The Tiger warrior jh-4

by David Gibbins

  Jack passed it over, and Costas held it up carefully to the light. “It’s made of lapis lazuli,” Jack said. “The same stone as that fragment you found at Berenike. It’s the highest grade too, from the mines in Afghanistan. You can see the sparkle of pyrites in the layers of blue. It’s been handled a lot, played with. It was among my great-great-grandfather’s possessions, given to him when he was a child. He had wanted to give it to his own son, his firstborn, on his second birthday. But that never happened.”

  “It’s beautiful,” Rebecca said reverently, taking it from Costas and stroking the trunk. “Can I have it? I mean, can I borrow it and keep it in my cabin? It’s kind of a shame to have it stuffed away in that old chest.”

  Costas wagged a finger at Rebecca. “Careful what you say about that chest. It follows him everywhere. It makes him feel like an old sea dog. Whenever he’s got some downtime, he comes and sits with it.”

  Hiebermeyer and Aysha came in, and they all sat down on the chairs Jack had arranged in an arc around the chest. Costas peered in the open drawer and gestured at another object inside, an old revolver. “The Wild West?”

  Jack gave a wry smile. “Right period, wrong continent. The period we’re talking about, the 1870s, saw major international confrontations-the Franco-Prussian War which nearly destroyed Europe, the Afghan War which brought Britain head-to-head with Russia. But it was also a flashpoint for colonial conflict. Within a few years you’ve got Custer’s Last Stand in America, the Zulu War in South Africa, and jungle rebellion in India. And in each case it’s unclear which side got off best.”

  “Your ancestor John Howard,” Aysha said, as Costas carefully lifted the revolver out of the drawer to inspect it more closely. “He was a British army officer?”

  Jack nodded. “Now that we’re all here, I want to tell you about him. In 1879 he was a lieutenant in the Royal Engineers, recently posted out to India as a subaltern in the Queen’s Own Madras Sappers and Miners. That was one of the premier regiments in the Indian army, based in Bangalore in south India but used on expeditions all around India and the frontiers. They were surveyors and builders, but they also trained as infantry, so were about the most useful troops around. Each of the ten companies had two British officers and several British NCOs, but the sappers were all Madrasis, including the native officers-the jemadars and subadars- and the native NCOs, the havildars and naiks. The Madrasis were proud men, a warrior caste. For a young British officer, service with a regiment like the Madras Sappers was about the best experience of soldiering you could have. Lieutenants commanded companies and the senior subalterns had the responsibilities a major would have today. All of the Royal Engineers officers had gone through the equivalent of a graduate degree program in engineering before coming out to India.”

  “India must have been a shock to the system coming from cold and drizzly England,” Costas said.

  Jack shook his head. “Not for Howard. He’d been schooled in England, but he was born in India in 1855 just before the Indian Mutiny, in the final years of the East India Company before the British crown took over. His father had been an indigo planter in Bihar, on the border with the Himalayas and Tibet, and his grandfather had been a colonel in the East India Company army. So India was in his blood. That helps to explain how he survived the jungle conditions of his first active deployment.”

  “This place we’re going to,” Costas said.

  “After more than two decades of peace following the mutiny, India was heating up,” Jack said. “There was war again in Afghanistan, for the first time in forty years. Most of the Madras Sapper officers were deployed there, but not Howard. The reason was another conflict, a tribal uprising that flared up in 1879 in the jungle of the northern Madras presidency, in the foothills of the Eastern Ghats Mountains along the Godavari River.” Jack pointed at the map above his desk. “Ever since the mutiny, the Indian government had put down any hint of internal uprising with an iron fist. A brigade-sized expedition was dispatched to the jungle, including two companies of sappers. But these revolts were regarded as civil disturbances, so there was little military glory and no medals for officers despite the hard campaigning involved. And this revolt, called the Rampa Rebellion after the local district, dragged on for almost two years, longer than the entire Afghan campaign. Howard was there almost from beginning to end.”

  “It must have been pestilential, during the monsoon,” Hiebermeyer said.

  Jack nodded. “Rampa had all the extremes of jungle warfare, in common with the jungle campaigns of the following century, in Burma, Malaysia, Vietnam. Malaria was a huge problem. A few years later, the surgeon-major of the Madras Sappers was Ronald Ross, later Sir Ronald Ross, the man who confirmed the link between mosquitoes and malaria. But at the time of the rebellion there was limited understanding of it and the men dropped like flies. And that’s where Howard’s Indian background comes into play. He had some resistance to the fever, and that must have been a factor in his continued deployment. He was the only officer fit enough to do the job.”

  Costas pulled back the hammer and rotated the cylinder on the old revolver, a long, elegant piece which had turned a plum color where the blueing on the metal had come away. “Eighteen fifty-one Colt Navy, London make,” he said. “I used to shoot one of these with an uncle of mine in Vermont who was a black powder enthusiast.” He turned the pistol over and traced his fingers over the letters and numbers stamped into the wooden grips. “Army markings?”

  “That’s UC, Upper Canada, the letter A for the Frontenac Troop, number fifty,” Jack explained. “This was one of a batch of revolvers bought from Colt’s London factory to arm cavalrymen of the Canadian militia, based in Kingston on Lake Ontario. The surgeon of the Madras Sappers, Dr. Walker, had grown up in Kingston, served in the militia himself and acquired this pistol as surplus in the 1870s when the militia converted to cartridge revolvers. Walker took it to India and gave it to Howard to complement an identical Colt revolver he’d inherited from his father, who used it during the Indian Mutiny. Always best to have a pair of cap-and-ball revolvers, as they took so long to reload.”

  “Where’s the other one?”

  “Howard took it with him when he disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?”

  “One day years later in northern India he packed his bag and left, never to return. No one knows for certain where he went or what happened to him. I’ve been obsessed with it ever since I heard the story as a boy. I used to read Kipling, and accounts of explorers on the Silk Road, and imagine him on some great final adventure. He’s always been there in my mind when I’ve gone off on quests of my own. Now that we’re so close to the jungle, to actually being on his trail, I’d love to get to the bottom of it. But more about that later. Let’s not jump the gun.”

  “I’ve found something on the rebellion,” Rebecca said, holding up a notebook with Victorian marblized covers and faded ink handwriting on a label. “The Rampa Expedition 1879, by John Howard, Lieutenant, R.E.”

  “That’s his diary,” Jack said. “It’s the only personal account to survive from the rebellion. Almost everything else I’ve reconstructed from records in the India Office collections in the British Library, from the military and judicial proceedings of the Madras government which oversaw the jungle tracts. The rebellion was overshadowed by the Afghan War, and pretty well lost to history.”

  Rebecca carefully opened a page, then began to read. “The difficulties of surveying really begin when the mapping is being pushed forward into an unknown country, especially if the surveyors are hampered with having to keep with troops, and their vision frequently obstructed by bad weather”

  Jack nodded. “Survey was his specialty. He’d just come out of the School of Military Engineering at Chatham, two years of intensive training. There’s a lot of youthful enthusiasm in the first pages of the diary. But that soon changes.”

  Rebecca read another section toward the end of the book. “The causes of that outbreak have been fully described
; the administration was slack; our officers turned a deaf ear to the complaints of an oppressed people, and the ancient spirit which appealed to the sword at length asserted itself, amongst a brave and hearty race of mountaineers. Once that spirit is roused, and we are forced into a campaign in a wild, difficult and malarious tract-no man can say how long the petty warfare will last, or what slumbering elements of disorder will be stirred up against us. All that can be predicted is that the enemy will seldom be seen, that fever will fill the regimental hospitals, and that when peace comes at last, it will be the peace of desolation. All that these hill clans require of us is that we shall protect them in the tranquil enjoyment of the few contracted and simple objects of personal liberty and comfort which constitute the main sources of their happiness”

  “Love the language,” Costas murmured.

  “That pretty well sums it up,” Jack said. “Years later the Indian nationalist movement tried to make out that the rebellion was part of a general uprising against the British, but that’s revisionist history at its worst. These were jungle people who basically wanted to be left alone. Most of them had never even seen a European face before. Their main contact with the outside world had been with lowland people, with corrupt Indian police constables and with traders who extorted them. There was little economic gain for the British in the jungle and they put less competent officials in charge, a lower grade of district officer who rarely bothered to inspect the tracts themselves. Then the Indian Forestry Act interfered with their traditional slash-and-burn agriculture. But the spark was some petty official in Calcutta failing to exempt the hill peoples from the abkari tax on alcohol. The jungle people lived for their toddy, the palm liquor which sustained them through the monsoon months when there was nothing else to do.”

  “I see what you mean,” Costas murmured. “Not exactly a glorious war. A long way from the geopolitics of Afghanistan.”

  “But war was still war,” Jack said. “Take away grand strategic purpose, and you question far more. And these officers were a long way from the closed-mind, stiff-upper-lip caricature. The Royal Engineers attracted men of high intellect and curiosity. Today they’d be scientists, civil engineers, explorers. Much of what we know about the anthropology and natural history of India comes from what these men did in their spare time. And much of their work was not spent soldiering, but in surveying and mapping, and building roads, bridges, dams, aqueducts and irrigation systems, railways, public monuments, the infrastructure of the nation today. You had to speak the language to operate effectively in India, and many of these officers were gifted linguists, empathetic with their soldiers and the people around them. You can see that in the diary. The tone may seem a little lofty to us today, but guys like Howard saw human beings in their gun sights, not primitive tribals. They were tough soldiers, unswervingly loyal to the British crown, and would kill without hesitation, but they knew they were not always on the moral high ground.”

  “There’s a reference to a book here, on the final page of the diary with writing on it,” Rebecca said. “It’s all smudged black.” She lifted the book and sniffed it, pulling a face. “It stinks like rotten eggs.”

  “Black powder residue,” Jack said. “He must have had it on his hands when he wrote that. He’d have just been shooting. Look at the date. Twentieth August 1879.”

  “I can barely read it, but the note says, Campbell, Wild Tribes of Khondistan, page 177. Then it says, Lord help me.”

  Jack took one of the two leather-bound volumes from the drawer and opened it to a marked page. “This is the actual book. He had it with him when he wrote that final diary entry. In the margin of the book he’s written, Captain Frye, an admirable officer, an oriental scholar of the highest rank, who occupied himself most zealously in the acquisition of the Khond language. He clearly wrote that some time earlier, perhaps when he’d first read the book before going into the jungle. But the passage of text beside the note is circled in the same ink as that last diary entry, slightly smudged. He must have read it again that day in the jungle. Listen to this:

  “A curious circumstance occurred to this excellent officer when in the hills. He was informed one day of a sacrifice on the very eve of consummation; the victim was a young and handsome girl, fifteen or sixteen years old. Without a moments hesitation, he hastened with a small body of armed men to the spot indicated, and on arrival found the Khonds already assembled with their sacrificing priest, and the intended victim prepared for the first act of the tragedy. He at once demanded her surrender; the Khonds, half-mad with excitement, hesitated for a moment, but observing his little party preparing for action, they yielded the girl Seeing the wild and irritated state of the Khonds, Captain Frye very prudently judged that this was no fitting occasion to argue with them, so with his prize he retraced his steps to his old encampment.”

  “Human sacrifice?” Costas exclaimed, looking horrified. “India? In 1879?”

  “That book was published in 1864, fifteen years before the Rampa Rebellion. The full title is A Personal Narrative of Thirteen Years Service Amongst the Wild Tribes of Khondistan for the Suppression of Human Sacrifice. The author, John Campbell, was an army officer charged with the task, and Frye was his assistant.”

  “But they failed.”

  Jack pursed his lips. “They succeeded. That was the public face of it, anyway. The British didn’t interfere much with ritual in India, but they drew the line at human sacrifice and female infanticide. What they did was drive both practices underground. Who knew what went on in the depths of the jungle, miles from prying eyes. Even today the sacrificial ritual survives among the tribal peoples, though they use chickens instead of humans. Or so we’re told.”

  “And in 1879?”

  “The rebel leader, Chendrayya, openly executed several native policemen he’d taken captive, giving the executions the semblance of sacrifice in defiance of the British. On one occasion he used a sword, probably a tulwar like the one on the wall over there.” Jack opened the book to an engraving in the frontispiece. It showed a semi-naked woman tied to a pole with a priest in front and a crowd pressing around her, brandishing knives. “But there are hints that actual human sacrifice was also carried out. These involved a meriah, a man, or woman, even a child, who was bought into slavery by the sacrificing tribe, well-fed and well-treated for months in advance, then intoxicated with palm toddy and lashed to a stake.”

  “How did they do it?” Rebecca asked quietly.

  “It’s pretty unpleasant. They ripped the victim apart with their bare hands and knives. Each man took a strip of flesh home to bury in his own soil before nightfall that day as a kind of fertility offering.”

  Rebecca looked pale. Costas took the book. “Why did they do it? Who was the god?”

  “I’m coming to that.”

  “And that date? Twentieth August 1879?”

  “That’s the lynchpin date of the rebellion, and also somehow of Howard’s life. Something happened that day, something I’ve been trying to fathom out ever since I first saw the diary as a kid.” Jack picked up the diary. “Here’s what I know. On that day, a party of thirty sappers were led into an ambush by four hundred rebels, armed with bows and poison arrows and matchlock muskets, as well as some old company muskets they’d stolen from the police. The sappers fought their way back through the jungle to the river. It was one of the biggest fights of the rebellion, with dozens killed and wounded. One British official died, a civil service man responsible for this area who’d accompanied the troops. That day was big enough to hit the news, and was even reported in the London Times and The New York Times, with the name of the officer commanding the sapper party, Lieutenant Hamilton. His account of the fight was printed in the Madras Military Proceedings. Otherwise there are no eyewitness records of that day. But I’m certain something else happened.” “Executions?” Costas murmured. “Sacrifice?” Jack looked at the book. “Hamilton’s foray took place from a river steamer, Shamrock, which had been on its way upriver to a place
where the sappers were going to hack a road into the jungle. Lieutenant Howard, my great-great-grandfather, was in overall charge, as the senior subaltern present. As well as Lieutenants Howard and Hamilton, there was another sapper officer, Robert Wauchope, recently returned from Afghanistan, an Irish-American who was a close friend of Howard’s. We’ve already encountered Dr. Walker, the Canadian. He probably had his hands full with cases of jungle fever. I’ve pinpointed where Hamilton’s party came out of the jungle on the riverbank, where the Shamrock must have been. It was the site of a native village. The rebels congregated there and put on a show for them. A pretty spectacular one. Howard was on the steamer. He saw something, or did something, that profoundly affected the rest of his life.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Jack paused. “He’d been at the top of his class at the Royal Military Academy, one of the officers flagged for great things, perhaps a future army commander like Lord Kitchener, another Royal Engineer. But after the jungle, it was as if he did everything he could to avoid active service again. He’d been detailed to join the Khyber Field Force in Afghanistan, but instead was deployed in Rampa until the end. Then he left the Madras Sappers for secondment to the Indian Public Works Department, and after that went back to England to spend ten years teaching survey and editing the journal of the School of Military Engineering. These were respectable career moves for a Royal Engineers officer, but not for the ambitious soldier he had once been. Even after he returned to India as a garrison engineer in the 1890s he passed up on chances of campaigning. It was only at the end of his career that he was poised for active service again, on the Afghan frontier, twenty-five years after the Rampa Rebellion.”

  “What about devotion to his family?” Rebecca said. “Couldn’t that have influenced him?”

  Jack looked across at the faded photograph above the chest, showing a woman in a black dress holding a baby, her faced turned down to the child, indiscernible. He turned to Rebecca, nodding slowly. “Howard married young, straight out of the academy. They had a baby boy they adored. They lived in the military cantonment at Bangalore, headquarters of the Madras Sappers. The boy died while Howard was in the jungle several months after that day in August, struck down with convulsions one morning and buried that evening. It was weeks before Howard even knew. His wife never got over it, though they had three more children. Howard was utterly devoted to them, and told his children that he took up his job at the School of Military Engineering in England to get them away from the diseases that had killed their brother, and to be with them when they were at school.”