Patrick Mercer - Dust and Steel

‘Keep still, can’t you, Jono?’ Lance-Corporal Pegg muttered to his wobbly pal as the company, now drawn up in four ranks, obediently standing at ease on the rolling decks, waited for their officer. ‘Else Jock McGucken’ll bloody ’ave you.’

‘Aye, Corp’l,’ Beeston whispered back through the side of his mouth. ‘I’ll be fine.’ Drops of sweat were forming at the edges of his nostrils. ‘Where are they tekin’ us now, Corp’l?’

After four months’ enforced idleness in Bombay, alleviated only by swirling rumours and counterrumours that they were off to deal with first one hot spot and then another, which resulted in nothing more than early rises, kit inspections and then numbing waits in the heat, they had all been glad to embark on the Berenice – glad, that was, until the seasickness struck. Then the electric excitement of the news that they were going to crush the mutineers, of new adventures and, above all else, the prospect of loot, had been dampened under a blanket of vomit.

‘Dunno. That shave about Delhi was all bollocks,’ Corporal Pegg opined. ‘That’s safe back in our hands now, an’ you heard that Sir Colin took Looknow, couple o’ weeks back?’

‘Oh, aye.’ Beeston brightened a little. ‘That’s that Scottish bogger, Sir Colin Campbell, in’t it? Last saw ’im at Ballyklava, din’t we, with them Jocks ’oo couldn’t shoot.’

They both sniggered at the memory of the 93rd Highlanders’ appalling musketry all that time ago.

‘Aye, that’s the bloke,’ smiled Pegg. ‘Stuck it to the bleedin’ Pandies this time, though; killed thousands. No, I reckon it’s Cawnpore for us. Needs to be. I’m bored to the fuckin’ death of ’anging about whilst all the others get the loot an’ quim, not to mention—’

‘Listen in, yous.’ McGucken’s bass Scots halted Pegg’s philosophising. ‘Grenadier Company…Company, ’shun.’ At the word of command every man stiffened, pushing his clasped hands straight down in front of his bellybutton, hollowing the back and bracing his thighs before snapping the left heel back against the right, thumping his boot hard on the teak decks of the ship.

‘Sir, one officer and seventy-eight men on parade…’ McGucken made the little ritual a spectacle, ‘two detached on duty, one sick.’ His hand quivered at the salute as the company commander came on deck, the colour-sergeant’s great legs like some satyr, straining at the cloth of his blue-black trousers. ‘May I have your leave to stand the men at ease, sir, please?’ The crescendo of his words made two muscular lascars in the waist of the ship look up in startled admiration.

‘Please do, Colour-Sar’nt.’ Morgan returned the salute with a relaxed grace, standing out clear and sharp in his scarlet coat, for Colonel Hume had forbidden the officers to wear smocks. ‘An’ gather the lads in around me, please; I can’t be doing with any shouting.’

A few, good-humoured insults about the men’s parentage from McGucken soon had the Grenadiers shuffling into a crescent around Morgan, straining to hear what news he had to tell them.

‘You’ve put up with a great deal of boredom, lads, over the past few months, and behaved pretty well,’ Morgan started. ‘Fairly well, anyway.’

There was a great storm of laughter as Morgan looked pointedly at eighteen-year-old Private Pierce from Crewe, one of the new draft, who had been found wandering drunk and stark naked on the fort’s yard two weeks before, making the natives, according to Private O’Keefe, ‘…t ’ank God that it wasn’t a proper man from Lifford there in the nip – that would o’ caused another mutiny – but amidst the wimmin this time!’

‘But now we know where we’re bound.’ Morgan paused for effect. ‘It’s Cawnpore, lads, to right the wrongs that were done to General Wheeler and his people back in June.’

‘See, I told you so,’ crowed Pegg as a general mutter of satisfaction swept around the company.

‘Now, you’ll all have heard what happened there, how the general was gammoned by Tantya Tope into putting his people into boats on the Ganges, then torn to ribbons by the Pandies as they floated in the shallows.’ Morgan paused again, looking at the serious faces of his men. ‘And how the white women and children, not to mention the native Christians, were hacked into pieces with axes and thrown down the wells…and worse.’

None of the troops could have failed to know what had happened in Cawnpore. The newspapers that reached them from England had been outraged by the rapes and massacres, but long before they arrived rumour had swept from the bazaar to the barrack block, from the stables to the officers’ mess: tales of treachery and black betrayal, blood and mindless cruelty. Morgan remembered it as a particularly difficult time. The news of the massacres had come hard on the heels of the murder of the Forgetts, and it had been all that the officers and NCOs could do to stop the men from visiting a little rough justice on their new ‘comrades’ in the 10th BNI.

‘Well, it’s our chance now, lads, to take Cawnpore back and to even the score a bit.’ Morgan watched the men. About half of them had yet to see either their twentieth birthdays or any fighting, but the others knew what such glib phrases meant. They knew that ‘evening the score’ meant blood and wounds, danger and death for them as well as their enemies, but wherever Morgan looked he could see nothing but plain determination, men whose simple values had been rocked by the death of innocents.

‘We’re to disembark at Mandavie.’ The troops looked at Morgan, utterly blank. ‘Only another day on board and then we’ve a long march up-country to Deesa that’ll take us the best part of four weeks. We’ll rest there – it’s the depot of our Eighty-Sixth, and we should be there for Christmas Day – before another flog of about five hundred miles to Cawnpore.’ This was greeted by a little cheer. ‘But it’s the march that I need to tell you about. For the first time we’ll be in hostile country, but not so hostile that we can afford to treat every native the same. It’s hard to understand, lads, and it’s going to take every bit of wit and patience you’ve got to deal with the mutineers that we meet as the murdering, godless thugs that they are, yet handle the civilian population with respect – unless they betray us.’ Morgan looked at seventy-odd wrinkled brows, not at all convinced that one word that he said was being understood, but he pressed on. ‘Now you’ll have all heard of Lord Canning’s declaration back in June…’

‘Oo’s ’e, then?’ Beeston asked quietly.

‘You know, Jono, that cunt from London ’oo wants us to pray for the Pandies’ salvation.’ The Governor-General of India would probably not have been flattered by Pegg’s description of him.

‘He’s made it quite clear that British rule is under no serious threat and that once this little pother in Bengal’s been put down,’ Morgan let none of his reservations about the depth and severity of the uprising show, ‘Her Majesty’s power will be wider and stronger than ever before. And that means that we’ve got to leave the country in the best shape we can. It’s no good putting every man, woman and child to the sword one minute and then having to rebuild the place an’ pretend that it never happened. Now, you’ll come across all sorts of horrors an’ meet folk who’ve been outraged and seen things that they should never have had to see; there’s all sorts of irregulars roamin’ about the country – English an’ native, soldiers and civilians – who’ve taken the law into their own hands an’ are stringing people up from every tree.’ Morgan paused again to look at the men, every one of whom was listening intently to him. ‘And that’s fine for mutineers, but not every native is disloyal. Just look at the Tenth…’