by John Masters
‘Verra gud’, sir. By the right, s’lut’!’ The hands slapped on the rifle butts. The Highlanders turned with a swing of kilts and stumbled away down the hill. Robin stood up slowly.
The firing against his company’s position was dying down. From the valley the guns gave out a continuous thunder. Rifle fire snapped and crackled like erratic lightning along the hilltops. He heard the rapid pop-pop-pop-pop of a gatling, then a hiccup and silence. The rolling clouds now damped the sounds of battle, now drifted apart to give them redoubling echoes.
He waited fifteen minutes. The guns stopped firing. He found Subadar Maniraj and said to him, ‘We’ll go on down now.’
‘It’s time,’ the old man muttered and dashed away around the hilltop in a wide circle, waving his sword and shouting, ‘Fall in! Extended order! By the centre! Hurry, hurry!’--mixed with streams of abuse and blows from the flat of his sword across the backs of the laggards. Robin called out, when they were ready, ‘Bugler, double bajao!’
The bugler blew the ‘Double,’ and the line of Gurkhas ran down the hill, packs and haversacks flapping, equipment creaking, boots scraping and striking sparks from the rock, bayonets flashing here and there with a livid glint under the darkening sky.
In the valley Robin could see little. He was not even sure they had reached it until he felt the ground rising again. At his elbow Maniraj said, ‘We’re there, sahib. We’d better wheel right and make contact with the Highlanders. I can hear shooting.’
‘Not much. Sounds like a few snipers.’
The mist swirled momentarily away. The company stood in an empty valley, among gleaming sea-black rocks. Shots and a stifled scream sounded from the right, the direction in which the subadar thought Mclain’s Highlanders were. But there was more firing to the left, and some straight ahead. A pair of Ghilzais charged out of the mist from the left and were into the middle of the company before they recognized the enemies about them. The Gurkhas shot them down after a brief hunt--’There! There!’
‘Ayo!’
‘On your left, fool!’
‘Ayo!’
‘Payo!’
Robin said, ‘We’re going to lose ourselves in a minute, Subadar-sahib, if we’re not careful. Wait.’ He got out his compass. After the needle had steadied he pointed to the north--the right--and said, ‘The Highlanders ought to be down there, very close. Our main body is coming from the opposite direction. They are! Hear the guns?’
‘Yes. Heaven knows what they’re firing at. But the Highlanders must be there.’ The subadar swung his hand to the west. ‘That’s where we heard the shots from just now.’
‘Which shots? There’s shooting all over the place. It’s no good chasing around in this, sahib. Mist makes sound seem to come from everywhere. We are in the right place, and the Highlanders, wherever they’ve got to, are in the wrong place. Any Ghilzais who retreat in front of the main attack will come along this valley, from that direction, and we’ve got to be ready for them. That’s been the object of our whole operation. Form a defence here, facing south.’
‘Achchi bat, sahib. But--‘
‘I’m afraid we must, sahib.’ Robin did not want to argue any more, though he knew the old man’s mind was obstinately set on heading for the firing, wherever it was.
The company settled down in their positions, some standing, some kneeling. Clouds drifted about the valley, and soon, through a long, misty corridor, Robin saw the dull lustre of bayonets working down a hill. The drab-coloured uniforms told him the troops were men of the Frontier Force. The clouds closed down again. From the middle of his company he could not see the outer ranks, forty paces from him. Twice, running Ghilzais broke through the mist, dragging tendrils of it with them. Then the Gurkhas fired quickly, and the mist wrapped them all once more. Every minute it grew colder. A bitter wind began to blow the cloud in grey billows past him. More firing, in fits and starts. He walked to various points of his line and asked what had happened. ‘Some Pathans, sahib. We missed them, they veered away,’ or, ‘We got one. There he is’--and a body lying crumpled at a rifleman’s feet. But only ten or twelve Ghilzais in all had come this way. The sound of the bullets clacking overhead changed. They were Sniders now, not the muzzle-loaders that most Ghilzais had. The brigade was getting close. Wherever the main body of the Ghilzais had gone, it had not come down this valley. Mclain hadn’t stopped it either, or there would have been the roar of a big battle close by.
Soldiers loomed up like giants in the fraying mist. The Gurkhas of Robin’s company shouted, ‘Sathi, sathi!’ The Frontier Force sepoys stopped among them, lowered their rifles, and began to chat in low whispers. Soon horses appeared behind the sepoys.
The general rode through and approached Robin. ‘Ha! So you got here, young man. Did you have good killing?’
‘No, sir. Only a dozen of them have tried to pass.’
The general gazed down in surprise, absently stroking the drops of condensed mist off his whiskers. ‘I didn’t hear any firing, of course, but I thought you must be getting at ‘em with the bayonet. The Frontier Force and the main body of the MacDonalds certainly chased four hundred Ghilzais off those ridges. Where in blazes have they got to? Where are Mclain’s lads?’
‘Over there, I think, sir.’ Robin began to tell the general what had happened but cut off his explanation with a cough. Mclain might get into severe trouble. He’d better say as little as possible.
The general said sharply, ‘You think! You lost touch with him, then?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘H’m. I hope it’s all right. This is a bad country to lose touch in, even for a few minutes.’ He turned to the Highlanders’ commanding officer. ‘Findlater, Savage here and your lad Mclain lost touch with each other. Savage thinks your people are over there somewhere. Perhaps they’ve had better luck. But you’d better send out a patrol to find them and bring them back into the column. We must get on, bivouac on the pass to-night.’
‘Very good, sir. Which way did Mclain go, Savage?’ The Highland lieutenant-colonel turned on Robin with a frown. ‘How did you lose touch? Why weren’t you keeping contact by the inward flank? Why--?’
Robin began to answer, seeking his words carefully. The Frontier Force sepoys formed up to continue the advance. The horses of the general’s staff stood with heads up and ears pricked, nervous in the moving mist, like islands in the stream of marching men. Two guns of the mountain battery went past, known long before their coming and remembered long after their going by the steady clank and crash of their loads in the harness. Then all sounds died down to the squink of boot-nails on the rock, the breathing of tired men, the scuff of the Frontier Force sandals. The cloud and mist dissolved, the wind dropped, and thin, gritty snow began to fall.
As the cloud lifted all those in the general’s party saw a man in a kilt stumbling down the western hill towards them. The general had begun to move, but reined in his horse. They all heard the running man’s gasps and sobs. First of all of them it was Robin who recognized the man as Mclain. He had no helmet, and blood covered the side of his face and hung congealed in thick patches on the front of his tunic. While the watchers remained numb-struck the young officer fell the last twenty feet down the hill and struggled forward on hands and knees. He raised his bloody head. His once-bright blue eyes were blank as pits.
Then at last the officers and orderlies around the general ran forward to support Mclain, and put their arms under his and lifted him up. His tunic hung in ribbons about him. His claymore was broken off six inches below the steel basketwork of the hilt. Robin saw every detail as he ran forward to help. But Mclain clung now to his own colonel’s knees and recognized no one else. He babbled ceaselessly, all the officer gone, and all the brave, moustachioed young gallant. In those seconds he seemed to speak from one of the other worlds in which Robin habitually lived, and Robin felt very close to him.
‘They’re dead, nearly all of them. All. I fought till--couldn’t fight. They didn’t kill me. Couldn’t. Mc
Pherson’s dead. Graham. Robertson. McIntosh and McKenzie. McLaughlan. All the MacDonalds. Laidlaw.’ He dragged in breath between the names and wept so bitterly that the watchers and the men supporting him cast down their eyes in order not to see the young officer’s utter loss of himself. But Robin watched every tear and heard every sob and recognized them all. He did not remember seeing and hearing this thing, but from his earliest years he had known it. This that he now experienced again, not this time as a halfmemory from babyhood but as a fully felt reality, was the root from which he had grown and must continue to grow. Mclain spoke from the pit where men are not men but so many grasping fingers of evil; where love and courage, hate and cowardice, are all equally vile because equally human, all equally far from the silence and solitude of God. Mclain wept on the gaunt sides of Glencoe, Robin over the Mutiny--he knew it now. Perhaps for a time Mclain would fear man as Robin did. These others, who could not bear to watch, had never known what Mclain had just learned. They would never know the pit. Or silence.
‘We got--right place--’ Colonel Findlater tried to help Mclain up, but he needed to kneel and had to speak. Embarrassment flooded the general’s face, and the soldiers kept passing, shuffling on under the lacy snow.
‘The Gurkhas wouldn’t come. We got over the--down into the valley--a hundred, two hundred. With knives! They never--rifles. And we--not--Not time! They--’
His wandering, blank eyes passed over Robin’s face. Robin stood still, limp from the welling flood of his understanding of the young man who had been thrown down into the same lonely place with him. He could not have borne for anyone to pass between them, cutting off the almost visible reaching-out of his spirit.
Mclain said again, ‘They--they--they--’ He tore loose from those who held him. He hit Robin in the face with the back of his bloody left hand, and again with the palm. ‘You--wouldn’t come. Oh, coward. You were afraid. Your skin!’ He began to scream, grasping Robin by the throat and feebly shaking him.
Robin felt the sting of blood on his bruised lips. One loose tooth grated against another. The snow fell like touches of an icy sword on his cheek. The Gurkhas of his company stood behind and around him, watching, their faces set in utter impassivity.
He said softly, ‘I wasn’t afraid, Mclain.’ He would not say any more now. He understood. If he did not explain it might still all blow over.
‘Yes, you were!’ Mclain had returned from Glencoe. If he remembered now that he had been there, he was ashamed of it. When he spoke he had regained a wavering control over his voice. ‘You’re a coward, like all your bloody Indians. My men saw you. My men saw him, sir’--he turned to Lieutenant-Colonel Findlater--’two of them I sent up with a message, asking him to come. He was skulking behind a wall on the hill. There was just a little sniping. Oh, you--oh, God, you--’
‘Have Mr. Mclain carried to the surgeon at once, Findlater, and well taken care of,’ the general said harshly, raising his voice to cut into Mclain’s ugly, panting fury. ‘The matter will be investigated. And about those men, your dead’--the general fumbled for words, then blurted out with awkward brusqueness--’I can only hold up the advance for an hour.’
Findlater muttered, ‘I understand, sir.’
The general swung his horse’s head and turned down the valley, not acknowledging Robin’s salute. Robin stood by the side of the track. Along the column the bugles blew ‘Stand Fast!’ Mclain had gone, carried away, retching, on a stretcher. Colonel Findlater spoke briefly to a captain of his Highlanders; the soldiers ranked behind the captain stared at Robin or up the hill. The captain asked some question, Findlater answered, and a sergeant-major ran to halt two passing camels of the baggage train. The camels were loaded with picks and shovels. The captain gave an order, almost silently, and the Highlanders began to march, wheeling left and climbing slowly up the hill.
Robin watched the fall of the snow. And what was he, if to his mind silence and solitude were just--nothing? The answer was always the same: nothing. This that had come about to-day might make Anne understand without his having to hurt her.
The rest of the 13th would not be up for some time. He said, ‘Maniraj-sahib, see that our wounded are taken care of by the field hospital.’ Then he began walking up the hill with the Highlanders.
A lieutenant at the tail of the climbing column said curtly, ‘There’s no need for you to come, Savage.’
‘I must.’
He walked up through the snow, knowing that he was alone, although Rifleman Jagbir Pun, carrying a service rifle and a long jezail, walked in his steps behind him.
CHAPTER 5
A new, light wind whirled the snow across the crest of the ridge that separated the main valley from the shallow gorge into which the MacDonalds had strayed. Thin snow dusted the rocks so that the gorge knew neither life nor colour--only the whiteness, and the blackness under the lee of the rocks and under the hunched bodies.
The first they passed lay on his back, propped against the steep hillside, his young face turned to the sky and the snow falling into his open mouth. A single, fierce, upward knife-stroke had entered his belly and slashed up through belt and tunic and skin so that his entrails hung out over his kilt. His rifle and ammunition pouches were gone. And another nearby, his kilt up, displayed a mangled red mush at the base of his stomach to show that he had been castrated. Another, sprawled forward, lay separate by ten feet from his head and the glaring eyeballs in it. Up and down the gorge floor and on the steep sides, the Highland men lay in the isolation of death. The corporal who had brought Mclain’s message lay here. They had taken his kilt, and the richly woven fabric would be cut and shaped to cover a Ghilzai woman’s head against the next snow.
The Highlanders who had come to bury their dead stood huddled together in the ravine. No one among them spoke, and Robin felt the current of their emotion begin to rise, striking from one man into another, spreading outward, doubling and redoubling in strength as it passed. The soldiers began to growl together like animals in a pit.
The captain spoke, the sergeants shouted hoarsely, the men ran to get picks and shovels from the camels. In the bed of the ravine, the only place where their picks could break the iron soil, half of them began to dig furiously. The other half spread in threes on the hill, sought out the bodies, and carried them down. The lieutenant stood at the edge of the widening grave with a notebook and a pencil, and wrote down the name and rank each corpse had held. The colour-sergeant emptied the first pack to be brought to him, and thereafter searched each body and put the rings, the money, and the tobacco from it into the pack, while the lieutenant wrote.
Up and down the gorge sentries peered into the snow. The diggers and the searchers carried their rifles slung across their backs, though all knew that there was now no need. The Ghilzais had made their ambush and killed their enemies and gone. An instant of time, an opportunity seized, had wiped out the general’s cautious combinations and sound manoeuvrings. The Ghilzais would not return.
Robin sat down on a rock and groped back through time to the fight in the ravine. The men and their actions came easily before him--the eruption in the mist, the bayonets and swords, a few startled shouts, the overwhelming silent storm of the knifemen. He sought further, below the actions to the emotions, to the place where Mclain had been. Only there could he gain full contact with any other human being.
It was no good. Mclain had come back to his pride and did not know him any more. No one did. No one in the world. Certainly not his father, Colonel Rodney Savage, C.B. Nor his stepmother, Caroline, for all her strange insights, because she had long ago turned her spirit to face his father’s. She hadn’t liked his mother, either; she couldn’t have, or she would not have married his father, not so soon.
It was no good, and it was better so. He had known people and trusted them once--his mother, for instance, and his father. No clear image of that time survived with him, but sometimes he felt a glow like a distant fire and recognized it as the memory of childish love. He gathered
snow in his hands and waited for the bite of it, watching the diggers and thinking--had he actually seen his mother suffer the pains of death, and greater pangs before dying? Had his father whispered of love while pressing him down into darkness? The snow was no colder than the sphere of glass within which those memories had for ever enclosed him. Worse, inside that diving bell he must have grown away from the human pattern, because to him men and women were scarcely more comprehensible than fish. They would come and open and shut their mouths outside the glass, threatening him or enticing him out to join them or begging him to let them in; but he’d die if he went out, and they’d die if they came in.
He sifted the snow through his fingers and put his hand in his pocket to find Alexander’s coin. As a boy he had tried to forget all about them, the fish, and live only on what was inside his bell, which was just himself. Later he’d taken to watching them through the glass to find out whether he was indeed different from them or whether the difference lay only in his imagination. So to-day would be important all his life, because the events of to-day had proved to him that a difference in imagination separated man from man as surely as gills or wings separated species from species, fish from birds. He had interpreted people’s actions as a man might interpret a shadow play, guessing what had to be done to cause a particular result or guessing on from the observed action to the emotion it would arouse. He saw that one man smiled and held out his hand on meeting another, and knew that they called it ‘friendship.’ He had no means of finding out whether what he felt on meeting Maniraj was that same emotion, although he too smiled and held out his hand. Love of women, avarice, ambition, hate--they used the words, and he had to, but the cold glass lay between him and them. Even fear was different; to-day’s fight showed that. When you were about to be stabbed you felt fear--that might serve as a definition of fear; but whatever it was that he had felt in face of the Ghilzai on the hilltop, and it had been strongly felt, it was unlike what Jagbir or Maniraj or Bolton felt. To them it must have looked like curiosity, the way he had stood there without a pistol and peered into the eyes of the man seeking his death. Perhaps it was what they called fear that he felt when anyone came too close to his glass and looked in as though wanting to break it for love of him--such as his father, and Anne.
