the tragedy was inimitable, but there was nothing tragic or resentful in
his way of telling it. It was a tale comfortable to Meena pride, and
therefore it was believed as legends are believed all over the world
which make life easier and give one a stiffer back or a more honourable
ancestry.
The Subadar told me that the books of the Meena bards had been
confiscated. They are locked up in the fort at Ranatbawar, and no one
may enter. If any one reads them, the Rajput dynasty will pass away, and
the Meena will be restored; therefore the Rajputs would like to destroy
them, but there is some ancient inhibition. The chronicles are put away
in an iron chest under the ground; yet, as the Subadar explained, the
record is indestructible. It has lived in men's memories and hearts, new
epics have been written, and the story is handed down from father to
son. Another Meena told me the story is written "in the Political
Agent's Book at Jaipur." This, I think, was by way of reference rather
than confirmation, for it could never have entered any of their heads
that one could doubt the genuineness or authenticity of the tale. When
the usurper was crowned a Meena was called in from afar to put the
tilak, or caste mark, on the king's forehead. And here the fairy story
comes in again, for the tilak was imprinted on the king's brow by the
Meena's toe. This is still the custom, the Subadar assured me, and he
explained that it was a humiliation imposed upon the king by the priests
as an atonement for his bad faith. The priest persuaded the king that
the only way that he could hope to keep his throne was by receiving the
tilak from the toe of the Meena, and he appeased his vanity by
pretending that the Meena, by raising his toe, signified submission,
just as the Yankee talks about turning up his toe to the daisies.
Here the Subadar was becoming too subtle for me, and I felt that I was
getting out of my depth. But there was another point which was quite
clear and simple. It bore out his theory of an hereditary obligation
which the Rajput owes the Meena by way of restitution. In Jaipur and
Alwar the Ujla Meenas are the custodians of the State treasure. I used
to think that they were appointed on the same principle as the Chaukidar
who would be a thief if he were not a guardian of the property under his
trust. But in this I wronged the Meena. The Ujlas are honourable
office-holders. When the Maharaja of Jaipur comes to the gadi he has to
take an oath that he will not diminish his inheritance, and he is
responsible to the Ujlas that anything that he may take away in times of
famine or other emergency shall be restored. The old Subadar took this
as a matter of pride. He was quite content with his ancestry--if indeed
he bothered his head about the status of the Meena at all. The legend of
the regicide rissaldar was well found. You could tell by the way he told
the story that he was pleased with it. One hears yarns of the kind,
comforting tales of legendary wrong, all over the world, in Hottentot
wigwams and Bloomsbury lodging-houses. The difference is only in degree.
They contribute mildly to self-respect; the humble are rehabilitated in
garments of pride; and very few of those who inherit the myth look for
the miracle of reversion.
The Meenas are as contented a people as you could find, a cheery,
simple, frugal, hardy race. The old Subadar boasted that his men never
fell out. "Even when the mules fall out," he told me, "they go on." They
are very brave in the jungle, and will stand up to a wounded leopard or
tiger. The Meena is a good shot, and a fine shikari. He will find his
way anywhere in the dark, and he never loses himself. He ought to be
useful in a night raid. He is a trifle hot-headed, I gathered. In the
divisional manœuvres near Nasiriyeh the cavalry were coming down on a
line of them in open country, when they fixed bayonets and charged.
"They are a perfectly splendid crowd," one of the officers told me, "I
should dearly love to see them go into action, and take twenty-five per
cent. casualties. It would be the making of them." But his Meenas had no
luck. No doubt, if they had been given a chance, they would have fought
as well as the best. It was their misfortune that they came too late,
and that they were sent up the wrong river. In the meanwhile, at Deoli,
recruits are pouring in. Every village contains a number of old
pensioners who, like my friend the Subadar, love to talk of their own
deeds, the prowess of their Sahibs, and how they marched with the
regiment towards Kabul. The young men stand round and listen, and are
fired with emulation, and there is no doubt that if the Sircar wants
them the contingent of Meenas will increase. They are not a very
numerous class, but they are steadfast and loyal. The love of honour and
adventure will spread as wide a net among them as conscription, and
there will be no jiwans seen in the villages who are not home on leave.
THE JHARWAS
(BY AN OFFICER WHO HAS COMMANDED THEM)
There are not many aboriginals in the Indian Army--a few Brahuis from
the borders of Beluchistan, the Mers and Merats and Meenas from the
hills and jungles of Rajputana, and the Jharwas of Assam. The word
"Jharwa" is the Assamese term for a "jungle-man," and how it came to be
generally applied to the enlisted man from Assam and Cachar is lost in
the obscurity of years. It is now the usual term for any sepoy who hails
from these parts, with the exception of the Manipuri.
[Illustration: THE JHARWA.]
When the Sylhet local battalion, afterwards the 44th Sylhet Light
Infantry, now the 1/8th Gurkha Rifles, was raised on February 19th,
1824, it was composed of Sylhetis, Manipuris, and the surrounding tribes
of Cachar, which province took its name from the Cacharis, who settled
there at the beginning of the seventeenth century, having been driven
out of the Assam valley by the Ahoms, or Assamese, and Muhammadans. The
plainsmen of Assam were very warlike till the Muhammadan invasion in the
sixteenth century, when they were so thoroughly overcome they fell an
easy prey to the Burmese, who were finally driven out of Assam and
Cachar by the British in 1824-26, since when the Assamese have settled
down peacefully.
The principal races, now enlisted under the name of Jharwa, are the
Mech, the Kachari, and the Rawa. The Mech mostly came from the region of
Jalpaiguri, and spread eastwards. The Kachari were the original
inhabitants of Assam; they are also found in Cachar, and are of the Koch
stock, from whom Coochbehar takes its name; they generally call
themselves Rajbansi, "of princely race." The Rawa (Ahoms) are also
original Assamese. There are, besides, the Garos, who come from the
Goalpara district. All the three former are Hindu converts, and show
much more caste prejudice than the Gurkha does, though he, in turn, is
not impressed with their Hindu claims. He raises no objection, however,
to living under the same barrack-roof with them, but will not eat their
food. In the old days, the Jharwa proved his value as a soldier in all
the fighting in the valleys of Assam and Cachar, and surrounding hills.
He rid the low country of the Khasias, who were the terror of the
plains, as can be seen from the "The Lives of the Lindsays" and a recent
publication "The Records of Old Sylhet," compiled by Archdeacon
Firminger. The first troops engaged in the subjugation of the Khasias
and Jaintias in their hills were Jharwas of the Sylhet battalion; the
campaign began in 1829, and was continued at intervals until 1863, when
the Jaintia rebellion was finally stamped out. Two companies of Gurkhas
were brought into this regiment in 1832, and by degrees the Jharwa
ceased to be enlisted in the regular army, till at last, in 1891, it was
ordered that no more were to be taken. This was the time of the Magar
and Gurung boom; in fact, except as regards the Khas, it was not
considered the thing to enlist any other Gurkha races in the army. The
fact that the Gurkha regiments up country earned their name with a large
admixture of Garhwalis in their ranks, in the same way as the Assam
regiments earned theirs with the help of many Jharwas, seemed largely to
be lost sight of, and though the Jharwa had continued to do yeoman
service in the ranks of the Assam Military Police, it was not till 1915
that it was thought worth while to try him in the regular army again.
After the war, a regular Jharwa Regiment raised and stationed in Assam
should be a most efficient unit, and a most valuable asset on that
somewhat peculiar frontier.
The Jharwa is a curious creature in many ways. He has nothing in common
with the Gurkha, except his religion, and to a certain extent his
appearance; nor is he even a hillman. Till he joins, he has probably
never done a hard day's work, nor any regular work, but has earned his
living by cutting timber, or doing a little farming in a rich and
fertile country where a man does not need to do much to keep himself. He
is more intelligent than the Gurkha, and has, as a rule, a fairly good
ear for music; he is lazy, hard to train, and not very clean in his
person, unless well looked after, but he is a first-class man at any
jungle work. The last of the old lot of Jharwas in the 1/8th Gurkhas,
Havildar Madho Ram (Garoo), won the Macgregor Memorial medal, in 1905,
for exploration and survey work in Bhutan. Others again are intensely
stupid. In October 1916, a Military Police havildar came out in charge
of a small draft to Mesopotamia, and his C.O. tried to find out how much
he knew about practical soldiering. He put him in charge of a squad of
men, and told him to exercise them. The worthy havildar was soon in a
fix. When asked how he rose to be havildar, he replied that he was
promoted because he was a good woodcutter and repairer of buildings. The
C.O. asked him where he was to get wood to cut in Mesopotamia, upon
which he looked round vacantly on all sides and remarked, "Jhar na hoi"
("there is no jungle"), whereupon he was sent back to look after the
regimental dump. Where the Jharwa fails is as an officer or
non-commissioned officer, since for generations he has never been in a
position to enforce or give implicit and prompt obedience. In Assam, it
is all one to the ordinary villager whether he does a thing now or next
week; a high standard of work or punctuality has never been expected of
him, consequently he does not expect it of anyone else, and a good many
N.C.O.'s got the surprise of their life when they found that the excuse,
"I told them, but they didn't do it," would not go down. But in jungle
work there are few to touch him, and he has proved his grit in the
stress of modern battle. Many years ago, I was following up a wounded
buffalo in the Nambhar forest, and one of our men was walking in front
of me, snicking the creepers and branches, which stretched across the
track, with a little knife as sharp as a razor. Suddenly, without a
word, he sprang to one side to clear my front, and there lay the huge
beast about ten yards off, luckily stone dead. It requires some nerve to
walk up to a wounded buffalo, without any sort of weapon to defend
oneself with. In the winter of 1916-17, a small party of the 7th Gurkhas
swam the Tigris, to reconnoitre the Turk position near Chahela. They
carried out their work successfully, but two Jharwas, who had
volunteered to go with the party, were overcome with the cold, and were
drowned coming back. The surviving Gurkhas all got the I.O.M. or D.S.M.
On February 17th, 1917, at Sannaiyat, a signaller, attached to the 1/8th
Gurkhas, Lataram Mech, took across his telephone wire into the second
Turkish line under very heavy shell-fire, which wiped out the N.C.O. and
another of his party of four, established communication with battalion
headquarters and the line behind him, and, when that part of the trench
was recaptured, came back across the open and rolled up his wire, under
fire all the time. On the same day another Jharwa lad, when he got into
the Turkish trench, flung away his rifle and belt, and ran amok with his
kukri. He broke that one and came back, covered with blood from head to
foot, into our front trench to get another, when he went forward again.
I could never find out his name. If he was not killed, he lay low,
probably thinking he would be punished for losing his rifle.
At Istabulat, another Jharwa (Holiram Garo) got separated from the rest
of his party, and attacked a part of the Turk position by himself.
Although wounded in the head, he lay on the front of the enemy's
parapet, and sniped away till dark, when he returned to his platoon, and
asked for more ammunition. For this he got the I.O.M. The poor little
Jharwa did wonderfully well, seeing that, till he left Assam, his
horizon had been bounded by the Bhootan-Tibet range on one side and the
Patkoi on the other. He had never seen guns, cavalry, trenches, or
anything to do with real warfare. Although reared in the damp enervating
climate of the plains of Assam, he stuck the intense cold and heat, as
well as food to which he had never been accustomed, without grumbling,
whilst the doctors said his endurance of pain in hospital was every bit
as good as the Gurkha's, and an example to all the other patients. Till
1915, the authorities knew nothing about him, his antecedents, or
peculiarities, so he was looked on as merely an untidy sort of Gurkha,
with whom, as said before, he had no affinity, besides not having
anything like the same physical strength.
Before we went out to Mesopotamia, my regiment was detailed to counter
an expected raid on a certain part of the Indian coast. We entrained at
midnight, and in the morning it was reported we had fifty more men than
we started with. It turned out that a party of fifty Jharwas had arrived
at the railway station, just before we left, and when they realised that
the regiment was going off without them, they made a rush, crowded in
where they could, and came along, leaving all their kit on the platform.
This, if not exactly proving good discipline, showed at any rate they
were not lacking in keenness and enterprise.
THE DRABI
In the Great War the Drabi has come by his own. He is now a recognised
combatant. At Shaiba and Sahil alone six members of the transport corps
were awarded the Indian Order of Merit. This is as it should be, for
before August, 1914, there was only one instance recorded of a Drabi
receiving a decoration.
The Drabi is recruited from diverse classes, but he is generally a
Punjabi Mussalman, not as a rule of the highest social grade, though he
is almost invariably a very worthy person. If I were asked to name the
agents to whom we owe the maintenance of our empire in the East, I
should mention, very high in the list, the Drabi and the mule. No other
man, no other beast, could adequately replace them. There are
combinations of the elements which defeat the last word of scientific
transport. And that is where the Drabi, with his pack mules or A.T.
carts, comes in.
In France, when the motor-lorries were stuck in the mud, we thanked God
for the mule and the Drabi. I remember my delight one day when I saw a
convoy of Indian A.T. carts swinging down the road, the mules leaning
against one another as pack mules will do when trained to the yoke. The
little convoy pulled up outside the courtyard of an abattoir in an old
town in Picardy, where it had been raining in torrents for days, until
earth and water had produced a third element which resembled neither.
The red-peaked kula protruding from the khaki turban of the Drabi
proclaimed a Punjabi Mussalman. Little else was distinguishable in the
mist and rain, which enveloped everything in a dismal pall. The inert
bundle of misery unrolled itself and, seeing a Sahib by the gate,
saluted.
"Bad climate," I suggested.
"Yes, Sahib, very bad climate."
"Bad country?"
But the man's instinctive sense of conciliation was proof against
dampness, moral or physical.
"No, Sahib. The Sircar's country is everywhere very good." The glint of
a smile crept over the dull white of his eyes.
To the Drabi there are only two kinds of white people--the Sircar, or
British Raj, and the enemy. The enemy is known to him only by the
ponderous and erratic nature of his missiles, for the mule-cart corps
belongs to the first line of transport.
"Where is your home?" I asked.
"Amritsar, Sahib."
I wondered whether he were inwardly comparing the two countries. Here,
everything drenched and colourless; there, brightness and colour and
clean shadows. Here, the little stone church of a similar drabness to
its envelope of mist; there, the reflection of the Golden Temple
sleeping in the tank all day. The minarets of his mosque and the
crenellated city walls would be etched now against a blue sky. I looked
at his mules. They did not seem at all _dépaysés_.
"How do they stand the damp?" I asked. "Much sickness?"
"No, Sahib. Only one has been sick. None have died except those
destroyed by the bo-ombs."
I wondered what the carts were doing at ----. They were of the first
line; the first line transport carries the food into the very mouth of
the Army. Being the last link in the line of communications, it is
naturally the most vulnerable. Other links are out of range of the
enemy's guns and immune, in this phase of the operations at least, from
attack except by aircraft. The Drabi explained that they had been
detailed for forage work.
As he lifted the curricle bar from the yoke one of the mules stepped on
his foot, and he called it a name that reflected equally on his own
morals and those of the animal's near relations. He did not address the
beast in the tone an Englishman would use, but spoke to it with
brotherly reproach. Just then an officer of the Indian Army Supply and
Transport Corps rode up, and I got him to talk, as I knew I could if I
praised his mules and carts enough. He enlarged on the virtues of the
most adaptable, adjustable, and indestructible vehicles that had ever
been used in a campaign, and of the most hardy, ascetic, and
providentially accommodating beast that had ever drawn or carried the
munitions of war. These light transport-carts are wonderful. They cut
through the mud like a harrow over thin soil. The centre of the road is
left to the lorries. "They would be bogged where we go," the S. and T.
man said proudly. "They are built for swamps and boulder-strewn mountain
streams. If the whole show turns over, you can right it at once. If you
get stuck in a shell-hole, you can cut the mules loose, use them as pack
transport, and man-handle the carts. Then we have got component parts.
We can stick on a wheel in a minute, and we don't get left like that
menagerie of drays, furnishing vans, brewers' carts, and farmers'
tumbrils, which collapse in the fairway and seem to have no extra parts
at all--unadaptable things, some of them, like a lot of rotten curios.
And, of course, you know you can take our carts to pieces and pack them;
you can get"--I think he said fourteen--"of them into a truck. And if
you----"
Then he enlarged on his beasts. Nothing ever hurts a mule short of a
bullet or shell. Physical impact, heat or cold, or drought, or damp, it
is all the same. They are a little fastidious about drink, but they
deserve one indulgence, and a wise Staff officer will give them a place
up-stream for watering above the cavalry. For hardiness nothing can
touch them. They are as fit in Tibet as in the Sudan, as composed in a
blizzard on the Nathu-la as in a sandstorm at Wadi Haifa. And I knew
that every word he said was true. I had sat a transport-cart through the
torrents of Jammu, and had lost a mule over a precipice in a mountain
pass beyond the Himalayas. It lay half buried in the snow all night with
the thermometer below zero. In the morning it was dragged up by ropes
and began complacently grazing.
"And look at them now in this slush!" They certainly showed no sign of
distress or even of depression.
"And the Drabis? Do they grouse?"
"Not a bit. They are splendid. They have no nerves, no more nerves than
the mules. You ought to have seen Muhammad Alim come back from Neuve
Chapelle. When hell began the order had gone round 'All into your
dug-outs,' and the bombardier of his cart had buried himself obediently
in the nearest funkhole. He stuck it out there all day. The next morning
he rolled up at the Brigade Column and reported his cart was lost.
Nothing could have lived in that fire, so it was struck off."
But Drabi Muhammad Alim had not heard the order. He sat through the
whole of the bombardment in his cart. After two days, not having found
his destination, he returned. "Sahib," he said, "I have lost the way."
When asked what the fire was like he said that there had been a wind
when the boom-golies passed, which reminded him of the monsoon when the
tufân catches the pine trees in Dagshai.
It occurred to me that the Asiatic driver assimilated the peculiar
virtues of his beast. The man with a camel or bullock or mule is less
excitable, more of a fatalist, than the man who goes on foot alone. The
mule and the Drabi would rattle along under shell-fire as imperturbably
as they run the gauntlet of falling rocks on the Kashmir road in the
monsoon. I have seen the Drabi calmly charioteering his pontoons to the
Tigris bank, perched on a thwart like a bird, when the bullets were
flying and the sappers preparing the bridge for the crossing. And I have
seen him carry on when dead to the world, a mere automaton like Ali
Hussein, who reported himself hit in the shoulder two days after the
battle at Umm-el-Hannah. "Yes, Sahib," he admitted to the doctor a
little guiltily when cross-examined, "it was in the battle two days ago
that I came by this wound." Then he added shamefacedly fearing reproof,
"Sahib, I could not come before. There was no time. There were too many
journeys. And the wounded were too many."
When his neighbour is hit by his side, the Drabi buries himself more
deeply into his wrappings. He does not want to pick up a rifle and kill
somebody for shooting his "pale" as a Tommy would, but says, "My brother
is dead. I too shall soon die." And he simply goes on prepared for the
end, neither depressed at its imminence, nor unduly exalted if it be
postponed. He is a worthy associate of those wonderful carts and mules.
In the evening I passed the abattoir again and looked over the gate.
Inside there was a batch of camp followers who had come in from fatigue
duty. I saw the men huddling over their fires in groups in that humped
attitude of contented discomfort which only the Indian can assume. Their
families in the far villages of the Punjab and the United Provinces
would be squatting by their braziers in just the same way at this hour.
Perhaps the Drabi would be thinking of them--if thought stirred within
his brain--and of the golden slant light of the sun on the shisham and
the orange siris pods and the pungent incense that rises in the evening
from the dried cow-dung fire, a product, alas! which France with all its
resources, so rich, varied, and inexhaustible, cannot provide.
THE SANTAL LABOUR CORPS
The Labour Corps in Mesopotamia introduced the nearest thing to Babel
since the original confusion of tongues. Coolies and artisans came in
from China and Egypt, and from the East and West Indies, the aboriginal
Santals and Paharias from Bengal, Moplahs, Thyas and Nayars from the
West Coast, Nepalese quarrymen, Indians of all races and creeds, as well
as the Arabs and Chaldeans of the country. They made roads and bunds,
built houses, loaded and unloaded steamers and trucks, supplied
carpenters, smiths and masons, followed the fighting man and improved
the communications behind him, and made the land habitable which he had
won.