“Carter Sahib is forward--not here. There is nothing behind us.”
“There is,” said the subaltern. “The squadron's walking on its own
tail.”
Then the Major in command moved down to the rear, swearing softly and
asking for the blood of Lieutenant Halley--the subaltern who had just
spoken.
“Look after your rearguard,” said the Major. “Some of your infernal
thieves have got lost. They're at the head of the squadron, and you're a
several kinds of idiot.”
“Shall I tell off my men, sir?” said the subaltern sulkily, for he was
feeling wet and cold.
“Tell 'em off!” said the Major. “Whip 'em off, by Gad! You're
squandering them all over the place. There's a troop behind you now!”
“So I was thinking,” said the subaltern calmly. “I have all my men here,
sir. Better speak to Carter.”
“Carter Sahib sends salaam and wants to know why the regiment is
stopping,” said a trooper to Lieutenant Halley.
“Where under heaven is Carter,” said the Major.
“Forward with his troop,” was the answer.
“Are we walking in a ring, then, or are we the centre of a blessed
brigade?” said the Major.
By this time there was silence all along the column. The horses were
still; but, through the drive of the fine rain, men could hear the feet
of many horses moving over stony ground.
“We're being stalked,” said Lieutenant Halley.
“They've no horses here. Besides they'd have fired before this,” said
the Major. “It's--it's villagers' ponies.”
“Then our horses would have neighed and spoilt the attack long ago. They
must have been near us for half an hour,” said the subaltern.
“Queer that we can't smell the horses,” said the Major, damping his
finger and rubbing it on his nose as he sniffed up wind.
“Well, it's a bad start,” said the subaltern, shaking the wet from his
overcoat. “What shall we do, sir?”
“Get on,” said the Major. “We shall catch it to-night.”
The column moved forward very gingerly for a few paces. Then there was
an oath, a shower of blue sparks as shod hooves crashed on small stones,
and a man rolled over with a jangle of accoutrements that would have
waked the dead.
“Now we've gone and done it,” said Lieutenant Halley. “All the hillside
awake and all the hillside to climb in the face of musketry-fire! This
comes of trying to do night-hawk work.”
The trembling trooper picked himself up and tried to explain that his
horse had fallen over one of the little cairns that are built of loose
stones on the spot where a man has been murdered. There was no need to
give reasons. The Major's big Australian charger blundered next, and the
column came to a halt in what seemed to be a very graveyard of little
cairns, all about two feet high. The manoeuvres of the squadron are not
reported. Men said that it felt like mounted quadrilles without training
and without the music; but at last the horses, breaking rank and
choosing their own way, walked clear of the cairns, till every man of
the squadron reformed and drew rein a few yards up the slope of the
hill. Then, according to Lieutenant Halley, there was another scene very
like the one which has been described. The Major and Carter insisted
that all the men had not joined rank, and that there were more of
them in the rear, clicking and blundering among the dead men's cairns.
Lieutenant Halley told off his own troopers again and resigned himself
to wait. Later on he said to me:
“I didn't much know and I didn't much care what was going on. The row of
that trooper falling ought to have scared half the country, and I would
take my oath that we were being stalked by a full regiment in the rear,
and they were making row enough to rouse all Afghanistan. I sat tight,
but nothing happened.”
The mysterious part of the night's work was the silence on the hillside.
Everybody knew that the Gulla Kutta Mullah had his outpost-huts on the
reverse side of the hill, and everybody expected, by the time that the
Major had sworn himself into quiet, that the watchmen there would open
fire. When nothing happened, they said that the gusts of the rain had
deadened the sound of the horses, and thanked Providence. At last the
Major satisfied himself (a) that he had left no one behind among the
cairns, and (b) that he was not being taken in the rear by a large and
powerful body of cavalry. The men's tempers were thoroughly spoiled,
the horses were lathered and unquiet, and one and all prayed for the
daylight.
They set themselves to climb up the hill, each man leading his mount
carefully. Before they had covered the lower slopes or the breast-plates
had begun to tighten, a thunderstorm came up behind, rolling across the
low hills and drowning any noise less than that of cannon. The
first flash of the lightning showed the bare ribs of the ascent, the
hill-crest standing steely-blue against the black sky, the little
falling lines of the rain, and, a few yards to their left flank, an
Afghan watch-tower, two-storied, built of stone, and entered by a ladder
from the upper story. The ladder was up, and a man with a rifle was
leaning from the window. The darkness and the thunder rolled down in
an instant, and, when the lull followed, a voice from the watch-tower
cried, “Who goes there?”
The cavalry were very quiet, but each man gripped his carbine and stood
beside his horse. Again the voice called, “Who goes there?” and in a
louder key, “O brothers, give the alarm!” Now, every man in the cavalry
would have died in his long boots sooner than have asked for quarter,
but it is a fact that the answer to the second call was a long wail of
“Marf karo! Marf karo!” which means, “Have mercy! Have mercy!” It came
from the climbing regiment.
The cavalry stood dumbfoundered, till the big troopers had time to
whisper one to another: “Mir Khan, was that thy voice? Abdullah, didst
thou call?” Lieutenant Halley stood beside his charger and waited.
So long as no firing was going on he was content. Another flash of
lightning showed the horses with heaving flanks and nodding heads; the
men, white eye-balled, glaring beside them, and the stone watch-tower
to the left. This time there was no head at the window, and the rude
iron-clamped shutter that could turn a rifle-bullet was closed.
“Go on, men,” said the Major. “Get up to the top at any rate!” The
squadron toiled forward, the horses wagging their tails and the men
pulling at the bridles, the stones rolling down the hillside and the
sparks flying. Lieutenant Halley declares that he never heard a squadron
make so much noise in his life. They scrambled up, he said, as though
each horse had eight legs and a spare horse to follow him. Even then
there was no sound from the watch-tower, and the men stopped exhausted
on the ridge that overlooked the pit of darkness in which the village
of Bersund lay. Girths were loosed, curb-chains shifted, and saddles
adjusted, and the men dropped down among the stones. Whatever might
happen now, they held the upper ground of any attack.
The thunder ceased, and with it the rain, and the soft thick darkness of
a winter night before the dawn covered them all. Except for the sound of
falling water among the ravines below, everything was still. They heard
the shutter of the watch-tower below them thrown back with a clang, and
the voice of the watcher calling, “Oh, Hafiz Ullah!”
The echoes took up the call, “La-la-la!” and an answer came from the
watch-tower hidden round the curve of the hill, “What is it, Shahbaz
Khan?”
Shahbaz Khan replied in the high-pitched voice of the mountaineer: “Hast
thou seen?”
The answer came back: “Yes. God deliver us from all evil spirits!”
There was a pause, and then: “Hafiz Ullah, I am alone! Come to me.”
“Shahbaz Khan, I am alone also; but I dare not leave my post!”
“That is a lie; thou art afraid.”
A longer pause followed, and then: “I am afraid. Be silent! They are
below us still. Pray to God and sleep.”
The troopers listened and wondered, for they could not understand what
save earth and stone could lie below the watch-towers.
Shahbaz Khan began to call again: “They are below us. I can see them!
For the pity of God come over to me, Hafiz Ullah! My father slew ten of
them. Come over!”
Hafiz Ullah answered in a very loud voice, “Mine was guiltless. Hear,
ye Men of the Night, neither my father nor my blood had any part in that
sin. Bear thou thine own punishment, Shahbaz Khan.”
“Oh, some one ought to stop those two chaps crowing away like cocks
there,” said the Lieutenant, shivering under his rock.
He had hardly turned round to expose a new side of him to the rain
before a bearded, long-locked, evil-smelling Afghan rushed up the hill,
and tumbled into his arms. Halley sat upon him, and thrust as much of a
sword-hilt as could be spared down the man's gullet. “If you cry out, I
kill you,” he said cheerfully.
The man was beyond any expression of terror. He lay and quaked, gasping.
When Halley took the sword-hilt from between his teeth, he was still
inarticulate, but clung to Halley's arm, feeling it from elbow to wrist.
“The Rissala! The dead Rissala!” he gasped, “It is down there!”
“No; the Rissala, the very much alive Rissala. It is up here,” said
Halley, unshipping his watering-bridle and fastening the man's hands.
“Why were you in the towers so foolish as to let us pass?”
“The valley is full of the dead,” said the Afghan. “It is better to fall
into the hands of the English than the hands of the dead. They march to
and fro below there. I saw them in the lightning.”
He recovered his composure after a little, and whispering, because
Halley's pistol was at his stomach, said: “What is this? There is no war
between us now, and the Mullah will kill me for not seeing you pass!”
“Rest easy,” said Halley; “we are coming to kill the Mullah, if God
please. His teeth have grown too long. No harm will come to thee unless
the daylight shows thee as a face which is desired by the gallows for
crime done. But what of the dead regiment?”
“I only kill within my own border,” said the man, immensely relieved.
“The dead regiment is below. The men must have passed through it on
their journey--four hundred dead on horses, stumbling among their own
graves, among the little heaps--dead men all, whom we slew.”
“Whew!” said Halley. “That accounts for my cursing Carter and the Major
cursing me. Four hundred sabres, eh? No wonder we thought there were
a few extra men in the troop. Kurruk Shah,” he whispered to a grizzled
native officer that lay within a few feet of him, “hast thou heard
anything of a dead Rissala in these hills?
“Assuredly,” said Kurruk Shah with a grim chuckle. “Otherwise, why did
I, who have served the Queen for seven-and-twenty years, and killed many
hill-dogs, shout aloud for quarter when the lightning revealed us to the
watch-towers? When I was a young man I saw the killing in the valley of
Sheor-Kit there at our feet, and I know the tale that grew up therefrom.
But how can the ghosts of unbelievers prevail against us who are of the
Faith? Strap that dog's hands a little tighter, Sahib. An Afghan is like
an eel.”
“But a dead Rissala,” said Halley, jerking his captive's wrist. “That
is foolish talk, Kurruk Shah. The dead are dead. Hold still, Sag.” The
Afghan wriggled.
“The dead are dead, and for that reason they walk at night. What need to
talk? We be men; we have our eyes and ears. Thou canst both see and hear
them down the hillside,” said Kurruk Shah composedly.
Halley stared and listened long and intently. The valley was full of
stifled noises, as every valley must be at night; but whether he saw or
heard more than was natural Halley alone knows, and he does not choose
to speak on the subject.
At last, and just before the dawn, a green rocket shot up from the far
side of the valley of Bersund, at the head of the gorge, to show that
the Goorkhas were in position. A red light from the infantry at left
and right answered it, and the cavalry burnt a white flare. Afghans in
winter are late sleepers, and it was not till full day that the Gulla
Kutta Mullah's men began to straggle from their huts, rubbing their
eyes. They saw men in green, and red, and brown uniforms, leaning on
their arms, neatly arranged all round the crater of the village of
Bersund, in a cordon that not even a wolf could have broken. They rubbed
their eyes the more when a pink-faced young man, who was not even in
the Army, but represented the Political Department, tripped down the
hillside with two orderlies, rapped at the door of the Gulla Kutta
Mullah's house, and told him quietly to step out and be tied up for safe
transport. That same young man passed on through the huts, tapping here
one cateran and there another lightly with his cane; and as each was
pointed out, so he was tied up, staring hopelessly at the crowned
heights around where the English soldiers looked down with incurious
eyes. Only the Mullah tried to carry it off with curses and high words,
till a soldier who was tying his hands said:--
“None o' your lip! Why didn't you come out when you was ordered,
instead o' keeping us awake all night? You're no better than my own
barrack-sweeper, you white-'eaded old polyanthus! Kim up!”
Half an hour later the troops had gone away with the Mullah and his
thirteen friends. The dazed villagers were looking ruefully at a pile of
broken muskets and snapped swords, and wondering how in the world they
had come so to miscalculate the forbearance of the Indian Government.
It was a very neat little affair, neatly carried out, and the men
concerned were unofficially thanked for their services.
Yet it seems to me that much credit is also due to another regiment
whose name did not appear in brigade orders, and whose very existence is
in danger of being forgotten.