_Larai meṅ laddu nahiṅ batte_ (War is not sugar-plums).—_Hindi
Proverb._
Working from the East to the West of England, through a countryside
alive with troops of all arms, the car came at dusk into a cathedral
town entirely inhabited by one type of regiment. The telegraph-office
was an orderly jam of solid, large, made men, with years of discipline
behind them and the tan of Indian suns on their faces—Englishmen still
so fresh from the troopships that one of them asked me, ‘What’s the day
o’ the month?’ They were advising friends of their arrival in England,
or when they might be expected on short leave at the week’s end; and the
fresh-faced telegraph girls behind the grilles worked with six pairs of
hands apiece and all the goodwill and patience in the world to back
them. That same young woman who, with nothing to do, makes you wait ten
minutes for a penny stamp while she finishes a talk with a lady-friend,
will, at a crisis, go on till she drops, and keep her temper throughout.
‘Well, _if_ that’s her village,’ I heard one of the girls say to an
anxious soul, ‘I tell _you_ that that will be her telegraph-office. You
leave it to me. _She’ll_ get it all right.’
He backed out, and a dozen more quietly took his place. Their regiments
hailed from all the old known stations of the East and beyond that into
the Far East again. They cursed their cool barrack accommodation; they
rejoiced in the keen autumn smells, and paraded the long street all
filled with ‘Europe shops’; while their officers and their officers’
wives, and, I think, mothers who had come down to snatch a glimpse of
their boys, crowded the hotels, and the little unastonished Anglo-Indian
children circulated round the knees of big friends they had made
aboard-ship and asked, ‘Where are you going now?’
One caught scraps of our old gipsy talk—names of boarding-houses,
agents’ addresses: ‘Milly stays with mother, of course.’ ‘I’m taking
Jack down to school to-morrow. It’s past half-term, but that doesn’t
matter nowadays’; and cheery farewells between men and calm-eyed women.
Except for the frocks, it might have been an evening assembly at any
station bandstand in India.
Outside, on the surging pavements, a small boy cried: ‘Paper! Evenin’
paper!’ Then seductively: _’Kargus!_’
‘What?’ I said, thinking my ears had cheated me.
‘_Dekko! Kargus!_’ said he. (’Look here! Paper!’)
‘Why on earth d’you say that?’
‘Because the men like it,’ he replied, and slapped an evening paper (no
change for a penny) into the hand of a man in a helmet.
Who shall say that the English are not adaptable?
The car swam bonnet-deep through a mile of troops; and a mile up the
road one could hear the deep hum of all those crowded streets that the
cathedral bells were chiming over. It was only one small block of
Anglo-India getting ready to take its place in the all-devouring Line.