Flashman at the Charge fp-4

by George MacDonald Fraser

  "This man," says he, "is a dangerous and desperate criminal. He is to be chained wrist and ankle at once, and the keys are to be thrown away. He will accompany us to Rostov tomorrow, and if, while he is in your charge he should escape or die"—he paused, and when he went on it was as casually said as though he were confining them to barracks—"you will be knouted to death. And your families also. Take him away."

  You may not credit it, but my feelings as they thrust me down into my underground pit, clamped chains on my wrists and ankles, and slammed the door on me, were of profound relief. For one thing, I was out of the presence of that evil madman with his leery optic—that may seem small enough, but you haven't been closeted with him, and I have. Point two, I was not only alive but due to be preserved in good health for at least four months—and I was old soldier enough to know that a lot can happen in that time. Point three, I wasn't going into the unknown: Afghanistan, ghastly place though it is, was a home county hunt to me, and if once I could get a yard start, I fancied I could survive the going a sight better than any Russian pursuers.

  It was a mighty "if', of course, but funny things happen north of the Khyber—come to that, I wondered if Ignatieff and his brother-thugs knew exactly what they were tackling in taking an army through that country. We'd tried it, and God knew we were fitter to go to war than the Russians ever were, yet we'd come most horribly undone. I remembered my old sparring chums, the Gilzais and Baluchis and Khels and Afridis—and those fiends of Ghazis—and wondered if the Ruskis knew precisely the kind of folk they'd be relying on for safe-conduct and alliance.

  They had their agents in Afghanistan, to be sure, and must have a shrewd notion of how things were; I wondered if they had secured their alliances in advance, perhaps with the King? And one thing was certain, the Afghans hated the British, and would join in an attack on India like Orangemen on the Twelfth. It would be all up with the Honourable East India Company then, and no bones about it.

  Thinking about that, I could make a guess that if there was a point where the Russian force might run into trouble, it would be in the wild country that they must pass through before they reached Afghanistan. In my days at Kabul, Sekundar Burnes had told me a bit about it—of the independent Khanates at Bokhara and Samarkand and the Syr Daria country, where the Russians had even then been trying to extend their empire, and getting a bloody nose in the process. Fearsome bastards those northern tribes were, Tajiks and Uzbeks and the remnants of the great hordes, and from the little I'd heard from folk like Pencherjevsky, they were still fiercely resisting Russian encroachment. We'd had a few agents up that way ourselves, in my time, fellows like Burnes and Stoddart, trying to undermine Russian influence, but with our retreat from Afghanistan it was well out of our bailiwick now, and the Russians would no doubt eat up the tribes at their leisure. That's what Ignatieff had hinted, and I couldn't see the wild clans being able to stand up to an army of thirty thousand, with ten thousand Cossack cavalry and artillery trains and the rest of it.

  No, setting aside a few minor rubs, this Russian expedition looked to me to be on a good firm wicket—but that mattered nothing as far as I was concerned. What I had to bide my time for was Afghanistan, and the moment when they brought me out of my blinkers to make what Ignatieff called a propaganda on Russia's behalf. That would be the moment to lift up mine eyes unto the hills, or the tall trees, or the nearest hole in the ground—anywhere at all, so long as it offered a refuge from Ignatieff. I didn't even think about the price of failure- to escape—it was quite unthinkable.

  You may think it strange, knowing me, that even in the hellish mess I found myself, with the shadow of horrible death hanging over me, I could think ahead so clearly. Well, it wasn't that I'd grown any braver as I got older the reverse, if anything—but I'd learned, since my early days, that there's no point in wasting your wits and digestion blubbering over evil luck and folly and lost opportunities. I'll admit, when I thought how close I'd been to winning clear, I could have torn my hair—but there it was. However fearful my present predicament, however horrid the odds and dangers ahead, they'd get no better with being fretted over. It ain't always easy, if your knees knock as hard as mine, but you must remember the golden rule: when the game's going against you, stay calm—and cheat.

  In this state of philosophic apprehension, then, I began my journey from Fort Arabat the following day—a journey such as I don't suppose any other Englishman has ever made. You can trace it on the map, all fifteen hundred miles of it, and your finger will go over places you never dreamed of, from the edge of civilization to the real back of beyond, over seas and deserts to mountains that perhaps nobody will ever climb, through towns and tribes that belong to the Arabian Nights rather than to the true story of a reluctant English gentleman (as the guide books would say) with two enormous scowling Cossacks brooding over him the whole way.

  The first part of the journey was all too familiar, by sled back along the Arrow of Arabat, over the bridge at Yenitchi, and then east along that dreary winter coast to Taganrog, where the snow was already beginning to melt in the foul little streets, and the locals still appeared to be recovering from the excesses of the great winter fair at Rostov. Russians, in my experience, are part-drunk most of the time, but if there's a sober soul between the Black Sea and the Caspian for weeks after the Rostov kermesse he must be a Baptist hermit; Taganrog was littered with returned revellers. Rostov I don't much remember, or the famous river Don, but after that we took to telegues, and since the great Ignatieff was riding at the front of our little convoy of six vehicles, we made good speed. Too good for Flashy, bumping along uncomfortably on the straw in one of the middle wagons; my chains were beginning to be damned uncomfortable, and every jolt of those infernal telegues bruised my wrists and ankles. You may think fetters are no more than an inconvenience, but when every move you make means lifting a few pounds of steel, which chafes your flesh and jars your bones, and means you can never lie without their biting into you, they become a real torture. I pleaded to have them removed, if only for an hour or two, and got a kick in my half-mended rib for my pains.

  Cossacks, of course, never wash (although they brush their coats daily with immense care) and I wasn't allowed to either, so by the time we were rolling east into the half-frozen steppe beyond Rostov I was filthy, bearded, tangled, and itchy beyond belief, stinking with the garlic of their awful food, and only praying that I wouldn't contract some foul disease from my noisome companions—for they even slept either side of me, with their nagaikas knotted into my chains. It ain't like a honeymoon at Baden, I can tell you.

  There were four hundred miles of that interminable plain, getting worse as it went on; it took us about five days, as near as I remember, with the telegues going like blazes, and new horses at every post-house. The only good thing was that as we went the weather grew slightly warmer until, when we were entering the great salt flats of the Astrakhan, the snow vanished altogether, and you could even travel without your tulup.

  Astrakhan city itself is a hell-hole. The land all about is as flat as the Wash country, and the town itself lies so low they have a great dyke all round to prevent the Volga washing it into the Caspian, or t'other way round. As you might expect, it's a plague spot; you can smell the pestilence in the air, and before we passed through the dyke Ignatieff ordered everyone to soak his face and hands with vinegar, as though that would do any good. Still, it was the nearest I came to making toilet the whole way.

  Mark you, there was one good thing about Astrakhan: the women. Once you get over towards the Caspian the people are more slender and Asiatic than your native Russian, and some of those dark girls, with their big eyes and long straight noses and pouting lips had even me, in my unkempt misery, sitting up and dusting off my beard. But of course I never got near them; it was into the kremlin for Flash and his heavenly twins, and two nights in a steaming cell before they put us aboard a steamer for the trip across the Caspian.

  It's a queer sea, that one, for it isn't abo
ve twenty feet deep, and consequently the boats are of shallow draught, and bucket about like canoes. I spewed most of the way, but the Cossacks, who'd never sailed before, were in a fearful way, vomiting and praying by turns. They never let go of me, though, and I realized with a growing sense of alarm that if these two watch-dogs were kept on me all the way to Kabul, I'd stand little chance of giving them the slip. Their terror of Ignatieff was if anything even greater than mine, and in the worst of the boat's heaving one of them was always clutching my ankle chains, even if he was rolling about the deck retching at the same time.

  It was four days of misery before we began to steam through clusters of ugly, sandy little islands towards the port of Tishkandi, which was our destination. I'm told it isn't there any longer, and this is another strange thing about the Caspian—its coastline changes continually, almost like the Mississippi shores. One year there are islands, and next they have become hills on a peninsula, while a few miles away a huge stretch of coast will have changed into a lagoon.

  Tishkandi's disappearance can have been no loss to anyone; it was a dirty collection of huts with a pier, and beyond it the ground climbed slowly through marshy salt flats to two hundred miles of arid, empty desert. You could call it steppe, I suppose, but it's dry, rocky heartbreaking country, fit only for camels and lizards.

  "Ust-Yurt," says one of the officers, as he looked at it, and the very name sent my heart into my boots.

  It's dangerous country, too. There was a squadron of lancers waiting for us when we landed, to guard us against the wild desert tribes, for this was beyond the Russian frontiers, in land where they were still just probing at the savage folk who chopped up their caravans and raided their outposts whenever they had the chance. When we made camp at night it was your proper little laager, with sangars at each corner, and sentries posted, and half a dozen lancers out riding herd. All very business-like, and not what I'd have expected from Ruskis, really. But this was their hard school, as I was to learn, like our North-west Frontier, where you either soldiered well or not at all.

  It was five days through the desert, not too uncomfortable while we were moving, but freezing hellish at night, and the dromedaries with their native drivers must have covered the ground at a fair pace, forty miles a day or thereabouts. Once or twice we saw horsemen in the distance, on the low rocky barchans, and I heard for the first time names like "Kazak" and "Turka", but they kept a safe distance. On the last day, though, we saw more of them, much closer, and quite peaceable, for these were people of the Aral coast, and the Russians had them fairly well in order on that side of the sea. When I saw them near I had a strange sense of recognition—those swarthy faces, with here and there a hooked nose and a straggling moustache, the dirty puggarees swathed round the heads, and the open belted robes, took me back to Northern India and the Afghan hills. I found myself stealing a look at my Cossacks and the lancers, and even at Ignatieff riding with the other officers at the head of our caravan, and thinking to myself—these ain't your folk, my lads, but they're mighty close to some I used to know. It's a strange thing, to come through hundreds of miles of wilderness, from a foreign land and moving in the wrong direction, and suddenly find yourself sniffing the air and thinking, "home". If you're British, and have soldiered in India, you'll understand what I mean.

  Late that afternoon we came through more salty flats to a long coastline of rollers sweeping in from a sea so blue that I found myself muttering through my beard "Thalassa or thalatta, the former or the latter?," it seemed so much like the ocean that old Arnold's Greeks had seen after their great march. And suddenly I could close my eyes and hear his voice droning away on a summer afternoon at Rugby, and smell the cut grass coming in through the open windows, and hear the fags at cricket outside, and from that I found myself dreaming of the smell of hay in the fields beyond Renfrew, and Elspeth's body warm and yielding, and the birds calling at dusk along the river, and the pony champing at the grass, and it was such a sweet, torturing longing that I groaned aloud, and when I opened my eyes the tears came, and there was a hideous Russian voice clacking "Aralskoe More!",*(*"Aral Sea!") and bright Asian sunlight, and the chains galling my wrist and ankle-bones, and foreign flat faces all round, and I realized that my earlier thoughts of home had been an illusion, and this was alien, frightening land.

  There was a big military camp on the shore, and a handy little steamer lying off, and while the rest of us waited Ignatieff was received with honours by a group of senior officers—and he only, a captain, too. Of course, I'd realized before this that he was a big noise, but the way they danced attendance on him you'd have thought he was the Tsar's cousin. (Maybe he was, for all I know.)

  They put us aboard the steamer that evening, and I was so tuckered out by the journey that I just slept where I lay down. And in the morning there was a coast ahead, with a great new wooden pier, and a huge river flowing down between low banks to the sea. As far as I could see the coast was covered with tents, and there was another steamer, and half a dozen big wooden transports, and one great warship, all riding at anchor between the pier and the river mouth. There were bugles sounding on the distant shore, and swarms of people everywhere, among the tents, on the pier, and on the ships, and a great hum of noise in the midst of which a military band was playing a rousing march; this is the army, I thought, or most of it, this is their Afghan expedition.

  I asked one of the Russian sailors what the river might be, and he said: "Syr Daria," and then pointing to a great wooden stockaded fort on the rising land above the river, he added: "Fort Raim."35 And then one of the Cossacks pushed him away, cursing, and told me to hold my tongue.

  They landed us in lighters, and there was another delegation of smart uniforms to greet Ignatieff, and an orderly holding a horse for him, and all around tremendous bustle of unloading and ferrying from the ships, and gangs of orientals at work, with Russian non-coms bawling at them and swinging whips, and gear being stowed in the newly-built wooden sheds along the shore. I watched gun limbers being swung down from a derrick, and cursing, half-naked gangs hauling them away; the whole pier was piled with crates and bundles, and for all the world it looked like the levee at New Orleans, except that this was a temporary town of huts and tents and lean-to's. But there were just as many people, sweating and working in orderly chaos, and you could feel the excitement in the air.

  Ignatieff came trotting down to where I was sitting between my Cossacks, and at a word they hauled me up and we set off at his heels through the confusion, up the long, gradual slope to the fort. It was farther off than I'd expected, about a mile, so that it stood well back from the camp, which was all spread out like a table down the shoreline. As we neared the fort he stopped, and his orderly was pointing at the distant picket lines and identifying the various regiments—New Russian Dragoons, Romiantzoff's Grenadiers, Astrakhan Carabiniers, and Aral Hussars, I remember. Ignatieff saw me surveying the camp, and came over. He hadn't spoken to me since we left Arabat.

  "You may look," says he, in that chilling murmur of his, "and reflect on what you see. The next Englishman to catch sight of them will be your sentry on the walls of Peshawar. And while you are observing, look yonder also, and see the fate of all who oppose the majesty of the Tsar."

  I looked where he pointed, up the hill towards the fort, and my stomach turned over. To one side of the gateway was a series of wooden gallows, and from each one hung a human figure—although some of them were hard to recognize as human. A few hung by their arms, some by their ankles, one or two lucky ones by their necks. Some were wasted and blackened by exposure; at least one was still alive and stirring feebly. An awful carrion reek drifted down on the clear spring air.

  "Unteachables," says Ignatieff. "Bandit scum and rebels of the Syr Daria who have been unreceptive to our sacred Russian imperial mission. Perhaps, when we have lined their river with sufficient of these examples, they will learn. It is the only way to impress recalcitrants. Do you not agree?"

  He wheeled his horse,
and we trailed up after him towards the fort. It was bigger, far bigger, than I'd expected, a good two hundred yards square, with timber ramparts twenty feet high, and at one end they were already replacing the timber with rough stone. The Russian eagle ensign was fluttering over the roofed gatehouse, there were grenadiers drawn up and saluting as -Ignatieff cantered through, and I trudged in, clanking, to find myself on a vast parade, with good wooden barracks around the walls, troops drilling in the dusty square, and a row of two-storey administrative buildings down one side. It was a very proper fort, something like those of the American frontier in the 'seventies; there were even some small cottages which I guessed were officers' quarters.

  Ignatieff was getting his usual welcome from a tubby chap who appeared to be the commandant; I wasn't interested in what they said, but I gathered the commandant was greatly excited, and was babbling some great news.

  "Not both of them?" I heard Ignatieff say, and the other clapped his hands in great glee and said, yes, both, a fine treat for General Perovski and General Khruleff when they arrived.

  "They will make a pretty pair of gallows, then," says Ignatieff. "You are to be congratulated, sir. Nothing could be a better omen for our march through Syr Daria."

  "Ah, ha, excellent!" cries the tubby chap, rubbing his hands. "And that will not be long, eh? All is in train here, as you see, and the equipment arrives daily. But come, my dear Count, and refresh yourself."

  They went off, leaving me feeling sick and hang-dog between my guards; the sight of those tortured bodies outside the stockade had brought back to me the full horror of my own situation. And I felt no better when there came presently a big, brute-faced sergeant of grenadiers, a coiled nagaika in his fist, to tell my Cossacks they could fall out, as he was taking me under his wing.