The Ravi Lancers (45 page)

He shook the reins and the horse trotted down the white road between the tall hedges. The moon rose over the downs and a nightingale sang along the wall of the Old Vicarage. He unharnessed the horse and walked at Diana’s side into the moonlight in front of the house, where the nightingale was singing.

They stood together, listening to the soaring song. When it stopped he took her in his arms. Her head sank on to his shoulder and he kissed her. Her mouth was soft, and slowly opened to him, as for the first time, doing something strange but natural. Her body moved a little but not with any strain or lust, only content and fulfilment. She turned her head up and whispered, ‘I love you ... I love you.’

He stooped again to kiss her, suddenly aware. Down in the fold of her body, under the organdie pressed against him, were the visions that had come to him, night and day. His phallus stiffened against her, thrusting at the organdie like a blind animal. For a time she did not move, neither towards nor away; then she sighed and pressed against him, parting her thighs so that the rod of his maleness pushed into the hidden divide of her thighs.

‘No!’ he cried, and realized that he had said it aloud. He broke away from her and ran into the house.

Krishna Ram was inspecting the trenches. As he left one bay and turned into the next the lance-dafadar in command greeted him with a rigid salute. By the light of the candle guttering on top of an ammunition box at the back of the trench Krishna began to count the bombs laid out ready on the firestep. Twenty-four. ‘How many men in the bay?’ he asked the NCO.

‘Six, lord.’

Krishna nodded. Four bombs a man was correct. Carefully he examined one bomb. The detonator was in position. The NCO drew back a groundsheet to display two boxes of small arms ammunition. Krishna pulled out a few clips at random and checked that they were properly loaded, one up, one down. He checked that each man was in possession of the new type of gas mask, a flannel helmet with mica eyepieces. Then he examined the sandbag walls of the trench, the revetments, firestep, parapet, and parados. The sentry was on the firestep, his orders on a board hanging from a nail in a revetting post behind him. Krishna climbed up, checked the man’s periscope, which was not used at night, and joined him on the actual firestep. He asked him questions about his orders, and, receiving the right answers, peered out to see what he could see. It was a dark night, clouds low and the air heavy with promised thunder, the enemy quiet in their trenches beyond the waste of torn earth called No Man’s Land; he saw nothing.

He dropped down, congratulated the lance-dafadar on his bay, and went on, Hanuman limping at his heels and the new trumpeter behind. Passing a traverse he entered the next bay and began the process again. Here the NCO had forgotten to put out the sticks or bayonets which, thrust into the earth, fixed some sort of right and left limits for night firing. He reprimanded the man, reflecting that at night, really, only the Vickers on their fixed tripods could fire accurately without being able to see their target.

After a look at his watch and a long silent spell on the firestep, listening, he went on. It was a few minutes before midnight. The CO had sent out a strong fighting patrol under Lieutenant Mahadeo Singh to bring back at least two prisoners for identification. They had gone out from the right end of the Ravi Lancers’ trenches at half past eleven. Nothing was to be expected from them for a little while yet.

The next bay had only four men in it. The acting lance-dafadar said that two had gone sick that afternoon, one with bad feet and one with a fever. There were too many sick, Krishna thought. That was making Warren Bateman stricter than ever. The regiment was harder, tougher, and more efficient than he had ever imagined possible with these amiable and uneducated peasants from the slopes of the Himalayas. The systems and techniques of trench warfare had much improved since the early days along this front, when the war first congealed. Then, generals and senior officers knew nothing of static warfare, and treated it only as an unpleasant interlude to be suffered through until once again the trumpets would sound and the armies sweep across hill and dale, the cavalry out in front. Gradually, Krishna saw, the war had ground the idea of motion into the soil, and with it the idea of fresh air, of change, of hope. First it had stopped the moving, then the breathing, so that men went underground like corpses, to be held down by barbed wire, mud, sandbags, steel, ruins. In this motionless subterranean struggle the Ravi Lancers were now proficient. The sandbag walls were faultless, and sloped at just the ordered angle to the vertical. The firesteps were at the right height, Very lights and gas alarm bells where they ought to be. The floors of the trenches muddy--that was inevitable--but clear of debris.

He moved on. Sentry with no string to the bay commander’s wrist. Sandbag holed and leaking. Machine gun in C Squadron sector, night aiming light gone out. Dafadar with fever, must be sent back, no other NCO in bay. All the time, listening, watching, looking out over No Man’s Land, wondering how Mahadeo Singh’s patrol was faring. Warren sent out a reconnaissance patrol nearly every night, and a fighting patrol at least twice a week. ‘We’ve got to dominate the Hun,’ he said. ‘He’s got to be afraid of us, never knowing when or where we’ll be coming. No Man’s Land must belong to us, not to him.’

Last week a fighting patrol had lain out, all night, four nights in succession, waiting to catch German reconnaissance patrols suspected of being sent out to make maps of the British wire. The fourth night they’d got it--a feldwebel and three men creeping through the dank weeds towards the centre of the line, in a heavy July rain. The Ravi patrol, a troop of twenty men under Jemadar Sunder Singh, killed them all, and brought in the bodies. Two nights later the Germans tried to retaliate, but were caught by machine guns on the wire in front of C, and left six dead. The identification was definite: the regiment facing the Ravi Lancers was the 88th Bavarians. Still Warren wanted more--a live prisoner. It was all going well, Krishna thought, but... The regiment was as good as Gurkhas or crack British infantry regulars, but...

A white Very light whooshed up into the sky half a mile to the right, and Krishna jumped up to the firestep. Another light hung in the dark night, showing the earth as a rotting green plain, mutilated and laid out for the undertaker. Machine guns clattered, rifles banged, machine pistols fired in staccato bursts. Then the German field guns opened up. The shells burst in yellow splashes of flame on the Ravi trenches opposite the firing. The artillery swept the front line and No Man’s Land for five minutes, then stopped. A breath later a machine gun made a long monotonous statement. Silence.

Krishna hurried through the last two bays of his inspection and then hastened back along the trench line to the right end. Mahadeo Singh’s patrol was to come back in through the wire in front of B Squadron. They were due at half past twelve. It was about that now.

Warren Bateman was waiting at the appointed place. He peered at Krishna in the gloom and said, ‘How was the inspection?’

‘Very good, sir, on the whole. There were a number of small things wrong, which I’ll put in my report... Any news of Mahadeo Singh?’

‘Not yet.’

They settled down. The CO was smoking a pipe. Now and then his clenched teeth gleamed in the flame of the hurricane lantern set beside the field telephone. Occasionally he murmured something to Shikari, crouched at his feet. He talked a lot to the dog these days, the way other men talked to themselves. Sometimes the hand holding the pipe shook slightly for a moment before he again got it under control. Himat Singh was there, too, a major now, pale and thin. He had only come out of hospital two days before, and returned straight to the regiment instead of taking the two weeks’ convalescent leave the doctors had ordered for him. Flaherty, now a captain, was there, silent. The jemadar of the troop in whose sector they waited was standing on the firestep beside the sentry, both seen as dim silhouettes against the drifting cloud rack.

The jemadar leaned down and whispered, ‘Someone is coming, sahib.’ To the men crouched nearby he muttered, ‘Stand-to!’ and they stepped silently up on to the firestep, weapons aimed and ready. Krishna joined Warren in the crowded line. Peering intently ahead he made out a low shape, hardly to be separated from the earth. The sentry a few feet to his right muttered sharply, ‘Halt, oo go dah?’

‘Friend,’ a voice gasped.
‘Madad dena, bhai.’
The man sounded exhausted, and his voice shook with terror.

‘Countersign dena!’ Warren Bateman whispered.

‘Aii, bhol-gaya, sahib,’
the voice quavered,
‘madad dijiyel’

‘What the hell’s the point of giving passwords and countersigns if the men are allowed to forget them?’ Warren snapped. ‘What squadron’s this patrol from?’

‘D, sir.’

‘Tell that man to come on in.’

The jemadar hissed an order and the thing came on along the earth, a dark snake turning slowly into a man. The jemadar pulled him into the trench where he collapsed. His right leg ended in a tattered stump below the knee. Now another man was coming in; this one had half his face scraped off by grenade splinters; another, a bullet through the arm. The trench began to stink of iodine as B Squadron’s medical orderly cleaned the men’s wounds and put on their first field dressings. The next man in was not wounded and Warren Bateman said, ‘What happened?’

The sowar spoke in short gasps, ‘We crawled out ... through the wire ... the lieutenant-sahib and Sowar Jamundar crawled ahead ... to cover us ... but the enemy were ready ... machine guns ... grenades ... rifles ... artillery ... we were helpless, lying there twenty feet away ... the lieutenant-sahib was killed...’

‘How do you know? Who saw his body?’

‘I sahib, and three others ... The dafadar said, charge ... We tried ... I reached the lieutenant. His face was ... smashed ... twenty, thirty machine gun bullets into it... We came back.’

‘Who gave the order?’ Warren grated.

‘No one, sahib. There was no one...’

Warren Bateman straightened up from the crouched position where he had been talking to the sowar. ‘Get these men back to the RAP,’ he said. ‘See that the Intelligence Officer talks to each of them before he is allowed to be evacuated to the CCS. Send the unwounded back to their squadrons.’

He stood up, glaring towards the enemy trenches. Then he stared at Himat Singh, six feet from him; then at Flaherty, even closer; finally at Krishna Ram. The eyes, dully gleaming yellow, rested. He said, ‘Major Krishna Ram, you will take out a fighting patrol tomorrow night and bring back at least two live prisoners. About thirty men from A Squadron. Work out a plan with the IO and discuss it with me at noon.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Krishna said formally. The CO swung on his heel and walked away down the communication trench, his ash walking stick thumping angrily into the sandbags at every second step.

Major Himat Singh said tenderly, ‘I wish the CO had sent me. I’d get the prisoners he wants.’

Krishna said, ‘If I don’t come back, he will--he will.’

He stayed a long time in the front line, as the sentries were changed, and the bloodstains washed away. The sowars settled back to sleep, but the smell of iodine and the gasping breath of the men in agony remained, as though embodied in the air, to hang for ever about that place.

Krishna started for the rear. Someone ought to visit those wounded men. They’d all be suffering from shock soon. When he reached the RAP near two o’clock in the morning he found Captain Ramaswami in his little dugout office. He said, ‘I thought someone ought to see the wounded from Mahadeo Singh’s patrol. And the men wounded when that experimental mortar blew up earlier.’ Ramaswami nodded. ‘Yes. But someone has already been. The CO.’

‘Oh,’ Krishna said. He was surprised. From the tone of Warren’s voice in the front line, it sounded as though he blamed the men for the patrol’s failure.

The black doctor said, ‘You must not underestimate him. It is not the sowars who are his enemies. They worship him.’

Krishna sat down. ‘They do. Yet we have a sickness rate double that of the Gurkhas or the Punjabis. Why?’

‘The men’s spirits are being starved,’ Ramaswami said promptly. ‘I get fevers that are genuine--temperature of 105 or 106 and the man as weak as a kitten--but I can’t diagnose them. No malarial parasites, no virus that I can isolate. I keep them here two or three days, the fever drops, and I send them back--but they’re not cured.’

‘Do you think--’ Krishna lowered his voice. ‘Do you think that Vedic medicine might help, if you were permitted to practise it?’ The doctor said, ‘Yes--not because it is Vedic, but because it is Indian. The men are suffering fundamentally from starvation, as I said. I have been experimenting. The results aren’t definite, but the fact is that these NYD fevers go down in a day or less if I put the patient in a ward where I have the Brahmin chanting mantras, giving out Ganges water, and putting rice and caste marks on the men’s foreheads.’

‘The CO allows that?’

‘I don’t ask him,’ the doctor said grimly. ‘I have a very efficient spy system and when he is seen coming everyone washes his forehead and the Pandit hides ... Don’t bother to see those men. The ones who aren’t asleep are in shock by now. Come tomorrow afternoon ... By the way, how long is it since I examined your penis?’

‘The week after I came back from leave,’ Krishna Ram said. ‘Well, that’s nearly a month now, isn’t it? I need to make one final check to see that no scar tissue has formed, and then you’re cleared. And the best way to prove it is to have a woman. It excites the walls of the urethra, and if anything’s wrong there, it will discharge ... Drop your trousers.’

He got his instrument, greased it, and gently inserted it into Krishna’s penis. As he peered down there was an exclamation from outside, and the orderly cried, ‘Sahib, no!’ then the door burst open and Major Himat Singh rushed in, crying, ‘Doc...’

He stopped, staring. Captain Ramaswami stood up slowly. He said, ‘There’s a sign on that door. It READS PRIVATE, KNOCK BEFORE ENTERING.’