Flood of Fire (55 page)

As the roar of cannon-fire rolled across the water flocks of waterbirds took wing, darkening the sky. Within minutes, the Chinese gunners were returning fire, even as cannonballs slammed into the battlements around them. For a while they kept up a spirited but erratic fusillade, with most of their shots sailing over their targets. Then, as the corvettes' thirty-two-pounders found their range, they began to fall silent, one by one, amidst explosions of shattered masonry and dismembered limbs.

Under cover of the bombardment the
Druids
marines and small-arms' men had already boarded a couple of longboats. Now, a signal went up on the frigate's foremast summoning the
Enterprize
. With a frantic churning of her paddle-wheels the steamer reversed out of the mud and turned her bows around. Pulling up to the
Druid
, she took the longboats in tow and went steaming past the barrier to the spot that had been chosen for the landing – a beach on the mainland part of the shoreline, from where the Chinese position could be attacked from the rear.

For a while the landing force disappeared from view, vanishing behind a curve in the shoreline. When Kesri next spotted the red-coated soldiers they were coming over the top of a spur, in double column, with the marines on the outer flank. Their position was exposed to the heights above as well as to battery on the barrier. Coming over the ridge they ran into heavy matchlock- and cannon-fire. Then detachments of Chinese troops began to advance on them from two sides.

Suddenly the British attack came to a halt. The
Druids
small-arms' men had a field-piece with them but before they could assemble it the landing-party was ordered to fall back on the beach.

Even as the retreat was under way, another flag was hoisted on the
Druid
. Captain Mee took a look and turned to Kesri: ‘The signal's up. We're to move forward to support the marines.'

Kesri snapped off a salute: Ji, Kaptán-sah'b.

The sepoys and their contingent of supporters were already on deck. The barrels of the howitzers and mortars, each of which weighed several hundred pounds, had been lowered into a cutter earlier; now the rest of the unit followed.

The camp-followers went first, led by the bhistis, their shoulders bowed by the weight of their water-filled mussucks; then came the medical attendants with rolled-up litters, and after them the gun-lascars, bearing the disassembled parts of a howitzer and its gun-carriage. Maddow, the newly recruited gun-lascar, was carrying a pair of hundred-pound wheels as if they were toys, one on each shoulder.

When the sepoys' turn came, Kesri positioned himself at the head of the side-ladder so that he could observe the men as they filed past: they were unblooded troops after all, going into action as a unit for the first time. As such Kesri would not have been surprised to detect signs of nervousness or distraction on their faces – but he saw saw none of those fleeting, uneasy movements of the eyes that were always a sure indication of skittishness. None of the sepoys so much as glanced at him as they stepped down the ladder: to a man their eyes were fixed on the knapsack ahead. It pleased Kesri to see them moving smoothly, like spokes in a wheel, with their minds not on themselves but on the unit: it meant that the hard work of the last many months had paid off,
that their trust in him was so complete that they knew, even without looking, that he was there, his presence as certain and dependable as the hand-rail that was guiding them down the ladder and into the longboat waiting below.

The boat's tow ropes had already been attached to the
Enterprize
: the craft surged ahead as soon as Captain Mee and the subalterns had boarded. The sound of the steamer's paddle-wheel drowned out the rattle of gunfire in the distance; the crossing seemed to take only a few minutes and then they were racing over the gangplank to join the marines at their beachhead.

As the sepoys formed ranks bhistis came running through, pouring water into their brass lotas. In the column beside them, the marines were urinating where they stood, in preparation for the advance. Knowing that there would be no time to relieve themselves once the attack began, the sepoys followed suit.

Captain Mee took command now, ordering the columns to advance, with the marines on the right flank. They ran up the slope at a steady trot and as they came over the top of the elevation, the order to fire rang out. This time the sepoys and marines were able to throw up a thick curtain of fire, even as bullets were whistling over their own heads.

With volley following on volley, the charcoal in the gunpowder created a great cloud of black smoke, reducing visibility to a yard or two. Coughing, spluttering, the sepoys were half-blinded by the acrid smoke and half-deafened by the massed roar of the muskets. But there was no check in their stride: the habits ingrained by their training – hundreds of hours of daily drills – took over and kept them moving mechanically forward.

Kesri was in ‘coverer' position, in line with the first row of sepoys. After the start of the battle his attention shifted quickly from the opposing lines to his own men. Many a time had he spoken to the sepoys about the surprises of the battlefield – the unpredictability of the terrain, the din, the smoke – yet he knew all too well that the reality always came as a shock, even to the best-prepared men.

Above the booms of the cannon and the steady rattle of musket-fire he caught the sound of a bullet hitting a bayonet, an eerie, vibrating tintinabullation. Looking into the smoke, his eyes sought
out the ghostly outline of the sepoy whose weapon had been struck: he was holding his musket at arm's length, gaping at the Brown Bess as though it had come alive in his hands and were about to skewer him. With a couple of steps Kesri crossed to his side and showed him how to kill the sound, by placing a flat palm upon the metal. Next minute, right behind him, there was the abrupt, metallic pinging of a musket-ball, ricocheting off the brass caging of a sepoy's topee. The man who had been hit would be deafened by the sound, Kesri knew: the noise would reverberate inside his skull as though his eardrums were being pounded by a mallet. Sure enough, the sepoy – a boy of seventeen – had fallen to his knees, with his hands clasped over his ears, shaking his head in pain. Leaping to his side, Kesri pulled the boy to his feet, thrust his fallen musket into his hands, and pushed him ahead.

In the meantime, the gun-lascars had assembled their gun-carriage; the howitzers opened fire together with the marines' field-piece. From the squat barrels of the howitzers came dull thudding sounds as they lobbed shells into the fortifications; from the field-piece came deep-throated roars as it hurled grapeshot and canister directly into the ranks of the opposing infantry.

Seeing the Chinese line waver, Captain Mee, who was in the lead, raised his sword to signal a charge. A great howl –
Har, har Mahadev!
– burst from the sepoys' throats as they rushed forward. When they emerged from the curtain of smoke, bayonets at the ready, the Chinese line swayed and began to turn; all of a sudden the opposing troops scattered, melting away into the forested hillside.

Now it was all Kesri could do to bring the men to heel: they were in the grip of that euphoria that seizes soldiers after a battle is won, a thing as elemental as the blood-lust of an animal after a hunt. This was when they were at their most dangerous, their discipline at its shakiest: Kesri ran after them, brandishing his sword and shouting dreadful threats as he dhamkaoed and ghabraoed them back into formation – yet in his heart, he was glad that their initiation into combat had happened in this way, in a minor skirmish rather than a pitched battle. As he watched them, sulkily falling back into line, a great pride filled Kesri's heart: he realized that he would never know a love as deep as that which bound him
to this unit, which was largely his own creation, the culmination of his life's work.

*

Neel was watching from the crest of a nearby hill, along with Zhong Lou-si and his entourage: for him, as for them, the engagement had, through most of its duration, confirmed certain widely held beliefs about the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Chinese and British forces. One of these was that British superiority at sea would be offset by Chinese strength on land; that the defenders' overwhelming advantage in numbers would allow them to repel a ground invasion.

No one in Zhong Lou-si's entourage was surprised by the damage inflicted by the British broadsides; they were well aware by now of the lethal firepower of steamers, frigates and other Western warships. The defenders too had been warned beforehand and had made preparations to wait out a bombardment. It was the ground assault that would be the real test, they knew, and when it was launched they had taken satisfaction in the minuscule size of the first landing-party – a total of fewer than three hundred men! They were jubilant when the marines and small-arms' men were forced into retreat by the thousands of Chinese troops that poured out to oppose them. At that moment Compton and his colleagues had felt that their beliefs had been vindicated and the battle had been won.

It was for this reason that the subsequent rout was doubly shocking, to Neel and Compton alike. Thousands of men put to flight by a force of fewer than five hundred! Not only did it defy belief, it challenged every reassuring assumption about the wider conflict, not least those that related to the effectiveness of Indian troops.

Although nobody mentioned the sepoys to Neel, he overheard Compton saying to someone: If the black-alien soldiers had not arrived the battle would have ended differently.

Neel took a perverse satisfaction in Compton's words for he had tried often, always unavailingly, to alter his friend's low opinion of the fighting qualities of Indian troops. Committed though Neel was to the Chinese cause, he was aware now of a keen sense of pride in his compatriots' performance that day. The matter of who
the sepoys were serving was temporarily forgotten; he knew that he would have been ashamed if they had failed to give a good account of themselves.

In other ways too the day was a revelation to Neel. He had never witnessed a battle before and was profoundly affected by what he saw. Thinking about it later he understood that a battle was a distillation of time: years and years of preparation, decades of innovation and change were squeezed into a clash of very short duration. And when it was over the impact radiated backwards and forwards through time, determining the future and even, in a sense, changing the past, or at least the general understanding of it. It astonished him that he had not recognized before the terrible power that was contained within these wrinkles in time – a power that could mould the lives of those who came afterwards for generation after generation. He remembered how, when reading of long-ago battles like Panipat and Plassey, he had thought of them as immeasurably distant from his own life, a matter of quaint uniforms and old-fashioned weaponry. Only now did it occur to him that it was on battlefields such as those that his own place in the world had been decided. He understood then why Shias commemorate the Battle of Kerbala every year: it was an acknowledgement that just as the earth splits apart at certain moments, to create monumental upheavals that forever change the terrain, so too do time and history.

How was it possible that a small number of men, in the span of a few hours or minutes, could decide the fate of millions of people yet unborn? How was it possible that the outcome of those brief moments could determine who would rule whom, who would be rich or poor, master or servant, for generations to come?

Nothing could be a greater injustice, yet such had been the reality ever since human beings first walked the earth.

Fifteen

O
n Zadig Bey's advice Shireen stayed indoors during the fighting. But Macau was so small that it was impossible to hide from the terrifying sound of cannon-fire: as she paced her darkened rooms Shireen was visited by all manner of dreadful imaginings. It was not till the late afternoon, when Zadig Bey came running to her house, that she learnt that the Chinese troops had been dispersed.

‘Are you sure, Zadig Bey?'

‘Yes, Bibiji, take my word for it, from now on Commissioner Lin will leave Macau alone. We will be perfectly safe here.'

Shireen was inclined to think that Zadig was being too optimistic but his prediction was vindicated soon enough. Within a day or two it was confirmed that all Chinese troops had been withdrawn from the vicinity of Macau. From then on both Macau and Hong Kong became, in effect, protectorates of the British expeditionary force. Foreigners no longer had anything to fear in either place.

The changed circumstances prompted many foreigners to move to Macau, among them the Parsi shipowner, Dinyar Ferdoonjee. Having made a fortune selling opium in the Philippines and Moluccas, he rented a large house that looked out on the bayside promenade of Praya Grande – the Villa Nova.

It so happened that Dinyar Ferdoonjee was a relative of Shireen's. When he heard that she was living in rented lodgings he went to see her and begged her to move in with him.