The Maclarens (The Regiment Family Saga Book 1) Read online

  The Maclarens

  The Regiment Family Saga Book 1

  CL Skelton

  Copyright © 1978 Regiment Publishing Company (Jersey) Ltd

  This edition published 2018 by Wyndham Books

  (Wyndham Media Ltd)

  27, Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX

  First published 1978

  www.wyndhambooks.com

  The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  With the exception of where actual historical events and people are described, this book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, organisations and events are a product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organisations and events is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  Cover artwork images: Shutterstock © happydancing /Chaadaeva

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  By CL Skelton

  from Wyndham Books

  The Hardacre Family Saga

  Hardacre

  Hardacre’s Luck

  The Regiment Family Saga

  The Maclarens

  Sweethearts and Wives

  Beloved Soldiers

  Contents

  Author’s note

  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

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

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  Author’s Note

  This book is a work of fiction. The 148th Regiment of Foot never existed. However, the campaigns which occur in the story are fact, though the actual manner in which they were conducted has been fictionalized. The history of the regiment and the attitude of those serving in it are fairly typical of the attitudes of men serving in the British Army, where they never joined the army as such; they joined the battalion.

  Among the many people who have helped me in the research which went into the writing of this book, and to whom I owe much, there is one whom I would like to mention, and to whom I would wish to offer my gratitude. He is Major Hugo Macdonald-Haig, M.C., who served for many years in one of the great Highland regiments.

  Finally, I dedicate this book to my father, Clement Skelton, M.C., who was a professional soldier for much of his life, and who served his country and his regiment through three major wars and many small campaigns.

  C. L. Skelton

  Drumnadrochit, Scotland

  August 1977

  Chapter One

  It was hot. It was as hot as the hell through which they had just lived and died. He looked around the square in which he stood. It was all yellow-brown dust and mud buildings, the high sun giving only a foot or two of shadow along the blank anonymous walls, concealing interiors like dry, stinking ovens.

  The men, those fortunate enough to have been given a stand-easy, lay tucked up close to the walls, keeping their bodies within what little shade there was and hating the merciless heat of that sun. At least they were free from the torturous weight of their Enfield rifles and the fifty pounds of full marching order ‒ packs, blankets, ammunition pouches, and the rest ‒ which had torn at their backs over the last few days. The square blocks of buildings and shops which formed the uninspiring centre of the native quarter offered no solace or comfort. Any form of movement brought forth a cloud of the brick-dry powder which choked the nostrils and cemented itself into their throats and the sweat which covered their aching bodies.

  With whatever voice they could muster they shouted for the bhisthi who padded around barefoot in the dust, filling their canteens with a pint of brackish water from his goatskin bag, grinning stupidly at the sahibs as they cursed him for his tardiness, not understanding what it was that they said in their strange language, and wondering why they had ever left that cold, wet country from which they had come. Every fumbling delay as he tipped the water from his mussak was greeted with another grin as he stepped quickly and easily out of the way of the half-hearted blows that were aimed at him.

  In the middle of all of this stood Andrew Maclaren leaning heavily on his broadsword. He had neither the heart nor the energy to try and avoid the sun beating down on his feather bonnet. Beneath the grime which encased him, Lieutenant Maclaren was a good-looking youth. Tall, he had the Maclaren red hair and blue eyes, a legacy of his Pictish ancestry. His nose was a little too thin and his jaw was a little too square. On his left cheek there were two moles, one above the other, the victims of a thousand cuts since he had started shaving at the age of fifteen.

  He was a boy who had suddenly become a man. A few days ago he had been a youth of twenty-one; now he had been baptized an adult. The blood of his baptism was caked on to his sword, cemented with the same yellow-brown dust which covered his uniform, his men, and the whole bloody country for as far as he could see. The once-white tropical tunic which he had been issued with on his arrival in India and which his servant had dyed to a blotchy khaki was now stained with the sweat which tried to rid his body of the heat. He was wearing the Maclaren kilt, the deep blues and the greens and the yellows, the colours and the sett of the tartan no longer distinguishable under the grime. The dust penetrated through his uniform and deep into his skin and made his body feel as if he had been invaded by a million minuscule creatures. He had an almost overpowering desire to scratch, to tear at his flesh with the ragged nails of his fingers, restrained only by the knowledge that if he broke the skin, the dust would work its way in, bringing with it creatures smaller and more virulent than the grains of sand and powdered clay, to feed on his flesh. There were creatures already feeding on his flesh, small winged creatures that took their fill and then moved on, each one making room for two more. Then there were the flies, fat blue-green-bodied ones that crawled presumptuously across his face and body. Now and again he would shake himself in an endeavour to rid himself of the current crop, only to have them immediately replaced by a new and more ravenous contingent.

  Every bone ached, every muscle begged him for rest. His body could not understand the mind that drove him on. His throat was dry and parched by the same muck that covered his face and hands, save where globs of sweat had turned it into a muddy mortar which dried, caked, and fell from him as his skin twitched under the constant irritation.

  Andrew was the fourth generation of
Maclarens to serve with the 148th Foot since the regiment had been raised by his great-grandfather to fight the French, over fifty years ago in the Napoleonic Wars. And Andrew was wishing with all his heart that he was back at home in Scotland with his regiment.

  ‘How in God’s name did I get myself into this?’

  He was addressing the air and the question was rhetorical. He knew the answer. On his promotion from ensign, instead of taking command of a half-company, as was his right, he had volunteered for service with the army in India. Not with the East India Company force, for he held the Queen’s commission, and that he was not prepared to surrender. The added financial advantage of the Company force with double the pay of the Queen’s soldiers meant nothing to Andrew, whose family estates in Scotland and investments in rapidly industrializing Britain provided the Maclarens with wealth in plenty.

  Andrew was here because he had taken this course in order to avoid the iron hand of his father, who commanded the First Battalion at their permanent headquarters at Perth. Not that Andrew disliked his father; they got on very well together and shared a mutual love of their regiment and the traditions already created. But his father was a strict and fearsome disciplinarian who Andrew knew would rather have seen his son dead than be himself accused of nepotism. Besides, Andrew believed that his father had doubts about him, about his manhood, about how he, who hated to shoot a stag, would react under fire and in the stress of battle. He believed, with some justification, that his father considered him perhaps too gentle to be a real soldier.

  So Andrew had decided, and his father had readily agreed, that a year or so away from the regiment and the chance of seeing some action would be a good thing for both of them. It would be especially good for Andrew’s formation as a soldier, who was by right of birth one day destined to command the regiment.

  And that was why, on that sixteenth day of July in 1857, Andrew was standing in the middle of the square, in the middle of the native quarter of Cawnpore, weeping.

  They were not embarrassed tears, but they were real tears. Tears that made little rivulets down his dust-encrusted face. They were not tears of pity, though pity was there. They were not tears of grief, though grief was there too. The Maclarens did not weep for grief or sorrow; they were tears of anger. Anger, frustration, and a deep, deep, bitter hatred. He felt emotions that he had not known he possessed. Cold, cold fury. He wanted to kill, not in the heat of battle as a soldier should, but slowly and without compassion. Not the way the men he had killed that morning had died, swiftly and cleanly; but in drawn-out agony as their lives were tortured from their bodies.

  ‘What dae I do wi’ it, sir?’

  Andrew forced himself to look again at the bloodied, ragged cloth bundle in the man’s arms. The corporal who stood before him was a hard-bitten Highlander. A Seaforth who had fought in a dozen campaigns, rough and unimaginative, a man to whom death and mutilation were no strangers. But as he spoke, his words were choked from between tense lips as he too forced back the tears. The small mutilated bundle of flesh that he held had been a baby. A little girl, not more than a couple of years old, with soft clear white skin and golden hair. And there it lay, its skull crushed and two of its tiny limbs torn from their sockets. A harmless, innocent little body, savagely defiled.

  ‘Put it ‒’ Andrew choked back a sob as he tried to form the words. ‘Put it with the others.’ And he turned his face away, more to hide the sight of the child from himself than to hide his emotion from the soldier.

  It was not the first pitiful sight that he had seen in that pitiless land. He had seen infants left to starve on dungheaps, little children with distended bellies and fleshless limbs, holding out emaciated hands as they begged for the food that would enable them to continue their shabby existence. He, they, had always tried to help with food for the hungry, and shelter in convent or institution for the abandoned. Not that they ever did more than scratch the surface of a problem that was just too enormous; but they tried.

  He had seen a little of what this country meant to those whom the accident of birth had condemned to live there. There were the rajahs, the princes, the wealthy merchants, the unbelievable luxury of the rich; but they were few.

  Against this, the grinding poverty of the poor who trod their water wheels, and scratched the earth with wooden ploughshares, knowing that if the next monsoon were to fail, then starvation would inevitably follow. Hundreds of millions, packed into that vast subcontinent of plain and desert and mountains and forest, living only by the law of survival of the fittest, and knowing that when things went wrong, the very old and the very young would not survive. Those who did live were condemned to spend their lives bending their backs in servitude to support the massive wealth of the few.

  Most of them lived in little villages consisting of mud and straw huts where their inhabitants slept on mud floors, or, if they were lucky, on cots of woven string which served as tables during the day. Their household articles were few, mostly pots made from clay in which they cooked, carried water, and stored their food. There was no sanitation, the water was probably brackish, disease was a way of life, and a full belly was a great and infrequent luxury. There was no way out, for most of them were condemned to live within the caste to which they had been born.

  The rule of the East India Company, now shaken to its foundations by the Sepoy rebellion, was tottering. Back home in Britain, the prime minister, Viscount Palmerston, was aware that the rule of the Company must end and direct control must be imposed on British India. And all of this because someone had decided to wrap some of the bullets supplied to the Company army in paper greased with pig’s fat.

  But these things meant nothing to the poor, for nothing would help the poor, and the British government would treat only with the princes and the rich, for they were the ones who owned the masses, and the masses would do as they were bid. And the poor would be left, as they had always been throughout the long history of their land, to be born and, if they were fortunate, to survive in that same poverty which was the only life they knew.

  Andrew was not the only one who had wept that day. There were others, many others, from highly bred officers of crack fashionable regiments down to the coarsest and most illiterate of the common soldiers, the men whom Wellington had described as ‘the scum of the earth’, men to whom emotion, if it existed, was just another bodily function. They too had wept and vomited from empty stomachs as they looked upon the horror that was Cawnpore.

  Why? On the tenth of May in 1857, at Meerut, a town about thirty-eight miles from Delhi, and after about two months of scattered unrest brought on by the rumour that the cartridges issued to the native troops were encased in pig’s fat, eighty-five of the men of the native cavalry were court-martialled for refusing to fire with those cartridges. These men were sentenced and marched off to jail. The court-martial was held on a Saturday, and on the Sunday evening, the native regiment suddenly rose and fired upon their officers and released the prisoners.

  After burning the prison and setting free more than a thousand convicts, the first of the massacres which were to become a horrible feature of the mutiny began. Of the European residents few survived, women and little children being put to the sword without mercy.

  At that time, the garrison at Cawnpore was under the command of Sir Hugh Wheeler, a seventy-four-year-old Bengal officer. He realized that the situation was dangerous and began to form an entrenched camp around the hospital barracks between the soldiers’ church and some unfinished lines which were being constructed for European troops. The position was not a good one militarily speaking, and by some incredible oversight, he failed to guard the magazine which contained the vast majority of their ammunition. It was after this that Sir Hugh asked the aid of the Chief of Bithoor. This man, Doondhoo Punth, or as he was more frequently called, Nana Sahib, had a carefully concealed grudge against the British authorities. He claimed that he had been robbed of an inheritance of some eight hundred lacs of rupees. He had mixed much with the Europ
ean community and though he did not speak English, he had acquired a superficial refinement which distinguished him as a native gentleman, and as such he was regarded as a friend of the British residents.

  He had been allowed a princely house and a retinue of two hundred soldiers and three field pieces. As soon as Wheeler applied for his aid, he came promptly with his guns and his men to Cawnpore. On his arrival in that city, however, he placed himself at the head of the mutineers and demanded that Sir Hugh Wheeler surrender his entrenchments. The surrender was refused and the entrenchments were assaulted. Inside these entrenchments were 465 men and 280 women and children.

  As the forces of the defenders became depleted, the forces of Nana Sahib became stronger. He was joined by a large body of fine soldiers, Oudh natives, and again and again they assaulted the garrison, which was daily diminishing in numbers. The defenders knew that there was no hope unless some sort of compromise could be reached, and they received with great relief an offer from Nana Sahib that those who were willing to lay down their arms would receive safe passage to Allahabad. To that offer was added a promise of food and boats to carry them all ‒ the garrison, the women, and the children.

  They had no alternative, they had to accept. The men were required to leave first. They laid down their guns and were put aboard the promised boats. The boats moved out into the Ganges and as soon as they were into the stream of the river, Nana Sahib’s artillery and infantry opened fire on them. Four men survived to take the message of Cawnpore to Allahabad.

  Andrew had joined General Henry Havelock on the latter’s arrival at Calcutta, whence he had been rushed at the outbreak of the mutiny. Sadly, Havelock had not arrived at Calcutta in time to avert the tragedy of Cawnpore. However immediately on their arrival on July 7, they had gone to Allahabad to organize the troops who had been gathering there in small detachments from various garrisons in the neighbourhood.

  Andrew’s chief was well known in India as a somewhat staid puritanical type of soldier, reminiscent of Cromwell’s Ironsides. He was over sixty and had served in the East for thirty-four years, a fact which Andrew regarded with some awe. Included in his campaigns were the Burmese war of 1824 and the Sikh war of 1825. He was a serious, sober-minded man, fierce in battle and gentle in victory, who would permit no blasphemy or drunkenness among his soldiers.