Chapter IV: Part 4

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.

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.

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.

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 Crarse." The Colonel smiled and sighed. He knew his man, and he told me what these preparations impended. The regiment was new to the country and to war, and I gathered that unless otherwise instructed the jemadar would go over the parapet the first time he found himself in action, doubling along clumsily in the same determined fashion as if he had been propelled mechanically from behind, and that he would not pull up or look round until he got to the enemy's trenches. And he would do this with the full expectation of having the glittering cross pinned on his breast in the evening. The other alternative would not trouble his head.