by John Wilcox
‘I don’t understand, sir.’
Lamb cleared his throat gruffly. ‘It’s your pay. And the other’s for, whasisname, 762.’
‘Three five two. But we have been paid for our scouting work.’
The little man shifted uneasily in his seat. ‘Yes, but that’s the difference between scouting pay and what’s due to you as a soldier. Same for your man.’
Simon shook his head. ‘But we are not soldiers any more. I resigned my commission four months ago and I bought Jenkins out of the army at the same time.’
‘Ah yes. Well.’ Now the Colonel looked openly embarrassed at last. ‘Truth is, Fonthill ...’ he dug back into the confusion on his table and produced another two envelopes, ‘I’ve been sitting on these: your resignation and your request to get your man out.’ He shrugged his shoulders disarmingly. ‘I just didn’t forward them on to the Horse Guards so, you see, you’re still in the army. Thought I’d better tell you now and give you your back pay, so to speak.’ He smiled. ‘Chance to buy a decent shirt, at least, don’t you think?’
Simon stared into the blue eyes facing him. ‘Do you mean to tell me, sir,’ he said slowly, ‘that I’ve been a second lieutenant in the 24th these last four months - all the time I’ve been scouting for John Dunn?’
The older man held his gaze and slowly nodded.
‘But you had no right to delay my resignation. No right at all.’
‘No, Fonthill. I didn’t delay it. I stopped it.’ This time Lamb spoke slowly and firmly.
Simon stood up. ‘Colonel Lamb. You cannot stop me from resigning from the army. The terms of my commission allow me to do so after the first three years of service. And as for Jenkins, I checked. He had served five years and I can buy him out. In fact, I have paid to do so.’
‘Your cheque is in your man’s envelope. It has not been cashed.’
Simon swung on his heel. ‘Then I’ll have no more of this.’ He spoke over his shoulder. ‘I shall see Lord Chelmsford.’
‘Come back.’ The words came like a whiplash. Despite his anger, Simon paused at the tent flap and looked back at the Colonel. The little man remained seated but pointed at the vacant chair. ‘Sit down, Fonthill. We have not finished yet.’
Slowly, Simon returned to the chair.
‘Good. Now listen to me.’ Lamb stood up and perched one buttock on the crowded table in front of Simon. All embarrassment was now gone. ‘I want you to withdraw that resignation and, if you wish, your request to buy out three nine seven, or whatever his number is!’
The Colonel lifted his hand as Simon began to interrupt. ‘No. Hear me out.’ His voice took on a warmer tone as he leaned forward. ‘I can well understand your disenchantment with the army, my boy. It must have been, well, frightening to say the least to have been court-martialled for cowardice. All that bloody fool Covington’s doing. But you were cleared and you must remember, Fonthill, that that bloody fool is also a most gallant soldier and a splendid CO of his battalion. He thought he was doing his duty.
‘Now.’ He walked round the table and selected and lit another cheroot. ‘You have also shown that you have become a first-class soldier over this last strange year, in rather unusual circumstances. Not only in the work you have done as - forgive me - a so-called civilian scout during our advance into Zululand, but also in the intelligence-gathering which you carried out for me in the months leading up to that dreadful business at Isandlwana.’ He blew a spiral of blue smoke into the air. ‘Same goes for your man Jones, too.’
‘Jenkins, sir. Jenkins.’
‘Ah yes. Quite so. Jenkins, yes. Three five two, isn’t he?’
‘Oh well done, sir.’
‘That will do, Fonthill. Don’t be impertinent.’
‘Sir.’
‘Look here. I believe you have a future in the army. I know very well that your father was a distinguished soldier - got a Victoria Cross in the Mutiny, didn’t he?’
Simon nodded.
‘Quite so. The line is there. The tradition is there. This court martial business will soon be forgotten. You owe it to your family and to yourself to continue. Besides which,’ the Colonel’s face relaxed once more into a smile, ‘and this is the third thing. I have a job for you. It is very important work and there are few I would entrust it to. But I am sure, in view of your experience here, that you would do it well.’
Simon stood up once more. ‘I rather thought that there might be something like that behind this, sir. I am very grateful to you, I really am. I appreciate all you say and all that you have done for me. But I do not wish to continue serving in the British Army. I insist on resigning.’
The Colonel was silent for a moment. Thoughtfully, he removed a fragment of tobacco from his tongue. ‘What, then, will you do?’ he asked quietly.
‘Don’t really know, sir. Jenkins wishes to stay with me as my servant, and I am lucky enough to have a few pennies of private income. I thought perhaps we might try our luck in India. Tea, perhaps, something up in the hills.’
‘Capital. Absolutely capital!’ The Colonel, too, was now on his feet, once again displaying the enthusiasm of a small boy. ‘This work I have for you - and at this stage it is absolutely conf idential - is in India and, dammit, beyond. You must do it.’
Simon smiled, as much at the enthusiasm as the offer. ‘Can I do this as a civilian?’
‘Good lord, man. Of course not. This is vital work. Can’t trust it to a feller ...’ he sought for words of sufficient condemnation, ‘in a tweed jacket and flannels.’
‘Then I am sorry, sir, but the answer must be no. I do not wish to remain in the army.’
The Colonel blew out his cheeks in resignation, sat down again and gestured for Simon to do the same. ‘Very well then, young man. I must play my last card.’ He leaned back in his chair and blew smoke towards the top of the tent pole. ‘You will remember - yes, of course you will remember - what I understand was the turning point of your court martial?’
‘I am not sure that I know what you’re driving at, sir.’
‘Well,’ the Colonel’s eyes were now half closed in contemplation of the conical top of the tent, ‘I was not there, of course, but I am told that what swung the court round in your favour was the last-minute intervention of a witness who confirmed your story about your capture by King Cetswayo and your escape from his camp. Eh? What?’
Simon felt his heart lurch. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said slowly. ‘John Dunn’s daughter, Nandi, was able to prove that I had not been telling a pack of lies, as Lieutenant Colonel Covington had implied.’
‘Quite so.’ Lamb’s eyes were now distinctly twinkling. ‘Quite so. But the court had already reached its verdict, I understand, and almost certainly would not have allowed a girl - and a half-caste Zulu at that - to give evidence at such a late stage if it had not been presented with a letter from me asking them to hear her.’
The Colonel’s chair came crashing back and he leaned across the paperwork in mock puzzlement. ‘And do you know, Fonthill, I’m damned if I remember ever writing such a letter!’
The crack of a whip outside and the rumble of wagon wheels broke the silence. Simon could think of nothing to say. ‘Really, sir,’ he croaked.
‘Must have been a damned forgery. Eh? What?’ The blue eyes now positively danced in that seamed brown face. ‘And done, of course, by that remarkable young lady who telegraphed to me in the Cape from Durban: Miss Alice Griffith, of the Morning Post. Damned good friend of yours, Fonthill, I’d say. And smart too, don’t you think?’
Simon cleared his throat. ‘I am sorry, sir,’ he said woodenly. ‘I knew nothing of that. What is important is that I was not guilty of the charge brought against me. You must believe that.’
The Colonel’s face hardened and he rose to his feet again and walked round the table. He put his hand on Simon’s shoulder and looked sternly into his face. ‘I do believe it. I know that you are not a coward. The letter said only what I would have written had there been time for me to do so before
the court rose - which there was not, of course, hence the forgery. But you have one thing to learn about me, Fonthill.’ He lowered his face towards Simon’s in emphasis. ‘I am absolutely ruthless where the interests of my Queen and country are concerned. I want you for this job. If you continue to refuse, then I shall have no hesitation in making public the fact that the letter was forged and demanding that the court martial be reopened.’
He walked back to his chair and pulled out a gold timepiece from the debris on the table. ‘Take your time to consider. I will give you exactly thirty seconds.’
In the ensuing silence, Simon felt he could hear the watch ticking. He stared at the nut-brown countenance before him. Little bastard. Just like the rest of them in this army of Queen Victoria. Single-minded to the point of blackmail. Should he call the little man’s bluff? Would Lamb dare to reopen the trial and risk renewing the storm of criticism back home which had followed the slaughter of Isandlwana? If he did, then Simon would stand no chance of an acquittal this time. The Colonel’s gaze was centred on his watch; one eyebrow raised as if disbelieving the time. No hint of indecision there; just an impersonal air of sang-froid. Ruthless bastard. Simon felt trapped. He sighed. ‘Very well. What do you want me to do?’
Immediately, Lamb’s face broke into a beam. ‘Good man. Knew you’d see sense eventually. Sorry about the hard stuff. Don’t mind playing dirty if I have to, y’know. Now.’ He leaned forward. ‘What do you know about the North West Frontier?’
Despite his anger, Simon felt his heart leap. The part of him which, despite his disillusion, remained a British soldier could not but be interested. The Frontier, India’s border with Afghanistan, presented the greatest opportunity for action and advancement for any officer in the army. It offered danger and hard employment and it did so because it was a vulnerable, half-open door to the richest possession of the Empire: India. The tribes of the independent state of Afghanistan were a militant hotchpotch of feuding warriors in constant conflict with the British garrisons of the Frontier. But they were comparatively unimportant compared to the threat posed by the other great imperial power, Russia, whose own territorial ambitions had taken the double-headed eagle banners of the Tsar right to the northern frontier of Afghanistan, leaving that cussedly independent nation as a kind of buffer between the two great imperial locomotives of the nineteenth century. The North West Frontier of India was Russia’s obvious point of entry to India. Afghanistan, then, was a playground for power politics - and a forcing ground for military careers.
‘Not much, sir,’ said Simon. ‘Only what I learned at Sandhurst and what I’ve read in the papers. And there’s been little chance to do that lately. I’m afraid I’m right out of touch.’
‘Well, you’ll need to be brought up to date damned quickly.’ The Colonel turned in his seat and pushed with his toe at a pile of maps on the ground. Selecting one, he turned back. ‘While we’ve been farting around with Cetswayo down here, the Russkies have been stirring up quite a bit of trouble in Afghanistan. Here, look.’ He unrolled a map of the region, put an inkstand at the top to prevent it re-furling and walked round the table to join Simon.
The map was depressingly empty. The corner of India fronting the border with Afghanistan bristled with hatched lines depicting railways and was studded with townships - Lahore, Rawal Pindi, Kohat, Banu - but the territory that was Afghanistan seemed to consist mainly of shaded mountain ranges and little else. The western Himalayas to the east linked with the Hindu Kush mountains running from east to west to form a seemingly uncrossable spine across the country. No railways, few towns and fewer roads. Across the country’s northern border lay white expanses marked ‘Russian Dominions in Asia’. Here, large blank areas were broken up by names romantically evocative from Simon’s childhood classroom: Samarkand, Tashkent, Bokhara, Khiva, Merv. But again no roads and few railways, although one, advancing menacingly due south from Merv to the Afghan border, caught Simon’s eye. It was marked ‘Under Construction’.
Lamb noticed Simon’s frown. ‘Yes. Not much in the way of cartography. One of our problems. Damned nuisance. But look.’ He jabbed a thumb on Afghanistan’s southern border with India and swivelled his forefinger on to the northern border with the Russian territories. ‘Whole bloody country’s only three inches wide. The Russians could be across those mountain passes in three weeks and be down on to the plains of the Punjab before we’d hitched up our knickers.’
‘What’s to stop them, then?’
The Colonel wrinkled his nose. ‘Apart from world opinion - and that can’t be relied on - it’s the Afghans. Awkward buggers. They don’t like us. You will remember that we invaded in 1840-something and got a bloody nose, but they’re not too fond of the Russkies either. So they play one off against the other. But you’ll know all this.’
Simon did, more or less. The Russian threat to India, via Afghanistan, had been a perennial topic of dinner and mess table conversation throughout Britain before he left for South Africa more than a year ago. In Zululand he had heard of a British invasion of Afghanistan and, vaguely, of a British victory somewhere in the hills. But he knew little of what had ensued. He told Lamb as much.
‘Right,’ said the Colonel, lighting another cheroot. ‘Won’t take long to paint you the picture.’ His briskness and obvious delight in this pedagogic role made Simon smile inwardly and took him back to a humid room in Cape Town, where Lamb had lectured him on Zulu history. But he listened intently. The Colonel was good at this.
‘Now,’ said the little man, his eyes sparkling, ‘about ten months or so ago, St Petersburg put great pressure on Sher Ali - he’s the Amir, the guv’nor, of Afghanistan - to accept a Russian mission at his capital, Kabul. The Afghans didn’t fancy this, so they did their old trick of turning to us, asking if we would come to their aid if the Russians attacked. Delhi got the wind up and vacillated. So old Ali was forced to accept a pretty strong contingent of Russkies at Kabul. This meant that the latch was off the Afghan gate to India and our government got the wind up again, from a different direction, so to speak.’ The blue eyes smiled through the cigar smoke. ‘Follow?’
Simon nodded.
‘Good. Now we demanded the same facilities, and when the Afghans hummed and hawed, we sent a mission that was firmly but politely turned back at the frontier. Naturally we couldn’t have that, so we invaded.’
Simon nodded again. ‘Naturally,’ he said, but his irony was lost on the Colonel. ‘We sent in three columns.’ Lamb jabbed at the map. ‘Lieutenant General Sir Donald Stewart took his Kandahar Field Force in from Quetta, here, to Kandahar and occupied that.’ He pointed to the south-east corner of Afghanistan. ‘At the same time, Major General Roberts’s Kurram Field Force marched from Kohat over the Peiwar Kotal mountain range here in the centre, and Lieutenant General Sir Sam Browne’s Peshawar Valley Field Force invaded through the Khyber Pass here towards Jalalabad in the east.’ He shrugged. ‘Not much choice really. These are the only routes in. Anyway, Stewart and Browne didn’t have much trouble, though Browne got a bit bogged down in the Khyber. It was Roberts who was opposed and got the fighting. He took on most of the Amir’s men up in the mountains here, at Peiwa Kotal, outflanked ’em in a brilliant move and cleared the way to Kabul. Conveniently, old Sher Ali fled and died quickly and his successor, Yakub Khan, decided to negotiate. Don’t blame him, with three British columns encamped in his damned country.’
Lamb flicked the ash off his cheroot. ‘There was a treaty concluded here, at Gandamak, on the border, under which the Kurram valley and Khyber Pass were assigned to us and we also gained our mission at Kabul and control of Afghan foreign policy, in return for which Yakub was recognised as amir and an annual British subsidy was agreed.’ The Colonel sighed. ‘It’s always bloody rupees in the end, you know, in that country.’
Simon nodded slowly. ‘And the Russians?’ he asked.
‘Still there, of course, but a bit squeezed out. They relied on us getting beaten and we weren’t.’
&nbs
p; Simon raised his eyebrows. ‘So everything’s all right, then?’
‘Ah, not quite. Roberts is still there - left in charge, so to speak, right in the south of the country - but the other two columns have withdrawn. Our mission has gone to Kabul, but Roberts is uneasy. He thinks there could be an uprising at any time. Trouble is, he’s got no reliable intelligence. So ...’ Lamb smiled. ‘He wants me to go out there and organise this for him. He’s my old boss, you see.’
‘Yes, but where do I fit in?’
‘I want you to be my main intelligence officer out there. Do what you’ve done so well here. Sniff out the feeling amongst the tribes. Give us warning of an uprising. Tell us where and when it might come.’
Simon’s eyebrows rose again. ‘But I don’t know Afghanistan, neither the country nor the language.’
‘Lack of lingo and local knowledge didn’t stop you doing a good job here.’ Lamb stood. ‘Look, you will need a bit of training out there, but there isn’t much time.’ He riffled through the papers on his desk again, drawing out a letter written in green ink in strong, sloping handwriting. ‘Here. This is from Roberts to me. Confidential, of course. Highly. Take it and read it overnight and then bring it back. It will fill you in. Right? Right?’
Simon sighed. The whole project sounded crazy: delegating highly sensitive intelligence work to a man who had never visited the country and knew nothing of its customs or its language. Crazy? No, homicidal. Was it the army’s way of getting rid of him? Unlikely. It would be far too contrived and expensive for the Horse Guards. It must be their inherent stupidity. He made one last try.
‘Surely General Roberts will have established sources of intelligence far more experienced and skilled than me?’
Lamb snorted. ‘Oh yes. But he doesn’t rate ’em. Wants a soldier.’ The blue eyes twinkled. ‘Looks as though he’s going to have a reluctant one.’
Simon stood. ‘Very well, sir. I’ll go. But I must take Jenkins with me. He’s discreet, and anyway, he’s a far better shot and horseman than I am. And I fancy you will need both on the Frontier.’
