THE START FOR LHASSA: A DIGRESSION ON SUPPLY AND TRANSPORT
Suddenly the order came that we were to march to Lhassa forthwith. Who
should and who should not form the Lhassa column must have been a
difficult question to settle. To perform invidious tasks of this sort
must be the most trying feature of generalship. It would be hard to find
an occasion on any expedition when, to the individual soldier, going on
seemed to mean so much, and staying behind so little. Forbidden cities
are so fascinating, and the idea of assisting in drawing aside a pardah
so appeals to our rude imaginations, that the desire to reach Lhassa
was especially great. Those high passes in front of us, the shores of
the great Palti lake and the upper Brahmaputra, that we knew not how we
should cross, all seemed also to point to a varied adventure, and there
was a spice of excitement in the thought of marching through a country,
on the resources of which we should have largely to maintain ourselves,
while as yet we knew hardly anything of their kind and extent.
We left the sad Gyantse garrison behind us, and marched off one morning
in threatening weather that soon turned to rain, our path for the first
few miles lying across a veritable bog. We consisted of the whole of a
British and a section of a native mountain battery, of a wing of the
Royal Fusiliers, of two companies of mounted infantry (drawn from
various native regiments, and consisting of Sikhs, Ghurkhas, and
Pathans) of the 8th Ghurkha Rifles, several companies of the 32nd Sikh
Pioneers and the 40th Pathans, one company of Sappers and Miners, and
two machine gun detachments. Several field hospitals or sections of
field hospitals accompanied us, besides, of course, many other
miscellaneous necessities such as ammunition column, treasure, supply
column, post-office, veterinary establishment, and field park. The
telegraph department was conspicuous by its absence, it being a feature
of the advance to Lhassa that we left the telegraph behind at Gyantse--a
proceeding which doubtless had both its inconvenient and its convenient
results. Last but not least came the transport. One may divide this into
regular and irregular. The regular transport consisted of the whole or
portions of five Indian mule corps, the 6th, the 7th, the 9th, the 10th,
and the 12th; the irregular of a cooli corps, and two locally raised
corps--one of yaks and the other of donkeys.
Our transport was so big an item and so big a necessity that a short
sketch of it as it ploughed through the sodden fields outside Gyantse
that wet July morning may not come amiss.
The average Indian transport pack mule, aged probably fifteen to
eighteen years old, is the finest old soldier we have got. If, like Lord
Roberts's gray arab, he were allowed to record his services round his
neck, he would display a fine collection of medals and clasps. Allowing
that he is now fifteen and that he joined the ranks ten years ago, and
allowing as a general principle that where a frontier expedition of any
size takes place the bulk of the regular mule transport of the army in
India is required for it, we can take it that at the age of six he had a
rough breaking-in to war conditions in Chitral; that, after a year or so
of peace, he carried convoy stores or troops' baggage over many weary
marches in the Malakand or the Tochi valley, or in Tirah. In 1900, as
likely as not, he was entrained one hot midsummer day, carried off to
Calcutta, and shipped to China. As an alternative he may have been
wanted in South Africa. Later on he very probably served in the Mahsud
blockade. Between whiles he has had a few spells of cantonment life, but
has probably spent his hot weathers daily carrying the needful water
supply up to some hill station, perched on a hilltop, from a reservoir
two thousand feet below, and a portion of his cold weathers in the
feverish sham warfare of manoeuvres. All the time he has preserved the
same dogged, cheery temperament, getting out of the train at the base of
an expedition, seeing there the familiar sights that portend field
service, then having a good roll in the dust, getting up and shaking
himself, as though to say, 'Here we are again,' like the clown in the
pantomime; or plodding along through rain or snow or hot weather
duststorm with two maunds on his back, and only wondering casually what
will be the next practical joke which his masters will perpetrate on
him. His is a rough lot, but he takes it kindly, and with good grain and
fodder is not unhappy.
The mule driver also is a man of parts. Compare him with that fine
soldier--the cavalryman. The former has to feed, groom, fit and clean
the gear of, and sometimes forage for, three or four animals instead of
one, as is the case of the latter. Further, the cavalryman mounts his
beast, while the mule driver marches on foot.
The case of the mule and his attendant came before the Government of
India a few years ago, who decided to improve their status. They have
since accomplished a great deal by introducing an organised corps system
among Indian transport. The system was worked experimentally for some
years, and is now an authorised and accomplished fact. The mule and his
driver, instead of, as was formerly the case, being no men's children in
particular, belong to their troop, to their subdivision, and to their
corps. Every corps is distinguishable by its uniform, and is commanded
by a British officer, who has under him his own permanent subordinate
staff, and who is responsible for the well-being and efficiency of all
the men and beasts in his charge.
The enhancement of efficiency and well-being, and, perhaps more than
all, of the personal self-respect of the individual driver, which has
been the result both of the new organised discipline and of the new
_esprit de corps_, is very marked. It remains only to prove conclusively
that in the field, the inter-organisation of transport can be
sufficiently maintained to serve its object, without interfering with
other military considerations. The allotting of their transport to
combatant units, according to their exact requirements, without
destroying the organisation of the transport units themselves, often
constitutes a problem which a chief transport officer has difficulty in
solving. The _via media_, which on this Expedition has afforded a
solution, has been to let the transport organisation, if necessary, go
to the winds on the march itself, but to give it the first claim to
consideration when once a column has reached camp.
Those irregular corps which supplemented the permanent military pack
transport were most indispensable but delightfully heterogeneous. It may
be interesting to describe the journey of, say, a maund of rice from
Siliguri to Lhassa on these various forms of transport. Wrapped in its
waterproof to keep off the rain torrents, the rice was dumped into a
bullock-cart at Siliguri. If the road did not collapse from a landslip
at any awkward moment and so drop the bullock-cart and its contents _en
masse_ into the Teesta river--a not infrequent occurrence--the rice-bag
probably reached Rangpo. From there it probably proceeded for a few
marches on the back of a pack bullock, a patient beast who moved slowly,
and whose feet in that damp climate got very tender, and on those stony
paths very sore. Later on it reached steep gradients where the pack
bullock could no longer carry it, and it was handed over for several
marches to a cooli. The cooli would be a native of some hill district of
India (Panch, for instance, or Darjiling). He and the comrades to whom
he passed it on would take it over either the Jalap-La or the Natu-La,
down into the Chumbi valley. From here a pack mule or an 'irregular'
pack pony would take it up to Phari. From here across the Phari plain
through Tuna and Kalatso and as far as Menza it would lie in an ekka,
for this was flat country, and it had seemed worth while and eventually
proved a signal success to drag up from India several hundred of those
plainly built but strong little two-wheeled carts called ekkas, which
hold five maunds each, and can be used on almost any road, however
rough, provided it is wide enough to hold both wheels. These ekkas had
been run up behind their ponies as far as possible, then taken to
pieces, and carried in fragments on the backs of coolis over the passes
and up on to the Phari plain, where, at a height of 15,000 feet, they
were put together again and plied to and fro, at first greatly to the
astonishment of the resident Tibetan, who had never seen any wheels
other than prayer-wheels. Most of the ekkas were drawn by ponies of the
small 'country-bred' type brought from India, but the casualties among
these were sometimes replaced by draught yaks.
From Menza onwards our rice-bag had a choice of mounts. It might go on a
pack mule, or meander slowly along on the back of a pack yak, or, with
the other bag alongside it, entirely eclipse from human view the most
miniature of donkeys, who, nevertheless, if allowed ample time to look
about him, and to pick up weird grazing by the roadside, would
eventually arrive in camp none the worse, and with his load intact after
a uniform progress of about one mile an hour.
On one or other of these animals the rice-bag would eventually reach
Lhassa, or, if it foregathered with the Lhassa column on its way up, it
might be handed over to one of the coolis who accompanied that column.
It probably reached Lhassa intact, its waterproof bag having protected
it from all weathers; but it might also have got a small hole somewhere
among its ample coverings, and lost a pound or two on the way, or--for
such is human nature--arrive still weighing the original eighty pounds,
but containing a stone or two in the place where some few odd pounds of
rice ought to have been.
The manners and customs of our various transport animals would form an
interesting study in natural history. The yak, to the uninitiated
intruder, was of course the most striking. The mule we know, and the
donkey we know, and the cooli was more or less of the same species as
ourselves; but the yak was a novelty. The yak is a buffalo in
petticoats. This seems an incongruous combination, for the _a priori_
idea of a buffalo is of something fierce, and of petticoats, of
something not fierce. But in this case petticoat influence has
altogether prevailed, for the yak is the mildest natured of animals. He
moves very slowly, takes life very quietly, and is content with little
here below, or rather here above, for if you take him below 9,000 feet
he pines for the heights. I believe he is really at his cosiest when
lying in a snowdrift on a winter's day with his petticoats around him
and only his horns showing. He then feels really well tucked up.
Both yaks and donkeys were very cheap forms of transport. It is true
that yaks had a way of dying and donkeys of deserting, but even so their
initial cost was very small, they needed very few drivers in proportion
to their numbers, and possessed the art of living on the country. An
animal that along a line of communications of some four hundred miles'
length, and lying in an inhospitable country, neither asks you to bring
him up fodder or even grain from the base, nor yet expects you to go
foraging for him, is indeed a treasure.
The yak and donkey drivers were Tibetans, as also were many of the
hospital ambulance carriers. The most noticeable points about these
Tibetans were that they were inveterate gamblers, and were also very
much married. The idea of accompanying us without their womenkind was
quite foreign to them, and we had to accede to their prejudices in the
matter. Merry little souls those women mostly were. Their foreheads and
noses usually smeared with that pigment of sows' blood which proclaims
to the world the Tibetan woman's chastity, they were ever to be seen
laughing or chaffing one another, either on the march or else in camp,
over their domestic duties or their knitting. Their stocking-knitting
was of a high order, except that the art of 'turning a heel' was unknown
to them.
I remember passing a knot of them one day as we climbed one of the worst
passes that we had to encounter on the march--a climb of four thousand
feet without a break. Hill people know better than any one the
advantage of breathing rhythmically, and the Tibetan loves to acquire
this rhythm by singing over any work that strains him at all. Tibetan
men and women, as they thresh their corn with the flail, chant pretty
ditties in unison, and Tibetan boatmen on the Sangpo will sometimes sing
to their work. And here was this band of women singing cheerily as they
climbed that mountain side, and never pausing in their song. They were
well up with the advance guard too, and the chorus could be heard all
down the column--a novel sort of band with which to cheer a British army
onwards on a toilsome march!
The cooli too, especially he who hied from the hinterland of Darjiling,
was as merry a soul as you meet on a day's march. Some were quite boys,
not more than sixteen, yet the way they shouldered their loads was
wonderful. The regulation load was eighty pounds, but I have often seen
quite a youngster with a hundred pounds on his back, taking it steadily
along up thousands of feet, and taking it as a matter of course, and
giving you a grinning greeting as you passed him. When off duty, they
would be for ever skipping about like mountain goats, skylarking, and
pulling one another about. The supervising staff of Ghurkhas, too, all
had the jolly Ghurkha face. For a cheery family party it would be hard
to beat that cooli corps.
But that Lhassa column with its train of transport has got well out of
the bog by now, and it behoves us to overtake it.