It was not the Colonel that brought Bobby out of Simla, but a much-more-to-be-respected Commandant. The sickness in the out-villages spread, the Bazar was put out of bounds, and then came the news that the Tail Twisters must go into camp. The message flashed to the Hill stations. ‘Cholera Leave stopped Officers recalled.’ Alas for the white gloves in the neatly-soldered boxes, the rides and the dances and picnics that were to be, the loves half spoken, and the debts unpaid! Without demur and without question, fast as tonga could fly or pony gallop, back to their Regiments and their Batteries, as though they were hastening to their weddings, fled the subalterns.
Bobby received his orders on returning from a dance at Viceregal Lodge where he had But only the Haverley girl knows what Bobby had said, or how many waltzes he had claimed for the next ball. Six in the morning saw Bobby at the Tonga Office in the drenching rain, the whirl of the last waltz still in his ears, and an intoxication due neither to wine nor waltzing in his brain.
‘Good man!’ shouted Deighton of the Horse Battery through the mist. ‘Whar you raise dat tonga? I’m coming with you. Ow! But I’ve a head and a half. I didn’t sit out all night. They say the Battery’s awful bad,’ and he hummed dolorously,
Leave the what at the what’s-its-name, Leave the flock without shelter, Leave the corpse uninterred, Leave the bride at the altar!
‘My faith! It’ll be more bally corpse than bride, though, this journey. Jump in, Bobby. Get on, Coachwan!’
On the Umballa platform waited a detachment of officers discussing the latest news from the stricken cantonment, and it was here that Bobby learned the real condition of the Tail Twisters.
‘They went into camp,’ said an elderly Major recalled from the whist-tables at Mussoorie to a sickly Native Regiment, ‘they went into camp with two hundred and ten sick in carts. Two hundred and ten fever cases only, and the balance looking like so many ghosts with sore eyes. A Madras Regiment could have walked through ‘em.’
‘But they were as fit as be-damned when I left them!’ said Bobby.
‘Then you’d better make them as fit as bedamned when you rejoin,’ said the Major brutally.
Bobby pressed his forehead against the rain-splashed window-pane as the train lumbered across the sodden Doab, and prayed for the health of the Tyneside Tail Twisters. Naini Tal had sent down her contingent with all speed; the lathering ponies of the Dalhousie Road staggered into Pathankot, taxed to the full stretch of their strength; while from cloudy Darjiling the Calcutta Mail whirled up the last straggler of the little army that was to fight a fight in which was neither medal nor honour for the winning, against an enemy none other than ‘the sickness that destroyeth in the noonday.’