The Siege of Krishnapur

The Collector looked up, puzzled. “Why d’you show me this?”

“That was his wife!” cried the Doctor triumphantly. “Don’t you see, he takes notes all the time. Nothing will stop him Even his wife! Nothing!”

Again, as the Collector put on his pith helmet and gave the brim a twitch, came the monotonous, desperate chanting he had heard before.

14

From the begi

While the Collector’s eyes had been lifted to the sky a loathsome creature had approached him along the ground; it was the hideous pariah dog, looking for Fleury. Since the Collector had last set eyes on the animal a ricocheting musket ball had taken off part of its rat-like tail, which now terminated in a repulsive ru

As the Collector raised his eyes again for a last, inspirational glance at the flag before moving on, a dreadful smell of putrefaction was borne to his nostrils and he thought: “I must have something done about that tonight before we have an epidemic.” This smell was no longer coming from the bodies of men and horses rotting outside the ramparts as it had done for the first few days; these, thank Heaven, had now been cleaned by the kites, vultures and jackals; it came from the dead horses and artillery bullocks that lay scattered over the Residency lawns and gardens, hit by the random shot and shells that unceasingly poured into the compound. But there was also a powerful and atrocious smell from behind the wall he had built to shield the croquet court, which lay between the Residency and Dunstaple’s house. Here it was that Mr Rayne, aided by Eurasians from the opium agency, conducted the slaughter and butchery of the Commissariat sheep, commandeered at the outbreak of the mutiny from the Krishnapur Mutton Club on the Collector’s instructions.

The smell, which was so atrocious that the butchers had to work with cloths tied over their noses, came from rejected offal which they were in the habit of throwing over the wall in the hope that the vultures would deal with it. But the truth was that the scavengers of the district, both birds and animals, were already thoroughly bloated from the results of the first attack … the birds were so heavy with meat that they could hardly launch themselves into the air, the jackals could hardly drag themselves back to their lairs. And so, out of the garrison’s sight, but not out of range of their noses, a mountain of corruption had steadily built up. Combined with the animals scattered on the lawns, the smells from the hospital and from the privies, and from the human beings living in too close contact with insufficient water for frequent bathing, an olfactory background, silent but terrible, was unrolling itself behind the siege.

The back wall of Dr Dunstaple’s house, which like the Residency was built of wafer-like red bricks, had been amazingly pocked by the shot which dashed against it; hardly a square foot of smooth surface remained now to be seen. In some places round shot had smashed through one wall after another so that if you had been unwise enough to raise your head to the appropriate angle you could have followed their passage through a series of rooms. After one such journey, the Collector had been told, a shot had finally burst through the wall into the Doctor’s drawing-room on the other side of the building, scattering candlesticks and dropping them to roll along the carpet, right up to where Mrs Dunstaple and a group of disobedient ladies playing truant from the suffocating air of the cellar were cowering under the piano. From these larger holes in the wall Enfield rifles bristled and occasionally orange flowers blossomed from their muzzles; the wall in the room behind them had been painted black so that no movement could be seen against them.

From the house a shallow trench had been dug out towards the crescent of earthworks behind which the ca

“Are they mining?”

“Yes. We’re digging a listening gallery.” Cutter described in a whisper what was happening: at the head of the gallery a man sat and worked with a short-handled pick or crowbar to loosen the earth; just behind him sat another man with an empty wine case to fill up with the loose earth; when full, this was drawn back by a rope.

The sepoys here were very close and it was thought inevitable that sooner or later they would begin mining, given the number of men at their disposal. For several nights the Collector had stayed up until dawn reading his military manuals by the light of an oil-lamp in his study to instruct himself in the art of military mining; only Cutter of the officers, two Cornish privates from Captainganj, and one or two Sikhs, had had any experience of mining before. What an advantage that knowledge can be stored in books! The knowledge lies there like hermetically sealed provisions waiting for the day when you may need a meal. Surely what the Collector was doing as he pored over his military manuals, was proving the superiority of the European way of doing things, of European culture itself. This was a culture so flexible that whatever he needed was there in a book at his elbow. An ordinary sort of man, he could, with the help of an oil-lamp, turn himself into a great military engineer, a bishop, an explorer or a General overnight, if the fancy took him. As the Collector pored over his manuals, from time to time rubbing his tired eyes, he knew that he was using science and progress to help him out of his difficulties and he was pleased. The inventions on his desk, the carriage which supplied its own track and the effervescent drinking vessel, watched him in silent admiration as he worked.

The Collector had learned that there are two cardinal rules of defensive mining … One is that your branch galleries (whose purpose is for listening to the approaching enemy miners) should run obliquely forward in order not to present their sides to the action of enemy mines … The other is that the distance between the ends of the branch galleries should be such that the enemy ca

The trouble with these cardinal rules, though wonderful in their way, was that they required a great deal of digging. No doubt they would have served perfectly if there had been enough men in the garrison to dig listening galleries in the approved ma