After a brief halt for a meal, Terrington sent on the Dogras to convoy
the wounded to Rashát, the Bakót levies following at midnight with the
transport. He would rely only on his tried fighters for the long
rearguard action which would begin on the morrow, and only end beyond
the Paldri.
But though the struggle of the next few days would mean hardship for
all and death to many, the worst was over with that day's ordeal, on
which had hung the safety of the entire force. Had Terrington been
beaten, every man with him would have been massacred, Rashát would have
fallen within a month, and his name held up to the scorn of the years
to come as of one who had lacked the courage to stand to his post. Yet
his victory had been, under Heaven, but an accident. He knew that well
enough. That fight, the most sanguine for its size in Indian history,
which has coloured the name as it dyed the water of Rashát river, would
have been lost but for the arrival at its crisis of men on whose coming
he had no right to count. It was won indeed, won in its overwhelming
effectiveness by his subtlety, his daring tactics, his personal valour,
but it would have been lost despite all those, despite any devices that
men could have contrived, had not a certain company of the Guides
possessed the splendid training and the undauntable energy of the men
whom Afzul Singh had led.
Yet now he had, thanks to them, the redounding credit of it, who, but
for them, would have borne its enduring shame.
Determined to hold the Gul on the morrow as long as possible,
Terrington halted the Guides on the further side of it, and ordered
them to turn in as soon as they had made a meal, while the Sikhs
prepared defences and furnished pickets for the night. The Guides,
save for their three miles' scurry, had been under fire all the way
from Sar, and had not left a man behind them. Keen soldiers all of
them, they forgot their own part in the day's success, and, when
Terrington went down to inspect their camp, gathered from their
cooking-pots and cheered him tempestuously.
Terrington laid his hand affectionately on Afzul's shoulder.
"You did it," he said gratefully; "you did it!"
The circle about his own camp fire was completed by Walcot and Freddy
Gale, and it was there that Rose Chantry watched the ways of men who
have come out of battle. Walcot, who had fought well and been slightly
wounded in the shoulder, seemed unable to talk enough. Speech gurgled
out of him like rain from a gargoyle. Freddy Gale listened, throwing
in brief descriptive touches, his round merry face convulsed from time
to time with infectious laughter. Terrington, who sat beside her, said
nothing at all, but the keenness of his eyes was softened by a grave
content.
Rose noticed the warmth of his greeting to Gale and his evident
gladness to have a man under him on whose knowledge and judgment he
could depend. Once, when leaning forward across the fire after dinner
to ask Walcot a question, she put her hand unawares on Terrington's,
which was lying on the ground. He did not move, and she took it in so
tight a grip, that, as she settled herself again, he turned his head
and looked smiling into her eyes.
The enemy had been so roughly handled that Mir Khan could not persuade
his men on the morrow to a fresh attack across such an obstacle as the
Gul, and Terrington after holding it till nightfall fell back upon
Rashát.
But before he reached it the Saris were again upon his heels like a
pack of famished wolves, ravenous for blood. During the three days'
march to the foot of the Palári, the fighting never ceased night or
day. In the dark it dwindled to the buzz or the slap of the sniper's
bullet, varied by an attempt to rush a picket; doing only occasional
damage but keeping the whole camp awake, and causing a suppression of
the fires whose warmth was becoming with every hour more essential.
Dawn generally brought an attack on two or three points at once, and
persistent efforts were made during the day to outclimb the British
flanking parties and command the line of march.
Once, when these were successful, Terrington only obtained relief by an
attack upon the centre, threatening the safety of the men above the
valley, but the effort proved so expensive that he was obliged in the
future still further to extend his wings and retire by continuous
echelon up and down the slope of the hills. It was slow work.
Then, too, though his losses were not heavy, the carriage of the
wounded was an increasing labour, and he was finally obliged to
dismount the Lancers and use their beasts for his injured men.
The first fringe of the snow was hailed, for all its augury of
hardship, with a shout of welcome.
As the men's feet slipped in its yielding softness, their eyes followed
the vast white slope that stretched above them till it was lost in the
grayness of the sullen sky. There, close under the heavens, tormented
by winds that powdered the snowflakes into icy points and whirled them
to and fro in furious eddies, lay the road to safety.
There was death in its blinding whiteness, death in its numbing torpor
death in its piercing cold; but beyond was life and wife and honour and
reward.
The sight of the snow drove Mir Khan to more desperate means, for,
without some critical success, beyond the Palári he dared not go, since
his opponents might be able to count on reinforcement, and the pass
close behind him.
But to Terrington the pressure of the enemy now became less serious
than the difficulties of the road. His men soon learnt the value of
snow as a protection, and snow entrenchments were much more rapidly
constructed than stone sangars. But with every march the strength of
his coolies was declining, and they could scarcely carry their reduced
loads. The horses, barely able to keep their footing on the frozen
ground, became at once exhausted when the deep snow was reached, and
had to be killed and eaten. This brought him almost to the end of his
fuel, and left the wounded to be carried by effectives who were already
beginning to feel the strain of constant fighting and the toil of
forcing their way through a foot's depth of snow. Moreover every hour
of ascent brought them into an air perceptibly rarer, and increased
grievously the stress of every added effort.
On the second day they reached the terrible region of the winds, and
for three hours waited helpless in a blast of icy crystals that cut the
face till it bled, and froze the eyelids with the tears that it brought
to them, and made every breath a pain.
The storm struck without warning. The snow ahead seemed suddenly to
rise on end; the next instant the awful gray mist of ice was tearing
past them. For those three hours it was impossible to move or to see.
The air seemed as thick as a river jellied with snow, and even when the
eyes could be opened, the clotted whiteness hid the end of one's arm.
Where the men clung together in frightened and shivering groups, the
wind piled drifts on the lee side up to their necks.
It seemed as though the snows of all the mountains was being swept into
the sea, and yet scarcely a flake fell upon the rear-guard, fighting
some few hundred feet below.
Terrington was alone when it fell, riding along the column, persuading,
encouraging, helping, threatening; lifting, by sheer strength of will,
the tired trail of men higher and higher. He slid off his shaggy
barebacked little pony, turned its tail to the wind, and leant against
it for the warmth which he knew both soon would need. He had an
immense capacity for patience, but it failed him now; and its failure
taught him what otherwise he might have waited long to learn. For
through those long bitter hours it was not of his men that he
thought--his men who had been his only care and love for years--but of
Rose Chantry. Thought of her, crouching frightened in her doolie,
fallen somewhere in the snow, the warmth going surely hour by hour from
her frail shivering little body, the cold fingers of death slowly
closing upon her, and no one by to bring her comfort and help her to be
brave. The thought was agony to him, and by the agony he knew that it
was love. Light, vain, fickle, ignorant, there were reasons enough,
and he knew them, for not even liking her. He did not know, for that
matter, if he did like her. He longed with indescribable solicitude to
see her face again. That was all he knew.
Even the cold that crept numbingly through him could not stifle that
desire. If the storm lasted for six hours no living thing would be
left in the pass. He was not afraid of that. He feared to outlive it
and find her dead.
Yet when the storm ceased as suddenly as it began, he made no search
for her. He was still that much master of himself. Finding a floor of
rock swept bare by the wind, he diverted the line of march across it,
and there, with Clones, inspected all the men as they passed for
frost-bite; and soon had a row of them laid out under blankets and
vigorously rubbed with snow.
The wounded had suffered most; all the worst cases were dead, many were
past help, and none had escaped injury: after them came the baggage
carriers, ill-clad and ill-nourished as they were, nearly all of whom
had paid for the exposure with a frozen foot or finger.
It was right at the end of the transport that Rose's doolie appeared,
and to Terrington's immense relief she thrust out her head from the
curtains as the bearers halted. It was a face fearfully pinched and
cold, but there was a new spirit behind it, for she would not speak of
her own ailings, but insisted upon getting out to rub the hands of the
frozen, till Clones, seeing she was likely to faint from fatigue, put
her back in the doolie.
On that night they camped below the Palári, and the next day it was
crossed by the entire force.
But though the wind spared them, that day was the most trying of the
retreat.
The blazing sun upon the snow after the storm had produced a rapid
increase of snow blindness. Of the English officers Terrington alone
was unaffected, the others all having to be led, Walcot especially
being much disfigured and in great pain.
The blinded men went hand in hand in single file with a leader who
could still see the track to each squad of ten, the skin of their faces
blistered and bleeding, their eyes crimson and inflamed, and tears
trickling continuously from them, to freeze upon their cheeks.
At a height of twelve thousand feet each movement was a struggle, and,
from ceaseless fighting, marching and want of sleep, every nerve and
muscle were at the breaking point. Gale, blind and worn out, but
cheery as ever, facing a fight which he could not see, kept the
rear-guard in splendid shape, and Clones, though blind also and
suffering from frost-bite, continued to feel his way among the wounded.
The faith of all was pinned desperately upon Terrington, and keen the
anxiety about his sight. It was perhaps sheer determination which kept
him as impervious to the glare as to fatigue.
Tired out he was, and knew he was, but he seemed able to hold his
tiredness at arm's length for so long as he was needed.
By evening the last man was clear of the pass; the enemy had not dared
to cross it, so the British force was practically safe from pursuit,
and on the morrow would be dropping down towards the green valleys and
the south. But only a few of the hardier hill-men had energy to kindle
smoking fires of the wet brushwood they were able to collect.
Terrington had gone round the camps to say a cheering word to the men
and see if all that was possible for the frozen and wounded had been
done; and at last, his task ended, turned with foreboding to the green
tent, which Gholam had pitched warily in a crevice of the rocks.
In the supreme effort of that crowning day he had not seen Rose since
the night before, when she had seemed achingly weak and ill.
She was sitting on the mattress, all her rugs piled about her,
shivering. She burst into tears as he knelt down beside her.
"My feet are frozen," she sobbed, "my feet are frozen."
He had her boots off in an instant, and set the lantern on the ground,
searching anxiously for the fatal whitening of the flesh. But though
her feet were absolutely numb the frost-bite had but just begun, and
half an hour's vigorous rubbing took the whiteness out of them; and
then Terrington chafed them gently, and breathed on them, and wrapped
them under his coat to bring the blood back to them as imperceptibly as
possible while Rose sat with hands clenched and face working, smiling
at his tenderness and crying with pain.
But in that torture of recovery she reached her limit of endurance.
The cold had sunk into her soul, and when Gholam brought in the smoky
lukewarm mess, which was all that even his adroitness could contrive in
that white waste she turned her head away from it, saying wearily that
she did not want to eat.
Terrington, with a sense of difficulty beside which the leading of men
was a simple matter, sat down on the mattress beside her and put his
arm supportingly about her shoulders.
"I'm going to feed you," he said.
She tried to meet his mothering with a smile, but as the flap of the
tent lifted with a blast of wind, which flung a spray of snow over
them, she shivered and shrank back, shaking her head.
"It doesn't matter if I eat or not," she said despairingly. "I can't
live another night with the cold. I wished I could die all last night,
it was such dreadful pain. I can't stand it any more."
For answer he drew her a little closer to him.
"God's brought us to the end of our trouble, child," he said.
"To-morrow it will be all going down, down, down, and warmer and warmer
every hour. You've only to make a fight of it just this one night
more--for my sake," he added.
She shook her head despondently, but he thrust his fork into the dish,
and brought a morsel of meat to her mouth, and made her eat it. And
so, coaxing and commanding, he forced a meal upon her, eating one
himself to give her time, and she leant against him with her head upon
his shoulder, faintly happy, but shivering at every blast that pierced
the chinks of the tent.
He rose when she had finished and laid her down on the mattress,
wrapping her up in everything he could find.
"You're not going away?" she murmured apprehensively.
"Only to have another look at the men," he said, tucking the rugs
closer about her.
"You'll come back; promise you'll come back," she pleaded anxiously.
Kneeling down beside her, he bent down and kissed her forehead gently.
"The moment I can," he said.
He tightened the flaps of the tent, and set Gholam Muhammed to pile
snow about the skirts of it. Then he went on to the camp.
He found everything there very much in need of him. The plans he had
made had not been completed. The men, utterly worn out, had flung
themselves down too tired even to care for self-preservation.
Walcot was seriously ill; Gale, Dore, Clones, and the two senior native
officers were all blind, and so were ignorant of what had been left
undone.
Freddy Gale, though he had twice fallen from exhaustion, had directed
personally the issue of rations, and used every chance to cheer his
men; but he missed that sense of their condition, and they the sense of
his control, which can come from sight alone.
They lay in the snow, inert, benumbed, certain victims to that frozen
sleep from which there is no wakening. Only the old soldiers of the
Guides had stretched their blankets, and made any likeness to a bivouac.
Terrington's voice came upon the scene like the call of a bugle. There
was help in it and scorn and energy and command, and, behind if,
unconquerable will and eyes that saw. The men dragged themselves to
their feet, and straightened themselves to match its clear direction.
Order after order rang out, like the voice of a ship's captain
shortening sail, quick, certain, vivid with necessity, but cool as the
dew. The heaps of men became ranks that took shape and moved. Rifles
rose on end, blankets were slung between them, and slowly the crescent
camp came into being, which should offer least resistance to and most
shelter from a storm. The little hospital leanto was enlarged, the
worst cases were brought in and treated, and then laid for warmth one
upon the other at the end of it.
For close on three hours Terrington's labour never ceased for a second,
and the camp lived upon his voice. He did not leave it till he had
seen every man with some covering over him, and some food to eat; not,
indeed, till maternally, he had tucked them all into bed. Then, hoarse
with shouting and drunk with fatigue, he staggered back to the little
green tent.
Rose turned her head as he entered, but the eyes were strange to him.
He kneeled down beside her, dried the snow from his hand, and laid the
back of it upon her cheek. Her skin was gray and mortally cold.
"I'm dying," she whispered.
He felt her hands, which were blue and lifeless, and with no flutter of
a pulse. The air in the little tent was a long way below the
freezing-point, and it was quite evident that she was slowly sinking
into the torpor from which she never could be roused.
He chafed her hands, but no heat came to them; she merely turned from
him with a weary gesture to be left alone. Then he pressed her palms
against the talc of the lantern, but the flickering candle seemed to
give out no warmth. Then, suddenly, a thought struck him with the
fierce hazard of despair.
He gazed at her in doubt for a moment, then he got up, dusted the
flakes of snow from his riding-breeches and drew off his long boots.
Rose turned her head away from him on the pillow with a sigh and closed
her eyes. She was slipping happily away from him into the land of
shadows.
Terrington took off his greatcoat and spread it over her. Then he
lifted the wraps that covered her, and lying down upon the mattress
slowly drew them over himself as well. She turned again, childishly
fretful at being disturbed. Running a finger down the buttons of his
patrol, Terrington raised himself, and taking her in his arms drew her
under him, spreading his body upon hers.
Though he was heated with exertion, it was a long time before any
warmth could melt its way into her chilled flesh. Terrington pressed
his face against hers, first to one cold cheek and then to another,
breathing, as one thaws a window pane, upon her neck. At last, when he
had almost lost hope of saving her, she made a little nestling motion
towards him like a frozen bird before the fire. Then her breath began
to be audible, and she gave long sighs as though to free herself of his
weight upon her.
Terrington's limbs were numb with the intentness of their pressure, and
his arms, folded about her, had fallen asleep. The cold seemed to lie
like a wet sheet over his back.
Presently Rose moved beneath him, a movement of her whole body: her
eyes opened, met his without wonder, and closed again with a sigh of
content. Her arms straightened, and then, loosening limply from the
shoulders, slipped to her sides. She seemed to soften and grow supple
beneath him and her breath came evenly between her lips. She was
asleep.
Terrington raised himself slightly, and so stayed all the night.
The agonies that he suffered from cold, cramp, and the stubborn
struggle with fatigue passed what he had thought possible to human
endurance.
In the gray of the morning she opened her eyes again.
"Nevile!" she exclaimed, as though she had but just parted with him in
a dream.
She had pushed in wonderment her hands against him, and he fell over as
though his arms had been cut off. She stared an instant at his
grotesque efforts to move, then with a sudden passion of enlightenment
seized his useless arms.
"Nevile, Nevile!" she cried, "what have you done for me? You've saved
my life."
He smiled dimly, trying to lift himself upon his elbows, but dropped
back again.
"Have I?" he said.
Her left arm went like a snake about his shoulder, and her face came
down quick and close to his.
"Why did you do it?" she asked almost angrily.
"I love you, dear," he said.