Dust and Steel

‘No, t’ank the Lord. She an’ the wee boy are up-country with some of the other ladies an’ a horde of the Rhani’s officers to look after them,’ Keenan replied calmly. ‘They’ll be fine. And anyway, with Commandant Kemp in charge, it’ll all be sorted out. He’ll cool any hotheads sooner than you can say jildi-rao, so he will.’

Keenan, too, swung up into the saddle. So intent had they all been in the conversation that the quiet arrival of two more figures on the veranda of the mess had gone unnoticed. Still buckling on their sword belts and settling their caps came Bazalgette and Morgan, on their way to the 95th’s lines for morning inspection. Both officers hesitated when they saw the group before them.

‘We got all that, Skene. Keenan, you’ll need every ounce of that gold to smooth things over, won’t you?’ said Bazalgette, full of earnest concern.

‘Aye, it should come in useful, provided we can get there fast enough,’ replied Skene.

But as the two officers spoke, Morgan’s eyes met Keenan’s. They both knew that they’d deliberately avoided conversing the night before in the mess, but now there was no choice. Morgan started towards Keenan, his mouth open, but no words coming, and as he did so the ensign walked his charger a few paces away from the mess, putting a little distance between himself and the others.

‘Hello, Keenan.’ Morgan stretched his hand up and gently laid hold of the horse’s bridle. ‘So Jhansi’s risen?’

‘It has, Captain Morgan, sir.’ Though Keenan’s voice was low and cool, it seemed to Morgan that the pair of them had never been parted. ‘It’ll be nothing that Commandant Kemp an’ us can’t cope wit’, though.’

‘No…no, I’m sure you’re right,’ Morgan stammered. ‘Have you heard of any casualties?’ He thought of dead, ripped Kathy Forgett.

‘No, sir, not yet,’ Keenan answered levelly. ‘But you can be sure of one t’ing: Mary. Keenan will always come through, just like she did with them Muscovites.’

Morgan blinked up at Keenan sitting high above him in the saddle, the sun turning him into a black sillhouette.

‘An’ there’s another t’ing you can be equally certain of.’ Keenan’s voice now held an edge of menace. ‘With the greatest of respect, sir, if ever you come near my Mary or our boy again, I’ll kill ye dead.’

THREE Bombay to Deesa (#ulink_42c258ec-541f-5b46-a2d4-bf1df36ea87b)

‘Stop yer fuckin’ swayin’ about, can’t you, Beeston?’ barked Colour-Sergeant McGucken, cheeks glowing with the salt air, his dun sea-smock such as all the troops wore to protect their scarlet shell jackets from the tar and omnipresent stains on board ship, as smart and soldierly as if it had been fitted in Savile Row. ‘Ye get more like a lassie with every tape ye get, ye bloody puddin”!’

The whole of the Grenadier Company had been paraded on the starboard deck of the Honourable East India Company’s steamer, Berenice, as much out of the sun as possible to be addressed by their company commander, Captain Anthony Morgan. As they’d left Bombay the swell had increased a little, reducing a good third of the company to mewling, puking hollows of themselves, fit only for sympathy – and that was in short supply. Now, four days into their six-day voyage north to the Gulf of Cutch and Mandavie, where the whole of the three hundred men of the left wing of the 95th were to disembark, most of the troops had recovered as the seas became more moderate.

Most of them, but not all. To his intense embarrassment, Private Beeston, veteran of more scrapes and skirmishes than he cared to remember, and the wearer of two good-conduct stripes, was amongst the worst affected, and only now was he beginning to stagger about, so pale that he made the ship’s canvas look positively ruddy.

‘Keep still, can’t you, Jono?’ Lance-Corporal Pegg muttered to his wobbly pal as the company, now drawn up in four ranks, obediently standing at ease on the rolling decks, waited for their officer. ‘Else Jock McGucken’ll bloody ’ave you.’

‘Aye, Corp’l,’ Beeston whispered back through the side of his mouth. ‘I’ll be fine.’ Drops of sweat were forming at the edges of his nostrils. ‘Where are they tekin’ us now, Corp’l?’

After four months’ enforced idleness in Bombay, alleviated only by swirling rumours and counterrumours that they were off to deal with first one hot spot and then another, which resulted in nothing more than early rises, kit inspections and then numbing waits in the heat, they had all been glad to embark on the Berenice – glad, that was, until the seasickness struck. Then the electric excitement of the news that they were going to crush the mutineers, of new adventures and, above all else, the prospect of loot, had been dampened under a blanket of vomit.

‘Dunno. That shave about Delhi was all bollocks,’ Corporal Pegg opined. ‘That’s safe back in our hands now, an’ you heard that Sir Colin took Looknow, couple o’ weeks back?’

‘Oh, aye.’ Beeston brightened a little. ‘That’s that Scottish bogger, Sir Colin Campbell, in’t it? Last saw ’im at Ballyklava, din’t we, with them Jocks ’oo couldn’t shoot.’

They both sniggered at the memory of the 93rd Highlanders’ appalling musketry all that time ago.

‘Aye, that’s the bloke,’ smiled Pegg. ‘Stuck it to the bleedin’ Pandies this time, though; killed thousands. No, I reckon it’s Cawnpore for us. Needs to be. I’m bored to the fuckin’ death of ’anging about whilst all the others get the loot an’ quim, not to mention—’

‘Listen in, yous.’ McGucken’s bass Scots halted Pegg’s philosophising. ‘Grenadier Company…Company, ’shun.’ At the word of command every man stiffened, pushing his clasped hands straight down in front of his bellybutton, hollowing the back and bracing his thighs before snapping the left heel back against the right, thumping his boot hard on the teak decks of the ship.

‘Sir, one officer and seventy-eight men on parade…’ McGucken made the little ritual a spectacle, ‘two detached on duty, one sick.’ His hand quivered at the salute as the company commander came on deck, the colour-sergeant’s great legs like some satyr, straining at the cloth of his blue-black trousers. ‘May I have your leave to stand the men at ease, sir, please?’ The crescendo of his words made two muscular lascars in the waist of the ship look up in startled admiration.

‘Please do, Colour-Sar’nt.’ Morgan returned the salute with a relaxed grace, standing out clear and sharp in his scarlet coat, for Colonel Hume had forbidden the officers to wear smocks. ‘An’ gather the lads in around me, please; I can’t be doing with any shouting.’

A few, good-humoured insults about the men’s parentage from McGucken soon had the Grenadiers shuffling into a crescent around Morgan, straining to hear what news he had to tell them.

‘You’ve put up with a great deal of boredom, lads, over the past few months, and behaved pretty well,’ Morgan started. ‘Fairly well, anyway.’

There was a great storm of laughter as Morgan looked pointedly at eighteen-year-old Private Pierce from Crewe, one of the new draft, who had been found wandering drunk and stark naked on the fort’s yard two weeks before, making the natives, according to Private O’Keefe, ‘…t ’ank God that it wasn’t a proper man from Lifford there in the nip – that would o’ caused another mutiny – but amidst the wimmin this time!’

‘But now we know where we’re bound.’ Morgan paused for effect. ‘It’s Cawnpore, lads, to right the wrongs that were done to General Wheeler and his people back in June.’

‘See, I told you so,’ crowed Pegg as a general mutter of satisfaction swept around the company.

‘Now, you’ll all have heard what happened there, how the general was gammoned by Tantya Tope into putting his people into boats on the Ganges, then torn to ribbons by the Pandies as they floated in the shallows.’ Morgan paused again, looking at the serious faces of his men. ‘And how the white women and children, not to mention the native Christians, were hacked into pieces with axes and thrown down the wells…and worse.’

None of the troops could have failed to know what had happened in Cawnpore. The newspapers that reached them from England had been outraged by the rapes and massacres, but long before they arrived rumour had swept from the bazaar to the barrack block, from the stables to the officers’ mess: tales of treachery and black betrayal, blood and mindless cruelty. Morgan remembered it as a particularly difficult time. The news of the massacres had come hard on the heels of the murder of the Forgetts, and it had been all that the officers and NCOs could do to stop the men from visiting a little rough justice on their new ‘comrades’ in the 10th BNI.

‘Well, it’s our chance now, lads, to take Cawnpore back and to even the score a bit.’ Morgan watched the men. About half of them had yet to see either their twentieth birthdays or any fighting, but the others knew what such glib phrases meant. They knew that ‘evening the score’ meant blood and wounds, danger and death for them as well as their enemies, but wherever Morgan looked he could see nothing but plain determination, men whose simple values had been rocked by the death of innocents.

‘We’re to disembark at Mandavie.’ The troops looked at Morgan, utterly blank. ‘Only another day on board and then we’ve a long march up-country to Deesa that’ll take us the best part of four weeks. We’ll rest there – it’s the depot of our Eighty-Sixth, and we should be there for Christmas Day – before another flog of about five hundred miles to Cawnpore.’ This was greeted by a little cheer. ‘But it’s the march that I need to tell you about. For the first time we’ll be in hostile country, but not so hostile that we can afford to treat every native the same. It’s hard to understand, lads, and it’s going to take every bit of wit and patience you’ve got to deal with the mutineers that we meet as the murdering, godless thugs that they are, yet handle the civilian population with respect – unless they betray us.’ Morgan looked at seventy-odd wrinkled brows, not at all convinced that one word that he said was being understood, but he pressed on. ‘Now you’ll have all heard of Lord Canning’s declaration back in June…’

‘Oo’s ’e, then?’ Beeston asked quietly.

‘You know, Jono, that cunt from London ’oo wants us to pray for the Pandies’ salvation.’ The Governor-General of India would probably not have been flattered by Pegg’s description of him.

‘He’s made it quite clear that British rule is under no serious threat and that once this little pother in Bengal’s been put down,’ Morgan let none of his reservations about the depth and severity of the uprising show, ‘Her Majesty’s power will be wider and stronger than ever before. And that means that we’ve got to leave the country in the best shape we can. It’s no good putting every man, woman and child to the sword one minute and then having to rebuild the place an’ pretend that it never happened. Now, you’ll come across all sorts of horrors an’ meet folk who’ve been outraged and seen things that they should never have had to see; there’s all sorts of irregulars roamin’ about the country – English an’ native, soldiers and civilians – who’ve taken the law into their own hands an’ are stringing people up from every tree.’ Morgan paused again to look at the men, every one of whom was listening intently to him. ‘And that’s fine for mutineers, but not every native is disloyal. Just look at the Tenth…’

‘You look at the murderin’ bastards if you want,’ whispered Beeston to whoever cared to listen.

‘…and we need the help of the civilian population, especially for the intelligence that they will give us about who is and who isn’t a mutineer, where the enemy is located, what his plans are, and a host of other details. Now, most of you have seen harder knocks than anything that this bunch of ragamuffins will be able to throw at us, and you always behaved yourselves.’ There was just a slight question mark in Morgan’s voice. ‘I expect the highest of standards from you: an’ Christ help anyone who steps out of line. Any questions?’ Morgan scanned the crowd of sun-burned faces. ‘No, right, Colour-Sar’nt.’

But before Morgan could hand over to McGucken, a boot stamped on the deck and a hand shot out, seeking permission to speak. ‘Sir,’ Pegg’s Wirksworth accent cut the sea air, ‘’ow d’we know ’oo is and isn’t a bleedin’ Pandy? The papers say they tek their uniforms off if it suits ’em an’ just bugger off into the villages and pretend to be ordinary folk.’

There was a hint of nodding heads from the other men at their self-appointed spokesman’s words.

‘That’s exactly what I’m saying, Corporal Pegg. These ain’t Muscovites fighting fair and even, but we can’t assume that everyone’s an enemy – it’s going to be difficult,’ Morgan answered firmly.

‘Aye, sir, but these bastards ’ave murdered women an’ nippers, an’ stabbed us in the back.’ Pegg wouldn’t be silenced. ‘It’s all right for some windbag politician to tell us to be Christian kind to the Pandies, sir, but they won’t ’ave to do the fighting, sir, will they?’

McGucken stepped forward to shut Pegg up, but Morgan stopped him as he saw a ripple of support and concern spread throughout the troops.

‘You’re right, Corporal Pegg.’ Pegg’s face relaxed at his officer’s tolerant reply. ‘But that’s our job; we’ve got to do the dirty work whilst shiny-arsed politicos blow words into the wind. So, we’ll just have to get on with it, won’t we; an’ if you find a bit of grog an’ gold in the process, the colour-sar’nt and me won’t be asking too many questions.’

It wasn’t much of a quip, but it worked well enough for Morgan as the men greeted it with a laugh until McGucken brought them to attention as he strode off.

As he groped for the rail that led him below decks, Morgan paused for a moment and stared at the shore, which was now quite distinct. White surf marked a strip of sand topped with dusty-green jungle, and he wondered just what danger and peril lay in front of them all.

‘No ’eathen mut’neers ’ere then, Corp’l?’ Beeston, footsore and bored after three hot, uneventful nights on the march said what everyone had been thinking.

‘No, not so far, Jono. Just these buggers an’ a stink o’ shit,’ Pegg replied disappointedly.

They had all got used to a cloud of Indian servants and bearers who had done the men’s every bidding for a daily pittance back in Bombay, but only a handful had greeted them at the desolate quayside at Mandavie, due, they all assumed, to the imminence of battle. But there had been no sign of the mutineers; indeed, there was little to be seen of anything as they marched in the cool of the night on the muddy tracks beside ditches and drains bordered by scrubby jungle.