The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [544]
56
They reached Jalalabad in the dawn, and a few hours later they buried Wigram Battye in the same stretch of ground where, forty-six years ago, the British had buried their dead at the time of the First Afghan War. And where nineteen new-made graves marked the last resting-place of the eighteen troopers and an officer of the 10th Hussars whose bodies, alone of the forty-six drowned below the ford, had been recovered from the Kabul River only two short days before.
Near him were laid a Lieutenant and a Private of the 70th Foot who had died in the flank attack by the infantry. But Risaldar Mahmud Khan and the five sowars who had also died in the battle of Fatehabad were men of different faiths; and according to their several religions, their bodies were carried to the Mohammedan burial ground to be laid in the earth with the proper ritual and prayers of the Faithful, or else cremated, and their ashes gathered up and cast into the Kabul River so that they might be carried down to the plains of India and from there, by the kindness of the gods, to the sea.
Not only the regiments concerned had watched these ceremonies. The army had turned out in force, and so too had the citizens of Jalalabad and its adjacent villages, and any travellers who happened to be passing through. Among the latter, unnoticed in the peering crowds, was a gaunt, baggy-trousered Shinwari who besides watching the Christian burials from a discreet distance, had also been among the spectators at the Moslem cemetery and at the burning-ground.
When all was over and the crowds and the mourners had dispersed, the Shinwari had made his way to a small house in a backwater of the city where he was presently joined by a Risaldar of the Guides Cavalry, wearing civilian dress. The two had talked together for an hour, speaking in Pushtu and sharing a hookah, and when the Risaldar returned to the camp and his duties there he took with him a letter written on coarse paper of local manufacture with a quill pen, but addressed in English to Lieut. W. R. P. Hamilton, Queen's Own Corps of Guides.
‘There was no need to write down the name; I will give it into Hamilton-Sahib's own hand,’ said Zarin, storing it carefully away among the folds of his clothing. ‘But it would be unwise for you to come into the camp to see him, or for him to be seen speaking to you. If you will wait among the walnut trees behind the tomb of Mohammed Ishaq, I will bring his reply there sometime after the moon is down. Or it may be a little earlier. I cannot tell.’
‘No matter. I shall be there,’ said Ash.
He had been there, and Zarin had handed him a letter that he read later that night by the light of an oil lamp in a room he had hired that same morning. Unlike Wally's usual letters it was very short, and mostly concerned with his grief at Wigram's death and the loss of Mahmud Khan and the others who had died in the battle. He was, he wrote, delighted to hear that Anjuli was now in Kabul, asked to be remembered to her, and ended by urging Ash to take care of himself and expressing the hope that they would be meeting again soon in Mardan…
It was a measure of his grief for Wigram that he had not even thought to mention something that only a short time ago would have taken precedence over almost anything else: the fact that he had just achieved his greatest ambition and the realization of a long-held and most secret dream.
General Gough, who had watched the whole battle from a vantage point on a hill-top, had sent for him to express the greatest admiration for the dash and gallantry of the Guides, and to commiserate over the heavy casualties they had suffered, in particular the death of their Commanding Officer, Major Battye, whose loss would be felt not only by his own Corps, but by everyone who had known him. But that had not been all; the General had gone on to speak warmly of Wally's own exploits, ending by informing him that in view of his taking over