The Empire Trilogy (86 page)

By contrast with the comfort of a few moments earlier the Collector suffered a painful return to reality as he stepped out into the glare. Worries, temporarily forgotten, assailed him once more...still no sign of a relieving force! The dwindling garrison...almost every day now someone was killed. The health of the garrison was beginning to deteriorate from the poor diet and lack of vegetables. Slight wounds became serious...from serious wounds death was inevitable. He stood, blinking, outside the Cutcherry for a moment, appalled, unable to decide where to go next. But then, remembering that his daughters were very likely observing his dismay through the telescope and were perhaps even concluding that he had just been shot, he grasped Fleury by the arm and steered him towards the Residency; he needed someone's company to nerve himself for his daily visit to the hospital. Besides, he might take the opportunity to counter the demoralizing effect of the Magistrate's words on the young man's mind.

He began to say something about the principles behind a civilization being more important than the question of whether they were actually realized in a concrete manner...He had a firm grip on the arm of his audience, too, which is usually helpful when you have an argument to put across. But he found himself finishing what he had to say rather lamely, partly because Fleury was sulking over the rapid rejection of his own theories and refused to agree with him, partly because they were both chased into the lee of the hospital by an enemy rocket which careered down at them in wild loops out of the sky and, for an awful moment, seemed to be chasing them personally. Fortunately, it did not explode for it landed quite close to them, burying its cone-shaped iron head in the earth no more than ten yards away. Fleury indignantly began to prise it out of the earth with his sabre which was, perhaps, rather rash of him since smoke was still pouring from the vents in its case even if the fuse on its base appeared to be extinct. It was a six-pound Congreve rocket, one of many which had dived wildly into the enclave.

“One of the advantages of our civilization,” said Fleury. But the Collector failed to grasp even this simple irony and observed mildly: “One of these days I'm afraid their rocketeers may hit something, if only by accident.”

He continued to stand irresolutely beside the smoking rocket, thinking: “If we lose any more men we won't be able to man the defences adequately. Then we'll be in a pickle.” At this moment Dr Dunstaple saw them through the window and sent a message out to ask Fleury if he would mind fetching half a dozen bottles of mustard from the Commissariat; he had another suspected case of cholera to deal with. Fleury hurried away and, after a short struggle with himself, the Collector made up his mind to enter the hospital.

The hospital had first been established in the Residency library, but this had proved too small and so it had been moved into the row of storehouses and stables immediately behind the Residency; this row of sheds had been roughly divided into two wards, one under the care of each doctor. Between the two wards what had, in happier days, been the saddle-room had been converted into an operating theatre where, surrounded by a mass of harness and saddlery, the two doctors united (at least, in principle) to perform amputations. Untidy stacks of
bhoosa
cattle feed piled up in the corners of the wards were another reminder that their former occupants had been quadrupeds and now provided a convenient refuge for rats and other vermin.

The door to Dr Dunstaple's ward stood open and even before the Collector had reached it the stench of putrefaction and chloroform had advanced to greet him. He moved forward, however, with an expression of good cheer on his face, while flies tried to crowd on to his smiling lips and eyes and swarmed thirstily on to his sweating forehead. At the far end of the ward he glimpsed the Padre kneeling in prayer beside a supine figure. As he passed into the acute stench rising from the nearest bed he clenched his fists in his pockets and prayed: “Please God, if I'm to die may I be killed outright and not have to lie in this infernal place!”

Dr Dunstaple, still waiting for Fleury to return with the bottles of mustard, had seen the Collector and came bustling forward, saying in a loud, exasperated tone: “Heaven knows what experiment that damn fella's up to now! Whatever it is, I wash my hands of it!”

The Collector gave him a worried look. In the few days since the siege had begun a disturbing change had come over the Doctor. In normal times the Collector found this fat little man endearing and slightly ridiculous. His arms and legs looked too short for his round body; his energy made you want to laugh. But recently his plump, good-humoured face had set into lines of bad temper and bitterness. His rosy complexion had taken on a deeper, unhealthy flush, and although clearly exhausted, he was, nevertheless, in a constant state of frenetic activity and fuss, talking now of one thing, now of another. There was something very harrowing about the way the Doctor passed from one subject to another without logical connection, yet what disturbed the Collector even more was the fact that he so often returned to the same topic:...that of Dr McNab. Of course, he had always enjoyed making fun of McNab, retailing stories about drastic remedies for simple ailments and that sort of thing. Alas, the Doctor had become increasingly convinced that McNab was experimenting, was ignoring his medical training to follow fanciful notions of his own.

Dr Dunstaple had begun to talk about the patient beside whose bed, a soiled straw mattress on a
charpoy
, the Collector found himself standing; the man was a Eurasian of very pale skin and dark eyes which feverishly swept the room. He was suffering, explained the Doctor in a rapid, overbearing tone as if expecting the Collector to disagree with him, from severe laceration, the result of a shrapnel burst, of the soft parts of the right hand; the thumb was partially detached near the upper end of the metacarpal bone. Though the lips of the wound were retracted and gaping there was no haemorrhage and it seemed possible that the deep arteries had escaped injury...

“Was that unreasonable to suppose?” demanded the Doctor suddenly. The Collector, who had been listening uncomfortably to these explanations, shook his head, but only slightly, not wanting to give the impression that he was passing judgement either one way or the other. At the same time he had become aware that another patient, an English private soldier who had escaped from Captainganj only to be wounded at Cutter's battery during the attack of the first of June, and who was strapped down to a
charpoy
near where the Padre was kneeling, had begun to sing, loudly and monotonously, as if to keep up his spirits. His song finished he immediately began it again, and so loudly as almost to drown the Doctor's vehement medical commentary:

“I'm ax'd for a song and 'mong soldiers 'tis plain,
I'd best sing a battle, a siege or campaign.
Of victories to choose from we Britons have store,
And need but go back to eight
een
fifty-four.”

“A compress, dipped in cold water, placed on the palm after the edges of the wound had been evenly approximated and two or three interrupted sutures applied...then strapped, bandaged...”

“The Czar of all Russia, a potentate grand,
Would help the poor Sultan to manage his land;
But Britannia stept in, in her lady-like way,
To side with the weakest and fight for fair play.”

“Stop that noise!” roared the Doctor. “Look here, Mr Hopkins, after twenty-four hours the integuments of the palm were flaccid and discoloured...Imagine how I felt! If you put any pressure on the wound a thin, sanious fluid with bubbles of gas escaped, causing considerable pain...”

“On Alma's steep banks, and on Inkerman's plain,
At famed Balaklava, the foe tried in vain
To wrest off the laurels that Britons long bore
But always got whopped in eight
een
fifty-four...”

“Then,” said the Doctor, gripping the Collector's arm for he had stepped back, dizzy from the heat and smell, not to mention the noise (for, in addition to this desperate chanting there were groans and cries of men calling for attention), “the thumb was dark and cold and insensible. Another twelve hours and the dark hue of mortification had already spread over half the palm...the thumb and two fingers were already cold, livid and without sensation...”

“It's true at a distance they fought very well
With round shot and grape shot and rocket and shell
But when our lads closed and bayonets got play
They didn't quite like it and so...ran away!”

“The pulse was small and frequent, the smell from the mortifying parts was particularly offensive, Mr Hopkins. I now advised amputation of the forearm, close to the carpal end...
Silence!
I
had
thought that it would be enough to remove part of the hand only, but this was out of the question...Ah, this wasn't good enough for McNab! He said gangrene must follow...d'you hear? So forty-eight hours it was left wrapped in a linseed poultice. This was not my idea. I knew the whole hand must come off in the end and that there would be no gangrene of the stump...Here, sir, you can see for yourself the way the flaps are uniting in healthy granulations. D'you think that was McNab's linseed poultice? Had we waited a moment longer the man would have sunk completely!”

“No, no,” broke in the Collector hurriedly. “Please don't undo the dressing. I shall see it when you're discharged fit,” he added brightly to the patient who paid no attention to him whatsoever; the man's eyes continued to roam about feverishly.

The Doctor tried to detain him for further explanations but the Collector forced him aside, unable to spend another moment by this bedside. He strode to the nearest window and looked out, clumsily knocking over a pitcher of water as he did so. It emptied itself in slow gulps on to the earthen floor by his feet. Beyond the deep shadow in which the horses of the Sikh cavalry stamped and thrashed in a frenzy of irritation from the flies which attacked them, he thought he could perceive a splash of colour from the few surviving roses beneath the shade of the wickerwork screens. He gazed at them greedily.

Then Fleury came into view, carrying the bottles of mustard and looking excited. Seeing the Collector at the window he called: “Mrs Scott has been taken ill.”

The Collector immediately put his finger to his lips and shook his head vigorously, pointing towards the next ward, to indicate that Fleury should inform McNab. Fleury, however, simply stopped in his tracks and stared at the Collector in astonishment, unable to comprehend why the most important personage in the garrison should suddenly resort to this baffling pantomine. He came closer and the Collector, concluding that Fleury was a dimwit (a conclusion supported, moreover, by his peculiar ideas on civilization) said in an undertone: “Tell Dr McNab. Dunstaple already has too much to do. He must be spared. Here, give me those.” And he took the bottles of mustard through the window, thinking: “What a time the poor mite has chosen to come into the world!”

The Doctor seemed surprised at first to be presented with the mustard and looked so irritated that the Collector wondered whether there had not been some mistake. But then the Doctor remembered, he had a case of cholera...it was almost certainly cholera, though sometimes when the men first reported sick it was hard to know from their symptoms whether they were suffering from cholera or from bilious remittent fever.

Cholera
. The Collector could see Dr Dunstaple's anger swelling, as if himself infected by the mere sound of the three syllables. And the Collector dreaded what was to come, for the subject of cholera invariably acted like a stimulant on the already overwrought Doctor. Cholera, evidently, had been the cause of the dispute between him and McNab which had brought about an unfortunate rift between the two doctors. Now he began, once again, to speak with a terrible eloquence about the iniquities of McNab's “experimental” treatments and quackery cures. Suddenly, he seized the Collector's wrist and dragged him across the ward to a mattress on which, pale as milk beneath a cloud of flies, a gaunt man lay shivering, stark naked.

“He's now in the consecutive fever...How d'you think I cured this man? How d'you think I saved his life?”

The Collector offered no suggestions so the Doctor explained that he had used the best treatment known to medical science, the way he had been taught as a student, the treatment which, for want of a specific, every physician worthy of the name accorded his cholera patients...calomel, opium and poultices, together with brandy as a stimulant. Every half hour he gave pills of calomel (half a grain), opium and capsicum (of each one-eighth of a grain). Calomel, the Collector probably didn't know, was an admirable aperient for cleansing the upper intestinal canal of the morbid cholera poison. At the same time, to relieve the cramps he had applied flannels wrung out of hot water and sprinkled with chloroform or turpentine to the feet, legs, stomach and chest, and even to the hands and arms. Then he had replaced them with flannels spread with mustard as his dispensers were now doing...At this point the Doctor tried to pull the Collector to yet another bed, where a Eurasian orderly was spreading mustard thickly with a knife on the chest and stomach of yet another tossing, groaning figure. But the Collector could stand no more and, shaking himself free, made for the door with the Doctor in pursuit.

The Doctor was grinning now and wanted to show the Collector a piece of paper. The Collector allowed himself to be halted as soon as he had inhaled a draught of fresh air. He stared in dismay at the unnaturally bright flush of the Doctor's features, at the parody of good humour they wore, remembering many happier times when the good humour had been real.

“I copied it from the quack's medical diary...With his permission, of course. He's always making notes. No doubt he thinks he will make an impression with them. Read it. It concerns a cholera case...He wrote it, I believe, in Muttra about three years ago. Go on. Read it...” And he winked encouragingly at the Collector.