Karna by Night Against the Panchalas

It was still the fourteenth day, in the sense that nobody had called it over. The sun had gone down long before on Jayadratha's death, and the armies had not stopped. Duryodhana had ordered lamps carried onto the field, and men fought with torches lashed to their cars and held up by servants who had no other work that night, and in a hall at Hastinapura, Sanjaya went on telling it to a blind king who could not see any of it.

What he had to tell just then was a rout, and it was Duryodhana's own army that was being routed. Satyaki, the grandson of Sini, had taken the king's car and bow away from him in the dark and left him to climb up beside Kritavarma. Arjuna had broken Shakuni's thousands. Dhrishtadyumna, the fire-born prince of Panchala who was commander of the Pandava host, had cut Drona's bowstring and was grinding the Kaurava troops between him and his brother Shikhandi, and the conchs of the Pandavas were being blown one after another in the sight of Drona and Karna and Drona's son.

So Duryodhana, who was a man well acquainted with words, drove to where his two great bowmen stood, and used them.

"This battle has been set on foot by you two in rage, having seen the ruler of the Sindhus slain by Savyasachin. You are beholding with indifference the slaughter of my army by the forces of the Pandavas, although you two are fully competent to vanquish those forces. If you two now abandon me, you should have, in the beginning, told me of it. We two shall vanquish the sons of Pandu in battle. Even these were the words, ye givers of honours, that ye then said unto me. Hearing these words of yours, I sanctioned these proceedings. I would never have provoked these hostilities with the Parthas, hostilities that are so destructive of heroic combatants. If I do not deserve to be abandoned by you two, ye bulls among men, then fight according to the true measure of your prowess."

Sanjaya used one image for what that speech did to them. Pierced by the goad of his words, those two heroes engaged in battle once more, like two snakes vexed with sticks.

The two of them went forward together, and the Parthas, seeing them come, gathered their troops and went to meet them, and the noise both sides made was the noise of men who wanted to be found in the dark.

They found Satyaki first. He was the one who had done the damage, and every bow on that side of the field turned on him at once. Drona pierced him with ten arrows. Karna pierced him with ten. Duryodhana put in seven. Vrishasena, Karna's eldest son, a boy fighting his father's war beside him, put in ten more, and Shakuni added seven, and then they did not scatter again. They stood where they were and closed around him, and Sanjaya called what they made an impervious wall of Kauravas.

That left Drona free of Satyaki, and the Somakas came at him instead. They were the southern kinsmen of the Panchalas, the clan that had given Dhrishtadyumna half his army, and they poured arrows on the old teacher from every side at once because there was no other way to reach him.

He began to take the lives of Kshatriyas, Sanjaya said, the way the sun destroys the darkness around it with its rays, which is a strange thing to say about a man fighting at midnight, and is exactly right about what he was doing.

And then, out of the dark on the Panchala side, there came a sound the Kauravas had not heard from that army before. It was men calling to one another by name while they were being killed.

"We then heard, O monarch, a loud uproar amongst the Panchalas, who called upon one another, while they were being slaughtered by Drona."

Some of them abandoned sons. Some abandoned fathers. Some left brothers, or uncles, or their sisters' sons, or whatever kinsman was nearest, and ran with all the speed they had for the sake of their own lives. Others, out of their senses altogether, turned and ran straight at Drona, which came to the same end.

Many of the Pandava army, Sanjaya told the blind king, were despatched to the other world in that hour.

The host broke.

It broke in the sight of Bhimasena and Arjuna and Krishna and the twins and Yudhishthira and the son of Prishata, which is to say that every man the Pandavas had who was worth anything was standing there watching it happen and could not stop it. Their soldiers ran, and as they ran they threw down the blazing torches they had been carrying, all around them, because a man running in the dark does not want to be the brightest thing on the field.

So the light went out of that half of the battle. The world was enveloped in darkness and nothing could be seen.

And here is the detail that decided the next hour. The Kaurava troops still had their lamps. In consequence of the light that was among them, the flight of the foe could be ascertained. The Pandava army had made itself invisible and had also made itself blind, and the men hunting it could see, and see by their own light, which the fugitives were running away from into the black.

Drona and Karna went after them, mighty car-warriors both, scattering shafts into ground where they could hear feet.

Janardana watched it and became cheerless. He had driven Arjuna through everything the fourteenth day had put in front of them, and he did not often let his face change, and Sanjaya says plainly that it changed then. He said to Phalguna:

"Dhrishtadyumna and Satyaki, accompanied by the Panchalas, had proceeded against those great bowmen, Drona and Karna, shooting many shafts. This large host of ours hath been broken and routed with showers of arrows. Though their flight is sought to be checked, they are still incapable of being rallied, O son of Kunti. Beholding the host fly away through fear, ye Pandava warriors, cast away your fears. Accompanied by all the forces and arraying them in good order, both of us, with uplifted weapons, are even now proceeding against Drona and the Suta's son for withstanding them."

Then he saw Vrikodara coming up out of the dark with the Somakas behind him, and he said it again, differently, the way a man says a thing to gladden another man.

"Yonder Bhima, who taketh delight in battle, surrounded by the Somakas and the Pandavas, is coming against those mighty car-warriors, Drona and Karna. Supported by him, as also by the many mighty car-warriors among the Pandavas, fight now, O son of Pandu, for assuring all your troops."

And those two tigers among men went and took their station at the head of the battle, in front of Drona and Karna, where the army could see them.

The army came back. That is the plain fact of it, and it is not a small one. A host that has thrown away its lights and run turned round in the dark and went again to the place where Drona and Karna were grinding their foes, because two men had gone and stood there first.

At dead of night, a fierce encounter took place, and Sanjaya reached for the sea to describe it: it resembled the meeting of two oceans swelling at moonrise.

Then the Kaurava soldiers did the thing their enemies had done an hour before. They threw away the blazing lamps out of their hands and fought fearlessly and madly without them, and with that the last of the light on that field went out. The world was enveloped in gloom and dust together. There was nothing to aim at and nothing to recognise.

So the combatants fought with one another guided only by the names they uttered.

A man called his own name into the dark to find out whether the man beside him was a friend, and the answer he got told him whether to strike. Sanjaya, who had been at enough courts to know, said the names of the kings contending there were heard the way names are heard at a swayamvara, where a herald stands beside a girl with a garland and reads out the lineage of each suitor as she passes down the line. That is the comparison he chose for it. The same roll of famous houses, called out in the same order, in a field where nobody could see his hand.

Then, suddenly, silence overspread the whole battle, and lasted for a moment.

Nobody has ever explained that moment. It is simply set down: that in the middle of the worst night of the war, every man on that field stopped making noise at once, and the ground where two armies stood mixed together went quiet.

Then the uproar came back, made by angry men, victors and vanquished together.

And wherever a lamp was still burning, wherever some servant had kept his nerve or some car still carried a torch, the heroes rushed towards it. They went at the light like insects going into a fire, because it was the only place where a man could be seen, and therefore the only place where a man could be killed. And as the Pandavas and the Kauravas contended with each other, the darkness of night thickened around them.

Karna found Dhrishtadyumna in that dark, and struck him on the chest with ten shafts made to go into the vitals.

The son of Prishata answered with five, and with two words. "Wait! Wait!" That is all the speech he gets in this passage, and it is the speech of a man who does not intend the other to go anywhere.

They covered each other in showers of arrows, and drew their bows to the fullest stretch, and pierced each other again, and then Karna's aim began to tell. He sent the four steeds of the foremost warrior among the Panchalas to Yama's abode. He cut off his enemy's bow with keen arrows. With one broad-headed shaft he felled the driver out of his niche in the car.

Dhrishtadyumna had commanded the whole Pandava army since the first morning of the war, and he now had no bow, no horses, no driver and no car. He jumped down onto the field and picked up a mace.

Then he walked at Karna on foot.

He was struck the whole way with straight shafts and he kept walking, and he reached the car, and he killed the four horses standing in the traces of it. Having done that, the slayer of hosts turned back with great speed, and there was one car in that part of the field that a man on foot could be sure of finding, because it was the loudest and the brightest thing on the plain. He climbed up onto Arjuna's.

Standing on it, he wanted to go back at Karna at once, and would have.

Dharma's son bade him desist.

That is how Yudhishthira comes into this hour, saying no to his own commander in the middle of a rescue, and there is no argument recorded, and Dhrishtadyumna stayed where he was put.

Behind them, Karna mixed his leonine shouts with the twang of his bowstring and blew his conch with great force, so that the whole field would know what had happened to the Panchala prince. His driver was already yoking fresh horses to the car, steeds white as conchs, of the Sindhu breed, well broken and very fast.

And the Panchalas and the Somakas, hearing that conch and knowing what it meant, took up all kinds of weapons and came for him, making death itself their goal.

They came, and he stood on the new car with the white horses and afflicted them with his shafts like a cloud pouring torrents of rain upon a mountain, and the Panchala host fled away in fear like a doe frightened by a lion.

After that it was not a battle. Horsemen fell from their horses, elephant riders from their elephants, car-warriors from their cars, all around. Karna cut off with razor-faced arrows the arms of men who were running away from him, and the heads with their earrings still on them, and the thighs of others, whether they were on elephants or on horseback or on the ground. Many great car-warriors, as they fled, did not feel that they had lost a limb.

Sanjaya measured their fear with one line that the blind king would have understood better than any tally of the dead. Slaughtered by those terrible shafts, the Panchalas and the Srinjayas took the motion of even a straw for Karna. Men out of their senses saw their own friends running beside them and thought they were seeing Karna, and fled from them.

He followed the broken host, shooting on all sides. Others, only looked at by Drona, fled without being shot at all.

Yudhishthira watched his army going and decided that retreat was advisable, and said so to Arjuna.

"Behold that mighty bowman, Karna, stationed there like Rudra himself armed with his bow. Behold him scorching everything around like the blazing sun himself, at this fierce hour, this dead of night. These wails are being incessantly heard, O Partha, of thy helpless friends who are uttering them, mangled by the shafts of Karna. The manner in which Karna is aiming and letting off his shafts is such that no interval can be noticed between the two acts. He will annihilate all our friends. Do that now, Dhananjaya, about the slaughter of Karna, which, according to thy judgment, should next be done, and the time for which may have come."

Arjuna turned to Krishna and did not pretend that his brother was calm.

"The royal son of Dharma is frightened today by the prowess of Karna. Our army is flying away, O slayer of Madhu, our troops, broken and mangled with Drona's shafts and frightened by Karna, are unable to make a stand. I see Karna careering fearlessly. Our foremost of car-warriors are flying away. I cannot, like a snake incapable of putting up with the tread of a human being upon its body, bear to see him thus careering at the head of battle before my eyes. Proceed, therefore, to that spot where Karna is. I will either kill him, or let him slay me."

Krishna said no, and gave his reasons in order, and the first of them was praise.

"I behold Karna, that tiger among men, that warrior of superhuman prowess, careering in battle like the chief of the celestials himself. O Dhananjaya, there is none else capable of advancing against him in battle, save thee and the Rakshasa Ghatotkacha. I do not, however, regard the time to have come for thee to encounter the Suta's son. The blazing dart, resembling a mighty meteor, given him by Vasava, is still with him, kept for thee with care by the Suta's son. He keepeth that dart by him, and hath now assumed a terrible form."

That was the whole calculation. Indra's dart would kill any single man it was thrown at, Karna was saving it for Arjuna, and Krishna did not intend to let Arjuna be the man standing in front of him when it went.

So he sent for somebody else. Ghatotkacha was Bhima's son by the rakshasa woman Hidimba, born in a forest during the exile, and he came at once, clad in mail and armed with sword and arrow and bow, and saluted Krishna and Arjuna and said, "Here I am, command me."

He of Dasarha's race spoke to that rakshasa of blazing mouth and fiery eyes and a body the colour of clouds.

"Listen, O Ghatotkacha. The time is come for the display of thy prowess, and not of anybody else. Be thou the raft in this battle to the sinking Pandavas. Thou hast diverse weapons, and many kinds of Rakshasa illusion. Behold, the army of the Pandavas is being beaten by Karna like a herd of kine by the herdsman. Afflicted at dead of night by the Suta's son with his arrowy showers, the Panchalas are flying away like a herd of deer afflicted by a lion. Except thee, there is none else that can withstand him. It is even for this, O son of Hidimba, that men desire children, for being rescued from difficulties. Do thou now rescue thy kinsmen. At night, Rakshasas become endued with unlimited prowess. Slay Karna in battle, at this dead of night, aided by thy illusions. The Parthas, with Dhrishtadyumna, will dispose of Drona."

It was a strange thing to say to a son of the house, and Krishna had said the hardest part of it plainly. Sires desire sons for achieving their own objects. Children, those sources of good, are expected to rescue their sires both here and hereafter. Ghatotkacha was being told, in front of his father's brothers, exactly what he was for.

Arjuna added his own judgment, which was a soldier's.

"O Ghatotkacha, thyself, the long-armed Satyaki, and Bhimasena, these three, in my judgment, are the foremost ones among all our warriors. Go and encounter Karna in single combat this night. The mighty car-warrior Satyaki will protect thy rear."

And Ghatotkacha answered them both, and there was no modesty anywhere in it.

"I am a match for Karna, as also for Drona, or for any illustrious Kshatriya accomplished in weapons. This night I shall fight such a battle with the Suta's son as will form the subject of talk as long as the world lasts. Tonight I will spare neither the brave nor the timid nor those that will, with joined hands, pray for quarter. Following the Rakshasa usage, I shall slay all."

Then he went, and the troops of the Kauravas were frightened at the sight of him coming, and Karna, that tiger among men, received the warrior of the blazing mouth and blazing locks with a smile. Sanjaya, who had to find a comparison for what began then, went outside the world of men for it. The battle between Karna and that rakshasa, both roaring at each other, was like the battle between Indra and Prahlada.