back, thank God, wheeling and riding back into the smoke, and the bhisti was at my elbow, thrusting his chaggle at my lips.
'Stand to!' shouts Wheeler, 'they're coming again!'
They were re-forming, a bare hundred yards off; the ground between was littered with dead and dying beasts and men. I had barely time to gulp a mouthful of warm, muddy water and seize my musket before they were howling in at us once more, and this time there were pandy infantrymen racing behind them.
'One more volley!' bawls Wheeler. 'Hold your fire, there! Aim for the horses! No surrender! Ready, present — fire!'
The whole wall blasted fire, and the charge shook and wavered before it came rushing on again; half a dozen of them were rearing and plunging up to the entrenchment, the sabres were swinging about our heads, and I was rolling away to avoid the smashing hooves of a rider coming in almost on top of me. I scrambled to my feet, and there was a red-coated black devil leaping at me from the parapet; I smashed at him with my musket butt and sent him flying, and then another one was at me with his sabre, lunging. I shrieked as it flew past my head, and then we had closed, and I was clawing at his face, bearing him down by sheer weight. His sabre fell, and I plunged for it; another pandy was rushing past me, musket and bayonet extended, but I got my hand on the fallen hilt, slashing blindly; I felt a sickening shock on my head, and fell, a dead weight landed on top of me, and the next thing I knew I was on my hands and knees, with the earth swimming round me, and Wheeler was bawling, 'Cease fire! Cease fire! Stretchers, there!' and the noise of yelling and banging had died away, while the last of the smoke cleared above the ghastly shambles of the parapet.
There seemed to be dead and dying everywhere. There must have been at least a dozen pandies sprawled within ten yards of where I knelt; the ground was sticky with blood. Wheeler himself was down on one knee, supporting the fat babu, who was wailing with a shattered leg; the frail civilian was lying asprawl, his cricket cap gone and his head just a squashed red mess. One of the pandies stirred, and pulled himself up on one knee; Wheeler, his arm still round the babu, whipped up his revolver and fired, and the pandy flopped back in the dust. The stretcher parties were hurrying up; I looked out over' the parapet, across a maidan littered with figures of men that crawled or lay still; there were screaming horses trying to rise, and others that lay dead among the fallen riders. Two hundred yards off there were men running — the other way, thank God; farther down the parapet someone sent up a cheer, and it gradually spread along the entrenchment in a ghastly, croaking yell. My mouth was too dry, and I was too dazed to cheer — but I was alive.
Bella Blair was dead. She was lying on her side, her hands clutched on the stock of a musket whose bayonet was buried in her body. I heard a moan behind me, and there was the riding-master, flopped against the parapet, his shirt soaked in blood, trying to reach for the fallen water-chaggle. I stumbled over to him, and held it up to his lips; he sucked it, groaning, and then let his head fall back.
'Beat 'em, did we?' says he, painfully. I could only nod; I took a gulp at the chaggle myself, and offered him another swig, but he turned his head feebly aside. There was nothing to be done for him; his life was running out of him where he lay.
'Beat 'em,' says he again. 'Dam' good. Thought … they was going to ride … clean over us there … for a moment.' He coughed blood, and his voice trailed away into a whisper. 'They shaped well, though … didn't they … shape well? My Bengalis …' He closed his eyes. 'I thought they shaped … uncommon well …'
I looked down the entrenchment. About half the defenders were on their feet at the parapet, I reckoned. In between, the sprawled, silent figures, the groaning, writhing wounded waiting for the stretchers, the tangle of gear and fallen weapons, the bloody rags — and now the pandy guns again, pounding anew at the near-dead wreck of the Cawnpore garrison, with its tattered flag still flapping from the mast. Well, thinks I, they can walk in now, any time they like. There's nothing left to stop 'em.
But they didn't. That last great assault of June twenty-third, which had come within an ace of breaking us, had sickened the pandies. The maidan was strewn with their dead, and although they pounded us with gunfire for another two terrible days, they didn't have the stomach for another frontal attack. If only they'd known it, half the men left on our parapet were too done up with fatigue and starvation to lift a musket, the barrack was choked with more than three hundred wounded and dying, the well was down to stinking ooze, and our remaining flour was so much dust. We couldn't have lasted two minutes against a determined assault — yet why should they bother, when hunger and heat and the steady rate of casualties from bombardment were sure to finish us soon anyway?
Three folk went mad, as I remember, in those forty-eight hours; I only wonder now that we all didn't. In the furnace of the barrack the women and children were too reduced by famine even to cry; even the younger officers seemed to be overcome by the lethargy of approaching certain death. For that, Wheeler now admitted, was all that remained.
'I have sent a last message out to Lawrence,' he told us senior men on the second night. 'I have told him that we have nothing left but British spirit, and that cannot last forever. We are like rats in a cage. Our best hope is that the rebels will come in again, and give us a quick end; better that than watch our women and little ones die by inches. '29
I can still see the gaunt faces in the flickering candlelight round his table; someone gave a little sob, and another swore softly, and after a moment Vibart asked if there was no hope that Lawrence might yet come to our relief.
Wheeler shook his head. 'He would come if he could, but even if he marched now he could not reach us in under two days. By then … well, you know me, gentlemen. I haven't croaked in fifty years' soldiering, and I'm not croaking now, when I say that short of a miracle it is all up. We're in God's hands, so let each one of us make his preparations accordingly.'
I was with him there, only my preparations weren't going to be spiritual. I still had my Pathan rig-out stowed away, and I could see that the time was fast approaching when, game ankle or no, Flashy was going to have to take his chance over the wall. It was that or die in this stinking hole, so I left them praying and went to my place on the parapet to think it out; I was in a blue funk at the thought of trying to decamp, but the longer I waited, the harder it might become. I was still wrestling with my fears when someone hove up out of the gloom beside me, and who should it be but East.
'Flashman,' says he, 'may I have a word with you?' 'If you must,' says I. 'I'll be obliged if you'll make it a brief one.'
'Of course, of course,' says he. 'I understand. As Sir Hugh said, it is time for each of us to make his own soul; I won't intrude on your meditations a moment longer than I must, I promise. The trouble is … my own conscience…. I need your help, old fellow.'
'I:h?' I stared at him, trying to make out his face in the dark. 'What the deuce — ?'
'Please … bear with me. I know you're bitter, because you think I abandoned you in Russia … left you to die, while I escaped. Oh, I know it was my duty, and all that, to get to Raglan … but the truth is —' he broke off and had a gulp to himself ' — the truth is, I was glad to leave you. There — it's out at last … oh, if you knew how it had been tormenting me these two years past! That weight on my soul — that I abandoned you in a spirit of hatred and sinful vengeance. No … let me finish! I hated you then … because of the way you had treated Valla … when you flung her from that sledge, into the snow! I could have killed you for it!'
He was in a rare taking, no error; a Rugby conscience pouring out is a hell of a performance. He wasn't telling me a thing I hadn't guessed at the time — I know these pious bastards better than they know themselves, you see.
'I loved her, you see,' he went on, talking like an old man with a hernia. 'She meant everything to me … and you had cast her away so … brutally. Please, please, hear me out! I'm confessing, don't you see? And … and asking for your forgiveness. It's late in the day, I know — but, well, it looks as though we haven't much longer, don't it? So … I wanted to tell you … and shake your hand, old school-fellow, and hear from you that my … my sin is forgiven me. If you can find it in your heart, that is.' He choked resoundingly. 'I … I trust you can.'
I've heard some amazing declarations in my time, but this babbling was extraordinary. It comes of Christian upbringing, of course, and taking cold baths, all of which implants in the impressionable mind the notion that repentance can somehow square the account. At any other time, it would have given me some malicious amusement to listen to him; even in my distracted condition, it was interesting enough for me to ask him:
'D'ye mean that if I hadn't given you cause to detest me, you'd have stayed with me, and let Raglan's message go hang?'
'What's that?' says he. 'I … I don't know what you mean. I … I … please, Flashman, you must see my agony
