An hour later at —— (Shall we ever be able to name people and places
outright again?) the wind brought up one whiff—one unmistakable whiff—of
_ghi_. Somewhere among the English pines that, for the moment, pretended
to be the lower slopes of the Dun, there were native troops. A mule
squealed in the dark and set off half-a-dozen others. It was
screw-guns—batteries of them, waiting their turn also at the game.
Morning showed them in their immaculate lines as though they had just
marched in from Jutogh—little, low guns with their ammunition; very big
English gunners in disengaged attitudes which, nevertheless, did not
encourage stray civilians to poke and peer into things; and the native
drivers all busied over their charges. True, the wind was bitter, and
many of the drivers had tied up their heads, but so one does at Quetta
in the cold weather—not to mention Peshawur—and, said a naik of drivers:
‘It is not the cold for which we have no liking. It is the wet. The
English air is good, but water falls at all seasons. Yet
notwithstanding, we of this battery (and, oh, the pride men can throw
into a mere number!) have not lost one mule. Neither at sea nor on land
have we _one_ lost. That can be shown, sahib.’
Then one heard the deep racking tobacco-cough in the lee of a tent where
four or five men—Kangra folk by the look of them—were drinking tobacco
out of a cow’s horn. Their own country’s tobacco, be sure, for English
tobacco.... But there was no need to explain. Who would have dreamed to
smell bazar-tobacco on a south country golf links?
A large proportion of the men are, of course, Sikhs, to whom tobacco is
forbidden; the Havildar Major himself was a Sikh of the Sikhs. He spoke,
of all things in this strange world, of the late Mr. M. McAuliffe’s
monumental book on the Sikh religion, saying, not without warrant, that
McAuliffe Sahib had translated into English much of the Holy Book—the
great Grunth Sahib that lives at Amritzar. He enlarged, too, on the
ancient prophecy among the Sikhs—that a hatted race should some day come
out of the sea and lead them to victory all the earth over. So spoke Bir
Singh, erect and enormous beneath the grey English skies. He hailed from
a certain place called Banalu, near Patiala, where many years ago two
Sikh soldiers executed a striking but perfectly just vengeance on
certain villagers who had oppressed their young brother, a cultivator.
They had gone to the extreme limits of abasement and conciliation. This
failing, they took leave for a week-end and slew the whole tribe of
their enemies. The story is buried in old Government reports, but when
Bir Singh implied that he and his folk were orthodox I had no doubt of
it. And behind him stood another giant, who knew, for his village was
but a few miles up the Shalimar road, every foot of Lahore city. He
brought word that there had been great floods at home, so that the risen
Ravi river had touched the very walls of Runjit Singh’s Fort. And that
was only last rains—and, behold!—here he was now in England waiting
orders to go to this fight which, he understood, was not at all a small
fight, but a fight of fights, in which all the world and ‘our Raj’ was
engaged. The trouble in India was that all the young men—the mere
_jiwans_—wanted to come out at once, which, he said, was manifestly
unjust to older men, who had waited so long. However, merit and patience
had secured their reward, and the battery was here, and it would do the
hot _jiwans_ no harm to stay at home, and be zealous at drill until
orders came for them in their turn. ‘Young men think that everything
good in this world is theirs by right, sahib.’
Then came the big, still English gunners, who are trained to play with
the little guns. They took one such gun and melted it into trifling
pieces of not more than a hundred and fifty pounds each, and reassembled
it, and explained its innermost heart till even a layman could
understand. There is a lot to understand about screw-guns—specially the
new kind. But the gunner of to-day, like his ancestor, does not talk
much, except in his own time and place, when he is as multitudinously
amazing as the Blue Marine.