When the Indian Mutiny broke out, and a little time before the siege
of Delhi, a regiment of Native Irregular Horse was stationed at
Peshawur on the Frontier of India. That regiment caught what John
Lawrence called at the time 'the prevalent mania,' and would have
thrown in its lot with the mutineers had it been allowed to do so.
The chance never came, for, as the regiment swept off down south, it
was headed up by a remnant of an English corps into the hills of
Afghanistan, and there the newly-conquered tribesmen turned against
it as wolves turn against buck. It was hunted for the sake of its
arms and accoutrements from hill to hill, from ravine to ravine, up
and down the dried beds of rivers and round the shoulders of bluffs,
till it disappeared as water sinks in the sand--this officerless,
rebel regiment. The only trace left of its existence to-day is a
nominal roll drawn up in neat round hand and countersigned by an
officer who called himself 'Adjutant, late ---- Irregular Cavalry.'
The paper is yellow with years and dirt, but on the back of it you
can still read a pencil note by John Lawrence, to this effect: 'See
that the two native officers who remained loyal are not deprived of
their estates.--J.L.' Of six hundred and fifty sabres only two stood
strain, and John Lawrence in the midst of all the agony of the first
months of the mutiny found time to think about their merits.
That was more than thirty years ago, and the tribesmen across the
Afghan border who helped to annihilate the regiment are now old men.
Sometimes a graybeard speaks of his share in the massacre. 'They
came,' he will say, 'across the border, very proud, calling upon us
to rise and kill the English, and go down to the sack of Delhi. But
we who had just been conquered by the same English knew that they
were over bold, and that the Government could account easily for
those down-country dogs. This Hindu stani regiment, therefore, we
treated with fair words, and kept standing in one place till the
redcoats came after them very hot and angry. Then this regiment ran
forward a little more into our hills to avoid the wrath of the
English, and we lay upon their flanks watching from the sides of the
hills till we were well assured that their path was lost behind them.
Then we came down, for we desired their clothes, and their bridles,
and their rifles, and their boots--more especially their boots. That
was a great killing--done slowly.' Here the old man will rub his
nose, and shake his long snaky locks, and lick his bearded lips, and
grin till the yellow tooth-stumps show. 'Yes, we killed them because
we needed their gear, and we knew that their lives had been forfeited
to God on account of their sin--the sin of treachery to the salt
which they had eaten. They rode up and down the valleys, stumbling
and rocking in their saddles, and howling for mercy. We drove them
slowly like cattle till they were all assembled in one place, the
flat wide valley of Sheor Kôt. Many had died from want of water, but
there still were many left, and they could not make any stand. We
went among them, pulling them down with our hands two at a time, and
our boys killed them who were new to the sword. My share of the
plunder was such and such--so many guns, and so many saddles. The
guns were good in those days. Now we steal the Government rifles,
and despise smooth barrels. Yes, beyond doubt we wiped that
regiment from off the face of the earth, and even the memory of the
deed is now dying. But men say----'
At this point the tale would stop abruptly, and it was impossible to
find out what men said across the border. The Afghans were always a
secretive race, and vastly preferred doing something wicked to saying
anything at all. They would be quiet and well-behaved for months,
till one night, without word or warning, they would rush a
police-post, cut the throats of a constable or two, dash through a
village, carry away three or four women, and withdraw, in the red
glare of burning thatch, driving the cattle and goats before them to
their own desolate hills. The Indian Government would become almost
tearful on these occasions. First it would say, 'Please be good and
we'll forgive you.' The tribe concerned in the latest depredation
would collectively put its thumb to its nose and answer rudely. Then
the Government would say: 'Hadn't you better pay up a little money
for those few corpses you left behind you the other night?' Here the
tribe would temporise, and lie and bully, and some of the younger
men, merely to show contempt of authority, would raid another
police-post and fire into some frontier mud fort, and, if lucky, kill
a real English officer. Then the Government would say: 'Observe; if
you really persist in this line of conduct you will be hurt.' If the
tribe knew exactly what was going on in India, it would apologise or
be rude, according as it learned whether the Government was busy with
other things, or able to devote its full attention to their
performances. Some of the tribes knew to one corpse how far to go.
Others became excited, lost their heads, and told the Government to
come on. With sorrow and tears, and one eye on the British taxpayer
at home, who insisted on regarding these exercises as brutal wars of
annexation, the Government would prepare an expensive little
field-brigade and some guns, and send all up into the hills to chase
the wicked tribe out of the valleys, where the corn grew, into the
hill-tops where there was nothing to eat. The tribe would turn out in
full strength and enjoy the campaign, for they knew that their women
would never be touched, that their wounded would be nursed, not
mutilated, and that as soon as each man's bag of corn was spent they
could surrender and palaver with the English General as though they
had been a real enemy. Afterwards, years afterwards, they would pay
the blood-money, driblet by driblet, to the Government and tell their
children how they had slain the redcoats by thousands. The only
drawback to this kind of picnic-war was the weakness of the redcoats
for solemnly blowing up with powder their fortified towers and keeps.
This the tribes always considered mean.
Chief among the leaders of the smaller tribes--the little clans who
knew to a penny the expense of moving white troops against them--was
a priest-bandit-chief whom we will call the Gulla Kutta Mullah. His
enthusiasm for border murder as an art was almost dignified. He
would cut down a mail-runner from pure wantonness, or bombard a mud
fort with rifle fire when he knew that our men needed to sleep. In
his leisure moments he would go on circuit among his neighbours, and
try to incite other tribes to devilry. Also, he kept a kind of hotel
for fellow-outlaws in his own village, which lay in a valley called
Bersund. Any respectable murderer on that section of the frontier was
sure to lie up at Bersund, for it was reckoned an exceedingly safe
place. The sole entry to it ran through a narrow gorge which could be
converted into a death-trap in five minutes. It was surrounded by
high hills, reckoned inaccessible to all save born mountaineers, and
here the Gulla Kutta Mullah lived in great state, the head of a
colony of mud and stone huts, and in each mud hut hung Some portion
of a red uniform and the plunder of dead men. The Government
particularly wished for his capture, and once invited him formally to
come out and be hanged on account of a few of the murders in which he
had taken a direct part. He replied:--
'I am only twenty miles, as the crow flies, from your border. Come
and fetch me.'
'Some day we will come,' said the Government, 'and hanged you will
be.'
The Gulla Kutta Mullah let the matter from his mind. He knew that the
patience of the Government was as long as a summer day; but he did
not realise that its arm was as long as a winter night. Months
afterwards when there was peace on the border, and all India was
quiet, the Indian Government turned in its sleep and remembered the
Gulla Kutta Mullah at Bersund, with his thirteen outlaws. The
movement against him of one single regiment--which the telegrams
would have translated as war--would have been highly impolitic. This
was a time for silence and speed, and, above all, absence of
bloodshed.
You must know that all along the north-west frontier of India there
is spread a force of some thirty thousand foot and horse, whose duty
it is quietly and unostentatiously to shepherd the tribes in front of
them. They move up and down, and down and up, from one desolate
little post to another; they are ready to take the field at ten
minutes' notice; they are always half in and half out of a difficulty
somewhere along the monotonous line; their lives are as hard as their
own muscles, and the papers never say anything about them. It was
from this force that the Government picked its men.
One night at a station where the mounted Night Patrol fire as they
challenge, and the wheat rolls in great blue green waves under our
cold northern moon, the officers were playing billiards in the
mud-walled club-house, when orders came to them that they were to go
on parade at once for a night-drill. They grumbled, and went to turn
out their men--a hundred English troops, let us say, two hundred
Goorkhas, and about a hundred cavalry of the finest native cavalry in
the world.
When they were on the parade-ground, it was explained to them in
whispers that they must set off at once across the hills to Bersund.
The English troops were to post themselves round the hills at the
side of the valley; the Goorkhas would command the gorge and the
death-trap, and the cavalry would fetch a long march round and get to
the back of the circle of hills, whence, if there were any
difficulty, they could charge down on the Mullah's men. But orders
were very strict that there should be no fighting and no noise. They
were to return in the morning with every round of ammunition intact,
and the Mullah and the thirteen outlaws bound in their midst. If they
were successful, no one would know or care anything about their work;
but failure meant probably a small border war, in which the Gulla
Kutta Mullah would pose as a popular leader against a big bullying
power, instead of a common border murderer.
Then there was silence, broken only by the clicking of the compass
needles and snapping of watch-cases, as the heads of columns compared
bearings and made appointments for the rendezvous. Five minutes later
the parade-ground was empty; the green coats of the Goorkhas and the
overcoats of the English troops had faded into the darkness, and the
cavalry were cantering away in the face of a blinding drizzle.
What the Goorkhas and the English did will be seen later on. The heavy
work lay with the horses, for they had to go far and pick their way
clear of habitations. Many of the troopers were natives of that part
of the world, ready and anxious to fight against their kin, and some
of the officers had made private and unofficial excursions into those
hills before. They crossed the border, found a dried river bed,
cantered up that, waited through a stony gorge, risked crossing a low
hill under cover of the darkness, skirted another hill, leaving their
hoof-marks deep in some ploughed ground, felt their way along another
watercourse, ran over the neck of a spur, praying that no one would
hear their horses grunting, and so worked on in the rain and the
darkness, till they had left Bersund and its crater of hills a little
behind them, and to the left, and it was time to swing round.
The ascent commanding the back of Bersund was steep, and they halted
to draw breath in a broad level valley below the height. That is to
say, the men reined up, but the horses, blown as they were, refused
to halt. There was unchristian language, the worse for being
delivered in a whisper, and you heard the saddles squeaking in the
darkness as the horses plunged.
The subaltern at the rear of one troop turned in his saddle and said
very softly:--
'Carter, what the blessed heavens are you doing at the rear? Bring
your men up, man.'