THROUGH FIRE AND WATER
India in the hot weather--A land of torment--The
drought--Forest fires--The cholera huts
burned--Fighting the flames--Death of a sepoy--The bond
between British officers and their men--The sepoy's
funeral--A fortnight's vigil--Saving the Station--The
hills ablaze--A sublime spectacle--The devastated
forest--Fallen leaves on fire--Our elephants'
peril--Saving the zareba--A beat for game in the
jungle--Trying to catch a wild elephant--A moonlight
ramble--We meet a bear--The burst of the Monsoons--A
dull existence--Three hundred inches of rain--The
monotony of thunderstorms--A changed
world--Leeches--Monster hailstones--Surveyors caught in
a storm--A break in the Rains--The revived
jungle--Useless lightning-conductors--The Monsoon
again--The loneliness of Buxa.
Through the long months of the Indian summer the cool Hills look down in
pity on the Plains steeped in the brooding heat, where the sun is an
offence and a torture, where the hot wind, like a blast of fiery air
from an opened furnace door, mocks with the thought of pleasant breezes
in a temperate land, where night brings only the breathless hours of
darkness when the parched earth gives out the heat it has stored by day,
and only dawn affords a momentary relief.
From early March to the end of June India is indeed turned into a place
of torment. In the crowded quarters of the cities millions of natives
swelter and endure with the dumb resignation of animals. Shut up in
darkened houses from morning to evening thousands of Englishwomen and
children suffer through the weary months. The fortunate ones fly to the
Hills; but Hill Stations are expensive and not for the poorer classes of
Europeans. And the white men of all ranks and professions must carry on
their work. His drill done, the British soldier lies on his cot under
the punkah of the barrack-room, thinks with regret of the cool land he
has left and forgets the misery of the unemployed in the rain and frosts
of England. And his officer, whose work takes him more frequently out
into the sun than the soldier, envies the lucky mortals who can obtain
leave and fly to Europe or the Hills. Through the hot night he tosses on
his bed placed under a punkah out in his garden and dozes fitfully until
the punkah coolie drops asleep and the faint wind of the overhead fan is
stilled. Then, bathed in perspiration, devoured by mosquitoes, he wakes;
and who can blame him if his language to the neglectful coolie, who can
sleep all day while his master works, is as hot as the climate?
From our little post on the face of the Himalayas we gazed to the south
over the lowlands, seen dimly through the heat haze, and pitied the
suffering millions in the India that stretched away from the foot of our
hills to the far-distant sea. Buxa is usually cool. The Monsoons which
sweep up from the equator and bring the welcome Rains towards the end of
June are here forestalled by other currents that deluge mountain and
forest with tropical showers as early as February. But for our sins in
our first year they failed us. And the heat crept up from its kingdom
in the Plains below and laughed at our boasts of the coolness of our
Hill Station. In March the only comfortable man in the detachment was a
prisoner whom I had sentenced for desertion to two months' confinement
in the one cell of the fort. For while we sweated on the hot parade
ground below, he gazed at us through the barred window of his cool,
stone-paved apartment beside the guard-room; and since I could find no
hard labour for his idle hands, he must have laughed as he watched us,
officers and men, toiling bare armed in the hot sun, digging earthworks
and erecting stockades on the knolls around. It seemed hard to believe
that only a few weeks before cheerful wood fires had burned in the
grates of our bungalows and after dinner we had pulled our chairs in
front of the comforting blaze and defied the cold with jorums of hot
punch.
But soon we had more than enough of other fires. The vast forests
stretching through Assam, Bhutan, the Terai and Nepal, were dry as
tinder owing to the unusual drought. From our eyrie in the hills we
looked down at night on the glow in the sky, east, south and west, that
told of jungles blazing around us. By day columns of smoke rose up in
the distance and spread until a black pall covered the landscape. The
hot wind brought the acrid smell of ashes and burning wood to us; and
soon the air was full of smuts. From Assam and Bhutan came the tale of
leagues of forest devoured by the flames. The dwellers in the pleasant
Hill Station of Darjeeling, seven thousand feet above the sea,
complained of the pall of smoke that veiled the mountains around them.
Day after day I gazed apprehensively on our happy hunting-grounds in
the forest below and feared to see them invaded by the conquering fires.
I pictured with dismay the game destroyed by the rushing flames or
driven far from us. And at last doubt became cruel certainty. Our
forests blazed. The legions of the victorious fire king swept through
the jungles we loved and denied them to us.
But at first we did not realise that danger threatened us, that our
small Station was itself imperilled. On a wooded spur below the fort
stood two long bamboo-walled buildings, intended as a segregation
hospital for cases of infectious disease. One afternoon news was brought
me that the forest fires had crept up to the base of the hill on which
they stood. I ran down to the fort and ordered out the whole detachment.
The men in whatever garb they were wearing at the moment turned out; and
we raced through the back gate and down a zigzag path cut on the face of
the precipice on the south side of the fort. Then we struggled up the
steep hill to the threatened buildings. Below us the forest blazed. The
flames were sweeping up the slopes towards us. The sight was a fine one;
but we had little leisure or inclination to admire it. Breaking branches
from the trees we fell upon the advancing enemy and endeavoured to beat
it back. The wind was against us. Sparks and burning embers flew past
and set alight to the hill-top behind us. It was curious to see how the
flames ran up the trees and, leaving the trunks unscathed, seized on the
masses of orchids on the boughs. Their leaves and stems blazed fiercely
as if filled with oil. Scorched by the heat, grimed with the flying
ashes and smuts, officers and men fought shoulder to shoulder against
the encroaching flames. In a long line we descended to meet them and
beat down the burning undergrowth. Suddenly a sharp gust of wind carried
a burst of fire against us. Smothered by the smoke, our clothes alight
from the red cinders, we were forced back. The flames lit up a patch of
tall grass, dry as tinder, which went up in a sheet of fire. We turned
and ran up to the summit. But one unfortunate sepoy stumbled and fell;
and the wave of flame swept over him. It passed him by and then died as
suddenly as it had risen. He stood up and staggered towards the
hill-top. The moment he was seen a dozen men rushed down over the
smouldering ground to help him. They carried him up to the crest and, as
he was badly burnt, took him to the hospital as soon as a litter could
be brought for him.
The flames began to circle round the base of the hill and threatened to
cut us off; so I was forced to abandon the position and order a retreat.
Hardly had we reached the zigzag path to the fort when the huts went up
in pillars of flame.
In the evening I visited my unfortunate sepoy. Though in pain, he was
conscious and able to speak to me; and I thought he would recover. But
during the night he collapsed suddenly and died. This was the first
death we had had in the detachment; and it cast a gloom over us all. The
sepoys regretted a comrade; while the loss of one of his men always
affects an officer. And in our isolated Station the death of one of our
small number was acutely felt.
There exists more sympathy between the British officers of an Indian
regiment and the sepoys than between the latter and the native officers.
Where the men imagine, not always without reason, that these last are
swayed by considerations of different race or caste, of favouritism
towards some and a dislike to others, of village and family feuds in
their homes--for the Indian officers are generally promoted from the
ranks--they know that the British officer is unaffected by such
influences. Consequently, the men have far more confidence in his
justice. When a sepoy is to be arraigned before a court martial for an
offence, he is allowed to choose whether he will be tried by British or
by Indian officers. In all my service I have known only one case in
which the man elected for the latter. And when he came before the court
and found it composed of native officers, he objected strongly and
declared that he wished to be tried by the Sahibs. When it was pointed
out to him that he had been given his choice of judges, he protested
that he had not understood, and that he had no wish to be tried by men
of his own nationality.
There is perhaps even a greater bond of union between the sepoys and the
white officers of a native regiment than between the soldiers and the
commissioned ranks in a British corps. In the first place the Indian
Army is a long-service one; and so officers and men remain longer
together. Many of my sepoys have watched me advance from subaltern to
captain, from captain to major; and youngsters I knew as recruits are
now native officers under me. Then the Indian soldier leans more on his
British officer. He comes to him with all his troubles about lawsuits
over land and his fields--for every man is a land-holder--and
confidently expects that his Sahib will fight for justice for him. Some
continental armies would be horrified to see the sepoy off parade
talking with friendly freedom to his British officer or playing hockey
with him on terms of perfect equality.
The flag of the fort was half-mast high, as the funeral-party marched
out to pay the last honours to their dead comrade. As the deceased sepoy
was a Rajput his body was carried down to Santrabari to be there placed
on a pile of wood and burned with all the ceremonies of his religion;
for, while Mohammedans are buried, Hindus are cremated.
But we had little leisure to brood over the dead man's fate. The
position of the fort and of the Station of Buxa was very precarious, now
that the fires had reached the hills. The former I safeguarded by
burning the grass on the isolated mound on which it stood. But our
bungalows, hemmed in by the jungle which grew to within a few yards of
them, were in constant danger. The diary of parades which I was obliged
to furnish every week to the brigade office in Shillong for the
information of the General bore for a fortnight the words "fighting
fires," instead of the usual entries of "company drill," "musketry,"
"field training," and the like. Day and night whenever the bugles rang
out the alarm, we had to turn out to fight the intruding flames. Once we
had to battle the whole day to save the forest officer's bungalow from
being burned. I well remember how, while we officers and men toiled in
the heat and smoke to beat back the fire, the Bengali clerks, whose
houses were also in danger, stood at a safe distance, weeping and
wringing their hands, but never attempting to help.
At night the burning forests below were a gorgeous though pitiable
sight. And when the fires, repelled from Buxa, swept past us upwards,
and the semicircle of hills around blazed to the summit of Sinchula one
night, the spectacle was sublime. In one spot, high overhead, the trees
had been felled and left lying on the ground after a half-hearted
attempt at cultivation by the Bhuttias. Here the long sparkling lines of
fire from the burning undergrowth were changed to pillars of flame, as
the huge, dry tree-trunks blazed fiercely up in the darkness.
But life was not pleasant in Buxa during those days. The atmosphere was
filled with smoke which veiled the sun. The heat was intense. So when
the danger had passed our Station, I took the detachment down into the
burned-out forest for a week's training in camp. The jungle was a sad
sight for a sportsman's eyes. The big trees stood scorched, their trunks
blackened and the branches charred where the masses of orchids that
clothed them had burned. Some of the hollow stems were still on fire
inside and sent out smoke among the tree-tops as from a steamer's
funnel. Dead trees, long supported by creepers, now lay smouldering on
the ground. The undergrowth which sheltered the game was gone. It was
strange to be able to see for a hundred yards or more between the
tree-trunks, where formerly ten paces was the limit of vision. The earth
was covered ankle-deep in ashes, which rose up in suffocating clouds at
every breath of hot wind. And above them was strewn a thick layer of
dead leaves; for the trees shed them in the hot weather. And these I
soon found constituted a fresh danger.
To my surprise I discovered that the little corner in the foot-hills
around Forest Lodge had been spared by the fire and my bamboo hut,
twenty-two feet up in the air among the branches, was intact. So I
halted the men and established the bivouac here. We had marched on ahead
of the baggage, which was loaded on the elephants. While these were
following us from Santrabari the masses of dry leaves underfoot caught
fire from some smouldering log; and a long line of flames swept down on
the terrified animals. Fortunately they were near a broad, dry
river-bed; and the scared _mahouts_ drove them into it for safety. A
mile away the crackling of the burning leaves aroused us to our new
danger. Breaking off branches, officers and men set to work to sweep the
leaves around the bivouac into heaps and leave the ground bare for a
couple of hundred yards on every side. By the morrow the fire had died
out, all the leaves having been consumed.
As we manoeuvred through the forest every day I was astonished to still
find traces of animal life in it. The destruction of the undergrowth and
creepers having left the jungle more open, I determined to try a beat
through it. On our last afternoon I sent all the men of the detachment a
mile away across a broad river-bed with orders to drive towards it in a
long line through the trees. On the near bank, which rose sheer to a
height of thirty-three feet above the sand, the British and native
officers, armed with rifles, took up their position. Lying flat on the
ground at the edge of the bank, we listened to the shouts of the men
coming nearer and nearer. The branches of the trees across the _nullah_
became violently agitated; and a large troop of monkeys swung through
them, leaped to the ground, and rushed over the sand on all fours. Then
a barking deer broke out about a hundred and fifty yards away, and I
fired at it. I was using a 470 cordite rifle; yet, struck just behind
the shoulder by a soft-nosed bullet, the little animal ran a furlong
before dropping dead. Nothing else followed it. Soon the men came into
view between the trees and halted below us. Draj Khan, who was managing
the line of beaters, was berating his comrades vehemently. He told me
that they had come across a large tusker elephant; and instead of
shepherding it gently towards the guns, a number of foolish young
sepoys, armed only with sticks, had rushed boldly at it with wild yells.
Luckily it did not attack them, but escaped out to one side of the beat.
At the other end of the line the men had come on a small herd of
_sambhur_, including two stags, and in their excitement had valiantly
charged them in the absurd hope of taking them alive. A _sambhur_ stag
with his sharp horns and the driving-power of his great weight behind
them is no mean foe; and it was just as well that the deer had fled from
the men and broke out through a gap in the line.
We tried a beat lower down the river, which resulted in the men putting
up a panther. But again some foolishly daring spirits rushed at it to
attack it with their sticks; and the animal got away at one end of the
beat. Draj Khan caught a young _sambhur_ fawn, a week old, and brought
it to me in his arms. This and the _khakur_ were our whole bag.
I was surprised to find that the burnt forest still sheltered so much
life. As the fires do not advance very rapidly the wild beasts can
generally keep ahead of them and escape. But I cannot understand how the
harmless animals support existence when all their fodder is destroyed.
One night when Creagh and I were sitting in the bivouac after dinner in
the dim light of a half moon, the idea occurred to me to take one of our
elephants and wander along the bed of a river a few hundred yards away,
in which, as there was still some water left, we might come upon wild
animals drinking. So we got our rifles, and a pad was strapped on
Khartoum's back. On her we passed out of the zareba surrounding the
camp, in which most of the men lay asleep on their _dhurries_ stretched
on the ground; for the native requires no softer bed and can repose
contentedly on paving stones. A couple of the Indian officers still sat
talking by a fire near the shelter of boughs erected for them by their
men. We answered the sentry's challenge and turned Khartoum down a path
from the bivouac to the water. It lay faintly white in the misty
moonlight which barely lit up the ground under the leafless trees. Not a
hundred yards from the camp the _mahout_ stopped Khartoum suddenly and
pointed to a black object which indistinctly blurred the path.
"A bear, Sahib," he whispered.
It was too dark to see my rifle-sights; but I rapidly tied my
handkerchief round the barrel and tried to aim at the shadowy outline of
the animal. Unluckily at that moment it moved off the path and entered
a patch of shadow under a tree which still kept its leaves. I fired both
barrels in quick succession without result and the bear scuttled away
among the trees. We tried to follow it but could not find it again.
When we reached the river-bed, down the middle of which a narrow stream
still ran, we wandered up it for a couple of miles in the misty light.
It was a curious sensation to be roaming noiselessly--for Khartoum's
feet made no sound on the soft sand--in the dead of night through the
silent jungle. Far away a _khakur's_ harsh bark rang out suddenly once
or twice, giving warning of the presence of some beast of prey; but
otherwise all was still. We disturbed a few deer drinking; and they
dashed away up the _nullah_ in alarm. But we saw no wild elephant or
tiger, such as I had hoped to come upon; and so we turned and made for
camp again.
On our return to Buxa the hills near us were bare and blackened; but
farther away the fires still blazed. The heat and the oppression of the
smoky atmosphere were still almost unendurable. But one night in the
first week of April I was awakened by a terrific peal of thunder right
overhead, which shook my bungalow and echoed and re-echoed among the
hills. Another followed, as the intense darkness was lit up by a
blinding lightning flash. And a dull moaning sound advancing from the
plains below and steadily increasing to a roar made me sit up in bed and
wonder what was about to happen. It drew near; and then a torrential
downpour of tropical rain beat down on the Station. My iron roof rattled
as if millions of pebbles were being flung on it. The noise was so
great that I lay awake for hours.
The storm raged all night; and when I rose for parade I looked out on a
changed world. The rain still descended in sheets. The parade ground was
a swamp. Down the _nullah_ beside my garden raced a tumbling torrent of
brown water flecked with white foam. Our rainy season had set in nearly
three months earlier than throughout the greater part of the Peninsula
of India. And now began the dullest time of our life in the outpost. In
the five months that followed nearly three hundred inches of rain fell
in Buxa. Work was at a standstill, save for physical drill in the men's
barrack-rooms and lectures to the non-commissioned officers. To walk
from my bungalow to the office in the fort every day was almost an
adventure. Wearing long rubber boots to the knee and wrapped in a
mackintosh I paddled across the swampy parade ground in drenching rain,
and even in the short distance was wet through. And at night I struggled
up the hill to dinner in the Mess along the steep road which was
converted into a mountain torrent a foot deep, fearing at every step to
find some snake, washed out of its hole in the ground, clinging
affectionately round my legs to stop its downward career. All night long
and most of the day storms swept down on us; and thunder growled and
grumbled among the hills. Dwellers in temperate lands can form no
conception of the awful grandeur of a tropical tempest, the fury of the
wind, the vivid lightning that spatters the sky and runs in chains and
linked patterns across its darkness, the awful sound of the crashing
thunder that seems to shake the world. But, terrifying at first, they
became actually wearisome from their frequency. When a thunderstorm has
raged about one's house for eighteen hours, circling round the hills and
returning again and again, one gets simply bored with it--there is no
other expression to describe the feeling.
It was wonderful to see the revivifying effect of the rain on the
parched ground. One could almost watch the grass grow. Where a few days
before was only bare earth, now the herbage stood feet high. All traces
of the devastating fires were washed away. On the hill-sides, fertilised
by the ashes, the undergrowth sprang up more luxuriantly than ever. But
it brought with it the greatest curse of the rainy season in the jungle.
Every twig, every leaf, every blade of grass, harboured leeches, thin
threads of black and yellow which waved one end in the air and seemed to
scent an approaching prey. Walk over the grass, brush past the bushes,
and a dozen of these pests fastened on you. Through the lace-holes of
one's boots, between the folds of putties, down one's collar they
insinuated themselves unnoticed; and you did not feel them until,
bloated with blood and swollen to an enormous size, they were
perceptible to the touch under the clothing. After a walk one was
obliged, on returning to the bungalow, to undress and was sure to find
several leeches fastened to one's body. I saw one sepoy with a leech
firmly fixed in his nostril. Another time I noticed a man's shirt sleeve
stained with blood from elbow to wrist, and, on examining the arm,
discovered that, unknown to the sepoy, two leeches were fastened on it
and had punctured veins.
Sometimes hailstorms alternated with the rain. I had heard stories of
the size of the hailstones in the Duars. Planters had assured me that
animals were often killed and the corrugated iron roofs of the factories
perforated by them. I declined to credit these assertions; although in
other parts of India I have seen hailstones an inch in diameter. But one
night in Buxa, while we were at dinner, a hailstorm rattled on the roof
of the bungalow; and I really believe that if this had not been made of
thick sheets of iron it would have been drilled through. My orderly
picked up one hailstone outside and brought it in to us. We passed it
from hand to hand; and then it occurred to me to measure it. It was a
rectangular block of clear ice containing as a core a round, whitish
hailstone of the usual size and shape; and, using the tape and compass,
we found it was two and a quarter inches long, one and a half broad, and
one inch thick. And this after it had lain for a few minutes on the
ground and had been handled by several persons. Next day a native survey
party, under the command of a European, arrived in Buxa on its way to
inspect the boundary marks along the Bhutan frontier, as these are
frequently moved back into our territory by the wily Bhutanese. The
Englishman in charge told me that he had been caught by the fringe of
this storm on the previous evening. He had only a few yards to run for
shelter but put up his umbrella as he did so. It was drilled through by
the hailstones as if they had been bullets. I heard afterwards of
several animals killed in the hills by this storm.
Shut up in our small Station by the relentless rain the days passed
wearily during the long wet months. Often in the afternoon the rain
ceased for a couple of hours; and we were able to get out for a little
exercise. So steep were the slopes, so rocky the soil, that in half an
hour after the cessation of the downpour the road and the parade ground
were comparatively dry. But we could not wander off them without the
risk of being attacked by scores of leeches.
In July came a break of nearly a week. I took advantage of it to descend
into the forest. Wonderful was the transformation there! No longer could
I complain that there was no shelter for game. The undergrowth was
higher and denser than ever. Save for an occasional blackened
tree-trunk, half hidden in the greenery, there was no trace of the
devastation wrought by the fires. The ashes had only served to fertilise
the ground, and the vegetation pushed more vigorously than ever. Orchids
again clothed the boughs. And, sporting in the unusual sunshine, myriads
of gorgeous tropical butterflies, scarlet and black, peacock-green, pale
blue, yellow, all the colours imaginable, rose up in clouds before my
elephant. The creepers again swinging from stem to stem writhed and
twisted in fantastic confusion. The rivers were in flood and rolled
their masses of brown, foam-flecked water to the south.
Despite the awful storms I saw no trace in the forest or the hills of
damage wrought by lightning. When we arrived in Buxa I had thought the
buildings well protected, as conductors ran down every chimney in
bungalow and barrack. But just before the Rains an engineer of the
Public Works Department had visited us to inspect them. To my alarm he
informed me that none of them were properly insulated, and that so far
from being a safeguard, they were a positive danger. Then, having
cheered me by saying that possibly in a year or two his Department would
put them to rights, he left. So when the thunderstorms broke over us I
used to wonder in pained resignation which building would be the first
struck. But we weathered them all successfully. Probably the hills
around saved us by attracting the electric fluid.
Our brief glimpse of fine weather was soon gone. Then the clouds rolled
up from the sea before the breath of the south-west Monsoons, the storms
again assailed us, and the floodgates of the sky were opened once more.
In England one complains of the dullness of a wet summer. Think of five
months' incessant rain in a small Station that never boasted more than
three European inhabitants, cut off from the world and thrown entirely
on their own resources! Smith had long since left us and we had no
doctor. In the middle of the Rains Creagh was ordered off to command the
Trade Agent's escort in Gyantse in Tibet; and I was left the only white
man in Buxa. Life was not gay. Even the relief of work was denied us;
and sport was impossible, for malaria and blackwater fever hold
possession of the jungles during the Monsoon. And even when the Rains
moderated in September, we were not allowed to shoot until the close
season ended in October. The wet season is not really over in India
until near the beginning of November; and in Buxa we sometimes had rain
in that month and in December.
But still we managed to survive the trial by fire and by water; and the
winter found us as ready for work and sport as ever.