The Ravi Lancers (33 page)

Warren Bateman said, ‘The brigade’s objective is the St. Rambert Ridge, one mile from here and nearly 800 yards ahead of the positions reached during the early stages of the attack. We’re on the left, Fusiliers on the right, 71st Punjabis and 1/12th Gurkhas in reserve. Dividing line, all inclusive to us, is the point of junction here in this trench, to the ruins of St. Rambert church, which you will see very clearly on the skyline as soon as it’s light. Sapper squads, two men each, are going with each leading squadron. Each squad has six Bangalore torpedoes, but squadrons have to provide men to carry them. The torpedoes are to be placed as the sappers direct, under the enemy wire. Then the sappers will fire them. We move off from this line at 0500 and are due to pass through the Devons at 0520. First light is at 0515...’

He started to give details of administrative matters, routes of evacuation for the wounded, and communication lines. A group of men of the Royal Corps of Signals passed laying telephone cable along the edge of the trench. Krishna Ram thought, we are to blow holes in wire we may encounter? But why didn’t someone know whether there was wire or not, and where it was? Perhaps the Devons knew, who had been preparing for this attack for days, and still could not succeed. How was it expected that the Ravi Lancers and the Fusiliers could?

‘The barrage starts forward from the Devons at 5.20 ack emma,’ Warren said, ‘and, I repeat, you must keep the men close up behind it, really close. Any questions?’

The officers were silent. It was a simple plan, Krishna thought, and Warren had explained it clearly. What questions could there be, except, how many will survive?

Warren said, ‘One last thing. I want you to know that General Rogers planned to put the Gurkhas into the front wave, keeping us in reserve. After what happened at Hill 73 he felt that he could not trust us to do our best. I persuaded him to give us this chance to retrieve our name. He was good enough to agree. That’s all, gentlemen. Good luck.’

Krishna Ram walked away along the trench. The trembling returned. They did not have a chance, these brown-skinned men who trusted him because he was a Son of the Sun. He could smell the familiar tang of the coriander that they sucked, and the oil they put on their hair, and even could imagine in his nostrils the leather and sweat of those horses which had been their pride--but there were no horses here, and the men were but fodder, to be fed into a mechanized slaughterhouse and ground to mincemeat by unseen European gods, whose praise was death.

‘No, no!’ he cried aloud.

‘What, prince?’ It was Lieutenant Pahlwan Ram, black, squat, ugly, fearful. They were alone in a fire bay, the dark trench empty. ‘Why do you say no?’

‘Because it is slaughter, the machines of death,’ Krishna said in a low voice.

‘Yes, highness. There will be terrible slaughter, for nothing ... Let us only pretend to attack but really stay in the trench ...’

Krishna Ram said, ‘We must do our duty. Go to your place, man. If you fail ... if you do what you suggested ... I shall shoot you.’

He found the machine gun section and, feeling that he was talking in his sleep, gave them their orders. Warren Bateman came along and said, ‘Ten minutes to go. Now, you’re quite clear what you’re to do, Krishna?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Tell me then.’

‘Follow to the first objective, with A and B Squadron and the machine guns. Then, on your signal, given by galloper or telephone, take them both through to the final objective. Once that is taken, report success by red over green Very lights.’

‘Right.’ A light shone briefly in his face and the CO’s voice was cheerful--’You look as though you’ve seen a ghost. Cheer up, man. We’re going to make Ravi history today.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Warren disappeared and Krishna waited again. Time passed under a blanket of meaningless sound--distant explosions, rattling clack of machine guns, crack of single rifle shots. Then whistles blew and he climbed on to the firestep to watch the regiment going over the top. D Squadron was on the left, C on the right. Between and behind them, as they stepped off into the eastern dawn, he saw the CO amid a scattered group of gallopers, trumpeters, orderlies, and HQ officers, with the gunner subaltern and his signallers.

Then it was time for him to move and he climbed out into the open. At once the trembling stopped. A and B Squadrons strode steadily forward. The machine gunners--the section had four Vickers now--bent under the weight of guns, tripods, and ammunition boxes, tried to keep up with them. They reached the Devons’ line with no casualties and dropped in among them. They were small men, wan and mud-covered, sitting along the trench, with many wounded lying among them, and many dead, their faces covered by a handkerchief or a bloodspattered cap. Other dead had been shoved up on parapet and parados. Krishna hardly noticed them as he stared through his binoculars at the still advancing lines of the leading squadrons. Their bayonets were catching the light now. Here and there he saw a man falling. The line beginning to run. Faint he heard a cheer, but could not make out the words. Surely it would be,
‘A-gye Krishna-ka choral’
--’the sons of Krishna are upon you’--the war cry of Ravi, heard once upon a score of battlefields in the land of the Five Rivers. They vanished into the enemy’s reserve trench. They had done what he had believed to be impossible: they had reached their objective.

Two minutes later the field telephone beside him buzzed and the signaller said, ‘For you, lord.’

Warren Bateman’s voice was metallic and distorted, but exultant. ‘We’ve done it! Move at once, Krishna, in quick time, and keep moving right through us on to your objective. I’ll speak to you as you come through.’

‘Yes, sir.’

He blew his whistle and the men climbed out all along the trench. Young Puran Lall was there near him, his face cold and set, the revolver drawn in his hand; and the new rissaldar of the squadron, Chaman Lall; and Rissaldar Ram Lall urging on the men staggering under the Vickers guns, and over to the left Himat Singh and B Squadron. After five minutes under light artillery fire Krishna dropped into the newly captured trench almost on top of Warren Bateman. The CO seized his elbow and cried, ‘They’re on the run, Krishna. Go! I’ll come myself to take over as soon as you’re in position.’

Krishna Ram climbed out of the back of the trench and saw that all his men were continuing the advance. The next three hundred yards up to the church, so plain there on the ridge, the stump of the tower barely twelve feet high, would be murderous. He saw wire ahead, and his stomach felt empty. But the sappers were running forward, beckoning, and a sowar carrying a Bangalore torpedo ran up, thrust it in under the wire. Sappers and sowars flung themselves down. A sharp explosion cracked at his eardrums, and a twelve-foot stretch of the wire was gone. To right and left more explosions showed where other holes had been blasted. The squadrons filed through, running, spread out again, and slowed to a walk. Machine gun fire began to cut in on the right and half a dozen men of A Squadron fell, mown down like hay by the unseen blades. White smoke began to creep along the ridge ahead, obliterating first the church tower, then the outline of the ridge itself. The machine gun fire stopped. Puran Lall shouted, ‘They’re giving us smoke, sir ... We’ll make it now! ‘

Krishna blew madly on his whistle, shouting, ‘Charge, charge!’ The sowars lowered their rifles from the ‘high port’ to the ‘on guard’, the bayonets levelled, and broke into a run. They began to mouth curses, their faces became distorted with hate and blind blood lust. Screaming the high unearthly scream of mountain leopards they drove into the smoke. The British artillery stopped firing. A German loomed up on Krishna’s left, and a sowar leaped at him with a scream of ‘Swine!’ and thrust his bayonet clear through his neck and out a foot the other side. Puran Lall fired his revolver twice, then threw it at another German’s face, whirled his sabre and took his head off. The figures, all half seen in the smoke, loomed like warriors from the apocalyptic last fight of the Mahabharata, and Krishna thought, at any moment Arjun will ride down from the clouds, and Duryodhan claw at him through the smoke.

As the visibility increased he saw more clearly with what grim efficiency the squadron was setting about its work of slaughter. It had been perhaps a German headquarters of some kind, for among the dead he saw many wearing the collar badges of officers. They lay all round the church, and in the cemetery among the shattered gravestones. The sowars still worked in a frenzy of killing, the rifles rising and falling. Here a wounded man tried to struggle to his feet, there another to crawl to safety, but there was no safety, no refuge, no quarter. The forward men reached the front edge of the trees--now only stumps--guarding the cemetery towards the north and Krishna shouted to Puran Lall, ‘Stop there. Dig in! Hanuman, run and tell B Squadron the same ... Rissaldar-sahib, put the machine guns at the corner of the churchyard. Not too close to the tower. Put down wire in front of them, any wire, as much as you can get!’ He found the Very pistol in his haversack, and fired first a red then a green light into the sky, as the signal of success.

For the next ten minutes he hurried from one end of the position to the other, supervising its consolidation. The Oxford Fusiliers, who had not been able to advance at first, were moving forward now on the right, freed of the fire from the church that had held them up. To the left the ground was open, but lines of bursting shells showed that British fire to prevent any enemy movement round that flank was in force and effective. The machine gun crews were dragging up wire they’d found in the church crypt, and pegging it down forty yards in front of their position, outside hand grenade range. The local German command did not seem to realize what had happened. No survivors had escaped from the church ridge to tell them, and Krishna thought they believed they still held it. British heavy artillery was systematically pounding the areas where they might be expected to be forming up for a counterattack, hiding the green land under fountains of black earth that rose slowly out of the ground, hung in the air a long while and then slowly fell.

Warren Bateman appeared at his side, with Lieutenant de Marquez of the artillery. ‘Well done, Krishna! We did it, you see! Well done, Puran Lall ... Ah, Himat, you’re on the left, are you? Good, refuse your flank so no one can get in behind us on that side.’

Suddenly shells began to burst among them. Krishna dropped flat, head pressed into the earth. Splinters of metal whined and whistled through the tattered shrubs. The distinctive patter of shrapnel bursting overhead and raining down its steel balls filled the air. The sowars lay among the gravestones or crouched close behind the cemetery wall. Warren Bateman was on his feet, binoculars to his eyes. Reluctantly, Krishna stood up beside him. He saw a line of Germans rise out of the ground two hundred yards down the far side of the St. Rambert Ridge. The view extended in that direction for miles. What a position they had lost here. They would not count the cost to get it back.

The German line came on, but de Marquez was barking orders into the artillery telephone which had come up with him, and a hail of 18-pounder shells burst among the advancing Germans. A second later the four machine guns opened up with a hammering rattle. For a moment the Germans kept coming, but their lines were melting away, the ground becoming pimpled with molehill humps, that had been men, and twisted shapes, fallen weapons. At last they turned and went back, only a handful, and those beginning to run as the relentless machine guns scythed them down to the very edge of the fold of ground whence they had emerged.

‘They’ll never turn us out of here now,’ Warren said energetically, ‘but start your men digging. Dig! Two out of every three men, dig--the other on watch. I’m sending back for more wire, urgently. They’ll attack again tonight and we must be ready for them.’

He bent to write on the message pad on his knee. A shell burst against the wall of the church behind him, and he fell forward with a gasp and a cry, quickly cut off by clenched teeth. Blood was pouring from his left leg. Krishna quickly knelt and tried to undo the puttee but could make no headway until the CO’s orderly drew his bayonet, which had been sharpened like a razor and carefully cut the material through. White bone sticking out through broken

and bleeding skin showed where the shell splinter had broken Warren Bateman’s leg. He was white and sweating as Krishna poured iodine into the wound, and applied the first field dressing. ‘Stretcher bearers! ‘ he called.

‘No!’ Warren Bateman said, ‘I’m staying here.’ But even as he spoke his eyes closed and he fell back into the arms of his orderly.

Krishna finished the message, calling for wire, which Warren had been writing when he was hit. Stretcher bearers came up, running crouched, as German shell fire steadily battered the ridge. All around earth flew as the sowars dug, and with the earth the skulls and bones of the men, women and children who had lain in peace for two or six centuries in the churchyard of St. Rambert.

The stretcher bearers started back down the reverse side of the ridge. Krishna watched until he saw them disappear safely into the old front line trench. Captain Himat Singh came, crawling along behind the cemetery wall, to his side. ‘I heard the CO’s been hit? How bad is he?’

‘Broken left leg, below the knee.’

‘He won’t die?’

‘Not unless he gets gangrene. The stretcher bearers gave him an anti-tetanus injection.’

‘He mustn’t die ... he must come back,’ Himat Singh muttered. ‘He must, he must!’

Yes, he must come back, Krishna thought, for there was a great matter to be settled between them, which they had as yet only begun to face. To the captain he said, ‘Himat, I don’t know when the wire I’ve asked for will come up. We’ve got to put more out, at once. Send a working party down to try to bring up the wire that the Germans laid down on our side of this ridge. Down there. With enough wire, we can hold this place.’

‘We can hold it without wire,’ Himat Singh said fiercely. He hurried off. At the back of the church tower a flight of steps led down into the crypt. Krishna went there now, sat down, and wished he had a cigarette. Hanuman was smoking a bidi. He was on the point of breaking down and asking his orderly to give him one when Hanuman said, ‘Would the presence like a drink?’