Treachery in Tibet (9 page)

He leant forward again in emphasis. ‘General, I can train those men. Sikhs are not generally regarded as good horsemen, but they can learn. I have with me my man Jenkins—’

Macdonald interrupted. ‘The famous 352?’

Ah that was better! ‘Yes, 352 Jenkins. He was my regimental sergeant major in South Africa and gained a bar there to the Distinguished Conduct Medal he earned with me in the Sudan. He is a splendid horseman – a damned sight better than me, I assure you – and he trained all our men in the Transvaal. If you can get more men, Sikhs or whatever, and ponies I will guarantee to train them on the hoof, so to speak, and, given the help of Jenkins and your red-haired fellow, lead them – I hope well.’

His words hung in the air. Then, Macdonald removed the cigarette from his mouth and said: ‘I like the sound of it, Fonthill. It sounds to me as though you could be invaluable. But, you know,’ he stubbed out the cigarette, ‘you would have to have rank. Lieutenant colonel – how would that suit?’ He gave a rare smile. ‘A demotion, I fear, from your last post but probably the best we can do.’

‘That’s of no matter to me, General. I suppose that means that Jenkins must rejoin, too. Perhaps colour sergeant – we shall not exactly be cavalry, only Mounted Infantry?’

‘Very well. Now I must get K’s approval to this, because, although
I can promote, I can’t take in someone from outside the army and give him a position of such seniority without his permission. I’ll telegraph him. Mind you, I don’t think we need bother with uniforms out here. They can’t be seen under the
poshteens
and furs anyway. I will get on with all this now and also inform Ottley – he’s the young captain in charge of our so-called cavalry – that he’s got a new CO.’

Macdonald rose from his chair and extended his hand. ‘Now, if you will excuse me, for I have much to do. Good to have you with us, Fonthill.’

‘Thank you, General.’

Fonthill strode away feeling much happier in his mind. At least he had carved out a role for him and Jenkins to play – and one with which they were reasonably familiar. They would be independent to a large extent and not having to work under the sharp nose of Macdonald. He frowned. A strange fish, indeed! He must obviously be handled with care. So too would Ottley, the young Irishman. He would not take kindly to having a very irregular soldier imposed in command over him. Simon sighed. At least it would be an irregular who had earned the CB and Distinguished Service Order. Perhaps that would mollify him somewhat.

He found the flame-haired captain instructing his Sikhs on how to groom their horses correctly; a good sign. He introduced himself and immediately Ottley’s face lit up.

‘Ah, delighted to meet you, sir,’ he beamed. ‘I read about the work you did with Mounted Infantry on the veldt in the recent bit of trouble. Wish I’d been with you then. What are you up to here, in this godforsaken place?’

Simon coughed awkwardly and then transmitted his news. ‘I am
sorry that you will be losing your independence, my dear fellow,’ he said. ‘But I promise that I am here to learn as much from you as you from me. It looks as though you have already done a good job in teaching these Sikhs how to ride.’

The young man’s smile did not lessen. ‘Good lord, no, sir,’ he said. ‘We are not exactly Horse Guards, you know. If a rabbit leaves its hole, half of my troop are liable to fall out of their saddles. But they are good men. Basically good soldiers and I think you will become proud of them.’

Fonthill held out his hand. ‘I am sure I will.’ They shook hands. ‘What is your Christian name?’

‘William.’

‘Good. I will address you so. And you must call me Simon.’ He grinned. ‘No Horse Guards stuff here, William. We will be a
very
irregular unit. Oh, one more thing I should tell you.’ He explained Jenkins’s role.

Ottley frowned at first, but when Jenkins’s name was introduced his face brightened. ‘Oh! 352. Goodness, sir … er … Simon, he is almost as famous as you. Got a DCM, didn’t he?’

‘Two, in fact. The first in the Sudan and the second against the Boers.’

‘Well, he obviously knows his stuff.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘Any chance of us being the first into Lhasa, do you think?’

‘Wouldn’t mind putting a guinea or two on it.’

‘Splendid. Look forward to it. Do you want to superintend the grooming?’

‘No. I have other things to do. I will meet the men in the morning.’ A thought struck him. ‘No. Better not yet. My position has to be
confirmed by Kitchener. So let’s keep this under our hats for the moment. But I don’t anticipate any problems there. Carry on, William.’

‘Thank you, ah, Simon.’

Fonthill walked away with a new-found spring in his step to find Alice and Jenkins. His wife, as usual, was not in their tent, for, with little hard news to transmit back to Fleet Street, she was regularly out and about watching the behaviour of the troops and the coolies, picking up facts and colour. At this point, she still had a free hand, for her colleagues from the other newspapers had still not made the difficult journey up from the border. Jenkins, however, was crouched down outside his tent at the side of Sunil, whose Lee Metford rifle he had broken down in parts and laid out on a piece of cloth on the ground.

‘Good news,’ cried Simon. ‘We’re back in the army.’

The Welshmen immediately assumed a melancholic face. ‘Oh, bloody ’ell,’ he grunted. ‘You promised me that there would be no more of all that … bloody salutin’ an’ stuff.’

‘No, nor will there be. We are going to be in charge of the Mounted Infantry. That lot that we watched coming in. And there’s more reinforcements on their way, from what I hear. We will be a
very
irregular unit. Rather like what we were out on the veldt, except we won’t have that bloody man Sir John French breathing down our necks. And you have been demoted to Colour Sergeant.’

‘Ah well. Could ’ave been worse. Could ’ave been the Mountain Climbers Brigade. When do we start?’

‘Probably tomorrow. As long as it takes Lord Kitchener to approve our appointment by telegraph. Then we shall have to start training these Sikhs. You work with Captain Ottley teaching ’em riding and
I’ll teach them formation work and so on – if I can remember the drill, that is.’

‘I don’t think we shall need much of that in these parts, bach sir. More a question of ’ow to sit in the saddle when the bleedin’ ’orse is goin’ straight up a mountain.’

‘Yes. Something like that. Now, Sunil, can you put the kettle on?’

Kitchener’s approval came back with flattering speed, relayed to Fonthill by Macdonald’s orderly. The two men immediately found the mounted Sikhs’ lines and the work began. In fact, it transpired that Ottley, a captain of the 23rd Pioneers, was the only man in the expeditionary force who had attended the Mounted Infantry course at Sialkot. He had had very little time to train his men before the column set off and the thirty with him now had been the only Sikhs, plus a handful of Gurkhas, who had been considered efficient enough to leave with the main force. Forty or so had had to be left behind for further training. Since then, twenty or so had come up to New Chumbi and others were expected.

Unskilled as horsemen, nevertheless the little unit had led the flying column that Macdonald had taken into the mountains. Ottley told Fonthill that his ‘cavalry’ had penetrated far ahead of the column, past the fortress of Phari – ‘an imposing sight’ – and pressed on up over the 15,200-high Tang La, ‘The Clear Pass’, so called because the prevailing winds kept it usually clear of snow, until they met the lower slopes of Mount Chomolhari.

‘They towered above us like a perpendicular wall of snow,’ recounted Ottley. ‘We had gone as far as we possibly could and we and our ponies were exhausted. Also, despite the snow, there was little to drink, so we had to turn back.’

‘How did the men behave?’

‘Magnificently. I was proud of them. We met no opposition, of course, from the natives and those we saw at Phari were very welcoming. But we discovered that we had one great problem.’

‘What was that?’

‘We have no riding breeches, of course, and the loose serge trousers worn by the men had chafed their inner thighs horribly. Many were bleeding and hardly able to walk, let alone ride. We need to get proper breeches as soon as possible.’

‘Of course. I’ll see to it straight away.’

‘Despite all the problems – which included, by the way, the fact that the ponies became very disturbed and refused to settle down – despite all this, we managed to cover thirty-five miles in one day to get back. Pretty damned good, I’d say. Augurs well for the future. They are good men.’

‘Splendid. I will telegraph back to the base camp for breeches. Oh – what happened with the Phari Fort? Younghusband has issued a promise to the Tibetans that we will not occupy territory or fortified positions. I presume the General left no garrison there?’

For the first time Ottley looked troubled. He frowned. ‘Afraid so. Despite the appeals of the Tibetan commander there, the General threw out the wives and dependents of the defenders – who had offered no resistance, remember – and installed two companies of Gurkhas in the fort.’

‘Oh dear. Presumably he was worried that it could prove an obstacle to the main column if the Tibetans decided to resist.’

‘I suppose so. It looks a pretty formidable place from the outside, at least. I heard it was a fort that had dominated the old trading route
to India and also some kind of mobilisation centre for this end of Tibet, so I suppose the General knew what he was doing.’

The habitual sunny smile returned to his face. ‘But then generals are always supposed to know what they are doing, aren’t they?’

Fonthill returned the grin. ‘I’ve known a few who didn’t. I’ll go and telegraph about the breeches. Have you had the MO see to the men?’

‘Yes. Just a bit of ointment. Don’t think the Sikhs liked it but I made ’em apply it.’

‘Good.’

Because of the chafing problems, the men were relieved of riding duties for the next few days and Simon, Ottley and Jenkins restricted their teaching activities to lectures on keeping formation, wheeling into line, firing from the saddle and so on. The black faces of the men wore intense expressions as they listened, both eyes and mouths wide open and Fonthill worried that little had been imparted, but Ottley assured him that all of the instructions had been taken on board.

Christmas came and went at New Chumbi with hardly a break in the routine of drill, weapon inspections and, once the riding breeches had been delivered, scouting expeditions by Fonthill’s men that produced no sign of hostile troops. The biggest change was in the weather, for the smiling face of the Chumbi valley quickly disappeared when bitterly cold and strong winds swept along the plateau and winter settled in. Luxuries disappeared from the menu and the chapattis had to be made from a basic mixture of flour and water, which tasted, as one subaltern confessed, ‘like mustard plaster’. The biggest hardship was when the officers’ mess orderlies revealed that their normal care
in cooling the champagne had been overdone and the wine was far too bitterly cold to be drunk. Beer, which had been kept under cover, had to be substituted.

‘Serves you all right,’ muttered Alice. ‘Nobody deserves champagne so far, because nothing has happened. What are we supposed to be doing here, anyway?’

The answer seemed to be ‘consolidating’, while a second supply route between Gangtok and New Chumbi was opened, which cut some ten miles off the route and enabled the amount of food being brought in to rise to 40,000 pounds a day. The indigenous inhabitants of Chumbi were also now losing their reserve and were providing animal fodder, buckwheat and potatoes, for which they were paid handsomely.

Alice had now lost her exclusivity in the column for she had been joined by three other journalists representing
The Times,
the
Daily Mail
and Reuters News Agency. She dourly resented their presence and refused to join their little tented compound, preferring to mess with Simon, Jenkins and Sunil.

‘We are all fighting for journalistic scraps here, anyway,’ she confided to Simon, ‘for there is nothing to write about. I am tired of describing the bloody sunset and the difficulties of putting up tents when you can’t drive a peg into the ground. I do wish we could advance.’

Her wish was granted early in January, however, when it was announced that another flying column, with Younghusband and the diplomatic heart of the mission, would advance over the Tang La and set it up in a further advanced base high up on the plateau at a tiny hamlet called Tuna, where it would see out the rest of the winter.

It was to everyone’s relief, then, when sufficient supplies had been built up to allow this second, stronger, flying column, led by Fonthill’s Mounted Infantry, to set off from New Chumbi over the mountains again. Word filtered down that the move had been at the insistence of Younghusband who, it was said, had eventually won a highly charged argument with Macdonald about the dangers to be faced by advancing further into Tibet in midwinter. Simon, busily preparing his horsemen for the advance, was not involved in the argument – and he was heartily glad of it.

The journalists, who had grown increasingly restive under what Alice condemned as an unnecessarily rigid form of censorship installed by Macdonald on the plain, were now allowed to join the advance. Before setting off, Fonthill took Sunil to one side. The youth’s relationship to Alice had become even closer and he had begun trying to teach her Tibetan. Simon decided to capitalise on the friendship.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Now that we are advancing into Tibet proper and I shall be riding out with my men every day, I would be grateful if you would take on the responsibility of looking after the memsahib.’

Suni’s eyes opened wide. ‘Oh yes, sahib. What you want me to do?’

‘Well, she doesn’t need a nursemaid and she would be horrified at the suggestion that she could not look after herself. But,’ he grinned, ‘she can be a trifle headstrong, you know?’

The youth nodded gravely.

‘So there is no need to tread on her coat-tails, so to speak, but I would be most grateful if you would stay close to her as soon as we go into action. Do you think you could do that?’