Chapter VI: Part 6

"They are the straightest people I have ever struck," he said. "We raised nearly 1700 of them in the district, paid them a month's wages in advance, and told them to find their way to the nearest railway station, a journey of two or three days. They all turned up but one, and the others told us he had probably hanged himself because his wife would not let him go. They are very honest, law-abiding folk. They leave their money lying about in their tents, and it is quite safe. They have no police in their villages; the headman settles all their troubles. And there is no humbug about them. Other coolies slack off if you don't watch them, and put on a tremendous spurt when they see an officer coming along, and keep it up till he is out of sight. But the dear old Santal is much too simple for this. If the Army Commander came to see them they'd throw down their picks and shovels and stare at him till he went away. They are not thrusters; they go their own pace, but they do their day's work all right. And they are extraordinarily patient and willing. They'll work over time if you don't tell them to stop; and they'll turn out, if you ask them, and do an extra turn at a pinch, without grumbling, even if they have only just got back to camp and haven't had time to cook their food."

All this sounded very Utopian, but the glimpse of them on the Bridge of Boats, and an hour spent in their camp on Sunday morning, gave one the impression of children who had not been spoilt. We went the round of their tents, and they played to us on their flutes, the same pastoral strains one hears in villages all over the East; and they showed us the sika mark burnt in their forearms, always an odd number, which, like Charon's Obol, is supposed to give them a good send-off in the next world. They burn themselves, too, when they have aches and pains. One man had a scar on his forehead a week old, where he had applied a brand as a cure for headache. Nearly every Santal is a musician, and plays the drum or pipe. The skins of the drums had cracked in the heat at Makina, and they had left them behind, but they make flutes out of any material they can pick up. One of them blew off two of his fingers boring stops in the brass tube of a Turkish shell which had a fuse and an unexploded charge left in it. That is the only casualty among the Santals remotely connected with arms. It is an understood thing that they should not go near the firing line. Once an aeroplane bomb fell near the corps. They looked up like a frightened herd. A second came sizzling down within a hundred yards of them, and they took to their heels. A little man showed me how he had run, rehearsing a pantomime of panic fright, with his bandy legs, and doubled fist pummelling the air.

The Santals came out on a one year's agreement, as they must get back to their harvest. But they will sign on again. They have no quarrel with Mesopotamia. Twenty rupees a month, and everything found, is a wage that a few years ago would have seemed beyond the dreams of avarice. They are putting on weight; fare better than they have ever done, and their families are growing rich. Most of them have their wages paid in family allotments at home, generally to their elder brother, father, or son, rather than their wife. The Santals are distrustful of women as a sex. "What if I were labouring here," one of them said, "and she were to run off with another man and the money?" The women are not permitted to attend the sacrifices in the Holy Grove, or to eat the flesh of offerings, or to climb the consecrated trees, or to know the name of the family's secret god lest they should betray it; or even, save in the case of a wife or unmarried daughter, to enter the chamber where the household god dwells in silent communion with the ancestors. Save for these restrictions the relations between men and women in the tribe are happy and free. In social life the women are very independent and often masters in the house. They are a finer physical type, and the men of the tribe are proud to admit it. The corps was collecting firewood when one of the officers twitted a man on the meagre size of his bundle.

"Look at the Arabs," he said. "Even the women carry a bigger load than you."

But the Santal was not abashed. He did not resent this reflection upon himself; it was the carrying power of his own women he defended. "Our women, too, carry much bigger loads than we do," he said ingenuously.

There is a curious reticence about names among the Santals. Husband and wife will not mention each other's names, not even when speaking of some one else bearing the same name. When receiving her allotment from a British officer the Santal woman has to call in a third person to name the absent husband. It would be a species of blasphemy to divulge the secret herself. There is a table of degrees of relationship in which the mention of names is taboo among the tribes, similar to the catalogue prohibiting intermarriage of kin in our Prayer Book. And, of course, it is quite useless to ask a Santal his age. Dates and sums of money are remembered by the knots tied in a string; but the birth date is not accounted of any importance. "How old are you?" the O. C. of the corps asked one of these bearded men of the woods. "Sahib," the Santal replied, after some puckering of the brow in calculation, "I am at least five years old."

There is one comfort the Santal misses when away from home. He must have his handi, or rice beer, or if not his handi, at least some substitute that warms his inside. They said they would make their own handi in Mesopotamia if we gave them the rice; but they discovered it could not be done. Either they had not the full ingredients, or their women had the secret of the brew. Hence the order for a tri-weekly issue of rum. Many of the Santals were once debarred from becoming Christians, fearing that the new faith meant abstention from the tribal drink.

This summer the Santals will be at home again, drinking their handi, looking after their crops and herds, reaping the same harvest, thinking the same thoughts, playing the same plaintive melodies on their pipes, as when Nebuchadnezzar ruled in Babylon. Three dynasties of Babylon, Assyria, Chaldea, and the Empire of the Chosroes, have risen and crumbled away on the soil where he is labouring now, and all the while the Santal has led the simple life, never straying far from the Golden Age, never caught up in the unhappy train of Progress. And so his peace is undisturbed by the seismic convulsions of Armageddon; he has escaped the crown that _Kultur_ has evolved at Karlsruhe and Essen and Potsdam. At harvest-time, while the Aryan is still doing military duties, the Santal will be reaping in the fields. As soon as the crops are in, there is the blessing of the cattle, then five days and nights of junketing, drinking and dancing, bathing and sacrifice, shooting at a target with the bow, and all the license of high festival. Then after a month or two he will return to the fringe of the Great War, and bring with him his friends. He will fall to again, and take up his pick and shovel, the most contented man in Iraq.

THE INDIAN FOLLOWER

The Drabi and Kahar[11] are no longer followers. They are combatants and eligible for decorations, and their names appear in the columns of honour in the Army List, and occupy an increasing space. If cooks, syces, bhisties, bearers and sweepers were eligible too, their names would also appear; for the war has proved that chivalry exists under the most unlikely exteriors. A great deal has been written about the Drabi and the Kahar, and their indifference to danger. The nature of their work keeps them constantly under fire, whether they are bringing up rations to the trenches, or searching the ground for the wounded. The recognition of them as combatants is a belated act of justice, and one wishes that the devotion of the humbler menial classes could be recognised in the same way. One meets followers of the wrong kind, but the old type of Indian servant has increased his prestige in the war. Officers who did not know him before are impressed with his worth. He has shown courage in emergency, and, what is more, he has the British habit, only in the passive voice, of "slogging on."

One admires the Indian's impassivity under fire, and one is sometimes led into neglecting cover on account of it. It does not do for the Sahib to sneak along behind an A.T. cart when the Drabi is taking his chance with the mules in front. In France I heard an amusing story of a Sergeant-Major who had to thread a bombarded area much more slowly than his wont, on account of the sang-froid of a syce. An officer was taking an extra horse with him into Ypres at a time when the town was beginning to establish its reputation for unpleasantness, and he came in for a heavy bombardment. Besides the usual smaller stuff, seventeen-inch shells were coming over like rumbling trains, and exploding with a burst like nothing on earth. The officer wished he had left his second horse behind, and was wondering if it would be safe to send his syce back on the chance of his finding the new dump when he met the Sergeant-Major who was returning direct to it. The Sergeant-Major undertook to show the syce the way, and to look after him. When next the two met, the officer asked the Sergeant-Major if the syce had given him any trouble.

"Trouble, sir! He came along fast enough until we got to the _pavé_. Then he pulled up, and wouldn't go out of a walk. It was as nasty a mess-up as ever I've been in, but he wouldn't quit his walk."

The Sergeant-Major's language, I believe, was as explosive as his surroundings; but the syce humbly repeated that it was the Sahib's orders never to go out of a walk where there was hard ground or stones, and "here it was all stones." Five battery mules were knocked out, and a syce and horse killed next door to him; still he walked--or capered, for the horse, even more than the sergeant-major, was for taking over charge.

I remember an old cook of the Black Watch who persisted in wearing a saucepan on his head in the trenches at Sannaiyat when the Turks were bombarding us. The man had to be humoured, so a special cooking vessel--rather a leaky one--was set aside by the mess-sergeant for his armoury. He was nervous because the regimental bhistie had been killed by a shell. There was great lamentation in the battalion when the bhistie fell. The bhistie, that silent, willing drudge, is always a favourite with the British soldier. His gentleness, patience, and devotion are proverbial. Even in cantonments, bent under the weight of his massaq,[12] he is invested with a peculiar dignity, and in desert places he appears as one of the few beneficent manifestations of Providence. One always thinks of him as a giver; his bestowals are without number, his demands infinitesimal. I have never heard of a grumbling, or impatient, or morose bhistie, or of one whose name has been associated actively or passively with violence, or provocation, or crime. There was a dreadful day during the Ahwaz operations in May, 1915, when our troops, after a stifling night, found the wells they had counted on were dry. They were already exhausted; the temperature was 125 degrees in the shade, or would have been if there had been any shade, and to reach water they had another ten or fifteen miles' march to Kharkeh. An officer in the Indian Cavalry told me that he watched a bhistie of the Merwara battalion supporting a man, who was too weak to walk unaided, for more than two miles. When the sepoy came to the end of his tether the bhistie stayed with him a few seconds, and then relieved him of his rifle which he carried into camp. That was probably the hottest and thirstiest day's march our troops endured in Mesopotamia. A number of the Merwaras died of thirst. It was just before Dunlop's burning march over the desert by Illah and Bisaitin to Amara, when even the most hard-bitten old campaigners fell through heat-exhaustion. During all these operations the bhisties behaved splendidly at a time when any form of effort was a virtue, fetching water untiringly and pouring it over the victims of the march.

The bearer, too, has played up well when he has had the chance. During the retirement from Ctesiphon the last batch of boats to leave Kut just before the siege came in for a good deal of sniping. One of them put ashore at a bend, and landed a party which took up a position on the bank and tried to keep down the enemy's fire. This was very early in the morning. "It was quite a hot corner," an officer told me. "I had spotted a man who had crawled up to within a hundred and fifty yards of us, and was drawing a bead on him. I had clean forgotten the boat, and Kut, and the retreat, and all the rest of it, when I heard a familiar voice behind me, 'Tea ready, sorr.' It was good old Dubru, my Madrasi bearer, who had come up under fire. The tea was good and the buttered toast still hot. His only remark when I had finished it was 'Master like another cup?' I should have been very unhappy if the old fellow had been hit."

I could multiply instances of the providence that keeps the follower to his prescribed task, whether in emergency or in the ordinary day's work. A medical officer was going round his camp during a bombardment, to see that his staff were taking cover. He found the infection ward in a great state of perturbation--not from fright as might have been expected. The trouble was a violation of the rules. "Sir," a Babu explained to him, "it is a serious matter, no doubt, two contact cases have escaped confinement of ward." It was his way of saying that two men with mumps had had the sense to discover a funkhole and make themselves scarce.

The name of the sweeper is associated with chivalry in an ironic sense only. His Indian titles "Mehtar" and "Jemadar" are facetiously honorific, as when one speaks of him as "the knight." Yet the sweeper has won laurels in the war. It was at Givenchy, I think, at the very beginning of things, when cartridges were jammed in the magazines, and men were wanted to take ramrods to the front, and there were no spare combatants for errands of this kind, that the sweepers carried the ramrods over the open ground with no cover of communication trenches to the men in the firing line. In Mesopotamia a sweeper of the --th Rifles took an unauthorised part in an assault on the Turkish lines, picked up the rifle of a dead sepoy, and went on firing until he was shot in the head.

What are the elements of the follower's sang-froid? In the case of this sweeper it can only have been the love of honour or adventure, but he was a very exceptional man, and one cannot expect to find the same spirit in the normal drudge. The good old Drabi who, when the bullets are flicking round, pulls his blanket about his ears and subsides a little in his cart is not of this mould. In an analysis of the composition of his courage lack of imagination would play a part, and fatalism, which becomes a virtue in the presence of death; but the main thing, and this explains two-thirds of his stiffening, is that it never enters his head that it is possible not to carry on with his job. In the follower's honest, slow brain, the processes which complicate decision in subtler minds are clotted into one--the sense of order, continuity, routine, everything that is implied in a regulation. These things are of the laws of necessity. He does not know it, but "carrying on" is his gospel, philosophy, and creed.

* * * * *

PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
LONDON AND BECCLES, ENGLAND.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

FOOTNOTES:

Footnote 1:

2nd and 9th.

Footnote 2:

The 1/1st, 2/2nd, 2/3rd, 1/4th, 2/8th, and 1/9th.

Footnote 3:

The Tunkha Nameh of Guru Govind.

Footnote 4:

Sabaa aswad.

Footnote 5:

"The Indian Corps in France," by Lieut.-Colonel J. W. B. Merewether,
C.I.E., and Sir Frederick Smith.

Footnote 6:

These statistics relate to the pre-war establishment of the Indian
Army.

Footnote 7:

The remnants of "the gallant few" became the nucleus of the Loyal 16th
Regiment.

Footnote 8:

Brave deeds.

Footnote 9:

The Commander, Ahmed Bey, surrendered to the 90th Punjabis.

Footnote 10:

The peak which protrudes from the centre of the turban.

Footnote 11:

Stretcher-bearer.

Footnote 12:

Waterskin.

Transcriber's Notes

1. Silently corrected typographical errors; retained non-standard spellings and dialect.

2. Italic text in the text version is delimited by _underscores_.