lungs were bursting as we ploughed through the thicker jungle near the river, tripping on snags, tearing ourselves, sobbing with exhaustion — and then we were on the bank, and Delafosse was sliding to a halt in the mud and yelling.
'It's gone! Vibart! My God, the boat's gone!'
The mudbank was empty — there was the great groove where the barge had been, but the brown stretch of water was unbroken to the wall of green on its far side; of the barge there wasn't a sign.
'It must have slid off —' Delafosse was crying, and I thought, good for you, my boy, let's stop to consider how it happened, eh, and the niggers can come up and join in. I didn't even check stride; I went into the water in the mightiest racing dive I ever performed, and I heard the cries and splashes as the others took to the river behind me. I was striking out blindly, feeling the current tugging me downstream — I didn't mind; anywhere would do so long as it was away from those black devils screeching in the forest behind. The far bank was too distant to reach, but downstream where the river curved there were islands and sandbanks, and we were being carried towards them far faster than our pursuers could hope to run. I swam hard with the current, until the yelping of the niggers had faded into the distance, and then glanced round to see how the others were getting along. There were four heads bobbing in the water — Delafosse, Thomson, Murphy, and Sullivan, all swimming in my wake, and I was just debating whether to make for the nearest sandbank or allow myself to be carried past, when Delafosse reared up in the water, yelling and gesturing ahead of me. I couldn't make him out, and then the single shrieked word 'Muggers!' reached me, and as I looked where he was pointing the steamy waters of the Ganges seemed to turn to ice.
On a mudbank a hundred yards ahead and to my right, shapes were moving — long, brown, hideously scaly dragons waddling down to the water at frightening speed, plashing into the shallows and then gliding out inexorably to head us off, their half-submerged snouts rippling the surface. For an instant I was paralysed — then I was thrashing at the water in a frenzy of terror, trying to get out into midstream, fighting the sluggish current. I knew it was hopeless; they must intercept us long before we could reach the islands, but I lashed out blindly, ploughing through the water, too terrified to look and expecting every moment to feel the agonising stab of crocodile teeth in my legs. I was almost done, with exhaustion and panic, and then Sullivan was alongside, tugging at me, pointing ahead — and I saw that the placid surface was breaking up into a long, swirling race where the water ran down between two little scrubby mudbanks. There was just a chance, if we could get into that broken water, that the faster current might carry us away — muggers hate rough water, anyway — and I went for it with the energy of despair.
One glance I spared to my right — my God, there was one of the brutes within ten yards, swirling towards me. I had a nightmare glimpse of that hideous snout breaking surface, of the great tapering jaws suddenly yawning in a cavern of teeth — and I regret to say I did not notice whether the fourth tooth of the lower jaw was overlapping or not. A naturalist chap, to whom I described my experience a few years ago, tells me that if I'd taken note of this, I'd have known whether I was being attacked by a true crocodile or gavial, or by some other species, which would have added immense interest to the occasion.33 As it was, I can only say that the bloody thing looked like an Iron Maiden rushing at me through the water, and I was just letting out a last wail of despair when Sullivan seized me by the hair, the current tore at our legs, and we were swept away into the rough water between the islands, striking out any old way, going under into the choking brown, coming up again and struggling to stay afloat — and then the water had changed to clinging black ooze, and Sullivan was crying:
'Up, up, sir, for Christ's sake!' and he was half-dragging me through the slime towards the safety of a tangled mass of creeper on top of a mudbank. Delafosse was staggering out beside us, Thomson was knee-deep in the water smashing with a piece of root at the head of a mugger which lunged and snapped before swirling away with a flourish of its enormous tail: Murphy, his arm trickling blood, was already up on the top of the bank, reaching down to help us. I heaved up beside him, shuddering, and I remember thinking: that must be the end, nothing more can happen now, and if it does, I don't care, I'll just have to die, because there's nothing I can do. Sullivan was kneeling over me, and I remember I said:
'God bless you, Sullivan. You are the noblest man alive,' or something equally brilliant — although I meant it, by God — and he replied: 'I daresay you're right, sir; you'll have to tell my missus, for damn me if she thinks so.' And then I must have swooned away, for all I can remember is Delafosse saying: 'I believe they are friends — see, Thomson, they are waving to us — they mean us no harm,' and myself thinking, if it's the muggers waving, don't you trust the bastards an inch, they're only pretending to be friendly …
Luck, as I've often observed, is an agile sprite who jumps both ways in double quick time. You could say it had been evil chance that took me to Meerut and the birth of the Mutiny — but I'd escaped, only to land in the hell of Cawnpore, from which I was one of only five to get clear away after the ghat massacre. It had been the foulest luck to run into those wild men in the jungle, and the infernal muggers — but if they hadn't chased us, we mightn't have fetched up on a mudbank under the walls of one of those petty Indian rulers who stayed loyal to the Sirkar. For that was what had happened — the new niggers whom Delafosse saw waving and hallooing from the shore turned out to be the followers of one Diribijah Singh, a tough old maharaj who ruled from a fort in the jungle, and was a steadfast friend of the British. So you see, all that matters about luck is that it should run good on the last throw.34
Not that the game was over, you understand; when I think back on the Mutiny, even on Cawnpore, I can say that the worst was still to come. And yet, I feel that the tide turned on that mudbank; at least, after a long nightmare, I can say that there followed a period of comparative calm, for me, in which I was able to recruit my tattered nerves, and take stock, and start planning how to get the devil out of this Indian pickle and back to England and safety.
For the moment, there was nothing to do but thank God and the loyal savages who picked us up from that shoal, with the muggers snuffling discontentedly in the wings. The natives took us ashore, to the maharaj's castle, and he was a brick — a fine old sport with white whiskers and a belly like a barrel, who swore damnation to all mutineers and promised to return us to our own folk as soon as we had recovered and it seemed safe to pass through the country round. But that wasn't for several weeks, and in the meantime the five of us could only lie and recuperate and contain our impatience as best we might — Delafosse and Thomson were itching to get back into the thick of things; Murphy and Sullivan, the two privates, kept their counsel and ate like horses; while I, making an even greater show of impatience than my brother-officers, was secretly well content to rest at ease, blinking in the sun and eating mangoes, to which I'm partial.
In the meantime, we later discovered, great things were happening in the world beyond. When news of Cawnpore's fall got out, it gave the Mutiny a tremendous fillip; revolt spread all along the Ganges valley and in Central India, the garrisons at Mhow and Agra and a dozen other places rebelled, and most notable of all, Henry Lawrence got beat fighting a dani' silly battle at Chinhat, and had to hole up in Lucknow, which went under siege. On the credit side, my old friend the First Gravedigger (General Havelock to you) finally got up off his Puritan rump and struck through Allahabad at Cawnpore; he fought his way in after a nine-day march, and recaptured the place a bare three weeks after we'd been driven out — and I suppose all the world knows what he found when he got there.
You remember that when we escaped the massacre at the Suttee Ghat, the barges with the women and children were caught by the pandies. Well, Nana took them ashore, all 200 of them, and locked them up in a place called the Bibigarh, in such filth and heat that thirty of them died within a week. He made our women grind corn; then, when word came that Havelock was fighting his way in, and slaughtering all opposition, Nana had all the women and children butchered. They say even the pandies wouldn't do it, so he sent in hooligans with cleavers from the Cawnpore bazaar; they chopped them all up, even the babies, and threw them, dead and still living, down a well. Havelock's people found the Bibigarh ankle-deep in blood, with children's toys and hats and bits of hair still floating in it; they had got there two days too late.
I don't suppose any event in my lifetime — not Balaclava nor Shiloh nor Rorke's Drift nor anywhere else I can think of — has had such a stunning effect on people's minds as that Cawnpore massacre of the innocents. I didn't see the full horror of it, of course, as Havelock's folk did, but I was there a few weeks after, and walked in the Bibigarh, and saw the bloody floor and walls, and near the well I found the skeleton bones of a baby's hand, like a little white crab in the dust. I'm a pretty cool hand, as you know, but it made me gag, and if you ask me what I think of the vengeance that old General Neill wreaked, making captured mutineers clean up the Bibigarh, flogging 'em and forcing 'em to lick up the blood with their tongues before they were hanged — well, I was all for it then, and I still am. Perhaps it's because I knew the corpses that went into that well — I'd seen them playing on the
