A STRAY SHOT.
----A barren strand,
A petty fortress and a dubious hand----
The expedition, though in no way distinguishable from twenty others, did
not prove such a mere promenade as Sutton had anticipated. The whole
country-side was in a nasty, excitable mood. The news of Blunt's
injudicious proceedings had spread far and wide, and the prospect of
endangered rights turned the wavering scale with wild clans, whose
loyalty at the best of times was anything but proof against a seeming
danger or a fancied wrong.
Every landholder whose title Blunt had impugned proved a centre of
disaffection; and even where there was no reason for hostility the
example of unruliness was infectious. Many a stalwart hillsman, coerced
for years into uncongenial tranquillity, felt the old pulses throb
within him, and his heart beating high at the prospect of a fight;
unearthed some primitive weapon--sword or matchlock or lance--from its
hiding-place beneath the floor of his hut, mounted on a wiry pony and
made his way over the mountains to the scene of action. Several more
outrages, of which the District officers knew the significance too well,
had already been reported. Everything predicted a storm, and a pretty
severe one.
Indian life is like a strange, dark sea, full of invisible currents,
strange tides, unsuspected and unexplained influences. The waters, which
look so smooth and lifeless, may be stealing silently along and hurrying
the hapless vessel to its doom. Magnetic streams, inappreciable to the
nicest scrutiny, pour this way or that and disturb the most accurate
calculations. Storms gather and lower and burst when all looks most
serene; a little cloud rises in the quarter where danger is least
expected, and in a few minutes the ship is tossing, a crushed and
staggering wreck, in the midst of a tornado.
Just before the great outbreak of 1857 the ruler of India had occasion
to remark on the absolute tranquillity of the Empire and on the peaceful
prospects of a reign which stood, as the facts proved, on the very
crisis of its fate, and whose annals were presently to be written in
characters of blood. Men who live in such a world as this become
sensitive to its symptoms, and adept at interpreting them. The
magistrates knew well enough--they could scarcely have said why--that
mischief was at work. Police officers on remote stations wrote uneasily
and hinted at the advisability of reinforcements. Strange, weird beings,
whose unkempt locks and half-crazy visages bespoke for them the
_prestige_ of especial sanctity, thronged about the bazaars, the wells,
the spreading tree where travellers halted for rest and talk. A famous
Fakir went through the District haranguing excited audiences on the
kindred duties of piety and rebellion against an impious ruler. Then the
first drops of the storm began to fall. One morning the collector of a
neighbouring town was sitting in his verandah; in front a pair of
saddled horses were being led up and down; by his side was a tea-table,
with letters, business papers and the frugal repast which ushers in the
Indian official's day. At his feet two little children sat at play. From
inside a lady's voice cried that she would be ready for a start in two
minutes. Presently an animated bundle of rags, hair and dirt, came
grovelling up with a petition. The misery of the creature was its
passport, and the sentry who stood by, at a signal from the officer, let
it pass. Then came a whining, rambling, unintelligible story of
grievance; and then, as the listener's eye for a moment wandered from
the speaker, a sudden rush--the flash of a concealed dagger--a groan--a
heavy fall, and the Englishman lay dead on the ground with a cruel
Pathan knife-wound through his heart. The assassin stood fiercely at
bar, exulting in his accomplished vow to slay a 'Feringhee,' and trying
his best to stab the sentry who approached him. They cut him down as he
stood; and before noon that day rumour had whispered in a hundred
villages that Allah's will had been done, and that the Jehad, or Sacred
War, was forthwith to commence.
To strike quickly, effectually, and with an air of absolute confidence
in the result, is in such cases the safest policy. A symptom of
hesitation, an hour's delay, would ensure disaster. The spark, which one
moment might be stamped under foot, the next would be a consuming fire,
forbidding all approach.
Sutton's business was, he well understood, to teach these lawless
spirits (which no conqueror has ever yet succeeded in taming) a stern
lesson of obedience, and to teach it them quickly, sharply, and in the
mode most likely to impress the popular imagination. If all went well
the business would be over in a week, and the refractory clansmen our
good friends and subjects till temper, forgetfulness, or an official
blunder produced another outburst. If things went ill--but this is a
contingency upon which the administrators of British India cannot afford
to calculate and which Sutton's temperament and good fortune alike had
long accustomed him to ignore.
When he rode into the camp he found everything in readiness and
everybody in the highest spirits. Boldero had impressed a fine array of
camels and bullock-carts, and had organised a commissariat train more
than sufficient for the wants of the expedition. The mule battery had
arrived in perfect order. The little knot of officers who were to join
the expedition gave a hearty welcome to a leader whose very presence
seemed to them the best guarantee of success. In a minute the news
spread through the camp that the 'Colonel Sahib' had arrived, and the
men, whom he had led so often to victory, glowed at the thought that the
well-loved and well-trusted leader was once again in the midst of them
and that something stirring was certainly at hand. The little force was
to encamp that night at the bottom of the pass along which for the next
two days their route would lie; then they would come to a high level
table-land, where the enemy was (so the scouts said) entrenched, and
where the serious part of the business might be expected to begin.
Occasions such as these were the parts of Sutton's life in which
hitherto he had felt himself most at home, and which he had, in fact,
enjoyed the most keenly. He had been very successful, and had, he knew,
been not undeserving of success. This was the thing in life which he
could do pre-eminently well, and the doing it gave him a thrill of
pleasure, which lasted all through the duller parts of his existence.
Yet now things seemed changed to him. He had looked forward to this
expedition with enthusiasm; it had taken in every way the shape which he
wished; and now, when the hour was come, it had brought no sense of
pleasure with it. Sutton was startled at his own lack of zeal. The lads
who were having their first apprenticeship in actual soldiering, were,
he felt, far more soldier-like about it than he was. He could not sleep
that night, and strolled about the camp amid all the old accustomed
sights and sounds; the long array of human sleeping forms, each one
motionless and corpse-like; the lines of tethered horses; the sentinels
pacing stolidly up and down and challenging the passer-by in the still,
clear air; the bullocks encamped by their carts, serenely chewing
through the peaceful hours undisturbed by the thought of pokes and
shoves which awaited them on the morrow. It was all very familiar, and
brought back many a like occasion of former years; and yet there was,
Sutton knew, a difference: the world was no longer the same; a new
current of thought and feeling had set in and disturbed all the old
associations. His afternoon ride had metamorphosed his entire being.
Maud's sweet impassioned air as she had wished him farewell; her
serious, soft, pathetic tones; her last look as she turned to go, the
sort of earnest rapture which her eyes bespoke; the unspoken pledge
which had been exchanged between them; these were the matters which
preoccupied his thoughts and left but scant room in them for the
business which he had in hand. He found himself, accordingly,
uninterested, unenthusiastic, and, for the first time in his life,
completely sceptical as to the usefulness of his employment. Every man,
philosophers tell us, is seized at some period of his career with a
misgiving as to whether his life-task is not a delusion. Is it worth the
long, painful endeavour, the patient waiting, the resolute hopefulness
which a successful career demands? Life seems, as it did to the sailors
of Ulysses, a wearisome, endless affair,
For ever climbing up the climbing wave;
Is it certain that the end for which we struggle so earnestly is good
for ourselves or for any one? Sutton had such a mood just now strong
upon him. He had been all his life soldiering; a hundred time-honoured
phrases had declared it the finest profession in the world; but what did
it come to? To be chasing a pack of lawless savages about a country
scarcely less savage than themselves, and inflicting a chastisement
which no one supposed would be more than temporarily effectual. To drill
a handful of freebooters into something sufficiently like discipline to
render them effectual as an instrument of destruction; to march up a
pass and stamp out the first germs of civilised life by burning a few
wretched crops and crumbling hovels; to fire at an enemy always well out
of reach, and then march down again; what was there in all this to
deserve the thought, the devotion, the sacrifice of life itself, which
men so freely gave in its pursuit? Had not life something better worth
living for than this? Were not the civilians right who sneered at
soldiering as a meet occupation for brainless heads and hands for which,
if not kept thus wholesomely employed, Satan was sure to find some less
desirable occupation? Thus it came to pass that of all the men who
marched in the expedition its leader was the one who was least in love
with it.
Two days later Sutton had warmed into his work and was in better
spirits. The march had been delightful. The splendid military road,
which coiled in and out among the folds of the mountain, robbed the
journey alike of anxiety and fatigue. Nothing gives a pleasanter sense
of power and triumph over nature than these great engineering exploits.
You canter along a splendid road with easy gradients, a scarcely
perceptible ascent; there is a precipice above, a precipice below, and
no spot anywhere on which, till the hand of science came to make it, a
human foot could rest. Every now and then a distant vista reminds you
that you are climbing some of the wildest and steepest hill sides in the
world. The mountaineers may well cower and fly before a foe who begins
with so impressive an achievement, and who cuts his way--resistless as
fate itself--across the rocky brow of barriers which it seems half-mad,
half-impious to try to scale.
The expedition, Sutton found, was in every way complete. His own
regiment was always ready to march at twenty minutes' notice, and the
General at Dustypore seemed to have been equally well prepared. The air,
despite the hot sun, was fresh and exhilarating; the men were in the
very mood for brilliant service. Besides, a peasant who had just been
brought in from the district told them that, ten miles across the plain
which now stretched away in gentle undulations before them, the enemy
was entrenched in strength and intended to show fight. The village had
been fortified, the man said, with a wall of earth and stones, and the
fighters would be found behind it.
'Then, gentlemen,' cried Sutton, who was standing with a knot of
officers at his tent door when the news arrived, 'I propose that we
attack them to-night. If we let them have a day to do it in, these
scoundrels will give us the slip.'
In half an hour the whole force was on the march. The day was
delightfully fresh; the mountain-mists gathered overhead and formed a
welcome shelter from the blazing sky. Sutton had his troopers on either
flank; then came the tiny battery, looking more like playthings than the
grim realities the Armstrongs proved; in the midst of a long line of
Native Infantry. The men marched with a will and with the exciting
consciousness that in the afternoon there was to be a fight. At noon,
when there was a halt to rest the force, the outline of the village wall
might be clearly seen, and those who had telescopes could make out an
occasional figure creeping stealthily about. There was a little rising
ground some half-mile from the village, and here Sutton determined to
establish his battery. The tiny telescope-like tubes soon did their
work, and the main gate of the village fell inwards with a crash; the
mud wall crumbled and fell wherever it was touched, and a thick cloud of
dust showed where each ball had lodged. In ten minutes the village was
in flames, and Sutton's little army was advancing on it at a run.
Presently they got within musket-shot, and bullet after bullet came
singing through the air. Sutton was riding, with a trumpeter on the
right, half-a-dozen yards in advance of his men; the ground, though firm
and safe, grew rougher as they neared the village; and the troops' line
was somewhat broken. By this time they could make out the mud wall which
had been thrown up in front of the village and measure the paces between
it and them. It was a mere nothing, but the men were going at it faster
than they should. Two horses were struck and fell heavily just as their
riders were pulling them together for the jump. Half-a-dozen more
refused: then came the usual scene of rearing, plunging, and dismounted
men. There was an instant's check, but only an instant's, for Sutton and
the trumpeter were over, and the first dozen men who followed them had
knocked the wall level with the ground. Sutton had speedily disposed of
two of the hillsmen, who fired their pistols in his face and made at him
with their swords; and had galloped up to help the trumpeter, who was
having a hard time of it with a Sawar, mounted on a nimble little horse
and evidently a competent and practised swordsman. The man turned on his
noble antagonist and made a cut which left a deep dent on Sutton's
sword-handle. The native had, however, met with more than his match. The
others got over just in time to see Sutton cut him down, and his horse
gallop wildly off with an empty saddle. The men gave a shout and
galloped forward. Then some one from a neighbouring window took a lucky
shot. Sutton was at the moment giving an order and pointing with his
sword in the direction indicated. His sword flew out of his hand, his
arm fell powerless, and his horse, rearing up, fell back upon him. His
native aide-de-camp dragged him out from under the horse, which was
lying shot through the heart across him. Half-a-dozen men carried him to
the rear. Ten minutes later, when the village had been cleared and the
troop returned from the pursuit, they found him lying in a crimson pool,
insensible, with a broken arm and a bullet-wound in his side, the red
stream from which the surgeon, kneeling beside him, was endeavouring in
vain to staunch.