by V. A. Stuart
“Perhaps. Oh, God grant that my wife and Liz Mackenzie didn’t try to get back to the bungalow! Because if they did, if they went back after Hugh Gough called there, then they … oh, God have mercy on them!”
“Go back,” Alex urged, feeling acutely sorry for him. “You and Mackenzie. Call for volunteers to accompany you and take as many men as you need.”
“And who will go to the jail?” Craigie objected. “You and Clark can’t go alone.”
“We’ll go with the rissaldar and half a dozen men. W are probably too late now to prevent them releasing the prisoners, unless Gough got through with my message and we find the Horse Artillery battery and a British patrol there. If we do, all may yet be well and we shan’t need you in any case. But if we don’t and I find we can’t do anything useful there, then Clark can join you with the rest of our men and I’ll go to the Rifles’ barracks and,” Alex’s mouth hardened, “I’ll demand action, if they break me for it!”
“Right, sir,” Craigie agreed. “I’m grateful. It’s not only my wife I’m anxious about. There are several others, who may have stayed at home. Charlotte Chambers, whose husband is adjutant of the 11th, for one. She’s pregnant and very near her time.” He laid a hand on Alex’s knee, forcing a smile, “I’ll do what I can, sir, and thank you again. Good luck and I hope you find the Gunners waiting for you!”
He had no difficulty in obtaining his volunteers and he and Mackenzie turned and were off at a gallop in the direction from which they had come, the sowars clattering obediently after them and the mob, which had been following at their heels, parting with shrill shrieks and curses to let them through.
There was another, much larger and more dangerous mob gathered about the jail when Alex, with Melville Clark and their now diminished escort approached it at a cautious trot. By the gate, a number of blacksmiths had set up anvils and lighted fires, beside which they waited expectantly, swinging their hammers and jesting with the crowd—evidence, Alex’s mind registered, that the release of the prisoners had been planned and was about to take place. A few red-coated sepoys stood with them but of the British troops he had hoped to find there he could see no sign and his heart sank.
“We shan’t have a hope of stopping them now, sir,” Melville Clark said bitterly, putting his thoughts into words as the rissaldar hissed at them to draw rein. “The devil take those Queen’s regiments! With even half a troop of Dragoons we might have done it but as it is …” He passed a hand across his smoke-grimed face. “Look, here they come!”
As the first of the prisoners emerged through the smashed iron gratings, assisted by the guards and their fellow cavalrymen, a frenzied cheer sounded above the crash of tumbling masonry and the roar of flames from the blazing courthouse nearby. Borne on the shoulders of their comrades, the prisoners were taken to the waiting anvils and the bazaar smiths, wielding their hammers dexterously, made short work of their leg irons and manacles, to the accompaniment of triumphant shouts from the line of mounted sowars drawn up to receive them. As each man was freed, he was given a horse and his uniform—the white undress jacket and pantaloons, normally worn off duty—and mounting, he drew his sabre, to join in the excited cheering which greeted every new addition to the ranks.
It was, Alex thought, for all the babble of voices, a disciplined and well-ordered operation. The men kept their ranks and obeyed the orders of their N.C.O.s; the European jailer and his wife stood, under guard but unharmed, by the door of his house, which, unlike those in the immediate vicinity, had not been set on fire. When all the 85 condemned men had been restored to the status they had lost, an Indian officer called them to attention and, ignoring the frantic appeals from other inmates of the jail who were watching from behind its barred windows, prepared to move them off. In threes, in perfect alignment, the regiment wheeled and Alex spurred to meet them. It was now or never, he knew. If any appeal to reason were to be made, he dared delay no longer.
But he had covered only a few yards when the old rissaldar and two of his escort closed around him, jerking Sultan back on his haunches with a brutal tug at his bridle.
“No, Sahib, no!” the rissaldar implored him.
“But I must speak to them. I must!”
“They would not listen. They would tear you limb from limb. You cannot stop them now.” The man’s fear was very real, Alex recognized; it was in his voice, in his dark, anxious eyes and in the trembling of his hand as it closed about Sultan’s rein. “Come, Sahib, I beg you. We will take you and Clark Sahib to safety and then we will go.”
“You will go, Rissaldar Sahib? But you have committed no crime, you have not joined the mutiny. Where will you go?”
“To join my regiment,” the old man answered defiantly. “The 3rd Light Cavalry will march to Delhi, with the infantry paltans, at once. We shall pledge our lives and our tulwars to the service of Bahadur Shah, to whom we shall restore the throne of the great Mogul emperors, which is his by right. It is written, Sahib, that the Company’s Raj will be ended throughout India. It is the will of Allah! And, as you have seen, we have struck the first blow and gained the first victory. The white soldiers have not opposed us. Allah is great!”
His words and the calm certainty with which they were uttered struck into Alex’s heart. He did not argue, he could not, aware that any contradiction he might offer would evoke only scorn. In the absence of all opposition on the part of the British regiments to the orgy of arson and looting, as well as to the release of the prisoners, any mutineer might be justified if he claimed victory and attributed that victory to the will of his god, be it Allah or Ram.
He met Clark’s shamed gaze, as their escort bustled them on through the ruined streets and the sacked houses, each with its quota of dead, and the younger man burst out wretchedly, “I never thought that I would live to see Meerut destroyed and no effort made to save it! I almost wish that I were lying there, with those poor murdered souls. It might be preferable to feeling ashamed of the uniform I wear and the race I represent!” He shuddered, as a group of native servants ran, screeching gleefully, from a nearby garden, the plunder they had amassed piled into a handcart. “Even the servants have turned on their masters and betrayed them and there’s nothing we can do to stop them or avenge those they have slaughtered! We’ve saved our own skins, thanks to the loyalty of a few men like these and they intend to desert us as soon as they can, so that they can march on Delhi.”
“They must not be allowed to reach Delhi,” Alex told him uncompromisingly, thinking of Sir Henry Lawrence’s grim prediction. “They will have to be stopped, no matter what the cost, and if we can help to stop them then at least it gives us a valid reason for saving our skins.”
Clark said nothing. White and exhausted, he sat slumped in his saddle and only roused himself when, half a mile from the Rifles’ barracks, their escort took leave of them, with a courteous “Khuda hafiz” from the old rissaldar and a blow with the flat of his sabre across the sweat-soaked quarters of Clark’s horse.
“The soldier-sahibs guard the maidan on which they drill,” he called after them, with thinly veiled scorn. “Against an attack we have not made and do not intend to make.”
“Is it possible that he’s speaking the truth?” Clark asked incredulously.
“It would appear so,” Alex was forced to concede. They turned into Boundary Road, now a wilderness of trampled gardens and burnt-out British bungalows and glimpsed the retreating backs of a score or so of 3rd Light Cavalry sepoys—the first they had seen engaged in undisciplined pillage. But there were others, Alex soon realized, as a fusillade of shots drew his attention to one of the houses standing back from the road and he saw a mob of scarlet-coated sepoys milling about outside. Encouraged by the savage screams of an audience of bazaar riff-raff, the sepoys were exchanging shots with the occupants of the house and hurling lighted torches into it, in an attempt to smoke out the defenders.
“Come on,” Alex said, gritting his teeth. “There’s someone alive in there. Let’s try a
nd get them out!”
Sabres drawn, they both put their horses at the mob, jumping over the low wall of the garden and taking the sepoys in the rear. The first blow Alex contrived to strike was at a dismounted sowar, with lance-daffadar’s stripes on his arm and, despite the difficulty of controlling Sultan with his legs, he knew a moment of almost savage satisfaction when the man went down before him, his head half-severed from his body. Clark was striking about him with equal fury and the mutineers, after resisting their assault for a few minutes, scattered and took flight, contenting themselves with firing a few spasmodic shots from a safe distance, jeered at by their erstwhile supporters from the bazaar.
CHAPTER SIX
THE bungalow’s defenders—three weary civilians, in bloodstained evening dress—came down from the roof, their smoking shotguns still grasped in their hands and from somewhere in the rear of the house, where they had been crouched in terror, emerged the wife of one of them, with two white-faced little boys. As their rescuers stood guard, they made a dash for the stables, harnessed two horses to a carriage and, profuse in their thanks, set off at a gallop for the Rifles’ barracks. The bodies of the children’s ayah and an old, white-bearded bearer, lying on the verandah, bore mute witness to the fact that some of the native servants had remained faithful and paid for their fidelity with their lives.
Alex and Melville Clark rode after the carriage through the rear gate of the compound, pausing there to make sure that it was unmolested and then, with common accord, riding into the next compound and the next. Their shouts were greeted by silence; in the fourth house they came to, they found the body of a woman, so mutilated as to be unrecognizable, and they turned their eyes away, sickened, from the two small, pathetic white bodies impaled on the wooden fence separating the rear veranda from the cookhouse.
“It’s no bloody use, sir,” Clark said, a sob in his voice. “We shan’t find anyone alive here now. We’re too late. But in the name of God, what have those damned Queen’s regiments been doing, while this was going on? They are barely half a mile away. Could they not hear the shooting, the infernal row that mob kicked up, the screams of that poor woman and her children?”
Craigie’s wife, young Mackenzie’s sister, and the pregnant Mrs Chambers—if they had stayed in or returned to their homes—were nearly two miles away, Alex thought, his throat suddenly tight. Some of the occupants of these bungalows might have escaped, might have found safety in the European barracks before the marauding sepoys struck. Pray God they had. But those living as far away as Mrs Craigie would have had no chance, unless Gough had got there in time.
“Heaven alone knows, Nobby,” he answered bitterly. “But I think we’d better go and find out. If it costs me my commission, I’m going to see that they take action to stop our men and the sepoys from marching on Delhi!”
They spurred their flagging horses into a gallop and met the first skirmishers of the 60th Rifles advancing, with fixed swordbayonets and their commanding officer at their head, down Chapel Street. From a furiously angry and despairingly outspoken Colonel Jones, who stopped them for information, they learned the reason for the delay.
“My regiment mustered for church parade at six o’clock,” he said. “The alarm was sounded, the R.S.M. quite properly sent them to change into greens—you can’t fight night actions in white. There was a slight hold-up because the magazine was locked and the men had only their emergency ten rounds. I had the infernal magazine broken into and issued a hundred rounds per man, which took about half an hour. We were ready by a quarter to seven. I’d given orders to march off, leaving one company to secure the European lines and intending to take a column of eight hundred men to the race-course, so as to confine the mutinous regiments to their own lines. I’d sent notice of my intentions to Colonel Custance of the Carabineers and to the Bengal Artillery, requesting their immediate support and then …” He made an effort to control his indignation. “That damned fool Wilson arrived and ordered me to wait, if you please!”
“To wait, Colonel?” Alex echoed, in shocked bewilderment. “For what?”
Colonel Jones roared an order to his adjutant, who cantered off obediently, and then said, with a disgust he made no attempt to hide, “For General Hewitt, of course. As station commander, Wilson insisted that he could issue no orders when the divisional commander was present and the doddering old imbecile duly arrived in his blasted mobile bath-chair five minutes later! They then engaged in a lengthy conference, to which I was not admitted, sent for the Dragoons and the Artillery and formed us all up on our parade ground … to repel an attack, I was eventually told, which the mutinous regiments were supposed to be launching from the Sudder Bazaar! Needless to tell you, there was no blasted attack. Your miserable Pandies were too busy breaking into the jail and setting fire to the place to attack us. And they had more sense, damn them to hell!” He peered short-sightedly at the devastation about him, his eyes behind the thick lenses of his pince-nez holding a steely glint. “While they were shooting down their officers and slaughtering English women and children, I was permitted to send a single detachment of fifty men to secure the Treasury. It’s beyond belief, isn’t it? They should both be courtmartialed for this, Hewitt and Wilson.”
“I sent an officer, Lieutenant Gough, to ask for cavalry, and Horse Artillery support to prevent the attack on the jail, sir,” Alex said grimly, keeping pace with him as he started to move on. “Didn’t he get through?”
Colonel Jones snorted. “Oh, he got through all right and was sent packing with a flea in his ear! General Wilson told him that there were more important things to worry about than a raid on the jail.” A flash of white in the darkened compound of one of the bungalows they were passing caught the alert eye of a corporal and the Rifles’ commanding officer broke off as a band of belated looters let fall the proceeds of their raid and attempted to make their escape. A dozen Enfields spoke and the corporal’s party made a swift end of the white-robed thieves with their sword-bayonets. “Good man!” Jones approved. “Are they sepoys?”
The corporal shook his head regretfully and, turning to Alex again, the colonel went on, his tone sarcastic, “Pity. They were only bazaar ruffians, goojurs by the look of them. But we are, at long last, on our way to avenge our dead by attacking the mutineers. Those are my orders … issued by General Wilson who, it appears, has now taken command of the brigade, notwithstanding the presence of the divisional commander, who is following behind the column in his bloody bath-chair. We’re to deploy across the racecourse, supported by cavalry and artillery, and occupy the native lines.”
“The lines, Colonel?” Alex was taken aback. He saw the advancing skirmishers turn right-handed into Circular Road, and reined in with a smothered exclamation. “I doubt whether you’ll find more than a few stragglers in the lines now. There’s nothing there, they’ve burnt everything in sight and, according to my information, all three native regiments intend to make for Delhi. That means they’ll head for the Trunk Road. If you cut across to the Begum’s Bridge now, you may be able to stop them.”
“Contrary to my orders, Sheridan?” Colonel Jones swore. “Damn, they’ve got to be stopped, though, haven’t they?” He frowned, shading his eyes from the glare of a burning godown, as he peered anxiously into the darkness beyond. “A battery of Horse Artillery and the two squadrons Custance has mounted ought to do it, if they can establish a blockade on that road now. We could back them up. How far d’you suppose your sowars could have got?”
“They can’t have got far, sir—a mile or so, perhaps, if they set off at once, which I doubt. Some of them had only watering bridles and blankets on their horses. They’d have to saddle up and—”
“And the infantry will have to march, won’t they? Right, I’ll come back with you and we’ll both talk to Wilson.” The dapper little colonel, for all his unmilitary appearance and his myopia, was a man after his own heart, Alex decided, warming to him as he brought his skirmishers to a halt and issued a crisp order to his second-i
n-command.
Accompanied by Melville Clark, they rode back past the main body of the Rifles and Alex asked, as a sudden fear assailed him, “Colonel, do you know if any warning of this outbreak has been sent to Delhi?”
“Warning? The telegraph wire has been cut but I understand a message was sent about an hour ago. Hewitt dictated it.” Colonel Jones added cynically, “He said ‘I am holding my position.’ If you can call that a warning, then yes, Delhi has been warned.” He glanced around at Alex’s shocked face. “Saving your presence, Sheridan, I say perdition take all Company’s officers! India appears to soften their brains, if—as in the case of General Hewitt I take leave to doubt—they were born with any brains in the first place! Ah, there’s Wilson, in conference with his superior, as usual. It might be better, for all concerned if you talked to him. I’m afraid I may lose my temper.”
General Wilson received them without enthusiasm, sitting his horse in silence beside the divisional commander’s buggy. Alex repeated what his rissaldar had told him but was cut short when he attempted to offer his own appraisal of the situation.
“You are asking me to believe the claim of a mutineer, who simply told you that his regiment was going to Delhi?”
“Not a mutineer, sir—a reliable native officer.”
“Who, on your own admission, has now joined his regiment in mutiny? Did he, or any of the other sowars who escorted you to the jail, make any attempt to prevent the release of the prisoners?” Wilson’s tone was cutting.
“No sir,” Alex was forced to admit, feeling impotent anger catch at his throat. “There were barely a dozen of us and at least two hundred of them, in addition to a mob of several thousand. There was nothing we could do. I sent Lieutenant Gough to ask for support from your troops but—”
