Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “Go for them, Byng, old man. Live off the country, keep moving, and don’t let ’em guess once what your next move’s going to be!”

  So Byng recruited as he went, and struck like a brain-controlled tornado at whatever crossed his path. But irreparable damage had been done before the old school was relieved, and Byng — like others — was terribly short of men. Many of his own irregulars were so enraged at having been disbanded at a moment’s notice that they refused to return to him. Their honor, as they saw it, had been outraged. Only two British regiments could be spared him, and they were both thinned by sickness from the first. They were Sikhs, who formed the bulk of his headquarterless brigade, and many of them were last-minute friends, who came to him unorganized and almost utterly undrilled.

  But Byng was a man of genius, and his bare reputation was enough to offset much in the way of unpreparedness. He coaxed and licked and praised his new men into shape as he went along; within a week he had stormed Deeseera, blowing up their greatest reserve of ammunition and momentarily stunning the rebellion’s leaders. But cholera took charge in the city, and two days later found him hurrying out again, to camp where there was uncontaminated water, on rising ground that gave him the command of three main roads. It was there that the rebels cornered him.

  They blew up a hundred-yard-long bridge behind him at the one point where a swiftly running river could be crossed, and from two other sides at once mutinied native regiments and thousands from the countryside flocked, hurrying to take a hand in what seemed destined to be Byng’s last action. The fact that so many swaggering soldier Sikhs were cornered with him was sufficient in itself to bring out Hindoo and Mohammedan alike.

  The mutinous regiments had all been drilled and taught by British officers until they were as nearly perfect as the military knowledge of the day could make them; the fact that they had killed their officers only served to make them savage without detracting much from their efficiency. They had native officers quite capable of taking charge, and sense enough to retain their discipline.

  So Byng intrenched himself on the gradual rise, and sent out as many messengers as he could spare to bring reinforcements from whatever source obtainable. Then, when almost none came, he got ready to die where he stood, using all the soldier gift he had to put courage into the last-ditch loyalists who offered to die with him. He had counted most on aid from Cunningham and Mahommed Gunga, but that source seemed to have failed him; and he gave up hope of their arrival when a body of several thousand rebels took up position on his flank and cut off approach from the direction whence Cunningham should come.

  The sun blazed down like molten hell on sick and wounded. Rotting carcasses of horses and cattle, killed by the rebels’ artillery-fire, lay stenching here and there, and there was no possibility of disposing of them. A day came very soon, indeed, when horse, or occasional transport bullock, was all there was to eat, and a night came when Govind Singh, the leader of the Sikhs, came to him and remonstrated.

  The old man had to be carried to Byng’s tent, for a round shot had disabled him, and he had himself set down by the tent-door, where the General sat on a camp-stool.

  “General-sahib, I have not been asked for advice; I am here to offer it.”

  The huge black dome of heaven was punctuated by a billion dots of steely white that looked like pin-pricks. All the light there was came from the fitful watch-fires, where even the wagons were being burned now that the meagre supply of rough timber was giving out. The rebels, too, were burning everything on which they could lay their hands, and from between the spaced-out glow of their bonfires came ever and again the spurt of cannon-flame.

  “Speak, Govind Singh!”

  “Sahib, we have no artillery with which to answer them. We have no food; and the supply of ammunition wanes. Shall we die here like cattle in a slaughter-house?”

  “This is as good as any other place” said Byng.

  “Nay, sahib!” “How, then?”

  “In their lines is a better place! Here is nothing better than a shambles, with none but our men falling. They know that our food is giving out — they know that we lose heavily — they wait. They will wait for days yet before they close in to finish what their guns have but begun, and — then — how many will there be to die desperately, as is fitting?”

  “We might get reinforcements in the morning, Govind Singh.”

  “And again, we might not, sahib!”

  “I sent a number of messengers before we were shut in.”

  “Yes, sahib — and to whom? To men who would ask you to reinforce them if they could get word to you! Tomorrow our rear will be surrounded, too; they have laid planks across the little streams behind us, and are preparing to drag guns to that side, too. Now, sahib, we have fire left in us. We can smite yet, and do damage while we die. Tomorrow night may find us decimated and without heart for the finish. I advise you to advance at dawn, sahib!”

  That advice came as a great relief to Byng-bahadur. He had been the first to see the hopelessness of the position, and every instinct that he had told him to finish matters, not in the last reeking ditch, but ahead, where the enemy would suffer fearfully while a desperate charge roared into them, to peter out when the last man went down fighting. Surrender was unthinkable, and in any event would have been no good, for the mutineers would be sure to butcher all their prisoners; his only other chance had been to hold out until relief came, and that hope was now forlorn.

  A Mohammedan stepped out of blackness and saluted him — a native officer, in charge of a handful of irregular cavalry, whose horses had all been shot.

  “Well — what is it?”

  “This, sahib. Do we die here? I and my men would prefer to die yonder, where a mutineer or two would pay the price!”

  A Ghoorka officer — small as a Japanese and sturdy-looking came up next. The whole thing was evidently preconcerted.

  “My men ask leave to show the way into the ranks ahead, General-sahib! They are overweary of this shambles!”

  “We will advance at dawn!” said Byng. “Egan—” He turned to a British officer, who was very nearly all the staff he had. “Drag that table up. Let’s have some paper here and a pencil, and we’ll work out the best plan possible.”

  He sent for the commanding officers of the British regiments — both of them captains, but the seniors surviving — and a weird scene followed round the lamp set on the tiny table. British, Sikh, Mohammedan, and Ghoorka clustered close to him, and watched as his pencil traced the different positions and showed the movement that was to make the morrow’s finish, their faces outlined in the lamp’s yellow glow and their breath coming deep and slow as they agreed on how the greatest damage could be done the enemy before the last man died.

  As he finished, and assigned each leader to his share in the last assault that any one of them would take a part in, a streak of light blazed suddenly across the sky. A shooting-star swept in a wide parabola to the horizon. A murmur went up from the wakeful lines, and the silence of the graveyard followed.

  “There is our sign, sahib!” laughed the Mohammedan. The old Sikh nodded and the Ghoorka grinned. “It is the end!” he said, without a trace of discouragement.

  “Nonsense!” said Byng, his face, too, turned upward.

  “What, then, does it mean, sahib?”

  “That — it means that God Almighty has relieved a picket! We’re the picket. We’re relieved! We advance at dawn, and we’ll get through somehow! Join your commands, gentlemen, and explain the details carefully to your men — let’s have no misunderstandings.”

  The dawn rose gold and beautiful upon a sleepless camp that reeked and steamed with hell-hot suffering. It showed the rebels stationary, still in swarming lines, but scouts reported several thousand of them moving in a body from the flank toward the British rear.

  “What proportion of the rebel force?” asked Byng. “New arrivals, or some of the old ones taking up a new position?”

  “The same crowd, sir. They�
�re just moving round to hem us in completely.”

  “So much the better for us, then! That leaves fewer for us to deal with in front.”

  As he spoke another man came running to report the arrival of five gallopers, coming hell-bent-for leather, one by one and scattered, with the evident purpose of allowing one man to get through, whatever happened.

  “That’ll be relief at last!” said Byng-bahadur. And, instead of ordering the advance immediately, he waited, scouring the sky-line with his glasses.

  “Yes — dust — lance-heads — one — two — three divisions, coming in a hurry.”

  Being on rising ground, he saw the distant relieving force much sooner than the rebels did, and he knew that it was help for him on the way some time before the first of the five gallopers careered into the camp, and shouted:

  “Cunnigan-bahadur comes with fifteen hundred!”

  “Fifteen hundred,” muttered Byng. “That merely serves to postpone the finish by an hour or two!”

  But he waited; and presently the rebel scouts brought word, and their leaders, too, became aware of reinforcements on the way for somebody. They made the mistake, though, of refusing to believe that any help could be coming for the British, and by the time that messengers had hurried from the direction of the British rear, to tell of gallopers who had ridden past them and been swallowed by the shouting British lines, three squadrons on fresh horses were close enough to be reckoned dangerous.

  “Is that a gun they’ve got with them?” wondered Byng. “By the lord Harry, no, — it’s a coach and six! They’re flogging it along like a twelve-pounder! And what the devil’s in those wagons?”

  But he had no time for guesswork. The desultory thunder of the rebel ordnance ceased, and the whole mass that hemmed him in began to revolve within itself, and present a new front to the approaching cavalry.

  “Caught on the hop, by God! The whole line will advance! Trumpeter!”

  One trumpet-call blared out and a dozen echoed it. In a second more a roar went up that is only heard on battle-fields. It has none of the exultant shout of joy or of the rage that a mob throws up to heaven; it is not even anger, as the cities know it, or the men who riot for advantage. It is a welcome ironically offered up to Death — full-throated, and more freighted with moral effect on an enemy than a dozen salvoes of artillery.

  The thousands ahead tried hard to turn again and face two attacks at once; but, though the units were efficiently controlled, there were none who could swing the whole. Byng’s decimated, forward-rushing fragment of a mixed brigade, tight-reined and working like a piece of mechanism, struck home into a mass of men who writhed, and fell away, and shouted to each other. A third of them was out of reach, beyond the British rear; fully another third was camped too far away to bring assistance at the first wild onslaught. Messengers were sent to bring them up, but the messengers were overtaken by a horde who ran.

  Then, like arrows driven by the bows of death, three squadrons took them on the flank as Cunningham changed direction suddenly and loosed his full weight at the guns. Instead of standing and serving grape, the rebel gunners tried to get their ordnance away — facing about again too late, when the squadrons were almost on them. Then they died gamely, when gameness served no further purpose. The Rangars rode them down and butchered them, capturing every single gun, and leaving them while they charged again at the rallying hordes ahead.

  The strange assortment of horsed wagons and the lumbering six-horse coach took full advantage of the momentary confusion to make at a gallop for the British rear, where they drew up in line behind the Sikhs, who were volleying at short range in the centre.

  Byng detached two companies of British soldiers to do their amateur damnedest with the guns, and, for infantry, they did good service with them; fifteen or twenty minutes after the first onslaught the enemy was writhing under the withering attention of his own abandoned ordnance. But the odds were still tremendous, and the weight of numbers made the ultimate outcome of the battle seem a foregone conclusion.

  From the British rear heads appeared above the rising ground; the deserted camp was rushed and set alight. The tents blazed like a beacon light, and a moment later the Ghoorkas retaliated by setting fire to such of the rebel camp as had fallen into British hands.

  It was those two fires that saved the day. From the sky-line to the rebel rear came the thunder of a salvo of artillery. It was the short bark of twelve-pounders loaded up with blank — a signal — and the rebels did not wait to see whether this was friend or foe. Help from one unexpected source had reached the British; this, they argued, was probably another column moving to the relief, and they drew off in reasonably decent order — harried, pestered, stung, as they attempted to recover camp-equipment or get away with stores and wagons, by Cunningham, Alwa, and Mahommed Gunga.

  In another hour the rebel army was a black swarm spreading on the eastern sky-line, and on the far horizon to the north there shone the glint of bayonets and helmet spikes, the dancing gleam of lance-tips, and the dazzle from the long, polished bodies of a dozen guns. A galloper spurred up with a message for Byng.

  “You are to join my command,” it ran, “for a raid in force on Howrah, where the rebels are supposed to have been concentrating for months past. The idea is to paralyze the vitals of the movement before concentrating somewhere on the road to Delhi, where the rebels are sure to make a most determined stand.”

  As he read it Mahommed Gunga galloped up to him, grinning like a boy.

  “Cunnigan-sahib’s respects, General-sahib! He asks leave to call his men off, saying that he has done all the damage possible with only fifteen hundred.”

  “Yes. Call ’em off and send Cunningham to me. How did he shape?”

  “Like a son of Cunnigan-bahadur! General-sahib-salaam!”

  “No. Here, you old ruffian — shake hands, will you? Now send Cunningham to me.”

  Cunningham came up fifteen minutes later, with a Rangar orderly behind him, and did his best to salute as though it were nothing more than an ordinary meeting.

  “Oh! Here you are. ‘Gratulate you, Cunningham! You came in the nick of time. What kept you?”

  “That ‘ud take a long time to tell, sir. I’ve fifteen hundred horses about ten miles from here, sir, left in charge of native levies, and I’d like permission to go and fetch them before the levies make off with them.”

  “Splendid! Yes, you’d better go for them. What’s in the wagons.”

  “The Howrah treasure, sir!”

  “What?”

  “The whole of the Howrah treasure, sir! It’s held as security. Howrah guarantees to keep the peace and protect the homes of my men. I guaranteed to hand him back the treasure when the show’s over, less deductions for damage done!”

  “Well, I’m — Who thought of that? You or Mahommed Gunga?”

  “Oh, I expect we cooked it up between us, sir.”

  “H-rrrr-umph! And what’s in the six-horse coach?”

  “A lady and her father.”

  “The deuce they are!”

  Byng rode up to the lumbering vehicle, signing to Cunningham to follow him.

  “General Byng,” said Cunningham. “Miss McClean, sir.”

  A very much dishevelled and very weary-looking young woman with a wealth of chestnut hair leaned through the window and smiled, not at the General but at Cunningham. Byng stared — looked from one to the other of them — and said “Hu-rrrr-umph!” again.

  “It was she who made the whole thing possible, sir.”

  “The very deuce it was!” It began to be evident that Byng was not a ladies’ man!

  “This is Mr. McClean, sir — Rosemary’s father. He helped her put the whole scheme through.”

  Byng nodded to the missionary and looked back at Rosemary McClean — then from her to Cunningham again.

  “Hu-rrrr-umph! Christian names already! More ‘gratulations, eh?”

  Rosemary’s head and shoulders disappeared and Cunningham looked foolish.r />
  “Well! Send Mahommed Gunga for the horses. Ride over there to where you see General Evans’s column and tell him the whole story. Take a small escort and the treasure with you. And — ah — er — lemme see — take this carriage, too. Oh, by the bye — you’d better ask General Evans to make some arrangements for Miss McClean. Leave her over there with the treasure. I want you back with my brigade, and I want you to be some sort of use. Can’t have love-making with the brigade, Mr. Cunningham!”

  The Brigadier rode off with a very perfunctory salute.

  “Isn’t he a rather curmudgeony sort of officer?” asked Rosemary the moment that his back was turned.

  “Oh, no!” laughed Cunningham. “That’s Byng-bahadur’s little way, that’s all. He’s quite likely to insist on being best man or something of that sort when the show’s all over! Wait here while I fetch the escort.”

  THE END

  A SOLDIER AND A GENTLEMAN

  This is the short novel, published in 1914 in Adventure magazine, which introduces the strong female character Yasmini, who featured in several future Mundy publications including King of the Khyber Rifles. Yasmini was inspired fourteen years before by a tantalising glimpse Mundy experienced of a wealthy and extremely beautiful Indian woman, whose carriage door had been accidentally thrown open and her beauty, boldness and mysterious allure stayed with Mundy and prompted the character that he was to exploit till the early 1920’s. Yasmini uses her brilliant intellect, linguistic skills, knowledge of both Western and Indian cultures and stunning beauty to fuel her overriding ambition, but despite her undoubted skills and gifts she is clearly also amoral and ruthless. Nevertheless, Mundy, whom some commentators have suggested became captivated by his own creation, cannot resist giving her her own unique sense of honour and a gift for “reading” the characters of other people. It has also been suggested that with strong female characters like Yasmini, Mundy took a feminist view of women in his fiction, as nearly all of his leading females act outside the social and cultural norms of the day — as he says of Yasmini in this story, “She did exactly as she chose and what she chose was mostly unexpected.”