Part 23

What the Goorkhas and the English did will be seen later on. The heavy work lay with the horses, for they had to go far and pick their way clear of habitations. Many of the troopers were natives of that part of the world, ready and anxious to fight against their kin, and some of the officers had made private and unofficial excursions into those hills before. They crossed the border, found a dried river-bed, cantered up that, walked through a stony gorge, risked crossing a low hill under cover of the darkness, skirted another hill, leaving their hoof-marks deep in some ploughed ground, felt their way along another water-course, ran over the neck of a spur praying that no one would hear their horses grunting, and so worked on in the rain and the darkness till they had left Bersund and its crater of hills a little behind them, and to the left, and it was time to swing round. The ascent commanding the back of Bersund was steep, and they halted to draw breath in a broad level valley below the height. That is to say, the men reined up, but the horses, blown as they were, refused to halt. There was unchristian language, the worse for being delivered in a whisper, and you heard the saddles squeaking in the darkness as the horses plunged.

The subaltern at the rear of one troop turned in his saddle and said very softly:--

“Carter, what the blessed heavens are you doing at the rear? Bring your men up, man.”

There was no answer, till a trooper replied:--

“Carter Sahib is forward--not here. There is nothing behind us.”

“There is,” said the subaltern. “The squadron's walking on its own tail.”

Then the Major in command moved down to the rear, swearing softly and asking for the blood of Lieutenant Halley--the subaltern who had just spoken.

“Look after your rearguard,” said the Major. “Some of your infernal thieves have got lost. They're at the head of the squadron, and you're a several kinds of idiot.”

“Shall I tell off my men, sir?” said the subaltern sulkily, for he was feeling wet and cold.

“Tell 'em off!” said the Major. “Whip 'em off, by Gad! You're squandering them all over the place. There's a troop behind you now!”

“So I was thinking,” said the subaltern calmly. “I have all my men here, sir. Better speak to Carter.”

“Carter Sahib sends salaam and wants to know why the regiment is stopping,” said a trooper to Lieutenant Halley.

“Where under heaven is Carter,” said the Major.

“Forward with his troop,” was the answer.

“Are we walking in a ring, then, or are we the centre of a blessed brigade?” said the Major.

By this time there was silence all along the column. The horses were still; but, through the drive of the fine rain, men could hear the feet of many horses moving over stony ground.

“We're being stalked,” said Lieutenant Halley.

“They've no horses here. Besides they'd have fired before this,” said the Major. “It's--it's villagers' ponies.”

“Then our horses would have neighed and spoilt the attack long ago. They must have been near us for half an hour,” said the subaltern.

“Queer that we can't smell the horses,” said the Major, damping his finger and rubbing it on his nose as he sniffed up wind.

“Well, it's a bad start,” said the subaltern, shaking the wet from his overcoat. “What shall we do, sir?”

“Get on,” said the Major. “We shall catch it to-night.”

The column moved forward very gingerly for a few paces. Then there was an oath, a shower of blue sparks as shod hooves crashed on small stones, and a man rolled over with a jangle of accoutrements that would have waked the dead.

“Now we've gone and done it,” said Lieutenant Halley. “All the hillside awake and all the hillside to climb in the face of musketry-fire! This comes of trying to do night-hawk work.”

The trembling trooper picked himself up and tried to explain that his horse had fallen over one of the little cairns that are built of loose stones on the spot where a man has been murdered. There was no need to give reasons. The Major's big Australian charger blundered next, and the column came to a halt in what seemed to be a very graveyard of little cairns, all about two feet high. The manoeuvres of the squadron are not reported. Men said that it felt like mounted quadrilles without training and without the music; but at last the horses, breaking rank and choosing their own way, walked clear of the cairns, till every man of the squadron reformed and drew rein a few yards up the slope of the hill. Then, according to Lieutenant Halley, there was another scene very like the one which has been described. The Major and Carter insisted that all the men had not joined rank, and that there were more of them in the rear, clicking and blundering among the dead men's cairns. Lieutenant Halley told off his own troopers again and resigned himself to wait. Later on he said to me:

“I didn't much know and I didn't much care what was going on. The row of that trooper falling ought to have scared half the country, and I would take my oath that we were being stalked by a full regiment in the rear, and they were making row enough to rouse all Afghanistan. I sat tight, but nothing happened.”

The mysterious part of the night's work was the silence on the hillside. Everybody knew that the Gulla Kutta Mullah had his outpost-huts on the reverse side of the hill, and everybody expected, by the time that the Major had sworn himself into quiet, that the watchmen there would open fire. When nothing happened, they said that the gusts of the rain had deadened the sound of the horses, and thanked Providence. At last the Major satisfied himself (a) that he had left no one behind among the cairns, and (b) that he was not being taken in the rear by a large and powerful body of cavalry. The men's tempers were thoroughly spoiled, the horses were lathered and unquiet, and one and all prayed for the daylight.

They set themselves to climb up the hill, each man leading his mount carefully. Before they had covered the lower slopes or the breast-plates had begun to tighten, a thunderstorm came up behind, rolling across the low hills and drowning any noise less than that of cannon. The first flash of the lightning showed the bare ribs of the ascent, the hill-crest standing steely-blue against the black sky, the little falling lines of the rain, and, a few yards to their left flank, an Afghan watch-tower, two-storied, built of stone, and entered by a ladder from the upper story. The ladder was up, and a man with a rifle was leaning from the window. The darkness and the thunder rolled down in an instant, and, when the lull followed, a voice from the watch-tower cried, “Who goes there?”