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Title: The Great Wall of India
Date of first publication: 1933
Author: Ian Hay (1876-1952)
Date first posted: Dec. 24, 2019
Date last updated: Dec. 24, 2019
Faded Page eBook #20191249

This eBook was produced by: Al Haines
This file was produced from images generously made available by https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.209758




[Transcriber's note: Because of copyright considerations, the
illustrations by Ethel "Bip" Pares (1904-1977) could not be included
in this ebook]




  THE
  GREAT WALL OF
  INDIA




[Frontispiece: (roadside intersection sign)]




  THE
  GREAT WALL OF
  INDIA

  _by_
  IAN HAY



  HODDER AND STOUGHTON, LIMITED
  at ST. PAUL'S HOUSE in the CITY of LONDON




  FIRST PUBLISHED . . . 1933


  _Made and Printed in Great Britain.
  Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ltd., London and Aylesbury._




CONTENTS

AUTHOR'S NOTE

I. THE FRONTIER MAIL

II. THE KHYBER

III. A SCOUT POST

IV. WATCH AND WARD

V. A "JIRGAH"

VI. THE MAN ON THE SPOT




_AUTHOR'S NOTE_

India is very much in the air just now, and one's friends may be
divided, for purposes of argument on the subject, into two classes:

   I.  People who have been in India.
  II.  People who have not been in India.

Class II can be subdivided into:

(_a_) People who have read all about India.

(_b_) People who have read nothing about India.

(_c_) People whose knowledge of India is mainly derived from lifelong
intimacy with the writings of Rudyard Kipling.


I come under the heading of Class II, sub-section (_c_).  Or rather,
I did.  Since the spring of this year I have qualified for admission
into Class I.  I should hate to tell you, as they say across the
Atlantic, how long my stay was.  Anyhow, I qualified, with the result
that I now find myself, in some trepidation, committing my
impressions to paper.  These impressions are of an entirely personal
nature--I believe the right word is 'subjective'--and I therefore
hope that I may be forgiven for employing the egotistic 'I'
throughout.  I would much rather write in more formal vein, but that
might attach to my observations an authority which they do not in
point of fact possess.

Still, first impressions, however crude, have their uses.  They take
note of things which the writer will never notice again--or at least,
never consider worth recording again.  When an _habitué_ attempts to
describe a place, it usually happens that he omits all the points of
interest which the uninstructed hearer wishes to be told about.  That
is why a novice's description possesses a definite value all its own.

For instance, if ever I wake up in Bombay Harbour again, I shall no
longer be interested to note the sounds and smells and infinite
variety of colour and creed and costume on Ballard Pier.  I shall be
entirely occupied in scheming how to get through the Customs with the
least possible worry and delay.  The glamour of a first experience
will be gone: I shall be an ordinary, fussy, gangway-crasher.




I

_THE FRONTIER MAIL_

The incoming P. & O. mailboat disgorges its passengers at Bombay at a
remorselessly early hour each Friday morning, so if you are going
north you have to wait until the Frontier Mail starts in the evening.
('Frontier Mail'--there is a thrill for you, right away!)  But before
we board it we have to fill in a whole day in Bombay--and exploring a
big city for the first time has a peculiar fascination of its own,
provided you can do it by yourself and in your own way.

Viewed from London, through the eyes of our more emotional
publicists, Bombay is mainly populated at the present moment by
riotous adherents of Mr. Gandhi.  But there are others.  This great
city seethes and teems with people of every political and religious
creed.  Parsees, Hindus, Muslims, Jains, Sikhs--they are all there;
and they are all marked in plain figures, for each sect wears its own
distinctive head-gear.  (A useful notion, worthy of extension to
London.  It would save much misapprehension, for instance, in Hyde
Park on a Sunday afternoon.)  This makes it possible to identify the
supporters of Mr. Gandhi, and so bring them into their proper
perspective.  They wear little white caps of the type favoured, in
pattern though not in colour, in English convict prisons.  They are
not particularly numerous or noticeable against this great and
variegated background.  True, the morning paper mentions that they
have been rioting again on the Maidan--a great, brown, dusty sort of
Clapham Common in the northern part of the city--but this means no
more to Bombay as a whole than the news of a Communist demonstration
in Limehouse last night would mean to London as a whole.  For the
moment, the Bombay police, in their smart blue uniforms and yellow
_bérets_, seem to have little more to do than direct the traffic.
The only visible obstacle to the smooth running of the wheels of
Empire this morning is a young Hindu lady sitting on a campstool
outside a large outfitter's shop.  She wears a placard round her
neck, which implores you not to patronize this particular
establishment.  Nobody takes the slightest notice of her, and she
seems well content.

Bombay itself is a big, sprawling, noisy, haphazard, entirely prosaic
sort of place.  Electric trams clank along the principal
thoroughfares, and the shops, which vary from a kind of miniature
railway-arch (under which the proprietor sits surrounded by his
wares) to the modern European department store, are all busy.

The streets are filled with motor-cars--mostly blowing horns.  The
populace which throngs the fairway takes no more notice of these than
of the young lady on the campstool--either because they are too busy
chattering, or because they are asleep.  The capacity of the Oriental
for profound slumber in uncomfortable and dangerous attitudes in
public places is illimitable.  He can sleep on the roadway or the
pavement, with traffic roaring past or passers-by stepping over his
body, with equal facility and immunity.  I have frequently seen a man
sound asleep on the stone parapet of a narrow country bridge.  Half a
turn, and he would have been in the stream twelve feet below.  But he
never did turn, and doubtless never does.

Another pedestrian to whom you must get accustomed in the
streets--and for that matter on the pavement--is that sacred but
occasionally thoughtless animal, the cow, which roams abroad with
none to say her nay, whether she be holding up an electric tram or
making herself embarrassingly at home in a shop-door.

One soon notices that few Europeans walk the streets of Bombay.  They
nearly all drive, partly because it is usually rather too warm to
walk with comfort, and partly because shopping is almost invariably
done by servants.  One of the first things a white man must learn in
this land of caste is that he may not run his own errands or
otherwise cheapen his own status.  Which is in its way a parable,
capable of a larger application.

Speaking of errands, here is another interesting and decorative
little custom.  Native bank-messengers, office porters, and all that
brown-faced, white-robed section of the community which begins where
the white-collared European section leaves off, wear upon their
chests a bright brass plate, upon which is engraved their exact
office and designation.  Another good notion for London--though I
have a feeling that an Englishman required in this year of grace to
display upon his bosom the legend 'Income Tax Assessor' (as his
opposite number in Bombay does, with infinite pride) would probably
adopt some sort of camouflage until he got within point-blank range
of his victim.



II

However, the day is over all too quickly, and now we all foregather
at the Ballard Pier Railway Station, where the Frontier Mail is
waiting for us.

Here are Government officials bound for Delhi; here are British
officers returning from leave to military stations like Umballa and
Amritsar, or distant Frontier stations like Peshawar.  There is a
special saloon attached for a youthful Maharajah, who has come out
from school in England in order to preside at some special function
in his own capital.  He is attended by his State officials, who have
met him in Bombay, and his English guardian, who has brought him out
from home.

There is a good sprinkling of portly, prosperous-looking Hindu
business-men.  One of them is talking in an earnest, sing-song voice
to an elderly Englishman--a Commissioner, perhaps, returning to his
District.

"Yes, sah, I _have_ become anti-British," you overhear him say.
"Why?  You give us no security of expectation these days, either in
politics or business.  You put your foot down--and then take it up
again!  You must govern, you know, or get out!"

The train itself consists of numerous classes, as is inevitable in
this land of many races and castes, ranging from the first-class
sleeping-coach--an unexpectedly spacious affair, ten feet wide, with
two long leather sleeping-couches running lengthwise--to the
wooden-seated and windowless third-class, crammed with people who
look and sound like the chorus of _Chu Chin Chow_.  The engine itself
is English-built, and is always in the charge of a European driver.

Presently we start, clank over the points, and slip out of Bombay in
the falling darkness.  All pretence of European modernity ceases on
the outskirts of the city.  We pass by endless rows of open mud huts,
each with a wood fire twinkling in front of it, over which a woman is
cooking the evening meal, while brown naked babies roll about in the
dust.  There are millions of families like that in India.  They, and
perhaps the abjectly servile sweeper who will dust out our railway
carriage every time the train stops, represent one end of the scale;
at the other come the Native Prince, the Nawab, the Maharajah.
Midway or thereabouts stands the Babu, educated beyond his
opportunities, brain without brawn, clamouring for an independent
India.  A difficult combination to satisfy with any safety to itself.

At the first stop we return from the dining-car--my stable companion,
by the way, is a Gunner officer bound for the Staff College at
Quetta--to find that in our absence our servants have laid out our
bedding-rolls on the two leather couches, and disappeared for the
night into the noisome cubby-hole at the forward end of the coach
which they share with the rest of their kind, and from which they
will emerge at the crack of dawn with tea and shaving water.  We also
find that another traveller has invaded our compartment, and is now
asleep in the upper-berth--a hinged arrangement which is only let
down when required.  That is the trouble about Indian night travel.
You may be awakened at any hour by the irruption of a fresh
passenger, who will introduce blasts of cold air, turn on all the
lights, and smoke cigarettes until he has unrolled his bedding and
made his arrangements for the night.  However, only the _habitué_
minds these things: to the novice everything is part of the adventure.



III

The next fifty hours I spent in the train.  During the first day we
passed through Rajputana--flat, brown, and completely dried up at
this time of year, for we are almost exactly between two rainy
seasons.

The railway stations are, in their small way, a reflection of the
complicated social structure of India.  There are separate
waiting-rooms for Hindu and Muslim passengers; there is even a female
ticket-collector whose duty it is to collect the tickets of ladies
travelling _purdah_, behind darkened-glass windows.  Otherwise
railway travel is a sociable business.  Everybody gets out at every
stop, and the occupants of the Intermediate and Third Classes buy
refreshments from itinerant vendors--sticky sweetmeats and mysterious
dainties resembling rissoles, kept hot on a portable charcoal stove.
The bookstalls are filled with English magazines, a welcome and
homely spectacle for which the weary traveller has to thank the
energy and enterprise of that remarkable distributing agency, the
great house of Wheeler.  At the quieter stations friendly monkeys
lope about the platforms, chattering and asking for food.

In the afternoon we parted from our little Maharajah.  He was greeted
at his own station, with full honours, by an assembly of
brightly-attired local notables, supported by local riff-raff.  A
white cloth covered the platform, and there was a military guard of
honour--stalwart Jats, with full band, which, rather surprisingly,
played _Over the Sea to Skye_ on bagpipes by way of a Royal Salute.
His Highness had changed his clothes in the train.  He no longer wore
the preparatory-school flannel shorts in which he had romped with us
on board ship: he was attired in white _jodhpurs_, a light-blue satin
tunic, and a pink turban with an osprey plume in it--a very
picturesque and a very sedate little figure.  Garlands of flowers
were piled high round his neck.  The procession drove off in a haze
of saffron dust as the train moved out.

At Umballa my companion left me, at half-past two in the morning, and
I travelled on alone.  We were in the Punjab now--a green and
well-cultivated land, though much colder.  Sikhs with red-dyed
beards, wearing their jaws wrapped up as if against toothache,
crowded the platform at Amritsar, where I woke.  Each of them was
encumbered with a home-made bubble-bubble pipe fully three feet long,
which appeared to be his sole article of luggage.  I could not help
thinking of the story of the man who walked down a street carrying a
grandfather's clock, and was asked by a well-meaning passer-by why he
did not try a wrist-watch.

The national gift for small-talk showed no falling off.  In Waterloo
Station in London the noise is considerable, but it is furnished in
the main by the trains.  In Lahore Station, where I breakfasted, it
was deafening, but it emanated not from the trains but from the
people.  It was in Lahore, you will recall, that Kim, sitting astride
Zam Zammah, acquired the first rudiments of the art of vernacular
backchat.

Now we began to climb, with the Grand Trunk Road from distant
Calcutta running beside us.  In the afternoon we reached a wild,
eerie country of soft brown rock, like chocolate-cake, all carved up
into isolated square blocks, presumably by the action of water.  At
Attock we crossed the Indus, creeping in the dusk across the lofty
bridge which spans the gorge through which the great river flows.
Then darkness fell, but not before the Himalayas had shown themselves
away on our right.  At Rawalpindi I lost my sole remaining white
companion on the train--an Engineer on some remote surveying
expedition--and ate my solitary evening meal under the oppressive
supervision of the entire strength of the white-robed and
heavily-bearded dining-car staff.

At last came Peshawar, the terminus of the line, and my friend and
host, whom I will call Major Kenmar, commanding the North-West
Irregulars--which is not their proper name.  He had motored a hundred
and fifty miles--o'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent--to meet
me.  Having criticized my dazzlingly white solar _topi_, which he
said reminded him of the second act of a musical comedy, he announced
that on the morrow, before departing for his Headquarters, we would
visit the Khyber Pass.




II

_THE KHYBER_

Peshawar lies in the centre of a vast, stony plain in the very
left-hand-top corner of India.  To the north stretches the
mountainous Mohmand country, leading to Malakand and Chitral.  On the
south lies the North-West Frontier Province itself, deeply indented
here by what is known as the Tirah Salient, home of the Adam Khel
Pathans.  The east is bounded by the rich and fertile valley of the
Kabul River, which, having penetrated the rocky barrier separating
British India from Afghanistan north of the Khyber, here curls south
to join the Indus.  To the west lies the Khyber Pass itself.

Like most Indian cities, Peshawar is divided into two halves--the
native city, or Bazaar, and the Cantonments, which house the
Garrison, the Administrative Headquarters, and the British population
generally.

The contrast is strange.  Old Peshawar, one of the toughest spots in
all India, is a walled town--the resort of innumerable tribes and
factions--turbulent, suspicious, and credulous to a degree.  Start
any kind of inflammatory rumour, and you have a conflagration at
once.  Naturally, Peshawar affords a fertile field to the
trouble-makers--the agents of the self-styled Congress--the
Gandhiites, in short--and the 'Redshirts.'  In this mainly Muslim
territory the Gandhiites, who are Hindus, are comparatively
innocuous; but the Redshirts, who draw their instructions and their
pay from a European power on the north side of the Hindu Kush, are a
perpetual menace.

[Illustration: (turbaned man)]

Of course turbulence in Peshawar is nothing new.  Ninety years ago
the city formed part of the Sikh Kingdom, and was governed for the
Sikhs by an interesting old gentleman named Avitabile, an Italian
soldier of fortune who had been imported for that express purpose.
His method of maintaining order was simple.  Whenever murder or
rapine broke out in the city, he sent out into the streets for the
nearest passer-by, and hanged him over the Palace gate, continuing
the treatment, at the rate of one pedestrian per day, until
tranquillity reasserted itself.  We have to be content with more
diplomatic, if less efficacious, methods now.  For instance, in the
summer of 1930 the Afridis came down from the hills and tried to
besiege Peshawar.  They were repulsed without much difficulty; but
obviously this sort of thing had to be discouraged, so Government
troops occupied the Kajori Plain south-west of Peshawar, whither the
Afridis were accustomed to descend from the snowbound valleys of
Tirah for the winter grazing, and the plain was not evacuated until
the Afridis had acknowledged the error of their ways and given
guarantees for future good behaviour.  It was almost a bloodless
campaign, and comparatively cheap.  It is still referred to locally
as the Woolworth War.  One would like to know what old Avitabile
would have called it.

This morning, however, as we push our way through the crowded bazaar,
accompanied by a plain-clothes police official, all is quiet.  In a
political sense, that is: vocally, needless to say, everybody is in
full blast.  Each trade has its own street--the street of jewellers,
or coppersmiths, or bird-sellers, or sweet-sellers, or shawl-sellers,
or tinware merchants.  Everybody is selling something, or
manufacturing something, or both; and everybody is bargaining.  Food,
as usual, is being cooked, sold, and eaten in every unlikely spot--as
often as not in the middle of the dusty roadway, under the feet of
the crowd.  Big Pathan policemen stand about armed with _lathis_, or
brass-tipped staves.  They have nothing to do to-day, but a fortnight
ago they were at grips with a first-class Redshirt upheaval, and the
city gates were closed.  The political barometer rises and falls
easily in Peshawar.

The Cantonments just outside the town breathe a very different
atmosphere.  Here are straight roads, orderly lines of verandahed
barrack-buildings, gravel paths bordered with whitewashed stones--and
the old familiar Aldershot smell of incinerated refuse.  There is an
excellent hotel by the railway station; and here we may note that the
Indian hotel differs from the American hotel in this material point,
that it resembles a skyscraper laid on its side.  In other words, it
is a long, rambling building one storey high.  Each guest has his own
suite and verandah.  Behind the verandah lies a small sitting-room;
then a bedroom furnished with little but a bed and a dressing-table;
finally, a stone-floored whitewashed bathroom, containing an enormous
crock of water and a tin bath.  This bathroom has a door of its own
opening out on to the backyard, for the exclusive use of the sweeper
who attends to it.  His caste is so low that he may not enter by any
other door, or penetrate into the other two rooms.  High life below
stairs is not confined to Mayfair, apparently.

There is also a golf course (with an armed sentry over the ninth
hole) upon which British officers and their wives can be seen
playing.  You can even see English babies in perambulators.  There is
a European bazaar, wherein you may buy such necessities of English
life as tooth-paste and Edgar Wallace novels.  Here, at the stern
behest of my host, my Bond Street headgear was replaced by a smaller
and more subdued article of khaki colour.



II

Most of us have tried at one time or another to picture for ourselves
what the Khyber Pass is like.  To me it has always been a deep,
black, frowning gorge, with a road winding through it upon which you
may at any moment encounter a sniper's bullet.  I was not far out,
except that the rocks are not black but clay coloured, and in this
land of perpetual sunshine smile rather than frown.  As for the
snipers' bullets, they are not so numerous as they used to be, for
reasons which will presently appear.

The entrance to the Pass is nine miles from Peshawar, and is guarded
by a gate, through which you may not penetrate until you have signed
your name in a book and generally given some account of yourself; for
here you are leaving British India, and the direct protection of the
British Raj, in order to enter that strip of No-Man's-Land known as
Tribal Territory, beyond which lies mysterious Afghanistan.

On the road to the Khyber, by the way, just outside Peshawar, you may
observe a considerable building.  This is the Islamia College, run
upon very much the same lines as the Gordon College at Khartum, in
which the sons of Frontier chieftains are receiving an education
which may enable them, in time, to appreciate the superiority of
reason over force in the game of Border politics.

The gate into the Pass is guarded by a brick fort--Jamrud--a curious
affair with wireless masts on top, which, as you approach, looks
exactly like a stranded battleship.  A week or two ago we should not
have been allowed through this gate at all, owing to the outbreak of
a periodical 'spot of bother' somewhere.  The first thing the British
Government does when trouble breaks out in the North-West is to close
the Khyber Pass--much as a prudent householder turns off the gas at
the meter on the first alarm of fire.

Now we are in the Pass, and we note that there are three roads and
not one.  The first is the old caravan road, which winds and twists
interminably, and thereby keeps as level as is humanly possible when
you have to climb four thousand feet in fifteen miles.  A great
caravan of pack animals from Kabul still passes through twice a week.
The other is of more modern construction, and is intended for motor
traffic only.  Occasionally the two roads converge or cross, and
here, to prevent confusion, signposts are erected, of a primitive but
unmistakable design.  The motor road is designated by a stencilled
silhouette of a motor-car, the other by those of a camel and a donkey.

The third road is the new railway, which spends most of its time
emerging from one tunnel only to dive into another.  Occasionally it
crosses one of the roads by an ordinary level-crossing.  At each of
these a hut is erected, in which squat some half-dozen contemplative
gentlemen, whose duty it is to bar the road with a pole whenever a
train is about to cross it.  I asked casually how often a train did
cross it.  'Twice a week,' was the answer.  The ideal job, in fact.

The motor road is finely engineered and the drive fascinating.
Occasionally we encounter other vehicles.  First, a couple of big
cylindrical petrol-lorries, rumbling through to Kabul; then a small
motor-car, on its second speed, containing a British Major-General
and his A.D.C., probably on their way to an Inspection.  There are
few pedestrians: they are mostly on the other road.  But occasionally
we pass a picturesque figure, or group of figures, stationed at a
road-bend or silhouetted against the sky upon some outstanding rock.
These are Khassadars, or Irregular Armed Constabulary.  If they were
not Irregular Armed Constabulary they would be Irregular Armed
Bandits; so the British Government, with its usual uncanny instinct
for turning poachers into gamekeepers, has diverted them into the
paths of usefulness by giving them a regular job, of which they are
inordinately proud, and the rudiments of discipline.  They are only
employed by day, for the Khyber Pass closes (like Kensington Gardens)
at dusk.

There are few trees to be seen, but here and there we pass small
patches of intensely green cultivation.  These are usually in the
neighbourhood of a village.  The villages themselves are rare and
small; indeed, they do not house much more than a single family and
its ramifications: life here is still entirely patriarchal.  The
villages are surrounded by a mud wall, perhaps twelve feet high, with
a lofty watch-tower in the corner.  When night falls the villagers,
men, women, and children, with their camels, goats, and donkeys,
crowd inside; the gate is shut and barred against marauders, and the
watch-tower is manned until daybreak.  There are villages like this
stretching half across Asia, and they have been going through the
same nightly routine since the days of the Psalmist.  "Unless the
Lord keep the city, the watch-man..."--we understand that phrase now.

In the neighbourhood of each village there is usually a small
walled-in enclosure, containing an untidy-looking collection of
miscellaneous rubbish--an old packing-case, some logs of wood, a roll
of rusty wire-netting--heaped round a pile of stones, in which is
planted an upright stick with a few tattered rags tied to it.  This
is a _Ziarat_--the grave of a local Holy Man--and is employed for a
curious purpose.  The inhabitants of Tribal Territory care nothing
for the laws of _meum_ and _tuum_--it is doubtful if they have heard
of them--but they are profoundly superstitious, especially in the
matter of places which they regard as being haunted.  This fact
renders a _Ziarat_ an ideal safe-deposit--or left-luggage office--or
parking-place.  You may leave your property there for months, and
nobody will touch it.

We are now in a wide, shallow valley, some three thousand feet up.
And here we come to the end, the extreme end, of that long,
unobtrusive arm which furnishes to this part of the Frontier such
tranquillity as it can boast--a collection of tidy, symmetrical
barrack-buildings, and the busy, well-ordered atmosphere of a British
military outpost.  Landi Khotal, the place is called.  Troops are
drawn up on the parade-ground--a battalion of Indian Infantry and two
Companies of Highlanders--Gordons.  Evidently we were right about the
General in the car.  We should like to pause and pass the time of day
with these old friends, but we have to be out of the Khyber Pass by
closing-time; so on we go.

We are almost at the highest point now.  On our left, still on flat
ground, stands a serai, or halting-place for passing caravans--a
great walled enclosure, with stalls running all round inside, like
cloisters.  It is empty now, but the bi-weekly caravan from Kabul is
due here to-night.

The road climbs a little higher, takes a twist to the right, then to
the left again round a hairpin turn at the head of a deep gully, then
a final twist, and we are at the summit of the Pass, looking down
into Afghanistan.

It is a tremendous vista.  Forty miles away we can discern the great
snowy barrier of the Hindu Kush, nineteen thousand feet high.  On our
right the two roads continue by easy gradients down the valley-side.
The railway is there too, discernible by reason of an occasional
tunnel-mouth.  The spot on which we stand is called Michni Kandao.
There is a gate here across the road, guarded by a bearded sentry in
a species of frock-coat, a bandolier, and an astrakhan cap.  He is a
Khassadar, and it is his duty to see that you do not enter
Afghanistan without the necessary credentials.  He does not remain
here at night, though, after legitimate traffic has ceased: the
serious work of guarding the Pass is done by the occupants of that
three-storey stone tower, or picket-post, on our left.  Let us pay
them a visit.

[Illustration: (sentry at tower)]

The ground-floor of the tower, for obvious reasons, possesses neither
door nor window: you enter by the first-floor, up a ladder.  The post
is held by a detail of the famous Guides, themselves one of the
original units of that historic Corps the 'Piffers,' or Punjab
Frontier Force.  They are sturdy Pathan troops, under a sergeant, or
havildar, who welcomes us effusively.

Being welcomed by a Pathan is a rather overpowering business.  He
possesses a great deal of the natural cordiality, genuine anxiety to
make you feel at home, and complete insincerity of the West
Highlander.  His greeting takes the form of a double hand-shake and a
flowery compliment, which you are expected to return.  Another
compliment follows _instanter_, and you have to cap that; and so on.
My own personal contribution to the ceremony was limited to a single
recently acquired salutation, which sounds like 'Sturry Mashie'--and
means, I believe, "O brother, may you never be tired!"  Then I threw
my hand in.  But my Major Kenmar was undefeatable.  He answered the
havildar phrase for phrase, standing up to him until both were out of
breath and ready to call it a draw.

After that we were conducted to the flat roof of the post.  Here were
machine-guns behind sandbags, and an immovable sentry, with his face
set towards Afghanistan.  The havildar did the honours.  He showed us
the little town of Landi Khana lying four thousand feet below us,
where the railway ends and Afghanistan begins.  The Frontier is
indicated by white stones, at intervals: we pick them out one by one,
as they climb the hill on either side of the valley to our right and
left.  This is the famous Durand Line, which for nearly forty years
has marked the eastern limits of Afghan territory and influence.

Down on our left the havildar showed us the faintly discernible
outline of the steep mountain-track up which Alexander the Great led
his host, to the piercing of the Pass and the conquest of the Punjab,
twenty-two centuries ago.  He seemed to know all about it, Major
Kenmar told me.  Tradition in the East needs no printed page.

The conversation takes a more general and, I shrewdly suspect, more
frivolous turn.  It is interlarded now with what sounds like
Rabelaisian jests; anyhow, ribald laughter is continuous.  My Major
seems to be doing his bit: he has ceased translating to me, which is
ominous.  All the same, to hold one's own in an exchange of
sophisticated wise-cracks with a handful of remote tribal humorists
at the top of the Khyber Pass is a more important accomplishment than
it sounds.  Nor is it easily come by.  I happen to know that the
Major spent most of a long leave some years ago studying Pushtu, and
passing the necessary examinations.  Then, when he returned to duty,
he made a point of inviting one of his native officers to his
quarters for an hour every afternoon for three months, to take tea
and exchange laborious small-talk in the vernacular.  Men have been
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for less.

Presently we depart, under a hail of cheerful benediction, for it is
high noon, and we must be back at Jamrud before dusk.  So I take my
place at the wheel--it is my turn to drive--and swing the car round,
wishing in my heart that people at home could be brought to realize
and appreciate the work that is being done for them, all day and
every day, in out-of-the-way but none-the-less vital corners of the
Empire, by that unrecognized, unrivalled diplomatist, the British
soldier abroad.




III

A SCOUT POST

We left Peshawar next morning.  At the garage we met a young officer
of the police, setting out for Haripur Gaol, a hundred miles away,
upon a professional summons connected with the immediate future of a
group of subsidized hooligans who had been a little too prominent in
the disturbances a fortnight ago.

"At last," he announced cheerfully, "we aren't going to be made to
look like fools.  These lads come up for sentence to-day--and this
time the sentences are going to be served!  It will be a nice change
for us, and a bit of a surprise for them.  Thank God the Government
are giving us a break!"

"He seems pleased with life," I remarked, as we drove off.

"And so would you be.  For four years the Government have been trying
the policy of conciliation--which means giving hired assassins a slap
on the wrist and telling them to be good boys in future.  Well, of
course, to these people conciliation only means one thing, and that
is, that you are afraid of them.  You can imagine what sort of a deal
the police have been getting lately.  Time after time they risk their
lives rounding up some particularly dangerous gang, and secure a
conviction.  The gang is sentenced to a long term; then, after a
week, word comes from above that they are all to be let out again--as
a gesture of goodwill and magnanimity!  Their friends call for them
at the prison gates with a brass band, and they drive away in
motor-cars, thumbing their noses at the warders!  Well, that period
of lunacy is over, anyhow!  Still, perhaps it was wise to give it a
trial, just to show the genuine upholder of the _suaviter in modo_
that it wouldn't work.  You turn left here, by this sentry.  I'll
take the wheel after lunch."

We have about a hundred and fifty miles to do, and a hard route to
cover.  At present we are driving along a straight, dusty, military
highway, filled with traffic making for Peshawar--sadly overloaded
little donkeys, camels in single file, slow-moving bullock-carts,
two-wheeled tongas, each drawn by a lean horse almost lifted off its
legs by the uptilted shafts, and that last word in civilized
transport, an occasional ramshackle motor-van, rattling along at
breakneck speed in a cloud of dust, with passengers clinging to it
like brown bees to a grimy comb.

There are pedestrians too, mostly men.  Such women as are permitted
to walk abroad in this Muslim stronghold are completely covered in a
long white garment rather like a candle-extinguisher, with two small
square holes, cut Ku-Klux-Klan fashion, for the eyes.  The Muslim
standard of personal modesty is quite definite.  A Muslim woman is
_purdah_ from the crown of her head to the soles of her feet; a man,
from neck to knee.  One cannot help wondering what these
unenlightened Orientals would think of a European bathing _plage_.

Wheeled traffic is mainly confined to the towns and their
neighbourhood.  As we travel farther afield we shall meet only camels
and donkeys.  These donkeys have a hard life.  They are never
fed--merely turned loose to browse among rock and scrub when not
working, which is seldom.  They are chiefly employed to carry wood
for fuel and stones for building.  The stones are obtained from the
bed of the nearest river, which is usually dry.  Wood, which is
growing scarcer and scarcer, is now conveyed from great distances.
Indeed, one of the gravest problems of the north-west is the
increasing rarity of water, and consequently of vegetation: it may
render necessary a complete transference of the population to
irrigated districts farther south.

The camel has a slightly better time of it.  It is occasionally fed
and watered, and there are Government regulations as to how heavy a
load it must carry--five maunds, or four hundred pounds, to be
precise.  But these regulations, alas, apply only to Government
camels.  Still, it is difficult to be really sorry for a camel: it
has such an ineffably supercilious air.  The Pathans have an
explanation for this.

The Prophet himself, they tell you, was one day reciting to his
followers the different names of God, of which there are exactly one
hundred.  He recited ninety-nine of these, then paused.

"The hundredth name," he said, "you are not worthy to hear; I shall
not declare it unto you.  Instead, I will whisper it into the ear of
this camel."  And he did so.

That is why the camel, to this day, looks so infernally superior.

We are out of the Peshawar Plain now, and are painfully surmounting
the Kohat Pass, along a road of tortuous windings and horrific
curves.  It rather resembles the Corniche Road in the French Riviera,
except that we are several hundred feet up in the air instead of at
sea-level.  The journey, too, involves us in a mileage quite out of
proportion to the distance covered; for very often, to avoid a steep
drop and climb, the road turns and runs a mile or two up a gully into
the heart of a mountain, then doubles back on itself and emerges a
hundred yards or so from where it entered.  You have to be careful
round corners too, for at any moment you may encounter a camel
carrying something longitudinal, such as a horizontal telegraph pole;
and if a camel so burdened should shy across the road--as he
frequently does--and you are travelling too fast, you have your
choice between hitting the camel, running into a lofty cliff on your
right, or plunging over a precipice on your left.  Still, the Kohat
Pass is preferable to the Portsmouth Road on a wet Sunday.

At last we come down to earth again, in a green and smiling plain,
and pass through the pleasant cantonments of Kohat itself.  There is
a surprising little English church here, brick built, with stained
glass, mural brasses, and all--mainly memorials to that long-defunct
but gallant band, the Punjab Frontier Force.  This is the last
British outpost that we shall see, for we are now about to swing west
and make for a region where the King's writ does not run--more Tribal
Territory, in fact.

Kohat was not always as peaceful as it looks to-day.  In the period
of turmoil which followed the end of the Great War it acquired
notoriety as a place in which white women were no longer safe.  It
witnessed the murder of Colonel and Mrs. Foulkes by a gang of raiders
in 1920; and it was from Kohat that Miss Ellis was carried off by an
Afridi gangster named Ajab Khan in 1923.  The abduction and
subsequent gallant rescue of Miss Ellis made some stir in England at
the time, but it is doubtful if many remember the story in these
days.  England has grown somewhat introspective of late: she has
troubles of her own.  Why worry about India?

Our road is not so steep now, but it is almost as tortuous and much
more bumpy.  We creep round sharply curving hillsides and open up
fresh vistas of treeless, rocky valleys.  Sometimes we cross a
riverbed.  One or two of the principal watercourses--you can hardly
call them rivers, for although they may be hundreds of yards wide in
places, their waters, except at spate time, are but the merest
trickle among the stones--are spanned by substantial bridges
constructed by our own ubiquitous Sappers.  But for the most part we
dispense with such luxuries.  Many of the smaller streams are crossed
by what is known as an 'Irish bridge'--which means that there is no
bridge at all; merely an inverted arch (like one of the concave
sections of a switch-back railway) made of concrete and neatly fitted
to the bed of the stream.  Down you drop, splashing through the water
at the bottom, to emerge rattling and steaming on the other side.
Sometimes there is not even an Irish bridge--in which case you simply
get down to your lowest gear and bump gingerly over the stones and
through the water-splash, praying that your tyres and magneto may
survive.

At a remote and lonely spot we cross the Frontier.  Here stands a
Frontier Post, not much bigger than an old-fashioned tollhouse, at
which every roving tribesman entering British India must deposit his
rifle, just as you must deposit your umbrella when you enter the
Royal Academy--and rifles in this district are quite as common as
umbrellas in Piccadilly.  They are of all makes and ages--Martini
Henrys, Lee Metfords, Lee Enfields, sometimes a medley of all
three--and most of them have been smuggled.  They are cherished far
more tenderly than children.  Lock and barrel are kept scrupulously
clean, and the stock, besides being frequently inlaid with ivory, is
usually decorated with gay-coloured tassels.

At length, towards the end of the afternoon, we cross another river,
the Kaitu, by a steel and concrete bridge, swing round a corner into
yet another stony valley, and come suddenly upon the first of Major
Kenmar's Scout Posts.  We will call it Spin Khel.

It is a square mud fort, with a crenellated parapet, pleasingly
reminiscent of Zinderneuf, in _Beau Geste_.  One almost expects to
see the heads of those dead sentries lolling in every opening.  But
this place is very much alive.  As we approach, the great gate swings
back and the guard turns out--a smart little guard of Major Kenmar's
own Pathans, under a highly efficient havildar.  The British
Officer-in-Command of the Post appears, and greets us.  He is a
sun-burned young man of thirty or so, and he is stationed in this
desolate spot for a month at a time, the only white man among two
hundred.  After that he gets back to Headquarters for a spell, where
he sometimes sees as many as half a dozen white faces at once.

[Illustration: (interior of fort)]

He gives us tea, with jam, and talks geography to me.  Spin Khel
forms the right flank of the long outpost line, facing north-westward
towards the Afghan province of Khost, which constitutes Major
Kenmar's command.  The left flank, Kadda Post, is a hundred miles
away.  (Kadda Post has a history of its own, as you shall hear.)
Chashmai Fort, Major Kenmar's headquarters, for which we are bound,
stands about midway.

We are shown round the Post.  Post is a modest term, for this is a
considerable stronghold.  Buildings run all round the interior of the
walls, their flat roofs forming a firing platform just below the
crenellated parapet.  Introductions follow, to various upstanding
_subahdars_ and _jemadars_ (corresponding to First and Second
Lieutenants) with much hand-shaking and numerous openings for the
'Sturry Mashie' ritual.  We mount to the firing platform and look
over the parapet.  The Fort itself is surrounded by a stout ring of
barbed-wire fencing, beyond which the Post garden has been laid out.
Green vegetables rank as rare and refreshing fruit in this arid land,
and are prized accordingly.  Fortunately, there is a stream not far
off, and with four platoons available, gardeners are three a penny.

But they do other things besides garden here.  The Post, as usual, is
ringed about by dark, frowning hills.  On the hillsides certain Roman
numerals are discernible, painted on rocks, in large plain figures.
These furnish the key to the range-card which hangs by each
machine-gun.  The Fort boasts no artillery, but the machine-guns can
comb out those hillsides quite effectively in a few minutes.  Given
these fixed ranges, too, they can be fired at night with equal
accuracy.

"I suppose," I suggest casually, "that if any trouble arose at any
time, your work would be entirely defensive.  I mean, you wouldn't go
outside and ask for it?"

"Wouldn't we?  Listen!"

To employ a convenient colloquialism, I have started something.

"At any moment we may get word of some funny business in those hills
over there--a raid, or a riot, or a kidnapping-for-ransom-party, or a
rumpus of some kind which has to be dealt with promptly before it
grows into anything really serious.  We can't afford to sit tight
inside the Post then: we have to go out and do something about it,
and do it quick, or the whole Frontier might fizz over.  Would you
like to see?  We're about due for a _chigba_ party, in any case."

"What is a _chigba_ party?"

"Literally, a 'hue and cry'--a sort of emergency muster.  We have one
periodically, just to keep the men on their toes.  We'll have one
now, and time it."

I glanced down from the firing platform into the interior of the
little fort, where men were sleeping, cooking, polishing their
equipment, and doing all the hundred-and-one odd jobs which have
occupied the soldier's spare time for thousands of years.  Few of
them were in uniform; in fact, most of them were in their shirts.

The officer turned to a _subahdar_ and gave an order.  The _subahdar_
disappeared: a few seconds later the bugles rang out.  Instantly the
scene was one of seemingly blind confusion.  Men sprang to their feet
and dashed off in every direction.  Then the bugles stopped: there
was no further noise, but an infinity of movement.  Most of the men
had disappeared altogether.

"They have gone to their quarters to get into uniform," explained my
host.  "We allow them twelve minutes.  Within that time three
platoons have to parade in full marching order, with every man
carrying sufficient ammunition, food, and water to make him a
perfectly self-supporting marcher and fighter for the next
twenty-four hours.  Here they are."

Already the men were emerging, and falling in on their markers.  They
were in uniform now--khaki shorts, khaki shirt, worn outside--every
true Oriental wears his shirt outside his trousers--khaki turban,
puttees, and _chaplis_, which are stout leather nail-studded sandals.
The British officers wear these, too, over thin soleless boots.
_Naiks_ (corporals) were fussily counting their own particular
chickens.

Presently the lines clicked to attention, and the _subahdar_ in
command reported.  My host looked at his watch.

"Eight and a half minutes," he remarked.  "Good!  Dismiss the
_chigba_ party!"




IV

WATCH AND WARD

Chashmai Fort is much more than a fort; in fact, you might call it a
_multum in parvo_.  Externally it is a rectangular stronghold built
of _kacha_ brick, about five hundred yards long by three hundred
wide, with high crenellated walls and the Union Jack flying over the
main gate.  It stands in a fairly green and cultivated plain about
forty miles west of Bannu--and incidentally of the nearest white
woman.  To the north-west lies the rocky barrier of the Mazdak Range,
which separates Tribal Territory from the adjacent Afghan province of
Khost.  The Durand Line is only twelve miles away.

For fifty miles on either flank stretches the exiguous line of scout
and picket-posts which forms the rest of Major Kenmar's command.
There are a thousand men in Chashmai; another thousand are
distributed among the Posts.  There are twelve British officers in
all, and some seventy Indian officers.

A word about the troops themselves.  They are Pushtu-Speaking
Pathans, hardy and war-like.  They are a proud race, with a code of
honour as rigid as our own, though not invariably conforming to
British legal standards.  For instance, insult or injury, especially
to one's family or womenkind, can only be wiped out in blood.  In the
little officers' garden inside the walls of Chashmai to-day you will
find an upstanding officer's servant, peacefully watering the grass
in his intervals of duty.  His is a case in point.  He volunteered
for service in the War, and was away for some years.  When he
returned he found his wife and family in the clutches of the local
_bania_, or usurer--in the last stages of destitution, in fact.  He
thereupon sought out the _bania_, and despatched him with an axe.
Pathan honour being now satisfied, British justice had to have its
prosaic say.  The man served a sentence of ten years' penal
servitude, and is now back at his job--with no hard feeling on either
side.

[Illustration: (Pathan)]

The Pathan may be a relentless, and sometimes a treacherous, foe, but
he has many attractive qualities.  He is sober, religious, and on the
whole clean-living.  He is an athlete and a sportsman.  He possesses
a robust sense of humour, and like most humorists, does not suffer
fools gladly.  Obviously you cannot break in this type of recruit to
regular soldiering by ordinary barrack-square methods.  A Guards'
drill-instructor would finish him in a week--or more probably, he
would finish the Guards' drill-instructor.  Neither can he be
entrusted to a callow subaltern.  He must be trained and handled by
men--men as he understands the term.  Fortunately, our country still
produces such: there are half a dozen of them in Chashmai Fort to-day.

Now for the Fort itself.  A great part of its available space is
occupied, naturally, by barrack accommodation.  And here let me say a
word about the domestic economy of the North-West Irregulars, as I am
calling them.  They are not on the strength of the Army of India, for
the simple reason that they do not serve in India, and are not
British subjects.  They are technically part of the Border Militia,
and provision is made for their upkeep under the picturesque heading,
_Watch and Ward_, in Section 19_a_ of the Indian Budget.  They draw
no pay from the Army Pay Corps, no rations from the Royal Army
Service Corps.  Instead, they receive a modest annual grant from the
Indian Treasury, out of which they make their own arrangements for
pay, rations, and transport.  In other words, they are on board-wages.

Such a military establishment possesses special and unusual features.
For instance, Chashmai Fort contains a mosque--a very beautiful
little mosque, built entirely by the troops, at their own
expense--with hot water laid on just outside, so that ceremonial
ablution may be performed in comfort.  As for non-ceremonial
ablution, the Pathan sees as little sense in that as the average
preparatory schoolboy.  Recruits are compelled to wash once a week;
thereafter it is a case of 'I leave it to you, Pathan.'

The Pathan soldier, again, under the board-wages system (he receives
six rupees messing allowance a month), does his own catering and
cooking; so meals are not so stereotyped as to form or time as in
more regular units.  He consumes vast quantities of tea, and eats
meat when he feels like it, and when he can afford it; but his chief
article of subsistence is a sort of flat loaf, baked quickly on a hot
iron plate.  Alcohol, as a devout Muslim, he never touches.

The Fort, of course, contains a hospital, with a presiding
genius--quite literally a genius--whom we will call the Medical
Major.  He is a full-blooded Pathan, and is a member of that
distinguished and eclectic Corps, the Indian Medical Service.  Last
week a _sowar_ of the Mounted Infantry Section was run away with by
his horse.  The horse charged into a stiff barbed-wire fence, and
rolled over in it, with the man underneath.  Both were cruelly
mangled: the man had a kidney torn in two, and ruptured his colon.
He was carried into the hospital more as a matter of routine than
anything: he was plainly dying, and with Oriental fatalism was
perfectly prepared to die.  But the Occidental training of the
Medical Major rose up in revolt.  He performed an operation; as a
matter of fact, he performed a miracle.  He removed the damaged
kidney entirely, and stitched up the colon.  The man is now on the
high road to recovery.

The horse, too, is getting well.  It stands in the horse-lines
outside the Fort to-day, an interesting invalid, wearing a saucy blue
gauze apron over its lacerated chest, to keep the flies off.  Its
_sowar_, however, knows how the cure was really effected: it was by
virtue of the tiny scrap of paper, inscribed with a verse from the
Koran, which hangs round the animal's neck in a little leather bag.
They are sturdy little horses, these--Baluchis, with crescent-shaped
ears, and no head or shoulders to speak of.  When you mount one you
feel as if you were sitting upon the extreme end of the
vaulting-horse in a gymnasium.

The far end of this _multum in parvo_ Fort is entirely given over to
the Royal Air Force, for this is an important military airport.  The
landing-ground is just outside the wall.  The Fort also houses a
Sapper unit, the Military Engineering Section, which is responsible
for our excellent water-supply--it has sunk two deep wells within the
Fort itself--and moreover runs a power station which furnishes us
with the luxury of electric light.

But the least obtrusive and most interesting corner of the Fort has
yet to be visited.  This is the Civil Post, within which resides the
Political Agent and his miniature staff.  The Political Agent is a
young Englishman of little more than thirty, with a Beattyesquely
cocked _topi_, and an air of wisdom beyond his years.  He resides
here in Tribal Territory under a friendly arrangement between the
Government of India and the Tribes themselves, for the express
purpose of advising them upon questions of law and equity, use and
custom, and of composing their differences, which needless to say are
endless.  If--I say _if_--the Tribes should reject his advice, or
start settling their differences in their own way--if they should get
rough, in fact--then Major Kenmar and his followers might have to
intervene.  But not unless.  Nominally, the Political Agent is the
whole show--the velvet glove.  That is how _Pax Britannica_ is
maintained along this uneasy borderland.  We shall meet the Political
Agent later.



II

Outside the walls you will find practically everything that need not
be inside.  There is the parade ground, which also forms a rough polo
ground.  Polo is a cheap game here: the Mounted Infantry horses are
the ponies, and expense is limited to the cost of sticks and balls.
Everybody participates, British and Indian officers alike.
Occasionally a match is arranged with some other solitary brotherhood
from distant posts like Razmak or Wana, valleys and valleys away.

Then there is the rifle range.  (I fired a group there before
breakfast one morning, in company with a recruits' class, and found
that my vision was not what it used to be.)  There is the usual
indispensable vegetable garden.  Major Kenmar is an inveterate
gardener, and will spend whole minutes in a kind of trance, brooding
ecstatically over vistas of dried mud which one day will be onions.
There is an open-air swimming bath, made by the men themselves; a
lawn-tennis court, chiefly utilized by the Babu clerks of the Civil
Post; the aerodrome; a petrol station; a bomb-store; and several
exceedingly brown and gritty football grounds, with dust-devils for
ever dancing down the middle.  The Pathan has recently taken to
soccer, and plays with all the fanaticism of the recently converted.

For the moment, indeed, he seems to have abandoned his former medium
of healthy exercise--a vigorous ceremonial dance known as the Cuttack
Dance--in favour of inter-platoon league matches.

But all these are the ordinary and inevitable appurtenances of a
military station.  Let us pass through this gateway in the barbed
wire, and take a morning stroll of half a mile or so along the road
which runs towards the Tochi River.

A word about these roads.  They are all of post-War construction.
Heaven knows they are rough enough and few enough, but they have
simplified the problem of Frontier control out of all knowledge.
Formerly, if some marauding tribe swept down from the mountains and
cut up a British outpost, they could retire thereafter into remote
valleys where nothing short of an elaborately organized and slow
moving punitive expedition could deal with them.  Now a _chigha_
party, backed by motor transport, can penetrate into almost any
fastness in a few hours.

The old Frontier Road (pre-War) runs south from Peshawar, well behind
the Frontier, through Kohat and Bannu to Dera Ismail Khan--one
hundred and sixty miles, or about the distance from London to Crewe.
This has now been supplemented by a great loop which swings westward
into Tribal Territory over a great pass, Razmak Nerai, climbing as
high as eight thousand feet.  From this road others branch westward
at intervals; Chashmai Fort stands at the end of one of these.

These Tribal Territory roads are safe enough so long as you do not
stray from them.  Once you are out of sight of the highway, among the
rocky _nullahs_, there is always the risk of encountering a
misanthrope with a perfectly good rifle.  And after dark, when the
Khassadars have gone home to bed, the road itself is none too secure.
Only two nights ago a belated motor-lorry was held up on its way from
Bannu to Chashmai, and the driver shot.

But here, on this sunny stretch of tamarisk-bordered road just
outside the Fort, all is peace.  Presently we surmount a low rise,
and find ourselves looking down on Chashmai _Serai_.  This is an
ordinary mud-walled village, and may be described as the civilian
annexe to the Fort.  It contains the married quarters of the garrison
and the headquarters of a Khassadar Company--the latter a bit of a
pigsty after the ordered cleanliness of the Fort.  The _serai_ itself
is none too tidy: it resembles a vast farmyard cluttered with low mud
buildings and plentifully endowed with livestock and children.

But there is a surprise coming--in so far as one has retained any
further capacity for surprise in this land of the unexpected.  Our
friend the Medical Major has just emerged from a low doorway.

"Come and look at my civil hospital," he says.

I follow him in.  The hospital is low and dark: the walls and floor
are of dried mud, but the place is clean and cool and free from
flies.  The accommodation is primitive--_charpoys_, or string beds,
covered by a couple of Army blankets, together with a few simple
nursing appliances.  Some of the cases are grisly enough.  Needless
to say, the sick Pathan tries every other variety of the healing
art--charms, incantations, or the application of cow-dung--before
entrusting his person to the perils of modern scientific treatment.
Consequently, most of the cases, by the time they reach the hospital,
are in the condition technically known as 'advanced.'  The female
ward contains women with ulcers and tumours which should have been
attended to months ago.  The men are mostly in need of surgical
treatment--for camel-bite (gangrenous, of course, by this time) and
gun-shot wounds, chiefly.  One man to whom I spoke was suffering from
a large hole in the small of his back: he had been shot there from
point-blank range by a relative.  The patient was quick to add,
apparently in extenuation, that he was looking the other way at the
time.

But the prize exhibit is to be found in the children's ward.  He is a
little boy of seven, who was born with lockjaw.  For seven long years
his parents kept him alive by squirting milk through his clenched
teeth.  Then they brought him here.  A few weeks ago our invincible
Medical Major operated on the tendons of the jaw--with the result
that the young patient is now sitting up in bed, with an old stocking
wrapped over his head and under his chin, indulging in the new and
delightful pastime of opening and shutting his mouth.  He was a
living skeleton when he came; now he is actually getting fat.  The
fame of that kindly miracle will penetrate to every valley in Tribal
Territory: it may do as much to maintain peace and goodwill along
the Border as the most efficient _chigha_ party.




V

A "JIRGAH"

We are outside Kadda Post, which you may remember forms the left and
most remote flank of Major Kenmar's line.  Kadda is one of the most
exposed outposts in the Empire: it has had to withstand a siege as
recently as May 1930--for the usual reason.

In that month Congress propaganda penetrated to the Kadda district,
with one of its periodical announcements that the British had
evacuated India.  Having no means of verifying the statement, the
tribesmen accepted it with enthusiasm, and a mixed force--mixed in
the sense that the men were accompanied by their womenkind, also
armed with rifles--promptly advanced on the Post to the number of
about three thousand, calling out to the garrison inside to throw
open the gates and share the loot with their loving relatives.  The
garrison responded by barring the gates and opening fire.  The
attackers were soon driven off, to take cover in surrounding
_nullahs_ and other points of vantage, whence they maintained an
intermittent fire for the next five days.  Meanwhile the British
officer in command of the Post had established wireless communication
with Chashmai.  The prompt despatch of a relieving column from
Razmak, and a few salutary bombs (after due warning) upon the
raiders' landed property, brought the proceedings to an end, and the
district has been perfectly quiet ever since.

This morning this solitary Post presents a most unusual appearance of
animation, for we are about to hold _Jirgah_.  A _Jirgah_ is a
meeting of tribal dignitaries--chiefs, village headmen, or _maliks_,
and the like.  These assemble periodically, to transact the business
of Tribal Territory in such a manner as to reconcile British law with
tribal custom.

They have been arriving all the morning, some of them from great
distances.  Each hands in his cherished rifle at the usual
Gentlemen's Cloak Room by the gate in the barbed wire, and takes his
place in the close-packed throng which squats in crescent-shaped
formation upon the open ground outside the Post, between the wire and
the walls.  Before them stands a table with a white cloth on it;
behind the table are four Windsor chairs.  The most important of
these--the one with arms to it--will presently be occupied by the
Political Agent; for this, on the face of it, is an entirely civil
function.  A certain unobtrusive military chaperonage is evident in
the presence all round the stony landscape of a string of sentries
with fixed bayonets, and of a machine-gun peering through a loophole
on top of the wall; but otherwise the atmosphere is as free from
militarism as an American Dentists' Convention.

[Illustration: (turbaned man)]

Presently all are assembled--some three hundred all told, and an
astonishingly picturesque crowd they are--heavily turbaned, bearded,
voluble, and smelly to an increasing degree, as the sun grows
stronger.  Now the British officials appear--the Political Agent
himself, Major Kenmar and the officer commanding the Post, and what
reporters used to call 'the present scribe.'  We are accompanied by
the Indian Assistant Political Agent, and a number of Babu clerks
bearing account books, minute books, and a large mysterious japanned
tin box.

Soon the mystery is revealed.  The box contains money, mostly in
Indian paper currency, which is about to be given away.  Everyone
here, be he considerable tribal chieftain or _malik_ of a small mud
village, draws pocket-money from the British Government.  This
pocket-money may range from as high as a hundred rupees a month
(about seven pounds ten) to eight annas (ninepence).  The recipient
of such emoluments is expected in return to maintain discipline in
his own particular district.  No discipline, no pocket-money.  The
whole thing works like a charm.

One by one the tall, dignified figures move to the table.  A name is
called, reference is made to a ledger, and the money is handed over.
It is accepted without acknowledgment or thanks.  The recipient
merely stuffs it somewhere into the panoply of majestic rags in which
he is clothed, and stalks away.  It is not good form in Waziristan to
exhibit enthusiasm over what Mr. Mantalini would have called
'demnition halfpence.'

Occasionally there is a check, and a little discussion.  This man
claims to be collecting for his brother, who is sick.  The question
of his _bona fides_ is referred to the assembly as a whole: various
voices are uplifted in guarantee.  He receives his money, and passes
on.

Another says, "I am owed something from last time."  The register is
consulted, and he is refuted.  Having been tersely admonished not to
try that game on again, he retires with unruffled dignity, followed
by the uproarious laughter of his friends, who dearly love a joke of
this kind, especially when it is rubbed in by an expert hand.

A small boy of four, with many charms and the inevitable little
leather pouch containing a verse of the Koran round his neck, is
brought forward to be paid in lieu of a deceased parent.  He is
lifted on to the table bodily, and receives his portion with becoming
dignity.

Then comes another check.  The Babu clerk is about to count some
notes into the outstretched hand of an applicant, when the Political
Agent looks up from the register.

"No you don't," he says.  "Oh dear, no!  There was a small matter of
an abduction in your district a month ago--a rather nasty bit of
work, the book says."  He goes into fluent and convincing detail.
"Have you sought out the guilty one?  Have you handed him over to
justice?  No!  That won't do, you know.  Go and find him, and bring
him to Chashmai Fort, and then perhaps we will talk about your five
rupees.  Pass along, please!"



II

At last everybody is paid off, and we proceed to general
business--the settlement of disputes, mainly, and the consideration
of petitions.

Ali Baba and Cassim--or two near relatives of theirs--stand up and
claim succession to the same _malik_ship.  Both speak at once, and
with appalling eloquence.  Each is supported by a rumbling
_obbligato_ from friends and relations.  The young Political Agent
sits immovable, with his _topi_ a little more on one side than usual,
taking everything in.  Finally he gives judgment--in favour of Ali
Baba.  It is obvious from the approving murmur which follows that it
is the right one.  Cassim exhibits neither surprise nor resentment;
he merely sits down again.  It was worth having a shot for, anyhow.

Then comes a petition--something about a contract for road-building,
and the reinstatement of some dismissed labourers.  There is
considerable argument here, and much eloquence from rival
contractors.  The proceedings are complicated and lengthened by the
intervention of a discursive old gentlemen with a henna-dyed beard,
who delivers himself of an interminable discourse with an elusive
point.  Major Kenmar murmurs to me that the speaker is declaring
himself fully prepared to replace the dismissed labourers with ten
times as many, all from his own village, and all quite free of
charge!  Apparently the orator is a well-known character.  He has no
village: his hordes of workmen exist only in his imagination.  In
fact, he is not a malik at all--merely a grandiloquent old nobody who
is not quite right in his head.  The East is specially tender to
such.  At last, when his friends consider that he has had a fair
innings, they tell him to sit down, and he does so.  We get back to
the point, and the Political Agent gives judgment.

Another petition follows--this time for the restoration of certain
rifles, taken as a fine for a tribal misdemeanour.

"We have been without arms these many months," pleads the
protagonist, a sinister-looking individual with one eye.  "The
offence is expiated, and we are still defenceless.  May not the
rifles be restored to us _now_!"

The Political Agent shakes his head.

"It was a particularly bad case," he says.  "Nothing doing, my
brother!  Buzz off, and come back in a year.  Then we will think
about it.  Next!"

'Next' is a very aggrieved landowner, upon whose property the
garrison of some Post unnamed have constructed an emergency aeroplane
landing-ground, without so much as by your leave.  His grievance is a
perfectly genuine one: he is entitled to compensation.

"I have heard nothing about this," says the Political Agent,
frowning.  "It's a mess, all the same," he adds to me.

"Where does the compensation come from?" I ask.

"That's just the mess.  There isn't any!" He turns to Major Kenmar.
"What a curse you soldiers are!"

"Don't curse me, old man," says Kenmar: "they weren't my soldiers."

"Then whose were they?"

"Tony Knox's.  This landing-ground isn't in our parish at all."

"Sure?"

"Certain.  I heard all about it from the R.A.F. only the other day."

The Political Agent looks genuinely relieved.

"This is grand," he says.  "I can pass the buck to old ----"  He
mentions the name of the Political Agent in the next district.  Then
he turns to the plaintiff, and informs him, with a seraphic smile,
that he has come to the wrong _Jirgah_.

The plaintiff withdraws sorrowfully, and in his place rise up the
members of a rather numerous family.  They explain that they are the
joint owners of a piece of land: now they are parting company.  What
about it?  Needless to say, young Solomon ultimately divides that
land as dexterously as, and far more thoroughly than, his prototype
divided the baby, to the satisfaction of all concerned.

Now comes the last case of the day--an argument about somebody's
share in a watercourse--always a thorny question in this country, for
this reason.

The whole problem of the Frontier is water.  There is little or no
rainfall, and wells are scarce.  Practically all water comes from the
nearest river, whose bed lies in some neighbouring valley.  I say bed
advisedly, because there is usually a good deal more bed than river.
Occasionally, after a tropical thunderstorm, some mighty spate comes
roaring down, submerging fords and Irish bridges, isolating whole
districts, and bringing traffic to a standstill.  But only for a few
hours.  Next day the waters have gone from the face of the earth:
they have rushed on to join the Tochi, which itself never gets any
where, but dries up by degrees in the sandy plain to the west of
Bannu.  Nothing is left save a shallow trickle among the stones.  It
is upon this trickle that the life of the Pathan cultivator depends.
If he can convey it to his own little patch among the rocks, that
patch will blossom green with wheat, barley, and millet.  He cannot
carry it by hand: the distance is too great.  Instead, he taps the
parent river at just the right spot, constructing a tiny runnel--a
mere gutter banked with mud--which carries the precious fluid on an
almost imperceptibly falling gradient across the flat and round the
corners of hills until it reaches its destination.  This simple
husbandman possesses a most uncanny eye for ground.  He seems
invariably to tap the river at exactly the right level and without
the aid of any kind of surveying instrument.

Naturally these meandering little watercourses, passing as they do
round and through various other people's property, come in for a good
deal of unauthorized tapping.  All you have to do is to stop one of
them up with a handful of earth and cut another outflow more
favourable to your own needs.  It is asking almost too much of human
nature to resist such a temptation.  Supposing your neighbour's gas
main ran through your kitchen in Kennington, and gas-meters were
uninvented?

One of these perennial cases has arisen now, and the Political Agent
is called upon to settle it.  Feeling runs high.  There are
accusations and counter-accusations: voices are raised, and long
brown fingers pointed.  Gradually, under shrewd and patient
questioning, the facts emerge: so does the guilty party.  The
Political Agent puts the fear of death into him, and we adjourn for
our frugal lunch.

The _Jirgah_ is over.  The motley throng rise and stream away,
reclaiming their rifles at the gate.  A few remain: they have matters
on their minds which a man's sense of pride--or sense of shame,
perhaps--forbids him to disclose in open assembly.  He will unburden
his soul in private audience to the Political Agent in the afternoon.

I am surprised to find that we have been out in the hot sun for more
than three hours.  It has been a most absorbing morning, and leaves
an uneffaceable picture in the mind--the picture of justice at its
best, because at its simplest--the open sky, the open court, the firm
hand, the light touch, the square deal.  There are nations in
enlightened Europe itself which would welcome such.




VI

THE MAN ON THE SPOT

Chashmai Fort was not always as tranquil as it looks to-day.  It has
been fiercely attacked more than once, but has never fallen.  Its
direst perils were encountered just after the War, before the
beginning of what is known now as the Reconstruction Period.

The outbreak of the Great War gave a glorious opportunity to the
forces of disaffection on the North-West Frontier.  India was denuded
of troops, including thousands of loyal denizens of the Frontier
itself.  Rumour was rife, and German and Turkish propaganda working
full time.  The Turkish menace was the gravest, for it involved the
religious issue.

Our outstanding safeguard during those troublous times was the
rocklike fidelity to his plighted word of a really strong man,
Habibullah Khan, Amir of Afghanistan, who from start to finish never
wavered in his attitude of complete neutrality.  Had he given way,
Afghanistan and the hostile tide which lay heaped up behind it would
have been let loose on us.  Even then the situation was tense enough.
In 1915 Chashmai Fort itself was attacked from Khost, but withstood
the onset.  Sporadic fighting followed up and down the Tochi Valley
for the best part of a year.  There was a more serious outbreak
farther north, in the Mohmand and Malakand districts.  But gradually
the situation improved.  Fresh troops came out from home to take the
place of the absent Regulars; white tents sprang up everywhere.  The
Amir of Afghanistan and the Afridis of the Khyber continued unshaken
in their neutrality, and the last two years of the War passed off in
almost complete tranquillity.

It was after the Armistice that the real trouble began.  Our friend
and benefactor, the Amir, was murdered in Jalalabad in 1919.  His
successor, the weak and vain-glorious Amanullah--recently the guest
of the Lord Mayor at the Guildhall, and more recently still an exile,
heaven knows where--yielded to the optimistic representations of his
counsellors and decided to pierce the Khyber and capture Peshawar.
The Third Afghan War resulted.  Amanullah and his troops made a poor
show against our war-hardened veterans, and his main thrust was an
ignominious failure.  But one of his Generals, Nadir Khan, a really
able soldier, made such play in Waziristan and the Tochi Valley that
as a measure of precaution the garrisons of various outlying posts
were withdrawn to safer ground.  Such a step, at such a moment, in
such a country, is nearly always fatal.  Withdraw a single outpost
garrison, dismantle a single picket-post or watch-tower, and word
runs round the Frontier that the British are evacuating India.  The
inevitable resulted.  The whole Frontier blazed up.  There were
serious tribal outbreaks.  There were even mutinies in important
Frontier posts.  There was one in Chashmai itself, but the loyal
section won the day and the Fort was held.

Long and stern was the struggle which followed.  It cannot be
described here: let it suffice to say that at last, in November 1923,
an understanding was reached and an agreement signed.

Then came Reconstruction, and a golden opportunity for a broad and
comprehensive tackling of the Frontier problem as a whole.  It was
admirably utilized.  A railway was constructed through the Khyber,
and certain roads, already described, of enormous material and moral
value, were built in Tribal Territory.

There were interruptions, of course.  The old Hindu-Muslim antagonism
raised its head once more: there were inter-communal riots at Kohat,
accompanied by murder and kidnapping.  But the work went on.  The
status of the Tribal Territories was more clearly and firmly defined.
Tribal chieftains and _maliks_ were given regular privileges and
regular responsibilities.  The Khassadar Force was established.  The
Frontier began to settle down, and a friendlier and more trustful
relationship began to grow up, not only between the Tribes and the
Government, but between the Tribes themselves.  The velvet glove
again.



II

Let us take a final glance over Major Kenmar's line of outposts.
They represent a mere fraction of a great system, for this long
jagged Frontier stretches from the southern edge of the Hindu Kush to
the northern confines of Baluchistan.  But they will serve.

To visit them in detail would take several days.  They are
comparatively close to one another, but such road connections as they
possess involve a long and circuitous journey, _viâ_ the main
Frontier road, far back in British India.  Let us content ourselves
by taking a bird's-eye view from the air--with the assistance of the
R.A.F.  We shall have to climb, for the intervening mountains rise up
as high as thirteen thousand feet....

We are up at last, high in a cloudless sky.  It is perishingly cold,
but the prospect pays for all.  Below us for the moment lies the wide
valley of the Tochi River, which we are crossing from north to south.
Along its borders are bright patches of vivid green: these are the
cultivated holdings which are fortunate enough to possess a water
supply; doubtless each of them has furnished a topic for debate at
many _Jirgah_.

Behind us lies another valley, which we have just traversed, with a
river in it.  The river must have been the Kaitu, for close beside it
lay Spin Khel Post, our first point of call on the run from Peshawar.
To the right is the dark barrier which separates Tribal Territory
from Afghanistan.  We never cross this in peace-time.  On the left
rises a huge rocky shoulder with a ribbon-like road running over it,
and a lone building at its very summit.  The road is the loop road
through Tribal Territory, already described, and it is climbing over
Razmak Nerai, nearly eight thousand feet up.  The building is
Alexandra Post, held by a detachment from the Razmak garrison.

For the most part the valleys below us are grey, rocky, and
barren--steep and deep, mere gorges, and entirely waterless.  I gaze
down into the one we are passing over, and wonder what would happen
to the aeroplane if it had to make a forced landing--or what would
happen to us if we survived the impact.  But my young pilot does not
seem to mind: he zooms cheerfully up another thousand feet to clear
the next range, and opens up another valley.

Now we are looking down on Kadda Post, the scene of our recent
_Jirgah_.  It lies in a saucer-shaped hollow, some four or five
thousand feet above sea-level: I can read the white range-marks
painted on the rocky hillsides quite easily.  Not far off, among the
foothills to the west, we discern the villages from which the Post
was attacked in 1930.

We swing round, and set out for home.  One by one I pick out the
other Posts which complete this little line of defence--solitary,
unfriended, but sleeplessly vigilant.  Presently Chashmai Fort comes
into view once more, looking like a plasticine model on a nursery
table.  Let us come to earth again, and ponder a little before we
bring this rambling narrative to a close.



III

Roads, Scout Posts, Tribal Territory, Border Militia, Khassadars,
board-wages, _chigha_ parties, _Jirgahs_, civil hospitals--all
functioning under the reassuring shadow of the Regular Army--such is
the British way of maintaining tranquillity along the North-West
Frontier to-day.  The Romans would probably have built a wall, with a
continuous city of soldiers and camp followers along its entire
length on the one side, and a wide strip of carefully maintained
desolation on the other.  The Chinese once did the same thing.  But
the Great Wall of India is different.  You cannot see it, but it is
there just the same; and up and down its invisible length are
scattered men whom Hyde Park orators have never heard of--soldiers,
airmen, police, civil servants--holding their Wall year in year out,
and keeping it in repair by the use of certain rare and infallible
elements--common sense, fair dealing, humour, and stark courage.

These men, as we have seen for ourselves, are frequently stationed
far apart from one another, which means that to a great extent each
of them has to be a law unto himself.  Nominally each is responsible
to the next in rank above him, and he to the next above him; and so
on until we come to the Agent to the Governor-General--which is what
the Governor of the North-West Frontier Province has to call himself
when he leaves British India and gets into Tribal Territory.  But in
the main each man has to rely upon his own judgment and his own
initiative.  His judgments may be reversed by a higher authority, or
his use of initiative may be officially censured upon any and every
occasion; but he has to chance that; it is all part of the game.  As
a rule he has neither the time nor the opportunity to take advice or
consult precedents.

And so, along that Frontier line to-day--a line as long as the
railway from London to Glasgow--the Man on the Spot is getting on
with jobs, shouldering responsibilities, improvising expedients,
meeting emergencies, making the wheels go round somehow.  He expects
no thanks, and he is not disappointed.  Occasionally he will grumble
and grouse--it is one of his most valued and natural privileges--and
tell you that he is fed up, and usually he is.  But the Great Wall of
India stands, and that is all he cares about.

One thing, and one thing only, does he ask of us--and that is to be
let alone and not messed about.  It seems a natural request, for this
especial reason.

The history of our country owes little or nothing to inspired
leadership.  In fact, it is hardly too much to say that we have
seldom been wisely directed or well led in all the thousand years of
our existence.  Our strength has always lain in the middle--in the
natural courage and sturdy common sense of our Other Ranks.  Most of
our victories, whether in war, industry, or politics, have been what
we are proud to call 'soldiers' battles.'  This means that the
Englishman, though he is neither imaginative nor spectacular, can
usually be trusted to do a subordinate job in a workmanlike manner,
without graft or thought of self-interest, and, above all, without
any particular supervision or encouragement from people higher up.
That was how we won the War; that is how we have built up an Empire.
That is why on the North-West Frontier to-day the wisest thing we can
do is to trust to our Major Kenmar and those whom he represents.  All
he needs, to quote the young police officer in Peshawar, is a break.
In other words, leave him to hold his Wall in his own rule-of-thumb,
fearless, tactful, inimitable way, fortified by the knowledge that he
will neither be attacked from behind nor overborne from above, and he
will not fail you.  After all, he never has, has he?


[The end of _The Great Wall of India_ by Ian Hay]