smoke was drifting above me, and then I lost consciousness.
I told you the worst was still to come, didn't I? Well, you've read my chronicle of the Great Mutiny, and if you've any humanity you're bound to admit that I'd had my share of sorrow already, and more — even Campbell later said that I'd seen hard service, so there. But Rose himself declared that if he hadn't been told the circumstance of my awakening at Gwalior by an eyewitness, he wouldn't have believed it — it was the most terrible thing, he said, that he had ever heard of in all his experience of war, or anybody else's, either. He wondered that I hadn't lost my reason. I agreed then, and I still do. This is what happened.
I came back to life, as is often the case, with my last waking moment clear in my mind. I had been on horse-back, riding hard, seeing a shot strike home in a sandy nullah — so why, I wondered irritably, was I now standing up, leaning against something hard, with what seemed to be a polished table top in front of me? There was a shocking pain in my head, and a blinding glare of light burning my eyes, so I shut them quickly. I tried to move, but couldn't, because something was holding me; my ears were ringing, and there was a jumble of voices close by, but I couldn't make them out. Why the hell didn't they shut up, I wondered, and I tried to tell them to be quiet, but my voice wouldn't work — I wanted to move, to get away from the thing that was pressing against my chest, so I tugged, and an unspeakable pain shot through my left arm and into my chest, a stabbing, searing pain so exquisite that I screamed aloud, and again, and again, at which a voice cried in English, apparently right in my ear.
''Ere's another as can't 'old 'is bleedin' row! Stick a gag in this bastard an' all, Andy!'
Someone grabbed my hair and pulled my head back, and I shrieked again, opening my eyes wide with the pain, to see a blinding light sky, and a red, sweating face within a few inches of mine. Before I could make another sound, a foul wet rag was stuffed brutally into my mouth, choking me, and a cloth was whipped across it and knotted tight behind my head. I couldn't utter a sound, and when I tried to reach up to haul the filthy thing away, I realised why I hadn't been able to move. My hands were lashed to the object that was pressing into my body. Stupefied, blinking against the glare, in agony with my arm and head and the gag that was suffocating me, I tried to focus my eyes; for a few seconds there was just a whirl of colours and shapes — and then I saw.
I was tied across the muzzle of a cannon, the iron rim biting into my body, with my arms securely lashed either side of the polished brown barrel. I was staring along the top of that barrel, between the high wheels, to where two British soldiers were standing by the breech, poking at the touch-hole, and one was saying to the other:
'No, by cripes, none o' yer Woolwich models. No lanyards, Jim my boy — we'll 'ave to stick a fuse in, an' stand well clear.'
'She's liable to blow 'er flamin' wheels off, though, ain't she?' says the other. 'There's a four-pahnd cartridge in there, wiv a stone shot. S'pose it'll splinter, eh?'
'Ask 'im — arterwards!' says the first, gesturing at me, and they both laughed uproariously. 'You'll tell us, won't yer, Sambo?'
For a moment I couldn't make it out — what the devil were they talking about? And how dared the insolent dogs address a colonel as 'Sambo' — and one of 'em with a pipe stuck between his grinning teeth? Fury surged up in me, as I stared into those red yokel faces, leering at me, and I shouted 'Damn your eyes, you mutinous bastards! How dare you — d'ye know who I am, you swine? I'll flog the ribs out of you …' but it didn't come out as a shout, only as a soundless gasp deep in my throat behind that stifling gag. Then, ever so slowly, it dawned on me where I was, and what was happening, and my brain seemed to explode with the unutterable horror of it. As Rose said afterwards, I ought to have gone mad; for an instant I believe I did.
I don't have to elaborate my sensations — anyway, I couldn't. I can only say that I was sane enough after that first spasm of dreadful realisation, because behind the fog of panic I saw in a second what had happened — saw it with blinding certainty. I had been knocked on the head, presumably by a splinter of flying debris, and picked up senseless by our gallant troops. Of course they'd taken me for a pandy — with my matted hair and beard and filthy and ragged sepoy uniform; they'd seen I wasn't dead, and decided to execute me in style, along with other prisoners. For as I flung my head round in an ecstasy of such fear as even I had never known before, I saw that mine was only one in a line of guns, six or seven of them, and across the muzzle of each was strapped a human figure. Some were ragged pandies, like me, others were just niggers; one or two were gagged, as I was, the rest were not; some had been tied face to the gun, but most had the muzzles in their backs. And shortly these brutes who loafed about the guns at their ease, spitting and smoking and chaffing to each other, would touch off the charges, and a mass of splintering stone would tear through my vitals — and there was nothing I could do to stop them! If I hadn't screamed when I regained consciousness, I wouldn't have been gagged, and three words would have been enough to show them their ghastly error — but now I couldn't utter a sound, but only watch with bulging eyes as one of the troopers, in leisurely fashion, pushed a length of fuse into the touch-hole, winked at me, and then sauntered back to rejoin his mates, who were standing or squatting in the sunlight, obviously waiting for the word to start the carnage.
'Come on, come on, where the 'ell's the captain?' says one. 'Still at mess, I'll lay. Christ, it's 'ot! I want ter get on my charpoy, I do, an' bang me bleedin' ear-'ole. 'E couldn't blow the bloody pandies away arter supper, could 'e? Oh, no, not 'im.'
'Wot we blowin' 'em up for?' says one pale young trooper. 'Couldn't they 'ang the pore sods — or shoot 'em? It 'ud be cheaper.'
'Pore sods my arse,' says the first. 'You know what they done, these black scum? You shoulda bin at Delhi, see the bloody way they ripped up wimmen an' kids — fair sicken yer, wot wi' tripes an' innards all over the plice. Blowin' away's too — good for 'em.'
'Not as cruel as 'angin', neither,' says a third. 'They don't feel nothin'.' He strolled past my gun, and to my horror he patted me on the head. 'So cheer up, Sambo, you'll soon be dead. 'Ere, wot's the matter wiv 'im, Bert, d'ye reckon?'
I was writhing frenziedly in my bonds, almost fainting with the agony of my wounded arm, which was gashed And bleeding, flinging my head from side to side as I tried to spit out that horrible gag, almost bursting internally in my effort to make some sound, any sound, that would make him understand the ghastly mistake they'd made. He stood, grinning stupidly, and Bert sauntered up, knocking his pipe out on the gun.
'Matter? Wot the 'ell d'yer think's the matter, you duffer? 'E don't want 'is guts blew all the way to Calcutta — that's wot's the matter! Gawd, 'e'll kill 'isself wiv appleplexy by the look of 'im.'
'Funny, though, ain't it?' says the first. 'An' look at the rest of 'em — jes' waitin' there, an' not even a squeak from 'em, as if they didn't care. Pathetic, ain't it?'
'That's their religion,' pronounced Bert. 'They fink they're goin' to 'eaven — they fink they're goin' to get 'arf-a-dozen rum bints apiece, an' bull 'em till Judgement I )ay. Fact.'
'Go on! They don't look all that bleedin' pleased, then, do they?'
They turned away, and I flopped over the gun, near to suffocation and with my heart ready to burst for misery and fear. Only one word — that was all I needed — Christ, if I could only get a hand free, a finger even! Blood from my wounded arm had run on to the gun, drying almost at once on the burning metal — if I could even scrawl a message on it — or just a letter — they might see it, and understand. I must be able to do something — think, think, think, I screamed inside my head, fighting back the madness, straining with all my power to tear. my right wrist free, almost dislocating my neck in a futile effort to work the gag-binding loose. My mouth was full of its filthy taste, it seemed to be slipping farther into my gullet, choking me — God, if they thought I was choking, would they pull it out, even for a second? … that was all I needed, oh God, please, please, let them — I couldn't die like this, like a stinking nigger pandy, after all I'd suffered — not by such cruel, ghastly, ill-luck …
'Aht pipes, straighten up — orficer comin',' cries one of the troopers, and they scrambled up hastily, adjusting their kepis, doing up their shirt-buttons, as two officers came strolling across from the tents a couple of hundred yards away. I gazed towards them like a man demented, as though by staring I could attract their attention; my right wrist was raw and bleeding with my dragging at it, but the rope was like a band of steel round it, and I couldn't do more than scrabble with my fingers at the hot metal. I was crying, uncontrollably; my head was swimming — but no, no, I mustn't faint! Anything but that — think, think, don't faint, don't go mad! They've never got you yet — you've always slid out somehow …
'All ready, sergeant?' The leading officer was glancing along the line of guns, and my eyes nearly started from my head as I saw it was Clem Hennidge' — Dandy Clem of the 8th Hussars, whom I'd ridden with at Balaclava. He was within five yards of me, nodding to the sergeant, glancing briefly round, while beside him a fair
