The Sepoy
by Edmund Candler · English · Gutenberg #48666 · 286,253 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Sepoy
Author: Edmund Candler
Release date: April 8, 2015 [eBook #48666]
Most recently updated: October 24, 2024
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SEPOY ***
[Illustration]
THE SEPOY
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR._
A VAGABOND IN ASIA.
THE UNVEILING OF SHARA.
THE MANTLE OF THE EAST.
THE GENERAL PLAN.
SIRI RAM, REVOLUTIONIST.
THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY.
THE LONG ROAD TO BAGHDAD.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE SEPOY
By
EDMUND CANDLER
LONDON
JOHN MURRAY,
ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
1919
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_All rights reserved_
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TO
SIR VALENTINE CHIROL
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PREFACE
All these sketches, except "The Sikh" and "The Drabi," were written in
Mesopotamia. My aim has been, without going too deeply into origins and
antecedents, to give as accurate a picture as possible of the different
classes of sepoy. In Mesopotamia I met all the sixteen types included in
this volume, some for the first time. My acquaintance with them was at
first hand. But neither sympathy nor observation can initiate the
outsider into the psychology of the Indian soldier; or at least he
cannot be certain of his ground. One must be a regimental officer to
understand the sepoy, and then as a rule one only knows the particular
type one commands.
Therefore, to avoid mistakes and misconceptions, everything that I have
set down has been submitted to authority, and embodies the opinion of
officers best qualified to judge--that is to say, of officers who have
passed the best part of their lives with the men concerned. Even so I
have no doubt that passages will be found that are open to dispute.
Authorities disagree; estimates must vary, especially with regard to the
relative worth of different classes; and one must always bear in mind
that every company officer who is worth his salt is persuaded that there
are no men like his own. It is a pleasing trait and an essential one.
For it is the sworn confraternity between the British and Indian
officer, and the strong tie that binds the sepoy to his Sahib which have
given the Indian Army its traditions and prestige.
All references and statistics concerning the Indian Army will be found
to relate to the pre-war establishment; and no class of sepoy is
included which has been enlisted for the first time since 1914. At the
outbreak of war the strength of the Army in India was 76,953 British and
239,561 Indian. During the war 1,161,789 Indians were recruited. The
grand total of all ranks sent overseas from India was 1,215,338. The
casualties sustained by the force were 101,439. Races which never
enlisted before enlisted freely, and the Indian Army List when published
on the conclusion of Peace will be changed beyond recognition.
One or two classes I have omitted. The introduction of the Gujar, Meo,
Baluchi and Brahui, for instance, as separate types, would be an error
of perspective in a volume this size. It is hardly necessary to
differentiate the Gujar from the Jat; the origin of the two races is
much the same, and in appearance they are not always distinguishable.
The Meo, too, approximates to the Merat. The Baluchi proper has
practically ceased to enlist, and the sepoy who calls himself a Baluch
is generally the descendant of immigrants. There is also a scattering of
Brahuis in the Indian Army. They and the Baluchis are of the same stock,
and are supposed to have come from Aleppo way, though in some
extraordinary manner which nobody can understand the Brahuis have picked
up a Dravidian accent.
It is difficult, too, to write of the Madrasi--Hindu, Mussalman, or
Christian--as an entity apart. All I know of him is that in the Indian
Sappers and Miners and Pioneer regiments, when he is measured with other
classes, his British officer speaks of him as equal to the best.
The names of the officers to whom I am indebted would make a long list.
I met them in camps, messes, trenches, dugouts, and in the open field.
Some are old friends; others are unknown to me by name; many are unaware
that they have contributed material for these sketches; and I can only
thank them collectively for their help. For verification I have
consulted the official handbooks of the Indian Army; and for certain of
my references to the achievements of the Indian Army in France I am
indebted to the semi-official history ("The Indian Corps in France," by
Lieut.-Col. J. W. B. Merewether, C.I.E., and Sir Frederick Smith)
published under the authority of the Secretary of State for India. One
chapter, "The Drabi," I have taken almost bodily from my "Year of
Chivalry," which also included the story of Wariam Singh; my thanks are
due to the publishers, Messrs. Simpkin Marshall, for their permission to
reprint it. For the account of the Jharwas I am indebted to an officer
in a Gurkha regiment who wishes to remain anonymous. For illustrations
my thanks are due to General Holland Pryor, M.V.O., Major G. W.
Thompson, and Lieut.-Cols. Alban Wilson, D.S.O., R. C. Wilson, D.S.O.,
M.C., F. L. Nicholson, D.S.O., M.C., H. M. W. Souter, W. H. Carter, E.
R. P. Berryman, and Mr. T. W. H. Biddulph, C.I.E.
Two Indian words occur frequently in these pages. They are _izzat_ and
_jiwan_, words that are constantly in the mouths of officers and sepoys.
"Izzat" is best rendered by "honour" or "prestige"; "jiwan" means a
"youngster," and is applied to the rank and file of the Indian Army
without reference to age. I have kept the vernacular forms, as it is
difficult to find exact English equivalents, and much that is homely and
familiar in the words is lost in translation.
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE GURKHA 1
THE SIKH 26
THE PUNJABI MUSSALMAN 49
THE PATHAN 63
THE DOGRA 92
THE MAHRATTA 104
THE JAT 115
THE RAJPUT AND BRAHMAN 125
THE GARHWALI 138
THE KHATTAK 149
THE HAZARA 159
THE MER AND MERAT 170
THE RANGHAR 181
THE MEENA 188
THE JHARWAS 200
THE DRABI 208
THE SANTAL LABOUR CORPS 217
THE INDIAN FOLLOWER 227
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING
PAGE
HAVILDAR CHANDRADHOJ (RAI) 6
TEKBAHADUR GHOTAM (KHAS) 6
THE SIKH 26
THE PUNJABI MUSSALMAN 50
THE PATHAN PIPERS 64
THE DOGRA 92
THE KONKANI MAHRATTA 104
THE DEKHANI MUSSALMAN 112
A JAT CAMEL SOWAR 116
THE RAJPUT 126
THE GARHWALI 138
THE HAZARA 160
THE MERAT 170
THE RANGHAR 182
THE MEENA 188
THE JHARWA 200
BHIL FOLLOWERS 230
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE SEPOY
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE GURKHA
So much has been written of the Gurkha and the Sikh that officers who
pass their lives with other classes of the Indian Army are tired of
listening to their praises. Their fame is deserved, but the
exclusiveness of it was resented in days when one seldom heard of the
Mahratta, Jat, Dogra, and Punjabi Mussalman. But it was not the Gurkha's
or the Sikh's fault if the man in the street puts them on a pedestal
apart. Both have a very distinctive appearance; with the Punjabi
Mussalman they make up the bulk of the Indian Army; and their proud
tradition has been won in every fight on our frontiers. Now other
classes, whose qualities were hidden, live in the public eye. The war
has proved that all men are brave, that the humblest follower is capable
of sacrifice and devotion; that the Afridi, who is outwardly the nearest
thing to an impersonation of Mars, yields nothing in courage to the
Madrasi Christian of the Sappers and Miners. These revelations have
meant a general levelling in the Indian Army and the uplift of classes
hitherto undeservedly obscure. At the same time the reputation of the
great fighting stocks has been splendidly maintained.
The hillmen of Nepal have stood the test as well as the best. Ask the
Devons what they think of the 1/9th Gurkhas who fought on their flank on
the Hai. Ask Kitchener's men and the Anzacs how the 5th and 6th bore
themselves at Gallipoli, and read Ian Hamilton's report. Ask Townshend's
immortals how the 7th fought at Ctesiphon; and the British regiments who
were at Mahomed Abdul Hassan and Istabulat what the 1st and 8th did in
these hard-fought fights. Ask the gallant Hants rowers against what odds
the two Gurkha battalions[1] forced the passage of the Tigris at Shumran
on February 23rd. And ask the commander of the Indian Corps what sort of
a fight the six Gurkha battalions[2] put up in France.
Nothing could have been more strange to the Gurkha and more different
from what his training for frontier warfare had taught him to expect
than the conditions in Flanders. The first trenches the Gurkhas took
over when they were pushed up to the front soon after their arrival in
France were flooded and so deep that the little men could not stand up
to the parapet. They were exposed to the most devastating fire of heavy
artillery, trench-mortars, bombs, and machine guns. Parts of their
trench were broken up and obliterated by the Hun Minnewerfers and became
their graves. They hung on for the best part of a day and a night in
this inferno, but in the end they were overwhelmed and driven out of the
position, as happens sometimes with the best troops in the world. The
surprising thing is that they became inured to this kind of warfare. Not
only did they stand their ground, but in more than one assault they
drove the Huns from their positions, and in September, 1915, the same
battalion that had suffered so severely near Givenchy carried line after
line of German trenches west of Martin du Pietre.
Those early months in France, when our troops, ill provided with bombs
and trench-mortars and inadequately supported by artillery, were
shattered by a machinery of destruction to which they could make little
reply, were very much like hell. The soldier's dream of war had come,
but in the form of a nightmare. Afterwards in Mesopotamia, the
trench-fighting at El-Hannah and Sannaiyat was not much more inspiring.
But the hour was to come when our troops had more than a sporting chance
in a fight, and war became once more for the man at the end of the rifle
something like his picture of the great game. The Gurkhas were severely
tried in the ordeal by which this change was effected, and they played a
stout part especially in the Tigris crossing, the honour of which they
shared with the Norfolks; but, like the British Tommy in these trying
times, they were always cheerful.
It is not the nature of any Sepoy to grouse. Patience and endurance is
the heritage of all, but cheerfulness is most visible in the "Gurkh." He
laughs like Atkins when the shells miss him, and he is never down on his
luck. When the Turks were bombarding us on the Hai, I watched three
delighted Gurkhas throwing bricks on the corrugated iron roof of a
signaller's dug-out. A lot of stuff was coming over, shrapnel and high
explosive, but the Gurkhas were so taken up with their little joke of
scaring the signallers that the nearer the burst the better they were
pleased. The signallers wisely lay "doggo" until one of the Gurkhas
appeared at the door of the dug-out and gave the whole show away by a
too expansive grin.
In France the element of shikar was eliminated. It would be affectation
in the keenest soldier to pretend that he enjoyed the long-linked
bitterness of Festubert, Givenchy, and Neuve Chapelle. But in
Mesopotamia, especially after the crossing of the Tigris and the capture
of Baghdad, there were many encounters in which one could think of war
in the terms of sport. "There has been some shikar," is the Gurkha's way
of describing indifferently a small scrap or a big battle. Neuve
Chapelle was shikar. And it was shikar the other day when a Gurkha
patrol by a simple stratagem surprised some mounted Turks. The stratagem
succeeded. The Turks rode up unsuspectingly within easy range, but the
Gurkhas did not empty a single saddle. Their British officer chaffed
them on their bad shooting; but the havildar grinned and said, "At least
a little shikar has taken place." That is the spirit. War is a kind of
sublimated shikar. It is the mirror of the chase. The Gurkha is hunting
when he is battle-mad, and sees red; and he is hunting when he glides
alone through the grass or mud on a dark, silent night to stalk an enemy
patrol. Following up a barrage on the Hai, the 1/9th were on the Turks
like terriers. "Here, here, Sahib!" one of them called, and pointing to
a bay where the enemy still cowered, pitched his bomb on a Turk's head
with a grin of delight and looked round at a paternal officer for
approval. Another was so excited that he followed his grenade into the
trench before it had burst, and he and his Turk were blown up together.
The first time I saw Gurkhas in a civilized battle was at Beit Aieesa,
where the little men were scurrying up and down the trenches they had
just taken, with blood on their bayonets and clothes, bringing up
ammunition and carrying baskets of bombs as happy and keen and busy as
ferrets. They had gone in and scuppered the Turk before the barrage had
lifted. They had put up a block and were just going to bomb down a
communication trench. I saw one of them pull up the body of a British
Tommy who had been attached to the regiment as a signaller and was
bombed into a mess. The Gurkha patted him on the shoulder and
disappeared behind the traverse without a word.
[Illustration:
left. HAVILDAR CHANDRAHOJ (RAJ).
right. TEKBAHADUR GHOTAM (KHAS).
]
The Gurkha fights as he hunts. Parties of them go into the jungle to
hunt the boar. They beat the beast up and attack him with kukris when he
tries to break through their line. It is a desperate game, and the
casualties are a good deal heavier than in pig-sticking. The Gurkha's
attitude to the Turk or the Hun is his attitude to the boar. There is no
hostility or hate in him, and he is a cheerful, if a grim, fighter.
There was never a Gurkha fanatic. The Magar or Gurung does not wish to
wash his footsteps in the blood of the ungodly. To the righteous or the
unrighteous stranger he is alike indifferent. There is no race he would
wish to extirpate, and he has few prejudices and no hereditary foes.
When his honour or interest is touched he is capable of rapid primitive
reprisals, but he does not as a rule brood or intrigue. His outlook is
that of a healthy boy. There is no person so easy to get on with as the
"Gurkh." The ties of affection that bind him to his regimental officers
are very intimate indeed. When the Sahib goes on leave trekking, or
shooting, or climbing, he generally takes three or four of the regiment
with him. I have often met these happy hunting-parties in and beyond the
Himalayas. I have a picture in my mind of a scene by the Woolar Lake in
Kashmir. The Colonel of a Gurkha regiment is sitting in a boat waiting
for a youth whom he has allowed to go to a village on some errand of his
own. The Colonel has waited two hours. At last the youth appears, all
smiles, embracing a pumpkin twice the size of his head. No rebuke is
administered for the delay. The youth squats casually in the boat at his
Colonel's feet, and as he cuts the pumpkin into sections, makes certain
unquotable comments on the village folk of Kashmir. As the pair
disappear across the lake over the lotus leaves I hear bursts of
laughter.
The relations between officers and men are as close as between boys and
masters on a jaunt together out of school, and the Gurkha no more thinks
of taking advantage of this when he returns to the regiment than the
English schoolboy does when he returns to school. It is part of his
jolly, boyish, uncalculating nature that he is never on the make. In
cantonments, when any fish are caught or any game is shot, the
first-fruits find their way to the mess. No one knows how it comes. The
orderly will simply tell you that the men brought it. Perhaps after a
deal of questioning the shikari may betray himself by a fatuous, shy,
bashful grin.
The Gurkha does not love his officer because he is a Sahib, but because
he is his Sahib, and the officer has to prove that he is his Sahib
first, and learn to speak his language and understand his ways. A
strange officer coming into a Gurkha regiment is not adopted into the
Pantheon at once. He has to qualify. There may be a period of suspicion;
but once accepted, he is served with a fidelity and devotion that are
human and dog-like at the same time. I do not emphasize the exclusive
attachment of the Gurkha to his own Sahib as an exemplary virtue; it is
a fault, though it is the defect of a virtue. And it is a peculiarly
boyish fault. It is the old story of magnifying the house to the neglect
of the school. Infinite prestige comes of it; and this is to the good.
But prestige is often abused. Exclusiveness does not pay in a modern
army. In the organism of the ideal fighting machine the parts are
compact and interdependent; and it would be a point to the good if every
Gurkha were made to learn Hindustani and encouraged to believe that
there are other gods besides his own.
When one hears officers in other Indian regiments disparage the Gurkha,
as one does sometimes, one may be sure that the root of the prejudice
lies in this exclusiveness. I have heard it counted for vanity,
indifference, disrespect. It is even associated, though very wrongly,
with the eminence, or niche apart, which he shares in popular estimation
with the Sikh. But the Gurkha probably knows nothing about this niche.
He is a child of nature. His clannishness is very simple indeed. He
frankly does not understand a strange Sahib. Directly he tumbles to it
that anything is needed of him he will lend a hand, but having no very
deeply-ingrained habit of reverence for caste in the abstract apart from
his devotion to the proved individual, he may appear sometimes a little
neglectful in ceremony. But no Sahib with a grain of imagination or
understanding in him will let the casual habits of the little man weigh
in the balance against his grit and gameness, his loyalty, and his
splendid fighting spirit. I am always suspicious of the officer who
depreciates the Gurkha. He is either sensitively vain, or dull in
reading character, or jealous of the dues which he thinks have been
diverted from some other class to which he is personally attached.
This last infirmity one can understand and forgive. It grows out of an
officer's attachment to his men. It is present sometimes in the British
officers who command Gurkhas. Indeed, a man who after a year's service
with any class of Sepoy is so detached and impartial in mind as not to
find peculiar and distinctive virtues in his own men, ought not to be
serving in the Indian Army at all. I remember once hearing a subaltern
in a very obscure regiment discussing his class company. The battalion
had not seen service for at least three generations, and everyone took
it for granted that they would "rat" the first time they heard a shot
fired. But the boy was full of "bukh."
"By Jove!" he said, "our fellows are simply splendid, the best plucked
crowd in the Indian Army, and so game.... Oh no! they've never been in
action, but you should just see how they lay one another out at hockey."
Before the war one would have smiled inwardly at this "encomium," if one
could have preserved one's outward countenance, but Armageddon, the
corrective of exclusiveness and pride, has taught us that gallantry
resides under the most unlikely exteriors. It has taught us to look for
it there. Anyhow the boy had the right spirit even if his faith were
founded in illusion; for it is through these ties of mutual loyalty that
the spirit of the Indian Army is strong.
The devotion of the Sepoy to his officer is common to most, perhaps to
all, classes of the Indian Army. In some of the Gurkha battalions it is
usual for two of the men to mark their Sahib when he goes into action,
to follow him closely, and if he falls, to look after him and bring him
back whether wounded or dead. This is a tacitly understood and quite
unofficial arrangement, and the officer knows no more about his
self-appointed guard than the hero or villain of melodrama about the
detective who dogs his footsteps in the street. In France a British
officer in a Gurkha regiment knocked out by shell-shock opened his eyes
to find his orderly kneeling over him fanning the flies off his face. He
lost consciousness again. When he came to the Gurkha was still fanning
him, and the tears were rolling down his cheeks.
"Why are you crying, 'Tegh Bahadur?'" he said; "I am not badly hit."
"I am crying, Sahib," he said, "because my arm is gone, and I am no more
able to fight." And with a nod he indicated the wound. The shell that
had stunned the Sahib had carried off the orderly's forearm at the
elbow.
The Medical Officer will tell you that the Gurkha is the pluckiest
little fellow alive. In hospital he will go on smoking and chatting to
you when he is dying, fighting his battles over again. I remember a
Gurkha in an ambulance at Sinn pointing his index finger, which was
hanging by a tendon, as he described the attack. During a cholera
outbreak in 1916 among the Nepalese troops garrisoning the Black
Mountains frontier a Gurkha, who was evidently _in extremis_, was being
carried by his Major and another officer to a bit of rising ground where
there was some shade and a little breeze. When in an interval of
consciousness he opened his eyes and saw two Sahibs carrying him, he
tried to raise himself to the salute, but fell back in a half faint.
"You must pardon me, Sahib," he said, "but owing to weakness I am unable
to salute." The Major told him to lie still. "We are taking you to a
cool place," he explained. "Now you must be quick and get well." The
Gurkha answered with a faint smile, "Now that your honours have honoured
me by carrying me, I shall quickly get well." In a few minutes he died.
The Gurkha is not given to the neatly turned speech, the apt phrase, and
one might search one's memory a long time before one recalled a
compliment similar to this one spoken in simple sincerity by a dying
man. The arts of conciliation are not practised where he camps. There is
a delightful absence of the courtier about him, and he could not make
pretty speeches if he tried. The "Our Colonel Sahib shot remarkably
well, but God was merciful to the birds" story is told of a very
different race. If a colonel of Gurkhas shoots really badly, his orderly
will probably be found doubled up with mirth. The few comments of the
Gurkha that stick in the mind are memorable in most instances for some
crudeness, or misconception, or for a primitive, and not infrequently a
somewhat gruesome, sense of humour. One meets many types, but the
average "Gurkh," though observant, is not as a rule quick at the uptake.
I heard a characteristic story of one, Chandradhoj, a stalwart Limbu of
Eastern Nepal. It was in November last year, in the days of trench
warfare. His Colonel had sent him from the Sannaiyat trenches to Arab
Village to have his boots mended, and when he was returning in the
evening the Turks got it into their heads that a relief was taking
place, and put in a stiff bombardment, paying special attention to the
road. Chandradhoj got safely back through this. When the Colonel met him
in the evening passing his dug-out he stopped him and asked him how he
had fared.
"Well, you've got back all right," he said. "You wern't hit!"
"No, Sahib, I was not hit. I came back in artillery formation."
One could see him solemnly stepping aside a few paces from the road, the
prescribed distance from the imaginary sections on the left or right.
These were the Sahib's orders at such times, he would argue, and there
must be salvation in the rite.
The Gurkha sees what he sees, and his visual range is his mental range.
At Kantara he only saw the desert, and the desert was sand. Other
conditions beyond the horizon, an oasis for instance, were
inconceivable. He tried to get it out of his Sahib how and where the
Bedouin lived who came into Kantara Post. He thought they lived in holes
in the sand, but what they ate he could not imagine. When they came into
the Post looking wretched and miserable he gave them chapattis. "But,
Sahib," he asked, "what could they have eaten before we came other than
sand?"
One is never quite sure what will move a Gurkha to laughter. He grins at
things which tickle a child's fancy, and he grins at things which make
the ordinary man feel very sick inside. When the Turk abandoned Sinn in
May, 1916, we occupied the position. The advance lay over the month-old
battlefield of Beit Aieesa, and the enemy's dead were lying everywhere
in a very unpleasant stage of dissolution. Suddenly the grimness of the
scene was disturbed by explosive bursts of laughter. It was the Gurkhas.
"Well, what is the joke? What are you laughing at?" an officer asked
them. "Look, Sahib!" one of them said. "The devils are melting." Only he
used a much more impolite word than "devil," for which we have no
translation.
The Gurkha has not a very high estimate of the value of life. A few
years ago, when Rugby football was introduced in a certain battalion,
there was an unfortunate casualty soon after the first kick-off. One of
the men, collared by his Sahib, broke his neck on the hard ground, and
was killed stone-dead. The incident sealed the fate of Association in
the regiment, and Rugby became the vogue from that hour. "This is
something like a game," they said, "when you kill a man every time you
play."
The Gurkha would not be such a fine fighter if he had not a bit of the
primitive in him. Several years ago two companies of a Gurkha battalion,
who were holding a post in a frontier show, were bothered by snipers at
night. The shots came from a clump of bushes on the edge of a blind
nullah full of high brushwood, which for some reason it was inadvisable
to picquet. Here was an excellent chance of shikar, and a havildar and
four men asked if they might go out at night and stalk the Pathans. They
were allowed to go, the conditions being that they were to go
bare-footed, they were not to take rifles, and they were to do the work
with the kukri. Also they were to stay out all night, as they would
certainly be shot by the sentries of other regiments if they tried to
come in. Only one sniper's bullet whizzed into camp that night. The next
morning the havildar entered the mess while the officers were
breakfasting. He came in with his left hand behind his back and saluted.
"Sahib," he said, "two of the snipers have been killed."
"That's good, havildar," the Colonel said. "But how do you know that you
got them? Are they lying there, or have their brothers taken them away?"
The havildar, grinning broadly, produced a Pathan's head, and dumped it
on the breakfast table. "The other is outside," he said. "Shall I bring
it in?"
The Gurkha is good at this kind of night-work; he has the nerve of a
Highlander and the stealth of a leopard. His great fault in a general
attack is that he does not know when to stop. Without his Sahib he would
not survive many battles. And that is why the casualties are so heavy in
regiments when the British officers fall early in the fight. When the
Gurkhas were advancing at Beit Aieesa, I heard an officer in a Sikh
regiment say, "Little blighters. They're always scurrying on ahead, and
if you don't look after them they will make a big salient and bite off
more than they can chew." This is exactly what happened, though with the
Turkish guns as a bait, guns which they took and lost afterwards by
reason of the offending salient, they would not have been human if they
had held back.
The Gurkha battalions, as everybody knows, have permanent cantonments in
the hills, and do not move about like other regiments from station to
station. Most of them have their wives and families in the lines, and in
the leave season they get away for a time to their homes in Nepal. In
peace the permanent cantonment with its continuity of home life is a
privilege; but in the war the Gurkhas, like every other class of sepoy,
have had to bear with a weariness of exile which it is difficult for any
one but their own officers to understand. It is true of the Gurkha, as
of the Indian of the plains, that he gives up more when he leaves his
home to fight in a distant country than the European. The age-worn
traditions and associations which make up homeliness for him, the
peculiar and cherished routine, cannot be translated overseas. And it
must be remembered that the sepoy has not the same stimulus as we have.
It is true that he is a soldier, and that it is his business to fight,
and that he is fighting his Sahib's enemy. That carries him a long way.
But he does not see the Hun as his Sahib sees him, as an intolerable,
blighting incubus which he must cast off or die. One appreciates his
cheerfulness in exile all the more when one remembers this.
On a transport this summer in Basra, Asbahadur, a young Gurung from
Western Nepal was pointed out to me. He had just come home from leave.
He had six weeks in India, but there was the depôt to visit first. He
had to pick up his kit and draw his pay, and by the time he had got to
his village, Kaski Pokhri, on the Nepal frontier, sixteen days hard
going from Gorakhpur in the U.P., he found that he had only four days at
home before he must start off again to catch his steamer at Bombay. But
he had seen his family, his house, his crops, the barn that had to be
repaired, the familiar stretch of jungle and stream. He had dumped his
money in the only place where money is any good; and he had seen that
all was well.
He had learned, too, that it was well with his young brother, who had
run away from home to join the army, as so many young Gurkhas did at the
beginning of the war,--literally "running" for the best part of two
nights and days, only a short neck ahead of his pursuing parents, who
had now forgiven him.
There is conscription in Nepal now and there is no need for the young
men to run away. Asbahadur told me that he had met very few young men of
his age near his home. In his village the women were doing the work, as
they were in France, and as he understood was the case in the Sahib's
country. The garrisoning of India by the Nepalese troops had depleted
the county of youth. You only met old men and cripples and boys. Early
in the war the Nepal Durbar came forward with a splendid offer of
troops, which we were quick to accept. Thousands of her best, including
the Maharaja's _Corps de garde_, poured over the frontier into
Hindustan, and released many regular battalions for service overseas.
They have fought on the frontier, and taken their part in policing the
border from the Black Mountains on the north to as far south as the
territory of the Mahsuds.
There are three main divisions of Gurkhas: the Magar and Gurung of
Central and Western Nepal, indistinguishable except for a slight accent;
the Limbu and Rai of Eastern Nepal; and the Khattri and Thakur, who are
half Aryan. The Magars and Gurungs are the most Tartar-like, short, with
faces flat as scones. The Limbu and Rai physiognomy assimilates more
with the Chinese. In the Khattri and Thakur, or Khas Gurkhas as they are
called by others, though they do not accept the term, the Hindu strain
is distinguishable, though the Mongol as a rule is predominant. They are
the descendants of Brahmans or Rajputs and Gurkha women; hence the
opprobrious "khas," or "fallen." But it is a blend of nobility--a proud
birthright. It is only the implication of the "fall" they resent,--for
these marriages were genuine but for the narrow legislation of orthodoxy
and caste. Before the war it was taken as a matter of course by some
that the streak of plainsman in the mountaineer must imply a softening
of the national fibre, but the war has proved them as good as the best.
In the crossing of the Tigris at Shumran, the miniature Mesopotamian
Gallipoli, the Khas (9th Gurkhas) shared the honours in full with the
Magars and Gurung (2nd Gurkhas); but long before that any suspicion of
inferiority had been dissipated.
It is difficult to differentiate the different classes, but the Khas
Gurkha is probably the most intelligent. In the Limbu and the Rai there
are sleeping fires. They are as fastidious about their honour as the
Pathan and the Malay, and when any sudden and grim poetic justice is
exacted in blood in a Gurkha regiment the odds are that one or the other
are at the bottom of it. The Magars and the Gurung are the basic type,
the "everyman" among Gurkhas, the backbone in numbers of the twenty
battalions. As regards pluck there is nothing to choose between any of
them, and if one battalion goes further than another the extra
stiffening is the work of the British officers.
One's impression of the Gurkha in war and peace is of an almost
mechanical smartness, movements as quick and certain as the click of a
rifle bolt. Soldiering is a ritual among them. You may mark it in the
way they pitch camp, solemnly, methodically, driving in each peg as if
it were an ordained rite. They have learnt it all by rote. They could do
it as easily in their sleep. And the discipline has stood the shock of
seismic disturbance. In the Dharmsala earthquake of 1905 the quarter
guard of the 2/8th Gurkhas turned out and saluted their officer with the
same clockwork precision, when their bungalow had fallen like a house of
cards. They had escaped by a miracle, and half the regiment had been
killed, or maimed, or buried alive.
But remove the Gurkha from the atmosphere of barracks and camps and the
whole ritual is forgotten like a dream. Out on shikar, or engaged in any
work away from the battalion, he becomes his casual self again. But the
guest of a Gurkha regiment does not see this side of him. I have
memories of the men called into the mess and standing round like graven
images, the personality religiously suppressed, the smile tardily
provoked if Generals or strange Sahibs are present. A boy, with a
smooth, round, innocent face, as still and as expressionless as if he
had been hypnotized. Next to him a man with the face of a bonze. Another
with an expression of ferocity asleep and framed in benevolence. Passion
has drawn those deep lines at right angles with the mouth. They are
scars of the spirit--often enough now in the same setting as dints of
lead and steel.
You get these faces in Gurung, Magar, Limbu, Khas, and Rai. But
differentiation is profitless and often misleading, whether as regards
the outward or inward man. I heard an almost heated discussion as to
relative values by officers, who should know best, terminated by an
outsider with the laconic comment, "They are all dam good at chivying
chickens." As to this all were agreed. And the remark called up another
picture--the Gurkha returning from a punitive raid against a cut-throat
tribe, smothered in spoil and accoutrements, three carpets under one
saddle, and the little man on top with chickens under each arm, and
strung as thick as cartridges to his belt and bandolier.
THE SIKH
It has often been said that the Indian Army has kept Sikhism alive. War
is a conserver of the Khalsa, peace a dissolvent. When one understands
how this is so, one has grasped what Sikhism has done for the followers
of the faith, and why the Sikh is different in habit and thought from
his Hindu and Muhammadan neighbour, though in most cases he derives from
the same stock.
The Sikhs are a community, not a race. The son of a Sikh is not himself
a Sikh until he has taken the pahul, the ceremony by which he is
admitted into the Khalsa, the community of the faithful. It would take
volumes to explain exactly what initiation means for him. But the
important thing to understand is that the convert, in becoming a Sikh,
is not charged with a religious crusade. There is no bigotry in the
faith that has made a Singh of him. His baptism by steel and "the waters
of life" only means that he has gained prestige by admission into a
military and spiritual brotherhood of splendid traditions.
[Illustration: THE SIKH.]
Guru Nanak (1469-1539), the founder of the sect, was a man of peace and
a quietist. He only sought to remove the cobwebs that had overgrown
sectarian conceptions of God. He could not in his most prophetic dreams
have foreseen the bearded, martial Sikh whom we know to-day. This is the
Govindi Sikh, the product of the tenth Guru, that inspired leader of men
who welded his followers into the armed fraternity which supplanted the
Moguls and became the dominant military class of the Punjab.
It was persecution that made the Sikh what he is--not theological
conviction. Dogma was incidental. The rise of the Khalsa was a political
movement. The thousands of Jat yeomen who joined the banner accepted the
book with the sword. To make a strong and distinctive body of them, to
lift them above the Hindu ranks, to convert a sect into a religion, to
give them a cause and a crusade was Govind's work. It was he who
consolidated the Sikhs by giving them prestige. He instituted the
Khalsa, or the commonwealth of the chosen, into which his disciples were
initiated by the ceremony of the pahul. He swept away ritual, abolished
caste, and ordained that every Sikh should bear the old Rajput title of
Singh, or Lion, as every Govindi Sikh does to this day. He also gave
national and distinctive traits to the dress of his people, ordaining
that they should carry a sword, dagger, and bracelet of steel, don
breeches instead of a loincloth, and wear their hair long and secured in
a knot by a comb. He it was who grafted the principles of valour,
devotion, and chivalry on the humble gospel of Nanak, and introduced the
national salutation of "Wah Guru ji ka Khalsa! Wa Guru ji ki
Futteh!"--"Hail to the Khalsa! Victory to God"--a chant that has
dismayed the garrison of many a doomed trench held by the Turk and the
Hun.
"The Sikhs of Govind shall bestride horses,
And bear hawks upon their hands;
The Turks who behold them shall fly;
One shall combat a multitude,
And the Sikh who thus perishes shall be blessed for ever."[3]
It was odd that the Arabs in Mesopotamia should have called the Sikh
"The Black Lion,"[4] bearing witness to the boast that every member of
the Khalsa when he puts on the consecrated steel and adopts the title of
Singh is lionised in the most literal sense of the word and becomes the
part in fact as well as in name.
War is a necessary stimulus for Sikhism. In the reaction of peace the
Sikh population dwindles. It was in the struggle with Islam, during the
ascendency of Ranjit Singh, in the two wars against the British, and
after in the Mutiny, when the Sikhs proved our loyal allies, that the
Khalsa was strongest. Without the incentive to honour and the door open
to military service the ineradicable instincts of the Hindu reassert
themselves. Fewer jiwans come forward and take the pahul; not only is
the community weakened by lack of disciples, but many who hold fast to
the form let go the spirit; ritual, idolatry, superstition,
exclusiveness, and caste, the old enemies to the reformed religion,
creep in again; the aristocracy of honour lapses into the aristocracy of
privilege. Then the Brahman enters in, and the simple faith is obscured
by all manner of un-Sikh-like preoccupations. Sikhism might have fallen
back into Hinduism and become an obscure sect if it had not been for the
Indian Army. But here the insignia of Guru Govind have been maintained,
and his laws and traditions. The class regiments and class-company
regiments have preserved not merely the outward observances; they have
kept alive the inward spirit of the Khalsa. Thus it is that the Sikh has
more class feeling than any other sepoy, and more pride in himself and
his community. Govind set the lion stamp on him as he intended. By his
outward signs he cannot be mistaken--by his beard, the steel bracelet on
his wrist, his long knotted hair, or if that is hidden, by the set of
his turban, above all by his grave self-respect. The casual stranger can
mark him by one or all of these signs, but there is a subtler physical
distinction in expression and feature that you cannot miss when you know
the Sikh well. This is quite independent of insignia. It is as marked in
a boy without a hair to his chin as in an old campaigner. This also is
Govind's mark, the sum of his influence inscribed on the face by the
spirit. A great tribute this to the genius of the Khalsa, when one
remembers that the Sikh is not a race apart, but comes of the same
original stock as most of his Hindu and Muhammadan neighbours in the
Punjab, and that Govind, his spiritual ancestor, only died two hundred
years ago.
Amongst all the races and castes that have been caught up into the
Khalsa, by far the most important in influence and numbers is the Jat.
Porus was probably of the race. When Alexander, impressed by his
gallantry, asked him what boon he might confer, he demanded "to be
treated like a king"--a very Sikh-like speech. The Sikh soldier is the
Jat sublimated, and the bulk of the Sikhs in the Indian Army are of Jat
origin. Authorities differ as to the derivation of the Jats, but it is
commonly believed that they and the Rajputs are of the same Scythian
origin, and that they represent two separate waves of invasion; and this
is borne out by their physical resemblance and by a general similarity
in their communal habits of life. The Jat, so long as he remains a
Hindu, is called Jāt (pronounced Jā-āt), while the Jat who has adopted
Sikhism is generally referred to as Jăt (pronounced Jŭt). The spelling
is the same, and to the uninitiated this is a constant source of
confusion. The difference in pronunciation arose from a subtlety of
dialect, it being customary in the part of the Punjab where Sikhs
preponderate to shorten the long Ā of the Hindi.
The Jat is the backbone of the Punjab. From his Scythian ancestors is
derived the same stubborn fibre that stiffens the Punjabi cultivator,
whatever changes he may have suffered by influence of caste or creed,
whether he be Hindu, Muhammadan, or Sikh. The admitted characteristics
of the Jat are stubbornness, tenacity, patience, devotion, courage,
discipline and independence of spirit fitly reconciled; add to these the
prestige and traditions of the Khalsa and you have the ideal Sikh.
I say "the ideal Sikh," for without the contributory influences you may
not get the type as Govind conceived it. The ideal Sikh is the happy
Sikh, the Sikh who is content with the place he occupies in his cosmos,
who respects and believes in his superior officers, who does not
consider himself unjustly treated, and who has received no injury to his
self-esteem. For the virtuous ingredients in his composition are subject
to reaction. When he fancies he is wronged, he broods. The milk in him
becomes gall. The "waters of life" stirred by steel, his baptismal
draught, take on an acid potency. "I'd rather command Sikhs than any
other class of sepoy," a brigadier told me, and he had commanded every
imaginable class of sepoy for twenty years, "but they must be happy
Sikhs," he added. The brooding or intriguing Sikh is a nuisance and a
danger.
The pick of the Khalsa will be found in the class regiments and class
company regiments to which the Sikhism of to-day owes its conservation,
vigour, and life. The 14th Sikhs were raised at Ferozepore in 1846; the
15th at Ludhiana in the same year; the 45th Rattray's Sikhs in 1856 for
service among the Sonthals; the 35th and 36th Sikhs in 1887, the 47th in
1901. The 15th, the oldest Sikh battalion, and the 47th, the latest
raised, were the first to be given the opportunity of showing the mettle
of the Khalsa in a European war. The 47th, who were not raised till
1901, earned as proud a record as any in France, distinguishing
themselves from the day in October, 1914, when, with the 20th and 21st
Sappers and Miners, they cleared the village of Neuve Chapelle after
some Homeric hand-to-hand fighting in the houses and streets, to the
desperately stubborn advance up the glacis to the German trenches on
April 26, 1915, in the second battle of Ypres, when the regiment went in
with eleven British and ten Indian officers and 423 other ranks, of whom
but two British and two Indian officers and 92 rank and file mustered
after the action. The 15th Sikhs, one of the two earliest-raised Sikh
battalions, were the first to come into action in France, and they
maintained a high-level reputation for gallantry all through the
campaign. The story of Lieutenant Smyth and his ten Sikh bombers at
Festubert is not likely to be forgotten. Smyth and two sepoys were the
only two survivors of this gallant band who passed by a miracle,
crawling over the dead bodies of their comrades, through a torrent of
lead, and carried their bombs through to the first line. Smyth was
awarded the V.C., Lance-Naik Mangal Singh the Indian Order of Merit, and
every sepoy in the party the Indian Distinguished Service Medal. Two of
these men belonged to the 45th Sikhs, four to the 19th Punjabis. And
here it should be remembered that the Sikhs earned a composite part of
the honour of nearly every mixed class-company regiment in France; of
the Punjabi regiments, for instance, and of the Frontier Force Rifle
battalions, in which the number of Sikh companies varies from one to
four, not to mention the Sappers and Miners. It was in the very first
days of the Indians' _début_ in France that a Sikh company of the 57th
Rifles earned fame when it was believed that the line must have given
way, holding on all through the night against repeated counter-attacks,
though the Germans were past them on both flanks. As for the Sappers,
the story of Dalip Singh is pure Dumas. This fire-eater helped his
fallen officer, Lieut. Rail-Kerr, to cover, stood over him and kept off
several parties of Germans by his fire. On one occasion--a feat almost
incredible, but well established--he was attacked by twenty of the
enemy, but beat them all off and got his officer away.[5]
It is in "sticking it out" that the Sikh excels. No one will deny his
_élan_; yet _élan_ is not so remarkably and peculiarly his as the dogged
spirit of resistance that never admits defeat, the spirit that carried
his ancestors through the long ordeal by fire in their struggle with the
Moguls. It is in defensive action that the Sikhs have won most renown,
fighting it out against hopeless, or almost hopeless odds, as at Arrah
and Lucknow in the Mutiny, and in the Tirah campaign at Saraghiri on the
Samana ridge. The defence of the little house at Arrah by Rattray's (the
45th) Sikhs was one of the most glorious episodes of the Indian Mutiny,
and the story of the Sikh picket at Saraghiri will live as long in
history. The whole garrison of the post, twenty-one men of the 36th
Sikhs, a battalion lately raised and then in action for the first time,
fell to a man in its defence. The Afridis admitted the loss of two
hundred dead in the attack. As they pressed in on all sides in
overwhelming numbers the Sikhs kept up their steady fire for six hours,
until the walls of the post fell. The last of the little band perished
in the flames as he defended the guard-room door, and shot down twenty
of the assailants before he succumbed.
Strangely enough, these two regiments, the 36th and 45th Sikhs, to whom
we owe two of the most enduring examples in history of "sticking it
out," fought side by side on the Hai in an action which called for as
high qualities of discipline and endurance under reverse as any that was
fought in Mesopotamia. The Sikhs lived up to their tradition. Both
regiments went over the parapet in full strength and were practically
annihilated. Only 190 effectives came out of the assault; only one
British officer returned unwounded. The 45th on the right were exposed
to a massed counter-attack. A British officer was seen to collect his
men and close in on the Turks in the open; he and his gallant band were
enveloped and overwhelmed. So, too, in Gallipoli the 14th Sikhs, who
saved Allahabad in the Mutiny and immortalized themselves with Havelock
in the march on Lucknow and the defence of the Residency, displayed
their old spirit. When they had fought their way through the unbroken
wire at Gully Ravine (June 4, 1915) and taken three lines of trenches,
they hung on all day, though they had lost three-fourths of their
effectives, and every British officer but two was killed.
But I must tell the story of Wariam Singh, a Jat Sikh of a Punjabi
regiment; it was told me by one Zorowar Singh, his comrade, in France.
"You heard of Wariam Singh, Sahib," he asked--"Wariam Singh, who would
not surrender?"
Wariam Singh was on leave when the regiment was mobilized, and the news
reached him in his village. It was a very hot night. They were sitting
by the well, and when Wariam Singh heard that the ---- Punjabis were
going to Wilayat to fight for the Sircar against a different kind of
white man, he said that, come what might, he would never surrender. He
made a vow then and there, and, contrary to all regimental discipline,
held by it.
I can picture the scene--the stencilled shadows of the kikar in the
moonlight, the smell of baked flour and dying embers, the almost
motionless group in a ring like birds on the edge of a tank, and in the
background the screen of tall sugar-cane behind the dry thorn hedge. The
village kahne-wallah (recounter of tales) would be half chanting, half
intoning, with little tremulous grace-notes, the ballad about
"Wa-ar-button Sahib," or Jân Nikalsain, when the lumbardar from the next
village would appear by the well and portentously deliver the message.
The scene may have flickered before the eyes of Wariam Singh, lying
stricken beside his machine-gun, just as the cherry blossom of Kent is
said to appear to the Kentish soldier. The two English officers in his
trench had fallen; the Germans had taken the trenches to the left and
the right, and they were enfiladed up to the moment when the final
frontal wave broke in. The order came to retire, but Wariam Singh said,
"I cannot retire, I have sworn"; and he stood by his machine-gun.
"If he had retired no doubt he would have been slain. Remaining he was
slain, but he slew many," was Zorowar Singh's comment.
Afterwards the trench was taken back, and the body of Wariam Singh was
found under the gun. The corpses of the Germans lay all round "like
stones in a river bed."
The disciples of Govind comprise many classes other than the Jat, of
whom there are some thirty main clans. There are Sikhs of Brahman and
Rajput descent, and a number of tribes of humbler origin. The Jat stands
first in respect to honour and numbers; apart from him, it is the
humbler classes who have contributed most weight to the fighting arms of
the community. The Brahman-, Rajput-, and Khatri-descended Sikhs do not
enlist freely.
The 48th Pioneers are recruited almost entirely from Labanas, a tribe
whose history goes back to the beginning of time. There are Labanas, of
course, who are not Sikhs. The Raja of the community is a Hindu and
lives at Philibit, and there are Labana hillmen about Simla, farmers in
the Punjab, traders in the Deccan and Bombay, and owners of ships; but I
have no doubt that the pick of them are those that have enlisted in the
Khalsa. The Labanas were soldiers at least two thousand years before
Govind, and according to tradition formed the armed transport of the
Pandavas and brought in the fuel (labanke--a kind of brushwood, hence
the tribal name) for the heroes of the Mahabharata. I heard this story
from a Labana Sikh one night on the upper reaches of the Euphrates near
Khan Baghdadi, when we were miles ahead of our transport and had rounded
up a whole army of Turks. He told it me with such impressment that I
felt it must be true, though no doubt there are spoilers of romance who
would unweave the web.
Theoretically Sikhism acknowledges no caste; but in practice the Sikh of
Jat or Rajput descent will not eat or drink with Sikhs drawn from the
menial classes, though the lowest in the social scale have been tried
and proved on the field, and shown themselves possessed of military
qualities which, apart from caste prejudice, should admit them to an
equal place in the brotherhood of the faithful. The Mazbhis are a case
in point. The first of this despised sweeper class to attain distinction
were the three whom Guru Govind admitted into the Khalsa as a reward for
their fidelity and devotion when they rescued the body of Tegh Bahodur,
the murdered ninth Guru, from the fanatical Moslem mob at Delhi. When
Sikhism was fighting for its life, these outcasts were caught up in the
wave of chivalry and "gentled their condition;" but as soon as the
Khalsa were dominant in the Punjab the Mazbhis found that the equality
their religion promised them existed in theory rather than fact. They
occupied much the same position among the Jat- and Khattri-descended
Sikhs as their ancestors, the sweepers, enjoyed amongst the Hindus. They
were debarred from all privileges, and were at one time even excluded
from the army. It fell to the British to restore the status of the
Mazbhi, or rather to give him the opening by which he was able to
re-establish his honour and self-esteem. The occasion was in the Mutiny
of 1857, when we were in great need of trained sappers for the
siege-work at Delhi. A number of Mazbhis who were employed at the time
in the canal works at Madhopur were offered military service and
enlisted readily. On the march to Delhi these raw recruits fought like
veterans. They were attacked by the rebels, beat them off, and saved the
whole of the ammunition and treasure. During the siege Neville
Chamberlain wrote of them that "their courage amounted to utter
recklessness of life." Eight of them carried the powder-bags to blow up
the Kashmir Gate, under Home and Salkeld. Their names are inscribed on
the arch to-day and have become historical. John Lawrence wrote of the
deed as one of "deliberate and sustained courage, as noble as any that
ever graced the annals of war."
The Mazbhis are recruited for the Sikh Pioneer regiments, the 23rd,
32nd, and 34th, sister regiments of whom one, or more, has been engaged
in nearly every frontier campaign from Waziristan in 1860 to the Abor
expedition in 1911. It was the 32nd who carried the guns over the
Shandur Pass in the snow, in the march from Gilgit, and relieved the
British garrison in Chitral. The 34th were among the earliest Indian
regiments engaged in France, and the Mazbhis gained distinction in
October, 1914, when they were pushed up to relieve the French cavalry,
and the Sikh officers carried on the defence for a day and a night under
repeated attacks when their British officers had fallen. Great, too, was
the gallantry of the Indian officers of the regiment at Festubert
(November, 1914), and the spirit of the ranks. Yet the Mazbhis are still
excluded from most privileges by the Khalsa. They are not eligible for
the other Sikh class regiments. Nor are they acceptable in the cavalry
or in other arms, for the aristocratic Jat Sikh, as a rule, refuses to
serve with them. Yet you will find a sprinkling of Jat Sikhs in the
Mazbhi Pioneer regiments--quick-witted, ambitious men usually, who are
ready to make some sacrifice in the way of social prestige for the sake
of more rapid promotion. The solid old Mazbhis, with all their sterling
virtues, are not quick at picking up ideas. It is sometimes difficult to
find men among them with the initiative to make good officers. Thus in a
Mazbhi regiment the more subtle-minded Jat does not find it such a stiff
climb out of the ranks.
It would be a mistake to think that the Jat Sikh is necessarily a better
man in a scrap than the Mazbhi, though this is no doubt assumed as a
matter of course by officers whose acquaintance with the Sikh is
confined to the Jat. I shall never forget introducing a young captain in
a Mazbhi regiment to a very senior Colonel on the Staff. The colonel in
his early days had been a subaltern in the --th Sikhs, but had put in
most of his life's work in "Q" Branch up at Simla, and did not know a
great deal about the Sikh or any other sepoy. He turned to the young
leader of Mazbhis, who is quite the keenest regimental officer I know,
and said--
"Your men are Mazbhis, aren't they? But I suppose you have a stiffening
of Jats."
The youngster's eyes glinted rage and he breathed fire.
"STIFFENING, sir? Stiffening of JATS! Our men are Mazbhis."
Stiffening was an unhappy word, and it stuck in the boy's gorge for
weeks. To stiffen the Mazbhi;
"to gild refined gold,
To add another hue unto the rainbow,"
all come in the same catalogue of ridiculous excess. Stiffening! Why the
man is solid concrete. It would take a stream of molten lava to make him
budge. Or, as Atkins would say--
"He wants a crump on his blamed cokernut before he knows things is
beginning to get a bit 'ot, and then he ain't sure."
It was to stiffen his men a bit, as they were all jiwans and likely to
get a little flustered, that old Khattak Singh, Subadar of the 34th Sikh
Pioneers, called "Left, right; right, left," as the regiment tramped
into action at Dujaila; but the Mazbhi did not want stiffening. It is
rather his part to contribute the inflexible element when there is fear
of a bent or broken line. In the action at Jebel Hamrin, on March 25,
1917, when we tried to drive the Turks from a strong position in the
hills, where they outnumbered us, the Mazbhis showed us how stiff they
could be. They were divisional troops and for months they had been
employed in wiring our line at night,--a wearing business, standing
about for hours in the dark, under a blind but hot fire, casualties
every night and never a shot at the Turk. So tired were they of being
fired at without returning the enemy's fire that, when they got the
chance at Jebel Hamrin and were rolling over visible Turks, for a long
time they could not be induced to retire. The Turks were bringing off an
enveloping movement which threatened our right. The order had been given
for the retirement. But the Mazbhis did not, or would not, hear it.
Somebody, I forget whether it was a British officer, or if it was an
Indian officer after the British officers had all fallen, said that he
would not retire without a written order. Ninety of them out of one
hundred and fifty fell. Old Khattak Singh got back in the night, walked
six miles to the hospital with seven wounds, one in his shoulder and two
in his thigh, and said, "I had ninety rounds. I fired them all at the
Turks and killed a few. Now I am happy and may as well lie up for a
bit."
The Staff Colonel had a certain spice of humour, if little tact, and I
think he rather liked the boy for his outburst in defence of his dear
Mazbhis. To the outsider these little passages afford continual
amusement. One has to mix with different regiments a long time before
one can follow all the _nuances_, but it does not take long to realize
to what extent the British officer is a partisan. Insensibly he suffers
through his affections a kind of conversion. He comes to see many things
as his men see them, even to adopt their own estimate of themselves in
relation to other sepoys. And one would not have it otherwise. It speaks
well for the qualities of the Indian soldier, for the courage,
kindliness, loyalty, and faith with which he binds his British officer
to his own community. It may be very narrow and wrong, but an Indian
regiment is the better fighting unit for it. Better an enthusiasm that
is sometimes ridiculous than a lukewarm attachment. The officer who does
not think much of his jiwans will not go far with them. There are cases,
of course, where pride runs riot and verges on snobbishness. I remember
a subaltern who was shocked at the idea of his men playing hockey with a
regiment recruited from a lower caste. And I once knew a field officer
in a class regiment of Jat Sikhs who, I am sure, would have felt very
uncomfortable if he had been asked to sit down at table with an officer
who commanded Mazbhis. Yet, I am told, he was a fine soldier.
Fanatics of his kidney were happily rare. I use the past tense for they
have gone with the best, and I am speaking generally of a school that
has vanished. It may be resuscitated, but it will hardly be in our time.
Too many of the old campaigners, transmitters of tradition, splendid
fellows who lived for the regiment and swore by it, are dead or
crippled, and the pick of the Indian Army Reserve has been reaped by the
same scythe. The gaps have had to be filled so fast and from a material
so unready that one meets officers now who know nothing about their
sepoys, who do not understand their language and who are not even
interested in them, youngsters intended for other walks of life who will
never be impressed by the Indian soldier until they have first learnt to
impress him.
THE PUNJABI MUSSALMAN
The "P. M.", or Punjabi Mussalman, is a difficult type to describe. Next
to the Sikh, he makes up the greater part of the Indian Army. Yet,
outside camps and messes, one hears little of him. The reason is that in
appearance there is nothing very distinctive about him; in character he
combines the traits of the various stocks from which he is sprung, and
these are legion; also, as there are no P. M. class regiments, he is
never collectively in the public eye.
Yet the P. M. has played a conspicuous part in nearly every action the
Indian Army has fought in the war, and in every frontier campaign for
generations; in gallantry, coolness, endurance, dependability, he is
every bit as good as the best.
"Why don't you write about the P. M.?" a friend in the Nth asked me
once. He was a major in a Punjabi regiment, and had grown grey in
service with them.
We were standing on the platform of a flanking trench screened by
sandbags from Turkish snipers, looking out over the marsh at Sannaiyat.
Nothing had happened to write home about for six months, not since we
delivered our third and bloodiest attack on the position on the 22nd
April. The water had receded nearly a thousand yards since then. Our
wire fences stood out high and dry on the alkaline soil. The blue lake
seemed to stretch away into the interstices of the hills which in the
haze looked a bare dozen miles away.
Two days before our last attack in April the water was clean across our
front six inches deep, with another six inches of mud; on the 21st it
was subsiding; on the 22nd the flooded ground was heavy, but it was
decided that there was just a chance. So the assault was delivered. The
Turkish front line was flooded; there was no one in it, and it was not
until we had passed it that we were really in difficulties. The second
line of trenches was neck deep in water; behind it there was a network
of dug-outs and pits into which we floundered blindly. Beyond this,
between the Turkish second and third lines, the mud was knee deep. The
Highlanders, a composite battalion of the Black Watch and Seaforths, and
the 92nd Punjabis, as they struggled grimly through, came under a
terrific fire. It was here that their splendid gallantry was mocked by
one of those circumstances which make one look darkly for the hand of
God in war.
[Illustration: THE PUNJABI MUSSALMAN.]
The breeches of their rifles had become choked and jammed with mud. The
Jocks were tearing at them with their teeth, panting and sobbing, and
choking for breath. They were almost at grips with the Turk, but could
not return his fire.
The last action we fought for Kut was unsuccessful, but the gallantry of
the men who poured into that narrow front through the marsh will become
historic. The Highlanders hardly need praise. The constancy of these
battalions has come to be regarded as a natural law. "The Jocks were
magnificent," my friend said, "as they always are. So were the Indians."
And amongst the Indians were the P. Ms. There were other classes of
sepoy who may have done as well, but the remnants of the three Indian
battalions in this fight were mostly Punjabi Mussalmans. And here, as at
Nasiriyeh, Ctesiphon and Kut-el-Amara, in Egypt and France, at Ypres,
Festubert and Serapeum, the P. M. covered himself with glory. The Jock,
that sparing critic of men, had nothing but good words for him.
"Yes! Why don't you write about the P. M.?" the Major asked. One of the
reasons why I had not written about the P. M. is that he is a very
difficult person to write about. There is nothing very salient or
characteristic about him; or rather, he has the characteristics of most
other sepoys. To write about the P. M. is to write about the Indian
Army. And that is why, to my friend's intense annoyance, the man in the
street, who speaks glibly of Gurkha, Sikh, and Pathan, has never heard
of him.
"Here's the old P. M. sweating blood," he said, "all through the show,
slogging away, sticking it out like a good 'un, and as modest as you
make 'em. Never bukhs; never comes up after a show and tells you what he
has done. You don't know unless you see him. Old Shere Khan, our bomb
havildar, was hit through both jaws on the 22nd. He got two bullets in
the arm. Then he was shot in the lungs. But it was only when he got his
fifth wound in the leg that he ceased to lead his men and limped back to
the first-aid post. All our B. O.'s were down, but a doctor man with the
Highlanders happened to see the whole thing. So Shere Khan was
promoted."
The Major was bound to his P. Ms. with hoops of steel. It was the rifles
with fixed bayonets slung from pegs between the sandbags that recalled
Polonius' metaphor. It seemed more apt at Sannaiyat.
He introduced me to the Jemadar, Ghulam Ali, a man with a mouth like a
rat-trap and remarkable for a kind of dour smartness. The end of his
pagri was drawn out into a jaunty little tuft by the side of his kula.
His long hair, oiled, but uncurled, fell down to the nape of his neck.
Ghulam Ali, though shot through the forearm himself, had built up a
screen of earth round his Sahib when he was severely wounded at the
Wadi, stayed with him till dusk, helped him back to better cover, and
then returned to the firing line to bring in a lance-naik on his
shoulders.
There were very few of the old crowd left in the trenches. "These
youngsters are mostly recruits," the Major explained, "but they are a
good lot. I wish you could have seen Subadar ----," and he mentioned a
man who had practically run a district in East Africa all on his own
when there was no white man by. A tremendous character. "And
Subadar-Major Farman Ali Bahadar. He got the D.S.M. when he was with us
in Egypt, led a handful of his men across the open at Touffoum, and
turned the Turkish flank very neatly. He got an I.O.M. at Sheikh Saad.
And he led the regiment back at Sannaiyat when all the British officers
were down. He was a Khoreshi, by the way."
A Khoreshi is a member of the tribe of the Prophet. A good Khoreshi is a
man to be sought for and honoured, for his influence is great; but a bad
Khoreshi among the P. Ms. is as big a nuisance as a Mir among Pathans.
"A kind of ecclesiastical dignitary," the Major explained, "a sort of
Rural Dean. You will find men who funk him for reasons which have
nothing to do with discipline; and if he pulls the wrong way it is the
very devil."
The P. Ms. in the trenches were varied in type. There was nothing
distinctive or showy about them, only they all looked workman-like;
Sikh, Jat, and Punjabi Mussalman are mostly of common stock, and they
assimilate so much in feature that it is sometimes difficult to
distinguish between them. The P. Ms. ancestry may be Rajput, Jat, Gujar,
Arab or Mogul. There are more than 400 tribes which he can derive from,
and these are broken up into innumerable sects and sub-divisions. He
does not pride himself on his class, but on his clan. The generic
"izzat" of the P. M. is merged in the specific "izzat" of the Gakkar,
Tiwana, Awan, or whatever he may be. "Punjabi Mussalman" is a purely
official designation. And that is why the general public hears so little
of him.
As a class he is a kind of Indian Everyman and comprises all. You will
find among the P. Ms. every variety of type, from the big-boned Awan,
stalwart of the Salt Range, to the thin-bearded little hillman of
Poonch; from the Tiwanas, bloods of the Thai country who give us the
pick of our cavalry and will not serve on foot, to the wiry Baluchi, who
has forgotten the language and observances of his kinsmen over the
border. You will find descendants of all the Muhammadan invaders of
India, from the time of Mahmud of Ghazni in A.D. 1001, and of
pre-Islamic invaders centuries before that, and of the converts of every
considerable Moslem freebooter since. The recruiting officer encourages
pride of race, which is generally accompanied with a soldierly bearing
and pride in arms, though the oldest stock is not always the best. You
will find among the P. Ms. Khoreshis and Sayads of the tribes of the
Prophet and of Ali, Gakkars who will only give their daughters to
Sayads, Ketwals who descended from Alexander the Great. The Bhatti are
Pliny's Baternae. The Awans claim descent from the iconoclast Mahmud. At
Sannaiyat I saw a Jungua of the Jhelum district who might have stood for
a portrait of Disraeli. The true, or spurious, seed of the Moguls are
scattered all over the Punjab, and there are scions of ancient Rajput
stock like the Ghorewahas, who preserve their bards and are still half
Hindus, and the Manj, who are too blue-blooded to follow the plough. But
as a rule the P. M. has less frills than the Hindu of the same stock; he
will lend a hand at any honest work, and falls easily into disciplinary
ways.
What is it then that differentiates the Punjabi Mussalman? I put the
case to my friend.
"Your P. M. comes from all stocks, has the same ancestor as the Jat, the
Sikh, the Rajput, or the Pathan. Can you tell me exactly what being a P.
M. does for him?"
The Major was unable to enlighten me fully. He told me what I had heard
officers say of other classes of sepoy; only he left out all their
faults.
"Personally, I think the P. M. is more human," he said. "He is not so
proud as the ----, or so ambitious as the ----, or so mean as the ----,
or so stupid as the ----. He is a cheery soul, and when he gets money he
doesn't mind spending it. He is the most natural and direct of men, and
there is no damned humbug about him. I remember old Fazal Khan pulling
up a jiwan (youth) we had up, and who was being cross-examined in an
inquiry about some lost ammunition. The youngster hedged, corrected
himself, modified his statements, and generally betrayed his reluctance
to come to the point. Fazal Khan's rebuke was characteristic. 'Judging
distance ka mafik gawahi mut do!' he said ('Don't give your evidence as
if you were judging distance at the range!'). He had a wholesome
contempt for civilian ways. The regiment was giving a tamasha in the
lines--an anniversary show--and one of our subalterns suggested putting
up a row of flags all the way from the gate to the marquee. But Fazal
Khan was not for it. 'No, sahib!' he said gravely, 'too civil ka mafik,'
'the sort of thing a civilian would do.' The old fellow is a soldier all
through."
The Major's story gave me a glimmering of what it was that being a P. M.
did for Fazal Khan and his brood. "There is no damned humbug about
them,"--which was his way of saying that his friends neglect the arts of
insinuation.
"There is something downright about the P. M. Even when he is
mishandled, he is not mulish, only dispirited. And he'll do anything for
the right kind of Sahib. Besides, look how he rolls up, recruiting is
now better than ever--he is the backbone of the Indian Army."
A good "certifkit" and I think in the main true, though necessarily
partial. But the Major was not literally accurate in saying that the
P. M. is the backbone of the Indian Army. The Sikhs would have something
to say to that, for 214 companies of infantry, including the class
regiments, and forty squadrons of cavalry, are recruited entirely from
the Khalsa, besides a large proportion of sappers and miners, and half
the mountain batteries. The Gurkhas contribute twenty battalions of
foot, but they serve only in the infantry. Taking infantry, cavalry,
artillery and sappers, the P. M. in point of numbers is an easy second
to the Sikh.[6]
There are, of course, Mussalman sepoys and sowars recruited from other
provinces than the Punjab. Those from the United Provinces fall under
the official designation of "Hindustani Mussalman," and need not be
differentiated from the Muhammadans east of the Jumna. The same
qualities may be discovered in any clan; the difference is only in
degree; it is among the Punjabi Mussalmans that you will find the pick
of Islam in the Indian Army.
Of quality it is difficult to speak. He is a bold man who would
generalise upon the Indian Army, more especially upon the Punjab
fighting stocks. The truth is that, if you pick the best of them and
give them the same officers, there is nothing to choose between Sikh,
Jat, and Punjabi Mussalman. Only you must be careful to choose your men
from districts where they inherit the land and are not alien and
browbeaten, but carry their heads high.
Why, then, if the P. M. is as good as the best, has he not been
discovered by the man in the street? One reason I have suggested. You
can shut your eyes in the Haymarket and conjure up an image of Gurkha,
Sikh, or Pathan, but you cannot thus airily summon the P. M.--because he
is Everyman, the type of all. Another source of his obscurity is the
illogical nomenclature of the Indian Army. A class designation does not
mean a class regiment. How many Baluchis proper are there in the
so-called Baluchi regiments? Who gives a thought to the Dogras, P. Ms.
and Pathans in the 51st, 52nd, 53rd, and 54th Sikhs, the Dekkani
Mussalman in the Maharatta regiments, or the Dogras and P. Ms. in the
40th Pathans? Now the P. M. only exists in the composite battalions. He
has no class regiment of his own. You may look in vain in the Army List
for the 49th Gakkars, 50th Awans, or the 69th Punjabi Mussalmans. Hence
it is that the P. M. swells the honour of others, while his own name is
not increased.
Every boy in the street heard of the 40th Pathans at Ypres, but few knew
that there were two companies of P. Ms. in the crowd--"as good as any of
them," the Major said, "men who would stiffen any regiment in the Indian
Army."
And when it is generally known that the ---- Sikhs were first into the
Turkish trenches on the right bank at Sheikh Saad and captured the two
mountain guns, nobody is likely to hear anything of the P. M. company
who was with them, a composite part of the battalion.
The Major's men had been complimented for every action they had been in,
and this was the scene of their most desperate struggle. But there was
little to recall the Sannaiyat of April--only an occasional bullet
whistling overhead, or cracking against the sandbags. Instead of mud a
thin dust was flying and the peaceful birds stood by the edge of the
lake.
I wished the P. M. could have his Homer. Happily he is not concerned
with the newspaper paragraph. Were the Press to discover him it is
doubtful if he would hear of it. He enlists freely. He is such an
obvious fact, stands out so saliently wherever the Indian Army is doing
anything, looms so large everywhere, that it has probably never entered
his head that his light could be obscured. But his British officer takes
the indifference of the profane crowd to heart. When he hears the Sikh,
Gurkha, and Pathan spoken of collectively as synonymous with the Indian
Army he is displeased; and his displeasure is natural, if not
philosophic. If he were philosophic he would find consolation in the
same sheets which annoy him, for it is better to be ignored than to be
advertised in a foolish way. It is with a joy that has no roots in pride
that the Indian Army officer reads of the Gurkha hurling his kukri at
the foe, or blooding his virgin blade on the forearms of the
self-devoting ladies of Marseilles, or of the grave, bearded Sikhs
handing round the hubble-bubble with the blood still wet on their
swords; or of the Bengali lancer dismounting and charging the serried
ranks of the Hun with his spear. Hearing of these wonders, the Sahib who
commands the Punjabi Mussalman, and loves his men, will discover comfort
in obscurity.
THE PATHAN
One often hears British officers in the Indian Army say that the Pathan
has more in common with the Englishman than other sepoys. This is
because he is an individualist. Personality has more play on the border,
and the tribesman is not bound by the complicated ritual that lays so
many restrictions on the Indian soldier. His life is more free. He is
more direct and outspoken, not so suspicious or self-conscious. He is a
gambler and a sportsman, and a bit of an adventurer, restless by nature,
and always ready to take on a new thing. He has a good deal of _joie de
vivre_. His sense of humour approximates to that of Thomas Atkins, and
is much more subtle than the Gurkha's, though he laughs at the same
things. He will smoke a pipe with the Dublin Fusiliers and share his
biscuits with the man of Cardiff or Kent. He is a Highlander, and so,
like the Gurkhas, naturally attracted by the Scot. Yet behind all these
superficial points of resemblance he has a code which in ultimate things
cuts him off from the British soldier with as clean a line of
demarcation as an unbridged crevasse.
The Pathan's code is very simple and distinct in primal and essential
things. The laws of hospitality, retaliation, and the sanctuary of his
hearth to the guest or fugitive are seldom violated. But acting within
the code the Pathan can indulge his bloodthirstiness, treachery, and
vindictiveness to an extent unsanctioned by the tables of the law
prescribed by other races and creeds. It is a savage code, and the only
saving grace about the business is that the Pathan is true to it, such
as it is, and expects to be dealt with by others as he deals by them.
The main fact in life across the border is the badi, or blood-feud. Few
families or tribes are without their vendettas. Everything that matters
hinges on them, and if an old feud is settled by mediation through the
Jirgah, there are seeds of a new one ready to spring up in every contact
of life. The favour of women, insults, injuries, murder, debt,
inheritance, boundaries, water-rights,--all these disputes are taken up
by the kin of the men concerned, and it is a point of honour to
assassinate, openly or by stealth, any one connected by blood with the
other side, however innocent he may be of the original provocation.
Truces are arranged at times by mutual convenience for ploughing,
sowing, or harvest; but as a rule it is very difficult for a man
involved in a badi to leave his watch-tower, and still more difficult
for him to return to it. It will be understood that the Pathan is an
artist in taking cover. He probably has a communication trench of his
own from his stronghold to his field, and no one better understands the
uses of dead ground.
[Illustration: THE PATHAN PIPERS.]
What makes these blood-feuds so endless and uncompromising is that
quarrels begun in passion are continued in cold blood for good form. The
Malik Din and Kambur Khil have been at war for nearly a century and
nobody remembers how it all began. It is a point of honour to retaliate,
however inconvenient the state of siege may be. The most ordinary
routine of life may become impossible. The young Pathan may be itching
to stroll out and lie on a bank and bask or fall asleep in the sun. But
this would be to deliver himself into the hands of his enemy. There is
no dishonour in creeping up and stabbing a man in the back when he is
sleeping; but there is very great dishonour in failing to take an
advantage of an adversary or neglecting to prosecute a blood feud to its
finish. Such softness is a kind of moral leprosy in the eyes of the
Pathan.
With so much at stake the Pathan cannot afford to be long away from
home. In peacetime he frequently puts in for short leave. "Sahib," Sher
Ali explains, "it is the most pressing matter." And the Sahib gathers
that evil is likely to befall either Sher Ali's family or his neighbour
Akbar Khan's during the next two weeks, and is bound by the brotherhood
of arms to provide, so far as he is able, that it is not Sher Ali's. So
the Pathan slips away from his regiment, anticipating the advertised
date of his leave by consent, for there are men in his company connected
by blood ties with the other party--men perhaps who are so far committed
that they would lie up for Sher Ali themselves on a dark night if they
were away on leave in their own country at the same time. But the code
does not permit the prosecution of a vendetta in the regiment. A Pathan
may find himself stretched beside his heart's abhorrence in a night
picquet, the two of them alone together, alert, with finger on the
trigger. They may have spent interminable long hours stalking each other
in their own hills, but here they are safe as in sanctuary.
The trans-frontier Pathan would not wittingly have enlisted in the
Indian Army if he could have foreseen the prospect of a three years'
campaign in a foreign land. The security of his wife, his children, his
cattle, his land, depend on his occasional appearance in his village.
The interests of the Indian sepoy are protected by the magistrate and
the police, but across the border the property of the man who goes away
and fights may become the property of the man who stays at home. The
exile is putting all the trump cards into his enemy's hands. The score
will be mounting up against him. His name will become less, if not his
kin; his womenkind may be dishonoured. In the event of his return the
other party will have put up such a tally that it will take him all his
time to pay off old scores. After a year of "the insane war" in which he
has no real stake, and from which he can see no probable retreat, he is
likely to take thought and brood. Government cannot protect his land and
family; continued exile may mean the abandonment of all he has. In the
tribal feud the man away on long service is likely to go under; the man
on the spot has things all his own way.
Now the Pathan is a casuist. He is more strict in the observance of the
letter of his code than in the observance of the spirit. An oath on the
Koran is generally binding where there is no opening for equivocation,
but it is not always respected if it can be evaded by a quibble. A
Pathan informer was tempted by a police officer to give the names of a
gang of dacoits.
"Sahib," he said, "I've sworn not to betray any son of man."
"You need not betray them," the officer suggested. "Don't tell me, tell
the wall."
The Pathan was sorely tempted. He thought over the ethics. Then he
smiled, and, like Pyramus, he addressed the wall:
"Oh! whited wall," he began, "their names are Mirza Yahya, Abdulla
Khan...."
The code was not violated, as with a robust conscience the Pathan gave
away the name of every man in the gang.
A tribesman who boasts that he would not injure a hair of an unclean
swine which took sanctuary in his house, will conduct the guest with
whom he has broken bread just beyond the limits of his property and
shoot him. In a land dispute a mullah ordained that the two rival
claimants should walk the boundary of the property in question on oath,
each carrying a Koran on his head. They walked over the same ground, and
each bore witness that he trod his paternal acres, and they did so
without shame, for each had concealed a bit of his own undoubted soil in
his shoe. When a round or two of ammunition are missing, the subadar of
the company will raise a little heap of dust on the parade ground and
make each man as he passes by plunge his clenched fist in it, and swear
that he has not got the ammunition. The rounds are generally found in
the dustheap, and nobody is perjured.
An officer in a Pathan militia regiment found a stumpy little tree stuck
in the sand near the gate of the camp where trees do not grow. He was
puzzled, and asked one Indian officer after another to explain. They all
grinned rather sheepishly. "It is this way, Sahib," one of them said at
last. "We lose a number of small things in the camp. Now when an object
is lost the theft is announced, and each man as he passes the tree says,
'Allah curse the Budmash who stole the boots,' or the dish, or the
turban, or whatever it may be. And so it will happen sometimes that the
article will be found hanging in the fork of the tree in the morning
when darkness gives place to light."
The Pathan cannot bear up under the weight of such commination, it
spoils his sleep at night. Not that he has a sensitive conscience:
theft, murder, and adultery are not crimes to him in the abstract, but
only so far as they violate hospitality or loyalty to a bond. He has no
sentiment, or inkling of chivalry; but he must save his face, avoid
shame, follow the code, and prefer death to ridicule or dishonour. One
of the axioms of his code is that he must be true to his salt. The
trans-frontier Pathan is not a subject of the King as is the British
Indian sepoy, but he has taken an oath. An oath is in the ordinary way
binding, but if it can be shown that he has sworn unwittingly and
against his religion--every text in the Koran is capable of a double
interpretation--why, then the obligation is annulled. "Your religion
comes first"--the argument is put to him by the Hun and the Turk. "No
oath sworn to infidels can compel you to break your faith with Allah."
The Pathan is not normally a religious fanatic any more than the Punjabi
Mussalman. Had he been so he would not have ranged himself with us
against an Islamic enemy, as he has done in every frontier campaign for
the last half-century. But in this war Islam offered him the one decent
retreat from an intolerable position.
There were one or two cases of desertion among the Pathans in France and
Mesopotamia. The Pathan did not expect absolution if he fell into our
hands afterwards, or if he were caught trying to slip away. Forgiveness
is not in his nature. But think of the temptation, the easiness of
self-persuasion. Remember how subtly the maggot of sophistry works even
in the head of the Christian divine. Then listen to the burning words of
the Jehad:--
"Act not so that the history of your family may be stained with the ink
of disgrace and the blood of your Muhammadan brethren be shed for the
attainment of the objects of unbelievers. We write this to you in
compliance with the orders of God Almighty, the kind and also stern
Avenger."
A hundred texts might be quoted, and have been quoted, from the Koran to
show that it is obligatory for the Moslem soldier to fight against his
King's enemies, whether they be of his own faith or no. But how many,
after taking thought and counsel of expediency, are quite sure that
black is not white after all! The deserter may not escape to the Hun
lines and the pretended converts of Islam, whom instinct, stirring
beneath the Jehadist's logic, must teach him to despise. And he is for
the wall if he is caught, shamefully led out and bandaged and shot in
the eyes of his brethren who have been true to their oath. None of us
would hesitate to slip the trigger against a traitor of his kidney. The
man's very memory is abhorred. Yet in dealing out summary execution one
should remember the strong bias that deflected his mind. Out of the mud
and poisoned gas of Flanders. Out of Mesopotamia. Out of the blood and
fruitless sacrifice, the doom of celibacy, the monotony which is only
broken by the variety it offers of different shapes of disease and
death. Back to his tower and maize field if his kin have held them, and
his wife if she has waited for him, and all in the name of honour and
religion.
It may seem a mistake in writing of a brave people to take note of
backsliders; but the instances in which the Pathan has been seduced from
loyalty have been so discussed that it is better for the collective
honour of the race to examine the psychological side of it frankly. It
would be a great injustice to the Pathan if it were thought that any
failed us through fear.
In courage and coolness the Pathan is the unquestioned equal of any man.
Mir Dast, of Coke's Rifles F.F., attached to Wilde's Rifles F.F. in
France, the first Indian officer to win the V.C., was a type of the best
class of Afridi. No one who knew him was surprised to hear how, at the
second battle of Ypres, after all his officers had fallen, he selected
and consolidated a line with his small handful of men; how, though
wounded and gassed himself, he held the ground he had hastily scratched
up, walking fearlessly up and down encouraging his men; how, satisfied
at last that the line was secure, he continued to carry in one disabled
man after another, British and Indian, back to safety under heavy fire.
Mir Dast had told the Colonel of the 55th, when he left the battalion in
Bannu to join the regiment he was attached to in France, that he would
not come back without the Victoria Cross. "Now that Indians may compete
for this greatest of all bahadris," he said, "I shall return with it or
remain on the field." And he did not say this in a boastful manner, but
quietly as a matter of course, as though there were no other
alternative; just as a boxer might tell you by way of assurance,
repeating an understood thing, that he was going to fight on until the
other man was knocked out. I met Mir Dast afterwards in hospital, and
was struck with the extraordinary dignity and quiet reserve of the man;
an impression of gallantry was conveyed in his brow and eyes, like a
stamp on metal.
It was in the Mohmand campaign that Mir Dast won the I.O.M., in those
days the nearest Indian equivalent to the V.C. An officer friend of mine
and his who spoke to him in his stretcher after the fight, told me that
he found Mir Dast beaming. "I am very pleased, Sahib," he said. "I've
had a good fight, and I've killed the man that wounded me." And he held
up his bayonet and pointed to a foot-long stain of blood. He had been
shot through the thigh at three yards, but had lunged forward and got
his man. On the same day another Afridi did a very Pathan-like thing. I
will tell the story here, as it is typical of the impetuous, reckless
daring of the breed, that sudden lust for honour which sweeps the Pathan
off his feet, and carries him sometimes to the achievement of the
impossible--an impulse, brilliant while it lasts, but not so admirable
as the more enduring flame that is always trimmed and burns steadily
without flaring.
Nur Baz was a younger man than Mir Dast, and one of the same Afridi
company. It entered his head, just as it entered the head of Mir Dast
when he left Bannu for France, that he must achieve something really
remarkable. The young man was of the volatile, boastful sort, very
different from the hero of Ypres, and to his quick imagination the
conception of his bahadri was the same thing as the accomplishment of
it, or the difference, if there were any, was only one of tense. So he
began to talk about what he was going to do until he wearied the young
officer to whom he was orderly. "Bring me your bahadri first, Nur Baz,"
the subaltern said a little impatiently, "then I shall congratulate you,
but don't bukh so much about it."
The pride went out of Nur Baz at this snub as the air out of a pricked
bladder, and he was very shamefaced until his opportunity came. This was
in the same attack in which Mir Dast fell. The regiment were burning a
village, and the Afridi company had to clear the ridge behind which
commanded it; they and another Pathan company were attacking up parallel
spurs. Nur Baz, finding that his orderly work committed him to a
secondary _rôle_ in the operations, asked if he might join his section,
which was to lead the attack. He obtained his officer's consent, and was
soon scrambling up the hillside in the pursuit. When the leading section
extended he found the advance too slow, so he squatted behind a boulder,
waited until the wave had got on a few yards, then dived down to the
bottom of the nullah, climbed up again under cover, and in a few minutes
appeared on the edge of the spur some 250 yards in advance of the
assault. A yell of rage went up from the Pathans behind when they found
that Nur Baz had forestalled them and was going to be first in at the
death. But Nur Baz was happy as he leapt from one great boulder to
another, the ground spitting up under him, and stopped every moment to
get in a shot at the men in the sangar in front. Just as he reached it a
Martini bullet struck his rifle in the small of the butt and broke off
the stock. He could not fire now, but he fixed his bayonet and charged
the sangar with his broken weapon. There were three men in it when he
clambered over the parapet. One was dead, another who had missed him
with his muzzle-loader a second or two before was reloading, and the
third was slipping away. Nur Baz bayoneted the man who was reloading
just as he withdrew the rod with which he was ramming the charge home;
then he picked up the dead man's rifle and shot the fugitive; thus he
cleared his little bit of front alone.
His subaltern had watched this very spectacular bit of bahadri from the
parallel spur; but he only discovered that the central figure of it was
his orderly when Mir Dast in his stretcher remarked, "Nur Baz has done
well, Sahib, hasn't he?" Afterwards Nur Baz appeared "with a jaw like a
bulldog, grinning all over, and the three rifles slung to his shoulder,"
and received the congratulations of his Sahib.
"Sahib," he said, "will you honour me by taking one of these? Choose the
one you like best."
The subaltern selected the muzzle-loader, but Nur Baz demurred.
"I must first see the Colonel Sahib," he said, "if you choose that one."
"And why?"
"It is loaded, and it is not permitted to fire off a round in the camp
without the Colonel Sahib's permission."
Just then the Colonel arrived, and Nur Baz, having obtained permission,
raised the rifle jauntily to his shoulder and with evident satisfaction
loosed the bullet which ought to have cracked his brain pan into the
empty air. Nur Baz and Mir Dast, though differing much in style, both
had a great deal of the original Pathan in them.
One more story of an Afridi. It was in France. There had been an
unsuccessful attack on the German lines. A sergeant of the Black Watch
was lying dead in no-man's land, and the Hun sniper who had accounted
for him lay somewhere in his near neighbourhood; he had lain there for
hours taking toll of all who exposed themselves. It was getting dark
when an officer of the 57th Rifles saw a Pathan, Sher Khan, pushing his
way along the trench towards the spot. The man was wasting no time; he
was evidently on some errand, only he carried no rifle. The officer
called after him:
"Hello, Sher Khan, where are you off to?"
"I am going to get the sniper, Sahib, who shot the sergeant."
"But why haven't you got a rifle?"
"I am not going to dirty mine, Sahib. I'll take the sergeant's."
It was still light when he crawled over the parapet and wriggled his way
down a furrow to where the sergeant lay. The sniper saw him, and missed
him twice. Sher Khan did not reply to this fire. He lay quite still by
the side of the Highlander and gently detached one of his spats. This he
arranged so that in the half light it looked like a white face peeping
over the man's body. Then he withdrew twenty yards to one side and
waited. Soon the Hun's head appeared from his pit a few yards off and
disappeared quickly. But Sher Khan bided his time. The sniper was
evidently intrigued, and as it grew darker he exposed himself a little
more each time he raised his head peering at the white face over the
dead Highlander's shoulder. At last he knelt upright, reassured--the
thing was so motionless; nevertheless he decided that another bullet in
it would do no harm. He was taking steady aim when the Pathan fired. The
range was too close for a miss even in that light, and the Hun rolled
over. Half an hour afterwards Sher Khan returned with the Hun's rifle
and the Highlander's under his arm; in his right hand he carried the
Hun's helmet, a grisly sight, as his bullet had crashed through the
man's brain.
It is his individual touch, his brilliancy in initiative and coolness
and daring in execution that has earned the Afridi his high reputation
among Pathans. The trans-frontier Pathan with his eternal blood-feuds
would naturally have the advantage in this kind of work over the Pathan
from our side of the border; his whole life from his boyhood up is a
preparation for it. That is why some of the most brilliant soldiers in
the Indian Army have been Afridis. On the other hand, collectively and
in companies, the cis-frontier Yusafzais and Khattaks have maintained a
higher aggregate of the military virtues, especially in the matter of
steadiness and "sticking it out."
A strange thing about the Pathan, and inconsistent with his
hard-grained, practical nature, is that he is given to visions and
epileptic fits. He is visited by the fairies, to use his own expressive
phrase. I knew a fine old subadar who believed that these visitations
came to him because he had shot a pigeon on a mosque. He became a prey
to remorse, and made ineffectual pilgrimages to various shrines to
exorcise the spirit. How much of this subconscious side of the Pathan is
responsible for his state of mind when he runs amok would be an
interesting point for the psychologist. The man broods over some injury
or wrong and he is not content until he has translated his vision into
fact. Sometimes he goes to work like the Malay, killing in a hot, blind
fury. But there is often method in the orgy. It is an orgy of blood, one
glorious hour, perhaps, or a few rapturous seconds in which vengeance is
attained and satisfaction demanded of collective humanity, and the price
to be paid for it, the Pathan's own life, is perfectly well understood.
Take the case of Ashgar Ali. He learnt that a disparaging report as to
the work of his brother had been sent in to the O.C. of the battalion by
one Fazal-ud-din, a non-commissioned Pathan officer. Fazal-ud-din slept
with him in the same tent, and Ashgar Ali lay brooding and sleepless all
night. Before daybreak he had devised a plan. In the darkness he removed
all the rifles from the tent and hid them outside. He waited till the
moon rose. Then standing by the door he shot the betrayer through the
head as he slept. He shot another Pathan by his side who leapt to his
feet, awakened by the report. Then he slipped away stealthily to the
little round knoll which he had marked out for the catastrophe of his
drama. Here he kept up a steady fire at any human shape that came within
range, a stern dispenser of justice in full measure making good the
errors of a too-biased Providence. It was a calculated adjustment of
right and wrong, and he kept a cool head as he counted up his tally. He
saw his Colonel stalking him, an iron-grey head lifted cautiously from
behind a hummock at fifty yards, an easy target. But Ashgar Ali called
out, "Keep away, Sahib. I have no quarrel with you. My account is with
the men. Keep away, or I must shoot." Snipers were firing at him at long
range; a sepoy was creeping up behind, and almost as he spoke he rolled
over and lay still.
A Pathan murder, as viewed by the assassin, generally stands for
judgment and execution at the same time. There must be some such system
among a people who have no Government or police. When a Pathan comes
over the frontier and is arraigned by our code for a crime sanctioned by
his own there is trouble. It is a tragic matter when law, especially if
it is the Indian Penal Code, defeats the natural dispensations of
justice. A splendid young Pathan, the pick of his battalion, was tried
for shooting a man in his company. The act was deliberate, and to the
Pathan mind justified by the provocation. The man who was put away
meanly denied an obligation of honour. The Pathan shot him like a dog
before a dozen witnesses, and no doubt felt the same generous thrill of
satisfaction as he would have done in passing judgment in his own land.
But to the disgust of the regiment, and more especially of the British
officer, who understood the Pathan code, the upholder of honour, one of
the best and straightest men they had, was hanged.
The great difference between the Pathan and the Sikh is that the Pathan
is for himself. He has a certain amount of tribal, but no national,
pride. His assurance is personal. Family pride depends on what the
family has done within the memory of a generation; for there is little
or no distinction in birth. The Pathan is genuinely a democrat, the Sikh
only theoretically so. In strict accordance with his code the Sikh
should be democratic, but whatever he may profess, he is aristocratic in
spirit. His pride is in the community and in himself as one of the
community. The prestige of the Khalsa is always in his mind. The
Pathan's pride is there, but is latent. It leaps out quickly enough when
challenged. But when the Pathan is boastful it is in a casual manner.
Normally he does not bother his head about appearances. He is more like
an Englishman in taking things as they come. But the Sikh is always
acquisitive of honour. One cannot imagine Sikhs turning out old kit in
order to save the new issue for handing in to the quartermaster when
they "cut their name." Yet the Pathan, with his eye on the main chance,
is quite content to go shabby if when he retires he can get more for his
equipment on valuation. On one occasion on manœuvres, when a Pathan
company had carried their economy in this respect a bit too far, their
company commander got even with them in the kind of way they respect.
Haversacks, water-bottles, coats, bandoliers, were laid on the ground
for inspection. Then he sent them off to dig the perimeter. While they
were digging some distance away, he went round quietly with an Indian
officer and weeded out all the unserviceable kit. Then he sent for the
men to come back. "I'm going to make a bonfire of these things," he
said, "and what is more, you are going to dance round it." That young
officer had the right way with the Pathan, who can enjoy a joke turned
against himself better than most people. They danced round the fire,
hugely amused, and no one resented it.
It must not be imagined that the Pathan is of a careful or saving
disposition. He is out to enjoy himself, fond of all the good things of
life, open-handed, and a born gambler. The money he would have saved on
his new kit would probably have been gambled away a few days after he
had "cut his name." I knew a regiment where some of the young Pathans on
three and a half months' leave never went near their homes, but used to
enlist in the coolie corps on the Bolan Pass simply for the fun of
gambling! Gambling in the regiment, of course, was forbidden. But here
they could have their fling and indulge a love of hazard. Wages were
high and the place became a kind of tribal Monte Carlo. If they won,
they threw up the work and had a good time; if they lost, it was all in
the day's work. The Pathan is very much a bird of passage in a regiment.
He is a restless adventurer, and he is always thinking of "cutting his
name." He likes a scrap on the frontier, but soldiering in peace-time
bores him after a little while. It is all "farz kerna," an Orakzai said,
"make believe," like a field-day. "You take up one position and then
another, and nothing comes of it. One gets tired." Raids and
rifle-thieving over the frontier are much better fun. The Pathan had the
reputation of being the most successful rifle-thief we had rubbed up
against in a campaign until we met the Arab in Mesopotamia. The Arab,
when he goes about at night, seems to be leagued with Djinns; but in
stealth, coolness, invisibility, daring, the Pathan runs him close. A
sergeant of the Black Watch told me a characteristic story of how a
Pathan made good a rifle he had lost in France. There had grown up a
kind of _entente_ between the Black Watch and Vaughan's Rifles, who held
the line alongside of them. It could not be otherwise with two fighting
regiments of like traditions who have advanced and retired together,
held the same trenches and watched each other closely for months.
The Black Watch had been at Peshawar; some of them could speak
Hindustani, and one or two Pushtu. Their scout-sergeant, MacDonald, lost
his rifle one night. He had stumbled with it into a ditch during a
patrol, and left it caked with mud outside his dug-out when he turned in
in the small hours. When he emerged it was gone, gathered in by the
stretcher-bearers with the rifles of the dead and wounded, for
MacDonald's dug-out was beside a first-aid station, and his rifle looked
as if it belonged to a man who needed first aid.
He had to make a reconnaissance. There was a rumour that the enemy had
taken down the barbed wire in the trenches opposite and were going to
attack. It was the scout-sergeant's business to see. Luckily there was
grass in no-man's-land knee-deep. But he wanted a rifle, and he turned
to his good friends the Pathans as a matter of course.
"Ho, brothers!" he called out. "Where is the Pathan who cannot lay his
hands on a rifle? I am in need of a rifle."
It was, of course, a point of honour with the 58th Rifles to deliver the
goods. Shabaz Khan, a young Afridi spark, glided off in the direction
from which the scout-sergeant had come. MacDonald had not to wait many
minutes before he returned with a rifle.
A few minutes afterwards he was slipping down the communication trench
when he heard an oath and an exclamation behind him.
"By ----! There was eight rifles against the wall ten minutes ago, and
now there's only seven, and nobody's been here."
It was the stretcher-bearer sergeant. MacDonald examined his rifle and
found the regimental mark on the stock. He went on his way smiling. The
Black Watch were brigaded with the 58th Rifles at Peshawar. "I
remember," Sergeant MacDonald told me, "when the Highland Brigade Sports
were held there, one of our fellows was tossing the caber--it took about
six coolies to lift the thing. I thought it would impress the Pathans,
but not a bit of it. I asked the old Subadar what he thought of
MacAndrew's performance, and he said, 'It is not wonderful that you
Jokes'--'Joke' was as near as he could get to Jock--'should do this
thing. Are you not Highlanders (Paharis) like us, after all?'"
There is a marked difference in temperament among the Pathan tribes. The
Mahsud is more wild and primitive than most, and more inclined to
fanaticism. There are the makings of the Ghazi in him. On the other
hand, his blood-feuds are more easily settled, as he is not so
fastidious in questions of honour. The Afridi is more dour than the
other, and more on his dignity. He has not the openness and cheerfulness
of the Usafzai or Khattak, who have a great deal of the Celt in them.
The Afridi likes to saunter about with a catapult or pellet bow. He will
condescend to kill things, even starlings, but he does not take kindly
to games. He is a good stalker and quite happy with a rifle or a horse.
He excels in tent-pegging. But hockey and football do not appeal to him
as much as they do to other sepoys, though he is no mean performer when
he can be induced to play. This applies in a measure to all Pathans. An
outsider may learn a good deal about their character by watching the way
they play games. One cannot picture the Afridi, for instance, taking
kindly to cricket, but a company of them used to get some amusement out
of net practice in a certain frontier regiment not long ago. An officer
explained the theory of the game. The bat and ball did not impress the
Pathan, but the gloves and pads pleased his eye with their suggestion of
defence. Directly the elements of a man-to-man duel were recognized
cricket became popular. They were out to hurt one another. They did not
care to bat, they said, but wished to bowl, or rather shy. The Pathan
likes throwing things, so he was allowed to shy. Needless to say the
batsman was the mark and not the wicket. A good, low, stinging drive to
the off got one of the men on the ankle. Shouts of applause. First blood
to the Sahib. But soon it is the Pathan's turn to score. His quick eye
designs a stratagem in attack. By tearing about the field he has
collected three balls, and delivers them in rapid succession standing at
the wicket. The first, a low full-pitch, goes out of the field; the
second, aimed at the Sahib's knee, is neatly put into the slips, but the
batsman has no time to guard the third, hurled with great violence at
the same spot, and it is only the top of his pad that saves him from the
casualty list.
The Pathan is more careless and happy-go-lucky than the Punjabi
Mussalman, and not so amenable to discipline. It is his jaunty,
careless, sporting attitude, his readiness to take on any new thing,
that attracts the British soldier. That rifle-thief of the 58th was dear
to Sergeant MacDonald. But it is difficult to generalize about the
Pathan as a class. There is a sensible gulf fixed between the Khattak
and the Afridi, and between the Afridi and the Mahsud. I think, if it
were put to the vote among British officers in the Indian Army, the
Khattak would be elected the pick of the crowd. A special chapter is
devoted to him in this volume, and as his peculiar virtues are
discoverable in some degree among other classes of Pathans, the Khattak
chapter may be regarded as a continuation of the present one. There used
to be an idea that the cis-frontier Pathan, by reason of his settled
life and the security of the policeman and the magistrate round the
corner, was not a match for the trans-frontier Pathan who adjusted his
own differences at the end of a rifle. But the war has proved these
generalizations unsafe. The Pathan is a hard man to beat whichever side
of the border he hails from; but in a war like this he is all the better
for being born a subject of the King.
THE DOGRA
Chance threw me among the Dogras after a battle, and I learnt more of
these north-country Rajputs than I had ever done in times of peace.
Everybody knows how they left Rajputana before the Muhammadans conquered
the country and so never bowed to the yoke, how they fought their way
north, cut out their own little kingdoms, and have held the land they
gained centuries ago by the sword. I have travelled in the foothills
where they live, both in Kangra and Jammu, and can appreciate what they
owe to a proud origin and a poor soil. But one cannot hope to learn much
of a people in a casual trek through their country. The Dogra is shy and
does not unbosom himself to the stranger. Even with his British officer
he is reserved, and one has to be a year or more with him in the
regiment before he will talk freely of himself. But the confidence of
the British officer in the Dogra is complete, and his affection for him
equals that of the Gurkha officer for "the Gurkha." "He is such a
Sahib," the subaltern explained. "You won't find another class of sepoy
in the Indian army who is quite such a Sahib as the Dogra."
[Illustration: THE DOGRA.]
And here I must explain that I am only setting down what the subaltern
told me, that I tapped him on the subject he loved best, and that I am
making no invidious comparisons of my own. One seldom meets a good
regimental officer who does not modify one's relative estimate of the
different fighting stocks of the Indian Army. Still one can
discriminate. What the subaltern told me about the gallantry of the
Dogras I saw afterwards repeated in "Orders" by the General of the
Division. There were other regiments which received the same praise, and
if I had fallen among these I should have heard the same tale.
"The first thing we knew of that trench," the subaltern explained, "was
when the Turkey-cock blazed off into us at three hundred yards. Thank
heaven, our fellows were advance guard."
I smiled at the boy's delightful conceit in his own men. His company
were sitting or lying down on the banks of a water-cut in the restful
attitudes men fall into after strain. They were most of them young men,
clean-shaven with neat moustaches, lightly built but compact and supple,
of regular features, cast very much in a type. Some were smoking their
chillums, the detached bowl of a huqah, which they hold in their two
palms and draw in the smoke between the fingers through the aperture at
the base. The Dogra is an inveterate smoker and will have his chillum
out for a final puff two minutes before going into the attack. I was
struck by their scrupulous neatness. The morning had been the third day
of a battle. The enemy had decamped at dawn, but in the two previous
days half the regiment had fallen. Yet they seemed to have put in a
toilet somehow. Their turbans, low in the crown with the shell-like
twist in front peculiar to the Dogra, were as spick and span as on
parade. They looked a cool crowd, and it was of their coolness under the
most terrible fire that the subaltern spoke. One of them was readjusting
his pagri by a mirror improvised out of a tin he had picked up in the
mud, and was tying it in neat folds.
"The Dogra is a bit fussy about his personal appearance," the subaltern
explained. "He is a blood in his way. I have seen our fellows giving
their turbans the correct twist when they are up to the neck in it
during an advance.
"It was the devil of a position. The Turkey-cock lay doggo and held his
fire. We didn't see a sign of him until he popped off at us at three
hundred yards. Their trenches had no parapets and were almost flush with
the ground. In places they had built in ammunition boxes which they had
loopholed and plastered over with mud. They had dotted the ground in
front with little mounds which they used as range-marks, and they had
every small depression which offered any shelter covered with their
machine-guns."
And he told me how the Dogras pressed on to the attack over this ground
with a shout--not the "Ram Chandra ji ki jai" of route marches and
manœuvres, but with a "Ha, aha, aha, aha, aha," a sound terrifying in
volume, and probably the most breath-saving war cry there is.
A great many of the regiment were new to the game, mere boys of
seventeen, and the old hands had piqued their vanity, reminding them
that they had never been in battle and expressing a pious hope that they
would stand their ground. The subaltern had to pull some of these
striplings down who exposed themselves too recklessly. He pointed out to
me one Teku Singh, "a top-hole fellow." In the trench a machine-gun
jammed, Teku Singh clambered out to adjust it. The subaltern called to
him to keep his head down. "What does dying matter, Sahib?" he answered,
echoing at Sheikh Saad the spirit of Chitore. "The only fit place for a
Rajput to die is on the field of battle." Teku Singh was modestly
smoking his chillum on the bund.
The Dogra's is an unobtrusive gallantry. He is no thruster. He has not
the Pathan's devil-may-care air, nor the Sikh's pleasing swagger. When a
group of Indian officers are being introduced to an inspecting general
or the ruler of a province, you will find it is the Dogra who hangs in
the background. Yet he is intensely proud, conservative, aristocratic.
The subaltern's description of Teku Singh at home reminded me of the
hero of the "Bride of Lammermuir," that classic and lovable example of
the impoverished aristocrat, whose material poverty is balanced by more
honourable possessions. I have seen the land the Dogra cultivates. It is
mostly retrieved from a stony wilderness. His cornfields are often mere
sockets in the rock over which a thin layer of earth has gathered. His
family traditions forbid him to work on the soil and compel him to keep
a servant, though he has been known to plough secretly by night.
Under-fed at home, he will not accept service save in the army. There
are families who do nothing but soldiering. There is no difficulty about
recruits. "When a man goes home on leave," the subaltern explained, "he
brings back his pals. There is always a huge list of umedwars
(candidates) to choose from. It is like waiting to get into the
Travellers or the Senior Naval and Military."
Most of the men in the regiment were Katoch Dogras from the Kangra
district, the most fastidious of all. They won't plough, and won't eat
unless their food is cooked by a Katoch or a Brahmin. There are families
who will only join the cavalry. The plough they disdain, as they boast
that the only true weapon of a Rajput is the sword; when driven by
hunger and poverty to cultivate their land themselves, they do it
secretly, taking out their oxen by night and returning before daylight.
The head of the house has his talwar, or curved Indian sword with a
two-and-a-half-foot blade. It is passed down as an heirloom from father
to son, and is carried on campaigns by the Dogra officer. I have seen
them in camp here, though they are not worn in the trenches. The Dogra
has a splendid heart, but his physique is often weakened by poverty. It
is extraordinary how they fill out when they come into the regiment. It
is the same, of course, with other sepoys, but there is more difference
between the Dogra recruit and the seasoned man than in any other stock.
The habit of thrift is so ingrained in them that it is difficult to
prevent them stinting themselves in the regiment. The subaltern had a
story of a recruit who left his rations behind on manœuvres. It was the
General himself who discovered the delinquent. Asked for an explanation
the lad thought awhile and then answered bashfully, "Sahib, when I am
fighting I do not require food."
Every Dogra is shy and reserved and very sensitive about his private
affairs. When his name is entered in the regimental sheet roll, the
young recruit is asked who is his next of kin.
"Wife," he will say bashfully.
"What age?"
He is not quite certain, thinks she is about twelve.
"How high is she?"
"About so high." He stretches his hand four feet from the ground.
He is dreadfully bashful as he makes this gesture, afraid the other
recruits should hear, just like a boy in the fourth form asked to
describe his sister's complexion or hair.
Needless to say, the Dogra seldom, if ever, brings his wife into
cantonments. Exile must be harder to him than to many as he is the most
home-loving person. His only crime is that when he goes to his village
he sometimes runs things too close, so that an accident by the way, a
broken wheel or swollen stream, makes him overstay his leave.
"I wish I could show you Moti Chand," the subaltern continued. "He was a
mere boy not turned seventeen. This show was the first time he had been
under fire; he was one of the ammunition-carriers and had to go from the
front trenches to the first-line transport and bring back his box. He
made two journeys walking slowly and deliberately as they all do, very
erect, balancing the ammunition-box on his head. When he came up the
second time I told him to hurry up and get down into the trenches. 'No,
Sahib,' he said, 'Ram Chand, who was coming up beside me, was killed. I
must go back and bring in his box.' He brought in the box all right, but
was shot in the jaw. I think he is doing well.
"I can tell you, you would like the Dogra if you knew him. He is
difficult to know and his reserve might make you think him sulky at
first, but there is nothing sulky or brooding about him. He never bears
a grudge; he is rather a cheery fellow and has his own sense of humour.
As a shikari----"
The subaltern sang the praises of Teku Singh and Moti-Chand in a way
which was very pleasant to hear. He told me how their families received
him in Kangra, every household insisting that he should drink tea, and
he ended up by repeating that the true Dogra was the most perfect sahib
he knew.
It was no new experience for me to hear the Dogra praised. Their
fighting qualities are well known, and they have proved themselves in
many a frontier campaign, more especially in the capture of Nilt (1891),
and in the defence of Chitral and in the memorable march to the relief
of the garrison. And one had heard of the Dogra officer, Jemadar Kapur
Singh, in France, who held on until all but one wounded man had been put
out of action, and then rather than surrender shot himself with his last
cartridge. Besides the three Dogra class regiments, the 37th, 38th, and
41st, there are many Dogra companies in mixed-company battalions, and
Dogra squadrons in cavalry regiments. They may not make up a large part
of the Indian Army, but they contribute a much larger part in proportion
to their numbers than any other stock.
When next I met the subaltern the regiment had been in action again and
he had been slightly wounded. He took me into his tent and showed me
with pride what the General had written about his Dogras. One of them,
Lance-Naik Lala, had been recommended for the Victoria Cross; he was the
second sepoy in Mesopotamia on whom the honour was conferred.
"You'll see I haven't been talking through my hat," he explained. "Lala
was at it all day and most of the night, and earned his V.C. a dozen
times. It seemed certain death to go out to ----; the enemy were only a
hundred yards off."
"Lance-Naik Lala insisted on going out to his Adjutant," the
recommendation ran, "and offered to crawl back with him on his back at
once. When this was not permitted, he stripped off his own clothing to
keep the wounded officer warmer, and stayed with him till just before
dark when he returned to the shelter. After dark he carried the first
wounded officer back to the main trenches, and then, returning with a
stretcher, carried back his Adjutant."
This was at El Hannah on the 21st January. There was a freezing wind and
the wounded lay out in pools of rain and flooded marsh all night; some
were drowned; others died of exposure. It was a Dogra-like act of Lala
to strip himself, and to make a shield of his body for his Adjutant, an
act of devotion often repeated by the sepoy in Mesopotamia; and the
Adjutant was only one of five officers and comrades whom Lala saved that
day.
In a special issue of orders the Divisional General spoke of the
splendid gallantry of the 41st Dogras in aiding the Black Watch to storm
and occupy the enemy's trenches. The 6th Jats and 97th Infantry were
mentioned with the Dogras. Of the collective achievement of the four
regiments on that day the General wrote:--
"Their advance had to be made across a perfectly open, bullet-swept
area, against sunken loop-holed trenches in broad daylight, and their
noble achievement is one of the highest. The great and most admirable
gallantry of all ranks, and especially that of the British officers, is
worthy of the highest commendation. They showed the highest qualities of
endurance and courage under circumstances so adverse as to be almost
phenomenal."
THE MAHRATTA
I saw it stated in a newspaper that one of the surprises of the war has
been the Mahratta. "Surprise" is hardly a tactful word; and it points
back to a time when two or three classes of sepoy were praised
indiscriminately to the disparagement of others. The war has brought
about a readjustment of values. Not that the more tried and proven types
have disappointed expectation; the surprise is that less conspicuous
types have made good.
In France one heard a great deal about the Garhwali; in Mesopotamia the
Cinderella of the Indian Army was undoubtedly the Mahratta.
[Illustration: THE KONKANI MAHRATTA.]
That his emergence should be a surprise was illogical. The Mahratta
horseman was once a name to conjure with, and the sword of Siwoji has
left a dint in history legible enough. He was once the "Malbrovck" of
Hindustan. If the modern Mahratta has fallen under an eclipse the cause
has been largely geographical. Our frontier campaigns have never offered
the Indian Army active service enough to go round; certainly the Bombay
Army has not come in for its share, and Saihan, on the 15th of November,
1914, was the first pitched battle in which a Mahratta regiment,
constituted as such, had been engaged. What honour he earned before that
went to swell the collective prestige of class-company regiments; for it
was not until the Indian Army was reorganised in 1897 that the Mahratta
battalion came into being. The British officer, of course, in these
regiments knew his sepoy; he believed that the Dekkan and Konkan
produced as stout a breed as any other soil, and he would tell you so in
the most definite terms, and remind you how the Mahrattas proved their
mettle at Maiwand. But then one never listened seriously to a regimental
officer when he talked about his own men.
The Sapper in a field company with divers races under his command is
listened to with less suspicion. It was a Sapper who first opened my
eyes to the virtue of a Mahratta, and that was before the war.
"Who do you think the pick of your lot?" I asked.
"The Mahratta," he replied, unhesitatingly.
"Because he can dig?"
"None better. But it is his grit I was thinking of. I'd as soon have a
Mahratta with me in a scrap as any one."
One heard little or nothing of the Mahratta in France. Yet it was a
Mahratta who earned the Médaille Militaire--I believe the first bestowed
on an Indian--for an unobtrusive bit of work at Givenchy on the 11th of
December, 1914. We took a German saphead that day and drove the Huns
down their communication trench, and then we had to sap back to our own
lines, while another sap was being driven forward to meet us. For
twenty-three hours the small party was cut off from the rest of the
lines, and they worked steadily with their backs to the enemy, bombed at
and fired on the whole time. Supplies and ammunition ran short, and we
threw them a rope with a stone on it, and they dragged ammunition and
food and bombs into the trench, bumping over the German dead, and the
Mahratta took his turn at the traverse covering the party, as cool as a
Scot.
There were but a sprinkling of them in Flanders, a few Sappers and
Miners and two companies of the 107th Pioneers. It was left to Force "D"
to discover that the Mahratta has as big a heart for his size as any
sepoy in the Indian Army. To follow the exploits of the Mahratta
battalions from the battle of Saihan on the 15th November, 1914, to
Ctesiphon is to follow the glorious history of the 6th Division. Up to
and including Ctesiphon, no Mahratta battalion was given a position to
attack which it did not take, and in the retirement on Kut-el-Amarah
their steadiness was well proved. It is a record which is shared with
other regiments; but this chapter is concerned with the Mahratta alone.
They were in nearly every fight, and for a long time they made up a
fourth part of the whole force.
It was the 117th who, with the Dorsets, took the wood, and cleared the
Turks out of their trenches at Saihan. It was the 110th, with the
Norfolks, who led the attack on Mazeera village on the 4th December,
clearing the left bank of the river; and a double company of the
regiment captured the north face of the Qurnah position four days
afterwards. Two battalions of the Mahrattas were in the front line again
at Shaiba when the Turks were routed in one of the hardest fought and
most critical battles of the campaign. They were at Nasiriyeh and Amara,
and they were a tower of strength in the action at Sinn which gave us
Kut-el-Amarah. Here all three battalions--the 103rd, 110th, and
117th--were engaged. They went without water and fought three
consecutive engagements in forty-eight hours. The 117th, with the
Dorsets, and the 22nd company of Sappers and Miners, were the first
troops to enter the enemy's trenches. They broke through the wire and
rushed the big redoubt, led by a subadar-major when all their British
officers had fallen. At Ctesiphon again they covered themselves with
glory. The British regiment brigaded with them speak well of these
hard-bitten men, and many a villager of Dorset, Norfolk, or Oxford will
remember the Mahratta, and think of him as a person one can trust.
"What was the Indian regiment on your right?" I heard a Norfolk man ask
another, in discussing some obscure action on the Tigris of a year ago.
"The ---- Mahrattas."
The Bungay man nodded. "Ah, they wouldn't leave you up a tree."
"Not likely."
And being familiar with the speech of Norfolk men, who are sparing of
tribute, or admiration, or surprise, I knew that the "Mahratta" had
received a better "chit" than even the Sapper had given him.
It was in the trenches, and I had been getting the Norfolks to tell me
about the thrust up the river in the winter of 1914.
There was a lull in the firing. The Turks, 200 yards ahead, were
screened from us by the parapet; and as I stood with my back to this
looking eastward, there was nothing visible but earth and sky and the
Norfolk men, and a patch of untrodden field, like a neglected lawn,
running up to the next earth-work, and yellow with a kind of wild
mustard. The flowers and grasses and a small yellow trefoil, wild
barley, dwarf mallow, and shepherd's purse were Norfolk flowers. They
and the broad, familiar accent of the men made the place a little plot
of Norfolk. Nothing Mesopotamian impinged on the homeliness of the
scene.
And beyond the traverse were the Mahrattas, sons of another soil. They
were a new draft, most of them mere boys who had come straight from the
plough into this hard school. They looked dreamy and pensive, with a not
very intelligent wistfulness, but they were ready for anything that was
going on. Two of them were sniping from a loophole. One of them was shot
in the shoulder through a sandbag while I was there. Soon after dark I
saw a batch of six with an officer step over the parapet into that
particularly horrid zone called no-man's-land. They were to look for
surface mines and to be careful not to tread on one. The bullets cracked
against the parapet, but they were as casual as if they were going out
to pick mushrooms.
The "mines" were charged shell-cases lying flat on the ground. The
difficulty with these young recruits was to prevent them feeling for
them with their feet or prodding them with a bayonet. They were quite
untrained, but there was the same stuff in them as in the men who fought
at Shaiba and Ctesiphon, and boasted that they had never been beaten by
the Turks. A boy of seventeen who had gone out a few nights before was
shot in the leg and lost his patrol. In the morning he found he was
crawling up to the Turkish trenches. He was out all that day, but got
back to his regiment at night, and all the while he hung on to his
rifle.
The Subaltern had been a little depressed with this new batch of
recruits. There was so little time to knock them into shape, and he was
particularly pleased that Ghopade had brought back his rifle.
"They've got the right spirit," he said. "It's only a question of a
month or two. But look at these children."
They certainly did not look very smart or alert or particularly robust.
"This one doesn't look as if he could stick a Turk," I said, and pointed
to a thin hatchet-faced lad who could not have weighed much more than
eight stone.
"Oh, I expect he'd do that all right. They are much wirier than you
would think. It's their turn-out I mean."
"They've been in the trenches a week," I said, by way of extenuation.
But the Subaltern and I had passed by the --th and the --th in the same
brigade, equally trench-bound, and they were comparatively spick and
span.
The Mahratta sepoy is certainly no swashbuckler. To look at him, with
his dark skin and irregular features, you would not take him for a
member of a military caste. No one cares less for appearance; and his
native dress--the big, flat pagri, dhoti, and large loose shoes of the
Dekkan and Konkan--do not lend themselves to smartness. Nor does the
King's uniform bring with it an immediate transformation. The
unaccustomed military turban, which the Sikh or Pathan ties deftly as if
with one fold, falls about the head and down the neck of the Mahratta in
the most capricious convolutions. If he is a Bayard he does not look the
part, and looks, no doubt, as well as his geographical position, have
stood in the way of his finding himself. Anyhow, the men who move the
pawns on the board in the war-game had long passed him over.
The Mahratta battalions are not, strictly speaking, class regiments, for
they each contain a double company of Dekkan Muhammadans. These, but for
their inherited religion, are not very widely separated from the
Mahrattas. They too have brought honour to the Dekkan. At Ctesiphon a
double company of them were attacking a position. They lost all five
officers, the British subaltern killed, two jemadars wounded, two
subadars killed. One subadar, Mirza Rustum Beg, was wounded twice in the
attack, but went on and received his death-wound within twenty-five
yards of the enemy. The rest of the company went on, led by the
havildars, and took the trench at the point of the bayonet.
[Illustration: THE DEKHANI MUSSALMAN.]
That is not a bad record for a class of sepoy who has probably never
been mentioned in the newspapers during the war. But it has been a war
of "surprises," and one of the morals of Mesopotamia is that one ought
not to be surprised at anything. What the Mahratta and Dekkani
Muhammadan have done may be expected from--has, indeed, been paralleled
by--other hardened stocks. With good leading and discipline and the
moral that tradition inspires, you can make good troops out of the
agriculturist in most lands, provided he is not softened by a too
yielding soil.
The Mahratta has no very marked characteristics to distinguish him from
other sepoys. He is just the bedrock type of the Indian cultivator, the
real backbone of the country. And he has all the virtues and limitations
which you will find in the agriculturist whether he be Sikh, Rajput,
Dogra, Jat, or Mussalman, whether he tills the land in the Dekkan or
Peshawar. A prey to the priests, money-lenders and vakils, litigious,
slow-thinking, unsophisticated--but of strong affections, long-enduring
and brave. The small landowner, where the soil resists him and the
elements chastise, is much the same all over the world.
THE JAT
The Jat, as we have seen, is the backbone of the Punjab; for it is from
this Scythian breed that most of the Sikhs and a number of the Punjabi
Mussalmans derive their sinews and stout-heartedness. If you used the
word in its broad ethnic sense, signifying all classes of Jat descent,
the muster would include the best part of the roll of modern Indian
chivalry. But it is with the Hindu Jat, whose ancestors were not seduced
or intimidated by Islam and who himself is not sufficiently attracted by
the Khalsa to become a Sikh, that this chapter deals. That neither
material expediency, love of honour, nor the glamour of an ideal has
turned him aside from the immemorial path of his ancestors presupposes a
certain stolidity, in which one is not disappointed when one knows the
man.
I have passed many years in a district where there are Jats, but the Jat
villager is not the same man as the Jat sepoy, and I did not make
acquaintance with the sepoy breed until I ran across the bomb-havildar
of the 6th Jats in Mesopotamia.
I was taking my bully, and "Tigris" and whisky, with a Jat regiment, the
6th, when the discussion arose as to why the Jat wears gold in his
teeth. The doctor thought the idea was that gold carried you over the
Styx; it was a kind of Elysian toll. I persuaded the Colonel to call one
of the men into the dug-out and to draw him on the point. So Tara, the
bomb-havildar, was sent for, a jiwan of five years' service and the
quickest intelligence in the regiment.
Tara entered, saluted and stood at attention, each joint of him
independently stiff and inflexible, the stiffest wooden soldier could
not be more stiff than he, and his rifle was speckless in spite of the
mud. At the O.C.'s command his limbs became more independent of one
another, but rigidity was still the prominent note.
"Why do Jats wear gold in their teeth, Tara?" the Colonel asked: "this
Sahib wants to know."
Tara pondered.
[Illustration: A JAT CAMEL SOWAR.]
"For the sake of appearance, Sahib," he said, "to give them an air."
"Is there no other reason?"
Tara consulted the tarpaulin overhead, the mud walls, the mud table of
the mess, where "La Vie Parisienne" and a Christmas annual gave the only
bit of relief to this dun-coloured habitation. Then he smiled and
delivered himself slowly, "There is a saying among my people, Sahib,
that he who wears gold in his teeth must always speak what is true. Gold
in the teeth stops the passage of lies."
"But you have no gold in your teeth?"
"No, Sahib."
"Is that why you tell the tall story about all those Germans you killed
at Festubert?"
Tara smiled at this thrust.
"No, Sahib," he said, laughing. "It is true I killed ten between two
traverses."
"Better ask him right out, sir," the doctor suggested.
"I have heard some story about gold helping the Jat to heaven," the
Colonel observed to Tara.
The gleam of reminiscence in the havildar's eyes, as he confirmed this
legend, showed that he was not speaking merely to please. It was the old
story of Charon. Gold, he explained, was a passport in the other world
as in this, and it was not safe to carry it on the finger or on the ear
where it might be detached, so it was worn in the teeth.
"And who puts it there?"
"The goldsmith, Sahib," and he enlarged upon the exorbitance of the
Sonari; for the Jat is as thrifty as the Scot.
It was on account of these charges that Tara had omitted the rite.
"When you go back to your village," the Colonel said, dismissing him,
"don't forget to visit the Sonari, and then you will not tell any more
lies."
Tara saluted with an irradiating smile.
"Assuredly, Sahib, I will not forget," he said. "I shall go straight to
the Sonari."
This was quite a sally for Tara, and we all laughed, for the Jat is not
quick at repartee. The way we had to dig the story out of him was
characteristic, but he is not as a rule so responsive to badinage. The
Jat has no time for play. When he is a boy he is too busy looking after
the cows, and his nose is kept at the grindstone until he crumbles into
the soil that bore him. He has no badges, flags, emblems, no peculiar
way of tying his turban or wearing his clothes; and he has very little
sentiment. It was a stroke of genius in Guru Gobind Singh when he turned
the Jat into a Sikh, gave him the five badges, and wedded him to steel.
Tradition grew with the title of Singh, and a great military brotherhood
was founded: but in the unconverted Jat there is the same strong fibre,
the stronger, the regimental officer will tell you, for not having been
uprooted or pruned, and he prides himself that he will make as good a
soldier out of the Jat as ever the Guru did.
The Jat is primarily a farmer. He has not the ancient military
traditions of the Rajput, Mahratta, or Sikh, though none so stubborn as
he to fight for his own land. He does not figure in history among the
adventurers, builders of kingdoms, leaders of men, but circumstance has
moulded him from time to time into a fighting man. Prosperity may soften
him, but adversity only stiffens the impression of the mould.
It was during the reconstitution of the Indian Army in 1893, that the
Jats were built up again into a fighting race. A good regimental officer
can make anything he will out of the Jat. It takes earthquakes and
volcanoes to turn a regiment of these hard-bitten men out of a position
they have been given to hold. If the Jat is wanting in initiative and
enterprise, this is merely a defect of a virtue, for once set going it
never enters his honest hard head to do anything else but go on. And
that is why the Jat has done so well in this war. Every knock hardens
him. Courage is often the outcome of ignorance, but the remnants of a
Jat battalion which has been wiped out half a dozen times will go into
the attack again as unconcerned as a new draft.
The 6th Jats was one of the first of the Indian regiments to be engaged
in France. As early as the 16th of November, 1914, they had broken into
the German trenches. It was on the 23rd of the same month that they made
the gallant counter-attack over the snow at Festubert with the Garhwalis
and won back the lost trenches. At Givenchy, on December 20th, they held
their ground against the German wave when they were left practically in
the air; and they would not let go their hold at Neuve Chapelle when
they were enfiladed from the Port Arthur position, still intact, on
their right. Two months afterwards, on the 9th of May, they made their
frontal attack on Port Arthur. A double company penetrated the German
lines; only seven men returned unwounded. History repeated itself in
Mesopotamia. It has been the part of this gallant stock to arrive on the
scene in the nick of time and to be thrown into the brunt of the attack.
The Jat is not troubled with nerves or imagination, and he is seemingly
unacquainted with fear. Alarums, bombardments, and excursions having
become his normal walk of life, he will continue on his path, probably
with fewer inward questionings than most folk, until the end of the war.
Give him a trench to hold and he will stick to it as a matter of course
until he is ordered to come out.
The regiment in the trenches were mostly Jats of Hissar and Rohtak, and
the Colonel told me with the pride that is right and natural in the
regimental officer that this was the best stock. "You must get the Jat
where he is top dog in his own country," he said, "and not where he
lives among folk who think they are his betters. And he is best where
the land is poor. In districts where the sub-division of the soil among
large families does not leave enough to go round you will get a good
recruit." Locality is all important; a dividing river may make all the
difference. The Colonel admired the Jats of A, but he had no good word
for the Jats of B. The Rajput Jat, especially from Bikaner, he admitted,
were stout fellows, though they were not of his crew. There were
well-to-do districts in which the Jat would not follow the pursuit of
arms whether in peace or in war. "And if you want recruits," he enjoined
on me, "don't go to an irrigated district." Water demoralises them. When
a Jat sits down and watches the canal water and the sun raise his crop,
his fibre slackens, for his stubborn qualities proceed from the soil. It
is the same with other agricultural classes in the Indian Army, but the
Jat is probably the best living advertisement of the uses of adversity.
There is a proverb in the Punjab on the lines of our own tag about the
three things that are most improved by flagellation, but woman is the
only item recommended in both cases. The Hindu variant adds "flax" and
"the Jat."
There is another rude proverb of the country. "Like Jat, like byle
(ox)." There are many Jats and most of them have some peculiar virtue of
their own, but quickness of apprehension is not one of them. I had an
amusing reminder of this before I left the trench. Bullets were
spattering against the parapet with a crack as loud as the report of a
rifle, and our own and the Turkish shells screamed over the dug-out with
so confused a din that one was never quite sure which was which. It was
the beginning of the afternoon "strafe." Still there was no call for
casualties, and one only had to keep one's head low. In the middle of it
a subaltern coming down "Queen Street" looked in and told us that one of
the Jats was hit. "Loophole?" the Colonel asked. But it was not a
loophole. The jiwan had got hold of somebody's periscope; he had heard
that it was a charm which enables you to see without being hit--he was
standing up over the parapet trying to adjust it like a pair of field
glasses, when a bullet flicked off part of his ear.
The supply of good Indian officers is sometimes a difficulty in a Jat
regiment, for these children of labour follow better than they lead. But
even in the acquisition of understanding it is hard plugging application
that tells. "Continuing" is the Jat's virtue, or "carrying on" as we
say, and he will sap through a course of signalling with the same
doggedness as he saps up to the enemy's lines. "We've got some first
class signallers," the Colonel boasted, "they can write their reports in
Roman Urdu."
And the pick of the lot was Tara. What that youth has seen in France and
Mesopotamia would keep old Homer in copy through a dozen Iliads, but it
has left no wrinkle on his brow. Tara is still as fresh as paint.
"Sahib," he asks, "when may I go to the Turkish saphead with my bombs?"
He lost a brother at Sheikh Saad and wants to make good.
THE RAJPUT AND BRAHMAN
In the early days before the British Raj had spread North and West,
there was a period when the Bengal Army was enlisted almost exclusively
from the high-caste Hindu. In the campaigns against the Muhammadan
princes the Mussalman sepoy, for reasons of expediency, was gradually
weeded out. The Gurkha was unknown to Clive's officers; the day of the
Sikh and Mahratta was not yet; the Dogra was undiscovered; there was a
sprinkling of Pathan adventurers in the ranks and a few Jats and
Rohillas; but, generally speaking, the Rajput and Brahman had something
like a monopoly in military service.
The Rajputs, of course, are _par excellence_ the military caste of
Hindustan, and there is no more glorious page in the annals of chivalry
than the story of that resistance to the successive waves of Moslem
invaders. Three times the flower of the race were annihilated in the
defence of Chitore. But they never yielded, for the Rajput would take no
quarter. He was true to his oath not to yield; and when the odds against
him offered no hope of victory, his only care was to sell his life
dearly and to cut his way deep into the ranks of the enemy before he
fell. The women, too, refused the dishonour of survival. Led by their
queen and the princesses they passed into a sepulchre of flame. Others
fought and fell beside their husbands and sons, and their courage was
celebrated by the pen of Akbar, whose testimony to the spirit of the
race does not fall short of the Rajput bards.
The Rajput of to-day does not hold the same pre-eminence in the army as
did his ancestors. His survival in the land he held so bravely is due to
the British, who only came in time to save the race, exhausted by
centuries of strife, from conquest by more vigorous invaders. Yet it was
on the Rajput and the Brahman more than on any other class of sepoy that
we depended in our early campaigns. They fought with us against the
French; they helped us to crush the Nawab of Oudh. They served with
conspicuous gallantry in the Mahratta, Nepal, Afghan, and Sikh wars.
They formed part of the gallant band that defended the Residency at
Lucknow.[7] And later in Egypt, Afghanistan, and Burma, they maintained
the honour they had won. Had there been class regiments in those days
the izzat of the Rajput and Brahman sepoy would have been higher than it
is.
[Illustration: THE RAJPUT.]
The Brahmans only enlist in two class regiments of the Indian Army. The
type recruited is of magnificent physique; their breeding and pride of
race is reflected in their cleanliness and smartness on parade. They are
fine athletes, expert wrestlers, and excel in feats of strength; and
they have a high reputation for courage. Unhappily they have seen little
service since the class system was introduced, and so have not had the
opportunity of adding to a distinguished record.
For various reasons the Rajput does not enlist so freely in the Indian
Army as his proud military traditions might lead one to expect. The
difficulties of recruiting are greatest among the classes which should
provide the best material. The difference of quality among Rajput sepoys
is to a large extent determined by the locality of enlistment. Those
from Rajputana and the neighbouring districts of the Punjab as a rule
rank higher than recruits from the United Provinces and Oudh. The
western Rajputs, generally of purer blood, are not so fastidious about
caste, while farther east, especially Benares way, the Rajput is
inclined to become Brahmanised. Brahmanism, whatever its merits, is not
a good forcing ground for the military spirit. Exclusiveness is the bane
of "the twice-born," especially in war. On service the essentials of
caste are observed among Rajputs and Brahmans as fastidiously as in
peacetime, only a certain amount of ceremonial is dispensed with. At
ordinary times the high-caste Hindu when he is away from home prepares
his own dinner and eats it alone. Before cooking he bathes. Complete
immersion is prescribed, preferably in natural running water. Where
there is no stream or pool he is content with a wash down from a bucket;
and as he washes he must repeat certain prayers, facing the east. While
eating he wears nothing but his dhoti (loin cloth) and sacred thread;
the upper part of his body and his feet are bare. A small square is
marked off for cooking. This is called the chauka. It is smoothed and
plastered over, or lepai-ed as he calls it, with mud, or cowdung when
available. Should anyone not of the caste touch the chauka after it has
been prepared, all the food within its limits is defiled and must be
thrown away.
There are two distinct kinds of food, kachi which is cooked in ghi, and
pakhi which is cooked in water. Kachi may be eaten only at the chauka;
but happily for the sepoy pakhi may be carried about and eaten anywhere;
otherwise caste would completely demobilise him. Amongst Brahmans the
caste convention of cooking their own food and eating it alone dies
hard; and I know a Rajput class regiment in which it took ten years to
introduce the messing system. Company cooking pots were accepted at
first, but with no economy of space or time; for the vessels were handed
round and each man used them to cook his own food in turn. The Brahmans
are even more fastidious. I remember watching a class regiment at their
meal in the Essin position; their habit of segregation had spread them
over a wide area. Each man had ruled out his own pitch, and a Turk would
have taken the battalion for a brigade. Only in the case of near
relatives will two men sit at the same chauka. In spite of the cold, one
or two of them were naked except for the loin cloth. The others wore
vests of wool, which (apart from the loin cloth) is the one and only
material that Brahmans may wear at meals. All had first bathed and
changed their dhoti according to the prescribed rites, and carried water
with them to wash off any impurity from their feet when they entered the
chauka.
There are many prescribed minutiæ of ritual which vary with each sect
and sub-tribe, but these are the main inhibitions. Even on service the
Hindu preserves the sanctity of the chauka, and if not a Brahman, takes
with him a Brahman cook, relaxes nothing in regard to the purity of his
water from contamination by the wrong kind of people, and would rather
starve than eat meat killed in an unorthodox way. The mutton or goat
that the Mussalman eats must be slain by the halal or the stroke at the
throat, and the mutton the Sikh or Hindu eats by the jatka or stroke at
the back of the neck. The most elaborate precautions were taken in
France and were observed in Mesopotamia and elsewhere, to keep the two
kinds of meat separate. There was once a complaint that the flies from
the Muhammadan butchery settled on the meat prepared for the Hindus, and
the two slaughterhouses were accordingly removed farther apart.
Orthodoxy in this point is no mere fad, but a genuine physical need born
of centuries of tradition. The mere sight of the wrong kind of meat is
nauseating to the fastidious, and in cases where it is not physically
nauseating, toleration would be extremely bad form. I think the story
has already been told of the Gurkha subadar on board the transport
between Bombay and Marseilles who, when asked if his men would eat
frozen meat, replied, after consulting them, "Sahib, they will have no
objection whatever, provided one of them may be permitted each day to
see the animal frozen alive."
On service, of course, as on pilgrimages under hard climatic conditions,
there are dispensations in the ceremonial, though not in the essentials,
of caste. Brahmans have fought for us from Plassey to the present day
and their fastidious personal cleanliness has contributed to the
smartness and discipline of the Indian Army. In early days, when the
ranks of the Bengal regiments were filled almost entirely with
high-caste Hindus, orthodoxy was maintained in spite of all the rigours
of war. To-day little has changed. Bathing when the nearest water is an
icy glacier stream is not indulged in now on a frontier campaign; and
where there is no water at all the sepoy does not lose caste by the
neglect of his ablutions. The Rajput as a rule will eat his meals with
his boots and clothes on, as he has done no doubt whenever he has been
under arms since the Pandavas and Kouravas fought at Delhi.
The fastidious caste ceremonial is discouraged in the Indian Army. It
leads to complications at all times, especially on a campaign; and a
good Commanding Officer prides himself on his men's common sense and
adaptability to environment. Yet there have been occasions, even among
sepoys, when ritual and caste exclusiveness have been turned to
disciplinary uses. Here is a story which is very much to the point. The
first scene of this little drama was played in Egypt; the last on the
banks of the Tigris.
There was a company of Rajputs somewhere in the neighbourhood of Suez,
which contained a draft of very raw recruits. Three of these youngsters
and a particularly callow lance-naik were holding a picquet on the east
bank of the canal when they lost their heads. One of them blazed off at
a shadow. He was frightened by the tamarisk bushes in the moonlight, and
thought they were Turks' heads. A panic set in. All four blazed into the
scrub, threw down their rifles, bolted as if the devil were behind them,
and were only held up by the barbed wire of their own outpost. The
jiwans were notoriously wild and jungly, and everything that a recruit
should not be. They had never left their village save for a few months'
training before they embarked on the transport in Bombay. A certain
allowance might be made for stupidity and bewilderment, sufficient in
the case of extreme youth to waive the death penalty. Had it been a
moving campaign; had the regiment been in actual contact with the enemy,
these young men would have been "for the wall." There is nothing else to
do when soldiers go the wrong way. The O.C. and the Adjutant were
considering how to deal with them when the Subadar-Major entered the
orderly room. The man was a veteran, with a double row of ribbons on his
breast, and he had never let the regiment down in all his service. He
begged, as a special favour, that Rajput officers should be permitted to
wipe out the stain. "Leave it to us, Sahib," he said: "we will put such
an indignity on them, that there will not be a jiwan in the regiment who
will shrink from bahadri[8] again." The Colonel saw the wisdom of this.
The Rajput izzat was at stake, and he knew his man. So the Indian
officers of the regiment were deputed to deal with the case themselves,
just as prefects at school take the law into their own hands and
administer it with a much more deterrent effect than the headmaster with
his cane. The jiwans were tapped on the head with a slipper, the last
ignominy that can befall a Rajput. After such disgrace they could not
enter the chauka and mess with their caste companions. That is to say,
they were socially excommunicated until their honour was retrieved. For
nearly eighteen months they lit their outcast fire and took their meals
apart at a measured distance from the chaukas--at such a distance that
no ray of contamination could proceed from them to it.
They were still under the ban when the regiment left Egypt and went to
Mesopotamia. They did not go into action until the relieving column
found themselves in the impasse before Kut. This was their first chance,
and all four rehabilitated themselves. Two died honourably, one of them
inside the enemy's trenches killed by a Turkish grenadier; one was
awarded the Indian Order of Merit; and the lance-naik degraded was
promoted to naik. He was in the rearguard covering the retirement until
dark, and it was noticed that he laid out all his cartridge cases as he
fired, keeping them nicely dressed in a neat little heap, as had been
well rubbed into him on parade. I am told that there is much promise in
this jiwan. And it must be admitted that the caste instinct with all its
disabilities made a man of him. Breeding brought into contact with
regimental tradition gives the sense of _noblesse oblige_, and deference
is the birthright of the twice-born. Thus the Brahman of Oudh, tried and
proved in a wrestling match or a tug-of-war, thinks himself as good a
man in a scrap as the most fire-eating Turk; and the assumption is all
on the credit side.
Rajput pride is at the bottom of the saddest story of a sepoy I have
ever heard. The man was not a Rajput of the plains, but a hillman of
Rajput descent, as brave a man as any in a battalion whose chivalry in
France became a household word. After two days' incessant fighting with
a minimum of rest at night, he fell asleep at his post. On account of
his splendid service, and his exhaustion at the time, which was after
all the tax of gallantry, the death penalty was commuted, and the man
was sentenced to thirty lashes. He would much have preferred death.
However, he took the lashes well, and there was little noticeable change
in him afterwards beyond an increase of reserve. He went about his work
as usual, and was in two or three more actions, in which he acquitted
himself well. After a complete year in France, the battalion was moved
to Egypt, where they stayed five months. Then came the welcome news that
they were returning home. On the afternoon of the day he disembarked at
Bombay the Rajput shot himself. He had chosen to live when there was
work to do and death was his neighbour every day; now, when he might
have lived, and when he was a bare three days from his family and home,
he chose to die. The British officers tried to find out from the men
what had driven him to it. But the sepoys were very silent and reticent.
All they would say was that it was "on account of shame."
The boy who commanded his platoon, and who had been shooting with him in
his district before the war, knows no more than I the processes of his
mind. He is inclined to think that he decided at once, immediately after
sentence had been executed, to destroy himself when his regiment
returned. Or he may have turned it over in his mind day and night for
more than a year, and in the end the sight of Hindustan resolved him.
When the idea of home became real and imminent, the thought became
unendurable that he should be pointed at in the village street as the
man who had been whipped. In one case there is heroism; in the other a
very human weakness; and in either case a tragedy of spirit that reveals
the intensity of pride which is the birthright of the "twice-born."
THE GARHWALI
The Garhwalis' _début_ in Mesopotamia was worthy of their inspiring
record in France. It was at Ramadie. They made the night march on
September 27th, 1916, marched and fought all the 28th, and on the
morning of the 29th carried the Aziziyah and Sheikh Faraja Ridges at the
point of the bayonet, in an advance of 1500 yards under frontal and
enfilade fire. The Sheik Faraja ridge was their objective. But this was
not enough. The bridge of the Aziziyah Canal lay beyond, a point of
vantage, for over it all guns or wheeled transport that escaped from
Ramadie would have to pass. Feeling that they had rattled the Turk, that
his tail was down, and that it was a moment when initiative might turn
the scale, they pushed on another thousand yards over open ground, "as
bald as a coot," crossed a deep nullah, seized the bridge, scuppered the
teams of three Turkish guns, captured them, and accepted the surrender
of a Turkish General and two thousand men.
[Illustration: THE GARHWALI.]
Of course there was a lot of luck in it, but it was the luck that
gallantry deserves and wins for itself and turns to account. The Turk
was cornered and hemmed in with the cavalry astride the Aleppo road to
the west, the Euphrates at his back and no bridge, and our infantry
pressing in on the south and the east. But it was a wide front and our
line was thin; by the time that they had reached the Canal the three
assaulting companies were a bare hundred strong, and if the Turk had had
the heart of the Garhwalis he would have rolled them up.
Standing by the captured guns, with the stalwart Turks coming in
submissively all round, as if the surrender of the Anatolian to the
Garhwali were a law of nature and a preordained thing, a subadar of the
regiment turned modestly to his lieutenant and said, "Now it is all
right, Sahib. I had my fears about the young men. They knew so little
and were untried. Now we may be assured. They will stand."
When the battalion made the night march on September 27th, exactly two
years and two days had passed since they had fought their last action in
France; and they had seen more than one incarnation. The Subadar might
well be anxious. The regiment had a large proportion of recruits, and
they had a tall record to preserve. For the "gharry-wallah," or Indian
cabby, as he is familiarly called, though he has never driven anything
but the Hun--and the Turk, leapt into fame at Festubert, and has never
lost an iota of his high repute. Before the war his name was unknown to
the man in the street. The first battalion of the 39th Garhwal Rifles
was raised in 1887--the second in 1901, and they had seen little service
till France. Yet the Garhwali had always been a fighting man. He
enlisted in the Gurkha regiments before the class battalions were
formed, and his prowess helped to swell their fame, though one heard
little or nothing of him. He was swallowed up and submerged in the
Gurkha, and did not exist as a race apart. When at last the class
regiments came into being he had to wait thirty years for his chance.
But his officers knew him and loved him, and were confident all the
while that his hour of recognition would come.
It came at Festubert, when the first battalion attacked and recaptured
the lost trenches. Regiment after regiment had driven in the most
determined counter-attacks across a thousand yards of snow-covered
ground, and every assault had been withered up by the enemy's fire. The
Garhwalis got in on the flank, working along trenches held by our own
troops to the left of those captured by the Germans. They carried
traverse after traverse, and the taking of every traverse was as the
taking of a fort. At first they had a bagful of "jampot" bombs hastily
contrived by the Sappers--it was long before the days of Mills and
Stokes and other implements of destruction; but the bombs soon gave out,
and for the long stretch of trench, 300 yards or more, it was nothing
but rifle and bayonet work. A few men would leap on the parapet and
parados at each traverse, and then the party in the trench would charge
round the traverse and dispatch the garrison with the bayonet until the
whole line was in our hands. These are familiar tactics to-day, but
trench warfare was then in its infancy, and it fell to the Garhwalis to
give the lead and point the way. The gallant Naik Dewan Singh Negi, who
led his men round traverse after traverse and evicted the Hun, was
awarded the V.C.
That was in the last week of November, 1914. For the next few months the
Garhwalis were tried and proved every day. Neither the severe conditions
of the winter, nor the strange and terrible phenomena of destruction
evolved in the new Armageddon, could damp his fighting spirit. But it
was on the 10th March, 1915, when the two battalions "went over the top"
at Neuve Chapelle, that the name of Garhwal, no longer obscure, became a
name to conjure with in France. Ever since that day the Garhwali has
stood in the very front rank in reputation among the fighting classes of
the Indian Army. The 1st Battalion charged a line of trenches where the
wire was still uncut. Every British officer and nearly every Indian
officer in the attacking line was killed, but the men broke through the
wire, bayoneted the garrison of the trench, and hung on all that day
from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. with no Sahib in command. The C.O. and Adjutant
were both wounded, and at nightfall two officers were sent across from
the 2nd Battalion, who had got through with less severe loss, to help
the shattered remnants of the 1st. They hung on all that night and the
next day, and beat off a heavy counter-attack on the morning of the
12th. Rifleman Gobar Singh was awarded the V.C. for his day's work on
the 10th, when he led the front line bayoneting the Hun, but the gallant
sepoy never lived to wear his award.
The Garhwali subadar who went over the field with us after the Ramadie
fight, said to his officer that the regiment had not had such a day
since the "charge-ki-din." The 10th of March at Neuve Chapelle is
remembered by the Garhwali as "the day of the charge." For them it is
THE day. Even Ramadie will not wipe it out with all its fruits of
victory. For the regiment was put to a grimmer test at Neuve Chapelle,
and the reward in the measure of honour could not possibly be surpassed.
Still it was good to see that the new lot was as staunch as the first.
They are a modest-looking crowd, some of the youngest mere boys without
a wrinkle on their faces. The veterans reminded me very much of Gurkhas,
but more of the Khas Ghurka, who is half a Rajput, than of the Magar or
Gurung. The Garhwalis, like the Dogras, are direct descendants of the
Rajputs who cut out kingdoms for themselves in the hills centuries ago.
There is no Mongol blood in them, save in the case of intermarriage with
Nepal. They are a distinct race, yet being hillmen and neighbours, they
naturally have much in common with the Gurkha, in habit as well as look.
They have the cheerfulness and simplicity of the Gurkha, and the same
love of a scrap for its own sake, and, what is more endearing, the same
inability to grow up. They are always children. They care nothing for
drill books and maps, and as often as not hold them upside down. But
they see red in a fight, and go for anything in front of them. Both
battalions would have been wiped out a dozen times had it not been for
their British officers.
There is in build a great deal in common between the Gurkha and
Garhwali, and confusion is natural in the uninitiated. It is not only
that both are hillmen, belong to rifle regiments, and wear slouch or
terai hats; the Garhwali is in appearance a cross between the Dogra and
the "Ghurk." He has the close-cropped hair, the "bodi" or topknot, the
hillman's face, and you will find in the veterans the same tight-drawn
lines under the eye that bespeak stiffening in a hard school and give
them a grim and warlike look. But the British officer in a Garhwali
regiment naturally resents the swallowing of the small community, with
its honour, prestige, individuality and all, by the great. The Garhwali,
he argues, has at least earned his right to a separate identity now, and
he is jealous of the overshadowing wing.
Ramadie was a great day for him. The Garhwalis did not win the battle,
but they reaped the rich field by the bridge alone. Other regiments did
splendid work that day, and the officer who showed me over the ground
was afraid that I should forget them in "booming his show." "It was just
our luck," he explained, "that we happened to be there." Most of the
90th Punjabis had side-tracked to the right to take Unjana Hill, while
the rest of the brigade swept on and cleared the Sheikh Faraja Ridge. To
gain the Aziziyah Canal the Garhwalis changed direction and bore off to
the left. Other companies came up afterwards, but when the Garhwalis
reached the bridge they were unsupported. They took the bridge, the
guns, the 2000 prisoners, the Turkish General,[9] alone. As for the
prisoners, "It was not so much a capture," the officer explained to me
modestly, "as a surrender to the nearest troops, and we happened to be
there."
I had watched them in the distance, black specks on the sand, but it was
not until I went over the field with them the next day, and they fought
the battle again, that I realised what they had done. As the Garhwalis
charged over the open from Sheikh Faraja Ridge, the three guns in front
of them, firing point-blank over their sights, poured in shrapnel,
raking the ground, churning up the sand in a deadly spray. Halfway
across there was a deep dry nullah, with steep banks and a few scattered
palms on the other side. It was an ideal place to hold, but the enemy
were slipping away. In a moment the Garhwalis were in the nullah,
clambered up the opposite bank, and had their Lewis-gun trained on the
gun teams at 400 yards. The Turkish gunners died game, and in the
Garhwalis' last burst over the flat not a man fell. They rushed the
palm-clump to the right of the guns and the guns, which were undefended
with their dead all round. The three pieces were intact. The Turks had
no time to damage them. The horses were all saddled up in the palms,
with the ammunition limbers, officers' charges, mules and camels. Very
quickly the Garhwalis dug a pothook trench round the guns and
palm-clump, watched eagerly for the supports, and waited for the
counter-attack which surely must come. The three assaulting companies
were a bare hundred strong now, and behind the mud walls five hundred
yards in front of them, though they did not know it, lay the Turkish
General and 2000 of his men. But the silencing of the guns was the
beginning of the collapse. The Turks knew the game was up. The iron ring
we were drawing round them, their unsuccessful sortie against the
cavalry in the night, had taken the heart out of them. No doubt they
thought the Garhwalis the advance-guard of a mighty host.
White flags appeared on the mud wall in front. A small group of Turks
came out unarmed. Eight men were sent to bring them in. Then a
"crocodile" emerged from the nullah. "I've seen some crocodiles," a very
junior subaltern said to me, "but I have never seen one which bucked me
like that." The monster grew and swelled until it assumed enormous
proportions. One could not see whence each new fold of the beast
proceeded. It was like dragon seed conjured up out of invisibility in
the desert by a djinn. But it was a very tame dragon and glad of its
captivity. And there was really something of a miracle in it,--the kind
of miracle that happens in a legend or at the end of a fairy tale, where
the moral is pointed of the extraordinary rewards that befall all the
young who are single-minded and unafraid. Half an hour after the
crocodile had collected its folds Ahmed Bey, the Turkish General, was
discovered in a neighbouring house, and surrendered to a young British
officer of the company.
When they saw the Turkish General coming in, all the jiwans (young men)
must have thought of the "charge-ki-din," the day of honour of which
they had inherited the tradition but not the memory, and wished they had
been there too.
THE KHATTAK
The Khattaks kept their spirits up all through the hot weather. They
were too lively sometimes. There was one man who imitated a
three-stringed guitar a few yards from my tent as an accompaniment to
his friend's high treble. One night after a good feed, when the shamal
began blowing, they broke out into one of their wild dances, after the
Dervish fashion, swinging swords and leaping round the bonfire. You
would think the Khattak would be up to any murder after this kind of
show, but I am told the frenzy works the offending Adam out of him.
I was watching a fatigue party working at a bund on a particularly
sultry afternoon. They were all a bit "tucked up," but as soon as the
dhol (drum) and serinai (oboe) sounded, they started cat-calling and
made the earth fly. The Khattak is as responsive to the serinai as the
Highlander to the regimental slogan, but he is more demonstrative. It is
a good thing to be by, when the ---- Rifles leave camp. At the first
sound of the dhol and serinai the Khattak company breaks into a wild
treble shriek, tailing off perhaps with the bal-bala, the Pathan
imitation of the gurgling of the camel. The Sikh comes in with his "Wah
Guru-ji-Ki-Khalsa, Wah Guru-ji-Ki-jai!" and the Punjabi Mussalman with
his "Allah, Allah, Allah, Allah"; or he may borrow the Khattak's
bal-bala, or the British "Hip, hip, hooray!"
The Khattak is impulsive, mercurial, easily excited, seldom dispirited,
and if so, only for a short time. His élan is sometimes a positive
danger during an attack. At Sheikh Saad, on the right bank on January
7th, it was difficult to hold the Khattak company back while the
regiment on their left was coming up; they were all for going on ahead
and breaking the line; and in the end it was a premature sortie of the
Khattaks that precipitated the assault.
Shere Ali was among these. He and his father, Shahbaz Khan of the Bhangi
Khel, were typical Khattaks. From these two one may gather a fair
estimate of the breed. Shahbaz Khan, the father, I did not meet. Shere
Ali I saw wounded on a barge at Sheikh Saad. He was introduced to me by
his machine-gun officer, who was wounded at the same time.
Father and son both served in the Khattak double company of the ----
Rifles. Shahbaz Khan, retired subadar, died after eighteen months of the
Great War without hearing a shot fired. It was very galling to the old
man to be out of it, for his idea of bliss was a kind of glorified
Armageddon. He had fought in Tochi and Waziristan, but these frontier
scraps were unsatisfying. "It was only playing at war," he said. He
longed for a padshah-ki-lerai, "a war of kingdoms," in the old
Mahabharat style. "Sahib," he said, "I should like to be up to my knees
in gore with thousands of dead all round me." But the old man was born
fifteen years too soon. He would have been happy in the night attack
upon Beit Aieesa, or even perhaps with Shere Ali on the right bank at
Sheikh Saad, when the regiment rushed the Turkish trenches.
Shere Ali was with the regiment in Egypt, left the canal with them in
December, 1915, and was just in time for the advance from Ali Gharbi.
Shahbaz Khan came down to the depôt and dismissed his son with envious
blessings. He had dyed his beard a bright red, and he carried himself
with a youthful air, hoping that the Colonel might discover some
subterfuge by which he could re-emerge on the active list. The Colonel
would have given ten of his jiwans for him, and Shahbaz Khan knew it.
But the rules were all against him. So the regiment went off to the
accompaniment of the dhol and serinai, amidst many loud shouts and
salutations, mingled with British cheers, and old Shahbaz Khan was left
behind. He died in his bed before Shere Ali came back, and no doubt a
brooding sense of having been born too soon hastened his end.
Father and son, I have explained, were faithful to type. The Khattak is
the Celt of the Indian Army, feckless, generous, improvident, mercurial,
altogether a friendly and responsive person, but with the queer kink in
him you get in all Pathans, that primitive sensitive point of honour or
shame which puzzles the psychologist. It is often his duty to kill a
man. On these occasions the ægis of the British Government is a positive
misfortune. For the Khattaks are mainly a cis-frontier race, and
therefore subject to all the injustice and inequalities of our law.
Citizenship of the Empire hampers the blood feud. A stalking duel
started in British territory generally ends in the Andamans or Paradise.
If you lose you lose, and if you win you may be hanged or deported for
life. Nevertheless, the instinct for honour survives this
discouragement, and there is a genial colony of Khattak outlaws over the
border.
Old Shere Khan killed a rival for his wife's affections in the
regimental lines, and he could not have done anything else. The man's
offence carried its own sentence in the minds of all decent-thinking
people. The Subadar-Major begged the Adjutant to cut the fellow's
name--Sher Gol, I think it was--and to get him well away before night.
Otherwise, he said, there would be trouble. But the Adjutant could not
look into the case before the next morning. In the meantime, to
safeguard Sher Gol, he told the Subadar to see that twenty stout men
slept round his bed. The Subadar made it fifty, but the quarter guard
would have been better; for at one in the morning--it was a late
guest-night--the Adjutant and Sher Gol's company commander were called
out quietly to see the remains of him. His head was swaying slowly from
side to side on the edge of the bed. A hatchet planted in the skull and
oscillating with every movement of it had been left there as evidence.
The Subadar put his knee against the charpoy (bed) and pulled the
chopper out. Whereupon Sher Gol opened his eyes, saying, "Ab roshni hai"
("Now there is light"), and expired. He had been killed with fifty men
sleeping round him. They had all slept like the dead and nobody had
heard the blow. There was no evidence against Shahbaz Khan whatever;
public opinion was on his side.
Of such stock was Shere Ali, and though a mere lad he had killed his man
at Kohat before he fought at Sheikh Saad. Zam, zan, zar (land, women,
and gold), according to the Persian proverb, are at the bottom of all
outrages, and with Shahbaz Khan and Shere Ali, as with nine Khattaks out
of ten, it was zan. And zan (woman), too, was in Shere Ali's mind when
he brooded so dejectedly over his wound at Sheikh Saad. He was hit in
the foot and lamed the moment he left the trenches. This meant a
two-inch shortage, and, as he believed, permanent crutches.
"I have never seen him so down in the mouth," Anderson, the machine-gun
officer, said to me on the barge. "He has lost all his cheery looks."
Shere Ali was certainly dispirited. He had his head and chest low, and
all the wind taken out of him. He looked like a bird with its crest down
and its feathers ruffled.
The Khattak thinks no end of his personal appearance. He dresses to
kill, and loves to go and swank in the bazaar in his gala kit. He will
spend hours over his toilet peering at himself in the glass, all the
while without a trace of self-consciousness, though his neighbours may
be almost as interested in the performance as he. Then when his hair is
neatly oiled and trim to the level of the lobe of his ear, he will
stride forth in his flowery waistcoat of plum-colour or maroon velvet
with golden braid, spotless white baggy trousers, a flower behind his
ear, a red handkerchief in his pocket, a cane in his hand, and for
headgear a high Kohat lungi--black with yellow and crimson ends, and a
kula[10] covered with gold.
Every Khattak is a bit of a blood, and Shere Ali was true to type. In
his country a showy exterior betokens the gallant in both senses of the
word. A woman of parts will not look at a man unless he has served in
the army, or is at least something of a buccaneer. Of course, a wound
honourably come by is a distinction, and Shere Ali should not have been
depressed. He would return a bahadur, I told him, but he only smiled
sadly. He was crippled; there was no getting over it. He would join in
the Khattak dance no more. As for the dhol and serinai--if that
intriguing music had broken out just then I believe we should both have
wept.
I heard more of Shere Ali from Anderson when he returned fit three
months afterwards. In the depôt the lad's depression seemed permanent.
He was very anxious to get back to his village, and kept on asking when
he might go. But he was told that he must wait for a special pair of
boots. He was sent to Lahore to Watts to be fitted.
"Give him the best you can turn out," the Adjutant wrote; "a pair that
will last at least three years." Shere Ali returned all impatience.
"I have been measured, Sahib," he said; "but I have not yet got the
boots. Now may I go back to my village."
"No," the Adjutant told him, "you must wait for the boots. We must see
you well fitted out first."
He had another weary two weeks to wait. He was evidently rather bored
with all this fuss about footgear. What good are boots to a man who
can't walk?
At last they came. He untied the box with melancholy indifference, threw
the tissue paper and cardboard on the floor, and examined them
resignedly.
"Sahib," he said, "there is some mistake--they are not a pair."
He was persuaded to put them on.
"Now walk," the Adjutant said.
Shere Ali rose with an effort, and was leaning forward to pick up his
crutches, when he noticed that his lame foot touched ground. He advanced
it gingerly, stamped with it once or twice in a puzzled way, and then
began doubling round the orderly room. The Adjutant said that his chest
visibly filled out and the light came back to his eyes. He took a step
forward and saluted.
"When is the next parade, Sahib?" he asked.
"Never mind about parades," the Adjutant told him. "Go back to your
village and bring us some more jiwans like yourself, as many as you
like, and keep on bringing them."
We can't have too many Khattaks. Shere Ali, I am told, has quite a
decent stride. He is no end of a bahadur. And he is a sight for the gods
in his white baggy trousers, flowery waistcoat, and Kohat lungi, when he
dresses to kill.
THE HAZARA
I thought I had met all the classes in the Indian Army. But one day at
Sheikh Saad, when I was half asleep with the heat, I opened my eyes to
see a company of unfamiliar faces. They were not unfamiliar
individually. I had met the double of each of them; yet collectively
they were unfamiliar. In the first platoon I could have sworn to a
Gurkha, a Chinaman, a Tibetan, a Lepcha of Sikkim, a Chilasi, and an
undoubted Pathan with a touch of the Turki in him.
Whether in eye, nose, complexion, or the flatness of the cheek there was
something Mongol in them all, while in at least half there was a
suggestion of the Semitic. The Lepcha had the innocent jungly glance of
the cowherd of Gantok or Pemiongchi; the Chinaman with the
three-cornered eyes was an exaggeration of type; the Pathan would have
passed muster in the Khyber Rifles. They were all fairer than many
Englishmen after a year of Mesopotamia, and they spoke a kind of mongrel
Persian with a Tibetan intonation.
The regiment disembarked from the steamer and filed out to the rest camp
behind my tent in the intense heat of a September afternoon. It was too
hot to sleep, much too hot to wander about and ask questions. If it had
been cooler I should have gone out and talked to one of the regimental
officers. But 118 degrees in the shade under canvas kills curiosity. I
remember there was a dog under the outside fly of my tent, and for half
an hour I mistook its breathing for the engine of a motor-car, but never
quite rose to the effort of getting up to see if the machine could not
be persuaded to move on. Happily there was no need to go out and ask who
these men were. I soon tumbled to it, though I had never seen the breed
until they landed in the blinding glare of Sheikh Saad.
The history of the Hazaras is written in their faces. They are of Mongol
origin, though the colony is settled near Ghazni in Afghanistan. I had
heard how they came there, but had forgotten the story, only remembering
that the Mongols had married wives of the country of their adoption.
Hence the curious blend of the Central Asian and the Jew in the crowd
that was stumbling up the bank. A little reflection solved the puzzle in
spite of the heat.
[Illustration: THE HAZARA.]
There was one small tamarisk bush, not more than eighteen inches high,
but where it stood on the edge of the bank it threw a four-foot patch of
shade; the only natural shadow to be had anywhere round. A sepoy of the
regiment appropriated this. Then a jemadar came up and demanded it for
himself. The sepoy pretended not to hear. "Go and relieve the sentry,"
his officer said, pointing to an erect figure in the sun who was being
broiled by inches, "over the kit pile there by the steamer. Look alive.
Clear out!" The Hazara dragged himself out of the shade, and approaching
his friend the guard, caught him a resounding whack on the ear. One
cannot strike an officer; yet something had to be done; one has to let
steam off somehow. The guard jabbed at him with the bayonet and took
himself off in good spirit. The jemadar laughed.
All this horseplay was characteristic of everything I had heard of the
Hazara. The psychology of it was not of the East. There was something
Cockney or Celtic in the blows taken in good part, the give and take,
the common-sense and easy-going humour of the scene.
In the evening I went over and had a chat with the Hazara. One or two of
them spoke Hindustani with the accent of a Tommy, calling me "Sabb."
Finding them friendly and communicative folk, I asked them their
history. They had come over with a Ghenghiz Khan, they told me, to sack
Delhi; all agreed that it was Ghenghiz Khan, and that it was about 800
years ago and that they had crossed the Karakoram, and that their own
particular ancestors had been left by the Khan to hold the outpost of
Ghazni in Afghanistan. I looked up their history afterwards and found
that they had given it me more or less as it is set down in the
textbooks.
Also I learnt that it is not easy for the Hazaras to leave Afghanistan.
The Amir's guards have orders to hold them up at the frontier, though
there are time-honoured ways in which they contrive to break the cordon,
bribing the guards or slipping through in disguise, generally with the
Powindah caravans. It is still more difficult for them to get home and
return when on leave, and this is an embargo which indulges the Hazara's
natural bent for travel. In the furlough season you will find him as far
afield from cantonments as he can get in the time, often as far as
Colombo, Calcutta, Madras, or Rangoon. Filthy lucre is not his motive.
What he earns he spends. He has a curiosity uncommon in the Asiatic. He
likes wandering and seeing the world for its own sake; he lives
comfortably, is a bit of a spendthrift, gambles a lot, dresses with an
air, and likes to cut a figure in a tonga where the ordinary sepoy would
save a few annas by going on foot. If he belongs to a Pioneer regiment
he can afford it. For the Pioneer works on a Government contract in
peace time, and the Hazara thinks he has fallen on a poor job if he
cannot make twelve annas extra for a day's work in addition to his pay.
Few of them can read or write, but though illiterate they are
keen-witted and speak with the terseness of a proverb. They are much
quicker "at the uptake" than the Gurkha, whom they resemble in many
ways. When they go to Kirkee for Pioneer training they generally come
out top in the machine-gun, musketry, and signalling courses, and they
make excellent surveyors. As Pioneers they are hard to beat.
It will be gathered from the incident of the sepoy who was dispossessed
of his tamarisk bush, that the Hazara is of a cheerful disposition.
There is generally a comedian in the regiment, and after dinner at
Sheikh Saad one of the men was called in to give us a kind of
solo-pantomime. He began with the smart salute of the sepoy, bringing
his hand down with the mechanical click of a bolt; then he gave us the
Sahib's casual lifting of the cane, next he was a havildar drilling a
raw recruit. He took the parts in turn and contrived some clever
fooling. But I gathered that the man was only second-rate. No sooner had
he made his exit than everybody in the mess lamented Faizo who beguiled
so many nights of the New Zealanders on the canal, a subtle artist
compared to this clown with his stock regimental turns. Faizo is the
castigator of pretence, scourge of hypocrisy and the humbug of the
Church. In one scene he is the shaven mullah abstractedly mumbling his
prayers while he intently prepares his food. A dog comes in and defiles
the dish, Faizo for the moment becomes the dog--then the mullah torn
with the fury of commination, pursuing the dog with oaths and missiles
and spurning the polluted food. Then the mullah again, hungry and
unctuously sophisticated, blessing the food, miraculously restoring its
virtue, and finding it good.
No one is better at a nickname than Faizo. Few men are known in the
regiment by the name their father gave them. They are remembered by some
oddity or unhappy lapse of conduct, or the place they come from, and
Faizo is the regimental godfather of them all. There is Mahomet
Ulta--Mahomet upside down--who always gets hold of the wrong end of the
stick; Ser Khuskh--the dry-head, and "The Mullah," and "Kokri Gulpusht,"
"the frog with a shining posterior," who looks as if his face had been
glazed. Also there is Ghulam Shah the "Maygaphon." This is how he came
by the name.
Ghulam Shah is that rare thing, a stupid Hazara--and what is worse a
stupid havildar. One day on manœuvres he had tied the Hazaras up in an
inextricable knot through misunderstanding some command. The Colonel
stood on a mound and cursed him from afar off, and as his language
became more violent Ghulam Shah became more confused. He stood on one
leg and then on the other. Then remembering the megaphone he carried he
put it to his ear, and lastly, in despair, to his eye. On the evening of
the field day Faizo borrowed the regimental megaphone and pursued the
wretched Ghulam Shah round the parade ground. Ghulam Shah was a fat man
who ran heavily and panted. Faizo put the instrument to his ear and to
his eye. He inspected him with a theatrical gesture of his disengaged
hand. He listened to him curiously, as though he was some strange beast.
Last insult of all, he put the megaphone to his nose and smelt him.
It was refreshing to see how the Hazaras kept their spirits up in this
firepit, and to hear the clipped Mongol speech of the tableland in the
plain of Iraq. At Sheikh Saad we were little more than a hundred miles
from the plain of Shinar and the site of the Tower of Babel, and we were
carrying on with a confusion of tongues that would have demobilised the
tower builders. Here was a man talking Persian like a Tibetan, and from
beyond the circle of light there penetrated to us the most profane
comments delivered in the homeliest Devonshire burr.
Among the Hazaras were Baltis, who are being recruited into the Hazara
battalion now. Their country, Baltistan, or Little Tibet, lies to the
north of Kashmir, between Fadakh and the Gilgit district. The Baltis,
too, have a distinct language of their own and come of a semi-Mongolian
stock, and are Shiahs by faith like the Hazaras. They were originally
polygamists, like their neighbours the Bhots of Fadakh, but when they
became Muhammadans they adopted polyandry. They resemble the Hazaras in
looks, but on the whole are shorter and darker. They are an extremely
hardy race, and eke out a very scanty living as coolies and tillers of
the soil in the valleys of the Indus and its tributaries up Skardu and
Shigar way--a happy hunting-ground, the mere thought of which gave one
an empty and homesick feeling inside when tied down to one's gridiron or
Iraq. I had seen them at work in the high snow passes of Tibet, their
natural home, and little expected to meet them in the malignant waste by
the Tigris, which one would have thought must be death to mountain-born
folk whose villages are seldom found at an altitude of less than 8000
feet above the sea. Yet the descent to Tartarus did not seem to have
dismayed them in the least.
The Hazara is probably the nearest approach to the European you will
find in the Indian Army. It is odd that a cross of the Mongol and
Semitic should have produced this breed. His leg is not of the East; he
walks like the Tyke. I do not know the Tartar in his home, but these
descendants of his have much in common with us. In his sense of humour,
quick temper, rough and tumble wrestling, ragging and practical jokes,
and practical common sense; in his curiosity and love of travel, in his
complexion and disposition and in his easy-going habits of life, the
Hazara is not so very far removed from an Islander of the West.
The Hazara has a good opinion of himself though his pride is
unobtrusive. He is hard as nails, a man of tremendous heart, and he is
not easily beaten in a trial of physical strength. They nearly always
pull off the divisional tug-of-war. In the two mixed-company battalions
that enlist Hazaras it is a recognised tradition that the light-weights
should be a purely Hazara team.
There is not much material as yet for an estimate of the military virtue
of the race, but according to all precedent they should prove good men
in a scrap. For the Hazara is an anomaly in the East, where men as a
rule are only stout-hearted and self-respecting where they are lords of
the soil and looked up to by their neighbours. In Afghanistan, as alien
subjects of the Amir, Shiahs among Sunnis, Mongols among Pathans, they
have held their heads high and proved themselves unbroken in spirit;
though living isolated and surrounded by hostile peoples, and from time
to time the objects of persecution, you will find few types of manhood
less browbeaten than the Hazara.
THE MER AND MERAT
The Hindu and Muhammadan Mers and Merats from the Merwara Hills round
Ajmere are men of curious customs and antecedents, very homely folk, and
as good friends to the British Government as any children of the Empire.
I met them first at Qurnah, in June, 1916; thin, lithe men with sparse
beards like birds' nests in a winter tree. You could not tell the Mer
from the Merat. They are of one race, and claim to be the issue of a
Rajput king--Prithi Raj, I believe--by a Meena woman,--a mythical
ancestry suggested no doubt by Brahmans in order to raise their social
standing among other Hindus. They are really the descendants of the
aboriginal tribes of Rajputana, but in course of time, through
intercourse with Rajput Thakurs as servants, cultivators, and irregular
levies, they have imbibed a certain amount of Rajput blood. They are a
democratic crowd, and have never owed allegiance to the princes of
Rajasthan. Nor have they been defeated by them. In the old days when
they made a foray the Rajput cavaliers would drive them back into their
impossible country, where among their rocks and trees they would hurl
defiance in the shape of stones and arrows at mounted chivalry. Then in
the middle of last century an Englishman came along and did everything
for them which a true friend can do. Like Nicholson, he became
incorporated in the local Pantheon. He gave the Mers a statute and a
name, and lamps are still burning at his shrine.
[Illustration: THE MERAT.]
Mota is a Mer. There are six regiments in the Indian Army that draw from
his community, one class and five company class battalions. But as Mota
is an exaggeration of type, and more blessed with valour than brains and
discretion, I will not say to what particular battalion he belonged.
When I saw Mota Jemadar he was rehearsing a part. His Colonel and I were
sitting on the roof of a mud Arab house, then a regimental mess, where
we had established ourselves for the evening, hoping to find some
movement in the stifling air. Looking down we saw the jemadar doubling
painfully and deliberately across the walled palm grove in a temperature
of 105 degrees in the shade. We thought at first the man had been bitten
by a scorpion or a snake, and the Colonel called out to him from the
roof, "What is the matter, Mota?" "Nothing is the matter, Sahib," he
called up, "I am practising for the Victaria Crars
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