Drums Along the Khyber

by Philip McCutchan

  There was a buzz of talk as the officers dispersed. Ogilvie’s eye was caught by John Hay. The second-in-command said quietly, “You’ll not find the assault any worse than the Khyber, my boy. A little more concentrated—but the total strain won’t last so long.”

  “No, Major. Not if the attack’s successful, anyway!”

  “It will be, boy, it will be.” John Hay gave Ogilvie a steady look from under his shaggy, good-dog’s eyebrows. “Now just remember you came well through the Khyber. The Colonel’s pleased enough.”

  That was all Hay said before he turned away towards Lord Dornoch, who was waiting for him with a touch of impatience; and he had said it diffidently and awkwardly enough. There was nothing new in it; the same thing had been said, Ogilvie supposed, to every young man before his first taste of real battle. Yet it helped him quite a lot, for there was a quiet sincerity and a kindliness about Hay that spoke more for him than his tongue was able to utter, and he had, as it happened, spoken as if by instinct at precisely the right moment of time. Ogilvie was feeling, more than in the Khyber itself, the strange remoteness of Afghanistan and was finding it a frightening experience. Civilization such as he knew it lay now beyond the Khyber, way back in India, through fifty miles and more of largely hostile country that no man could cross in a hurry. Here outside Jalalabad, between those Kafiristan hills and the vast 14,000-foot high snow-line of the Sufaid Koh, he was utterly cut off, the Division to which he now belonged was out on its own, away from base, from comfort, from help, and was dependent wholly upon the whim and good sense of its Divisional Commander who, out here, ranked more or less with God. It was little comfort that God happened this time to be his own father, that man of blood and iron and unpredictable temper. The fact certainly didn’t make him into God the Son...Ogilvie was feeling lost and helpless and very aware of both his own deficiencies and of the responsibilities he was to bear for his men’s lives in action. Thus Hay’s fumbling words had brought comfort.

  Ogilvie walked away to the Royal Strathspeys’ lines, where his servant had pitched his tent and laid out his gear. On the way he passed other regimental lines and the sick lines, and he saw how full the latter were at the expense of the former. A few convalescents moved about, helping the medical orderlies. They looked wan and thin and only half alive. This sector of the line had been hit by dysentery, serious enough but, thank God, not the scourge of cholera. Not yet. Cholera had hit other sectors of the line and it could come here. Ogilvie halted outside his tent, looked across the far horizons to the foothills and beyond to the great mountains of the Hindu Kush. Over all this savage, vast spread of territory British soldiers had fought and died to protect the Raj way back in India beyond the passes. Here was the very outpost of Empire the outer bailey, in a sense, of all that Windsor Castle itself stood for, the farthest-flung part of the perimeter of the Queen’s Majesty, the last bastion of all that British life meant, the guardian outpost of a whole way of life. On what happened here, to a very large extent at any rate, depended the might and the wealth of Great Britain, the future of her peoples, of her steel mills and her shipyards and her workshops, her ships and her mines, of the Stock Exchange in. London, even of sterling itself...

  Later, after Ogilvie had had a wash in the basin provided by his servant, and after an evening meal from the field kitchens, he watched the magnificence of the going down of the sun behind the western hills that lay under a spreading, darkening mantle of gold and deep blue and purple and green. And in this he was joined by Colour-Sergeant MacNaught, in shirt sleeves and without his pith helmet. MacNaught had been walking past the end of the officers’ lines and Ogilvie had caught his eye and he’d stopped. He moved towards Ogilvie and came to attention.

  “Stand easy, Colour-Sarn’t.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Anything you want, Colour-Sarn’t?”

  “Not really, sir, no, thank you all the same.” MacNaught added quietly, “It makes a man think deeply, up here, sir.”

  “What about?”

  MacNaught hesitated, screwing up the sun-browned flesh round his eyes, then said simply and sincerely, “It’s very close to God, sir. Closest to heaven in a physical sense a man’ll ever get until the day he dies.”

  “Or until he climbs Everest.”

  “Aye, sir. And that’s not as likely as death, begging your pardon, sir.”

  Ogilvie thought again about the soldiers who lay in their shallow graves or their cairns of stones—or at the bottoms of chasms or gorges, their bones picked white and clean by the filthy carrion birds that even now were circling in their grisly way over the regimental lines—waiting, probably, for the sick to die. He said something of his earlier thoughts to the Colour-Sergeant.

  Slowly MacNaught said, “Aye, it’s true, sir. True enough.”

  Ogilvie brought out his cigarette-case. “Smoke?”

  “No, thank you, Mr. Ogilvie. I don’t fancy them things at all. I’ve my pipe, if you don’t mind?”

  “Go right ahead.” Ogilvie lit a cigarette, passed his lucifers to MacNaught when the pipe had been brought out and filled with strong stuff, not so fragrant as MacKinlay’s. MacNaught said, “As to what you were saying, sir. There’s little thought given in some circles to the value of what we do on the frontier. But mind you, Mr. Ogilvie, we’re the outpost for a hell of a lot of other things as well.”

  “Such as?”

  MacNaught puckered his eyes again, staring into the distance, then shook his head. “I’d doubt if I need to tell you, sir, if you think about it. There’s the rich people, right enough, but there’s also the filthy, stinking slums of Glasgow and Edinburgh to name one thing. I’ve been in tenements in Edinburgh, not a stone’s throw from the Castle, where there’s been fifteen persons to a room. Fifteen, Mr. Ogilvie! And babies being born, and men and women dying, and making love too, in the same room.. There’s the men who cannot find work and their women-folk and bairns suffering from real starvation and lack of clothing and lack of any warmth in winter. I’ve known families who haven’t seen a lump of coal or turf or a log for many winters together.” There was a bitterness in the Colour-Sergeant’s voice. “There’s the Highland families trying to exist in the crofts in isolated sheilings and not having much of a time of it at all.” He sighed. “They’re a far cry from London town and Windsor Castle.”

  “But not all that far from Balmoral.”

  “Sir?” MacNaught looked puzzled for a moment, then said, “Oh, aye, Mr. Ogilvie, I see your meaning. Aye, and that’s true. The old Queen herself has a soft spot for Scotland right enough. It’s just a hell of a pity some of the injustices can’t be righted, sir, that’s all.”

  Ogilvie laughed good-naturedly. “You sound like one of these Socialists, Colour-Sarn’t!”

  “God forbid that I should ever be that, Mr. Ogilvie. They’re a dirty bunch, sir, a dastardly lot and they make me sick to my stomach to hear them rant. I’m as loyal to the old Queen as the next man, as loyal as the Colonel himself.” He paused, looking again towards the distant hills now vanishing in the darkness. “It’s just that my father...an old man, sir, one of the crofters I was speaking of, a man who worked hard the whole of his days...”

  “Yes?” Ogilvie prompted.

  “The field telegraph has just brought news from Peshawar, sir, that the old fellow’s died. My old mother’ll be needing me now, sir. That’s all. It’s set me thinking.”

  Ogilvie said awkwardly. “Of course. I’m sorry, Colour-Sarn’t.”

  “That’s all right, sir, there’s nothing you can do about it, Mr. Ogilvie, and I know you would if you could. If we were quartered in England, say, I’d be asking for compassionate leave, but there’s no leave from beyond the Khyber.” He said no more, but stood very still, watching the last of the sunset, listening to the sounds of the tethered horses, their nostrils steaming into what was now a chilly night. “I’ll be wishing you good night, then, Mr. Ogilvie.”

  “Good night, Colour-Sarn’t.”

&nbs
p; “Sir!” Once again MacNaught stiffened to attention, thumbs held against the sides of his kilt, then he turned about smartly and marched away back to the N.C.O.’s lines. He was a good soldier, dependable through and through. He had made Ogilvie think a little more deeply than before, too. The Empire was a solid and good force, with noble aspirations to follow upon a glorious past, but mostly it had been built on human misery and blood and poverty. But how, Ogilvie wondered, could it be any other way? How could you iron out the differences between men? Men were not equal. It was inevitable that some should rise and others fall, some grow rich while others spent their lives close to the breadline. You couldn’t, indeed, have the one without the other; they were complementary—the sons of Mary and the sons of Martha. MacNaught himself, when he became a time-expired soldier, would have little future. He might keep himself in tobacco with his pension, but what of the rest, if the little Highland croft couldn’t keep him and his old mother, to say nothing of the wife and three children Ogilvie knew he had left in Scotland? He might possibly, if he was lucky, become a postman, or a commissionaire, or something in a gentlemen’s household. It wasn’t really much of a prospect after a life of giving orders and seeing them obeyed smartly. But—again—what other way could it ever be? If you cut out the city slums, if you clothed and fed and warmed all of the people all of the time, the country would very quickly go bankrupt. Then there would be nothing for anyone and there would be an end of the Empire. There were no two ways about that. You couldn’t have an Empire supported on this new-fangled Socialist theory; the two were incompatible. And to have a well-ordered society in a well-ordered world, you had to have the poor to do the work. Fortunately, with the exception of a few hotheads—men like Keir Hardie, for instance, and a fellow called Shaw, an Irishman who wrote plays or something, and temporarily saddened and embittered men like MacNaught, who would recover in a day or two—apart from such, the poor didn’t mind. His father had always maintained that and he was right—they were proud to feel that so much depended on them, that they were an essential cog of Empire. And there was nobody in the realm who would say a word against the good old Queen. They hadn’t been subjected to her tea-time stare at Balmoral...

  At such an irreverent thought Ogilvie smiled to himself. He admired the old lady tremendously in actual fact; she kept a very tight rein on the politicians and she was proud of her soldiers, which was as it should be. And she had no time for Gladstone...As the sound of a lone bugle blowing Last Post broke the silence from outside Divisional Headquarters—the tent which his father would use as an office—and died away, Ogilvie went inside his own tent and turned in. He lay wakeful for a while and soon heard some singing from the men’s lines, a song from the American Civil War:

  “Bring the good old bugle, boys, we’ll sing another song,

  Sing it with a spirit that will wake the world along,

  Sing it as we used to sing it, fifty thousand strong,

  While we were marching through Georgia...”

  And tomorrow night the brigade would be marching to close the gap on Jalalabad but they wouldn’t be fifty thousand strong, only a little over four thousand, plus their artillery when they picked it up. And the bugles would be sounding out Last Post for many dead after the brigade had reached its objective and joined battle.

  *

  All next day the 114th were kept on the move, exercising with their new brigade comrades. They were, they knew, constantly under the distant observation of the rebels in Jalalabad, but the movements, if spotted, would be unlikely to convey any useful information to the enemy. Some kind of small local movement—redeployments on account of sickness as it struck different sectors of the perimeter, or on account of casualties from the sporadic forays—had been going on continually since the British siege force had taken up its positions; and although Ahmed Khan would realize well enough that the arrival of a fresh battalion must signify an attempt ultimately to close his supply route, he would still not know when the attack on the defended peaks was to come.

  During that day the detailed orders for the march and the assault were promulgated to the Colonels, each of whom thereafter briefed his officers separately and took them painstakingly through the maps of the objective area and its approaches. The Royal Strathspeys were informed by Lord Dornoch that, while the Mahrattas would form the spearhead of the attack following the artillery bombardment, they themselves would in fact be in the thick of it the moment the assault was under way and it would be their task to take the rebel guns while the Mahrattas mopped up the warring tribesmen. So far as the march itself was concerned, the essential point was to keep well in cover throughout the daylight hours, and the hope was that the advance would not be spotted until the artillery bombardment began. The final leg of the march would be timed so that their arrival at the attack position would be during the hours of darkness on the third night.

  Sir Iain Ogilvie himself rode up alone to the brigade lines shortly before dusk. He was not coming with them; his task was to remain at Divisional H.Q. for the time being. He wished them well in his loud, gruff voice. Momentarily, James caught his father’s eye. Its gaze seemed to linger on him, though briefly, and the son was baffled by the expression. It was the penetrating look to which he was well accustomed, the look of the man of action summing up an officer, but there was something else there as well: doubt, and a fleeting anxiety. James Ogilvie found himself wondering whether the anxiety was for his safety as a son, or whether it was an apprehension lest he should bring any discredit on the father and the family name.