The Sabre's Edge (27 page)

It stands on a plain broken and rugged towards the west but otherwise bare, affording little cover, and I calculate the perimeter to be not very much short of five miles. Any siege force would have to be great indeed to invest the entire fortress. I have now been able to make a very faithful comparison of Lord Lake's dispositions, and it is at once apparent that his insufficiency in men was greater than I had supposed when reading the usual texts, for with the Maratha cavalry harassing him he was obliged to hold ready reserves to deal with them, and he had not thereby the means either to starve out the garrison in the old way or breach the walls in enough places and in sufficient strength to bolt the defenders.

A broad and deep ditch runs the entire length of the perimeter, from the inner edge of which rises a thick and lofty wall of sun-baked clay and stone, flanked by no fewer than thirty-five turreted bastions. I have been able to draw in plan the location of each, though for reasons of economy in time, and so as not to appear excessively interested should I have been accosted, I was minded to draw elevations of only those I judged would command the likely approaches. The citadel itself occupies a natural height, rising above all else in the city, and is itself enclosed by a ditch 1
’
0 feet wide and fifty feet deep. And, as if Vauban himself had directed the fortification, there are ravelins and lunettes, fleches and demi-lunes the entire length of the walls.

And how blessed are the people of Bhurtpore, too, since the moats and ditches are dry, so they are not plagued by the mosquitoes that thrive on still water, and they may drive their animals wherever they wish. I have learned that water when it is needed to fill the moats comes from a jheel to the north-west of the fortress, a very practical and happy arrangement. This water and these walls would pose the best engineer a test of his science. And when the water and the walls are covered by the guns of thirty-five bastions and countless other outworks, the infantry might very well become so many companies of forlorn hopes unless directed by a general of exceptional address. In the skill of the siege artillery and the field gunners reposes their fate. No fortress is impregnable, we must understand, but it is my decided opinion that if ever a fortress came close to such a condition it is Bhurtpore . . .

And then he had confided in his friend the unhappier detail of his detached duty - unusually, for it touched only on the business of the Sixth:

I am resolved to have Green out. He daily becomes more awkward in his dealings with everyone. In truth I can scarcely bear to speak to him. Every blemish in both his character and appearance seemed magnified in Dehli, there being no multitude of other officers to draw away attention. I have therefore written to Joynson and advised him that he speak severely with him about the advisability of his remaining in the regiment, for I have concluded that he could never make an officer, and if ever it comes to a fight the outcome would be very ill indeed - for himself, principally, for there could be little enough damage he might do to any of the dragoons, such is his subsidiary role. Yet were he ever to encounter a half decent swordsman the result must be disaster.

But, on the other hand, I am pleased to say that Perry is a fine lieutenant, on whose account I need have had no fears, and I shall take leave hence, before returning to Dehli, to see the great white mausoleum at Agra, about which you always spoke so much . . .

These letters he then took with him to Agra, where there were trusted hircarrahs to carry despatches down the Jumna and thence to Calcutta, and from where he himself could take a boat back to Dehli with greater ease. He had indeed grown fond of his licence. The days were still warm, and at night it was good to sit before a fire reading or in contemplation. He lacked the company of English-speakers, Jaswant Sing having now returned to Dehli, but this gave him opportunity to practise his Urdu with a certain confidence, and in any case he had never been fretful in his own company - except at the very end of his stay in Bhurtpore, but the fever had not developed its full power, and he was abed for no longer than a day.

Five more he gave himself to see what had once been the proud Mughal capital, Agra. On the last evening he sat beside the hearth in a comfortable haveli which Jaswant Sing had arranged for him, below the red walls of the great sandstone fort. The place was strangely peaceful for so teeming a city, and he contemplated its lessons. He laid down his glass of arrack - he had come to rely on it as a faithful aid to digestion, no matter how tempestuous the dinner served him - leaned back in his chair and drew long on the mildest of cheroots. The tobacco smoke mixed agreeably with that of the sandalwood burning in the grate, and he closed his eyes for a moment the better to hear the nightjar - stranger, as a rule, to the haunts of men.

In a while he opened them again, and picked up his journal from the table next to him. It had commanded more time than usual of an evening, for it was his sole entry at Agra:

12th November 1824

The work at Bhurtpore being done - and greatly more of it than I had ever imagined, so immense a place is it - I travelled thence to the Jumna again, under the admirable arrangements of Jaswant Sing, and reposed two nights at the ancient capital of the Moguls. The palace called the Taje Mahl, which means crown palace, is spoken of throughout India as one of unsurpassed beauty, the place of
burial of the wife of a great emperor to whom it was erected in praise. I visited it the first day on arriving and was not disappointed. While it is visible in whole from the river, approached from the south through the main gate only its dome and the four minarets, at each corner, of white marble, are to be seen above the circumadjacent trees of a Persian garden, in the way that the dome of the Pope's basilica in Rome can be seen above the crowding buildings of the Borgo. Only when, like the basilica, one comes right upon it can its entire beauty be imagined. I have attempted to sketch it, but it is wholly beyond my skill to render it any justice, and I have instead resolved to find an artist hereabout who will make me a fair likeness. Last night I visited the gardens opposed to it on the other bank of the Jumna, which are in very great disrepair, yet which are called the Moonlight Gardens for here is where, legend has it, the emperor would come at the full moon each month to recall his lost love. It was planted with all manner of herbage that gave off sweet scent by night, and there is still too a night scent, though the place is very jungled . . .

Hervey's journal pretended to nothing more than being well-kept. For the most part it was in note form, serving as a memorandum of movement, acquisition, accomplishment; or occasionally of intention, hindrance or opinion. But never of emotion, not even anger. Had it been his practice to include such feelings he would have filled pages since coming to Agra, for in that moonlight garden he had for a time begun to question the true intensity of his former love. It had been Emma Somervile's suggestion - insistence, indeed - that he visit Agra. There, she said, he would see the perfect expression of a grieving man's love. It had been no mawkish sentiment, for he had spoken with her of raising some memorial to Henrietta, and had done so with perfect calm. Henrietta was not yet dismissed habitually from his mind - thoughts of her, especially of their moments of intimacy, came on him still, and often - but he could now think of her with reason and cool judgement, quite unlike before. And Emma's suggestion had been far from unwelcome, for he had read and heard much of the white marble shrine: it would surely be instructive to see how a man who had grieved and had the means to memorialize that grieving had done so. However, the palace had seemed more and more a rebuke to him. Here stood a memorial as much to the constancy of an emperor's love as to the empress herself. Where was the evidence of his own constancy? In truth, the evidence was to the contrary - his bibi, the letters to and from Lady Katherine Greville, more sportive with each return.

Only later, on leaving Agra, as he read fitfully on the budgerow plying upstream for Dehli, did he learn that in time the emperor had abandoned the city and set up his court in the old Mughal capital - just as he, Hervey, had abandoned England and set up his domain in India. But Mumtaz Mahal had begged her husband not to pine for her, and to remarry. Hervey could not slough off his guilt so easily. And in any case his sins were mingled. He no longer honoured his wife's memory with his body, but neither did he say his prayers with system or regularity, let alone conviction. And he might as well have forgotten the offspring of their union. Somervile had been wont to say that many a man had lost his reason in India as well as his soul. But such men, Hervey supposed, had sought consolation in drink or some other opiate. He relied only on activity. No, he had no fear of losing his reason. But in India colours were brighter and shadows darker. It was not always so easy to judge things faithfully.

A noisy skein of bar-headed geese recalled him to the present. He turned up his collar against the freshening Jumna breeze, and picked up his volume on the Maratha wars again. How had Lord Lake miscalculated so? The walls of Bhurtpore had stood then as they did now. What had been the cause of so fatal a misjudgement?

He must have it. And he knew he must then pray that in all his forgetting activity he could himself keep a right judgement in things, civil or military.

PART THREE

THE PRIDE OF HINDOOSTAN

GENERAL ORDER

Fort
William 28
July
182
5
’
The Right Hon. The Governor-General has learned with great sorrow the demise of Major-General Sir David Ochterlony, resident in Malwa and Rajpootana. This melancholy event took place on the morning of the 1
’
th inst. at Meerut, whither he had proceeded for the benefit of change of air. On the eminent military services of Major-General Sir David Ochterlony, it would be superfluous to dilate; they have been acknowledged in terms of the highest praise by successive Governments; they justly earned a special and substantial reward from the Hon. East India Company; they have been recognised with expressions of admiration and applause by the British Parliament; and they have been honoured with signal marks of the approbation of his Sovereign . . .

. . . The confidence which the government reposed in an individual gifted with such rare

endowments, was evinced by the high and responsible situations which he successively filled, and the duties which he discharged with eminent ability and advantage to the Public Interests. As an especial testimony of the high respect in which the character and services of Major-General Sir D. Ochterlony are held, and as a public demonstration of sorrow for his demise, the Governor-General in Council is pleased to direct that minute guns to the number of sixty-eight, corresponding with his age, be fired this evening at sunset, from the ramparts of Fort William.

CHAPTER
TWELVE

MINUTE GUNS

Calcutta, October 182
’

H
is Excellency General the Right Hon. Stapleton Lord Combermere, GCB, GCH &c, Commander-in-Chief of all the Forces in India, as he was styled, received Hervey warmly but without the same careless ease of their previous acquaintances. They had first met eleven years ago in the field at Toulouse, as Hervey lay painfully under the ministration of a surgeon. The commander of Wellington's cavalry had been all praise and warm regards then for Hervey in that culminating battle of the campaign, in his despatches writing that 'by his bold and independent action he averted what might at the very least have been an embarrassment for the mounted arm'. They had met on three occasions since then, the last being that most diverting evening at Apsley House before Hervey had come out to India, when he had met Lady Katherine Greville.

'I fancy you might care for some coffee, Hervey? It's a damnably cold morning.'

The invitation wa
s to help himself from a pot on
a table covered with maps and sketches, at which stood Colonel Macleod, who was to be brigadier of artillery, and Colonel Anburey, who was to be the same of engineers. Hervey acknowledged them both with a brisk bow of the head before pouring some of the strong black liquid into a big cup and adding a good measure of sugar.

'You set us nicely in apposition, Captain Hervey,' said Colonel Anburey, nodding with a grim, if perhaps wry, sort of smile at Colonel Macleod.

Hervey knew exactly what he meant. 'I fear the sappers will have little chance of doing their work without the support of the guns, Colonel, for the approaches to the walls are coverless. And yet the walls are so solid and thick that the guns shall have to come in close, and that can only be done by sapping from outside the range of the fort. Indeed, I wonder that it will not be better to mine one or two of the bastions, for a breach will otherwise be devilish hard.'

Colonel Anburey shook his head. 'I read your opinion, Hervey, but it is out of the question if the country lies as you have drawn it.'

'Too far to tunnel,' explained Lord Combermere.

Hervey looked puzzled.

Colonel Anburey supplied the detail. 'The greatest distance a gallery may be driven is two hundred yards. Beyond that there is insufficient air for a man to breathe, and indeed for the explosive to operate efficiently.'