Chapter XI: At Jellalabad

'Well, Colville, how do you like India from what you have seen of it?' asked Colonel Spatterdash, as he sat smoking in his shirt and pyjamas, for, though the month was March, the solar heat was already considerable in that part of Afghanistan, and quite disagreeable by eight in the morning.

'I don't like it at all,' replied Colville; 'besides, I have been in India before, and you forget, colonel, that this is not India, but rather beyond it.'

'True, I am not likely to forget that, when the rocks are bristling with Afghan juzails! But, if you don't like it, what the deuce brought you out now?'

'To have a new sensation, to see a little more of the world again,' said Colville, evasively, as he was not disposed to tell his thoughtless listeners--some four or five officers--assembled for tiffin (_i.e._, lunch) about his romance, and the temporary loss of Mary Wellwood.

'A new sensation!' exclaimed Algy Redhaven, a handsome young captain of the 10th Hussars, who had just entered the bungalow; 'you are likely to have it soon enough. Have you heard the news that has just come in from the front, colonel?' he added to Spatterdash.

'No--what the devil is up?' growled the old field-officer.

'Fresh complications are likely at Cabul--the Ameer Shere Ali has gone to visit the Russian general at Tashkend.'

'Whew!' whistled old Spatterdash; 'that will likely precipitate matters. I always thought the invasion of British India by Russia would be as practicable a few years hence as that of Italy by Austria, and now, by Jove, we seem close upon it.'

And since the date we write of the Russians have pushed on to Merv in Turkomania!

The group of officers who were invited to the colonel's table were all happy and heedless young fellows belonging to Sir Samuel Browne's column, and high in anticipation of a protracted 'shindy' with the Afghans, as a force was being concentrated at Jellalabad.

A couple were on the staff, like Colville; one--Redhaven--belonged to the Royal Hussars; two others to a native infantry regiment; all were somewhat airily attired, and, till tiffin made its appearance, all were smoking cheroots so industriously that clouds of their pale smoke curled among the rough rafters and straw roof of the bungalow.

Jellalabad, where the fortune of war had then cast them, the winter residence of the Cabul monarchs since the consolidation of the Dooranee Empire, is situated in an extensive valley of considerable beauty and fertility, eight-and-twenty miles long by about four broad, and the town had before this been rendered memorable by the heroic stand which Sir Robert Sale, with a handful of British soldiers, made in it against the Afghans some forty years before.

In importance it was originally only next to Cabul and Candahar, but its fortifications had been completely destroyed by General Pollock after the war that ended in 1842. Like all Afghan cities of note, it had its Balla Hissar, half palace and half citadel, with a poor population estimated at from three to ten thousand.

Many streams fertilise its valley--namely, the Cabul River, which flows near the walls; the Surkh Rud, or Red River, and the Kara Su, or Black River, while around it are numerous castles, and picturesque villages, and groups of forest trees, though an arid desert spreads in its immediate vicinity.

Nearly four months had elapsed since Leslie Colville had parted from Mary Wellwood, and already as many ages seemed to have elapsed since the few brief days of reunion they had spent together at Grosvenor Square; and now he knew that many more months must elapse, must be faced and endured, ere he could hope to turn his steps towards Europe; and even while sitting there, among these bantering and somewhat noisy fellows, he looked around him as one in a dream, whose thoughts were far away, while Mary's soft, sad features came vividly before him in memory and in their beauty, though the latter, as some old poet says,

'Is in no face, but in the lover's mind.'

'How silent you are, Colville!' exclaimed old Spatterdash, relinquishing the mouthpiece of his hookah for a moment. 'Gad, I believe the fellow's in love.'

So full were his thoughts of Mary at that precise moment that he almost coloured as if they had been read by the colonel, who continued, in a tone of banter,

'With you, I suppose, it is,

"----to bid me not to love
Is to forbid my pulse to move,
My beard to grow, my ears to prick up;
Or, when I'm in the mood, to hiccup."

Is it so? Well, anyway, stick to the _brandy pawnee_ till tiffin comes.'

Again the old familiar sound of the cantonment _ghurries_, or gong-bells, as they were clanged for the change of sentries, was in his ear, and the view from the open windows of the bungalow was strange and striking.

Far away above the misty horizon rose amid the clouds--and cloudlike themselves, so bright and varied were their tints--the majestic mountains that tower between the shallow valley of Jellalabad and the ramparts of Cabul, and chief of them is the stupendous Suffaidh Koh, fourteen thousand feet in height, then covered with dazzling white snow; and if wondrously beautiful by day, it was perhaps still more so by night, when the full moon lit up its chasms and peaks with its Asiatic splendour.

In the immediate foreground, just before the windows of the bungalow, a curious scene--one illustrative of the distant region and the manners of our Indian fellow-subjects--was in progress.

The _Poojah_ of a battalion of H.M. Native Infantry, a Hindoo regiment, was being celebrated towards evening.

The battalion, in full marching order, with its colours, was drawn up in a circle. At each cardinal point of the compass was a small clod of earth, with barley and rice on it; and in the centre were the attendant Brahmins with a beautiful young goat, which had been sprinkled with pure water, barley, and rice. Then the sacrificer drew a huge Ghoorkali knife, and, after muttering some prayers, by one trenchant slash severed the head of the goat from its body. At the moment of immolation twelve guns boomed through the air and drums were beaten, after which the battalion was wheeled back into line, and marched by fours into its lines, with band playing and colours flying.

Colonel Spatterdash, Colville's host, was a thorough Indian officer of the old school, who had broiled for so many years in Bengal that he had lost much of his European identity, all memory of home nearly, and religion too, and had become so bronzed that evil-disposed fellows used to hint--but not in his presence--that he had 'a dash of the tar-brush in him--was fourteen annas to the rupee,' and so forth.

The wags of the station at Chutneypore declared that he wore a gold bangle given to him by the orange-visaged Rani of that place, who liked him as 'a wicked old man,' that squeezed her brown paws when he assisted her into the silk-curtained howdah of her great tusker elephant, which had carried 'Colonel Wellesley's' baggage at the battle of Assaye.

He was full of old Indian memories of the Rangoon Rangers and Bhurtpore Bulldogs, as he had heard of them when he came out from Addiscombe a cadet and griffin; and had many a story to tell of the pre-railway times, when, if not marching, people travelled by _dâk_, night and day, in palanquins; when the old Bengal colonel was a father to his regiment, the guide of his subalterns, and was never so happy as when he had a dozen or so at his table, all eager for _Kowab_, fresh eggs, with Phillibut rice, kedgere, &c., and _Bhola_ in plenty.

He was a captain when the mutiny occurred; and its horrors, with the dismay that his beloved Sepoys--the _Spatterdash-ka-Pultan_, so-called from his father--should prove untrue to their salt, nearly broke his heart; and he thought the end of the world had come when they flung him down a well at Gungawallah; but he was hard to kill. A banyan-tree that grew half way down broke his fall, and to that he clung till rescued by some Highlanders, after which he solaced himself mightily by blowing whole batches of 'pandies' from his guns.

And now tiffin came, curried chickens, rice, green chillis, mutton and chutney, &c., &c., with plenty of wine and brandy, all laid out by his faithful old Kitmutgar, wearing an enormous white turban.

'Anything,' said the colonel, 'is better than bitter beer that has been boiling on the dusty road between Peshawur and Jellalabad, till the cask hoops grow hot in the sun.'

So he took a huge beaker of _brandy pawnee_, as he reclined in the cane easy-chair in his well tattied bungalow, with punkah wallahs crouching in the verandah outside, and smoked his hookah, for he preferred such a residence to a double-poled tent or a tumble-down brick house in that city of earthquakes, till the troops marched.

'I knew your uncle, Wellwood, thoroughly,' said the colonel to Colville. 'He and I were great chums, and I once saw him do a plucky thing--a very plucky thing, by Jove!--when we were giving a fellow a tight flogging under fire.'

'A flogging under fire--that was remarkable, surely?'

'Not so in those days; we were never squeamish about anything then.'

'And this plucky thing?' said Redhaven, the hussar.

'Convinced me that Wellwood was pretty reckless of life. He had been soured by some disappointment in love, we heard--the idea of such a thing!'

And, while old Splatterdash laughed a little contemptuously at the thought of a tender passion, Colville, remembering the secret episode of Mrs. Deroubigne's life, listened with some interest.

'It came about in this way, you see,' said the colonel, after taking a long pull at his hookah. 'After we advanced upon Jhansi under Sir Hugh Rose to crush the rebellious Sepoys who held the place (which was a town and fortress of the Mahrattas of old), we bombarded it heavily for four days, but not without resistance, for the shattered remains of the Gwalior contingent, augmented to twenty-five thousand bayonets and sabres, and eighteen pieces of cannon from Kalpee, came marching along the right bank of the Jumna, hoping to raise the siege, d--n them!

'In that, however, the Pandies were disappointed. During the bombardment, when we were pitching shot and shell into each other, a great thirteen-inch bomb from an old mortar happened to fall close by where the soldier of a European regiment was tied up to "the halberts," as we still called the triangles, to receive a hundred and fifty lashes for insubordination when mad with drink and heat. The sudden appearance of this great missile, with its fuse burning and hissing, caused such confusion and consternation that the companies, formed in hollow square, fell back on all sides, even breaking their ranks, for none could composedly await such an explosion under their noses.

'Instead of yielding to this natural impulse, Wellwood took from his pocket a penknife, and, walking up to the helpless and terrified creature who was bound to the triangles, he cut the cords that bound his wrists and ankles, setting him free, and both had barely time to retire a little way and throw themselves flat on the ground, when the great shell burst, and a hurricane of iron swept over them and all around. Thus did he save this poor fellow, who must inevitably have perished from his inability to save himself; and Wellwood did more, for, in consideration of the mental agony the man had undergone, he remitted the remainder of the punishment; and, by a curious coincidence, the culprit perished a few days after in the action of Roohea when saving the life of Wellwood, whom some rebels were about to bayonet as he lay wounded and helpless on the ground.'

'This will be an episode in her father's life to tell Mary of when next I write to her,' thought Colville. And now the conversation drifted into the subject then uppermost in the minds of all--the probability of serious complications if Russian intrigues proved successful at Cabul, and none could expect them to be otherwise when the Ameer Shere Ali had departed openly to visit General Kauffmann at Tashkend, in Central Asia, which place, however, he was fated not to reach.

The subject that caused our dispute with him, and brought our troops to Jellalabad and elsewhere upon his frontier, was the dispute known then as the "Resident" question, because he rather favoured the Russians, and thus refused to have any such British official at his court for three reasons--firstly, the person of a Briton would not be safe there; secondly, that European officers might make demands that would occasion quarrels; and thirdly, that if Britain was represented, Russia would expect to be represented also. But it was known that he was in close correspondence with General Kauffman, and only feared that a British Resident might, if present, throw some light upon it; and in the end a convention was signed, by which Russia bound herself to give at least moral support to the existing Afghan dynasty.

An envoy sent by our government to Cabul never reached it, being forced back at a place called Ali Musjid. For this an apology was demanded, and Afghanistan was entered by a British army in three columns that won several victories, and the Ameer finding his case hopeless started for Tashkend, but died on the way, and was succeeded by his son, Yakoub Khan, who eventually showed a disposition to come to terms with us; but in this we are a little anticipating the events of our story, for, at the time Leslie Colville joined the staff at Jellalabad, Sir Samuel Browne was, as stated, collecting a force there, while General Maude relieved his post between that place and Dakka, and the gallant Roberts, posted further forward at the Peiwar Pass, was improving the difficult mountain road between that place and Cabul for the passage of guns and baggage.

So thus it was that our troops were now engaged in what was known as the second Afghan War--to counteract Russian influences.

As the evening advanced and darkness closed in, some yells and oaths in Hindostanee and Pushtoo were heard at a little distance outside the hedge of the colonel's compound, and Colville, who had been looking from a window, now started to his feet.

'I can't look on and permit that!' he exclaimed.

'Can't permit what?' asked Spatterdash, tartly.

'A lot of fellows----'

'Budmashes, no doubt, by the row they make.'

'Ill-using one man; and now, as it is time for me to go, colonel, I shall interfere _en passant_.'

'Don't think of it--don't bother!'

'But they may kill him.'

'What the devil does it matter? A nigger less in the world won't be missed,' growled Spatterdash, who had lost all sympathy with the natives since the Mutiny.

'Call the nearest guard--the picket--or some chowkeydars,' said Redhaven and others; 'but don't interfere in a row of this kind.'

Colville, however, buckled on his sword and revolver, lit a fresh cheroot, laughingly bowed himself out, and hurried away; for, sooth to say, he was a little tired of old Spatterdash, and as no one actually thought he would interfere in a native row, no one followed or accompanied him.

'The inlying pickets have been doubled to-night by order of the general,' said the colonel.

'Why?' asked some one.

'Because rumour says that the Sirdir Mahmoud Shah, a tearing Afghan devil, has come to lead the Mohmunds against us.'

'With what object?' asked Redhaven of the Hussars.

'A row, of course.'