Chintalpore, 3 April
Pleasure, though intense in India, seemed fated to be brief. Hervey was in his quarters with pen and paper once more, about to write to the collector to hasten both the subsidiary force and, in his view just as important, the officer who was to win the rajah’s approval and thence take command. Since returning from Jhansikote three days ago, he had heard of so many causes for alarm that he was now certain that Chintal faced the most pressing danger. He had written on the first evening to Guntoor to urge the collector to send, in advance of the subsidiary force, any troops he could spare, for a mood of deep foreboding seemed to have settled on Chintalpore — on merchants, beggars and courtiers alike. Rumours abounded and there had been signs in the heavens. Shiva himself had been incarnated several times, had murdered good and bad alike and ravished many virgins. There was, as yet, no riot, no general hysteric passion, but Hervey did not imagine such seething would end in ought else. His chief alarm, however, lay in what was reported to him by Locke (who was increasingly privy to the gossip of the bazaars), that there was a widespread supposition that Chintal was soon to be attacked by a confederacy of Haidarabad and Calcutta, and that the European officers were the harbingers of this aggression. It troubled him principally because, until the Company officer arrived to take command, he considered himself obliged to the rajah; yet any order he gave would be questioned, especially if its purpose were equivocal — in which case attempts at deception would carry grave dangers.
It did not help that the demeanour of the rajah himself was daily more unfathomable. He neglected the usual formalities of the court, would receive no-one without their absolute insistence, and remained for the most part in his quarters, forsaking his menagerie even. All this Hervey had laid before the collector in the first letter, and he repeated it now — together with further intelligence of the nizam’s malevolent intent (so alarming, indeed, was the intelligence that on receiving it this very morning the rajah’s first minister had fled the city). Officials in the west of Chintal had reported movement of Haidarabad’s sepoys all along the border, and — worse — cannon. Even more alarming, and more perplexing, were similar reports from the other side of the country, where the nizam’s territories reached over the Eastern Ghats and abutted Chintal on the plains of the lower Godavari. Hervey could divine no purpose in these movements, except the crudest attempts to overawe, and he asked for the collector’s assessment. Next he gave his estimate of the fighting power of the rajah’s army in the light of the recent depredations. It was not encouraging. At his instigation, since the mutiny, the rajah had removed those officers who he considered had shown insufficient discernment when trouble was fomenting, or who had shown particular vindictiveness when rebellion actually came. Locke had urged Hervey to dismiss all of them — indeed, to blow them from the mouths of the galloper guns in front of the rest. But Hervey had resisted: he could not, in one sweep, remove all the facility for order and fighting. Instead, he had urged the rajah to keep a core of the most junior officers (no-one above the rank of jemadar, except the Rajpoot and Maratha subedars) and to make each of them swear, at the oxbow durbar, by all that was sacred to their faiths, their unquestioning loyalty to him personally. He had had the rajah promote several of the Rajpoots — paragons, he was now convinced, of the martial spirit. But in all, he wrote, the rajah could muster only one battalion of fewer than a thousand sepoys. The reduction of his cavalry was, however, Hervey’s gravest concern. Alter Fritz could mount, serviceably, fewer than a hundred sowars, for the horses that had survived the strangles were in so poor a condition that it would be at least a month (perhaps more in this oppressive heat) before they were fit for service. He had sent to Nagpore for remounts, but anything that the collector could arrange, begged Hervey, would be of inestimable value, for there were no means to patrol the border with Haidarabad while at the same time keeping any sort of handy reserve in Chintalpore and Jhansikote for interior security. He implored the collector to send him a full troop of Madrasi cavalry at once.
All this he read over a second and then a third time before attaching his signature and seal, hoping he had managed to convey the necessity for prompt action, yet without its appearing too importunate a plea, as if he were anxious at any price to leave the city. Yet leave was all he wished, profoundly, to do. Every day he delayed — every hour — lessened his chances of being received by the nizam, and therefore the success of his mission. The first part of that mission — the jagir deeds — was in any case still unfulfilled, for Selden had found nothing but confusion in the chancery since the death of Kunal Verma. Hervey knew he stood in default of reporting to Colonel Grant, for it had been many weeks since he had sent any despatch to Paris. But so damning a testimony to his own shortcomings would such a despatch be that he had put down his pen, dry, on every occasion he had attempted the task. This letter for Guntoor, however, ought to bring him the means of at least presenting himself to the nizam, and therefore of having something of substance he might relate to Paris. He would thus entrust it to Cornet Templer, who had arrived only the day before to assist with arrangements for the subsidiary force. He could ill spare him, but who else might he send? Without Johnson, who would have done it admirably, he was at a loss over so many things, and Locke’s standing with the sepoys might be invaluable: indeed, without him he was not sure they could be relied on.
Private Johnson was unconvinced by Hervey’s eloquence when he heard the contents of the despatch. As they watched the farrier hammering in the last nail of a new set of shoes, Jessye standing as patiently as if they were at the forge in Horningsham, he gave his candid opinion. ‘Tha’s not said owt about them Pindarees, and no matter ’ow quickly them Company troops comes they won’t ’ave big enough guns to take on them that you said t’nizam ’ad.’
Johnson’s dalliance with a daughter of the palace these past weeks had done nothing for his elocution or refinement, thought Hervey, but, as so often, he had addressed the material issue. ‘In truth,’ he replied, frowning, ‘I’d been calculating that the Pindarees would not trouble the rajah this year — not this side of the festival of Dasahara, at least. And I saw no reason for the nizam to bring his so-called daughters into the field. For since he knows that Chintal has no artillery he would manage perfectly well with smaller pieces — which we ought to be able to deal with by other means.’
Johnson snorted. ‘Tha always used to say that ’ope wasn’t a principle of war!’
And Hervey was inclined to concede the point, except that there was an entirely reasonable element of calculation: it was not strictly hopefulness that made him optimistic — if indeed that word could be used to describe his condition. Before he could get too far into a justification of his optimism, however, they were interrupted by a jemadar with an urgent summons to the rajah’s quarters. ‘What occasions this?’ asked Hervey cautiously, knowing how reclusive the rajah had become in recent days.
‘There has been fighting on the upper reaches of the Godavari, sahib,’ replied the jemadar, measuring his Urdu so that Hervey was able to grasp it first time.
‘And a sahib has been found murdered on the road outside Chintalpore.’
‘A sahib? Which sahib? Who?’ demanded Hervey anxiously, though hardly wishing to hear the name.
‘His face is not known, Captain sahib.’
That much at least was a relief. ‘I’ll come at once. Has Locke-sahib been summoned also?’
The jemadar did not think so.
‘Then please send for him too.’
Fighting proved perhaps too strong a word to describe the incident on the Godavari, and Hervey thought he might have misunderstood the Urdu. The rajah’s dastak officials had been roughly handled by the nizam’s men, and though that hardly bode well it did not constitute an attack. But the officials also reported seeing guns with uncommonly long barrels.
‘Captain Hervey, an official of the Company was found dead this morning on the road from Guntoor.’ The rajah seemed perfectly composed as he handed a letter to him, unlike several minor officials also gathered in the audience chamber. ‘He seems to have been travelling alone, and set upon by thieves, for his pockets were empty and his horse gone. But sewn into the lining of his coat was this letter, addressed to you.’
The seal was unbroken. Hervey was astonished — and then thought meanly of himself for supposing it would be otherwise. He read the letter with mounting despair.
‘Does it reveal who was this man, Captain Hervey?’ said the rajah, still perfectly composed.
‘It does, sir — though a man I never met. He was Colonel Forster, whom the Company — and, indeed, I myself — hoped would take command of the subsidiary force once he had gained your confidence.’ As he spoke the words he could feel the fetters closing fast on him, and his stomach heaved at his abject failure to discharge the duke’s mission. ‘The letter also bears disturbing intelligence, sir,’ he continued, his voice once or twice betraying his turmoil. ‘Word has come from Nagpore that several thousand Pindarees have been swarming along the Nerbudda river, and that the Nagpore subsidiary force is not yet embodied — and that Appa Sahib, the regent, earnestly requests you to lend him all support at once.’
The rajah still seemed remarkably composed at the news. Yet, to Hervey, the situation could hardly have been graver — and he said so. Chintal faced threats on both flanks simultaneously, there was insufficient intelligence of what the nizam’s forces were about, especially in the east, and in the west they appeared to be staring in the face of the most powerful guns in India.
The rajah was not convinced. ‘Captain Hervey, for many years we have lived with the nizam’s fearsome daughters. Like many women, they spit and they make a great deal of noise. But, truly, must they trouble us so?’
Hervey was as close to exasperation as he had been since leaving England. This was not his fight: he had never even formally accepted command of the subsidiary force. Truly the rajah was a gentle man, but… ‘Sir,’ he began emphatically, ‘as I am given to understand, the nizam’s daughters are French iron guns of the very largest nature. Their barrels are long — almost ten feet. They may throw a projectile with considerable accuracy, therefore. And they may do so at great range — a mile, easily. You may suppose how they will command the approaches to any fortified position.’ He paused to allow the notion to sink in. ‘The projectile itself weighs thirty-six pounds — three times greater than any which the subsidiary force now being assembled possesses!’
‘War itself is an option of difficulties,’ replied the rajah simply — complacently, even.
Hervey checked himself. ‘You quote General Wolfe, sir, and that is most apt, for he was only able to take the heights at Quebec after stumbling on an unguarded path. It seems to me that we too must find one.’
‘Captain Hervey,’ smiled the rajah, ‘you do not know how pleased I am to hear you say it is we who shall have to find that path. I had begun to suspect you would desert us!’
Hervey counted himself fortunate, always, that the griping in his vitals — the fear of death or dishonour in equal measure — had never rendered him incapable of thinking. Indeed, in some respects it stimulated it. In an instant he had chosen to say ‘we’, for although he knew his mission for the duke was all but rendered impossible now (and by his own making), he could at least redeem some tiny part of his reputation by facing up to things squarely in Chintal. ‘I am at your service, sir,’ he said resolutely.
‘Do I therefore send my sepoys to Nagpore, Captain Hervey?’
‘No sir,’ he replied at once. ‘That would be to leave Chintal a prey to Haidarabad — and there may already be Pindarees down the Godavari on Nagpore’s borders.’
‘But we do not know what the nizam is to do with these guns,’ protested the rajah. ‘If I am able to recall my history, Quebec was a fortress, its defences fixed. Perhaps that is the nizam’s intent only — a fortress on his border?’
‘Sir, why should the nizam build so strong a fortress when there is no threat whatever? No, the only purpose those guns serve is either to be brought to the palace here, probably on boats down the Godavari, to cannonade you into submission — or else they are a lure.’
The rajah had looked anxious at the suggestion that his palace might be thus despoiled, but positively intrigued at the notion of a lure. ‘Please explain yourself more fully, Captain Hervey.’
At the rajah’s bidding, the assembled company sat down, no longer having need of the map spread on the table. Selden, who had arrived after the conference began, but silent throughout (his influence much diminished by the most recent attack of malaria), started coughing violently. The rajah gave him iced water, which revived him as much by its expression of continuing regard as by any medicinal property. Once the coughing had ceased, and the rajah was again seated, Hervey took a deep breath and began his estimate — a calculation which, if wrong, might soon spell the end of the rajah’s sovereignty over Chintal. ‘The nizam will not invest Chintalpore,’ he opened confidently. ‘His treaty of alliance with the Company forbids any such aggression without the Company’s compliance — and that, we know, is unthinkable.’ The raj kumari cleared her throat. Hervey looked at her and saw the suggestion that he could not be so assured on this point. He decided to press on rather than be drawn into deliberation on the perfidy of the Company, however. ‘Your Highness, as I was saying, it is wholly inconceivable that Haidarabad should undertake overtly offensive action against Chintal.’
‘Unless, that is, those brutish sons of the nizam have a hand in matters,’ responded the rajah. ‘I have heard much of the enfeeblement of the nizam these past months. Nor would I place any faith in that badmash Chundoo Lall, his minister. Their long-held designs on Chintal — or, rather, the wealth of Chintal — are about to be thwarted by our alliance with the Company, about which they will have surely heard, since nothing remains secret in Chintalpore. Is this not now the only remaining opportunity they have to wrest that wealth from me?’
‘I cannot gainsay that hypothesis, sir, but I cannot believe the resident in Haidarabad would not have knowledge of such an enterprise. And, that being so, the Company’s agents would have been alerted, and in turn Chintalpore. We must discount it as the least likely eventuality.’
‘And yet we hear,’ said the rajah, with a hint of reproach, ‘that the resident in Haidarabad is not all that he should be.’
A high official of the Honourable East India Company seduced from his duty by pecuniary advantage: it was a grave charge. Hervey scarcely considered an Englishman was free from the mark of original sin, but he was not inclined to see perfidy in that quarter — though Selden would, no doubt, remark that India sweated the false civilization out of the best of men. He knew he could have complete confidence in one official at least. ‘Your Highness,’ he replied, in careful, measured tones, ‘we know, regrettably, that things in Haidarabad may not be as they should. But I have the utmost faith in the Collector of Guntoor. He would not dissemble.’
The rajah conceded. ‘Then what is it that you suppose the nizam is about? What is this ruse you speak of?’
Hervey considered for a moment how best he might explain his thesis — which was, in essence, simple, however ingenious. ‘If Haidarabad may not attack Chintal, then Chintal must be induced to attack Haidarabad. If, as I suspect, the nizam is at this time building redoubts on Chintal soil — not very distantly across his border, so that he might say that its precise line was in some doubt — it is a gauntlet thrown down in challenge. If you do not take it up then there will be some further encroachment, but all the time falling short of anything to which Calcutta could have substantive objection.’
There followed a long silence during which the rajah appeared to be praying, and the raj kumari calculating. At length the rajah pronounced himself in agreement with the appreciation. ‘But, Captain Hervey, we now come to the most painful part: what is to be done? Do I appeal to Calcutta? Do I journey to Haidarabad to ask for terms? I have read that a good tactician is he who knows what to do when something must be done; whereas strategy must from nothing derive what that something is. What should be our strategy?’
There was scarcely an eye but on the rajah as he spoke. Now there was not an eye that was elsewhere but on Hervey. He was all too aware of it, all too conscious of the expectations of him. He had nipped in the bud the mutiny at Jhansikote with little more than a whiff of grapeshot, just as resolutely as Bonaparte had defended the Convention. But did his art lie any more than in the skirmish? He had, in the rajah’s conviction, made a thorough and accurate estimate of the situation that faced them. Yet it had been one thing to make an appreciation — that much could have been done, with varying degrees of percipience, by anyone in the chamber. It was quite another to determine a strategy. And he dared not betray any doubt, for to do so would challenge the resolve that each would need for his strategy to have the remotest chance of success.
He began resolutely. ‘We know that we have not one-hundredth of the power needed to fight the nizam’s army.’ It was not an auspicious beginning. The rajah looked all but dismayed, which hastened Hervey to his purpose. ‘We must therefore take care to fight only those of his forces that it is supremely necessary to fight. By the boldest action we must prevent the enemy from reaching the battlefield in the first instance. These great guns of his — the nizam’s daughters as everyone seems wont to call them — are the cornerstone of his attempt to overawe us. If we are able somehow to neutralize that advantage then the nizam’s own stratagem is thwarted. Then we may turn our backs on him, so to speak, and make ready to deal in turn with the Pindarees on the plain of the Godavari — for that, surely, is where they will erupt from Nagpore.’
The rajah looked disappointed. Was this a strategy of substance or of evasion? he asked himself. How, for instance, were the nizam’s guns to be dealt with by so insufficient a force as Hervey had at his disposal? Had he placed too much faith, after all, in this captain of cavalry — cornet a little but a year ago? ‘Captain Hervey, how, by all that is reasonable, do you suppose we may confront guns as powerful as these? Did not Napoleon himself say that it is with artillery that war is made?’
Hervey blanched at hearing the imperial name, for ‘Bonaparte’ was the best that any Englishman would allow. But it was no time for strict form, and he had to counter the rajah’s proposition — difficult though that task was. He could think of only one response, turning on the rajah’s own exposition of the strategic and the tactical. ‘Your Highness,’ he said, smiling confidently, ‘you have had occasion already to place your faith in my tactics, and not without gratification. Treating with those guns is merely an affair of tactics.’
The rajah, even if he retained doubts, looked intensely relieved. He left for his temple prayers with something of a smile, too.
‘I see you have reconciled where duty lies then, Captain Hervey,’ whispered Emma Lucie with a wry sort of frown.
‘Have I?’ he sighed. ‘I fear I have merely chosen the easier course.’
Later, in the seclusion of the palace gardens where they could not be overheard, Hervey spoke with Locke. Henry Locke, stout-hearted, in love with the most beguiling of the Maharashtri nautch girls because she looked him full in the face; though their positions of a decade before, when Hervey had stood in awe of him at Shrewsbury, were reversed, he bore no sign of disaffection. ‘What do you wish me to do?’
‘My dear friend,’ sighed Hervey, ‘this isn’t your fight. It’s not even my fight. I cannot tell you everything, but—’
‘Matthew Hervey, don’t try to send me away!’ Locke protested
He smiled. What simple loyalties fighting men enjoyed! ‘You don’t understand. I’m doing this because I’ve left myself no other course — because I’ve made such a hopeless job of the thing I was sent here to do!’
‘I could not care less. I have my reasons too. Just tell me what it is you would have of me!’
Hervey would lose no time with any expression of gratitude, for he knew he could not express it sufficiently with brevity. ‘First, you could see that no harm comes to Emma Lucie. Get her out of Chintalpore — to Guntoor if you can.’
He nodded.
‘And then I want you to go to Jhansikote and take charge there.’
Locke nodded again, and smiled broadly. ‘I do have one question though. Would it not be better to see off the Pindarees first before turning to the nizam’s redoubts? If, as you say, he will take no offensive action against Chintal, what’s to be feared having him at our rear?’
He had a point, though not one that Hervey had overlooked. ‘Do you recall what the Duke of Marlborough was said to have declared about campaigning — that no war could be fought without good and early intelligence?’
Locke nodded.
‘Well, that’s more the essence of our problem than those guns themselves. We are, so to speak, like a prizefighter who’s blindfold. We surmise the purpose of the nizam’s men on the lower plains is no more than to rattle our nerve, that they have no offensive intent.’
‘Ay,’ said Locke, furrowing his brow more, ‘but you claimed — and convincingly — that the nizam could not risk taking such action. And for him to do so on the plains, which are so much closer to the Company’s territories, makes no sense at all.’
Hervey nodded. ‘Yes, but what if his troops gave battle not as soldiers of Haidarabad but as Pindarees? They would be able to throw the whole of lower Chintal into confusion, cause the rajah to flee and give the nizam pretext for marching in to restore order.’
Locke’s mouth fell open. ‘Hervey, that’s fiendish. Why did you not say all this in the rajah’s chamber?’
‘For two reasons. First, I could not be sure who might hear — nor even could I be sure of the discretion, perhaps even the loyalty, of all that were in the chamber. And second — and I am most loath to say this, for I admire so much in the man — the rajah is not of the most resolute disposition, at least for the present. If he flees Chintalpore it will be the end.’
Locke blew out his breath in a gesture that acknowledged the true extent of the danger. ‘And you still believe that disabling those guns is the key?’
‘Yes,’ said Hervey, and with some assurance. ‘We may take our chances with the Pindarees, but if they were backed by those guns, I think it another matter.’
‘You think the nizam could simply move those great things the other side of Chintal?’
‘Let me put it to you thus, my dear fellow,’ replied Hervey, smiling. ‘From my reading of history, whenever a plan has depended upon the enemy’s not being able to move guns into a certain position, it has been overthrown by the very fact of his doing so!’
‘Yes, but here—’
‘Even here — even with these forests and hills. What about the Godavari? Now that Haidarabad appears, in practice, to have immunity from dastak, who knows what is moved along the river? Don’t lose heart, though. We shall be fighting the Pindarees with relief at hand — for I can’t think it will be long before the Company is able to despatch the subsidiary force. In any case, I’ll send urgent appeal to the collector this very day. What I want you to do, my dear Locke, is to drill the rajah’s infantry as light companies, for we shall have to bustle them about as nobody’s business. And have them ready, if you will, in three days’ time to take to the field. Tonight I shall leave with half a troop and the galloper guns for the west — I would do so earlier if this heat were not so punishing. And first I shall have it spread abroad that all of the rajah’s troops are to march on the nizam’s redoubts — for having us so march is their purpose. There are agents aplenty in Chintalpore: the false news will not take long to reach the guns.’
Locke looked puzzled. ‘Why do you want them to believe that all the rajah’s men are marching west?’
‘So that, my good friend, they are not tempted to move the guns. If they do, I cannot very well destroy them!’
Locke, knowing now the full risk of the enterprise, would hold Hervey in even higher regard than he had after the mutiny. He knew he could never match the acuity with which his erstwhile junior examined a problem. He could count himself just as brave in battle, but he knew that courage was more than that. It required nerve. That, indeed, was how Nelson and Hoste would have had it. And he did not, in his heart, trust he had nerve in the same measure.
All this he admitted freely to his nautch girl, the Maharashtrian beauty whom Hervey had first been suspicious of for her cloying attachment, but whom latterly he had come to believe was, in her affections, wholly genuine. She helped him make ready for his ride to Jhansikote, bringing him ripe figs from the palace gardens for the journey. And as he set out, when the full heat of the day was beginning to abate, there were large tears in her eyes, and entreaties that he would return to her unharmed. Had Locke given it but a second’s thought he would have known it an unlikely possibility — about as great as leading a boarding party against a deck swept by carronades. But his relish for the fight was growing by the hour, and after Jhansikote nothing seemed impossible. He kissed each eye gently — and then her lips with all the passion that was welling for the battle to come. ‘I shall be back,’ he said defiantly; ‘and then you shall come with me to England!’
Half an hour before dawn, Hervey stepped down from the saddle in a nullah close to the nizam’s redoubts. He had ridden hard all night. There had been — just as on the ride to Jhansikote on the night of the mutiny — an obliging moon, and there had been stretches of the road on which he could put Jessye into a hand-gallop. For the rest of the time they had trotted hard, except when she was in need of respite or where they came upon a hackery travelling by night to escape, as they, the heat of the day. Those travellers who were on foot — and there were many — simply stood aside as they heard the pounding hooves. Hervey, Johnson and the Maratha subedar had made the forty miles between Chintalpore and here in six hours, and their horses had yet something in reserve.
Behind them, hurrying at best speed, was a halftroop of the rajah’s cavalry (Hervey had specified not fewer than thirty sowars) and two galloper guns. But since these were coming from Jhansikote they would be four hours behind at least. He wanted all the time he could to think of some way to overcome the guns, however, and he knew, from long experience in the Peninsula, that if he could observe the routine of a defended position at first light it would reveal the best means of proceeding against it. He loosened Jessye’s girth and unfastened the noseband on her bridle so that she could pull at the couch grass: he would give her some of the oats he carried later. As he stood rubbing her ears, wondering what he might see when the sun revealed the redoubts to his telescope, Johnson handed him a tin cup. ‘Tea, sir,’ he said simply.
‘Tea?’ said Hervey incredulously. They had only just arrived, yet the cup was hot to the touch. Not even Johnson could have brewed tea in the saddle!
‘Ay, tea.’
‘Well tell me, man: how in heaven’s name have you hot tea so quickly?’
‘I’ll show you,’ and he went to retrieve the tea’s conveyance. ‘Here, can you make it out?’ — it was very dark now that the moon had set — ‘It’s a stone bottle which keeps ’ot with this charcoal ’ere in a cooker underneath. And it all fits together in a tin ’arness. I bought it in t’bazaar.’
Dark as it was, Hervey grasped the principle and wondered why he had not seen the same on campaign. Perhaps, however, in the everyday of the Indian bazaar or the London emporium, such a thing seemed overcontrived for its simple product. Yet no-one who had been on campaign would ever undervalue hot tea before stand-to on a day when battle was expected.
‘Johnson,’ he said simply, with a note of disbelieving admiration, ‘I do not know how I should fare without you!’
They ate some chapattis and gave the horses a little corn, and soon the first shafts of daylight were piercing the darkness behind them. He told Johnson to take the three horses a little way back along the nullah, and then he and the subedar ascended its sides, and a hillock no wider than a dewpond, so that they might spy out the strength of the nizam’s lure. He was confident they would be able to do so undetected: the subedar knew the ground well from many a patrol, and the dastak official whom they had sought out at the village a mile or so back had confirmed that here exactly was where they would see the redoubts. He would have wished the sun were not rising behind them, for it risked their exposure in silhouette to an observer still concealed by the darkness. But then, had the positions been reversed, he would not have been able to use his telescope for fear of the sun’s reflection on its lens. In any case, avoiding a silhouette was but part of the scouting cavalryman’s art: he must find some background cover — a bush, or suchlike.
They found a handy euphorbia and crawled under its protecting greenery. Hervey took out his telescope and searched in the direction the official had indicated. He had first been surprised there were no campfires, and now, with the glass to his eye, he could find no flame, no movement — no activity whatever. And there was not a sound, either. These, truly, were soldiers of high discipline, he muttered to the subedar.
As the light grew, almost with each tick of Hervey’s full hunter, he was able at last to make out one of the redoubts. ‘The guns must be run in: I can see nothing of them,’ he whispered, rubbing the condensation from the eyepiece before taking a further look. It was the same with the second redoubt: the embrasure could be made out clear enough, but again the gun appeared to be run in. He found the third: it was the same. Surely the guns would be run out for the dawn stand-to? Yet each of the eight redoubts looked, in the half-light, asleep, inattentive — not even the sign of a sentry. If only he now had the halftroop and the galloper guns: he wagered he could storm each in turn and take them at the point of the sword. Scarcely would the enemy have time to rouse! He even thought of rushing the nearest redoubt himself and, with the subedar, turning the gun on the other seven. But he knew well enough that, so alerted, they would overpower him first. No, he would have to wait another night and take each by stealth. But then he had spread word that the rajah’s troops were advancing: they would be waiting tomorrow, alert — surely?
The sun was now glinting over the hills to the east, the light growing ever stronger. After five more minutes, still peering through his telescope, Hervey started suddenly: ‘Great heavens! There’s no-one there — no-one at all!’
The subedar looked at him in astonishment. ‘Why would they build redoubts like that and then abandon them as quickly, sahib?’
‘I don’t know, Subedar sahib; I simply don’t know.’
He called for the horses, but as he did so there was a fearful squeal from one of them, and then squeals from all three. ‘What in God’s name is Johnson doing?’ he rasped as they scrambled down the hillock and into the nullah. The squealing continued as they ran to where Johnson was struggling to keep hold of the reins of the three terrified animals — rearing, jumping and kicking in a manner he had rarely seen. ‘What is it Johnson? What’s got into them?’
‘I don’t know, sir; they was all just ’aving a bit of this couch grass and suddenly they all goes barmy!’
‘Snake, sahib! They are panicking because of snake!’
There was no sign of a snake, however.
‘They know when there is snake, sahib; it is most likely gone by now, though.’
The horses were, indeed, settling. Hervey took Jessye’s reins and brought his hand up to her muzzle to reassure her. ‘Oh God,’ he said suddenly. ‘Subedar sahib, come look here: there’s blood on her nose!’
The subedar took one look and sucked in air between his teeth. ‘It is snakebite, sahib — no mistake.’
Hervey looked closer and saw the tell-tale pinpricks from which the blood oozed. He went cold with dread: he had heard of horses dying within minutes of a snakebite. Jessye was now standing stock-still, her legs spread as if to keep herself braced. She began to pant. Only a month before Waterloo he had read of a condition described as ‘shock’, explaining why he had seen horses most cruelly mutilated on the battlefield which had not succumbed, and yet others with little apparent injury failing to recover. The paper suggested it was a collapse of the respiratory system — and Jessye’s quickened breathing, and now her sweating flanks, pointed to just this. He called for a knife, but then decided against making free with it across the bite since the poison would already be deep. He took off the saddle and bridle as she began to shake.
In a while her forelegs began to buckle and she almost fell to the ground, just managing instead to drop unsteadily to her knees and then to roll onto her side. She lay sweating prodigiously, her breathing now growing shallow. ‘Sahib, send to the village for sadhu,’ pleaded the subedar.
Hervey had to check himself: the subedar’s plea was well meant, but he wanted no fakir dancing about his mare. He knew in his heart that nothing could be done for her, nothing that could arrest the poison’s evil, now deep in her vitals. Would Selden have bled her? The poison was in her blood, and bleeding would remove some of it, would it not? But Selden had always been so sceptical of bleeding. He would surely urge that not one drop of blood was better placed than in a vein. Jessye had survived so much — three years of the Peninsula, and then Waterloo. To succumb now to something that slithered in the couch grass was ignoble, the basest of ends — like Edmonds’s death to the first volley in that battle. He pulled his pistol from the saddle and began to prime it. He would not let her end come from a serpent: better that she die at the hand of a friend. He lifted her head, and she grunted. He pulled her ears, blew in her nostrils, wiped the blood from her muzzle, keeping the pistol out of sight as tears streamed down his cheeks. ‘Is she in pain, Subedar sahib?’
‘No sahib, she not in pain. Snake’s poison in horse only make it sleep in peace. Let me fetch sadhu, sahib. He know many mantras to draw out poison.’
‘Thank you, Subedar sahib, but no. I can feel her slipping away even as we speak.’ He brought the pistol to her head, gently but firmly putting the barrel to the fossa over her left eye so that the ball would not strike bone. He pulled the hammer back carefully to full cock, the ‘click’ as it engaged in the notch of the trigger arm seeming louder than he had ever heard. He prayed it would take just the one round… and then he drew the pistol away. ‘If she is in no pain, let her lie in the sun at rest, Subedar sahib. Let her remaining time be peaceful. I don’t want her to hear another shot: she’s heard too many.’
‘Yes, sahib; let her pass in peace with the sun on her.’
It had been no more than five minutes since he heard the commotion, but he knew he should now be about the business of the guns. Every instinct, every precept he had been taught and every lesson from life told him so, for in war, time was the only commodity which, once lost, could not be regained. ‘Johnson, stay with her until…’ He found himself choking on the words. ‘And then have her buried — I don’t want her on a pyre.’
‘Ay sir,’ replied Johnson quietly, just as moved at her plight, for he had been with Hervey, and therefore Jessye, for more than three years.
He cradled her head to his chest and whispered a farewell in her ear, tears now running freely. He gave Johnson a handful of silver to see to her burial. ‘There will be men in the village who will dig. Find whatever horse you can to get back to Chintalpore.’
Then he sprang up with all the resolve he could muster and leapt into the saddle of Johnson’s mount. ‘Come, Subedar sahib,’ he called briskly, his face streaked where the tears had washed the caked dust. He dug his spurs into the little Arab, and did not look back.
The redoubts were as empty as if they had never been occupied. Except that there was the unmistakable spoor of heavy guns — and easy to follow, for their wheel-ruts were as deep again as those of the wagons that had accompanied them. Hervey soon found the tracks of eight pieces converging beside the Godavari. This could not be a fording place, surely? There was no exit that he could see on the far bank. Had the nizam withdrawn his guns, therefore? Surely not on hearing that the rajah’s troops were marching west. There must therefore have been some interior cause for withdrawal, but it seemed unusually coincident. Which left only the possibility that the guns were taken downstream. To Chintalpore? Or to the Pindarees? If Haidarabad had known that the rajah’s forces were not moving west after all — that they were not, indeed, to be drawn by this lure — then the nizam’s men would have removed the guns at once. But how might Haidarabad have learned of this? Hervey had, after all, told only one man. Surely he and Locke had not been overheard? Surely Locke had not…? And then came the awful realization: the Maharashtri girl. Like the wretched Samson at Gaza, groaned Hervey, who ‘weakly to a woman revealed it’. He groaned again: Locke — brave, true, foolish. ‘O impotence of mind, in body strong!’
But what was the purpose now of railing? Indeed, the guns, if they were on the river, were powerless. With the lightest galloper gun he could force them to surrender, or even send them to the bottom! He looked again at the river, to the middle where the stream seemed fastest. A tree trunk bobbed obligingly by, giving him the chance to assess the speed. It seemed little more than marching pace, and since there was no breeze he estimated that barges carrying the guns could not exceed a horse’s jogtrot. They had had, perhaps, six hours’ start at most. They might be, say, forty miles downstream — at Chintalpore. His heart sank. But his duty was clear either way: if the guns were making for Chintalpore, his place was back at the rajah’s palace. And if they had not been able to make such speed…
He swung the mare round. ‘Subedar sahib,’ he shouted, ‘the guns are on the river between us and Chintalpore. We are going to destroy them!’
He had two options. To pace his mare so that, if the halftroop and the galloper guns had made slow progress (perhaps not yet even arrived at Chintalpore), they did at least reach them; or else he could make all speed at once in the hope of meeting the troop in time either to intercept — or at least catch up — the boats. Hope was not a principle of war, he reminded himself, yet surely the second option was the only one?
Now he would do something he had never done before. He would push his horse until it fell of exhaustion. Had he contemplated the act coolly and at length, he might have balked at it. Yet now, scenting the distant possibility of a kill, he felt nothing. He unfastened the holsters from the saddle and flung them and their pistols into the river. He unbuckled his sabre — a fine tulwar from the rajah’s armoury — and hurled that into the river too. And when the time came — when he needed just another mile from his mare — he would throw off shako and tunic, and discard the saddle to ride, as Xenophon prescribed, bareback. The subedar followed his example: everything — his own sacred tulwar included — he cast like Hervey into the waters of the Godavari.
After two hours at a truly prodigious pace, their horses tiring desperately with every stride, Hervey was suddenly inspirited by the distant appearance of the lancer troop. He pushed his little mare back into a gallop to close the remaining quarter of a mile, and kicked up so much dust that the troop was taking guard as he hallooed them. ‘Have you seen any boats on the river?’ he shouted.
The rissaldar looked confused. Hervey tried again, this time in Urdu. Still there was no reply. He cursed and looked at the subedar. ‘In heaven’s name ask him if he’s seen boats on the river — a dozen, maybe more; big boats, big enough to carry the nizam’s guns!’
With a concoction of English, Urdu and Telugu he eventually established that a small flotilla that might answer thus — certainly unusual in appearance, with several craft roped together, and having an uncommonly large number of people aboard — had passed them by almost an hour ago. Hervey’s face lit up at the news. He explained what he wanted and soon the rissaldar’s face was lit up too. The troop’s officer trotted back down the column to relay the intention, and the sowars’ faces took on the same aspect. Hervey wanted one more thing, however: paper and pencil. The rissaldar obliged, handing him his sabretache, and in less than a minute he had scribbled his message for Locke. It read simply, ‘Nizam’s daughters on river. Shall intercept. Make speed to Chintalpore in case elude me. There is spy in palace who knows our last conversation. Hervey.’ He gave it to a dafadar with instructions to ride for Jhansikote at all speed.
Changing horses to a big country-bred which tried to bite his arm as he mounted, Hervey hastened to the head of the column. ‘Very well then, Rissaldar sahib, let’s be about it!’
Though the rissaldar knew not the precise meaning of Hervey’s Urdu, the sense was clear enough, and, with an appeal to Shiva, he put his thirty men and the guns straight into a gallop.
Sooner than Hervey expected, they caught up with the flotilla of shallow-draught vessels taking the most powerful guns in southern India deep into the territory of the rajah. The sight filled him with a powerful sense of violation, and a glimpse into the eyes of the sowars behind him would have revealed the same. They had not hated these men from Haidarabad before. Though most of the nizam’s soldiers were Mussulmans they were brothers nonetheless. Perhaps it was the outrage of sibling betrayal which now fired these Hindoos of Chintalpore, for when they saw the boats they quickened the pace without orders. Soon they were in a flat gallop, the guns bouncing behind the bigger country-bred geldings. As they drew parallel and then overtook the boats which, here on the curve of the river, were much closer to the sowars’ bank, the nizam’s gunners realized what was to come, and there was at once commotion where before there had been only torpor. The guns themselves were covered by canvases — not that they could have been fired from such flimsy craft even had they been ready — and some of the gunners sought the meagre protection of concealment beneath them.
The sowars unhitched the galloper guns before the wheels had even stopped turning, swinging them at the boats with frenzied heaving. They opened fire so quickly that Hervey thought they must have been loaded ready. He urged them on with the most sanguinary imprecations. He wanted no measured action, only the most ferocious assault: what might these sepoys of the nizam be capable of if they were not subdued rapidly and with the greatest violence? The rissaldar, suffused with that same resolve, and without waiting for orders, spread his men along the bank to deal with those who were, willingly or otherwise, about to enter the water. The galloper guns found their mark easily. Although the Godavari, even before the monsoon, was wide at this point (perhaps as much as two hundred yards), it was a placid — even a sluggish — stream, and the guns needed no elevation. Against river barges a single four-pound shot did the most fearful destruction (they were just beyond the range of canister), and with targets that stood practically still, the business of relaying was nothing. The first to strike home carried away the head of one of the sepoys, leaving his body standing for several seconds before it toppled forward and over the side. Blood spattered about the others and sent them into a frenzy. An officer tried to rally them to some resistance, but he fell to a carbine ball, coolly discharged from the saddle by a diminutive Tamil who was not prepared to wait for the sabre. The others were soon loading theirs, but next the second galloper gun fired a corrected shot, low, which smashed through the gunwale and sent a torrent of splinters as lethal as grape across the deck of the third barge, leaving not a man standing for’ard. Sepoys on the fourth barge began a brisk return of fire, but to little effect, and Hervey ordered the jemadar to have the sowars direct their carbine fire at this and the following barges, which were much closer to the bank, to suppress the resistance until the galloper guns could play on them in turn.
The lead barge was now ablaze, the first gun having fired one of its precious fused shells into the shrouded cargo, and sepoys were soon jumping from the sides. Some could not swim: they thrashed wildly, calling upon Allah until the Godavari claimed them. Some struck for the distant bank, but a dozen sowars put their horses into the river after them. There could be no doubting who would win the race. Others, accepting their fate or hopeful of mercy, made for the nearer side. Sowars waded in to meet them, slinging lances over the shoulder to draw sabres instead, and the shallows soon ran red — brackish though the river was. Some of them, impatient of waiting for the remaining fugitives to leave the barge, swam their horses towards the craft to assail the would-be survivors with the steel point of the ten feet of bamboo. The second barge was now sinking, its gunwales below water, its sepoys, seeing the slaughter of the first, unable to commit themselves to the fate attending whichever course they chose. Those on the third made no attempt at resistance, climbing instead into the water on the cover-side, holding on desperately, doubtless hoping that the barge would somehow drift out of reach of the guns. But it edged instead into the second, which was wallowing midstream. Both guns now turned on it. The first round struck just below the waterline, and the barge’s fate was sealed, if slowly. But the other gun still had one fused shell, and it took only seconds to have the vessel ablaze, forcing the sepoys finally to choose their fate. However, none were to feel the sabre or the lance’s point, for before the most resolute had made a dozen strokes the barge blew up, sending a fountain of matchwood higher than the tallest mathi trees on either bank. On seeing this the sepoys on the fourth barge began throwing down their muskets and jumping into the water. Hervey guessed that the powder was carried on just two barges, this and the third, and he shouted for the galloper guns to play now on the last two, whose sepoys were returning fire briskly but with almost no effect from behind the cover of the gunwales.
The guns were now fiercely hot, despite vigorous sponging, yet still their sowars showed no fear in serving them. Indeed, the jemadar ordered double charges and canister, believing he could just reach the nearer barge. Two discharges put an end to the volleying from behind the gunwales, allowing the sowars to fire with more measure at the hull. The third shot, perhaps finding some weakened part of the clinker-built side, stove in a dozen feet of timber just on the waterline. The barge began to list at once. Those sepoys who had not been hit by canister sprang up in dismay from behind the gunwales, only to begin falling again to the sowars’ carbines. And then the barge, under the weight of the two giant cannon — now exposed as the canvas covers fell away — turned on its side like some great beast of the river, the cannon plunging free of their lashings into the Godavari, and then rolled over completely before disappearing. All attention now turned to the last barge, but Hervey wished to make it a prize: the nizam’s guns would be of incalculable value in the rajah’s service, and the sepoys would surely have intelligence of the nizam’s intentions. But before he could make his orders clear to the jemadar, the sepoys began trying to stave in the timbers, their officers having at least determined that the cannon should be denied to Chintal. Hervey ordered the galloper guns to reopen fire at once with canister, and the sowars with their carbines, to try to prevent the destruction. Guns and carbines worked terrible havoc — men fell almost continuously for a full five minutes — but still the sepoys hacked away with whatever they could find. In another five they were dead or dying to a man, sixty or more of them. But they had done their work, and the barge began to settle in the water. In five minutes it would be gone. Silence now returned to the Godavari. Hervey looked slowly from right to left, up and down the river, along its banks and its shallows. He had seen butchery of this kind before — but never so fervently and efficiently done.