splendid gallantry of the 41st Dogras in aiding the Black Watch to storm
and occupy the enemy's trenches. The 6th Jats and 97th Infantry were
mentioned with the Dogras. Of the collective achievement of the four
regiments on that day the General wrote:--
"Their advance had to be made across a perfectly open, bullet-swept
area, against sunken loop-holed trenches in broad daylight, and their
noble achievement is one of the highest. The great and most admirable
gallantry of all ranks, and especially that of the British officers, is
worthy of the highest commendation. They showed the highest qualities of
endurance and courage under circumstances so adverse as to be almost
phenomenal."
THE MAHRATTA
I saw it stated in a newspaper that one of the surprises of the war has
been the Mahratta. "Surprise" is hardly a tactful word; and it points
back to a time when two or three classes of sepoy were praised
indiscriminately to the disparagement of others. The war has brought
about a readjustment of values. Not that the more tried and proven types
have disappointed expectation; the surprise is that less conspicuous
types have made good.
In France one heard a great deal about the Garhwali; in Mesopotamia the
Cinderella of the Indian Army was undoubtedly the Mahratta.
[Illustration: THE KONKANI MAHRATTA.]
That his emergence should be a surprise was illogical. The Mahratta
horseman was once a name to conjure with, and the sword of Siwoji has
left a dint in history legible enough. He was once the "Malbrovck" of
Hindustan. If the modern Mahratta has fallen under an eclipse the cause
has been largely geographical. Our frontier campaigns have never offered
the Indian Army active service enough to go round; certainly the Bombay
Army has not come in for its share, and Saihan, on the 15th of November,
1914, was the first pitched battle in which a Mahratta regiment,
constituted as such, had been engaged. What honour he earned before that
went to swell the collective prestige of class-company regiments; for it
was not until the Indian Army was reorganised in 1897 that the Mahratta
battalion came into being. The British officer, of course, in these
regiments knew his sepoy; he believed that the Dekkan and Konkan
produced as stout a breed as any other soil, and he would tell you so in
the most definite terms, and remind you how the Mahrattas proved their
mettle at Maiwand. But then one never listened seriously to a regimental
officer when he talked about his own men.
The Sapper in a field company with divers races under his command is
listened to with less suspicion. It was a Sapper who first opened my
eyes to the virtue of a Mahratta, and that was before the war.
"Who do you think the pick of your lot?" I asked.
"The Mahratta," he replied, unhesitatingly.
"Because he can dig?"
"None better. But it is his grit I was thinking of. I'd as soon have a
Mahratta with me in a scrap as any one."
One heard little or nothing of the Mahratta in France. Yet it was a
Mahratta who earned the Médaille Militaire--I believe the first bestowed
on an Indian--for an unobtrusive bit of work at Givenchy on the 11th of
December, 1914. We took a German saphead that day and drove the Huns
down their communication trench, and then we had to sap back to our own
lines, while another sap was being driven forward to meet us. For
twenty-three hours the small party was cut off from the rest of the
lines, and they worked steadily with their backs to the enemy, bombed at
and fired on the whole time. Supplies and ammunition ran short, and we
threw them a rope with a stone on it, and they dragged ammunition and
food and bombs into the trench, bumping over the German dead, and the
Mahratta took his turn at the traverse covering the party, as cool as a
Scot.
There were but a sprinkling of them in Flanders, a few Sappers and
Miners and two companies of the 107th Pioneers. It was left to Force "D"
to discover that the Mahratta has as big a heart for his size as any
sepoy in the Indian Army. To follow the exploits of the Mahratta
battalions from the battle of Saihan on the 15th November, 1914, to
Ctesiphon is to follow the glorious history of the 6th Division. Up to
and including Ctesiphon, no Mahratta battalion was given a position to
attack which it did not take, and in the retirement on Kut-el-Amarah
their steadiness was well proved. It is a record which is shared with
other regiments; but this chapter is concerned with the Mahratta alone.
They were in nearly every fight, and for a long time they made up a
fourth part of the whole force.
It was the 117th who, with the Dorsets, took the wood, and cleared the
Turks out of their trenches at Saihan. It was the 110th, with the
Norfolks, who led the attack on Mazeera village on the 4th December,
clearing the left bank of the river; and a double company of the
regiment captured the north face of the Qurnah position four days
afterwards. Two battalions of the Mahrattas were in the front line again
at Shaiba when the Turks were routed in one of the hardest fought and
most critical battles of the campaign. They were at Nasiriyeh and Amara,
and they were a tower of strength in the action at Sinn which gave us
Kut-el-Amarah. Here all three battalions--the 103rd, 110th, and
117th--were engaged. They went without water and fought three
consecutive engagements in forty-eight hours. The 117th, with the
Dorsets, and the 22nd company of Sappers and Miners, were the first
troops to enter the enemy's trenches. They broke through the wire and
rushed the big redoubt, led by a subadar-major when all their British
officers had fallen. At Ctesiphon again they covered themselves with
glory. The British regiment brigaded with them speak well of these
hard-bitten men, and many a villager of Dorset, Norfolk, or Oxford will
remember the Mahratta, and think of him as a person one can trust.
"What was the Indian regiment on your right?" I heard a Norfolk man ask
another, in discussing some obscure action on the Tigris of a year ago.
"The ---- Mahrattas."
The Bungay man nodded. "Ah, they wouldn't leave you up a tree."
"Not likely."
And being familiar with the speech of Norfolk men, who are sparing of
tribute, or admiration, or surprise, I knew that the "Mahratta" had
received a better "chit" than even the Sapper had given him.
It was in the trenches, and I had been getting the Norfolks to tell me
about the thrust up the river in the winter of 1914.
There was a lull in the firing. The Turks, 200 yards ahead, were
screened from us by the parapet; and as I stood with my back to this
looking eastward, there was nothing visible but earth and sky and the
Norfolk men, and a patch of untrodden field, like a neglected lawn,
running up to the next earth-work, and yellow with a kind of wild
mustard. The flowers and grasses and a small yellow trefoil, wild
barley, dwarf mallow, and shepherd's purse were Norfolk flowers. They
and the broad, familiar accent of the men made the place a little plot
of Norfolk. Nothing Mesopotamian impinged on the homeliness of the
scene.
And beyond the traverse were the Mahrattas, sons of another soil. They
were a new draft, most of them mere boys who had come straight from the
plough into this hard school. They looked dreamy and pensive, with a not
very intelligent wistfulness, but they were ready for anything that was
going on. Two of them were sniping from a loophole. One of them was shot
in the shoulder through a sandbag while I was there. Soon after dark I
saw a batch of six with an officer step over the parapet into that
particularly horrid zone called no-man's-land. They were to look for
surface mines and to be careful not to tread on one. The bullets cracked
against the parapet, but they were as casual as if they were going out
to pick mushrooms.
The "mines" were charged shell-cases lying flat on the ground. The
difficulty with these young recruits was to prevent them feeling for
them with their feet or prodding them with a bayonet. They were quite
untrained, but there was the same stuff in them as in the men who fought
at Shaiba and Ctesiphon, and boasted that they had never been beaten by
the Turks. A boy of seventeen who had gone out a few nights before was
shot in the leg and lost his patrol. In the morning he found he was
crawling up to the Turkish trenches. He was out all that day, but got
back to his regiment at night, and all the while he hung on to his
rifle.
The Subaltern had been a little depressed with this new batch of
recruits. There was so little time to knock them into shape, and he was
particularly pleased that Ghopade had brought back his rifle.
"They've got the right spirit," he said. "It's only a question of a
month or two. But look at these children."
They certainly did not look very smart or alert or particularly robust.
"This one doesn't look as if he could stick a Turk," I said, and pointed
to a thin hatchet-faced lad who could not have weighed much more than
eight stone.
"Oh, I expect he'd do that all right. They are much wirier than you
would think. It's their turn-out I mean."
"They've been in the trenches a week," I said, by way of extenuation.
But the Subaltern and I had passed by the --th and the --th in the same
brigade, equally trench-bound, and they were comparatively spick and
span.
The Mahratta sepoy is certainly no swashbuckler. To look at him, with
his dark skin and irregular features, you would not take him for a
member of a military caste. No one cares less for appearance; and his
native dress--the big, flat pagri, dhoti, and large loose shoes of the
Dekkan and Konkan--do not lend themselves to smartness. Nor does the
King's uniform bring with it an immediate transformation. The
unaccustomed military turban, which the Sikh or Pathan ties deftly as if
with one fold, falls about the head and down the neck of the Mahratta in
the most capricious convolutions. If he is a Bayard he does not look the
part, and looks, no doubt, as well as his geographical position, have
stood in the way of his finding himself. Anyhow, the men who move the
pawns on the board in the war-game had long passed him over.
The Mahratta battalions are not, strictly speaking, class regiments, for
they each contain a double company of Dekkan Muhammadans. These, but for
their inherited religion, are not very widely separated from the
Mahrattas. They too have brought honour to the Dekkan. At Ctesiphon a
double company of them were attacking a position. They lost all five
officers, the British subaltern killed, two jemadars wounded, two
subadars killed. One subadar, Mirza Rustum Beg, was wounded twice in the
attack, but went on and received his death-wound within twenty-five
yards of the enemy. The rest of the company went on, led by the
havildars, and took the trench at the point of the bayonet.
[Illustration: THE DEKHANI MUSSALMAN.]
That is not a bad record for a class of sepoy who has probably never
been mentioned in the newspapers during the war. But it has been a war
of "surprises," and one of the morals of Mesopotamia is that one ought
not to be surprised at anything. What the Mahratta and Dekkani
Muhammadan have done may be expected from--has, indeed, been paralleled
by--other hardened stocks. With good leading and discipline and the
moral that tradition inspires, you can make good troops out of the
agriculturist in most lands, provided he is not softened by a too
yielding soil.
The Mahratta has no very marked characteristics to distinguish him from
other sepoys. He is just the bedrock type of the Indian cultivator, the
real backbone of the country. And he has all the virtues and limitations
which you will find in the agriculturist whether he be Sikh, Rajput,
Dogra, Jat, or Mussalman, whether he tills the land in the Dekkan or
Peshawar. A prey to the priests, money-lenders and vakils, litigious,
slow-thinking, unsophisticated--but of strong affections, long-enduring
and brave. The small landowner, where the soil resists him and the
elements chastise, is much the same all over the world.
THE JAT
The Jat, as we have seen, is the backbone of the Punjab; for it is from
this Scythian breed that most of the Sikhs and a number of the Punjabi
Mussalmans derive their sinews and stout-heartedness. If you used the
word in its broad ethnic sense, signifying all classes of Jat descent,
the muster would include the best part of the roll of modern Indian
chivalry. But it is with the Hindu Jat, whose ancestors were not seduced
or intimidated by Islam and who himself is not sufficiently attracted by
the Khalsa to become a Sikh, that this chapter deals. That neither
material expediency, love of honour, nor the glamour of an ideal has
turned him aside from the immemorial path of his ancestors presupposes a
certain stolidity, in which one is not disappointed when one knows the
man.
I have passed many years in a district where there are Jats, but the Jat
villager is not the same man as the Jat sepoy, and I did not make
acquaintance with the sepoy breed until I ran across the bomb-havildar
of the 6th Jats in Mesopotamia.
I was taking my bully, and "Tigris" and whisky, with a Jat regiment, the
6th, when the discussion arose as to why the Jat wears gold in his
teeth. The doctor thought the idea was that gold carried you over the
Styx; it was a kind of Elysian toll. I persuaded the Colonel to call one
of the men into the dug-out and to draw him on the point. So Tara, the
bomb-havildar, was sent for, a jiwan of five years' service and the
quickest intelligence in the regiment.
Tara entered, saluted and stood at attention, each joint of him
independently stiff and inflexible, the stiffest wooden soldier could
not be more stiff than he, and his rifle was speckless in spite of the
mud. At the O.C.'s command his limbs became more independent of one
another, but rigidity was still the prominent note.
"Why do Jats wear gold in their teeth, Tara?" the Colonel asked: "this
Sahib wants to know."
Tara pondered.
[Illustration: A JAT CAMEL SOWAR.]
"For the sake of appearance, Sahib," he said, "to give them an air."
"Is there no other reason?"
Tara consulted the tarpaulin overhead, the mud walls, the mud table of
the mess, where "La Vie Parisienne" and a Christmas annual gave the only
bit of relief to this dun-coloured habitation. Then he smiled and
delivered himself slowly, "There is a saying among my people, Sahib,
that he who wears gold in his teeth must always speak what is true. Gold
in the teeth stops the passage of lies."
"But you have no gold in your teeth?"
"No, Sahib."
"Is that why you tell the tall story about all those Germans you killed
at Festubert?"
Tara smiled at this thrust.
"No, Sahib," he said, laughing. "It is true I killed ten between two
traverses."
"Better ask him right out, sir," the doctor suggested.
"I have heard some story about gold helping the Jat to heaven," the
Colonel observed to Tara.
The gleam of reminiscence in the havildar's eyes, as he confirmed this
legend, showed that he was not speaking merely to please. It was the old
story of Charon. Gold, he explained, was a passport in the other world
as in this, and it was not safe to carry it on the finger or on the ear
where it might be detached, so it was worn in the teeth.
"And who puts it there?"
"The goldsmith, Sahib," and he enlarged upon the exorbitance of the
Sonari; for the Jat is as thrifty as the Scot.
It was on account of these charges that Tara had omitted the rite.
"When you go back to your village," the Colonel said, dismissing him,
"don't forget to visit the Sonari, and then you will not tell any more
lies."
Tara saluted with an irradiating smile.
"Assuredly, Sahib, I will not forget," he said. "I shall go straight to
the Sonari."
This was quite a sally for Tara, and we all laughed, for the Jat is not
quick at repartee. The way we had to dig the story out of him was
characteristic, but he is not as a rule so responsive to badinage. The
Jat has no time for play. When he is a boy he is too busy looking after
the cows, and his nose is kept at the grindstone until he crumbles into
the soil that bore him. He has no badges, flags, emblems, no peculiar
way of tying his turban or wearing his clothes; and he has very little
sentiment. It was a stroke of genius in Guru Gobind Singh when he turned
the Jat into a Sikh, gave him the five badges, and wedded him to steel.
Tradition grew with the title of Singh, and a great military brotherhood
was founded: but in the unconverted Jat there is the same strong fibre,
the stronger, the regimental officer will tell you, for not having been
uprooted or pruned, and he prides himself that he will make as good a
soldier out of the Jat as ever the Guru did.
The Jat is primarily a farmer. He has not the ancient military
traditions of the Rajput, Mahratta, or Sikh, though none so stubborn as
he to fight for his own land. He does not figure in history among the
adventurers, builders of kingdoms, leaders of men, but circumstance has
moulded him from time to time into a fighting man. Prosperity may soften
him, but adversity only stiffens the impression of the mould.
It was during the reconstitution of the Indian Army in 1893, that the
Jats were built up again into a fighting race. A good regimental officer
can make anything he will out of the Jat. It takes earthquakes and
volcanoes to turn a regiment of these hard-bitten men out of a position
they have been given to hold. If the Jat is wanting in initiative and
enterprise, this is merely a defect of a virtue, for once set going it
never enters his honest hard head to do anything else but go on. And
that is why the Jat has done so well in this war. Every knock hardens
him. Courage is often the outcome of ignorance, but the remnants of a
Jat battalion which has been wiped out half a dozen times will go into
the attack again as unconcerned as a new draft.
The 6th Jats was one of the first of the Indian regiments to be engaged
in France. As early as the 16th of November, 1914, they had broken into
the German trenches. It was on the 23rd of the same month that they made
the gallant counter-attack over the snow at Festubert with the Garhwalis
and won back the lost trenches. At Givenchy, on December 20th, they held
their ground against the German wave when they were left practically in
the air; and they would not let go their hold at Neuve Chapelle when
they were enfiladed from the Port Arthur position, still intact, on
their right. Two months afterwards, on the 9th of May, they made their
frontal attack on Port Arthur. A double company penetrated the German
lines; only seven men returned unwounded. History repeated itself in
Mesopotamia. It has been the part of this gallant stock to arrive on the
scene in the nick of time and to be thrown into the brunt of the attack.
The Jat is not troubled with nerves or imagination, and he is seemingly
unacquainted with fear. Alarums, bombardments, and excursions having
become his normal walk of life, he will continue on his path, probably
with fewer inward questionings than most folk, until the end of the war.
Give him a trench to hold and he will stick to it as a matter of course
until he is ordered to come out.
The regiment in the trenches were mostly Jats of Hissar and Rohtak, and
the Colonel told me with the pride that is right and natural in the
regimental officer that this was the best stock. "You must get the Jat
where he is top dog in his own country," he said, "and not where he
lives among folk who think they are his betters. And he is best where
the land is poor. In districts where the sub-division of the soil among
large families does not leave enough to go round you will get a good
recruit." Locality is all important; a dividing river may make all the
difference. The Colonel admired the Jats of A, but he had no good word
for the Jats of B. The Rajput Jat, especially from Bikaner, he admitted,
were stout fellows, though they were not of his crew. There were
well-to-do districts in which the Jat would not follow the pursuit of
arms whether in peace or in war. "And if you want recruits," he enjoined
on me, "don't go to an irrigated district." Water demoralises them. When
a Jat sits down and watches the canal water and the sun raise his crop,
his fibre slackens, for his stubborn qualities proceed from the soil. It
is the same with other agricultural classes in the Indian Army, but the
Jat is probably the best living advertisement of the uses of adversity.
There is a proverb in the Punjab on the lines of our own tag about the
three things that are most improved by flagellation, but woman is the
only item recommended in both cases. The Hindu variant adds "flax" and
"the Jat."
There is another rude proverb of the country. "Like Jat, like byle
(ox)." There are many Jats and most of them have some peculiar virtue of
their own, but quickness of apprehension is not one of them. I had an
amusing reminder of this before I left the trench. Bullets were
spattering against the parapet with a crack as loud as the report of a
rifle, and our own and the Turkish shells screamed over the dug-out with
so confused a din that one was never quite sure which was which. It was
the beginning of the afternoon "strafe." Still there was no call for
casualties, and one only had to keep one's head low. In the middle of it
a subaltern coming down "Queen Street" looked in and told us that one of
the Jats was hit. "Loophole?" the Colonel asked. But it was not a
loophole. The jiwan had got hold of somebody's periscope; he had heard
that it was a charm which enables you to see without being hit--he was
standing up over the parapet trying to adjust it like a pair of field
glasses, when a bullet flicked off part of his ear.
The supply of good Indian officers is sometimes a difficulty in a Jat
regiment, for these children of labour follow better than they lead. But
even in the acquisition of understanding it is hard plugging application
that tells. "Continuing" is the Jat's virtue, or "carrying on" as we
say, and he will sap through a course of signalling with the same
doggedness as he saps up to the enemy's lines. "We've got some first
class signallers," the Colonel boasted, "they can write their reports in
Roman Urdu."
And the pick of the lot was Tara. What that youth has seen in France and
Mesopotamia would keep old Homer in copy through a dozen Iliads, but it
has left no wrinkle on his brow. Tara is still as fresh as paint.
"Sahib," he asks, "when may I go to the Turkish saphead with my bombs?"
He lost a brother at Sheikh Saad and wants to make good.
THE RAJPUT AND BRAHMAN
In the early days before the British Raj had spread North and West,
there was a period when the Bengal Army was enlisted almost exclusively
from the high-caste Hindu. In the campaigns against the Muhammadan
princes the Mussalman sepoy, for reasons of expediency, was gradually
weeded out. The Gurkha was unknown to Clive's officers; the day of the
Sikh and Mahratta was not yet; the Dogra was undiscovered; there was a
sprinkling of Pathan adventurers in the ranks and a few Jats and
Rohillas; but, generally speaking, the Rajput and Brahman had something
like a monopoly in military service.
The Rajputs, of course, are _par excellence_ the military caste of
Hindustan, and there is no more glorious page in the annals of chivalry
than the story of that resistance to the successive waves of Moslem
invaders. Three times the flower of the race were annihilated in the
defence of Chitore. But they never yielded, for the Rajput would take no
quarter. He was true to his oath not to yield; and when the odds against
him offered no hope of victory, his only care was to sell his life
dearly and to cut his way deep into the ranks of the enemy before he
fell. The women, too, refused the dishonour of survival. Led by their
queen and the princesses they passed into a sepulchre of flame. Others
fought and fell beside their husbands and sons, and their courage was
celebrated by the pen of Akbar, whose testimony to the spirit of the
race does not fall short of the Rajput bards.