The Ravi Lancers (39 page)

Warren Bateman strode up as Krishna reached the left end of the line, where C Squadron linked with the Sherwood Foresters of the flanking brigade, at a brick-lined well beyond the copse. ‘Everything all right?’ Warren asked.

‘Yes, sir,’ Krishna said. ‘The men are tired, of course, but they’re not dead beat yet.’

‘Keep them at it,’ Warren said briefly. ‘I’m going back to brigade personally, to get more barbed wire. Or have the BM’s liver on a plate ... Stay at RHQ, please, until I get back.’

Krishna watched the CO walk briskly away. The man was only back a couple of days from a severe wound and a long convalescence, but he seemed to be tireless. What kept him going? Was it pride in the regiment? Determination to beat the Germans? Lust to get at them again, for more killing?

He set out for RHQ which was behind a hayrick half a mile west of Beaumont. The guns were getting louder, and 41st Field Battery, now in position a mile back, was beginning to range in. Now that he had experienced heavy and medium artillery fire, Krishna realized how relatively ineffectual the 18-pounders were. They would be great for a war of movement, supporting infantry against enemy in the open, or tribesmen or lightly armed irregulars; against entrenched Germans they were of little more use than peashooters.

So we need bigger guns, he thought moodily, and more of them. More barbed wire, more machine guns, some sort of light machine gun that a man could carry unaided, more lorries. Everything automatic, mechanical. The amount of ammunition being used was too much for flesh and blood to move. It had to be brought up by machines. The shells for some guns were so heavy that machines had to be used to lift them and ram them into the breech. The war was not being fought by men but by machines. Machines had no feelings, and no ability to think, so how would they know when to stop, when to make peace, even when to change the direction of the fighting?

At RHQ he sat down with his back to the haystack, watching a squad from the Signal Section digging weapon pits and putting out a single apron of barbed wire. Hanuman said, ‘Sleep, lord. I’ll wake you if the Colonel-sahib comes.’

Krishna nodded. No reason why he shouldn’t sleep. ‘Wake me in half an hour,’ he said.

He closed his eyes. Sleep, come, he murmured. But instead he was at the table in the estaminet in Mennecy, Warren Bateman cold and white and bitter at the head, and sweat in his own palms. The words were like lashes across his face. But had he done wrong to try to lead the regiment back to the wellspring of its spirit? And afterwards, only Ramaswami and Pahlwan Ram still there, everyone else slunk off like beaten dogs, Indian pi-dogs cringing before their master. Ramaswami said, ‘He doesn’t seem to realize what he’s saying ... “We must fight for our land, our women, our civilization.” What have France or England or Germany got to do with our land, our women, our civilization?’

And Pahlwan Ram, always ready with the word that would separate, ‘Yes, and practically calling us savages to our faces..

Then Krishna had got up and said curtly, ‘That’s enough of that. I’m going to bed.’

Bed ... dreams ... thoughts ... dreams ... Marthe’s white thighs and brown bush. Or was it Marthe’s? He remembered the silken flesh petals of the servant girl someone--his father? his mother?--had sent him on his fourteenth birthday, to teach him the grace of women. She was twenty, experienced and delicate, a ruby set in her nostril, her brown skin cool under his hand, patchouli scenting her sleek dark hair.

‘Colonel-sahib ane-wala hai!’

He sat up with a start and looked automatically at his wrist watch. Four o’clock. He’d slept nearly two hours. He could smell cooking dal, and noticed the wind was blowing from the southwest. The trenches at RHQ were four feet deep. Some men were still at work, digging communication trenches and machine gun emplacements, the rest were eating or sleeping where they had sat down to rest. He felt a pang of hunger himself, and stood up. Warren Bateman arrived and said, ‘Four GS wagons full of wire are right behind me. See that one goes to each squadron. Then eat. Then go and take command of the Rear Echelon. See that the RAP has good covered exits to the rear. See that the RM has the reserve ammunition well sandbagged.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Krishna said. The CO was beginning to look tired now, but still the orders came out crisp and sharp. His brain was running like a machine that would not stop. Surely, if this great strain continued, it would run off the rails?

Half an hour later, full of chupattis and dal, he started towards the rear. A heavy retching from somewhere close by made him halt. Hanuman said, ‘There he is, lord... In the ditch. A
gora
.’ Krishna stooped and saw, under the blackthorn blossoms, a pair of ammunition boots, the nails bright and shiny. They were turning this way and that as the English soldier, lying on his back, tried to vomit. His open tunic was thick with greeny slime and his face was the same colour. He pulled feebly at his throat as he retched and retched, and the boots jerked and drummed under the white flowers, and a blackbird flew trilling down the hedge.

Krishna Ram felt a heaving sickness in his own stomach. This was the poisonous gas. Either the man had lost his gas mask, or it had not worked. He stopped, made to hold the man in his arms, then recoiled from the filth drenching his chest and belly--then again stooped, and took him, and gently lifted him. ‘Give him water,’ he said to Hanuman.

Hanuman held his waterbottle to the man’s lips but he could not drink. Krishna thought he did not even know the bottle was there. His head lolled and still that dreadful, straining retching shook his body and contorted his face, still the sweat ran down the cold skin, and the head jerked and the boots drummed in the dust. Suddenly a mass of green and red slime poured up over Krishna’s arms. For a moment the flood continued, spongey and clotted grey-yellow matter, streaked with blood. Then as the soldier coughed, the vomit became dark pure blood. The body in Krishna’s arms went limp, the head fell back on to his shoulder.

Krishna Ram stood up, slowly. Here was another soldier, in soiled khaki swaying down the lane, from one side to the other ... Another ... a wagon load full, a horse pulling it, five men sprawled in the back, vomit and dissolved lungs drenching the floor boards, a dead man lying head down over the back, no driver, the horse plodding steadily on. More ... platoons, companies. He thought he was seeing the disdain of Vishnu, all the diseases of earth, worse than the cholera he had seen once by the river at Basohli, the year of the great Fair. This was not war, but pestilence, in the mind of man. This was Europe, the work of Europe’s gods, the pride of its civilization!

Warren Bateman was at his side, muttering, ‘My God, the men mustn’t see this. Flaherty! ‘

‘Sir?’

‘Get our empty GS wagons here at the trot, load these men--the ones who can’t walk--on to them and evacuate them to the CCS ... past our rear line, anyway. Then the wagons are to return to rear HQ.’

‘Yes, sir.’

The trail of gassed men kept passing. ‘Manchesters,’ Warren muttered; ‘Gunners. HLI. Sappers. Rifle Brigade. KOSB. Seaforths ... They must have wiped out a division ... Here, corporal, were you wearing your masks when the gas came?’

The stocky corporal coughed and moaned: ‘Yes, sir. They helped some of us. But ... on a hot day ... like this ... can’t keep them wet enough...’ He tramped on.

Krishna Ram felt the ground swaying. His eyes blurred and his forehead was as cold and wet as the man’s who had coughed out his lungs in his arms. Those lungs, that blood and mucus, were drying on his tunic now. He must wash ... cleanse ... purify. No, he must keep them for ever, as a warning, a message from Vishnu.

Warren Bateman said, ‘We’ll just have to do our best ... Do you know if the gas affects animals?’

Flaherty’s brow wrinkled. ‘I don’t remember reading anything about that in the intelligence reports, sir ... Were you thinking of the GS wagon horses?’

‘No,’ Warren said, ‘I was thinking of Shikari ... Well, he’ll have to take his chances like the rest of us.’

Krishna said, ‘Will he make
pashap
on his own mask or will someone have to do it for him?’

Warren Bateman looked at him strangely as he staggered off to the rear. In Krishna’s reeling mind he thought he heard the gods laughing, a scornful laugh. He felt himself swaying, and then, when he thought he must fall, Hanuman’s strong arm was under his elbow. ‘Sit down, lord ... by the ditch here.’

The sun was low, near six o’clock, when Warren Bateman came on the field telephone to Rear HQ. ‘Krishna?’ the voice was taut. ‘Yes, sir?’

‘Is any of this enemy shelling falling in the rear areas?’

‘No, sir.’

‘We’re getting a lot. De Marquez has been killed. Very few other casualties so far, though. I think they’re going to attack if the wind changes.’

Krishna Ram stared puzzled at the line of the hedgerow on the skyline to the east. ‘Why if the wind changes?’ he asked.

‘Now it’s blowing from us to them, or nearly so,’ Warren’s voice was impatient. ‘They release this poisonous gas from cylinders in their front line, so they can only do it when the wind is towards us ... Put out a gas sentry, to keep note of the wind. As soon as it changes--it’s veering slowly now--tell the RM to call a stand-to in the rear echelon. When you’ve done that go to the machine guns. Make sure they have fixed lines arranged and night aiming lights out so that they can fire across our front.’

Krishna gave the handset back to the signaller and sent for the rissaldar-major. While he waited he climbed out of the trench, stretched, and looked around. It was a scene of entrancing beauty, slowly being desecrated by the action of the two sides’ artillery, as though two boys with sharp pencils had been let loose on an old oil painting. The even fields were becoming dotted with shell holes. Loads of soil gouged out of the earth and flung all about, were pockmarking the green grass. The late spring foliage was being blasted off the trees. Even the sky, a huge arch of primrose slashed with crimson, was dotted with puffs of dark smoke as German antiaircraft guns followed an invisible British aeroplane down the horizon. The scent of the blackthorn was sweet in his nostrils, and the blackbirds still trilled in the hedges.

Then Rissaldar-Major Baldev Singh came, and five minutes later Krishna set off for the machine gun position. When he had done what he had to do there, he curled up and went to sleep, fully dressed, behind one of the guns.

Rissaldar Ram Lall awakened him at five a.m. A chilly dawn mist hung low over the land, and his skin was wet and cold with dew. The rissaldar said quietly, ‘
Huzoor
, the wind is in the northeast.’

He started up and felt the slight breeze blowing in his face from the direction of the German lines. He said, ‘Stand-to!’ and felt for his binoculars. Shells suddenly began to shriek and explode all around. The shelling increased, mostly from 5.9s. The trench was deep and narrow, the machine guns were mounted on a wide fire-step, each protected by a separate traverse. All four guns were in position, ready to fire on their fixed lines, but only one sowar was up as sentry. The rest, as ordered by Warren Bateman, were in dugouts cut into the forward wall of the trench, protected from the shelling but ready to come out when the sentry called them.

Krishna Ram leaned against the parapet with the rissaldar, staring into the east. The morning mist writhed like snakes, like dragons flattened out by some colossal pressure to be wider than they were long, and barely four feet high, with no legs visible. Yet there were eyes to the dragons--eyes everywhere as flashes of bursting shells sparkled in the vapour, then for a moment glowed evil red, then died down, to flash into wakefulness again somewhere else.

The field telephone buzzed and the rissaldar took it. He listened, spoke a few words and put it down. He called up to Krishna Ram, ‘It was the colonel-sahib. He said you are to go to D Squadron. He thinks the Germans are attacking there. He can’t get through on the telephone to them.’

Krishna Ram peered into the noisy fog, loud with the crash of unseen shells and his heart sank. If only there were live dragons out here, serpents of flesh and blood, instead of this impersonal, mechanical death ... D Squadron was in the centre of the line, between Beaumont and the Well, and set back in echelon. He clambered out of the trench, a sowar pulled aside the heavy chevaux-de-frise in the barbed wire to allow him to get through it, and he set off at a jog trot through the bombardment, his orderly and trumpeter on either side.

As he reached D’s position several bullets smacked close by and he shouted, ‘Don’t fire, idiots! ‘ Then Indian faces loomed out of the mist behind the aimed rifles and a jemadar was shouting, ‘Stop! It’s the Yuvraj! ‘

He jumped down into the trench and at once felt a stinging sensation in his eyes. For a second he thought someone had thrown pepper at him, then he saw the men around him beginning to cough, and understood. Shouting, ‘Gas! ‘ he found his mask, undid his fly buttons, and tried to urinate on it, while holding his breath. Up and down the trench the sowars did the same. The gas cloud was a pale yellow and the fitful wind was breaking it into narrow streamers creeping down upon them mingled in the mist; but the mist was rising as the sun rose, and some of the gas was rising with it, to pass over the top of the trench. But some gas was coming in, and some men were unable to dampen their masks in time. Krishna saw that one man in every five was falling back from the firestep, doubled up, coughing or retching through his mask.

Captain Sher Singh ran down the trench shouting, ‘Gas! Gas!... Rissaldar-sahib where are you?’ His voice sounded strangled behind the mask, but his words could be understood. He peered at Krishna Ram, recognized him, and cried, ‘Prince, what are we to do? The masks give no protection! ‘

‘Yes, they do!’ Krishna Ram shouted, and added in Hindi, ‘Stand up, man! Control yourself. For our name! ‘

‘But ... Oh, by the bones of Kali, we are dead men! Here they come! ‘

Rifle fire spat and crackled along the trench. Krishna looked out, and gasped in horror, a horror as intense as when the British tommy had coughed up his lungs over his arm. The things coming out of the mist were not men but animals, monkey gods of legend, flat-faced demons on two legs ... With trembling hand he sighted along the barrel of his revolver and fired. A monster twenty yards away spun round, his hands to his chest, and fell. They were mortal then! The sowar on his left had fallen or run, and Krishna grabbed his rifle and began rapid fire. More demons towered out of the yellow-streaked fog. One by one and two by two they fell. Only one masked demon reached the trench, to be bayoneted by Hanuman as he leaped down on top of Krishna Ram.