quite a number of innocents – just as the pandies at Meerut and Delhi had done.35
What beats me is the way people take it to heart – what do they expect in war? It ain’t conducted by missionaries, or chaps in Liberal clubs, snug and secure. But what amuses me most is the way fashionable views change – why, for years after Cawnpore, any vengeance wreaked on an Indian, mutineer or not, was regarded as just vengeance; nothing was too bad for ’em. Now it’s t’other way round, with eminent writers crying shame, and saying nothing justified such terrible retribution as Neill took, and we were far guiltier than the niggers had been. Why? Because we were Christians, and supposed to know better? – and because England contains this great crowd of noisy know-alls that are forever defending our enemies’ behaviour and crying out in pious horror against our own. Why our sins are always so much blacker, I can’t fathom – as to Cawnpore, it don’t seem to me one whit worse to slay in revenge, like Neill, than out of sheer spite and cruelty, like Nana; at least it’s more understandable.
The truth is, of course, that both sides were afraid – the pandy who’d mutinied, and feared punishment, decided he might as well be hanged for a sheep, and let his natural bloodlust go – they’re cruel bastards at bottom. And our folk – they’d had an almighty scare, and Cawnpore brought their natural bloodlust to the top in turn; just give ’em a few well-chosen texts about vengeance and wrath of God and they could fall to with a will – as I’ve already observed about Rowbotham’s Mosstroopers, there’s nothing crueller than a justified Christian. Except maybe a nigger running loose.
So you can see it was a jolly summer in the Ganges valley, all right, as I and my four companions discovered, when Diribijah Singh finally convoyed us out from his fort and back to Cawnpore after Havelock had retaken it. I hadn’t seen old Blood-and-Bones since he’d stood grumping beside my bed at Jallalabad fifteen years before, and time hadn’t improved him; he still looked like Abe Lincoln dying of diarrhoea, with his mournful whiskers and bloodhound eyes. When I told him my recent history he just listened in silence, and then grabbed me by the wrist with his great bony hand, dragged me down on to my knees beside him, and began congratulating God on lugging Flashy out of the stew again, through His infinite mercy.
“The shield of His truth has been before thee, Flashman,” cries he. “Has not the Hand which plucked thee from the paw of the bear at Kabul, and the
jaws of the lion at Balaclava, delivered thee also from the Philistine at Cawnpore?”
“Absolutely, amen,” says I, but when I took him into my confidence – about Palmerston, and why I came to India in the first place, and suggested there was no good reason why I shouldn’t head for home at once – he shook his great coffin head.
“It cannot be,” says he. “That mission is over, and we need every hand at the plough. The fate of this country is in the balance, and I can ill spare such a seasoned soldier as yourself. There is a work of cleansing and purging before us,” he went on, and you could see by the holy fire in his eyes that he was just sweating to get to grips with it. “I shall take you on to my staff, Flashman – nay, sir, never thank me; it is I shall be the gainer, rather than you.”
I was ready to agree with him there, but I knew there was no point in arguing with the likes of Havelock – anyway, before I could think of anything to say he was scribbling orders for hanging a few more pandies, and dictating a crusty note to Neill, and roaring for his adjutant; he was a busy old Baptist in those days, right enough.
So there I was, and it might have been worse. I’d had no real hope of being sent home – no high command in their right mind would have dispensed with the famous Flash when there was a campaign on hand, and since I had to be here I’d rather be under Havelock’s wing than anyone’s. He was a good soldier, you see, and as canny as Campbell in his own way; there’d be no massacres or Last Stands round the Union Jack with the Gravedigger in charge.
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