do the damage — damnation!' This as a cloud of dust, thrown up by a round-shot hitting the parapet, enveloped us. 'Stretcher, there! Lively now!' There was a body twitching close by where the shot had struck; at Moore's shout two fellows doubled out from the barrack to attend to it. After a brief look one of them shook his head, and then they picked up the body between them and carried it off towards what looked like a well; they just pitched it in, and Moore says:
'That's our cemetery. I've worked it out that we put someone in there every two hours. Over there — that's the wet well, where we get our water. We won't go too close — the pandy sharpshooters get a clear crack at it from that grove yonder, so we draw our water at night. Jock McKillop worked it for a week, until they got him. Heaven only knows how many we've lost on water-drawing since.'
What seemed so unreal about it, and still does, was the quiet conversational way he talked. There was this garrison, being steadily shot to bits, and starving in the process, and he went on pointing things out, cool as dammit, with the crackle of desultory firing going on around us. I stomached it so long, and then burst out:
'But in God's name — it's hopeless! Hasn't Wheeler tried to make terms?'
He laughed straight out at that. 'Terms? Who with? Nana Sahib? Look here, you were at Meerut, weren't you? Did they make terms? They want us dead, laddie. They slaughtered everything white up in the city yonder, and God knows how many of their own folk as well. They tortured the native goldsmiths to death to get at their loot; Nana's been blowing loyal Indians from guns as fast as they can trice 'em over the muzzles! No,' he shook his head, 'there'll be no terms.'
'But what the devil — I mean, what …?'
'What's going to come of it? Well, I don't need to tell you, of all people — either a relief column wins through from Allahabad in three days at most, or we'll be so starved and short of cartridge that the pandies will storm over that wall. Then …' He shrugged. 'But of course, we don't admit that — not in front of the ladies, anyway, however much some of'em may guess. Just grin and assure 'em that Lawrence will be up with the rations any day, what?'
I won't trouble to describe my emotions as this sank in, along with the knowledge that for once there was nowhere to bolt to — and I couldn't have run anyway, with my game ankle. It was utterly hopeless — and what made it worse, if anything, was that as a senior man I had to pretend, like Wheeler and Moore and Vibart and the rest, that I was ready to do or die with the best. Even I couldn't show otherwise — not with everyone else steady and cheery enough to sicken you. I'll carry to my grave the picture of that blood-sodden ground, with the flies droning everywhere, and the gaunt figures at the parapet; the barrack wall honeycombed with the shots that slapped into it every few seconds; the occasional cry of a man struck; the stretcher-parties running — and through it all Moore walking about with his bloody arm, grinning and ailing out jokes to everyone; Wheeler, with his hat on his head and the pistol through the cord at his waist, staring grim-faced at the pandy lines and scratching his white moustache while he muttered to the aide scribbling notes at his elbow; a Cockney sergeant arguing with a private about the height of the pillars at Euston Square station, while they cut pieces from a dead horse for the big copper boiler against the barrack wall.
'Stew today,' says Moore to me. 'That's thanks to you fellows coming in. Usually, if we want meat,' we have to let a pandy cavalryman charge up close, and then shoot the horse, not the rider.'
'More meat on the 'orse than there is on the pandy, eh, Jasper?' says the sergeant, winking, and the private said it was just as well, since some non-coms of his acquaintance, namin' no names, would as soon be cannibals as not.
These are the trivial things that stick in memory, but none clearer than the inside of that great barrack-room, with the wounded lying in a long, sighing, groaning line down one wall, and a few yards away, behind roughly improvised screens of chick and canvas, four hundred women and children, who had lived in that confined, sweating furnace for two weeks. The first thing that struck you was the stench, of blood and stale sweat and sickness, and then the sound — the children's voices, a baby crying, the older ones calling out, and some even laughing, while the firing cracked away outside; the quiet murmur of the women; the occasional gasp of pain from the wounded; the brisk voices from the curtained corner where Wheeler had his office. Then the gaunt patient faces — the weary- looking women, some in ragged aprons, others in soiled evening dresses, nursing or minding the children or tending the wounded; the loyal sepoys, slumped against the wall, with their muskets between their knees; an English civilian sitting writing, and staring up in thought, and then writing again; beside him an old babu in a dhoti, mouthing the words as he read a scrap of newspaper through steel-rimmed spectacles; a haggard-looking young girl stitching a garment for a small boy who was waiting and hitting out angrily at the flies buzzing round his head; two officers in foul suits that had once been white, talking about pig-sticking — I remember one jerking his arm to shoot his linen, and him with nothing over his torso but his jacket; an ayah*(*Native nursemaid.) smiling as she piled toy bricks for a little girl; a stocky, tow-headed corporal scraping his pipe; a woman whispering from the Bible to a pallid Goanese-looking fellow lying on a blanket with a bloody bandage round his head; an old, stern, silver- haired mem-sahib rocking a cradle.
They were all waiting to die, and some of them knew it, but there was no complaint, no cross words that I ever heard. It wasn't real, somehow — the patient, ordinary way they carried on. 'It beats me,' I remember Moore saying, 'when I think how our dear ladies used to slang and back-bite on the verandahs, to see 'em now, as gentle as nuns. Take my word for it, they'll never look at their fellow-women the same way again, if we get out of this.'
'Don't you believe it,' says another, called Delafosse. 'It's just lack of grub that's keeping 'em quiet. A week after it's all over, they'll be cutting Lady Wheeler dead in the street, as usual.'
It's all vague memory, though, with no sense of time to it; I couldn't tell you when it was that I came face to face with Harry East, and we spoke, but I know that it was near Wheeler's curtain, where I'd been talking with two officers called Whiting and Thomson, and a rather pretty girl called Bella Blair was sitting not far away reading a poem to some of the children. I must have got over my funks to some extent, for I know I was sufficiently myself to be properly malicious to him.
'Hallo, Flashman,' says he.
'Hallo, young Scud East,' says I, quite cool. 'You got to Raglan, I hear.'
'Yes,' says he, blushing. 'Yes, I did.'
'Good for you,' says I. 'Wish I could have come along — but I was delayed, you recollect.'
This was all Greek to the others, of course, so the young ass had to blurt it out for their benefit — how we'd escaped together in Russia, and he'd left me behind wounded (which, between ourselves, had been the proper thing to do, since there was vital news to carry to Raglan at Sevastopol), and the Cossacks had got me. Of course, he hadn't got the style to make the tale sound creditable to himself, and I saw Whiting cock an eyebrow and sniff. East stuttered over it, and blushed even redder, and finally says:
'I'm so glad you got out, in the end, though, Flashman. I … I hated leaving you, old fellow.'
'Yes,' says I. 'The Cossacks were all for it, though.'
'I … I hope they didn't — I mean, they didn't use you too badly … that they didn't ..' He was making a truly dreadful hash of it, much to my enjoyment. 'It's been on my conscience, you know … having to go off like that.'
Whiting was looking at the ceiling by this. Thomson was frowning, and the delectable Bella had stopped reading to listen.
'Well,' says I, after a moment, 'it's all one now, you know.' I gave a little sigh. 'Don't fret about it, young Scud. If the worst comes to the worst here — I won't leave you behind.'
It hit him like a blow; he went chalk-white, and gasped, and then he turned on his heel and hurried off. Whiting said, 'Good God!' and Thomson asked incredulously: 'Did I understand that right? He absolutely cut out and left you — saved his own skin?'
'Urn? What's that?' says I, and frowned. 'Oh, now, that's a bit hard. No use both of us being caught and strung up in a dungeon and …' I stopped there and bit my lip. 'That would just have meant the Cossacks would have had two of us to … play with, wouldn't it? Doubled the chance of one of us cracking and telling 'em what they wanted to know. That's why I wasn't sorry he cleared out … I knew I could trust myself, you see … But, Lord, what am I rambling about? It's all past.' I smiled bravely at them. 'He's a good chap, young East; we were at school together, you know.'
I limped off then, leaving them to discuss it if they wanted to, and what they said I don't know, but later than evening Thomson sought me out at my place on the parapet, and shook my hand without a word, and then Bella
