They were very slow at first. Fleury did not know what he was doing and they had to keep shouting at him, and Ram was really too old to carry ammunition as well as load it. But then Harry remembered Barlow who was still sitting on his chair with his hands in his pockets. Now that it was daylight you could see that Barlow’s face had turned a fearful grey, but somehow Harry got him on his feet and carrying ammunition. He only had to carry it a few yards, from the banqueting hall to the gun emplacement, but in these few yards there was no protection offered by the marble heads of Plato and Socrates, and musket balls kept droning by his nose and tugging at his garments.
Not only did Harry have to organize his amateurish team of gunners, he also had to direct his fire so that it had the most damaging effect; this involved a calculation of variables that could be extremely complicated: the weight of the powder charge, the degree of elevation of the gun, whether the shot to be fired was solid or powder-filled, all these considerations could make a crucial difference to where the shot landed. But Harry had practised this sort of thing so often he did not even have to calculate: he knew by instinct that with a twopound charge and an elevation of one degree he could drop a shell in the river bed where the sepoys swarmed as thick as flies on a treacle pudding.
Fleury found himself looking at Harry, whom he had always condescended to think rather dull, with new eyes as he watched him making some delicate but fatal adjustment to the handles of the elevating screw. Fleury was confronted, as he toiled clumsily with the spongeing rod in the dust and smoke, with a simple fact about human nature which he had never considered before: nobody is superior to anyone else, he only may be better at doing a specific thing. Doubtless, Coleridge or Keats or Lamartine would have been as clumsy with the sponge as he was himself … but wait, had not Lamartine been a military man? With French poets you could never tell. He stepped back, his ears ringing as the cannon crashed again. He could not remember.
“Fleury, for God’s sake!” shouted Harry, who knew how desperate the situation was. Fleury did not know; he was in a daze from the noise and smoke which had tears streaming down his face, and the haze of dust which hung everywhere, very fine, lending the scene a “historical” quality because everything appeared faintly blurred, as in a Crimean daguerrotype. Fleury found himself appending captions to himself for the Illustrated London News. “This was the Banqueting Hall Redoubt in the Battle of Krishnapur. On the left, Mr Fleury, the poet, who conducted himself so gallantly throughout; on the right, Lieutenant Dunstaple, who commanded the Battery, and a faithful native, Ram.”
“Fleury!” shouted Harry desperately. But Fleury’s mind would keep wandering; the trouble was that being ignorant of military matters he only had a vague idea of what was going on; all he knew for certain was that he was spongeing a gun and, after a while, his stunned senses refused to find that very interesting. He skidded suddenly as he was dashing to clear the vent for Harry and sat down on the flagstones. Only then did he realize that he had skidded in a great lake of blood which had leaked out of the pile of bodies and spread over the verandah.
Harry knew that they needed a miracle … that is, if the Collector did not send any more men with rifles and bayonets to reinforce the handful at the rampart. They needed another cannon, too, preferably a twelve-pounder, and a mortar to drop shells under the near bank of the river. What looked to Fleury like two or three hundred dim figures in a dust storm wandering aimlessly on the far bank a quarter of a mile away, had a precise meaning for Harry. He knew exactly what was happening: the sepoys were massing under the near bank before making an attack. The only thing that puzzled him was why they were taking so long about it.
By this time the sun had risen and the hot wind was beginning to blow, but still the sepoys delayed their assault. While they waited for it Major Hogan suddenly reeled out on to the verandah and steadied himself with a hand on the door-frame. He had had a terrible night, but the morning had been worse; every time the six-pounder fired it drove hot needles through his ears. Now he had got himself on to his feet, however, and was coming to take command of his men. He could see by the pile of bodies that they needed him.
Harry greeted Major Hogan’s appearance with dismay; it was not simply that he himself was no longer in command; he knew Hogan to be incompetent. What slender chance they had of holding the position vanished with Hogan giving the orders.
Now Hogan, having rallied himself, opened his mouth to give his first order; his brown teeth parted, but as they did so a musket ball vanished between them into his open mouth; his eyes bulged, he appeared to swallow it, then he dropped conveniently near to the other bodies, the back of his skull shattered. Harry and Fleury exchanged a glance but said nothing.
It was nine o’clock and the heat was becoming unbearable; the chase of the cannon could not be touched; if a drop of water fell on it from Fleury’s sponge it sizzled away in an instant. The flagstones shimmered and the lake of blood where Fleury had slipped had become a sticky brown marsh sucking at every footstep. Once Fleury trod on something which squashed beneath his foot and he thought with horror: “Someone’s eye!” He hardly dared to look down. But it was merely one of the Kabul grapes which Barlow had been eating.
Harry could tell that Fleury and Ram would not be able to go on much longer without a break: Ram because he was old, Fleury because he was inexperienced. Fleury had begun to have a shattered look; he kept his eyes away from the sticky mass and wisps of steam rising from it, and from the bodies. The shock, aided by the noise and heat, was taking hold of him. So Harry gave the order to stop firing; in any case it was time they moved the bodies out of the sun.
While the others rested in the shade, Harry went out again with his telescope; he had considered dragging the gun from one position to another in order to give the impression that they had more than one cannon in the battery. But a brass sixpounder weighs seventeen hundredweight: the prospect of getting it off its trunnions and on to the limber, dragging it to a new position, unlimbering, firing, limbering up once more, and going through the whole process again, quickly enough, and in such heat, with only four men was simply too much to contemplate.
It seemed to him that he could see movement above the rim of the near bank of the river; a green flag was being swept slowly back and forth in the hot breeze and at the same time a faint beating of drums came to his ears. The attack was coming at last. As he turned to order the others back to the cannon, the pensioner whom he had sent to the Collector hurried towards him, saluted and told him that the Collector Sahib could send no men or guns at present. “Collector Sahib very sorry and send this gentleman, Sahib.” Harry looked at the figure who had followed the pensioner diffidently out on to the verandah. It was the Collector’s manservant, Vokins.
Vokins gazed at him unhappily for a moment, but then a spent musket ball came humming through the air, struck the brickwork beside him and rolled towards his feet. He recoiled as if it were a scorpion, and fled back into the darkness of the banqueting hall to cower in a pile of bedding. But as his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom he became aware that this pile of bedding was, in fact, a pile of bodies, the result of the morning’s work. After a brief debate with himself he decided it was best to venture outside again among the living.