Shadow of the Moon (27 page)

‘It is not a political party, Lord Carlyon; it is an aspect of Hinduism. The Brahmins - the twice born - are the priestly caste of the Hindus and as such are held in great reverence by all other castes. There was at one time an attempt to limit the employment of Brahmins in the ranks, but they have enlisted as Rajpoots and Chutreeahs, yet kept their sacred rights and privileges - to the grave detriment of discipline.'

‘How sir? Do you mean to tell me that the Company enlists priests as fighting men?'

‘They are not priests in the ordinary sense,' explained Mr Halliwell, the portly civilian. ‘They are the hereditary members of the highest of all castes. One can only be born a Brahmin, not become one. And no Hindu of a lower caste dare offend them, for fear of the fearful penalties that would fall upon him not only in this world but the next.'

‘Which leads to endless trouble in the ranks,' put in Colonel Fallon, ‘because they hang together like members of a secret society. One Brahmin will not report another, and it is no uncommon thing to see an Indian officer of a lower caste grovelling to a mere sepoy who happens to be a Brahmin. It rots discipline, and we should have put a stop to it long ago; clapped a limit onto the number we recruited, and kept the whole Army on a lower caste level. It is the Brahmins who are at the back of all this present trouble.'

‘What trouble, sir?' inquired Lord Carlyon in a bored voice. ‘I understood Mr Halliwell here to say that reports of trouble were entirely without foundation.'

‘So they are,' snorted Mr Halliwell. ‘No foundation. Lot of chicken-hearted flap-doodle.'

‘Henry Lawrence ain't exactly my notion of a chicken-heart,' murmured a thin man with a brown, nutcracker face who wore the blue and silver of a Punjab cavalry regiment.

Mr Halliwell swung round on the speaker, his face above the high stock becoming dangerously empurpled: ‘I have every respect for Sir Henry's capabilities as an administrator,' he said angrily, ‘but the man's a demned
nigger-lover! He was against the Oudh annexation, and made such a devil of a nuisance of himself that Dal' had to put him in his place pretty sharply.'

‘Sir Henry was not the only one whom his Lordship put in his place,' said the thin man drily. ‘Seem to remember him doin' the same to Napier in ‘50 - and for much the same reason.'

‘Two of a kind,' retorted Mr Halliwell. ‘Alarmists, both of 'em. Sir Charles would have it that the Bengal Army was on the verge of mutiny and the Empire in danger. Quite fantastic - and he was proved wrong!'

‘If you mean that the danger was temporarily averted owing to the prompt action taken by Sir Charles, yes,' said Colonel Fallon with a snap. ‘But the fact remains that the whole Army noted and discussed the disagreement between their Commander-in-Chief and the Governor-General. The matter became common talk in every bazaar, and did us a great disservice, for the men not only saw their Commander-in-Chief forced to resign, but realized that their conquerors were divided in their councils. They also learned something far more dangerous. I think that you must have forgotten, sir, that the disaffection that Sir Charles Napier feared might lead to mutiny arose out of disappointment over pay and allowances, which he attempted to remedy himself.'

‘And wrongly! And wrongly!' blared Mr Halliwell. ‘It is not the province of the Army to decide such matters. That rests upon the decision of the Civil Government, who—'

‘Who do not know the mind of the sepoy!' countered Colonel Fallon angrily. ‘Are we never to learn by our mistakes?'

He was interrupted by a large blond gentleman whose countenance was adorned by a magnificent set of Dundreary whiskers and whose manner suggested - correctly - the House of Commons. Mr Joseph Leger-Green, who had lost his seat in the last election, was but newly arrived in Calcutta. He intended to make a short stay in the Orient with the object of writing a book on the subject of ‘Our Colonial Possessions', and had already compiled an impressive collection of notes. He turned now on Colonel Fallon and fixed him with a glittering eye:

‘May I ask what mistakes you refer to, Colonel? I confess to being at sea.'

‘I am sorry, sir,' apologized Colonel Fallon. ‘This must be an exceedingly tedious discussion for you. Let us abandon it.'

‘On the contrary, Colonel. I am intensely interested. I intend,' said Mr Leger-Green impressively, ‘to study the whole question of our foreign possessions during my tour. What question of pay and allowances do you refer to?'

The Colonel took another deep draught from the glass in his hand and regarded his interlocutor critically. Like most of his kind he had little use for visiting writers and politicos who arrived in Calcutta for a brief stay in the cold weather and returned to pose as experts on all Eastern questions, but the subject under discussion was one on which he felt strongly. He said:

‘The sepoys, sir, were granted special allowances for service outside British-held territory. We have used them to conquer vast new provinces which, once annexed, we have pronounced British and thereafter, with shortsighted parsimony, cancelled the “foreign” allowance of all sepoys serving there. The sepoys resent annexation at the best of times, but when it is followed by loss of allowances, that resentment is gravely aggravated. They resented it in Sind and later in the Punjab, and finally resorted to mutiny. The mutinies were put down. But concessions were made; and because they were made as the result of mutiny the sepoy gained the impression that they were made from fear, which has given him a sense of power …

‘The disasters of the Afghan War shook his belief in the infallibility of the British, the open quarrel between the Commander-in-Chief and the Governor-General showed him that his British rulers were divided against each other, and the concessions that followed the outbreaks of ‘49 and ‘50 have fostered the belief that we fear his strength. Lord Dalhousie, in common with many others, imagined that because the surface appeared calm there were no strong or treacherous currents beneath it. But I venture to think that his Lordship had a less intimate knowledge of the sepoy than Sir Charles Napier - and less understanding of the Eastern mind than Sir Henry Lawrence!'

‘
Pshaw
!' exclaimed Mr Halliwell vigorously. ‘As Governor-General his Lordship had the benefit of the best-informed opinions in India. Besides, everyone knows that Sir Henry is a dreamer and an impractical idealist. His brother John is worth a dozen of him - more sense and less sentimentality. These people don't appreciate sentimentality. They take it for weakness, and by George, they're right. The strong hand, that's what they need.'

‘Oh, I agree with you, sir,' said Colonel Fallon. ‘The worst turn anyone ever did the Army was Bentinck's folly in abolishing corporal punishment. If anything encouraged weakened discipline, it was that. Our Indian officers were the strongest against it. I had a deputation of 'em who told me that if we abolished corporal punishment the bad elements in the Army would cease to fear and would one day turn upon us. Yet we continue to flog British troops, and what is more we permit our sepoy soldiers to witness such floggings. We must be mad. And now there is this final folly of Oudh—'

‘Sir!' began Mr Halliwell hotly, but was unable to continue, for once again the smooth tones of Mr Leger-Green intervened:

‘I am greatly interested in this question of Oudh,' said Mr Leger-Green. ‘I have had several interviews with the ex-King. Pray, why do you consider it a folly? Taking the humanitarian view—'

‘I was speaking from a purely military one,' said Colonel Fallon impatiently. ‘We recruit the bulk of our sepoys from Oudh, and they had certain privileges in the state as servants of the Company. One of which was the right of appeal in cases of law to the British Resident, so that an Indian judge, if a sepoy was up before him, knew that, theoretically at least, the
Resident was that sepoy's advocate, and therefore walked warily. This privilege was so prized that almost every family in Oudh had at least one member serving in the Bengal Army. But now that every citizen of Oudh is equally under the Company's law, that privilege has gone, with many others, and there is no longer any special advantage in being in the service of the Company.'

Colonel Abuthnot, who had so far taken no part in the discussion, coughed gently and remarked in a diffident voice: ‘I agree that the recent annexation has caused a good deal of ill-feeling, yet in my opinion it is this matter of foreign service and the General Services Enlistment Act that has given rise to any uneasiness that may prevail in some regiments. It will pass, of course. But they are bound to regard it with some suspicion to begin with.'

Mr Leger-Green turned to the speaker and produced a small notebook in which he jotted down a hurried line of script: ‘The General Services Enlistment Act, did you say? And what is that?'

‘Service overseas, sir. The Bengal sepoy enlisted on the understanding that he should not be required to cross the sea.'

‘Caste again,' interpolated Colonel Fallon. ‘The men believe that crossing the sea would deprive them of their caste, and they would have to pay heavily to the priests on their return to be cleansed of the defilement. But the Governor-General, with the approval of Mr Halliwell here and his friends in the Council, recently issued a General Order to the effect that no recruit would in future be accepted who would not undertake to go wherever his services might be required. And that means Burma, sir! - or Persia - or China. Is it not understandable that a caste-ridden, bigoted and superstitious people are willing to believe any agitator who whispers that the British plan to destroy their caste so that they may become willing tools of the Company, prepared to go anywhere and do anything we tell them in order to gratify our lust for conquest?'

‘Rubbish!' exploded Mr Halliwell. ‘You exaggerate grossly, Colonel.'

‘I think not, sir. I think I may claim to have met and conversed with more of the people of this country than you gentlemen in Calcutta. Mohammedans and Hindus alike have regarded the advent of railways and telegraphs with the gravest suspicion, and when we permit the Missionary Societies to publish a manifesto to the effect that our trains and steamships, by facilitating the material union of all races of men, are to be the instruments for bringing about their spiritual union under one Faith - ours! - it is not to be wondered at that the wildest rumours are given credence.'

‘Am I to take it, Colonel Fallon,' said Mr Halliwell contemptuously, ‘that you consider your own Regiment to be a hotbed of sedition and unrest?'

A dark spot of colour burned beneath the brick-red of Colonel Fallon's sun-burnt cheeks and his hand made a small instinctive gesture towards his dress-sword, and fell again. He said hotly: ‘No, sir. I thank God that my own men are loyal! But I am not blind to the attacks that are being made upon
both their loyalty and their credulity by agitators and trouble-makers. Neither am I blind to the fact that we have done our best to give the sepoy an overweening sense of his own importance, while at the same time reducing his respect for authority. The commanding officer of his regiment, who should be the final arbiter of his fate, may neither reward nor punish him according to his deserts. I and my fellow colonels are reduced to impotence by red tape, and our decisions overruled by Headquarters. The only advancement an Indian may obtain is by seniority. Merit is apparently of no importance, and—'

A tall man with a thin grey beard and wearing the insignia of a Brigadier General said coldly: ‘You forget yourself, Colonel.'

Colonel Fallon turned quickly and the flush faded from his cheeks as he became aware that he had permitted his temper to lead him into openly expressed criticism of military policy, but his indignation was supported by the wine he had drunk and he was in any event no coward. He returned the Brigadier's cold gaze with composure and said hardily: ‘Perhaps, sir. But I do not forget that our native troops number two hundred and thirty-three thousand men, while the European soldiery totals barely more than forty-five thousand of all arms. Those are sobering figures, sir.'

‘
I
do not find them so,' declared Mr Halliwell. ‘It is well known that one Britisher is a match for fifty Asiatics any day. Are you not agreed, gentlemen?'

There was a chorus of assent and Colonel Fallon said sharply: ‘That, if I may say so, is a remark that could only be made by a civilian and a politician! I will bid you good evening, sir.' He bowed stiffly and walked angrily away.

‘Disgraceful!' puffed Mr Halliwell indignantly. ‘Man's a menace! a rumour-monger. Taken to nerves and the vapours like some mewling female. He ain't fit to command troops if he's started listening to that sort of flap-doodle.'

‘Two hundred and thirty-three thousand …!' It was the ex-Member for Chillbury and Howersford who spoke, and his mellifluous voice had a startled note in it. ‘And how many British did he say? Forty-five thousand odd? It is indeed a sobering thought. You are quite sure that there is no danger to be apprehended? I had intended to pay a brief visit to Delhi and the interior but—'

‘I assure you, sir,' said Mr Halliwell, ‘there is no need for any anxiety. The country is pacified from end to end and basks, if I may say so, in the beneficial sunshine of our benevolent rule. As for the Bengal Army, it is loyal to the core - I am sure that all you gentlemen will agree with me.'

‘Undoubtedly,' concurred the grey-bearded Brigadier. ‘The finest army in the world! Naturally, when one reflects that they have served us for a century, there are bound to have been a few unpleasant incidents from time to time. But they mean nothing. Mere ripples. The vast mass of the country and the Army are well content. In fact I can safely say they have never been
more so. Those who prate of disaffection are cranks and alarmists, but fortunately they are few in number. If you intend to visit Delhi, sir, Colonel Abuthnot here can tell you more about it than I can. His Regiment is stationed there, and I am quite sure that he does not consider them to be on the verge of revolt.'