[Illustration]
THE SEPOY
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR._
A VAGABOND IN ASIA.
THE UNVEILING OF SHARA.
THE MANTLE OF THE EAST.
THE GENERAL PLAN.
SIRI RAM, REVOLUTIONIST.
THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY.
THE LONG ROAD TO BAGHDAD.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE SEPOY
By
EDMUND CANDLER
LONDON
JOHN MURRAY,
ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
1919
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_All rights reserved_
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TO
SIR VALENTINE CHIROL
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PREFACE
All these sketches, except "The Sikh" and "The Drabi," were written in
Mesopotamia. My aim has been, without going too deeply into origins and
antecedents, to give as accurate a picture as possible of the different
classes of sepoy. In Mesopotamia I met all the sixteen types included in
this volume, some for the first time. My acquaintance with them was at
first hand. But neither sympathy nor observation can initiate the
outsider into the psychology of the Indian soldier; or at least he
cannot be certain of his ground. One must be a regimental officer to
understand the sepoy, and then as a rule one only knows the particular
type one commands.
Therefore, to avoid mistakes and misconceptions, everything that I have
set down has been submitted to authority, and embodies the opinion of
officers best qualified to judge--that is to say, of officers who have
passed the best part of their lives with the men concerned. Even so I
have no doubt that passages will be found that are open to dispute.
Authorities disagree; estimates must vary, especially with regard to the
relative worth of different classes; and one must always bear in mind
that every company officer who is worth his salt is persuaded that there
are no men like his own. It is a pleasing trait and an essential one.
For it is the sworn confraternity between the British and Indian
officer, and the strong tie that binds the sepoy to his Sahib which have
given the Indian Army its traditions and prestige.
All references and statistics concerning the Indian Army will be found
to relate to the pre-war establishment; and no class of sepoy is
included which has been enlisted for the first time since 1914. At the
outbreak of war the strength of the Army in India was 76,953 British and
239,561 Indian. During the war 1,161,789 Indians were recruited. The
grand total of all ranks sent overseas from India was 1,215,338. The
casualties sustained by the force were 101,439. Races which never
enlisted before enlisted freely, and the Indian Army List when published
on the conclusion of Peace will be changed beyond recognition.
One or two classes I have omitted. The introduction of the Gujar, Meo,
Baluchi and Brahui, for instance, as separate types, would be an error
of perspective in a volume this size. It is hardly necessary to
differentiate the Gujar from the Jat; the origin of the two races is
much the same, and in appearance they are not always distinguishable.
The Meo, too, approximates to the Merat. The Baluchi proper has
practically ceased to enlist, and the sepoy who calls himself a Baluch
is generally the descendant of immigrants. There is also a scattering of
Brahuis in the Indian Army. They and the Baluchis are of the same stock,
and are supposed to have come from Aleppo way, though in some
extraordinary manner which nobody can understand the Brahuis have picked
up a Dravidian accent.
It is difficult, too, to write of the Madrasi--Hindu, Mussalman, or
Christian--as an entity apart. All I know of him is that in the Indian
Sappers and Miners and Pioneer regiments, when he is measured with other
classes, his British officer speaks of him as equal to the best.
The names of the officers to whom I am indebted would make a long list.
I met them in camps, messes, trenches, dugouts, and in the open field.
Some are old friends; others are unknown to me by name; many are unaware
that they have contributed material for these sketches; and I can only
thank them collectively for their help. For verification I have
consulted the official handbooks of the Indian Army; and for certain of
my references to the achievements of the Indian Army in France I am
indebted to the semi-official history ("The Indian Corps in France," by
Lieut.-Col. J. W. B. Merewether, C.I.E., and Sir Frederick Smith)
published under the authority of the Secretary of State for India. One
chapter, "The Drabi," I have taken almost bodily from my "Year of
Chivalry," which also included the story of Wariam Singh; my thanks are
due to the publishers, Messrs. Simpkin Marshall, for their permission to
reprint it. For the account of the Jharwas I am indebted to an officer
in a Gurkha regiment who wishes to remain anonymous. For illustrations
my thanks are due to General Holland Pryor, M.V.O., Major G. W.
Thompson, and Lieut.-Cols. Alban Wilson, D.S.O., R. C. Wilson, D.S.O.,
M.C., F. L. Nicholson, D.S.O., M.C., H. M. W. Souter, W. H. Carter, E.
R. P. Berryman, and Mr. T. W. H. Biddulph, C.I.E.
Two Indian words occur frequently in these pages. They are _izzat_ and
_jiwan_, words that are constantly in the mouths of officers and sepoys.
"Izzat" is best rendered by "honour" or "prestige"; "jiwan" means a
"youngster," and is applied to the rank and file of the Indian Army
without reference to age. I have kept the vernacular forms, as it is
difficult to find exact English equivalents, and much that is homely and
familiar in the words is lost in translation.
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE GURKHA 1
THE SIKH 26
THE PUNJABI MUSSALMAN 49
THE PATHAN 63
THE DOGRA 92
THE MAHRATTA 104
THE JAT 115
THE RAJPUT AND BRAHMAN 125
THE GARHWALI 138
THE KHATTAK 149
THE HAZARA 159
THE MER AND MERAT 170
THE RANGHAR 181
THE MEENA 188
THE JHARWAS 200
THE DRABI 208
THE SANTAL LABOUR CORPS 217
THE INDIAN FOLLOWER 227
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING
PAGE
HAVILDAR CHANDRADHOJ (RAI) 6
TEKBAHADUR GHOTAM (KHAS) 6
THE SIKH 26
THE PUNJABI MUSSALMAN 50
THE PATHAN PIPERS 64
THE DOGRA 92
THE KONKANI MAHRATTA 104
THE DEKHANI MUSSALMAN 112
A JAT CAMEL SOWAR 116
THE RAJPUT 126
THE GARHWALI 138
THE HAZARA 160
THE MERAT 170
THE RANGHAR 182
THE MEENA 188
THE JHARWA 200
BHIL FOLLOWERS 230
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THE SEPOY
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THE GURKHA
So much has been written of the Gurkha and the Sikh that officers who
pass their lives with other classes of the Indian Army are tired of
listening to their praises. Their fame is deserved, but the
exclusiveness of it was resented in days when one seldom heard of the
Mahratta, Jat, Dogra, and Punjabi Mussalman. But it was not the Gurkha's
or the Sikh's fault if the man in the street puts them on a pedestal
apart. Both have a very distinctive appearance; with the Punjabi
Mussalman they make up the bulk of the Indian Army; and their proud
tradition has been won in every fight on our frontiers. Now other
classes, whose qualities were hidden, live in the public eye. The war
has proved that all men are brave, that the humblest follower is capable
of sacrifice and devotion; that the Afridi, who is outwardly the nearest
thing to an impersonation of Mars, yields nothing in courage to the
Madrasi Christian of the Sappers and Miners. These revelations have
meant a general levelling in the Indian Army and the uplift of classes
hitherto undeservedly obscure. At the same time the reputation of the
great fighting stocks has been splendidly maintained.
The hillmen of Nepal have stood the test as well as the best. Ask the
Devons what they think of the 1/9th Gurkhas who fought on their flank on
the Hai. Ask Kitchener's men and the Anzacs how the 5th and 6th bore
themselves at Gallipoli, and read Ian Hamilton's report. Ask Townshend's
immortals how the 7th fought at Ctesiphon; and the British regiments who
were at Mahomed Abdul Hassan and Istabulat what the 1st and 8th did in
these hard-fought fights. Ask the gallant Hants rowers against what odds
the two Gurkha battalions[1] forced the passage of the Tigris at Shumran
on February 23rd. And ask the commander of the Indian Corps what sort of
a fight the six Gurkha battalions[2] put up in France.
Nothing could have been more strange to the Gurkha and more different
from what his training for frontier warfare had taught him to expect
than the conditions in Flanders. The first trenches the Gurkhas took
over when they were pushed up to the front soon after their arrival in
France were flooded and so deep that the little men could not stand up
to the parapet. They were exposed to the most devastating fire of heavy
artillery, trench-mortars, bombs, and machine guns. Parts of their
trench were broken up and obliterated by the Hun Minnewerfers and became
their graves. They hung on for the best part of a day and a night in
this inferno, but in the end they were overwhelmed and driven out of the
position, as happens sometimes with the best troops in the world. The
surprising thing is that they became inured to this kind of warfare. Not
only did they stand their ground, but in more than one assault they
drove the Huns from their positions, and in September, 1915, the same
battalion that had suffered so severely near Givenchy carried line after
line of German trenches west of Martin du Pietre.
Those early months in France, when our troops, ill provided with bombs
and trench-mortars and inadequately supported by artillery, were
shattered by a machinery of destruction to which they could make little
reply, were very much like hell. The soldier's dream of war had come,
but in the form of a nightmare. Afterwards in Mesopotamia, the
trench-fighting at El-Hannah and Sannaiyat was not much more inspiring.
But the hour was to come when our troops had more than a sporting chance
in a fight, and war became once more for the man at the end of the rifle
something like his picture of the great game. The Gurkhas were severely
tried in the ordeal by which this change was effected, and they played a
stout part especially in the Tigris crossing, the honour of which they
shared with the Norfolks; but, like the British Tommy in these trying
times, they were always cheerful.
It is not the nature of any Sepoy to grouse. Patience and endurance is
the heritage of all, but cheerfulness is most visible in the "Gurkh." He
laughs like Atkins when the shells miss him, and he is never down on his
luck. When the Turks were bombarding us on the Hai, I watched three
delighted Gurkhas throwing bricks on the corrugated iron roof of a
signaller's dug-out. A lot of stuff was coming over, shrapnel and high
explosive, but the Gurkhas were so taken up with their little joke of
scaring the signallers that the nearer the burst the better they were
pleased. The signallers wisely lay "doggo" until one of the Gurkhas
appeared at the door of the dug-out and gave the whole show away by a
too expansive grin.
In France the element of shikar was eliminated. It would be affectation
in the keenest soldier to pretend that he enjoyed the long-linked
bitterness of Festubert, Givenchy, and Neuve Chapelle. But in
Mesopotamia, especially after the crossing of the Tigris and the capture
of Baghdad, there were many encounters in which one could think of war
in the terms of sport. "There has been some shikar," is the Gurkha's way
of describing indifferently a small scrap or a big battle. Neuve
Chapelle was shikar. And it was shikar the other day when a Gurkha
patrol by a simple stratagem surprised some mounted Turks. The stratagem
succeeded. The Turks rode up unsuspectingly within easy range, but the
Gurkhas did not empty a single saddle. Their British officer chaffed
them on their bad shooting; but the havildar grinned and said, "At least
a little shikar has taken place." That is the spirit. War is a kind of
sublimated shikar. It is the mirror of the chase. The Gurkha is hunting
when he is battle-mad, and sees red; and he is hunting when he glides
alone through the grass or mud on a dark, silent night to stalk an enemy
patrol. Following up a barrage on the Hai, the 1/9th were on the Turks
like terriers. "Here, here, Sahib!" one of them called, and pointing to
a bay where the enemy still cowered, pitched his bomb on a Turk's head
with a grin of delight and looked round at a paternal officer for
approval. Another was so excited that he followed his grenade into the
trench before it had burst, and he and his Turk were blown up together.
The first time I saw Gurkhas in a civilized battle was at Beit Aieesa,
where the little men were scurrying up and down the trenches they had
just taken, with blood on their bayonets and clothes, bringing up
ammunition and carrying baskets of bombs as happy and keen and busy as
ferrets. They had gone in and scuppered the Turk before the barrage had
lifted. They had put up a block and were just going to bomb down a
communication trench. I saw one of them pull up the body of a British
Tommy who had been attached to the regiment as a signaller and was
bombed into a mess. The Gurkha patted him on the shoulder and
disappeared behind the traverse without a word.
[Illustration:
left. HAVILDAR CHANDRAHOJ (RAJ).
right. TEKBAHADUR GHOTAM (KHAS).
]
The Gurkha fights as he hunts. Parties of them go into the jungle to
hunt the boar. They beat the beast up and attack him with kukris when he
tries to break through their line. It is a desperate game, and the
casualties are a good deal heavier than in pig-sticking. The Gurkha's
attitude to the Turk or the Hun is his attitude to the boar. There is no
hostility or hate in him, and he is a cheerful, if a grim, fighter.
There was never a Gurkha fanatic. The Magar or Gurung does not wish to
wash his footsteps in the blood of the ungodly. To the righteous or the
unrighteous stranger he is alike indifferent. There is no race he would
wish to extirpate, and he has few prejudices and no hereditary foes.
When his honour or interest is touched he is capable of rapid primitive
reprisals, but he does not as a rule brood or intrigue. His outlook is
that of a healthy boy. There is no person so easy to get on with as the
"Gurkh." The ties of affection that bind him to his regimental officers
are very intimate indeed. When the Sahib goes on leave trekking, or
shooting, or climbing, he generally takes three or four of the regiment
with him. I have often met these happy hunting-parties in and beyond the
Himalayas. I have a picture in my mind of a scene by the Woolar Lake in
Kashmir. The Colonel of a Gurkha regiment is sitting in a boat waiting
for a youth whom he has allowed to go to a village on some errand of his
own. The Colonel has waited two hours. At last the youth appears, all
smiles, embracing a pumpkin twice the size of his head. No rebuke is
administered for the delay. The youth squats casually in the boat at his
Colonel's feet, and as he cuts the pumpkin into sections, makes certain
unquotable comments on the village folk of Kashmir. As the pair
disappear across the lake over the lotus leaves I hear bursts of
laughter.
The relations between officers and men are as close as between boys and
masters on a jaunt together out of school, and the Gurkha no more thinks
of taking advantage of this when he returns to the regiment than the
English schoolboy does when he returns to school. It is part of his
jolly, boyish, uncalculating nature that he is never on the make. In
cantonments, when any fish are caught or any game is shot, the
first-fruits find their way to the mess. No one knows how it comes. The
orderly will simply tell you that the men brought it. Perhaps after a
deal of questioning the shikari may betray himself by a fatuous, shy,
bashful grin.
The Gurkha does not love his officer because he is a Sahib, but because
he is his Sahib, and the officer has to prove that he is his Sahib
first, and learn to speak his language and understand his ways. A
strange officer coming into a Gurkha regiment is not adopted into the
Pantheon at once. He has to qualify. There may be a period of suspicion;
but once accepted, he is served with a fidelity and devotion that are
human and dog-like at the same time. I do not emphasize the exclusive
attachment of the Gurkha to his own Sahib as an exemplary virtue; it is
a fault, though it is the defect of a virtue. And it is a peculiarly
boyish fault. It is the old story of magnifying the house to the neglect
of the school. Infinite prestige comes of it; and this is to the good.
But prestige is often abused. Exclusiveness does not pay in a modern
army. In the organism of the ideal fighting machine the parts are
compact and interdependent; and it would be a point to the good if every
Gurkha were made to learn Hindustani and encouraged to believe that
there are other gods besides his own.
When one hears officers in other Indian regiments disparage the Gurkha,
as one does sometimes, one may be sure that the root of the prejudice
lies in this exclusiveness. I have heard it counted for vanity,
indifference, disrespect. It is even associated, though very wrongly,
with the eminence, or niche apart, which he shares in popular estimation
with the Sikh. But the Gurkha probably knows nothing about this niche.
He is a child of nature. His clannishness is very simple indeed. He
frankly does not understand a strange Sahib. Directly he tumbles to it
that anything is needed of him he will lend a hand, but having no very
deeply-ingrained habit of reverence for caste in the abstract apart from
his devotion to the proved individual, he may appear sometimes a little
neglectful in ceremony. But no Sahib with a grain of imagination or
understanding in him will let the casual habits of the little man weigh
in the balance against his grit and gameness, his loyalty, and his
splendid fighting spirit. I am always suspicious of the officer who
depreciates the Gurkha. He is either sensitively vain, or dull in
reading character, or jealous of the dues which he thinks have been
diverted from some other class to which he is personally attached.
This last infirmity one can understand and forgive. It grows out of an
officer's attachment to his men. It is present sometimes in the British
officers who command Gurkhas. Indeed, a man who after a year's service
with any class of Sepoy is so detached and impartial in mind as not to
find peculiar and distinctive virtues in his own men, ought not to be
serving in the Indian Army at all. I remember once hearing a subaltern
in a very obscure regiment discussing his class company. The battalion
had not seen service for at least three generations, and everyone took
it for granted that they would "rat" the first time they heard a shot
fired. But the boy was full of "bukh."
"By Jove!" he said, "our fellows are simply splendid, the best plucked
crowd in the Indian Army, and so game.... Oh no! they've never been in
action, but you should just see how they lay one another out at hockey."
Before the war one would have smiled inwardly at this "encomium," if one
could have preserved one's outward countenance, but Armageddon, the
corrective of exclusiveness and pride, has taught us that gallantry
resides under the most unlikely exteriors. It has taught us to look for
it there. Anyhow the boy had the right spirit even if his faith were
founded in illusion; for it is through these ties of mutual loyalty that
the spirit of the Indian Army is strong.
The devotion of the Sepoy to his officer is common to most, perhaps to
all, classes of the Indian Army. In some of the Gurkha battalions it is
usual for two of the men to mark their Sahib when he goes into action,
to follow him closely, and if he falls, to look after him and bring him
back whether wounded or dead. This is a tacitly understood and quite
unofficial arrangement, and the officer knows no more about his
self-appointed guard than the hero or villain of melodrama about the
detective who dogs his footsteps in the street. In France a British
officer in a Gurkha regiment knocked out by shell-shock opened his eyes
to find his orderly kneeling over him fanning the flies off his face. He
lost consciousness again. When he came to the Gurkha was still fanning
him, and the tears were rolling down his cheeks.
"Why are you crying, 'Tegh Bahadur?'" he said; "I am not badly hit."
"I am crying, Sahib," he said, "because my arm is gone, and I am no more
able to fight." And with a nod he indicated the wound. The shell that
had stunned the Sahib had carried off the orderly's forearm at the
elbow.
The Medical Officer will tell you that the Gurkha is the pluckiest
little fellow alive. In hospital he will go on smoking and chatting to
you when he is dying, fighting his battles over again. I remember a
Gurkha in an ambulance at Sinn pointing his index finger, which was
hanging by a tendon, as he described the attack. During a cholera
outbreak in 1916 among the Nepalese troops garrisoning the Black
Mountains frontier a Gurkha, who was evidently _in extremis_, was being
carried by his Major and another officer to a bit of rising ground where
there was some shade and a little breeze. When in an interval of
consciousness he opened his eyes and saw two Sahibs carrying him, he
tried to raise himself to the salute, but fell back in a half faint.
"You must pardon me, Sahib," he said, "but owing to weakness I am unable
to salute." The Major told him to lie still. "We are taking you to a
cool place," he explained. "Now you must be quick and get well." The
Gurkha answered with a faint smile, "Now that your honours have honoured
me by carrying me, I shall quickly get well." In a few minutes he died.
The Gurkha is not given to the neatly turned speech, the apt phrase, and
one might search one's memory a long time before one recalled a
compliment similar to this one spoken in simple sincerity by a dying
man. The arts of conciliation are not practised where he camps. There is
a delightful absence of the courtier about him, and he could not make
pretty speeches if he tried. The "Our Colonel Sahib shot remarkably
well, but God was merciful to the birds" story is told of a very
different race. If a colonel of Gurkhas shoots really badly, his orderly
will probably be found doubled up with mirth. The few comments of the
Gurkha that stick in the mind are memorable in most instances for some
crudeness, or misconception, or for a primitive, and not infrequently a
somewhat gruesome, sense of humour. One meets many types, but the
average "Gurkh," though observant, is not as a rule quick at the uptake.
I heard a characteristic story of one, Chandradhoj, a stalwart Limbu of
Eastern Nepal. It was in November last year, in the days of trench
warfare. His Colonel had sent him from the Sannaiyat trenches to Arab
Village to have his boots mended, and when he was returning in the
evening the Turks got it into their heads that a relief was taking
place, and put in a stiff bombardment, paying special attention to the
road. Chandradhoj got safely back through this. When the Colonel met him
in the evening passing his dug-out he stopped him and asked him how he
had fared.
"Well, you've got back all right," he said. "You wern't hit!"
"No, Sahib, I was not hit. I came back in artillery formation."
One could see him solemnly stepping aside a few paces from the road, the
prescribed distance from the imaginary sections on the left or right.
These were the Sahib's orders at such times, he would argue, and there
must be salvation in the rite.
The Gurkha sees what he sees, and his visual range is his mental range.
At Kantara he only saw the desert, and the desert was sand. Other
conditions beyond the horizon, an oasis for instance, were
inconceivable. He tried to get it out of his Sahib how and where the
Bedouin lived who came into Kantara Post. He thought they lived in holes
in the sand, but what they ate he could not imagine. When they came into
the Post looking wretched and miserable he gave them chapattis. "But,
Sahib," he asked, "what could they have eaten before we came other than
sand?"
One is never quite sure what will move a Gurkha to laughter. He grins at
things which tickle a child's fancy, and he grins at things which make
the ordinary man feel very sick inside. When the Turk abandoned Sinn in
May, 1916, we occupied the position. The advance lay over the month-old
battlefield of Beit Aieesa, and the enemy's dead were lying everywhere
in a very unpleasant stage of dissolution. Suddenly the grimness of the
scene was disturbed by explosive bursts of laughter. It was the Gurkhas.
"Well, what is the joke? What are you laughing at?" an officer asked
them. "Look, Sahib!" one of them said. "The devils are melting." Only he
used a much more impolite word than "devil," for which we have no
translation.
The Gurkha has not a very high estimate of the value of life. A few
years ago, when Rugby football was introduced in a certain battalion,
there was an unfortunate casualty soon after the first kick-off. One of
the men, collared by his Sahib, broke his neck on the hard ground, and
was killed stone-dead. The incident sealed the fate of Association in
the regiment, and Rugby became the vogue from that hour. "This is
something like a game," they said, "when you kill a man every time you
play."
The Gurkha would not be such a fine fighter if he had not a bit of the
primitive in him. Several years ago two companies of a Gurkha battalion,
who were holding a post in a frontier show, were bothered by snipers at
night. The shots came from a clump of bushes on the edge of a blind
nullah full of high brushwood, which for some reason it was inadvisable
to picquet. Here was an excellent chance of shikar, and a havildar and
four men asked if they might go out at night and stalk the Pathans. They
were allowed to go, the conditions being that they were to go
bare-footed, they were not to take rifles, and they were to do the work
with the kukri. Also they were to stay out all night, as they would
certainly be shot by the sentries of other regiments if they tried to
come in. Only one sniper's bullet whizzed into camp that night. The next
morning the havildar entered the mess while the officers were
breakfasting. He came in with his left hand behind his back and saluted.
"Sahib," he said, "two of the snipers have been killed."
"That's good, havildar," the Colonel said. "But how do you know that you
got them? Are they lying there, or have their brothers taken them away?"
The havildar, grinning broadly, produced a Pathan's head, and dumped it
on the breakfast table. "The other is outside," he said. "Shall I bring
it in?"
The Gurkha is good at this kind of night-work; he has the nerve of a
Highlander and the stealth of a leopard. His great fault in a general
attack is that he does not know when to stop. Without his Sahib he would
not survive many battles. And that is why the casualties are so heavy in
regiments when the British officers fall early in the fight. When the
Gurkhas were advancing at Beit Aieesa, I heard an officer in a Sikh
regiment say, "Little blighters. They're always scurrying on ahead, and
if you don't look after them they will make a big salient and bite off
more than they can chew." This is exactly what happened, though with the
Turkish guns as a bait, guns which they took and lost afterwards by
reason of the offending salient, they would not have been human if they
had held back.
The Gurkha battalions, as everybody knows, have permanent cantonments in
the hills, and do not move about like other regiments from station to
station. Most of them have their wives and families in the lines, and in
the leave season they get away for a time to their homes in Nepal. In
peace the permanent cantonment with its continuity of home life is a
privilege; but in the war the Gurkhas, like every other class of sepoy,
have had to bear with a weariness of exile which it is difficult for any
one but their own officers to understand. It is true of the Gurkha, as
of the Indian of the plains, that he gives up more when he leaves his
home to fight in a distant country than the European. The age-worn
traditions and associations which make up homeliness for him, the
peculiar and cherished routine, cannot be translated overseas. And it
must be remembered that the sepoy has not the same stimulus as we have.
It is true that he is a soldier, and that it is his business to fight,
and that he is fighting his Sahib's enemy. That carries him a long way.
But he does not see the Hun as his Sahib sees him, as an intolerable,
blighting incubus which he must cast off or die. One appreciates his
cheerfulness in exile all the more when one remembers this.
On a transport this summer in Basra, Asbahadur, a young Gurung from
Western Nepal was pointed out to me. He had just come home from leave.
He had six weeks in India, but there was the depôt to visit first. He
had to pick up his kit and draw his pay, and by the time he had got to
his village, Kaski Pokhri, on the Nepal frontier, sixteen days hard
going from Gorakhpur in the U.P., he found that he had only four days at
home before he must start off again to catch his steamer at Bombay. But
he had seen his family, his house, his crops, the barn that had to be
repaired, the familiar stretch of jungle and stream. He had dumped his
money in the only place where money is any good; and he had seen that
all was well.
He had learned, too, that it was well with his young brother, who had
run away from home to join the army, as so many young Gurkhas did at the
beginning of the war,--literally "running" for the best part of two
nights and days, only a short neck ahead of his pursuing parents, who
had now forgiven him.
There is conscription in Nepal now and there is no need for the young
men to run away. Asbahadur told me that he had met very few young men of
his age near his home. In his village the women were doing the work, as
they were in France, and as he understood was the case in the Sahib's
country. The garrisoning of India by the Nepalese troops had depleted
the county of youth. You only met old men and cripples and boys. Early
in the war the Nepal Durbar came forward with a splendid offer of
troops, which we were quick to accept. Thousands of her best, including
the Maharaja's _Corps de garde_, poured over the frontier into
Hindustan, and released many regular battalions for service overseas.
They have fought on the frontier, and taken their part in policing the
border from the Black Mountains on the north to as far south as the
territory of the Mahsuds.
There are three main divisions of Gurkhas: the Magar and Gurung of
Central and Western Nepal, indistinguishable except for a slight accent;
the Limbu and Rai of Eastern Nepal; and the Khattri and Thakur, who are
half Aryan. The Magars and Gurungs are the most Tartar-like, short, with
faces flat as scones. The Limbu and Rai physiognomy assimilates more
with the Chinese. In the Khattri and Thakur, or Khas Gurkhas as they are
called by others, though they do not accept the term, the Hindu strain
is distinguishable, though the Mongol as a rule is predominant. They are
the descendants of Brahmans or Rajputs and Gurkha women; hence the
opprobrious "khas," or "fallen." But it is a blend of nobility--a proud
birthright. It is only the implication of the "fall" they resent,--for
these marriages were genuine but for the narrow legislation of orthodoxy
and caste. Before the war it was taken as a matter of course by some
that the streak of plainsman in the mountaineer must imply a softening
of the national fibre, but the war has proved them as good as the best.
In the crossing of the Tigris at Shumran, the miniature Mesopotamian
Gallipoli, the Khas (9th Gurkhas) shared the honours in full with the
Magars and Gurung (2nd Gurkhas); but long before that any suspicion of
inferiority had been dissipated.
It is difficult to differentiate the different classes, but the Khas
Gurkha is probably the most intelligent. In the Limbu and the Rai there
are sleeping fires. They are as fastidious about their honour as the
Pathan and the Malay, and when any sudden and grim poetic justice is
exacted in blood in a Gurkha regiment the odds are that one or the other
are at the bottom of it. The Magars and the Gurung are the basic type,
the "everyman" among Gurkhas, the backbone in numbers of the twenty
battalions. As regards pluck there is nothing to choose between any of
them, and if one battalion goes further than another the extra
stiffening is the work of the British officers.
One's impression of the Gurkha in war and peace is of an almost
mechanical smartness, movements as quick and certain as the click of a
rifle bolt. Soldiering is a ritual among them. You may mark it in the
way they pitch camp, solemnly, methodically, driving in each peg as if
it were an ordained rite. They have learnt it all by rote. They could do
it as easily in their sleep. And the discipline has stood the shock of
seismic disturbance. In the Dharmsala earthquake of 1905 the quarter
guard of the 2/8th Gurkhas turned out and saluted their officer with the
same clockwork precision, when their bungalow had fallen like a house of
cards. They had escaped by a miracle, and half the regiment had been
killed, or maimed, or buried alive.
But remove the Gurkha from the atmosphere of barracks and camps and the
whole ritual is forgotten like a dream. Out on shikar, or engaged in any
work away from the battalion, he becomes his casual self again. But the
guest of a Gurkha regiment does not see this side of him. I have
memories of the men called into the mess and standing round like graven
images, the personality religiously suppressed, the smile tardily
provoked if Generals or strange Sahibs are present. A boy, with a
smooth, round, innocent face, as still and as expressionless as if he
had been hypnotized. Next to him a man with the face of a bonze. Another
with an expression of ferocity asleep and framed in benevolence. Passion
has drawn those deep lines at right angles with the mouth. They are
scars of the spirit--often enough now in the same setting as dints of
lead and steel.
You get these faces in Gurung, Magar, Limbu, Khas, and Rai. But
differentiation is profitless and often misleading, whether as regards
the outward or inward man. I heard an almost heated discussion as to
relative values by officers, who should know best, terminated by an
outsider with the laconic comment, "They are all dam good at chivying
chickens." As to this all were agreed. And the remark called up another
picture--the Gurkha returning from a punitive raid against a cut-throat
tribe, smothered in spoil and accoutrements, three carpets under one
saddle, and the little man on top with chickens under each arm, and
strung as thick as cartridges to his belt and bandolier.
THE SIKH
It has often been said that the Indian Army has kept Sikhism alive. War
is a conserver of the Khalsa, peace a dissolvent. When one understands
how this is so, one has grasped what Sikhism has done for the followers
of the faith, and why the Sikh is different in habit and thought from
his Hindu and Muhammadan neighbour, though in most cases he derives from
the same stock.
The Sikhs are a community, not a race. The son of a Sikh is not himself
a Sikh until he has taken the pahul, the ceremony by which he is
admitted into the Khalsa, the community of the faithful. It would take
volumes to explain exactly what initiation means for him. But the
important thing to understand is that the convert, in becoming a Sikh,
is not charged with a religious crusade. There is no bigotry in the
faith that has made a Singh of him. His baptism by steel and "the waters
of life" only means that he has gained prestige by admission into a
military and spiritual brotherhood of splendid traditions.
[Illustration: THE SIKH.]
Guru Nanak (1469-1539), the founder of the sect, was a man of peace and
a quietist. He only sought to remove the cobwebs that had overgrown
sectarian conceptions of God. He could not in his most prophetic dreams
have foreseen the bearded, martial Sikh whom we know to-day. This is the
Govindi Sikh, the product of the tenth Guru, that inspired leader of men
who welded his followers into the armed fraternity which supplanted the
Moguls and became the dominant military class of the Punjab.
It was persecution that made the Sikh what he is--not theological
conviction. Dogma was incidental. The rise of the Khalsa was a political
movement. The thousands of Jat yeomen who joined the banner accepted the
book with the sword. To make a strong and distinctive body of them, to
lift them above the Hindu ranks, to convert a sect into a religion, to
give them a cause and a crusade was Govind's work. It was he who
consolidated the Sikhs by giving them prestige. He instituted the
Khalsa, or the commonwealth of the chosen, into which his disciples were
initiated by the ceremony of the pahul. He swept away ritual, abolished
caste, and ordained that every Sikh should bear the old Rajput title of
Singh, or Lion, as every Govindi Sikh does to this day. He also gave
national and distinctive traits to the dress of his people, ordaining
that they should carry a sword, dagger, and bracelet of steel, don
breeches instead of a loincloth, and wear their hair long and secured in
a knot by a comb. He it was who grafted the principles of valour,
devotion, and chivalry on the humble gospel of Nanak, and introduced the
national salutation of "Wah Guru ji ka Khalsa! Wa Guru ji ki
Futteh!"--"Hail to the Khalsa! Victory to God"--a chant that has
dismayed the garrison of many a doomed trench held by the Turk and the
Hun.
"The Sikhs of Govind shall bestride horses,
And bear hawks upon their hands;
The Turks who behold them shall fly;
One shall combat a multitude,
And the Sikh who thus perishes shall be blessed for ever."[3]
It was odd that the Arabs in Mesopotamia should have called the Sikh
"The Black Lion,"[4] bearing witness to the boast that every member of
the Khalsa when he puts on the consecrated steel and adopts the title of
Singh is lionised in the most literal sense of the word and becomes the
part in fact as well as in name.
War is a necessary stimulus for Sikhism. In the reaction of peace the
Sikh population dwindles. It was in the struggle with Islam, during the
ascendency of Ranjit Singh, in the two wars against the British, and
after in the Mutiny, when the Sikhs proved our loyal allies, that the
Khalsa was strongest. Without the incentive to honour and the door open
to military service the ineradicable instincts of the Hindu reassert
themselves. Fewer jiwans come forward and take the pahul; not only is
the community weakened by lack of disciples, but many who hold fast to
the form let go the spirit; ritual, idolatry, superstition,
exclusiveness, and caste, the old enemies to the reformed religion,
creep in again; the aristocracy of honour lapses into the aristocracy of
privilege. Then the Brahman enters in, and the simple faith is obscured
by all manner of un-Sikh-like preoccupations. Sikhism might have fallen
back into Hinduism and become an obscure sect if it had not been for the
Indian Army. But here the insignia of Guru Govind have been maintained,
and his laws and traditions. The class regiments and class-company
regiments have preserved not merely the outward observances; they have
kept alive the inward spirit of the Khalsa. Thus it is that the Sikh has
more class feeling than any other sepoy, and more pride in himself and
his community. Govind set the lion stamp on him as he intended. By his
outward signs he cannot be mistaken--by his beard, the steel bracelet on
his wrist, his long knotted hair, or if that is hidden, by the set of
his turban, above all by his grave self-respect. The casual stranger can
mark him by one or all of these signs, but there is a subtler physical
distinction in expression and feature that you cannot miss when you know
the Sikh well. This is quite independent of insignia. It is as marked in
a boy without a hair to his chin as in an old campaigner. This also is
Govind's mark, the sum of his influence inscribed on the face by the
spirit. A great tribute this to the genius of the Khalsa, when one
remembers that the Sikh is not a race apart, but comes of the same
original stock as most of his Hindu and Muhammadan neighbours in the
Punjab, and that Govind, his spiritual ancestor, only died two hundred
years ago.
Amongst all the races and castes that have been caught up into the
Khalsa, by far the most important in influence and numbers is the Jat.
Porus was probably of the race. When Alexander, impressed by his
gallantry, asked him what boon he might confer, he demanded "to be
treated like a king"--a very Sikh-like speech. The Sikh soldier is the
Jat sublimated, and the bulk of the Sikhs in the Indian Army are of Jat
origin. Authorities differ as to the derivation of the Jats, but it is
commonly believed that they and the Rajputs are of the same Scythian
origin, and that they represent two separate waves of invasion; and this
is borne out by their physical resemblance and by a general similarity
in their communal habits of life. The Jat, so long as he remains a
Hindu, is called Jāt (pronounced Jā-āt), while the Jat who has adopted
Sikhism is generally referred to as Jăt (pronounced Jŭt). The spelling
is the same, and to the uninitiated this is a constant source of
confusion. The difference in pronunciation arose from a subtlety of
dialect, it being customary in the part of the Punjab where Sikhs
preponderate to shorten the long Ā of the Hindi.
The Jat is the backbone of the Punjab. From his Scythian ancestors is
derived the same stubborn fibre that stiffens the Punjabi cultivator,
whatever changes he may have suffered by influence of caste or creed,
whether he be Hindu, Muhammadan, or Sikh. The admitted characteristics
of the Jat are stubbornness, tenacity, patience, devotion, courage,
discipline and independence of spirit fitly reconciled; add to these the
prestige and traditions of the Khalsa and you have the ideal Sikh.
I say "the ideal Sikh," for without the contributory influences you may
not get the type as Govind conceived it. The ideal Sikh is the happy
Sikh, the Sikh who is content with the place he occupies in his cosmos,
who respects and believes in his superior officers, who does not
consider himself unjustly treated, and who has received no injury to his
self-esteem. For the virtuous ingredients in his composition are subject
to reaction. When he fancies he is wronged, he broods. The milk in him
becomes gall. The "waters of life" stirred by steel, his baptismal
draught, take on an acid potency. "I'd rather command Sikhs than any
other class of sepoy," a brigadier told me, and he had commanded every
imaginable class of sepoy for twenty years, "but they must be happy
Sikhs," he added. The brooding or intriguing Sikh is a nuisance and a
danger.
The pick of the Khalsa will be found in the class regiments and class
company regiments to which the Sikhism of to-day owes its conservation,
vigour, and life. The 14th Sikhs were raised at Ferozepore in 1846; the
15th at Ludhiana in the same year; the 45th Rattray's Sikhs in 1856 for
service among the Sonthals; the 35th and 36th Sikhs in 1887, the 47th in
1901. The 15th, the oldest Sikh battalion, and the 47th, the latest
raised, were the first to be given the opportunity of showing the mettle
of the Khalsa in a European war. The 47th, who were not raised till
1901, earned as proud a record as any in France, distinguishing
themselves from the day in October, 1914, when, with the 20th and 21st
Sappers and Miners, they cleared the village of Neuve Chapelle after
some Homeric hand-to-hand fighting in the houses and streets, to the
desperately stubborn advance up the glacis to the German trenches on
April 26, 1915, in the second battle of Ypres, when the regiment went in
with eleven British and ten Indian officers and 423 other ranks, of whom
but two British and two Indian officers and 92 rank and file mustered
after the action. The 15th Sikhs, one of the two earliest-raised Sikh
battalions, were the first to come into action in France, and they
maintained a high-level reputation for gallantry all through the
campaign. The story of Lieutenant Smyth and his ten Sikh bombers at
Festubert is not likely to be forgotten. Smyth and two sepoys were the
only two survivors of this gallant band who passed by a miracle,
crawling over the dead bodies of their comrades, through a torrent of
lead, and carried their bombs through to the first line. Smyth was
awarded the V.C., Lance-Naik Mangal Singh the Indian Order of Merit, and
every sepoy in the party the Indian Distinguished Service Medal. Two of
these men belonged to the 45th Sikhs, four to the 19th Punjabis. And
here it should be remembered that the Sikhs earned a composite part of
the honour of nearly every mixed class-company regiment in France; of
the Punjabi regiments, for instance, and of the Frontier Force Rifle
battalions, in which the number of Sikh companies varies from one to
four, not to mention the Sappers and Miners. It was in the very first
days of the Indians' _début_ in France that a Sikh company of the 57th
Rifles earned fame when it was believed that the line must have given
way, holding on all through the night against repeated counter-attacks,
though the Germans were past them on both flanks. As for the Sappers,
the story of Dalip Singh is pure Dumas. This fire-eater helped his
fallen officer, Lieut. Rail-Kerr, to cover, stood over him and kept off
several parties of Germans by his fire. On one occasion--a feat almost
incredible, but well established--he was attacked by twenty of the
enemy, but beat them all off and got his officer away.[5]
It is in "sticking it out" that the Sikh excels. No one will deny his
_élan_; yet _élan_ is not so remarkably and peculiarly his as the dogged
spirit of resistance that never admits defeat, the spirit that carried
his ancestors through the long ordeal by fire in their struggle with the
Moguls. It is in defensive action that the Sikhs have won most renown,
fighting it out against hopeless, or almost hopeless odds, as at Arrah
and Lucknow in the Mutiny, and in the Tirah campaign at Saraghiri on the
Samana ridge. The defence of the little house at Arrah by Rattray's (the
45th) Sikhs was one of the most glorious episodes of the Indian Mutiny,
and the story of the Sikh picket at Saraghiri will live as long in
history. The whole garrison of the post, twenty-one men of the 36th
Sikhs, a battalion lately raised and then in action for the first time,
fell to a man in its defence. The Afridis admitted the loss of two
hundred dead in the attack. As they pressed in on all sides in
overwhelming numbers the Sikhs kept up their steady fire for six hours,
until the walls of the post fell. The last of the little band perished
in the flames as he defended the guard-room door, and shot down twenty
of the assailants before he succumbed.
Strangely enough, these two regiments, the 36th and 45th Sikhs, to whom
we owe two of the most enduring examples in history of "sticking it
out," fought side by side on the Hai in an action which called for as
high qualities of discipline and endurance under reverse as any that was
fought in Mesopotamia. The Sikhs lived up to their tradition. Both
regiments went over the parapet in full strength and were practically
annihilated. Only 190 effectives came out of the assault; only one
British officer returned unwounded. The 45th on the right were exposed
to a massed counter-attack. A British officer was seen to collect his
men and close in on the Turks in the open; he and his gallant band were
enveloped and overwhelmed. So, too, in Gallipoli the 14th Sikhs, who
saved Allahabad in the Mutiny and immortalized themselves with Havelock
in the march on Lucknow and the defence of the Residency, displayed
their old spirit. When they had fought their way through the unbroken
wire at Gully Ravine (June 4, 1915) and taken three lines of trenches,
they hung on all day, though they had lost three-fourths of their
effectives, and every British officer but two was killed.
But I must tell the story of Wariam Singh, a Jat Sikh of a Punjabi
regiment; it was told me by one Zorowar Singh, his comrade, in France.
"You heard of Wariam Singh, Sahib," he asked--"Wariam Singh, who would
not surrender?"