Red Runs the Helmand

‘Shukria, bahadur,’ gasped Keenan, as the corpse dropped away. The lance daffadar seemed almost as surprised by the perfection of the blow as the officer was to be in one piece.

The charge slowed and broke, as the horsemen fell upon their enemies, knots of cavalrymen soon surrounded by a sea of Duranis who had quickly recovered from the crashing impact. Keenan found himself in a sandy gully filled with pushing, yelling tribesmen, his own troopers hacking left and right in a desperate attempt to force the enemy swordsmen back.

‘More than we thought, sahib,’ said Miran, almost matter-of-factly. ‘I hope the colonel sahib has got those owls in B Squadron ready to come and help.’ The last few words were said with a grunt – the daffadar had abandoned his lance and drawn his sword. Now the blade sickled through a sheepskin poshteen and deep into the shoulder of an older, bearded warrior, who quit the fight with a yelp of pain.

‘Aye, Daffadar, but they’ll need to be quick – look to Captain Reynolds, won’t you?’ Keenan saw his squadron leader just a few paces further up the nullah engulfed by a dozen attackers. The trumpeter – who was taught to protect the officer when at close quarters like this – seemed to be down. Keenan thought he’d seen one of the horses roll on to its side as muskets and matchlocks banged all around. Then, at first, Reynolds had slashed all about him, driving the Duranis back, but Keenan saw one bolder than the rest who threw down his shield and musket, drew his knife and scrambled forward. The tribesman had come from the captain’s rear, and the long knife poked hard over Reynolds’s rolled blanket and darted into the small of his back. The blade disappeared and re-emerged, stained red, and, in an instant, the officer had gone from a fighting man to a semi-cripple: he dropped his sword and yelled in pain, gripping the pommel of his saddle as the rest of the foe closed in and tried to drag him to the ground.

With no further words, the daffadar had dug his spurs into his mount, the pony kicking up the grit as she surged towards the mob. Keenan did the same, Kala barging one man out of her way with her left shoulder before putting her master right among the struggling throng.

Just in front of Keenan, a young Durani had thrown down his sword and seized 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 was the last command that Keenan gave in his first action. As his men blazed at fleeing targets, he took his own carbine, which, until then, he hadn’t thought to fire, but now he found a mark. One Durani was moving well from cover to cover, firing a captured Snider at Malcolmson’s men as they hunted down the few who still resisted. Keenan watched his man shelter behind a bush, topple a trooper from his saddle with one shot, then rise and scuttle back to his next position. But as the man broke into a trot, Keenan put the metal V of his foresight on the knot of his target’s belt, aimed just a fraction more to the left to allow for the time of flight of the round and gently squeezed the trigger. The warrior dropped like a shot rabbit, falling towards Keenan as the lead ploughed through his flesh. There was not even a flicker of life in him: the half-inch lump of lead had ripped it from him.

He’s trying to be as modest as he can be, but I know that Sam was in the thick of it – word soon got back to me, especially as he had ended up commanding a squadron when things got tight. Firing his carbine alongside the men . . . I did the same in my first action – well, almost. But I don’t see any of the self-doubt that beset me: there’s a poise about the lad that I never had and which I’ve never noticed in him before – must get it from his mother. I expect I’ve been blinded by setting Billy’s course for him, making sure that the Morgan name is held high. Well, much good may that do, for both my boys are out here in Afghanistan now – though I doubt that Billy will get the same chance to earn his spurs that Sam’s had. It’ll take Billy an age to live down that business in Kandahar with the child.

‘Well, anyway, Father, that was months ago. We’ve seen a little more skirmishing since then, but nothing to compare with Khusk-i-Nakud. D’you think there’s likely to be another campaign this season, or will we be going back to India?’ asked Sam.

The boy even holds a glass like I do, both hands curled around the base,

‘I doubt there’ll be any more fighting, Sam. All the spunk’s gone out of things now that hand-wringing Gladstone has got in. Mark my words, if we don’t show the Afghans who’s in charge, the bloody Russians will be in Kabul, like rats up a gutter, and then we’ll see just how safe India’s borders are. But I expect we’ll sweat out the hot weather here and then take a gentlemanly trek back through the passes some time in late summer. I think you may have seen all the action you’re likely to get just for the moment, my lad. Just be glad your hide’s in one piece.’

‘Aye, Father, you’re right. A nice silver medal and a notch on my hilt are probably as much as I want. Some of the other officers are full of piss and vinegar – they can’t wait for the next round – but a little swordplay with an angry Durani goes a long way in my book.’

I looked at my first son and liked what I saw. It would have been so easy to give his superior officer – and his father – some sort of devil-may-care, God-rot-Johnny-Afghan patter. But, no, he’d tasted blood and once was quite enough for him. I admired his frankness. Mind you, I wonder if I really did expect a quiet summer and a long walk, or was I just trying to calm the lad’s expectations? If I’d really thought that things in Afghanistan were all but over that spring, I was sorely disappointed.

Chapter Four - The March

I’d hung around in garrisons before, but nothing ever like this. In Dublin, Pembroke Dock, Bombay and Karachi, you could establish some sort of routine, some sort of rhythm, to your work and have as good a social life as the people, the shooting and the hunting would allow. Then, when man oeuvres, postings or even campaigns beckoned, you could gear yourself up, jildi the men, tighten belts and set about whatever it was that Horse Guards wanted with gusto.

But Kandahar was debilitating. We weren’t at war yet we were; we were expecting trouble yet we weren’t. The rumours about a troublesome Ayoob Khan in Herat on the Persian border, which had held so much sway when I assumed command of the brigade in April, more than a month ago now, waxed and waned. Meanwhile, fighting was still going on in the north and the town was just as uneasy and bloody unpleasant as it had always been. Patrols continued to be knocked around, scuffles were frequent, and yet we had to pretend that everything was sweetness and light with the wali and his scabrous troops.

At least the dithering gave me time to get to know the units in the brigade and to push them into some sort of shape. By early May I’d visited the two companies of the 66th who were detached to protect the lines of communication at Khelati-Ghilzai, eighty-five miles away on the Kabul road, and got a good idea of how the land lay to the north-east. More importantly, I’d come to realise how I would miss them in the event of a serious fight around Kandahar. Their detachment meant that Galbraith only had six companies under his command, and these four hundred and fifty men were the only European troops – other than the Gunners – that I had to my name.

But the 66th were a good lot. Even though Galbraith had never seen active service before, he’d had a fair old time with the regiment and established a pretty firm grip on them. I’d already noticed how many long-service men they had with them and my son’s sergeant – Kelly – was typical of their senior NCOs. I was also impressed with Beresford-Pierce, Billy’s captain commanding H Company. He and his colour sergeant – James – seemed as close as McGucken and I had ever been in the old days, and it was this company that Galbraith chose to demonstrate to me the 66th’s skill at arms.

The British battalion was the only unit to be armed with the Martini-Henry breech-loader; they’d had it for several years now and were thoroughly proficient with a weapon whose rate of fire could be devastating in the right hands. Galbraith and his musketry officer had trained the soldiers to fire eight volleys a minute; a high number of men were good enough shots to have qualified for the extra pay that a certified marksman received. As long as the weapon didn’t overheat and fail to eject a spent cartridge case, each rifleman would be crucial if the sort of fighting that Roberts’s troops had experienced up north came our way.

The only fly in Galbraith’s ointment seemed to be his men’s thirst. The Temperance Movement had got a real grip in India with, in my experience, most British units having at least a hundred men or so who had forsworn the bottle. But there were many fewer in the 66th, and I noticed that the regimental prison was always full of lads doubling about in full kit in the heat of the day with an energetic provost corporal in close attendance. Still, there were worse problems, and while there continued to be clashes between the regiment and the toughs in town, there were no repeats of the incident in which Billy had been involved in April.

But when I managed to get some time with my native battalions, I discovered how much work there was to do. The 1st Bombay Grenadiers came with a high reputation for steadiness earned in the Mutiny – but that was a long time ago now – and they had done well in Aden in ’65, but I didn’t like the way that my brigade major, Heath, talked about them. He’d been their adjutant, after all, and whenever we discussed them he would mention nothing except their steadiness on parade and the various complicated devices they used to ensure that they all took a graduated pace when each company wheeled from column to line. He never mentioned their musketry or their ability to cover miles without a man dropping out and seemed oddly ignorant about which tribe and caste each man came from.

But that was better than the open suspicion that swirled around the other battalion, the 30th Bombay Native Infantry, or Jacob’s Rifles. They had made quite a good start in my eyes, being more ready for the field than their counterparts, yet they were a new regiment, having been raised after the Mutiny, and had no battle honours to hang on their colours. On top of this, the vast majority of their recruits were Pathans, the very same folk from whom we had most trouble in Kandahar. As was the way with the Army, someone had decided that the loyalty of Jacob’s Rifles was in doubt, so everyone treated them like pariahs, yet Sam’s 3rd Scinde Horse – also mainly Pathani – were never criticised for the same thing, not in my hearing, anyway.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the composition of both battalions, I was more concerned with how they would perform in a fight. Since the Mutiny, it was our habit to keep the Indian units equipped with the last generation of small-arms rather than the most modern. So it was that the Grenadiers and the Jacobs both carried the .577 Snider-Enfield conversion rifles. These were the old muzzle-loaders that I had known in my young day, with a trap affair let into the breech and a metal cartridge and bullet fixed together as one neat round. The result was good enough in well-trained hands, allowing six volleys to be fired per minute with accurate individual fire up to about six hundred paces. But the Snider was prone to jam and fouling and it took a lot of practice before a soldier became really proficient with it. Also, many of our Afghan enemies had the same weapon, which meant that the only advantage we might enjoy would come from stern discipline and plenty of practice.

My strongest card, for sure, were the six guns of E Battery, B Brigade Royal Horse Artillery. The men were smart and sharp, every horse I saw was beautifully groomed and a proper source of pleasure to its driver, while the rifled nine-pounders were lethally well kept.

‘Them fuckers’ll soon sort out Johnny Afghan, sir.’ I let Lynch, my trumpeter, who was on loan from E Battery, regale me with the tools of his trade. ‘Aye, we can hit a sixpence up to three an’ a half thousand paces with high-explosive or shrapnel rounds, we can, sir.’ Lynch was bursting with pride, delighted to be back among his pals with ‘his’ general under his wing. I allowed him to think that I was a complete tyro in such matters. ‘An’ the lads can get off four rounds a minute once they’ve found the range.’

Lynch was right to be proud of his guns and his battery, but our nine-pounders were still muzzle-loading and slow compared with the new breech-loaders that were coming into service. Now I’d seen what well-handled guns could do, especially to native troops, but there was a nasty rumour that Ayoob Khan had rifled guns like we did, and further intelligence to suggest that Russian advisers were to be seen openly in Herat. I preferred to forget how bloody good the Russian gunners had been in the Crimea.

Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of this lot, I managed to get them out of cantonments for two full man oeuvres by mid-May, and saw that they seemed to be settling down. I was still fretting over the compatibility of my two native battalions with my British one when rumours began to filter into the lines of a bloody little affair in which the 29th Baloochis and some of the 66th, who were detached, had been involved near Khelat-i-Ghilzai. I was called to Primrose’s headquarters with the other brigade commanders to be told what was in the wind.

‘Gentlemen, three days ago, on the second of May, a wing of the Twenty-ninth Bombay and a half-company of the Sixty-sixth under Tanner’s command were ambushed on Shahbolan Hill. They’d been out on a punitive expedition along the lines of communication towards Kabul and were returning to Khelat-i-Ghilzai when they got bounced. Now, as it happened, none of our men was killed and we found fourteen enemy bodies.’ I hated the way that Primrose strutted about while he told us this. A starched white liner stuck out above the collar of his neat khaki drill while he paced to and fro, hands clasped behind his back, apparently relishing the idea of sudden death. ‘But there’s far more to this little skirmish than meets the eye. McGucken, would you take over, please?’

‘Aye, General, thank you.’ The political officer stood up from his camp chair, towering over the scrawny form of our commander. I hadn’t seen much of Jock in the intervening weeks for we’d both been busy. I’d knocked into him as he was riding out towards Kabul with an escort of native troopers, himself wearing Afghan dress and looking very much the part with the beard he’d grown, but we’d had no time for the ‘swally’ we’d been promising each other.

Now he cleared his throat in a way that took me back more years than I cared to remember, swept the room with an uncompromising eye and continued. ‘Gentlemen, I canna pretend that intelligence is as reliable as I would like. Simla has been insisting that Ayoob Khan’s troops are as good as useless because they continue to have major differences with one another. Sadly, however, this affair up near Khelat-iGhilzai is the first real proof I’ve had that Simla’s talking rot.’ McGucken’s suggestion that our headquarters in India was incompetent – which we all suspected – raised a chuckle. ‘No, this was a determined attack by Herati troops. It was well planned but was dealt with by Colonel Tanner’s quick thinking and the determination of our men. Some of the bodies are believed to be from one of the Afghan regular units that were involved in the murder of Sir Louis Cavagnari last year.’ This prompted an uneasy muttering among the audience. ‘It’s the first real demonstration of how far afield Ayoob Khan’s men are able to operate – and his intention to destabilise the situation here in Kandahar even further.

‘You’ll all be aware of the guns that we presented to the wali recently.’ McGucken looked round the brigade commanders to assess their reaction: there had been all sorts of moaning about the decision to give Sher Ali Khan a battery of brass smooth-bores. Primrose had backed McGucken, whose idea it had been, suggesting that the guns would be seen as a gesture of trust that might lead to greater co-operation from the wali, but I thought back to my brief meeting with Sher Ali last month and his own lack of confidence in his troops. I didn’t like the idea of giving away gun-metal that might very well be turned upon its donors. ‘Well, that ordnance seems to have served as a key that’s unlocked our host’s lips. I always suspected that those who might be persuaded to talk to us were being told to keep their traps shut by the rebellious elements in the wali’s forces. Well, the wali gave the guns into his son’s safe keeping and that young fellow, some of yous gentlemen’ – McGucken’s speech dropped back into pure Glasgow only occasionally – ‘will have met him already, has suddenly become much more talkative. He tells me that Ayoob Khan plans to move out of Herat in the middle of June, in about five weeks’ time. He will try to make us believe that his forces will skirt north of us and go on to Kabul, where he and several thousand troops will then do a spot of gentle lobbying. His real intention, however, will be to fall upon Kandahar.’