The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [101]
In the old days, when the Land-of-the-Five-Rivers (the Punjab) was still a Sikh province, and the only British troops within its borders were East India Company regiments stationed at Lahore to uphold the authority of a British Resident, the idea of an elite and highly mobile force, capable of moving to any trouble-spot at a moment's notice, had been conceived by Sir Henry Lawrence, that great and wise administrator who was to die a hero's death during the Mutiny, in the beleaguered Residency at Lucknow.
This ‘fire-brigade’ would consist of one troop of cavalry and two companies of infantry, unhampered by tradition and run on entirely new lines, in that it would combine soldiering with early and accurate intelligence work, and its members – handpicked men commanded by handpicked officers – would wear a loose, comfortable, khaki-coloured uniform that would blend into the dusty background of the Frontier hills, instead of the regulation scarlet coat and tight stock in which a majority of regiments marched, sweltered and suffered in temperatures that made such clothing a torment – and which could be seen from miles away. As a further break with tradition, Sir Henry had named his brain-child ‘The Corps of Guides’ and entrusted the raising of it to one Harry Lumsden, a young man possessed of exceptional ability, character and courage, who had fully justified the choice.
The original headquarters of the new Corps had been at Peshawar, and at first its duties had consisted of dealing with the marauding Frontier tribes, who preyed on the peaceful villagers, carrying off women, children and cattle into the inhospitable Border hills, in defiance of the Sikh Durbar who were nominally in control of the Punjab and in whose name a handful of British officials exercised authority. Later on the Corps had been sent south to fight in the plains round Ferzapore, Mooltan and Lahore, and had served with distinction in the bloody battles of the Second Sikh War.
It was only when the war had ended and the Punjab been annexed by the Company's Government that the Guides had returned once more to the Frontier – though not to Peshawar. The Border having become more settled, they had selected a site near the Kalpani River where the tracks from Swat and Buner meet, and exchanged their tents for a mud-walled fort at Mardan on the plain of Yusafzai. It had been a desolate and treeless spot when Hodson had begun work on the fort, and his wife, Sophia, writing home in January of 1854, had said of it: ‘Picture to yourself an immense plain, flat as a billiard table but not as green, with here and there a dotting of camel-thorn about eighteen inches high by way of vegetation. This, far as the eye can see on the west and south of us, but on the north the everlasting snows of the mighty Himalayas above the lower range which is close to our camp.’
The view had not changed: but the Corps had grown in size and the Guides had planted trees to shade their cantonment, and on this autumn night the garden that Hodson had made for his wife and their only and dearly loved child, who was to die in infancy, was sweet with the scent of jasmine and roses. In the cemetery where the dead of the Ambeyla campaign lay buried, a dozen tombstones gleamed white in the moonlight; and near by, at the junction of three roads, a mulberry tree threw a black patch of shadow above the place where Colonel Spottiswood, Commanding Officer of the Bengal Infantry Regiment that had been sent to relieve the Guides in the black year of 1857, shot himself when his beloved regiment mutinied.
The familiar scents and sounds of the cantonment drifted out to Ash like a greeting. The smell of horses and wood-smoke, of water on parched ground and spiced food cooking over charcoal fires,