Cawnpore rampart, and being heard their lessons in that awful barrack, and laughing at the elephant dunging. Perhaps that baby hand I found belonged to the infant I'd seen in the arms of the woman in the torn gown. Anyway, I'd have snuffed out every life in India, and thought naught of it, in that moment when I looked at Bibigarh — and if you think that shocking, well, maybe I'm just more like Nana Sahib than you are.
Anyway, what I think don't signify. What mattered was the effect that Cawnpore had on our people. I know it turned our army crazy; they were ready to slaughter anything that even sniffed of mutiny, from that moment on. Not that they'd been dealing exactly kindly before; Havelock and Neill had been hanging right, left and centre from Allahabad north, and I daresay had disposed of quite a number of innocents — just as the pandies at Meerut and Delhi had done.35
What beats me is the way people take it to heart — what do they expect in war? It ain't conducted by missionaries, or chaps in Liberal clubs, snug and secure. But what amuses me most is the way fashionable views change — why, for years after Cawnpore, any vengeance wreaked on an Indian, mutineer or not, was regarded as just vengeance; nothing was too bad for 'em. Now it's t'other way round, with eminent writers crying shame, and saying nothing justified such terrible retribution as Neill took, and we were far guiltier than the niggers had been. Why? Because we were Christians, and supposed to know better? — and because England contains this great crowd of noisy know-alls that are forever defending our enemies' behaviour and crying out in pious horror against our own. Why our sins are always so much blacker, I can't fathom — as to Cawnpore, it don't seem to me one whit worse to slay in revenge, like Neill, than out of sheer spite and cruelty, like Nana; at least it's more understandable.
The truth is, of course, that both sides were afraid — the pandy who'd mutinied, and feared punishment, decided he might as well be hanged for a sheep, and let his natural bloodlust go — they're cruel bastards at bottom. And our folk — they'd had an almighty scare, and Cawnpore brought their natural bloodlust to the top in turn; just give 'em a few well-chosen texts about vengeance and wrath of God and they could fall to with a will — as I've already observed about Rowbotham's Mosstroopers, there's nothing crueller than a justified Christian. Except maybe a nigger running loose.
So you can see it was a jolly summer in the Ganges valley, all right, as I and my four companions discovered, when Diribijah Singh finally convoyed us out from his fort and back to Cawnpore after Havelock had retaken it. I hadn't seen old Blood-and-Bones since he'd stood grumping beside my bed at Jallalabad fifteen years before, and time hadn't improved him; he still looked like Abe Lincoln dying of diarrhoea, with his mournful whiskers and bloodhound eyes. When I told him my recent history he just listened in silence, and then grabbed me by the wrist with his great bony hand, dragged me down on to my knees beside him, and began congratulating God on lugging Flashy out of the stew again, through His infinite mercy.
'The shield of His truth has been before thee, Flash-man,' cries he. 'Has not the Hand which plucked thee from the paw of the bear at Kabul, and the jaws of the lion at Balaclava, delivered thee also from the Philistine at Cawnpore?'
'Absolutely, amen,' says I, but when I took him into my confidence — about Palmerston, and why I came to India in the first place, and suggested there was no good reason why I shouldn't head for home at once — he shook his great coffin head.
'It cannot be,' says he. 'That mission is over, and we need every hand at the plough. The fate of this country is in the balance, and I can ill spare such a seasoned soldier as yourself. There is a work of cleansing and purging before us,' he went on, and you could see by the holy fire in his eyes that he was just sweating to get to grips with it. 'I shall take you on to my staff, Flashman — nay, sir, never thank me; it is I shall be the gainer, rather than you.'
I was ready to agree with him there, but I knew there was no point in arguing with the likes of Havelock — anyway, before I could think of anything to say he was scribbling orders for hanging a few more pandies, and dictating a crusty note to Neill, and roaring for his adjutant; he was a busy old Baptist in those days, right enough.
So there I was, and it might have been worse. I'd had no real hope of being sent home — no high command in their right mind would have dispensed with the famous Flash when there was a campaign on hand, and since I had to be here I'd rather be under Havelock's wing than anyone's. He was a good soldier, you see, and as canny as Campbell in his own way; there'd be no massacres or Last Stands round the Union Jack with the Gravedigger in charge.
So I settled in as Havelock's intelligence aide — a nice safe billet in the circumstances, but if you would learn the details of how I fared with him you must consult my official history, Dawns and Departures of a Soldier's Life (in three handsomely-bound morocco volumes, price two gns. each or five gns. the set, though you may have difficulty laying hands on Volume III, since it had to be called in and burned by the bailiffs after that odious little Whitechapel sharper D'Israeli egged on one of his toadies to sue me for criminal information. Suez Canal shares, eh? I'll blacken the bastard's memory yet, though, just see if I don't. Truth will out).
However, the point is that my present tale isn't truly concerned with the main course of the Mutiny henceforth — although I bore my full reluctant part in that — but still with that mad mission on which Pam had sent me out in the first place, to Jhansi and the bewitching Lakshmibai. For I wasn't done with her, whatever Havelock might think, and however little I guessed it myself; the rest of the Mutiny was just the road that led me back to her, and to that final terrible adventure of the Jhansi flight and the guns of Gwalior when — but I'll come to that presently.
In the meantime I'll tell you as briskly as I can what happened in the few months after I joined Havelock at Cawnpore. At first it was damned bad news all round: the Mutiny kept spreading, Nana had sheered off after losing Cawnpore and was raising cain farther up-country, Delhi was still held by the pandies with our people banging away at it, and Havelock at Cawnpore didn't have the men or means to relieve Lucknow, only forty miles away, where Lawrence's garrison was hemmed in. He tried hard enough, but found that the pandy forces, while they didn't make best use of their overwhelming numbers, fought better defensive actions than anyone had expected, and Havelock got a couple of black eyes before he'd gone ten miles, and had to fall back. To make matters worse, Lloyd's advance guard got cut up at Arah, and no one down in Calcutta seemed to have any notion of overall strategy — that clown Canning was sitting like a fart in a trance, they tell me, and no proper order was taken.
I wasn't too upset, though. For one thing I was snug at the Cawnpore headquarters, making a great bandobast*(*Organisation, administration.) over collecting information from our spies and passing the gist on to Havelock (intelligence work is nuts to me, so long as I can stay close to bed, bottle and breakfast and don't have to venture out). And for another, I could sense that things were turning our way; once the first flood of pandy successes had spent itself, there could only be one end, and old Campbell, who was the best general in the business, was coming out to take command-in-chief.
In September we moved on Lucknow in style, with fresh troops under Outram, a dirty-looking little chap on a waler horse, more like a Sheeny tailor than a general. They tell me it was a hell of a march; certainly it rained buckets all the way, and there was some stern fighting at Mangalwarh and at the Alum Bagh near Lucknow town — I know, because I got reports of it in my intelligence ghari at the rear of the column, where I was properly ensconced writing reports, examining prisoners, and getting news from friendly natives — at least, they were friendly by the time my Rajput orderlies had basted 'em a bit. From time to time I poked my head out into the rain, and called cheery encouragement to the reinforcements, or sent messages to Havelock — I remember one of them was that Delhi had fallen at last, and that old Johnny Nicholson had bought a bullet, poor devil. I drank a quiet brandy to him, listening to the downpour and the guns booming, and thought God help poor soldiers on a night like this.
However, having got Lucknow, Havelock and Outram didn't know what the devil to do with it, for the pandies were still thick around as fleas, and it soon became evident that far from raising the siege, our forces were nothing but reinforcement to the garrison. So we were all besieged, for another seven weeks, and the deuce of a business it must have been, with bad rations and the pandies forever trying to tunnel in under our defences, and our chaps fighting 'em in the mines which were like a warren underground. I say 'must have been', for I knew nothing about it; the night we entered Lucknow my bowels began to explode in all directions, and before morning I was flat on my back with cholera, for the second time in my life.
For once, it was a blessing, for it meant I was spared knowledge of a siege that was Cawnpore all over again, if not quite as bad. I gather I raved a good deal of the time, and I know I spent weeks lying on a cot in a beastly little cellar, as weak as a rat and not quite in my right mind. It was only in the last fortnight of the siege
