A Good Soldier Read online

  A Good Soldier

  Richard Townsend Bickers

  © Richard Townsend Bickers 1984

  Richard Townsend Bickers has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1984 by Robert Hale Ltd as ‘The Sands of Truth’.

  This edition published in 2014 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Foreword

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Extract from Fighters Up by Richard Townsend Bickers

  A crore, or karor, is ten million.

  A lakh is a hundred thousand.

  They are written, respectively,

  10,000,000 and 100,000.

  The gold mohur was a coin worth 15 rupees.

  The title is taken from an anonymous Indian poem “Yasmini”.

  At night, when passions ebbing tide,

  left bare the sands of truth,

  Yasmini, resting by my side,

  spoke softly of her youth.

  Foreword

  The historical background to this story is in general accurate. Occasional advantage has been taken of the licence permitted in fiction. The 47th Native Infantry of the Bengal Army did mutiny in 1824 when ordered to the Burmese War and for the reason stated. There was a mutiny in Vellore by the Madras Army in 1806 caused by the rumour that the sepoys’ salt had been polluted by the blood of pigs and cows: but there was not really a mutiny at Barrackpore in 1824 on the same grounds. There was, however, a reorganisation of the Sepoy Army in that year which detached a large number of British officers from their troops.

  The first steam vessel launched in India was a paddle boat built in 1819 for the King of Oudh, Nawab Ghazi-ud-din Hadar, at Lucknow. In 1823 another paddle steamer, Diana, was launched at Calcutta, followed in 1825 by Enterprise, in 1826 by Ganges and Irrawaddy and in 1828 by Hooghly and Berhampooter. Thus the introduction of paddle steamers on the Hooghly in 1824 is historically premature but essential to the plot and the spirit of the story.

  The transliteration of Hindustani, the lingua franca evolved from Urdu and Hindi, into Roman script, follows the form used in dictionaries and grammar books. This may cause some uncertainty to readers accustomed to the spelling of vernacular words in an Anglicised phonetic form. The academic form has been used because it is correct, logical and consistent; and the author happens to know the native script, which ensures accuracy.

  Chapter One

  Hugh Ramsey woke to the boom of the morning gun which daily startled the crows into noisily protesting flight. The Bengal sun was up and windows, in mid-April, were un-shuttered. The temperature the day before had risen to over 110 degrees and the night had been sultry.

  The pankha hanging from the ceiling by three ropes fanned the warm, humid air into a sluggish current whose draught he could scarcely feel on his sweaty skin. A pankha quli sat on the veranda day and night, tugging the rope which swung the heavy oblong canvas fan in a swishing parabola throughout the months of the Hot Weather. Sometimes he held the end of the rope between his toes and often when he did this he dozed off. The prankish or unkind junior officers’ way of awakening a drowsy pankha quli was to stand on a chair and give the fan a violent swing which jerked his leg out straight and overhead and evoked a pained “Hai, mai!” One high-spirited young ensign had ensured the wakefulness of his fan-puller by telling one of the bearers to scatter sugar around him. This attracted red ants and the poor devil had to stay awake or be bitten. The perpetrator was laughing about it in the mess and Ramsey exerted his authority as a platoon commander to order him to abandon the practice. He smiled as he watched the fan and remembered the trick, but it was not fair to treat the natives like that; they could not retaliate.

  His Pathan orderly came in silently on bare feet, set a tray on the bedside table, drew himself up and saluted.

  “Salaam, Lieutenant Sahib.”

  “Salaam, Sher Mahommed Khan.”

  The tall sepoy strutted out of the room and Ramsey heard his voice raised, from the veranda. A stronger current of the warm, heavy air brushed Ramsey’s face and bare chest. The thin, baggy cotton Muslim pantaloons he wore clung to his sweating legs under the sheet. He tossed the sheet aside, poured a cup of tea and peeled a banana. There were some things one could seldom teach a native to do satisfactorily. Sher Mahommed Khan was a natural soldier and a strong, brave man to have at his side in battle, but made a vile cup of tea: half-filling it with milk and spooning in a sickly quantity of sugar; to his own taste, not his master’s.

  Ramsey leaned against the pillows and contemplated Barrackpore through the windows. It was a pleasant cantonment and he was glad to be back from a month’s duty in Calcutta, 16 miles down the Hooghly, where the Honourable East India Company’s sepoy regiments took it in turns to do duty at Fort William where the British troops of King George IV were stationed. Certainly there were many diversions at the seat of government, but there were enough here for him; and he disliked the stinks, squalor and poverty, the sight of deformed beggars and deliberately mutilated begging children in Calcutta as much as he despised the majority of the administrators, merchants and lawyers who lived there in pomp. In Barrackpore the air was fresher and there were fewer sycophants and there was less chicanery, because there were few civilians: not that there were no toadies, cheats and bullies, or greed, among his brother officers: but even the least admirable of them were men in his sense of the word and he could respect them even when he did not happen to like them.

  Calcutta, because the Governor General of India resided there, was the centre of gaiety, power and fashion. All conditions of men came there to make large fortunes swiftly before returning permanently to Britain to live in high style and never spare an affectionate or grateful or understanding thought for the land which had brought them their riches. Ramsey loved England but he had a strong loyal and emotional attachment and commitment to the country where his father and grandfather had served before him. The appeal of India lay mostly in its people, in whom he and his forebears had found a simple loyalty, a personal devotion and a reliance on their leadership, protection and justice. He had sympathy and affection for them.

  In Calcutta there was an abundance of pretty, flirtatious women and of opportunities for clandestine romance; but a British officer did not have to live like a monk in Barrackpore. The Governor General had a residence there; not as palatial as Government House, but grand enough, with gardens of vast extent and a great elephant stud whose crimson-and-gold-caparisoned beasts added colour and grandeur to the flowers and shrubs. Lady guests were excited and delighted to ride on them and the gentlemen impressed. There was a vivacious social life in the cantonment, graced by elegant, handsome, often witty, women: the wives, daughters and sisters of officers and civilian officials. It might be difficult to conduct a discreet amorous liaison, but they were always pleasant to look upon, to dance with, to admire in amateur dramatics and they enlivened and beautified the station with their mere presence. Their children were every bachelor’s surrogate nephews and nieces, objects of nostalgic indulgence a
nd a reminder of their real young relations many thousands of miles across the world. If the ladies of the station were inaccessible, for solace there was no lack of lovely and beguiling Indian girls.

  Ramsey slipped his feet into the slippers which his orderly had already ensured harboured no scorpion that might have crawled in overnight, and went to the window. In the garden monkeys chattered and swung among the palms and sal trees; kite hawks hovered and swooped; cawing crows hunted for lizards and mice; blue jays flapped, lazy and bright-winged, through flocks of darting, twittering sparrows.

  The gul mohur trees were heavy with large, golden-orange flowers. The gul mohur touched many responses in Ramsey’s spirit: it was an object of beauty and a symbol of the land to which he had dedicated his service. Men called it the pagoda tree because of its gold-petalled flowers: the pagoda was an old Indian gold coin. A British euphemism for making money was ‘shaking the pagoda tree’. He contemplated the fallen petals on the ground and his thoughts dwelt on how easy it was for the fat merchants of Calcutta figuratively to shake the pagoda tree and gather literal gold in far greater quantity than the petals which fell from overblown blooms; while the officers of the Sepoy Army which kept India safe for their profiteering had to wait long years for promotion in every rank and exist on small pay and a few extra rewards for which their lives were frequently at risk.

  His grandfather, who had fought at Plassey in 1757 and at the great battle of Buxar six years later, victories which made Britain’s commercial and political power in India secure, had retired rich, a Major General in the Honourable Company’s Army. His father had retired only a year ago, as a Staff Colonel, with a comfortable but much smaller fortune: not much to show for 32 years’ patriotic devotion, battle, wounds and near scrapes with death, compared with what a merchant, official or barrister in Calcutta, Madras or Bombay could amass in less than half that time.

  He himself had spent the first seven years of his life in India before being sent to school in England. It was six years since he had returned as an 18-year-old ensign, and a year since he had been given accelerated promotion to lieutenant for distinguishing himself in action. His captaincy was so far in the future, however great his gallantry might be in battles yet to come, that it was too distant to appear a reality. As for the prospects of ever making a fortune, even as modest a one as his father had managed to, they were right out of sight. There had been many unsatisfactory changes in the Sepoy Army since his grandfather’s day and during his father’s. He sensed that there were more to come, and soon, and he did not relish them; the prospect made him uneasy, dissatisfied and resentful.

  He went to the adjoining bathroom where a tall red earthenware jar of tepid water awaited him. With a quart-sized tin mug he sluiced it over his body, soaped and then doused himself again. The water ran over the cement floor and out through a hole in the wall. Snakes came through those outlets from time to time. During the last monsoon the servants had killed a cobra under the almira in his bedroom in which his clothes hung.

  He enjoyed soldiering; but the past six years had flowed away as swiftly as the soapy water gurgling through the hole; and the few pickings he had obtained had disappeared as swiftly as the water soaked into the parched earth behind the bungalow he shared with another platoon commander in his company. The third lieutenant was married. Neither of his fellows had any wealth to show for his years of service either; and both were older than he.

  The thud of hooves sounded through the windows of the bedroom. The bathroom door was open. Ramsey saw the tall shako and red tunic of a galloper pass the windows and heard the horse snorting at the front door. With a few quick strokes of the razor he finished shaving as Sher Mahommed Khan came hastily in.

  “The Colonel Sahib’s, compliments, Your Honour, and he requests your presence at his office.”

  Dressing hastily, Ramsey wondered what sudden alarm had prompted the summons on this peaceful morning at the beginning of the Hot Weather of 1824. The Old Man would see all his officers in half an hour, anyway, on first parade.

  He heard Lumsden’s hurried footsteps crossing the big drawing-room onto which their bedrooms opened, and a knock on his door.

  “Ready, Hugh?”

  “Come in, Alec. Won’t be a second.”

  Lumsden bustled in, his fair moustache flaring ferociously in a fine upward flourish as it always did first thing in the morning before the heat made it droop at the ends. Of middle height, deep-chested and broad-shouldered, his brilliant pale blue eyes and perennially pink or red face made a contrast with Ramsey’s tallness, dark eyes and weather-darkened skin. No amount of heat or humidity could diminish Lumsden’s energy, his enthusiasm for whatever was afoot, military or social; no outnumbering enemy, no weight of cannon or musket fire, no host of swords or lances ever appeared to perturb him. Ramsey had reservations about his friend’s intelligence but none about his courage or decency. His galvanic way of moving and staccato habit of speech made many people restless. Ramsey regarded them with amused tolerance and affection: Alec Lumsden was a good fellow.

  “Wonder what the tamasha’s about?”

  “Somebody’s wife reported seeing one of the ensigns sneaking out of Ashni Daphne’s bungalow without his trousers, perhaps.” Ashni meant a bosom female friend. Daphne was the wife of a major on the Staff. She had a grotesquely large pectoral development and the reputation of indefatigable seductress of young officers. Most of the station turned a blind eye to her friendly activities: her husband had been embarrassingly wounded soon after their marriage.

  “Be serious, Hugh. Think it’s orders for Burma?” Britain had recently entered a war there.

  “I hope not. I haven’t got over the last expedition yet. Besides, the regiment needs daily practice if we are to show the cavalry how pig sticking should really be done. Can’t allow a campaign to interfere with that.”

  “I say! Where’s your ambition?” Lieutenant Lumsden looked indignant and shocked in equal parts.

  Ramsey laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. “Come on. I’m ready for the Colonel Sahib’s lecture: it wasn’t I visiting the delectable Ashni.” But it could have been, four or five years ago: Daphne had been very kind to him when he was a comparative greenhorn. As for ambition: it had never ceased to burn in him, but he had no intention of discussing that with Alec or anyone else; either at this moment or any other. His ambitions did not pursue the normal path of his brother officers’ and there would never be a time or place to admit even his most intimate friend to them.

  Striding along the dusty road, inhaling the burning air that was laden with the scent of oleanders, roses and jasmine mingled with the pervading ubiquitous Indian odour of smouldering charcoal and cow dung, it occurred to Hugh Ramsey that he had no intimate friend. He was not the kind of man who needed one or gave confidences.

  *

  Lieutenant Colonel Howell had assembled only his British officers. They sat stiffly in a semi-circle and he looked at them across his desk with anger in his pouched eyes. One big hand drummed on the desk top, his arm outstretched to reach it on account of his girth, his other hand tugging and smoothing his heavy, greying moustache; two familiar warnings of suppressed temper.

  “We have an unpleasant situation on our hands, Gentlemen. The General has ordered all regimental commandants to call similar meetings and to address the sepoy officers and men on parade. All the senior subadars” (Indian officers equivalent to captains) “came to see their Colonels Commanding last evening. It appears that a rumour has spread throughout the Bengal Army that the Honourable Company has been defiling the salt ration with the blood of pigs and cows.” Which would outrage both Hindus, who worshipped the cow, and Muslims, to whom the pig was vile. “The purpose allegedly being to force them to sin against their own religions and adopt ours.

  “Some of you may know, and I well remember, that the same lie was spread in 1806, with terrible consequences, at Vellore. If the Madras Army took such violent offence at the accusation, we all know ho
w much more grievously offended our own high-caste Hindus and devout Mahommedans must feel, and how readily they might be led into acting hastily.”

  The sepoys of the Madras Army who had mutinied in 1806 had murdered their British officers by night in the supposed safety of their homes.

  The Bengal Army was the elite of the East India Company’s forces. The bulk of its troops were recruited from the warrior races of the north-west, whether Hindus, Sikhs or Muslims. Of the first, not merely were three-quarters high-caste but half of those were Brahmins. Off-duty, Hindu officers who did not belong to that highest of castes would defer even to mere privates who did; and although there was no caste system among Sikhs or Muslims, those in the Bengal Army boasted the fiercest kind of personal pride and respect for their beliefs.

  The Colonel had more to say. “That is not all. Sedition-mongers are spreading the rumour that regiments ordered to Burma will not be given the time necessary to march there, but will be forcibly transported by sea. In view of the impending departure of the Forty-Seventh, the General fears there may be trouble, despite assurances given by him to the senior subadars and passed on by them to the rank and file.”

  Hindus believed that to cross a sea, the Black Water, meant losing caste. An outcaste could never be restored to the one into which he was born. In future reincarnations he would appear on earth only as an untouchable or some low form of animal life. The prospect of a compulsory sea voyage was therefore anathema. The 47th Native Infantry was about to set off on the long march to the Burmese War.

  Ramsey respected the troops’ beliefs and understood the Muslims’ revulsion for pigs: but it was difficult to understand the Hindus’ attitude to sea voyages when they eagerly drank the urine of cows, which he found barbaric and disgusting.

  Bugles were sounding. The Colonel’s charger stood with its groom in the shadow cast beyond the veranda of the office building. The 17-hand bay neighed when it heard the sound and tossed its head clinking its bits and curb chain.