Red Runs the Helmand. Patrick Mercer
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Morgan shot a look at Sergeant Kelly, whose level stare merely told him that he, too, expected an officer-type answer to a wholly reasonable question.
‘Good point, Battle.’ Morgan paused as he measured his reply. ‘It isn’t like the proper war that was being fought last year. We’re here, as you say, to help the wali, but his own troops are unreliable and the town is full of badmashes we need to know about, and then report back to the political officer. Now, if there are no more questions . . .’ Morgan was suddenly aware that he and his patrol had been hanging around for far too long.
‘Yessir. What do we do if we see a Ghazi, sir?’ Thompson, belt now tightened, chirped up.
‘Most unlikely, Thompson. They’ll melt away at the sight of us,’ replied Morgan.
Thompson wasn’t to be put off. ‘They didn’t with the Fifty-Ninth, sir, did they? Why—’
‘Yes, well, we’re not the Fifty-Ninth, are we? This lot have heard that the Sixty-sixth are here and they won’t want to take us on. Now, split into pairs, ten paces between each. Sar’nt Kelly, bring up the rear, please. Follow me.’ With that, Morgan’s little command stepped out of the tented lines of the 66th, through a gate in the barbed-wire perimeter and away up the gentle incline three-quarters of a mile towards the walls, shanties and sun-lit pall of woodsmoke that was Kandahar.
Morgan walked as casually as he could among his soldiers. The men were moving either side of the pot-holed road in what the Army liked to describe as ‘staggered file’ – odd numbers on the left and even numbers on the right, no two men in a line with each other. That, he thought, was meant to make a random jezail shot less likely to strike more than one man, but he could see how the troops tended to close in on each other for comfort and reassurance.
‘No, lads, keep spread out. Don’t bunch up, keep your distance,’ Morgan said, as lightly as he could, trying not to let his tension show in his voice. He looked at the men that some mistaken fate had placed under his command. They were all polite to him, almost painfully so, trusting him because of the stars he wore on his collar and his accent, more than any proof of competence he had so far shown. Yet he was surprised by how easy he found their company. Sandhurst had told him to expect the worst, that while most of his men would be good, trustworthy sorts, a few would be out to mock him and dun him of every penny he might be foolish enough to carry around. He had identified no one like that. True, Battle was a bit of a handful – he’d come the wiseacre a couple of times over the young officer’s Protestantism – but Morgan had managed to slap him down good-naturedly enough.
But, looking at Private Battle, Billy Morgan remembered how his father would tease the Catholics both back home in Cork and in his countless stories about the old Army. Yet, while he pretended to be suspicious of their religion, his obvious fondness for what he called his Paddies shone through. Now the new Army, Morgan thought, had fewer of those Irishmen who’d been driven to take the shilling by the potato blight back in the forties and fifties, but those who had enlisted were good enough and fitted in well with the sturdy English lads that the 66th recruited from around their depot in Reading. No, even in the short space of time he’d spent with H Company, Morgan was beginning to understand the men, to enjoy their ready, irreverent humour (how had they referred to General Roberts in his vast, non-regulation sun-helmet when they saw his picture in the paper? ‘That little arse in the fuck-off hat’, wasn’t it?) and understand their values. How, he wondered, would he have managed if he’d been commissioned into one of the native regiments, like his half-brother, Sam Keenan? Everything would have been so foreign – and even if he’d managed to learn the language well enough to do his job, it would never have been possible, surely, to become really close to an Indian.
But, thought Billy Morgan, that would never have been the case for he was only ever going to serve in a smart regiment – his father would hear of nothing else. As a little boy he’d accepted, without questioning, that he would always get the best of everything while Sam would have what was left over. He could still remember when he was five years old and how bitter the older, bigger Sam had been at having to accept the smaller of the two ponies their father had bought for them. It was the first time Billy had really noticed any difference, but as he matured, he had seen how Mary, his step-mother, had protected the way in which Sam had been brought up in her Catholic Church.
His father had made a joke of it, laughing when Mary elongated the word ‘maas’ and crossing himself in faux-respect whenever something Roman was mentioned. And as Father thought that County Cork was far too much under the sway of the Pope, he would brook no suggestion that Billy should be sent to one of the local schools. Oh, no, they were good enough for Sam, but for Billy there should be nothing but the best: he was to be educated in England, at Sandhurst and then a good line regiment, just like his father.
He and his brother had seen little of each other. Only when Billy returned to Glassdrumman in the school holidays would they meet – and clash. Billy knew that Sam resented him and the preferential treatment he received, and on the few occasions that they were together as boys, and then as young men, he wasn’t slow to show it. Everything became a contest – no fish could be pulled from a stream or bird shot from a rainy sky without its becoming a test of manhood. At first Billy was always bettered by his bigger brother, who would challenge him to runs over the heather or bogs or turn a fishing trip into a swimming challenge across an icy lough, which he always lost. But as Billy grew, he began to win, so Sam ensured that the contests became more intense.
It was just before Sam had gone off to the Bombay Army, Billy remembered, that things had come to a head. He was home from school and Sam was full of piss and vinegar about his new adventure, full of brag about the Indians he would soon command and the glamour of that country. Then Billy had made some disparaging comment about native troops and the great Mutiny and Sam had retorted with something snide about Maude, Billy’s dead Protestant mother. Billy knew he was being daft, for he’d never known his mother – she had died in childbirth, allowing his father to marry again – and he loved his step-mother, Mary, but the sneer was too much and he had flown at his brother just outside the tack-room.
There hadn’t been much to it, really. Both boys were scraped and bruised by Billy’s first onslaught – he could feel the granite of the stableyard setts even now – before Finn the groom was pulling them apart and promising ‘a damn good leatherin’ to the pair o’ ye if you don’t stop it, so’. But, Finn’s intercession lay at the root of the trouble even now. Billy knew that if they’d been allowed to fight on, for them both to get the bile out of their systems, there might have been some settlement. Instead Finn had made them shake hands and Sam was away too early the next day for there to be any further rapprochement.
They’d not seen each other since that drizzly afternoon in Cork four years ago, but now Billy found himself at the end of the sun-baked earth, yet within spitting distance of the brother he’d hoped never to see again. The brother, Billy thought, who’d chosen to keep his own father’s name – well, God rot Sam Keenan, and the unlucky sods he commands.
Morgan was pulled back from his thoughts by a trickle of tribesmen on their way to market. At first the soldiers passed one or two heavily laden donkeys swaying up the gritty main road towards the town, their loads of newly woven baskets towering above them. Their owners ignored Morgan’s and his men’s attempts at cheerful greetings, and as the traffic became denser the troops gave up any attempt to humour the population.
‘Close up at the rear, please, Sar’nt Kelly.’ Morgan had to yell down the street to be heard at the back of the patrol: the closer they got to the Bardurani Gate, the thicker the press of people and animals became.
‘Right, sir. Come on, you lot, shift yourselves,’ answered Kelly, provoking the last pair of soldiers to break into a shuffling run, their eyes wide at the medley of sights, colours and smells before them. Like his men, Morgan was fascinated by what he saw – camels carrying earthenware pots, herds of bleating goats and sheep, driven by boys with long, whippy sticks, mules and asses with rolled carpets and every manner of cheap, Birmingham-made pots and pans, even a dog pulling a crude cart that squeaked under a load of apricots. And the stink filled his nostrils. Animal piss and human sweat, aromatic smells from little charcoal braziers where