‘I do not know,’ said Templer, with the elements of a frown now added to his wide smile. ‘But since Madras was the original presidency, it is for the others to explain why they changed, sir.’
‘Quite so,’ smiled Hervey, recognizing the propriety. ‘Is there very much difference in other respects between the three armies?’
‘Indeed there is, though I have not been in the country long enough to see at first hand. But when we make camp tonight I shall be glad to tell you what I know.’
There was evidently more to Cornet Templer than his broad, easy smile – and Hervey liked him even better for it.
When all were satisfied that the necessary salutations had been made, Cornet Templer asked the collector for leave to begin the patrol.
Somervile nodded.
‘Walk-march please, Subedar sahib,’ he called. It seemed to Hervey more a friendly invitation than a command.
‘Very good, sahib,’ replied the subedar, who barked the orders in turn to the patrol, but in a tongue Hervey did not recognize. The sepoys straightened their backs once more and the column moved off in a cloud of dust fetlock-high, out of the civil lines and on to the wide palmyra avenue that led directly to the high road north to the Krishna river – and thence, if they were to remain on it rather than branching north-east (the latter being their intention), to the Rajah of Chintal’s capital at Chintalpore.
Dust rose higher as they settled to a brisk working trot, kicked up by the more extravagant action of one or two of the horses, fresh and eager to stretch their legs after a night in standing-stalls. The dust quickly reached his nostrils, yet it was not wholly unwelcome, for it seemed no different from the spices to which he was becoming accustomed. Indeed, he was already of a mind that this taste of baked earth was rather the essence of India, like the light which transformed the way he saw things, or the heat at midday, as if hands were touching him. It was not possible, even momentarily, to be insensate in this land, for the presents to each and every sense were so potent as to be almost compelling. Already he had observed that no bird had anything but the gaudiest plumage. Not even an insect concealed itself by drab colour. No noise was restrained, no taste – in either sense – was mild. No smell was anything but pungent, no belief incredible, no notion too outlandish. And all this within the civil lines of the Company’s very regular station at Guntoor. Now he would see Hindoostan – the country beyond the chunam and the chintz, beyond the exaggerated English manners of the Company’s officials and their liveried servants. He would see it just as he had wanted to see Ireland beyond the Pale, a year and a half ago. The experience of native Ireland had taught him, however, that although he might cross such a divide physically, to do so with his heart spelled ruin. He would be on his guard.
But home thoughts were with him yet as they jogged past pretty bungalows (the word new to him), whose white fences and trim gardens would not have been out of place in Sussex. ‘Which part of England are you come from?’ he asked, Cornet Templer now having drawn alongside him.
‘I don’t call any part home, sir,’ replied Templer, still smiling; ‘I spent three terms at Harrow but went thence to Addiscombe, for I was first meant for the Company’s sappers. My people are from Wicklow.’
So much for his instinct for people, thought Hervey – English indeed! They talked freely, however, especially of Addiscombe (for Hervey had little knowledge of the Company’s military academy), until, leaving the town limits, Templer excused himself to go forward to attend to some detail with the point-men.
Hervey rode thereafter with Locke and the collector, several yards off to the flank in order to avoid the dust. They wore mixed dress, with overalls of light canvas made up for them a day or so before in Guntoor, and their sword belts were simple affairs with snakefastening and no sash. Locke wore a marine man’s hat of black glazed leather, with a neck shield pinned to it, and Hervey wore his own shako with a cream cover and neck flap – like Templer and his men. But neither of them had on a tunic of appreciably martial stamp. Hervey’s was a coat of hunting length, the same colour as his shako, and he wore a yellow silk stock. Locke had on a cutaway of the same weight of cotton, but of a dusty pink colour, together with a white stock and his treasured gorget. Despite this mixture, however, neither man could have appeared to an onlooker as anything other than military, whereas nothing could have been further from the case with the collector, whose black coat made no concession to what Hervey supposed would soon be the excessive heat of the day – though his wide-brimmed straw hat would provide considerably greater protection from the sun than the short peak of Hervey’s shako or the pulled-up brim of Locke’s headdress.
‘It seems a distant cry from trade, this,’ smiled Hervey.
‘Then let me disabuse you, sir, of any notion that trade is what the Company is about nowadays. At first, yes – in Queen Elizabeth’s day. Then it was truly a company of merchants trading spices from the east. It began to change with King Charles’s Braganza dowry – Bombay – and then later when that enfeebled Mughal Shah Alam made the Company his dewan – his administrator – for the Bengal revenues. But this much you surely know?’
Hervey was relieved that the collector had some appetite for conversation, even at this hour, for Locke was bearing the signs of little sleep, promising to be no sort of companion at all. ‘I have not heard it stated so definitively, sir.’ He was not without the art of flattery in a good cause.
The collector was more than happy to continue, definitively. ‘Mr Pitt’s India Act established the Board of Control. Doubtless he would have preferred to appropriate the Company lock, stock and barrel, but that would have put too much patronage in his hands for the Whigs to stomach. It was a half-baked scheme, for it gave no-one the necessary freedom to act. And it made worse the differences between the three presidencies. Madras and Bombay were all but pursuing contrary policies towards Mysore at one juncture.’
Hervey pressed him to more as he leaned forward to remove a monstrous horsefly from his gelding’s ear.
‘The amending act three years ago has done much to tidy things up – the president of the Board now has a seat in the cabinet and such like – but it spells the end for the Company. Of that I’m sure. We are in all effects a department of state even at the present, and it will not be long, in my judgement, before parliament sees fit to wind up all trading interests. What worries me, Captain Hervey, is that our new administrators are becoming too imperious in their dealings with the country powers and with the natives in the presidencies. Warren Hastings knew the continent, you see, from his engagement with trade. The new breed does not.’
Hervey thanked him for his candid opinion.
The collector made light of it. ‘But I heard you asking Templer if there is any difference between the armies of the three presidencies.’
‘Yes; he said he would explain when we made camp tonight.’
‘He will indeed, but I shall first tell you the root of those differences.’ He flicked his whip against his mare’s quarters, she having become disunited. ‘You would say that there is a difference in the fighting qualities of men from the various parts of our own islands, would you not? You would no doubt say that the Scotchman is a fearsome soldier, but without his officers he is at a loss; that the man from East Anglia is steadfast in adversity and so on. But these are but fine shades in men whose red coats make of them all fine soldiers. Here things are a matter of greater extremes – as they are in all things. From a military point of view there is no doubt that the Rajpoots of northern India are the noblest, the finest of the races. The Rajpoot is tall and well-built, clean-limbed. He may not marry a woman who is not of a Rajpoot family. Where you find him – in the Bombay regiments – he is peerless.’
Hervey nodded in appreciation. ‘Then I hope I shall soon meet them.’
‘Not this side of the Nerbudda river, I think,’ replied the collector, shaking his head. ‘You shall have to go to what is Hindoostan proper – to the north of the Nerbudda. But that
is as may be. The Bombay presidency’s forces are well-tried: that is the material point. And, incidentally, what a city Bombay is, Captain Hervey! You would consider it alone worth the journey to see what its women will dare in the matter of dress! Nowhere on earth will you see any more colourful sight than a Parsi girl – brilliant beyond measure!’
Hervey and Locke were all attention.
‘A Bombay street is as splendid and lively a sight as a Calcutta one is ugly and dispiriting.’
‘I think you have no very great regard for the Bengali, sir?’
‘Not in the main. He’s feeble and effete beyond measure. He holds personal cowardice to be no disgrace. Do you know of any other race in the world to which that accusation might be directed?’
‘Which leaves the soldiers of the presidency of Madras,’ said Hervey, smiling.
The collector sighed. ‘The glories of the ancient Telinga kingdoms are long past, and – it must be said – their martial spirit. When the French occupied the Karnatic, and when Clive was campaigning in Mysore, the Telinga fought with ferocity and intelligence.’ He touched his mare’s flank again with the whip as she fell back half a length. ‘But the Madrasi now is a man of peace, a better servant than a soldier. The Telinga makes a better-looking sepoy, being of superior physique, but he possesses on the whole less stamina than the Tamil. The Tamil can exhibit fine fighting qualities, mark you: Subedar Thangraj overcame more than a dozen mutineers at Vellore with only a clubbed carbine.’
Hervey glanced across at the subedar. In his native dignity there was the stamp of Serjeant Strange. He looked back further along the column, seeing in a face here and there more than a vestige of that fighting spirit which the collector said was now dimmed. He found it hard to believe that men who wore their uniforms as well as these did, or who sat their horses so, were not as determined when it came to drawing the sword.
The collector strove at once to correct the impression he had given. ‘Captain Hervey, do not suppose for one moment that I am saying these men lack fighting spirit. It is only that by comparison Madras is not thought to have so martial a people. If you were to see the men of the northern parts – Rajpoots, Sikhs, Jats, Punjabis, Pathans – big men, not enervated by climate, you would understand my meaning. Have no fear: Cornet Templer’s men will fight as well as you would wish. And I for one am content to place my security in their hands.’
Next day
The sun had been up for only an hour, but in that cool, fresh, first sixty minutes of another Indian day the patrol had made ten miles. Chota hazree – sweet tea and a plantain – had been brought to the officers in their bivouac tents a half-hour before sunrise, and they had been in the saddle as the first shafts of light searched them out on the plateau from behind the hills to the east. Nothing that Hervey had seen before made him so conscious of his own insignificance.
The collector had intended to ride for another hour, at a reduced pace, before halting for a breakfast of cold chikor, of which they had bagged a dozen brace the afternoon before. But there was to be no burra hazree just yet. ‘Pindarees, sahib,’ exclaimed Subedar Thangraj, his eyes seeing clearly what Templer and Hervey could only confirm with the telescope.
From a mile away the village, which had no name that any in the patrol knew of, and none on any map, bore the signs of having been assailed. More than the usual number of vultures circled above, and there was a continual glide earthwards. And instead of the many wisps of smoke that would ordinarily have marked the cooking fires and ovens of a village of this size, there was a single, large pall of black smoke.
Cornet Templer’s face changed at once from ease to tautness. ‘Subedar sahib: extended line, draw swords!’
Hervey had to check his instincts. Templer intended, it seemed, to gallop straight to the village without any preliminary reconnaissance or indirect approach. This was dangerously more than audacity, surely? This was more than the boldness which Peto’s book advocated and which Hervey approved. It was recklessness, was it not? He looked at Henry Locke, who shrugged. ‘He orders the troop to form line and draw swords,’ he explained; to which Locke simply raised both his eyebrows.
‘Captain Hervey,’ said the collector with perfect calm, seeing his concern, ‘in the Company’s cavalry it is the practice to charge the enemy at once – instantly, without hesitation. He invariably outnumbers you and hesitation is fatal; by the very action of attempting to throw over the greater number there somehow comes the ability to do so. And the enemy, who in his rational appreciation would know that such a thing is impossible, is denied the time to think, and so is afeard that it must in truth be so. Rarely will he stand his ground – unless his escape is closed off.’
By the time the collector had finished his elegant if somewhat elliptical explanation, the troop had extended into line. ‘Draw swords!’ ordered the subedar. Fifty and more sabres came rasping from their scabbards. Hervey winced at the noise, as he always did – the sound of sword edges blunting. But he also suspected that these sepoys had begun the patrol with blades as sharp as razors.
‘Walk march!’ called Cornet Templer, his voice carrying easily to both flanks – in all a frontage of 150 yards.
All Hervey could think of was the duke’s instructions to his cavalry commanders: ‘Cavalry is to attack in three lines, four or five hundred yards apart when facing cavalry; a reserve must be kept of twothirds of the whole, to exploit a success or to cover a withdrawal.’ And here was Cornet Templer and his troop in one extended line, and open order!
He fell in by the collector’s side at the rear and drew his sword. The collector pulled his straw hat down firmly and reached inside his coat for the diminutive pistol he always carried (but had not thought to prime). ‘Keep an eye for any who wish to throw themselves on our mercy, Hervey. I should wish to interrogate them.’
Hervey smiled to himself at the collector’s absolute confidence in the outcome, struggling meanwhile with his gelding, which seemed to have had little by way of formal schooling and was reverting to its instinct for the herd. The line was soon in a brisk canter. Dust billowed, horses were pulling and blowing at the same time. Hooves drummed and bits jingled. He looked left and right at the half-hundred troopers: from behind they could have been from any one of the armies that fought Bonaparte. They could have been from the Grande Armée itself, except that they rode shorter than any regular cavalry he had seen before – and in open order and extended line! Yet it was not difficult to understand how these men felt invincible in that headlong rush at the Pindarees, of whose number they had not the slightest intimation, for there was dust enough to conceal a thousand cavalrymen.
‘Charge!’ roared Templer, with fewer than a hundred yards to run to the village. The line of sabres lowered to the ‘engage’, expecting to catch the enemy on foot.
Hervey could see nothing of what they were charging. He thought he saw horses but he could not be certain, for dust swirled everywhere. He was more anxious still: even if there were no ambuscade, the line, once it had collided with the village, would rapidly lose cohesion – when a half-capable enemy could take them from a flank.
And then they were in the village, and it was all he could do to keep his seat as his little gelding, effortlessly changing leg, swerved this way and that to avoid tumbling at an obstacle, any number of which would have brought down a less balanced horse. They jumped something he didn’t even see, and the gelding landed with its head still up and ready for the next challenge.
Some of the sepoys were far ahead, and he could see that the charge had become a pursuit. Here and there was a fallen horse, but mainly they were human shapes which lay sprawled and bloody – and none was wearing a French-blue tunic. He galloped on, looking about for the collector. The ground was rising slightly but there was no cover. As far as he could see in front of him there were sepoys furiously raising and lowering their sword arms. He began to check, for the gelding was blowing hard – when the best of horses could stumble. A lone Pindaree came towards him
and threw down his sword, falling from the saddle to his knees and clasping his hands together, pleading. Hervey was trying to find the words to tell him he was made prisoner when one of the sepoys galloped up with a different intention. He shouted that the man had surrendered, but whether or not he was understood, it made no difference, for the sepoy sliced at the Pindaree’s neck from behind, severing the head as neatly as Hervey had seen Serjeant Strange cut a swede in half in the tilt-yard.
It was not his fight, he told himself, and the sepoy gave him a most respectful salute with his bloody sabre as he circled back to join his comrades. He turned and slowly trotted back to the village, recalling what the collector had said two nights before about the strongest stomachs turning. There were bloody bundles of flesh and homespun about the village, but no other human presence that he could see. He heard the bugle, and looked back to see the line at last rallying. Then the collector appeared, in a lather every bit as prodigious as that of his horse – and blowing almost as much – though he had kept up remarkably well. ‘A sorry business this, Hervey,’ he called, dismounting by one of the bundles and clasping a handkerchief over his nose.
Hervey said he did not expect there would be anyone for him to interrogate, to which the collector seemed not overly surprised, nor even very disappointed.
‘We had better begin searching the huts, however,’ he suggested, still clasping the silk to his nose. ‘There may be something that tells us what these fiends are next about.’
They regretted doing so almost at once. The sight in the first hut made the collector rush out clutching the silk to his mouth, and throw up noisily. Inside, Hervey stared in disbelief. Here was a lesson in anatomy he had not seen even in a textbook – the womb hacked open and its full-grown contents ripped away and sliced like meat on a butcher’s slab. And, as if that could not have been enough to satiate the most depraved, the wretched woman had been impaled hideously and severally. Hervey now wished he had struck off the Pindaree’s head himself, for though he had seen the horrifying work of cannon, never before had he known sheer surgical brutality. He was numb with incomprehension.
The Nizam's Daughters Page 15
