Zemindar (111 page)

‘What had he to say? You must have spoken to him? How is he, Charles?’ I asked eagerly.

Charles retrieved the baby from the corner where we kept kindling for the fire, and sat her on his lap. He shook his head.

‘He didn’t say a word—and wouldn’t allow me to say one either. But I think he saved my life.’

‘Charles! How? What happened to you?’ He did not appear to be harmed in any way.

‘I’d been down the new mine leading to the wall of the Chathar Manzil—the breaching mine. It’s finished, but a couple of us went down to clear away the debris at the far end, as it was to be readied for firing today. It’s always pretty dreadful, you know, squirming your way into the earth in the heat and the damp, and the air is generally foul. I filled a couple of sacks with soil and stones and passed them back to Simmons to haul to the entry, and when I knew he was through began to ease myself out too. There has been a lot of work above ground in that section—trenches and new emplacements and so on—and as I moved back earth kept falling on my head and face, so I was damned glad to find myself within sight of the end. I could hear some heavy guns, but was not worried as I thought they were our own. Well, Simmons passed the sacks up to some others, and crawled out after them. I doused the lantern and started up the ladder too, thanking my Maker that I had survived another trip, and then, just as I got my head into fresh air there was a blinding flash and before I knew what was happening someone had thrown himself at me and the two of us landed at the bottom of the shaft again, covered with earth, the remains of the ladder and the lantern … and … other things. The shell had got Simmons just as he’d dusted himself off and was starting back to his billet.’

‘Oh, Charles! Poor man!’

Charles was silent for a moment, thinking probably of his own good fortune, and I waited impatiently for him to continue.

‘Oliver and a group of others had wandered up to see what was going on, and Oliver, they say, had walked forward to give me a hand getting out, not knowing, of course that it was me. You remember how quick his reactions always were—when we were out shooting and riding … in Hassanganj? Well, he hasn’t slowed up. He must have seen the shell approaching at the same time as my head appeared above ground, and just hurled himself towards me and the impetus threw both of us back down the shaft.’

‘But he had saved himself too,’ I pointed out, not in disparagement but with great relief.

‘Yes,’ Charles agreed thoughtfully. ‘But I believe his intention had been to save me.’

‘Why do you think that,’ I wondered, ‘if he didn’t even speak to you?’

‘Because when they eventually dug us out and he realized on whose behalf he had acted so promptly, for a moment I saw an expression on his face … as though, well Laura, as though he was sorry he had done it.’

I said nothing, as in my heart I knew that such might well have been the case.

‘It was not hatred, you understand. Nothing so crude.’

Charles was not accustomed to the analysis of motive or emotion, and spent a moment in thought.

‘It was more, more … self-hatred, or at least a most acute annoyance with himself. The expression passed in an instant, of course, and then he just nodded in that caustic way of his as I shook his hand and thanked him, then turned on his heel—and walked off.’

Apart from this strange incident I knew nothing of what had happened to Oliver Erskine, and there was nothing we women could do except wait, and hope, and pray, if we were so inclined, that those of our men who had survived so far would be spared the final battle.

The men were ‘unco’ active’ as Jessie put it, making preparations to aid in our own relief when Sir Colin and his force were sighted. Several new batteries for heavy guns were thrown up on the farther side of the Chathar Manzil gardens, and mines were driven beneath the surrounding wall to blow a section of it to pieces when the guns were in readiness.

The atmosphere within the entrenchment in those days reminded me forcibly of my first impression of the place, when, exhausted but almost weeping with relief, we had entered the Baillie Guard and looked around us at the hive-like activity, confused and unexplained, all taking place in an atmosphere of high expectation. The waiting for something to happen was again almost unendurable, the more so for us women, since we had no one now to whom we could apply for information or explanation.

Mrs Bonner was still full of gossip, but gossip that told us nothing we did not already know. We knew the rebels in the city had increased by several thousands; we knew the route Sir Colin would follow in coming to us; we knew the plans our own men would follow to assist him as he fought towards us. What we really wanted to know was just how, even more than just when, we would be leaving.

However, Sir Colin, unlike others before him, was true to his word, and before noon on the 14th we heard guns firing in the direction of the Dilkusha. Soon we could watch their smoke rising in slow peaceful puffs above the trees of the park, and by nightfall beacons on both the Dilkusha and the Martinière indicated that our relievers had accomplished their object for the day and were in possession of both buildings.

As if to warn us not to allow those two far-off flames to raise our hopes too high, the pandies that night bombarded us with a concentrated enthusiasm that put the Old Garrison in mind of the worst nights of July.

Next day brought anti-climax. It had been expected that Sir Colin would push on towards us, but no amount of scanning the treed horizon with anxious fieldglasses could raise the hint of a movement. At noon, troops of the enemy, both horse and foot, were seen to move out towards the Martinière with drums, bugles and fifes, and green flags flying. Then, after an anxious few hours, they were seen returning at a more accelerated pace than they had gone forth, and a few cheers rang out in the garrison at the sight. At dusk a semaphore was discerned on the roof of the Martinière, and after the usual delays, mistakes and rereadings, the message was passed to the garrison: ‘Advance tomorrow!’

When darkness fell, Sir Colin began a heavy bombardment of some objective to his left, a ruse to mislead the enemy into thinking he would follow the same route as had the previous relief, for in fact, when morning came, he would approach us by a circuitous march to the right. For a while Kate and I stood on the verandah and watched shells soaring up like tailed comets among the stars, sometimes bursting in flight to light the whole eastern sky with their vicious radiance. It was not so much the pyrotechnics that interested us, as the novel sensation of knowing that those shells and rockets were aimed at someone other than ourselves. When Kate was driven inside by the cold, I remained where I was, glad to be alone in the noisy night with my thoughts.

It was the fourth day of Oliver’s absence, the fifth night. The strain of not seeing him was becoming even more unendurable than the waiting for Sir Colin. The latter’s arrival now admitted of no conjecture. It was merely a matter of time, perhaps of only a few hours. But Oliver? Where was he? Could he have left the entrenchment? The idea was absurd, of course, but it haunted me nevertheless.

Early on the following morning, the 140th day of the siege, the garrison began to crowd up on to any roof strong enough to hold a man, to enjoy the excitement of watching Sir Colin’s advance.

For a while I too watched from the roof of the hospital, until a neighbour at the rail told me that Sir Colin’s troops were storming the Sikander Bagh (Alexander’s Garden), a large Mogul park enclosed in brick walls of massive size and height, and that the glints of light we now and then caught between the trees was the sun shining on massed bayonets as the men forced their way in. ‘Hand to hand it will be now,’ the man beside me murmured. ‘Rotten tough going; a bloody carnage it will be, though, once they’re in, the pandies will have no escape—not if we have enough men, that is.’ I climbed down to the ward, wanting to see no more.

Through the day the battle continued. Building by building, palace by palace, mosque by domed mosque, and garden by garden, the inexorable tide pushed slowly towards us, while the guns grew nearer and the whitey-yellow smoke hung more thickly over the trees. Beyond the Chathar Manzil the new batteries were brought into play, the mines were sprung to breach the wall, and in the afternoon, at Havelock’s order, the ‘Advance’ was sounded and at last our own columns of assault sallied out, cheering, to fight in the open.

That night a further new battery was thrown up at the most forward position we had won, and a howitzer and two heavy guns, with which it was to be armed, were manhandled into position.

Early in the evening of the following day, November 17th, we heard in the distance the sound of cheering. Gradually it grew louder and nearer, as by word of mouth the news travelled with the cheers that General Outram and Sir Colin Campbell had met and the second relief was officially effected.

Later we learned that it was Henry Kavanagh who had led Outram through a tumbled laneway near the Moti Mahal to where Sir Colin waited to shake him by the hand. At the time, however, we merely listened, awestruck, as slowly the cheers grew, travelling through groups of grimy men holding the far-flung palaces, by way of shouts and waved muskets and shots in the air, to signal the men behind them in batteries, earthworks and embattled orchards, until, as the joyful sound approached our populated walls, we knew it could mean nothing other than that the final meeting of the two forces had taken place.

They told us that that same cheer had travelled away from us, through the Shah Najaf and the Sikander Bagh and the Martinière, all the way back to the Dilkusha, so that, had one been able to hear it, the entire route fought over by Sir Colin and his men was loud with the huzzahs of victory.

This second relief, we found, however, was very different to the first.

No swarms of strange soldiery burst noisily into the entrenchment with tears on their faces, swinging children to their shoulders in joy at finding them alive. Most of Sir Colin’s troops were needed to hold open the route they had won, and only a comparatively few officers and men wandered through the enclave, viewing with incredulity the paucity of our defences and the shattered structures we had clung to so stubbornly.

They were a different breed of men too, at first view, from the battle-weary veterans of many engagements who had accompanied Outram and Havelock. Blue-coated staff officers, correctly accoutred and adequately weaponed; storied stalwarts of the 93rd Highlanders in tartan and black-feathered bonnets; black-bearded Sikhs in their new drab uniforms called after the colour of earth ‘khaki’; the 90th, in the familiar scarlet and white; sepoys of the 53rd Native Infantry in French grey. Strangest of all to our eyes were the sailors of the warship
Shannon
that, bound for China, had been deflected to Calcutta, where the crew had disembarked and marched up-country to our aid, hauling their eight great guns by hand a good part of the way. In their naval blue and still wearing their round straw hats, they were spoken of with wonder by our sepoys as being ‘four feet tall, four feet broad and capable of carrying big guns on their heads’.

All these newcomers were so well-dressed, so comfortably booted, that to us it seemed they must be amateurs of war, and we looked on them with a mixture of envy and resentment. Then we began to hear what they had done for us, in their fine uniforms and footgear, and changed our minds. They had fought a deadly succession of battles for our safety, almost within sight of us all the time, each one of which would assume in time the quality of legend. The battle for the Dilkusha, where the pandies fled with the fleeing deer; for the Martinière, whose grey turrets were reflected in its lake flowered strangely with red-coated pandies floating face-down among the water lilies; for the bloody Sikander Bagh, where the toll of enemy dead reached the symbolic number of 1,857; for the Shah Najaf, a strongpoint abandoned in despair by the enemy, fearful the sailors’ guns would ignite five thousand pounds of stored powder. Not a foot was traversed without a struggle. The few short miles between the Dilkusha and the Moti Mahal cost Sir Colin the lives of five hundred men.

We ate white bread that night, a small portion each, and butter, and each received an orange and a tot of rum. Letters had arrived too, wagonloads of mail, newspapers and periodicals from home. Kate received several letters and wept as she read them, for her correspondents had not known of George’s death. But there was nothing for Charles, Emily or myself; our family could not have known that we had left Hassanganj or even that Hassanganj was no more. As I watched Kate weeping over her letters, I tried again to visualize Mount Bellew and the kind stolid faces of my aunt and uncle, but again the effort failed me. The knot of fear around my heart grew more constricted as I thought of England.

On the following morning we were told that Sir Colin Campbell wanted the women and children to leave the entrenchment that same day. This order did not affect us unduly, for we had few preparations to make and very little to pack; the women in the more favoured houses of the civilian staff, however, set up a cry of outrage that forced Sir Colin to give us twenty-four hours’ grace. Then we were told that not only the women and children would be leaving; Sir Colin had ordered the whole garrison to be withdrawn and the Residency completely evacuated.

We had all been aware that the dependants and the sick would leave as soon as the route to Cawnpore was secure, but that the men themselves, all the men, would also have to retire was greeted with downright unbelief.

For one hundred and forty-two days we had fought and endured in the belief that more than our own lives were at stake. I will not plead an altruism amounting to heroism; naturally our own lives and those of our loved ones were our first and most fundamental concern. But yet, when we thought of the matter, we had believed that, given the time and means to retake Lucknow, our long endurance would contribute to the overthrow of anarchy in the entire Kingdom of Oudh, and this belief had helped us to combat more than the pandies’ fire. It had given a measure of meaning to our sufferings.