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 Hindustani 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, walked 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.’
There was no answer, till a trooper replied:--
‘Carter Sahib is forward--not there. There is nothing behind us.’
‘There is,’ said the subaltern. ‘The squadron’s walking on its own
tail.’
Then the Major in command moved down to the rear swearing softly and
asking for the blood of Lieutenant Halley--the subaltern who had just
spoken.
‘Look after your rearguard,’ said the Major. ‘Some of your infernal
thieves have got lost. They’re at the head of the squadron, and you’re
a several kinds of idiot.’
‘Shall I tell off my men, sir?’ said the subaltern sulkily, for he was
feeling wet and cold.
‘Tell ’em off!’ said the Major. ‘_Whip_ ’em off, by Gad! You’re
squandering them all over the place. There’s a troop behind you _now_!’
‘So I was thinking,’ said the subaltern calmly. ‘I have all my men
here, sir. Better speak to Carter.’
‘Carter Sahib sends salaam and wants to know why the regiment is
stopping,’ said a trooper to Lieutenant Halley.
‘Where under heaven _is_ Carter?’ said the Major.
‘Forward with his troop,’ was the answer.
‘Are we walking in a ring, then, or are we the centre of a blessed
brigade?’ said the Major.
By this time there was silence all along the column. The horses were
still; but, through the drive of the fine rain, men could hear the feet
of many horses moving over stony ground.
‘We’re being stalked,’ said Lieutenant Halley.
‘They’ve no horses here. Besides they’d have fired before this,’ said
the Major. ‘It’s--it’s villagers’ ponies.’
‘Then our horses would have neighed and spoilt the attack long ago.
They must have been near us for half an hour,’ said the subaltern.
‘Queer that we can’t smell the horses,’ said the Major, damping his
finger and rubbing it on his nose as he sniffed up wind.
‘Well, it’s a bad start,’ said the subaltern, shaking the wet from his
overcoat. ‘What shall we do, sir?’
‘Get on,’ said the Major. ‘We shall catch it to-night.’
The column moved forward very gingerly for a few paces. Then there
was an oath, a shower of blue sparks as shod hooves crashed on small
stones, and a man rolled over with a jangle of accoutrements that would
have waked the dead.
‘Now we’ve gone and done it,’ said Lieutenant Halley. ‘All the hillside
awake, and all the hillside to climb in the face of musketry-fire. This
comes of trying to do night-hawk work.’
The trembling trooper picked himself up and tried to explain that his
horse had fallen over one of the little cairns that are built of loose
stones on the spot where a man has been murdered. There was no need
for reasons. The Major’s big Australian charger blundered next, and
the column came to a halt in what seemed to be a very graveyard of
little cairns all about two feet high. The manœuvres of the squadron
are not reported. Men said that it felt like mounted quadrilles without
training and without the music; but at last the horses, breaking rank
and choosing their own way, walked clear of the cairns, till every
man of the squadron re-formed and drew rein a few yards up the slope
of the hill. Then, according to Lieutenant Halley, there was another
scene very like the one which has been described. The Major and Carter
insisted that all the men had not joined rank, and that there were
more of them in the rear clicking and blundering among the dead men’s
cairns. Lieutenant Halley told off his own troopers again and resigned
himself to wait. Later on he told me:--
‘I didn’t much know, and I didn’t much care what was going on. The row
of that trooper falling ought to have scared half the country, and I
would take my oath that we were being stalked by a full regiment in the
rear, and _they_ were making row enough to rouse all Afghanistan. I sat
tight, but nothing happened.’
The mysterious part of the night’s work was the silence on the
hillside. Everybody knew that the Gulla Kutta Mullah had his outpost
huts on the reverse side of the hill, and everybody expected by the
time that the Major had sworn himself into a state of quiet that the
watchmen there would open fire. When nothing occurred, they said that
the gusts of the rain had deadened the sound of the horses, and thanked
Providence. At last the Major satisfied himself (_a_) that he had left
no one behind among the cairns, and (_b_) that he was not being taken
in the rear by a large and powerful body of cavalry. The men’s tempers
were thoroughly spoiled, the horses were lathered and unquiet, and one
and all prayed for the daylight.
They set themselves to climb up the hill, each man leading his
mount carefully. Before they had covered the lower slopes or the
breast-plates had begun to tighten, a thunderstorm came up behind,
rolling across the low hills and drowning any noise less than that of
cannon. The first flash of the lightning showed the bare ribs of the
ascent, the hill-crest standing steely blue against the black sky,
the little falling lines of the rain, and, a few yards to their left
flank, an Afghan watch-tower, two-storied, built of stone, and entered
by a ladder from the upper story. The ladder was up, and a man with a
rifle was leaning from the window. The darkness and the thunder rolled
down in an instant, and, when the lull followed, a voice from the
watch-tower cried, ‘Who goes there?’
The cavalry were very quiet, but each man gripped his carbine and
stood beside his horse. Again the voice called, ‘Who goes there?’ and
in a louder key, ‘O, brothers, give the alarm!’ Now, every man in the
cavalry would have died in his long boots sooner than have asked for
quarter; but it is a fact that the answer to the second call was a
long wail of ‘Marf karo! Marf karo!’ which means, ‘Have mercy! Have
mercy!’ It came from the climbing regiment.
The cavalry stood dumbfoundered, till the big troopers had time to
whisper one to another: ‘Mir Khan, was that thy voice? Abdullah, didst
_thou_ call?’ Lieutenant Halley stood beside his charger and waited.
So long as no firing was going on he was content. Another flash of
lightning showed the horses with heaving flanks and nodding heads, the
men, white eye-balled, glaring beside them, and the stone watch-tower
to the left. This time there was no head at the window, and the rude
iron-clamped shutter that could turn a rifle bullet was closed.
‘Go on, men,’ said the Major. ‘Get up to the top at any rate.’ The
squadron toiled forward, the horses wagging their tails and the men
pulling at the bridles, the stones rolling down the hillside and
the sparks flying. Lieutenant Halley declares that he never heard a
squadron make so much noise in his life. They scrambled up, he said,
as though each horse had eight legs and a spare horse to follow him.
Even then there was no sound from the watch-tower, and the men stopped
exhausted on the ridge that overlooked the pit of darkness in which the
village of Bersund lay. Girths were loosed, curb-chains shifted, and
saddles adjusted, and the men dropped down among the stones. Whatever
might happen now, they had the upper ground of any attack.
The thunder ceased, and with it the rain, and the soft thick darkness
of a winter night before the dawn covered them all. Except for the
sound of falling water among the ravines below, everything was still.
They heard the shutter of the watch-tower below them thrown back with
a clang, and the voice of the watcher calling: ‘Oh, Hafiz Ullah!’
The echoes took up the call, ‘La-la-la!’ And an answer came from the
watch-tower hidden round the curve of the hill, ‘What is it, Shahbaz
Khan?’
Shahbaz Khan replied in the high-pitched voice of the mountaineer:
‘Hast thou seen?’
The answer came back: ‘Yes. God deliver us from all evil spirits!’
There was a pause, and then: ‘Hafiz Ullah, I am alone! Come to me!’
‘Shahbaz Khan, I am alone also; but I dare not leave my post!’
‘That is a lie; thou art afraid.’
A longer pause followed, and then: ‘I am afraid. Be silent! They are
below us still. Pray to God and sleep.’
The troopers listened and wondered, for they could not understand what
save earth and stone could lie below the watch-towers.
Shahbaz Khan began to call again: ‘They are below us. I can see them.
For the pity of God come over to me, Hafiz Ullah! My father slew ten of
them. Come over!’
Hafiz Ullah answered in a very loud voice, ‘Mine was guiltless. Hear,
ye Men of the Night, neither my father nor my blood had any part in
that sin. Bear thou they own punishment, Shahbaz Khan.’
‘Oh, some one ought to stop those two chaps crowing away like cocks
there,’ said Lieutenant Halley, shivering under his rock.
He had hardly turned round to expose a new side of him to the rain
before a bearded, long-locked, evil-smelling Afghan rushed up the hill,
and tumbled into his arms. Halley sat upon him, and thrust as much of a
sword-hilt as could be spared down the man’s gullet. ‘If you cry out, I
kill you,’ he said cheerfully.
The man was beyond any expression of terror. He lay and quaked,
grunting. When Halley took the sword-hilt from between his teeth, he
was still inarticulate, but clung to Halley’s arm, feeling it from
elbow to wrist.
‘The Rissala! The dead Rissala!’ he gasped. ‘It is down there!’
‘No; the Rissala, the very much alive Rissala. It is up here,’ said
Halley, unshipping his watering-bridle, and fastening the man’s hands.
‘Why were you in the towers so foolish as to let us pass?’
‘The valley is full of the dead,’ said the Afghan. ‘It is better to
fall into the hands of the English than the hands of the dead. They
march to and fro below there. I saw them in the lightning.’
He recovered his composure after a little, and whispering, because
Halley’s pistol was at his stomach, said: ‘What is this? There is no
war between us now, and the Mullah will kill me for not seeing you
pass!’
‘Rest easy,’ said Halley; ‘we are coming to kill the Mullah, if God
please. His teeth have grown too long. No harm will come to thee unless
the daylight shows thee as a face which is desired by the gallows for
crime done. But what of the dead regiment?’
‘I only kill within my own border,’ said the man, immensely relieved.
‘The Dead Regiment is below. The men must have passed through it on
their journey--four hundred dead on horses, stumbling among their own
graves, among the little heaps--dead men all, whom we slew.’
‘Whew!’ said Halley. ‘That accounts for my cursing Carter and the Major
cursing me. Four hundred sabres, eh? No wonder we thought there were a
few extra men in the troop. Kurruk Shah,’ he whispered to a grizzled
native officer that lay within a few feet of him, ‘hast thou heard
anything of a dead Rissala in these hills?’
‘Assuredly,’ said Kurruk Shah with a grim chuckle. ‘Otherwise, why did
I, who have served the Queen for seven-and-twenty years, and killed
many hill-dogs, shout aloud for quarter when the lightning revealed us
to the watch-towers? When I was a young man I saw the killing in the
valley of Sheor-Kôt there at our feet, and I know the tale that grew up
therefrom. But how can the ghosts of unbelievers prevail against us who
are of the Faith? Strap that dog’s hands a little tighter, Sahib. An
Afghan is like an eel.’
‘But a dead Rissala,’ said Halley, jerking his captive’s wrist. ‘That
is foolish talk, Kurruk Shah. The dead are dead. Hold still, _sag_.’
The Afghan wriggled.
‘The dead are dead, and for that reason they walk at night. What need
to talk? We be men; we have our eyes and ears. Thou canst both see and
hear them, down the hillside,’ said Kurruk Shah composedly.
Halley stared and listened long and intently. The valley was full of
stifled noises, as every valley must be at night; but whether he saw or
heard more than was natural Halley alone knows, and he does not choose
to speak on the subject.
At last, and just before the dawn, a green rocket shot up from the far
side of the valley of Bersund, at the head of the gorge, to show that
the Goorkhas were in position. A red light from the infantry at left
and right answered it, and the cavalry burnt a white flare. Afghans in
winter are late sleepers, and it was not till full day that the Gulla
Kutta Mullah’s men began to straggle from their huts, rubbing their
eyes. They saw men in green, and red, and brown uniforms, leaning on
their arms, neatly arranged all round the crater of the village of
Bersund, in a cordon that not even a wolf could have broken. They
rubbed their eyes the more when a pink-faced young man, who was not
even in the Army, but represented the Political Department, tripped
down the hillside with two orderlies, rapped at the door of the Gulla
Kutta Mullah’s house, and told him quietly to step out and be tied up
for safe transport. That same young man passed on through the huts,
tapping here one cateran, and there another lightly with his cane; and
as each was pointed out, so he was tied up, staring hopelessly at the
crowned heights around where the English soldiers looked down with
incurious eyes. Only the Mullah tried to carry it off with curses and
high words, till a soldier who was tying his hands said:--
‘None o’ your lip! Why didn’t you come out when you was ordered,
instead o’ keepin’ us awake all night? You’re no better than my own
barrack-sweeper, you white-’eaded old polyanthus! Kim up!’
Half an hour later the troops had gone away with the Mullah and his
thirteen friends. The dazed villagers were looking ruefully at a
pile of broken muskets and snapped swords, and wondering how in the
world they had come so to miscalculate the forbearance of the Indian
Government.
It was a very neat little affair, neatly carried out, and the men
concerned were unofficially thanked for their services.
Yet it seems to me that much credit is also due to another regiment
whose name did not appear in the brigade orders, and whose very
existence is in danger of being forgotten.
IN THE RUKH.
The Only Son lay down again and dreamed that he dreamed a dream.
The last ash dropped from the dying fire with the click of a falling
spark,
And the Only Son woke up again and called across the dark:--
‘Now, was I born of womankind and laid in a mother’s breast?
For I have dreamed of a shaggy hide whereon I went to rest.
And was I born of womankind and laid on a father’s arm?
For I have dreamed of long white teeth that guarded me from harm.
Oh, was I born of womankind and did I play alone?
For I have dreamed of playmates twain that bit me to the bone.
And did I break the barley bread and steep it in the tyre?
For I have dreamed of a youngling kid new riven from the byre.
An hour it lacks and an hour it lacks to the rising of the moon--
But I can see the black roof-beams as plain as it were noon!
’Tis a league and a league to the Lena Falls where the trooping
sambhur go,
But I can hear the little fawn that bleats behind the doe!
’Tis a league and a league to the Lena Falls where the crop and the
upland meet,
But I can smell the warm wet wind that whispers through the wheat!’
_The Only Son._