Читать книгу Playing with Fire - James Grant - Страница 5

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It was pretty clear, on the whole, to Hester, that her cousin, Roland Lindsay, thought but little of the past, and perhaps, as a general rule, cared for it even less. While she had been living on the memory of these dear days, especially since this—his last return home—he had allowed other events to obliterate it from his mind.

Let us take a little retrospect.

In contrast to the apparently languid and blasé smoker, swinging in his net hammock, enjoying the balmy evening breeze by the wooded Esk, and dallying with a girl of more than ordinary loveliness, let us imagine him in a dusty and blood-stained tunic, with a battered tropical helmet, a beard unshaven for many a day, haggard in visage, wild-eyed and full of soldierly enthusiasm, one of the leading actors in a scene like the following, at the fatal and most disastrous battle of Kashgate.

It was the evening of the 3rd November in an arid waste of the Soudan—sand, sand everywhere—not a well to yield a drop of brackish water, not a tree to give the slightest shade. The heat was awful, beyond all parallel and all European conception, well-nigh beyond endurance, and the doomed soldiers of General Hicks—known as Hicks Pasha—a veteran of the famous old Bombay Fusiliers who had served at Magdala, and to whose staff Roland Lindsay, then a subaltern, was attached, toiled on, over the dry and arid desert steppe that lies between El Duem and El Obeid, in search of the troops of the ubiquitous Mahdi—the gallant Hicks and his few British officers training their loosely and hastily constituted Egyptian army to operations in the field, even while advancing against one, said to be three hundred thousand strong—doubtless an Oriental exaggeration—but strong enough nevertheless, as the event proved, to sweep their miserable soldiers off the face of the earth, in that battle, the details of which will never be known till the Last Day, as only one or two escaped.

Like Colonel Farquhar of the Guards, Majors Warren, Martin and other British officers, Roland Lindsay, by his personal example, had done all that in him lay to cheer the weak-limbed and faint-hearted Egyptian soldiers, whose almost sable visages were now gaunt and hollow, and whose white tunics and scarlet tarbooshes were tattered and worn by their long and toilsome march through the terrible country westward of the White Nile—a vast steppe covered with low thorny trees, purple mimosa, gum bushes, and spiky grass, till the sad, solemn, and desert waste was reached near Kashgate, where all—save one or two—were to find their graves!

Mounted on a splendid Arab, whose rider he had slain in the battle of the 29th of April, Roland Lindsay led one face of the hollow square in which the troops marched, and in which formation they fought for three days, with baggage, sick and wounded in the centre, Krupp and Nordenfeldt guns in the angles, against a dark and surging human sea of frantic Dervishes, wild Bedouins, and equally wild and savage Mohammedans and Mulattoes, shrieking, yelling, armed with ponderous swords and deadly spears that flashed like thousands of mirrors in the sunshine.

The Dervishes came on, the foremost and most fearless, sent by the Mahdi, Mahommed Achmet Shemseddin, who had declared that they must vanquish all, as they had the aid of Heaven, of the Prophet and his legions of unseen angels, as at the battle of Bedr, when he conquered the Koreish.

Wild and desperate was the prolonged fighting, the Egyptians knowing that no mercy would be accorded to them, and fearful was the slaughter, till the sand was soaked with blood—till the worn-out square was utterly broken, its living walls dashed to pieces, and hurled against each other under the feet of the victorious Mahdists.

In vain did young Lindsay, like other Britons who followed Hicks, endeavour to make some of their men front about; calling on them, sword and revolver in hand, as they flung themselves on the sand now in despair, face downwards, and perished miserably under sword and spear, or fled in abject and uncontrollable terror; but in the end he found himself abandoned, and had to hack his way out of the press through a forest of weapons till he reached the side of General Hicks, who was making a last and desperate charge at the head of his staff alone!

Side by side, with a ringing and defiant cheer, these few Britons galloped against the living flood that was led by a sheikh in brilliant floating robes.

'He is the Mahdi—he is the Mahdi!' cried Lindsay, and such Hicks and all who followed him supposed that sheikh, but in mistake, to be.

He was splendidly mounted, and in addition to his Mahdi surcoat and floating robes wore a glittering Dharfour helmet, with a tippet of chain-mail and a long shirt of the same defensive material. Through this the sword of Hicks gave him a deadly cut in the arm, and his sword-hand dropped, but with the other he contrived to hurl a club, which unhorsed the General, who was then slain; but the mailed warrior, who looked like a Crusader of the twelfth century, was hewn down by Roland through helmet and head to the chin, and just as he fell above Hicks all the staff perished then on foot, their horses being speared or hamstrung—all gallant and resolute soldiers, Fraser, Farquhar, Brodie, Walker, and others—fighting back to back or in a desperate circle.

One moment Roland saw the last of them, erect in all the pride and strength of manhood, inspired by courage and despair—his cheeks flushed, his eyes flashing, while handling his sword with all the conscious pride of race and skill; and the next he lay stretched and bleeding on the heap beside him, with the pallor in his face of one who would never rise again.

In that mêlée no less than three Emirs of the False Prophet fell under the sword of Lindsay, who cut his way out and escaped alone; and spattered with blood from the slain, as well as from two sword-wounds in his own body, spurred rearward his horse, which had many a gash and stab, but carried him clear out of the field and onward till darkness fell, and he found himself alone—alone in the desert. There the whitening skeleton of more than one camel—the relic of a caravan—lay; and there the huge Egyptian vultures ('Pharaoh's chickens,' as they are called), with their fierce beaks, great eyes, and ample wings, were floating overhead on their way to the field, for the unburied slain attract these flocks from a wonderful distance.

When his horse sank down, Lindsay remained beside it, helpless and weary, awaiting the blood-red dawn of the Nubian sun.

As he lay there under the stars that glittered out of the blue sky like points of steel, many a memory of the past, of vanished faces, once familiar and still loved; of his home at Earlshaugh, with its wealth of wood and hill; and recollections which had been growing misty and indistinct came before him with many a scene and episode, like dissolving views that melted each other, as he seemed to himself to sink into sleep—the sleep that was born of fatigue, long over-tension of the nerves, and loss of blood.

For weeks he was returned as one of the slain who had perished at Kashgate; but Roland was hard to kill. He had reached Khartoum—how he scarcely knew—ere Gordon, the betrayed and abandoned by England, had perished there; and eventually regained the headquarters of his regiment, then with the army of occupation in Lower Egypt.

Of all this, and much more, with reference to her cousin had Hester Maule read in the public prints; but little or nothing of his adventures in the East could she glean from him, as he seemed very diffident and loth to speak of himself, unlike her father, Sir Harry, who was never weary of his reminiscences of the war in Central India, particularly the siege and capture of Jhansi under Lord Strathnairn, of gallant memory.

So the bearing of Roland Lindsay at the battle of Kashgate and elsewhere had proved that he was worthy of the old historic line from which he sprang; and that there was a latent fire, energy, and spirit of the highest kind under his calm, easy, and pleasant exterior.