Chapter V: Part 5

Also I gathered that the phrase "unless otherwise instructed" implied much uphill work on the part of the regimental officer. Mota was imbued with a fixed idea. His mind was not in that receptive mood which enables the fighting man to act quickly in an emergency. Supposing his rôle were not the offensive. Supposing that he were suddenly attacked at the moment when he felt himself secure, and had no time for deliberation or counsel, the old jemadar might be doubling in any direction under the contagion of example or to reach a place where he could think out the new situation and resolve how to act. When a Mer gets as far as a rehearsal he will never fail in the performance. He is all right so long as he knows exactly what he is expected to do.

There was the historic occasion of Ajmere in 1857, when the action of the Mers and Merats altered the whole course of the Mutiny in their own district, and held back the wave that threatened to sweep over Rajasthan. News came to the local battalion that the garrison had risen at Nasirabad and murdered the British officers. Led by their Sahib and lawgiver, the Mers made a forced march of thirty-eight miles from Beawar to Ajmere, dispossessed the mutinous guards of the treasury and arsenal, and held the fort against the rebels who were advancing upon the city, flushed with success, from Nasirbad. All of which fell in with the Mer legend that they would never be ruled by any save a white king.

It was a class battalion that I met at Qurnah in June, 1916; incidentally it was not Mota's crowd. They had already seen much hard campaigning, and a small scrap or two in the desert between the Kharkeh and Karum rivers, where some of the regiment had died of thirst. But the most interesting point about the Mers and Merats to a student of Indian races is the relationship between the Hindus and Muhammadans of the same stock. In the chapter about the Brahmans and Rajputs in the Army I have given an instance of how the caste system strengthened discipline. Caste, of course, is in itself a discipline, and was originally imposed as such. In its call for the sacrifice of the individual to the community it has played its part in the stiffening of the Hindu for countless generations. But in the twentieth century the most orthodox will admit its disabilities, the exacting ritual involved in it, and the artificial and complex differentiation between men who have really everything in common. The caste question as a rule, when it emerges in a regiment, creates difficulties, and very rarely, as in the case of the excommunicated Rajputs, smooths them over. The Merwara battalion, which was once divided by caste into two camps, is a case in point. It is an old story, but as it is little known it is worth recording as an example of the evils of exclusiveness. And as both parties are now good friends, no harm can be done by telling it.

First it should be understood that the Mers and Merats are the most home-staying folk in the Indian Army. Like the Gurkhas, the class battalion has one permanent cantonment, and never leaves it except to go on active service. Until this war they had not been on a campaign since the Afghan expedition in 1878-9. They are even more domiciled than the Gurkha, for their depôt at Ajmere is in their own district, and they can get home on a week-end's leave from Friday night till Monday morning; and when their turn comes they seldom let the privilege go by.

Living and serving in their own country, detached from other folk, they evolved a happy easy-going, tolerant, social system of their own. The Mers are Hindus; the Merats Muhammadans. They are of the same stock, but the Mussalman Merats are the descendants of the Mers who were forcibly converted to Islam by Aurungzeb. This conversion did not break up the brotherhood. Hindu and Muhammadan intermarried, and sat at meals together within the chauka as before. It is no doubt on account of their freedom from the restrictions of both religions that the Merats have never reverted to Mers or become Muhammadans in real earnest. They still feared the Hindu deities, and were strangers to the inside of a mosque. Mer and Merat together made up a very united people, and one quite apart. They cared little for dogma or ritual, and had their own ideas about caste. Thus they lived contentedly together until 1904, when a party of them were sent home to England with other details of the Indian Army to attend the Coronation of King Edward VII.

It is sad to think that this happy anniversary should have been the beginning of discord, but the serpent entered their Eden when they took train to Bombay and embarked on the transport. Here they found themselves amongst every kind of sepoy from the Mahratta of the Konkan to the Jharwa of Assam, from the Bhangi Khel of Kohat to the Mussalman of Southern Madras--all of whom had their prescribed ritual and fixed rules of life. Few of this crowd had ever seen the sea before, but they were most of them travelled men of the world compared to the Mer and Merat. Amongst the Rajputs, Gurkhas, Sikhs, Pathans, and Punjabi Mussalmans, the Ajmere contingent must have appeared the most open-mouthed and bewildered of country cousins. None of the sepoys knew anything about them. "Who are you? Where do you come from?" they were asked. They were just like children torn from the bosom of the family and plunged for the first time into the unsympathetic entourage of a school. They were twitted unmercifully for their unnatural alliance. Asked to define themselves they stated, quite honestly, that they were Rajputs. The easy-going Hindus made a huge joke out of this; the orthodox were angry and rude. For whoever saw a Rajput and a Mussalman break bread together? The Mer was told that he was not a true Rajput, not even a true Hindu. The poor Merats, too, were regarded as backsliders from Islam. They did all sorts of things that a good Muhammadan ought not to do. All their old customs and easy compromises, all the happy little family understandings, those recognised and cherished inconsistencies which make half the endearments of home-life, became the subject of an unfeeling criticism.

Mer and Merat became mutually suspicious. Before they reached Aden the Mers had already begun to dress their hair differently, more in the Rajput style. At Suez they were in two distinct camps. The cooking-vessels which had been common to both were abhorred by the Hindus; neither would eat what the other had touched; each eyed the other askance.

When they returned to India the infection of exclusiveness spread, and Hindu sectarian missionaries coming into the fold added to the mischief. But happily common sense and old affections prevailed. Now they do not ostensibly feed together and intermarry; but they are good friends, and relations are smooth, though they can never be quite the same happy family again.

Two generations or more of regimental life have passed since these events, and I heard a very different story of a Merwara company on board a transport in this war. When they embarked in Karachi harbour they trod the deck of the vessel tentatively and with suspicion. But soon timidity gave place to pride. "You see, Sahib," the Subadar explained, "we are not laid out by this sea-sickness which we are told is very disastrous to certain classes of sepoys, and even to some sahibs." The unknown peril had been the theme of conversation most of the way from Rajputana, and the Mers, no doubt, believed that the first entries in the "Regimental Roll of Honour" would be the victims of the subtle and malignant paralysis with which Kala pani (the black water) can infect the strongest. As bad luck would have it, no sooner had the transport cleared the harbour than they struck dirty weather and a choppy sea. Mer and Merat collapsed as one. On the third day those who had legs to support them or strength to stir the pot were carrying round food to the less fortunate, united in this common emergency and careless of caste and creed. The sea separated them, and ten years afterwards the sea joined them again. Let us hope that the voyage marked a revival of the golden age.

The story of both voyages bears out the comment of Mota's Colonel, that the Mer and Merat, though far from being impressionable, are singularly open to example. These brave and friendly folk may be lacking in initiative, but give them a lead, show them what may be done, and they will never fail in emulation. Hardly a man of military age is not enlisted, and the traditions of Ajmere were continued at Kut, where there was a company of Mers and Merats in one of the two regiments who held the liquorice factory so gallantly through the siege.

THE RANGHAR

The Mussalmans of Rajput descent are a fine fighting stock. The best known are the Ranghars of the Eastern Punjab and the Kaim Khanis of Rajputana proper. The handsomest sepoy I met in Mesopotamia was a Ranghar, and he had that jolly, dare-devil look about him which recalls the best traditions of the highwayman.

When the non-military Hindus, most of them unwilling converts, embraced Muhammadanism, it was the custom in choosing their Islamic name to adopt the prefix "Sheikh." Alma Ram became Sheikh Ali, for instance, and Gobind Das Sheikh Zahur-ud-din. But the proud Rajput warriors were unwilling to be classed with these. "We come of a fighting stock," they argued, "like the Pathans. Our history is more glorious than theirs." So they adopted the suffix "Khan," which with the man of genuine Muhammadan ancestry implies Pathan descent. The Chohans, when they became converted, were known to the Rajputs as the Kaim Khanis, or "the firm and unbreakable ones." Every Ranghar, too, was be-khaned, and as a class they have shown a martial spirit equal to the title.

The British officer in the Indian Cavalry swears by the Ranghars. I know cavalry leaders who would unhesitatingly name him if asked in what breed they considered there was the best makings of a sowar. He is born horseman and horsemaster. And he is very much "a man." Even in the Punjab, where there are collected the best fighting stocks in India--that is to say, the best fighting stocks in the East--he is a hero of romance. "You'll find the Ranghar," the Pirrhai tells us,

"In the drink shop, or in the jail,
On the back of a horse,
Or in the deep grave."

I had heard that tag long before I met the Ranghar on service, and I wanted to see how his dare-devil, undisciplined past--if indeed it was as dare-devil as it is painted--served him on a campaign. The Ranghar, one knows, is a Rajput by origin and a Muhammadan by faith. His ancestors were brought to see eye to eye with the Mogul--a change of vision due to no priestcraft, but dictated by the sword. It must be remembered that their lands were exposed to the full tide of the Moslem flood. The Rajputs who earned immortality by their defiance of Akbar, the lions of Rajasthan, lived far from Delhi in the shelter of their forests and hills. The vicinity of the Ranghars to the Mogul capital helps to explain their submission; it does not explain the relative virility and vitality of the breed to-day compared with their Hindu Rajput contemporaries. It will be generally admitted, I think, that the average Ranghar or Khaim Khani is a stouter man than the Rajput pure and simple. Why this should be so; why the descendants of the unconverted Rajputs who held by their faith should not produce as hard a breed of men as the Rajputs who were the first to submit to Islam, and that under compulsion, is a mystery unexplained. One does not set much store by converts in the East. They are generally a yielding, submissive crew. But the Ranghar is very decidedly "lord of himself," a man of action, with something of the pagan in him perhaps, but no hidden corners in his mind where sophistry can enter in and corrupt. The best answer I have heard to the Hun Jehadist wile was given by a Ranghar.

It was in the Shabkadr show on the 5th September, 1915, when the Mohmunds had the support of the Afghan Ningrahahis under the notorious Jan Badshah, who came in against us in defence of the Amir. There had been some hot scrapping. Our cavalry were clearing a village out Michni way in the afternoon, and had had heavy casualties in horses and men. The scene was a long, walled compound, from which we had been sniped at for hours. Into this rode half a dozen men of the 1st D.Y.O. Lancers, headed by the Ranghar Jemadar Rukkun-ud-din. The colonel of the regiment, standing up in his stirrups, saw the whole affair from over the wall, and heard the first parley, or rather the Afghans' impudent Jehadist appeal and the Ranghars' answer to it. As the Lancers cantered through the gate three abreast, the head of the Afghan crowd stepped forward, gave them the Muhammadan greeting, and with the confidence of an unassailable argument cried out to them, "We are of the true faith. Ye are of the true faith. Why then do ye fight for unbelieving Kafirs?" For answer Jemadar Rukkun-ud-din drew his revolver and shot the man in the stomach where he stood. In the scrimmage that followed the two parties were evenly matched in respect of numbers. No one gave quarter; in fact, no quarter had been given or taken all day; it is not the Mohmund or the Afghan habit, and they do not understand it. The sowars were mounted, and rode in with their lances; the Afghans were unmounted, but their magazines were full, and they fired a volley at the Lancers as they charged. Two sowars fell wounded, but not mortally. There was pandemonium in the compound for the next forty seconds, the Afghans running round and firing, the Ranghars galloping and swerving to get in their thrust. The lance beat the rifle every time, for the Afghan found the point and the menace of impact, and the plunging horse too unsteadying for accurate aim. In less than a minute they were all borne down.

Some one suggested that in the natural course of events Rukkun-ud-din would receive a reward, but the astute Colonel, said in the hearing of all--

"Reward! What talk is this of reward? What else could a Ranghar do but kill the man who insulted him. It would be a deep shame to have failed."

At the moment the speech was worth more than a decoration. It made the Ranghars feel very Ranghar-like--and that is the best thing that a Ranghar can feel, the best thing for himself and for his regiment. Incidentally the decoration came. One has not to search for pretexts for bestowing honour on men like these.

There was another youngster in that _melee_ who deserved an I.O.M., a lance-duffadar, a lad of twenty. He had been hit in the seat from behind. The colonel heard of it and noticed that the lad was still mounted.

"You are wounded?" he asked.

"Sahib, it is nothing."

"Answer my question. Where were you hit?"

The boy for the first time showed signs of distress.

"Sahib," he said hesitatingly, "it is a shameful thing. These dogs were spitting in every corner. I have been wounded in the back."

He was made to dismount. His saddle was ripped by a bullet and sodden with blood.

"You must go back to the ambulance, young man," his Colonel told him.

"Sahib, I cannot go back in a doolie like a woman."

He was allowed to mount, though it was an extraordinarily nasty wound for the saddle. A weight seemed to be lifted from him when the Colonel explained that to a Ranghar and a cavalryman a wound in the back could only mean one was a good thruster and well in among the enemy when one was hit.

THE MEENA

I found the Meenas of the Deoli regiment in a backwater of the Euphrates some days' journey from anywhere. They were so far from anywhere that when we came round a bend in the river in our bellam the sight of their white camp on the sand, and the gunboat beside it, made me feel that we had reached the coast after a voyage of inland exploration. The Meenas were a little tired of Samawa, where nothing happened. They wanted to be brigaded; they wanted to fight; they wanted at least to get up to Baghdad. They had to wait a long time before any of these desires were fulfilled. Nevertheless, although they had reasons to think themselves forgotten, they were a cheery crowd.

There are two classes of Meenas--those of the 42nd Deoli regiment, the Ujlas, Padhiars and Motis, who claim to have Rajput blood in them, and the purely aboriginal stock enlisted by the 43rd Erinpura regiment from Sirohi and Jodhpur. I expected to find the Deoli Meenas small, alert, suspicious-looking men of the Bhil, Santal, or Sawarah cast. I was surprised to discover them tall and stolid; pleasant, honest, plain in feature; and offering great variety in type. The Rajput blood is no myth. They do not look the least like aboriginals, and you could find the double of many of them among Dogras, Jats, Mahrattas, and Rajputana and Punjabi Mussalmans. This normal Aryan appearance is no doubt partly the impression of discipline, drill, confidence, training. In their own hills, before they enlisted they were a wild and startled-looking breed. And they had curious customs. One was that a man on losing his father had the right to sell his mother. In the days when they were first recruited you had to pay a man four annas to come in for a drill. The Meena would arrive with his bow and arrow, which were deposited in the quarter-guard. He was taught drill and paid for a day's work. He then picked up his bow and arrow and departed. Gradually, as they realised that no harm came of it, they began to settle and to bring their families into cantonments. But they were so distrustful of us in the beginning that we had to pay them every evening after the day's work.

The taming of the Meena and the genesis of the Deoli cantonment were slowly evolved processes. The history of it reads like an account of the domestication of a wild creature. First the Meena was encouraged to build. A collection of huts was soon grouped together, and the men lived in them. Each man built his own hut, and when he left the regiment sold it to his successor. After some little time they asked if they might bring their wives and families to live in them. This marked the beginning of an unalienable confidence, but the Meena was already imbued with a faith in his British officer. In after days, when the old huts were pulled down and regimental lines constructed, the men still lived in their own quarters, and this proprietary right was maintained until a few years ago. The motto of the regiment, "E turba legio," well describes the method of raising it.

Suspicion is the natural inheritance of the Meenas. They are the sons of cattle-lifters, dacoits, and thieves. For centuries they plundered the Rajput and were hunted down by him. It was the British who helped the Rajput to subdue them. To clear the district they infested it was necessary to cut down the jungle. The Meenas were gradually rounded up and confined to a prescribed area--the Meena Kerar, which lies partly in Jaipur and partly in Udaipur and Bundi, and is administered by the Political Agent at Deoli. Roll was called at night in the villages, and the absentee was the self-proclaimed thief. The system still holds in the more impenitent communities, but the restrictions on the Meena's movements are becoming fewer as he conforms with the social contract. The pleasing thing about it is that he bears us no grudge for the part we played in breaking him in. Like his neighbours, the Mer and the Merat, he recognises the British as the truest friends he has.

The simplicity, disingenuousness, and friendliness of the Meena are unmistakable. They are the most responsive people, and as sepoys, through contact with their British officers, they soon lose the habit of suspicion. I spent half a day with the Indian officers, and neither I nor they were bored. They like talking, and intersperse their conversation with ready and obvious jokes. It seemed to me that though they had had most of the mischief knocked out of them, they retained a good deal of their superstition and childishness. That was to be expected, but one missed the shyness and sensitiveness that generally go with superstition. They were curiously frank and communicative about their odd beliefs. Like the old Thugs they have faith in omens. The Subadar showed me the lucky and unlucky fingers, and I gathered that if the jackal howls twice on the right, one's objective in a night march is as good as gained; if thrice on the left, the stars are unpropitious, and the enterprise should be abandoned. In November, 1914, the regiment was moved to Lahore to do railway defence work. The morning the battalion left the railway station where they entrained most of the men did puja (homage) to the engine, standing with open mouths, and fingers tapping foreheads. The railway is fifty-eight miles from cantonments in Deoli, and it was the first train that many of them had seen. Until the regiment moved opinions were divided as to whether the Meenas would continue to enlist. Such an upheaval and migration had not happened since the Afghan war. Wild rumours flew round the villages, but the Commanding Officer, by a wise system of letting a few men return on leave to their homes to spread the good news that the regiment was well and happy, soon quieted the countryside. Living so far out of the world they are naturally clannish. There is as much keenness about winning a hockey match against an outside team as there is in the final for a house-cup in an English public school. And here in Mesopotamia they were full of challenge. They wanted to show what Deoli could do, but as luck would have it there was not a Turk within a hundred and fifty miles.

The most delightful story I got out of the Subadar was the history of a Meena dynasty which ruled in Rajputana in the good old days before the gods became indifferent. I learnt that the proud Rajputs who claim descent from the sun and the moon are really interlopers who dispossessed the Meena by an act of treachery a hundred years ago.

"Fifteen princes have been Rajputs," the Subadar told me. "Before that the Meenas were kings. The last Meena king was the sixteenth from now."

"What was his name?" I asked.

"Sahib, I have forgotten his name--but he was childless. One day, when he was riding out, he met a Rajput woman who carried a child unborn. 'Your son shall be the child of my heart,' he told her; and when the boy was born he brought him up, and made him commander of his horse."

"Did he adopt him?"

"Sahib, he could not adopt him. The custom was in those days that when the old king died, the new king must be one of his line. Thus the gadi would pass to his brother's son, a Meena. No Rajput could inherit. Nevertheless, he treated the boy as his child. And then, Sahib, one day when the boy came back from seeing the Emperor at Delhi, he killed the king and all his relatives, and the whole army. It was like this, Sahib. It was the Kinaghat festival, when the king and all his people used to go down to the river without arms, and sprinkle water for the dead. It was the old custom, Sahib, and no one had ever made use of it for an evil purpose. But the Rajput secretly gathered his men behind a hill, and when the king and his people had cast aside their arms, and were performing the holy rite, the Rissaldar and other Rajputs fell upon them and killed them all, so that there was not a Meena left alive within a great distance of the place of slaughter. That is how the Rajput became the master, and the Meena his servant."

The Subadar's solemn "Again Huzoor" as he introduced each new phase in the tragedy was inimitable, but there was nothing tragic or resentful in his way of telling it. It was a tale comfortable to Meena pride, and therefore it was believed as legends are believed all over the world which make life easier and give one a stiffer back or a more honourable ancestry.

The Subadar told me that the books of the Meena bards had been confiscated. They are locked up in the fort at Ranatbawar, and no one may enter. If any one reads them, the Rajput dynasty will pass away, and the Meena will be restored; therefore the Rajputs would like to destroy them, but there is some ancient inhibition. The chronicles are put away in an iron chest under the ground; yet, as the Subadar explained, the record is indestructible. It has lived in men's memories and hearts, new epics have been written, and the story is handed down from father to son. Another Meena told me the story is written "in the Political Agent's Book at Jaipur." This, I think, was by way of reference rather than confirmation, for it could never have entered any of their heads that one could doubt the genuineness or authenticity of the tale. When the usurper was crowned a Meena was called in from afar to put the tilak, or caste mark, on the king's forehead. And here the fairy story comes in again, for the tilak was imprinted on the king's brow by the Meena's toe. This is still the custom, the Subadar assured me, and he explained that it was a humiliation imposed upon the king by the priests as an atonement for his bad faith. The priest persuaded the king that the only way that he could hope to keep his throne was by receiving the tilak from the toe of the Meena, and he appeased his vanity by pretending that the Meena, by raising his toe, signified submission, just as the Yankee talks about turning up his toe to the daisies.

Here the Subadar was becoming too subtle for me, and I felt that I was getting out of my depth. But there was another point which was quite clear and simple. It bore out his theory of an hereditary obligation which the Rajput owes the Meena by way of restitution. In Jaipur and Alwar the Ujla Meenas are the custodians of the State treasure. I used to think that they were appointed on the same principle as the Chaukidar who would be a thief if he were not a guardian of the property under his trust. But in this I wronged the Meena. The Ujlas are honourable office-holders. When the Maharaja of Jaipur comes to the gadi he has to take an oath that he will not diminish his inheritance, and he is responsible to the Ujlas that anything that he may take away in times of famine or other emergency shall be restored. The old Subadar took this as a matter of pride. He was quite content with his ancestry--if indeed he bothered his head about the status of the Meena at all. The legend of the regicide rissaldar was well found. You could tell by the way he told the story that he was pleased with it. One hears yarns of the kind, comforting tales of legendary wrong, all over the world, in Hottentot wigwams and Bloomsbury lodging-houses. The difference is only in degree. They contribute mildly to self-respect; the humble are rehabilitated in garments of pride; and very few of those who inherit the myth look for the miracle of reversion.

The Meenas are as contented a people as you could find, a cheery, simple, frugal, hardy race. The old Subadar boasted that his men never fell out. "Even when the mules fall out," he told me, "they go on." They are very brave in the jungle, and will stand up to a wounded leopard or tiger. The Meena is a good shot, and a fine shikari. He will find his way anywhere in the dark, and he never loses himself. He ought to be useful in a night raid. He is a trifle hot-headed, I gathered. In the divisional manœuvres near Nasiriyeh the cavalry were coming down on a line of them in open country, when they fixed bayonets and charged. "They are a perfectly splendid crowd," one of the officers told me, "I should dearly love to see them go into action, and take twenty-five per cent. casualties. It would be the making of them." But his Meenas had no luck. No doubt, if they had been given a chance, they would have fought as well as the best. It was their misfortune that they came too late, and that they were sent up the wrong river. In the meanwhile, at Deoli, recruits are pouring in. Every village contains a number of old pensioners who, like my friend the Subadar, love to talk of their own deeds, the prowess of their Sahibs, and how they marched with the regiment towards Kabul. The young men stand round and listen, and are fired with emulation, and there is no doubt that if the Sircar wants them the contingent of Meenas will increase. They are not a very numerous class, but they are steadfast and loyal. The love of honour and adventure will spread as wide a net among them as conscription, and there will be no jiwans seen in the villages who are not home on leave.

THE JHARWAS

(BY AN OFFICER WHO HAS COMMANDED THEM)

There are not many aboriginals in the Indian Army--a few Brahuis from the borders of Beluchistan, the Mers and Merats and Meenas from the hills and jungles of Rajputana, and the Jharwas of Assam. The word "Jharwa" is the Assamese term for a "jungle-man," and how it came to be generally applied to the enlisted man from Assam and Cachar is lost in the obscurity of years. It is now the usual term for any sepoy who hails from these parts, with the exception of the Manipuri.

When the Sylhet local battalion, afterwards the 44th Sylhet Light Infantry, now the 1/8th Gurkha Rifles, was raised on February 19th, 1824, it was composed of Sylhetis, Manipuris, and the surrounding tribes of Cachar, which province took its name from the Cacharis, who settled there at the beginning of the seventeenth century, having been driven out of the Assam valley by the Ahoms, or Assamese, and Muhammadans. The plainsmen of Assam were very warlike till the Muhammadan invasion in the sixteenth century, when they were so thoroughly overcome they fell an easy prey to the Burmese, who were finally driven out of Assam and Cachar by the British in 1824-26, since when the Assamese have settled down peacefully.

The principal races, now enlisted under the name of Jharwa, are the Mech, the Kachari, and the Rawa. The Mech mostly came from the region of Jalpaiguri, and spread eastwards. The Kachari were the original inhabitants of Assam; they are also found in Cachar, and are of the Koch stock, from whom Coochbehar takes its name; they generally call themselves Rajbansi, "of princely race." The Rawa (Ahoms) are also original Assamese. There are, besides, the Garos, who come from the Goalpara district. All the three former are Hindu converts, and show much more caste prejudice than the Gurkha does, though he, in turn, is not impressed with their Hindu claims. He raises no objection, however, to living under the same barrack-roof with them, but will not eat their food. In the old days, the Jharwa proved his value as a soldier in all the fighting in the valleys of Assam and Cachar, and surrounding hills. He rid the low country of the Khasias, who were the terror of the plains, as can be seen from the "The Lives of the Lindsays" and a recent publication "The Records of Old Sylhet," compiled by Archdeacon Firminger. The first troops engaged in the subjugation of the Khasias and Jaintias in their hills were Jharwas of the Sylhet battalion; the campaign began in 1829, and was continued at intervals until 1863, when the Jaintia rebellion was finally stamped out. Two companies of Gurkhas were brought into this regiment in 1832, and by degrees the Jharwa ceased to be enlisted in the regular army, till at last, in 1891, it was ordered that no more were to be taken. This was the time of the Magar and Gurung boom; in fact, except as regards the Khas, it was not considered the thing to enlist any other Gurkha races in the army. The fact that the Gurkha regiments up country earned their name with a large admixture of Garhwalis in their ranks, in the same way as the Assam regiments earned theirs with the help of many Jharwas, seemed largely to be lost sight of, and though the Jharwa had continued to do yeoman service in the ranks of the Assam Military Police, it was not till 1915 that it was thought worth while to try him in the regular army again. After the war, a regular Jharwa Regiment raised and stationed in Assam should be a most efficient unit, and a most valuable asset on that somewhat peculiar frontier.

The Jharwa is a curious creature in many ways. He has nothing in common with the Gurkha, except his religion, and to a certain extent his appearance; nor is he even a hillman. Till he joins, he has probably never done a hard day's work, nor any regular work, but has earned his living by cutting timber, or doing a little farming in a rich and fertile country where a man does not need to do much to keep himself. He is more intelligent than the Gurkha, and has, as a rule, a fairly good ear for music; he is lazy, hard to train, and not very clean in his person, unless well looked after, but he is a first-class man at any jungle work. The last of the old lot of Jharwas in the 1/8th Gurkhas, Havildar Madho Ram (Garoo), won the Macgregor Memorial medal, in 1905, for exploration and survey work in Bhutan. Others again are intensely stupid. In October 1916, a Military Police havildar came out in charge of a small draft to Mesopotamia, and his C.O. tried to find out how much he knew about practical soldiering. He put him in charge of a squad of men, and told him to exercise them. The worthy havildar was soon in a fix. When asked how he rose to be havildar, he replied that he was promoted because he was a good woodcutter and repairer of buildings. The C.O. asked him where he was to get wood to cut in Mesopotamia, upon which he looked round vacantly on all sides and remarked, "Jhar na hoi" ("there is no jungle"), whereupon he was sent back to look after the regimental dump. Where the Jharwa fails is as an officer or non-commissioned officer, since for generations he has never been in a position to enforce or give implicit and prompt obedience. In Assam, it is all one to the ordinary villager whether he does a thing now or next week; a high standard of work or punctuality has never been expected of him, consequently he does not expect it of anyone else, and a good many N.C.O.'s got the surprise of their life when they found that the excuse, "I told them, but they didn't do it," would not go down. But in jungle work there are few to touch him, and he has proved his grit in the stress of modern battle. Many years ago, I was following up a wounded buffalo in the Nambhar forest, and one of our men was walking in front of me, snicking the creepers and branches, which stretched across the track, with a little knife as sharp as a razor. Suddenly, without a word, he sprang to one side to clear my front, and there lay the huge beast about ten yards off, luckily stone dead. It requires some nerve to walk up to a wounded buffalo, without any sort of weapon to defend oneself with. In the winter of 1916-17, a small party of the 7th Gurkhas swam the Tigris, to reconnoitre the Turk position near Chahela. They carried out their work successfully, but two Jharwas, who had volunteered to go with the party, were overcome with the cold, and were drowned coming back. The surviving Gurkhas all got the I.O.M. or D.S.M. On February 17th, 1917, at Sannaiyat, a signaller, attached to the 1/8th Gurkhas, Lataram Mech, took across his telephone wire into the second Turkish line under very heavy shell-fire, which wiped out the N.C.O. and another of his party of four, established communication with battalion headquarters and the line behind him, and, when that part of the trench was recaptured, came back across the open and rolled up his wire, under fire all the time. On the same day another Jharwa lad, when he got into the Turkish trench, flung away his rifle and belt, and ran amok with his kukri. He broke that one and came back, covered with blood from head to foot, into our front trench to get another, when he went forward again. I could never find out his name. If he was not killed, he lay low, probably thinking he would be punished for losing his rifle.

At Istabulat, another Jharwa (Holiram Garo) got separated from the rest of his party, and attacked a part of the Turk position by himself. Although wounded in the head, he lay on the front of the enemy's parapet, and sniped away till dark, when he returned to his platoon, and asked for more ammunition. For this he got the I.O.M. The poor little Jharwa did wonderfully well, seeing that, till he left Assam, his horizon had been bounded by the Bhootan-Tibet range on one side and the Patkoi on the other. He had never seen guns, cavalry, trenches, or anything to do with real warfare. Although reared in the damp enervating climate of the plains of Assam, he stuck the intense cold and heat, as well as food to which he had never been accustomed, without grumbling, whilst the doctors said his endurance of pain in hospital was every bit as good as the Gurkha's, and an example to all the other patients. Till 1915, the authorities knew nothing about him, his antecedents, or peculiarities, so he was looked on as merely an untidy sort of Gurkha, with whom, as said before, he had no affinity, besides not having anything like the same physical strength.

Before we went out to Mesopotamia, my regiment was detailed to counter an expected raid on a certain part of the Indian coast. We entrained at midnight, and in the morning it was reported we had fifty more men than we started with. It turned out that a party of fifty Jharwas had arrived at the railway station, just before we left, and when they realised that the regiment was going off without them, they made a rush, crowded in where they could, and came along, leaving all their kit on the platform. This, if not exactly proving good discipline, showed at any rate they were not lacking in keenness and enterprise.

THE DRABI

In the Great War the Drabi has come by his own. He is now a recognised combatant. At Shaiba and Sahil alone six members of the transport corps were awarded the Indian Order of Merit. This is as it should be, for before August, 1914, there was only one instance recorded of a Drabi receiving a decoration.

The Drabi is recruited from diverse classes, but he is generally a Punjabi Mussalman, not as a rule of the highest social grade, though he is almost invariably a very worthy person. If I were asked to name the agents to whom we owe the maintenance of our empire in the East, I should mention, very high in the list, the Drabi and the mule. No other man, no other beast, could adequately replace them. There are combinations of the elements which defeat the last word of scientific transport. And that is where the Drabi, with his pack mules or A.T. carts, comes in.

In France, when the motor-lorries were stuck in the mud, we thanked God for the mule and the Drabi. I remember my delight one day when I saw a convoy of Indian A.T. carts swinging down the road, the mules leaning against one another as pack mules will do when trained to the yoke. The little convoy pulled up outside the courtyard of an abattoir in an old town in Picardy, where it had been raining in torrents for days, until earth and water had produced a third element which resembled neither. The red-peaked kula protruding from the khaki turban of the Drabi proclaimed a Punjabi Mussalman. Little else was distinguishable in the mist and rain, which enveloped everything in a dismal pall. The inert bundle of misery unrolled itself and, seeing a Sahib by the gate, saluted.

"Bad climate," I suggested.

"Yes, Sahib, very bad climate."

"Bad country?"

But the man's instinctive sense of conciliation was proof against dampness, moral or physical.

"No, Sahib. The Sircar's country is everywhere very good." The glint of a smile crept over the dull white of his eyes.

To the Drabi there are only two kinds of white people--the Sircar, or British Raj, and the enemy. The enemy is known to him only by the ponderous and erratic nature of his missiles, for the mule-cart corps belongs to the first line of transport.

"Where is your home?" I asked.

"Amritsar, Sahib."

I wondered whether he were inwardly comparing the two countries. Here, everything drenched and colourless; there, brightness and colour and clean shadows. Here, the little stone church of a similar drabness to its envelope of mist; there, the reflection of the Golden Temple sleeping in the tank all day. The minarets of his mosque and the crenellated city walls would be etched now against a blue sky. I looked at his mules. They did not seem at all _dépaysés_.

"How do they stand the damp?" I asked. "Much sickness?"

"No, Sahib. Only one has been sick. None have died except those destroyed by the bo-ombs."

I wondered what the carts were doing at ----. They were of the first line; the first line transport carries the food into the very mouth of the Army. Being the last link in the line of communications, it is naturally the most vulnerable. Other links are out of range of the enemy's guns and immune, in this phase of the operations at least, from attack except by aircraft. The Drabi explained that they had been detailed for forage work.

As he lifted the curricle bar from the yoke one of the mules stepped on his foot, and he called it a name that reflected equally on his own morals and those of the animal's near relations. He did not address the beast in the tone an Englishman would use, but spoke to it with brotherly reproach. Just then an officer of the Indian Army Supply and Transport Corps rode up, and I got him to talk, as I knew I could if I praised his mules and carts enough. He enlarged on the virtues of the most adaptable, adjustable, and indestructible vehicles that had ever been used in a campaign, and of the most hardy, ascetic, and providentially accommodating beast that had ever drawn or carried the munitions of war. These light transport-carts are wonderful. They cut through the mud like a harrow over thin soil. The centre of the road is left to the lorries. "They would be bogged where we go," the S. and T. man said proudly. "They are built for swamps and boulder-strewn mountain streams. If the whole show turns over, you can right it at once. If you get stuck in a shell-hole, you can cut the mules loose, use them as pack transport, and man-handle the carts. Then we have got component parts. We can stick on a wheel in a minute, and we don't get left like that menagerie of drays, furnishing vans, brewers' carts, and farmers' tumbrils, which collapse in the fairway and seem to have no extra parts at all--unadaptable things, some of them, like a lot of rotten curios. And, of course, you know you can take our carts to pieces and pack them; you can get"--I think he said fourteen--"of them into a truck. And if you----"

Then he enlarged on his beasts. Nothing ever hurts a mule short of a bullet or shell. Physical impact, heat or cold, or drought, or damp, it is all the same. They are a little fastidious about drink, but they deserve one indulgence, and a wise Staff officer will give them a place up-stream for watering above the cavalry. For hardiness nothing can touch them. They are as fit in Tibet as in the Sudan, as composed in a blizzard on the Nathu-la as in a sandstorm at Wadi Haifa. And I knew that every word he said was true. I had sat a transport-cart through the torrents of Jammu, and had lost a mule over a precipice in a mountain pass beyond the Himalayas. It lay half buried in the snow all night with the thermometer below zero. In the morning it was dragged up by ropes and began complacently grazing.

"And look at them now in this slush!" They certainly showed no sign of distress or even of depression.

"And the Drabis? Do they grouse?"

"Not a bit. They are splendid. They have no nerves, no more nerves than the mules. You ought to have seen Muhammad Alim come back from Neuve Chapelle. When hell began the order had gone round 'All into your dug-outs,' and the bombardier of his cart had buried himself obediently in the nearest funkhole. He stuck it out there all day. The next morning he rolled up at the Brigade Column and reported his cart was lost. Nothing could have lived in that fire, so it was struck off."

But Drabi Muhammad Alim had not heard the order. He sat through the whole of the bombardment in his cart. After two days, not having found his destination, he returned. "Sahib," he said, "I have lost the way." When asked what the fire was like he said that there had been a wind when the boom-golies passed, which reminded him of the monsoon when the tufân catches the pine trees in Dagshai.

It occurred to me that the Asiatic driver assimilated the peculiar virtues of his beast. The man with a camel or bullock or mule is less excitable, more of a fatalist, than the man who goes on foot alone. The mule and the Drabi would rattle along under shell-fire as imperturbably as they run the gauntlet of falling rocks on the Kashmir road in the monsoon. I have seen the Drabi calmly charioteering his pontoons to the Tigris bank, perched on a thwart like a bird, when the bullets were flying and the sappers preparing the bridge for the crossing. And I have seen him carry on when dead to the world, a mere automaton like Ali Hussein, who reported himself hit in the shoulder two days after the battle at Umm-el-Hannah. "Yes, Sahib," he admitted to the doctor a little guiltily when cross-examined, "it was in the battle two days ago that I came by this wound." Then he added shamefacedly fearing reproof, "Sahib, I could not come before. There was no time. There were too many journeys. And the wounded were too many."

When his neighbour is hit by his side, the Drabi buries himself more deeply into his wrappings. He does not want to pick up a rifle and kill somebody for shooting his "pale" as a Tommy would, but says, "My brother is dead. I too shall soon die." And he simply goes on prepared for the end, neither depressed at its imminence, nor unduly exalted if it be postponed. He is a worthy associate of those wonderful carts and mules.

In the evening I passed the abattoir again and looked over the gate. Inside there was a batch of camp followers who had come in from fatigue duty. I saw the men huddling over their fires in groups in that humped attitude of contented discomfort which only the Indian can assume. Their families in the far villages of the Punjab and the United Provinces would be squatting by their braziers in just the same way at this hour. Perhaps the Drabi would be thinking of them--if thought stirred within his brain--and of the golden slant light of the sun on the shisham and the orange siris pods and the pungent incense that rises in the evening from the dried cow-dung fire, a product, alas! which France with all its resources, so rich, varied, and inexhaustible, cannot provide.

THE SANTAL LABOUR CORPS

The Labour Corps in Mesopotamia introduced the nearest thing to Babel since the original confusion of tongues. Coolies and artisans came in from China and Egypt, and from the East and West Indies, the aboriginal Santals and Paharias from Bengal, Moplahs, Thyas and Nayars from the West Coast, Nepalese quarrymen, Indians of all races and creeds, as well as the Arabs and Chaldeans of the country. They made roads and bunds, built houses, loaded and unloaded steamers and trucks, supplied carpenters, smiths and masons, followed the fighting man and improved the communications behind him, and made the land habitable which he had won.

One day I ran into a crowd of Santals on the Bridge of Boats in Baghdad. It was probably the first time that Babylon had drawn into its vortex the aboriginals of the hill tracts of Bengal. They were scurrying like a flock of sheep, not because they were rushed, I was told, but simply for fun. Some one had started it, and the others had broken into a jog-trot. One of them, with bricks balanced on his head, was playing a small reed flute--the Pipe of Pan. Another had stuck a spray of salmon-pink oleander in his hair. The full, round cheeks of the little men made their black skin look as if it had been sewn up tightly and tucked under the chin. They were like happy, black, gollywogs, and the dust in their elfin locks, the colour of tow, increased the impish suggestion of the toy-shop. The expression on their faces is singularly happy and innocent, and endorses everything Rousseau said about primitive content. Evolution has spared them; they have even escaped the unkindness of war.

When the Santal left his home, all he took with him was two brass cooking-pots, his stick, and a bottle of mustard oil. The stick he uses to sling his belongings over his shoulder, with a net attached, and generally his boots inside. He loves to rub himself all over with oil, but in this unfruitful land he can find little or none, and he had not even time to refill at Bombay. On board ship he saw coal for the first time. Each man was given a brickette with his rations, for fuel, and Jangal, Baski, Goomda Kisku, and others put their vessel on the strange, black substance, and expected it to boil. A very simple, happy, and contented person is the Santal. Once gain his confidence, and he will work for you all day and half the night; abuse it, and he will not work at all.

I found them in their camp afterwards in a palm grove by the Tigris, not unlike a camp in their own land, only the palms were dates and not cocoanuts. Here the Santals were very much at home. The pensioned Indian officer in charge, a magnificent veteran, of the 34th Sikh Pioneers, with snowy beard and moustache and two rows of ribbons on his breast, was pacing up and down among these little dark men like a Colossus or a benevolent god. The old Subadar was loud in their praises. He had been on the staff of a convict Labour Corps, and so spoke from his heart.

"There is no fighting, quarrelling, thieving, lying among them, Sahib. If you leave anything on the ground, they won't pick it up. No trouble with women folk. No gambling. No tricks of deceit."

A British officer of the company who knew them in their own country told me the same tale.