The Ravi Lancers by John Masters

Author:John Masters [Masters, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical Fiction
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

March 1915

Krishna Ram walked slowly down the ride, his hand deep thrust into the pockets of his British warm. It was ten o’clock in the morning, after a long night march which had brought the regiment up to its position in reserve, five miles behind the front line. The march had gone well. The men were hard and fit, the weather had improved, and brigade and division staffs were learning more about their business and there were no refugees to block, the road and make shambles of the staff tables.

They had arrived a few minutes before first light, spread out in the wood here, set up their bivouacs, and promptly gone to sleep--again, a mark of the trained professional soldier. Krishna Ram had made the march half drunk, for he had shared a bottle of brandy with Sher Singh and Pahlwan Ram before starting out, and there had been extra nips from a bottle carried by Hanuman along the way, until the early hours. Now unpleasant fumes filled his head, which ached steadily. He would have liked to go to sleep, but he was on duty as Field Officer of the week and must wait till he had had the morning reports.

The wood was thin. Most of the trees had been shattered by heavy artillery during fighting here in November and December. The Ravi Lancers, having arrived in darkness, could not be seen by enemy observers on the high ground the other side of the valley, a good seven miles away. Nor could such observers see the other battalions of the brigade, though they were bivouacked more in the open behind and to the left rear of the Ravi Lancers. The other brigades of the division were in bivouac close behind in echelon right, also scattered in copses, woods, and farm buildings.

Krishna decided he’d have another drink. The bottle in Hanuman’s pack was only half empty; and there was another full one in his valise. Sohan Singh would get him more, somehow--as much as he wanted, any time. Sohan Singh was a marvel. A real bazaar babu. He licked his lips. He remembered the look Warren Bateman had given him when he went to RHQ at the end of the march to report the tail in, no stragglers. The CO had smelled the brandy on his breath, with a look of disgust, a look saying, the fellow’s running true to type, the educated native, drinking himself out of his funk.

He looked at the men asleep in the bivouacs, their boots sticking out; at the sentries standing guard over the rows of piled arms. They didn’t have any brandy to ... a low droning noise caught his wandering attention and he looked round, puzzled. No lorry could come into the quiet aisles of the ride, cut for the landowner’s pheasant shooting, for there was no motorable road into the wood. The noise increased and now he placed it. It came from the air. An aeroplane, of course! They had been becoming more and more common on the front since the winter weather began to break.

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