The Weary Generations (15 page)

‘We are also getting new bayonets,' Thakur Das informed him.

‘What kind?'

‘Same kind, only longer.'

‘I see the advantage,' Naim said, smiling. ‘The longer it is, the further it hits.'

‘Exactly.' Thakur Das suddenly became serious. ‘Are you making fun of me?'

‘No, no,' Naim said.

Thakur Das lay down, facing the wall. ‘Section commander showed me all this,' he said authoritatively.

They route-marched for miles the next day in a light rain. Then the rain stopped, the clouds lifted and by the time they returned to camp the sun had broken through. In his tent, Naim was trying repeatedly to strike a damp match. He was annoyed with himself. For the first time he felt bored.

‘Put it out in the sun,' Thakur Das said, offering a dry box of matches.

‘When are we going to the front?' Naim asked.

‘Soon.'

‘Soon, soon! Have you ever heard of anyone winning a war by route-marching?'

‘Be patient,' Thakur Das said.

Imitating the havaldar, Naim repeated, ‘Soon!'

Thakur Das turned round with a quick movement. ‘Lance Naik Naim Ahmad,' he shouted.

‘Yes.'

‘Stand to attention.'

Reluctantly, Naim complied.

‘How many rounds in a Maxim gun's belt?'

‘Two hundred and fifty,' Naim answered.

‘Weight?'

‘About – er –'

‘Weight of the gun?' Havaldar asked sharply.

‘Sixty pounds.'

‘At ease.'

Thakur Das went and stood at the tent-opening, his back to Naim. The light of the day faded suddenly. Clouds, thought Naim, absent-mindedly looking at the broad back of the havaldar that framed the opening.

Thakur Das came back. ‘Don't ask too many questions. When war comes, it always comes too soon. Much too soon. When, where, how, all these questions, they make a coward of you. Sit.'

The two men sat side by side and lit cigarettes. Clouds chased each other across the sky, making the watery sun appear and disappear on the tent floor.

‘Don't you ever ask questions?' Naim asked after a while.

‘No.'

‘You are not afraid of dying?'

After a moment, Thakur Das replied, ‘I don't think about it.'

‘What,' Naim said, trying to appear solemn, ‘if I kill you now?'

Thakur Das made a tiny start. He began pulling at his cigarette. ‘You
will not do that,' he said in a slightly nervous voice.

‘I am only joking,' Naim said.

Thakur Das finished his cigarette and leaned over to toss it out of the tent. ‘You talk of going to the front,' he said. ‘There everyone is the same, with guns and live ammunition, you can kill me as easily as I can kill you. But we don't, because it would be murder. Murder is different. You are going on your way and you kick over an anthill without giving it a thought. That is war. But if you see a single ant crawling up your arm, you don't kill it, it would be murder. You carefully blow it away to the ground.'

The sun was out and its rays were creeping up the tent once again. In the pale light, Thakur Das looked restless.

‘You don't feel the pain of dying in battle?' Naim asked.

‘I don't know. I have seen men dying like rats. You asked me whether I was afraid of dying. I don't know about that either. I have two children. I will have no control over my wife when I am dead. My wife has a boy from her previous husband. I don't, I have to tell you this, look at him as my own. When I die, my children will have no father. Or another father. I am afraid of that. A young boy like you cannot understand that. You only have fear of your own death.'

From Marseille they moved again. This time they were given the same kind of railway train that they got at the very beginning of their journey at Ferozpur: a goods train, the floor of the compartments covered with thick layers of hay. The train would stop at small stations for hours. They travelled for three days through beautiful country until they reached their camp in Orléans. They stayed there for sixteen days waiting for orders from headquarters, route-marching every day. The regiment consisted of nine British officers, eighteen Indian NCOs and seven hundred and ninety men. On the fifth day of their stay the Duke of Connaught's own son, Captain Prince Arthur, visited the regiment in person. Riding a white horse and dressed in an impressive uniform, this good-looking young man addressed the officers and men in the weak morning sun.

‘I still remember the happiness I felt a few years ago when I visited the regiment in Hong Kong. To see Indian troops standing side by side with the British in Europe today makes me doubly happy. I will inform my father, the colonel commandant of the regiment, that you are in good form. I leave you now in the hope of seeing you again in a short while at the battlefront.'

Nobody saw or heard from him again until some time later when someone read in a newspaper that he had been killed in action.

On the seventeenth day they boarded another goods train and arrived
at a place that abounded in paper-making factories. They found they were not alone there. Route-marching, they passed the camp site of 57 Frontier Force. Hawknosed and moustached Pathan soldiers, washing their utensils inside the barbed-wire perimeter, waved at the sight of passing countrymen and called out ‘Hooa, hooa!' Next evening they saw a line of vehicles, crawling like ants, approaching from a distance. The 29th Connaughts, their excited hands on the wire fence, waited with a collective thumping heart. The lorries were not for them. Their hopes died when they saw the vehicles turning towards the Frontier Force camp site. They were to wait and continue route-marching for a few days yet.

‘We shall be at the front tomorrow,' someone would say. ‘Our lorries are coming.'

‘I can hear the sound of cannon,' another would announce.

‘Then you will die on the way,' a third would laugh, ‘without ever seeing a bomb.'

‘You never see a bomb anyway. Nor a bullet that hits you.'

‘You may not see it but you will know it when it rips through your arse.'

The peasants, who had never seen a war, talked about it without terror or bravado, as though it were no more than a joke. One day the staff captain told them where the front was. ‘It is two hundred miles away from here. In Belgium.'

‘What, not in France?'

‘No.'

Eventually they got their share of lorries. The vehicles travelled slowly, crossing the Belgian border and reaching their destination in twenty-four hours. They were lodged in the ghost town of Hollebeke. The battlefront was three miles away.

The town had been totally evacuated. All the best houses were commandeered by the white military – cavalry and artillery companies made up of three different nationalities: the Belgians, French and British. Two-storey houses were occupied by them, with their cooks, kitchens and boxes of dry rations. A few of the officers had their favourite horses in the ground-floor rooms as well. Headquarters staff were housed separately in a good large building. Then there were the shops, cleared of goods and their floors covered with corn stalks. Half the shops contained the horses and mules of cavalry and supply companies; the other half were reserved for the Indians.

The night sky hung low over the treetops, their leaves shivering in a light, cold wind. It was a narrow rectangle of a room, once a small shop, where the sixteen men of a machine-gun section, having eaten their dry
meat and cheese rations, were lying down for the night. Some had promptly fallen asleep. A dim lantern hung in an alcove and two machine-guns stood by the wall; the ammunition was with the section commander.

‘Are the mules safe?' Havaldar Thakur Das asked.

‘They are,' Naim replied.

‘Who is on the watch?'

‘Spahi Ahmad.'

‘Who will take over?'

‘Riaz. At two o'clock.'

‘Check it before you sleep.'

‘I will.'

Naim had the familiar smell of dry corn stalks in his nostrils. The warm, humid breath of slumbering bodies was slowly spreading in the room. He undid his boots beneath his blanket and pushed them out with his half-warm feet. Thakur Das, who had made a small tent of his blanket by lifting his knees inside it and wrapping it all round him, including his face, and could even be heard snoring for a minute or two, suddenly poked his head out and asked, ‘Have you a cigarette?'

Naim gave him a cigarette, requesting him to go and smoke by the door to avoid setting the dry corn alight.

‘Let's go and sit there,' Thakur Das suggested.

‘I am tired,' Naim said.

‘Oh, come on, keep me company.'

The two of them, wrapped up in blankets, went to the door, half opening it, and sat there smoking.

‘The floor is freezing,' Naim said.

‘Will your complaints ever stop? Pull up some stalks. Let them catch fire. Who knows what will happen to the place when the attack comes.'

Naim slid some corn stalks underneath him and, feeling their comforting warmth, settled on them. ‘I wonder why the front is so quiet. Only three miles away and jackals are barking.'

‘The Germans haven't attacked yet,' Thakur Das informed him.

‘Who is in our front lines now?'

‘White troops. They are up against a whole enemy division.'

‘How do you know?'

‘Captain Maclean told me.'

Thakur Das threw his cigarette out of the door and wiped a huge hand over his two-day growth of beard. From the next shop came the sounds of mules' nervous hoofs on the floor, followed by one of the animals urinating noisily on the corn stalks. Naim stuck his head out of the door and called
out in a controlled voice, ‘Spahi Ahmad Khan!'

The soldier struck his rifle with the flat of his hand and answered back, ‘Present.'

‘Very good,' Naim said to the dark night.

A fine, silent rain was falling outside. ‘This weather is bad for war,' Thakur Das said.

Naim quietly shut the door.

‘In the rain that does not make a sound you don't know what is coming,' Thakur Das said again. ‘The worst is snowfall.'

‘Why?' asked Naim.

‘First, it gets very cold. Then you slip on it.'

Naim laughed out loud.

‘What is funny?' Thakur Das asked angrily.

‘Nothing. Where did you see snow?'

‘In the North West Frontier region. Action against the Afridis.'

They were diverted by a low roaring sound up above. Thakur Das opened the door and looked up. The noise got gradually nearer. A moving red light appeared in the sky, crossing from left to right. Following the point of light, the two of them, forgetting their blankets, got up and stepped out into the street, their mouths open and eyes fixed above them. The light and the roar disappeared quickly over and behind the rooftops. They stood there in the rain for a minute, looking at the featureless sky, then came back into the room.

‘This was an aeroplane,' Thakur Das said confidently.

‘Was it the Germans' aeroplane?' Naim asked.

‘Don't know.'

‘It had a red light.'

‘They all have a red light,' said Thakur Das; then less certainly, ‘sometimes a green light.'

‘It makes more noise than cannons.'

‘They do.'

‘Have you seen it before?'

‘No, they have only now started flying.'

‘How do you know?'

‘Why are you always questioning me? Do you doubt my word?'

‘No, of course not,' Naim said.

Naim excitedly lit a cigarette.

‘Finish your cigarettes here,' Thakur Das said to him. ‘You can't smoke at the front.'

‘Why not?'

‘Why? Why? The bullet will come at the cigarette end and take your face away, don't you understand? Give me a cigarette.'

They sat smoking at their place just inside the closed door.

‘Maybe we go up tomorrow,' Thakur Das said after a while. ‘I am fed up with here.'

Naim looked at him with a smile.

‘Don't try to be clever,' Thakur Das said. ‘I feel worse than the mules in this place.'

‘Yes,' Naim said, ‘they only stand and urinate when they feel like it.'

‘Listen, boy, I am really fed up. It's no joke. A man has got to be either facing the bullets or back home.'

‘Do you miss home?' Naim asked him.

‘I do. I miss my wife.'

‘Do you love her?'

‘I miss her, is that not enough? I know that she misses me as well. Missing someone is better than loving them. You know, we got together in a strange way. I used to be in the business of women.'

‘Business of women?'

‘Buying and selling them, that is what we used to do, Ram Singh and I. We lifted them from Ambala, Ludhiana, Rohtak and took them to Punjab. They fetched good money in Lyallpur, Sargodha, Multan, from bid landlords. We never had any use for them ourselves, we were well-known kabaddi players, only looked after our health and strength. But one day it happened.'

‘What happened?'

‘I heard that a kumhari had given out a call that should there exist a real man in the world, he may come and take her away. My moustache curled up at the sound of this. I found out that the kumhar, the woman's husband, was a champion wrestler in the area and his mother used to lock him and his wife in a room and didn't let them out till the morning. So going there at night was out of the question.' Thakur Das's voice was halted by phlegm in his throat. He cleared it and went on, ‘So, going there at night was no use. I sent word through a go-between woman that I would be under a pipal tree a half-furlong from her village on a certain day at the time that the sun begins to slip from overhead, and if she is a woman of her word she may come out and meet me. That day I waited under the tree for an hour and she didn't come. I fell asleep from the heat of the sun. I was woken by the point of a stick being poked in my belly. I opened my eyes and saw a young man standing there. “What do you want?” I asked. “You send a message with pride and then you shut your eyes. Shame on you. It is not a man
who sleeps as he awaits a woman,” said the young man. Except that it was no young man, it was her in disguise. We started off together from there and spent the night at a friend's house in another village. In the morning she says, “Marry me.” I promised to do so just to silence her and took her to Amritsar. There I sold her to a customer for one hundred silver rupees and escaped from there in the dark of the night. That was that, I thought. But no. I was sleeping in my own house a few days later when I was woken up again. Can you believe it, woken from deep sleep twice in a row by the same woman? This time she was sitting on my chest with a dagger in her hand.' Thakur Das stopped.