did his ancestors. His survival in the land he held so bravely is due to
the British, who only came in time to save the race, exhausted by
centuries of strife, from conquest by more vigorous invaders. Yet it was
on the Rajput and the Brahman more than on any other class of sepoy that
we depended in our early campaigns. They fought with us against the
French; they helped us to crush the Nawab of Oudh. They served with
conspicuous gallantry in the Mahratta, Nepal, Afghan, and Sikh wars.
They formed part of the gallant band that defended the Residency at
Lucknow.[7] And later in Egypt, Afghanistan, and Burma, they maintained
the honour they had won. Had there been class regiments in those days
the izzat of the Rajput and Brahman sepoy would have been higher than it
is.
[Illustration: THE RAJPUT.]
The Brahmans only enlist in two class regiments of the Indian Army. The
type recruited is of magnificent physique; their breeding and pride of
race is reflected in their cleanliness and smartness on parade. They are
fine athletes, expert wrestlers, and excel in feats of strength; and
they have a high reputation for courage. Unhappily they have seen little
service since the class system was introduced, and so have not had the
opportunity of adding to a distinguished record.
For various reasons the Rajput does not enlist so freely in the Indian
Army as his proud military traditions might lead one to expect. The
difficulties of recruiting are greatest among the classes which should
provide the best material. The difference of quality among Rajput sepoys
is to a large extent determined by the locality of enlistment. Those
from Rajputana and the neighbouring districts of the Punjab as a rule
rank higher than recruits from the United Provinces and Oudh. The
western Rajputs, generally of purer blood, are not so fastidious about
caste, while farther east, especially Benares way, the Rajput is
inclined to become Brahmanised. Brahmanism, whatever its merits, is not
a good forcing ground for the military spirit. Exclusiveness is the bane
of "the twice-born," especially in war. On service the essentials of
caste are observed among Rajputs and Brahmans as fastidiously as in
peacetime, only a certain amount of ceremonial is dispensed with. At
ordinary times the high-caste Hindu when he is away from home prepares
his own dinner and eats it alone. Before cooking he bathes. Complete
immersion is prescribed, preferably in natural running water. Where
there is no stream or pool he is content with a wash down from a bucket;
and as he washes he must repeat certain prayers, facing the east. While
eating he wears nothing but his dhoti (loin cloth) and sacred thread;
the upper part of his body and his feet are bare. A small square is
marked off for cooking. This is called the chauka. It is smoothed and
plastered over, or lepai-ed as he calls it, with mud, or cowdung when
available. Should anyone not of the caste touch the chauka after it has
been prepared, all the food within its limits is defiled and must be
thrown away.
There are two distinct kinds of food, kachi which is cooked in ghi, and
pakhi which is cooked in water. Kachi may be eaten only at the chauka;
but happily for the sepoy pakhi may be carried about and eaten anywhere;
otherwise caste would completely demobilise him. Amongst Brahmans the
caste convention of cooking their own food and eating it alone dies
hard; and I know a Rajput class regiment in which it took ten years to
introduce the messing system. Company cooking pots were accepted at
first, but with no economy of space or time; for the vessels were handed
round and each man used them to cook his own food in turn. The Brahmans
are even more fastidious. I remember watching a class regiment at their
meal in the Essin position; their habit of segregation had spread them
over a wide area. Each man had ruled out his own pitch, and a Turk would
have taken the battalion for a brigade. Only in the case of near
relatives will two men sit at the same chauka. In spite of the cold, one
or two of them were naked except for the loin cloth. The others wore
vests of wool, which (apart from the loin cloth) is the one and only
material that Brahmans may wear at meals. All had first bathed and
changed their dhoti according to the prescribed rites, and carried water
with them to wash off any impurity from their feet when they entered the
chauka.
There are many prescribed minutiæ of ritual which vary with each sect
and sub-tribe, but these are the main inhibitions. Even on service the
Hindu preserves the sanctity of the chauka, and if not a Brahman, takes
with him a Brahman cook, relaxes nothing in regard to the purity of his
water from contamination by the wrong kind of people, and would rather
starve than eat meat killed in an unorthodox way. The mutton or goat
that the Mussalman eats must be slain by the halal or the stroke at the
throat, and the mutton the Sikh or Hindu eats by the jatka or stroke at
the back of the neck. The most elaborate precautions were taken in
France and were observed in Mesopotamia and elsewhere, to keep the two
kinds of meat separate. There was once a complaint that the flies from
the Muhammadan butchery settled on the meat prepared for the Hindus, and
the two slaughterhouses were accordingly removed farther apart.
Orthodoxy in this point is no mere fad, but a genuine physical need born
of centuries of tradition. The mere sight of the wrong kind of meat is
nauseating to the fastidious, and in cases where it is not physically
nauseating, toleration would be extremely bad form. I think the story
has already been told of the Gurkha subadar on board the transport
between Bombay and Marseilles who, when asked if his men would eat
frozen meat, replied, after consulting them, "Sahib, they will have no
objection whatever, provided one of them may be permitted each day to
see the animal frozen alive."
On service, of course, as on pilgrimages under hard climatic conditions,
there are dispensations in the ceremonial, though not in the essentials,
of caste. Brahmans have fought for us from Plassey to the present day
and their fastidious personal cleanliness has contributed to the
smartness and discipline of the Indian Army. In early days, when the
ranks of the Bengal regiments were filled almost entirely with
high-caste Hindus, orthodoxy was maintained in spite of all the rigours
of war. To-day little has changed. Bathing when the nearest water is an
icy glacier stream is not indulged in now on a frontier campaign; and
where there is no water at all the sepoy does not lose caste by the
neglect of his ablutions. The Rajput as a rule will eat his meals with
his boots and clothes on, as he has done no doubt whenever he has been
under arms since the Pandavas and Kouravas fought at Delhi.
The fastidious caste ceremonial is discouraged in the Indian Army. It
leads to complications at all times, especially on a campaign; and a
good Commanding Officer prides himself on his men's common sense and
adaptability to environment. Yet there have been occasions, even among
sepoys, when ritual and caste exclusiveness have been turned to
disciplinary uses. Here is a story which is very much to the point. The
first scene of this little drama was played in Egypt; the last on the
banks of the Tigris.
There was a company of Rajputs somewhere in the neighbourhood of Suez,
which contained a draft of very raw recruits. Three of these youngsters
and a particularly callow lance-naik were holding a picquet on the east
bank of the canal when they lost their heads. One of them blazed off at
a shadow. He was frightened by the tamarisk bushes in the moonlight, and
thought they were Turks' heads. A panic set in. All four blazed into the
scrub, threw down their rifles, bolted as if the devil were behind them,
and were only held up by the barbed wire of their own outpost. The
jiwans were notoriously wild and jungly, and everything that a recruit
should not be. They had never left their village save for a few months'
training before they embarked on the transport in Bombay. A certain
allowance might be made for stupidity and bewilderment, sufficient in
the case of extreme youth to waive the death penalty. Had it been a
moving campaign; had the regiment been in actual contact with the enemy,
these young men would have been "for the wall." There is nothing else to
do when soldiers go the wrong way. The O.C. and the Adjutant were
considering how to deal with them when the Subadar-Major entered the
orderly room. The man was a veteran, with a double row of ribbons on his
breast, and he had never let the regiment down in all his service. He
begged, as a special favour, that Rajput officers should be permitted to
wipe out the stain. "Leave it to us, Sahib," he said: "we will put such
an indignity on them, that there will not be a jiwan in the regiment who
will shrink from bahadri[8] again." The Colonel saw the wisdom of this.
The Rajput izzat was at stake, and he knew his man. So the Indian
officers of the regiment were deputed to deal with the case themselves,
just as prefects at school take the law into their own hands and
administer it with a much more deterrent effect than the headmaster with
his cane. The jiwans were tapped on the head with a slipper, the last
ignominy that can befall a Rajput. After such disgrace they could not
enter the chauka and mess with their caste companions. That is to say,
they were socially excommunicated until their honour was retrieved. For
nearly eighteen months they lit their outcast fire and took their meals
apart at a measured distance from the chaukas--at such a distance that
no ray of contamination could proceed from them to it.
They were still under the ban when the regiment left Egypt and went to
Mesopotamia. They did not go into action until the relieving column
found themselves in the impasse before Kut. This was their first chance,
and all four rehabilitated themselves. Two died honourably, one of them
inside the enemy's trenches killed by a Turkish grenadier; one was
awarded the Indian Order of Merit; and the lance-naik degraded was
promoted to naik. He was in the rearguard covering the retirement until
dark, and it was noticed that he laid out all his cartridge cases as he
fired, keeping them nicely dressed in a neat little heap, as had been
well rubbed into him on parade. I am told that there is much promise in
this jiwan. And it must be admitted that the caste instinct with all its
disabilities made a man of him. Breeding brought into contact with
regimental tradition gives the sense of _noblesse oblige_, and deference
is the birthright of the twice-born. Thus the Brahman of Oudh, tried and
proved in a wrestling match or a tug-of-war, thinks himself as good a
man in a scrap as the most fire-eating Turk; and the assumption is all
on the credit side.
Rajput pride is at the bottom of the saddest story of a sepoy I have
ever heard. The man was not a Rajput of the plains, but a hillman of
Rajput descent, as brave a man as any in a battalion whose chivalry in
France became a household word. After two days' incessant fighting with
a minimum of rest at night, he fell asleep at his post. On account of
his splendid service, and his exhaustion at the time, which was after
all the tax of gallantry, the death penalty was commuted, and the man
was sentenced to thirty lashes. He would much have preferred death.
However, he took the lashes well, and there was little noticeable change
in him afterwards beyond an increase of reserve. He went about his work
as usual, and was in two or three more actions, in which he acquitted
himself well. After a complete year in France, the battalion was moved
to Egypt, where they stayed five months. Then came the welcome news that
they were returning home. On the afternoon of the day he disembarked at
Bombay the Rajput shot himself. He had chosen to live when there was
work to do and death was his neighbour every day; now, when he might
have lived, and when he was a bare three days from his family and home,
he chose to die. The British officers tried to find out from the men
what had driven him to it. But the sepoys were very silent and reticent.
All they would say was that it was "on account of shame."
The boy who commanded his platoon, and who had been shooting with him in
his district before the war, knows no more than I the processes of his
mind. He is inclined to think that he decided at once, immediately after
sentence had been executed, to destroy himself when his regiment
returned. Or he may have turned it over in his mind day and night for
more than a year, and in the end the sight of Hindustan resolved him.
When the idea of home became real and imminent, the thought became
unendurable that he should be pointed at in the village street as the
man who had been whipped. In one case there is heroism; in the other a
very human weakness; and in either case a tragedy of spirit that reveals
the intensity of pride which is the birthright of the "twice-born."
THE GARHWALI
The Garhwalis' _début_ in Mesopotamia was worthy of their inspiring
record in France. It was at Ramadie. They made the night march on
September 27th, 1916, marched and fought all the 28th, and on the
morning of the 29th carried the Aziziyah and Sheikh Faraja Ridges at the
point of the bayonet, in an advance of 1500 yards under frontal and
enfilade fire. The Sheik Faraja ridge was their objective. But this was
not enough. The bridge of the Aziziyah Canal lay beyond, a point of
vantage, for over it all guns or wheeled transport that escaped from
Ramadie would have to pass. Feeling that they had rattled the Turk, that
his tail was down, and that it was a moment when initiative might turn
the scale, they pushed on another thousand yards over open ground, "as
bald as a coot," crossed a deep nullah, seized the bridge, scuppered the
teams of three Turkish guns, captured them, and accepted the surrender
of a Turkish General and two thousand men.
[Illustration: THE GARHWALI.]
Of course there was a lot of luck in it, but it was the luck that
gallantry deserves and wins for itself and turns to account. The Turk
was cornered and hemmed in with the cavalry astride the Aleppo road to
the west, the Euphrates at his back and no bridge, and our infantry
pressing in on the south and the east. But it was a wide front and our
line was thin; by the time that they had reached the Canal the three
assaulting companies were a bare hundred strong, and if the Turk had had
the heart of the Garhwalis he would have rolled them up.
Standing by the captured guns, with the stalwart Turks coming in
submissively all round, as if the surrender of the Anatolian to the
Garhwali were a law of nature and a preordained thing, a subadar of the
regiment turned modestly to his lieutenant and said, "Now it is all
right, Sahib. I had my fears about the young men. They knew so little
and were untried. Now we may be assured. They will stand."
When the battalion made the night march on September 27th, exactly two
years and two days had passed since they had fought their last action in
France; and they had seen more than one incarnation. The Subadar might
well be anxious. The regiment had a large proportion of recruits, and
they had a tall record to preserve. For the "gharry-wallah," or Indian
cabby, as he is familiarly called, though he has never driven anything
but the Hun--and the Turk, leapt into fame at Festubert, and has never
lost an iota of his high repute. Before the war his name was unknown to
the man in the street. The first battalion of the 39th Garhwal Rifles
was raised in 1887--the second in 1901, and they had seen little service
till France. Yet the Garhwali had always been a fighting man. He
enlisted in the Gurkha regiments before the class battalions were
formed, and his prowess helped to swell their fame, though one heard
little or nothing of him. He was swallowed up and submerged in the
Gurkha, and did not exist as a race apart. When at last the class
regiments came into being he had to wait thirty years for his chance.
But his officers knew him and loved him, and were confident all the
while that his hour of recognition would come.
It came at Festubert, when the first battalion attacked and recaptured
the lost trenches. Regiment after regiment had driven in the most
determined counter-attacks across a thousand yards of snow-covered
ground, and every assault had been withered up by the enemy's fire. The
Garhwalis got in on the flank, working along trenches held by our own
troops to the left of those captured by the Germans. They carried
traverse after traverse, and the taking of every traverse was as the
taking of a fort. At first they had a bagful of "jampot" bombs hastily
contrived by the Sappers--it was long before the days of Mills and
Stokes and other implements of destruction; but the bombs soon gave out,
and for the long stretch of trench, 300 yards or more, it was nothing
but rifle and bayonet work. A few men would leap on the parapet and
parados at each traverse, and then the party in the trench would charge
round the traverse and dispatch the garrison with the bayonet until the
whole line was in our hands. These are familiar tactics to-day, but
trench warfare was then in its infancy, and it fell to the Garhwalis to
give the lead and point the way. The gallant Naik Dewan Singh Negi, who
led his men round traverse after traverse and evicted the Hun, was
awarded the V.C.
That was in the last week of November, 1914. For the next few months the
Garhwalis were tried and proved every day. Neither the severe conditions
of the winter, nor the strange and terrible phenomena of destruction
evolved in the new Armageddon, could damp his fighting spirit. But it
was on the 10th March, 1915, when the two battalions "went over the top"
at Neuve Chapelle, that the name of Garhwal, no longer obscure, became a
name to conjure with in France. Ever since that day the Garhwali has
stood in the very front rank in reputation among the fighting classes of
the Indian Army. The 1st Battalion charged a line of trenches where the
wire was still uncut. Every British officer and nearly every Indian
officer in the attacking line was killed, but the men broke through the
wire, bayoneted the garrison of the trench, and hung on all that day
from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. with no Sahib in command. The C.O. and Adjutant
were both wounded, and at nightfall two officers were sent across from
the 2nd Battalion, who had got through with less severe loss, to help
the shattered remnants of the 1st. They hung on all that night and the
next day, and beat off a heavy counter-attack on the morning of the
12th. Rifleman Gobar Singh was awarded the V.C. for his day's work on
the 10th, when he led the front line bayoneting the Hun, but the gallant
sepoy never lived to wear his award.
The Garhwali subadar who went over the field with us after the Ramadie
fight, said to his officer that the regiment had not had such a day
since the "charge-ki-din." The 10th of March at Neuve Chapelle is
remembered by the Garhwali as "the day of the charge." For them it is
THE day. Even Ramadie will not wipe it out with all its fruits of
victory. For the regiment was put to a grimmer test at Neuve Chapelle,
and the reward in the measure of honour could not possibly be surpassed.
Still it was good to see that the new lot was as staunch as the first.
They are a modest-looking crowd, some of the youngest mere boys without
a wrinkle on their faces. The veterans reminded me very much of Gurkhas,
but more of the Khas Ghurka, who is half a Rajput, than of the Magar or
Gurung. The Garhwalis, like the Dogras, are direct descendants of the
Rajputs who cut out kingdoms for themselves in the hills centuries ago.
There is no Mongol blood in them, save in the case of intermarriage with
Nepal. They are a distinct race, yet being hillmen and neighbours, they
naturally have much in common with the Gurkha, in habit as well as look.
They have the cheerfulness and simplicity of the Gurkha, and the same
love of a scrap for its own sake, and, what is more endearing, the same
inability to grow up. They are always children. They care nothing for
drill books and maps, and as often as not hold them upside down. But
they see red in a fight, and go for anything in front of them. Both
battalions would have been wiped out a dozen times had it not been for
their British officers.
There is in build a great deal in common between the Gurkha and
Garhwali, and confusion is natural in the uninitiated. It is not only
that both are hillmen, belong to rifle regiments, and wear slouch or
terai hats; the Garhwali is in appearance a cross between the Dogra and
the "Ghurk." He has the close-cropped hair, the "bodi" or topknot, the
hillman's face, and you will find in the veterans the same tight-drawn
lines under the eye that bespeak stiffening in a hard school and give
them a grim and warlike look. But the British officer in a Garhwali
regiment naturally resents the swallowing of the small community, with
its honour, prestige, individuality and all, by the great. The Garhwali,
he argues, has at least earned his right to a separate identity now, and
he is jealous of the overshadowing wing.
Ramadie was a great day for him. The Garhwalis did not win the battle,
but they reaped the rich field by the bridge alone. Other regiments did
splendid work that day, and the officer who showed me over the ground
was afraid that I should forget them in "booming his show." "It was just
our luck," he explained, "that we happened to be there." Most of the
90th Punjabis had side-tracked to the right to take Unjana Hill, while
the rest of the brigade swept on and cleared the Sheikh Faraja Ridge. To
gain the Aziziyah Canal the Garhwalis changed direction and bore off to
the left. Other companies came up afterwards, but when the Garhwalis
reached the bridge they were unsupported. They took the bridge, the
guns, the 2000 prisoners, the Turkish General,[9] alone. As for the
prisoners, "It was not so much a capture," the officer explained to me
modestly, "as a surrender to the nearest troops, and we happened to be
there."
I had watched them in the distance, black specks on the sand, but it was
not until I went over the field with them the next day, and they fought
the battle again, that I realised what they had done. As the Garhwalis
charged over the open from Sheikh Faraja Ridge, the three guns in front
of them, firing point-blank over their sights, poured in shrapnel,
raking the ground, churning up the sand in a deadly spray. Halfway
across there was a deep dry nullah, with steep banks and a few scattered
palms on the other side. It was an ideal place to hold, but the enemy
were slipping away. In a moment the Garhwalis were in the nullah,
clambered up the opposite bank, and had their Lewis-gun trained on the
gun teams at 400 yards. The Turkish gunners died game, and in the
Garhwalis' last burst over the flat not a man fell. They rushed the
palm-clump to the right of the guns and the guns, which were undefended
with their dead all round. The three pieces were intact. The Turks had
no time to damage them. The horses were all saddled up in the palms,
with the ammunition limbers, officers' charges, mules and camels. Very
quickly the Garhwalis dug a pothook trench round the guns and
palm-clump, watched eagerly for the supports, and waited for the
counter-attack which surely must come. The three assaulting companies
were a bare hundred strong now, and behind the mud walls five hundred
yards in front of them, though they did not know it, lay the Turkish
General and 2000 of his men. But the silencing of the guns was the
beginning of the collapse. The Turks knew the game was up. The iron ring
we were drawing round them, their unsuccessful sortie against the
cavalry in the night, had taken the heart out of them. No doubt they
thought the Garhwalis the advance-guard of a mighty host.
White flags appeared on the mud wall in front. A small group of Turks
came out unarmed. Eight men were sent to bring them in. Then a
"crocodile" emerged from the nullah. "I've seen some crocodiles," a very
junior subaltern said to me, "but I have never seen one which bucked me
like that." The monster grew and swelled until it assumed enormous
proportions. One could not see whence each new fold of the beast
proceeded. It was like dragon seed conjured up out of invisibility in
the desert by a djinn. But it was a very tame dragon and glad of its
captivity. And there was really something of a miracle in it,--the kind
of miracle that happens in a legend or at the end of a fairy tale, where
the moral is pointed of the extraordinary rewards that befall all the
young who are single-minded and unafraid. Half an hour after the
crocodile had collected its folds Ahmed Bey, the Turkish General, was
discovered in a neighbouring house, and surrendered to a young British
officer of the company.