WAR--I
'Love each other and live in peace.'
_Saying of the Buddha._
This is the Buddhist belief as I have understood it, and I have written
so far in order to explain what follows. For my object is not to explain
what the Buddha taught, but what the Burmese believe; and this is not
quite the same thing, though in nearly every action of their life the
influence of Buddhism is visible more or less strongly. Therefore I
propose to describe shortly the ideas of the Burmese people upon the
main objects of life; and to show how much or how little Buddhism has
affected their conceptions. I will begin with courage.
I think it will be evident that there is no quality upon which the
success of a nation so much depends as upon its courage. No nation can
rise to a high place without being brave; it cannot maintain its
independence even; it cannot push forward upon any path of life without
courage. Nations that are cowards must fail.
I am aware that the courage of a nation depends, as do its other
qualities, upon many things: its situation with regard to other nations,
its climate, its food, its occupations. It is a great subject that I
cannot go into. I wish to take all such things as I find them, and to
discuss only the effect of the religion upon the courage of the people,
upon its fighting capabilities. That religion may have a very serious
effect one way or the other, no one can doubt. I went through the war of
annexation, from 1885 to 1889, and from it I will draw my examples.
When we declared war in Upper Burma, and the column advanced up the
river in November, 1885, there was hardly any opposition. A little fight
there was at the frontier fort of Minhla, but beyond that nothing. The
river that might have been blocked was open; the earthworks had no
cannon, the men no guns. Such a collapse was never seen. There was no
organization, no material, no money. The men wanted officers to command
and teach them; the officers wanted authority and ability to command.
The people looked to their rulers to repel the invaders; the rulers
looked to the people. There was no common intelligence or will between
them. Everything was wanting; nothing was as it should be. And so
Mandalay fell without a shot, and King Thibaw, the young, incapable,
kind-hearted king, was taken into captivity.
That was the end of the first act, brief and bloodless. For a time the
people were stupefied. They could not understand what had happened;
they could not guess what was going to happen. They expected that the
English would soon retire, and that then their own government would
reorganize itself. Meanwhile they kept quiet.
It is curious to think how peaceful the country really was from
November, 1885, till June, 1886. Then the trouble came. The people had
by that time, even in the wild forest villages, begun to understand that
we wanted to stay, that we did not intend going away unless forced to.
They felt that it was of no further use looking to Mandalay for help. We
had begun, too, to consider about collecting taxes, to interfere with
the simple machinery of local affairs, to show that we meant to govern.
And as the people did not desire to be governed--certainly not by
foreigners, at least--they began to organize resistance. They looked to
their local leaders for help, and, as too often these local governors
were not very capable men, they sought, as all people have done, the
assistance of such men of war as they could find--brigands, and
freelances, and the like--and put themselves under their orders. The
whole country rose, from Bhamo to Minhla, from the Shan Plateau to the
Chin Mountains. All Upper Burma was in a passion of insurrection, a very
fury of rebellion against the usurping foreigners. Our authority was
confined to the range of our guns. Our forts were attacked, our convoys
ambushed, our steamers fired into on the rivers. There was no safety for
an Englishman or a native of India, save within the lines of our
troops, and it was soon felt that these troops were far too few to cope
with the danger. To overthrow King Thibaw was easy, to subdue the people
a very different thing.
It is almost impossible to describe the state of Upper Burma in 1886. It
must be remembered that the central government was never very strong--in
fact, that beyond collecting a certain amount of taxes, and appointing
governors to the different provinces, it hardly made itself felt outside
Mandalay and the large river towns. The people to a great extent
governed themselves. They had a very good system of village government,
and managed nearly all their local affairs. But beyond the presence of a
governor, there was but little to attach them to the central government.
There was, and is, absolutely no aristocracy of any kind at all. The
Burmese are a community of equals, in a sense that has probably never
been known elsewhere. All their institutions are the very opposite to
feudalism. Now, feudalism was instituted to be useful in war. The
Burmese customs were instituted that men should live in comfort and ease
during peace; they were useless in war. So the natural leaders of a
people, as in other countries, were absent. There were no local great
men; the governors were men appointed from time to time from Mandalay,
and usually knew nothing of their charges; there were no rich men, no
large land-holders--not one. There still remained, however, one
institution that other nations have made useful in war, namely, the
organization of religion. For Buddhism is fairly well
organized--certainly much better than ever the government was. It has
its heads of monasteries, its Gaing-dauks, its Gaing-oks, and finally
the Thathanabaing, the head of the Burmese Buddhism. The overthrow of
King Thibaw had not injured any of this. This was an organization in
touch with the whole people, revered and honoured by every man and woman
and child in the country. In this terrible scene of anarchy and
confusion, in this death peril of their nation, what were the monks
doing?
We know what religion can do. We have seen how it can preach war and
resistance, and can organize that war and resistance. We know what ten
thousand priests preaching in ten thousand hamlets can effect in making
a people almost unconquerable, in directing their armies, in
strengthening their determination. We remember La Vendee, we remember
our Puritans, and we have had recent experience in the Soudan. We know
what Christianity has done again and again; what Judaism, what
Mahommedanism, what many kinds of paganism, have done.
To those coming to Burma in those days, fresh from the teachings of
Europe, remembering recent events in history, ignorant of what Buddhism
means, there was nothing more surprising than the fact that in this war
religion had no place. They rode about and saw the country full of
monasteries; they saw the monasteries full of monks, whom they called
priests; they saw that the people were intensely attached to their
religion; they had daily evidence that Buddhism was an abiding faith in
the hearts of the people. And yet, for all the assistance it was to them
in the war, the Burmese might have had no faith at all.
And the explanation is, that the teachings of the Buddha forbid war. All
killing is wrong, all war is hateful; nothing is more terrible than this
destroying of your fellow-man. There is absolutely no getting free of
this commandment. The teaching of the Buddha is that you must strive to
make your own soul perfect. This is the first of all things, and comes
before any other consideration. Be pure and kind-hearted, full of
charity and compassion, and so you may do good to others. These are the
vows the Buddhist monks make, these are the vows they keep; and so it
happened that all that great organization was useless to the patriot
fighter, was worse than useless, for it was against him. The whole
spectacle of Burma in those days, with the country seething with strife,
and the monks going about their business calmly as ever, begging their
bread from door to door, preaching of peace, not war, of kindness, not
hatred, of pity, not revenge, was to most foreigners quite inexplicable.
They could not understand it. I remember a friend of mine with whom I
went through many experiences speaking of it with scorn. He was a
cavalry officer, 'the model of a light cavalry officer'; he had with him
a squadron of his regiment, and we were trying to subdue a very troubled
part of the country.
We were camping in a monastery, as we frequently did--a monastery on a
hill near a high golden pagoda. The country all round was under the sway
of a brigand leader, and sorely the villagers suffered at his hands now
that he had leapt into unexpected power. The villages were half
abandoned, the fields untilled, the people full of unrest; but the
monasteries were as full of monks as ever; the gongs rang, as they ever
did, their message through the quiet evening air; the little boys were
taught there just the same; the trees were watered and the gardens swept
as if there were no change at all--as if the king were still on his
golden throne, and the English had never come; as if war had never burst
upon them. And to us, after the very different scenes we saw now and
then, saw and acted in, these monks and their monasteries were difficult
to understand. The religion of the Buddha thus professed was strange.
'What is the use,' said my friend, 'of this religion that we see so many
signs of? Suppose these men had been Jews or Hindus or Mussulmans, it
would have been a very different business, this war. These yellow-robed
monks, instead of sitting in their monasteries, would have pervaded the
country, preaching against us and organizing. No one organizes better
than an ecclesiastic. We should have had them leading their men into
action with sacred banners, and promising them heaven hereafter when
they died. They would have made Ghazis of them. Any one of these is a
religion worth having. But what is the use of Buddhism? What do these
monks do? I never see them in a fight, never hear that they are doing
anything to organize the people. It is, perhaps, as well for us that
they do not. But what is the use of Buddhism?'
So, or somewhat like this, spoke my friend, speaking as a soldier. Each
of us speaks from our own standpoint. He was a brilliant soldier, and a
religion was to him a sword, a thing to fight with. That was one of the
first uses of a religion. He knew nothing of Buddhism; he cared to know
nothing, beyond whether it would fight. If so, it was a good religion in
its way. If not, then not.
Religion meant to him something that would help you in your trouble,
that would be a stay and a comfort, a sword to your enemies and a prop
for yourself. Though he was himself an invader, he felt that the Burmans
did no wrong in resisting him. They fought for their homes, as he would
have fought; and their religion, if of any value, should assist them. It
should urge them to battle, and promise them peace and happiness if
dying in a good cause. His faith would do this for him. What was
Buddhism doing? What help did it give to its believers in their
extremity? It gave none. Think of the peasant lying there in the ghostly
dim-lit fields waiting to attack us at the dawn. Where was his help? He
thought, perhaps, of his king deported, his village invaded, his friends
killed, himself reduced to the subject of a far-off queen. He would
fight--yes, even though his faith told him not. There was no help there.
His was no faith to strengthen his arm, to straighten his aim, to be his
shield in the hour of danger.
If he died, if in the strife of the morning's fight he were to be
killed, if a bullet were to still his heart, or a lance to pierce his
chest, there was no hope for him of the glory of heaven. No, but every
fear of hell, for he was sinning against the laws of
righteousness--'Thou shalt take no life.' There is no exception to that
at all, not even for a patriot fighting for his country. 'Thou shalt not
take the life even of him who is the enemy of thy king and nation.' He
could count on no help in breaking the everlasting laws that the Buddha
has revealed to us. If he went to his monks, they could but say: 'See
the law, the unchangeable law that man is subject to. There is no good
thing but peace, no sin like strife and war.' That is what the followers
of the great teacher would tell the peasant yearning for help to strike
a blow upon the invaders. The law is the same for all. There is not one
law for you and another for the foreigner; there is not one law to-day
and another to-morrow. Truth is for ever and for ever. It cannot change
even to help you in your extremity. Think of the English soldier and the
Burmese peasant. Can there be anywhere a greater contrast than this?
Truly this is not a creed for a soldier, not a creed for a fighting-man
of any kind, for what the soldier wants is a personal god who will
always be on his side, always share his opinions, always support him
against everyone else. But a law that points out unalterably that right
is always right, and wrong always wrong, that nothing can alter one into
the other, nothing can ever make killing righteous and violence
honourable, that is no creed for a soldier. And Buddhism has ever done
this. It never bent to popular opinion, never made itself a tool in the
hands of worldly passion. It could not. You might as well say to
gravity, 'I want to lift this stone; please don't act on it for a time,'
as expect Buddhism to assist you to make war. Buddhism is the
unalterable law of righteousness, and cannot ally itself with evil,
cannot ever be persuaded that under any circumstances evil can be good.
The Burmese peasant had to fight his own fight in 1885 alone. His king
was gone, his government broken up, he had no leaders. He had no god to
stand beside him when he fired at the foreign invaders; and when he lay
a-dying, with a bullet in his throat, he had no one to open to him the
gates of heaven.
Yet he fought--with every possible discouragement he fought, and
sometimes he fought well. It has been thrown against him as a reproach
that he did not do better. Those who have said this have never thought,
never counted up the odds against him, never taken into consideration
how often he did well.
Here was a people--a very poor people of peasants--with no leaders,
absolutely none; no aristocracy of any kind, no cohesion, no fighting
religion. They had for their leaders outlaws and desperadoes, and for
arms old flint-lock guns and soft iron swords. Could anything be
expected from this except what actually did happen? And yet they often
did well, their natural courage overcoming their bad weapons, their
passionate desire of freedom giving them the necessary impulse.
In 1886, as I have said, all Burma was up. Even in the lower country,
which we held for so long, insurrection was spreading fast, and troops
and military police were being poured in from India.
There is above Mandalay a large trading village--a small town
almost--called Shemmaga. It is the river port for a large trade in salt
from the inner country, and it was important to hold it. The village lay
along the river bank, and about the middle of it, some two hundred yards
from the river, rises a small hill. Thus the village was a triangle,
with the base on the river, and the hill as apex. On the hill were some
monasteries of teak, from which the monks had been ejected, and three
hundred Ghurkas were in garrison there. A strong fence ran from the hill
to the river like two arms, and there were three gates, one just by the
hill, and one on each end of the river face.
Behind Shemmaga the country was under the rule of a robber chief called
Maung Yaing, who could raise from among the peasants some two hundred or
three hundred men, armed mostly with flint-locks. He had been in the
king's time a brigand with a small number of followers, who defied or
eluded the local authorities, and lived free in quarters among the most
distant villages. Like many a robber chief in our country and elsewhere,
he was liked rather than hated by the people, for his brutalities were
confined to either strangers or personal enemies, and he was open-handed
and generous. We look upon things now with different eyes to what we did
two or three hundred years ago, but I dare say Maung Yaing was neither
better nor worse than many a hero of ours long ago. He was a fairly good
fighter, and had a little experience fighting the king's troops; and so
it was very natural, when the machinery of government fell like a house
of cards, and some leaders were wanted, that the young men should crowd
to him, and put themselves under his orders. He had usually with him
forty or fifty men, but he could, as I have said, raise five or six
times as many for any particular service, and keep them together for a
few days. He very soon discovered that he and his men were absolutely no
match for our troops. In two or three attempts that he made to oppose
the troops he was signally worsted, so he was obliged to change his
tactics. He decided to boycott the enemy. No Burman was to accept
service under him, to give him information or supplies, to be his guide,
or to assist him in any way. This rule Maung Yaing made generally known,
and he announced his intention of enforcing it with rigour. He did so.
There was a head man of a village near Shemmaga whom he executed because
he had acted as guide to a body of troops, and he cut off all supplies
from the interior, lying on the roads, and stopping all men from
entering Shemmaga. He further issued a notice that the inhabitants of
Shemmaga itself should leave the town. They could not move the garrison,
therefore the people must move themselves. No assistance must be given
to the enemy. The villagers of Shemmaga, mostly small traders in salt
and rice, were naturally averse to leaving. This trade was their only
means of livelihood, the houses their only homes, and they did not like
the idea of going out into the unknown country behind. Moreover, the
exaction by Maung Yaing of money and supplies for his men fell most
heavily on the wealthier men, and on the whole they were not sorry to
have the English garrison in the town, so that they could trade in
peace. Some few left, but most did not, and though they collected
money, and sent it to Maung Yaing, they at the same time told the
English officer in command of Maung Yaing's threats, and begged that
great care should be taken of the town, for Maung Yaing was very angry.
When he found he could not cause the abandonment of the town, he sent in
word to say that he would burn it. Not three hundred foreigners, nor
three thousand, should protect these lazy, unpatriotic folk from his
vengeance. He gave them till the new moon of a certain month, and if the
town were not evacuated by that time he declared that he would destroy
it. He would burn it down, and kill certain men whom he mentioned, who
had been the principal assistants of the foreigners. This warning was
quite public, and came to the ears of the English officer almost at
once. When he heard it he laughed.
He had three hundred men, and the rebels had three hundred. His were all
magnificently trained and drilled troops, men made for war; the Burmans
were peasants, unarmed, untrained. He was sure he could defeat three
thousand of them, or ten times that number, with his little force, and
so, of course, he could if he met them in the open; no one knew that
better, by bitter experience, than Maung Yaing. The villagers, too,
knew, but nevertheless they were stricken with fear, for Maung Yaing was
a man of his word. He was as good as his threat.
One night, at midnight, the face of the fort where the Ghurkas lived on
the hill was suddenly attacked. Out of the brushwood near by a heavy
fire was opened upon the breastwork, and there was shouting and beating
of gongs. So all the Ghurkas turned out in a hurry, and ran to man the
breastwork, and the return fire became hot and heavy. In a moment, as it
seemed, the attackers were in the village. They had burst in the north
gate by the river face, killed the Burmese guard on it, and streamed in.
They lit torches from a fire they found burning, and in a moment the
village was on fire. Looking down from the hill, you could see the
village rushing into flame, and in the lurid light men and women and
children running about wildly. There were shouts and screams and shots.
No one who has never heard it, never seen it, can know what a village is
like when the enemy has burst in at night. Everyone is mad with hate,
with despair, with terror. They run to and fro, seeking to kill, seeking
to escape being killed. It is impossible to tell one from another. The
bravest man is dismayed. And the noise is like a great moan coming out
of the night, pierced with sharp cries. It rises and falls, like the
death-cry of a dying giant. It is the most terrible sound in the world.
It makes the heart stop.
To the Ghurkas this sight and sound came all of a sudden, as they were
defending what they took to be a determined attack on their own
position. The village was lost ere they knew it was attacked. And two
steamers full of troops, anchored off the town, saw it, too. They were
on their way up country, and had halted there that night, anchored in
the stream. They were close by, but could not fire, for there was no
telling friend from foe.
Before the relief party of Ghurkas could come swarming down the hill,
only two hundred yards, before the boats could land the eager troops
from the steamers, the rebels were gone. They went through the village
and out of the south gate. They had fulfilled their threat and destroyed
the town. They had killed the men they had declared they would kill. The
firing died away from the fort side, and the enemy were gone, no one
could tell whither, into the night.
Such a scene of desolation as that village was next day! It was all
destroyed--every house. All the food was gone, all furniture, all
clothes, everything, and here and there was a corpse in among the
blackened cinders. The whole countryside was terror-stricken at this
failure to defend those who had depended on us.
I do not think this was a particularly gallant act, but it was a very
able one. It was certainly war. It taught us a very severe lesson--more
severe than a personal reverse would have been. It struck terror in the
countryside. The memory of it hampered us for very long; even now they
often talk of it. It was a brutal act--that of a brigand, not a soldier.
But there was no want of courage. If these men, inferior in number, in
arms, in everything, could do this under the lead of a robber chief,
what would they not have done if well led, if well trained, if well
armed?
Of desperate encounters between our troops and the insurgents I could
tell many a story. I have myself seen such fights. They nearly always
ended in our favour--how could it be otherwise?
There was Ta Te, who occupied a pagoda enclosure with some eighty men,
and was attacked by our mounted infantry. There was a long fight in that
hot afternoon, and very soon the insurgents' ammunition began to fail,
and the pagoda was stormed. Many men were killed, and Ta Te, when his
men were nearly all dead, and his ammunition quite expended, climbed up
the pagoda wall, and twisted off pieces of the cement and threw them at
the troops. He would not surrender--not he--and he was killed. There
were many like him. The whole war was little affairs of this kind--a
hundred, three hundred, of our men, and much the same, or a little more,
of theirs. They only once or twice raised a force of two thousand men.
Nothing can speak more forcibly of their want of organization than this.
The whole country was pervaded by bands of fifty or a hundred men, very
rarely amounting to more than two hundred, never, I think, to five
hundred, armed men, and no two bands ever acted in concert.
It is probable that most of the best men of the country were against
us. It is certain, I think, that of those who openly joined us and
accompanied us in our expedition, very, very few were other than men who
had some private grudge to avenge, or some purpose to gain, by opposing
their own people. Of such as these you cannot expect very much. And yet
there were exceptions--men who showed up all the more brilliantly
because they were exceptions--men whom I shall always honour. There were
two I remember best of all. They are both dead now.
One was the eldest son of the hereditary governor of a part of the
country called Kawlin. It is in the north-west of Upper Burma, and
bordered on a semi-independent state called Wuntho. In the troubles that
occurred after the deposition of King Thibaw, the Prince of Wuntho
thought that he would be able to make for himself an independent
kingdom, and he began by annexing Kawlin. So the governor had to flee,
and with him his sons, and naturally enough they joined our columns when
we advanced in that direction, hoping to be replaced. They were
replaced, the father as governor under the direction of an English
magistrate, and the son as his assistant. They were only kept there by
our troops, and upheld in authority by our power against Wuntho. But
they were desired by many of their own people, and so, perhaps, they
could hardly be called traitors, as many of those who joined us were.
The father was a useless old man, but his son, he of whom I speak, was
brave and honourable, good tempered and courteous, beyond most men whom
I have met. It was well known that he was the real power behind his
father. It was he who assisted us in an attempt to quell the
insurrections and catch the raiders that troubled our peace, and many a
time they tried to kill him, many a time to murder him as he slept.
There was a large gang of insurgents who came across the Mu River one
day, and robbed one of his villages, so a squadron of cavalry was sent
in pursuit. We travelled fast and long, but we could not catch the
raiders. We crossed the Mu into unknown country, following their tracks,
and at last, being without guides, we camped that night in a little
monastery in the forest. At midnight we were attacked. A road ran
through our camp, and there was a picket at each end of the road, and
sentries were doubled.
It was just after midnight that the first shot was fired. We were all
asleep when a sudden volley was poured into the south picket, killing
one sentry and wounding another. There was no time to dress, and we ran
down the steps as we were (in sleeping dresses), to find the men rapidly
falling in, and the horses kicking at their pickets. It was pitch-dark.
The monastery was on a little cleared space, and there was forest all
round that looked very black. Just as we came to the foot of the steps
an outbreak of firing and shouts came from the north, and the Burmese
tried to rush our camp from there; then they tried to rush it again from
the south, but all their attempts were baffled by the steadiness of the
pickets and the reinforcements that were running up. So the Burmese,
finding the surprise ineffectual, and that the camp could not be taken,
spread themselves about in the forest in vantage places, and fired into
the camp. Nothing could be seen except the dazzling flashes from their
guns as they fired here and there, and the darkness was all the darker
for those flashes of flame, that cut it like swords. It was very cold. I
had left my blanket in the monastery, and no one was allowed to ascend,
because there, of all places, the bullets flew thickest, crushing
through the mat walls, and going into the teak posts with a thud. There
was nothing we could do. The men, placed in due order about the camp,
fired back at the flashes of the enemy's guns. That was all they had to
fire at. It was not much guide. The officers went from picket to picket
encouraging the men, but I had no duty; when fighting began my work as a
civilian was at a standstill. I sat and shivered with cold under the
monastery, and wished for the dawn. In a pause of the firing you could
hear the followers hammering the pegs that held the foot-ropes of the
horses. Then the dead and wounded were brought and put near me, and in
the dense dark the doctor tried to find out what injuries the men had
received, and dress them as well as he could. No light dare be lit. The
night seemed interminable. There were no stars, for a dense mist hung
above the trees. After an hour or two the firing slackened a little, and
presently, with great caution, a little lamp, carefully shrouded with a
blanket, was lit. A sudden burst of shots that came splintering into the
posts beside us caused the lamp to be hurriedly put out; but presently
it was lit again, and with infinite caution one man was dressed. At last
a little very faint silver dawn came gleaming through the tree-tops--the
most beautiful sight I ever saw--and the firing stopped. The dawn came
quickly down, and very soon we were able once more to see what we were
about, and count our losses.
Then we moved out. We had hardly any hope of catching the enemy, we who
were in a strange country, who were mounted on horses, and had a heavy
transport, and they who knew every stream and ravine, and had every
villager for a spy. So we moved back a march into a more open country,
where we hoped for better news, and two days later that news came.