The Ravi Lancers (54 page)

He returned to the sand model. ‘As you can hear, the artillery preparation began five days ago and will last until zero hour, the day after tomorrow--seven hundred guns, from 4.5 inch hows up to 9.2s. You might have guessed at the size of the programme from the number of lorries and cart convoys using the roads in the rear areas here. We have the improved model gas masks, and if the wind is right gas may be used by our side, but that will not be decided till the last moment. The artillery preparation will smash the wire in front of Fosse-Garde, destroy all Hun trenches to a depth of one mile, and also destroy his machine gun posts. All four of the regiment’s machine guns will be carried forward by the assaulting waves, so that we will be in a better position to beat off the counter-attacks which may be expected after we have taken our objective. Our objective is the eastern edge of Fosse-Garde, an advance of 500 yards from the front line trenches of VIII Corps, through whom we are due to pass at zero hour ... As soon as we have taken Fosse-Garde the Jubbulpore Brigade will pass through us to take the high ground beyond--here’--he pointed off the edge of the sand model to the east--’then the 1st and 2nd British Cavalry Divisions will pass through, and fan out in the German rear areas. The front will be irretrievably broken and a war of movement and manoeuvre will be reinstated ... to our advantage. I will issue detailed orders closer to the time. The attack will begin, as I said, the day after tomorrow--October 12th.’

‘Dussehra! ‘ one of the officers exclaimed.

‘Oh ... I forgot,’ Warren said. He cursed himself silently. He ought to have remembered that. He recovered himself, and said, ‘A good omen. We shall make our sacrifices to Kali in the bodies of Huns ... Any questions about the overall plan?’ The rain dripped off the peak of his cap in front of his eyes.

Major Himat Singh said, ‘We’re going to need carrying parties to carry ammunition forward with us, sir. The assault waves can never carry enough, especially if they are going to take the MGs with them.’

Warren said, ‘I am going to have each squadron use one of its troops just for that. It isn’t more men that we want up there, but fewer men with more fire power.’

Krishna Ram said, ‘As the bombardment has been going on so long, sir, the Germans will expect the attack when it comes. Is there anything we can do to regain surprise?’

Warren said, ‘I think you can rely on the general for that. Any more?’

Major Bholanath said, ‘Is raining, now. Has been raining nearly all days since we left the line. This ground up there clay, very heavy. Horses and mules were not being able to move before we left the line. After six days shooting, thousands, millions of heavy shells, no one being able to move ... surely not cavalry, sahib.’

Warren said impatiently, ‘The weather is certainly bad, but it is not only bad for us. The Hun will find it just as hard to move his reserves as we do to advance. We must impose our will on the enemy, Bholanath, not allow difficulties to overcome us ... Is that all? Remember that this is all top secret and may not be discussed with anyone not present at this meeting. Dismiss, please.’

Warren sat at the rough table in the regimental office, signing his name over and over again. The worst thing about being in the rear areas was the torrent of bumf that descended on you. Lists in quadruplicate, equipment returns, states of men sick, by classes and ranks. It was better up the line ... well, they’d be there again soon enough, barely thirty hours now. His jaw tightened at the thought. This would be the decisive battle ... Fosse-Garde, the turning point.

Captain Flaherty appeared at the door. ‘Major Krishna Ram would like to see you, sir ... alone.’

‘Tell him to come in. You stay, too,’ Warren said. He put down his pen and straightened his back.

Krishna Ram entered, and Warren said, ‘Is the matter you want to speak to me about entirely personal--to do with your private life?’

Krishna Ram said at once, ‘No, sir.’

Good, Warren thought; a purely private request could only have to do with Diana, and he didn’t want to talk about that now. The solution would not come in words but in action, at Fosse-Garde.

Aloud he said, ‘Then the adjutant must hear it, to act as a witness to what is said, if necessary. Speak up.’

Krishna Ram stood at attention the other side of the bare table. He looked Warren in the eye, and said, ‘Four weeks ago, sir, in return for your promise that you would take no action against the rissaldar-major, I agreed not to ask my grandfather to have this regiment recalled to Ravi.’

‘Yes.’

‘Apart from wanting to save the RM I wanted to prove to you that we could be good soldiers and still think like--and
be
--Hindu Indians. You wanted the regiment to stay to prove the opposite ... and you wanted me to stay because I have become, you feel, the personification of all that you want to get rid of. You therefore felt it necessary to overcome me in a personal duel.’

Warren sat silent. Allowing Krishna to speak like this was bad for discipline, but what he said was true, no use denying it.

Krishna said, ‘I too, welcomed the duel at that time. But since we came out of the line I have been spending as much time as possible each day in solitary meditation. It has been shown to me, in these long lonely hours, that I am keeping the regiment here to use them as my arms, my weapons in the duel with you. I am risking their lives not for their sakes but for mine, for the sake of my pride ... I hoped for more time to think this through to the right decision, the wisest and most proper for us ... but the offensive has forced me to make up my mind at once. I am sure that I don’t want to fight any more here in France, for France or for England. I am sure that the men of the regiment feel the same. I have come to ask that we forget our agreement of four weeks ago. I am surrendering. Please go to the general--I will go with you--and tell him that our morale has gone, and that we are not fit to take part in the offensive. There won’t be time to make any big changes before it begins, but we must go into reserve in place of the Fusiliers, not to be used except in self defence. As soon as the offensive is over, we are to be sent back to India--in disgrace, if you wish. If you think you need some proof of the state we are in, I can organize a mutiny, a mass refusal to obey orders ... whatever you think best.’

‘And the rissaldar-major?’ Warren said. ‘You promised to keep the regiment here in order to protect the RM, didn’t you? Now you don’t care what happens to him?’

‘I do care, sir,’ Krishna said. ‘But I think I can guarantee him a great future out of the army, in our state--I would like to have him as my Chief Minister when I succeed to the
gaddi
--to compensate him for anything you do to him. But in any case I cannot allow one man’s fate, neither his nor mine, to cause any more death or disillusion. The regiment must go back to India.’

He looked determined but not hostile, Warren thought, and thinner than before. Perhaps he had been fasting while he squatted crosslegged in solitude, in the Indian way of
bhairagis
and
sunnyasis
. But how out of place in an Artois farmhouse! And how different he had become from the cheerful young aristocrat of the
dak
bungalow at Kangrota!

Krishna continued, ‘The war is becoming more inhuman every day. Our gods are human, and allow for war, but not for mechanical destruction. They are not themselves mechanical and cannot tolerate mechanization. But every day the war forces us to become more machine-like, less human and so--according to our belief--less divine, for the gods that humans worship are themselves, really, human too.’

‘Go on,’ Warren said, hearing Flaherty’s disdainful sniff beside him. Flaherty was so eager to disavow his Indian heritage that he wouldn’t accept even what was patently true; and this that Krishna Ram was saying was true enough ... only irrelevant.

Krishna said, ‘It isn’t only the war ... it is Europe. In trying to learn the European way of making war we have learned European ways of thought. The ties that bind us to our own principles, our own ways of thought, have been weakened, or destroyed. There have been rapes and petty thefts, all entirely foreign to our men. Absence without leave, desertions even ... unheard of before we came here. Lying to escape punishment. Deliberate waste. We have caught a disease, just as my grandfather warned me...’

‘You call Western civilization a disease?’ Warren said. Krishna was still at attention the other side of the table, but for the first time since he had joined the regiment, the facts of the difference in their rank, and of his position as Krishna’s commanding officer, were not present in Warren’s mind. It was almost as when they had first met, at the cricket field in Lahore, and he was interestedly sharing opinions with a member of a different culture.

‘Yes,’ Krishna said, his face sad. ‘It has symptoms ... what that young sowar brought up in durbar--the false Christianity that preaches love, and kills ... that teaches poverty, but takes ... that preaches tolerance, like to Mr. Fleming--and rejects ... the fever that enabled Europe to conquer Asia, and believe that there was nothing to be learned from the conquered ... If we don’t go back now, it will be too late. It may be too late already. We, all the Indian troops here, will take this disease back with us. Instead of believing that a man’s inner posture, his relationship with his soul, is more important than his position on earth, many will believe that only victory, self-fulfilment matters... which is the same as saying, getting your own way regardless of what outrages on the body and soul you have to commit ... This will spread in India, which will not help either India or England. The sowars and sepoys are not political themselves, and never will be, for the most part. But the disease they carry will infect all India. The politicians will not act like Indians any more, but like Europeans. There will be political crimes, that India never knew ... murders, assassinations, poisonings, the killings of women and children ... I beg you, sir, let us go now.’

Warren said, ‘Is that all?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Warren drummed his fingers on the table, looking out of the broken window of the little room while he marshalled his words. At last he said, ‘What you said about Europe is partly true. My old CO, and the Commissioner of Lahore, both thought it would be dangerous to bring Indian troops to France, for different reasons. But the war hadn’t really started then. We took it lightly, being cocksure of the outcome. Here in France we learned in suffering that the outcome was not predetermined ... that it depended on our beating the Germans to their knees, smashing them in battle, face to face. We cannot achieve victory without hardening ourselves ... but we do not have to remain hard afterwards.’

Krishna made a gesture of disagreement but Warren said, his voice rising a little, ‘It is true! So, after we have won, you can go back to your old ways. But first, we must win, or the world to which we return will be a different one.’

‘It will be anyway, sir,’ Krishna interjected.

‘A German world, which we will not tolerate ... We are going to win. You are going to help. The effect on your soul, or whatever you call it, or on the souls of other Indians, matters as little as the fact that you or I may be killed the day after tomorrow. I hold you to your promise.’

‘Very well, sir,’ Krishna said. ‘I suggest, sir, that you make sure that your orderly is always armed, and covering your back, wherever you go. The news of the offensive has pushed some of the men ... and officers ... to the end of their tether.’

‘And you’re encouraging them to get rid of me?’ Warren sneered.

‘No, sir. The trouble is that some are not thinking of me as they used to, as a Son of the Sun, but only as your second-in-command, and assistant. The ones who are stretched near the limit will not confide in me.’

He saluted and went out. As the door closed behind him, Warren said, ‘What did you make of that, Flaherty?’

‘About what you’d expect,’ the captain growled. ‘Wouldn’t it be wiser to send him back to India, at once, sir? He says the men just think of him as the second-in-command, but it’s not true. He can twist them around his little finger. And the officers even more so.’

‘It might be wise,’ Warren said, ‘but I’m not going to do it. I’m going to show him, in battle, that he’s wrong and I’m right... I’m not going to sign any more papers. I’m going out. D Squadron are playing hockey, aren’t they?’

‘Yes, sir ... But wait till your orderly can get his rifle, please, sir.’

At midnight some change in the rumble of the artillery brought Warren upright in bed out of sleep. He sat there a while in the darkness, listening. The ground shook as always, the broken panes in the window rattled as always. The sound of the guns almost, but not quite, drowned the hiss of the rain on the tiled, patched roof. Each time the near battery fired, Warren said under his breath, ‘There! Take that! Bloody Hun!’ seeing in his mind’s eye the machine gun post pulverized, the smashed bodies, the avenues of wire being ripped to shreds. After half an hour the guns still thundering like distant surf, he went back to sleep.

He awoke to a formless screaming that sent his hands grabbing for the revolver in the equipment slung over the head of his bed. Then a sharp explosion seared his eyeballs with yellow flame, bits of something smashed into the brick wall over his head, and the window blew out with a tinkling of glass. For a second longer things fell or bumped or rattled. Then, in the silence, he heard a long low breathing, a bubbling breath that became a rattle, a sigh, and died. Beyond, a voice called,
‘Sahib! Colonel Sahib! Ap thik hai?’

He jumped up, and switched on the flashlight he kept on the stool beside his bed. A big khaki hump lay sprawled in the doorway, in a spreading dark pool of red. He bent over it as his orderly ran in, a hurricane lantern in his hands.

Warren turned the twisted head on the floor up a little and saw that it was Captain Flaherty. He was dead, his chest and stomach blown out. Distinctively waffled metal shards stuck out of the walls, or lay on the floor. Flaherty had been killed by one of the new British grenades. The orderly knelt in horror beside the dead adjutant, facing Warren across the body.