Books: Hira Singh
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Talbot Mundy >> Hira Singh
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"Who says I suspect him?" he answered. "Nay, nay, nay! I will have
no murder done--no drumhead tyranny, fathered by the lees of fear!
Let Gooja Singh alone!"
"Does your head not ache?" I asked him.
"More than you guess!" said he. "But my heart does not ache. Two
aches would be worse than one. Come silently!"
So I rode beside him silently, and making a circuit and signaling to
the watchers not to betray our presence, we came on our hiding
infantry unsuspected by them. We dismounted, and going close on foot
were almost among them before they knew. Gooja Singh was on his feet
in their midst, giving them information and advice.
"I tell you Ranjoor Singh is dead!" said he. "Hira Singh swears he
is only asleep, but Hira Singh lies! Ranjoor Singh lies dead on top
of the corn in the cart in yonder gully, and Hira Singh--"
I know not what more he would have said, but Ranjoor Singh stopped
him. He stepped forward, smiling.
"Ranjoor Singh, as you see, is alive," he said, "and if I am dead,
then I must be the ghost of Ranjoor Singh come among you to enforce
his orders! Rise!" he ordered. "Rise and fall in! Havildars, make
all ready to resume the march!"
"Shoot him, sahib!" I urged, taking out my pistol, that had once
been Tugendheim's. "Shoot him, or let me do it I"
"Nay, nay!" he said, laughing in my face, though not unkindly. "I am
not afraid of him."
"But I, sahib," I said. "I fear him greatly!"
"Yet thou and I be two men, and I command," he answered gently. "Let
Gooja Singh alone."
So I went and grew very busy ordering the column. In twenty minutes
we were under way, with a screen of horsemen several hundred yards
ahead and another little mounted rear-guard. But when the order had
been given to resume the march and the carts were squeaking along in
single file, I rode to his side again with a question. I had been
thinking deeply, and it seemed to me I had the only answer to my
thoughts.
"Tell me, sahib," I said, "our nearest friends must be the Russians.
How many hundred miles is it to Russia?"
But he shook his head and laughed again. "Between us and Russia lies
the strongest of all the Turkish armies," he said. "We could never
get through."
"I am a true man!" I said. "Tell me the plan!" But he only nodded,
and rode on.
"God loves all true men," said he.
CHAPTER VI
Where the weakest joint is, smite.
--RANJOOR SINGH.
Well, sahib, Abraham caught up with us on the evening of the third
day after leaving with that letter to the Germans in Angora, having
ridden moderately to spare his horse. He said there were only two
German officers there when he reached the place, and they seemed
worried. They gave him the new saddle asked for, and a new horse
under it; also a letter to carry back. Ranjoor Singh gave me the
horse and saddle, letting Abraham take my sorry beast, that was
beginning to recover somewhat under better treatment.
Ranjoor Singh smiled grimly as he read the letter. He translated
parts of it to me--mainly complaints about lack of this and that and
the other thing, and very grave complaints against the Turks, who,
it seemed, would not cooperate. You would say that was good news to
all of us, that should have inspired us with new spirit. But as I
said in the beginning, sahib, there are reasons why the British must
rule India yet a while. We Sikhs, who would rule it otherwise, are
all divided.
We were seven non-commissioned officers. If we seven had stood
united behind Ranjoor Singh there was nothing we could not have
done, for the men would then have had no example of disunity. You
may say that Ranjoor Singh was our rightful officer and we had only
to obey him, but I tell you, sahib, obedience that is worth anything
must come from the heart and understanding. Ranjoor Singh was as
much dependent on good-will as if we had had the choosing of him. So
he had to create it, and that which has once been lost, for whatever
reason, is doubly and redoubly hard to make again. He did what he
did in spite of us, although I tried to help.
Of us seven, first in seniority came I; and as I have tried already
to make clear I was Ranjoor. Singh's man (not that he believed it
altogether yet). If he had ordered me to make black white, I would
have perished in the effort to obey; but I had yet to prove that.
Next in order to me was Gooja Singh, and although I have spared the
regiment's shame as much as possible, I doubt not that man's spirit
has crept out here and there between my words--as a smell creeps
from under coverings. He hated me, being jealous. He hated Ranjoor
Singh, because of merited rebuke and punishment. He was all for
himself, and if one said one thing, he must say another, lest the
first man get too much credit. Furthermore, he was a BADMASH,
[Footnote: Low ruffian.] born of a money-lender's niece to a man
mean enough to marry such. Other true charges I could lay against
him, but my tale is of Ranjoor Singh and why should I sully it with
mean accounts; Gooja Singh must trespass in among it, but let that
be all.
Third of us daffadars in order of seniority was Anim Singh, a big
man, born in the village next my father's. He was a naik in the
Tirah in '97 when he came to the rescue of an officer, splitting the
skull of an Orakzai, wounding three others, and making prisoner a
fourth who sought to interfere. Thus he won promotion, and he held
it after somewhat the same manner. A blunt man. A fairly good man. A
very good man with the saber. A gambler, it is true--but whose
affair is that? A ready eye for rustling curtains and footholds near
open windows, but that is his affair again--until the woman's
husband intervenes. And they say he can look after himself in such
cases. At least, he lives. Behold him, sahib. Aye, that is he
yonder, swaggering as if India can scarcely hold him--that one with
his arm in a sling. A Sikh, sahib, with a soldier's heart and ears
too big for his head--excellent things on outpost, where the little
noises often mean so much, but all too easy for Gooja Singh to
whisper into.
Of the other four, the next was Ramnarain Singh, the shortest as to
inches of us all, but perhaps the most active on his feet. A man
with a great wealth of beard and too much dignity due to his
father's THALUKDARI [Footnote: Landed estate.] His father pockets
the rent of three fat villages, so the son believes himself a
wisehead. A great talker. Brave in battle, as one must be to be
daffadar of Outram's Own, but too assertive of his own opinion. He
and Gooja Singh were ever at outs, resentful of each other's claim
to wisdom.
Next was Chatar Singh, like me, son and grandson of a soldier of the
raj--a bold man, something heavy on his horse, but able to sever a
sheep in two with one blow of his saber--very well regarded by the
troopers because of physical strength and willingness to overlook
offenses. Chatar Singh's chief weakness was respect for cunning.
Having only a great bull's heart in him and ability to go forward
and endure, he regarded cunning as very admirable; and so Gooja
Singh had one daffadar to work on from the outset (although I did
what I could to make trouble between them).
The remaining two non-commissioned officers were naiks--corporals,
as you would say--Surath Singh and Mirath Singh, both rather
recently promoted from the ranks and therefore likely to see both
sides to a question (whereas a naik should rightly see but one).
Very early I had taken those two naiks in hand, showing them
friendship, harping on the honor and pleasure of being daffadar and
on the chance of quick promotion.
Given a British commanding officer--just one British officer--even a
little young one--one would have been enough--it would have been
hard to find better backing for him. Even Gooja Singh would scarcely
have failed a British leader. But not only was the feeling still
strong against Ranjoor Singh; there was another cloud in the sky.
Did the sahib ever lay his hands on loot? No? Ah! Love of that runs
in the blood, and crops out generation after generation!
Until the British came and overthrew our Sikh kingdom--and that was
not long ago--loot was the staff of life of all Sikh armies. In
those days when an army needed pay there was a war. Now, except for
one month's pay that, as I have told, the Germans had given us, we
had seen no money since the day when we surrendered in that Flanders
trench; and what the Germans gave us Ranjoor Singh took away, in
order to bribe the captain of a Turkish ship. And Gooja Singh swore
morning, noon and night that as prisoners of war we should not be
entitled to pay from the British in any event, even supposing we
could ever contrive to find the British and rejoin them.
"Let us loot, then, and pay ourselves!" was the unanimous verdict, I
being about the only one who did not voice it. I claim no credit. I
saw no loot, so what was the use of talking? We were crossing a
desert where a crow could have found small plunder. But being by
common consent official go-between I rode to Ranjoor Singh's side
and told him what the men were saying.
"Aye," he nodded, not so much as looking sidewise, "any one would
know they are saying that. What say the Turk and Tugendheim?"
"Loot, too!" said I, and he grunted.
It was this way, sahib. Our Turkish officer prisoner was always put
with his forty men to march in front--behind our advance guard but
in front of the carts and infantry. Thus there was no risk of his
escaping, because for one thing he had no saddle and rode with much
discomfort and so unsafely that he preferred to march on foot more
often than not; and for another, that arrangement left him never out
of sight of nearly all of us. One of us daffadars would generally
march beside him, and some of the Syrian muleteers had learned
English either in Egypt or the Levant ports, so that there was no
lack of interpreters. I myself have marched beside the Turk for
miles and miles on end, with Abraham translating for us.
"Why not loot? Who can prevent you? Who shall call you to account?"
was the burden of the Turk's song.
And Tugendheim, who spoke our tongue fluently, marched as a rule
among the men, or rode with the mounted men, watched day and night
by the four troopers who had charge of him--better mounted than he,
and very mindful of their honor in the matter. He made himself as
agreeable as he could, telling tales about his life in India--not
proper tales to tell to a sahib, but such as to make the troopers
laugh; so that finally the things he said began to carry the weight
that goes with friendliness. He soon discovered what the feeling was
toward Ranjoor Singh, and somehow or other he found out what the
Turk was talking about. After that he took the Turk's cue (although
he sincerely despised Turks) and began with hint and jest to
propagate lust for loot in the men's minds. Partly, I think, he
planned to enrich himself and buy his way to safety--(although God
knows in which direction he thought safety lay!). Partly, I think,
he hoped to bring us to destruction, and so perhaps offset his
offense of having yielded to our threats, hoping in that way to
rehabilitate himself. So goes a lawyer to court, sure of a fee if
his client wins, yet sure, too, of a fee if his client loses,
enjoying profit and entertainment in any event. Yet who shall blame
Tugendheim? Unlike a lawyer, he stood to take the consequences if
both forks of the stick should fail. I told Ranjoor Singh all that
Tugendheim and the Turk were saying to the men, and his brow
darkened, although he made no comment. He did not trust me yet any
more than he felt compelled to.
"Send Abraham to me," he said at last. So I went and sent Abraham,
feeling jealous that the Syrian should hear what I might not.
Ranjoor Singh had been forcing the pace, and by the time I speak of
now we had nearly crossed that desert, for a rim of hills was in
front of us and all about. It was not true desert, such as we have
in our Punjab, but a great plain already showing promise of the
spring, with the buds of countless flowers getting ready to burst
open; when we lay at rest it amused us to pluck them and try to
determine what they would look like when their time should come. And
besides flowers there were roots, remarkably good to eat, that the
Syrians called "daughters of thunder," saying that was the local
name. Tugendheim called them truffles. A little water and that
desert would be fertile farm-land, or I never saw corn grow!
Ranjoor Singh conversed with Abraham until we entered a defile
between the hills; and that night we camped in a little valley with
our outposts in a ring around us, Ranjoor Singh sitting by a bright
fire half-way up the side of a slope where he could overlook us all
and be alone. We had seen mounted men two or three times that day,
they mistaking us perhaps for Turkish troops, for they vanished
after the first glimpse. Nevertheless, we tethered our horses close
in the valley bottom, and lay around them, ready for all
contingencies.
I remember that night well, for it was the first since we started
eastward in the least to resemble our Indian nights. It made us feel
homesick, and some of the men were crooning love-songs. The stars
swung low, looking as if a man could almost reach them, and the
smoke of our fires hung sweet on the night air. I was listening to
Abraham's tales about Turks--tales to make a man bite his beard--
when Ranjoor Singh called me in a voice that carried far without
making much noise. (I have never known him to raise his voice so
high or loud that it lost dignity.) "Hira Singh!" he called, and I
answered "Ha, sahib!" and went clambering up the hill.
He let me stand three minutes, reading my eyes through the darkness,
before he motioned me to sit. So then we sat facing, I on one side
of the fire and he the other.
"I have watched you, Hira Singh," he said at last. "Now and again I
have seemed to see a proper spirit in you. Nay, words are but
fragments of the wind!" said he. (I had begun to make him
protestations.) "There are words tossing back and forth below," he
said, looking past me down into the hollow, where shadows of men
were, and now and then the eye of a horse would glint in firelight.
Then he said quietly, "The spirit of a Sikh requires deeds of us."
"Deeds in the dark?" said I, for I hoped to learn more of what was
in his mind.
"Should a Sikh's heart fail him in the dark?" he asked.
"Have I failed you," said I, "since you came to us in the prison
camp?"
"Who am I?" said he, and I did not answer, for I wondered what he
meant. He said no more for a minute or two, but listened to our
pickets calling their numbers one to another in the dark above us.
"If you serve me," he said at last, "how are you better than the
stable-helper in cantonments who groomed my horse well for his own
belly's sake? I can give you a full belly, but your honor is your
own. How shall I know your heart?"
I thought for a long while, looking up at the stars. He was not
impatient, so I took time and considered well, understanding him
now, but pained that he should care nothing for my admiration.
"Sahib," I said finally, "by this oath you shall know my heart.
Should I ever doubt you, I will tear out your heart and lay it on a
dung-hill."
"Good!" said he. But I remember he made me no threat in return, so
that even to this day I wonder how my words sounded in his ears. I
am left wondering whether I was man enough to dare swear such an
oath. If he had sworn me a threat in return I should have felt more
at ease--more like his equal. But who would have gained by that? My
heart and my belly are not one. Self-satisfaction would not have
helped.
"Soon," he said, looking into my eyes beside the fire, "we shall
meet opportunities for looting. Yet we have food enough for men and
mules and horses for many a day to come; and as the corn grows less
more men can ride in the carts, so that we shall move the swifter.
But now this map of mine grows vague and our road leads more and
more into the unknown. We need eyes ahead of us. I can control the
men if I stay with them, but in that case who shall ride on and
procure intelligence?"
In a flash I saw his meaning. There was none but he wise enough to
ride ahead. But who else could control the men--men who believed
they had sloughed the regiment's honor in a Flanders trench and a
German prison camp? They were sloughing their personal honor that
minute, fraternizing with Turkish prisoners. With their sense of
honor gone, could even Ranjoor Singh control them? Perhaps! But if
Ranjoor Singh rode forward, who should stay behind and stand in his
shoes?
I looked at the stars, that had the color of jewels in them. I
listened to the night birds. I heard the wind soughing--the mules
and horses stamping--the murmur of men's voices. My tongue itched to
say some foolish word, that would have proved me unfit to be trusted
out of sight. But the thought came to me to be still and listen. And
still I remained until he began again.
"If I told the men what the true position is they would grow
desperate," he said. "They would believe the case hopeless."
"They almost believe that now!" said I.
"Have the Turk and Tugendheim been kept apart?" said he.
"Aye," I answered. "They have not had ten words together."
"Good," said he. "Neither Turk nor Tugendheim knows the whole truth,
but if they get together they might concoct a very plausible,
misleading tale."
"They would better have been bound and gagged," said I.
"No," he answered. "If I had bound and gagged them it would have
established sympathy between them, and they would have found some
way of talking nevertheless. Kept apart and let talk, the Turk will
say one thing, Tugendheim another."
"True," said I. "For now the Turk advises plunder to right and left,
and settlement afterward among Armenian villages. He says there are
women to be had for the taking. 'Be a new nation!' says he."
"And what says Tugendheim?" asked Ranjoor Singh.
"'Plunder!'" said I. "'Plunder and push northward into Russia! The
Russians will welcome you,' says he, 'and perhaps accept me into
their secret service!--Plunder the Turks!' says Tugendheim. 'Plunder
the Armenians!' says the Turk."
"I, too, would be all for Russia," he answered, "but it isn't
possible. The coast of the Black Sea, and from the Black Sea down to
the Persian frontier, is held by a very great Turkish army. The main
caravan routes lie to the north of us, and every inch of them is
watched."
"I am glad then that it must be Egypt," said I. "A long march, but
friends at the other end. Who but doubts Russians?"
He shook his head. "Syria and Palestine," he said, "are full of an
army gathering to invade Egypt. It eats up the land like locusts. An
elephant could march easier unseen into a house than we into Syria!"
"So we must double back?" said I. "Good! By now they must have
ceased looking for us, supposing they ever thought us anything but
drowned. Somewhere we can surely find a ship in which to cross to
Gallipoli!"
He laughed and shook his head again. "We slipped through the one
unguarded place," he said. "If we had come one day later that place,
too, would have been held by some watchful one, instead of by the
fool we found in charge."
Then at last I thought surely I knew what his objective MUST be. It
had been common talk in Flanders how an expedition marched from
Basra up the Tigris.
"Bagdad!" I said. "We march to Bagdad to join the British there!
Bagdad is good!"
But he answered, "Bagdad is not yet taken--not yet nearly taken.
Between us and Bagdad lies a Turkish army of fifty or sixty thousand
men at least."
I sat silent. I can draw a map of the world and set the rivers and
cities and boundaries down; so I knew that if we could go neither
north--nor south--nor westward, there remained only eastward,
straight-forward into Persia. He read my thoughts, and nodded.
"Persia is neutral," he said, with a wave of his hand that might
mean anything. "The Turks have spared no army for one section of the
Persian frontier, choosing to depend on savage tribes. And the
Germans have given them Wassmuss to help out."
"Ah!" said I, making ready to learn at last who Wassmuss might be.
"When we have found this Wassmuss, are we to make him march with us
like Tugendheim?"
"If what the Germans in Stamboul said of him is only half-true," he
answered, "we shall find him hard to catch. Wassmuss is a remarkable
man. Before the war he was consul in Bagdad or somewhere, and he
must have improved his time, for he knows enough now to keep all the
tribes stirred up against Russians and British. The Germans send him
money, and he scatters it like corn among the hens; but the money
would be little use without brains. The Germans admire him greatly,
and he certainly seems a man to be wondered at. But he is the one
weak point, nevertheless--the only key that can open a door for us."
"But if he is too wary to be caught?" said I.
"Who knows?" he answered with another of those short gruff laughs.
"But I know this," said he, "that from afar hills look like a blank
wall, yet come closer and the ends of valleys open. Moreover, where
the weakest joint is, smite! So I shall ride ahead and hunt for that
weakest joint, and you shall shepherd the men along behind me. Go
and bring Abraham and the Turk!"
I went and found them. Abraham was already asleep, no longer wearing
the Turkish private soldier's uniform but his own old clothes again
(because, the Turkish soldier having done nothing meriting
punishment, Ranjoor Singh had ordered him his uniform returned). I
awoke him and together we went and found the Turk sitting between a
Syrian and Gooja Singh; and although I did not overhear one word of
what they were saying, I saw that Gooja Singh believed I had been
listening. It seemed good to me to let him deceive himself, so I
smiled as I touched the Turk's shoulder.
"Lo! Here is our second-in-command!" sneered Gooja Singh, but I
affected not to notice.
"Come!" said I, showing the Turk slight courtesy, and, getting up
clumsily like a buffalo out of the mud, he followed Abraham and me.
Some of the men made as if to come, too, out of curiosity, but Gooja
Singh recalled them and they clustered round him.
When I had brought the Turk uphill to the fire-side, Ranjoor Singh
had only one word to say to him.
"Strip!" he ordered.
Aye, sahib! There and then, without excuse or explanation, he made
the Turkish officer remove his clothes and change with Abraham; and
I never saw a man more unwilling or resentful! Abraham had told me
all about Turkish treatment of Syrians, and it is the way of the
world that men most despise those whom they most ill-treat. So that
although Turks have no caste distinctions that I know of, that one
felt like a high-caste Brahman ordered to change garments with a
sweeper. He looked as if he would infinitely rather die.
"Hurry!" Ranjoor Singh ordered him in English.
"HURRIET?" said the Turk. HURRIET is their Turkish for LIBERTY. All
the troops in Stamboul used it constantly, and Ranjoor Singh told me
it means much the same as the French cry of "Liberty, Equality,
Fraternity!" The Turk seemed bewildered, and opened his eyes wider
than ever; but whatever his thoughts were about "HURRIET" he rightly
interpreted the look in Ranjoor Singh's eye and obeyed, grimacing
like a monkey as he drew on Abraham's dirty garments.
"You shall wear the rags of a driver of mules if you talk any more
about loot to your men or mine!" said Ranjoor Singh. "If I proposed
to loot, I would bury you for a beginning, lest there be nothing for
the rest of us!"
He made Abraham translate that into Turkish, lest the full gist of
it be lost, and I sat comparing the two men. It was strange to see
what a change the uniform made in Abraham's appearance--what a
change, too, came over the Turk. Had I not known, I could never have
guessed the positions had once been reversed. Abraham looked like an
officer. The Turk looked like a peasant. He was a big up-standing
man, although with pouches under his eyes that gave the lie to his
look of strength. Now for the first time Ranjoor Singh set a picked
guard over him, calling out the names of four troopers who came
hurrying uphill through the dark.
"Let your honor and this man's ward be one!" said he, and they
answered "Our honor be it!"
He could not have chosen better if he had lined up the regiment and
taken half a day. Those four were troopers whom I myself had singled
out as men to be depended on when a pinch should come, and I
wondered that Ranjoor Singh should so surely know them, too.
"Take him and keep him!" he ordered, and they went off, not at all
sorry to be excused from other duties, as now of course they must
be. Counting the four who guarded Tugendheim, that made a total of
eight troopers probably incorruptible, for there is nothing, sahib,
that can compare with imposing a trust when it comes to making sure
of men's good faith. Hedge them about with precautions and they will
revolt or be half-hearted; impose open trust in them, and if they be
well-chosen they will die true.
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