With a touch of impatience Dornoch said, “I doubt if that would apply in the case of Captain Black, sir.”
“Hope you’re right” After that the two men began discussing some of the details of the military campaign that lay ahead of them and in the course of the discussion it became clear that Sir Iain Ogilvie was still a good and wise soldier despite his having the fixed social prejudices of his years.
*
If the adjutant had known of the conversation between his Colonel and the Divisional Commander, he would have agreed wholeheartedly with Dornoch’s final remark. Many years before, Black’s father, like Ogilvie’s, had sent him into the army. The reasons had been utterly different from Sir Iain’s but had been nonetheless heartfelt, nonetheless urgent. In the Black family there was absolutely no military tradition at all; Andrew Black was there to establish it and thus to become a gentleman. His father, who had any amount of money, aspired to rise socially, and considered the best way to do this was to have a son in the army, and not only in the army, but in one of the very best regiments. It would be an open sesame. So Andrew Black had gone to Sandhurst and had duly passed out very creditably. In the meantime all kinds of strings had been pulled and various financial pressures applied with the utmost discretion, for Black senior was a brilliant man of business and had good friends who were important bankers holding the accounts of landed families and military families and even families in Government itself...and young Andrew Black had been gazetted to the Royal Strathspeys, which was a regiment of panache as well as of distinction—more so, in the father’s view, than the Guards. For this gift of a military career Andrew Black had never forgiven his father, even though he had made himself become a good soldier and enjoyed many aspects of army life, most especially the power it gave him over many men’s lives. The truth was that he had never felt easy in the company of his brother officers. He saw slights in everything, in every conversational gambit which he didn’t quite understand, in every amusedly raised eyebrow when he himself had made some small gaffe, in every smile, in every reprimand that had come his way as a subaltern. He had grown to dislike the officer caste to the point of hatred, though mostly he had managed to keep this dislike to himself. He had never become a Royal Strathspey in his heart. He had quickly become moody, sell-reliant, a man who walked alone, and frequently these days drank alone as well. He was drinking now, not in the Mess, but alone in his quarters—sinking a bottle of whisky rather too fast for tomorrow’s health and fitness. He was thinking about the people who called themselves the landed gentry, a class that practically everyone but he in the Mess belonged to. James Ogilvie did, par excellence! Dornoch was a lord—a bloody lord Black told himself vindictively. Not that Dornoch was ever in the least ostentatious about it, but it came through naturally in all he did and said, and in all he didn’t say or do as well. It rankled; Black couldn’t hope to compete and he knew it, though he’d managed to master the secret language of the upper classes well enough, the particular inflexions and accents and pronunciations and grammatical constructions that indelibly marked a man apart from the others; he had even largely learned which incorrect speech had to be used to the same end, for sometimes correctness could stamp one with the stamp of bounderism. And Ogilvie again...as conceited a young puppy as ever he’d met. Dumbly insolent to him ever since he’d joined from Sandhurst, and couldn’t take a reprimand without looking soulful and hurt—damn his eyes!
Savagely, Black gulped at the whisky. Ogilvie was as aristocratic a name as you could find anywhere—hence the fellow’s appointment to the 114th, no doubt. And then the father! His appointment to the high command smelt, by God, it stank to heaven of nepotism, even if on this occasion it was nepotism in reverse, if there was such a thing. Where the son is, so also is the father—to protect him, cosset him, ladle him with the syrup of high rank, and eventually promote him over Captain Andrew Black’s head...
Finishing the bottle, Black lurched to his feet, his eyes red and angry, went over to a cupboard and brought out another. Half an hour later his head sunk over the table, going down into the crook of his elbow, and he slept. To him soon after this came Major Hay, dropping in, on his way to Lord Dornoch’s quarters, to tell him the Colonel wished to discuss certain details of the forthcoming movement of the battalion through the Khyber Pass. Major Hay—aristocrat like the others, fussy as an old hen, shook his greying head sadly at what he saw. He clicked his tongue in distress; for he understood a lot about Andrew Black. He removed the bottle and the glass out of sight, lifted the adjutant’s head—lifted the adjutant, dragged him with some difficulty across to his bed, sat him on it, lifted his legs up and rolled him on to his side towards the wall. Then he went, not to the Colonel, but to the Medical Officer, Surgeon Major Carton, who was sitting reading in the Mess.
“I’m sorry to bother you, Doctor,” he said.
“That’s all right.” Gorton looked up. “Sit down. Have a brandy?”
“Thank you, but I won’t. Andrew’s sick. I was wondering if you’d look in?”
Corton stretched and grinned, ran his fingers through thick sand-coloured hair. “I was hoping for a quiet evening, John. Been at it ever since we marched in, checking medical stores—trying to get us a decent kit, though you’d think I was asking for all the treasure of the Orient. How d’you beat cholera—if it comes our way—or stop bleeding, with half a ton of Gregory Powder?” He sighed. “So Andrew’s sick—what of, John?”
“A fever of some kind, I think.”
Corton grinned again. “That man’s riding for a fall,” he observed. “All right, John, if it’ll make you feel any easier, I’ll go along and give him a powder.”
Hay said gratefully, “Thank you, thank you indeed,” and went off to report to the Colonel that the conference was off so far as the adjutant was concerned since Black was currently in the doctor’s care. It was true in a sense, but it was also a damnable lie really, and no one realized better than John Hay himself that he would never have done the same for a private soldier or a junior N.C.O., which was a circumstance Hay saw as a simple and inevitable fact of regimental life. And, of course, what he had done was a kindly enough act; but next morning Black, staggering under the weight of his hangover and shaking in every limb, gave no credit for that. The bloody gentry had once again got him at a disadvantage.
That same morning Lord Dornoch held Defaulters and, by the sheerest coincidence, had to deal with a corporal who, the night before, had been found unfit for guard duty because he had been drunk on a bottle of gin slipped to him by a member of the crew aboard the troopship. Dornoch, as he was bound to do, gave the man a severe tongue-lashing and spoke at some length about the perniciousness of such behaviour so hard on the heels of their arrival in India and especially when the battalion was about to go into action. Major Hay was present when the Colonel sentenced the corporal to reduction to the ranks and in addition, since the battalion could already, by stretching a point, be considered to be on active service, to one day’s Field Punishment Number One. It was a harsh sentence, intended as an example, and Hay saw little inconsistency in his tacit approval of the sentence and his own action the night before in regard to Captain Andrew Black. An officer was an officer, the men were something very different, and you really couldn’t give them much leeway. When later he saw the ex-corporal lashed securely and with devilish discomfort to the wheel of a gun-carriage, out on the parade for all to see in the searing sun, without water, Hay was visited by a touch of irritation. Really, it was too bad of Black to behave like a ranker.
*
That night the barrack-room saw the difference between the gentlemen and the rank and file in a rather more lurid and vivid light.
The man James Ogilvie had failed to reprimand during coaling-ship at Aden was the spokesman. “It’s all very fine for the bleedin’ gentry,” he said in a loud, hectoring voice. “Why, what are they after all, but wee tin gods, up yonder in their muckin’ palatial splendour, wi’ sairvants to wait on them an
’ all, even to spread the bleedin’ toothpaste on the bloody brushes for them like as not? Can ye tell me that?” No one bothered to answer; Private Jock Burns, self-appointed barrack-room lawyer, had all the answers already. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “They’re mortal, same as us, though ye’d never so much as dream it the way they behave. If one o’ them doesna get a good Scots bullet up the bum when we enter the Khyber, I’m not Jock Burns! Look now—His bloody Lordship almost quoted the Bible when he stripped yon Robbie Main o’ his stripes today...battalion’s virtually in bloody action now, he says!” Burns’s seamed face lowered and his jaw came out like an underhung bulldog. “Well, then, aren’t the bloody officers in action wi’ us? So why are they goin’ to a bloody ball the night, dancin’ and drinkin’ and messin’ around wi’ the women—ladies, I beg their bloody pardons—and gettin’ themselves as unfit as Robbie Main for marchin’ off tomorrow? Can ye tell me that?”
In point of fact, Private Burns was not the only one who thought it inappropriate that the officers should attend a ball the night before marching into action. James Ogilvie would have agreed with him, even though the great Iron Duke himself had set the precedent before Waterloo. This was not 1815 and the British Army had changed its character more than a little since those far-off days. But India was India and the social obligations, though perhaps they did not occur, at least along the frontier, so frequently as at Invermore depot, were rigidly observed whenever possible. Tonight, Lord Dornoch had decreed as possible. More than that—imperative. For in a palace outside Peshawar lived a princeling from Afghanistan named Feroz Khan, cousin of the Amir on whose behalf the British regiments were to fight. Feroz Khan had extended his invitation to the newly arrived officers of the garrison and it would be most impolite—even impolitic, which was more important—to refuse. Action or no action, every available officer would be expected to attend, wearing full Mess dress with decorations.
James Ogilvie was one of those instructed to attend, and as it happened that night was to be an important one for him. It was also to be an impressive one, one in which he received his first taste of the extravagant glory that was high-caste native India. But first he was given a taste of something else. As the officers were driven out from the cantonments at dusk they swayed on their carriage springs past the dereliction of the other half of India, the Untouchables lying crowded and slinking in dark doorways, in filthy side alleys, in the streets as the gentry passed through the town. A sickening stench rose to Ogilvie’s nostrils, almost making him retch, recalling the smell along the troopdecks of the Malabar but a thousand times more concentrated. No wonder the Peshawar garrison had been so badly hit by sickness. Hands reached out, unintelligible voices addressed the splendid British officers beseechingly.
“What do they want?” Ogilvie asked.
MacKinlay, his company commander, was with him in the carriage and he laughed at the question. “My dear James, are you really so ignorant of the world? They want alms. It’s all they have to live on.”
“Do we give them alms, then?”
Again MacKinlay laughed. “If you want every beggar-man in Peshawar to drag you out of the carriage, then by all means chuck ’em an anna or two! But I’d advise against it, James. Leave ’em well alone—they’re happy enough as they are.”
“Happy!” Ogilvie gave him an indignant look. “How can you say that?”
“They’ve never known any better life,” MacKinlay answered with complete indifference. “Believe me, I know India. You have to close your eyes to a hell of a lot—if you don’t, you’ll start to think too much and then you’ll go off your head.”
“You don’t believe these things ought to be thought about?”
Carefully, MacKinlay snipped the end from a cigar with a small gold cutter. “It’s better not, old boy, it’s far better not. You’re a British officer, one of God’s chosen people...your job’s to safeguard the Empire, and help to rule it, not to sow the seeds of its dismantlement by talking or acting like a blasted radical, James! God knows, there’s quite enough of them around these days.” He reached out and tapped Ogilvie’s arm. “There’s one thing above all you’ll learn in India, and that is, the natives have to be kept down hard. Let ’em once get above themselves, old boy, and the Empire’s done for, you mark my words!”
Ogilvie didn’t respond; he sat in silence, and in the expensive fragrance of MacKinlay’s cigar, as the carriage rolled on through the town and out the other side. He had been surprised by MacKinlay’s viewpoint, by the vehement way in which it had been expressed. MacKinlay had always seemed a tolerant man, with the standard paternalism towards the men but with more sincerely-meant kindliness than many other officers. All at once he was different; Ogilvie didn’t entirely realize it, but he had come up against the built-in shift in values that affected so many of the officer class when they were one of a comparatively small garrison in a native and largely hostile land. It was a defence mechanism at work, a defence against the cringing, wily hostility which they felt in their bones lay so close beneath the servile veneer of the masses. Men inspired less fear when they had become, by process of rigidly instilled thought-patterns, objects to be despised.
They left the city behind them and with it the smells and the whining, deformed beggars and holy men. They came out into moon-filled countryside, bare open land stretching to the distant hills lying below the farther snow-covered Himalayan peaks. Out here the air seemed cooler and fresher, with a hint of those distant snows borne along a light evening breeze. Soon across the plain they saw the lights of the palatial residence for which they were bound and MacKinlay said with a sigh of relief, “That’s the India you want to cultivate, dear boy. Mind you, the princes are probably even bigger rogues than the Untouchables—must be, in fact—but they do know which side their bread’s buttered these days!”
Ogilvie wondered just what MacKinlay meant by his use of the word ‘rogue’ in connection with the seedy beggars of the town, who had looked to him merely poor outcasts without the opportunity of aspiring even to roguery; but he sensed that MacKinlay would be unable to explain other than by some airy comment to the effect that so far as he was concerned all natives were rogues, varying only in degree. If this was so, it struck Ogilvie as an arid attitude to take towards a country in which, for better or worse, they were to spend so many years of their lives. Soon the officers in their carriages passed under a battlemented gatehouse set across the roadway, past a splendid quarter-guard of dismounted private cavalry, huge, blackbearded men dressed in dazzling white satin with gold scarves and jewelled turbans, and high, shining boots that caught the flicker of the great guard-lanterns that shone on either side. The carriages went on across a wide courtyard with a fountain playing in its centre, a courtyard brightly lit by more lanterns and by hundreds of coloured fairy-lights hanging from trees and poles like a Chinese garden. Brittle Indian music was coming from somewhere inside the palace. At the head of a flight of marble steps, His Highness Feroz Khan was greeting his guests as they filed past. The officers of the 114th joined the queue, with Ogilvie at the tail. His Highness was an old man, bent and wizened like a monkey, grinning from beneath an ornate sky-blue turban whose peacock-feather rose from an immense ruby set in gold—a head-dress that almost extinguished him. He bowed to each guest, then took his hand with a dry, claw-like touch. He grinned and bobbed away, showing blackened teeth, but said nothing. They filed past into an enormous space—Ogilvie felt that ‘hall’ was not quite the word for it—and on behind the extravagantly-dressed queue into a long apartment with an ornate ceiling patterned in gold and blue tiles. In here half the British and Indian Armies appeared to have gathered, together with most of the Indian civil and political services in their dress uniforms. It was a breathtaking sight—the variegated uniforms of Scots and Irish, cavalry and infantry, gunners, sappers, rifle regiments, scarlet and blue and gold and green, and the extravaganzas of the Indian regiments—Guides, Mahrattas, lancers it was brilliantly colourful. Ogilvie found h
imself wondering how it was that Whitehall had ever decided the Royal Strathspeys were needed at all to support so vast a garrison unless the sickness and the casualties that had afflicted the men had passed the officers by (which was not too unlikely a thought, perhaps). The ladies, though providing yet more colour, were overshadowed by their gorgeously-clad menfolk. Servants circulated, bringing endless trays laden with liquor. After a while Ogilvie’s head began to swim with the heat from the close-packed bodies, from the chandeliers, from the amount of drink he had felt obliged to take. Slowly, separated now from the rest of the battalion, he made his way through the ante-room towards the ballroom, where the music was coming from. This had changed now to an English waltz, extremely badly played, and the floor was a most glittering sight. Hairy-faced officers, streaming with sweat, moved past Ogilvie as he stood staring, their elegantly gloved hands holding the bare, powdered backs of their ladies—or someone else’s. It was probably no more than coincidence that Ogilvie’s thoughts went back to London and the remarks of his friend Jackie Harrington at precisely the moment when his Colonel, coming up behind him, laid a hand on his shoulder. Dornoch asked, “Enjoying yourself, my boy?”
“Yes, thank you, Colonel.”
“You look a trifle lost. Not surprising really—your first taste of princely Indian life! I remember when I was your age...I felt a genuine sense of awe that one man should have such immense riches. That was Haidarabad. I was staying with the Nizam for a tiger shoot. We never did kill a tiger that time—but there were enough dusky maidens to satisfy any young man’s wildest dreams!” Dornoch laughed, and the laugh faded to a small, rather whimsical smile that played around the corners of his mouth; he seemed cool enough, and unimpressed with his present surroundings. He went on, “I’d like you to meet a lady whose husband is currently in action outside Jalalabad—and whose escort for this evening has had to leave to attend to a small matter in the native cantonment.” He turned aside and put a hand on the arm of a young woman with mischievous eyes and a cloud of dark hair around a pale, oval face. “My dear, may I introduce Mr. Ogilvie of my regiment? James, this is Mrs. Archdale, whose husband is distinguishing himself with a Mahratta brigade. I’m sure she’d like to dance.” His eyes twinkled at the girl—she was little more really—with a kind of fatherly wickedness. “You’ll excuse me, my dear? I’m afraid it’s my job to circulate at these affairs, just as it is in my own Mess.”
Drums Along the Khyber Page 6
