Follow the Drum - James Leasor

Follow the Drum is a story of men and women caught in a cataclysm of mutiny, hatred, fear and passion. India, in the mid-nineteenth century, was virtually nun by a British commercial concern, the Honourable East India Trading Company, whose directors would pay tribute to one Indian ruler and the depose another in their efforts to maintain their balance sheet of power and profit. To back up their decisions they maintained an Indian native army with British officers helped, when needed, by British regular troops. But great changes were already casting dark shadows across the land. The electric telegraph, the steamship and the railway were shrinking distances, while missionaries were preaching new gospels. Indian soldiers feared that their ancient traditions were being eroded, and when a stupid order was given to use cartridges greased with cow fat and pig lard (one animal sacred to Hindus and the other abhorrent to Moslems) there was mutiny. Even then, the British senior officers, many of them drink-sodden and long past retiring age, did not realise the magnitude of the opposition to them. They responded by having sepoys fired from guns and disbanding whole regiments, which, instead of calming tempers, merely accelerated the eruption of the Indian Mutiny. In the terrible days of the burning summer of 1857, the British, outnumbered in some garrisons by ten to one, in others by a thousand to one, fought back for bare survival. Conventional leaders were thus frequently displaced by unconventional men, such as Hodson and Nicholson, who brought daring new conceptions and mobility to waging war. The lives of millions were changed for ever; among them the Indian ruler, Nana Sahib, who bore a grudge against the British; Arabella MacDonald, the courageous and hot-blooded daughter of an English regular officer; the old King of Delhi, toothless and enfeebled, a virtual prisoner of the people he tried to rule; Richard Lang, an idealistic nineteen-year-old who began that year as a boy and ended it as a man. Follow the Drum is a documentary novel of tremendous sweep of action and descriptive power, in which fact and fiction are blended into compelling narrative.