The Road To Kandahar (Simon Fonthill Series) Read online

  The Road to Kandahar

  JOHN WILCOX

  headline

  www.headline.co.uk

  Copyright © 2005 John Wilcox

  The right of John Wilcox to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2010

  All characters - other than the obvious historical figures - in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  eISBN : 978 0 7553 8167 8

  This Ebook produced by Jouve Digitalisation des Informations

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Author’s Note

  John Wilcox was born in Birmingham and was an award-winning journalist for some years before being lured into industry. In the mid-nineties he sold his company in order to devote himself to his first love, writing. His first novel, THE HORNS OF THE BUFFALO, which begins the Simon Fonthill series, was highly acclaimed. He has also published two works of non-fiction, PLAYING ON THE GREEN and MASTERS OF BATTLE.

  Also by John Wilcox

  The Horns of the Buffalo

  Masters of Battle

  (Non-fiction)

  For my daughter Alison

  Acknowledgements

  THE ROAD TO KANDAHAR was the first of the Fonthill novels to be read by my agent Jane Conway-Gordon, and her cheerful encouragement led to the publication of it and the others in the series. At Headline my editor, Marion Donaldson, displayed patient courtesy in coping with my idiosyncratic twists of syntax and story development. The staff of The London Library were, as ever, most helpful in allowing me to plunder their books and newspapers to ensure that, as far as possible, I was able to recreate the Britain and Afghanistan of 1879- 1880 with reasonable accuracy. I am also grateful to Dr Patrick Craig-McFeely for ensuring that my account of Simon’s recovery from his injuries is medically credible. I must thank my wife Betty, who read several drafts of the novel with determination and only the occasional whimper. Finally, like every other author who looks back at the Victorian sub-continent, I owe gratitude to those magnificent old Indian hands, Field Marshal Lord Roberts and Rudyard Kipling, who recorded it with verve and accuracy.

  J.W.

  Chilmark,

  May 2004

  Afghanistan and Surrounding States in 1879

  Chapter 1

  Natal, South Africa, July 1879

  Simon Fonthill guided his horse carefully through the detritus of an army in the field. For half a mile back from the banks of the Tugela River, the tents sprawled in a dishevelled array. Originally they had been pitched in impeccable rows; now their orderliness was eroded by limbers strewn across the lines, camp fires which smoked between the tents and a forest of damp bedding that hung from clotheslines and steamed in the early-morning sunlight.

  The smells which met Simon’s nostrils melded together in a pot-pourri of nostalgia and disgust and he wrinkled his nose. The damp washing - moist, warm and domestic - brought back the safety of Martha’s wash-house, at the back of his parents’ home on the Welsh borders: a place of refuge and welcome, away from his mother’s strictures and his father’s gentle but reproving eye. The other odours were army: feet, sweat and cheap tobacco. All around him sat, stood and sprawled soldiers in varying states of undress: some wearing only long-john combinations, others with braces dangling from regulation blue trousers, bare-chested in the morning heat yet still retaining the cool night’s woollen comforters on their heads. This was an army relaxing; an army pleased with itself, having done a job well. A victorious army.

  Instinctively, Simon’s eyes searched in the middle distance for the pickets on the far edge of the lines. There were none, and then he remembered that the Zulus had gone, defeated. There was no danger now.

  He trotted on and glimpsed a band boy, no more than twelve years old, buffing his bugle as he smoked an incongruously long clay pipe. The lad knelt, as if in supplication to his glistening instrument, and Simon’s mind switched back to the last bugler boy he had seen, held aloft by a Zulu, skewered like a piece of pork on the warrior’s assegai. Isandlwana was only six months ago. The difference was all around him but still he shivered.

  As usual when this black dog came to sit on his shoulder, Simon looked round for the reassurance of Private Jenkins 352, late of His Majesty’s 24th Regiment of Foot. Jenkins rode behind his officer, his feet balancing on the very edge of his stirrups, his knees bent so that he sat high, like a jockey - and with a jockey’s confidence. Jenkins’s head swivelled constantly as he, too, took in the scene. He mouthed to Simon: ‘Bloody army!’

  Nodding, Simon repeated to himself: ‘Bloody army. Bloody army indeed!’ Although he had resigned his commission - and bought Jenkins out of the army - shortly after Rorke’s Drift, their subsequent work as civilian scouts for the re-invading column in the south still linked them, however intangibly, to the military. It was not a position which suited either of them.

  He hailed a private of the Buffs, one of the few soldiers in scarlet uniform. ‘Where’s the Commander-in-Chief’s headquarters?’

  The soldier gave both horsemen a keen glance. There was a tone of command to the question that sat ill with the appearance of the questioner. No air of military smartness distinguished Fonthill. He slumped in the saddle, his shoulders slightly hunched, his legs thrusting the stirrups forwards and upwards. He wore the loose flannel shirt, cotton corduroy breeches, dirty, scuffed riding boots and slouch hat of a Boer hunter but, unlike most Afrikaners, he was clean-shaven and his face was open, with wide-set brown eyes. He was also carrying at his belt the new .38 calibre Webley-Pryse officer’s revolver, and an army-issue Martini-Henry cavalry carbine protruded from the saddle holster by his knee. Fonthill was only in his middle twenties, but he sat his horse gingerly, almost with the air of a man expecting to be tossed at any minute, in great contrast to the ease of his companion. This was not the only contrast between them. Jenkins was bare-headed, obviously much shorter, and his very broad shoulders, dark eyes, spiky black hair and wide moustache gave him the air of a mounted stevedore. They were a strange couple to be seeking the Commander-in-Chief.

  The soldier delayed his reply long enough to weigh the odds, then decided that it would be wise to give them the benefit of the doubt. Lord Chelmsford’s Zululand army was full of traps for the unwary.

  ‘Straight ahead for about a quarter of a mile along this track. Then you’ll see the General’s standard on your left.’

  Simon raised a finger to his hat brim and urged his horse forward. Jenkins drew alongside.

  ‘I don’t much like being back in t
he army,’ he said. ‘Do I have to start calling you sir again?’

  ‘We’re not back in the army, so don’t talk rot.’

  Jenkins sucked in his moustache. ‘It’s all right for you. You’re supposed to be a gentleman. But ridin’ back ’ere, along the lines, like, I feel as though they could put me back on fatigues as soon as look at me. I feel . . .’ he searched in his narrow vocabulary, ‘vulnerable is the word, see.’ In the manner of the valley Welsh, Jenkins’s voice rose mellifluously at the end of each sentence, as though he was asking a question.

  Simon smiled to himself. ‘You’ve never been vulnerable in your whole life, 352.’ He looked down. ‘For God’s sake, loosen those stirrups. You look as though you’re riding in the four fifteen at Chepstow. And fall back behind. There’s not room for two of us.’

  Jenkins lapsed into a half-heard grumble, now familiar to Simon. ‘You’re a fine one to talk,’ he muttered, ‘with your toes stickin’ up like candles in church. Uh.’ But he reached down to lengthen his stirrups and dropped back behind Simon.

  It was as well that he did so, for the nearer they rode to the centre of the camp, the more congested the track became. The Tugela was low at midsummer, but even so, the humidity hung heavily around them and made their shirts stick to their backs like plaster. Yet the moisture that seemed so prevalent did not break into rain, and the dust from the stream of carts, riders and slouching soldiers added to the discomfort, making teeth gritty and giving a harsh edge to their tongues.

  ‘Why d’you want me with you anyway?’ called Jenkins. ‘I could ’ave been doin’ something really useful back at the camp, like the washin’, see.’

  Simon turned in his saddle. ‘Because, as I told you before ...’ he began, but paused as Jenkins’s hard gaze over his shoulder made him turn back.

  Coming towards them, at a gentle canter, rode a major of Hussars. He was a gorgeous sight amongst the dust and dishevelment all around. The sunlight danced off the buttons and epaulettes which decorated the ridiculous half-jacket, half-cape which he wore on his left shoulder, and he rode with a back as straight as a colour standard, his buttocks - so tightly rounded that it looked as though his breeches had been painted on - rising and falling to the rhythm of the horse’s gait. One white-gloved hand lightly held the reins while the other pointed directly to the ground, in the approved parade-ground fashion.

  As he saw Simon he did not slacken his pace but lifted his disengaged hand and waved him aside. Instinctively, Simon tugged momentarily at the reins to pull his horse aside, off the track. As he did so, he looked into the pale blue eyes of the Hussars officer. In an instant a series of images flew across his mind: the sardonic features of Lieutenant Colonel Covington at his trial, his lip curled, his eyebrows raised in mock astonishment; the jowls of Colonel Pulleine as he looked up from his campaign table at Isandlwana and said, ‘Johnny Zulu doesn’t frighten me . . . I’ve got twelve hundred men of the regiment here; and the Zulus breaking the line, rushing in, hacking and stabbing. He pulled his horse’s head round again, stopped and waited, leaving only a small space for the Hussar to pass, between him and a parked wagon.

  The major stared with his china-blue eyes, chin strap cutting a furrow into his jaw. ‘Out of the way.’

  Slowly, Simon edged his horse forward. As he did so, he felt the head of Jenkins’s mount nuzzle the back of his left thigh. His man, as ever, was right behind him. The weight of the two horses forced the Hussar to edge off the track, tangling his low-slung sabre scabbard between the spokes of the wagon wheel. ‘What the hell ...’ he began.

  Simon waited until he was level with the major. Then, leaning forward so that his face was only inches from that of the other man, he said quietly, ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘What? What!’ The Hussar’s face had turned vermilion, a combination, perhaps, of heat, too much mess port and extreme anger. ‘How dare you,’ he shouted, attempting to wrest the head of his horse round. But the solidity of the other two mounts forced him to give way. Simon edged by and gave a perfunctory flip of his hat brim. Jenkins followed, and bestowed on the cavalryman one of his most beatific smiles, the kind of grin that made his huge moustache bend upwards so that it almost touched his ears. ‘Mornin’, Major,’ he said. ‘Nice day.’

  The Major steadied his mount, looked after them and made to follow, then thought better of it. ‘Bloody Boers,’ he shouted, and then, head up even more belligerently than before, if that was possible, rode on.

  When the track widened, Jenkins drew abreast of Simon and for a while they rode in companionable silence before the Welshman spoke, in a light, conversational style. ‘Yes, well then. We’re in deep trouble again, isn’t it? That’ll be two court martials for you now in six months an’ one for me, though I didn’t even say a bleedin’ word, look you.’

  ‘Rubbish. I keep telling you, we’re no longer in the army.’

  ‘Just as well, if you ask me. I’m not much good at this bein’ shot at dawn business. Bit too early, see.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Very good, sir.’

  A few minutes later they dismounted at a tent before which stood a crudely painted wooden sign announcing ‘Colonel George Lamb, CB, Chief of Staff ’. The sentry enquired their business and disappeared into the tent, but not before he had looked the pair up and down with clear disapproval. Simon turned to Jenkins. ‘Look, I’ve no idea what Colonel Lamb wants of me, but whatever it is, it could include you. So I think it best for you to wait here. Just in case we need you.’

  ‘Very good, bach sir.’

  The sentry’s manner had changed when he returned. ‘Mr Fonthill, sir, the Colonel will see you right away.’

  The interior of the small bell tent was dominated by a long trestle table, its top seriously bowed in the middle from the weight of the papers piled on it. Behind this barrier sat a small, tanned man smoking a cheroot. He was in shirt-sleeves, a foulard silk scarf loosely knotted at his throat, and his scarlet jacket hung on the chair back. As Simon entered he threw down his pen and advanced to meet him, hand outstretched.

  ‘Damned glad to see you, Fonthill. Damned glad. Take a pew.’ At five foot nine, Simon was no giant. But he seemed to tower over the Colonel, who pumped his hand as though trying to draw water. ‘Sit down, do.’

  Simon removed a ribbon-tied cardboard file from a camp stool and sat facing the Colonel, whose nut-brown face beamed at him from above the piled papers.

  ‘Sorry about all this,’ he said, waving his cheroot deprecatingly at the mound. ‘Boney - or whoever it was - was wrong. An army doesn’t march on its stomach. These days it staggers about on arse paper like this.’ He regarded Simon through the blue smoke, a half-smile on his face. ‘Look like a bloody Boer. Gone a bit native, eh?’

  Simon shifted uneasily. ‘Well, sir ...’

  Lamb held up his hand. ‘No. No. Necessary for the job, I know.’ He gestured to the scarf at his neck. ‘Envy you. Glad to get out of a tunic whenever I can. General’s away so I can today.’

  Simon smiled at the familiar staccato sentences. Yet it was not like Lamb to beat about the bush. The summons to see the Chief of Staff had been urgent, and there was an air of unease about the little man’s jocularity. Simon wondered what was afoot. But, hell, he had had enough of the army! It was not his place to make it easy for the Colonel. So he sat on the camp stool and waited.

  ‘Cheroot?’

  ‘No thank you, sir.’

  ‘Right. Yes. Well. Good. Good.’ Lamb picked up a piece of paper from the right side of his desk and put it to the left, without looking at it. ‘Must be wonderin’ what this is all about. Right? Right?’

  Simon gently inclined his head. ‘Sir.’

  ‘Jolly good. Yes, well then. Right.’ Colonel Lamb shifted in his chair and blew a smoke ring. ‘Right. Three things. First, a word of congratulations. You and your man . . . what’s his name?’

  ‘Jenkins, sir, 352.’

  ‘Three five two?’

  ‘That’s his last three
numbers, sir. The 24th is a Welsh regiment, as you know, and there were six Jenkinses in his holding company at Brecon, four of them with the same initials. The only way to distinguish between ’em was to use their last three numbers.’

  ‘Ah, I see. Well, anyway. You and he have done a first-class job over the last four months. Absolutely first class. Stopped us gettin’ caught with our breeches down again, like at Isandlwana.’ The Colonel pulled on his cheroot and waved it in the air. ‘Good scoutin’, too. Yes. First class. First class.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ Simon waited. He had not been summoned to the Chief of Staff to be patted on the head. There must be something else. But he was damned if he was going to help Lamb to get to it.

  ‘Yes,’ the Colonel repeated. ‘The General was most pleased. Particularly after ...’ his voice faltered for a moment, ‘after that court martial nonsense.’

  Simon’s gaze remained expressionless. ‘It wasn’t nonsense, sir. I could have gone to a firing squad.’

  ‘What, eh? Well, yes, I suppose so. Miserable business. But you were acquitted, so everything turned out right in the end. Eh? What? Good.’

  The Colonel smiled, almost in supplication, and Simon was forced to smile back. ‘Quite, sir. What do you want of me now, then?’

  ‘Right.’ Lamb delved among the papers on his desk. ‘Second thing. Got something for you. And for 376 or whatever his damned number is.’ He handed two envelopes across the table and Simon opened the one addressed to him. Inside was a money draft for thirty-five guineas.