Flashman In The Great Game

"What the devil d'you mean?" I demanded.

"How many? Come, as a favour to thy old friend."

"Eh? What's it to you, dammit? Oh, well, let's see … there's the wife, and … er … and, ah —"

"Aye — ye have fornicated more times than I have passed water," says this elegant fellow. "And just because they let thee have thy way, didst thou trust them therefore? Because they were beautiful or lecherous — well thou fool enough to think it made them honest? Like enough. This Rani has beglamoured thee — well then, go thou up and knock on her palace gate tonight, and cry ‘Beloved, let me in.’ I shall stand under the wall to catch the pieces."

When he put it that way, of course, it was ridiculous. Whether she was loyal or not — and I could hardly credit that she wasn't — it didn't seem quite the best time to test the matter, with her state running over at the edges with mutineers. Good God, was there nowhere safe in this bloody country? Delhi, Meerut, Jhansi — how many garrisons remained, I asked Ilderim, and told him the stories I'd heard, and the sights I'd seen, on my way south.

"No one knows," says he grimly. "But be sure the sepoys have not won, as they would have the world believe. They have made the land between Ganges and Jumna a ruin of fire and blood, and gone undefeated — as yet. They range the country in strength — but already there is word that the British are marching on Delhi, and bands of sahibs who escaped when their garrisons were overthrown are riding abroad in growing numbers. Not only men who have lost their regiments, but civilian sahibs also. The Sirkar still has teeth — and there are garrisons that hold out in strength. Cawnpore for one — a bare four days' ride from here. They say the old General Wheeler sahib is in great force there, and has shattered an army of sepoys and badmashes. When Shadman brings our horses, it is there we will ride."

"Cawnpore?" I almost squeaked the word in consternation, for it was back in the dirty country with a vengeance. Having come out of that once, I'd no wish to venture in again.

"Where else?" says he. "There is no safer road from Jhansi. Farther south ye dare not go, for there are few sahib places, and no great garrisons. Nor are there to the west. Over the Jumna the country may be hot with mutineers, but it is where thine own folk are — and they are mine, too, and my lads'."

I looked at the ugly villains round the fire, hard-bitten frontier rough-necks to a man in their dirty old poshteens and the big Khyber knives in their belts — by George, I'd be a sight safer going north again in their company than striking out anywhere else on my own. What Ilderim said was probably true, too; Cawnpore and the other river strongholds would be where our generals would concentrate — I could get back among my own kind, and shed this filthy beard and sepoy kit and feel civilised again. Wouldn't have to spin any nonsense about why I'd disappeared from Jhansi, either, in supposed pursuit of Ignatieff- my God, I'd forgotten him entirely, and the Thugs, and all the rest. My mission to Jhansi — Pam and his cakes and warnings — it was all chaff in the wind now, forgotten in this colossal storm that was weeping through India. No one was going to fret about where I'd sprung from, or what I'd been doing. I felt my spirits rising by the minute — when I thought of the escape I'd had, leaving Jhansi in the first place, I could say that even my horrible experience at Meerut had been worth while.

That's another thing about being a windy beggar — if you scare easily, you usually cheer up just as fast when the danger is past. Well, not past yet, perhaps — but at least I was with friends again, and by what Ilderim said the Mutiny wasn't by any means such a foregone thing as I'd imagined — why, once our people got their second wind, it would be the bloody rebels who'd be doing the running, no doubt, with Flashy roaring on the pursuit I tom a safe distance. And I might have been rotting out yonder with the others at Jokan Bagh — I shuddered at the ghastly memory of Ilderim's story — or burned alive with the Dawsons at Meerut. By Jove, things weren't so bad after all.

"Right," says I. "Cawnpore let it be." How was I to know I was almost speaking my own epitaph?

In the meantime, I had one good night's sleep, feeling safe for the first time in weeks with Ilderim's rascals around me, and next day we just lay up in the temple ruins while one sowar went to scout for Shadman Khan, who was meant to be out stealing horses for us. It was the rummest fix to be in, for all day we could hear the bugles tootling out on the plain where the Rani's army was mustering for her own private little wars with Jhansi's neighbours; Ilderim reported in the evening that she had assembled several hundred foot soldiers, and a few troops of Maharatta riders, as well as half a dozen guns — not a bad beginning, in a troubled time, but of course with a treasury like Jhansi's she could promise regular pay for her soldiers, as well as the prospect of Orcha's loot when she had dealt with the Dewan.

With the second dawn came Shadman himself, cackling at his own cleverness: he and his pals had laid hands on six horses already, they were snug in a thicket a couple of miles from the town, and he had devised a delightful plan for getting another half dozen mounts as well.

"The Hindoo bitch needs riders," says he. "So I marched into her camp on the maidan this afternoon and offered my services. 'I can find six old Company sowars who will ride round Jehannum and back for a rupee a day and whatever spoil the campaign promises,' says I to the noseless pig who is master of her cavalry, 'if ye have six good beasts to put under them. "We have horses and to spare,' says he, 'bring me your six sowars and they shall have five rupees a man down payment, and a carbine and embroidered saddle-cloth apiece.' I beat him up to ten rupees each — so tomorrow let six of us join her cavalry, and at nightfall we shall unjoin, and meet thee, rissaldar, and all ride off rejoicing. Is it not a brave scheme — and will cost this slut of a Rani sixty rupees as well as her steeds and furniture?"

There's nothing as gleeful as a Pathan when he's doing the dirty; they slapped their knees in approval and five of them went off with him that afternoon. Ilderim and I and the remaining three waited until nightfall, and then set off on foot to the thicket where we were to rendezvous; there were the first six horses and a sowar waiting, and round about midnight Shadman and his companions came clattering out of the dark to join us, crowing with laughter. Not only had they lifted the six horses, they had cut the lines of a score more, slit the throat of the cavalry-master as he lay asleep, and set fire to the fodder-store, just to keep the Rani's army happy.

"Well enough," growls Ilderim, when he had snarled them to silence. "It will do — till we ride to Jhansi again, some day. There is a debt to pay, at the Jokan Bagh. Is there not, blood-brother?" He gripped my shoulder for a moment as we sat our mounts under the trees, and the others fell in two by two behind us. In the distance, very black against the starlit purple of the night sky, was the outline of the Jhansi fortress with the glow of the city beneath it; Ilderim was staring towards it bright-eyed — I remember that moment so clearly, with the warm gloom and the smell of Indian earth and horse-flesh, the creak of leather and the soft stamping of the beasts. I was thinking of the horror that lay in the Jokan Bagh — and of that lovely girl; in her mirrored palace yonder with its swing and soft carpets and luxurious furniture, and trying to make myself believe that they belonged in the same world.

"It will take more than one dead rebel and a few horses to settle the score for Skene sahib and the others," says he. "Much more. So — to Cawnpore? Walk-march, trot!"

He had said it was a bare four days' ride, but it took us that long to reach the Jumna above Haminpur, for on my advice we steered clear of the roads, and kept to the countryside, where we sighted nothing bigger than villages and poor farms. Even there, though, there was ample sign of the turbulence that was sweeping the land; we passed hamlets that were just smoking, blackened ruins, with buzzing carcases, human and animal, lying where they had been shot down, or strung up to branches; and several times we saw parties of mutineers on the march, all heading north-east like ourselves. That was enough to set me wondering if I wasn't going in the wrong direction, but I consoled myself that there was safety in numbers — until the morning of the fourth day, when Ilderim aroused me in a swearing passion with the news that eight of our party had slipped off in the night, leaving only the two of us with Muhammed Din and Rafik Tamwar.

"That faithless thieving, reiving son of a Kabuli whore, Shadman Khan, has put them up to this!" He was livid with rage. "He and that other dung-beetle Asaf Yakub had the dawn watch — they have stolen off and left us, and taken the food and fodder with them!"

"You mean they've gone to join the mutineers?" I cried.

"Not they! We would never have woken again if that had been their aim. No — they will be off about their trade, which is loot and murder! I should have known! Did I not see Shadman licking his robber's lips when we passed the sacked bungalows yesterday? He and the others see in this broken countryside a chance to fill their pockets, rather than do honest service according to their salt. They will live like the bandits they were before the Sirkar enlisted them in an evil hour, and when they have ravaged and raped their fill they will be off north to the frontier again. They have not even the stomach to be honest mutineers!" And he spat and stamped, raging.

"Never trust an Afridi," says Tamwar philosophically. "I knew Shadman was a badmash the day he joined. At least they have left us our horses."

That was little consolation to me as we saddled up; with eleven hardy riders round me I'd felt fairly secure, but now that they were reduced to three — and only one of those really trustworthy — I fairly had the shakes again.

However, having come this far there was nothing for it but to push on; we weren't more than a day's ride from Cawnpore by my reckoning, and once we were behind Wheeler's lines we would be safe enough. My chief anxiety was that the closer we got, the more likely we would be to find mutineers in strength, and this was confirmed when, a few hours after sun-up, we heard, very faint in the distance, the dull thump of gunfire. We had stopped to water our beasts at a tank beside the road, which at that point was enclosed by fairly thick forest either side; Ilderim's head came up sharp at the sound.

"Cawnpore!" says he. "Now what shall that shooting mean? Can Wheeler sahib be under siege? Surely -

Before I could reply there was a sudden drumming of hooves, and round a bend in the road not two hundred yards ahead came three horsemen, going like hell's delight; I barely had time to identify them as native cavalrymen of some sort, and therefore probably mutineers, when into view came their pursuers — and I let out a yell of delight, for out in the van was an undoubted white officer, with his sabre out and view-hallooing like a good 'un. At his heels came a motley gang of riders, but I hadn't time to examine them — I was crouched down at the roadside with my Colt out, drawing a bead on the foremost fugitive. I let blaze, and his horse gave a gigantic bound and crashed down, thrashing in the dust; his two companions swung off to take to the woods, but one of the mounts stumbled and threw its rider, and only the other won to the safety of the trees, with a group of the pursuers crashing after him.

The others pounced on the two who'd come to grief, while I ran towards them, yelling:

"Hurrah! Bravo, you fellows! It's me, Flashman! Don't shoot!"

I could see now that they were Sikh cavalry, mostly, although there were at least half a dozen white faces among them, staring at me as I came running up; suddenly one of dooce are you going about dressed as a nigger for?"

"You say you're Flashman?" says another — he was wearing a pith helmet and spectacles, and what looked like old cricket flannels tucked into his top-boots. "Well, if you are an' I must say you don't look a bit like him — you ought to know me. Because Harry Flashman stood godfather to my boy at Lahore in '42 — what's my name, eh?"

I had to close my eyes and think — it had been on my triumphal progress south after the Jalallabad business. An Irish name — yes, by God, it was unforgettable.

"O'Toole!" says I. "You did me the honour of having your youngster christened Flashman O'Toole — I trust he's well?"

"By God I did!" says he, staring. "It must be him, Cheeseman! Here, where's Colonel Rowbotham?"

I confess I was curious myself — Rowbotham's Moss-troopers was a new one on me, and if their commander was anything like his followers he must be a remarkable chap. There was a great rumpus going on in the road behind the group who surrounded me, and I saw that one of the fugitives was being dragged up between two of the Sikhs, and thrown forward in the dust before one of the riders, who was leaning down from his saddle looking at the still form of the fellow whose horse I'd shot.

"Why, this one's dead!" he exclaimed, peevishly. "Of all the confounded bad luck! Hold on to that other scoundrel, there! Here, Cheeseman, what have you got — is it some more of the villains?"

He rode over the dead man, glaring at me, and I don't think I've ever seen an angrier-looking man in my life. Everything about him was raging — his round red face, his tufty brindle eyebrows, his bristling sandy whiskers, even the way he clenched his crop, and when he spoke his harsh, squeaky voice seemed to shake with suppressed wrath. He was short and stout, and sat his pony like a hog on a hurdle; his pith helmet was wrapped in a long puggaree, and he wore a most peculiar loose cape, like an American poncho, clasped round with a snake-clasp belt. Altogether a most ridiculous sight, but there was nothing funny about the pale, staring eyes, or the way his mouth worked as he considered me.

"Who's this?" he barked, and when Cheeseman told him, and O'Toole, who had been eyeing me closely, said he believed I was Flashman after all, he growled suspiciously and demanded to know why I was skulking about dressed as a native, and where had I come from. So I told him, briefly, that I was a political, lately from Jhansi, where I and my three followers had escaped the massacre.

"What's that you say?" cries he. "Massacre — at Jhansi?" And the others crowded their horses round, staring and exclaiming, while I reported what had happened to Skene and the rest — even as I told it, I was uncomfortably aware of something not quite canny in the way they listened: it was a shocking story enough, but there was an excitement about them, in the haggard faces and the bright eyes, as though they had some fever, that I couldn't account for. Usually, when Englishmen listen to a dreadful tale, they do it silently, at most with signs of disgust or disbelief, but this crowd stirred restlessly in their saddles, muttering and exclaiming, and when I'd finished the little chap burst into tears, gritting his teeth and shaking his crop.

"God in Heaven!" cries he. "Will it never cease? How many innocents — twenty children, you say? And all the women? My God!" He rocked in his saddle, dashing the tears away, while his companions groaned and shook their fists — it was an astonishing sight, those dozen scarecrows who looked as though they'd fought a long campaign in fancy-dress costume, swearing and addressing heaven; it occurred to me that they weren't quite right in the head. Presently the little chap regained his composure, and turned to me.

"Your pardon, colonel," says he, and if his voice was low it was shaking with emotion. "This grievous news — this shocking intelligence — it makes me forget myself. Rowbotham, James Kane Rowbotham, at your service; these are my mosstroopers — my column of volunteer horse, sir, banded after the rebellion at Delhi, and myself commissioned by Governor Colvin at Agra."

"Commissioned … by a civilian?" It sounded deuced odd, but then he and his gang looked odd. "I gather, sir, that you ain't … er, Army?"

He flew up at that. "We are soldiers, sir, as much as you! A month ago I was a doctor, at Delhi …" His mouth worked again, and his tongue seemed to be impeding his speech. "My … my wife and son, sir … lost in the uprising … murdered. These gentlemen … volunteers, sir, from Agra and Delhi … merchants, lawyers, officials, people of all classes. Now we act as a mobile column, because there are no regular cavalry to be spared from the garrisons; we strive to keep the road open between Agra and Cawnpore, but since the mutineers are now before Cawnpore in force, we scour the country for news of their movements and fall on them when we can. Vermin!" He choked, glaring round, and his eye fell on the prisoner, prone in the dust with a Sikh keeping a foot on his neck. "Yes!" cries he, "we may not be soldiers, sir, in your eyes, but we have done some service in putting down this abomination! Oh, yes! You'll see — you'll see for yourself! Cheeseman! How many have we now?"

"Seven, sir, counting this one." Cheeseman nodded at the prisoner. "Here comes Fields with the others now."

What I took to be the rest of Rowbotham's remarkable regiment was approaching down the road at a brisk trot, a dozen Sikhs and two Englishmen in the same kind of outlandish rig as the others. Running or staggering behind, their wrists tied to the Sikhs' stirrup-leathers, were half a dozen niggers in the last stages of exhaustion; three or four of them were plainly native infantry-men, from their coats and breeches.

"Bring them up here!" cries Rowbotham violently, and when they had been untied and ranged in a straggled line in front of him, he pointed to the trees behind them. "Those will do excellently — get the ropes, Cheeseman! Untie their hands, and put them under the branches." He was bouncing about in his saddle in excitement, and there were little flecks of spittle among the stubble of his chin. "You'll see, sir," says he to me. "You'll see how we deal with these filthy butchers of women and children! It has been our custom to hang them in groups of thirteen, as an appropriate warning — but this news of Jhansi which you bring — this new horror — makes it necessary … makes it necessary …" He broke off incoherently, twisting the reins in his hands. "We must make an immediate example, sir! This cancer of mutiny … what? Let these serve as a sacrifice to those dead innocent spirits so cruelly released at Jhansi!"

He wasn't mad, I'd decided; he was just an ordinary little man suddenly at war. I've seen it scores of times. He had reason, too; I, who had been at Meerut and Jhansi, was the last to deny that. His followers were the same; while the Sikhs threw lines over the branches, they sat and stared their hatred at the prisoners; I glanced along and noted the bright eyes, the clenched teeth, the tongues moistening the lips, and thought to myself, you've taken right smartly to nigger-killing, my boys. Well, good luck to you; you'll make the pandies sorry they ever broke ranks before you're done.

They didn't look sorry at the moment, mind, just sullen as the Sikhs knotted the ropes round their necks — except for one of them, a fat scoundrel in a dhoti who shrieked and struggled and blubbered and even broke free for a moment and flung himself grovelling before Rowbotham until they dragged him back again. He collapsed in the dust, beating the earth with his hands and feet while the others stood resigned; Cheeseman says:

"Shall we put 'em on horses, sir — makes it quicker?"

"No!" cries Rowbotham. "How often must I tell you — I do not wish to make it quicker for these … these villains! They are being hanged as a punishment, Mr Cheeseman — it is not my design to make it easy for them! Let them suffer — and the longer the better! Will it atone for the atrocities they have wrought? No, not if they were flayed alive! You hear that, you rascals?" He shook his fist at them. "You know now the price of mutiny and murder — in a moment you shall pay it, and you may thank whatever false God you worship that you obtain a merciful death — you who did not scruple to torture and defile the innocent!" He was raving by now, with both hands in the air, and then he noticed again the dead fellow lying in the road, and roared to the Sikhs to string him up as well, so that they should all hang together as a token of justice. While they were manhandling the corpse he rode along behind the prisoners, examining each knot jealously, and then, so help me, he whipped off his hat and began to pray aloud, beseeching a Merciful God, as he put it, to witness what just retribution they were meting out in His name, and putting in a word for the condemned, although he managed to convey that a few thousand years in hell wouldn't do them any harm.

Then he solemnly told the Sikhs to haul away, and they tailed on the ropes and swung the pandies into the air, the fat one screeching horribly. He wasn't a mutineer, I was certain, but it probably wouldn't have been tactful to mention that just then. The others gasped and thrashed about, clutching at their halters — now I saw why they hadn't tied their hands, for three of them managed to clutch the ropes and haul themselves up,while the others choked and turned blue and presently hung there, twitching and swaying gently in the sunlight. Everyone was craning to watch the struggles of the three who had got their hands on the ropes, pulling themselves up to take the choking strain off their necks; they kicked and screamed now, swinging wildly to and fro; you could see their muscles quivering with the appalling strain.

"Five to one on the Rajput," says O'Toole, fumbling in his pockets.

"Gammon," says another. "He's no stayer; I'll give evens on the little 'un — less weight to support, you see."

"Neither of 'em's fit to swing alongside that artillery havildar we caught near Barthana," says a third. "Remember, the one old J.K. found hiding under the old woman's charpoy. I thought he'd hang on forever — how long was it, Cheese?"

"Six and a half minutes," says Cheeseman. He had his foot cocked up on his saddle and was scribbling in a note-book. "That's eighty-six, by the way, with today's batch —" he nodded towards the struggling figures. "Counting the three shot last night, but not the ones we killed in the Mainpuri road ambush. Should knock up our century by tomorrow night, with luck."

"I say, that's not bad — hollo, O'Toole, there goes your Rajput! Bad luck, old son — five chips, what? Told you my bantam was the form horse, didn't I?"

"Here — he'll be loose in a moment, though! Look!" O'Toole pointed to the small sepoy, who had managed to pull himself well up his rope, getting his elbow in the bight of it, and was tugging at the noose with his other hand. One of the Sikhs sprang up to haul at his ankles, but Rowbotham barked an order and then, drawing his revolver, took careful aim and shot the sepoy through the body. The man jerked convulsively and then fell, his head snapping back as the rope tightened; someone laughed and sang out "Shame!" while another huzzaed, and then they all had their pistols out, banging away at the hanging figures which twitched and swung under the impact of the bullets.

"Take that, you bastard!" "There — that's for little Jane! And that — and that!" "How d'ye like it now, you black pig of a mutineer? I wish you had fifty lives to blow away!" "Die, damn you — and roast in hell!" "That's for Johnson — that's for Mrs Fox — that, that, and that for the Prices!" They wheeled their mounts under the corpses, which were running with blood now, blasting at them point-blank.

"Too bloody good for 'em!" cries the white-bearded chap in the straw hat, as he fumbled feverishly to reload. "The colonel's right — we ought to be flaying 'em alive, after what they've done! Take that, you devil! Or burning the brutes. I say, J.K., why ain't we burnin' 'em?"

They banged away, until Rowbotham called a halt, and their frenzy died down; the smoking pistols were put away, and the column fell in, with the flies buzzing thickly over the eight growing pools of blood beneath the bodies. I wasn't surprised to see the riders suddenly quiet now, their excitement all spent; they sat heavy in their saddles, breathing deeply, while Cheeseman checked their dressing. It's the usual way, with civilians suddenly plunged into war and given the chance to kill; for the first time, after years spent pushing pens and counting pennies, they're suddenly free of all restraint, away from wives and families and responsibility, and able to indulge their animal instincts. They go a little crazy after a while, and if you can convince 'em they're doing the Lord's work, they soon start enjoying it. There's nothing like a spirit of righteous retribution for kindling cruelty in a decent, kindly, God-fearing man — I, who am not one, and have never needed any virtuous excuse for my bestial indulgences, can tell you that. Now, having let off steam, they were sated, and some a little shocked at themselves, just as if they'd been whoring for the first time — which, of course, was something they'd never have dreamed of doing, proper little Christians that they were. If you ask me what I think of what I'd just witnessed — well, personally, I'd have backed O'Toole's Rajput, and lost my money.

However, now that the bloody assizes was over, and Rowbotham and his merry men were ready to take the road again, I was able to get back to the business in hand, which was getting myself safely into Cawnpore.

Fortunately they were headed that way themselves, since two weeks spent slaughtering pandies in the countryside had exhausted their forage and ammunition (the way they shot up corpses, I wasn't surprised). But when, as we rode along, I questioned Rowbotham about how the land lay, and what the cannonading to the north signified, I was most disagreeably surprised by his answer; it couldn't have been much worse news.

Cawnpore was under siege, right enough, and had been for two weeks. It seemed that Wheeler, unlike most commanders, had seen the trouble coming; he didn't trust his sepoys a damned inch, and as soon as he heard of the Mee-rut rising he'd prepared a big new fortification in barracks on the eastern edge of Cawnpore city, with entrenchments and guns, so that if his four native regiments mutinied he could get inside it with every British civilian and loyal rifle in the place. He knew that the city itself, a great straggling place along the Ganges, was indefensible, and that he couldn't have hoped to secure the great numbers of white civilians, women and children and all, unless he packed them into his new stronghold, which was by the racecourse, and had a good level field of fire all round.

So when the pandies did mutiny, there he was, all prepared, and for a fortnight he'd been giving them their bellyful, in spite of the fact that the mutineers had been reinforced by the local native prince, Nana Dondu Pant Sahib, who'd turned traitor at the last minute. Rowbotham hadn't the least doubt that the place would hold; rumours had reached him that help was already on its way, from Lucknow, forty miles to the north, and from Allahabad, which lay farther off, east along the Ganges.

This was all very well, but we were going to have to run the gauntlet to get inside, as I pointed out; wouldn't it be better to skirt the place and make for Lucknow, which by all accounts was still free from mutiny? He wouldn't have that, though; his troops needed supplies badly, and in the uncertain state of the country he must make for the nearest British garrison. Besides, he anticipated no difficulty about getting in; his Sikhs had already scouted the pandy besiegers, and while they were in great strength there was no order about their lines, and plenty of places to slip through. He'd even got a message in to Wheeler, giving him a time and signal for our arrival, so that we could win to the entrenchment without any danger of being mistaken for the enemy.

For a sawbones he was a most complete little bandolero, I'll say that for him, but what he said gave me the blue fits straight off. Plainly, I'd jumped from the Jhansi frying-pan into the Cawnpore fire, but what the devil could I do about it? From what Rowbotham said, there wasn't a safe bolt-hole between Agra and Allahabad; no one knew how many garrisons were still holding, and those that were couldn't offer any safer refuge than Cawnpore; I daren't try a run for Lucknow with Ilderim (God knew what state it might be in when we got there). A rapid, fearful calculation convinced me that there wasn't a better bet than to stick with this little madman, and pray to God he knew what he was doing. After all, Wheeler was a good man — I'd known him in the Sikh war — and Rowbotham was positive he'd hold out easily and be relieved before long.

"And that will be the end of this wicked, abominable insurrection," says he, when we made camp that night ten miles closer to Cawnpore, with the distant northern sky lighting to the flashes of gunfire, rumbling away unceasingly. "We know that our people are already investing Delhi, and must soon break down the rebel defences and pull that unclean creature who calls himself King off his traitor's throne — that will be to root out the mischief at its heart. Then, when Lawrence moves south from Lucknow, and our other forces push up the river, this nest of rebels about Cawnpore will be trapped; destroy them, and the thing is done. Then it will only remain to restore order, and visit a merited punishment upon these scoundrels; they must be taught such a lesson as will never be forgotten — aye, if we have to destroy them by tens of thousands —" he was away again on that fine, rising bray which reminded me of the hangings that afternoon; his troopers, round the camp-fire, growled enthusiastically " -hundreds ofthousands, even. Nothing less will serve ifthis foulness is to be crushed once for all. Mercy will be folly — it will be construed as mere weakness."

This sermon provoked a happy little discussion on whether, when all the mutineers had been rounded up, they should be blown from guns, or hanged, or shot. Some favoured burning alive, and others flogging to death; the chap in the straw hat was strong for crucifixion, I remember, but another fellow thought that would be blasphemous. They got quite heated about it — and before you throw up your hands in pious horror, remember that many of them had seen their own families butchered in the kind of circumstances I'd witnessed myself at Meerut, and were thirsting to pay the pandies back with interest, which was reasonable enough. Also, they were convinced that if they didn't make a dreadful example, it would lead to more outbreaks, and the slaughter of every white person in India — the fear of that, and the knowledge of the kind of wantonly cruel foe they were up against, hardened them as nothing else could have done.

It was all one to me, I may say; I was too anxious about coming safe into Cawnpore to worry about how they disposed of the mutineers — it seemed a trifle premature to me. They were the rummest lot, though; when they'd tired of devising means of execution they got into a great argument about whether hacking and carrying should be allowed in football, and as I was an old Rugby boy my support was naturally enlisted by the hackers — it must have been the strangest sight, when I come to think of it, me in my garb of hairy Pathan with poshteen and puggaree, maintaining that if you did away with scrimmaging you'd be ruining the manliest game there was (not that I'd go near a scrimmage if you paid me), and the white-bearded wallah, with the blood splashes still on his coat, denouncing the handling game as a barbarism. Most of the others joined in, on one side or the other, but there were some who sat apart brooding, reading their Bibles, sharpening their weapons, or just muttering to themselves; it wasn't a canny company, and I can get the shivers thinking about them now.

They could soldier, though; how Rowbotham had licked them into shape in less than a month (and where he'd got the genius from) beat me altogether, but you never saw anything more workmanlike than the way they disposed their march next day, with flank riders and scouts, a twenty-pound forage bag behind each saddle, all their gear and arms padded with cloth so that they didn't jingle, and even leather night-shoes for the horses slung on their cruppers. Pencherjevsky's Cossacks and Custer's scalp-hunters couldn't have made a braver show than that motley gang of clerks and counter jumpers that followed Rowbotham to Cawnpore.

We were coming in from the east, and since the pandy army was all concentrated close to Wheeler's stronghold and in the city itself, we got within two or three miles before Rowbotham said we must lie up in a wood and wait for dark. Before then, by the way, we'd pounced on an outlying pandy picket in a grove and killed two of them, taking three more prisoner: they were strung up on the spot. Two more stragglers were caught farther on, and since there wasn't a tree handy Rowbotham and the Sikh rissaldar cut their heads off. The Sikh settled his man with one swipe, but Rowbotham took three; he wasn't much with a sabre. (Ninety-three not out, as Cheeseman put it.)

We lay up in the stuffy, sweltering heat of the wood all afternoon, listening to the incessant thunder of the cannonading; one consolation was the regular crash of the artillery salvoes, which indicated that Wheeler's gunners were making good practice, and must still be well stocked with powder and shot. Even after nightfall they still kept cracking away, and one of the Sikhs, who had wormed his way up to within a quarter-mile of the entrenchment, reported that he had heard Wheeler's sentries singing out "All's well!" regular as clockwork.

About two in the morning Rowbotham called us together and gave his orders. "There is a clear way to the Allahabad road," says he, "but before we reach it we must bear right to come in behind the rebel gun positions, no more than half a mile from the entrenchment. At precisely four o'clock I shall fire a rocket, on which we shall burst out of cover and ride for the entrenchment at our uttermost speed; the sentries, having seen our rocket, will pass us through. The word is ‘Britannia’. Now, remember, for your lives, that our goal lies to the left of the church, so keep that tower always to your right front. Our rush will take us past the racecourse and across the cricket pitch —"

"Oh, I say!" says someone. "Mind the wicket, though."

` — and then we must put our horses to the entrenchment bank, which is four feet high. Now, God bless us all, and let us meet again within the lines or in Heaven."

That's just the kind of pious reminder of mortality I like, I must say; while the rest of'em were shaking hands in the dark I was carefully instructing Ilderim that at all costs he must stick by my shoulder. I was in my normal state of chattering funk, and my spirits weren't raised as we were filing out of the wood and I heard someone whisper:

"I say, Jinks, what's the time?"

"Ten past three," says Jinks, "on the bright summer morning of June the twenty-second — and let's hope to God we see the twenty-third."

June twenty-third; I knew that date — and suddenly I was back in the big panelled room at Balmoral, and Pam was saying "… the Raj will come to an end a hundred years after the battle of Plassey … next June twenty-third." By George, there was an omen for you! And now all round was the gloom, and the soft pad of the walking horses, and the reins sweating in my palms as we advanced interminably, my eyes glued to the faint dark shape of the rider ahead; there was a mutter of voices as we halted, and then we waited in the stifling dark between two rows of ruined houses — five minutes, ten, fifteen, and then a voice called "Ready, all!" There was the flare of a match, a curse, then a brighter glare, and suddenly a rush of sparks and an orange rocket shot up into the purple night sky, weaving like a comet, and as it burst to a chorus of cries and yells from far ahead Rowbotham shouts "Advance!" and we dug in our heels and fairly shot forward in a thundering mass.

There was a clear space ahead, and then a grove of trees, and beyond more level ground with dim shapes moving. As we bore down on them I realised that they must be pandies; we were charging the rear of their positions, and it was just light enough to make out the guns parked at intervals. There were shrieks of alarm and a crackle of shots, and then we were past, swerving between the gun-pits; there were horsemen ahead and either side and Ilderim crouched low in the saddle at my elbow. He yelled something and pointed right, and I saw an irregular tumbled outline which must be the church; to its left, directly ahead, little sparks of light were flashing in the distance — the entrenchment defenders were firing to cover us.

Someone sang out: "Bravo, boys!" and then all hell burst loose behind us; there was a crashing salvo of cannon, the earth ahead rose up in fountains of dust, and shot was whistling over our heads. A horse screamed, and I missed by a whisker a thrashing tangle of man and mount which I passed so close that a lashing limb caught me smack on the knee. Voices were roaring in the dark, I heard Rowbotham's frantic "Close up! Ride for it!" A dismounted man plunged across my path and was hurled aside by my beast; behind me I heard the shriek of some-one mortally hit, and a riderless horse came neighing and stretching frantically against my left side. Another shattering volley burst from the guns in our rear, and that hellish storm swept through us — it was Balaclava all over again, and in the dark, to boot. Suddenly my pony stumbled, and I knew from the way he came up that he was hit; a stinging cloud of earth and gravel struck me across the face, a shot howled overhead, and Ilderim was sweeping past ahead of me.

"Stop!" I bawled. "My screw's foundered! Stop, blast you — give me a hand!"

I saw his shadowy form check, and his horse rear; he swung round, and as my horse sank under me his arm swept me out of the saddle — by God, he was strong, that one. My feet hit the ground, but I had hold of his bridle, and for a few yards I was literally dragged along, with Ilderim above hauling to get me across the crupper. Someone cannoned into us, and then as I pulled myself by main force across the crupper I felt a sudden shock, and Ilderim pitched over me and out of the saddle.

Even as I righted myself on the horse's back the whole scene was suddenly bathed in glaring light — some swine had fired a flare, and its flickering illumination shone on a scene that looked like a mad artist's hell. Men and horses seemed to be staggering and going down all round me under the hail of fire, throwing grotesque shadows as they fought and struggled. I saw Rowbotham pinned under a fallen horse only a few yards away; Cheeseman, his face a bloody mask, was stretched supine beside him, his limbs asprawl; Ilderim, with his left arm dangling, was half-up on one knee, clutching at my stirrup. A bare hundred yards ahead the entrenchment was in plain view, with the defenders' heads visible, and some ass standing atop of it waving his hat; behind us, the red explosions of the cannon suddenly died, and to my horror I saw, pounding out under the umbrella of light cast by the flare, a straggling line of riders — sepoy cavalry with their sabres out, bearing down at the charge, and not more than a furlong away. Ilderim seized my stirrup and bawled:

"On, on! Ride, brother!"

I didn't hesitate. He'd turned back to rescue me, and his noble sacrifice wasn't going to be in vain if I could help it. That was certain death bearing down on us; I jammed in my heels, the horse leaped forward, and Ilderim was almost jerked off his feet. For perhaps five paces he kept up, with the yells and hoof-beats growing behind us, and then he stumbled and went down. I did my damnedest to shake him free, but in that instant the bloody bridle snapped, and I hurled out of the saddle and hit the ground with a smash that jarred every bone in my body. A shocking pain shot through my left ankle — Christ, it was caught in the stirrup, and the horse was tearing ahead, dragging me behind at the end of a tangle of leatherwork which somehow was still attached to its body.

If any of you young fellows ever find yourself in this predicament, where you're dragged over rough, iron-hard ground, with or without a mob of yelling black fiends after you, take a word of advice from me. Keep your head up (screaming helps), and above all try to be dragged on your back — it will cost you a skinned arse, but that's better than having your organs scraped off. Try, too, to arrange for some stout lads to pour rapid fire into your pursuers, and for a handy Gilzai friend to chase after you and slash the stirrup-leather free in the nick of time before your spine falls apart. I was half-conscious and virtually buttockless when Ilderim — God knows, wounded as he was, where he'd got the speed and strength — hauled me up below the entrenchment and pitched me almost bodily over the breastwork. I went over in a shocking tangle, roaring: "Britannia! Britannia, for Christ's sake! I'm a friend!" and then a chap was catching me and lowering my battered carcase to earth and inquiring:

"Will you have nuts or a cigar, sir?"

Then a musket was being pushed into my hand, and in shocked confusion I found myself at the rampart, banging away at red-coated figures who came out of the smoke and dust, and I know Ilderim was alongside me, relieving me of my revolver and loosing off shots into the brown. All round there was the crash of volleys, and a great bass voice was yelling. "Odds, fire! Reload! Evens, fire! Reload!" The pain from my ankle was surging up my leg, into my body, making me sick and dizzy, I was coughing with the reek of powder smoke, there was a bugle sounding, and a confused roar of cheering — and the next thing I remember I was lying in the half-light of dawn, with my back against a sand-bagged wall, staring at a big, shot-torn barrack building, while a tall, bald-headed cove with a pipe was getting my boot off, and applying a damp cloth to my swollen ankle.

There were a couple of chaps with muskets looking on, and Ilderim was having his arm bandaged by a fellow in a kepi and spectacles. There were others, moving about, carrying people towards the barrack, and along the parapet there were haggard-looking fellows, white and sepoy, with their pieces at the ready. A horrid smell seemed to hang over the place, and everything was filthy, with gear and litter all over the dusty ground, and the people seemed to be moving slowly. I was still feeling pretty dazed, but I guessed it must all be a dream anyway, for the chap third along the parapet to my left, with a handkerchief knotted round his head, was undoubtedly young Harry East. There couldn't be two snub noses like that in the world, and since the last time I'd seen him I'd been pinned under a sledge in the snows of southern Russia, and he had been lighting out for safety, it didn't seem reasonable that he should have turned up here.

I'll tell you a strange thing about pain — and Cawnpore. That ankle of mine, which I'd thought was broken, but which in fact was badly sprained, would have kept me flat on my back for days anywhere else, bleating for sympathy; in Cawnpore I was walking on it within a few hours, suffering damnably, but with no choice but to endure it.That was the sort of place it was; if you'd had both legs blown off you were rated fit for only light duties.

Imagine a great trench, with an earth and rubble parapet five feet high, enclosing two big single-storey barracks, one of them a burned-out shell and the other with half its roof gone. All round was flat plain, stretching hundreds of yards to the encircling pandy lines which lay among half-ruined buildings and trees; a mile or less to the north-west was the great straggling mass of Cawnpore city itself, beside the river- but when anyone of my generation speaks of Cawnpore he means those two shattered barracks with the earth wall round them.

That was where Wheeler, with his ramshackle garrison, had been holding out against an army for two and a half weeks. There were nine hundred people inside it when the siege began, nearly half of them women and children; of the rest four hundred were British soldiers and civilians, and a hundred loyal natives. They had one well, and three cannon; they were living on two handfuls of mealies a day, fighting off a besieging force of more than three thousand mutineers who smashed at them constantly with fifteen cannon, subjected them to incessant musket-fire, and tried to storm the entrenchment. The defenders lost over two hundred dead in the first fortnight, men, women, and children, from gunfire, heat and disease; the hospital barrack had been burned to ashes with the casualties inside, and of the three hundred left fit to fight, more than half were wounded or ill. They worked the guns and manned the wall with muskets and bayonets and whatever they could lay hands on.

This, I discovered to my horror, was the place I'd fled to for safety, the stronghold which Rowbotham had boasted was being held with such splendid ease. It was being held — by starved ghosts half of whom had never fired a musket before, with their women and children dying by inches in the shot-torn, stifling barrack behind them, in the certainty that unless help came quickly that entrenchment would be their common grave. Rowbotham never lived to discover how mistaken he'd been: he and half his troop were lying stark out on the plain — his final miscalculation having been to time our rush to coincide with a pandy assault.

I was the senior officer of those who'd got safely (?) inside, and when they'd discovered who I was and bound up my ankle I was helped into the little curtained corner of the remaining barrack where Wheeler had his office. We stared at each other in disbelief, he because I was still looking like Abdul the Bulbul, and I because in place of the stalwart, brisk commander I'd known ten years ago there was now a haggard, sunken ancient; with his grimy, grizzled face, his uniform coat torn and filthy, and his breeches held up with string, he looked like a dead gardener.

"Good God, you're never young Harry Flashman!" was his greeting to me. "Yes, you are though! Where the dooce did you spring from?" I told him — and in the short time I took to tell him about Meerut and Jhansi, no fewer than three round-shot hit the building, shaking the plaster; Wheeler just brushed the debris absently off his table, and then says:

"Well, thank God for twenty more men — though what we'll feed you on I cannot think. Still, what matter a few more mouths? — you sec the plight we're in. You've heard nothing of … our people advancing from Allahabad, or Lucknow?" I said I hadn't and he looked round at his chief officers, Vibart and Moore, and gave a little gesture of despair.

"I suppose it was not be expected," says he. "So … we can only do our duty — how much longer? If only it was not for the children, I think we could face it well enough. Still — no croaking, eh?" He gave me a tired grin. "Don't take it amiss if I say I'm glad to see you, Flashman, and will welcome your presence in our council. In the meantime, the best service you can do is to take a place at the parapet. Moore here will show you — God bless you," says he, shaking hands, and it was from Moore, a tall, fair-haired captain with his arm in a blood-smeared sling, that I learned of what had been happening in the past two weeks, and how truly desperate our plight was.

It may read stark enough, but the sight of it was terrible. Moore took me round the entrenchment, stooping as he walked and I hobbled, for the small-arms fire from the distant sepoy lines kept whistling overhead, smacking into the barrack-wall, and every so often a large shot would plump into the enclosure or smash another lump out of the building. It was terrifying — and yet no one seemed to pay it much attention; the men at the parapet just popped up for an occasional look, and those moving in the enclosure, with their heads hunched down, never even broke step if a bullet whined above them. I kept bobbing nervously, and Moore grinned and said:

"You'll soon get used to it — pandy marksmen don't hit a dam' thing they aim at. It's the random shots that do the damage — damnation!" This as a cloud of dust, thrown up by a round-shot hitting the parapet, enveloped us. "Stretcher, there! Lively now!" There was a body twitching close by where the shot had struck; at Moore's shout two fellows doubled out from the barrack to attend to it. After a brief look one of them shook his head, and then they picked up the body between them and carried it off towards what looked like a well; they just pitched it in, and Moore says:

"That's our cemetery. I've worked it out that we put someone in there every two hours. Over there — that's the wet well, where we get our water. We won't go too close — the pandy sharpshooters get a clear crack at it from that grove yonder, so we draw our water at night. Jock McKillop worked it for a week, until they got him. Heaven only knows how many we've lost on water-drawing since."

What seemed so unreal about it, and still does, was the quiet conversational way he talked. There was this garrison, being steadily shot to bits, and starving in the process, and he went on pointing things out, cool as dammit, with the crackle of desultory firing going on around us. I stomached it so long, and then burst out:

"But in God's name — it's hopeless! Hasn't Wheeler tried to make terms?"

He laughed straight out at that. "Terms? Who with? Nana Sahib? Look here, you were at Meerut, weren't you? Did they make terms? They want us dead, laddie. They slaughtered everything white up in the city yonder, and God knows how many of their own folk as well. They tortured the native goldsmiths to death to get at their loot; Nana's been blowing loyal Indians from guns as fast as they can trice 'em over the muzzles! No," he shook his head, "there'll be no terms."

"But what the devil — I mean, what …?"

"What's going to come of it? Well, I don't need to tell you, of all people — either a relief column wins through from Allahabad in three days at most, or we'll be so starved and short of cartridge that the pandies will storm over that wall. Then …" He shrugged. "But of course, we don't admit that — not in front of the ladies, anyway, however much some of'em may guess. Just grin and assure 'em that Lawrence will be up with the rations any day, what?"

I won't trouble to describe my emotions as this sank in, along with the knowledge that for once there was nowhere to bolt to — and I couldn't have run anyway, with my game ankle. It was utterly hopeless — and what made it worse, if anything, was that as a senior man I had to pretend, like Wheeler and Moore and Vibart and the rest, that I was ready to do or die with the best. Even I couldn't show otherwise — not with everyone else steady and cheery enough to sicken you. I'll carry to my grave the picture of that blood-sodden ground, with the flies droning everywhere, and the gaunt figures at the parapet; the barrack wall honeycombed with the shots that slapped into it every few seconds; the occasional cry of a man struck; the stretcher-parties running — and through it all Moore walking about with his bloody arm, grinning and ailing out jokes to everyone; Wheeler, with his hat on his head and the pistol through the cord at his waist, staring grim-faced at the pandy lines and scratching his white moustache while he muttered to the aide scribbling notes at his elbow; a Cockney sergeant arguing with a private about the height of the pillars at Euston Square station, while they cut pieces from a dead horse for the big copper boiler against the barrack wall.

"Stew today," says Moore to me. "That's thanks to you fellows coming in. Usually, if we want meat,' we have to let a pandy cavalryman charge up close, and then shoot the horse, not the rider."

"More meat on the 'orse than there is on the pandy, eh, Jasper?" says the sergeant, winking, and the private said it was just as well, since some non-coms of his acquaintance, namin' no names, would as soon be cannibals as not.

These are the trivial things that stick in memory, but none clearer than the inside of that great barrack-room, with the wounded lying in a long, sighing, groaning line down one wall, and a few yards away, behind roughly improvised screens of chick and canvas, four hundred women and children, who had lived in that confined, sweating furnace for two weeks. The first thing that struck you was the stench, of blood and stale sweat and sickness, and then the sound — the children's voices, a baby crying, the older ones calling out, and some even laughing, while the firing cracked away outside; the quiet murmur of the women; the occasional gasp of pain from the wounded; the brisk voices from the curtained corner where Wheeler had his office. Then the gaunt patient faces — the weary-looking women, some in ragged aprons, others in soiled evening dresses, nursing or minding the children or tending the wounded; the loyal sepoys, slumped against the wall, with their muskets between their knees; an English civilian sitting writing, and staring up in thought, and then writing again; beside him an old babu in a dhoti, mouthing the words as he read a scrap of newspaper through steel-rimmed spectacles; a haggard-looking young girl stitching a garment for a small boy who was waiting and hitting out angrily at the flies buzzing round his head; two officers in foul suits that had once been white, talking about pig-sticking — I remember one jerking his arm to shoot his linen, and him with nothing over his torso but his jacket; an ayah*(*Native nursemaid.) smiling as she piled toy bricks for a little girl; a stocky, tow-headed corporal scraping his pipe; a woman whispering from the Bible to a pallid Goanese-looking fellow lying on a blanket with a bloody bandage round his head; an old, stern, silver-haired mem-sahib rocking a cradle.

They were all waiting to die, and some of them knew it, but there was no complaint, no cross words that I ever heard. It wasn't real, somehow — the patient, ordinary way they carried on. "It beats me," I remember Moore saying, "when I think how our dear ladies used to slang and back-bite on the verandahs, to see 'em now, as gentle as nuns. Take my word for it, they'll never look at their fellow-women the same way again, if we get out of this."

"Don't you believe it," says another, called Delafosse. "It's just lack of grub that's keeping 'em quiet. A week after it's all over, they'll be cutting Lady Wheeler dead in the street, as usual."

It's all vague memory, though, with no sense of time to it; I couldn't tell you when it was that I came face to face with Harry East, and we spoke, but I know that it was near Wheeler's curtain, where I'd been talking with two officers called Whiting and Thomson, and a rather pretty girl called Bella Blair was sitting not far away reading a poem to some of the children. I must have got over my funks to some extent, for I know I was sufficiently myself to be properly malicious to him.

"Hallo, Flashman," says he.

"Hallo, young Scud East," says I, quite cool. "You got to Raglan, I hear."

"Yes," says he, blushing. "Yes, I did."

"Good for you," says I. "Wish I could have come along — but I was delayed, you recollect."

This was all Greek to the others, of course, so the young ass had to blurt it out for their benefit — how we'd escaped together in Russia, and he'd left me behind wounded (which, between ourselves, had been the proper thing to do, since there was vital news to carry to Raglan at Sevastopol), and the Cossacks had got me. Of course, he hadn't got the style to make the tale sound creditable to himself, and I saw Whiting cock an eyebrow and sniff. East stuttered over it, and blushed even redder, and finally says:

"I'm so glad you got out, in the end, though, Flashman. I … I hated leaving you, old fellow."

"Yes," says I. "The Cossacks were all for it, though."

"I … I hope they didn't — I mean, they didn't use you too badly … that they didn't .." He was making a truly dreadful hash of it, much to my enjoyment. "It's been on my conscience, you know … having to go off like that."

Whiting was looking at the ceiling by this. Thomson was frowning, and the delectable Bella had stopped reading to listen.

"Well," says I, after a moment, "it's all one now, you know." I gave a little sigh. "Don't fret about it, young Scud. If the worst comes to the worst here — I won't leave you behind."

It hit him like a blow; he went chalk-white, and gasped, and then he turned on his heel and hurried off. Whiting said, "Good God!" and Thomson asked incredulously: "Did I understand that right? He absolutely cut out and left you — saved his own skin?"

"Urn? What's that?" says I, and frowned. "Oh, now, that's a bit hard. No use both of us being caught and strung up in a dungeon and …" I stopped there and bit my lip. "That would just have meant the Cossacks would have had two of us to … play with, wouldn't it? Doubled the chance of one of us cracking and telling 'em what they wanted to know. That's why I wasn't sorry he cleared out … I knew I could trust myself, you see … But, Lord, what am I rambling about? It's all past." I smiled bravely at them. "He's a good chap, young East; we were at school together, you know."

I limped off then, leaving them to discuss it if they wanted to, and what they said I don't know, but later than evening Thomson sought me out at my place on the parapet, and shook my hand without a word, and then Bella Blair came, biting her lip, and kissed me quickly on the cheek and hurried off. It's truly remarkable, if you choose a few words carefully, how you can enhance your reputation and damage someone else's — and it was the least I could do to pay back that pious bastard East. Between me and his own precious Arnold-nurtured conscience he must have had a happy night of it.

I didn't sleep too well myself. A cupful of horse stew and a handful of flour don't settle you, especially if you're shaking with the horrors of your predicament. I even toyed with the idea of resuming my Pathan dress — which I had exchanged for army shirt and breeches — slipping over the parapet, lame as I was, and trying to escape, but the thought of being caught in the pandy lines was more than I could bear. I just lay there quaking, listening to the distant crack of the rebel snipers, and the occasional crump of a shot landing in the enclosure, tortured by thirst and hunger cramps, and I must have dozed off, for suddenly I was being shaken, and all round me people were hurrying, and a brazen voice was bawling "Stand to! Stand to! Loading parties, there!" A bugle was blaring, and orders were being shouted along the parapet — the fellow next me was ramming in a charge hurriedly, and when I demanded what was the row he just pointed out over the barricade, and invited me to look for myself.

It was dawn, and across the flat maidan, in front of the pandy gun positions, men were moving — hundreds of them. I could see long lines of horsemen in white tunics, dim through the light morning mist, and in among the squadrons were the scarlet coats and white breeches of native infantry. Even as I looked there was the red winking of fire from the gun positions, and then the crash of the explosions, followed by the whine of shot and a series of crashes from the barracks behind. Clouds of dust billowed down from the wall, to the accompaniment of yells and oaths, and a chorus of wails from the children. A kettle-drum was clashing, and here were the loading parties, civilians and followers and even some of the women, and a couple of bhistis,*(*Native water-carriers.) and then Wheeler himself, with Moore at his heels, bawling orders, and behind him on the barrack-roof the torn Union jack was being hauled up to flap limply in the warm dawn air.

"They're coming, rot 'em!" says the man next to me. "Look at 'em, yonder — 56th N.I., Madras Fusiliers. An' Bengal Cavalry, too — don't I know it! Those are my own fellows, blast the scoundrels — or were. All right, my bucks, your old riding-master's waiting for you!" He slapped the stock of his rifle. "I'll give you more pepper than I ever did at stables!"

The pandy guns were crashing away full tilt now, and the whistle of small arms shot was sounding overhead. I was fumbling with my revolver, pressing in the loads; all down the parapet there was the scraping of ram-rods, and Wheeler was shouting:

"Every piece loaded, mind! Loading parties be ready with fresh charges! Three rifles to each man! All right, Delafosse! Moore, call every second man from the south side — smartly, now! Have the fire-parties stand by! Sergeant Grady, I want an orderly with bandages every ten yards on this parapet!"

He could hardly be heard above the din of the enemy firing and the crash of the shots as they plumped home; the space between the parapet and the barracks was swirling with dust thrown up by the shot, and we lay with our heads pressed into the earth below the top of the barrier. Someone came forward at a crouching run and laid two charged muskets on the ground beside me; to my astonishment I saw it was Bella Blair — the fat babu I'd seen reading the previous night was similarly arming the riding-master, and the chap on t'other side of me had as his loader a very frail-looking old civilian in a dust-coat and cricket cap. They lay down behind us; Bella was pale as death, but she smiled at me and pushed the hair out of her eyes; she was wearing a yellow calico dress, I recall, with a band tied round her brows.

"All standing to!" roars Wheeler. He alone was on his feet, gaunt and bare-headed, with his white hair hanging in wisps down his cheeks; he had his revolver in one hand, and his sabre stuck point-first in the ground before him. "Masters — I want a ration of flour and half a cup of water to each —"

A terrific concerted salvo drowned out the words; the whole entrenchment seemed to shake as the shots ploughed into it and smashed clouds of brick dust from the barracks. Farther down the line someone was screaming, high-pitched, there was a cry for the stretchers, the dust eddied round us and subsided, and then the noise gradually ebbed away, even the screams trailed off into a whimper, and a strange, eery stillness fell.

"Steady, all!" It was Wheeler, quieter now. "Riflemen — up to the parapet! Now hold your fire, until I give you the word! Steady, now!"

I peered over the parapet. Across the maidan there was silence, too, suddenly broken by the shrill note of a trumpet. There they were, looking like a rather untidy review — the ranks of red-coated infantry, in open order, just forward of the ruined buildings, and before them, within shot, the horse squadrons, half a dozen of them well spaced out. A musket cracked somewhere down the parapet, and Wheeler shouted:

"Confound it, hold that fire! D'you hear?"

We waited and watched as the squadrons formed, and the riding-master cursed under his breath.

"Sickenin'," says he, "when you think I taught 'em that. As usual — C Troop can't dress! That's Havildar Ram Hyder for you! Look at 'em, like a bloody Paul Jones! Take a line from the right-hand troop, can't you? Rest of'em look well enough, though, don't they? There now, steady up. That's better, eh?"

The man beyond him said something, and the riding-master laughed. "If they must charge us I'd like to see 'em do it proper, for my own credit's sake, that's all."

I tore my eyes away from that distant mass of men, and glanced round. The babu, flat on the ground, was turning his head to polish his spectacles; Bella Blair had her face hidden, but I noticed her fists were clenched. Wheeler had clapped his hat on, and was saying something to Moore; one of the bhistis was crawling on hands and knees along the line, holding a chaggle for the fellows to drink from.

Suddenly the distant trumpet sounded again, there was a chorus of cries from across the maidan, a volley of orders, and now the cavalry were moving, at a walk, and then at a trot, and there was a bright flicker along their lines as the sabres came out.

Oh, Christ, I thought, this is the finish. There seemed to be hordes of them, advancing steadily through the wisps of mist, the dust coming up in little clouds behind them, and the crackle of the sharpshooters started up again, the bullets whining overhead.

"Steady, all!" roars Wheeler again. "Wait for the word, remember!"

I had laid by my revolver and had my musket up on the parapet. My mouth was so dry I couldn't swallow — I was remembering those masses of horsemen that had poured down from the Causeway Heights at Balaclava, and how disciplined fire had stopped them in their tracks — but those had been Campbell's Highlanders shooting then, and we had nothing but a straggling line of sick crocks and civilians. They must break over us like a wave, brushing past our feeble volleys -

"Take aim!" yells Wheeler, "make every shot tell, and wait for my command!"

They were coming at the gallop now, perhaps three hundred yards off, and the sabres steady against the shoulders; they were keeping line damned well, and I heard my riding-master muttering:

"Look at 'em come, though! Ain't that a sight? — and ain't they shaping well! Hold 'em in there, rissaldar, mind the dressing —"

The thunder of the beating hooves was like surf; there was a sudden yell, and all the points came down, with the black blobs of faces behind them as the riders crouched forward and the whole line burst into the charge. They came sweeping in towards the entrenchment, I gripped my piece convulsively, and Wheeler yelled "Fire!"

The volley crashed out in a billow of smoke — but it didn't stop them. Horses and men went down, and then we were seizing our second muskets and blazing away, and then our third — and still they came, into that hell of smoke and flame, yelling like madmen; Bella Blair ws beside me, thrusting a musket into my hand, and hurrying feverishly to reload the others. I fired again, and as the smoke cleared we looked out onto a tangle of fallen beasts and riders, but half of them were still up and tearing in, howling and waving their sabres. I seized my revolver and blasted away; there were three of them surging in towards my position, and I toppled one from the saddle, another went rolling down with his mount shot under him, and the third came hurtling over the entrenchment, with the man on my right slashing at him as he passed.

Behind him pressed the others — white coats, black faces, rearing beasts, putting their horses to the parapet; I was yelling incoherent obscenities, scrabbling up the muskets as fast as they were reloaded, firing into the mass; men were struggling all along the entrenchment, bayonets and swords against sabres, and still the firing crashed out. I heard Bella scream, and then there was a dismounted rider scrambling up the barrier directly before me; I had a vision of glaring eyes in a black face and a sabre upraised to strike, and then he fell back shrieking into the smoke. Behind me Wheeler was roaring, and I was grabbing for another musket, and then they were falling back, thank God, wheeling and riding back into the smoke, and the bhisti was at my elbow, thrusting his chaggle at my lips.

"Stand to!" shouts Wheeler, "they're coming again!"

They were re-forming, a bare hundred yards off; the ground between was littered with dead and dying beasts and men. I had barely time to gulp a mouthful of warm, muddy water and seize my musket before they were howling in at us once more, and this time there were pandy infantrymen racing behind them.

"One more volley!" bawls Wheeler. "Hold your fire, there! Aim for the horses! No surrender! Ready, present — fire!"

The whole wall blasted fire, and the charge shook and wavered before it came rushing on again; half a dozen of them were rearing and plunging up to the entrenchment, the sabres were swinging about our heads, and I was rolling away to avoid the smashing hooves of a rider coming in almost on top of me. I scrambled to my feet, and there was a red-coated black devil leaping at me from the parapet; I smashed at him with my musket butt and sent him flying, and then another one was at me with his sabre, lunging. I shrieked as it flew past my head, and then we had closed, and I was clawing at his face, bearing him down by sheer weight. His sabre fell, and I plunged for it; another pandy was rushing past me, musket and bayonet extended, but I got my hand on the fallen hilt, slashing blindly; I felt a sickening shock on my head, and fell, a dead weight landed on top of me, and the next thing I knew I was on my hands and knees, with the earth swimming round me, and Wheeler was bawling, "Cease fire! Cease fire! Stretchers, there!" and the noise of yelling and banging had died away, while the last of the smoke cleared above the ghastly shambles of the parapet.

There seemed to be dead and dying everywhere. There must have been at least a dozen pandies sprawled within ten yards of where I knelt; the ground was sticky with blood. Wheeler himself was down on one knee, supporting the fat babu, who was wailing with a shattered leg; the frail civilian was lying asprawl, his cricket cap gone and his head just a squashed red mess. One of the pandies stirred, and pulled himself up on one knee; Wheeler, his arm still round the babu, whipped up his revolver and fired, and the pandy flopped back in the dust. The stretcher parties were hurrying up; I looked out over' the parapet, across a maidan littered with figures of men that crawled or lay still; there were screaming horses trying to rise, and others that lay dead among the fallen riders. Two hundred yards off there were men running — the other way, thank God; farther down the parapet someone sent up a cheer, and it gradually spread along the entrenchment in a ghastly, croaking yell. My mouth was too dry, and I was too dazed to cheer — but I was alive.

Bella Blair was dead. She was lying on her side, her hands clutched on the stock of a musket whose bayonet was buried in her body. I heard a moan behind me, and there was the riding-master, flopped against the parapet, his shirt soaked in blood, trying to reach for the fallen water-chaggle. I stumbled over to him, and held it up to his lips; he sucked it, groaning, and then let his head fall back.

"Beat 'em, did we?" says he, painfully. I could only nod; I took a gulp at the chaggle myself, and offered him another swig, but he turned his head feebly aside. There was nothing to be done for him; his life was running out of him where he lay.

"Beat 'em," says he again. "Dam' good. Thought … they was going to ride … clean over us there … for a moment." He coughed blood, and his voice trailed away into a whisper. "They shaped well, though … didn't they … shape well? My Bengalis …" He closed his eyes. "I thought they shaped … uncommon well …"

I looked down the entrenchment. About half the defenders were on their feet at the parapet, I reckoned. In between, the sprawled, silent figures, the groaning, writhing wounded waiting for the stretchers, the tangle of gear and fallen weapons, the bloody rags — and now the pandy guns again, pounding anew at the near-dead wreck of the Cawnpore garrison, with its tattered flag still flapping from the mast. Well, thinks I, they can walk in now, any time they like. There's nothing left to stop 'em.

But they didn't. That last great assault of June twenty-third, which had come within an ace of breaking us, had sickened the pandies. The maidan was strewn with their dead, and although they pounded us with gunfire for another two terrible days, they didn't have the stomach for another frontal attack. If only they'd known it, half the men left on our parapet were too done up with fatigue and starvation to lift a musket, the barrack was choked with more than three hundred wounded and dying, the well was down to stinking ooze, and our remaining flour was so much dust. We couldn't have lasted two minutes against a determined assault — yet why should they bother, when hunger and heat and the steady rate of casualties from bombardment were sure to finish us soon anyway?

Three folk went mad, as I remember, in those forty-eight hours; I only wonder now that we all didn't. In the furnace of the barrack the women and children were too reduced by famine even to cry; even the younger officers seemed to be overcome by the lethargy of approaching certain death. For that, Wheeler now admitted, was all that remained.

"I have sent a last message out to Lawrence," he told us senior men on the second night. "I have told him that we have nothing left but British spirit, and that cannot last forever. We are like rats in a cage. Our best hope is that the rebels will come in again, and give us a quick end; better that than watch our women and little ones die by inches. "²⁹

I can still see the gaunt faces in the flickering candlelight round his table; someone gave a little sob, and another swore softly, and after a moment Vibart asked if there was no hope that Lawrence might yet come to our relief.

Wheeler shook his head. "He would come if he could, but even if he marched now he could not reach us in under two days. By then … well, you know me, gentlemen. I haven't croaked in fifty years' soldiering, and I'm not croaking now, when I say that short of a miracle it is all up. We're in God's hands, so let each one of us make his preparations accordingly."

I was with him there, only my preparations weren't going to be spiritual. I still had my Pathan rig-out stowed away, and I could see that the time was fast approaching when, game ankle or no, Flashy was going to have to take his chance over the wall. It was that or die in this stinking hole, so I left them praying and went to my place on the parapet to think it out; I was in a blue funk at the thought of trying to decamp, but the longer I waited, the harder it might become. I was still wrestling with my fears when someone hove up out of the gloom beside me, and who should it be but East.

"Flashman," says he, "may I have a word with you?" "If you must," says I. "I'll be obliged if you'll make it a brief one."

"Of course, of course," says he. "I understand. As Sir Hugh said, it is time for each of us to make his own soul; I won't intrude on your meditations a moment longer than I must, I promise. The trouble is … my own conscience…. I need your help, old fellow."

"I:h?" I stared at him, trying to make out his face in the dark. "What the deuce — ?"

"Please … bear with me. I know you're bitter, because you think I abandoned you in Russia … left you to die, while I escaped. Oh, I know it was my duty, and all that, to get to Raglan … but the truth is —" he broke off and had a gulp to himself " — the truth is, I was glad to leave you. There — it's out at last … oh, if you knew how it had been tormenting me these two years past! That weight on my soul — that I abandoned you in a spirit of hatred and sinful vengeance. No … let me finish! I hated you then … because of the way you had treated Valla … when you flung her from that sledge, into the snow! I could have killed you for it!"

He was in a rare taking, no error; a Rugby conscience pouring out is a hell of a performance. He wasn't telling me a thing I hadn't guessed at the time — I know these pious bastards better than they know themselves, you see.

"I loved her, you see," he went on, talking like an old man with a hernia. "She meant everything to me … and you had cast her away so … brutally. Please, please, hear me out! I'm confessing, don't you see? And … and asking for your forgiveness. It's late in the day, I know — but, well, it looks as though we haven't much longer, don't it? So … I wanted to tell you … and shake your hand, old school-fellow, and hear from you that my … my sin is forgiven me. If you can find it in your heart, that is." He choked resoundingly. "I … I trust you can."

I've heard some amazing declarations in my time, but this babbling was extraordinary. It comes of Christian upbringing, of course, and taking cold baths, all of which implants in the impressionable mind the notion that repentance can somehow square the account. At any other time, it would have given me some malicious amusement to listen to him; even in my distracted condition, it was interesting enough for me to ask him:

"D'ye mean that if I hadn't given you cause to detest me, you'd have stayed with me, and let Raglan's message go hang?"

"What's that?" says he. "I … I don't know what you mean. I … I … please, Flashman, you must see my agony of spirit … I'm trying to … make you understand. Please — tell me, even now, what I can do."

"Well," says I, thoughtfully, "you could go and fart in a bottle and paint it."

"What?" says he, bewildered. "What did you say?"

"I'm trying to indicate that you can take yourself off," says I. "You're a selfish little swine, East. You admit you've behaved like a scoundrel to me, and if that wasn't enough, you have the cheek to waste my time — when I need it for prayer. So go to hell, will you?"

"My God, Flashman … you can't mean it! You can't be so hard. It only needs a word! I own I've wronged you, terribly … maybe in more ways than I know. Sometimes … I've wondered if perhaps you too loved Valla … if you did, and placed duty first …" He gulped again, and peered at me. "Did you … love her, Flashman?"

"About four or five times a week," says I, "but you needn't be jealous; she wasn't nearly as good a ride as her Aunt Sara. You should have tried a steam-bath with that one.

He gave a shocked gasp, and I absolutely heard his teeth chatter. Then: "God, Flashman! Oh … oh, you are unspeakable! You are vile! God help you!"

"Unspeakable and vile I may be," says I, "but at least I'm no hypocrite, like you: the last thing you want is for God to help me. You don't want my forgiveness, either; you just want to be able to forgive yourself. Well, you run along and do it, Scud, and thank me for making it easy for you. After what you've heard tonight, your conscience needn't trouble you any longer about having left old Flashy to his fate, what?"

He stumbled off at that, and I was able to resume my own debate about whether it was best to slide out or stay. In the end, my nerve failed me, and I curled up in the lee of the parapet for the night. Thank God I did, for on the next morning Wheeler got his miracle.

She was the most unlikely messenger of grace you ever saw — a raddled old chee-thee*(*Half-caste.) biddy with clanking earrings and a parasol, drawn in a rickshaw ghari by two pandies, with another couple marching as guard, and a havildar out in front brandishing a white flag. Wheeler ordered a stand-to when this strange little procession was seen approaching the east corner of the entrenchment, and went off himself with Moore to meet it, and a few minutes later word was passed for me and Vibart, who was up at my end of the parapet, to present ourselves.

Wheeler and the other senior men were grouped inside the parapet, while the old wife, fanning herself with a leaf and sipping at a chatti, was sitting just outside with her escort squatting round her. Wheeler was holding a paper, and glancing in bewilderment from it to the old woman; as we came up someone was saying: "I wouldn't trust it a blasted inch! Why should they want to treat, at this time o'day? Tell me that!", and Wheeler shook his head and passed the paper to Vibart.

"Read that," says he. "If what it says is true, the Nana wishes to make terms."

It didn't sink in, at first; I studied the paper over Vibart's shoulder, while he read it out half-aloud. It was a brief, simple note, written in a good hand, in English, and addressed to Wheeler. As near as I recall, it said:

To subjects of Her Most Gracious Majesty, Queen Victoria — all who are not connected with the acts of Lord Dalhousie and are willing to lay down their arms, shall receive a safe passage to Allahabad.

It was signed on behalf of Nana Sahib, with a name I couldn't make out, until Vibart muttered it out: "Azeemoolah Khan". He looked at Wheeler, then at the old woman, and Wheeler flapped a hand and says:

"This is Mrs Jacobs, of … ah, Cawnpore city. She has this note from Azeemoolah himself, in the presence of the Nana."

"How-dee-do, gentlemen," says Mrs Jacobs, bowing with a great creak of stays from her seat in the ghari. "Such jolly weather we are having, yess?"

"I don't like it," says Wheeler quietly, turning his back so that she shouldn't hear; the others grouped round us. "As Whiting says, why should he offer terms when he must know we're at his mercy? All he needs do is wait."

"Perhaps, sir," says Vibart, "he don't know how reduced we are." He let out a deep breath. "And we have our women and children to think of —"

At this the others broke in, in a fierce babble of low voices: "It's a plot!" "No, it ain't!" "We've stood the bastards off this long —" "It's false — I can smell nigger treachery a mile away." "Why should it be treachery — my God, what have we to lose? We're done for as it is …", while I tried to keep my face straight and the delicious hope began to break over me — we were saved! For it seemed to me in that moment that whatever anyone said, whatever Wheeler felt, he was going to have to accept any terms the pandies offered — he couldn't refuse, and doom the women and children in that stinking barrack to certain death, however fearful of treachery he might be. We were being offered at least a chance of life against the certainty of death: he had to take it.

So I said nothing, while they wrangled in whispers there by the parapet, with every drawn face along the entrenchment on either side turned anxiously in our direction, and that painted old harridan sitting under the canopy of her ghari, nodding and bowing whenever anyone glanced at her. And sure enough, Wheeler finally says:

"What's your opinion, Colonel Flashman?"

The temptation to sing out: "Take it, you bloody old fool — offer to crawl on your belly the whole way to Allahabad!" was strong, but I mastered it and looked pretty cool. "Well, sir," says I. "It's an offer — no more. There's nothing to be decided until we've tested it."

That shut them up. "True enough," says Wheeler, "but -

"Someone must talk to Nana Sahib," says I. "It may be that all isn't well with him, or that he thinks this siege ain't worth the candle. Maybe his precious pandies have had enough -

"That's it, by God!" broke in Delafosse, but I went on, very steady:

"But we can't accept — or turn him down flat — till we've heard more than is written here," and I tapped the paper in Vibart's hand. "He hasn't approached us out of charity, we may be sure — well, it may be treachery, or it may be weakness. Let's look him in the eye."

It must have sounded well — bluff Flashy talking calm sense while others went pink in the face. They weren't to know I'd made up my trembling mind in the moment I'd read the note; the trick now was to make sure that Wheeler made up his, and in the right direction. For he was obviously full of suspicion about the Nana, and half-inclined to listen to the hotheads who were urging him to throw the offer back in the mutineers' teeth — you never heard such appalling nonsense in your life. Here we were, doomed for certain, being offered an eleventh-hour reprieve, and more than half the idiots in that impromptu council were for rejecting it out of hand. It made my innards heave to listen; thinks I, this is going to need delicate handling.

However, Wheeler saw the sense of what I'd said, and decided that Moore and I should go to sec the Nana and hear precisely what he had to say. Thank God he chose me — I don't care, as a rule, to put my head into the lion's den, even under a flag of truce, but this was one negotiation I wanted to have a large hand in. I didn't want any hitches about the surrender — for surrender, if I had anything to do with it, was what it was going to be. All that mattered besides was that I should keep my credit intact.

So at noon Moore and I were escorted through the pandy lines, with Mrs Jacobs in her ghari jabbering about what a shame it was, oah yess, that the present unsettled state of affairs had prevented her getting up to the hills during the hot weather. Who she was, by the way, I never discovered; she looked like a typical half-caste bawd who'd been employed as a go-between because she was obviously neutral and inoffensive. But I may be misjudging the lady.

The notorious Nana Sahib was waiting for us in front of a great day-tent in a grove of trees, with a pack of servitors and minions attending him, and a score of Maharatta guardsmen, in breastplates and helmets, ranged either side of the great Afghan carpet before his chair. That carpet gave me an uneasy twinge — it reminded me of the one on which I'd seen McNaghten seized and chopped up outside Kabul, at just such a meeting as this; however, Moore and I put out our chests and looked down our noses, as true Britons ought to do in the presence of rebellious niggers who happen to have the drop on them.

Nana himself was a burly, fat-faced rascal with curly mustachioes and a shifty look — what they call a tung admi,*(*Literally, "a tight man".) dressed in more silks and jewels than a French whore, sliding his eyes across Moore and me and whispering behind a plump hand to the woman beside him. She was worth a lewd thought or two, by the way; one of your tall, heavy-hipped beauties with a drooping lower lip — Sultana Adala, they called her, and I'm sorry I never got closer to her than twenty feet. We exchanged a glance or two during that interview, and let our mutual imaginations work; ten minutes alone together would have done the rest. On Nana's other side sat a nondescript and nasty-looking rascal, who I gather was his brother-in-crime, Tantia Tope.

However, the man who took things in hand was Azeemoolah Khan, a tall, handsome, light-skinned exquisite in a cloth-of-gold coat and with a jewelled aigret in his turban, who stepped smiling across the carpet with his hand out. Moore promptly put his hands behind his back, I contented myself by hooking my thumbs into my belt, and Azeemoolah smiled even wider and withdrew his hand with a graceful flutter — Rudi Starnberg couldn't have done it better. I gave him our names, and he opened his eyes wide.

"Colonel Flashman! But this is an honour indeed! It has always been my regret that I missed you in the Crimea," says he, flashing his teeth. "And how is my dear old friend, Mr William Howard Russell?"

It was my turn to stare, at that; I didn't know then that this Azeemoolah was a travelled man, who spoke French and English as well as I did, had done diplomatic work in London — and gone through our sillier society women like a mad stallion at the same time. A charming, clever politician, whose urbanity masked a nature as appealing as a hooded cobra's;³⁰ for the occasion he was acting as interpreter for the Nana, who spoke no English.

I told him, fairly cool, that we were there to receive his master's proposals, at which he sighed and spread his hands.

"Well, gentlemen, it is a most distressing business, and no one is more deeply troubled by it than his highness, which is why he has sent his note to General Wheeler, in the hope that we can put an end to all this bloodshed and suffering -

Moore interrupted at this to say that in that case it was a pity he hadn't sent his message earlier, or stayed loyal in the first place. Azeemoolah just smiled.

"But we are not talking politics, are we, Captain Moore? We are looking at military reality — which is that your gallant resistance is at an end, one way or another. His highness deplores the thought of useless slaughter; he is willing, if you will quit Cawnpore, to allow your garrison to depart with the honours of war; you shall have all necessary food and comforts for your women and children (for whom his highness is particularly concerned), and safe passage to Allahabad. It seems to me not an ungenerous offer."

The Nana, who obviously knew the purport of what was being said, leaned forward at this, smiling greasily, and gabbled in Maharatta. Azeemoolah nodded, and went on:

"He says that baggage animals are already being collected to carry your wounded to the river, where boats will be waiting to take you all to Allahabad."

I asked the question Wheeler wanted asked. "What guarantees of safe-conduct does he offer?"

Azeemoolah lifted his brows. "But are any necessary? If we intended you harm, we have only to attack, or wait. We know your situation, you see. Believe me, gentlemen, his highness is moved simply by humanity, the spirit of mercy -

Whether it was deliberately timed or not, I don't know, but his words were interrupted by the most hideous scream of agony — a drawn-out, bubbling wail from behind the grove of trees. It rang out again, and then died into an awful whimper of pain, and I felt the hairs rise on my neck. Moore almost jumped out of his boots.

"What in God's name was that?" says he.

"Maharatta diplomacy, I imagine," says I, with a straight face and my innards dissolving. "Someone being flayed alive, probably, for our benefit — so that we could hear, and take note."

"… but if his highness's word is not sufficient," Azecmoolah went on blandly, "he would raise no objection to your carrying away your personal arms and … shall we say, twenty rounds a man? With that, you will hardly be at a greater disadvantage in the open than behind that pathetic breastwork. But I repeat, gentlemen, his highness has nothing to gain by treachery — quite the reverse. It is repugnant to him, and would be politically damaging."

I didn't trust the bastard an inch, but I was privately inclined to agree with him. Wiping out a British garrison entire was one thing, but he could do that anyway, without luring us into the open. On the other hand, getting a British garrison to haul down its flag would be a real feather in his cap — but Azeemoolah was a mile too shrewd to say so, for nothing would have been better calculated to stiffen Wheeler's resistance.

Nana started to chatter again in Maharatta, while I tried to efface the memory of that awful scream by exchanging a long look or two with Sultana Adala — it never does any harm. Azeemoolah heard him out, and then addressed us again.

"His highness asks you to reassure General Wheeler, and to add that while you are considering his most generous proposal, he is instructing our troops to observe an armistice. I myself will come tomorrow for General Wheeler's answer."

And that was that. Moore and I trudged back through the pandy lines — and if anything was needed to convince me that surrender was imperative it was the sight of those glowering black faces at the gun emplacements and round the bivouacs. They might look less smart and orderly than they'd done as loyal Company troops, but by God there were plenty of them, and no signs of weakening or desertion.

It was touch and go, though, when we got back to the entrenchment and reported to Wheeler what Nana's proposals were. He called a council of all the officers, and we sat or stood crowded into the stifling corner of the barrack which was his office, with the moaning of the wounded beyond the partition, and the wailing of the children, while we heard rehearsed again all the arguments that had been whispered to and fro that morning. It frightened me, I may tell you, for Wheeler was still smelling treachery, and our younger sparks were in full cry against the notion of surrender.

"We've held out this long," cries Delafosse, "and now they're weakening. Tell him to go to blazes, I say, and ten to one he'll raise the siege."

There were growls of approval at this, until Vibart says:

"And if he don't raise it? What then? We'll not have a child or woman alive in this hellish place three days hence. Are you prepared to accept that?"

"Are you prepared to accept a rebel's word?" retorts )elafossc. "While we're in a defensive position here, at least we can make sonic show against him — and he may raise the siege, or Lawrence may march. But once we accept his terms and step into the open, we're at his mercy."

"And we'll have hauled down our flag to a pack of rebels," says Thomson bitterly. "How do we go home to England and tell 'em that?"

At this some cried "Bravo!" and urged Wheeler to answer Nana with defiance, but old Ewart, who was so sick that he had to attend the council lying on a stretcher, wondered what England would say if we condemned hundreds of women and children to die in the useless defence of a couple of ruined mud buildings. The older men nodded agreement, but the youngsters shouted him down, and Delafosse repeated the argument, red in the face, that Nana must be weakening or he'd never have made the offer.

Wheeler, who'd been sitting tugging his moustache while they bickered, looks at Moore and me.

"You saw his camp, gentlemen; what opinion did you form? Is he negotiating from weakness, because his troops have lost heart?"

I'd said nothing throughout; I was biding my time, and let Moore answer. He said we'd seen no signs of flagging morale, which was true enough. Wheeler looked glum, and shook his head.

"I cannot think the Nana is to be trusted," says he. "And yet … it is a cruel choice. All my nature, every instinct, tells me to fight this command to the last; to die in my duty as a soldier should do, and let my country avenge me. But to do that at the cost of our loved ones' lives … already, so many … "

He broke off, and there was an uneasy silence; everyone knew that Wheeler's own son had died the day before. Finally he rubbed his face and looked round.

"If it were ourselves alone, there could be but one answer. As it is, I confess I should be tempted, for our women and children's sake, to accept this murderer's terms, were it not that my judgement tells me he will play us false. I … "

"Forgive me, sir," says Moore, quietly, "but if he does, we've lost nothing. For if we don't trust him, we're dead anyway — all of us. We know that, and —"

"At least we can die with honour!" cries some fool, and the younger chaps cheered like the idiots they were. At this Wheeler's head came up, and I saw his stubborn lip go out, and I thought, now, Flashy, now's your time, or the stupid old bastard will damn us all in the name of Duty and Hon-our. So I growled in my throat, and scraped my heel, and that caught his attention, just in time, and he looked at me.

"You've said nothing, Flashman," says he. "What is your thought?"

I felt all their eyes turn to me, and deliberately took my time, for I knew Wheeler was within an ace of deciding to fight it out to a finish, and I was going to have to humbug him, and the rest of them, into surrendering. But it was going to require my most artistic handling.

"Well, sir," says I, "like you, I wouldn't trust the Nana as far as the tuck-shop." (Someone laughed; homely old Flashy, you sec, with his schoolboy metaphors.) "But as Moore here says — that don't matter. What does — or so it seems to me — is the fate of our ladies —" (here I looked red-faced and noble) " — and the … the youngsters. If we accept the Nana's offer, at least there's a chance they'll come off safe."

"You'd surrender?" says Wheeler, in a. strained voice.

"For myself?" growls I, and looked at the floor. "Well, I never quite got the habit … goes against the grain, I reckon. Matter of honour — as someone said just now. And I suppose it can be said that honour demands we fight it out to the last —"

"Shabash!" cries Delafosse. "Well done, Flashy!"

" — but, d'ye know, sir," I went on, "the day my honour has to be maintained by sacrificing Vibart's little boy — or ' I'unstall's mother — or Mrs Newnham's daughter, well … " I raised my head and stared at the circle of faces, a strong, simple man stirred to his depths; you could have heard a pin drop. "I don't know — I may be wrong … but I don't think my honour's worth that much, d'ye know?"

The beauty of it was, while it was the most fearful gammon, coming from me — it was stark truth for the rest of them, gallant and honourable souls that they were. The irony was that for my own cowardly, selfish reasons, I was arguing the sane and sensible course, and having to dress it up in high-sounding bilge in order to break down their fatuous notions of Duty. Reason wouldn't have done it, but to suggest that the true honour demanded surrender, for the women and children's sake — that shamed 'em into sanity.

Old Ewart put the final touch to it. "And that, gentle-men, you would do well to bear in mind —" he glared almost defiantly at Delafosse" — is the opinion of the man who held Piper's Fort, and led the Light Brigade."

Wheeler put it to the formality of a vote, but it was foregone now. When Moore and Whiting voted to surrender, even the fieriest of the younger men gave way, and inside half an hour Wheeler's answer was on its way to Nana, agreeing to capitulate with the honours of war.³¹ But he added the condition that we should not only keep our arms, but sixty rounds a man instead of the proposed twenty —"then, if there is treachery, it will profit him little," he told us, and echoed the thought Azeemoolah had expressed in the afternoon: "We can fight as well in the open as in this death-trap." That was all he knew.

He was still fearful of treachery, you see. I was not — you may think I was deluding myself, but the fact was I couldn't see that the Nana had anything to gain by playing us false. I state that honestly now, and I've explained the details of the Cawnpore surrender because it was a momentous thing, not only in the Mutiny, but in Indian history. I had spoken — and, as I've said, I believe mine was the decisive voice — for surrender, because I saw it as the only way to save my skin. But apart from that vital consideration, I still believe that surrender was right, by every canon of soldiering and common sense. Call me a fool if you like, and shake your heads in the light of history — nothing could have been worse than fighting on in that doomed entrenchment.

Whatever misgivings Wheeler may have had, hardly anyone else shared them when word got round of what had been decided, and Azeemoolah and Jwala Pershad had come to the entrenchment with the Nana's undertakings all signed and witnessed: draught animals were to arrive at dawn for the mile-long journey to the river where boats would be waiting, and throughout the night there was bustle and eagerness and thanksgiving all through the garrison. It was as though a great shadow had been lifted; cooking fires blazed outside the barrack for the first time in weeks, the wounded were brought out of that stinking oven to lie in the open air, and even the children frolicked on the parapet where we'd been slashing at the sepoys two days before. Tired, worn faces were smiling, no one minded the dirt and stench any longer, or gave a thought to the rebels' massed guns and infantry a few hundred yards away; the firing had stopped, the fear of death had lifted, we were going out to safety, and throughout the night, over the din of packing and preparation, the sound of hymns rolled up to the night sky.

One of the few croakers was Ilderim. Wheeler had told those sepoys who had remained loyal and fought in the garrison to slip away over the southern rampart, for fear of reprisals from their mutinous fellows in the morning, but Ilderim wouldn't have it. He came to me in the dark at the north entrenchment, where I was smoking a cheroot and enjoying my peace of mind.

"Do I slip away like a cur when someone throws a stone at it?" says he. "No — I march with Wheeler Sahib and the rest of you tomorrow. And so that no pi-dog of a mutineer will take me for anything but what I am, I have put this on, for a killut*(*Dress of honour, usually on ceremonial occasions.) —" and as he stepped closer in the gloom, I saw he was in the full fig of a native officer of cavalry, white coat, gauntlets, long-tailed puggaree and all. "It is just a down-country regiment's coat, which I took from one of those we slew the other day, but it will serve to mark me as a soldier." He grinned, showing his teeth. "And I shall take my sixty rounds — do thou likewise, blood-brother."

"We're not going to need 'em, though," says I, and he shrugged.

"Who knows? When the tiger has its paw on the goat's neck, and then smiles in friendship … Wheeler Sahib does not trust the Nana. Dost thou?"

"There's no choice, is there?" says I. "But he's signed his name to a promise, after all —"

"And if he breaks it, the dead can complain," says he, and spat. "So I say — keep thy sixty rounds to hand, Flashman sahib."

I didn't heed him much, for Pathans are notoriously suspicious of everyone, reason or none, and when day broke there was too much to do to waste time in thinking. The mutineers came in the first mists of dawn, with bullocks and elephants and carts to carry us to the river, and we had the herculean task of getting everyone into the convoy. There were two hundred wounded to be moved, and all the women and children, some of them just babes-in-arms, and old people who'd have been feeble enough even without three weeks on starvation rations. Everyone was tired and filthy and oddly dispirited now that the first flush of excitement had died away. As the sun came up it shone on a strange, nightmare sight that lives with me now only as a series of pictures as the evacuation of Cawnpore began.

I can see the straggling mass of the procession, the bullock-carts with their stretchers carrying the blood-stained figures of the wounded, gaunt and wasted; bedraggled white women, either sitting in the carts or standing patiently alongside, with children who looked like White-chapel waifs clinging to their skirts; our own men, ragged and haggard, with their muskets cradled, taking up station along the convoy; the red coats and sullen faces of the mutineers who were to shepherd us across the maidan and down to the river ghat beyond the distant trees where the boats were waiting. The dawn air was heavy with mist and suspicion and hatred, as Wheeler, with Moore at his elbow as always, stood up on the rampart and reviewed the battered remnants of his command, strung out along the entrenchment, waiting listlessly for the word to move while all around was the confused babble of voices, orders being shouted, officers hurrying up and down, elephants squealing, the carts creaking, children crying, and the kites beginning to swoop down on the emptying barracks.

Incidents and figures remain very clear — two civilians hauling down the tattered flag from the barrack roof, rolling it up carefully and bringing it to Wheeler, who stood absent-mindedly with it trailing from one hand while he shouted: "Sarn't Grady! Is the south entrenchment clear, Sarn't Grady?" A little boy with curly hair, laughing and shouting "Plop-plop!" as one of the elephants dropped its dung; his mother, a harassed young woman in a torn ball-gown (it had rosebuds embroidered, I recall) with a sleeping infant in her arms, slapped and shook him with her free hand, and then straightened her hair. A group of mutineers walking round the barracks, belabouring one of our native cooks who was limping along under a great load of pans. A British private, his uniform unrecognisable, being railed at by an old mem-sahib as he helped her into a cart, until she was settled, when she said, "Thank you, my good man, thank you very much," and began searching her reticule for a tip. Four mutineers were hurrying up and down the untidy convoy, calling out and searching, until they spotted Vibart and his family — and then they ran hallooing and calling "Colonel sahib! Mem-sahib!", and seized on the family's baggage, and one of them, beaming and chuckling, lifted Vibart's little lad on to his shoulders, piggy-back, while the others shouted and shoved and made room for Mrs Vibart in a wagon. Vibart was dumbfounded, and two of the mutineers were weeping as they took his hand and carried his gear — I saw another one at it, too, an old grizzled havildar of the 56th, standing on the entrenchment gazing down into the ruin of the barracks with tears running down his white beard; he was shaking his head in grief, and then he would look no more, but turned about and stared across the maidan, still crying.

Most of the mutineers weren't so sentimental, though. One tried to snatch a musket from Whiting, and Whiting flung him off snarling and shouting: "You want it, do you? I'll give you its contents fast enough, you damned dog, if you don't take care!" The pandies fell back, growling and shaking their fists, and another gang of them stood and jeered while old Colonel Ewart was carried on a palki to his place in the line. "Is it not a fine parade, colonel sahib?" they were jeering. "Is it not well drawn up?" And they cackled and made mock of the drill, prancing up and down.

I didn't like the look of this a bit, or of the menacing-looking crowd of pandies which was growing across the maidan. Promises or no promises, it don't take much to touch off a crowd like that, and I was relieved when Moore, who had hurried to the head of the column, shouted and blew his whistle, and the procession began to move, creaking slowly, away from the entrenchment, and out on to the plain. I was near the rear of the line, where Vibart had charge of the supply-wagons; behind us the pandies were already scavenging in the deserted barracks — by God, they were welcome to anything they could find.

It was about a mile to the river, where the boats were, but we were so exhausted, and the convoy so haphazard and cumbersome, that it took us the best part of an hour to cross the maidan alone. It was a hellish trek, with the mutineers trying to drive us along, swearing and thrusting, and our fellows cursing 'em back, while wagons foundered, and one or two of the garrison collapsed and had to be loaded aboard, and the drivers thrashed at the beasts. Crowds of natives had come down from Cawnpore city to watch and jeer at us and get in the way; some of them, and the more hostile pandies, kept sneaking in close to shout taunts, or even to strike at us and try to steal our belongings. Something's going to crack in a moment, thinks I, and sure enough, just as we were trying to manhandle one of the store-wagons over a little white bridge at the far side of the maidan, where the trees began, there was a crackle of firing off to one side, and sudden shouting, and then more shots.

The driver of my store-wagon tried to whip up in alarm, a wheel caught on the bridge, and I and two civilians were struggling to keep it steady when Whiting comes up at the run, cocking his musket and demanding to know what the row was. In the same moment one of our corporals came flying out of the wood, rolled clean under the wagon in front of us, and jumps up yelling:

"Quick, sir — come quick! Them devils is murthering Colonel Ewart! They got 'im in the trees yonder, an' —"

Whiting sprang forward with an oath, but quick as light one of the mutineers who'd been watching us at the bridge jumps in his way and flung his arm round him. For a moment I thought, oh God, now they're going to ambush us, and the corporal must have thought the same, for he whipped out his bayonet, but the mutineer holding Whiting was just trying to keep him back and shouting:

"Nahin, sahib, khabadar!*(*Take care!) If you go there, they will kill you! Let be, sahib! Go on — to the river!"

Whiting swore, and struggled with him, but the mutineer — a big, black-moustached havildar with a Chillianwallah medal — threw him down and wrested his musket away. Whiting came up, furious, but the corporal under-stood, and grabbed his wrist.

" 'E's right, sir! Them swine'll just sarf karot you, like they done the colonel! We got to git on to the river, like 'e says! Otherwise, maybe they'll do for everybody — the wimmen an' kids an' all, sir!"

He was right, of course — I'd been through the same sort of retreat as this, back in Afghanistan, and you've got to allow for a few stray slaughters and turn a blind eye, or the next thing you know you'll have a battle on your hands. Even Whiting realised it, I think, for he wheeled on the havildar and says:

"I must see. Will you come with me?"

The fellow says, "Han, sahib", and they strode into the trees. It seemed a sensible time to be getting on down to the river, so I told the corporal I must inform Wheeler of what was happening, ordered him to see the store-wagon safely over the bridge, and jumped up on to the coping, running past the carts ahead, with their passengers demanding to know what was happening. I hurried on through the trees, and found myself looking down the slope to the Suttee Choura Ghat, and beyond it the broad, placid expanse of the Ganges.

The slope was alive with people. The foremost wagons had reached the landing-stage, and our folk were already getting out and making their way to the water's edge, where a great line of thatched, clumsy-looking barges was anchored in the shallows. The wagons nearer me were splitting away from the convoy to get closer to the water, and everything was in confusion, with some people getting out and others sitting tight. Already the ground was littered with abandoned gear, the stretchers with the wounded were being unloaded just anywhere; groups of women and children were waiting, wondering which way to go, while their menfolk, red in the face and shouting, demanded to know what the orders for embarkation were. Someone was calling, "All ladies with small children are to go in numbers twelve to sixteen!" but no one knew which barges were which, and you couldn't hear yourself think above the elephants squealing and the babble of voices.

On either side of the slope there were groups of pandies with their bayonets fixed, glowering but doing nothing to help, and off to one side I saw a little gaily-dressed group of natives by a temple on a knoll — Azeemoolah was there, talking to Wheeler, who was gesturing towards the barges, so I walked across towards them, through the silent groups of pandy riflemen, and as I came up Azeemoolah was saying:

… but I assure you general, the flour is already in the boats — go and see for yourself. Ah, Colonel Flashman, good morning, sir; I trust I see you in good health. Perhaps, general, Colonel Flashman could be asked to examine the boats, and see that all is as I have told you?"

So I was dispatched down to the water, and had to wade out through the shallows to the barges; they were great, musty-smelling craft, but clean enough, with half-naked nigger boatmen in charge, and sure enough there were grain sacks in most of them, as Azeemoolah had said. I reported accordingly, and then we set to with the embarkation, which simply meant telling people off at random to the various barges, carrying the women and children through the water, bearing the stretchers of the wounded head-high, stumbling and swearing in the stinking ooze of the shallows — I went under twice myself, but thank God I didn't swallow any; the Ganges is one river you don't want to take the waters of. It was desperate work, gasping in the steamy heat as the sun came up; the worst of it was getting the women and children and wounded properly stowed inboard — I remember thinking it was ironic that my experience of packing howling niggers into the slave-ship Balliol College some years before should come in so handy now. But there you are — any special knowledge comes in useful, sooner or later.

By God, though, the niggers had been easier to handle. I reckon I must have carried twenty females to the barges (and none of 'em worth even a quick fumble, just my luck), plucked one weeping child from the water's edge, where she was crying for her mama, put my fist into the face of a pandy who was pestering Mrs Newnham and trying to snatch her parasol, quieted an old crone who refused to be embarked until she was positive the barge she was going to was Number 12 ("Mr Turner said I must go to Number 12; I will go to no other" — it might have been the Great Eastern for all I knew, or cared), and stood neck deep wrestling to replace a rotted rudder rope. Strange, when you're working all out with things like that, sweating and wrestling to make sense out of chaos, you forget about death and danger and possible treachery — all that matters is getting that piece of hemp knotted through the rudder stem, or finding the carpetbag that Mrs Burtenshaw's maid has left in the cart.

I was about done when I stumbled up through the litter of the bank for the last time, and looked about me. Nearly all the command was loaded, the barges were floating comfortably high on the oily surface, and beyond them the last dawn mists were receding across the broad expanse of the river to the far bank half a mile distant, with the eastern sun turning the water to a great crimson mirror.

There weren't above fifty of our folk, Vibart's rearguard mostly, left on the wreck-strewn, mud-churned slope; Wheeler and Moore and Vibart were all together, and as I came to them I heard Whiting's voice, shaking with anger:

" — and he was shot on his palki, I tell you — half a dozen times, at least! Those foresworn swine up yonder —" and he shook his fist towards the temple on the knoll, where Azeemoolah was sitting with Tantia Tope in a little group of the Nana's officers. There was no sign of Nana himself, though.

"There is nothing to be done, Captain Whiting!" Wheeler's voice was hoarse, and his gaunt face was crimson and sweating. He looked on the edge of collapse. "I know, sir, I know — it is the basest treachery, but there is no remedy now! Let us thank God we have come this far — no, no, sir, we are in no case to protest, let alone punish — we must make haste down the river before worse befalls!"

Whiting stamped and cursed, but Vibart eased him away. The pandies who had lined the slope were moving down now, through the abandoned wagons, converging on the landing-place.

"Hollo, Flash," says Moore, wearily. Like me, he was plastered with mud, and the sling was gone from his wounded arm. "They settled Massie, too — did you know? He and Ewart protested when the pandies dragged off tour of our loyal sepoys — so they shot 'em all, out o' hand -

"Like dogs, beside the road!" cries Whiting. "By God, if I'd a gun!" He dashed the sweat from his eyes, glaring at the pandies on the slope. Then he saw me. "Flashman — one of the sepoys was that Pathan orderly of yours — the big chap in the havildar's coat — they shot him in the ditch!"

For a moment I didn't comprehend; I just stared at his flushed, raging face. "Like a dog in the ditch!" cries he again, and then it hit me like a blow: he was telling me that Ilderim was dead. I can't describe what I felt — it wasn't grief, or horror, so much as disbelief. Ilderim couldn't die — he was indestructible, always had been, even as the boy I'd first met at Mogala years ago, one of those folk whose life is fairly bursting out of them; I had a vision of that grinning, bearded hawk-face of just a few hours ago —"No pi-dog of a mutineer will take me for anything but what I am!" And he'd been right, and it had been the death of him — but not the kind of death the great brave idiot had always looked for, just a mean, covert murder at the roadside. Oh, you stupid Gilzai bastard, I thought — why didn't you go over the wall when you had the chance …

"Come on!" Moore was pushing at my shoulder. "We'll be last aboard. We're in the — hollo, what's that?"

From the trees on the top of the slope a bugle sounded, the notes floating clearly down to us. I looked up the hill, and saw a strange thing happening — I suppose I was still shocked by the news of Ilderim's death, but what I saw seemed odd rather than menacing. The pandies on the slope, and there must have been a couple of hundred of them, were dropping to the kneeling firing position, their muskets were at their shoulders, and they were pointing at us.

"For Christ's —" a voice shouted, and then the hillside seemed to explode in a hail of musketry, the balls were howling past, I heard someone scream beside me, and then Moore's arm flailed me to the ground, and I was plunging through the ooze, into the water. I went under, and struck out for dear life, coming up with a shattering crash of my head against the middle barge. Overhead women were shrieking and muskets were cracking, and then there was the crash of distant cannon, and I saw the narrow strip of water between me and the shore ploughed up as the storm of grape hit it. I reached up, seizing the gunwale, and heaved myself up, and then the whole barge shook as though in a giant hand, and I was hurled back into the water again.

I came up gasping. The pandies were tearing down the slope now, sabres and muskets and bayonets at the ready, charging into the last of our shore-party, who were struggling in the shallows. Up on the slope others were firing at the boats, and in the shade beneath the trees there was the triple flash of cannon, sending grape and round-shot smashing down into the helpless lumbering boats. Men were struggling in the water only a few yards from me — I saw a British soldier sabred down, another floundering back as a sepoy shot him point-blank through the body, and a third, thrust through with a bayonet, sinking down slowly on the muddy shore. Wheeler, white-faced and roaring "Treachery! Shove off — quickly! Treachery!", was stumbling out into the shallows, his sabre drawn; he slashed at a pursuing sepoy, missed his footing and went under, but a hand reached out from the gunwale near me and pulled him up, coughing and spewing water. Moore was in the water close by, and Vibart was trying to swim towards us with his wounded arm trailing. As Moore plunged towards him I sank beneath the surface, dived, and struck out beneath the boat, and as I went I was thinking, clear enough, well, Flashy my lad, you were wrong again — Nana Sahib wasn't to be trusted after all.

I came up on the other side, and the first thing I saw was a body falling from the boat above me. Overhead its thatch was burning, and as a great chunk of the stuff fell hissing into the water I shoved away. I trod water, looking about me: in the next two barges the thatches were alight as well, and people were screaming and tumbling into the water — I saw one woman jumping with a baby in her arms: I believe it was the one who had cuffed the little boy for laughing at the elephant's dung. The shore was hidden from me by the loom of the barge, but the crash of firing was redoubling, and the chorus of screams and yells was deafening. People were firing back from the barges, too, and in the one down-river from me two chaps were beating at the burning thatch, and another was heaving at its tiller; very slowly it seemed to be veering from the bank. That's the boy for me, thinks I, and in the same moment the thatch of the barge immediately above me collapsed with a roar and a whoosh of sparks, with shrieks of the damned coming from beneath it.

It was obvious, even in that nightmare few moments, what had happened. Nana had been meaning to play false all along; he had just waited until we were in the boats before opening up with musketry, grape, and every piece of artillery he had. From where I was I could see one barge already sinking, with people struggling in the water round it; at least four others were on fire; two were drifting helplessly into midstream. The pandies were in the water round the last three boats, where most of the women and children were, but then a great gust of smoke blotted the scene from my view, and at the same time I heard the crackle of firing from the far bank — the treacherous bastards had us trapped both sides. I put my head down and struck out for the next barge ahead, which at least had someone steering it, and as I came under its stern there was Moore in the water alongside, shoving for all he was worth to turn the rudder and help it from the shore. Beyond him I saw Wheeler and Vibart and a couple of others being dragged inboard, while our people blazed back at the pandies on the bank.

Moore shouted something incoherent at me, and as I seized on the rudder with him his face was within a foot of mine — and then it exploded in a shower of blood, and I literally had his brains blown all over me. I let go, shrieking, and when I had dashed the hideous mess from my eyes he was gone, the barge was surging out into the river as our people got the sweeps going, and I was just in time to grasp the gunwale and be dragged along, clinging like grim death, and bawling to be hauled aboard.

We must have gone several hundred yards before I managed to scramble up and on to the deck and get my bearings. The first thing I saw was Wheeler, dead or dying; he had a gaping wound in the neck, and the blood was pumping oozily on to his shirt. All around there were wounded men sprawled on the planks, the smouldering thatch filled the boat with acrid clouds of smoke, and at both gunwales men were firing at the banks. I clung to the gunwale, looking back — we were half a mile below Suttee Ghat by now, where most of the barges were still swinging at their moorings, under a pall of smoke; the river round them was full of people, floundering for the bank. The firing seemed to have slackened, but you could still see the sparkle of the muskets along the slope above the ghat, and the occasional blink of a heavy gun, booming dully across the water. Behind us, two of the barges seemed to have got clear, and were drifting helplessly across the river, but we were the only one under way, with half a dozen chaps each side tugging at the sweeps.

I took stock. We were clear; the shots weren't reaching us. Wheeler was dead, flopped out on the deck, and beyond him Vibart was lying against the gunwale, eyes closed, both arms soaked in blood; someone was babbling in agony, and I saw it was Turner, with one leg doubled at a hideous angle and the other lying in a bloody pool.

Whiting was holding on to one of the awning supports, a gory spectre, fumbling one-handed at the lock of a carbine -- there hardly seemed to be a sound man in the barge. I saw Delafosse was at one of the sweeps, Thomson at another, and Sergeant Grady, with a bandage round his brow, was in the act of loosing off a shot at the shore. And then, with a little shock of astonishment, I saw that one of the wounded men on the deck was East — and he was finished.

Why, I don't know, but I dropped down beside him and felt his pulse. He opened his eyes at that, and looked up at me, and someone at my elbow — I don't know who — says hoarsely:

"Pandy got him on the bank … bayonet in the back, poor devil."

East recognised me, and tried to speak, but couldn't; you could see the life ebbing out of his eyes. His lips ~pnverrd, and very faintly I heard him say:

"Flashman … tell the doctor … I …"

That was all, except that he gripped my hand hard, and the man beside me said something about there not being any doctor on board.

"That ain't what he meant," says I. "It's another doctor he means — a schoolmaster, but he's dead."

East gave a little ghost of a smile, and his hand tightened, and then went loose in mine — and I found I was blubbering and gasping, and thinking about Rugby, and hot murphies at Sally's shop, and a small fag limping along pathetically after the players at Big Side — because he couldn't play himself, you see, being lame. I'd hated the little bastard, too, man and boy, for his smug manly piety — but you don't see a child you've known all your life die every day. Maybe that was why I wept, maybe it was the shock and horror of what had been happening. I don't know. Whatever it was, I'm sure I felt it all the more sincerely for knowing that I was still alive myself, and no bones broken so far.³²

Memory's the queerest thing. When you've been through a hellish experience — and the Cawnpore siege and surrender ranks high in that line, along with Balaclava and Kabul and Greasy Grass and Isandlhwana — the aftermath tends to be vague, until some fresh horror strikes. That barge is mercifully dim in my mind now — I know it was the only one that got away from Cawnpore, and that of the rest, all were shot to pieces or burned with their passengers, except those which had the women and children aboard. The pandies captured those, and took the women and kids back ashore — all the world knows what happened after that. But only a few things are clear about our trip down-river — Thomson has left a pretty full account of it, if you're interested. I remember Whiting dying — or rather I remember him being dead, looking very pale and small in the bows of the boat. I remember taking a turn at the rudder, and splashing and straining in the water when we grounded on a mudbank in the dark. I remember hearing drums beating on the bank, and Vibart biting on a leather strap as they set his broken arm, and the dull splashes as we put dead bodies over the side, and the musty taste of dry mealies which was all we had to eat — but the first time that memory becomes consecutive and coherent after East died was when a fire-arrow came winging out of the dark and thudded into the deck, and we were shooting away at dim figures on the nearest bank, and fire-arrows came down in a blazing rain as we hauled on the sweeps and forced the barge back into mid-stream out of range. We rowed like fury until the fiery pinpoints of light on the bank were far behind us, and the yelling and drumming of the niggers had died away, and then we flopped down exhausted and the current carried us and landed us high and dry on another mudbank just before dawn.

This time there was no shoving off; we were wedged tight in the mud, along a deserted jungly shore, with nothing to be heard but monkeys chattering and birds screeching in the dense undergrowth. The far bank was the same, a thick mass of green, with the brown oily river sliding slowly past. At least it looked peaceful, which was i pleasant change.

Vibart reckoned we must still be a hundred miles from Allahabad, and if the behaviour of the niggers who'd showered us with fire-arrows was anything to go by, we could count on hostile country most of the way. There were two dozen of us in the boat, perhaps half of whom were fit to stand; we were low on powder and ball, and desperately short of mealies, there were no medical supplies, and it was odds half the wounded would contract gangrene unless we reached safety quickly. Not a pleasant prospect, thinks I, as I looked round the squalid barge, with its dozen wounded groaning or listless on the planks, the stench of blood and death everywhere, and even the whole men looking emaciated and fit to croak. I was in better case than most -- I hadn't been through the whole siege — and it was crossing my mind that I might do worse than slip away on my own and trust to luck and judgement to get to Allahabad on foot; after all, I could always turn into a native again.

So when we held our little council, I prepared the way for decamping, in my own subtle style. The others, naturally, were all debating how we might get refloated again and press on to Allahabad; I shook them up by suddenly growling that I was in no hurry to get there.

"I agree we must get the barge refloated to take the wounded on," says I. "For the rest of us — well, for me, leastways, I'd sooner head back for Cawnpore."

They gaped at me in disbelief. "You're mad!" cries Delafosse.

"So I've been told," says I. "See here — while we had the women and children to think of, they were our first concern. That's the only reason we surrendered, isn't it? Well, now they're … either gone, or captives of those fiends — I don't much fancy running any longer." I looked as belligerent as I knew how. "There hasn't been much time to think things out these past hours — but now, well, I reckon I've a score to settle — and the only place I want to settle it is Cawnpore."

"But … but …" says Thomson, "we can't go back, man! It's certain death!"

"Maybe," says I, very business-like. "But I've seen my country's flag hauled down once — something I never thought to see — I've seen us betrayed, our … our loved ones ravished from us …" I managed a manly glisten about the eye. "I don't like it above half! So — I'm going back, and I'm going to get a bullet into that black bastard's heart — I don't care how! And — that's that."

"By God!" says Delafosse, taking fire, "by God — I've half a mind to come with you!"

"You'll do no such thing!" This was Vibart; he was deathly pale, with both arms useless, but he was still in command. "Our duty is to reach Allahabad — Colonel Flashman, I forbid you! I will not have your life flung away in … in this rash folly! You will carry out General Wheeler's orders -

"Look, old fellow," says I. "I was never one of General Wheeler's command, you recollect? I don't ask anyone to come with me — but I left a friend dead back there — a comrade from the old Afghan days — a salt man from the hills. Well, maybe I'm more of a salt man than a parade soldier myself — anyway, I know what I must do." I gave him a quizzical little grin, and patted his foot. "Anyway, Vibart, I'm senior to you, remember?"

At this they cried out together, telling me not to be a fool, and Vibart said I couldn't desert our wounded. He wanted to send a shore-party, to try to find friendly villagers who would tow us off; I was best fitted to lead it, he said, and my first duty was to carry out Wheeler's dying wishes, and get down-river. I seemed to hesitate, and finally said I would lead the shore-party —"but you'll be going to Allahabad without me in the end," says I. "All I'll need is a rifle and a knife — and a handshake from each one of you."

So we set off, a dozen of us, to try to find a friendly village. If we found one, and the prospects of getting off for Allahabad seemed good, I'd allow myself to be persuaded, and go along with them. If we didn't — I'd slip away, and they could imagine I'd gone back to Cawnpore on my mission of vengeance. (That's one thing about having a reckless reputation: they'll believe anything of you, and shake their heads in admiration over your dare-devilry.)

We hadn't gone five minutes into the jungle before I was wishing to God I'd been able to stay in the boat. It wasn't very thick stuff, once we got away from the river, but eery and curiously quiet, with huge tall trees shadowing a forest-floor of creeper and swampy plants, like a great cathedral, and only the occasional tree-creature chirruping in the silence. We struck a little path, and followed it, and presently came on a tiny temple in a clearing, a lath-and-plaster thing that looked as though it hadn't been visited in years. I )clafossc and Sergeant Grady scouted it, and reported it empty, and I was just ordering up the others when we heard it — very low and far-off in the forest: the slow boom-boom of drums.

I don't know any sound like it for shivering the soul. I've heard it in Dahomey, when the Amazons were after us, and in South American backwaters, and on a night on the Papar River in Borneo when the Iban head-hunters took the warpath — the muted rumble of doom that conjures up spectres with painted faces creeping towards you through the dark. They're usually damned real spectres, too — as they were here, for I'd barely given my order when there was a whistle and a thud, and Grady, on the edge of the clearing, was staggering with an arrow in his brow, and with a chorus of blood-chilling screams they were on us — black, half-naked figures swarming out of the trees, yelling bloody murder. I snapped off one shot — God knows where it went — and then I was haring for the temple. I made it a split second ahead of two arrows which quivered in the doorpost, and then we were tumbling inside, with Delafosse and Thomson crouched in the doorway, blazing away as hard as they could.

They came storming up to the doorway in a great rabble, and for the next five minutes it was as bloody and desperate a melee as ever I've been in. We were so packed in the tiny space inside the building — it wasn't more than eight feet square, and about that number of us had got inside — that only two of us could fire through the door at once. Whoever the attackers were — half-human jungle people, apparently, infected by the general Mutiny madness — they didn't appear to have fire-arms, and the foremost of them were shot down before they could get close enough to use their spears and long swords. But their arrows buzzed in like hornets, and two of our fellows went down before the attack slackened off We were just getting our breath back, and I was helping Thomson push an arrow through and out of the fleshy part of Private Murphy's arm — and all the time we could hear our besiegers grunting and fumbling stealthily close under the temple wall — when Delafosse suddenly whoops out "Fire, fire! They've set the place alight!"

Sure enough, a gust of smoke came billowing in the doorway, setting us coughing and stumbling; a fire-arrow came zipping in to bury itself in Private Ryan's side, and the yells of the niggers redoubled triumphantly. I staggered through the reek, and Thomson was clutching my arm, shouting:

"Must break out … two volleys straight in front … run for it…"

It was an affair of split seconds; there wasn't time to think or argue. He and Delafosse and two of the privates stumbled to the door, Thomson yells "Fire!", they all let blast together, and then we put our heads down and went charging out of the temple, with the flames licking up behind us, and drove in a body across the clearing for the shelter of the jungle. The niggers shrieked at the sight of us, I saw the man before me tumble down with a spear in his back, I cannoned into a black figure and he fell away, and then we were haring through the trees, my musket was gone, and no thought but flight. Delafosse was in front of me; I followed him as he swerved on to the path, with the arrows whipping past us; booted feet were thumping behind me, and Thomson was shouting, "On, on — we can distance 'em! — come on, Murphy, Sullivan — to the boat!"

How we broke clear, God knows — the very suddenness with which we'd rushed from the temple must have surprised them — but we could hear their yells in the jungle behind, and they weren't giving up the hunt, either. My lungs were bursting as we ploughed through the thicker jungle near the river, tripping on snags, tearing ourselves, sobbing with exhaustion — and then we were on the bank, and Delafosse was sliding to a halt in the mud and yelling.

"It's gone! Vibart! My God, the boat's gone!"

The mudbank was empty — there was the great groove where the barge had been, but the brown stretch of water was unbroken to the wall of green on its far side; of the barge there wasn't a sign.

"It must have slid off —" Delafosse was crying, and I thought, good for you, my boy, let's stop to consider how it happened, eh, and the niggers can come up and join in. I didn't even check stride; I went into the water in the mightiest racing dive I ever performed, and I heard the cries and splashes as the others took to the river behind me. I was striking out blindly, feeling the current tugging me downstream — I didn't mind; anywhere would do so long as it was away from those black devils screeching in the forest behind. The far bank was too distant to reach, but downstream where the river curved there were islands and sandbanks, and we were being carried towards them far faster than our pursuers could hope to run. I swam hard with the current, until the yelping of the niggers had faded into the distance, and then glanced round to see how the others were getting along. There were four heads bobbing in the water — Delafosse, Thomson, Murphy, and Sullivan, all swimming in my wake, and I was just debating whether to make for the nearest sandbank or allow myself to be carried past, when Delafosse reared up in the water, yelling and gesturing ahead of me. I couldn't make him out, and then the single shrieked word "Muggers!" reached me, and as I looked where he was pointing the steamy waters of the Ganges seemed to turn to ice.

On a mudbank a hundred yards ahead and to my right, shapes were moving — long, brown, hideously scaly dragons waddling down to the water at frightening speed, plashing into the shallows and then gliding out inexorably to head us off, their half-submerged snouts rippling the surface. For an instant I was paralysed — then I was thrashing at the water in a frenzy of terror, trying to get out into midstream, fighting the sluggish current. I knew it was hopeless; they must intercept us long before we could reach the islands, but I lashed out blindly, ploughing through the water, too terrified to look and expecting every moment to feel the agonising stab of crocodile teeth in my legs. I was almost done, with exhaustion and panic, and then Sullivan was alongside, tugging at me, pointing ahead — and I saw that the placid surface was breaking up into a long, swirling race where the water ran down between two little scrubby mudbanks. There was just a chance, if we could get into that broken water, that the faster current might carry us away — muggers hate rough water, anyway — and I went for it with the energy of despair.

One glance I spared to my right — my God, there was one of the brutes within ten yards, swirling towards me. I had a nightmare glimpse of that hideous snout breaking surface, of the great tapering jaws suddenly yawning in a cavern of teeth — and I regret to say I did not notice whether the fourth tooth of the lower jaw was overlapping or not. A naturalist chap, to whom I described my experience a few years ago, tells me that if I'd taken note of this, I'd have known whether I was being attacked by a true crocodile or gavial, or by some other species, which would have added immense interest to the occasion.³³ As it was, I can only say that the bloody thing looked like an Iron Maiden rushing at me through the water, and I was just letting out a last wail of despair when Sullivan seized me by the hair, the current tore at our legs, and we were swept away into the rough water between the islands, striking out any old way, going under into the choking brown, coming up again and struggling to stay afloat — and then the water had changed to clinging black ooze, and Sullivan was crying:

"Up, up, sir, for Christ's sake!" and he was half-dragging me through the slime towards the safety of a tangled mass of creeper on top of a mudbank. Delafosse was staggering out beside us, Thomson was knee-deep in the water smashing with a piece of root at the head of a mugger which lunged and snapped before swirling away with a flourish of its enormous tail: Murphy, his arm trickling blood, was already up on the top of the bank, reaching down to help us. I heaved up beside him, shuddering, and I remember thinking: that must be the end, nothing more can happen now, and if it does, I don't care, I'll just have to die, because there's nothing I can do. Sullivan was kneeling over me, and I remember I said:

"God bless you, Sullivan. You are the noblest man alive," or something equally brilliant — although I meant it, by God — and he replied: "I daresay you're right, sir; you'll have to tell my missus, for damn me if she thinks so." And then I must have swooned away, for all I can remember is Delafosse saying: "I believe they are friends — see, Thomson, they are waving to us — they mean us no harm," and myself thinking, if it's the muggers waving, don't you trust the bastards an inch, they're only pretending to be friendly …

Luck, as I've often observed, is an agile sprite who jumps both ways in double quick time. You could say it had been evil chance that took me to Meerut and the birth of the Mutiny — but I'd escaped, only to land in the hell of Cawnpore, from which I was one of only five to get clear away after the ghat massacre. It had been the foulest luck to run into those wild men in the jungle, and the infernal muggers — but if they hadn't chased us, we mightn't have fetched up on a mudbank under the walls of one of those petty Indian rulers who stayed loyal to the Sirkar. For that was what had happened — the new niggers whom Delafosse saw waving and hallooing from the shore turned out to be the followers of one Diribijah Singh, a tough old maharaj who ruled from a fort in the jungle, and was a steadfast friend of the British. So you see, all that matters about luck is that it should run good on the last throw.³⁴

Not that the game was over, you understand; when I think back on the Mutiny, even on Cawnpore, I can say that the worst was still to come. And yet, I feel that the tide turned on that mudbank; at least, after a long nightmare, I can say that there followed a period of comparative calm, for me, in which I was able to recruit my tattered nerves, and take stock, and start planning how to get the devil out of this Indian pickle and back to England and safety.

For the moment, there was nothing to do but thank God and the loyal savages who picked us up from that shoal, with the muggers snuffling discontentedly in the wings. The natives took us ashore, to the maharaj's castle, and he was a brick — a fine old sport with white whiskers and a belly like a barrel, who swore damnation to all mutineers and promised to return us to our own folk as soon as we had recovered and it seemed safe to pass through the country round. But that wasn't for several weeks, and in the meantime the five of us could only lie and recuperate and contain our impatience as best we might — Delafosse and Thomson were itching to get back into the thick of things; Murphy and Sullivan, the two privates, kept their counsel and ate like horses; while I, making an even greater show of impatience than my brother-officers, was secretly well content to rest at ease, blinking in the sun and eating mangoes, to which I'm partial.

In the meantime, we later discovered, great things were happening in the world beyond. When news of Cawnpore's fall got out, it gave the Mutiny a tremendous fillip; revolt spread all along the Ganges valley and in Central India, the garrisons at Mhow and Agra and a dozen other places rebelled, and most notable of all, Henry Lawrence got beat fighting a dani' silly battle at Chinhat, and had to hole up in Lucknow, which went under siege. On the credit side, my old friend the First Gravedigger (General Havelock to you) finally got up off his Puritan rump and struck through Allahabad at Cawnpore; he fought his way in after a nine-day march, and recaptured the place a bare three weeks after we'd been driven out — and I suppose all the world knows what he found when he got there.

You remember that when we escaped the massacre at the Suttee Ghat, the barges with the women and children were caught by the pandies. Well, Nana took them ashore, all 200 of them, and locked them up in a place called the Bibigarh, in such filth and heat that thirty of them died within a week. He made our women grind corn; then, when word came that Havelock was fighting his way in, and slaughtering all opposition, Nana had all the women and children butchered. They say even the pandies wouldn't do it, so he sent in hooligans with cleavers from the Cawnpore bazaar; they chopped them all up, even the babies, and threw them, dead and still living, down a well. Havelock's people found the Bibigarh ankle-deep in blood, with children's toys and hats and bits of hair still floating in it; they had got there two days too late.

I don't suppose any event in my lifetime — not Balaclava nor Shiloh nor Rorke's Drift nor anywhere else I can think of — has had such a stunning effect on people's minds as that Cawnpore massacre of the innocents. I didn't see the full horror of it, of course, as Havelock's folk did, but I was there a few weeks after, and walked in the Bibigarh, and saw the bloody floor and walls, and near the well I found the skeleton bones of a baby's hand, like a little white crab in the dust. I'm a pretty cool hand, as you know, but it made me gag, and if you ask me what I think of the vengeance that old General Neill wreaked, making captured mutineers clean up the Bibigarh, flogging 'em and forcing 'em to lick up the blood with their tongues before they were hanged — well, I was all for it then, and I still am. Perhaps it's because I knew the corpses that went into that well — I'd seen them playing on the Cawnpore rampart, and being heard their lessons in that awful barrack, and laughing at the elephant dunging. Perhaps that baby hand I found belonged to the infant I'd seen in the arms of the woman in the torn gown. Anyway, I'd have snuffed out every life in India, and thought naught of it, in that moment when I looked at Bibigarh — and if you think that shocking, well, maybe I'm just more like Nana Sahib than you are.

Anyway, what I think don't signify. What mattered was the effect that Cawnpore had on our people. I know it turned our army crazy; they were ready to slaughter anything that even sniffed of mutiny, from that moment on. Not that they'd been dealing exactly kindly before; Havelock and Neill had been hanging right, left and centre from Allahabad north, and I daresay had disposed of quite a number of innocents — just as the pandies at Meerut and Delhi had done.³⁵

What beats me is the way people take it to heart — what do they expect in war? It ain't conducted by missionaries, or chaps in Liberal clubs, snug and secure. But what amuses me most is the way fashionable views change — why, for years after Cawnpore, any vengeance wreaked on an Indian, mutineer or not, was regarded as just vengeance; nothing was too bad for 'em. Now it's t'other way round, with eminent writers crying shame, and saying nothing justified such terrible retribution as Neill took, and we were far guiltier than the niggers had been. Why? Because we were Christians, and supposed to know better? — and because England contains this great crowd of noisy know-alls that are forever defending our enemies' behaviour and crying out in pious horror against our own. Why our sins are always so much blacker, I can't fathom — as to Cawnpore, it don't seem to me one whit worse to slay in revenge, like Neill, than out of sheer spite and cruelty, like Nana; at least it's more understandable.

The truth is, of course, that both sides were afraid — the pandy who'd mutinied, and feared punishment, decided he might as well be hanged for a sheep, and let his natural bloodlust go — they're cruel bastards at bottom. And our folk — they'd had an almighty scare, and Cawnpore brought their natural bloodlust to the top in turn; just give 'em a few well-chosen texts about vengeance and wrath of God and they could fall to with a will — as I've already observed about Rowbotham's Mosstroopers, there's nothing crueller than a justified Christian. Except maybe a nigger running loose.

So you can see it was a jolly summer in the Ganges valley, all right, as I and my four companions discovered, when Diribijah Singh finally convoyed us out from his fort and back to Cawnpore after Havelock had retaken it. I hadn't seen old Blood-and-Bones since he'd stood grumping beside my bed at Jallalabad fifteen years before, and time hadn't improved him; he still looked like Abe Lincoln dying of diarrhoea, with his mournful whiskers and bloodhound eyes. When I told him my recent history he just listened in silence, and then grabbed me by the wrist with his great bony hand, dragged me down on to my knees beside him, and began congratulating God on lugging Flashy out of the stew again, through His infinite mercy.

"The shield of His truth has been before thee, Flash-man," cries he. "Has not the Hand which plucked thee from the paw of the bear at Kabul, and the jaws of the lion at Balaclava, delivered thee also from the Philistine at Cawnpore?"

"Absolutely, amen," says I, but when I took him into my confidence — about Palmerston, and why I came to India in the first place, and suggested there was no good reason why I shouldn't head for home at once — he shook his great coffin head.

"It cannot be," says he. "That mission is over, and we need every hand at the plough. The fate of this country is in the balance, and I can ill spare such a seasoned soldier as yourself. There is a work of cleansing and purging before us," he went on, and you could see by the holy fire in his eyes that he was just sweating to get to grips with it. "I shall take you on to my staff, Flashman — nay, sir, never thank me; it is I shall be the gainer, rather than you."

I was ready to agree with him there, but I knew there was no point in arguing with the likes of Havelock — anyway, before I could think of anything to say he was scribbling orders for hanging a few more pandies, and dictating a crusty note to Neill, and roaring for his adjutant; he was a busy old Baptist in those days, right enough.

So there I was, and it might have been worse. I'd had no real hope of being sent home — no high command in their right mind would have dispensed with the famous Flash when there was a campaign on hand, and since I had to be here I'd rather be under Havelock's wing than anyone's. He was a good soldier, you see, and as canny as Campbell in his own way; there'd be no massacres or Last Stands round the Union Jack with the Gravedigger in charge.

So I settled in as Havelock's intelligence aide — a nice safe billet in the circumstances, but if you would learn the details of how I fared with him you must consult my official history, Dawns and Departures of a Soldier's Life (in three handsomely-bound morocco volumes, price two gns. each or five gns. the set, though you may have difficulty laying hands on Volume III, since it had to be called in and burned by the bailiffs after that odious little Whitechapel sharper D'Israeli egged on one of his toadies to sue me for criminal information. Suez Canal shares, eh? I'll blacken the bastard's memory yet, though, just see if I don't. Truth will out).

However, the point is that my present tale isn't truly concerned with the main course of the Mutiny henceforth — although I bore my full reluctant part in that — but still with that mad mission on which Pam had sent me out in the first place, to Jhansi and the bewitching Lakshmibai. For I wasn't done with her, whatever Havelock might think, and however little I guessed it myself; the rest of the Mutiny was just the road that led me back to her, and to that final terrible adventure of the Jhansi flight and the guns of Gwalior when — but I'll come to that presently.

In the meantime I'll tell you as briskly as I can what happened in the few months after I joined Havelock at Cawnpore. At first it was damned bad news all round: the Mutiny kept spreading, Nana had sheered off after losing Cawnpore and was raising cain farther up-country, Delhi was still held by the pandies with our people banging away at it, and Havelock at Cawnpore didn't have the men or means to relieve Lucknow, only forty miles away, where Lawrence's garrison was hemmed in. He tried hard enough, but found that the pandy forces, while they didn't make best use of their overwhelming numbers, fought better defensive actions than anyone had expected, and Havelock got a couple of black eyes before he'd gone ten miles, and had to fall back. To make matters worse, Lloyd's advance guard got cut up at Arah, and no one down in Calcutta seemed to have any notion of overall strategy — that clown Canning was sitting like a fart in a trance, they tell me, and no proper order was taken.

I wasn't too upset, though. For one thing I was snug at the Cawnpore headquarters, making a great bandobast*(*Organisation, administration.) over collecting information from our spies and passing the gist on to Havelock (intelligence work is nuts to me, so long as I can stay close to bed, bottle and breakfast and don't have to venture out). And for another, I could sense that things were turning our way; once the first flood of pandy successes had spent itself, there could only be one end, and old Campbell, who was the best general in the business, was coming out to take command-in-chief.

In September we moved on Lucknow in style, with fresh troops under Outram, a dirty-looking little chap on a waler horse, more like a Sheeny tailor than a general. They tell me it was a hell of a march; certainly it rained buckets all the way, and there was some stern fighting at Mangalwarh and at the Alum Bagh near Lucknow town — I know, because I got reports of it in my intelligence ghari at the rear of the column, where I was properly ensconced writing reports, examining prisoners, and getting news from friendly natives — at least, they were friendly by the time my Rajput orderlies had basted 'em a bit. From time to time I poked my head out into the rain, and called cheery encouragement to the reinforcements, or sent messages to Havelock — I remember one of them was that Delhi had fallen at last, and that old Johnny Nicholson had bought a bullet, poor devil. I drank a quiet brandy to him, listening to the downpour and the guns booming, and thought God help poor soldiers on a night like this.

However, having got Lucknow, Havelock and Outram didn't know what the devil to do with it, for the pandies were still thick around as fleas, and it soon became evident that far from raising the siege, our forces were nothing but reinforcement to the garrison. So we were all besieged, for another seven weeks, and the deuce of a business it must have been, with bad rations and the pandies forever trying to tunnel in under our defences, and our chaps fighting 'em in the mines which were like a warren underground. I say "must have been", for I knew nothing about it; the night we entered Lucknow my bowels began to explode in all directions, and before morning I was flat on my back with cholera, for the second time in my life.

For once, it was a blessing, for it meant I was spared knowledge of a siege that was Cawnpore all over again, if not quite as bad. I gather I raved a good deal of the time, and I know I spent weeks lying on a cot in a beastly little cellar, as weak as a rat and not quite in my right mind. It was only in the last fortnight of the siege that I began to get about again, and by that time the garrison was cheery with the news that Campbell was on his way. I limped about gamely at first, looking gaunt and noble, and asking "Is the flag flying still?" and "Is there anything I can do, sir? — I'm much better than I look, I assure you." I was, too, but I took care to lean on my stick a good deal, and sit down, breathing hard. In fact, there wasn't much to do, except wait, and listen to the pandies sniping away — they didn't hit much.

In the last week, when we knew for certain that Camp-bell was only a few days away, with his Highlanders and naval guns and all, I was careless enough to look like a whole man again — it seemed safe enough now, for you must know that at Lucknow, unlike Cawnpore, we were defending a large area, and if one kept away from the outer works, which unemployed convalescents like me were entitled to do, one could promenade about the Residency gardens without peril. There were any number of large houses, half-ruined now, but still habitable, and we occupied them or camped out in the grounds — when I came out of my cellar I was sent to the bungalow, where Havelock was quartered with his staff people, but he packed me off to Outram's headquarters, in case I should be of some use there. Havelock himself was pretty done by this time, and not taking much part in the command; he spent most of his time in Gubbins's garden, reading some bilge by Macaulay — and was greatly intrigued to know that I'd met Lord Know-all and discussed his "Lays" with the Queen; I had to tell Havelock all about that.

For the rest, I yarned a good deal with Vincent Eyre, who'd been in the Kabul retreat with me, and was now one of the many wounded in the garrison, or chaffed with the ladies in the old Residency garden, twitting them about their fashions — for after a six-month siege everyone was dressed any old how, with scraps and curtains and even towels run up into clothes. I was hailed everywhere, of course — jovial Flash, the hero on the mend — and quizzed about my adventures from Meerut to, Cawnpore. I never mind telling a modest tale, if the audience is pretty enough, so I did, and entertained them by imitating Makarram Khan, too, which attracted much notice and laughter. It was an idiot thing to do, as you'll see — it earned another man the V.C., and nearly won me a cut throat.

What happened was this. One morning, it must have been about November 9th or loth, there was a tremendous commotion over on the southern perimeter, where some-one in Anderson's Post claimed he had heard Campbell's pipers in the distance; there was huge excitement, with fellows and ladies and niggers and even children hastening through the ruined buildings, laughing and cheering — and then everything went deadly still as we stood to listen, and sure enough, above the occasional crack of firing, far, far away there was the faintest whisper on the breeze of a pig in torment, and someone sings out, "The Campbells are coming, hurrah, hurrah!" and people were embracing and shaking hands and leaping in the air, laughing and crying all together, and a few dropping to their knees to pray, for now the siege was as good as over. So there was continued jubilation throughout the garrison, and Outram sniffed and grunted and chewed his cheroot and called a staff conference.

He had been smuggling out messages by native spies all through the siege, and now that the relief force was so close he wanted to send explicit directions to Campbell on the best route to take in fighting his way through the streets and gardens of Lucknow to the Residency. It was a great maze of a place, and our folk had had the deuce of a struggle getting in two months earlier, being cut up badly in the alleys. Outram wanted to be sure Campbell didn't have the same trouble, for he had a bare 5,000 men against 60,000 pandies, and if they strayed or were ambushed it might be the end of them — and consequently of us.

I didn't have much part in their deliberations, beyond helping Outram draft his message in the secret Greek code he employed, and making a desperate hash of it. One of the Sappers had the best route all plotted out, and while they talked about that I went into the big verandah room adjoining to rest from the noon heat, convalescent-like. I sprawled on the cot, with my boots off, and must have dozed off, for when I came to it was late afternoon, the murmur of many voices from beyond the chick screen had gone, and there were only two people talking. Outram was saying:

… it is a hare-brained risk, surely — a white man proposing to make his way disguised as a native through a city packed with hostiles! And if he's caught — and the message falls into their hands? What then, Napier?"

"True enough," says Napier, "but to get a guide out to Campbell — a guide who can point his way for him — is better than a thousand messages of direction. And Kavanaugh knows the streets like a bazaar-wallah."

"No doubt he does," mutters Outram, "but he'll no more pass for a native than my aunt's parrot. What — he's more than six feet tall, flaming red hair, blue eyes, and talks poor Hindi with a Donegal accent! Kananji may not be able to guide Campbell, but at least we can be sure he'll get a message to him."

"Kananji swears he won't go if Kavanaugh does. He's ready to go alone, but he says Kavanaugh's bound to be spotted."

"There you are, then!" I could hear Outram muttering and puffing on a fresh cheroot. "Confound it, Napier — he's a brave man … and I'll own that if he could reach Campbell his knowledge of the byways of Lucknow would be beyond price — but he's harder to disguise than … damme, than any man in this garrison."

I listened with some interest to this. I knew Kavanaugh, a great freckled Irish bumpkin of a civilian who'd spent the siege playing tig with pandy besiegers in the tunnels beneath our defences — mad as a hatter. And now madder still, by the sound of it, if he proposed to try to get through the enemy lines to Campbell. I saw Outram's problem — Kavanaugh was the one man who'd be a reliable guide to Campbell, if only he could get to him. But it was Tattersall's to a tin can that the pandies would spot him, torture his message out of him, and be ready and waiting for Campbell when he advanced. Well, thank God I wasn't called on to decide …

… if he can disguise himself well enough to pass muster with me, he can go," says Outram at last. "But I wish to heaven Kananji would accompany him — I don't blame him for refusing, mind … but if only there were someone else who could go along — some cool hand who can pass as a native without question, to do the talking if they're challenged by the pandies — for if they are, and if Kavanaugh has to open that great Paddy mouth of his … stop, though! Of course, Napier — the very man! Why didn't it occur … "

I was off the cot and moving before Outram was half-way through his speech; I knew before he did himself whose name was going to pop into his mind as the ideal candidate for this latest lunacy. I paused only to scoop up my boots and was tip-toeing at speed for the verandah rail; a quick vault into the garden, and then let them try to find me before sunset if they could … but blast it, I hadn't gone five steps when the door was flung open, and there was Outram, pointing his cheroot, looking like Sam Grant after the first couple of drinks, crying:

"Flashman! That's our man, Napier! Can you think of a better?"

Of course, Napier couldn't — who could, with the famous Flashy on hand, ripe to be plucked and hurled into the bloody soup? It's damnable, the way they pick on a fellow — and all because of my swollen reputation for derring-do and breakneck gallantry. As usual, there was nothing I could do, except stand blinking innocently in my stocking-soles while Outram repeated all that I'd heard already, and pointed out that I was the very man to go along on this hideous escapade to hold the great Fenian idiot's hand for him. I heard him in mounting terror, concealed behind a stern and thoughtful aspect, and replied that, of course, I was at his disposal, but really, gentlemen, was it wise? Not that I cared about the risk (Jesus, the things I've had to say), but I earnestly doubted whether Kavanaugh could pass … my convalescent condition, of course, was a trifling matter … even so, one wouldn't want to fail through lack of strength … not when a native could be certain of getting through …

"There isn't a loyal sepoy in this garrison who can come near you for skill and shrewdness," says Outram briskly, "or who'd stand half the chance of seeing Kavanaugh safe. Weren't you playing your old Pathan role the other day for the ladies? As to the toll of your illness — I've a notion your strength will always match your spirit, whatever happens. This thing's your meat and drink, Flashman, and you know it — and you've been fairly itching to get into harness again. Eh?"

"I'll hazard a guess," says Napier, smiling, "that he's more concerned for Kavanaugh than for himself — isn't that so, Flashman?"

"Well, sir, since you've said it —"

"I know," says Outram, frowning at his damned cheroot. "Kavanaugh has a wife and family — but he has volunteered, you see, and he's the man for Campbell, not a doubt of it. It only remains to get him there." And the brute simply gave me a sturdy look and shook my hand as though that were the thing settled.

Which of course it was. What could I do, without ruining my reputation? — although such was my fame by this time that if I'd thrown myself on the floor weeping with fright, they'd probably not have taken me seriously, but thought it was just one of my jokes in doubtful taste. Give a dog a bad name — by God, it doesn't stick half as hard as a good one.

So I spent the evening dyeing myself with soot and ghee, shuddering with apprehension and cursing my folly and ill luck. This, at the eleventh hour! I thought of having another shot at Napier, pleading my illness, but I didn't dare; he had a hard eye, and Outram's would be even worse if they suspected I was shirking. I near as a toucher cried off, though, when I saw Kavanaugh; he was got up like Sinbad the Sailor, with nigger minstrel eyes, hareem slippers, and a great sword and shield. I stopped dead in the doorway, whispering to Napier:

"My God, man, he won't fool a child! We'll have the bloody pandies running after us shouting, ‘Penny for Guy Fawkes!’ "

But he said reassuringly that it would be pretty dark, and Outram and the other officers agreed that Kavanaugh might just do. They were full of admiration for my get-up — which was my usual one of bazaar-ruffler — and Kavanaugh came up to me with absolute tears in his eyes and said I was the stoutest chap alive to stand by him in this. I nearly spat in his eye. The others were full of sallies about our appearance, and then Outram banded Kavanaugh the message for Campbell, biting on his cheroot and looking hard at us.

"I need not tell you," says he, "that it must never tall into enemy hands. That would be disaster for us all."

Just to rub the point in, he asked if we were fully armed (so that we could blow our brains out if necessary), and then gave us our directions. We were to swim the river beyond the northern rampart, recross it by the bridge west of the Residency, and cut straight south through Lucknow city and hope to run into Campbell's advance picquets on the other side. Kavanaugh, who knew the streets, would choose our path, but I would lead and do the talking.

Then Outram looked us both in the eye, and blessed us, and everyone shook hands, looking noble, while I wondered if I'd time to go to the privy Kavanaugh, shaking with excitement, cleared his throat and says:

"We know what is to be done, sorr — an' we'll give our lives gladly in the attempt. We know the risks, ould fellow, do we not?" he added, turning to me.

"Oh, aye," says I, "that bazaar'll be full of fleas — we'll be lousy for weeks." Since there was no escape, I might as well give 'em another Flashy bon mot to remember.

It moved them, as only jocular heroism can; Outram's aide, Hardinge, was absolutely piping his eye, and said England would never forget us, everyone patted us on the back with restrained emotion, and shoved us off in the direction of the rampart. I could hear Kavanaugh breathing heavily — the brute positively panted in Irish — and whispered to him again to remember to leave any talking to me. "Oi will, Flashy, Oi will," says he, lumbering along and stumbling over his ridiculous sword.

The thing was a farce from the start. By the time we had slipped over the rampart and made our way through the pitch dark down to the bank of the Goomtee, I had realised that I was in company with an irresponsible lunatic, who had no real notion of what he was doing. Even while we were stripping for our swim, he suddenly jerked his head up, at the sound of a faint plop out on the water.

"That's trout afther minnow," says he, and then there was another louder plop. "An' that's otter afther trout," says he, with satisfaction. "Are ye a fisherman, are ye?" Before I could hush his babbling, he had suddenly seized my hand — and him standing there bollock-naked with his togs piled on his head — and said fervently:

"D'ye know what — we're goin' to do wan o' the deeds that saved the Impoire, so we are! An' Oi don't moind tellin' ye somethin' else — for the first toime in me loife, Oi'm scared!"

"The first time!" squeaks I, but already he was plunging in with a splash like the launching of the Great Eastern, puffing and striking out in the dark, leaving me with the appalling realisation that for once I was in the company of someone as terrified as myself. It was desperate — I mean, on previous enterprises of this kind I'd been used to relying on some gallant idiot who could keep his head, but here I was with this buffoon who was not only mad Irish, but was plainly drunk with the idea of playing Dick Champion, the Saviour of the Side, and was trembling in his boots at the same time. Furthermore, he was given to daydreaming about trouts and otters at inappropriate moments, and had no more idea of moving silently than a bear with a ball and chain. But there was nothing for it now; I slid into the freezing water and swam the half-furlong to the far bank, where he was standing on one leg in the mud, hauling his clothes on, and making the deuce of a row about it.

"Are ye there, Flash?" says he, in a hoarse whisper you could have heard in Delhi. "We'll have to be hellish quiet, ye know. Oi think there's pandies up the bank!"

Since we could see their picquets round the camp-fires not fifty yards away, it was a reasonable conclusion, and we hadn't stolen twenty yards along the riverside when someone hailed us. I shouted back, and our challenger remarked that it was cold, at which the oaf Kavanaugh petrified me by suddenly bawling out: "Han, bhai, bahut nmder!"*(*"Yes, brother, very cold!") like some greenhorn reciting from a Hindi primer. I hustled him quickly away, took him by the neck, and hissed:

"Will you keep your damned gob shut, you great murphy?"

I is apologised in a nervous whisper, and muttered some-thing about Queen and Country; his eye was glittering feverishly. "Oi'll be more discreet, Flash," says he, and so we went on, with me answering another couple of challenges before we reached the bridge, and crossed safely over into Lucknow town.

This was the testing part, for here there was lighting in the streets, and passers-by, and Kavanaugh might easily he recognised as counterfeit. The swim hadn't done his dyed skin any good, and apart from that his outlandish rig, the European walk, the whole cut of the man, was an invitation to disaster. Well, thinks I, if he's spotted, it's into the dark for Flashy, and old O'Hooligan can take care of himself.

The worst of it was, he seemed incapable of keeping quiet, but was forever halting to mutter: "The mosque, ah, that's right, now — and then de little stone bridge — where the divil is it? D'ye see it, Flashy — it ought to be right by hereabouts?" I told him if he must chunter, to do it in Hindi, and he said absent-mindedly "Oi will, Oi will, niver fear. Oi wish to God we had a compass." He seemed to think he was in Phoenix Park.

It wasn't too bad at first, because we were moving through gardens, with few folk about, but then we came to the great Chauk Bazaar. Thank God it was ill-lit, but there were groups of pandies everywhere, folk at the stalls, idlers at every corner, and even a few palkis swaying through the narrow ways. I put on a bold front, keeping Kavanaugh between me and the wall, and just swaggered along, spitting. No one gave me a second glance, but by hellish luck we passed close by a group of pandies with some whores in tow, and one of the tarts plucked at Kavanaugh's sleeve and made an improper suggestion; her sepoy stared and growled resentfully, and my heart was in my 'mouth as I hustled Kavanaugh along, shouting over my shoulder that he'd just been married the previous day and was exhausted, at which they laughed and let us be. At least that kept him shut up for a spell, but no sooner were we clear of the bazaar than he was chattering with relief, and stopped to pick carrots in a vegetable patch, remarking at the top of his voice that they were "the swaitest little things" he'd tasted in months.

Then he lost our way. "That looks devilish like the Kaiser Bagh," says he, and fell into a monsoon ditch. I hauled him out, and he went striding off into the dark, and to my horror stopped a little old fellow and asked where we were. The man said "Jangli Ganj", and hurried off, glancing suspiciously at us. Kavanaugh stood and scratched himself and said it wasn't possible. "If this is Jangli Ganj," says he, "then where the hell is Mirza Kera, will ye tell me that? Ye know what, Flashman, that ould clown doesn't know where he's at, at all, at all." After that we blundered about in the dark, two daring and desperate men on our vital secret mission, and then Kavanaugh gave a great laugh and said it was all right, he knew where we were, after all, and that must be Moulvie Jenab's garden, so we should go left.

We did, and finished up striking matches along Haidar's Canal — at least, that's what Kavanaugh said it was, and he should have known, for he was in it twice, thrashing about in the water and cursing. When he had climbed out he was in a thundering rage, swearing the Engineers had got the map of Lucknow all wrong, but we must cross the canal anyway, and bear left until we hit the Cawnpore road. "The bloody thing's over dere somewhere!" cries he, and he seemed sure of that, at least, I stifled my growing …..and off we went, with Kavanaugh tripping over fir and stopping every now and then to peer into the Ithuu wondering: "D'ye think that garden could have rr the Char Bagh, now? No, no, niver — and yet agin, It nit right be — what d'ye think, Flashy?"

What I thought you may guess; we must have been wandering for hours, and for all we knew we might be heat lillg back towards the Residency. Kavanaugh's slippers ltr,l given out, and when he lost one of them we had to pipe about in a melon patch until he found it; his feet were m .r deplorable condition, and he'd lost his shield, Intl he was still convinced our plight was all the fault tat the ancient he had asked the way from. He thought we Wright try a cast to our right, so we did, and found rturselve.. wandering in I)ilkoosha Park, which was full of Nutty .utrllery, even I knew we were quite out the way, and K.rvattanglr xaid, yeti, Ile had made a mistake, but such mtNhalrs were of frequent occurrence. We must bear away south, so we tried that, and I asked a peasant sitting out With his crops if he would guide us to the Alam Bagh. 1e raim lie was too old and lame, and Kavanaugh lost trio temper and roared at him, at which the fellow ran oll ahrtrking, and the dogs began to bark and we had to run Irrr it and Kavanaugh went headlong into a thorn hur4lt (And this, as he'd remarked, was one of the Deeds tl4.rr 'saved the Empire; it's in all the books.)

I here was no end to the fellow's capacity for disaster, al'IrarrntIy. Given a choice of paths, he headed along one whir It brought us full tilt into a pandy patrol, and I had to talk our way out of it by saying we were poor men going to I. (rtrroula to tell a friend the British had shot his brother. Arriving in a village, he wandered into a hut when I wasn't looking, and blundered about in the dark, seized a woman by the thigh — fortunately she was too terrified to cry out, and we got away. After that he took to crying out "That's Jalallabad, Oi'm certain sure. And that's Salehnagar, over there, yes." Pause. "Oi think." The upshot of that was that we landed in a swamp, and spent over an hour ploshing about in the mud, and Kavanaugh's language was shocking to hear. We went under half a dozen times before we managed to find dry land, and I spotted a house not far off, with a light in an upper window, and insisted that Kavanaugh must rest while I found out where we were. He agreed, blaspheming because the last of his dye had rubbed off with repeated immersions.

I went to the house, and who should be at the window but the charmingest little brown girl, who said we were not far from Alam Bagh, but the British had arrived there, and people were running away. I thanked her, inwardly rejoicing, and she peeped at me over the sill and says:

"You are very wet, big man. Why not come in and rest, while you dry your clothes? Only five rupees."

By George, thinks I, why not? I was tired, and sick, and it had been the deuce of a long time, what with sieges and cholera and daft Irishmen falling in bogs; this was just the tonic I needed, so I scrambled up, and there she was, all chubby and brown and shiny, giggling on her charpoy and shaking her bouncers at me. I seized hold, nearly crying at this unexpected windfall, and in a twinkling was marching her round the room, horse artillery fashion, while she squeaked and protested that for five rupees I shouldn't be so impatient. I was, though, and it was just as well, for I'd no sooner finished the business than Kavanaugh was under the window, airing his Urdu plaintively in search of me, and wanting to know what was the delay?

I leaned out and cadged five rupees off him, explaining it was a bribe for an old sick man who knew the way; he passed it up, I struggled into my wet fugs, kissed my giggling Delilah goodnight, and scrambled down, feeling fit for anything.