The Ravi Lancers (52 page)

This was Krishna’s third patrol since the CO came back from sick leave. The first had been a small reconnaissance patrol, such as this, sent out to observe movement in front of Sector 77, where the Germans were thought to be putting up new wire. They weren’t, they were doing nothing, and the patrol returned, without incident or casualties. Why had Warren sent him, his second-in-command, on that task? The most bone-headed acting-lance-dafadar in the regiment could tell whether wire was being put out or not.

The second patrol he’d been ordered out on was more reasonable--a full scale fighting patrol to cover the establishment of an advanced listening post in front of B Squadron at the left of the line. Even so, two troops totalling forty men with two of the new Lewis guns was hardly a major’s command. The normal person to put in command of such a force would be the squadron leader--Himat Singh, or his senior rissaldar.

Perhaps the CO wanted him, Krishna, to get more tactical experience at the junior level. Perhaps it was something more personal. But that would be peculiarly oriental. It would be ironic if Warren Bateman, in his efforts to turn the men into brown-skinned Englishmen, himself turned into a white-skinned Indian.

He peered around. His men were all here and rested. Time to move on.

He crawled up the side of the shell hole and on across No Man’s Land parallel to the German wire, which was on his right. It was strange that he had had no mail since the postcard Diana had sent him from Le Havre, which said simply
All my love, D.
He’d told her in Paris that Warren was on leave in England. Had she gone down to Shrewford Pennel when she got back? Had Warren visited her in Woolwich? Did he know that she had been away from Woolwich? Of their meeting in Paris? If she had told him about that, surely she would have written saying that she had done so. He ought to tell the CO himself. It was shameful to live with such a pretence; also, like all lies and deceptions, it showed fear. He was not afraid of Warren Bateman. He ought...

A hand on his boot stopped him short. As he turned his head he heard an exclamation from close in front, and saw the loom of a body no more than six feet ahead of him. A rifle exploded almost in his ear. The dark shape lurched, coughed, and was still. Two more shapes detached themselves from the first, rose, and ran. The sowar behind Krishna fired again but the runners had melted into the darkness. A pistol flare rose into the rain, and a machine gun began to sweep No Man’s Land from the German lines. Its fixed line was somewhere off to the left and the bullets ripped high over the crater where the Indian patrol lay.

The sowar who had fired muttered, ‘I thought you had seen him, lord, or I would have fired earlier.’

‘I saw nothing,’ Krishna said. ‘You saved me.’

That’s what came of thinking about one’s private life in No Man’s Land, he thought grimly. He’d crawled almost up to the muzzle of the German’s rifle--would have done so if the sowar had not fired. Something was trickling down his face. He put up his hand and peered at it--blood from a cut in the forehead. Probably wire in the shell hole, which he’d slid on to or over. Nothing to do but wait now.

The machine gun was joined by another. A shell from a German field gun whistled over to burst close by. The two remaining Germans of the listening patrol must have got back to their line by now and reported the position where the Indians ran into them. But they were as safe here as anywhere, lying on their faces in the mud at the bottom of the shell hole, safe from anything but a direct hit, and the Germans didn’t sound very angry, or disposed to fire too many shells.

Diana ... he saw her body, not in the great bed, but in the long grass beside the Seine, dandelions under her thighs and daisies under her head. It was hard to imagine her as his wife. Her relationship to him could not be the same as his mother’s had been to his father, or the old Rani’s to his grandfather. Diana was both stronger and less influential. Indian women had ways of exerting pressure that you did not recognize until they had had their effect and you had done or thought what they wanted you to do or think; but Diana said, Do this, don’t do that... which gave a man the ability to resist, if he wanted to.

The shelling, after ten minutes’ desultory searching of No Man’s Land, ceased. The machine guns stopped firing. He muttered to his dafadar, ‘Five minutes more, and we’ll start back.’

An hour later he was in the RAP, having the long wire cut in his forehead bandaged. He and Ramaswami were alone in the little office. It was near two in the morning. The doctor said, ‘There. You’ll look very warlike for a few days ... The CO has been making a thorough investigation of the sick list, and the medicines issued. He says it is to check up on whether I am using Vedic cures, but I think there is another motive--to find out whether you were really sick, and confined to your dugout for those four days, as I reported ... You look as if you could do with a cigarette.’

Krishna sat on the edge of the table, swinging his legs. ‘No, thanks,’ he said. ‘I’m over that craving now.’

The doctor said, ‘I thought you should know. Might he have come to suspect something?’

Krishna said, ‘I don’t know ... I was with his sister in Paris.’

‘Oh.’ The doctor’s dark face was grave. ‘I didn’t know that.’

‘I don’t know whether he knows. I haven’t had any mail since, though she promised to write every other day.’

The doctor said, ‘You’ve been sent out on, how many patrols, since the CO came back from leave?’

‘Three.’

’He’s trying to get you killed. Which means that he knows about his sister.’

‘Perhaps. Though Diana is not really the cause. She’s only a symptom.’

‘Are you going to let him? There’s nothing I can do to save you, but there’s plenty you can. He could be found shot by accident any day. Or dead from food poisoning.’

Krishna said seriously, ‘Not yet ... I feel that a great battle is coming. It will decide.’

‘A battle with the Germans? Or between you and him?’

‘Between the Kauravas and the Pandavas.’

The doctor said, ‘And he is Duryodhan?’

‘Yes. I am trying, like the god whose name I bear, to find a solution without war ... but Duryodhan is determined to fight a decisive battle. It shall be as it shall be.’

It was raining again, with an early autumn wind blowing from the Atlantic across the sodden earth. The wind blew wet on Krishna’s cheek and water was soaking the big khaki handkerchief he wore round his neck, and beginning to run down his back.

Seven days since his last patrol. Or was it six? Every other officer of the regiment had been out in between, including the CO himself, so he had no justification, according to European ideas of fair play, to think that he was being picked on; yet he was sure. Warren had told him that the brigadier-general was insisting on more and more aggressive patrolling along the whole of the brigade front. That would be true enough. Some time had passed since Rainbow Rogers got his CMG, and he would be hungry for something more. There were rumours that a Spanish Army delegation studying trench warfare would be willing to swap a high decoration for a really good demonstration of a fighting patrol. Nevertheless, to Krishna, all that was more of an excuse than a reality. If Rainbow hadn’t become so keen on patrolling, Warren would have, on his own account. And certainly no one could say he was a coward. He was quite willing to risk his own life to get Krishna’s.

He peered at the luminous dial of his watch, shading it in his cupped hand. 0237. He could start back in, say, ten minutes.

It had rained every night that he was on patrol. Was his ancestor the Sun turning his face from him? Or sending his handmaiden to protect him with the sound of her tears? This northern rain made night in No Man’s Land very uncomfortable, the air raw and chill, the mud clammy in hands and face and heavy on the boots; but the sounds of the water in the puddles and shell holes, the slap and ting of raindrops on an abandoned mess-tin, the sough of the wind in the jungle of barbed wire, these helped a man to move without being heard and made the German sentries huddle deeper into the collars of capes and greatcoats, less able to identify what they were less able to detect.

He tapped his dafadar on the shoulder and signalled with his hand, ‘Back.’ The NCO started back with half the men, while Krishna stayed forward with the Lewis gunner and the other half, in case covering fire was needed. Far up the line to the north a star shell threw a tiny glare into the sky. Momentarily the Lewis gunner’s brown eye gleamed above the fat, shiny barrel. Then the light faded. Nothing to report, Krishna thought. Four hours on listening patrol, hoping to ambush a German patrol or at least to hear and see and not be heard and seen. All quiet. No casualties, no prisoners. The CO had brought back a German body from his patrol last week, with no casualties or loss to his own men.

The British wire glinted dully in the rain and a sentry challenged quietly. Krishna passed through the gap and slid down into the trench. It wouldn’t take long to tell the IO what he had learned on the patrol--nothing.

Half an hour later he walked down three steps, pulled aside a gas curtain, and entered the candle-lit cave of his dugout. He sat on the camp bed, yawning, while Hanuman took off his boots. A British officer would take a tot of rum at a time like this; so would he have, six months ago--two or three tots. But Hanuman handed him a mug of steaming hot tea laced with pepper and cardamom seeds. The warmth flowed into his chilled bones and he yawned again. Pahlwan, the IO, had told him that the CO had not gone to bed but was waiting in his command dugout for the patrol report. Well, now he too could go to bed. Krishna had survived the night. Warren had patience.

A voice at the gas curtain said, ‘Prince?’ He recognized the quartermaster’s voice and called, ‘Enter.’

Sohan Singh came in, making deep
namasti
. He opened a little jar and said, ‘This will give you a good sleep, lord, with pleasant dreams.’

Krishna saw that the powder in the jar was high quality opium.

He said, ‘Oh ... well, I’m not on duty again till noon. Drop some in.’

‘In a moment, lord,’ Sohan Singh said respectfully. ‘At this quality, and in the hot tea, it will act very quickly ... Prince, Major Himat Singh spent two hours with the CO yesterday. Captain Flaherty placed chairs so that the clerks could hear nothing, and he himself waited in the outer office so that no one could get closer.’

‘Discussing fighting patrols?’ Krishna said. ‘Himat’s a great expert on them.’

‘Lord, Himat Singh will do anything for Colonel Bateman. Even to betraying his own prince.’

‘For the sake of the regiment. Yes, I can understand that.’

‘With a British officer, it might be so, lord, but he is an Indian. What he is doing is not for the regiment but out of his love for Colonel Bateman ... I think that the colonel may have asked him, on his honour, to tell if he knows of any irregularities that occurred while he was away, or that are still taking place. Such as the private fund you authorized me to arrange. Such as the French women in the barn.’

‘And you think he may have done so?’

‘It is possible. Colonel Bateman shows nothing, says nothing. His face does not alter towards me.’

Krishna said, ‘Very Oriental. Just like you yourself, or your father. Or my grandfather ... Is that all?’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘Give me the opium ... Hanuman, see that I am not disturbed, except by the colonel-sahib in person, until eleven o’clock.’

‘Huzoor sahib!’

It was raining again. This autumn was wetter than last year’s, but not as cold. Under the rain the soil here in Artois turned into a peculiar glue-like clay that he had not met in India. It was exactly a year since he had landed at Marseilles with the Ravi Lancers, the flower of Indian chivalry. He could see the lance points gleaming as the regiment, reunited with their horses, trotted out of the docks and up the hill through the streets. The sun was shining that day, and the sea a blue-painted backdrop, the light glittering on the little wave crests as it glittered on the lance points.

Five days since his last patrol. This one was a fighting patrol to knock out a machine gun post on the slope of Hill 93. Hill 93 was no more than a melancholy hump six or seven feet high, but in that flat land it gave the gunners command of a long sector of No Man’s Land. Patrols and aerial photographs had shown that the post was well roofed and sandbagged, and well protected by wire. It probably contained eight men and two NCOs, no more, for the photographs showed that it was a round bay, twelve feet in diameter, linked to the front line behind it by twenty feet of trench.

Here was the wire. The machine gun post was close to his right front now. The sentry ought to be standing on the open firestep to one side or other of the roofed gun platform. He ought to be ... but would he be, in this rain? More likely, he was crouched over the gun, under cover, peering through the narrow band of the aperture for the gun’s traverse. He murmured to the jemadar who was his second-in-command on the patrol, ‘Ready?’

The jemadar muttered, ‘Yes, lord.’

Krishna crawled off to the right with six men. Straight in front of the post, but to the side of the machine gun platform, which was positioned for the guns to fire in enfilade, two sowars covered the wire in a blanket, and began to cut through, one man cutting and one holding the wire on either side of the cut to prevent it springing back to hit another wire with a distinctive sound. Once the sowar dropped the wire cutters and Krishna tensed, ready to charge, but nothing happened. After twenty minutes of careful slow work they were through the wire. The machine gun post lay ten yards ahead.

Krishna brought his men up close, rose to his knees, and broke into a careful run. He reached the edge of the pit before anyone else, and dropped in a long jump on to the firestep, thence to the duckboarded floor. He heard an exclamation to his left, and saw something move under the gun’s low roof, and fired his revolver twice at two feet range. Immediately, from where he’d left the jemadar, the patrol’s Lewis gun began to fire in bursts along the German front line trench. Two of his own sowars ran past him down the short communication trench and began to throw grenades. Two more raised the gas curtain covering the dugout in the back wall of the post and threw in four grenades. They burst in a clangour of steel, followed by agonized screams. Steel splinters thudded into the sandbags as Krishna pulled the dead sentry off the gun and fired his revolver into the gun’s firing mechanisms.