protests of their empty stomachs. The Colonel did his best to remedy the
default of lining as soon as it was borne in upon him that the affair
would not begin at once, and so well did he succeed that the coffee was
just ready when—the men moved off, their Band leading. Even then there
had been a mistake in time, and the Fore and Aft came out into the
valley ten minutes before the proper hour. Their Band wheeled to the
right after reaching the open, and retired behind a little rocky knoll
still playing while the regiment went past.
It was not a pleasant sight that opened on the uninstructed view, for
the lower end of the valley appeared to be filled by an army in
position—real and actual regiments attired in red coats, and—of this
there was no doubt—firing Martini-Henry bullets which cut up the ground
a hundred yards in front of the leading company. Over that pock-marked
ground the regiment had to pass, and it opened the ball with a general
and profound courtesy to the piping pickets; ducking in perfect time, as
though it had been brazed on a rod. Being half-capable of thinking for
itself, it fired a volley by the simple process of pitching its rifle
into its shoulder and pulling the trigger. The bullets may have
accounted for some of the watchers on the hillside, but they certainly
did not affect the mass of enemy in front, while the noise of the rifles
drowned any orders that might have been given.
‘Good God!’ said the Brigadier, sitting on the rock high above all.
‘That regiment has spoilt the whole show. Hurry up the others, and let
the screw-guns get off.’
But the screw-guns, in working round the heights, had stumbled upon a
wasp’s nest of a small mud fort which they incontinently shelled at
eight hundred yards, to the huge discomfort of the occupants, who were
unaccustomed to weapons of such devilish precision.
The Fore and Aft continued to go forward, but with shortened stride.
Where were the other regiments, and why did these niggers use Martinis?
They took open order instinctively, lying down and firing at random,
rushing a few paces forward and lying down again, according to the
regulations. Once in this formation, each man felt himself desperately
alone, and edged in towards his fellow for comfort’s sake.
Then the crack of his neighbour’s rifle at his ear led him to fire as
rapidly as he could—again for the sake of the comfort of the noise. The
reward was not long delayed. Five volleys plunged the files in banked
smoke impenetrable to the eye, and the bullets began to take ground
twenty or thirty yards in front of the firers, as the weight of the
bayonet dragged down and to the right arms wearied with holding the kick
of the leaping Martini. The Company Commanders peered helplessly through
the smoke, the more nervous mechanically trying to fan it away with
their helmets.
‘High and to the left!’ bawled a Captain till he was hoarse. ‘No good!
Cease firing, and let it drift away a bit.’
Three and four times the bugles shrieked the order, and when it was
obeyed the Fore and Aft looked that their foe should be lying before
them in mown swaths of men. A light wind drove the smoke to leeward, and
showed the enemy still in position and apparently unaffected. A quarter
of a ton of lead had been buried a furlong in front of them, as the
ragged earth attested.
That was not demoralising to the Afghans, who have not European nerves.
They were waiting for the mad riot to die down, and were firing quietly
into the heart of the smoke. A private of the Fore and Aft spun up his
company shrieking with agony, another was kicking the earth and gasping,
and a third, ripped through the lower intestines by a jagged bullet, was
calling aloud on his comrades to put him out of his pain. These were the
casualties, and they were not soothing to hear or see. The smoke cleared
to a dull haze.
Then the foe began to shout with a great shouting, and a mass—a black
mass—detached itself from the main body, and rolled over the ground at
horrid speed. It was composed of, perhaps, three hundred men, who would
shout and fire and slash if the rush of their fifty comrades who were
determined to die carried home. The fifty were Ghazis, half-maddened
with drugs and wholly mad with religious fanaticism. When they rushed
the British fire ceased, and in the lull the order was given to close
ranks and meet them with the bayonet.
Any one who knew the business could have told the Fore and Aft that the
only way of dealing with a Ghazi rush is by volleys at long ranges;
because a man who means to die, who desires to die, who will gain heaven
by dying, must, in nine cases out of ten, kill a man who has a lingering
prejudice in favour of life. Where they should have closed and gone
forward, the Fore and Aft opened out and skirmished, and where they
should have opened out and fired, they closed and waited.
A man dragged from his blankets half awake and unfed is never in a
pleasant frame of mind. Nor does his happiness increase when he watches
the whites of the eyes of three hundred six-foot fiends upon whose
beards the foam is lying, upon whose tongues is a roar of wrath, and in
whose hands are yard-long knives.
The Fore and Aft heard the Gurkha bugles bringing that regiment forward
at the double, while the neighing of the Highland pipes came from the
left. They strove to stay where they were, though the bayonets wavered
down the line like the oars of a ragged boat. Then they felt body to
body the amazing physical strength of their foes; a shriek of pain ended
the rush, and the knives fell amid scenes not to be told. The men
clubbed together and smote blindly—as often as not at their own fellows.
Their front crumpled like paper, and the fifty Ghazis passed on; their
backers, now drunk with success, fighting as madly as they.
Then the rear-ranks were bidden to close up, and the subalterns dashed
into the stew—alone. For the rear-rank had heard the clamour in front,
the yells and the howls of pain, and had seen the dark stale blood that
makes afraid. They were not going to stay. It was the rushing of the
camps over again. Let their officers go to Hell, if they chose; they
would get away from the knives.
‘Come on!’ shrieked the subalterns, and their men, cursing them, drew
back, each closing into his neighbour and wheeling round.
Charteris and Devlin, subalterns of the last company, faced their death
alone in the belief that their men would follow.
‘You’ve killed me, you cowards,’ sobbed Devlin and dropped, cut from the
shoulder-strap to the centre of the chest, and a fresh detachment of his
men retreating, always retreating, trampled him under foot as they made
for the pass whence they had emerged.
I kissed her in the kitchen and I kissed her in the hall.
Child’un, child’un, follow me!
Oh Golly, said the cook, is he gwine to kiss us all?
Halla—Halla—Halla—Hallelujah!
The Gurkhas were pouring through the left gorge and over the heights at
the double to the invitation of their Regimental Quick-step. The black
rocks were crowned with dark green spiders as the bugles gave tongue
jubilantly:—
In the morning! In the morning _by_ the bright light!
When Gabriel blows his trumpet in the morning!
The Gurkha rear-companies tripped and blundered over loose stones. The
front-files halted for a moment to take stock of the valley and to
settle stray boot-laces. Then a happy little sigh of contentment soughed
down the ranks, and it was as though the land smiled, for behold there
below was the enemy, and it was to meet them that the Gurkhas had
doubled so hastily. There was much enemy. There would be amusement. The
little men hitched their _kukris_ well to hand, and gaped expectantly at
their officers as terriers grin ere the stone is cast for them to fetch.
The Gurkhas’ ground sloped downward to the valley, and they enjoyed a
fair view of the proceedings. They sat upon the boulders to watch, for
their officers were not going to waste their wind in assisting to
repulse a Ghazi rush more than half a mile away. Let the white men look
to their own front.
‘Hi! yi!’ said the Subadar-Major, who was sweating profusely. ‘Dam fools
yonder, stand close order! This is no time for close order, it is the
time for volleys. Ugh!’
Horrified, amused, and indignant, the Gurkhas beheld the retirement of
the Fore and Aft with a running chorus of oaths and commentaries.
‘They run! The white men run! Colonel Sahib, may _we_ also do a little
running?’ murmured Runbir Thappa, the Senior Jemadar.
But the Colonel would have none of it. ‘Let the beggars be cut up a
little,’ said he wrathfully. ‘’Serves ’em right. They’ll be prodded into
facing round in a minute.’ He looked through his field-glasses, and
caught the glint of an officer’s sword.
‘Beating ’em with the flat—damned conscripts! How the Ghazis are walking
into them!’ said he.
The Fore and Aft, heading back, bore with them their officers. The
narrowness of the pass forced the mob into solid formation, and the
rear-rank delivered some sort of a wavering volley. The Ghazis drew off,
for they did not know what reserves the gorge might hide. Moreover, it
was never wise to chase white men too far. They returned as wolves
return to cover, satisfied with the slaughter that they had done, and
only stopping to slash at the wounded on the ground. A quarter of a mile
had the Fore and Aft retreated, and now, jammed in the pass, was
quivering with pain, shaken and demoralised with fear, while the
officers, maddened beyond control, smote the men with the hilts and the
flats of their swords.
‘Get back! Get back, you cowards—you women! Right about face—column of
companies, form—you hounds!’ shouted the Colonel, and the subalterns
swore aloud. But the Regiment wanted to go—to go anywhere out of the
range of those merciless knives. It swayed to and fro irresolutely with
shouts and outcries, while from the right the Gurkhas dropped volley
after volley of cripple-stopper Snider bullets at long range into the
mob of the Ghazis returning to their own troops.
The Fore and Aft Band, though protected from direct fire by the rocky
knoll under which it had sat down, fled at the first rush. Jakin and Lew
would have fled also, but their short legs left them fifty yards in the
rear, and by the time the Band had mixed with the regiment, they were
painfully aware that they would have to close in alone and unsupported.
‘Get back to that rock,’ gasped Jakin. ‘They won’t see us there.’
And they returned to the scattered instruments of the Band, their hearts
nearly bursting their ribs.
‘Here’s a nice show for _us_,’ said Jakin, throwing himself full length
on the ground. ‘A bloomin’ fine show for British Infantry! Oh, the
devils! They’ve gone an’ left us alone here! Wot’ll we do?’
Lew took possession of a cast-off water bottle, which naturally was full
of canteen rum, and drank till he coughed again.
‘Drink,’ said he shortly. ‘They’ll come back in a minute or two—you
see.’
Jakin drank, but there was no sign of the regiment’s return. They could
hear a dull clamour from the head of the valley of retreat, and saw the
Ghazis slink back, quickening their pace as the Gurkhas fired at them.
‘We’re all that’s left of the Band, an’ we’ll be cut up as sure as
death,’ said Jakin.
‘I’ll die game, then,’ said Lew thickly, fumbling with his tiny
drummer’s sword. The drink was working on his brain as it was on
Jakin’s.
‘’Old on! I know something better than fightin’,’ said Jakin, ‘stung by
the splendour of a sudden thought’ due chiefly to rum. ‘Tip our bloomin’
cowards yonder the word to come back. The Paythan beggars are well away.
Come on, Lew! We won’t get hurt. Take the fife an’ give me the drum! The
Old Step for all your bloomin’ guts are worth! There’s a few of our men
coming back now. Stand up, ye drunken little defaulter. By your
right—quick march!’
He slipped the drum-sling over his shoulder, thrust the fife into Lew’s
hand, and the two boys marched out of the cover of the rock into the
open, making a hideous hash of the first bars of the ‘British
Grenadiers.’
As Lew had said, a few of the Fore and Aft were coming back sullenly and
shamefacedly under the stimulus of blows and abuse; their red coats
shone at the head of the valley, and behind them were wavering bayonets.
But between this shattered line and the enemy, who with Afghan suspicion
feared that the hasty retreat meant an ambush, and had not moved
therefore, lay half a mile of level ground dotted only by the wounded.
The tune settled into full swing and the boys kept shoulder to shoulder,
Jakin banging the drum as one possessed. The one fife made a thin and
pitiful squeaking, but the tune carried far, even to the Gurkhas.
‘Come on, you dogs!’ muttered Jakin to himself. ‘Are we to play
forhever?’ Lew was staring straight in front of him and marching more
stiffly than ever he had done on parade.
And in bitter mockery of the distant mob, the old tune of the Old Line
shrilled and rattled:—
Some talk of Alexander,
And some of Hercules;
Of Hector and Lysander,
And such great names as these!
There was a far-off clapping of hands from the Gurkhas, and a roar from
the Highlanders in the distance, but never a shot was fired by British
or Afghan. The two little red dots moved forward in the open parallel to
the enemy’s front.
But of all the world’s great heroes
There’s none that can compare,
With a tow-row-row-row-row-row,
To the British Grenadier!
The men of the Fore and Aft were gathering thick at the entrance to the
plain. The Brigadier on the heights far above was speechless with rage.
Still no movement from the enemy. The day stayed to watch the children.
Jakin halted and beat the long roll of the Assembly, while the fife
squealed despairingly.
‘Right about face! Hold up, Lew, you’re drunk,’ said Jakin. They wheeled
and marched back:—
Those heroes of antiquity
Ne’er saw a cannon-ball,
Nor knew the force o’ powder,
‘Here they come!’ said Jakin. ‘Go on, Lew’:—
To scare their foes withal!
The Fore and Aft were pouring out of the valley. What officers had said
to men in that time of shame and humiliation will never be known; for
neither officers nor men speak of it now.
‘They are coming anew!’ shouted a priest among the Afghans. ‘Do not kill
the boys! Take them alive, and they shall be of our faith.’
But the first volley had been fired, and Lew dropped on his face. Jakin
stood for a minute, spun round and collapsed, as the Fore and Aft came
forward, the curses of their officers in their ears, and in their hearts
the shame of open shame.
Half the men had seen the drummers die, and they made no sign. They did
not even shout. They doubled out straight across the plain in open
order, and they did not fire.
‘This,’ said the Colonel of Gurkhas, softly, ‘is the real attack, as it
should have been delivered. Come on, my children.’
‘Ulu-lu-lu-lu!’ squealed the Gurkhas, and came down with a joyful
clicking of _kukris_—those vicious Gurkha knives.
On the right there was no rush. The Highlanders, cannily commending
their souls to God (for it matters as much to a dead man whether he has
been shot in a Border scuffle or at Waterloo), opened out and fired
according to their custom, that is to say, without heat and without
intervals, while the screw-guns, having disposed of the impertinent mud
fort aforementioned, dropped shell after shell into the clusters round
the flickering green standards on the heights.
‘Charrging is an unfortunate necessity,’ murmured the Colour-Sergeant of
the right company of the Highlanders. ‘It makes the men sweer so, but I
am thinkin’ that it will come to a charrge if these black devils stand
much longer. Stewarrt, man, you’re firing into the eye of the sun, and
he’ll not take any harm for Government ammuneetion. A foot lower and a
great deal slower! What are the English doing? They’re very quiet there
in the centre. Running again?’
The English were not running. They were hacking and hewing and stabbing,
for though one white man is seldom physically a match for an Afghan in a
sheepskin or wadded coat, yet, through the pressure of many white men
behind, and a certain thirst for revenge in his heart, he becomes
capable of doing much with both ends of his rifle. The Fore and Aft held
their fire till one bullet could drive through five or six men, and the
front of the Afghan force gave on the volley. They then selected their
men, and slew them with deep gasps and short hacking coughs, and
groanings of leather belts against strained bodies, and realised for the
first time that an Afghan attacked is far less formidable than an Afghan
attacking: which fact old soldiers might have told them.
But they had no old soldiers in their ranks.
The Gurkhas’ stall at the bazar was the noisiest, for the men were
engaged—to a nasty noise as of beef being cut on the block—with the
_kukri_, which they preferred to the bayonet; well knowing how the
Afghan hates the half-moon blade.
As the Afghans wavered, the green standards on the mountain moved down
to assist them in a last rally. This was unwise. The Lancers chafing in
the right gorge had thrice despatched their only subaltern as galloper
to report on the progress of affairs. On the third occasion he returned,
with a bullet-graze on his knee, swearing strange oaths in Hindustani,
and saying that all things were ready. So that Squadron swung round the
right of the Highlanders with a wicked whistling of wind in the pennons
of its lances, and fell upon the remnant just when, according to all the
rules of war, it should have waited for the foe to show more signs of
wavering.
But it was a dainty charge, deftly delivered, and it ended by the
Cavalry finding itself at the head of the pass by which the Afghans
intended to retreat; and down the track that the lances had made
streamed two companies of the Highlanders, which was never intended by
the Brigadier. The new development was successful. It detached the enemy
from his base as a sponge is torn from a rock, and left him ringed about
with fire in that pitiless plain. And as a sponge is chased round the
bath-tub by the hand of the bather, so were the Afghans chased till they
broke into little detachments much more difficult to dispose of than
large masses.
‘See!’ quoth the Brigadier. ‘Everything has come as I arranged. We’ve
cut their base, and now we’ll bucket ’em to pieces.’
A direct hammering was all that the Brigadier had dared to hope for,
considering the size of the force at his disposal; but men who stand or
fall by the errors of their opponents may be forgiven for turning Chance
into Design. The bucketing went forward merrily. The Afghan forces were
upon the run—the run of wearied wolves who snarl and bite over their
shoulders. The red lances dipped by twos and threes, and, with a shriek,
up rose the lance-butt, like a spar on a stormy sea, as the trooper
cantering forward cleared his point. The Lancers kept between their prey
and the steep hills, for all who could were trying to escape from the
valley of death. The Highlanders gave the fugitives two hundred yards’
law, and then brought them down, gasping and choking, ere they could
reach the protection of the boulders above. The Gurkhas followed suit;
but the Fore and Aft were killing on their own account, for they had
penned a mass of men between their bayonets and a wall of rock, and the
flash of the rifles was lighting the wadded coats.
‘We cannot hold them, Captain Sahib!’ panted a Ressaldar of Lancers.
‘Let us try the carbine. The lance is good, but it wastes time.’
They tried the carbine, and still the enemy melted away—fled up the
hills by hundreds when there were only twenty bullets to stop them. On
the heights the screw-guns ceased firing—they had run out of
ammunition—and the Brigadier groaned, for the musketry fire could not
sufficiently smash the retreat. Long before the last volleys were fired
the doolies were out in force looking for the wounded. The battle was
over, and, but for want of fresh troops, the Afghans would have been
wiped off the earth. As it was they counted their dead by hundreds, and
nowhere were the dead thicker than in the track of the Fore and Aft.
But the Regiment did not cheer with the Highlanders, nor did they dance
uncouth dances with the Gurkhas among the dead. They looked under their
brows at the Colonel as they leaned upon their rifles and panted.
‘Get back to camp, you. Haven’t you disgraced yourself enough for one
day! Go and look to the wounded. It’s all you’re fit for,’ said the
Colonel. Yet for the past hour the Fore and Aft had been doing all that
mortal commander could expect. They had lost heavily because they did
not know how to set about their business with proper skill, but they had
borne themselves gallantly, and this was their reward.
A young and sprightly Colour-Sergeant, who had begun to imagine himself
a hero, offered his water bottle to a Highlander, whose tongue was black
with thirst. ‘I drink with no cowards,’ answered the youngster huskily,
and, turning to a Gurkha, said, ‘Hya, Johnny! Drink water got it?’ The
Gurkha grinned and passed his bottle. The Fore and Aft said no word.
They went back to camp when the field of strife had been a little mopped
up and made presentable, and the Brigadier, who saw himself a Knight in
three months, was the only soul who was complimentary to them. The
Colonel was heart-broken, and the officers were savage and sullen.
‘Well,’ said the Brigadier, ‘they are young troops of course, and it was
not unnatural that they should retire in disorder for a bit.’
‘Oh, my only Aunt Maria!’ murmured a junior Staff Officer. ‘Retire in
disorder! It was a bally run!’
‘But they came again, as we all know,’ cooed the Brigadier, the
Colonel’s ashy-white face before him, ‘and they behaved as well as could
possibly be expected. Behaved beautifully, indeed. I was watching them.
It’s not a matter to take to heart, Colonel. As some German General said
of his men, they wanted to be shooted over a little, that was all.’ To
himself he said—‘Now they’re blooded I can give ’em responsible work.
It’s as well that they got what they did. ’Teach ’em more than
half-a-dozen rifle flirtations, that will—later—run alone and bite. Poor
old Colonel, though.’
All that afternoon the heliograph winked and flickered on the hills,
striving to tell the good news to a mountain forty miles away. And in
the evening there arrived, dusty, sweating, and sore, a misguided
Correspondent who had gone out to assist at a trumpery village-burning,
and who had read off the message from afar, cursing his luck the while.
‘Let’s have the details somehow—as full as ever you can, please. It’s
the first time I’ve ever been left this campaign,’ said the
Correspondent to the Brigadier, and the Brigadier, nothing loath, told
him how an Army of Communication had been crumpled up, destroyed, and
all but annihilated by the craft, strategy, wisdom, and foresight of the
Brigadier.
But some say, and among these be the Gurkhas who watched on the
hillside, that that battle was won by Jakin and Lew, whose little bodies
were borne up just in time to fit two gaps at the head of the big
ditch-grave for the dead under the heights of Jagai.
THE END
_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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