The Cannons of Lucknow (16 page)

Phrased thus, the invitation was tantamount to an order, and, without waiting for a reply, Neill kicked his horse into a canter and went to join the members of his staff, riding thirty yards ahead of him.

Alex was depressed and anxious when he returned to his tent, but his depression lifted when he saw a familiar white-bearded figure awaiting him there. Flinging his reins to his
syce
, he ran the few yards which separated him from the entrance to the tent, and old Mohammed Bux salaamed, tears streaming down his lined brown cheeks.

“I had not thought to look upon your face again,
huzoor
,” the bearer said.

“Nor I on yours, my friend,” Alex told him, his own throat tight. “How came you here?”

The bearded lips curved into a smile. “Word reached my village that the sahibs were once more in Cawnpore and had driven the vile Mahratta into the jungle. So I returned, Sahib, without the hope that I might find you. All those who had defended the entrenchment had been slain, we were told, even the
mems
and the
baba-sahibs
. I had not waited—the sahib sent me, in the uniform of a sowar, to my village and I went, sahib, as you had commanded, casting off the uniform before I entered. But later I cursed myself because I had not waited.”

“You have nothing for which to curse yourself, Mohammed Bux,” Alex assured him. “When I sent you hence, it was in the belief that the Nana would honour the promise he had made to give us safe passage to Allahabad. He did not honour that promise.”

“So we heard,
huzoor
. And we heard also that the Nana vowed to take his own life, should he lose Cawnpore. That vow he also failed to honour. He is alive, Sahib, in Oudh, gathering a new army about him.” Graphically, the old man recounted the rumours that had reached his village concerning the Nana's treachery as, resuming his accustomed role, he assisted Alex to pull off his boots and divest himself of his sodden, mud-spattered clothing. “When I came into the camp this morning, I questioned the other servants and from them I learned that you were alive, Sahib. At first I feared that they were lying. I could not believe what they told me, but one of them brought me to this tent and now I see,
huzoor
, that he spoke truly, praise be to Allah!” He broke off and, fetching a towel, knelt with it in his thin, work-worn hands. Looking up into his master's face, he asked sadly, “Is it only you, Sahib, who is left? My
memsahiba
… the
chota baba-sahib
… have all gone from us?”

“Yes,” Alex confirmed bleakly. “All are dead, Mohammed Bux.” As he spoke of the manner of Emmy's death, the faithful old servant wept without restraint. Until the last day of the siege, Mohammed Bux had been in the entrenchment, refusing to leave even when opportunity was afforded him, performing the most menial of tasks and silently enduring all hardships, he had continued, until the end, to serve. Looking down, at him now, Alex was deeply moved by his devotion. He had, at long last, obtained a draft from the Paymaster and had cashed it that morning; he got to his feet and took half the money from his valise.

“This is for you, Mohammed Bux. It is not adequate reward for what you did, but I shall seek you out when this war is over and give you then what you deserve. Take it and go back to your village. You are free of my service.”

“You are sending me away from you, Sahib?” The old man was bewildered. He frowned at the money in his hand and let it fall, uncounted, to the ground. “You are sending me, for the second time, to my village?”

“I go to war,” Alex explained gently “We are to fight our way, if we can, to Lucknow. Conditions will be hard, we take no tents. It will be no place for an old man, Mohammed Bux. You have earned—you have more than earned an honourable retirement and I would give it to you, as a measure of my gratitude for the long years of your service.”

“
Nahin
, Sahib,
nahin!
My parents are dead, my wives also, and my children grown to man and womanhood. In my village, I am as a stranger. I would stay with you.”

Subjecting the wizened dark face to a searching scrutiny, Alex saw that the old man was in earnest. “If that is your considered wish … have you thought well, Mohammed Bux?”

“
Ji-han
, Sahib,” the bearer assured him. “I have thought well and it is my wish to serve you.” He rose, with dignity, from his knees and, taking Alex's hand, pressed it to his forehead in token of the bargain sealed between them. Then, bending down, he picked up the coins from the
dhurry
-covered floor of the tent, counted out ten of them, and laid the rest on the camp table. “I have taken the wage owed to me, Sahib,” he said, smiling. “I go now to prepare tea.”

The tent flap closed behind his retreating back and Alex, with a sigh of thankfulness, started to don the freshly laundered garments laid out for him on the bed.

Next day, after dismissing his recruits for their midday meal, he rode back across the canal and into the city, taking the road which skirted the Orderlies' Bazaar and the burnt-out ruins of the medical depot. The Bibigarh was a small, single-story building, painted with fading yellow-ochre wash, which stood enclosed in its own walled compound, a mere thirty yards from the Old Cawnpore Hotel, in which the Nana had taken up residence at the conclusion of the siege.

The hotel, Alex saw, a trifle to his surprise, was back to its normal business—indeed, to exceptional business, judging by the number of officers now emerging from its portals and heading—with considerably less reluctance than himself—for the house in which the massacre had taken place. Outside the wall of the compound and lining the road leading to it, a large crowd had already gathered, held back from both road and gateway by a guard of the Fusiliers and the 84th. Leaving his horse in the hotel stable, he joined a group of young Fusilier officers and walked with them to the gateway. They had lunched well—at their commanding officer's expense, it seemed—at the hotel and now, like schoolboys granted an unexpected holiday, they were in cheerfully festive mood, laughing and joking with each other. Their laughter faded, however, when they entered the precincts of the Bibigarh and Alex, who had been trying vainly to shut his ears to their ribaldry, was conscious of relief.

Inside, the scene differed from the normal solemn procedure laid down for military executions in that there was no hollow square drawn up in disciplined alignment and no band playing the Funeral March. The troops present, of whom a high proportion were officers, gathered in groups as spectators rather than witnesses and in place of the band, four drummers of the 84th stood with their provost-sergeant on the verandah of the building, their instruments piled in front of them.

It wanted fifteen minutes to the appointed time for the executions, but the six condemned men, under a strong guard, were lined up beneath the gallows which had been erected within the courtyard, their arms pinioned. The guards were natives, in the dun-coloured uniforms and red turbans of the newly recruited civil police—drawn, Alex had been told, from men of sweeper caste, under Eurasian N.C.O.'s—all armed with steel tipped lathis. The prisoners, with a single exception, were sepoys, in uniform but stripped of their buttons and badges of rank, bareheaded and with their jacket collars open at the neck and significantly turned back.

The exception was the
jullad
, a hulking brute of a man with a pock-marked face and in soiled white robes, who was standing apart from the rest, an outcast, even from the sweeper police. He was showing visible signs of apprehension, sweating profusely in the steamy heat and looking this way and that, his gaze lingering on the small knot of native spectators gathered at the rear of the gallows, as if in the hope of rescue. By contrast, the sepoys maintained a dignified calm, outstaring the noisy, hostile crowd of British soldiers which surged about them, their own eyes full of hate. Two of them were wounded, Alex noticed, but in spite of this and their pinioned arms, they were careful to avoid physical contact with their guards—and the guards, for all their new and privileged status, treated them with the awed respect which Hindus of lower caste always accorded to Brahmins.

At twenty-five minutes past twelve, the provost-marshal, Captain Bruce, called the assembled troops to attention and General Neill and his escort rode in through the gateway. Dismounting, the general strode to the verandah of the Bibigarh and, acknowledging Bruce's salute, gave him permission to proceed. First in English and then in Hindustani, the provost-marshal read out the charges against each man and the sentences, the drums rolled, and Bruce, after a brief pause, continued to read from the papers in his hand.

“By order of the brigadier-general commanding in Cawnpore, the brigadier-general has determined that every stain of the innocent blood which was shed in this House of Massacre shall be cleared and wiped out, previous to their execution, by such of the miscreants as may be thereafter apprehended, who took an active part in the mutiny, to be selected according to their rank, caste, and degree of guilt. Each miscreant will be taken under guard to the house in question and will be forced to clear up a small portion of the bloodstains, and the provost-marshal will use the lash freely in forcing anyone who objects to complete his task. After having the portion properly cleared up, the culprit is to be immediately hanged and, for this purpose, a gallows has been erected close at hand.”

There was a stunned silence. The British soldiers looked at one another, as the meaning of what they had just heard slowly sank in. They were standing to attention and, since no order had been received which would have permitted them to demonstrate their feelings, they remained silent. Some of the younger officers who were not officially on duty raised a cheer, but this was not taken up by the rest, and beside him Alex heard a subaltern of a mutinied native regiment say incredulously, “But this is meeting barbarism with barbarism! Surely General Havelock did not sanction such an order?”

“General Havelock crossed into Oudh at noon,” a Fusilier captain reminded him. “General Neill commands here now.”

The provost-marshal waited until the spasmodic cheers had died down and repeated the order in Hindustani. One of his staff, posted beside the group of prisoners, also translated it to them and, for the first time since their ordeal had begun, the condemned sepoys lost their stoical calm, as they waited tensely for the names of those who were to suffer this ultimate punishment to be read out.

The
jullad
's name was called first. Already terrified, the man burst into a torrent of weeping, but he gave his guards little trouble and stumbled across to the verandah of the Bibigarh without having to be coerced. Two of the drummers, one carrying a cat o' nine tails slung over his shoulder, preceded him into the house; the provost-sergeant contemptuously propelled the abject prisoner into the inner room and General Neill stood, arms akimbo, in the open doorway to watch his sentence carried out. The whip, seemingly, was not applied, for no cries of pain reached those in the courtyard outside, but when the
jullad
emerged five or six minutes later, he came on his hands and knees and, flinging himself at the general's feet, pleaded with him for mercy.

“
Huzoor
… Protector of the Poor, I beg you to grant me my life! I have a wife and children, who will starve without me … and I did only what my masters bade me do. I am guilty of no crime, Great One—I did but take from here the bodies of those who were slain by others. I killed none—”

Neill gestured to the guards and, grasping the ropes with which he was bound, they dragged the man, screaming incoherently, to the gallows, where two of their number, acting as executioners under the supervision of a British sergeant, abruptly silenced his screams. The body was still jerking spasmodically at the end of its noose when the name of Bhandoo Singh was read out, and Alex, watching the
Subedar
's face, saw the expression on it change from indifference to horrified disbelief.

The native officer, it was evident, had not imagined that the hideous punishment meted out to the
jullad
could possibly be inflicted upon himself. He had waited bravely enough for death but not for
this
death, whose prelude would rob him of his immortal soul. True, he had heard the order read out, but in his interpretation of it had not supposed that his own crimes would merit his selection, and before he could stop himself, he shouted his protest aloud.

“I had no part in what was done here! I shed no blood in this house … hear me, I speak truly!”

The guards, in obedience to an order barked out by the sergeant to secure him, took a few paces in his direction and then hesitated, reluctant even now to lay hands on the person of a thrice-born Brahmin. A low-voiced argument ensued and then, without warning, the
Subedar
motioned to them to stand aside and they did so, unthinkingly. He made as if to walk of his own accord toward the Bibigarh and they prepared to fall in behind him, but instead he turned and flung himself on to the wooden ladder leading to the gallows. Hampered by his bound hands, he somehow reached the top and was attempting to thrust his head into the trailing noose when the sergeant kicked the ladder away. Bhandoo Singh fell with a sickening thud onto the platform, his right leg doubled up beneath him.

“Is he alive?” Neill's voice thundered, from the door of the Bibigarh.

The sergeant bent over the recumbent man and he called back breathlessly, “Yes, sir, he's alive. But I think he's broken his leg, sir. Shall I—”

“Bring him over here, man!” the general ordered irritably. “Carry him if you have to but get him here. The sentence will be carried out.”

The sweeper police, smarting under the lash of the sergeant's tongue and anxious to make amends for their mistake, lifted the
Subedar
without regard for his injuries, and four of them carried him, moaning, into the shadowed interior of the Bibigarh. The two drummers with their cat and the Provost-Sergeant followed them, and a few moments later a high-pitched shriek and the unmistakable swish of an expertly wielded lash told those outside that Bhandoo Singh's fight against his defilement was not yet over. But it did not and could not last much longer; within ten minutes the limp body was carried out and on its return to the gallows, willing hands lifted it up to enable the noose to be put in place. A strange, almost animal murmur rose from the watchers as the dark body, with the telltale weals crisscrossing back and shoulders, swung twitching from the gallows like some grotesque marionette performing a macabre dance of death above their heads, as the air was slowly choked from his lungs. The sergeant, cursing his untutored executioners for a botched-up job, put a swift end to the victim's agony by hauling downward on his legs, and as the twitching ceased, the next name was read out.