The Empire Trilogy (82 page)

Sometimes, when you try to peer too intensely into the gloom, your eyes make you see things which do not exist; Harry and Fleury presently began to have just this experience. If they had not known that it was impossible they could have sworn that the distant melon beds were seething with moving shadows. Yet there was no question of an attack from that quarter across so much open ground. Their heads turned to each other uneasily, nevertheless; then they looked at the pensioners to see if they were noticing anything; they did not want to make fools of themselves in front of these veterans by ordering them to fire at shadows. But the pensioners sat there impassively; their eyes were too weak, in any case, to be much help in this situation. After some hesitation Harry, in a gruff and insecure tone, gave the order to light the portfire; the portfire, made of a mixture of brimstone, gunpowder and saltpetre, was sixteen inches long and would burn for fifteen minutes; that should be long enough to see them past this tricky twilight interval.

“What on earth is that?”

It was the Padre's voice floating eerily over the compound from the direction of the Cutcherry.

“When war shall cease...in...all...the...world...” concluded the Padre amid such a lugubrious howling of pariah dogs that in spite of their excitement the two young men experienced a sudden dread.

“Look at the other bank!” Now that the sky had lightened one could distinguish silhouettes against it; for an instant it had seemed that a strong breeze was blowing through the melon-beds and setting them on the march, but the day's wind had not yet risen. Hardly had Fleury spoken when the rim of darkness beneath the horizon began to sparkle like a firework and immediately the air about them began to sing and howl with flying metal and chips of masonry...then in a wave came the sound. Daubs of orange hopped at regular intervals from one end of the rim of darkness to the other. Suddenly, a shrapnel shell landed on the corner of the verandah and all was chaos.

Harry had been on the point of giving the order to fire but he had been plucked from Fleury's side and was grovelling somewhere in the darkness.

“Fire!” shouted Fleury, but the pensioner who was holding the portfire merely looked towards him apologetically and sank to the ground where he lay like an empty suit of clothes.

“How terrible!' muttered Fleury helplessly. The verandah was littered with dead pensioners, or what looked like bits of pensioners, it was hard to be sure in the gloom. The two Sikhs lolled against each other, stone dead, with what could have been blood but was probably only
pan
juice trickling from their mouths. Barlow, though he still had his hands in his pockets and was still looking disaffected, had been blown off his chair and was lying on his side. Hardly a minute of the engagement had elapsed and as far as Fleury could see only two pensioners were still alive, and they appeared to be the very oldest and most infirm of the contingent. And still they had managed to fire no shot. While Harry was still struggling ineffectually to get to his feet Fleury grasped the portfire stick and touched it to the vent of the cannon; a jet of flame issued from the muzzle and there was a crash that made the whole verandah quake and set a shower of stone chips and fragments of mortar dancing on the flagstones. In a second or two there appeared out of nowhere against the bright dawning sky a black ball sailing towards the dark rim of melon beds, into which it presently vanished with no visible effect whatsoever.

“Are you alright, Harry?”

“Just winded,” grunted Harry, though in fact a flying brick had struck him a painful blow in the groin; for a moment he had thought his entire trunk had been sliced off, pictures of his dear mother and, less appropriately, of Lucy in her chemise, had crowded before his drowning eyes as he prepared to die; then he realized that no actual damage had been done; he was holding his genitals cupped in his hand for they were too painful to massage.

“Almost everybody appears to be dead,” shouted Fleury in a discouraged tone. The noise of musket fire from the rampart on each side was so great that he could not hear Harry's reply but saw that he was pointing at Barlow. Barlow was alive and appeared uninjured. They picked him up and sat him on his chair again. Once more Harry's mouth began to move, this time with an expression of frenzied excitement on his face. Again he pointed, this time over the balustrade.

The day had brightened enough for them to pick out shadowy detail in the landscape. What they saw, six or seven hundred yards away, was more than enough to cause Harry's excitement. Sepoys were swarming through the melon beds and down towards the far bank of the river. But this was all wrong. The sepoys were not supposed to attack from the south. The south was the one cardinal point from which the Residency was defensible; from the others, all the sepoys had to do, practically, was to step over a low wall and slit your throat. And yet the south was where they were coming from (what Harry and Fleury did not yet know was that they were coming from the other cardinal points as well). Without their British officers, of course, the sepoys were likely to commit the most extraordinary follies, such as attacking impregnable positions (never mind for the moment the Redan at Sebastopol).

It was true that the banqueting hall was the most easily defensible corner of the enclave; all the same, it required men to defend it. There were a dozen indigo planters and Eurasian civilians scattered sparsely behind the low earthen wall on each side of the battery. If the native cavalry attacked here, and even if they did not, these men could be easily overrun by a moderately determined assault, in spite of the three hundred yards of open ground which the attacking infantry would have to cross.

One thing had become clear to Harry: the cannon was going to be crucial. It was the one factor that could compensate for the lack of rifles and bayonets. If that first, unlucky shell-burst had not obliterated so many of the pensioners at least they might have been able to serve the cannon adequately; but now there were only two pensioners left. They were making weak efforts to drag the bodies of their comrades back from the verandah and stack them against the lolling Sikhs. Harry ordered one of the remaining pensioners to take a message to the Collector asking for more men; he doddered away, attempting to whip his limbs into a gallop.

Fleury had not been paying attention when the cannon was loaded; the beginnings of an epic poem had been simmering in his brain. Although he did not know it he had just fired a round shot into the sepoy encampment which lay out of sight beyond the melon beds. A round shot is all very well for a steady artillery exchange or for reducing defences, but it is no good for stopping an infantry charge; it does not kill enough people simultaneously for that. What you need is canister or grape. Harry had no shortage of canister for the occasion. But what worried him was how they were going to fire it.

Nine men were needed to serve a cannon if you include those attending the limber and the ammunition wagon; it was difficult to serve without at least five men. But Harry, Fleury and the other elderly pensioner, Ram, set to work in a frenzy. Ram was very thin and tall, and his white mustaches drooped almost to the medals on his tunic; but fortunately he had served in the artillery and knew what he was about. So they divided up the work as best they could, Harry commanding and laying the gun, Fleury spongeing, Ram loading and serving the ammunition; then Fleury or Harry would prime the vent and, after Ram had fired it, clear it with the drift.

They were very slow at first. Fleury did not know what he was doing and they had to keep shouting at him, and Ram was really too old to carry ammunition as well as load it. But then Harry remembered Barlow who was still sitting on his chair with his hands in his pockets. Now that it was daylight you could see that Barlow's face had turned a fearful grey, but somehow Harry got him on his feet and carrying ammunition. He only had to carry it a few yards, from the banqueting hall to the gun emplacement, but in these few yards there was no protection offered by the marble heads of Plato and Socrates, and musket balls kept droning by his nose and tugging at his garments.

Not only did Harry have to organize his amateurish team of gunners, he also had to direct his fire so that it had the most damaging effect; this involved a calculation of variables that could be extremely complicated: the weight of the powder charge, the degree of elevation of the gun, whether the shot to be fired was solid or powder-filled, all these considerations could make a crucial difference to where the shot landed. But Harry had practised this sort of thing so often he did not even have to calculate: he knew by instinct that with a two-pound charge and an elevation of one degree he could drop a shell in the river bed where the sepoys swarmed as thick as flies on a treacle pudding.

Fleury found himself looking at Harry, whom he had always condescended to think rather dull, with new eyes as he watched him making some delicate but fatal adjustment to the handles of the elevating screw. Fleury was confronted, as he toiled clumsily with the spongeing rod in the dust and smoke, with a simple fact about human nature which he had never considered before: nobody is
superior
to anyone else, he only may be better at doing a specific thing. Doubtless, Coleridge or Keats or Lamartine would have been as clumsy with the sponge as he was himself...but wait, had not Lamartine been a military man? With French poets you could never tell. He stepped back, his ears ringing as the cannon crashed again. He could not remember.

“Fleury, for God's sake!” shouted Harry, who knew how desperate the situation was. Fleury did not know; he was in a daze from the noise and smoke which had tears streaming down his face, and the haze of dust which hung everywhere, very fine, lending the scene a “historical” quality because everything appeared faintly blurred, as in a Crimean daguerrotype. Fleury found himself appending captions to himself for the
Illustrated London News
. “This was the Banqueting Hall Redoubt in the Battle of Krishnapur. On the left, Mr Fleury, the poet, who conducted himself so gallantly throughout; on the right, Lieutenant Dunstaple, who commanded the Battery, and a faithful native, Ram.”

“Fleury!” shouted Harry desperately. But Fleury's mind
would
keep wandering; the trouble was that being ignorant of military matters he only had a vague idea of what was going on; all he knew for certain was that he was spongeing a gun and, after a while, his stunned senses refused to find that very interesting. He skidded suddenly as he was dashing to clear the vent for Harry and sat down on the flagstones. Only then did he realize that he had skidded in a great lake of blood which had leaked out of the pile of bodies and spread over the verandah.

Harry knew that they needed a miracle...that is, if the Collector did not send any more men with rifles and bayonets to reinforce the handful at the rampart. They needed another cannon, too, preferably a twelve-pounder, and a mortar to drop shells under the near bank of the river. What looked to Fleury like two or three hundred dim figures in a dust storm wandering aimlessly on the far bank a quarter of a mile away, had a precise meaning for Harry. He knew exactly what was happening: the sepoys were massing under the near bank before making an attack. The only thing that puzzled him was why they were taking so long about it.

By this time the sun had risen and the hot wind was beginning to blow, but still the sepoys delayed their assault. While they waited for it Major Hogan suddenly reeled out on to the verandah and steadied himself with a hand on the door-frame. He had had a terrible night, but the morning had been worse; every time the six-pounder fired it drove hot needles through his ears. Now he had got himself on to his feet, however, and was coming to take command of his men. He could see by the pile of bodies that they needed him.

Harry greeted Major Hogan's appearance with dismay; it was not simply that he himself was no longer in command; he knew Hogan to be incompetent. What slender chance they had of holding the position vanished with Hogan giving the orders.

Now Hogan, having rallied himself, opened his mouth to give his first order; his brown teeth parted, but as they did so a musket ball vanished between them into his open mouth; his eyes bulged, he appeared to swallow it, then he dropped conveniently near to the other bodies, the back of his skull shattered. Harry and Fleury exchanged a glance but said nothing.

It was nine o'clock and the heat was becoming unbearable; the chase of the cannon could not be touched; if a drop of water fell on it from Fleury's sponge it sizzled away in an instant. The flagstones shimmered and the lake of blood where Fleury had slipped had become a sticky brown marsh sucking at every footstep. Once Fleury trod on something which squashed beneath his foot and he thought with horror: “Someone's eye!” He hardly dared to look down. But it was merely one of the Kabul grapes which Barlow had been eating.

Harry could tell that Fleury and Ram would not be able to go on much longer without a break: Ram because he was old, Fleury because he was inexperienced. Fleury had begun to have a shattered look; he kept his eyes away from the sticky mass and wisps of steam rising from it, and from the bodies. The shock, aided by the noise and heat, was taking hold of him. So Harry gave the order to stop firing; in any case it was time they moved the bodies out of the sun.

While the others rested in the shade, Harry went out again with his telescope; he had considered dragging the gun from one position to another in order to give the impression that they had more than one cannon in the battery. But a brass six-pounder weighs seventeen hundredweight: the prospect of getting it off its trunnions and on to the limber, dragging it to a new position, unlimbering, firing, limbering up once more, and going through the whole process again, quickly enough, and in such heat, with only four men was simply too much to contemplate.

It seemed to him that he could see movement above the rim of the near bank of the river; a green flag was being swept slowly back and forth in the hot breeze and at the same time a faint beating of drums came to his ears. The attack was coming at last. As he turned to order the others back to the cannon, the pensioner whom he had sent to the Collector hurried towards him, saluted and told him that the Collector Sahib could send no men or guns at present. “Collector Sahib very sorry and send this gentleman, Sahib.” Harry looked at the figure who had followed the pensioner diffidently out on to the verandah. It was the Collector's manservant, Vokins.