Theirs Was The Kingdom (41 page)

Giles, preoccupied with someone else’s problems, was the only one among them who received a return-of-post reply to his letter. His father promised to call upon the headmaster the next time he was in the Western Wedge, and hear at first hand why Hugo seemed unable to hoist himself out of a class where his age was more than a year above the average. As to the boy’s athletic prowess, that was another thing Adam preferred to judge for himself. It might well be that Giles was as prejudiced in favour of Hugo’s promise as he was in respect of Mr. Gladstone’s oratory.

2

He had no idea what the quarrel was about, or how they came to be here, twelve thousand strong, crossing the desert to bring a dissident chieftain to battle and replace him with someone who would welcome inclusion in what the newspapers called “the British sphere of influence.” He was not in the least clear what a “sphere of influence” was. To Alexander Swann this was a personal adventure, offering him an opportunity to reassess himself as man and professional soldier.

The African adventure was a long way behind him now, but similarities between the two campaigns returned to him after the sun had gone down and the advance continued by starlight.

Then, as now, they had marched seeking a confrontation, supremely confident in their strength, firepower, discipline, and overall superiority. But in an hour they had been reduced to a fleeing mob. Was there any guarantee that the same thing would not happen again here in more open ground, with savages herding them back to their ships and every man among them concerned with saving his miserable hide? He wondered, uncomfortably, if his Rorke’s Drift dedication would survive that kind of test and whether, after a rout, he would be sought among the heroes or the terrified fugitives on the path to the Blood River. There was no way of knowing short of ordeal by fire and that, so they said, was awaiting them out there under the stars, at a place marked on his field map as
Tel-el-Kebir
, and ringed in red pencil “
Arabi’s entrenchment. Sixty Krupp guns? Strength est. 25,000
.”

The march from base to Nine Gun Hill and onward, under cloak of darkness, towards the Arabi camp, offered him an unlooked-for opportunity to rummage among his hopes and fears in this land that he had once thought of as a place of mystery and awesome antiquity but was now seen as a grey, featureless desert, populated by swarms of gigantic flies, scuttling scorpions and droves of beggars and, as the Delta advance got under way, clouds of hostile Bedouin horsemen who went through an impressive display far out on the flanks of the column but dispersed at the gallop after a few long-range shots had been fired in their direction.

At Nine Gun Hill the column halted for a double rum ration and orders were passed, mouth to mouth, down a chain of command that was thus seen to exist, even in this velvet blackness and upswirl of dust. No firearm to be loaded; bayonets to remain unfixed until the order to charge; no pipes; no conversing; no hurry. Just a creeping advance across the sand towards an entrenchment lit by the North Star, that was said to be the compass of a naval lieutenant almost as young as himself and introduced to him, at the last halt, as Lieutenant Rawson. They were about to move off when a shape appeared out of the gloom and he heard his name called, twice and rather testily, so that he recognised the voice as that of his Colonel, Sir Archibald Allison.

“Swann? Lieutenant Swann?”
He answered up promptly, “Here, sir, next to the guide!” Sir Archibald said, more genially, “Are you the young shaver Hargreaves was telling me about? Present at Rorke’s Drift?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Serving under who? Eh? Eh?”

“I was with the N.N.C.”

“The what, boy?”

“The… er… Natal Native Contingent, sir.”

“Good God!” the Colonel said, and it struck Alexander that he almost certainly thought of the N.N.C. as a mob of locally recruited headhunters. He went on, however, with the air of conferring a great favour, “Well, you’re damned lucky, boy! Special assignment from the C-in-C. One subaltern to march with the guide—told me to find someone who had smelled powder. Well, then, listen hard. Elbow to elbow with Lieutenant Rawson here. Pair of you a hundred paces ahead and not a squeak from either of you until you’re challenged, or run up against the first enemy ditch. Any questions?”

“Do I fire or holler back, sir?”

“You holler back. Top of your lungs, boy, then go forward without waiting for the rest of us. You, too, Rawson, providing you’re not leading the whole damned column on a wild goose chase. You sure you can keep direction by the stars?”

“By one star, sir. The North Star.”

“Aye, and suppose it clouds over?”

“It won’t cloud, sir. Not until peep o’ dawn.”

“I’ll hold you to that, by God. Let us down and the Navy and Sir Garnet’ll fall out and you’ll find yourself in a rare scrape, young feller-me-lad. Well, well, off you go. We’ll give you a clear minute by my watch. Your nearest contact will be Sergeant Mackenzie, who’ll follow on within hail. Good luck. You, too, Swann.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Rawson brought his chin down and there was light enough to see that he had been staring up at his star, so that Alex wondered how the devil he could tell one from the other. He would dearly liked to have asked him, but sensed that the young man, outwardly so debonair, needed all the concentration he could bring to his task of steering an army across a desert to a fixed point somewhere out ahead and bringing it there not a moment too late or too soon.

From where they marched—some eighty yards ahead of Sergeant Mackenzie and the vanguard—the small, inconsequential sounds of the advance reached them as a long uninterrupted sigh, punctuated by the half-heard scrape of a hobnailed boot on a sliver of shale, or the occasional rasp of a buckle on a rifle butt; tiny, insignificant sounds, that could not have been identified in a less rarefied silence, so that he thought, “It’s too much to hope that so many can move so far without an accident of one kind or another—a stumble, a curse, a cough, a sneeze…
something
over and above the rustle of twenty thousand boots planted on twenty thousand patches of sand. His confidence ebbed and flowed, his body a paper bag filled by a boy’s breath—squashed, emptied, refilled again, waiting to be popped. Rawson continued to advance very steadily, lifting and placing each foot with care, but not as any man would cross broken ground in the dark, for every now and again he lifted his nose high, as though smelling the way, and whenever he did this Alex, glancing sideways, saw starlight reflected in his upturned eye. A man consulting his compass and on the correct interpretation the fate of every man present.

The experience was surely unique, more singular in every way than its forerunner thousands of miles south of this sandy wilderness, and as they groped their way forward, moving at no more than two miles an hour, he found that its very singularity enabled him to temper his fear.

The sentry’s challenge, reaching him as a string of yammering, incomprehensible sounds, acted like a lit fuse on an arc of combustibles to the rear and flanks, so that the sustained murmur that had orchestrated the night-long march became a gust and then, erupting as a long roll of thunder, snapped the tension like a severed hawser and brought him, on the instant, a sensation of ecstatic release. The roaring tempest of sound boosted him forward into a matching tempest as the darkness about him was lit by myriad yellow flashes; for a few seconds it seemed that he and Rawson were lifted by two giant waves of sound before they could add their trifling quota to the uproar and begin to run, aware of a sharp rise in the ground that ended in a hillock of tightly packed sand.

The exhilaration of being here, of being the first of the first, was almost tangible, so that he heard himself bawling his triumph aloud as he clawed his way upward and found himself on level ground again. He lost touch with Rawson, who fell away into the thinning darkness but was replaced, as by a conjuring trick, by Sergeant Mackenzie, howling like a banshee as he lost his footing and plunged down an almost vertical slope into a ditch packed with still, greyish-white bundles. They suddenly became mobile and hideously vocal and darted this way and that, colliding one with the other and bouncing off on a fresh tack as a following torrent of yelling kilted men spilled over and through them, driving a compact course up the reverse slope of the breastwork.

It was almost light then, with the sky streaked with coral and heliotrope over the Delta but blue-black darkness immediately ahead where the half-seen sand seemed to boil, spewing men in twos and threes and dozens the full width of the ditch and along the level ground beyond the parados. It was Isandlwana all over again but shorn of its terrors, the same series of swiftly changing cameos, each with a different shape and texture but all helio-graphing an identical message of personal triumph and majestic infallibility. Everything happening around him was extraordinarily vivid, yet his own part in it seemed automatic. He did not remember at what point in the rush he drew his sword or stopped to load his revolver. Neither was he more than vaguely aware of scaling the parados, crossing level ground, clearing a second ditch, and mounting to the plateau where the last Arabi defences were carried at a rush. Later, when the sky was flooded with pinkish light and the battle, resolving itself into hundreds of little eddies, had surged down the far side of the plateau and through the enemy’s tent lines and horse lines, he saw that there was blood on his sword; its lower edge was turned, and three of his revolver chambers contained empty, unejected shells, but he had no memory of the encounters these things implied. The first real awareness of what had happened and how it had happened came when he heard the bugler blowing the recall and watched the breathless Highlanders driving their prisoners into a marked-out square at the foot of the plateau. Some of them were laughing and soon he saw why, for there to receive them was Sir Archibald himself, demonstrating his exuberance in a pot-bellied, hat-waving prance, looking more like a successful punter at Epsom than an elderly field-officer commanding a brigade in action.

He called out, in his fruitiest voice, “Well
done
, boys! Well
done
, by God!” and then, seeing Alexander, whirled on him, shouting, “Well done, Swann! Heard your holler! Couldn’t be better! Couldn’t be better! Eh? Eh?” Alex flushed like a schoolboy complimented on a faultless construe in front of his class. He pretended to be occupied with the business of cleaning his sword-blade as two squadrons of the 4th Dragoons cantered down from the ridge. The leading horseman, a black-moustached captain, reined in, shouting over his shoulder, “Here’s a how-de-do! Damned Jocks have left us nothing to do!”

It was true. From the edge of the plateau Alex saw that the attack had been a textbook success. The wings of the British column were on the point of meeting less than a mile beyond the tent lines and inside the ring, tossing down their arms and equipment, was what looked like the greater part of Ahmed Arabi’s force. Only on the plain beyond were small groups of horse and foot, widely scattered and soon lost to view in swirls of dust. A few hundred others lay scattered about between the camp and the twelve-foot ditch on the far side of the plateau. Suddenly recollecting his duty, Alex called Sergeant Mackenzie and gathered a party to make a circuit of the dry moat.

Here, at the point where they had broken in, the dead lay thickest, perhaps ten Arabi to every Highlander. Three of his own platoon lay there, two wounded and one, Private Campbell, with a hole through his temple. He remembered Campbell, a hard case with a long service record, and the reputation of a heavy drinker and inveterate card player. Not the kind of man likely to get half his head blown off in a hit-and-miss fight of this kind. Looking down at his narrow, sunburned features he remembered the dead Zulu sniper on the Oscarberg Terraces, the first man he had killed, and there was a link between them. Both had greying hair and small, well-muscled bodies. Both looked indifferent to death in someone else’s cause. He asked, of Sergeant Mackenzie, who was applying first aid to Private McCabe’s bubbling thigh wound, “Did Campbell have any family, Sergeant?”

“Och, no sir,” Mackenzie said, carelessly, “he’s a string of half-caste children here, there, and everywhere but he was no’ a marrying man.” He stood up, wiping bloodstained hands on a turban. “He was a bonny blade in a fight!” “I take it we’ll bury him here, with military honours?” “Aye, sir,” Mackenzie said, “I’ll detail a burial and firing party.” They gathered them up, carrying them over the plateau to one of the larger tents, miraculously still standing. Just as they arrived the Surgeon-Major and his orderlies bustled up with their pack horses and set about improvising an operating table from a pile of abandoned ammunition boxes.

He hung about listlessly, not knowing what to do until orders were issued to move on to Cairo, but the sense of elation remained with him all through that day and through the succeeding night, when they were occupying the conquered city and found themselves quarters for a stay that promised to be short.

He saw Sir Garnet Wolseley and his staff clatter by and thought, idly, “They’re right about his ability, by George! Tel-el-Kebir was a tougher nut to crack than Cetywayo and his impis, with scarcely a modern firearm among them. It’s a question of mapping out a plan, sticking to it, using trained men instead of lumbering yourself with a swarm of amateurs… Training is everything, given a cool head at G.H.Q.… You won’t catch me playing blind man’s bluff with the opposition, as Chelmsford and Durnford did away to the south,” and he turned into his quarters and took up his note pad to write home saying he was safe and well. The telegraph system would have conveyed news of the victory to London by now, and there would be headlines in
The Times
, the
Westminster Gazette
, and the
Pall Mall Gazette.
His father, a cynic concerning all official bulletins, would require confirmation of this one, and he was going to get it, together with an undertaking that his eldest son, from here on, was a textbook soldier of the kind Adam Swann, who had exchanged shako for city topper, made the subject of so many jests.