Thomas found it difficult to fault the argument, remembering the maxim that, all other factors being equal, a force attacking a prepared defensive position should outnumber the defenders by at least two to one.
“Then what else have you to suggest?” Tussun demanded, looking round him from one to another.
Umar Agha answered him: “That we should rely on denying them the supplies, and especially the water, of Jedaida village, to force them to come down and attack us on the level ground, where our more disciplined troops will have the advantage.”
‘Disciplined!’ thought Thomas, remembering the Albanian and Turkish infantry as he had known them through nearly four years.
Tussun nodded, “I agree that ideally that would be the more sensible course, but” — he opened the full blaze of his tawny eyes upon them, and his voice rose and hardened — “it is a strategy that could take a week, maybe more, to take effect, and we do not have a week. Within half that time ibn Saud could be upon us from the rear. If that happens, trapped and without hope of effective relief, not one of us will come out of Jedaida Pass alive!”
Thomas saw the aghas’ faces grow blank. For the moment neither of them could think of a counter argument, and in the pause, Tussun pressed on:
“There is no hope of a decisive action this evening, that I know well. At first light tomorrow we shall attack and capture the lower ridges on both sides of the pass. That should take only one, admittedly costly, assault on either side. We shall check and fall back before the cost becomes too great. And meanwhile we shall make the Beni Harb the gift of an obvious tactical blunder to delight their hearts.”
His listeners sat forward alertly. Carefully, no glance passed between the commander and Thomas, who had worked the plan out with him in the first place. “We shall overextend the flanks of the assault into the pass until more than half our infantry is outflanked by the Beni Harb and appears to be in the jaws of a trap. When that happens, the tribesmen will not be able to resist the temptation to spring it. They will attack down from the ridges, while their horse and camel men advance round the bend of the defile.”
“And we shall be cut to pieces,” said Umar Agha, with the air of one pointing out the obvious to a headstrong child.
“You are forgetting the cavalry,” Zeid said softly.
“So — we wait to hear of the cavalry.”
Tussun’s russet brows were drawn close in concentration. “Ibrahim Agha will have half the cavalry concealed in the main palm grove directly opposite the mouth of the pass, ready to charge at an instant’s notice, while the rest is out on the flanks, manoeuvring to give as much as possible the appearance of being the whole body. Once the enemy are out from the breastworks and attacking in the open, our infantry should be able to stand their ground against them, even as you yourself have said, Umar Agha. At that point the whole of our cavalry, save for a small reserve will charge, sweeping them, their horse and camel men away.”
Thomas thought, ‘The cub grows up. Indeed the cub grows up.’ He spoke to the young commander standing bright-eyed and frowning in their midst, but pitched his words of support for the other listeners: “Your plan is a good one, Tussun Pasha, seeing that we have no chance but to fight — and win — a decisive action within the next two or at most three days …” Without any will of his own, he felt his face crack into a smile. “Certainly Zeid ibn Hussein and I can promise you that the cavalry will be up the pass within one minute from the order.” He turned his attention to the two infantry leaders: “Please warn your troops to leave the floor of the pass clear as soon as the Beni Harb attack begins; we shall need right of way if we are not to charge over our own men.”
“So — now to work out details …” Tussun made a gesture to gather closer the less senior of his officers who had made a kind of outer circle until now. Matters went quickly and keenly now that the main plan had been accepted. And a short while later the fig garden was empty. And there was beginning to be a quiet and ordered coming and going of young officers such as Medhet between the commanders and the troops among the palm groves and the walls …
Later, returning from his cavalry lines to the house of the fig garden, which was now their headquarters, Thomas was greeted with the news that one of Sheik Muhammed’s elder sons had come in with an urgent warning that Saud ibn Saud had arrived three days earlier at El Rass, with a thousand horse and twenty thousand foot warriors and camel men, all Wahabis of Nadj.
Sheik Muhammed, his father, sent word, the young man had said, that if the Turkish army did not break through by tomorrow’s end they must withdraw during tomorrow’s night or find the Wahabi war host across their line of retreat.
Tussun had thanked him and had him fed.
“Where is he? I must speak with him —” Thomas began.
“Already on his way back,” Tussun said. “He asked leave to depart at once. His mother is the senior wife.” Then he laughed. “No, that is unkind. It was valiant of him to come himself.”
*
Watching from the low rocky knoll just ahead of the palm groves where his best cavalry squadrons lay concealed, Thomas was afraid at first that the push forward into the pass was going to be too obvious a tactical error; but it seemed to be happening so much in the nature of the fighting that the Beni Harb, with the Arab’s typical contempt for “Turkish” generalship might just be taken in by it.
The clash of steel and rattle of musketry and the occasional crack of the field-pieces came back in a wave of sound from the rock faces, the note changing as the fight thrust further and further into the defile. The two flanks of the assault had almost reached the great curve that carried the track out of sight. Any moment now — surely any moment now — Thomas gazed after them with eyes narrowed against the sun-glare, straining to catch the first sign of the expected counter attack.
Beside him a horse moved, tossing up its head with a jingle of accoutrements. He assumed, without looking round, that the rider was Medhet, who as usual was with him to act as a galloper. Then Tussun’s voice said, “It looks like the mouth of Gehenna.”
“They’re almost as far into it as we dare let them go,” Thomas said.
“What happens if the Harb have not launched their counter attack by the time our infantry have cleared the last of the lower slopes before the bend?”
“Then I think that you must order a retreat. We cannot afford to lose men needlessly. But it looks as though the Beni Harb will counter attack at any moment now; they seem to be giving up the breastworks too easily … It could be that they do indeed think themselves to be leading our men on into a trap — or it could be that their morale is cracking, but I doubt that’s the way of it.”
For a few minutes longer they watched the fight through drifting smoke that was beginning to fill the gorge.
Still no sign of the counter attack on which the whole plan depended.
“We could provoke a move by sending one squadron up the pass and round into the next reach, where the Jehaine say it widens out,” Tussun said.
Thomas hesitated. For no reason that he could lay hold of, he felt slightly uneasy. But something had to be done, and a cavalry squadron loosed up the pass should certainly act as a trigger, to counter attack or retreat …
The Turkish cavalry were already out in the open, on both flanks, keeping up a constant dust-raising manoeuvring that made their numbers seem greater than they were; but they had not the calibre for this particular task. Thomas sent Medhet back with an order to Abu Salan to bring his squadron out from the palm grove; gave him quick and clear orders not to enter the second reach of the pass if there was any sign of the counter attack, in which case he was to withdraw, fighting a rear-guard action until reinforcements arrived to loose him from the fight.
For a long time, despite all that came after, when Thomas thought of Jedaida, he saw again that single squadron of Arab horse, thin crimson pennant fluttering at their head, trotting smartly up the pass into the drifting smoke.
They had alm
ost reached the curve of the track, when Tussun leaned over and gripped Thomas’s arm, pointing with his other hand: “In Allah’s name — look!”
But Thomas was already looking.
The tribesmen were swarming out from the breastworks, though in the first few moments it was impossible to tell whether in flight or counter attack. After those first few moments there was no longer any doubt. Above the musketry Thomas heard the first faint fierce trumpet calls from height beyond height, answered from the depths of the gorge like an echo; and from every ridge and ravine and round the turn of the pass emptied a vast battle-swarm of black-robed Wahabi warriors.
*
The barest few minutes before, on the ridge below which the defile curved eastward and opened into a narrow valley, Abdullah ibn Saud, eldest son of the Wahabi leader, three days of forced marching behind him, turned to his trumpeter and the Beni Harb sheikhs gathered around him:
“In the name of Allah, it is the time!”
The sheikhs flung up their jezails in signal, and among the rocks on the far side of the gorge the sun glinted on musket barrels as the signal was taken up. In the same instant the trumpeter put his trumpet to his bearded lips and sounded the call which was echoed and flung back from a score of places along the mountain flanks.
Abdullah looked far down to his left, where the single squadron of Bedouin cavalry came up at an ordered canter towards the bend. He looked down to his right, where the valley beyond it was filled with Wahabi horsemen and camels. As he looked, the horsemen broke forward in answer to the trumpets, streaming after their black banners that lifted on the wind of their going. The rock faces were moving with the downward flow of fighting men. The horsemen had reached the bend of the defile …
“Now by Allah! The Turks are charging!”
Below him the long patient years of Zeid’s and Thomas’s training were proving their worth. While all around them the infantry were breaking back and turning to run, the squadron was quickening from a canter to a full flying gallop.
Looking down from above like a falcon before the stoop, Abdullah ibn Saud watched with his companions. “Now by Allah and his Prophet,” he said, “these dogs fallen from the true Faith, be brave men, none the less! If any of their footmen escape this day, it will be because these blocked the pass for long enough to buy their lives with their own!”
To one of the men beside him, he said, “Away down with thee and remind my brother Feisal who is forgetful in such matters that our horsemen must fan out beyond the village to cut off all escape, also that they must not stop to plunder! There will be time for that when all the enemies of the Prophet are dead.”
Below him the last survivors of the Bedouin squadron, fighting still, were being swept away as thousands of yelling Wahabis engulfed the rear of the fleeing infantry.
*
On the knoll at the edge of the date garden, there was no time for shock or outcry; no time for anything but the instant making of decisions. Thomas swung round on Tussun Pasha and in a voice as harsh as a bird of prey’s gave him his orders as though he and not the younger man were the commander.
“Do what you can to rally the infantry along the edge of the palm groves, keep the reserve company at least intact. Bid them open their files to let the fugitives through, then withdraw in line, still firing.” And as though Thomas were the commander indeed, Tussun Pasha wheeled his horse and made for the reserve.
Thomas turned to his young bugler beside him. “Sound the Advance and keep on sounding it … Medhet, get to the left flank cavalry and bid Colonel al Fusari to keep charging the Wahabi flank to slow them down. When he has to, he can withdraw leap-frogging, troop by troop …”
The first of Thomas’s own squadrons, the men he had trained and lived with for years, were advancing out of the palm groves and cantering towards him; he shouted to Zeid ibn Hussein at their head: “Brother, take the first troop and follow Tussun — on thy heads be his life!”
And as the Arab colonel flung up his sabre in acknowledgment and shouting to his own troop to follow him, headed after the galloping figure of Tussun Pasha, the Scotsman took his place at the head of the rest, and drawing his own sabre, turned back towards the fighting.
It was only then that he saw what had happened during the minute or so that his attention had been elsewhere.
Between him and the Wahabi war host, the gorge mouth was filling with a backward-streaming mass of panic-stricken infantry. No hope of the cavalry charging through them, however ruthlessly, without becoming clogged and losing both impetus and cohesion. Desperately his gaze raked the struggling scene from wall to wall of the pass, and showed him that to the right, where the rock wall fell back at an angle of some 45°, the churning swarm was less dense than elsewhere. He gestured with his sabre, “Follow me — follow me home!”
He heard the thunder of hooves behind him, but could not look back, could only hope that all the squadron leaders had received the order correctly, could only put his trust in Allah and ride, his young standard bearer beside him and his bugler sounding. “Charge! — Charge! — Charge!”
Up the slope towards the gaping mouth of the pass, they thrust. Still a compact and disciplined force, the first troop and the better part of the second sheared their way through the Wahabi column a hundred yards behind its outspreading van; but behind them and battling to follow on, the rest of the squadrons were caught up and cut off by the still thickening tide of terrified fugitives. Hacking his way out on the far side, Thomas saw a low spur of rock that thrust out from the mountainside at the bend of the defile and headed for it, to regroup. His memory of the last few minutes was almost blank, but his sword blade was foul as a butcher’s cleaver.
On the crest of the spur he reined in his sweating and wild-eyed mare, and sat waving his men up past him. Daud was still at his side. He grinned at the young bugler. “That was a charge well sounded! Now sound me the Rally.” But his stomach tightened as he realised that not much more than fifty men were still with him to answer the call.
Meanwhile Tussun had seen the infantry reserve dissolve and become one with the fleeing mob before he could reach it. He had seen Umar Agha on a wounded cavalry horse in full flight, ahead of his fleeing troops. He had seen the Turkish cavalry, galloping for open country on the far right flank. Near at hand a group of maybe a hundred of his own Albanians stampeded by; he forced a way towards them, his sword flailing above his head.
“Stand and fight!” he was shouting. “Turn and follow me!”
They poured past him with blind panic-stricken faces; if he had been in their way they would have cut him down.
Ibn Hussein and something less than twenty of his troop reached him at that moment, cutting their way through the flood to his side. And they were close behind him and coming up on either hand as he drove his horse towards another clot of his countrymen, the last of any size left in the mouth of the defile. “You!” he was shouting. “Were we not born of the same mothers? Let us not shame them! — Turn, my brothers — turn and follow me!”
His voice raved on at them; they seemed not even to hear, but simply surged on; and despite all that they could do, half the Arab troopers were caught up and swept away by them as driftwood by a river in spate.
He was weeping, tears of rage and humiliation and the horror of what was happening running down his cheeks. He used his sabre on them. Those who it reached ran on heedless of wounds.
Some way ahead he saw the enemy ranks, black under their raven banners. They had reached the abandoned field guns and the impetus of their rush seemed checked for an instant. He made straight for them, howling at full pitch of his lungs, “I am Tussun Pasha; I am the son of Muhammed Ali! Kill me or die, you dogs and sons of dogs!”
Zeid and three remaining troopers followed him.
From his vantage point, Thomas looked desperately out across the defile. Not much dust rose from the rocky ground, not much smoke, for the firing had almost ceased; most of the fugitives had flung their muskets away an
d the tribesmen had turned to sword and lance, and the scene lay clear, hideously clear, to the sight. There was no sign of the Turkish horsemen, no sign of the infantry reserve; save for a few pockets of desperate cavalry fighting, the whole expeditionary force was in full flight.
Save for fifty or so with Thomas. Save also for five others!
In that confused splinter of time five horsemen burst out from the mass of fugitives and charged straight for the heart of the enemy advance. And Thomas’s belly seemed to knot itself within him as he recognised the desperate foremost rider.
He pointed with his sword, yelling to the men around him. “If the Pasha dies we are dishonoured and accursed in the sight of Allah! With me! Charge!”
And as one man, his fifty followed him, forming a rough wedge as they went down the rock-strewn slope and into the thick of the Wahabi war host. At his right flank his standard bearer carrying proudly aloft the lance with its gold and crimson folds flying; on his left his bugler repeatedly sounding the charge, bugle in one hand, sword in the other, controlling his horse with his knees. He settled low into his saddle, crashing through towards the point, so far as he could judge it, of Tussun’s impact.
Exhausted and soaked in sweat, bleeding from superficial wounds, his heart pounding in his ears and the red battle-mist hanging before his eyes, Thomas hacked his way onward through the yelling Wahabi ranks. His sword-hand was slippery with blood and sweat, and once the sabre slipped from his grasp to hang from the leather thong about his wrist, but he recovered his grasp and ploughed on. He sliced through the bamboo shaft of a lance, and then the blade broke on the nut-shaped helmet of one of Prince Feisal’s bodyguard. He flung the hilt in the man’s face, and reaching over his shoulder, drew from the scabbard across his back, in which he always carried it into action, his beloved broadsword.
Blood and Sand Page 22
