We did our best to put the Ghazis back in that hole as actual corpses. A blizzard of Martini-Henry rounds mowed them down by the score. For two hours we stood our ground, and might have held out all day had the British left flank not been overrun. The retreating infantry and artillery rolled into us like a wave, and we broke, too.
How I got cut off from the Sixty-sixth I cannot recall, at least not clearly. One moment I stood next to Murray; the next I found myself alone and surrounded by a small mob of zealots. The earlier fighting was orderly, well mannered even, when compared to the chaos that descended after the lines broke. It was no longer army against army, but man against man, a thousand savage brawls occurring within a stone’s throw of one another, but isolated by a choking soup of smoke and dust. Shrieks of victory commingled with the cries of the wounded, the thunder of onrushing Afghans with the clatter of the British retreat, until a single sound—a deafening, skull-shaking din—overhung all. Little wonder, then, that neither I nor my would-be murderers discerned the crash of the oncoming artillery limber until it was almost upon us. The galloping horses appeared as if from nowhere, scattering ally and enemy alike. Crazed Ghazis hung from the wagon in a dozen places, while the driver and a gunner, armed only with handspikes and Khyber knives, hacked madly at their hands and arms, anything to loosen their hold and keep them from the gun.
The passing of the limber broke up the mob. I escaped, only to find myself a moment later at the edge of the dry watercourse the enemy had used to such good effect. The haze was not so thick here, though that was nothing to be cheered. Bodies lay two and three deep at the bottom of the steep-sided ravine, men and animals together, as far as the eye could trace the rift. Here were the Ghazis we had cut down, and the British who had been slaughtered as they abandoned the field. Most were still. A few raised trembling hands to the sky or tried in vain to free themselves from the bloody tangle. A camel with shattered forelimbs thrashed about, moaning like a damned soul—which was appropriate, as the scene resembled nothing so much as an illustration of Dante.
I stood on the brink of the ravine, frozen by fear or mesmerized by the horrific scene before me—I cannot now say which—until a figure on the opposite bank drew my attention. Dazedly I noted that he wore an obsolete British uniform, the familiar red cloth tunic and dark blue trousers of our soldiers in the first Afghan war. But atop his head rested a turban, and the twin rifles slung across his shoulder were not Enfields or Sniders, but jezails. My own rifle was gone, fumbled and dropped in my scramble away from the runaway artillery wagon. I reached for my service revolver. Before my fingers even touched the holster, the Afghan soldier raised one of his long-barreled flintlocks and fired.
The bullet bit into my left shoulder, spun me around so that I fell into the ravine backward. Chest aflame with pain, I slid down the embankment and came to rest atop the corpse river. The mass of bodies shifted slightly at my arrival. Cradled there among the dead and near dead, I felt the hot, wet mark of my wound spread. Feebly I tried to stanch the flow, all the while staring up at the red-coated assassin. Calmly he dropped his first rifle and raised the second. The jezail takes so long to reload that experienced Afghan warriors carry more than one, ready to fire, for just such eventualities.
But the fatal shot never came. The soldier suddenly threw his arms out. His mouth framed a startled gasp that never escaped his throat, and then he toppled, already lifeless, into the ravine. Standing in his place atop the embankment was Murray, a bloody Khyber knife in his hand. I gestured to him, called out weakly, anything to let him know I still lived. To my horror, he hurtled forward and tumbled down as if he, too, had been stabbed in the back. But it was haste that drove him on, not steel, and he quickly made his way to my side.
“Don’t try to move,” he said, taking in my condition at a glance. “Keep your hand in place on the wound. Stay still.”
Without another word, he lay down beside me, the Khyber knife clutched to his chest, then pulled the corpse of a Ghazi so that it rested atop us both. “Only until the stragglers pass,” he said, by way of an explanation.
I soon understood the meaning of that cryptic comment. From the din on the plain, it sounded as if the fighting had moved to the southwest. The Afghans were hard on the heels of our troops, even as they fell back upon the little villages of Mundabad and Khig to make their final stand. This left us rather far behind the enemy line.
From time to time a scavenging tribesman picked his way across the corpse river. The body of the Afghan atop us shielded us from the blows these savages sometimes dealt the British dead they encountered. So long as we remained still, the stragglers passed us by. Eventually we could hear shouting up on the plain, and then that, too, receded, until it became quiet enough for me to hear the steady buzzing of the sand flies over the distant clash of arms.
“Someone’s put them to collecting their dead farther up the riverbed,” Murray whispered. “Organizing them for burial.”
He shrugged off our fleshy shield and placed strong hands on me. “This will hurt, I’m afraid, but we’d best move. I’ll find someplace for us to hide. We’ll keep to the riverbed, head northeast—”
“Away from the regiment?” I asked weakly.
“It’s our only chance, sir,” he said as he did his best to secure a bandage in place over my shattered shoulder. Then he heaved me onto his back, adding, “I suspect that there’s little enough left of the Sixty-sixth for us to rejoin anyway.”
I recall only parts of our journey along the ravine. By then I was delirious from the pain and loss of blood. The hours passed as a series of half-understood incidents, dream melding with reality. The dead seemed to reach for us. Gray hands snatched at Murray’s boots until they tripped him, and we both fell onto the corpse river. Later, a shrouded figure rose up from the rest. Gore stained his clothes so completely that they might as well have been dyed crimson. His face, too, was smeared with it. And as I watched, that face contorted, mouth stretching impossibly wide to loose a shriek of alarm. Murray let me fall and, drawing his Khyber knife, buried the blade in the man’s throat. But that did not silence the cry, at least to my addled brain. The wound on his neck opened and, like a second mouth, added to the alarm. Even after the Afghan collapsed, his cry continued—only now from the lips of my orderly.
At last Murray let that wailing end. “I’ve countermanded that fellow’s alarm,” he said as he approached me. I shrank back, and received in return a kind, weary smile. “It helps to know a little of the enemy’s tongue, sir, but that doesn’t make me one of them.”
My head cleared enough then for me to recognize my friend. “Of course not,” I said. “Sorry. I thought I saw—thought that you—”
“No need to explain,” Murray interrupted. “The mind plays tricks under these circumstances.” Before he lifted me again, he removed a thin chain from his pocket and wrapped it around my right hand. In my palm rested the silver disk of a Saint Christopher medal. “If it’s not imposing, perhaps you might find this of help . . .”