Barclay of the Guides

by Herbert Strang

Rahmut went away well satisfied. Minghal was in a very different case when he too had had an interview with the commander-in-chief. Not a word was said by Bakht Khan to show that the duty he laid upon Minghal had been suggested by his enemy and rival; he rather hinted that his design was to learn from Minghal how the old chief comported himself in the fight. Minghal had, perforce, to acquiesce in the arrangement; his position was not so secure that he could afford to show open reluctance to meet the enemy. Their orders were to lead an attack on the breastwork before the Mori gate, and then, having succeeded in that task, to work round on two sides to the ruined mosque that stood a little nearer the Ridge, and slaughter all the enemy they found there.

The attack was to be made after nightfall. Rahmut knew nothing of the ground between the city walls and the breastwork, and in the afternoon he went out with one of his men to reconnoitre. Both were mounted, and since the ground was covered with gardens which would give them cover, they ventured to ride a good distance in the direction of the goal of the night's operations.

All at once Rahmut caught sight of a man a little ahead of them, dodging among the trees in a stealthy manner, that suggested a keen desire to avoid observation. Rahmut was a born scout, and, without appearing to see the man, he kept him well in view, until convinced that he was making for the British lines. Then he gave chase suddenly, and the man, though he ran hard, was soon overtaken. Hauling him to the shade of some trees, Rahmut questioned his trembling captive, and was not long in wresting from him a confession that he was indeed on his way to the Ridge to give warning of the night attack.

Rahmut had been rendered suspicious by his recent experiences in Delhi. He was not satisfied with a general statement, but pressed the man for a precise account of his errand, and he was not greatly surprised when it came out that the informer had been sent by Minghal Khan himself, and that the important part of his message was the disclosure of the exact quarter on which Rahmut's attack was to be made. It was just what might have been expected of Minghal, as indeed of any other Pathan who happened to bear a grudge against a fellow-countryman.

Rahmut lost little time in arranging to counter this cunning move of his enemy. He took the messenger back into Delhi, the man believing that he would be handed over to the Kotwal for hanging. But Rahmut made the man take him to his own house, and he set a guard over it, and swore to the wretch that the house and all within it should be destroyed unless he did what was bidden him. And the bidding was, to go to the British lines and give the warning as Minghal had commanded, with one little change: the point of attack was to be, not that which had been assigned to Rahmut, but that which had been assigned to Minghal. Holding the informer's house and family as hostages, Rahmut had no doubt that the man would obey, and he went back to his serai satisfied with his afternoon's work.

During the day the excitement in the city had risen to fever heat. News had come in that Nana Sahib, on the approach of the British to Cawnpore, had massacred the two hundred women and children who had remained in his hands since that fatal day when their fathers and husbands had been shot down on the boats. The wiser residents of Delhi were aghast: they knew the dreadful story of that other tragedy, at Calcutta, a century before, when a hundred of the sahibs perished in the Black Hole. They knew what retribution had fallen on Siraj-uddaula then; what would happen now, after this far more horrible butchery of women and children? But the fanatics rejoiced in the tale of blood. The greater the excesses, the more impossible to draw back. The greater the vengeance to be feared, the more imperative to strain every nerve to crush these obstinate Feringhis on the Ridge. The protraction of the siege was already doing them harm. Risings were taking place in many scattered districts; and even in the Panjab, which Jan Larrens had hitherto kept quiet, there were ominous mutterings. If the English on the Ridge could but be routed, all Northern India would be ablaze.

And so the sepoys at sunset marched in their thousands from the gates. Amid the blare of bugles, the thunder of artillery from the walls, the strident calls of the muezzins from the minarets of the mosques, proclaiming eternal glory for all who bled in the holy cause, the rebels flocked out, maddened with fanatical fury and with bang, aglow with the resolve to conquer or die.

But behind the breastworks waited British officers, cool, unemotional, with their men, British and native, seasoned warriors, disciplined, the best soldiers in the world. They watched the advancing horde as it came among the gardens, the moonbeams making a strange play of light and shade. On they came, and the great guns thundered, and the muskets crackled, and shouts and yells mingled with the brazen blare of bugles. Time after time the dusky warriors hurled themselves against the low breastworks that defended the circuit of the Ridge, coming within a score paces of them. Hour after hour the din continued, the sky blazing with the constant discharge of artillery, a shifting wall of smoke making strange patterns in the moonlight. The moon sank, and still the firing did not cease; it was not until next day's sun was mounting the sky that the survivors of the night shambled back, a discomfited mob, to the rose-red walls of the city.

What had they gained by this tremendous fusillade and bombardment? Nothing. Their ammunition had been expended by cart-loads; thousands upon thousands of rounds had been fired; but all the time they had never seen their enemy, who, behind their entrenchments, waited until they saw the whites of the rebels' eyes, and then sent them reeling back with withering volleys. Hundreds of forms lay motionless in the eye of the rising sun, some in red coats, some in white dhotis, some in the chogahs of hill-men, with turbans of many colours, amid muskets and swords and bugles, and everywhere the green flag of the Prophet. And on the Ridge there was great rejoicing; for this bitter lesson to the Pandies had cost their masters no more than a dozen men.

Nowhere did the fight rage more fiercely on that night than at the breastworks before the Flagstaff Tower. But though fierce, the fight was short, for Rahmut Khan was no fanatic; and when he found, after a brief trial, that he was opposed, not by warriors with whom his men could contend in equal fight, but by solid ramparts which burst into flame, though behind it no men were seen, he concluded that this was fighting he did not understand, and drew off his men. And Minghal Khan, approaching with his regiment the spot from which, as he fondly hoped, most of the Feringhis had been withdrawn to meet the attack against which he had warned them, was met by a crashing volley so terrible that a third of his men were stricken down, and he himself barely escaped with his life. A bullet grazed his cheek, ploughing a red furrow through it, and carrying away the lobe of his ear; a spent bullet struck his brow, and he staggered half-unconscious to the ground. And when he regained the city, and learnt that his enemy, Rahmut, had come unscathed through the battle, and, moreover, that the men he had left to raid Rahmut's serai during his absence had been beaten off with great loss by a guard posted there, for some incomprehensible reason, by Bakht Khan himself, he boiled with insensate fury, heaping curses on the heads of those who had betrayed him.