Massacre at Cawnpore Page 5

  There was truth in what he said, Alex was aware, but he was also aware that, with a scant two hundred trained soldiers—74 of them invalids—and perhaps a hundred officers, with a like number of male civilians as yet untrained in the military use of arms, the garrison would be compelled to remain behind the crumbling walls of their ill-sited entrenchment. They had no alternative; they were hemmed in by a circle of heavy guns and by a force of nearly four thousand native troops, backed up by the Nana’s army and the hostile population of the city. Even with the aid of the loyal sepoys—supposing they remained loyal—a bayonet charge would be suicidal. Whilst a small, resolute band might, by this means, succeed in fighting their way out, they could not bring the women and children with them and it was quite unthinkable to leave those defenceless ones, even for a few hours, by themselves. He thought of Emmy and his frail little son and shook his head regretfully.

  “The general can’t give any such word when there are women and children to protect, Corporal,” he said and added, wishing that he could believe it himself, “but our time will come. When darkness falls, God willing we’ll find a way to silence some of those guns.”

  “You can count on me, sir,” the corporal assured him, brightening a little. “Henegan’s the name, sir, if you need a volunteer. I’m a single man, I don’t mind chancing my arm. Anything’s better than just lying here, letting the sun rot your insides or waiting for a ball with your name on it, like that poor devil of a gunner. The others, they seen it coming, but McGuire stood still like he was mesmerised, and it took both his legs off, sir.”

  “Just see that you dodge, then, Corporal Henegan,” Alex bade him. He moved on down the line of sweating, dust-covered defenders, offering what encouragement he could. Most of the men were armed with Miniés or with the new Enfields, with five or six other rifles ready loaded beside each man. And yet they had been unable to fire a single shot, even at the cavalry who, for all their arrogant wheeling this way and that across the plain, continued to stay just out of range.

  Like the grey-haired corporal, the men were chafing at their enforced inaction, but it was evident that the sowars would not attack without infantry support—and the infantry appeared to be driven by no sense of urgency. They were making for their old Lines, Alex saw, and they were marching easy with muskets slung and drums and fifes playing them in, for all the world as if they were returning from a peacetime field exercise. The 1st were quartered in the former Dragoon Barracks north of the riding school and had left the column which, composed of the 53rd and the 56th, could be seen quite clearly as it swung along the road from the New Cantonment—also well out of range—and past the Artillery Hospital to the south of the entrenchment.

  The Nana Sahib had warned of an immediate attack but in all probability, Alex thought, they would wait until dusk to attack in force, depending on the soaring temperature and the artillery bombardment to weaken the opposition they might expect to encounter and to keep the defenders pinned down. Already the heat was almost unbearable and it would get worse, he knew, as the day wore on. There was no shade for the soldiers manning the walls of the entrenchment; no relief, save for brief spells, which the men took in turn and spent crouching in the shallow trench at the foot of the wall, for it was death now to cross to the hospital block or enter the garden, on which the rebel gunners were keeping up an incessant fire.

  From within the entrenchment, the British nine-pounders, out-ranged and throwing smaller shot, could make only occasional reply and even this seemed almost to have ceased when suddenly Alex heard the two guns to the right of his position open up a rapid fire. He turned to make his way towards them, conscious of a lifting of his spirits when he saw that both appeared to have found the range of the mortar battery which, from behind its screen of trees, had earlier wrought such havoc among the tents.

  The officer in charge, a slim, pink-cheeked boy in the distinctive gold-laced blue shell jacket, with scarlet collar and cuffs, of the Bengal Horse Artillery, had contrived to mount his guns behind a protective embrasure of sandbags and, by means of hand-spikes, was firing both at maximum elevation. In addition to his gunners, he had about twenty men—two of them officers, the rest private soldiers of the Queen’s 32nd and 84th—under instruction and, as Alex neared the group, the young artillery officer ordered his own men to “take a breather” and put his trainees to serve both guns.

  On his advice, they stripped to shirts and trousers and he worked them hard, pacing up and down between the two gun positions to check each gun before permitting it to be fired. The infantrymen were slow and clumsy at first but began to improve under his painstaking coaching. A tall, bewhiskered captain was sponging the muzzle of the nearest gun, a lieutenant of Native Infantry and a portly sergeant of the hefty young privates of the 84th—all Irishmen, from their voices—manned the drag-ropes and hand-spikes and served as ventsman, loader and firer.

  The sweat was pouring off them but, responding to their instructor’s enthusiasm and ready praise for their efforts, they did everything he demanded of them without complaint and they raised a lusty cheer when an explosion, followed by a sheet of flame, sent some of the mutineer gunners running in panic from the shelter of their screening trees. The rain of shells from the mortar battery abruptly ceased and when, a little later, the whole battery was seen to be withdrawing to the rear, the artillery lieutenant gave vent to a delighted “View Hulloo!” and flung his forage cap high into the air.

  “Well done, my boys, well done!” he shouted at them and the smoke-grimed faces of his newly initiated gun teams split into answering grins. Seeing Alex, the boy recovered his cap and, cramming it on to his head again, came across to join him.

  “That was damned fine shooting,” Alex told him, as the men in his own sector took up the cheering. “And it has provided a much needed boost to morale. You’re Lieutenant Ashe, I take it?” He introduced himself and Ashe came respectfully to attention.

  “It wasn’t bad for amateurs, sir, was it? We were firing shrapnel, at four percent elevation and I must admit it was a lucky chance that enabled us to hit one of their ammunition limbers.” He called out to his battery to cease fire and when the two officers came to take leave of him, mopping their heated faces, he introduced them. “Captain George Kempland, sir, 56th and Lieutenant Henry Delafosse, 53rd … Colonel Sheridan, gentlemen, Third Cavalry. We’ll make gunners of them yet, I truly believe … and of you, too, sir, if you’d like to try your hand. The general’s given me carte blanche to train up as many unattached officers as I …” he noticed Alex’s empty sleeve and broke off. “I’m sorry, Colonel, I didn’t realise.”

  “Do not concern yourself, Mr Ashe,” Alex besought him. “You could perhaps use me as a firing number, if the worst comes to the worst.”

  “Which it well may,” Captain Kempland stated gravely. He passed a powder-blackened hand through his thick fair hair and slowly resumed his jacket. “I’m sorry to sound so despondent a note, gentlemen, but—” he jerked his head at the guns. “With our puny fire-power, what the devil can we do? Wheeler has left the entire contents of the Magazine to the Pandies. They’re free to help themselves to all the ordnance they need in order to crush us—eighteen- and twenty-four-pounders, while we …” he spread his hands helplessly. “Oh, I’m not decrying your efforts, Ashe my dear boy. You’ll keep those pop-guns of yours firing till they burst their barrels, I don’t for one moment doubt. But what’s to happen to us when they do?”

  No one answered him but they all exchanged uneasy glances and Kempland said, with controlled bitterness, “God forgive General Wheeler for his decision to abandon the Magazine—I confess I never shall as long as I live. We could have held out there for three months—six, even—don’t you agree, Colonel Sheridan?”

  Sharing his regret and his misgivings, Alex inclined his head in unhappy silence. Young St George Ashe returned with Lieutenant Delafosse to his guns, to begin instructing a second batch of infantrymen and, as he did so, the mortar battery opened up ag
ain from a new position and at considerably longer range. But it was soon on target. The fourth wave of shells whined high over the puny barrier of the entrenchment wall, with the all too familiar sound of hissing fuses and, of a group of men attempting to draw water from the well, only one escaped unscathed, to fling himself dazedly into the shelter of the hospital veranda. The half-filled bucket of water he had been carrying slipped from his grasp, to spill its precious contents over the wooden floor.

  A stretcher party, choosing their moment carefully, ran across the intervening space but, after a brief inspection of the bodies scattered in the vicinity of the well, went back to the hospital with their doolie empty, leaving the dead where they lay.

  George Kempland said nothing, but his expression spoke volumes as he looked up into the shimmering heat haze above his head in mute, reproachful anger.

  “All right, lads,” he bade his men who had been with him on the guns. “Dismiss for an hour and get some food inside you, while you’ve got the chance. But watch your step, Sergeant May-wood—you saw what happened just now at the well. Don’t attempt to march your men. Let them double across to the cookhouse when they see an opportunity. And have a care yourself—we can’t afford to lose a trained loader!” To Alex he said, as the men obediently moved in the direction of the cookhouse in ones and twos, “One begins to wonder whether one is justified in permitting them to risk their lives for the chance of filling their bellies but … a man fights better on a full stomach, there’s no doubt of that. In such circumstances as these, at any rate … and the poor fellows will have to fight. God alone knows how, when half of the 32nd can hardly walk and some, according to the surgeons, shouldn’t be on their feet at all. But now we’ve got them working guns!” He shrugged disgustedly. “I suppose the swine will attack us with everything they’ve got once the sun goes down, don’t you agree, Colonel?”

  “Yes, I’d expect them to,” Alex agreed. “They’re bound to try for a quick victory. The Nana knows our resources down to the last man and the last cartridge case and he won’t anticipate that we shall put up much resistance.” He frowned and added thoughtfully, “I hope they do attack us this evening.”

  “You hope they do? In heaven’s name why?”

  “Because we’re more than ready for them and it will give us all more heart if we can hit back and inflict casualties on them at this early stage. Morale is dangerously low, even among the officers.”

  “True,” the fair-haired Kempland admitted wryly. “My own has touched rock-bottom, as you’ve observed, but I can make no apology for it. On the eve of Chilianwala I was more hopeful of the outcome than I am now. You were also in the Punjab campaign, were you not, Colonel?”

  “Yes,” Alex confirmed. “And I was at Chilianwala.”

  “Then you know how I feel.”

  “Yes, perhaps I do but—”

  “I’ve seen commanders commit costly errors before,” the infantryman put in. “But in the whole of my career, never so disastrous an error as Wheeler has made in refusing to occupy and defend the Magazine. This place is indefensible. Damn it, there are over three thousand rebels out there, well armed, well fed and almost certainly well doped with bhang. Do you really believe that we can hold them off, if they launch a full-scale attack on us this evening?”

  “Yes, I am confident that we can.” Alex eyed the questioner searchingly, seeing anger in his face but no fear. George Kemp-land was a tough, experienced soldier, whose regiment had suffered heavy casualties at the Battle of Chilianwala; he was not the type to adopt a defeatist attitude or yield to panic. “Our Enfields, however few, against muskets, nine-pounders, well served and at close range against infantry—British soldiers against sepoys! They will not stand a chance if they attack us with infantry. My fear is that they won’t.” Remembering the corporal’s glum prophecy, he added reluctantly. “Because if they really know what they’re about, they’ll simply continue their bombardment until they’ve reduced every building we possess to dust.”

  “Heaven forbid!” Captain Kempland exclaimed. He shivered, despite the heat. “God spare us that, with all those women and children trying to find shelter. It is infinitely worse for them than it is for us, I … have you a family here, Colonel?”

  “I have my wife and son,” Alex said, feeling his throat tighten. Kempland’s eyes met his in sympathetic understanding.

  “I have a wife and three children,” he managed huskily. “May God have mercy on them all!”

  They separated and Alex went back to his sector. He sent his men, a few at a time, to the cookhouse for a meal, but there was no relief for them. As soon as they had eaten, they had to return to their posts to enable others to be released.

  All day the cannonade continued with unabated fury, as the sun rose to its zenith in a brazen sky and, long before sunset, several men had collapsed from heatstroke, their faces blackened and the breath strangled in their throats. Most of them had exhausted the contents of their water-bottles, however sparingly they sipped at the tepid water in an effort to make it last throughout the endless day, and there was little to be done for those who collapsed, until the doolie party from the hospital could brave the perils of the fire-raked compound and remove them, for the reserve buckets had long since been drained dry.

  With the help of an Engineer officer, Francis Whiting, and a party of young Company’s officers, Alex salvaged a number of the burnt-out tents and contrived to shelter at either end of his sector, slinging the charred canvas on planks over a shallow trench. The labour of digging even a few feet into the rock-hard ground was considerable but a succession of volunteers, working in relays, managed it at last and both shelters were soon in constant use, serving as a temporary resting place for stretcher cases from his own and Lieutenant Ashe’s sectors.

  Ashe was seemingly indefatigable; his guns, their barrels too hot to touch with the bare hands, kept up a steady fire on any target within their range. When they fell silent, Alex could hear his voice, hoarse with the strain of shouting, as he lectured his trainee teams on the essentials of gun drill, driving them mercilessly but himself harder still. He had lost his senior sergeant, he told Alex sadly, when they met during one of the few respites he allowed himself—blinded by a shell splinter, the man had died half an hour later. There were tears in the youngster’s eyes as he recounted the manner of his loss but, within the next few hours, it was doubled and then trebled, when the battery in the riding school sent a deadly salvo of round-shot into a group of his gunners. Dry-eyed and grimly determined, Ashe brought up more ammunition, a line of sweating, straining men dragging the tumbril from another sector of the line and, with a mixed team of amateur gunners, subjected the riding school to a withering and vengeful fire. Only when the gun carriage cracked under the pressure imposed on it at maximum elevation did he regretfully discontinue his efforts and the eighteen-pounder sited behind the riding school went on with its relentless pounding.

  “If only those devils would come at us!” Corporal Henegan of the 84th muttered angrily. “If only they would show themselves! Gutless bastards, why don’t they attack? They’ve had all day, haven’t they?”

  He was expressing the thoughts of almost every man crouched behind the mud walls of the entrenchment, Alex knew, not to mention his own. The order for the defenders to stand to arms— in force since 10:30 that morning—had not been countermanded although, apart from gun and mortar fire, the enemy had made no hostile demonstration. Since noon, the infantry had remained in their lines and, well before that, the cavalry had withdrawn from the plain. Did they intend to attack, he wondered anxiously—would they attempt to carry the British position by assault this evening? Or had the Nana, with the inherent cunning of his race, decided to play a waiting game? That he might delay, leaving his guns to do the work for him, was not beyond the bounds of possibility, although there would be pressure on him, of course. Hot-heads like Azimullah Khan, the one-time munshi, who had no military experience—even the Moulvi of Fyzabad, to whom the poli
tical advantage of a swift victory would be all-important … both of them would undoubtedly urge their leader to take the risk. But would he listen to their counsel, unless the mutineers themselves also urged it?

  The sun was sinking now, like a ball of molten fire behind the feathery tops of the neem trees lining the edge of the racecourse, but there was only a slight breeze and this brought more dust than relief with it and the faint, yet unmistakable, stench of putrefaction from the bodies scattered about the compound. Animals as well as humans had died under the pounding of the guns, Alex realised. An officer’s charger lay near the quarter-guard buildings, still saddled, its entrails spilling out over the silver-crested Shabraque, its blood-soaked tongue hideously lolling and, seventy or eighty yards beyond, the commissariat cattle enclosure was a shambles … but, until the guns stopped firing, no one could move the bodies, save at the risk of life and limb.

  He sighed and turned, rubbing eyes weary and swollen from the glare, to look with shocked dismay at the battered walls of the hospital behind him. Emmy was inside that building, he knew; Emmy and his son and with them other women and children, the wounded and the dying … dear heaven, what must they have had to endure, with fear allied to the stifling heat and overcrowded conditions? All day he had forced himself to concentrate solely on the duties of his command, the needs of the men in his sector and the prospects of coming to grips with the enemy. He had not dared to let himself think of anything else and least of all of Emmy, but he thought of her now as two more round-shot buried themselves in the wall of her refuge, and felt sick with despair.