by John Wilcox
Through the smoke, Alice glimpsed men on the hillsides throwing up their arms and falling. Yet many more still came on. As one man, all the sepoys inserted another cartridge in their magazines and then fired again. They continued to do so until the battlements were wreathed in smoke and Alice fell back, the sour taste of cordite on her lips, her cheeks blackened by gunpowder and half deafened by the sound of gunfire.
As the order to cease firing rang out, she took another look over the embrasure. The defenders’ disciplined firing had taken its toll. Bodies, looking like children’s rag dolls in their variously coloured cotton clothing, lay scattered along the side of the hills and across the road. The Pathans were retreating and finding cover. Then, a bullet thudded into the stonework by her head and another glanced off and pinged away. The snipers were finding the range now and the havildar at her side ducked his head and waved her away.
Alice crawled back into the open doorway of her room and wondered if the subedar major’s sons were deliberately firing at him. Perhaps it was a family feud that had caused a rift – or just some silly and deadly game these strange people were playing? She shook her head in bewilderment again.
For perhaps ten minutes there was comparative quiet around the fort, except for the exchange of shots between the snipers and the defenders at the embrasures, consistently from the attackers and desultory from the soldiers. Alice realised that they had obviously been told to conserve their ammunition and wait for the tribesmen to leave their cover. Then she heard the drums – so ever-present, so threatening! – increase their beat and the screaming and shouting began again, to mark the beginning of another attack.
Once again, the subedars screamed orders – obviously telling the defenders to hold their fire – and then, at the commands, the volleys began again, their crashing sound mingling with the drums and bouncing the echoes back from the mountainsides until Alice, crouching just away from her open doorway, thought that her eardrums would burst with the noise. Then, again, the orders to cease fire and the beginning again of the individual rifle duels.
So it continued throughout the afternoon, as the sun blazed down. During a momentary pause, Alice realised that she must make some contribution to the defence, for clearly her revolver was of little use. She looked around her room and ripped off the bed the cotton sheets, which she tore into strips, then cut some of them into squares with her nail scissors, to use as pads. Thrusting the pads into her pockets, she threw the strips over her shoulder, poured water from her jug into her washing bowl and picked up the bowl and, crouching as best she could, carried her load onto the platform behind the embrasures and then, awkwardly, down the steps into the square below. Immediately, bullets thudded into the ground around her and she realised that she was a target for the snipers looking down from the hills. Perspiring, she scurried into the cookhouse.
Immediately, she saw Subedar Major Khan sitting on a table while a sepoy was trying to cut away his tunic to reach a wound in his upper arm. ‘Go back to your room, memsahib,’ he shouted to make himself heard above the din. ‘Dangerous here.’
‘It’s dangerous everywhere, Subedar Major,’ she shouted back. ‘I must help. Here, let me do that.’
She thrust the sepoy aside, and sawed away at the tunic with her scissors. The bullet seemed to have passed straight through the arm, chipping the bone, so that she did not have to probe for it, thank goodness, although it was bleeding profusely. Using one of her pads, she bathed and cleaned the wound, and bound the bandage onto it tightly, to restrict the bleeding.
‘Well done, memsahib,’ grunted the subedar major through clenched teeth. He pushed himself off the table and gestured around.
Alice realised that the kitchen was being used as a rough-and-ready medical centre and that several wounded men were lying groaning on the tables.
‘You can help here, miss,’ said Khan. ‘These men not good nurses and we have no doctor here. I must get back to the walls.’ He rapped out an order. ‘Thank you, memsahib. I tell them to do what you say. You good woman – and brave too.’ Then he ducked through the doorway and sprinted across the open ground, holding his wounded arm, to reach the partial cover of the stone stairway set in the wall.
Alice sucked in her breath as she looked around her. Two sepoys, who had obviously been acting as medical orderlies, were looking at her expectantly. Their faces and hands were filthy and they were using dirty strips of kitchen waste as bandages. At least seven wounded men were lying on the tables.
Alice’s heart sank. She had never received any medical training and retained only the most fundamental notion of first aid. She gulped. What had been Nurse Nightingale’s mantra in the Crimea? Ah yes. Cleanliness, that was it. At least they could clean and bind the wounds and, hopefully, prevent too much loss of blood.
‘Do you speak English?’ she asked.
The two men shook their heads.
‘Oh,’ sighed Alice, ‘now that’s just splendid.’ She gestured to the cooking bowls and to the primitive cold-water tap that stood in one corner. She ran across and filled one bowl. Then picked up a coarse piece of soap and went through the motions of washing and indicated that the sepoys should do the same. Then, while they washed, she laid out her bandages and pads and began inspecting the wounds.
It was miserable work. There was no morphine or other drugs to staunch the pain and all that she could do was to wash the wounds and apply the pads and bandages. She gestured to the orderlies to watch her and then do the same for some of the others. But they were able to do little to help three of the wounded who had serious gunshot wounds, in the chest or head, from having been exposed to the snipers on the ramparts.
The four of them worked hard through the day as more wounded were brought in and Alice hardly noticed when dusk fell, except that suddenly there was an influx of hurt men from the walls. The darkness meant that they could limp across the square – sometimes helped by their fellows – without fear of being hit, and make it to the cookhouse door.
Getting some of the fit men to lift the corpses and lay them outside, Alice indicated that the newly wounded should take their places on the tables and she carried on with her work of washing and bandaging, although now she began to feel a sense of hopelessness, realising that, so often, something more radical was needed if the wounded men were to survive.
She had hoped that the end of daylight would mean some diminution in the wave of attacks. But the noise of the shouting, the beating of the drums and the awful cacophony of the firing continued through the night. Exhausted, at about 3 a.m., Alice gestured to her orderlies to stop their work and to find something to eat, while she brewed tea. For a precious few minutes, the three of them squatted on the floor of beaten earth, sipped their tea and ate chapattis, smeared with strawberry jam, amidst the groans of the wounded.
Alice eventually realised that there was now little more they could do in their crowded makeshift hospital, for they had no more bandages or pads left and the numbers of wounded demanding attention – those that had been able to reach the dubious safety of the cookhouse, that is – were increasing, so that many were forced to sit outside the open doorway. She must seek help, so, as dawn was breaking, she dipped her hands in the red water in the bloodstained bowl, wiped them on her jodhpurs and ventured outside to find the subedar major, while she was still able to cross the square.
She grabbed the arm of a sepoy. ‘Subedar Major Khan?’ she asked, pointing up at the firing step running behind the battlements.
The man shook his head. ‘Dead,’ he said.
Alice put her fist to her mouth. ‘Oh, God,’ she exclaimed. For a brief moment, she wondered if the bullet that had killed him had been fired by one of his sons. She hung on to the sepoy’s arm as he tried to pull away. ‘The other subedars?’ she demanded, whirling her arm around to emphasise the question.
‘Dead. Fort finished.’
Then the man slipped away. Alice looked around her in growing anxiety. She realised, then, that the firing step
above her was littered with inert bodies and that very few sepoys were still lining the embrasures and firing. There was a furious banging on the outside of the great gates. How had the attackers been allowed to get that close to the entrance?
She ran up the steps to the battlements and, picking her way over the dead and wounded, found the embrasure outside her room where the old havildar had been. He was now half hanging, head down, through the gap in the stonework, the top of his scalp torn away. Then she stole a glance over his body. The base of the wall was now a mass of tribesmen, all jostling to get towards the gate of the fort. She looked along the firing step. No one – not one single sepoy – was left manning the embrasures. Those that were left were now trotting down the steps towards the inside of the gate.
She realised with horror: they were going to open the gates!
‘NO!’ screamed Alice. ‘NO. NO!’ Drawing her revolver from where it had slipped down inside her cummerbund, she ran after them down the steps. She saw that some of the soldiers were attempting to lift the heavy bar of timber that lay across the door. She clawed at the sepoy nearest her at the back of the crowd, but he pushed her away violently. The bar was being raised. What to do?
Alice immediately thought of the wounded. She had heard of the cruelty of the Pathans and how they would mutilate whoever of their opponents survived. She therefore ran to the cookhouse. The two orderlies had abandoned their post, so Alice slammed the door and fumbled around for a key, but there was none. Biting her lip and trembling, she therefore stood beside the nearest wounded man, one hand on his bandaged chest, the other levelling her revolver at the door. Waiting …
She could tell by the howling from outside that the gates to the fort had been opened and she heard the pounding of hundreds of feet across the square of the fort. There was a splintering of wood as doors leading to the barracks were smashed open and then, with a crash, that to the makeshift hospital was thrust aside.
Alice raised her revolver and shouted, ‘Stop, or I shoot.’
She realised how pathetic she sounded for her voice could hardly be heard above the din, but the sight of this bloodstained woman levelling her revolver at them was enough to freeze the three Pathans who were jammed in the entrance. They looked at her with jaws dropped and Alice had a momentary impression of wild, exultant, black faces and eyes that regarded her with amazement, and then, puzzled amusement. Slowly, they looked her up and down and then, equally slowly, raised their curved swords.
Alice pulled the trigger of the Webley but nothing happened. The revolver had jammed. She closed her eyes and prepared to die.
A voice suddenly screamed a command in what Alice presumed must be Pushtu and she opened her eyes. The men jamming the doorway were being pulled back and a tall figure, dressed in white robes that were of a quality and richness that emphasised his difference in rank to those surrounding him, pushed through. He carried a bloodstained sword.
His black eyes looked directly into those of Alice and then he said, in impeccable English, ‘Good heavens. And who might you be, pray?’
With that, overwhelmed with hunger, exhaustion and shock, Alice fainted.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Alice had no idea how long she lay unconscious but it was a pungent smell of burning that first penetrated her senses and then a great noise, of people shouting, timber crackling and crashing and rifles being fired. She opened her eyes and looked up at the blue, Punjabi sky, now streaked with smoke. Ah, so she was not dead!
She tried to sit up but found that she was roughly bound and seemed to be tied to some sort of litter that was lying on the ground. She craned her neck and realised that she had been deposited high on the hillside and that she was looking down on Fort Landi Kotal, now well ablaze. Tribesmen were milling all around her and drums were still beating, obviously in triumph.
And yet, she could see that the fighting was not yet over and not all of the sepoys had capitulated to the tribesmen. Down below, a group of the soldiers had somehow formed a square and fought their way through the gates and, still in a rough square formation, were marching along the road towards Peshawar, under the command of what appeared to Alice to be a subedar – so there was at least one left! – and occasionally firing at a few of the Pathans who still accosted them. It seemed that they had been allowed to escape, for the tribesmen were far more interested in looting and then destroying the fort.
Alice frowned and let her head fall back. It throbbed and her mouth and tongue seemed to be made of sandpaper. She tried to marshal her thoughts and make sense of it all but the hard work and anxieties of the previous day and night brought back her exhaustion and she allowed herself to slip back into an uneasy slumber.
She awoke to find herself being carried by two men, one at her feet and the other at her head, so that she looked up past his considerable stomach into the underside of his beard. As best she could see, they were typical Pathan tribesmen. The man ahead was wearing a skull cap and a loose angarka. He had a bandolier crossing his breast and back and Alice realised that the weight she could feel on her feet were those of the two men’s rifles. Feeling her move, the man at her head looked down and gave her a broken-toothed grin. He was wearing a loosely wound turban and she recognised her revolver pushed into his belt. Fat lot of good it would do him, she reflected sourly. The bloody thing didn’t fire when it was needed!
The man grunted to the other bearer and she was lowered to the ground. Then a rough arm was thrust under her head to tilt it forwards and a leather gourd put to her mouth. The water was lukewarm but it tasted sweet to Alice and she gulped greedily. The turbaned bearer produced a scrap of cloth and, with surprising gentleness, wiped away the water that ran down her chin. Then he stood upright and the journey began again.
Alice mouthed ‘thank you’ and then, more loudly, ‘Do you speak English?’
The turbaned one gave her some reply in dialect then shook his head. Alice noticed that his face was pockmarked and his face bore a vivid scar across the left cheek. She tried to look around her but all she could see were one or two other tribesmen loping along and the inevitable rocks and scree. They seemed to be walking along an established track because the litter was tilting neither to left or right.
She tried again to think rationally. The fort had obviously been virtually overrun and, perhaps, some sort of deal done with some, at least, of the defenders: the tribesmen – probably related, like the lamented subedar major, to the soldiers in the fort – promising to spare their lives if they opened the gates. Then, she recalled, with a start, the apparition that had appeared at the doorway of the cookhouse, just when she was about to be butchered. Did she imagine it, or did he speak to her in perfect English?
Alice shook her head. She must have imagined that – working throughout the day and the night in the heat, amongst the blood and cries of the wounded, amidst constant noise, and with no rest and little to eat or drink – her mind must have tipped for a moment. She was at her wits’ end and expecting a brutal death. The man must obviously have been some sort of leader and spoke to her in Pushtu or even Hindi. She must have fantasised his appearance and voice.
So … she had been captured and her life spared. Why? The Pathans usually killed and mutilated their prisoners. Her thoughts turned to the wounded in the cookhouse. Had they been spared too? Highly unlikely. Tears trickled down her face as she recalled the brown eyes of the sepoys she had tended and their smiles of thanks. Ah, but this was a harsh, cruel country!
But why was she still alive – and obviously being cared for in some way? Was she to be a hostage, a bargaining pawn in some further negotiations? Her eyes closed again and she was suddenly back in the fort, amongst the flames and then, through the door, appeared Simon, dressed in fine Persian robes. He swept her up, carried her outside and then, very tenderly lowered her down.
She awoke to find that, indeed, the litter was being lowered to the ground but, alas, not by Simon. She realised that it was nearly dusk and she was in some sort of encam
pment, though still in the hills, for they could be seen rising beyond a row of tents. Then the litter was raised again – this time roughly – and she was carried into one of the tents. There she was left and she struggled to break free from the bonds that bound her to the makeshift stretcher.
She had managed to free one of her wrists when Scarface reappeared. He was carrying some sort of tray containing a dish heaped high with rice and studded with what appeared to be some sort of meat. Alongside were two oranges and a beaker full of milk. The man bent down and picked up the ends of the cords that had bound her wrists, waved them about disapprovingly under her nose, shaking his head. Speaking to her in dialect, he untied the rest of the cords and helped her to sit up. Then he pointed to the tray and made eating gestures with his fingers, before indicating the entry to the tent and shaking his head again negatively, taking out a knife and drawing it across his throat. Clearly, she was not to venture outside.
Alice nodded her head. ‘I won’t run,’ she said, ‘even if I bloody well could.’ She summoned up the ghost of a smile, picked up the milk and raised it to him in thanks. He nodded, repeated the gesture with the knife and then left the tent, returning quickly with an oil lantern that he deposited on the floor.
Looking around her, Alice realised that the tent had what looked like a comfortable divan in one corner, piled high with cushions, and a low table in the other. The milk halfway to her lips, she paused. Oh God! Was she about to be raped? Was this what it was all about – taking her from the fort, giving her sustenance and now laying her down by a lush bed? And was the milk drugged?
She took a cautious sip. It tasted delicious. Quite creamy and slightly warm. Probably fresh from a goat. Was she now, then, in the headquarters or even the tent of the fabled mullah, what was his name? Sayyid something, or something Sayyid?
