must have thought of the "charge-ki-din," the day of honour of which
they had inherited the tradition but not the memory, and wished they had
been there too.
THE KHATTAK
The Khattaks kept their spirits up all through the hot weather. They
were too lively sometimes. There was one man who imitated a
three-stringed guitar a few yards from my tent as an accompaniment to
his friend's high treble. One night after a good feed, when the shamal
began blowing, they broke out into one of their wild dances, after the
Dervish fashion, swinging swords and leaping round the bonfire. You
would think the Khattak would be up to any murder after this kind of
show, but I am told the frenzy works the offending Adam out of him.
I was watching a fatigue party working at a bund on a particularly
sultry afternoon. They were all a bit "tucked up," but as soon as the
dhol (drum) and serinai (oboe) sounded, they started cat-calling and
made the earth fly. The Khattak is as responsive to the serinai as the
Highlander to the regimental slogan, but he is more demonstrative. It is
a good thing to be by, when the ---- Rifles leave camp. At the first
sound of the dhol and serinai the Khattak company breaks into a wild
treble shriek, tailing off perhaps with the bal-bala, the Pathan
imitation of the gurgling of the camel. The Sikh comes in with his "Wah
Guru-ji-Ki-Khalsa, Wah Guru-ji-Ki-jai!" and the Punjabi Mussalman with
his "Allah, Allah, Allah, Allah"; or he may borrow the Khattak's
bal-bala, or the British "Hip, hip, hooray!"
The Khattak is impulsive, mercurial, easily excited, seldom dispirited,
and if so, only for a short time. His élan is sometimes a positive
danger during an attack. At Sheikh Saad, on the right bank on January
7th, it was difficult to hold the Khattak company back while the
regiment on their left was coming up; they were all for going on ahead
and breaking the line; and in the end it was a premature sortie of the
Khattaks that precipitated the assault.
Shere Ali was among these. He and his father, Shahbaz Khan of the Bhangi
Khel, were typical Khattaks. From these two one may gather a fair
estimate of the breed. Shahbaz Khan, the father, I did not meet. Shere
Ali I saw wounded on a barge at Sheikh Saad. He was introduced to me by
his machine-gun officer, who was wounded at the same time.
Father and son both served in the Khattak double company of the ----
Rifles. Shahbaz Khan, retired subadar, died after eighteen months of the
Great War without hearing a shot fired. It was very galling to the old
man to be out of it, for his idea of bliss was a kind of glorified
Armageddon. He had fought in Tochi and Waziristan, but these frontier
scraps were unsatisfying. "It was only playing at war," he said. He
longed for a padshah-ki-lerai, "a war of kingdoms," in the old
Mahabharat style. "Sahib," he said, "I should like to be up to my knees
in gore with thousands of dead all round me." But the old man was born
fifteen years too soon. He would have been happy in the night attack
upon Beit Aieesa, or even perhaps with Shere Ali on the right bank at
Sheikh Saad, when the regiment rushed the Turkish trenches.
Shere Ali was with the regiment in Egypt, left the canal with them in
December, 1915, and was just in time for the advance from Ali Gharbi.
Shahbaz Khan came down to the depôt and dismissed his son with envious
blessings. He had dyed his beard a bright red, and he carried himself
with a youthful air, hoping that the Colonel might discover some
subterfuge by which he could re-emerge on the active list. The Colonel
would have given ten of his jiwans for him, and Shahbaz Khan knew it.
But the rules were all against him. So the regiment went off to the
accompaniment of the dhol and serinai, amidst many loud shouts and
salutations, mingled with British cheers, and old Shahbaz Khan was left
behind. He died in his bed before Shere Ali came back, and no doubt a
brooding sense of having been born too soon hastened his end.
Father and son, I have explained, were faithful to type. The Khattak is
the Celt of the Indian Army, feckless, generous, improvident, mercurial,
altogether a friendly and responsive person, but with the queer kink in
him you get in all Pathans, that primitive sensitive point of honour or
shame which puzzles the psychologist. It is often his duty to kill a
man. On these occasions the ægis of the British Government is a positive
misfortune. For the Khattaks are mainly a cis-frontier race, and
therefore subject to all the injustice and inequalities of our law.
Citizenship of the Empire hampers the blood feud. A stalking duel
started in British territory generally ends in the Andamans or Paradise.
If you lose you lose, and if you win you may be hanged or deported for
life. Nevertheless, the instinct for honour survives this
discouragement, and there is a genial colony of Khattak outlaws over the
border.
Old Shere Khan killed a rival for his wife's affections in the
regimental lines, and he could not have done anything else. The man's
offence carried its own sentence in the minds of all decent-thinking
people. The Subadar-Major begged the Adjutant to cut the fellow's
name--Sher Gol, I think it was--and to get him well away before night.
Otherwise, he said, there would be trouble. But the Adjutant could not
look into the case before the next morning. In the meantime, to
safeguard Sher Gol, he told the Subadar to see that twenty stout men
slept round his bed. The Subadar made it fifty, but the quarter guard
would have been better; for at one in the morning--it was a late
guest-night--the Adjutant and Sher Gol's company commander were called
out quietly to see the remains of him. His head was swaying slowly from
side to side on the edge of the bed. A hatchet planted in the skull and
oscillating with every movement of it had been left there as evidence.
The Subadar put his knee against the charpoy (bed) and pulled the
chopper out. Whereupon Sher Gol opened his eyes, saying, "Ab roshni hai"
("Now there is light"), and expired. He had been killed with fifty men
sleeping round him. They had all slept like the dead and nobody had
heard the blow. There was no evidence against Shahbaz Khan whatever;
public opinion was on his side.
Of such stock was Shere Ali, and though a mere lad he had killed his man
at Kohat before he fought at Sheikh Saad. Zam, zan, zar (land, women,
and gold), according to the Persian proverb, are at the bottom of all
outrages, and with Shahbaz Khan and Shere Ali, as with nine Khattaks out
of ten, it was zan. And zan (woman), too, was in Shere Ali's mind when
he brooded so dejectedly over his wound at Sheikh Saad. He was hit in
the foot and lamed the moment he left the trenches. This meant a
two-inch shortage, and, as he believed, permanent crutches.
"I have never seen him so down in the mouth," Anderson, the machine-gun
officer, said to me on the barge. "He has lost all his cheery looks."
Shere Ali was certainly dispirited. He had his head and chest low, and
all the wind taken out of him. He looked like a bird with its crest down
and its feathers ruffled.
The Khattak thinks no end of his personal appearance. He dresses to
kill, and loves to go and swank in the bazaar in his gala kit. He will
spend hours over his toilet peering at himself in the glass, all the
while without a trace of self-consciousness, though his neighbours may
be almost as interested in the performance as he. Then when his hair is
neatly oiled and trim to the level of the lobe of his ear, he will
stride forth in his flowery waistcoat of plum-colour or maroon velvet
with golden braid, spotless white baggy trousers, a flower behind his
ear, a red handkerchief in his pocket, a cane in his hand, and for
headgear a high Kohat lungi--black with yellow and crimson ends, and a
kula[10] covered with gold.
Every Khattak is a bit of a blood, and Shere Ali was true to type. In
his country a showy exterior betokens the gallant in both senses of the
word. A woman of parts will not look at a man unless he has served in
the army, or is at least something of a buccaneer. Of course, a wound
honourably come by is a distinction, and Shere Ali should not have been
depressed. He would return a bahadur, I told him, but he only smiled
sadly. He was crippled; there was no getting over it. He would join in
the Khattak dance no more. As for the dhol and serinai--if that
intriguing music had broken out just then I believe we should both have
wept.
I heard more of Shere Ali from Anderson when he returned fit three
months afterwards. In the depôt the lad's depression seemed permanent.
He was very anxious to get back to his village, and kept on asking when
he might go. But he was told that he must wait for a special pair of
boots. He was sent to Lahore to Watts to be fitted.
"Give him the best you can turn out," the Adjutant wrote; "a pair that
will last at least three years." Shere Ali returned all impatience.
"I have been measured, Sahib," he said; "but I have not yet got the
boots. Now may I go back to my village."
"No," the Adjutant told him, "you must wait for the boots. We must see
you well fitted out first."
He had another weary two weeks to wait. He was evidently rather bored
with all this fuss about footgear. What good are boots to a man who
can't walk?
At last they came. He untied the box with melancholy indifference, threw
the tissue paper and cardboard on the floor, and examined them
resignedly.
"Sahib," he said, "there is some mistake--they are not a pair."
He was persuaded to put them on.
"Now walk," the Adjutant said.
Shere Ali rose with an effort, and was leaning forward to pick up his
crutches, when he noticed that his lame foot touched ground. He advanced
it gingerly, stamped with it once or twice in a puzzled way, and then
began doubling round the orderly room. The Adjutant said that his chest
visibly filled out and the light came back to his eyes. He took a step
forward and saluted.
"When is the next parade, Sahib?" he asked.
"Never mind about parades," the Adjutant told him. "Go back to your
village and bring us some more jiwans like yourself, as many as you
like, and keep on bringing them."
We can't have too many Khattaks. Shere Ali, I am told, has quite a
decent stride. He is no end of a bahadur. And he is a sight for the gods
in his white baggy trousers, flowery waistcoat, and Kohat lungi, when he
dresses to kill.
THE HAZARA
I thought I had met all the classes in the Indian Army. But one day at
Sheikh Saad, when I was half asleep with the heat, I opened my eyes to
see a company of unfamiliar faces. They were not unfamiliar
individually. I had met the double of each of them; yet collectively
they were unfamiliar. In the first platoon I could have sworn to a
Gurkha, a Chinaman, a Tibetan, a Lepcha of Sikkim, a Chilasi, and an
undoubted Pathan with a touch of the Turki in him.
Whether in eye, nose, complexion, or the flatness of the cheek there was
something Mongol in them all, while in at least half there was a
suggestion of the Semitic. The Lepcha had the innocent jungly glance of
the cowherd of Gantok or Pemiongchi; the Chinaman with the
three-cornered eyes was an exaggeration of type; the Pathan would have
passed muster in the Khyber Rifles. They were all fairer than many
Englishmen after a year of Mesopotamia, and they spoke a kind of mongrel
Persian with a Tibetan intonation.
The regiment disembarked from the steamer and filed out to the rest camp
behind my tent in the intense heat of a September afternoon. It was too
hot to sleep, much too hot to wander about and ask questions. If it had
been cooler I should have gone out and talked to one of the regimental
officers. But 118 degrees in the shade under canvas kills curiosity. I
remember there was a dog under the outside fly of my tent, and for half
an hour I mistook its breathing for the engine of a motor-car, but never
quite rose to the effort of getting up to see if the machine could not
be persuaded to move on. Happily there was no need to go out and ask who
these men were. I soon tumbled to it, though I had never seen the breed
until they landed in the blinding glare of Sheikh Saad.
The history of the Hazaras is written in their faces. They are of Mongol
origin, though the colony is settled near Ghazni in Afghanistan. I had
heard how they came there, but had forgotten the story, only remembering
that the Mongols had married wives of the country of their adoption.
Hence the curious blend of the Central Asian and the Jew in the crowd
that was stumbling up the bank. A little reflection solved the puzzle in
spite of the heat.
[Illustration: THE HAZARA.]
There was one small tamarisk bush, not more than eighteen inches high,
but where it stood on the edge of the bank it threw a four-foot patch of
shade; the only natural shadow to be had anywhere round. A sepoy of the
regiment appropriated this. Then a jemadar came up and demanded it for
himself. The sepoy pretended not to hear. "Go and relieve the sentry,"
his officer said, pointing to an erect figure in the sun who was being
broiled by inches, "over the kit pile there by the steamer. Look alive.
Clear out!" The Hazara dragged himself out of the shade, and approaching
his friend the guard, caught him a resounding whack on the ear. One
cannot strike an officer; yet something had to be done; one has to let
steam off somehow. The guard jabbed at him with the bayonet and took
himself off in good spirit. The jemadar laughed.
All this horseplay was characteristic of everything I had heard of the
Hazara. The psychology of it was not of the East. There was something
Cockney or Celtic in the blows taken in good part, the give and take,
the common-sense and easy-going humour of the scene.
In the evening I went over and had a chat with the Hazara. One or two of
them spoke Hindustani with the accent of a Tommy, calling me "Sabb."
Finding them friendly and communicative folk, I asked them their
history. They had come over with a Ghenghiz Khan, they told me, to sack
Delhi; all agreed that it was Ghenghiz Khan, and that it was about 800
years ago and that they had crossed the Karakoram, and that their own
particular ancestors had been left by the Khan to hold the outpost of
Ghazni in Afghanistan. I looked up their history afterwards and found
that they had given it me more or less as it is set down in the
textbooks.
Also I learnt that it is not easy for the Hazaras to leave Afghanistan.
The Amir's guards have orders to hold them up at the frontier, though
there are time-honoured ways in which they contrive to break the cordon,
bribing the guards or slipping through in disguise, generally with the
Powindah caravans. It is still more difficult for them to get home and
return when on leave, and this is an embargo which indulges the Hazara's
natural bent for travel. In the furlough season you will find him as far
afield from cantonments as he can get in the time, often as far as
Colombo, Calcutta, Madras, or Rangoon. Filthy lucre is not his motive.
What he earns he spends. He has a curiosity uncommon in the Asiatic. He
likes wandering and seeing the world for its own sake; he lives
comfortably, is a bit of a spendthrift, gambles a lot, dresses with an
air, and likes to cut a figure in a tonga where the ordinary sepoy would
save a few annas by going on foot. If he belongs to a Pioneer regiment
he can afford it. For the Pioneer works on a Government contract in
peace time, and the Hazara thinks he has fallen on a poor job if he
cannot make twelve annas extra for a day's work in addition to his pay.
Few of them can read or write, but though illiterate they are
keen-witted and speak with the terseness of a proverb. They are much
quicker "at the uptake" than the Gurkha, whom they resemble in many
ways. When they go to Kirkee for Pioneer training they generally come
out top in the machine-gun, musketry, and signalling courses, and they
make excellent surveyors. As Pioneers they are hard to beat.
It will be gathered from the incident of the sepoy who was dispossessed
of his tamarisk bush, that the Hazara is of a cheerful disposition.
There is generally a comedian in the regiment, and after dinner at
Sheikh Saad one of the men was called in to give us a kind of
solo-pantomime. He began with the smart salute of the sepoy, bringing
his hand down with the mechanical click of a bolt; then he gave us the
Sahib's casual lifting of the cane, next he was a havildar drilling a
raw recruit. He took the parts in turn and contrived some clever
fooling. But I gathered that the man was only second-rate. No sooner had
he made his exit than everybody in the mess lamented Faizo who beguiled
so many nights of the New Zealanders on the canal, a subtle artist
compared to this clown with his stock regimental turns. Faizo is the
castigator of pretence, scourge of hypocrisy and the humbug of the
Church. In one scene he is the shaven mullah abstractedly mumbling his
prayers while he intently prepares his food. A dog comes in and defiles
the dish, Faizo for the moment becomes the dog--then the mullah torn
with the fury of commination, pursuing the dog with oaths and missiles
and spurning the polluted food. Then the mullah again, hungry and
unctuously sophisticated, blessing the food, miraculously restoring its
virtue, and finding it good.
No one is better at a nickname than Faizo. Few men are known in the
regiment by the name their father gave them. They are remembered by some
oddity or unhappy lapse of conduct, or the place they come from, and
Faizo is the regimental godfather of them all. There is Mahomet
Ulta--Mahomet upside down--who always gets hold of the wrong end of the
stick; Ser Khuskh--the dry-head, and "The Mullah," and "Kokri Gulpusht,"
"the frog with a shining posterior," who looks as if his face had been
glazed. Also there is Ghulam Shah the "Maygaphon." This is how he came
by the name.
Ghulam Shah is that rare thing, a stupid Hazara--and what is worse a
stupid havildar. One day on manœuvres he had tied the Hazaras up in an
inextricable knot through misunderstanding some command. The Colonel
stood on a mound and cursed him from afar off, and as his language
became more violent Ghulam Shah became more confused. He stood on one
leg and then on the other. Then remembering the megaphone he carried he
put it to his ear, and lastly, in despair, to his eye. On the evening of
the field day Faizo borrowed the regimental megaphone and pursued the
wretched Ghulam Shah round the parade ground. Ghulam Shah was a fat man
who ran heavily and panted. Faizo put the instrument to his ear and to
his eye. He inspected him with a theatrical gesture of his disengaged
hand. He listened to him curiously, as though he was some strange beast.
Last insult of all, he put the megaphone to his nose and smelt him.
It was refreshing to see how the Hazaras kept their spirits up in this
firepit, and to hear the clipped Mongol speech of the tableland in the
plain of Iraq. At Sheikh Saad we were little more than a hundred miles
from the plain of Shinar and the site of the Tower of Babel, and we were
carrying on with a confusion of tongues that would have demobilised the
tower builders. Here was a man talking Persian like a Tibetan, and from
beyond the circle of light there penetrated to us the most profane
comments delivered in the homeliest Devonshire burr.
Among the Hazaras were Baltis, who are being recruited into the Hazara
battalion now. Their country, Baltistan, or Little Tibet, lies to the
north of Kashmir, between Fadakh and the Gilgit district. The Baltis,
too, have a distinct language of their own and come of a semi-Mongolian
stock, and are Shiahs by faith like the Hazaras. They were originally
polygamists, like their neighbours the Bhots of Fadakh, but when they
became Muhammadans they adopted polyandry. They resemble the Hazaras in
looks, but on the whole are shorter and darker. They are an extremely
hardy race, and eke out a very scanty living as coolies and tillers of
the soil in the valleys of the Indus and its tributaries up Skardu and
Shigar way--a happy hunting-ground, the mere thought of which gave one
an empty and homesick feeling inside when tied down to one's gridiron or
Iraq. I had seen them at work in the high snow passes of Tibet, their
natural home, and little expected to meet them in the malignant waste by
the Tigris, which one would have thought must be death to mountain-born
folk whose villages are seldom found at an altitude of less than 8000
feet above the sea. Yet the descent to Tartarus did not seem to have
dismayed them in the least.
The Hazara is probably the nearest approach to the European you will
find in the Indian Army. It is odd that a cross of the Mongol and
Semitic should have produced this breed. His leg is not of the East; he
walks like the Tyke. I do not know the Tartar in his home, but these
descendants of his have much in common with us. In his sense of humour,
quick temper, rough and tumble wrestling, ragging and practical jokes,
and practical common sense; in his curiosity and love of travel, in his
complexion and disposition and in his easy-going habits of life, the
Hazara is not so very far removed from an Islander of the West.
The Hazara has a good opinion of himself though his pride is
unobtrusive. He is hard as nails, a man of tremendous heart, and he is
not easily beaten in a trial of physical strength. They nearly always
pull off the divisional tug-of-war. In the two mixed-company battalions
that enlist Hazaras it is a recognised tradition that the light-weights
should be a purely Hazara team.
There is not much material as yet for an estimate of the military virtue
of the race, but according to all precedent they should prove good men
in a scrap. For the Hazara is an anomaly in the East, where men as a
rule are only stout-hearted and self-respecting where they are lords of
the soil and looked up to by their neighbours. In Afghanistan, as alien
subjects of the Amir, Shiahs among Sunnis, Mongols among Pathans, they
have held their heads high and proved themselves unbroken in spirit;
though living isolated and surrounded by hostile peoples, and from time
to time the objects of persecution, you will find few types of manhood
less browbeaten than the Hazara.
THE MER AND MERAT
The Hindu and Muhammadan Mers and Merats from the Merwara Hills round
Ajmere are men of curious customs and antecedents, very homely folk, and
as good friends to the British Government as any children of the Empire.
I met them first at Qurnah, in June, 1916; thin, lithe men with sparse
beards like birds' nests in a winter tree. You could not tell the Mer
from the Merat. They are of one race, and claim to be the issue of a
Rajput king--Prithi Raj, I believe--by a Meena woman,--a mythical
ancestry suggested no doubt by Brahmans in order to raise their social
standing among other Hindus. They are really the descendants of the
aboriginal tribes of Rajputana, but in course of time, through
intercourse with Rajput Thakurs as servants, cultivators, and irregular
levies, they have imbibed a certain amount of Rajput blood. They are a
democratic crowd, and have never owed allegiance to the princes of
Rajasthan. Nor have they been defeated by them. In the old days when
they made a foray the Rajput cavaliers would drive them back into their
impossible country, where among their rocks and trees they would hurl
defiance in the shape of stones and arrows at mounted chivalry. Then in
the middle of last century an Englishman came along and did everything
for them which a true friend can do. Like Nicholson, he became
incorporated in the local Pantheon. He gave the Mers a statute and a
name, and lamps are still burning at his shrine.
[Illustration: THE MERAT.]
Mota is a Mer. There are six regiments in the Indian Army that draw from
his community, one class and five company class battalions. But as Mota
is an exaggeration of type, and more blessed with valour than brains and
discretion, I will not say to what particular battalion he belonged.