Amitav Ghosh - Flood of Fire

The boys turned away abruptly and went back to the road. As they were taking hold of another corpse they heard a grunting sound close by and looked up.

A few yards ahead a fallen Chinese soldier had struggled to his feet: his clothes were scorched and his left arm was hanging uselessly at his side, almost severed at the shoulder. In his right hand was a sabre which he raised when his eyes found Raju and Dicky. Pressing up against each other they froze in shock as the man stumbled towards them, brandishing his sword.

Then Dicky found his voice and screamed: ‘Bachao!’ — and miraculously a sepoy emerged from the swirling cloud of dust and bayoneted the man through the stomach. Scarcely pausing to look at the two boys, the sepoy put one foot on the corpse, wrenched out his bayonet, and plunged back into the fray.

As Raju’s breath returned he realized that his trowsers were wet. He was staring at the dark patch when Dicky said: ‘Don’t worry about it, men. Happens to everyone. It’ll dry up soon.’

Glancing at his friend, Raju saw that Dicky’s trowsers showed a similar stain.

*

Less than a hundred yards away Kesri was trying, vainly, to hold back his men.

From his position at the head of the Bengal detachment he had seen the carnage unfold, as the defenders ran straight into the sepoys’ barrage of bullets. In the beginning Captain Mee and a few other officers had called on the surviving Chinese soldiers to surrender. Uncomprehending and panicked, they had responded instead by flailing about with their weapons. The officers had perforce had to cut them down, and as the lines closed, the marines and sepoys had abandoned themselves to a frenzy of blood-letting.

The sight sickened Kesri: in all his years of soldiering he had never seen a slaughter like this one. There were corpses everywhere, many of them with black scorch-marks on their tunics. On some, the clothes were still burning: looking more closely, Kesri saw that the fires were caused by a fault in the defenders’ equipment. The powder for their guns was carried not in cartridges, as was the case with British troops, but in rolled-up paper tubes. These tubes were kept in a powder-pouch that was strapped across the chest. In the course of the fighting the flaps of these pouches would fly open, spilling powder over the soldiers’ tunics; the powder was then set alight by the wicks and flints of their matchlocks.

Turning to one side, Kesri skirted around the road, to the shattered ramparts of the waterside battery. The Union Jack was flying everywhere now — on the ramparts of Chuenpee and across the channel, on the fort of Tytock, which had been stormed in a similar fashion by another British landing-party.

Climbing through a breach in the wall, Kesri made his way into the nearby battery. Here too there was ample evidence of a massacre: bodies lay in piles around the craters where heavy shells had exploded; along the bottom of the ramparts lay the corpses of Chinese soldiers who had been felled by crumbling masonry. Plastered against the light-coloured stone of the walls, in bright, bloody splashes, were clumps of tissue and fragments of bone. Here and there splattered brains could be seen dribbling down like smashed egg-yolks.

Almost uniformly the clothes of the dead defenders were scorched with the marks of burning gunpowder. It took no great effort to imagine the panic among the defenders as the flames leapt from tunic to tunic.

In some of the gun-emplacements British marines and artillerymen were hard at work, rendering the big guns useless by hammering spikes into their touch-holes and knocking out their trunnions. Amongst them was a marine who often visited the wrestling pit at Saw Chow.

‘Damned fine set of guns they had here,’ said the marine to Kesri, stroking the gleaming brass barrel of a massive eight-pounder. ‘Have to hand it to Johnny Chinaman — he learns fast. Some of these guns are perfect copies of our own long-barrels. We even found some thirty-two-pounders. All newly cast — lucky for us they haven’t yet learnt how to use them properly. Look here.’ He kicked a block of wood that was wedged under the barrel. ‘These jackblocks kept them from lowering the barrels — that’s why so many of their shots went over us.’

In a corner, over a heap of corpses, hung a hastily scribbled sign, in English.

‘What does it say?’ Kesri asked.

The marine grinned, wiping his face with the back of his hand: ‘One of our sarjeants put it up. It says: “This is the road to glory.”‘

Turning away, Kesri walked in the other direction. Ahead lay a sharp corner, and on rounding it he found himself in a dim, narrow passageway. As his eyes grew accustomed to the light he saw that there was a Chinese soldier at the far end of the corridor. Kesri knew from his tall, plumed hat and his high boots that he was probably an officer. He had evidently suffered an injury, for there was a cleft in the armoured plates that covered his torso; blood was dripping through the cracks.

On catching sight of Kesri the soldier raised his heavy, two-handed sword. Kesri could tell from his crouched stance that he was gathering strength for one last charge.

Lowering his own sword, Kesri rested the tip on the ground and raised a hand, palm outward.

‘Surrender! Surrender!’ he called out. ‘No harm will come …’

Kesri knew, as he was saying the words, that they were useless. He could tell from the expression on the man’s face that even if he’d understood he would have chosen death over surrender. Sure enough, a moment later the man came rushing at Kesri, almost as though he were begging to be cut down, as indeed he was.

When he had pulled out his dripping sword, Kesri saw that the man’s eyes were still open. For the few seconds of life that remained to him, the man fixed his gaze on Kesri. His expression was one that Kesri had seen before, on campaigns in the Arakan and the hills of eastern India — he knew it to be the look that appears on men’s faces when they fight for their land, their homes, their families, their customs, everything they hold dear.

Seeing that expression again now it struck Kesri that in a lifetime of soldiering he had never known what it was to fight in that way — the way his father had fought at Assaye — for something that was your own; something that tied you to your fathers and mothers and those who had gone before them, back into the dimness of time.

An un-nameable grief came upon him then; falling to his knees he reached out to close the dead man’s eyes.

*

On the island of Hong Kong, the sound of cannon-fire, muted though it was by distance, was still menacing enough to keep the gardeners away from the nursery. Through the morning Paulette worked alone, trying to stay busy, watering, pruning, digging — but it was impossible to ignore that distant thudding.

Over the last year Paulette had grown accustomed to hearing sporadic bursts of musketry and cannon-fire in the distance — but this was different. Not only was it more prolonged, there was a concentrated menace in it, a savagery, that made it difficult to carry on as usual. It was hard not to think of death and dying; of spilt blood and torn flesh. In the midst of all that, caring for plants seemed futile.

Towards mid-morning, when the cannon-fire died away and a pall of smoke appeared on the northern horizon, Paulette broke off to sit in the shade of a tree.

What had happened? What did the smoke portend? She could not but wonder, although in some part of herself she did not really want to know.

In a while she spotted a figure coming up the path that led to the nursery. Training her spyglass on the slope she saw that the visitor was Freddie. She breathed a sigh of relief: with Freddie at least there would be no need to pretend to be cheerful, or brave, or anything like that. He would be content to be left to himself.