The Ravi Lancers

by John Masters

  ‘For Mother’s sake,’ Diana said pointedly.

  ‘Yes,’ Ralph said. ‘Certainly not for mine. Or Sam’s. Mr Woodhouse thinks he’s a danger to society. I saw it in his face. And a coward...’

  ‘So does Mother, sometimes,’ Diana said.

  ‘I know, but Mother ... she’s different. She’s the only person in the world I care about hurting. Or losing the respect of.’

  Like the rissaldar-major, Krishna thought suddenly. There was something very similar about Margaret Bateman and Baldev Singh--serenity, courage, opinions held decidedly but with a tenderness to the opinions of others, firmness with gentleness.

  Diana glanced at him again. ‘I wish you didn’t have to go back to France,’ she said.

  ‘So do I,’ he said. ‘But I must.’

  Hill Cottage was small, square and ugly, built of brick about 1880 to house a farm labourer’s family in the minimum acceptable conditions. Mr. Fleming greeted him in the tiny parlour into which the front door opened. The tea kettle was on a black range in the back of the room, a silver teapot warming, and a Coalport tea set arranged on a small table. Mr. Fleming seemed to hurry him into the house, with nervous gestures, but once he was inside his manner gradually relaxed. While he poured tea, offered Krishna buttered toast and Gentleman’s Relish, he demanded and listened to a stroke by stroke description of Saturday’s innings at the Oval. Outside the begonias made splashes of dark green and scarlet behind the lace curtains. Now and then a farm cart plodded down the lane, or they heard the sharp clip-clop of a delivery cart, and once the put-put of a motor car.

  At last Mr. Fleming sat back and said, ‘I suppose you want to know why I call myself Fuller now.’

  ‘No,’ Krishna said quickly. ‘I don’t. I don’t care. You’re just the man who was so good to me when I was a boy.’

  ‘Thank you, Krishna ... You were always something quite out of the ordinary. So much sensitivity. You know, Indians don’t have as much sensitivity as the world gives them credit for. I mean, they don’t necessarily feel with another person. It’s usually that they can read what the other person is feeling quicker than Europeans. Krishna, I... I...’

  Krishna thought desperately, Oh God, Parmeshwar, Brahma, how can I get him out of this? And then he prayed that the tutor would not belie or lessen the truth, but would trust him to have grown up in soul as much as he had grown in body.

  Mr. Fleming said, ‘I have a compulsion towards the vice for which Oscar Wilde was sent to gaol.’

  ‘If it is a vice,’ Krishna said quietly.

  The tutor shot him a quick, wondering look. ‘Yes ... Only God knows that. I know it is a burden, a cross to bear.’

  ‘Only here,’ Krishna said.

  ‘Ah, these small villages! I suppose in London, I could disappear ... or no one would care.’

  ‘I meant, in England. In Christendom,’ Krishna said. ‘Not in India. Afghanistan. Turkey. Arabia.’

  ‘Oh.’ The tutor was silent, sipping his tea. ‘I am more afraid of women than I am fond of ... men,’ he said. ‘There is something about women that, when we get close--in spirit, I mean, when they begin to show affection--that is like what hearing a barrage approaching must be to you. I feel I am going to be destroyed.’ He laughed, pleased at his little simile.

  Krishna Ram said, ‘Worse. The barrages will end some day.’

  ‘But not womankind, eh? ... It is not as bad here as you might imagine. The lower classes generally do not bother me one way or another. I get respectful service at the butcher’s and baker’s. It is only the people of my own class and education...’

  ‘I know,’ Krishna said.

  The tutor said, ‘After leaving Basohli ... with a very generous gift from your grandfather, a very generous gift, indeed, I may say ... I obtained an appointment as an assistant master at Uppingham. That lasted four years, and I was very happy until ... I could not control myself. The boy was partly to blame. He was of our persuasion. Still is. Quite a famous actor now ... Then I came here, under a different name. I thought the shock of being dismissed from Uppingham had cured me. It had not. There was an Eton boy, seeming to beg my affection. I was wrong ... Warren Bateman snubbed me brutally, not long ago. I had thought him different from the others.’

  ‘I know,’ Krishna said, ‘but that’s not the real him, sir. He’s under a terrible strain. I can’t explain ... Mr. Fleming, come back to Basohli. I will pay your fare. I will see that my grandfather employs you--you, as you are, not as what some others think you ought to be. You are welcome in India. You know it.’

  ‘I do know it!’ the tutor cried unhappily. ‘I have even thought of writing to you ... but I am not Indian! I am English. I believe in English standards, and try, try, to live up to them. It is these people, these villagers of Wiltshire, gentlemen such as Warren Bateman, ladies such as his mother and Lady Pennel, whom I need the acceptance of. I am of them, and cannot live among others, however kind.’

  ‘Please remember what I have said, though,’ Krishna said. ‘You may change your mind. My address is Ravi Lancers, Field Post Office No. 46, B.E.F.’

  He stood up. The tutor stood, his hand out. ‘Thank you, Krishna. And I can’t tell you how deeply I am moved by seeing you in our uniform, risking your life a score of times a day, for my country, for those things that I think I taught you to value.’

  Krishna shook the proffered hand warmly, but his thoughts were grey. Him, too? When it came to the crisis, would Mr. Fleming be on Warren’s side, just because they shared the same colour of skin? Or because they had both, with their mother’s milk, absorbed the spirit of the West, been cradled in the laps of the West’s gods?

  Half an hour later he was back at the Old Vicarage, walking up and down the emerald green of the lawn, thinking, thinking, thinking, and finding no exit from the closed wall of his thoughts.

  Saturday, a week after the great day at the Oval, was his last full day of leave. In the morning he walked the puppies for an hour, afterwards helped prepare the Old Vicarage display at the flower show. In the afternoon he wandered round the show with Diana, watching old Mrs. Bateman, who was a judge, and drinking in the scents and colours of the flowers and basking for the last time in the peace, however shallow, of the day. Young Marsh, big and strong and curly-haired, was helping Mrs. Bateman, and Ralph Harris was walking with Joan; and many were the knowing looks that Krishna intercepted, sent at their backs as they strolled among the marquees set up on the lawns of Pennel House--the tall willowy shape of Joan arrayed now like Ariadne, her hair down her back held at the nape of the neck with a plain gold clasp, her children dressed in Greek togas--Ralph Harris, as close and carelessly possessive as it might be her husband or acknowledged lover, instead of her husband’s bastard half-brother.

  The long afternoon wore slowly on and as the sun set in red flame down the vale Krishna bathed and then dressed for the ball at Manningford Bohun. He was going to wear uniform, but after he had put on his khaki shirt and trousers, he stopped. In the suitcase he had a set of the formal dress of his kingdom--white jodhpur trousers, tightly wrinkled from ankle to knee, fuller above that, and a long gold-silk achkan, like a frock coat, buttoning to the stand-up collar, cuffs and collar heavily embroidered with silver metal thread. With these there were ornate white and gold slippers, a necklace of worked-gold chain, sapphire studded, and the diamond and ruby star of the Royal Order of the Sun of Ravi. He only hesitated a second before quickly taking off his uniform and dressing again as the Yuvraj of Ravi.

  Diana was passing across the hall, a shimmer of white organdie and blue ribbon, as he came down the stairs. She stopped, stared, put her hand to her mouth and gasped, ‘Krishna ... Oh, Krishna! You look marvellous! I feel we ought to have outriders and an escort of cavalry ... The trap’s ready.’

  Then old Mrs. Bateman came down, exclaimed over Krishna, and made sure they were well wrapped; and Joan came and said, ‘Well... enjoy yourselves. It may be the last time.’

  ‘Joan,’ her mother-in-law
said reprovingly.

  ‘I didn’t mean the war,’ she said. ‘I meant, the last time anyone will be holding balls like this. Anyway, I really mean, have a good time.’ She pecked Diana on the cheek.

  The ball was being held, in a house three miles away, in honour of the heir to the estate’s twenty-first birthday. He was home on a week’s leave from his regiment, the Rifle Brigade, and greeted them at the door with a grin and a wave. He said, ‘Major Krishna Ram, isn’t it? And a century for Surrey.’ He was wearing tails and Krishna Ram thought he was already slightly drunk. Then he took off his overcoat and led Diana into the decorated drawing-room, to an audible gasp from the young men and women already gathered there.

  The dinner was excellent; he did not eat the roast beef, but managed to make do with soup, roast potatoes, vegetables and dessert. Nor did he touch the wine, again managing to avoid the attentions of the butler without causing comment from anyone. When the dancing began he felt light and almost as though again at the wicket, entirely concentrated now on Diana Bateman. Her body was firm and close in his arms in the waltz, her eyes level, close to his, and, he thought, questioning, waiting. She looked as she had looked in court in Pewsey, while waiting for the magistrates’ decision on Young Marsh. The hostess introduced him to other young women, and he danced with them, but always returned to Diana. The heady sweetness of night-scented stock wafted in through open windows, with the smell of cut grass, and a soughing in the huge trees at the far edge of the lawn. He floated, knowing he was floating, and when the end came, floated through the farewells, through the good wishes to the twenty-one-year-old, who by now was absolutely drunk. Like Krishna, his leave was at an end. In a few more hours, they would both be back in France. But for Krishna, floating without wine, there was no tomorrow, no yesterday, only this day, this hour.

  He shook the reins and the horse trotted down the white road between the tall hedges. The moon rose over the downs and a nightingale sang along the wall of the Old Vicarage. He unharnessed the horse and walked at Diana’s side into the moonlight in front of the house, where the nightingale was singing.

  They stood together, listening to the soaring song. When it stopped he took her in his arms. Her head sank on to his shoulder and he kissed her. Her mouth was soft, and slowly opened to him, as for the first time, doing something strange but natural. Her body moved a little but not with any strain or lust, only content and fulfilment. She turned her head up and whispered, ‘I love you ... I love you.’

  He stooped again to kiss her, suddenly aware. Down in the fold of her body, under the organdie pressed against him, were the visions that had come to him, night and day. His phallus stiffened against her, thrusting at the organdie like a blind animal. For a time she did not move, neither towards nor away; then she sighed and pressed against him, parting her thighs so that the rod of his maleness pushed into the hidden divide of her thighs.

  ‘No!’ he cried, and realized that he had said it aloud. He broke away from her and ran into the house.

  July 1915

  Krishna Ram was inspecting the trenches. As he left one bay and turned into the next the lance-dafadar in command greeted him with a rigid salute. By the light of the candle guttering on top of an ammunition box at the back of the trench Krishna began to count the bombs laid out ready on the firestep. Twenty-four. ‘How many men in the bay?’ he asked the NCO.

  ‘Six, lord.’

  Krishna nodded. Four bombs a man was correct. Carefully he examined one bomb. The detonator was in position. The NCO drew back a groundsheet to display two boxes of small arms ammunition. Krishna pulled out a few clips at random and checked that they were properly loaded, one up, one down. He checked that each man was in possession of the new type of gas mask, a flannel helmet with mica eyepieces. Then he examined the sandbag walls of the trench, the revetments, firestep, parapet, and parados. The sentry was on the firestep, his orders on a board hanging from a nail in a revetting post behind him. Krishna climbed up, checked the man’s periscope, which was not used at night, and joined him on the actual firestep. He asked him questions about his orders, and, receiving the right answers, peered out to see what he could see. It was a dark night, clouds low and the air heavy with promised thunder, the enemy quiet in their trenches beyond the waste of torn earth called No Man’s Land; he saw nothing.

  He dropped down, congratulated the lance-dafadar on his bay, and went on, Hanuman limping at his heels and the new trumpeter behind. Passing a traverse he entered the next bay and began the process again. Here the NCO had forgotten to put out the sticks or bayonets which, thrust into the earth, fixed some sort of right and left limits for night firing. He reprimanded the man, reflecting that at night, really, only the Vickers on their fixed tripods could fire accurately without being able to see their target.

  After a look at his watch and a long silent spell on the firestep, listening, he went on. It was a few minutes before midnight. The CO had sent out a strong fighting patrol under Lieutenant Mahadeo Singh to bring back at least two prisoners for identification. They had gone out from the right end of the Ravi Lancers’ trenches at half past eleven. Nothing was to be expected from them for a little while yet.

  The next bay had only four men in it. The acting lance-dafadar said that two had gone sick that afternoon, one with bad feet and one with a fever. There were too many sick, Krishna thought. That was making Warren Bateman stricter than ever. The regiment was harder, tougher, and more efficient than he had ever imagined possible with these amiable and uneducated peasants from the slopes of the Himalayas. The systems and techniques of trench warfare had much improved since the early days along this front, when the war first congealed. Then, generals and senior officers knew nothing of static warfare, and treated it only as an unpleasant interlude to be suffered through until once again the trumpets would sound and the armies sweep across hill and dale, the cavalry out in front. Gradually, Krishna saw, the war had ground the idea of motion into the soil, and with it the idea of fresh air, of change, of hope. First it had stopped the moving, then the breathing, so that men went underground like corpses, to be held down by barbed wire, mud, sandbags, steel, ruins. In this motionless subterranean struggle the Ravi Lancers were now proficient. The sandbag walls were faultless, and sloped at just the ordered angle to the vertical. The firesteps were at the right height, Very lights and gas alarm bells where they ought to be. The floors of the trenches muddy--that was inevitable--but clear of debris.

  He moved on. Sentry with no string to the bay commander’s wrist. Sandbag holed and leaking. Machine gun in C Squadron sector, night aiming light gone out. Dafadar with fever, must be sent back, no other NCO in bay. All the time, listening, watching, looking out over No Man’s Land, wondering how Mahadeo Singh’s patrol was faring. Warren sent out a reconnaissance patrol nearly every night, and a fighting patrol at least twice a week. ‘We’ve got to dominate the Hun,’ he said. ‘He’s got to be afraid of us, never knowing when or where we’ll be coming. No Man’s Land must belong to us, not to him.’

  Last week a fighting patrol had lain out, all night, four nights in succession, waiting to catch German reconnaissance patrols suspected of being sent out to make maps of the British wire. The fourth night they’d got it--a feldwebel and three men creeping through the dank weeds towards the centre of the line, in a heavy July rain. The Ravi patrol, a troop of twenty men under Jemadar Sunder Singh, killed them all, and brought in the bodies. Two nights later the Germans tried to retaliate, but were caught by machine guns on the wire in front of C, and left six dead. The identification was definite: the regiment facing the Ravi Lancers was the 88th Bavarians. Still Warren wanted more--a live prisoner. It was all going well, Krishna thought, but... The regiment was as good as Gurkhas or crack British infantry regulars, but...

  A white Very light whooshed up into the sky half a mile to the right, and Krishna jumped up to the firestep. Another light hung in the dark night, showing the earth as a rotting green plain, mutilated and laid out for the u
ndertaker. Machine guns clattered, rifles banged, machine pistols fired in staccato bursts. Then the German field guns opened up. The shells burst in yellow splashes of flame on the Ravi trenches opposite the firing. The artillery swept the front line and No Man’s Land for five minutes, then stopped. A breath later a machine gun made a long monotonous statement. Silence.

  Krishna hurried through the last two bays of his inspection and then hastened back along the trench line to the right end. Mahadeo Singh’s patrol was to come back in through the wire in front of B Squadron. They were due at half past twelve. It was about that now.

  Warren Bateman was waiting at the appointed place. He peered at Krishna in the gloom and said, ‘How was the inspection?’

  ‘Very good, sir, on the whole. There were a number of small things wrong, which I’ll put in my report... Any news of Mahadeo Singh?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  They settled down. The CO was smoking a pipe. Now and then his clenched teeth gleamed in the flame of the hurricane lantern set beside the field telephone. Occasionally he murmured something to Shikari, crouched at his feet. He talked a lot to the dog these days, the way other men talked to themselves. Sometimes the hand holding the pipe shook slightly for a moment before he again got it under control. Himat Singh was there, too, a major now, pale and thin. He had only come out of hospital two days before, and returned straight to the regiment instead of taking the two weeks’ convalescent leave the doctors had ordered for him. Flaherty, now a captain, was there, silent. The jemadar of the troop in whose sector they waited was standing on the firestep beside the sentry, both seen as dim silhouettes against the drifting cloud rack.

  The jemadar leaned down and whispered, ‘Someone is coming, sahib.’ To the men crouched nearby he muttered, ‘Stand-to!’ and they stepped silently up on to the firestep, weapons aimed and ready. Krishna joined Warren in the crowded line. Peering intently ahead he made out a low shape, hardly to be separated from the earth. The sentry a few feet to his right muttered sharply, ‘Halt, oo go dah?’