lines, four or five hundred yards apart when facing cavalry; a reserve must be kept of twothirds of the whole, to exploit a success or to cover a withdrawal.’ And here was Cornet Templer and his troop in one extended line, and open order!
He fell in by the collector’s side at the rear and drew his sword. The collector pulled his straw hat down firmly and reached inside his coat for the diminutive pistol he always carried (but had not thought to prime). ‘Keep an eye for any who wish to throw themselves on our mercy, Hervey. I should wish to interrogate them.’
Hervey smiled to himself at the collector’s absolute confidence in the outcome, struggling meanwhile with his gelding, which seemed to have had little by way of formal schooling and was reverting to its instinct for the herd. The line was soon in a brisk canter. Dust billowed, horses were pulling and blowing at the same time. Hooves drummed and bits jingled. He looked left and right at the half-hundred troopers: from behind they could have been from any one of the armies that fought Bonaparte. They could have been from the Grande Armee itself, except that they rode shorter than any regular cavalry he had seen before — and in open order and extended line! Yet it was not difficult to understand how these men felt invincible in that headlong rush at the Pindarees, of whose number they had not the slightest intimation, for there was dust enough to conceal a thousand cavalrymen.
‘Charge!’ roared Templer, with fewer than a hundred yards to run to the village. The line of sabres lowered to the ‘engage’, expecting to catch the enemy on foot.
Hervey could see nothing of what they were charging. He thought he saw horses but he could not be certain, for dust swirled everywhere. He was more anxious still: even if there were no ambuscade, the line, once it had collided with the village, would rapidly lose cohesion — when a half-capable enemy could take them from a flank.
And then they were in the village, and it was all he could do to keep his seat as his little gelding, effortlessly changing leg, swerved this way and that to avoid tumbling at an obstacle, any number of which would have brought down a less balanced horse. They jumped something he didn’t even see, and the gelding landed with its head still up and ready for the next challenge.
Some of the sepoys were far ahead, and he could see that the charge had become a pursuit. Here and there was a fallen horse, but mainly they were human shapes which lay sprawled and bloody — and none was wearing a French-blue tunic. He galloped on, looking about for the collector. The ground was rising slightly but there was no cover. As far as he could see in front of him there were sepoys furiously raising and lowering their sword arms. He began to check, for the gelding was blowing hard — when the best of horses could stumble. A lone Pindaree came towards him and threw down his sword, falling from the saddle to his knees and clasping his hands together, pleading. Hervey was trying to find the words to tell him he was made prisoner when one of the sepoys galloped up with a different intention. He shouted that the man had surrendered, but whether or not he was understood, it made no difference, for the sepoy sliced at the Pindaree’s neck from behind, severing the head as neatly as Hervey had seen Serjeant Strange cut a swede in half in the tilt-yard.
It was not his fight, he told himself, and the sepoy gave him a most respectful salute with his bloody sabre as he circled back to join his comrades. He turned and slowly trotted back to the village, recalling what the collector had said two nights before about the strongest stomachs turning. There were bloody bundles of flesh and homespun about the village, but no other human presence that he could see. He heard the bugle, and looked back to see the line at last rallying. Then the collector appeared, in a lather every bit as prodigious as that of his horse — and blowing almost as much — though he had kept up remarkably well. ‘A sorry business this, Hervey,’ he called, dismounting by one of the bundles and clasping a handkerchief over his nose.
Hervey said he did not expect there would be anyone for him to interrogate, to which the collector seemed not overly surprised, nor even very disappointed.
‘We had better begin searching the huts, however,’ he suggested, still clasping the silk to his nose. ‘There may be something that tells us what these fiends are next about.’
They regretted doing so almost at once. The sight in the first hut made the collector rush out clutching the silk to his mouth, and throw up noisily. Inside, Hervey stared in disbelief. Here was a lesson in anatomy he had not seen even in a textbook — the womb hacked open and its full-grown contents ripped away and sliced like meat on a butcher’s slab. And, as if that could not have been enough to satiate the most depraved, the wretched woman had been impaled hideously and severally. Hervey now wished he had struck off the Pindaree’s head himself, for though he had seen the horrifying work of cannon, never before had he known sheer surgical brutality. He was numb with incomprehension.
‘You had better search the well, Mr Templer,’ said the collector as he recovered himself, seeing the troop coming into the village.
Before it occurred to Hervey why the well should be searched, one of the havildars revealed why. ‘It is full of bodies, sahib,’ he called.
Hervey, Templer and the native officers doubled over to him, covering their noses as they did so. The well was large, twenty feet across, with a three-foot wall, and it was deep. There were many bodies (perhaps fifty — it was difficult to estimate), and as far as Hervey could tell, peering into its darkness, most — perhaps all — were women. Those uppermost in the tangled mound were naked.
‘They were the ones who either had not the time or the courage to jump for themselves,’ said the collector.
‘What do we do now?’ asked Hervey, beginning to sicken at both the sight and the stench.
‘What do you think we should do?’ enquired the collector, with a mild challenge in his voice. ‘We roll up our bloody sleeves and get them out!’
The officers took turns to descend to the bottom of the well, to where the ordure was most nauseous, and tied ropes round each body, the sepoys hauling them to the surface. For over three hours they laboured thus, until the remains of every one of forty-seven women and girls — and eleven infants — were brought into the heat of the mid-morning sun. Meanwhile, the other sepoys had collected the bodies of a dozen men, mostly aged, and had lain them in the shade of the village’s banyan. Now they began building a massive pyre on which they might all be cremated according to the rites of Vishnu.
‘The village men would have been in the fields, by the look of things,’ said the collector, ‘and there they will have hid since. We shall not be able to tempt them in for a day or so.’
Hervey simply nodded.
The collector lowered his voice, until it had almost a note of despair. ‘This is an especially brutal raid. The women are always susceptible, but they are by no means always defiled, nor the men killed if they offer no resistance.’
‘It’s the mutilation and… the brutishness, the
The collector nodded grimly. ‘If I were to suppose what happened, I should say that the village was taken wholly by surprise — at about three o’clock yesterday. Some of the women would have screamed, gathered up their last-born and run at once to the well, throwing themselves in within sight of the marauders. This would have excited the worst of them — a freebooting band among freebooters without what passes for the discipline of some of the Pindaree cohorts. Some of the old men would have made a show of protecting the women and been cut down for their trouble. The first blood would have excited the appetite for more, until there was a frenzy of rape and slaughter. You are dealing with a savagery here, Captain Hervey, the like of which you would find hard to imagine even in your battles in Spain. I pray this cohort we surprised is not typical of what we may expect.’
‘And how many rupees might the Pindarees have supposed a village such as this would render up?’ asked Hervey incredulously.
‘Just so, just so,’ the collector replied, shaking his head again. ‘We are, as a rule, spared these sights in the Company’s territories, and half of me wishes to believe that this incursion was but a misjudgement.However, I fear this and the earlier forays have been somehow to test our strength, and that we shall see more unless we do something. Yet I can’t suppose that anything which is done in a small way shall have any effect. No, it must be something undertaken on a bigger scale — encompassing the whole of the country. I hold the extirpation of the Pindaree menace to be the greatest, and most pressing, necessity of the Company. And yet the Court of Directors in London will have no truck with it.’
Cornet Templer told off a jemadar’s patrol to follow the Pindaree spoor, then came up and saluted. ‘Do you have any further orders, sir?’
‘No, Mr Templer, I think not. How many did we account for in all?’
