The Ravi Lancers

by John Masters

  ‘Very well, sergeant. Dismiss. Thank you again.’

  The sergeant turned smartly to the right, slapped the rifle butt again, and said to his private, ‘Pick up that dummy and see the next one’s ready, Johnson.’ A minute later their car puttered away down the road.

  Warren Bateman turned to the assembled men. ‘You have seen how bayonet fighting should be done. In future that is how it will be done in this regiment. It is a demonstration of what I said yesterday at durbar. You must hate. Every man in the regiment will have one hour a day of bayonet drill from now until we move up the line, Dayal.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Dismiss, please.’ He beckoned to Krishna Ram to follow him to his office. ‘That sergeant’s a genius,’ Warren said thoughtfully.

  Krishna said nothing; he thought that Sergeant Mackintosh was a madman. The CO said, ‘He instilled the offensive spirit even though no one but a few officers understood a word he was saying.’

  It was more than that, Krishna thought: there was a lack of communication on deeper levels. Indians could hate all right, and become mad in battle ... but to order? Pretending that the enemy had raped your wife when he had not? It turned reality into make-believe.

  They were inside the CO’s office, and Warren carefully closed the ramshackle door leading to the adjutant’s office next door. He sat down, indicating a chair for Krishna. He said, ‘What I am going to tell you is still secret. I have the general’s order to tell you though, so that preparations would not be held up if anything were to happen to me ... What I told the men about a routine relief up the line was not true. General French is going to make a major attack. The whole of First Army will be involved, with our Hindustan Division in army reserve. Second Army are making heavy diversionary attacks, starting tonight, to draw the enemy reserves farther south. As soon as the movements of German reserves are confirmed, the First Army attack will begin. They will break through on the second day. The day after that we pass through them to the high ground beyond the Longmont Canal. Here.’ He stood up and pointed out the names on the map of the Western Front pinned on the wall behind him.

  Krishna said, ‘Yes, sir ... How is it proposed to get the leading troops through the enemy wire this time? There can’t be a long bombardment, or the Germans would guess what was going to happen.’

  ‘No, there will be no long bombardment,’ Warren said. ‘The assaulting troops will cut the wire with Bangalore torpedoes, and break into the forward German trench line under cover of smoke shells.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Krishna said, ‘but... you saw the German defences at Lestelle Wood and Hill 73, sir. There were belts of wire extending back as far as we could see. And more men in reserve than in the front line. That was in December. The Germans have had three months to improve the defences that we couldn’t get through then. You remember how much improved they were even in February when we were patrolling in that sector.’

  ‘First Army will break through,’ Warren said. After a pause he said, ‘They must.’ He spoke as though willing himself to believe something that in his heart he didn’t.

  Krishna, emboldened, said, ‘I don’t see how the attack can succeed. I was talking to a sapper captain last month, when I went down to Abbeville about the stores. He said that the railway systems on both sides of the Western Front can move defensive reserves along the front quicker than the attacking troops can overcome the defences. I think he ... ’

  ‘Our RFC machines can spot the slightest movement as soon as it begins,’ Warren Bateman said sharply. ‘By dropping bombs and firing their guns--they have machine guns now, you know--they can stop or delay all movement.’

  ‘But, sir ..’ Krishna remembered the bespectacled captain with the long nose and the cynical twisted half smile: ‘My dear major, they can put twenty thousand troops on trains behind, say, Sedan, after dark today, when our aircraft can see nothing--and before dawn have them detraining ten miles behind the front lines opposite you.’

  ‘What?’ Warren said.

  Krishna summoned his courage and determination. He said, ‘I don’t think the attack has a hope of success unless something new and different is done. I am afraid that First Army will fail, and then we will be sent to the same place where they failed, with the situation not better but worse than it was for them. We shall lose many men and officers, for nothing.’

  ‘What do you think we should do?’ Warren said, his voice cold.

  ‘I think we should protest, sir. Or suggest a different plan of our own.’

  ‘Such as ... ?’

  ‘I don’t know ... Perhaps there is none. But at least if we stay where we are, the Germans cannot get through us any more than we can get through them, and then, after a time ... people will realize there is no solution here, and think of a way out.’

  ‘That is a defeatist attitude,’ Warren said, ‘and I will not tolerate it. We are going to attack, on the Commander-in-Chief’s plan--and I hope you will agree that he knows a little more about what he is doing than you do--and we are going to succeed. You will obey orders not only in the letter but also in the spirit. Is that clear?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Krishna said. He felt weak and dispirited. Perhaps he was no good for war after all. Warren Bateman’s strong face was hewn of steel and leather. He was one of those who had come in little boats five thousand miles from home and conquered millions--millions who had thought, before they came, that they were warriors, proud and invincible. Warren was right. He himself was an Indian weakling. No more argument.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ he said.

  ‘One more thing,’ Warren Bateman said, ‘I am discontinuing the special privileges allowed you as grandson and heir of the Rajah. You will no longer permit VCOs or men to touch your knees, but will only accept military salutes. Your two bodyguards will be absorbed into a squadron. This is a regiment of Indian cavalry, not a Rajah’s toy.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Krishna said. He saluted, wheeled, and started out. As he passed the end of the CO’s table the little fox-terrier Shikari snarled at him and moved as though to bite his feet. Krishna stared at the dog in amazement, then, as he went out, his eyes began to fill with tears.

  March 1915

  Krishna Ram walked slowly down the ride, his hand deep thrust into the pockets of his British warm. It was ten o’clock in the morning, after a long night march which had brought the regiment up to its position in reserve, five miles behind the front line. The march had gone well. The men were hard and fit, the weather had improved, and brigade and division staffs were learning more about their business and there were no refugees to block, the road and make shambles of the staff tables.

  They had arrived a few minutes before first light, spread out in the wood here, set up their bivouacs, and promptly gone to sleep--again, a mark of the trained professional soldier. Krishna Ram had made the march half drunk, for he had shared a bottle of brandy with Sher Singh and Pahlwan Ram before starting out, and there had been extra nips from a bottle carried by Hanuman along the way, until the early hours. Now unpleasant fumes filled his head, which ached steadily. He would have liked to go to sleep, but he was on duty as Field Officer of the week and must wait till he had had the morning reports.

  The wood was thin. Most of the trees had been shattered by heavy artillery during fighting here in November and December. The Ravi Lancers, having arrived in darkness, could not be seen by enemy observers on the high ground the other side of the valley, a good seven miles away. Nor could such observers see the other battalions of the brigade, though they were bivouacked more in the open behind and to the left rear of the Ravi Lancers. The other brigades of the division were in bivouac close behind in echelon right, also scattered in copses, woods, and farm buildings.

  Krishna decided he’d have another drink. The bottle in Hanuman’s pack was only half empty; and there was another full one in his valise. Sohan Singh would get him more, somehow--as much as he wanted, any time. Sohan Singh was a marvel. A real bazaar babu. He licked his lips. He remembe
red the look Warren Bateman had given him when he went to RHQ at the end of the march to report the tail in, no stragglers. The CO had smelled the brandy on his breath, with a look of disgust, a look saying, the fellow’s running true to type, the educated native, drinking himself out of his funk.

  He looked at the men asleep in the bivouacs, their boots sticking out; at the sentries standing guard over the rows of piled arms. They didn’t have any brandy to ... a low droning noise caught his wandering attention and he looked round, puzzled. No lorry could come into the quiet aisles of the ride, cut for the landowner’s pheasant shooting, for there was no motorable road into the wood. The noise increased and now he placed it. It came from the air. An aeroplane, of course! They had been becoming more and more common on the front since the winter weather began to break. There it was now, two wings like moths, an enclosed body--ah, that must be a new type, for in the old ones you could clearly see the pilot and the observer sitting one behind the other in a sort of open cage. This one had a machine gun mounted on a ring, and the propeller whirling away in front to pull the machine through the air.

  The biplane turned, banking steeply, and he saw the mark on the wing--a large black Maltese cross. German!

  He broke into a run, tugging at the whistle on its lanyard round his neck. He yelled at the nearest sentry, ‘Dushman! Dushman! Fire! ‘ Reaching the man, he grabbed the rifle from his hand, took aim, and fired. Between shots he blew a series of short blasts on the whistle.

  The German aeroplane flew low over the wood, turned and headed south. Krishna Ram fired at it again and again. A scattering of other shots came out of the woods as other sentries realized what was happening, and opened fire. The sleepy sowars were tumbling out of the bivouacs and grabbing their rifles from the piles. Krishna could clearly see the aircraft, now half a mile away, circling low over the bivouac areas of the rest of the brigade, and then of the rest of the division.

  He gave the rifle back to the sentry, and started towards RHQ to report, when he remembered that Warren had gone to Brigade HQ for orders, taking the adjutant with him. He turned to the woordie-major, running down the aisle of the trees with his revolver drawn, and said, ‘Stand down, jemadar-sahib. Everyone back to sleep.’

  Captain Himat Singh came up. ‘Do you think we got it, sir?’ He shook his head, wincing from the sudden motion. ‘No, though I think I put one pretty close to the pilot.’ He added in Hindi, ‘Now our attack will have even less chance of success.’

  Himat Singh said stiffly, ‘How is that, sir?’

  Krishna said, ‘That aeroplane was not here for a little jaunt, you know. It was reconnoitring, and the observer must have seen us ... all of us. A whole division, newly arrived behind a section of the front where nothing is supposed to be in prospect.’

  Himat Singh said, ‘We will beat them anyway!’

  Krishna Ram thought, the two DSOs have made him a different man altogether from the one who left Basohli, and it was Warren Bateman who had brought out the qualities that enabled him to win them. He said, ‘I hope so. But it isn’t going to be easy.’

  ‘The CO will not let us be put to anything we cannot achieve,’ Himat Singh said now, almost sternly. ‘And if he says we can do it, we can.’

  ‘Yes, Himat,’ Krishna said wearily. ‘You’re right. You’re right.’

  The guns opened up an hour before dusk for the First Army attack, and an hour after dusk the Lahore Brigade started to move forward to occupy the trenches vacated by the forward movement of the attacking troops. It was a clear night, the stars only now and then hidden by drifting clouds, and a first quarter crescent moon dipping into the misty haze above the spring earth. At first the march was up a road shell-pocked but not badly damaged, and through villages that housed the bivouacs of the medium and heavy gunners. The guns were still firing as the regiment passed and Krishna wondered what they were firing at, what was happening up there in the darkness ahead. The breeze blew slow and heavy out of the south, burdened with the scent of primroses and new grass and the burgeoning buds on the surviving trees.

  The regiment marched silently and easily. The bayonets hung familiarly on each man’s hip now, and on his back the heavy infantry pack. The gospel of Sergeant Mackintosh had been passed down to the youngest sowars, and Krishna had never seen such facial contortions, or heard such screaming and cursing and maniacal abuse as during the bayonet practice that seemed to fill every spare hour of those last days in rear billets. He wondered how much of it was real and how much put on to please Bateman-sahib ... but after all, was that really any different from the good sergeant, who could switch his hate on and off like an electric light?

  Where he marched at the head of the regiment--Warren was again at Brigade HQ getting orders--they came upon a wagon, broken and left in the road, one horse dead in the trace and one still struggling, wounded. Krishna opened his mouth to say, ‘Get them out of the way,’ when it was already happening. A rifle exploded, the woordie-major’s voice was sharp--’Cut the reins. Push the cart into the ditch. And the horses ... Get more men, then. Bring up the leading troop.’ Men doubled past him where he stood, there was a chorus of grunts and low cries, then the woordie-major trotted back saluting, ‘Rasta saf hai, sahib.’ The delay had been barely four minutes.

  Krishna marched on, thinking. Three months ago they would have stood around wondering how they could move the wagon without further damaging it--it was Government property, well made and valuable; how they could save the wounded horse--perhaps it wasn’t badly hurt, it was a good horse. A working horse represented not only property but crops, seeds, the fruit of the holy earth. Now they went at obstacles like wolves ... and the obstacles vanished, destroyed without compunction.

  The regiment swung on into the darkness, rifles slung on the shoulder. The road ended in a huge shell-hole beside a battery of field guns, firing away into the night, the orange flashes momentarily lighting up the scene, the layers crouched behind the shield, the loaders pushing in fresh shells, sergeants kneeling by the trails. Enemy shells were bursting not far to the right. A military policeman holding a shaded lantern peered at him, then at a piece of paper in his hand. ‘Ravi Lancers, sir? Here’s your guide.’ A corporal of British infantry materialized out of the blackness behind the yellow glow and saluted. ‘Follow me, sir ... Jerry’s ‘aving a bit of an ‘ate on the communication trenches, so keep your ‘ead down.’

  He led into a trench that began just beyond the gun positions. The walls of the trench were well revetted, lined with pit props, and it was fairly wide, but the pace at once slowed. Soon the men were shuffling forward five paces, then stopping five minutes, then forward again. Shells burst louder and closer, and the sharp reek of lyddite was continuously in Krishna’s nostrils. Now traffic began coming the other way down the trench and progress was slowed still more. Wounded men came, walking, hopping, supporting themselves on their rifles, or a comrade’s shoulder; men carrying tools and rolled wire; more wounded; someone scrambling like a madman back along the trench, up the sides, anyhow he could move faster, shouting hoarsely, ‘Division runner, division runner, make way, make way!’ Krishna wondered idly whether he really was a messenger, or whether he was a man like Sowar Alam Singh, a soldier who’d decided he’d had enough and out of his fear and need somehow finding the right words to clear his path.

  A huge flash and roar just behind him threw him against the wall of the trench. Earth rammed into his face and his shoulder hurt. He was on his knees, his head singing. Hanuman was over him. ‘Are you all right, Highness? Are you hurt? ... Let me take you back.’

  He crawled to his feet. He was wet ... there was water running down his cheek, water on his tunic, more on his arm. Something solid fell on his shoulder. He felt it and realized he was holding a hand. It was Captain Himat Singh’s. ‘Are you all right, sir? That was a direct hit in the trench just behind us. Four of my men killed and two vanished, as far as I can make out.’

  Krishna realized that the wet on him was blood, blood
blasted out of the men killed behind him, blood of the two others ‘vanished’--what did that mean but smashed to pieces, separated into their component parts, especially blood?

  ‘Move on, sir?’ Himat Singh said.

  ‘Yes,’ Krishna muttered. ‘Yes.’ His legs began to move again. He was not hurt. The shelling grew louder, heavier. The guide shouted, ‘We’re close now.’ Krishna peered at the luminous dial of his watch: 3.30 a.m. They were an hour behind time. He began to tremble, his body shaking with a rapid slight motion that he could not control. A figure loomed out of the dark and took his arm--’Who’s there? Krishna Ram? ... Why, you’re trembling.’ It was Warren Bateman.

  ‘Yes, sir.’ He had heard the surprise and then the contempt, or perhaps it was triumph, in the CO’s voice. How could he explain? He had charged without fear at Poucelle. He had stood to the machine guns at Hill 73 without fear. No qualm had crossed his mind while he lay helpless after being blown unconscious and half buried in No Man’s Land; but something had happened since--a slow realization that it was not men fighting this war, but machines. The enemy which had annihilated those six men of B Squadron was a machine, a machine with a mind and purpose of its own--destruction; and it fed on youth, beauty, and love. Only the cowardly, the ugly, and the old would escape.

  Warren Bateman let go of Krishna’s arm. He said, ‘The Devons and the HLI are in front of us. They’ve been held up in the enemy’s second line trenches and can’t advance. We are going through them at dawn.’

  Krishna’s trembling ceased as suddenly as it had begun. Warren, at least, was not an impersonal machine but a man, an obstinate man determined to do or die. He was not afraid of that. He thought that Warren was waiting for him to say, I told you so, but he said nothing and Warren said, ‘Dayal Ram has guides here to lead the squadrons to their places. I want all officers, also the RM and woordie-major, for orders here at 4.15 ack emma.’