Retribution Road

by Antonin Varenne

  In Bombay, Dalhousie waited until December and declared the south of the country a Company territory, part of the British Raj. Without any truce, treaty or negotiation, the army of shareholders in London, now masters of the gulf of Bengal all the way to Malaysia, traced a new frontier 125 miles from the coast and took possession of the southern third of the country, leaving Pagan Min cut off in the north.

  Pagan’s obstinacy and his impossible position led to political dissent in his Court. Having assumed the throne by assassinating all his brothers, the monarch was ultimately deposed by his half-brother, Mindon, supported by Ava’s nabobs.

  As soon as he had taken control of the kingdom, Mindon Min, a subtler diplomat than his predecessor, initiated a policy of openness with the English, while at the same time negotiating with other European powers to counter the commercial diktats of London. The day of his coronation, in February 1853, he received the Company’s ambassadors and, in a show of good faith, announced the liberation of all British prisoners of war.

  *

  At the end of March, the monsoon having begun early that year, three Burmese junks entered the port of Rangoon under torrential rain. The three boats docked, unnoticed among the dozens of trading vessels that cluttered the harbour. The gangplanks were lowered and three columns of prisoners disembarked amid general indifference, soaked to the skin, dressed in clothes that were too big for them.

  A dozen soldiers and a young lieutenant awaited them on land and escorted them to a Company warehouse, where the goods had been moved out of the way to create space for blankets to be laid out. Behind a little table, another officer sat waiting, with some sheets of paper, an inkwell and a metal pen in front of him. At the back of the warehouse, standing behind little terracotta stoves and steaming mess tins, pitchers of wine and water, three other soldiers watched as the liberated prisoners entered.

  Mindon Min had ordered their hair to be cut and their beards trimmed, but that made little difference. If some of them still looked reasonably healthy – those who had spent the least time in captivity – others were in a pitiful state, a succession of stoop-shouldered, jelly-legged puppets walking in line like blind cattle. Some limped, others chewed their lips nervously with their toothless gums. Their eyes were sunk deep in dark sockets, above gaunt cheeks, their skin grey and wrinkled. Beaten down and bent double, they all looked the same height now. Rain trickled from them in front of the little table, and as they filed past, a puddle of water formed, in which they dragged their bare feet. One by one, they gave their name to the seated officer, who slowly wrote down the date and place of the capture, their surname, Christian name, rank, division, regiment and battalion.

  The officer had eleven sheets spread out before him, one for each month that had passed since Godwin and Lambert had landed at Rangoon. He chose the sheet on which to write in accordance with the date spoken by the men.

  When they had given their names, the prisoners walked between the blankets over to the soup, each hesitating before crossing this wide space alone. They held out their hands without looking at the men who were serving them, staring at their full mess tins, tightly gripping the tin cups filled with wine, sitting cross-legged on a blanket and putting the tins on their laps. Some of them sobbed. The prisoners sat as far away from each other as possible, shooting fearful glances around them like stray cats, ready to flee at the first attack. When another prisoner passed close to them, they leaned over their food and shovelled it into their mouths as fast as possible. Others filled their pockets with it.

  The officer at the table raised his eyes, his pen suspended in the air. The man standing in front of him was practically a skeleton, two pointed bones for shoulders; even his skull seemed to have shrunk.

  “What date did you say, soldier?”

  The man licked his lips. His voice was feeble.

  “17 April, 1852.”

  The officer picked up the sheet for April. No name was yet written on it. He dipped his nib in the inkwell and asked: “Name?”

  The man moistened his lips again.

  “Edmund Peavish.”

  The officer wrote the name on the paper and lifted his head with a laugh.

  “Lad, you’re the oldest prisoner of this war!”

  The soldier smiled, showing a few black teeth, and articulated in his whistling voice: “God bless you. There are ten of us.”

  The officer turned his head towards the line and saw other men behind Peavish, men who barely looked like men at all, more like walking corpses or merely ghosts.

  On the sheet for April, one by one, he wrote ten names under the same date:

  Edmund Peavish

  Peter Clements

  Edward Morgan

  Christian Bufford

  Erik Penders

  Frederick Collins

  John Briggs

  Horace Greenshaw

  Norton Young

  Sergeant Arthur Bowman

  II

  1858

  London

  1

  On July 1 in Piccadilly, within the walls of Burlington House, the members of the Linnean Society gathered for an exceptional lecture. Biologists, zoologists, botanists and anthropologists waited outside the doors of the main conference hall, their mouths and noses covered with menthol handkerchiefs.

  Wallace was going to present his article on the “Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type”, and the rumour had been confirmed: Darwin was not going to be there, stricken as he was by the death of his young son from scarlet fever. Wallace would take the responsibility of reading out Darwin’s work: “On the Variation of Organic Beings in a State of Nature; on the Natural Means of Selection; on the Comparison of Domestic Races and True Species”.

  For months, the scientific community had talked of nothing else but the discoveries of Wallace and Darwin, a veil of mystery surrounding their new theories, which were said to be radical. And yet, standing as far as possible from the draught-proofed windows of Burlington House, those in the know were preoccupied by another subject that day: behind their scented handkerchiefs, they spoke in low voices about the threat of epidemics.

  Some reassured themselves by mentioning the latest theories of Snow on the cholera bacteria, transported by water not air, but this had not yet been proved and, faced with the fear of toxic air, Snow’s research was widely denigrated while the mass anxiety continued.

  Cholera was in the air, there could be no doubt about that.

  A journalist from the Morning Chronicle passed between the scientists, notebook in hand, questioning them about the risks of contagion and the London sewer system, attempting to get a response to the question that had been on everyone’s lips for the past two weeks: when would it end?

  While it was easy to explain how it had begun, no man of science dared propose a solution, nor to risk even the vaguest prognosis. The only clue the journalist was able to draw upon to write his conclusion was that the scientists gathered here today were fewer in number than usual, many of them having already fled the capital.

  Lyell and Hooker, who had convened the lecture, quickly walked along the corridor. The doors of the main hall were opened and everyone rushed in, hopeful that the stench would be less strong inside.

  The journalist stopped writing notes and followed the professors into the sparsely attended lecture hall.

  It stank just as badly in there as it had outside.

  Cesspits were no longer in vogue. For a few years now, the rich had been installing running water and individual toilets in their houses. The water was pumped from the Thames, ran through the pipes, and, once it was dirty, poured out into the sewers, before rejoining the river.

  The winter had been dry and the spring warm. By May, the level of the Thames was already alarmingly low. In June, temperatures had reached record highs and the river had begun to run dry. The water that came from people’s taps had changed colour and the sewers, too dry, had started to become congested by the influx of all this extra
waste. Sinks, bathtubs and toilets were blocked, cesspits had been dug in gardens again, and at the end of June the number of shit-collectors employed to empty these pits – many of whom had been put out of work by the arrival of indoor plumbing – had doubled.

  Their carts crossed the streets at night, wheels jolting on the cobblestones, lamps hung on poles casting a meagre light over tired, mean old faces, cartloads of shit, and shapeless men wearing long coats that covered them down to their boots. They passed through the gates of the capital in silence, like the prisoners twenty years earlier who had transported corpses from the great cholera epidemic to mass graves. They emptied their carts in the fields and went back into the city, loading up again and returning to the countryside, and so on until dawn, when the peasants paid them for their work. Two shillings and five pence for a cartload of dung. Prices had fallen as fast as the shit-collectors had got their jobs back. London had so much excrement to offer that the market had collapsed.

  The sewers were now so dry that the armies of children searching in the shit for lost treasures to sell, had to dig into the faeces with spades and pickaxes rather than raking them out.

  The temperature continued to rise. Waste from factories accumulated in oily, black layers on the surface of this river of putrid lava. Carcasses of cows and sheep from the slaughterhouses, stuck in the mud, slowly passed the new Parliament in Westminster. Skeleton legs poked up in the air as on an abandoned battlefield and crows swooped down to rest on them. It took half a day for the horns of a bull to move from Lambeth Bridge, pass under the windows of the House of Lords, and disappear under Waterloo Bridge.

  In certain places, it was said, you could cross the river on foot.

  On July 2, the heat was unparalleled and the entire city stank like a giant corpse.

  All along the riverbank, windows were blocked up.

  The streets were deserted, and there was almost no traffic on the Thames. A few little steamboats still had enough power to advance through the mud, their waterwheels threshing up a foul black spray, but the absence of any wind made it impossible for sailing boats to move. Ferryboats and barques, pushed forward by poles, could still navigate the river, but no-one wanted to take them anymore.

  The rich left the city for their countryside homes or went off to the seaside. The courts hurried through their trials: men were judged in a few minutes, receiving unexpected pardons or death sentences for minor misdemeanours from judges who ran through the corridors with handkerchiefs pressed to their noses.

  Parliament no longer sat.

  In factories, the boilers not only produced sweltering heat but odours that were believed to be fatal. While the price of dung went into freefall, the market for drinking water boomed. Fountains dried up. Clean water from springs or wells, drawn far from the Thames riverbed, transported and sold for a fortune, was now too expensive for ordinary people. Dehydrated workers died in the furnaces of the steelworks.

  The Metropolitan police patrolled the empty pavements. London was like a city under curfew or after a revolt, when the troops have charged and the anger has died down and the victims’ bodies have been collected. The coppers’ steel-capped boots echoed through abandoned streets, replacing the sounds of hammers and weavers’ looms. Outside the water board’s offices, increasingly large groups of men and women gathered to yell at officials. The police pushed them back to their slums, where the situation was most difficult. In the low parts of town, the sewage rose up through the gutters, seeping between the bars and filling the side-streets and back-alleys with a vile mud. In cramped cellars where entire families lived, beneath the level of the roads, children in rags waded ankle-deep in the capital’s excreta.

  Panic gripped the city: how could you escape the air that you breathed?

  Along with the unbearable stench and the fear of diseases came bitterness and slander. Scapegoats were sought. The Chinese, people said, were too silent; the Pakistanis smiled too much; the Jews were too good at business. The rich were too rich. The papists were stirring up trouble. The army was going to encircle the slums, it was all part of a plan. There were still parts of London that did not smell bad. The shit-collectors worked for the bosses; at night, they emptied their carts in the poor areas of town, spreading disease.

  The only shops still flourishing were sellers of cloth. When their stock ran out, people used wooden planks, mattresses or furniture to block up their windows.

  The restaurants and inns had closed.

  The factories’ production had slowed and almost all activity had ceased in the port of London. The companies’ ships no longer went beyond Leamouth and North Woolwich. Goods were unloaded downstream, where the tides were strong enough to permit navigation and dilute the black river’s thick current. The dockers were out of work and London’s docks were deserted.

  In the new port of St Katharine, the empty warehouses were padlocked, but the prowlers, day labourers, thieves and beggars had disappeared. The East End gangs were, like everyone else, waiting for the port to come back to life, for London to be freed from this terror so they could all go back to work.

  In this atmosphere of tension and inactivity, all London’s police constables had been ordered to appear on the streets and to be on their guard, to nip any minor disputes in the bud. Wherever you looked now, at any hour of the day or night, you would always see a copper. The sound of their whistles could be heard all over the city.

  If the Underworld had a smell, it could surely be no different from this one, and this idea slowly gained ground: London really was turning into Hell. This was divine punishment for some buried crime, some monstrous sin. Preachers announced that the Great Stink was only the beginning, that damnation would be eternal and the noxious air merely the first wounds of a more terrifying retribution that would soon be visited upon England.

  In London, people prayed, far more than they had done in a long, long time.

  *

  The Thames River Police continued to patrol Docklands, just like their colleagues from Blackwall and Waterloo, even though in reality there was nothing left to patrol. Their job was to guard the ships, to oversee the unloading of goods and the activities of the gangs, but the docks they walked along, truncheons in hand, were practically deserted.

  In these special forces, funded by the companies, most of the policemen were veterans of the colonies. It was a sort of laborious retirement for deserving or desperate soldiers, who worked for cut-price rates. Recruitment had followed this pattern since the force’s creation, and the Metropolitan police had no say in the matter. These coppers had a different reputation and obeyed the orders of the company directors just as much as those of the police administration.

  While the foul air was no more bearable for them than for London’s other inhabitants, they were at least used to this kind of heat. In fact, for some of them, this pervasive corpse-like stench was quite familiar too. It was simply a question of degree, the smell of the London air redolent of an insanely high pile of disembowelled Indians or Africans on a hot, sunny day in the tropics.

  Officer O’Reilly, veteran of the West India Company, heard the bells of Whitechapel announcing the end of his shift and began to walk more quickly on Execution Dock. As he rushed towards the station at Wapping, he passed by the pontoon of the old gallows, not used since the 1830s but left standing here, casting its slender shadow over the thick river.

  O’Reilly remembered the last hangings there and the crowds that massed around them when, as a child, he came here to see a pirate dance at the end of a rope. Those guilty of killing English officers were given a short rope. Because they did not fall from high enough, their necks did not break and they died slowly, kicking their legs. These were the hangings everyone preferred.

  Children were playing on the pontoon, starving little runts in rags who seemed no more perturbed by the odour than a West India veteran. Beggars, pickpockets, gang messengers, delinquents and orphans, these children were a scourge on the Docklands, the port’s inactivity ha
ving left them unemployed too. They were parasites – of the river and its trade – whose corpses the Wapping police found about ten times a year, trapped between a dock and the hull of a boat, between the bars of a sewer entrance, or in a fisherman’s net. Sometimes they were found covered with knife wounds. These gangs were constantly at war and the settling of scores between them regularly ended in dead bodies.

  “Get away from there!”

  The children were clowning around on the worm-eaten railings, walking above the mud, pretending to hang their shadows on the shadow of the gallows. They paid no attention to the policeman. O’Reilly took two steps towards them and lifted his truncheon. The children scarpered.

  “O’Reilly, you Irish scum!”

  “Your arse stinks, O’Reilly!”

  “Bloody bobbies, you’re the plague!”

  “Send the bobbies to the gallows, drown the rich in shit!”

  *

  Other guards were converging on Wapping High, all of them in just as much of a rush as the Irishman.

  Putting their caps and truncheons on the tables, they sat on chairs in the common room.

  Superintendent Andrews was waiting for them, the smoke of his pipe adding to the already unbreathable atmosphere. None of the men bothered opening their notebooks to make their reports. They mentioned altercations, arguments between wives and drunken husbands, citizens who accused each other of emptying their chamber pots in the neighbours’ yards. A few thefts and burglaries in shops, a few old people afraid for their safety. Anyone with possessions was worried by those who possessed nothing.