I’ll tell you a strange thing about pain – and Cawnpore. That ankle of mine, which I’d thought was broken, but which in fact was badly sprained, would have kept me flat on my back for days anywhere else, bleating for sympathy; in Cawnpore I was walking on it within a few hours, suffering damnably, but with no choice but to endure it. That was the sort of place it was; if you’d had both legs blown off you were rated fit for only light duties.
Imagine a great trench, with an earth and rubble parapet five feet high, enclosing two big single-storey barracks, one of them a burned-out shell and the other with half its roof gone. All round was flat plain, stretching hundreds of yards to the encircling pandy lines which lay among half-ruined buildings and trees; a mile or less to the northwest was the great straggling mass of Cawnpore city itself, beside the river – but when anyone of my generation speaks of Cawnpore he means those two shattered barracks with the earth wall round them.
That was where Wheeler, with his ramshackle garrison, had been holding out against an army for two and a half weeks. There were nine hundred people inside it when the siege began, nearly half of them women and children; of the rest four hundred were British soldiers and civilians, and a hundred loyal natives. They had one well, and three cannon; they were living on two handfuls of mealies a day, fighting off a besieging force of more than three thousand mutineers who smashed at them constantly with fifteen cannon, subjected them to incessant musket-fire, and tried to storm the entrenchment. The defenders lost over two hundred dead in the first fortnight, men, women, and children, from gunfire, heat and disease; the hospital barrack had been burned to ashes with the casualties inside, and of the three hundred left fit to fight, more than half were wounded or ill. They worked the guns and manned the wall with muskets and bayonets and whatever they could lay hands on.
This, I discovered to my horror, was the place I’d fled to for safety, the stronghold which Rowbotham had boasted was being held with such splendid ease. It was being held – by starved ghosts half of whom had never fired a musket before, with their women and children dying by inches in the shot-torn, stifling barrack behind them, in the certainty that unless help came quickly that entrenchment would be their common grave. Rowbotham never lived to discover how mistaken he’d been: he and half his troop were lying stark out on the plain – his final miscalculation having been to time our rush to coincide with a pandy assault.
I was the senior officer of those who’d got safely (?) inside, and when they’d discovered who I was and bound up my ankle I was helped into the little curtained corner of the remaining barrack where Wheeler had his office. We stared at each other in disbelief, he because I was still looking like Abdul the Bulbul, and I because in place of the stalwart, brisk commander I’d known ten years ago there was now a haggard, sunken ancient; with his grimy, grizzled face, his uniform coat torn and filthy, and his breeches held up with string, he looked like a dead gardener.
“Good God, you’re never young Harry Flashman!” was his greeting to me. “Yes, you are though! Where the dooce did you spring from?” I told him – and in the short time I took to tell him about Meerut and Jhansi, no fewer than three round-shot hit the building, shaking the plaster; Wheeler just brushed the debris absently off his table, and then says:
“Well, thank God for twenty more men – though what we’ll feed you on I cannot think. Still, what matter a few more mouths? – you see the plight we’re in. You’ve heard nothing of … our people advancing from Allahabad, or Lucknow?” I said I hadn’t and he looked round at his chief officers, Vibart and Moore, and gave a little gesture of despair.
“I suppose it was not be expected,” says he. “So … we can only do our duty – how much longer? If only it was not for the children, I think we could face it well enough. Still – no croaking, eh?” He gave me a tired grin. “Don’t take it amiss if I say I’m glad to see you, Flashman, and will welcome your presence in our council. In the meantime, the best service you can do is to take a place at the parapet. Moore here will show you – God bless you,” says he, shaking hands, and it was from Moore, a tall, fair-haired captain with his arm in a blood-smeared sling, that I learned of what had been happening in the past two weeks, and how truly desperate our plight was.
It may read stark enough, but the sight of it was terrible. Moore took me round the entrenchment, stooping as he walked and I hobbled, for the small-arms fire from the distant sepoy lines kept whistling overhead, smacking into the barrack-wall, and every so often a large shot would plump into the enclosure or smash another lump out of the building. It was terrifying – and yet no one seemed to pay it much attention; the men at the parapet just popped up for an occasional look, and those moving in the enclosure, with their heads hunched down, never even broke step if a bullet whined above them. I kept bobbing nervously, and Moore grinned and said:
“You’ll soon get used to it – pandy marksmen don’t hit a dam’ thing they aim at. It’s the random shots that do the damage – damnation!” This as a cloud of dust, thrown up by a round-shot hitting the parapet, enveloped us. “Stretcher, there! Lively now!” There was a body twitching close by where the shot had struck; at Moore’s shout two fellows doubled out from the barrack to attend to it. After a brief look one of them shook his head, and then they picked up the body between them and carried it off towards what looked like a well; they just pitched it in, and Moore says:
“That’s our cemetery. I’ve worked it out that we put someone in there every two hours. Over there – that’s the wet well, where we get our water. We won’t go too close – the. pandy sharpshooters get a clear crack at it from that grove yonder, so we draw our water at night. Jock McKillop worked it for a week, until they got him. Heaven only knows how many we’ve lost on water-drawing since.”
What seemed so unreal about it, and still does, was the quiet conversational way he talked. There was this garrison, being steadily shot to bits, and starving in the process, and he went on pointing things out, cool as dammit, with the crackle of desultory firing going on around us. I stomached it so long, and then burst out:
“But in God’s name – it’s hopeless! Hasn’t Wheeler tried to make terms?”
He laughed straight out at that. “Terms? Who with? Nana Sahib? Look here, you were at Meerut, weren’t you? Did they make terms? They want us dead, laddie. They slaughtered everything white up in the city yonder, and God knows how many of their own folk as well. They tortured the native goldsmiths to death to get at their loot; Nana’s been blowing loyal Indians from guns as fast as they can trice ’em over the muzzles! No,” he shook his head, “there’ll be no terms.”
“But what the devil – I mean, what …?”
“What’s going to come of it? Well, I don’t need to tell you, of all people – either a relief column wins through from Allahabad in three days at most, or we’ll be so starved and short of cartridge that the pandies will storm over that wall. Then …” He shrugged. “But of course, we don’t admit that – not in front of the ladies, anyway, however much some of ’em may guess. Just grin and assure ’em that Lawrence will be up with the rations any day, what?”
I won’t trouble to describe my emotions as this sank in, along with the knowledge that for once there was nowhere to bolt to – and I couldn’t have run anyway, with my game ankle. It was utterly hopeless – and what made it worse, if anything, was that as a senior man I had to pretend, like Wheeler and Moore and Vibart and the rest, that I was ready to do or die with the best. Even I couldn’t show otherwise – not with everyone else steady and cheery enough to sicken you. I’ll carry to my grave the picture of that blood-sodden ground, with the flies droning everywhere, and the gaunt figures at the parapet; the barrack wall honeycombed with the shots that slapped into it every few seconds; the occasional cry of a man struck; the stretcher-parties running – and through it all Moore walking about with his bloody arm, grinning and calling out jokes to everyone; Wheeler, with his hat on his head and the pistol through the cord at his waist, staring grim-faced at the pandy lines and scratching his white moustache while he muttered to the aide scribbling notes at his elbow; a Cockney sergeant arguing with a private about the height of the pillars at Euston Square station, while they cut pieces from a dead horse for the big copper boiler against the barrack wall.
“Stew today,” says Moore to me. “That’s thanks to you fellows coming in. Usually, if we want meat, we have to let a pandy cavalryman charge up close, and then shoot the horse, not the rider.”
“More meat on the ’orse than there is on the pandy, eh, Jasper?” says the sergeant, winking, and the private said it was just as well, since some non-coms of his acquaintance, namin’ no names, would as soon be cannibals as not.
These are the trivial things that stick in memory, but none clearer than the inside of that great barrack-room, with the wounded lying in a long, sighing, groaning line down one wall, and a few yards away, behind roughly improvised screens of chick and canvas, four hundred women and children, who had lived in that confined, sweating furnace for two weeks. The first thing that struck you was the stench, of blood and stale sweat and sickness, and then the sound – the children’s voices, a baby crying, the older ones calling out, and some even laughing, while the firing cracked away outside; the quiet murmur of the women; the occasional gasp of pain from the wounded; the brisk voices from the curtained corner where Wheeler had his office. Then the gaunt patient faces – the weary-looking women, some in ragged aprons, others in soiled evening dresses, nursing or minding the children or tending the wounded; the loyal sepoys, slumped against the wall, with their muskets between their knees; an English civilian sitting writing, and staring up in thought, and then writing again; beside him an old babu in a dhoti, mouthing the words as he read a scrap of newspaper through steel-rimmed spectacles; a haggard-looking young girl stitching a garment for a small boy who was waiting and hitting out angrily at the flies buzzing round his head; two officers in foul suits that had once been white, talking about pig-sticking – I remember one jerking his arm to shoot his linen, and him with nothing over his torso but his jacket; an ayaha smiling as she piled toy bricks for a little girl; a stocky, tow-headed corporal scraping his pipe; a woman whispering from the Bible to a pallid Goanese-looking fellow lying on a blanket with a bloody bandage round his head; an old, stern, silver-haired mem-sahib rocking a cradle.
They were all waiting to die, and some of them knew it, but there was no complaint, no cross words that I ever heard. It wasn’t real, somehow – the patient, ordinary way they carried on. “It beats me,” I remember Moore saying, “when I think how our dear ladies used to slang and back-bite on the verandahs, to see ’em now, as gentle as nuns. Take my word for it, they’ll never look at their fellow-women the same way again, if we get out of this.”
“Don’t you believe it,” says another, called Delafosse. “It’s just lack of grub that’s keeping ’em quiet. A week after it’s all over, they’ll be cutting Lady Wheeler dead in the street, as usual.”
It’s all vague memory, though, with no sense of time to it; I couldn’t tell you when it was that I came face to face with Harry East, and we spoke, but I know that it was near Wheeler’s curtain, where I’d been talking with two officers called Whiting and Thomson, and a rather pretty girl called Bella Blair was sitting not far away reading a poem to some of the children. I must have got over my funks to some extent, for I know I was sufficiently myself to be properly malicious to him.
“Hallo, Flashman,” says he.
“Hallo, young Scud East,” says I, quite cool. “You got to Raglan, I hear.”
“Yes,” says he, blushing. “Yes, I did.”
“Good for you,” says I. “Wish I could have come along – but I was delayed, you recollect.”
This was all Greek to the others, of course, so the young ass had to blurt it out for their benefit – how we’d escaped together in Russia, and he’d left me behind wounded (which, between ourselves, had been the proper thing to do, since there was vital news to carry to Raglan at Sevastopol), and the Cossacks had got me. Of course, he hadn’t got the style to make the tale sound creditable to himself, and I saw Whiting cock an eyebrow and sniff. East stuttered over it, and blushed even redder, and finally says:
“I’m so glad you got out, in the end, though, Flashman. I … I hated leaving you, old fellow.”
“Yes,” says I. “The Cossacks were all for it, though.”
“I … I hope they didn’t – I mean, they didn’t use you too badly … that they didn’t …” He was making a truly dreadful hash of it, much to my enjoyment. “It’s been on my conscience, you know … having to go off like that.”
Whiting was looking at the ceiling by this. Thomson was frowning, and the delectable Bella had stopped reading to listen.
“Well,” says I, after a moment, “it’s all one now, you know.” I gave a little sigh. “Don’t fret about it, young Scud. If the worst comes to the worst here – I won’t leave you behind.”
It hit him like a blow; he went chalk-white, and gasped, and then he turned on his heel and hurried off. Whiting said, “Good God!” and Thomson asked incredulously: “Did I understand that right? He absolutely cut out and left you – saved his own skin?”
“Um? What’s that?” says I, and frowned. “Oh, now, that’s a bit hard. No use both of us being caught and strung up in a dungeon and …” I stopped there and bit my lip. “That would just have meant the Cossacks would have had two of us to … play with, wouldn’t it? Doubled the chance of one of us cracking and telling ’em what they wanted to know. That’s why I wasn’t sorry he cleared out … I knew I could trust myself, you see … But, Lord, what am I rambling about? It’s all past.” I smiled bravely at them. “He’s a good chap, young East; we were at school together, you know.”
I limped off then, leaving them to discuss it if they wanted to, and what they said I don’t know, but later than evening Thomson sought me out at my place on the parapet, and shook my hand without a word, and then Bella Blair came, biting her lip, and kissed me quickly on the cheek and hurried off. It’s truly remarkable, if you choose a few words carefully, how you can enhance your reputation and damage someone else’s – and it was the least I could do to pay back that pious bastard East. Between me and his own precious Arnold-nurtured conscience he must have had a happy night of it.
I didn’t sleep too well myself. A cupful of horse stew and a handful of flour don’t settle you, especially if you’re shaking with the horrors of your predicament. I even toyed with the idea of resuming my Pathan dress – which I had exchanged for army shirt and breeches – slipping over the parapet, lame as I was, and trying to escape, but the thought of being caught in the pandy lines was more than I could bear. I just lay there quaking, listening to the distant crack of the rebel snipers, and the occasional crump of a shot landing in the enclosure, tortured by thirst and hunger cramps, and I must have dozed off, for suddenly I was being shaken, and all round me people were hurrying, and a brazen voice was bawling “Stand to! Stand to! Loading parties, there!” A bugle was blaring, and orders were being shouted along the parapet – the fellow next me was ramming in a charge hurriedly, and when I demanded what was the row he just pointed out over the barricade, and invited me to look for myself.
It was dawn, and across the flat maidan, in front of the pandy gun positions, men were moving – hundreds of them. I could see long lines of horsemen in white tunics, dim through the light morning mist, and in among the squadrons were the scarlet coats and white breeches of native infantry. Even as I looked there was the red winking of fire from the gun positions, and then the crash of the explosions, followed by the whine of shot and a series of crashes from the barracks behind. Clouds of dust billowed down from the wall, to the accompaniment of yells and oaths, and a chorus of wails from the children. A kettledrum was clashing, and here were the loading parties, civilians and followers and even some of the women, and a couple of bhistis,b and then Wheeler himself, with Moore at his heels, bawling orders, and behind him on the barrack-roof the torn Union Jack was being hauled up to flap limply in the warm dawn air.
“They’re coming, rot ’em!” says the man next to me. “Look at ’em, yonder – 56th N.I., Madras Fusiliers. An’ Bengal Cavalry, too – don’t I know it! Those are my own fellows, blast the scoundrels – or were. All right, my bucks, your old riding-master’s waiting for you!” He slapped the stock of his rifle. I’ll give you more pepper than I ever did at stables!”
The pandy guns were crashing away full tilt now, and the whistle of small arms shot was sounding overhead. I was fumbling with my revolver, pressing in the loads; all down the parapet there was the scraping of ram-rods, and Wheeler was shouting:
“Every piece loaded, mind! Loading parties be ready with fresh charges! Three rifles to each man! All right, Delafosse! Moore, call every second man from the south side – smartly, now! Have the fire-parties stand by! Sergeant Grady, I want an orderly with bandages every ten yards on this parapet!”
He could hardly be heard above the din of the enemy firing and the crash of the shots as they plumped home; the space between the parapet and the barracks was swirling with dust thrown up by the shot, and we lay with our heads pressed into the earth below the top of the barrier. Someone came forward at a crouching run and laid two charged muskets on the ground beside me; to my astonishment I saw it was Bella Blair – the fat babu I’d seen reading the previous night was similarly arming the riding-master, and the chap on t’other side of me had as his loader a very frail-looking old civilian in a dust-coat and cricket cap. They lay down behind us; Bella was pale as death, but she smiled at me and pushed the hair out of her eyes; she was wearing a yellow calico dress, I recall, with a band tied round her brows.
“All standing to!” roars Wheeler. He alone was on his feet, gaunt and bare-headed, with his white hair hanging in wisps down his cheeks; he had his revolver in one hand, and his sabre stuck point-first in the ground before him. “Masters – I want a ration of flour and half a cup of water to each –”
A terrific concerted salvo drowned out the words; the whole entrenchment seemed to shake as the shots ploughed into it and smashed clouds of brick dust from the barracks. Farther down the line someone was screaming, high-pitched, there was a cry for the stretchers, the dust eddied round us and subsided, and then the noise gradually ebbed away, even the screams trailed off into a whimper, and a strange, eery stillness fell.
“Steady, all!” It was Wheeler, quieter now. “Riflemen – up to the parapet! Now hold your fire, until I give you the word! Steady, now!”
I peered over the parapet. Across the maidan there was silence, too, suddenly broken by the shrill note of a trumpet. There they were, looking like a rather untidy review – the ranks of red-coated infantry, in open order, just forward of the ruined buildings, and before them, within shot, the horse squadrons, half a dozen of them well spaced out. A musket cracked somewhere down the parapet, and Wheeler shouted:
“Confound it, hold that fire! D’you hear?”
We waited and watched as the squadrons formed, and the riding-master cursed under his breath.
“Sickenin’,” says he, “when you think I taught ’em that. As usual – C Troop can’t dress! That’s Havildar Ram Hyder for you! Look at ’em, like a bloody Paul Jones! Take a line from the right-hand troop, can’t you? Rest of ’em look well enough, though, don’t they? There now, steady up. That’s better, eh?”
The man beyond him said something, and the riding-master laughed. “If they must charge us I’d like to see ’em do it proper, for my own credit’s sake, that’s all.”
I tore my eyes away from that distant mass of men, and glanced round. The babu, flat on the ground, was turning his head to polish his spectacles; Bella Blair had her face hidden, but I noticed her fists were clenched. Wheeler had clapped his hat on, and was saying something to Moore; one of the bhistis was crawling on hands and knees along the line, holding a chaggle for the fellows to drink from. Suddenly the distant trumpet sounded again, there was a chorus of cries from across the maidan, a volley of orders, and now the cavalry were moving, at a walk, and then at a trot, and there was a bright flicker along their lines as the sabres came out.
Oh, Christ, I thought, this is the finish. There seemed to be hordes of them, advancing steadily through the wisps of mist, the dust coming up in little clouds behind them, and the crackle of the sharpshooters started up again, the bullets whining overhead.
“Steady, all!” roars Wheeler again. “Wait for the word, remember!”
I had laid by my revolver and had my musket up on the parapet. My mouth was so dry I couldn’t swallow – I was remembering those masses of horsemen that had poured down from the Causeway Heights at Balaclava, and how disciplined fire had stopped them in their tracks – but those had been Campbell’s Highlanders shooting then, and we had nothing but a straggling line of sick crocks and civilians. They must break over us like a wave, brushing past our feeble volleys –
“Take aim!” yells Wheeler, “make every shot tell, and wait for my command!”
They were coming at the gallop now, perhaps three hundred yards off, and the sabres steady against the shoulders; they were keeping line damned well, and I heard my riding-master muttering:
“Look at ’em come, though! Ain’t that a sight? – and ain’t they shaping well! Hold ’em in there, rissaldar, mind the dressing –”
The thunder of the beating hooves was like surf; there was a sudden yell, and all the points came down, with the black blobs of faces behind them as the riders crouched forward and the whole line burst into the charge. They came sweeping in towards the entrenchment, I gripped my piece convulsively, and Wheeler yelled “Fire!”
The volley crashed out in a billow of smoke – but it didn’t stop them. Horses and men went down, and then we were seizing our second muskets and blazing away, and then our third – and still they came, into that hell of smoke and flame, yelling like madmen; Bella Blair ws beside me, thrusting a musket into my hand, and hurrying feverishly to reload the others. I fired again, and as the smoke cleared we looked out onto a tangle of fallen beasts and riders, but half of them were still up and tearing in, howling and waving their sabres. I seized my revolver and blasted away; there were three of them surging in towards my position, and I toppled one from the saddle, another went rolling down with his mount shot under him, and the third came hurtling over the entrenchment, with the man on my right slashing at him as he passed.
Behind him pressed the others – white coats, black faces, rearing beasts, putting their horses to the parapet; I was yelling incoherent obscenities, scrabbling up the muskets as fast as they were reloaded, firing into the mass; men were struggling all along the entrenchment, bayonets and swords against sabres, and still the firing crashed out. I heard Bella scream, and then there was a dismounted rider scrambling up the barrier directly before me; I had a vision of glaring eyes in a black face and a sabre upraised to strike, and then he fell back shrieking into the smoke. Behind me Wheeler was roaring, and I was grabbing for another musket, and then they were falling back, thank God, wheeling and riding back into the smoke, and the bhisti was at my elbow, thrusting his chaggle at my lips.
“Stand to!” shouts Wheeler, “they’re coming again!”
They were re-forming, a bare hundred yards off; the ground between was littered with dead and dying beasts and men. I had barely time to gulp a mouthful of warm, muddy water and seize my musket before they were howling in at us once more, and this time there were pandy infantrymen racing behind them.
“One more volley!” bawls Wheeler. “Hold your fire, there! Aim for the horses! No surrender! Ready, present – fire!”
The whole wall blasted fire, and the charge shook and wavered before it came rushing on again; half a dozen of them were rearing and plunging up to the entrenchment, the sabres were swinging about our heads, and I was rolling away to avoid the smashing hooves of a rider coming in almost on top of me. I scrambled to my feet, and there was a red-coated black devil leaping at me from the parapet; I smashed at him with my musket butt and sent him flying, and then another one was at me with his sabre, lunging. I shrieked as it flew past my head, and then we had closed, and I was clawing at his face, bearing him down by sheer weight. His sabre fell, and I plunged for it; another pandy was rushing past me, musket and bayonet extended, but I got my hand on the fallen hilt, slashing blindly; I felt a sickening shock on my head, and fell, a dead weight landed on top of me, and the next thing I knew I was on my hands and knees, with the earth swimming round me, and Wheeler was bawling,
“Cease fire! Cease fire! Stretchers, there!”
and the noise of yelling and banging had died away, while the last of the smoke cleared above the ghastly shambles of the parapet.
There seemed to be dead and dying everywhere. There must have been at least a dozen pandies sprawled within ten yards of where I knelt; the ground was sticky with blood. Wheeler himself was down on one knee, supporting the fat babu, who was wailing with a shattered leg; the frail civilian was lying asprawl, his cricket cap gone and his head just a squashed red mess. One of the pandies stirred, and pulled himself up on one knee; Wheeler, his arm still round the babu, whipped up his revolver and fired, and the pandy flopped back in the dust. The stretcher parties were hurrying up; I looked out over the parapet, across a maidan littered with figures of men that crawled or lay still; there were screaming horses trying to rise, and others that lay dead among the fallen riders. Two hundred yards off there were men running – the other way, thank God; farther down the parapet someone sent up a cheer, and it gradually spread along the entrenchment in a ghastly, croaking yell. My mouth was too dry, and I was too dazed to cheer – but I was alive.
Bella Blair was dead. She was lying on her side, her hands clutched on the stock of a musket whose bayonet was buried in her body. I heard a moan behind me, and there was the riding-master, flopped against the parapet, his shirt soaked in blood, trying to reach for the fallen water-chaggle. I stumbled over to him, and held it up to his lips; he sucked it, groaning, and then let his head fall back.
“Beat ’em, did we?” says he, painfully. I could only nod; I took a gulp at the chaggle myself, and offered him another swig, but he turned his head feebly aside. There was nothing to be done for him; his life was running out of him where he lay.
“Beat ’em,” says he again. “Dam’ good. Thought … they was going to ride … clean over us there … for a moment.” He coughed blood, and his voice trailed away into a whisper. “They shaped well, though … didn’t they … shape well? My Bengalis …” He closed his eyes. “I thought they shaped … uncommon well …”
I looked down the entrenchment. About half the defenders were on their feet at the parapet, I reckoned. In between, the sprawled, silent figures, the groaning, writhing wounded waiting for the stretchers, the tangle of gear and fallen weapons, the bloody rags – and now the pandy guns again, pounding anew at the near-dead wreck of the Cawnpore garrison, with its tattered flag still flapping from the mast. Well, thinks I, they can walk in now, any time they like. There’s nothing left to stop ’em.
But they didn’t. That last great assault of June twenty-third, which had come within an ace of breaking us, had sickened the pandies. The maidan was strewn with their dead, and although they pounded us with gunfire for another two terrible days, they didn’t have the stomach for another frontal attack. If only they’d known it, half the men left on our parapet were too done up with fatigue and starvation to lift a musket, the barrack was choked with more than three hundred wounded and dying, the well was down to stinking ooze, and our remaining flour was so much dust. We couldn’t have lasted two minutes against a determined assault – yet why should they bother, when hunger and heat and the steady rate of casualties from bombardment were sure to finish us soon anyway?
Three folk went mad, as I remember, in those forty-eight hours; I only wonder now that we all didn’t. In the furnace of the barrack the women and children were too reduced by famine even to cry; even the younger officers seemed to be overcome by the lethargy of approaching certain death. For that, Wheeler now admitted, was all that remained.
“I have sent a last message out to Lawrence,” he told us senior men on the second night. “I have told him that we have nothing left but British spirit, and that cannot last forever. We are like rats in a cage. Our best hope is that the rebels will come in again, and give us a quick end; better that than watch our women and little ones die by inches.”29
I can still see the gaunt faces in the flickering candlelight round his table; someone gave a little sob, and another swore softly, and after a moment Vibart asked if there was no hope that Lawrence might yet come to our relief.
Wheeler shook his head. “He would come if he could, but even if he marched now he could not reach us in under two days. By then … well, you know me, gentlemen. I haven’t croaked in fifty years’ soldiering, and I’m not croaking now, when I say that short of a miracle it is all up. We’re in God’s hands, so let each one of us make his preparations accordingly.”
I was with him there, only my preparations weren’t going to be spiritual. I still had my Pathan rig-out stowed away, and I could see that the time was fast approaching when, game ankle or no, Flashy was going to have to take his chance over the wall. It was that or die in this stinking hole, so I left them praying and went to my place on the parapet to think it out; I was in a blue funk at the thought of trying to decamp, but the longer I waited, the harder it might become. I was still wrestling with my fears when someone hove up out of the gloom beside me, and who should it be but East.
“Flashman,” says he, “may I have a word with you?”
“If you must,” says I. “I’ll be obliged if you’ll make it a brief one.”
“Of course, of course,” says he. “I understand. As Sir Hugh said, it is time for each of us to make his own soul; I won’t intrude on your meditations a moment longer than I must, I promise. The trouble is … my own conscience. I … I need your help, old fellow.”
“Eh?” I stared at him, trying to make out his face in the dark. “What the deuce –?”
“Please … bear with me. I know you’re bitter, because you think I abandoned you in Russia … left you to die, while I escaped. Oh, I know it was my duty, and all that, to get to Raglan … but the truth is –” he broke off and had a gulp to himself “– the truth is, I was glad to leave you. There – it’s out at last … oh, if you knew how it had been tormenting me these two years past! That weight on my soul – that I abandoned you in a spirit of hatred and sinful vengeance. No … let me finish! I hated you then … because of the way you had treated Valla … when you flung her from that sledge, into the snow! I could have killed you for it!”
He was in a rare taking, no error; a Rugby conscience pouring out is a hell of a performance. He wasn’t telling me a thing I hadn’t guessed at the time – I know these pious bastards better than they know themselves, you see.
“I loved her, you see,” he went on, talking like an old man with a hernia. “She meant everything to me … and you had cast her away so … brutally. Please, please, hear me out! I’m confessing, don’t you see? And … and asking for your forgiveness. It’s late in the day, I know – but, well, it looks as though we haven’t much longer, don’t it? So … I wanted to tell you … and shake your hand, old school-fellow, and hear from you that my … my sin is forgiven me. If you can find it in your heart, that is.” He choked resoundingly. “I … I trust you can.”
I’ve heard some amazing declarations in my time, but this babbling was extraordinary. It comes of Christian upbringing, of course, and taking cold baths, all of which implants in the impressionable mind the notion that repentance can somehow square the account. At any other time, it would have given me some malicious amusement to listen to him; even in my distracted condition, it was interesting enough for me to ask him:
“D’ye mean that if I hadn’t given you cause to detest me, you’d have stayed with me, and let Raglan’s message go hang?”
“What’s that?” says he. “I … I don’t know what you mean. I … I … please, Flashman, you must see my agony of spirit … I’m trying to … make you understand. Please – tell me, even now, what I can do.”
“Well,” says I, thoughtfully, “you could go and fart in a bottle and paint it.”
“What?” says he, bewildered. “What did you say?”
“I’m trying to indicate that you can take yourself off,” says I. “You’re a selfish little swine, East. You admit you’ve behaved like a scoundrel to me, and if that wasn’t enough, you have the cheek to waste my time – when I need it for prayer. So go to hell, will you?”
“My God, Flashman … you can’t mean it! You can’t be so hard. It only needs a word! I own I’ve wronged you, terribly … maybe in more ways than I know. Sometimes … I’ve wondered if perhaps you too loved Valla … if you did, and placed duty first …” He gulped again, and peered at me. “Did you … love her, Flashman?”
“About four or five times a week,” says I, “but you needn’t be jealous; she wasn’t nearly as good a ride as her Aunt Sara. You should have tried a steam-bath with that one.”
He gave a shocked gasp, and I absolutely heard his teeth chatter. Then: “God, Flashman! Oh … oh, you are unspeakable! You are vile! God help you!”
“Unspeakable and vile I may be,” says I, “but at least I’m no hypocrite, like you: the last thing you want is for God to help me. You don’t want my forgiveness, either; you just want to be able to forgive yourself. Well, you run along and do it, Scud, and thank me for making it easy for you. After what you’ve heard tonight, your conscience needn’t trouble you any longer about having left old Flashy to his fate, what?”
He stumbled off at that, and I was able to resume my own debate about whether it was best to slide out or stay. In the end, my nerve failed me, and I curled up in the lee of the parapet for the night. Thank God I did, for on the next morning Wheeler got his miracle.
a Native nursemaid.
b Native water-carriers.