It was probably the first time that Babylon had drawn into its vortex
the aboriginals of the hill tracts of Bengal. They were scurrying like a
flock of sheep, not because they were rushed, I was told, but simply for
fun. Some one had started it, and the others had broken into a jog-trot.
One of them, with bricks balanced on his head, was playing a small reed
flute--the Pipe of Pan. Another had stuck a spray of salmon-pink
oleander in his hair. The full, round cheeks of the little men made
their black skin look as if it had been sewn up tightly and tucked under
the chin. They were like happy, black, gollywogs, and the dust in their
elfin locks, the colour of tow, increased the impish suggestion of the
toy-shop. The expression on their faces is singularly happy and
innocent, and endorses everything Rousseau said about primitive content.
Evolution has spared them; they have even escaped the unkindness of war.
When the Santal left his home, all he took with him was two brass
cooking-pots, his stick, and a bottle of mustard oil. The stick he uses
to sling his belongings over his shoulder, with a net attached, and
generally his boots inside. He loves to rub himself all over with oil,
but in this unfruitful land he can find little or none, and he had not
even time to refill at Bombay. On board ship he saw coal for the first
time. Each man was given a brickette with his rations, for fuel, and
Jangal, Baski, Goomda Kisku, and others put their vessel on the strange,
black substance, and expected it to boil. A very simple, happy, and
contented person is the Santal. Once gain his confidence, and he will
work for you all day and half the night; abuse it, and he will not work
at all.
I found them in their camp afterwards in a palm grove by the Tigris, not
unlike a camp in their own land, only the palms were dates and not
cocoanuts. Here the Santals were very much at home. The pensioned Indian
officer in charge, a magnificent veteran, of the 34th Sikh Pioneers,
with snowy beard and moustache and two rows of ribbons on his breast,
was pacing up and down among these little dark men like a Colossus or a
benevolent god. The old Subadar was loud in their praises. He had been
on the staff of a convict Labour Corps, and so spoke from his heart.
"There is no fighting, quarrelling, thieving, lying among them, Sahib.
If you leave anything on the ground, they won't pick it up. No trouble
with women folk. No gambling. No tricks of deceit."
A British officer of the company who knew them in their own country told
me the same tale.
"They are the straightest people I have ever struck," he said. "We
raised nearly 1700 of them in the district, paid them a month's wages in
advance, and told them to find their way to the nearest railway station,
a journey of two or three days. They all turned up but one, and the
others told us he had probably hanged himself because his wife would not
let him go. They are very honest, law-abiding folk. They leave their
money lying about in their tents, and it is quite safe. They have no
police in their villages; the headman settles all their troubles. And
there is no humbug about them. Other coolies slack off if you don't
watch them, and put on a tremendous spurt when they see an officer
coming along, and keep it up till he is out of sight. But the dear old
Santal is much too simple for this. If the Army Commander came to see
them they'd throw down their picks and shovels and stare at him till he
went away. They are not thrusters; they go their own pace, but they do
their day's work all right. And they are extraordinarily patient and
willing. They'll work over time if you don't tell them to stop; and
they'll turn out, if you ask them, and do an extra turn at a pinch,
without grumbling, even if they have only just got back to camp and
haven't had time to cook their food."
All this sounded very Utopian, but the glimpse of them on the Bridge of
Boats, and an hour spent in their camp on Sunday morning, gave one the
impression of children who had not been spoilt. We went the round of
their tents, and they played to us on their flutes, the same pastoral
strains one hears in villages all over the East; and they showed us the
sika mark burnt in their forearms, always an odd number, which, like
Charon's Obol, is supposed to give them a good send-off in the next
world. They burn themselves, too, when they have aches and pains. One
man had a scar on his forehead a week old, where he had applied a brand
as a cure for headache. Nearly every Santal is a musician, and plays the
drum or pipe. The skins of the drums had cracked in the heat at Makina,
and they had left them behind, but they make flutes out of any material
they can pick up. One of them blew off two of his fingers boring stops
in the brass tube of a Turkish shell which had a fuse and an unexploded
charge left in it. That is the only casualty among the Santals remotely
connected with arms. It is an understood thing that they should not go
near the firing line. Once an aeroplane bomb fell near the corps. They
looked up like a frightened herd. A second came sizzling down within a
hundred yards of them, and they took to their heels. A little man showed
me how he had run, rehearsing a pantomime of panic fright, with his
bandy legs, and doubled fist pummelling the air.
The Santals came out on a one year's agreement, as they must get back to
their harvest. But they will sign on again. They have no quarrel with
Mesopotamia. Twenty rupees a month, and everything found, is a wage that
a few years ago would have seemed beyond the dreams of avarice. They are
putting on weight; fare better than they have ever done, and their
families are growing rich. Most of them have their wages paid in family
allotments at home, generally to their elder brother, father, or son,
rather than their wife. The Santals are distrustful of women as a sex.
"What if I were labouring here," one of them said, "and she were to run
off with another man and the money?" The women are not permitted to
attend the sacrifices in the Holy Grove, or to eat the flesh of
offerings, or to climb the consecrated trees, or to know the name of the
family's secret god lest they should betray it; or even, save in the
case of a wife or unmarried daughter, to enter the chamber where the
household god dwells in silent communion with the ancestors. Save for
these restrictions the relations between men and women in the tribe are
happy and free. In social life the women are very independent and often
masters in the house. They are a finer physical type, and the men of the
tribe are proud to admit it. The corps was collecting firewood when one
of the officers twitted a man on the meagre size of his bundle.
"Look at the Arabs," he said. "Even the women carry a bigger load than
you."
But the Santal was not abashed. He did not resent this reflection upon
himself; it was the carrying power of his own women he defended. "Our
women, too, carry much bigger loads than we do," he said ingenuously.
There is a curious reticence about names among the Santals. Husband and
wife will not mention each other's names, not even when speaking of some
one else bearing the same name. When receiving her allotment from a
British officer the Santal woman has to call in a third person to name
the absent husband. It would be a species of blasphemy to divulge the
secret herself. There is a table of degrees of relationship in which the
mention of names is taboo among the tribes, similar to the catalogue
prohibiting intermarriage of kin in our Prayer Book. And, of course, it
is quite useless to ask a Santal his age. Dates and sums of money are
remembered by the knots tied in a string; but the birth date is not
accounted of any importance. "How old are you?" the O. C. of the corps
asked one of these bearded men of the woods. "Sahib," the Santal
replied, after some puckering of the brow in calculation, "I am at least
five years old."
There is one comfort the Santal misses when away from home. He must have
his handi, or rice beer, or if not his handi, at least some substitute
that warms his inside. They said they would make their own handi in
Mesopotamia if we gave them the rice; but they discovered it could not
be done. Either they had not the full ingredients, or their women had
the secret of the brew. Hence the order for a tri-weekly issue of rum.
Many of the Santals were once debarred from becoming Christians, fearing
that the new faith meant abstention from the tribal drink.
This summer the Santals will be at home again, drinking their handi,
looking after their crops and herds, reaping the same harvest, thinking
the same thoughts, playing the same plaintive melodies on their pipes,
as when Nebuchadnezzar ruled in Babylon. Three dynasties of Babylon,
Assyria, Chaldea, and the Empire of the Chosroes, have risen and
crumbled away on the soil where he is labouring now, and all the while
the Santal has led the simple life, never straying far from the Golden
Age, never caught up in the unhappy train of Progress. And so his peace
is undisturbed by the seismic convulsions of Armageddon; he has escaped
the crown that _Kultur_ has evolved at Karlsruhe and Essen and Potsdam.
At harvest-time, while the Aryan is still doing military duties, the
Santal will be reaping in the fields. As soon as the crops are in, there
is the blessing of the cattle, then five days and nights of junketing,
drinking and dancing, bathing and sacrifice, shooting at a target with
the bow, and all the license of high festival. Then after a month or two
he will return to the fringe of the Great War, and bring with him his
friends. He will fall to again, and take up his pick and shovel, the
most contented man in Iraq.
THE INDIAN FOLLOWER
The Drabi and Kahar[11] are no longer followers. They are combatants and
eligible for decorations, and their names appear in the columns of
honour in the Army List, and occupy an increasing space. If cooks,
syces, bhisties, bearers and sweepers were eligible too, their names
would also appear; for the war has proved that chivalry exists under the
most unlikely exteriors. A great deal has been written about the Drabi
and the Kahar, and their indifference to danger. The nature of their
work keeps them constantly under fire, whether they are bringing up
rations to the trenches, or searching the ground for the wounded. The
recognition of them as combatants is a belated act of justice, and one
wishes that the devotion of the humbler menial classes could be
recognised in the same way. One meets followers of the wrong kind, but
the old type of Indian servant has increased his prestige in the war.
Officers who did not know him before are impressed with his worth. He
has shown courage in emergency, and, what is more, he has the British
habit, only in the passive voice, of "slogging on."
One admires the Indian's impassivity under fire, and one is sometimes
led into neglecting cover on account of it. It does not do for the Sahib
to sneak along behind an A.T. cart when the Drabi is taking his chance
with the mules in front. In France I heard an amusing story of a
Sergeant-Major who had to thread a bombarded area much more slowly than
his wont, on account of the sang-froid of a syce. An officer was taking
an extra horse with him into Ypres at a time when the town was beginning
to establish its reputation for unpleasantness, and he came in for a
heavy bombardment. Besides the usual smaller stuff, seventeen-inch
shells were coming over like rumbling trains, and exploding with a burst
like nothing on earth. The officer wished he had left his second horse
behind, and was wondering if it would be safe to send his syce back on
the chance of his finding the new dump when he met the Sergeant-Major
who was returning direct to it. The Sergeant-Major undertook to show the
syce the way, and to look after him. When next the two met, the officer
asked the Sergeant-Major if the syce had given him any trouble.
"Trouble, sir! He came along fast enough until we got to the _pavé_.
Then he pulled up, and wouldn't go out of a walk. It was as nasty a
mess-up as ever I've been in, but he wouldn't quit his walk."
The Sergeant-Major's language, I believe, was as explosive as his
surroundings; but the syce humbly repeated that it was the Sahib's
orders never to go out of a walk where there was hard ground or stones,
and "here it was all stones." Five battery mules were knocked out, and a
syce and horse killed next door to him; still he walked--or capered, for
the horse, even more than the sergeant-major, was for taking over
charge.
I remember an old cook of the Black Watch who persisted in wearing a
saucepan on his head in the trenches at Sannaiyat when the Turks were
bombarding us. The man had to be humoured, so a special cooking
vessel--rather a leaky one--was set aside by the mess-sergeant for his
armoury. He was nervous because the regimental bhistie had been killed
by a shell. There was great lamentation in the battalion when the
bhistie fell. The bhistie, that silent, willing drudge, is always a
favourite with the British soldier. His gentleness, patience, and
devotion are proverbial. Even in cantonments, bent under the weight of
his massaq,[12] he is invested with a peculiar dignity, and in desert
places he appears as one of the few beneficent manifestations of
Providence. One always thinks of him as a giver; his bestowals are
without number, his demands infinitesimal. I have never heard of a
grumbling, or impatient, or morose bhistie, or of one whose name has
been associated actively or passively with violence, or provocation, or
crime. There was a dreadful day during the Ahwaz operations in May,
1915, when our troops, after a stifling night, found the wells they had
counted on were dry. They were already exhausted; the temperature was
125 degrees in the shade, or would have been if there had been any
shade, and to reach water they had another ten or fifteen miles' march
to Kharkeh. An officer in the Indian Cavalry told me that he watched a
bhistie of the Merwara battalion supporting a man, who was too weak to
walk unaided, for more than two miles. When the sepoy came to the end of
his tether the bhistie stayed with him a few seconds, and then relieved
him of his rifle which he carried into camp. That was probably the
hottest and thirstiest day's march our troops endured in Mesopotamia. A
number of the Merwaras died of thirst. It was just before Dunlop's
burning march over the desert by Illah and Bisaitin to Amara, when even
the most hard-bitten old campaigners fell through heat-exhaustion.
During all these operations the bhisties behaved splendidly at a time
when any form of effort was a virtue, fetching water untiringly and
pouring it over the victims of the march.
[Illustration: BHIL FOLLOWERS.]
The bearer, too, has played up well when he has had the chance. During
the retirement from Ctesiphon the last batch of boats to leave Kut just
before the siege came in for a good deal of sniping. One of them put
ashore at a bend, and landed a party which took up a position on the
bank and tried to keep down the enemy's fire. This was very early in the
morning. "It was quite a hot corner," an officer told me. "I had spotted
a man who had crawled up to within a hundred and fifty yards of us, and
was drawing a bead on him. I had clean forgotten the boat, and Kut, and
the retreat, and all the rest of it, when I heard a familiar voice
behind me, 'Tea ready, sorr.' It was good old Dubru, my Madrasi bearer,
who had come up under fire. The tea was good and the buttered toast
still hot. His only remark when I had finished it was 'Master like
another cup?' I should have been very unhappy if the old fellow had been
hit."
I could multiply instances of the providence that keeps the follower to
his prescribed task, whether in emergency or in the ordinary day's work.
A medical officer was going round his camp during a bombardment, to see
that his staff were taking cover. He found the infection ward in a great
state of perturbation--not from fright as might have been expected. The
trouble was a violation of the rules. "Sir," a Babu explained to him,
"it is a serious matter, no doubt, two contact cases have escaped
confinement of ward." It was his way of saying that two men with mumps
had had the sense to discover a funkhole and make themselves scarce.
The name of the sweeper is associated with chivalry in an ironic sense
only. His Indian titles "Mehtar" and "Jemadar" are facetiously
honorific, as when one speaks of him as "the knight." Yet the sweeper
has won laurels in the war. It was at Givenchy, I think, at the very
beginning of things, when cartridges were jammed in the magazines, and
men were wanted to take ramrods to the front, and there were no spare
combatants for errands of this kind, that the sweepers carried the
ramrods over the open ground with no cover of communication trenches to
the men in the firing line. In Mesopotamia a sweeper of the --th Rifles
took an unauthorised part in an assault on the Turkish lines, picked up
the rifle of a dead sepoy, and went on firing until he was shot in the
head.
What are the elements of the follower's sang-froid? In the case of this
sweeper it can only have been the love of honour or adventure, but he
was a very exceptional man, and one cannot expect to find the same
spirit in the normal drudge. The good old Drabi who, when the bullets
are flicking round, pulls his blanket about his ears and subsides a
little in his cart is not of this mould. In an analysis of the
composition of his courage lack of imagination would play a part, and
fatalism, which becomes a virtue in the presence of death; but the main
thing, and this explains two-thirds of his stiffening, is that it never
enters his head that it is possible not to carry on with his job. In the
follower's honest, slow brain, the processes which complicate decision
in subtler minds are clotted into one--the sense of order, continuity,
routine, everything that is implied in a regulation. These things are of
the laws of necessity. He does not know it, but "carrying on" is his
gospel, philosophy, and creed.
* * * * *
PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
LONDON AND BECCLES, ENGLAND.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOOTNOTES:
Footnote 1:
2nd and 9th.
Footnote 2:
The 1/1st, 2/2nd, 2/3rd, 1/4th, 2/8th, and 1/9th.
Footnote 3:
The Tunkha Nameh of Guru Govind.
Footnote 4:
Sabaa aswad.
Footnote 5:
"The Indian Corps in France," by Lieut.-Colonel J. W. B. Merewether,
C.I.E., and Sir Frederick Smith.
Footnote 6:
These statistics relate to the pre-war establishment of the Indian
Army.
Footnote 7:
The remnants of "the gallant few" became the nucleus of the Loyal 16th
Regiment.
Footnote 8:
Brave deeds.
Footnote 9:
The Commander, Ahmed Bey, surrendered to the 90th Punjabis.
Footnote 10:
The peak which protrudes from the centre of the turban.
Footnote 11:
Stretcher-bearer.
Footnote 12:
Waterskin.
Transcriber's Notes
1. Silently corrected typographical errors; retained non-standard
spellings and dialect.
2. Italic text in the text version is delimited by _underscores_.