Red Runs the Helmand. Patrick Mercer

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СКАЧАТЬ Reynolds’s tunic with both hands, dragging at the wounded officer who was feebly kicking out with the toes of his riding boots while trying to control his rearing horse. Keenan was about to strike a living target for the first time but, despite hours of practice, every bit of training deserted him. His victim was facing away from him, intent upon Reynolds in the noise and confusion that overwhelmed them all – a perfect mark for a deep stab with the point of the sword. Such a strike, Keenan had been taught, would be effective and economical, yet blunt instinct took over as he swept his tulwar over his left shoulder and let go a great scything cut that almost unbalanced him.

      The carefully sharpened steel hit the foot soldier in two places at once. The base of the blade struck the man just above the left ear, his woollen cap taking some of the power out of the blow, but not before a great wound was opened on his scalp. At the same time, the forward part of the sword sliced obliquely through the Durani’s left hand, neatly cutting off a couple of fingers and carving a wide flap of skin under which the bones showed whitely. The blow had been awkward, clumsy, and his opponent, though hurt and shouting in pain, still clung to Reynolds with fanatical determination.

      ‘Use the point, sahib, finish him properly.’ Next to Keenan in the plunging mêlée, the daffadar was jabbing at his own countrymen expertly, while remaining detached enough to guide his British officer.

      Pulling the hilt of his sword back over Kala’s rump, Keenan lunged hard at his shrieking opponent. The point of the weapon hit the man under his armpit and pushed obliquely through his major organs with surprising ease. One moment the tribesman had been wounded, but alive and dangerous; at the next he fell away, slipping easily off Keenan’s blade into the cloud of dust and thrashing hoofs below, a look of horror on his bristly face.

      So, that was what it was like to kill, thought Keenan. He glanced at the corpse – it was already shrunken and shapeless in death – but any pang of guilt had no time to develop as the daffadar bawled, ‘Shabash, sahib!’ at him and ran yet another of the enemy through the shoulder to send the man corkscrewing back behind them and right on to the lance of a sowar riding with the second rank. Keenan knew the lad, a well-muscled youngster who’d come down from Rawalpindi to enlist last year. He was a wrestler and now every bit of sinew was put into a blow that buried his spear deep in the wounded tribesman’s belly, finishing the brutal work that the daffadar had started. Keenan glanced at the cavalryman as he brought his weapon back to the ‘recover’. There was no regret, no sympathy, just a vulpine grin behind his beard – a soldier satisfied with a job well done.

      The immediate danger was over. Keenan watched as the Durani infantry loped away from his men, dodging among the brush and trees, one or two pausing to fire but most running hard to regroup among the buildings from which they had emerged. Even as Keenan took all this in, however, even as he looked back at the bundles of dusty rags that had been his enemy and the odd khaki figure sprawled beside them, he realised that a badly cut-about, barely conscious Captain Reynolds was being helped down from his saddle by two soldiers.

      ‘What are your orders, sahib?’ Rissaldar Singh, the senior of the squadron’s two native officers, stood before him, a fleck of blood on his horse’s neck but otherwise as unruffled as if he were on parade.

      ‘Orders?’ Keenan answered bemusedly, wondering why one of the other troop officers should have come to him for guidance.

      ‘Yes, sahib, orders. You’re in charge now that Reynolds sahib is hurt,’ Singh continued calmly.

      ‘Yes . . . yes, of course I am.’ Despite Keenan’s lack and Singh’s depth of experience, as the only British officer left in the squadron, command automatically devolved upon him. Now he looked at the enemy. He could see a great crowd of them, probably two hundred strong, he guessed, turning to face his troops from the mud-walled hamlet that lay a furlong away over open, tussocky ground. Even as he watched he could see their confidence returning: they had started to shout defiance and fire wild shots towards the Scinde Horse.

      ‘Let’s be at ’em, then. Get your troops shaken out either side of mine beyond this nullah . . .’ Keenan pointed to the shallow ditch immediately to their front, but stopped as Singh shook his head.

      ‘No, sahib, we are too few – look.’

      Keenan took stock of his new command. Singh was right: not only had the squadron lost its commander and several men, but many of the horses had been cut by swords and knives or grazed by bullets and all were blown. Most of the men had lost or broken their lances and two score simply could not hope to repeat the success of their earlier action, especially now that surprise was lost and the enemy had planted himself among protective walls and enclosures.

      ‘The colonel will want to finish them with the other squadrons – we must hold them with our carbines, sahib,’ Singh suggested, with quiet insistence.

      ‘Aye, you’re right, sahib. Trumpeter . . .’ But there was no one to obey Keenan – he’d forgotten that the signaller had been one of the first to fall. ‘Dismount, prepare to skirmish,’ he shouted, the command being taken up by the NCOs who tongue-lashed the dazed troopers off their horses and forward with their weapons.

      Keenan looked away to his right where the main body of the rearguard had been concentrated before the fight. Again Singh seemed to have been correct: he could see the remaining two squadrons of the Scinde Horse wheeling amid their own cloud of dust, shaking out into line abreast, while the company of the 29th Beloochis were trotting off to a flank to give covering fire, he guessed, with their long Snider rifles. Their own carbine fire, if quick and accurate, would gall the enemy just as the rest of Colonel Malcolmson’s horsemen charged home.

      ‘Squadron, load.’ The men had flung themselves down behind any cover they could find and now they rammed cartridges into the breech of their weapons and clicked the breech-traps closed. ‘Two fifty . . . aim high.’ Keenan reckoned the range to be a little less than three hundred yards. The men adjusted their sights. ‘Fire!’ The snub-nosed rifles crashed out, pleasingly together, immediately obscuring his view of the target with a dense grey cloud.

      ‘Reload.’ The gentle breeze cleared some of the smoke, allowing Keenan to see where his men’s bullets had whipped and stung the enemy. Where, just seconds before, there had been a dense packet of defiant tribesmen, now wounded men were struggling on the ground and their chanting had been replaced by moans of pain.

      ‘Fire!’ Again, the carbines banged out, and the rifles of the 29th joined in from way over on his troop’s right. Behind the bank of muzzle smoke, Keenan could see the hundred and twenty lancers of the other two squadrons gathering speed as they trotted, then cantered up the gentle slope towards the village.

      ‘Engage by troops.’ Keenan wondered if this was the right thing to do or whether it would have been better to continue to volley fire.

      ‘Shabash, sahib.’ The daffadar beamed delightedly at his officer as he encouraged his soldiers’ frantic marksmanship. ‘See them run.’

      And, through the smoke, Keenan could see how the Durani formation was beginning to disintegrate. Lashed by bullets, with more and more warriors writhing on the ground, a steady trickle of men was edging away into the cover of the village. Then the remaining two Scinde Horse squadrons charged home. The buildings and walls took some of the momentum away from the assault, but as Keenan watched, and Miran capered with delight beside him, the cavalrymen began their lethal trade.

      Lances stabbed and curved steel hacked, poked and slashed; some tribesmen resisted bravely, trying to meet the terrible blades with shields and muskets, but most just melted away through the village, running for all they were worth into the hills beyond.

      ‘Fire at will!’ It СКАЧАТЬ