The Great War

by Rakhshanda Jalil

  The weather, which had been indifferent except for little spells of sunshine, took a turn for the bad. At the touch of a cold wind the sparse vegetation on the outskirts of Orleans seemed to change its colour from green to gold and dull vermilion and a red coppery hue. A few menacing clouds gathered from the west and, wandering low over the plains, splashed the ripened earth with showers.

  The sepoys who had felt cold even in the equable air of the South of France now began to shiver, and to drink more tumblerfuls of the crude mixture of tealeaves, hot water, milk and sugar, which their cooks boiled all together in cauldrons and called tea. They had had field service clothing on the winter scale given to them in Marseilles. Most of them were fairly used to extremes of climate, but in India, the torrential rains swept through the land and left the earth pregnant, warm and swollen, while here, there was a continuous drizzle, soaking the fields till they were damp and muddy.

  The excitement of seeing the motor lorries that were handed over to the corps, superior to any motor cars they had seen in India, raised their spirits somewhat. They emerged from their tents, burdened with the weight of grey skies, and gathered round the brand-new vehicles with the open eyes of wonder. The polished sheen of the trucks, the efficient air of speed that seemed to be controlled in their compact bodies, aroused admiration from the men who knew the advantages and disadvantages of the bullock cart.

  ‘How could such huge motors be driven?’ Daddy Dhanoo asked, turning his bleary bulging eyes to his companions. ‘My meaning is, how could they pass other vehicles on the road, for one of them would occupy the whole width of the road!’

  ‘I would like to see the engine,’ said Lalu admiring the skill of the men who had made the thing.

  ‘How could a machine contained in such a small tin shed drag such a big body, laden with men and arms?’ Uncle Kirpu said, even his cynicism vanquished by the huge buses.

  ‘To be sure, these sahibs can work wonders!’ said Daddy Dhanoo.

  ‘Arrest the movement of the stars on a map, eh?’ said Lalu, mimicking Daddy Dhanoo. ‘Catch time in the hands of a watch! Harness electricity as if it were a mule!’ And he went and mischievously pressed the horn, till Dhanoo, Kirpu and a few others who stood by almost ran, startled.

  ‘And you are all donkeys who ought to be harnessed and flogged so that some sense could be driven into your heads!’ said Subah, swaggering up to one of the trucks from the tent of his former mates where he had come to show off his new Jemadar’s outfit. For, instead of being reprimanded for his presumption at Marseilles, he had received the direct commission of Jemadar when he was presented to the Colonel. ‘Who blew that horn?’ he asked angrily. Finding the men all ranged in silence against him, he sought to placate them. ‘There is nothing very mysterious about trucks! They are just bigger motor cars than those you have seen in India. The surprising thing to all us officers, is that we have been spared any at all, because… but I must not tell you, it is confidential...’

  ‘Then don’t,’ said Uncle Kirpu. There is Holdar Lachman Singh and I trust he knows…’

  ‘Ohe nahin, fool, there are certain things which only the officers know,’ said Subah, eager enough to tell them. ‘Well, it is rumoured that there has been a retreat at a place called Mons. The Allied Armies have paid a terrible toll. The Sarkar is faced with difficulties in the supply of materials and transport on land and sea. You don’t know what heroic efforts the General Staff and all the British officers are making. It is now known that the Angrezi Sarkar was completely unprepared for the war… And if you consider that the Sarkar has to meet the demands of the front for conveyances, we should be grateful that we have been able to get this motor transport.’

  Lalu noticed the sudden exaggeration of pride and importance that had come into Subah’s manner. He had always shown off, of course, but till yesterday his aggressiveness had been restrained by the humiliation of knowing he was in the ranks. But now, since he had been raised to the rank of Jemadar, he had become overbearingly masterful and all-knowing. It was extraordinary how a star on your shoulder or a stripe on the arm, as in the case of Lok Nath, could make you talk down to everyone.

  ‘It is all due to Lord Kitchener Sahib’s solicitude for the Indian troops,’ said Subah.

  ‘My father, the Subedar Major Sahib, knows Lord Kitchener...’ he continued, and began to embellish the gossip he had heard in the officers’ quarters.

  ‘Lord Kitchener gave new barracks and new cantonments to the Indian Army, Jemadar Sahib,’ said Lachman Singh, seeking to direct the conversation into less confidential channels. ‘He was a great officer. There were many things he did, which were against the custom of the Sarkar. I remember that one of the things the sahibs resented very much was the reduction of the number of British paltans2 in every brigade from two to one.’

  ‘Yus, yus,’ interrupted Subah, falling into English as the ability to speak the language of the sahibs was reputed to increase his sense of importance among the Indian ranks. ‘My father, the Subedar Major Sahib, was a special orderly officer to Lord Kitchener Sahib.’

  ‘Ohe, what can you remember of that?’ said Uncle Kirpu, crudely demolishing the bluff that Subah was seeking to impose on them. ‘You were only a kid, as big as my little finger, running about the regiment naked with your little looli3, and the crows used to peck at your bottom.’

  Everyone laughed at this. Uncle Kirpu was well known for his caustic wit and, as one of the first sepoys to join the regiment, was allowed to say anything to anyone, whether British officer, Indian officer, NCO or sepoy. Subah joined in the laughter, though pale blush of embarrassment covered his red face and his eyes glanced furtively from side to side.

  ‘My father was a sultan,’ the fool is said to have answered, when they asked him ‘Who are you?’ Kirpu quoted the Persian proverb with a broken accent.

  ‘Oh, don’t recall his childhood to him now,’ Lalu said.

  ‘Don’t bark!’ shouted Subah suddenly, his face redder than ever. ‘I shall present you to the Karnel Sahib if you cut such a joke with me again.’

  ‘If he receives the same treatment on being presented to the Karnel Sahib as you got, then please to present me too,’ Kirpu said slowly. ‘My old shoulders could do with a star and I like the idea of a Sham Browne belt.’

  Everyone laughed again, including Subah, though Lalu hung his head and paled as he met Jemadar’s stare. ‘Uncle let go, come to your senses, and don’t be a clown,’ said Havildar Lachman Singh, siding with the Jemadar though he sympathised with the rest.

  ‘Forgive me, Subah,’ said Lalu, realising his mistake.

  ‘I am Jemadar Sahib, henceforth, remember,’ said Subah, with a steady glare in his eyes. ‘’Shun!’

  Uncle Kirpu and Sepoy Lal Singh came to attention. ‘Both of you report for fatigue duty every day from tomorrow,’ the Jemadar ordered. And he walked away in the direction of the officer’s tent, shaking a little.

  The groups of sepoys who stood by Lalu, and Kirpu and Lachman turned from the shining splendour of the trucks to explore each other’s faces. The excitement, the exhilaration in their eyes subsided amidst the furrows of shame carved by the past humiliations inflicted on them by superior officers and they stood baffled as though struck by an electric shock, because the bullying of an officer who was their friend a day ago seemed like a fresh wound in the changed circumstances of their lives, among all the strange things of the West. They had begun to believe that Vilayat4 was an unrelieved paradise and, encouraged by all the privileges of journeys in ships and railways through foreign lands, which they had never enjoyed before, heartened by the kindness of people everywhere, they had grown to the dignity of human beings and forgotten the way in which they had always been treated as so much cattle in India. They were beginning, through contact with ordinary white folk and through the knowledge that even coolies here seemed to be coolies only during their work hours, and then sahibs in their own right, who put on suits and boots and walked out with their girlfriends,
to lose the fear and abjectness that their superior officers had inspired in them in the cantonments of India. And now, they had been suddenly thrown back to the realisation of their real position.

  The fatigue duty imposed by Jemadar Subah Singh became, in fact, a visit to a fair.

  For, as Lalu and Kirpu came out with a party of sepoys, each of whom had been condemned for similar offences, to receive the battalion’s share of horse transport, they found the fields, which had been converted into marsh by the rain, bestrewn, beyond the shining steel trucks and motor lorries, with vehicles of all possible kinds and horses of all sizes and colours.

  Through the discordant roar of raucous shouts and calls and the neighs and snorts which rent the air, they could see hundreds of vans; from those which could presumably be drawn by two horses and which were capable of carrying one or two tonnes, to small donkey carts like those which the washermen in the cantonments of India used to transport dirty linen from the lines to the river, or such as they had seen by the vegetable stalls in the side streets of Marseilles, their rafts on wheels adjusted to shafts made of single poles.

  ‘Are these the wagons we have come to receive?’

  Uncle Kirpu asked. ‘Look at the harness! This one has no collar and that other has no head or heel ropes!’

  ‘And wah wah, the horses!’ said young Kharku, the little bugler and mascot of the 69th.

  ‘Father of fathers!’ said Lalu. ‘That one seems blind of one eye!’

  ‘You couldn’t take those vehicles across a Mall Road to say nothing of taking them through a war even on the North Western Frontier!’ said Hanumant Singh, a lemur­like veteran Dogra sepoy who was not wont to say too much.

  ‘Well, to tell the truth, I don’t know how these things are going to work,’ said an NCO.

  ‘They are doing their best for us, as Jemadar Subah Singh might say,’ remarked Lalu. And he was going to add his quota of mockery, but he saw the Jemadar coming up from behind and winced.

  ‘Come boys, come and let us get busy,’ called Jemadar Subah Singh. His round plump face was wreathed in smiles and he seemed to have relented since the quarrel, as much perhaps because he was a man of passionate temperament jumping from the extremes of gaiety to sadness, from wild anger to a childlike docility, as because he was aroused by what he saw as he came to inspect the fatigue party at work.

  The sepoys came to attention and saluted as soon as he came abreast of them, and he raised his cane to acknowledge their greetings.

  ‘They are fine horses,’ the Jemadar said, walking smartly up and leading the sepoys into the very thick of the fair where a snuffling, snorting, trampling herd grazed on the thin grass before them.

  ‘Magnificent!’ said the sycophant Sikh NCO Chanan Singh.

  ‘And, considering the Sarkar has been plunged into this war so suddenly,’ continued the Jemadar, ‘and has had to face the difficulties of fighting the Germans on one side and of making arrangements for the welfare of the troops on the other, it is a wonder that they have assembled all these things.’

  ‘They will have to face many more difficulties repairing those vans on the field than in fighting the war,’ said Kirpu, the irrepressible.

  ‘According to you, uncle, the doomsday has come,’ said Subah, laughing and thumping Kirpu on the back.

  ‘The drowning Brahmin will take his followers with him,’ said Kirpu fatalistically. ‘Therefore, where the Sarkar goes, huzoor, we have to follow like good disciples.’

  ‘Impudent, incorrigible uncle!’ remarked Subah laughing. And he put his arm round Kirpu affectionately, as if the old man had touched some tenderness in him.

  ‘As the Jemadar Sahib says, brother,’ put in Havildar Chanan Singh to Kirpu, ‘one must not be disrespectful to the Sarkar.’ Lalu looked at Subah, then at Kirpu’s quiet, sardonic visage and then at the faces of Chanan Singh and the other sepoys who walked respectfully behind the Jemadar Sahib and seemed to accept every word he uttered as the law of Gods.

  ‘Come yar, Lalu, come, why are you lagging behind?’ said Subah in the friendly manner of old days. ‘We shall find one of the sahibs or an interpreter and ask him where our horses are.’

  Lalu followed a little quicker after this overture of kindliness, and leapt across the shafts of miniature carts, more fragile than the bullock carts in his village and general make-up, past carriages which, though they were improvements on the ekka of Gughi’s father and more like the phaetons in Manabad and the big cities, were rusty with years of damp on their springs.

  As he came abreast of Uncle Kirpu and the other sepoys, he saw them pull up and salute Major Peacock Sahib of the regiment who stood ahead of them. He clicked his heels and took his hand to his head though he was not noticed. For the Major Sahib, a short, quick-tempered, agile man, was speaking peevishly in a twisted Hindustani to Jemadar Subah Singh.

  ‘Francisi log acha bandobast nahin!’ And he spoke in English. ‘They know nothing about horses! Look, all the animals running loose. Muddle! No one knows which horses are whose!’

  And he puckered his brow and frowned, closing his eyes and looking round.

  ‘We shall wait for orders then, huzoor,’ said Jemadar Subah Singh.

  ‘Some of the horses have strayed towards the river there,’ Major Peacock said, pointing with his stick to a line of gleaming silver that flowed through long stalks of waving grass.

  ‘Get the sepoys to catch them and bring them here for inspection.’

  ‘Huzoor,’ said Subah, clicking his heels and saluting with such alacrity that his head and torso bent forward. And he turned to the men:

  ‘Come boys, I shall give you leave to go to town after we have finished our work. And what’s more, I shall treat you to some sherbet.’

  ‘Come boys, if the sahib speaks so plainly about the mismanagement of the Francisis,’ called Kirpu, ‘you be sure he will tell us a thing or two in his own language if we don’t look sharp.’

  Apart from such fatigue duties as were imposed by cussed superiors, the sepoys had plenty of leisure to go sightseeing.

  Daddy Dhanoo squeezed into himself with the cold. Uncle Kirpu was not too fond of pleasure. Lalu took permission from Havildar Lachman Singh to go to town.

  The boy would not go alone, however, and he hung about Kirpu like a child persuading an elder to accompany him.

  ‘Oh, come Chacha5, come,’ he begged.

  ‘You go along, son, you will meet other sepoys from the regiment. ‘A high metalled horse needs no whipping.’ You will go prancing along.’

  ‘But horses go in herds, Chachaji, come, don’t be a donkey.’

  ‘I know you will not cease pestering me,’ said Kirpu at last. ‘Tell that cook, Santu, to give Dhanoo some more tea and I shall get ready.’

  Lalu jumped up, pranced like a horse and shouted to Santu to give Dhanoo a tumblerful of tea. And, covering the old man with all the available blankets, they walked away from the camp through the weak sunshine of a cold autumnal afternoon.

  Lalu was full of excitement to be going along to this city. The march through Marseilles had been merely a fleeting expedition, and he was obsessed with something, which struggled to burst through all the restraints and the embarrassment of the unfamiliar, to break through the fear of the exalted life that the Europeans lived, the rare high life of which he, like all the sepoys, had only had distant glimpses from the holes and the crevices in the thick hedges outside the sahibs’ bungalows in India. And, as he walked under the shadows of mansions with shuttered windows like those on the houses of Marseilles, reading the names of shops on the boards, as he walked past vineyards dappled by the pale sun, past stretches of grassy land, which seemed, from the droves of sheep clustered on it, to be pasturages, his tongue played with the name of this city, Orleans, and there was an echo in his mind, from the memory of something that had happened here, something he could not remember.

  ‘A quieter city than Marsels,’ Uncle Kirpu said.

  Indeed, in spite of the smoke of factory
chimneys that trailed across the sky, in spite of the modern lettering on shopfronts, the delicate grassy lawns, the small detached houses and old doors of buildings, there was something fascinating about the place and different from Marseilles. ‘Oh! Water! Oh, there is a stream!’ shouted the sepoys whose impetuosity knew no bounds.

  Lalu rushed up and saw the stream on the right, flowing slowly, gently, and shouted: ‘River!’

  ‘Everything is small in these parts,’ Kirpu said. ‘Look at their rivers — not bigger than our small nullahs. Their whole land can be crossed in a night’s journey, when it takes two nights and days from the frontier to my village in the district of Kangra. Their rain is like the pissing of a child. And their storms are a mere breeze in the tall grass…’

  ‘To be sure, they are small, the streams,’ confirmed a Punjabi Muhammadan. ‘The width of seven of these won’t make the bed of the Jhelum at its narrowest.’

  ‘It is about the same size as the Jhelum in Srinagar,’ said a Dogra from Jammu and Kashmir. ‘Why, it is just like Srinagar, this city, built on two sides of a river. Look, there are boats on it, too, like the houseboats in Srinagar.’ And he pointed towards the river.

  ‘Ils…Looa…Looa!’ a burly Frenchman in a straw hat said, smiling as he stopped to look at the sepoys watching the river flow.

  The sepoys shook their hands to signify that they couldn’t understand and, as the Frenchman pointed again to the accompaniment of a copious commentary, they nodded out of politeness.

  ‘What does he say!’ asked one of the sepoys.

  ‘Something in Francisi, Allah knows what,’ answered another.

  At that the Frenchman bowed very politely, smiled and went his way.

  ‘Salaam huzoor,’ said the sepoys, saluting and almost coming to attention in the face of the white man. For, all white men, military or civil, were to them superior like the English sahibs in India who surrounded themselves with princely airs.

  ‘Look, look, there are two sweepers drinking wine by two Tommies,6 and also a woman!’ said a sepoy naively. ‘They have little religion or shame!’