by V. A. Stuart
“I saw what they did, Eddie,” Alex told him, his tone harsh. “And I killed your rissaldar for you.”
“He deserved to die, the devil take him—he was party to the betrayal. It was he who gave the order to our boatmen to desert us.” Vibart controlled himself with visible difficulty and went on bleakly, “The poor old general—they stopped his palanquin sixty yards from the nearest boat and tried to make him walk to it. He never reached it—those fiends of sowars cut him down when he was endeavouring to drag himself to the water’s edge. John tried to aid him, with Ashe and Saunders but they were too far away.”
Alex drew in his breath sharply. “What about Lady Wheeler and the two girls? Did they reach the boats?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t see them. But someone said they were taken on board one of the boats. Not that it will have helped them, poor souls.” Vibart hesitated, his gaze resting pityingly on Alex’s wan, sweat-streaked face. “Your wife—Emmy, was she … that is, I saw her fall into the water. She was hit at close range, I fear, and—”
“She died in my arms,” Alex told him with brief bitterness.
“I’m grieved for you, I … what is there to say?” Edward Vibart gestured wryly to his own wife, who sat with the two wide-eyed, terrified little girls clasped in her arms, staring into space with the terrible, silent intensity of deep shock. “Perhaps your Emmy is better off than Melanie, if the truth were known. Perhaps all of them back there are better off now than we are ourselves—God knows! Our agony may just be prolonged. Though I confess that I want to live, Alex … I want to live for only one reason.”
“Your reason is the same as mine, I imagine. I want to live to see the Nana driven from Cawnpore.” Alex’s voice shook with the intensity of his feelings. “I want to see him hunted as a fugitive, from whom even his own people will turn in loathing and disgust! And if I live, I’ll help to hunt him down … that I swear, by all I hold sacred.”
Vibart laid a hand on his knee. “Yes,” he agreed thickly. “Those are my sentiments also. The Nana of Bithur is the vilest of assassins and by this day’s work he has put himself beyond the pale. He gave his solemn oath and he broke it. Before heaven, some of us must live, Alex, if only to tell the story of his betrayal and to ensure that justice is meted out to him. We’ve no choice but to fight on.”
But it was a cruelly unequal battle that they must fight, Alex knew. Within a few minutes of his conversation with Edward Vibart, the boat again grounded on a sandbank and, as seven or eight of them went over the side to endeavour to push it off, a heavy fire was opened on them from a six-pounder on the Cawnpore bank which, drawn by bullocks, had been pursuing them. Up to his waist in water, his shoulder against the boat’s side, Alex heaved with the rest, exerting all his failing strength seemingly in vain. The six-pounder got their range; a round-shot shattered their steering oar and cries of dismay from astern told them that one of the other boats had been hit.
“Come alongside us, if you can!” Vibart yelled. “We’ll take your wounded.” He had to repeat his shout before they heard him but then a dozen swimmers, including Mowbray Thomson and Francis Whiting, manoeuvred the sinking boat alongside. The dead were thrown overboard to make space for a fresh influx of passengers and, when at last their combined efforts succeeded in freeing their craft from the sandbank, it was so heavily laden that it seemed unlikely that it could remain for much longer afloat.
The shore gun started to rake them with grape, wounding several and killing, among others, the heroic John McKillop; but their fighting ranks had been doubled and, with the addition of such practised marksmen as Whiting and Thomson and Private Bannister of the 32nd, they held the gun team at bay. Concentrating their fire on the bullocks, at Mowbray Thomson’s suggestion, they disabled two of them and, as they rowed desperately with spars and even pieces of timber torn from the boat’s deck, they saw that the six-pounder had been compelled to abandon the chase.
A fresh shock awaited them when they neared the mudflats on the Oudh bank, however. Two guns opened on them from behind the concealment of a mango grove and cavalry galloped up to the water’s edge, to fire volley after volley from their carbines into the listing boat. The exhausted boat’s crew returned their fire and Alex, assisting Vibart in the stern to manipulate a makeshift sweep, came near to despair when he felt the keel strike yet another sandbank, unseen in the muddy water. The boat’s movement ceased and Vibart, taking his turn to go over the side to haul it off, was hit in the left arm by a musket-ball. They dragged him back on board; someone contrived a rough bandage from his shirt-tail and, white with pain, he lay for over an hour in a semi-conscious state.
His wife, still clasping her two small children in nerveless arms, seemed unaware that he had been wounded and, out of pity, no one attempted to break the news to her, but Francis Wren set down his rifle and, with touching gentleness, took one of the sobbing children on to his knee. “There, Jessica, there,” he soothed her, and drew the small golden head on to his shoulder. “Your papa is only having a little rest. You have one too, there’s a good girl. I’ll take care of you.”
The sobs subsided and Charles Quinn, still disabled by the wound he had received four days earlier, pulled himself painfully to the thwart and picked up the discarded Enfield. “About time I earned my keep,” he observed and, leaning forward, took careful aim at one of the cavalry sowars. The man fell from his horse and lay still.
Some time after mid-day, the third boat, which had been following them, was seen to be swamped and sinking. A few of the men on board managed to swim over to them and, as they were hauled on to the deck, one of them gasped out the distressing news that there were no other survivors. It was impossible to ascertain whether or not his information was correct; the current was wayward and sluggish, their own boat so low in the water that it was also in danger of foundering and any attempt to turn it against the current would, almost certainly, have resulted in its sinking. They could only press on, ridding themselves of the weight of their dead at intervals, so as to make more room for the living.
One of the survivors from the third boat was St George Ashe and when, after a weary struggle, they drew out of range of the guns, he told them, in tones of bitter anger, that John Moore had been among those killed at the Suttee Chowra Ghat.
“Poor fellow, he was trying to get our boat free of the sand— he and five or six of the men who formed the advance guard were in the water—and a sepoy of the 1st took deliberate aim at him and shot him through the heart.” Ashe’s voice broke. “He was the best and bravest man I’ve ever known or ever shall know. And now he’s dead—shot by one of those foul swine of rebels, on the orders of the foulest of them all, who broke his sacred oath and betrayed us! They killed the poor old general too … a sowar of the Light Cavalry hacked his head off as he lay on the ground and held it up for the rest of the filthy traitors to see! And they cheered him—they actually cheered him. They …”He could not go on; burying his blistered, blackened face in his hands, he wept, but there was no comfort any of them could offer him.
* Among correspondence found by Brigadier James Neill, on taking command of the re-occupied city of Cawnpore.
CHAPTER EIGHT
ALL DAY the ghastly, unequal chase went on; cavalry cantered after them along both banks; infantry kept up a ceaseless fire of musketry, and the guns on the Lucknow shore limbered up and joined the pursuit, sending grape and canister after them whenever the boat was in range. Charles Quinn was shot in the chest; Mowbray Thomson knocked unconscious when a musket ball ploughed through his scalp and both the paymaster of the Light Cavalry, Captain Seppings, and his wife were wounded—she painfully through the thigh—and Alex, now plying his sweep unaided, tried vainly to shut his ears to her screams. Surgeon Macauley, who had joined them from the sunken boat, managed at last to bring her some relief and then he, too, took a bullet in the right arm, which shattered the bone and virtually disabled him.
With the sick and wounded outnumbering the fit fighting me
n, their despair grew. They had no food; the provisions stowed the previous night had evidently been removed after the inspection, and all that passed their lips until nightfall were occasional gulps of muddy, bitter-tasting river water. With the coming of darkness, they gained a desperately needed respite. There was no moon; the guns ceased fire and the volume of musketry became less intense and so inaccurate as to do them little harm. But the boat again ran aground when they had travelled an estimated six miles down-river and they were now so exhausted that the effort to refloat it seemed beyond them. Both Alex and Vibart joined the half dozen men in the water to pit their shoulders and their single arms against the recalcitrant vessel; shifting it into midstream at last, they were only just in time to avoid a burning boat, which sepoys on the Cawnpore bank had set adrift, in the hope that it might fall foul of them. Flaming arrows, each one tipped with charcoal, presented the next hazard and they were forced to jettison what remained of their straw-thatched awning when this started to smoulder.
Francis Wren lost the fingers of his right hand and Seppings was hit again as they stood up in a brave attempt to fight the flames but after this, to the fugitives’ heartfelt relief, the current carried them out of range of their attackers and they were able to snatch brief periods of sleep.
Dawn found them still afloat but they realised that they had travelled only four, instead of the six miles they had believed, and the boat seemed, to their anxious eyes, to have settled dangerously low in the water. The pursuit had, however—if only temporarily—been abandoned and, greatly cheered by this, the rowers bent to their skeleton oars with a fresh will, whilst others set about the melancholy but now routine task of putting the dead overboard.
It was Alex who sighted the natives bathing at the river’s edge, two hours later. They were obviously harmless villagers and he suggested an attempt to make contact with them, to which—after a brief discussion—the other officers agreed. A native drummer was put ashore, with a handful of rupees to purchase food and, if possible, to bargain for the services of a few boatmen. After a nerve-wracking wait, the man returned empty-handed. The villagers had promised food, he said, and had taken the money but … he hesitated, eyeing them miserably.
“Well?” Mowbray Thomson prompted, his voice strained.
“They say, Sahib, that there are soldiers at Nuzuffghur, two miles below us, to whom orders have been sent to seize us,” the drummer told him. “And also that Babu Ram Buksh, the zamindar of Dowriakhera, on the Oudh side, has engaged with the Nana Sahib that no feringhis shall be permitted to escape from his territory. He, too, has armed men waiting and the villagers are afraid to help us. They will give us chapattis and some rice but that is all.”
The food did not appear. They waited, with fading hopes, and finally decided to go on.
“Some of us must live, Alex,” Edward Vibart said. “Whatever it costs. Our betrayal has to be avenged.” He leaned, with eyes closed, on the oar they shared and then, bracing himself, started to haul on it once more with grim, tight-lipped determination. “I have a brother in Fategarh, you know—the boy went there to visit his fiancée. I hope he’s safe, at least.” Overhearing him, Francis Whiting offered a scrap of torn paper for his inspection.
“I’ve set down a very brief account of our misfortunes, Eddie,” he explained. “If both you and Alex would oblige me by signing it, I’ll put it in a bottle and cast it into the river. Who knows— by the grace of God, someone may find it—your brother, perhaps, or someone from Neill’s column. It seemed a good idea, in case none of us survives, to put the facts on record.”
Vibart sighed, appended his name with the pencil Whiting produced and passed it to Alex in silence.
Nuzuffghur was a small fishing village on the Cawnpore bank; a pleasant, peaceful seeming collection of stilted huts and mud houses built amongst the trees and marked by a white stone temple to the Hindu god Hanuman, the steps of which descended gracefully to the river’s edge. The current carried the boat down to it and, despite their efforts to steer clear of obstructions, a long sandbar in midstream proved their undoing. A fusillade of shots rang out and sepoys appeared from behind the screening trees and on the steps of the temple. They directed a vicious fire on the boat’s occupants, as they struggled to haul and push its keel free of the glutinous mud. Beside him, waist-deep in water, Alex saw Edward Vibart stagger and almost fall, blood from a wound in his unbandaged arm staining the surface of the water in slowly spreading circles. From the deck above, Francis Whiting reached out to aid him; between them, they got him into the boat and, leaving him there, Whiting himself slid into the water to take his place.
“One good heave should do it,” he said breathlessly. “She’s nearly off now and Tommy’s got a pole out on the other side. Those villagers were right, weren’t they, Alex? There’s the best part of a regiment on the bank there and a gun to the …” his voice was abruptly silenced by a musket ball, which struck him in the back of the head. He was dead when Alex, abandoning his hold on the boat’s stern, made a frantic grab at his shirt. The boat cleared the bar and, as he scrambled back on to its deck, he saw Francis Whiting’s body—caught in a freak current—go whirling shorewards as if, even in death, he were determined to face and bring retribution to his enemies.
On deck, Vibart lay moaning softly and poor Wren, now also wounded a second time, had been forced to let the child he had been holding escape from his embrace. She stumbled unsteadily to her father’s side, a frail, golden-haired ghost of a child in a torn dress, sobbing her terror. Alex was hard put to it to control himself as he caught and restored her to her mother, unable to find any answer to her pathetic question, “Oh, sir, why are the sepoys still firing at us? Didn’t they promise to leave off?”
Back once more at his sweep with the Irish lad, Murphy, he looked for the gun Francis Whiting had warned him about and saw it being unlimbered on top of a high bank, twenty yards beyond the temple steps.
“’Tis going to rain, sorr,” Murphy told him. “Let’s hope them bastards forget to keep their powder dry!”
Alex glanced skywards and noticed, with surprise, that the bright sunlight of the morning and early afternoon had faded. The sky was grey and overcast, pregnant with rain, and he found himself praying fervently that the threatened cloudburst would come in time to save them. Miraculously, it did; the six-pounder discharged only one round and then the heavens opened and the rain came down in blinding torrents, driving both gunners and infantrymen to seek shelter, their quarry, for the time being, forgotten. So heavy was the downpour that even the rowers had to leave their oars and bail; there was no shelter in the open boat but the chilly sheets of rain refreshed their stiff and aching bodies and the wounded welcomed the fall in temperature and the temporary numbness induced by the cool water in which they lay.
Their respite lasted until late afternoon. The rain passed over and at sunset the chase was resumed, this time by a boat considerably larger than their own, with a lateen sail spread to catch the evening breeze and a dozen boatmen at the oars. It was manned by fifty or sixty well armed sepoys, whose fire disabled Athill Turner, killed a Light Cavalry officer named Harrison and inflicted minor wounds on several others. The enemy craft was gaining rapidly on that of the British fugitives when, looking back to measure the distance between them, Alex saw to his joy that it had run aground on a sandbank close into the shore. The light was going and, seeing no sign of any other pursuit, he steered for the shallows, his call for volunteers answered by twenty weary but vengeful men.
The sepoys had not expected their quarry to turn on them and half of them, impatient to float their craft before darkness hemmed them in, were in the water, their backs to the shore, making so much noise that they heard nothing until the British Enfields spoke. It was a swift attack and a bloody one, with no quarter given, and only about six or seven escaped. Alex, with Mowbray Thomson, Delafosse and Ashe, climbed into the captured boat, hoping to find food but, although well stocked with arms and ammunition—which they
appropriated—there was nothing eatable on board.
The boat itself was in better condition than their own but it was stuck fast on the sandbank and, their efforts to get it off being unsuccessful, they contented themselves with its oars and the sail, which they carried back through the shallow water, to display to the anxious Vibart. The oars were of great assistance when they were once more afloat and heading down-river but they were so worn out by their exertions that the rowers slept at their oars and Alex, sharing the sweep with Sergeant Grady of the 84th, lapsed more than once into a semi-conscious state. Waking, with a start, in darkness, he realised to his dismay that the boat had again grounded. Within minutes of this discovery, rain lashed down with almost hurricane force and, with the flood, the boat freed itself. Two oars were lost when the increased force of the current snatched them from the weary hands of the men to whom they had been consigned and the sail—which they had rigged with so much effort—became uncontrollable in the sudden gusts of wind sweeping across the river and they were compelled to lower it.
At Thomson’s suggestion and with infinite difficulty, they draped it on poles in place of the thatched awning and across the open deck, in the hope of affording some sort of shelter for the wounded. Several of them were in a bad way and, leaving Grady to steer, Alex, with Macaulay and Ashe, did what they could to ease their suffering. It was little enough and the brave spy Blenman, who had been shot through the groin, repeatedly begged them to give him the merciful release of a bullet. They had no dressings; scraps of cloth torn from their clothing and soaked in rainwater were the only palliatives they could offer and Blenman’s agonised pleas became harder to resist as the night wore on. To their relief, he sank into a stupor and died about an hour later.
