AT JELLALABAD.
'Well, Colville, how do you like India from what you have seen of
it?' asked Colonel Spatterdash, as he sat smoking in his shirt and
pyjamas, for, though the month was March, the solar heat was already
considerable in that part of Afghanistan, and quite disagreeable by
eight in the morning.
'I don't like it at all,' replied Colville; 'besides, I have been in
India before, and you forget, colonel, that this is not India, but
rather beyond it.'
'True, I am not likely to forget that, when the rocks are bristling
with Afghan juzails! But, if you don't like it, what the deuce
brought you out now?'
'To have a new sensation, to see a little more of the world again,'
said Colville, evasively, as he was not disposed to tell his
thoughtless listeners--some four or five officers--assembled for
tiffin (_i.e._, lunch) about his romance, and the temporary loss of
Mary Wellwood.
'A new sensation!' exclaimed Algy Redhaven, a handsome young captain
of the 10th Hussars, who had just entered the bungalow; 'you are
likely to have it soon enough. Have you heard the news that has just
come in from the front, colonel?' he added to Spatterdash.
'No--what the devil is up?' growled the old field-officer.
'Fresh complications are likely at Cabul--the Ameer Shere Ali has
gone to visit the Russian general at Tashkend.'
'Whew!' whistled old Spatterdash; 'that will likely precipitate
matters. I always thought the invasion of British India by Russia
would be as practicable a few years hence as that of Italy by
Austria, and now, by Jove, we seem close upon it.'
And since the date we write of the Russians have pushed on to Merv in
Turkomania!
The group of officers who were invited to the colonel's table were
all happy and heedless young fellows belonging to Sir Samuel Browne's
column, and high in anticipation of a protracted 'shindy' with the
Afghans, as a force was being concentrated at Jellalabad.
A couple were on the staff, like Colville; one--Redhaven--belonged to
the Royal Hussars; two others to a native infantry regiment; all were
somewhat airily attired, and, till tiffin made its appearance, all
were smoking cheroots so industriously that clouds of their pale
smoke curled among the rough rafters and straw roof of the bungalow.
Jellalabad, where the fortune of war had then cast them, the winter
residence of the Cabul monarchs since the consolidation of the
Dooranee Empire, is situated in an extensive valley of considerable
beauty and fertility, eight-and-twenty miles long by about four
broad, and the town had before this been rendered memorable by the
heroic stand which Sir Robert Sale, with a handful of British
soldiers, made in it against the Afghans some forty years before.
In importance it was originally only next to Cabul and Candahar, but
its fortifications had been completely destroyed by General Pollock
after the war that ended in 1842. Like all Afghan cities of note, it
had its Balla Hissar, half palace and half citadel, with a poor
population estimated at from three to ten thousand.
Many streams fertilise its valley--namely, the Cabul River, which
flows near the walls; the Surkh Rud, or Red River, and the Kara Su,
or Black River, while around it are numerous castles, and picturesque
villages, and groups of forest trees, though an arid desert spreads
in its immediate vicinity.
Nearly four months had elapsed since Leslie Colville had parted from
Mary Wellwood, and already as many ages seemed to have elapsed since
the few brief days of reunion they had spent together at Grosvenor
Square; and now he knew that many more months must elapse, must be
faced and endured, ere he could hope to turn his steps towards
Europe; and even while sitting there, among these bantering and
somewhat noisy fellows, he looked around him as one in a dream, whose
thoughts were far away, while Mary's soft, sad features came vividly
before him in memory and in their beauty, though the latter, as some
old poet says,
'Is in no face, but in the lover's mind.'
'How silent you are, Colville!' exclaimed old Spatterdash,
relinquishing the mouthpiece of his hookah for a moment. 'Gad, I
believe the fellow's in love.'
So full were his thoughts of Mary at that precise moment that he
almost coloured as if they had been read by the colonel, who
continued, in a tone of banter,
'With you, I suppose, it is,
"----to bid me not to love
Is to forbid my pulse to move,
My beard to grow, my ears to prick up;
Or, when I'm in the mood, to hiccup."
Is it so? Well, anyway, stick to the _brandy pawnee_ till tiffin
comes.'
Again the old familiar sound of the cantonment _ghurries_, or
gong-bells, as they were clanged for the change of sentries, was in
his ear, and the view from the open windows of the bungalow was
strange and striking.
Far away above the misty horizon rose amid the clouds--and cloudlike
themselves, so bright and varied were their tints--the majestic
mountains that tower between the shallow valley of Jellalabad and the
ramparts of Cabul, and chief of them is the stupendous Suffaidh Koh,
fourteen thousand feet in height, then covered with dazzling white
snow; and if wondrously beautiful by day, it was perhaps still more
so by night, when the full moon lit up its chasms and peaks with its
Asiatic splendour.
In the immediate foreground, just before the windows of the bungalow,
a curious scene--one illustrative of the distant region and the
manners of our Indian fellow-subjects--was in progress.
The _Poojah_ of a battalion of H.M. Native Infantry, a Hindoo
regiment, was being celebrated towards evening.
The battalion, in full marching order, with its colours, was drawn up
in a circle. At each cardinal point of the compass was a small clod
of earth, with barley and rice on it; and in the centre were the
attendant Brahmins with a beautiful young goat, which had been
sprinkled with pure water, barley, and rice. Then the sacrificer
drew a huge Ghoorkali knife, and, after muttering some prayers, by
one trenchant slash severed the head of the goat from its body. At
the moment of immolation twelve guns boomed through the air and drums
were beaten, after which the battalion was wheeled back into line,
and marched by fours into its lines, with band playing and colours
flying.
Colonel Spatterdash, Colville's host, was a thorough Indian officer
of the old school, who had broiled for so many years in Bengal that
he had lost much of his European identity, all memory of home nearly,
and religion too, and had become so bronzed that evil-disposed
fellows used to hint--but not in his presence--that he had 'a dash of
the tar-brush in him--was fourteen annas to the rupee,' and so forth.
The wags of the station at Chutneypore declared that he wore a gold
bangle given to him by the orange-visaged Rani of that place, who
liked him as 'a wicked old man,' that squeezed her brown paws when he
assisted her into the silk-curtained howdah of her great tusker
elephant, which had carried 'Colonel Wellesley's' baggage at the
battle of Assaye.
He was full of old Indian memories of the Rangoon Rangers and
Bhurtpore Bulldogs, as he had heard of them when he came out from
Addiscombe a cadet and griffin; and had many a story to tell of the
pre-railway times, when, if not marching, people travelled by _dâk_,
night and day, in palanquins; when the old Bengal colonel was a
father to his regiment, the guide of his subalterns, and was never so
happy as when he had a dozen or so at his table, all eager for
_Kowab_, fresh eggs, with Phillibut rice, kedgere, &c., and _Bhola_
in plenty.
He was a captain when the mutiny occurred; and its horrors, with the
dismay that his beloved Sepoys--the _Spatterdash-ka-Pultan_,
so-called from his father--should prove untrue to their salt, nearly
broke his heart; and he thought the end of the world had come when
they flung him down a well at Gungawallah; but he was hard to kill.
A banyan-tree that grew half way down broke his fall, and to that he
clung till rescued by some Highlanders, after which he solaced
himself mightily by blowing whole batches of 'pandies' from his guns.
And now tiffin came, curried chickens, rice, green chillis, mutton
and chutney, &c., &c., with plenty of wine and brandy, all laid out
by his faithful old Kitmutgar, wearing an enormous white turban.
'Anything,' said the colonel, 'is better than bitter beer that has
been boiling on the dusty road between Peshawur and Jellalabad, till
the cask hoops grow hot in the sun.'
So he took a huge beaker of _brandy pawnee_, as he reclined in the
cane easy-chair in his well tattied bungalow, with punkah wallahs
crouching in the verandah outside, and smoked his hookah, for he
preferred such a residence to a double-poled tent or a tumble-down
brick house in that city of earthquakes, till the troops marched.
'I knew your uncle, Wellwood, thoroughly,' said the colonel to
Colville. 'He and I were great chums, and I once saw him do a plucky
thing--a very plucky thing, by Jove!--when we were giving a fellow a
tight flogging under fire.'
'A flogging under fire--that was remarkable, surely?'
'Not so in those days; we were never squeamish about anything then.'
'And this plucky thing?' said Redhaven, the hussar.
'Convinced me that Wellwood was pretty reckless of life. He had been
soured by some disappointment in love, we heard--the idea of such a
thing!'
And, while old Splatterdash laughed a little contemptuously at the
thought of a tender passion, Colville, remembering the secret episode
of Mrs. Deroubigne's life, listened with some interest.
'It came about in this way, you see,' said the colonel, after taking
a long pull at his hookah. 'After we advanced upon Jhansi under Sir
Hugh Rose to crush the rebellious Sepoys who held the place (which
was a town and fortress of the Mahrattas of old), we bombarded it
heavily for four days, but not without resistance, for the shattered
remains of the Gwalior contingent, augmented to twenty-five thousand
bayonets and sabres, and eighteen pieces of cannon from Kalpee, came
marching along the right bank of the Jumna, hoping to raise the
siege, d--n them!
'In that, however, the Pandies were disappointed. During the
bombardment, when we were pitching shot and shell into each other, a
great thirteen-inch bomb from an old mortar happened to fall close by
where the soldier of a European regiment was tied up to "the
halberts," as we still called the triangles, to receive a hundred and
fifty lashes for insubordination when mad with drink and heat. The
sudden appearance of this great missile, with its fuse burning and
hissing, caused such confusion and consternation that the companies,
formed in hollow square, fell back on all sides, even breaking their
ranks, for none could composedly await such an explosion under their
noses.
'Instead of yielding to this natural impulse, Wellwood took from his
pocket a penknife, and, walking up to the helpless and terrified
creature who was bound to the triangles, he cut the cords that bound
his wrists and ankles, setting him free, and both had barely time to
retire a little way and throw themselves flat on the ground, when the
great shell burst, and a hurricane of iron swept over them and all
around. Thus did he save this poor fellow, who must inevitably have
perished from his inability to save himself; and Wellwood did more,
for, in consideration of the mental agony the man had undergone, he
remitted the remainder of the punishment; and, by a curious
coincidence, the culprit perished a few days after in the action of
Roohea when saving the life of Wellwood, whom some rebels were about
to bayonet as he lay wounded and helpless on the ground.'
'This will be an episode in her father's life to tell Mary of when
next I write to her,' thought Colville. And now the conversation
drifted into the subject then uppermost in the minds of all--the
probability of serious complications if Russian intrigues proved
successful at Cabul, and none could expect them to be otherwise when
the Ameer Shere Ali had departed openly to visit General Kauffmann at
Tashkend, in Central Asia, which place, however, he was fated not to
reach.
The subject that caused our dispute with him, and brought our troops
to Jellalabad and elsewhere upon his frontier, was the dispute known
then as the "Resident" question, because he rather favoured the
Russians, and thus refused to have any such British official at his
court for three reasons--firstly, the person of a Briton would not be
safe there; secondly, that European officers might make demands that
would occasion quarrels; and thirdly, that if Britain was
represented, Russia would expect to be represented also. But it was
known that he was in close correspondence with General Kauffman, and
only feared that a British Resident might, if present, throw some
light upon it; and in the end a convention was signed, by which
Russia bound herself to give at least moral support to the existing
Afghan dynasty.
An envoy sent by our government to Cabul never reached it, being
forced back at a place called Ali Musjid. For this an apology was
demanded, and Afghanistan was entered by a British army in three
columns that won several victories, and the Ameer finding his case
hopeless started for Tashkend, but died on the way, and was succeeded
by his son, Yakoub Khan, who eventually showed a disposition to come
to terms with us; but in this we are a little anticipating the events
of our story, for, at the time Leslie Colville joined the staff at
Jellalabad, Sir Samuel Browne was, as stated, collecting a force
there, while General Maude relieved his post between that place and
Dakka, and the gallant Roberts, posted further forward at the Peiwar
Pass, was improving the difficult mountain road between that place
and Cabul for the passage of guns and baggage.
So thus it was that our troops were now engaged in what was known as
the second Afghan War--to counteract Russian influences.
As the evening advanced and darkness closed in, some yells and oaths
in Hindostanee and Pushtoo were heard at a little distance outside
the hedge of the colonel's compound, and Colville, who had been
looking from a window, now started to his feet.
'I can't look on and permit that!' he exclaimed.
'Can't permit what?' asked Spatterdash, tartly.
'A lot of fellows----'
'Budmashes, no doubt, by the row they make.'
'Ill-using one man; and now, as it is time for me to go, colonel, I
shall interfere _en passant_.'
'Don't think of it--don't bother!'
'But they may kill him.'
'What the devil does it matter? A nigger less in the world won't be
missed,' growled Spatterdash, who had lost all sympathy with the
natives since the Mutiny.
'Call the nearest guard--the picket--or some chowkeydars,' said
Redhaven and others; 'but don't interfere in a row of this kind.'
Colville, however, buckled on his sword and revolver, lit a fresh
cheroot, laughingly bowed himself out, and hurried away; for, sooth
to say, he was a little tired of old Spatterdash, and as no one
actually thought he would interfere in a native row, no one followed
or accompanied him.
'The inlying pickets have been doubled to-night by order of the
general,' said the colonel.
'Why?' asked some one.
'Because rumour says that the Sirdir Mahmoud Shah, a tearing Afghan
devil, has come to lead the Mohmunds against us.'
'With what object?' asked Redhaven of the Hussars.
'A row, of course.'