Barracks, Bivouacs and Battles

“What countryman are you?”

“An Argyllshire Tipperary man, sor,” replied Mick, without the twinkle of an eyelash.

“How came you by your two middle names? They are surely not common in Tipperary?”

“Och, yer honour, I was christened by thim two afther me grandmother, an’ she was, I belave, a pure-bred Scotchman. It is in dutiful mimory of her, rest her sowl, that I want for to jine the Ross-shire Buffs.”

“Well,” replied Mr. Macpherson imperturbably, “your dutiful aspiration shall be gratified.”

The chum answered the formal questions regarding himself, and then the regimental sergeant-major was directed to take the pair to the quarter-master sergeant, to receive the clothing and accoutrements of infantrymen.

Quarter-master Sergeant Tulloch, “Muckle Tulloch,” as he was called in the regiment because of his abnormal bulk, was, although a Scot, a man of humour; and it occurred to him that the new Irish Ross-shire Buff might furnish some amusement. Highland regiments do not wear the kilt on Indian service; indeed the tartans are not brought out from home. But there happened by some odd chance to be a Highland uniform among the quarter-master’s stores; and this Tulloch solemnly made over to Mick Sullivan, instructing him to attire himself in it at once, that its fit might be ascertained. The store had been temporarily established in the unoccupied house of a wealthy native, and Sullivan went into one of the empty rooms to don the unaccustomed garments. Tulloch and the sergeant-major, as well as Mick’s chum, stood listening to Mick fervently d – ing the “quare blankets,” as he struggled with the difficulties presented by kilt and plaid. At length it seemed as if he had accomplished the task somehow, and he was heard to stride to the farther end of the long bare apartment. The partly-open door revealed Mr. Sullivan, drawn up to his full height in front of a large panel-mirror. He certainly presented an extraordinary aspect. For one thing, the kilt, which had been made for a short man, was very much too short for Mick, and a yard or two of naked leg protruded from below it. Then he had fastened on the sporran behind instead of in front, and it hung down in the former region like a horse’s tail. The plaid was put on something in the fashion of a comforter, and his lower extremities were encased in his long cavalry Wellington boots, from the heels of which the spurs stuck out fiercely. He had struck an attitude, and was soliloquising —

“Be the holy, Michael Donald Mactavish Sullivan, an’ it’s yersilf is the purty spictacle intirely! Troth, an’ it would puzzle that dacent woman your mother to idintify the fruit of her womb in this disguise. Sure an’ it’s a beautiful dress, an’ the hoighth av free vintilation! Supposin’ I was sittin’ down on an ant-hill? Och, musha, an’ pwhat would Tipperary think if she wor to see me this day? Faix,” he went on, after a long scrutinising gaze, “it’s mesilf is doubtful whether I’m pwhat ye would call dacent; but the divil a ha’p’orth care I,” with a sudden burst of reassurance, “sure, if I’m ondacent, that’s the Quane’s look-out, may the hivins be her bed!”

At this the listeners could not refrain from a burst of laughter, which brought Mick’s soliloquy to an abrupt conclusion. He became a little angry when he found he had been sold, and was not to have the kilt after all his trouble; but presently found consolation in the ant-hill view of the subject, and accepted his woollen doublet and dungaree trousers with a bland condescension. Next day the 78th began to move up country to the Allahabad concentration, and a few weeks later Havelock led out into the country of bloodthirsty mutiny that scant devoted vanguard of the British force which was to reconquer India.

Spite of cruel heat, sunstrokes, cholera, and the exhaustion of long marches, the little column pressed on blithely, for the stimulus of hope was in the hearts of the men. But that hope was killed just when its fulfilment was all but accomplished. To the soldiers, spent with the fighting of the day, as they lay within but one short march of Cawnpore, came in the dead of night the woful tidings of the massacre of the company of women and children, the forlorn remnant of the Cawnpore garrison whom the Nana Sahib had spared from the butchery of the Slaughter Ghaut. Next morning Havelock’s little army camped on the Cawnpore maidan, and Mick and his chum, accompanied by big Jock Gibson, one of the 78th pipers, with his pipes under his arm, set out in a search for the scene of the tragedy. Directed by whispering and terrified natives, they reached the Bibi Ghur, the bungalow in which the women and children had been confined, and in which they had been slain. With burning eyes and set faces, the men looked in on the ghastly and the woful tokens of the devilry that had been enacted inside those four low walls – the puddles of blood, the scraps of clothing, the broken ornaments, the leaves of bibles, the children’s shoes – ah, what need to catalogue the pitiful relics! Then they followed the blood-trail to the brink of the awful well, filled and heaped with the hacked and battered dead. Sullivan lifted up his voice and wept aloud. His comrade, of dourer nature, gazed on the spectacle with swelling throat. Big Jock Gibson sank down on the ground, sobbing as he had never done since the day his mother said him farewell, and gave him her Gaelic blessing in the market-place of Tain. As he sobbed, his fingers were fumbling mechanically for the mouthpiece of his pipes. Presently he slipped it absently into his mouth. As the wind whistles through the bare boughs of the trees in winter, so came, in fitful soughs, the first wayward notes from out weeping Jock’s drone and chanter. At length he mastered the physical signs of his woe, or rather, it might have been, he transferred his emotion from his heart into his pipes; and as the other two left him, he was sitting there, over the great grave, pouring forth a wild shrill dirge – a pibroch and a coronach in one.

An hour later, to a group of comrades gathered in a little tope in front of the tents, Mick Sullivan was trying, in broken words, to tell of what he had seen. He was abruptly interrupted by Jock Gibson, who strode into the midst of the circle, his face white and drawn, his pipes silent now, carried under his arm.

“Comrades,” began Jock, in a strange far-away voice, “I hae seen a sicht that has curdlet my bluid. The soles o’ my brogues are wat wi’ the gore o’ women an’ bairns; I saw whaur their corpses lay whummled ane abune anither, strippit and gashed, till the well was fu’ ow’r its lip. Men, I can speak nae mair o’ that awesome sicht; but I hae broucht awa’ a token that I fand – see!”

And Jock pulled from out his breast a long heavy tress of golden hair cut clean through, as if with a slash of a sharp sword that had missed the head. As he held it out, it hung limp and straight in a sunbeam that fell upon it through the leaves of the mango-trees. The rough soldiers bared their heads in the presence of it.

Old Hamish Macnab, the Kintail man, the patriarch of the regiment, stepped forward —

“Gie me that, Jock Gibson!”

Jock handed Macnab the token from the place of the slaughter.

“Stan’ roun’ me, men!” commanded Macnab.

The Highlanders closed about him silently, impressed by the solemnity of his tone.

Then Macnab bade them to join hands round him. When they had done so, he lifted up his voice, and spoke with measured solemnity, his eyes blazing and the blood all in his old worn face —

“By the mithers that bore ye, by yer young sisters and brithers at hame in the clachan an’ the glen, by yer ain wives an’ weans some o’ ye, swear by this token that henceforth ye show nae ruth to the race that has done this accursed deed of bluid!”

Sternly, from deep down in every throat, came the hoarse answer, “We swear!” Then Macnab parted out the tress into as many locks as there were men in the circle, distributing to each a lock. He coiled up the lock he had kept for himself, and opening his doublet, placed it on his heart. His comrades silently imitated him.

All the world knows the marvellous story of Havelock’s relief of Lucknow; against what odds the little column he commanded so gallantly fought its way from Cawnpore over the intervening forty miles; with what heroism and what losses it battled its way through the intricacies and obstacles of the native city; till at length, Havelock and Outram riding at its head, it marched along the street of death till the Bailey-guard gate of the Residency was reached, and greetings and cheers reached the war-worn relievers from the far-spent garrison which had all but abandoned hope of relief. Before the advance from Cawnpore began, Mick Sullivan and his chum, remaining still nominally attached to the Highland regiment, had joined the little force of irregular cavalry which Havelock had gathered from the infantrymen who could ride, while he waited at Cawnpore for reinforcements. As scouts, on reconnaissance duty, in pursuits and in sheer hard fighting, this little cohort of mounted men had its full share of adventure and danger, and the Light Dragoon comrades had great delight in being once again back in the saddle.

When the main column had pressed on into the Residency, the wounded of the fighting in the suburbs and native town had been left behind in the Motee Mahal along with the rearguard. On the morning after the entrance, a detachment of volunteers sallied out to escort into the Residency the doolies in which the wounded still lay inadequately cared for. The return journey from the first was much molested by hostile fire, many of the native bearers bolting, and leaving the doolies to be carried by the escorting Europeans. The guide became bewildered, and the head of the procession of doolies deviated from the proper route into a square which proved a perfect death-trap, and has passed into history as “Doolie Square.” The handful of escorting soldiers, of whom Mick’s comrade was one, fought desperately to protect the poor wounded lying helpless in the doolies; but the rebels drove them back by sheer weight, and massacred a large proportion of the hapless inmates. Too late to save these, the fire of the escort cleared the square, and fortunately no more doolies entered the fatal cul-de-sac. Suddenly the little party holding their ground there became aware of a great commotion in the street, just outside the archway which formed the entrance to the square. Pistol-shots were heard, and loud shouts in Hindustanee mingled with something that sounded like a British oath. A sally was at once made. Darting out of the square through the archway, the sallying party fought their way through the swarm of Sepoys outside to where a single European swaying a cavalry sabre, his back against the wall, and covering a wounded boy-officer who lay at his feet, was keeping at bay, now with a dexterous parry, anon with a swift sweeping cut, and again with a lightning thrust, the throng of howling miscreants who pressed around him. The foremost man of the sallying party, cutting down a Pandy who turned on him, sprang to the side of the man with the dripping sabre in his hand.

“Look if the lad’s alive,” were the first words of Mick Sullivan, for he was the man with the sabre.

Mick’s chum, for he it was who had headed the rescuers, stooped down, and found the young officer alive and conscious. He told Mick so.

“Thin hould me up, acushla, for it’s kilt intirely I am,” and poor Mick threw his arm over his chum’s shoulder, and the gallant fellow’s head fell on his breast.

The Pandies were massing again, so the little party, carrying Mick and the officer, struggled back again into their feeble refuge inside the square. The youngster was seen to first, and then Dr. Home proceeded to investigate Mick’s condition.

“Och an’ sure, docthor jewel, ye may save yersilf the trouble. I’m kilt all over – as full of wownds as Donnybrook is of drunk men at noightfall. I’ve got me discharge from the sarvice, an’ that widout a pinsion. There’s niver a praiste in an odd corner av the mansion, is there, chum?”

The chum told him the place was not a likely one for priests.

“I’d fain have confissed before I die, an’ had a word wid a praiste, but sure they can’t expict a man on active sarvice to go out av the wurrld as reg’lar as if he were turnin’ his toes up in his bed. Chum,” continued the poor fellow, his voice becoming weaker as the blood trickled from him into a hollow of the earthen floor, “chum, dear, give us a hould av yer hand. Ye mind that poor young crayture av a wife of mine I left wapin’ fur me on the quay av Southampton. There’s some goold and jools in the dimmickin’ bag in me belt, an’ if ye could send them to her, ye would be doin’ yer old chum a kindness.”

The chum promised in a word – his heart was too full for more. Mick lay back silent for a little, gasping in his growing exhaustion. But suddenly he raised himself again on his elbow, and in a heightened voice continued —

“An’, chum, if ever ye see the 30th Light again, tell them, will ye, that Mick Sullivan died wid a sword in his hand” – he had never quitted the grip of the bloody sabre – “an’ wid spurs on his heels. I take ye all to witness, men, that I die a dhragoon, an’ not a swaddy! Divil a word have I to say against the Ross-shire Buffs, chaps – divil a word; but I’m a dhragoon to the last dhrap av me blood! Ah me!” – here honest Mick’s voice broke for the first time – “ah me! niver more will I back horse or wield sword!”

And then he fell back, panting for breath, and it seemed as if he had spoken his last words. But the mind of the dying man was on a train of thought that would still have expression. Again he raised himself into a sitting posture, and loud and clear, as if on the parade-ground, there rang out from his lips the consecutive words of command —

“Carry swords!”

“Return swords!”

“Prepare to dismount!”

“Dismount!”

A torrent of blood gushed from his mouth, and he fell forward dead. Mick Sullivan had dismounted for ever.

* * * * *

When the great mutiny was finally stamped out, Mick Sullivan’s chum got himself sent back to the 30th Light, down in the Madras Presidency. He delivered his poor comrade’s dying message to the regiment, and told the tale of his heroic death; and how Outram had publicly announced that, had he survived, he would have recommended Mick for the Victoria Cross. From colonel to band-boy, the 30th Light was deeply moved by the recital. The regiment subscribed to a man to place a memorial-stone over Mick’s grave in the cemetery inside the Lucknow Residency, where he had been laid among the heroes of the siege. The quarter-master took temporary charge of the “goold and jools” which were Mick’s legacy to “the Crayture,” and the colonel himself wrote home instructions that every effort should be made to find the little woman and have her cared for.

* * * * *

One morning, about a month later, the colonel and his wife were taking their early canter on the Bangalore maidan. As they crossed the high road from down country, they noticed, tramping through the deep dust, a white woman with a child in her arms. She dragged herself wearily; the pale fagged face, and the wistful upward look at them as she trudged by, moved the good heart of the colonel’s wife.

“Speak to her,” she said to her husband; “she is a stranger, and forlorn.”

“Where are you bound for, my good woman?” asked the colonel; “have you come far?”

The woman set down the child, a well-grown boy, who looked about two years old, and with a long sigh of weariness replied —

“I’ve come from England, sir, and I am on my way to the 30th Light Dragoons to find my husband.”

“That little chap is quite too heavy for you to carry. What is your name, young one?”

The urchin sprang to “attention,” saluted with rigid accuracy, and gravely replied —

“Mick Tullivan, Tir!”

“Good God!” whispered the colonel’s wife; “it’s Sullivan’s widow – it’s ‘the Crayture’ herself. Gallop to barracks for a gharry, and while you are gone, I will tell her. God pity her!”

And the kind lady was out of the saddle, and had the boy in her arms, and her tears were raining on his face, as the colonel rode away on his errand.

When the gharry arrived “the Crayture” was sitting by the wayside, the skirt of her dress drawn over her face, her head on the shoulder of the colonel’s wife, her boy gripped tight in her arms.

The Mem Sahib carried the poor thing to her own bungalow for a day or two; and then good-hearted old Bess Bowles, the trumpeter’s wife of G troop, came and took her and her boy away to the room that had been prepared for her in the married quarters. Perhaps it was not exactly in accordance with strict regulations, but the colonel had put the widow woman “on the strength” – she was no longer an unrecognised waif, but had her regimental position. Her ration of bread and meat her husband’s comrades of G troop contributed; the officers made a little fund that sufficed to give her soldier’s pay. She earned it, for a week after she “joined,” the surgeon found her in the hospital, in quiet informal possession of the ward in which lay the most serious cases; and when next year the cholera smote the regiment, the rugged old Scot pronounced her “worth her weight in gold.” She has long ago been a member of the sisterhood of army nurses. I remember her out in Africa during the Zulu war, and since then she has smoothed soldiers’ pillows in the Egyptian campaigns; but she is still, and will be till the day she dies, a supernumerary “on the strength” of the 30th Light. She never married again; she is an elderly woman now, and the winsomeness of the days when we knew her as “the Crayture” has gone; but the quiet faithful courage that sustained her on the weary line of march and the forlorn-hope expedition to the East, is staunch still in her honest heart. The sergeant-major of to-day of G troop in the 30th Light – I call the corps by its old familiar name still, but they are Hussars now – is a straight, clean-built young fellow, with a light heart, a bright eye, and a quaint humour. His name is Mick Sullivan, and he is the son of “the Crayture,” and of the man who died in the porch of “Doolie Square.”

THE FATE OF “NANA SAHIB’S ENGLISHMAN”

One fine evening in September 1856, young Mr. Kidson entered Escobel Castle by the great front door, and was hurrying across the hall on his way to the passage leading to his own apartments, when his worthy old mother, who had seen from her parlour window her son approach the house, ran out into the hall to meet him in a state of great agitation. It was little wonder that the aspect the young man presented excited the good creature’s maternal emotion. The region around his right optic was so puffed and inflamed as to give the surest promise of a black eye of the first magnitude in the course of a few hours; to say that his nose was simply “bashed” is very inadequately to describe the condition of that feature; his lower lip was split and streaming with blood; and he carried in his left hand a couple of front teeth which had been forcibly dislodged from their normal position in his upper jaw. He was bareheaded, and he carried on his clothes enough red clay to constitute him an eligible investment on the part of an enterprising brickmaker. “Guid be here, my ain laddie!” wailed the poor mother in her unmitigated Glasgow Doric, “what’s come tae you? Wha has massacred my son this fearsome bloodthirsty gait?” “Oh, hang it!” was the genial youth’s sole acknowledgment of the maternal grief and sympathy, as, dodging her outstretched arms, he slunk to his rooms and rang vehemently for hot water and a raw beef-steak.

Young Mr. Kidson’s parents were brand-new rich Glasgow folks, who in their old age of vast wealth had recently bought the Highland estate of Escobel, in the hope to gratify Mr. Kidson senior’s ambition to gain social recognition as a country gentleman and to become the founder of a family, an aspiration in which he received but feeble assistance from his simple old wife, who had a tender corner in her memory for the Guse-Dubs in which she was born. Their only son, the hero of the puffed eye and the “bashed” nose, had been ignominiously sent down from Oxford while yet a freshman. At present he was supposed to be doing a little desultory reading in view of entering the army; in reality he was spending most of his time in boozing with grooms and gamekeepers in a low shebeen. A downright bad lot, this young Mr. Kidson, of whom, in the nature of things, nothing but evil could come.

While he was skulking into the privacy of his “den,” an extremely pretty girl was sobbing convulsively on the breast of a stalwart fair-haired young fellow, whose eyes were flashing wrath, whose face still had an angry flush, and the knuckles of whose right hand were cut open, the blood trickling unheeded down the weeping girl’s white dress. She, Mary Fraser, was the daughter of the clergyman of the parish; the young man, by name Sholto Mackenzie, was the orphan nephew of the old laird of Kinspiel, a small hill-property on the mountain slope. The two were sweethearts, and small chance was there of their ever being anything more. For Kinspiel was strictly entailed, and the old laird, who was so ill that he might die any day, had a son who had sons of his own, and was in no position, if he had the will, to help on his dead sister’s manchild. Mary Fraser and Sholto Mackenzie had trysted to meet this evening in the accustomed pine glade on the edge of the heather. The girl was there before the time. Young Mr. Kidson, listlessly smoking as he lounged on a turf bank, caught a glimpse of her dress through the trees, and promptly bore down on her. There was a slight acquaintance, and she returned his greeting, supposing that he would pass on. But he did not – on the contrary, he waxed fluent in coarse flatteries, and suddenly grasping the girl in his arms was making strenuous efforts to snatch kisses from her, undeterred by her struggles and shrieks. At this crisis Sholto Mackenzie, hearing the cries, came running up at the top of his speed. Young Mr. Kidson, fancying himself a bit as a man who could use his fists, had not the poor grace to run away. While the girl leant half fainting against a tree there was a brief pugilistic encounter between the young men, as the issue of which Mr. Kidson was disabused of a misconception, and presented the aspect which a few minutes later brought tribulation to his mother. As he carried himself and his damages off, he muttered through his pulped lips with a fierce oath that the day would come when his antagonist should rue the evening’s work. Whereat the antagonist laughed contemptuously, and addressed himself to the pleasant task of calming and consoling his agitated sweetheart.

Before the grouse season closed the old laird of Kinspiel was a dead man, and there was no longer a home for Sholto Mackenzie in the quaint old crow-stepped house in the upland glen among the bracken. What career was open to the penniless young fellow? He had no interest for a cadetship, and that Indian service in which so many men of his race have earned name and fame was not for him. In those days there was no Manitoba, no ranching in Texas or Wyoming; the Cape gave no opportunities, the Argentine was not yet a resort for English youth of enterprise, and he had not money enough to take him to the Australian gold-diggings or to the sheep-runs of New Zealand. He saw no resource but to offer himself to the Queen’s service in the capacity of a private soldier, in the hope that education, good conduct, and fervent zeal would bring him promotion and perhaps distinction. By the advice of a local pensioner he journeyed to London and betook himself to the metropolitan recruiting centre in Charles Street, Westminster. No Sergeants Kite now patrol that thoroughfare in quest of lawful prey; nay, the little street with its twin public-house headquarters is itself a thing of the past. About the centre of the long wooden shanty recently built for the purposes of the census, stood the old “Hampshire Hog,” with its villainous rendezvous in the rear; nearer the Park on the opposite side, just where is now the door of the India Office, the “Cheshire Cheese” reared its frowsy front. In the days I am writing of, recruits accepted or had foisted on them the “Queen’s Shilling,” received a bounty, gave themselves for twenty-four years’ service, and were escorted by a staff-sergeant to their respective regiments. Now there is neither Queen’s shilling nor bounty, and the recruit, furnished with a travelling warrant, is his own escort to Ballincollig or Fort George. What scenes had dingy Charles Street witnessed in its day! How much sin and sorrow; too late remorse, too late forgiveness! In many a British household has Charles Street been cursed with bitter curses; yet has it not been, in a sense, the cradle of heroes? It sent to battle the men whose blood dyed the sward of the Balaclava valley; it fed the trenches of Sebastopol; it was the sieve through whose meshes passed the staunch warriors who stormed Delhi and who defended Lucknow, who bled and conquered at Sobraon and Goojerat.