Free Bhowani Junction by John Masters

sir!’
    It was a long train, coming slowly up from the north. It passed through the station and swung curving round, carriage after carriage, under the signals and into the yards. All the windows were open and filled with round brown faces, the dust thick on them.
    The engine stopped, hissing. The carriages stopped. One man jumped down from each carriage, ran across the tracks, and knelt down, looking outward, his rifle ready in his hands.
    Victoria jumped forward, calling, ‘Look out!’ because oneof the Gurkhas had settled in the path of a moving fly-shunted wagon. Savage snapped, ‘Mind your own business, Miss Jones. He is supposed to look after himself.’ The Gurkha moved aside before the wagon reached him, and Victoria muttered, ‘Sorry, sir.’
    The other Gurkhas poured out of the carriages, man after man after man in an endless single file from each door. British officers appeared, and Lieutenant Macaulay went over to speak to one of them.
    The Gurkhas were dirty and quiet and of course small. They weren’t like the sepoys of the Indian garrison battalion that had been here before, nor like the soldiers I’d seen walking about in clean, starched uniforms in Agra. They all formed up close by us, and they smelled of the train and ammonia and the cardamom seeds a lot of them were chewing. A few were thickset older men, but mostly they were young chaps, almost children. Their faces were round and unlined under the dust and the streaky sweat. They moved with a sort of unhurried bad temper, and almost without noise. In less than ten minutes the first batch crunched away, turned on to the Deccan Pike, and marched north toward cantonments. They had come from the war, lots of wars, but it seemed to me that they had brought their wars with them.
    Ten or twelve Gurkhas under the old subadar-major came over to the tea urn. It looked to me as if those men had been ordered that minute to be ‘sick’, but Mrs Williams didn’t notice anything. I was drinking some tea myself when Savage came up to me. He had a short rifle in his hand, and he was buckling his equipment on. He said, ‘Ready? Miss Jones, we’re going now.’
    ‘Very good, sir,’ she said again, looking him in the eye.
    He was swinging away from her. He stopped, whipped round, and said, ‘All right, Miss Jones. Mind you see the chamber pots are clean by the time I come back.’
    She was so angry she could not speak, but it was really her fault for goading him. She knew he hated that phrase. He waited a moment, then turned away. A ganger brought the trolley down, and we got on and started off.
    On the trolley were Colonel Savage, me, a sergeant (they call them havildars in the Indian Army), and five sepoys—called riflemen in Gurkha regiments. One of the riflemen was Savage’s orderly, a thin Gurkha of about eighteen called Birkhe.
    It had been still and hot all afternoon, but when we began to move the wind scorched our faces. The trolley seemed to be running all the time through the open door of a furnace, and we had to screw up our eyes against the hot wind and the dust. I soon put on my dark glasses.
    The Gurkhas lost their bad temper when we began to move. They pushed each other and joked, and Savage made jokes with them which I couldn’t understand because he spoke very quickly in Gurkhali, the Gurkhas’ language. We were packed on there like sardines, and I asked him to tell the Gurkhas not to play the fool or someone would fall off.
    Dabgaon is twenty-four miles from Bhowani Junction, and we got there in about an hour and a half. Savage got out his map and showed me a pencil mark on it. ‘This is the map reference the Wimpy gave,’ he said, ‘where it spotted those men.’ The place he pointed to was near the Cheetah bridge about half-way between Dabgaon and Malra. So we went there and hauled the trolley off the line.
    The line curved there and ran in a cutting. At the north end of the cutting it ran out on to an embankment, and then on to the