The Ravi Lancers (53 page)

Then, ordering Hanuman to pull aside the gas curtain, he went into the dugout, revolver out-thrust. A hurricane lantern still burned in a sandbagged niche at the back. Half a dozen German soldiers writhed, groaning, or lay still, on the floor and in bunks at the sides. Against one wall were stacked three cylinders with nozzles. Krishna recognized them at once, from intelligence reports and drawings, as flame throwers. The Germans had used them at the end of July but the British, so far, had not made any of their own. He called up to his men, ‘Come here. Take those ... Out now!’

He ran out and climbed up on to the firestep. One by one his men joined him, and passed through the wire. The jemadar and the rest of the patrol came up and they all started back towards the British lines at a slow run. From the German lines there was silence until the patrol was passing through the British wire; then Krishna heard the thud of artillery from the east and with a whistling shriek four shells burst among them, blasting Krishna to the ground.

As he picked himself out of the mud, he called, ‘Are you all right? Moti? Chattar Singh?’

No one answered. The jemadar was calling to him from the safety of the trench close ahead, ‘Come in, lord. Quick! They’ll fire again.’

But Krishna searched along the wire in the mud and darkness until he found first one then another and at last all six of the sowars who had been with him at the machine gun post. They were all dead, two decapitated, two torn in half. The German artillery did not fire again.

Warren Bateman was waiting for him in the trench. A torch flashed momentarily in his face and the familiar voice said, ‘Krishna? Are you hit?’

‘No, sir,’ he said.

‘Did you get the machine guns?’

‘Yes, sir. Killed the sentry and half the crew. I went into their dugout. They had three flame throwers there. We brought them back ... We had six killed, just now. They’re along our wire, here. And the flame throwers.’

‘Right. I’ll have them brought in at once. Wait for me in my office dugout at rear HQ.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Krishna walked along the front line trench until a communication trench opened up to the rear. His boots were heavy with mud and he kept staggering and sliding as he shuffled to the rear. For a moment out there, in the exhilaration of the fight, he had felt eager and young. Now he did not. Nor yet old and cold, nor precisely numb. He felt removed from himself, watching his body trudge down the trench, past the reserve trench line, past the second reserve line, past the RAP, a dim blue lamp outside its gas curtain, to the CO’s office dugout. Warren’s orderly was there, and two hurricane lanterns burned on the table. A calendar hung on one sandbagged wall, with a framed portrait of King George V, which he had presented to the regiment after his inspection last December. On the other wall hung a hand-coloured photograph of Krishna’s grandfather the Rajah of Ravi, and a pair of large maps, stuck with coloured pins and covered with red and blue lines. The desk was a bare table, a hard chair behind it and another in front.

Krishna sat down in one of the chairs, and waited. Ten minutes later the gas curtain parted and the adjutant, Brian Flaherty, came in, saluting, and said, ‘The CO will be here in a moment, sir.’

Krishna thought, this is going to be the declaration of war. Anything else could have waited till morning. Warren had been hoping, surely, that the Germans would save him the necessity of this step; but Vishnu looked after his own, and Krishna was going to live. The battle would have to be declared. Four a.m. was a time to catch a man weak and off his guard, particularly if he has just spent three hours in No Man’s Land, killed a man, and was splattered with the blood of his comrades, and subjects.

Warren Bateman came in, followed by Flaherty, and Krishna stood up. The CO sat down behind the desk, took off his peaked cap and set it carefully down in his in tray. Flaherty stood rigid behind and to one side of Krishna. Krishna thought, I wonder why he has brought Flaherty into this? It could be as a witness to some order he was about to give, but it felt like something else, something more personally concerning the struggle between them.

Warren Bateman opened the table drawer and took out a packet of letters. He handed them across the table to Krishna Ram and said, ‘These letters are addressed to you. They were intercepted and examined by the Corps Censor ... at my request.’

Krishna said, ‘Did you have reason to doubt my loyalty, or discretion, sir?’

‘I had reason to doubt your devotion to duty. Those letters prove that you were in Paris when you were supposed to be here in command of the regiment. You deserted your post without leave. And you lied about it, giving out that you were sick and unable to see anyone. Is this true?’

‘Yes,’ Krishna Ram said.

‘I will deal with that, as a military matter, later. As a personal matter I am telling you that my sister is not going to marry a liar, a man who betrays the trust placed in him. Do you understand?’

Krishna Ram said, ‘That will have to be decided by her, sir. As you say, it is not a military matter.’

‘You will not marry my sister,’ Warren Bateman said forcefully. ‘These things that you have done have proved finally what Rudyard Kipling said,
East is east and west is west and never the twain shall meet.
Your ideas of decency and honour are not the same as hers, and I am not going to see her life ruined by a ... you. Nor have her bear children like Flaherty here.’ He looked at Flaherty. ‘Are you happy with what you are?’

The burly half-Indian looked startled, then his mouth quivered and he said, ‘No, sir ... I hate it, sir! I often pray to God to make me English or Indian, one or the other.’

Perhaps he’s right, Krishna thought. It needed more than wisdom to hold to two cultures, embracing both--it needed love. Or strength. Warren did not seem to know, or perhaps had forgotten, that Kipling’s poem continued:

But there is neither East nor West,
Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face,
Though they come from the ends of the earth!

Mr Fleming had taught him that, very emphatically.

‘You see?’ Warren said. ‘The subject is not for discussion any more.’ He took another sheaf of papers out of the drawer, opened it and spread the papers on the desk. He said, ‘Here are statements by Major Himat Singh and Quartermaster-Jemadar Chhota Mall. They state that the quartermaster is misusing regimental funds by investing them in the French stock exchange, and by dealing with various commodities on the civilian market. He is also running a regimental brothel. Here’--he tapped another paper--‘is his own statement. He says that all this is true, and it was all his own idea and no one else knows about it. Is that true?’

‘No, sir. It was done on my orders.’

‘Why?’

Krishna Ram looked thoughtfully into Warren Bateman’s eyes. What did he see, with those eyes and how much deeper with the eyes of the spirit? He loved India, and Indians, without understanding either. What sort of explanation could Krishna give now, that would transfuse into Warren’s consciousness ideas and thoughts that had grown up not in the dust of the plains, the heat of the bazaars--Warren knew all that--but in quiet rooms with the old Brahmin, with his mother, with the pert girl sent to teach him love of women, in the inner depths of the temple, from the paintings of past rajahs and their women by the river at Basohli?

He said, ‘I thought it was right, for the men. It was according to our customs in Ravi.’

Warren Bateman said, ‘You have betrayed the trust I put in you, which is not important. You have forced half a dozen men to lie for you ... the doctor, your orderly, all the officers of the regiment, except one. But I see that lying is nothing to an Indian, especially an Indian prince ... But perhaps you care that you have wrecked the career of and ruined the life of a man who, until you came, had every hope of a long and prosperous retirement, loaded with honours. Rissaldar-Major Baldev Singh.’

‘The RM?’ Krishna said, staring down at Warren. ‘He knew nothing of it.’

‘Do you expect me to believe that?’ Warren said.

‘He didn’t,’ Krishna said vehemently. ‘We knew that he would do his duty at all costs, so we saw that he was kept in the dark of anything that was done against your British rules and regulations.’

‘What is the rissaldar-major’s job?’ Warren said quietly.

‘To ... to know,’ Krishna said. ‘Yes. But how can he, in a regiment like this, with its special circumstances? In the regular army, the officers are British, so the sowars and sepoys turn to their VCOs, headed by the rissaldar-major. They rely on their RM to interpret for them to the British ... to translate what they feel into what the British can understand. But here--we are the same as the men. Only you and the adjutant are foreign. The men do not need interpreters. Even so, as the RM is a Rajput, too, he might have learned of what I had ordered, if I were not who I am.’

‘And you used that fact to destroy discipline in your grandfather’s own regiment? Well, I am going to have Baldev Singh demoted and discharged. I hope you will realize that you alone bear the burden of his disgrace, for that is what it will be.’

Krishna looking into Warren’s face, saw a tortured intensity behind the hostile mask. Something terrible had happened to him in England, something that turned the struggle between them into a gouging at his vitals. There was Diana, but it felt like something even more personal. Perhaps he had learned about Joan and Ralph Harris.

But he must not allow the RM to fall a victim to the CO’s agony, like a spectator killed by a stray bullet at a duel. He said, ‘If you punish the RM, sir, I shall cable my grandfather asking him to withdraw this regiment from Imperial Service.’

Warren Bateman sat back as though he had been struck in the face. His brow darkened. He said, ‘You couldn’t do that. We are in the war. You want to run away from it? From our duty?’

‘Whose duty it is, is a matter that is not clear to me ... to any of us,’ Krishna said. He knew he had Warren in a corner now. Warren was Duryodhan, bent on war. If the regiment were withdrawn there would be not war, but peace, at least for the time being. But Warren Bateman was committed, like all the nations drowning in this ocean of mud, to total victory. The puzzled and hurt look in Warren’s square face momentarily touched a chord of pity in Krishna. Warren could not really believe that his second-in-command was blackmailing him. Krishna said gently, ‘Sir, why don’t you request transfer back to the regular Indian Army? It would not be hard to persuade Brigadier-General Rogers to accept me as CO, and you would certainly get another regiment ... a real one.’

‘And watch you let this one go to pot in your own decadent way?’ Warren snarled. ‘The first thing you’d do would be to get it out of France, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. But that would no longer be any concern of yours, would it?’

‘Yes!’ Warren shouted, banging his clenched fist down on the papers spread on the table. ‘By God, yes! I was appointed to make this regiment as good as any in the Indian Army, as good as the Guides or Hodson’s, and I’m going to do it... Why don’t you ask for a posting back to Ravi? I’ll see that you get it on the grounds that you are your grandfather’s heir.’

‘No, sir. My place is here.’

They stared at each other. Krishna saw Warren’s thoughts. He was thinking that if he was to have his duel to the death he must accept Krishna’s terms. At length Warren Bateman said, ‘This private fund has got to stop. The regimental funds must be used only as the PRI recommends and I approve.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Krishna said. He himself was the President of the Regimental Institutes, and the CO would now approve those items such as special rations, and comforts, and rum for nautches and celebrations, which he recommended.

‘The brothel must be closed.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And the rissaldar-major reinstated as the only channel of communication between the men and myself on any matters which do not pass through the normal chain of command.’

‘Yes, sir. Is that all?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then, sir, I request that all ranks be allowed to wear caste marks when not on duty in the front line. That Captain Ramaswami be permitted to practise Vedic medicine on those men who so request. That durbar be reinstituted whenever we are out of the line. That the Brahmin be given money to build, or adapt a building, for use as a temple at any place where we are billeted. That all officers wear the turban at all times. And that new bodyguards be posted to me.’

Warren Bateman tried hard to keep the emotion out of his face; but his cracking knuckles, the set of his jaw and the sweat on his forehead gave him away. He said, ‘And you will stay? And the regiment?’

‘Yes.’

‘I agree. Dismiss! ‘

Warren pointed with the long staff Narayan Singh had cut for him. ‘This is where the village of Fosse-Garde used to stand. It has been totally destroyed. The whole offensive will be centred on Fosse-Garde. The Hindustan Division will be in the centre of the army, and our brigade leading the division. We are leading the brigade ... in the centre.’

The rumble and roar of artillery surged louder and Warren leaned on the staff, waiting for it to die down again. This was the fifth day of bombardment, and, like waves in the sea, the sound waxed and waned without any apparent reason, for the fire from seven hundred guns was in fact continuous and steady.

The roar sank to a heavy muttering grumble interspersed with crashes from a nearby medium battery. Warren let his eyes travel round the half-circle of his burberry-clad officers the other side of the sand model. A light, chill rain fell without cease. He held Krishna Ram’s eye and said, ‘I may say that in the original plan we were to be held in reserve. But I felt that as the Fusiliers suffered most heavily during the brigade’s last spell in the line, and in order to do away with any idea that Indian troops are not as good as British, or have to be protected, or let the British troops do the unpleasant jobs, I asked the general to allow us to take the place allotted to the Fusiliers in the attack, and place them in reserve. The general was good enough to agree, so...’ Krishna Ram’s eyes did not blink. Warren stared coldly at the rest of the officers, one by one. Any one of them, except Himat Singh, would betray him at a whisper from Krishna. Himat was the only Indian he could rely on, through thick and thin, the only one who had really learned the lessons he had been trying to teach them ever since he joined the regiment at the campground at Kangrota.