The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [636]
Having drunk they had returned to the Residency which they had left barely a quarter of an hour ago – only to find it fulfof smoke, for the enemy behind the wall had not been idle while they were gone. More ladders had been pushed out from house-tops on the far side of the street, and while the Afghans, crawling along these perilous bridges, had reinforced the survivors of the fight on the stairway, their friends in the street below had hacked their way through the flimsy walls and thrust live coals and oil-soaked rags through holes they had made in the foundation.
The Residency and the compound, already hemmed in on three sides, was now being assailed from above and below as well, since besides possessing themselves of the stables and cavalry lines and every house-top in sight, the enemy had established themselves in force on the roof of the Mess House and had broken through its foundations.
The courtyard, the ground-floor rooms and the barrack-block were full of dead and dying men, and of the seventy-seven Guides who had seen the sun rise that morning, only thirty were left. Thirty… and the ‘troops of Midian’ who ‘prowled and howled around’ numbered – how many thousands? Four?… six?… eight thousand men?
For the first time that day Wally's heart sank, and facing the future squarely and clear-eyed he deliberately abandoned hope. But this was something that William, as a member of the Foreign and Political Department and an apostle of Peace by Negotiation and Compromise, was still not prepared to do.
William had returned from that abortive attack on the guns to exchange the unfamiliar sabre and service revolver for his shot-gun, and hastily filling his pockets with cartridges, he hurried up to the roof of the Envoy's House to fire at the Afghans who were massing on the roof of the higher house on the opposite side of the courtyard. It was only then that he became aware of the volume of smoke that was billowing out from the ground-floor rooms of the Mess House, and realized that if the fire took hold they were lost.
Yet even then he did not give up hope, but once again, lying on the roof among five jawans who were also engaged in discouraging the opposition entrenched on top of the Mess House, scribbled another desperate appeal to the Amir, using a blank page ripped from a small notebook he carried in his pocket. They could not hold out much longer, wrote William, and if His Highness did not come to their aid, their fate – and his own – was sealed. They could not believe that His Highness was prepared to stand aside and do nothing while his guests were murdered…
‘Take that to Hamilton-Sahib,’ said William, ripping out the page and handing it to one of the jawans. ‘Tell him he must find someone among the servants who will deliver it to the Amir.’
‘They will not go, Sahib,’ said the man, shaking his head. ‘They know that four Mussulmans have gone with letters and none have returned, and that the Hindu who went was hacked to pieces in full sight. Nevertheless –’
He tucked it in his belt, and wriggling away in the direction of the stairs, vanished down them in search of his Commanding Officer, whom he found over at the Mess House, firing from a window on the first floor at a group of mutineers who were attempting to reload the guns. Wally took the scrap of paper and dismissing the messenger with a brief nod read it through and wondered with a detached feeling of curiosity why William should think it was worth sending another appeal to the Amir, when the only tangible result of previous appeals had been one evasive reply that could hardly be matched for weakness and hypocrisy. In any case none of the messengers had returned, so it was always possible that all of them had met the same fate as the unfortunate Hindu, and it seemed pointless to Wally to send yet another to his death. But though the entire responsibility for the defence of the Residency had fallen on his shoulders, young Mr Jenkyns, as the Envoy's Secretary and Political Assistant,