Drums Along the Khyber Read online

  Drums Along the Khyber

  Philip McCutchan

  Copyright © Philip McCutchan 2014

  The right of Philip McCutchan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  First published in 1969 by Hodder & Stoughton.

  This edition published in 2014 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Extract from The Great Game by Steven O’Brien

  One

  “Mr. Ogilvie!” It was Black’s voice, sharply critical, coming up in his rear. “Can you, or can you not, read a heliograph?”

  James Ogilvie turned with a start, cursing under his breath as his right hand rose towards his Wolseley helmet. He had failed to see the winking field heliograph, its mirrors reflecting the sun, for the simple reason that it was coming from behind him. No doubt, however, subalterns were expected to have eyes in the backs of their heads; and it would not have occurred to him to pass the blame to his men for being no more vigilant than he. His face scarlet, he read off the message. It was from the Colonel, who was currently resting the main body of the regiment back along the cruel pass that ran through out of India. Ogilvie had been sent ahead with a corporal and three recruits to scout. This would, Black had suggested to Ogilvie’s company commander and the Colonel, be excellent experience for a young officer and green soldiers.

  The message told James Ogilvie that Ahmed Khan had scouts out too, that the party had been spotted and was about to be ambushed if they went ahead. They were therefore to remain in cover while the regiment advanced and overtook them, after which the expeditionary force would press forward under covering fire from the sharpshooters on the flanks.

  Black, the adjutant, snorted. “Damn you, Mr. Ogilvie, we’ve been trying to raise you for the last fifteen minutes. Kindly remember in future not to neglect your rear. The Colonel’s not at all pleased about this—and as for me, I’m damned if I’m pleased at having the regiment saddled in action with boys fresh from Sandhurst!”

  “I’m sorry,” Ogilvie said awkwardly, but Black had already turned away and was making his retreat towards the main body, his horse slipping and sliding on the atrocious surface of the track, disapproval in every line of his ramrod-straight back. There had been something in the adjutant’s sallow, discontented face, however, that had said he wasn’t especially sorry to be able to speak adversely to Lord Dornoch about Ogilvie, and Ogilvie was uncomfortably aware that he, as the scout, should have seen the enemy before the Colonel. But there wasn’t time to worry about that for now. Already there was the distant sound of rifle fire and bullets snicked off the mountainside ahead of Ogilvie’s party. At the moment, they couldn’t be reached; they were in some sort of cover, more by good luck than good judgment, but there wouldn’t be much more of that as they advanced. As Ogilvie waited for the regiment to come up he heard across the unfriendly, watchful spaces of the rough terrain of the Sufaid Koh the curious noise that accompanied the first few puffs of wind into the bagpipes; and a moment later they burst out in the full throat of their savage but exultant notes, playing Pipe-Major Ross’s own fairly recent composition—A Farewell to Invermore. A phrase from the past slipped suddenly into James Ogilvie’s mind, even though he himself had never failed to respond to the sound of the pipes: ‘C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre.’ Still, they’d been seen already, as the helio had said, so they might as well advance with spirit and with dash...

  To the skirl and beat of the pipes and drums, the 114th Highlanders, The Queen’s Own Royal Strathspeys, came on in column of route, kilts a-swing below the khaki-drill tunics, to face the sporadic rifle-fire from the crests, to assure the enemies of the Queen-Empress that the British Raj responded with fire and sword to every tweak of the lion’s tail. And to ensure that it was known far and wide that wherever the flag waved rebellious natives would, in the greater interest of the majority, be put down with that same fire and sword so that the Pax Britannica would not long be broken.

  *

  This was to be James Ogilvie’s first experience of fire and he felt a disturbing looseness in his stomach as he waited to take his party into the column of advance, wondering how he would be likely to conduct himself when they came within range of the rifles and more, how he would conduct himself when they reached Jalalabad, if ever they did without being cut to pieces on the way, and came under the guns of the fortress. He thought, too, about the past; thought about his year at Sandhurst, which he had to admit had been no shining example of a successful start to a military career. It wasn’t that he had done anything wrong, but certainly he had never been singled out for honours. His instructors, his officers, his Company Sergeant-Major, his section Colour-Serjeant—had regarded him as a burden to be borne, stoically if not cheerfully, and, to some limited extent, as a butt for their not-unkindly-meant wit. After many years spent, on his mother’s insistence, at a private tutorial establishment instead of a public school, he had had difficulty in adapting himself, in spite of the military traditions of his family, to the rush and bustle of a Gentleman Cadet’s life. He had been bewildered by the constant parades and the constant shortage of time which, among other things, had entailed being dismissed daily from the last parade at 7.25 p.m. and being expected to be in the Mess, washed and in full mess order, at 7.30 precisely. Other aspects of life had not appealed, either—among them the ceremonious but vicious unofficial treatment accorded to the new entrants, when for instance they were forced in a body at bayonet-point, by senior cadets, to descend a steep iron staircase cluttered with tables and chairs, at the rush. This had before now resulted in broken arms and legs. The ducking in the lake on the first occasion on which a cadet wore his mess uniform could prove costly, too. Of course there had been the lighter moments in this, the unofficial side of Sandhurst life—such as the senior term’s passing-out ball soon after he had joined, when at dusk the great lake had been covered with hundreds of chamber-pots from the Gentlemen Cadets’ bedrooms, each of them carrying a single lighted candle to entrance the military ladies of Camberley and Aldershot... but such moments had been few and didn’t really appeal in any case to Ogilvie, whose Scottish ancestry had tended to make him more serious-minded and sensitive than many of his fellow cadets. Now, through the blare of the pipes moving closer along the remote frontier pass, voices came back to James Ogilvie, the voices of men whose drill movements were as precision-perfect as machines and who couldn’t comprehend what motivated a young Gentleman Cadet who, after a full year on the square, was still virtually unable at times to force a decent military control upon his limbs. Or even to keep his ears open…

  *

  “Mr. Ogilvie, I really do believe you have got cloth ears. Sir! Will you kindly pay attention to the orders! They are given in a well-thought-out sequence as laid down by minds greater than your own.” The Company Serjeant-Major of A Company, purple in his sweating face, bristled a ginger moustache close to James Ogilvie’s nose. “Did you ’ear what I said, Mr. Ogilvie, you terrible Gentleman Cadet, you?”

  “I’m sorry, Staff.” Ogilvie looked, in accordance with Queen’s Regulations for the Army, straight ahead—neither up nor down, right or left. He was aware of very blue eyes bulging beneath the gold-rimmed peak of C.S.M. Apps’s cap. Apps, on long-suffering detachment from the Grenadiers for service as an instructor at the Royal Military College, was as tall as himself.

  Apps’s pace-stick trembled beneath a hammy arm. He stepped backward and to his left, awa
y from Ogilvie. His voice rose to a hoot, a scream that tore across the parade ground and echoed off the walls behind. “I said—right marker! Sir!”

  Ogilvie, already at attention, moved into action as commanded. He took six short, sharp paces forward and halted, drawing his extended right foot down with a guardsman’s crash. He then waited for Apps’s order that would form the remainder of A Company up on his left. The order didn’t come. Instead, he was left standing like a flushing statue while the C.S.M. addressed the young gentlemen in thunderstruck tones. “Gentlemen! Did you see the way Mr. Ogilvie halted! No—do not answer me back! I realize you saw! But perhaps you do not know what you saw. I shall tell you. Gentlemen, you have seen the way not to bloody-well halt!” He marched quivering up to Ogilvie. “Tomorrow you will pass out, Mr. Ogilvie, and I shall become a sane man again with God’s help. Tomorrow, at the passing-out parade, you will march past the Duke of Cambridge. His Royal Highness is an old gentleman, Mr. Ogilvie. You are very likely going to give him an apoplectic fit.”

  Ogilvie swallowed. “Yes, Staff.”

  “It will be a case of murder. You must buck your ideas up, Mr. Ogilvie. His Royal Highness is a stickler for smartness. His Royal Highness is a first cousin of Her Majesty the Queen, Mr. Ogilvie. His Royal Highness led a division of Guards and Highlanders at the battle of the Alma, Mr. Ogilvie. His Royal Highness had his horse shot from under him at Inkerman. His Royal Highness has faced shot and shell and has survived, Mr. Ogilvie. But as God’s me judge, ’e hain’t going to survive you! I am astonished that you ’ave been accepted for the 114th. The 114th is a crack regiment with a reputation for spit and polish. As you should know. Sir!”

  “Yes, Staff.”

  “Besides the which, long gentlemen look funny in a kilt. Now let us try again, Mr. Ogilvie, for the sake of the 114th. About...turn! Quick...march. Left-right-left...’alt. About...turn. Right marker.”

  *

  James Ogilvie knew very well that it was inexcusable that he should put up such a showing the day before the passing-out parade. There had been so many times when he had felt the army was not, after all, for him. He was perhaps too dreamy ever to become a man of action, to lead men confidently in battle. At his prep school he had never liked games for one thing—to his father’s dismay—and in today’s army there was beginning to be quite an insistence on games. The army was changing rapidly and the old type of blood and guts officer—like Ogilvie’s own father and grandfather, like His Royal Highness and his horse at Inkerman—was on the way out, though they still lingered in high places. Ogilvie wished he could sort out his own mind. His ideal concept of a military officer was frankly someone with a dash of that blood and guts outlook, though he was pretty sure he personally could never have stomached all that had gone with it—the floggings, the squalors of barrack-room life, the injustices of arrogance. His concept, however, was decidedly not that of a cricketing, footballing officer. But there had been that emphasis on games at Sandhurst and he had been the odd man out once again, the loner among the muddied oafs. And drill movements failed to fascinate him as much as C.S.M. Apps and the Colour-Serjeants expected them to. Yet all the same he had the army in his blood—to some extent he was a romantic on this point—and there were the aspects of it that appealed to him very strongly indeed. Among these were its traditions, the stories of the regiments and corps that made up the most far-flung and victorious army of modern times. It was an army now comfortably astride a magnificent Empire, ruling the heathen in the name of the Queen-Empress—that little old lady in black, with the bun and the arrogant bearing who, when his father had been commanding the depot in Invermore, had once bidden him to tea in the castle at Balmoral. James had been scared stiff and hadn’t been able to open his mouth when Her Majesty had barked a condescending word at him, and his father and mother had been scarlet with embarrassment, though normally it took a good deal to embarrass his irascible father. James Ogilvie loved martial music—even enjoyed marching when behind the crash and thunder of the brass. There was something that stirred his very soul as he thought of the days that had gone, of the men who had marched away into history behind the regimental colours, carrying the flag of England to a glory that, unlike them, was immortal. He thrilled to the valour and sacrifice that had built the Empire, forged it by fire into what it was today—solid, prosperous, utterly and finally unassailable. The pride of it, the pride of being one of a gallant company of men, weighed very heavily in the balance and he knew inside himself that, despite his doubts, he could never have been anything other in life than an officer of the 114th Highlanders, lately commanded by both his father and his grandfather before him.

  Next day, as the passing-out company led the parade past the elderly charger-mounted figure of the Duke of Cambridge—the old man who was soon to hand over as Commander-in-Chief to Lord Wolseley—James Ogilvie’s heart beat fast with an increased sense of that inherited pride of soldiery. It seemed to him, as the band crashed out The British Grenadiers so that the music beat through a heat haze and echoed off the yellow-white walls of the college, that here on the parade at Sandhurst the heart of the Empire beat, that here were gathered, somewhere in the mists, the ghosts of men from a splendid past to encourage those who, once gazetted to their regiments, would carry the honour and the glory on into the future, those who held in fresh hands the sacred traditions so dearly bought, those who would widen the scope of British might till all the map were red. Stiffly Ogilvie marched past the old Commander-in-Chief, eyes front behind the Senior Under-Officer of A Company, a young man bound for the Coldstream Guards and a life of ceremonial and palace duties, debutantes and London seasons, hunting, grouse-shooting, tea-parties in duchesses’ town houses. Such a life made no appeal to James Ogilvie; he knew that much at least, though he had not yet arrived at the happy state of knowing just what it was he did want of his chosen career. But there would be no London seasons for James Ogilvie for many a year, for the 114th were presently under orders for India. Among other things this would mean he would see his parents again for the first time in three years. His father, now a major-general, was on the staff of Southern Army H.Q. at Ootacamund. The prospect of seeing his mother was delightful, of seeing his father both welcome and unwelcome. Ogilvie’s father set high standards and expected his son to contribute more honour to the family’s name. And he was much inclined to outspokenness, especially when in a tantrum. This tended to make James even more unsure of himself, of his ability to make a success of his profession of arms.

  But meanwhile he could savour the moment, the present. There was the band and the pageantry and the dream. And that afternoon, when the passing-out ceremony was over for another year, Company Serjeant-Major Apps addressed him.

  “He’s still alive an’ breathing, Mr. Ogilvie! Couldn’t never ’ave clapped eyes on you, he couldn’t! I thank you from the bottom of me ’eart for not letting me down, Mr. Ogilvie. Maybe you’ll make an officer yet. And here’s me very best wishes that you do. Sir!” His right arm cut a swathe through the air in front of Ogilvie’s nose and the hand quivered in front of his forehead. “You’ve got the makings in you, spite of all I’ve ever said. You’re not such a block’ead as some.”

  *

  Two days later Ogilvie had been in London, staying with a friend, a Guards subaltern who maintained rooms in Half Moon Street off Piccadilly. Ogilvie had fourteen days’ leave before he was due to report to the 114th’s depot at Invermore, and he filled those fourteen days with late risings, with rowing on the river at Henley, with expensive dinners, and a round of the shows and the music halls. He enjoyed the music halls especially, liked the full-throated, uninhibited roaring out of such songs as Soldiers of the Queen, or The Girl I Left Behind Me. In a curious way it made him feel he was embarking for active service, that the singing was, as it were, for him personally—even though he was naturally wearing mufti his profession would be fairly obvious. He found this a satisfactory feeling, but it worried him nevertheless, for he was seeing himself
already for what he had not yet in fact become, and that was altogether too easy a way to be a soldier, too vicarious. It was like a non-combatant, a regimental paymaster say, revelling in old ladies’ admiration at a tea-party. He felt the need to be blooded, to test himself. There were other things he had to be blooded in as well, and one of them was liquor. One night during that leave he had far too much champagne, followed by far too much brandy at the Cafe Royal, and Jackie Harrington, his friend, took him home senseless in a hansom. In the morning he felt like death and vowed never to repeat that particular experience. And another night Mr. Harrington took him rather furtively behind the scenes at the Gaiety Theatre and introduced him to a girl named Freddie something-or-other, and they all went on to a curious sort of club in Soho, and then Freddie came back to Harrington’s rooms and was still there in the morning...all night James Ogilvie had known she was there and he’d had almost no sleep as a result, letting his imagination—and at that stage of his life it was only imagination—run riot. He felt intense desire, and a blind envy of Harrington, and when the girl had gone he couldn’t stop himself asking a few immature questions.

  “You—er—you’re not thinking of marrying Freddie, are you, Harrington?” he asked.

  Harrington burst out in a roar of highly astonished laughter. “A girl of that class, a show girl? Good God, Ogilvie, do have a little sense!”

  “But you...she was here all night.”

  “So she was indeed, you ass! Damn good at it too.” Harrington twiddled at his moustache. He was a good-looking man, with a firm thrustful chin and a high forehead, and had a very well cultivated guards officer laugh. “Isn’t it time you grew up, old man?”

  “What d’you mean?”

  Harrington looked at him with a twinkle in his eye. “I mean,” he said deliberately, putting a match to his pipe, “a man doesn’t need to marry every girl he sleeps with. One couldn’t anyway, in this ridiculous country. Women of that class are different. One doesn’t compromise a girl of family, naturally—it’s just not done, I’d agree—same as you wouldn’t put one of your own household’s maids on her back, though it’s quite all right to bed someone else’s. You know that. Girls like Freddie are, well, fair game. They’re already compromised!”