The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [624]
Between them, the little band of Guides had fired exactly thirty-seven shots in the course of that brief engagement, of which no less than four – all heavy bullets fired from Lee-Enfield rifles at a distance of six yards – had smashed straight through the chest of an enemy soldier to kill a second behind him. The remainder had accounted for one man apiece, while a dozen more had been bayonetted and eight cut down by sabres.
The resulting carnage was not pleasant to look upon, for scores of men lay dead on the dusty, blood-spattered ground, while here and there a wounded one strove to drag himself to his knees and crawl like an injured animal towards the kindly shade and out of the glare of the sunlight.
The Guides had exacted a terrible toll and almost evened the odds. But they had paid a high price for that brief victory, one that with their dwindling numbers they could ill afford. Out of the twenty men who had taken part in that third sortie, only fourteen came back; and of these, half-a-dozen were barely able to walk, while none came through entirely unscathed, even though many wounds were no more than superficial.
The sepoys on the barrack roof had covered their return with rifle fire, and others of the Escort waited for them under the archway to bar the doors behind them before following them into the Residency. But this time the victors walked tiredly and there was no elation in their faces, only grimness. The grimness of men who know that the fruits of their hard-won fight cannot be retained, but will have to be fought for again and again – and with ever dwindling resources – or else abandoned to the enemy, which must spell disaster.
They had not been away very long, yet during that brief interval five of the men who had been posted on the roofs of the two Residency houses had been killed and another six wounded; for the makeshift parapets gave them little protection from the marksmen stationed on the higher rooftops of the near-by houses, and the skies seemed to be raining lead. They helped the wounded down to where the desperate Kelly and his solitary Hospital Assistant, Rahman Baksh, were working like men possessed – coatless, and splashed with blood from head to foot like butchers in an abattoir as they tirelessly swabbed, cut and stitched, bandaged, applied tourniquets and administered anaesthetics and opiates in the hopelessly overcrowded rooms where the wounded sat or lay or stood leaning against the walls, their powder-grimed faces drawn with weariness and pain, but making no complaint.
The dead had been treated more cavalierly; there was no time to spare for carrying away corpses, and they had been used instead to reinforce those inadequate parapets. For the Guides were realists. In a crisis such as this they saw no reason why their comrades should not continue to serve their Corps to the end; and the end did not look to be far off, because there were now less than ten men on the two roofs not counting the dead. And the enemy had no shortage of men or ammunition…
‘Has there been an answer from the Amir yet, sir?’ asked William, stripping off his stained coat as he limped into the office and found his Chief grey-faced from pain, but still firing methodically through the broken shutter.
‘No. We must send again. Are you wounded?’
‘Only a hack on the shin, sir. Nothing to worry about.’ William sat down and began to tear his handkerchief into strips and knot them together. ‘But I'm afraid we lost six men, and several of the others were badly mauled.’
‘Is young Hamilton all right?’ inquired Sir Louis sharply.
‘Yes, bar a scratch or two. He's a bonnie fighter, yon laddie. He fought like ten men and sang the whole time. Hymns, of all things. The men seem to like it – I wonder if they've any idea what he's singing about? They probably think it's a war-song… which I suppose it is, when you come to think of it: “The Son of God goes forth