Bugles and a Tiger: Adventure on India's Frontier

by JOHN MASTERS

THE train rumbled on the iron bridge over the Ravi canal near Pathankol, India, and I started to collect my baggage. The last time I had traveled this route I had been coming to face the terrifying ceremony of being vetted, or approved by ordeal.

When an officer was seconded to the staff or the militia, or something else, or retired altogether from the service, his departure created a vacancy in his regiment. If the regiment had a good reputation, swarms of new officers like myself clamored to fill these vacancies. The Gurkhas had long ago taken the fancy of the British people and press. They and the Sikhs were the only Indian troops the general public in Britain had ever heard of, so Gurkha and Sikh regiments usually had three or four applicants for every vacancy. The regiments made their selections by the good but cruel method of vetting. They invited the candidates, in succession, to spend ten days’ leave with them as their guests.

On arrival each young man was placed in charge of the junior subaltern — lieutenants and second lieutenants are subalterns — who took him to military, sporting, and social occasions. Efforts were made to get the candidate drunk, because in vino there is veritas, and always his behavior was unobtrusively watched. When the regiment had seen all the applicants, a mess meeting was held, and the colonel asked every officer to give his selections. As a rule the opinions of the subalterns, who might expect to live closest and longest with the new boy, carried the most weight. The colonel, who bore sole responsibility, made the final decision. Sometimes he vetoed a young man approved by the subalterns. More rarely he insisted on taking someone they did not like. In nearly every such case events proved him wrong.

The wings of my luck beat strongly over me when I was vetted in July of 1935. One of India s typically confused religious disputes had been going on for some months in Lahore, the capital of the Punjab. It centered in the destruction by Sikhs of a small Moslem place of worship called thcShadiganj Mosque, which lay in the grounds of a Sikh gurdwaar a, or temple. That July the argument came to the point of serious rioting between the two communities. In India the worst riots flare up early in the monsoon — that is, in July or August—because months of murderous heat have frayed everyone’s temper, and because the monsoon itself brings conditions that make it not too uncomfortable to get into the streets and work off ill feeling. In fact, it is very nice to be out in the cool rain, throwing bricks.

Copyright 1955, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston 16, Mass. All rights reserved.

The Shadiganj affair boiled over while I was being vetted in Bakloh, 140 miles away. The battalion was ordered to Lahore ek dum —or, in English, at once. I begged to be allowed to go along. The colonel agreed, and I did my best to make myself useful on the move down and for a day or two in Lahore while the battalion got into position, reconnoitered alarm stations, and dodged flying bottles.

I believe the 4th Gurkhas accepted me only because of this lucky chance. And so this train was taking me at a dignified pace to join James and John, Beetle, Midge and Moke, Bullet, the Boy, and the rest, as an officer of the 4th Prince of Wales’s Own Gurkha Rifles.

The broad-gauge railway ends at Pathankot. In the outside world Pathankot is probably known only by those who remember Kipling’s story, “The Arrest of Lieutenant Golightly.” To us, who used it frequently, it was famous for its station restaurant, where a decrepit staff rigidly adhered, at all seasons and through many years, to the best Indian traditions of catering for travelers. This was only my third passage through the place, but I greeted the familiar dead flies and cobwebs with affection and was happily stuffed full of curry when I set off to find the bus that would take me to Bakloh.

Indian buses were all built on the same lines. On an American chassis — Ford, Chevrolet, G.M., Diamond T. — local earpenlers mounted an illfitting wooden body, painted the whole in garish colors, and added representations of a few temples, cows, and tigers. On the road the vehicle rattled, squeaked, groaned, and swayed. The cautious traveler never put his finger or his person close to two separate parts because when the bus started they would become moving parts and would pinch him. Beside the driver there was one first-class seat, thinly padded. Behind this was a row of secondclass seats. Each consisted of a padded bench with an upright wooden back and five inches of knee room. Next there were two or three rows of plain wooden benches—the third class—with three inches of knee room each and no backs. Behind again was an open space for baggage and merchandise. Hero, on cords of wood, sacks of rice, and cans of kerosene, perched the driver’s mate, known as the cleaner. On the roof were slats to hold more baggage.

I found my his in its stable, its tires looking wan. About thirty minutes after the advertised time of departure the Sikh driver appeared and started up the engine. Impatient now, I jumped into the firstclass seat — and we were away.

We traveled fifty yards to the bus office and stopped. There seemed to be a hundred people and at housand cubic feet of baggage to be loaded. After twenty or thirty minutes all was on board, the driver jumped in — and we were away.

We traveled fifty yards and stopped. We filled up with gas. Many of the passengers, who had been hanging on by their nails or bulging through the windows, got out and relieved themselves in the dust. The driver jumped in—and we were away.

We traveled fifty yards, back to the bus office, and stopped. The driver disappeared inside to check his invoices and Dills of lading. Our tickets were inspected and three stowaways thrown off. After twenty minutes the driver jumped in — and we were away.

There were only two more stops before we finally did leave the town, one to pick up a goat and another hundred cubic feet of merchandise (charcoal in sacks), and one at the octroi post. In all my time in India I never saw a bus driver or anyone else actually pay any octroi, but there was an octroi post on the outskirts of almost every town, and buses always stopped there. This time the resident tax collector, who was sitting inside with his feet on the table, in the pompous tranee of Oriental officialdom, came out and went through a slow-motion routine of inspecting us, our baggage, and the merchandise. Then he waved a finger — and we were away.

We were away through the unspeakable squalor of the outskirts of Pathankot and then on the wide road between the mango trees. The world was green, and lit tie convoys of overloaded donkeys and gaily shawled women walked along the grass verge under the trees. We honked at tongas — built to lake three passengers but habitually loaded with eight people and a huge bale of hay —and made them swerve out of the middle of the road. The bus had an electric horn, but it was disconnected to save the battery and to enable the driver to show his virtuosity on the winding mountain road, where one hand perpetually honked at the rubber bulb of the old-fashioned horn and the other changed gear — “Look, no hands!" To the left as the road swung, the forested hills climbed up and up, rolling higher and higher till they disappeared into the hazy surge of the Himalaya. Once a gap in the trees, the line of the road, and the drift of cloud all worked together to unveil an austere, blue-white wall of ice a hundred miles away in the main chain of the greatest mountain mass on earth. A little later we rushed heedlessly under a cliff of conglomerate and the sign guarding it: DRIVE CAREFULLY, LOOKING UPWARDS.

After three hours of terrifying effort, after the radiator had boiled twice and twice been slaked with cold water, after everyone in the back of the bus had been sick many times, we stopped on the edge of a precipice and I got out. This was Tuni Hatti, and I had arrived. There was said to be a truck coming down the three miles from Bakloh to the road junction here. It would (perhaps) arrive in an hour, or (perhaps) two.

“Salaam, sahib,”said the driver. The bus roared down a curving slope, the engine switched off, out of gear, the top load swaying, the paper-thin tires sliding on the loose surface.

I left my bags and boxes beside the road and started walking up the hill. It was hot in the afternoon sun, but trees covered the hillside, and a footpath wound up through them to Bakloh. I knew the path, for I had hurried down it in July with clattering Gurkhas all round me, on the first stage of the road to the Shadiganj riots.

A thousand feet above the metal road and five hundred feet below the ridge crest I came to the 2nd Battalion’s football ground. They had hewn it out of the hill, for there is no level place in Bakloh, and its sides were steeply built up from the valley. Below it, on the left, I saw a rifle range, and on the grassy knoll above the butts, a clump of trees. They were a rare kind of date palm and looked out of place among the pines. An exactly similar clump of the same rare date trees crowned the end of the next spur, three miles up toward Dalhousie. Thick forest covered the next lower spur toward the plains, but on the end of that too, among the trees, was another clump of palms. I sat down to draw breath and to look at the palms. I felt the grip of the same awed fascination that had overtaken me when I first heard the legend about them.

The local hillmen said that these palms marked the line of Alexander the Great’s outposts. The clumps were descended from the dates Alexander’s soldiers had brought from the banks of the Tigris. Certainly the trees rose in the places any officer would have chosen for an outpost line, and history confirms that this was indeed the farthest limit of Alexander’s penetration to the east. I thought: Perhaps a young Macedonian officer climbed this path to inspect his posts. They were strangers here too, and the clangor of their shields on the rock echoed over twenty-two hundred years into my ears.

2

THE officers were at tea. They had been at tea when I came up to be vetted. Midge looked up, said, “Hello, Masters,” and went on with his cake, but in a friendly manner. He would have stopped eating cake had it been necessary to assure me of my welcome, or had I been a guest.

Another man, small, tough, young, with bright blue eyes, tightly curled fair hair, and a furrowed brow, leaped to his feet and cried, “Good God, how did you get here? Where are your things? You’re early.” He looked at his watch with an unbelieving frown, shook it, placed it to his ear, and began to mutter under his breath, “Christ—damn watch. Have some tea.”

James Sinclair Henry Fairweather, the next subaltern above me, was off again. He had been deputed to meet me and had forgotten, or had forgotten the time. He frequently did. Everyone else laughed, and after a moment James looked up with a beautiful shy smile and said, “Oh, well, you’re here, anyway.”

James bustled off to make sure the local bus picked up my kit from the road junction at Tuni Hatti, where I had left it, and I looked around me.

The Victorian founders of our regiment had built the mess low, of stone, and set it on the edge of the ridge, its front turned to the Himalaya. The Edwardians had glassed in the back veranda, which faced south over the edge of the ridge, toward India. And so, near the end of the century-long dream, we Georgians took our ease there, as on the promenade deck of a moored airship. Beyond the glass, forests and terraced fields dropped steeply away for twentyfive hundred feet, then climbed with the same precipitousness to a ridge two miles distant and only a few hundred feet lower than ours; and so on, and down and on in dwindling rises and falls, to the flat lands of the Punjab. Beyond the last low smoky ridge the khaki plains reached round and on until, in the farthest light, only the visible curve of the earth’s surface served to separate them from the sky. To the right the Ravi River burst through a cleft in the foothills and wound out across the earth in a broadening, spreading flood. The low sun sent us intermittent golden flashes from unseen water. To the left the river Beas curled out of Kulu, the Valley of the Gods, and moved off to the horizon. Far, far to the left again were haze and a loom of mountains. The light hung opalescent over all — not sharp, but warm and blue-green, washed by recent rain and split by the broad shafts of the sun. The undersides of the cumulo-nimbus cloud masses showed thick and solid and dark blue to the earth, but their anvil heads lowered thirty thousand feet above the plains, and shimmered with a frozen gold in the upper light, and moved steadily on toward us.

I had come to my home.

After a leisurely tea, James took me to a bungalow just above the mess. Half the bachelors lived there; it was called the Rabbit Warren. It had no electric light, so James lent me a small oil lamp. He went away, and I took a look at my room. I seemed to be renting a narrow bed, a chest of drawers, a wardrobe, two hard chairs, one easy chair, a table, and a bookshelf. Attached to the room was my private ghuslkhana with its appropriate fittings, also rented.

A ghuslkhana corresponds in function to a bathroom, but it is a profound misconception to think of white porcelain, faucets, or water sanitation. The ghuslkhana is small and square and has a hole in the outer wall to let out water and let in snakes. One corner, around that outlet, is fenced in by a low parapet the height of a single brick. In this enclosure sits an oval zinc tub. Outside the parapet is a slatted wooden board to stand on, and a wooden towel horse. Ranged along the inner wall are a deal table, holding an enamel basin, a soap dish, and a jug; a chamber pot; a packet of Bronio hanging from a nail; and a wooden thing on four legs whose proper name may possibly be “toilet,” but which was never called anything but “the thunderbox.” The thunderbox has a hole in the middle of the seat, and a hinged top. Under the hole, fitted into the structure, is a deep enamel pot called a “top hat.”

The ghuslkhana is the realm of the sweeper, who is the lowest of India’s low — outcaste, untouchable, and hereditarily destined to deal with ordure. I did not fail to make a careful inspection of my ghuslkhana. I had read “Rikki-tikki-tavi” many times, and through the years never forgot to search nervously for snakes coiled in the tub or — dreadful vision! — in the top hat. (I never found a snake, but was once bitten by a small scorpion that crept in and concealed itself in ray towel.) I found that this was an ordinary ghuslkhana and, like all the others I ever saw, a fine miniature of the Indian scene—barren, ramshackle, by turns too hot or too cold, yet full of interesting corners, strange expectations, and a mixed smell of wood smoke and human excrement.

A voice outside the front door said, “Sahib!” I called, ‘Come in,” and an old Gurkha entered with a note. The note read: “This is your bearer, Biniram Thapa,” and was signed by James.

We examined each other cautiously. He was old and grizzled and bent, and he had a dyspeptic eye. Within a couple of days the outlines of his personality were to become clear. He had no finesse and no professional charm. He knew little about being a bearer, and he damn well wasn’t going to learn any more, for he had gone to Flanders in 1914 ias a rifleman with the 1st Baltalion, and had taken the bayonet to the Prussian Guard, and stood patiently in the snow and sleet of the trenches under shell fire. He had learned onceover quickly how to make a bed and hang up clothes, but never how to hurry. I liked him and everything about him, above all for the greatest virtue any Indian servant can possess — he had no English. In fact, he had no Hindustani either, and only a monosyllabic kind of Gurkhali.

Biniram unpacked my suitcase, threw my pajamas on the bed, and stomped out. I set up the mosquito net and went to bed. It was a bare and untidy room, but the night was warm and still, and I was home. All in a moment the striving that others of my blood had put into this land had caught up with me. In England I had tried to ape the fashionable ignorance of India, but now already I found myself resenting England’s total unawareness of this country, which she owned and governed at, so long a distance of distaste. I did not like hearing Indians spoken of as “niggers,” “wogs,” “Hindoos,” or even “black-bellied bastards” — the standard terms of the British soldier and often of the British Service officer. To me already, from the evenings I had spent in the messes of Indian regiments in Kazmak and on column, they were Dogras, Bengalis, Afridis, Konkani Mahrattas.

On the other hand, I had never had the attitude of the average civilian tourist, so I did not think of India as quaint, picturesque, exploited, inscrutable, or otherworldly. I thought India was ugly, beautiful, smelly, predictable, and as material as the West. It was inhabited not by yogis and saints, but by people—knaves, giants, dwarfs, and plain people — of various shades of brown.

There was Kipling, who was not a Eurasian, as has been suggested, but also was not by birth or circumstance one of India’s self-appointed elite — the men on passage, the civilian and military tourists, from the Viceroy to Thomas Atkins. Why had Kipling gone out of his way to underline with sadistic approval attitudes of mind and habits of raceconsciousness that must have caused pain to anyone who loved India? But his descriptions — the turn of a phrase that caught exactly some intonation I had just heard, some sight and smell of the Indian road I had just traveled, some breath from the mountains beyond my window—what of these? These proved that he did love India. No one could write like that except from love. . . .

I was sleepy. I would have to investigate Kipling later. What was all that recurring nonsense of his about “Black Infantry”? Had he meant to speak of Gurkhas in that derogatory sense? If so, he was a color-crazy ass. Perhaps he did not even know about the 2nd Battalion of the 4th Prince of Wales’s Own Gurkha Rifles.

Gome to think of it, neither did I. I knew nothing. I would have to learn or I would never be a good officer. If I was a bad officer I would not be recommended for transfer to the Political Service when the time came. The thought died away, stillborn. I was never going to apply for transfer from this regiment, unless they turned on me and hated me.

3

SECOND BATTALION, 4th Prince of Wales’s Own Gurkha Rifles. It was a long title, though by no means the longest in the King’s armies. I wanted to find out what it meant. I knew already what it connoted—nearly a thousand men, white and brown, who wore the IV badge; hundreds of rifles and scores of machine guns; an undying continuity of association in which, after I had passed by, my name and memory would share a place, part of its immortality. But what did it mean?

The Gurkhas are the people of Nepal, an independent kingdom sandwiched between the northeastern border of India and the desolate mysteries of Tibet. Nepal is 550 miles long by 100 miles wide, and lies stretched along the Himalayan chain, north and northwest of Galcutta. Tt is mountainous, wild, and almost completely undeveloped.

The Mongoloid Gurkhas conquered the original Newar inhabitants in 1768. The immediately subsequent history of Nepal is a tale of court intrigue, poisoning, murder, and civil war that makes Renaissance Florence seem like a kindergarten. Yet the Gurkhas also found time to fight the Tibetans to the north, keep their independence against the grasping, ubiquitous fingers of the Chinese Empire, and, at last, spill out into India.

India was no longer a turmoil of warring princelings. The Honourable East India Company was on the march, and soon enough the two powers clashed. The Anglo-Nepalese War began in 1814. The British are a tradition-loving people, so at first the war went badly for them. The Gurkhas were the toughest enemy they had till then met in India, and they suffered several resounding disasters before muddling through to victory. But it had been a good, clean war, and each side seemed to have enjoyed the other’s company. They decided to make friends, and — an eerie thing in the annals of politics — they meant it, as subsequent history gave them ample opportunity to prove.

They signed a treaty of perpetual friendship and alliance. The British allowed Nepal its independence. In return, the rulers of Nepal agreed to allow their Gurkha subjects to enlist as mercenary volunteers in three new regiments of the East India Company’s service. These three Gurkha regiments formed the first strands of a rope that bound together the fortunes and affections of England and Nepal through the next 130 years.

The most important year in Anglo-Gurkha relations was 1857. In that year the flames of the Great Indian Mutiny engulfed the visible British power in India. All over the country, Englishwomen fled with their babies from their burning bungalows, to be sheltered in the sugar cane by kindly Indians. Few Indian princes thought that the English could win India back again; but Jung Bahadur, then ruler of Nepal, threw the whole power of Nepal into the British scales. Among other things, he permitted the East India Company to raise more Gurkha regiments. The first extra regiment so raised was called, with baffling consistency, the Extra Gurkha Regiment, and this was the regiment that later became the 4th Gurkhas.

In 1857, then, lit by the lurid glare of the Mutiny, there stepped onto the world stage these small men from a small kingdom, who were in the next hundred years to die on many fields, always with honor, in battle against the enemies of their friends. For the first time the world learned the Gurkha code; “I will keep faith.”

4

MOST Gurkhas are Hindus of a sort, though their religion docs not sit heavily on any except those of the higher castes, which the 4th did not enlist. In Flanders in 1914, when our 1st Battalion had had no food for a couple of days, food at last appeared in the trenches — several hundred cans of corned beef, each can clearly marked with the canning company’s trademark, a bull’s head. No Hindu, however lax, can eat beef; but this time it was going to be beef or nothing. The colonel sent for the senior Gurkha officer and wordlessly pointed to the rations.

After a moment came the quiet reply, “Sahib, we are here to fight the Germans. We cannot fight if we starve. It will be forgiven us. Remove the labels, and let it be corned mutton.”

Gurkhas vary in shade from pale wheat-gold to dull, dark brown. Their skulls are usually round — but, whatever the shape, always thick. I saw a Gurkha havildar (sergeant) bend down to tie his bootlace just behind a particularly fractious mule. The mule let drive, and both iron-shod hoofs smashed with murderous force into the havildar’s temple. He complained of a headache all afternoon. The mule went dead lame.

Though there are, of course, exceptions, the distinguishing marks of the Gurkha are usually a Mongolian appearance, short stature, a merry disposition, and an indefinable quality that is hard to pin down with one word. Straightness, honesty, naturalness, loyalty, courage — all these are near it, but none is quite right, for the quality embraces all these. In a Gurkha regiment nothing was ever stolen, whether a pocket knife, a watch, or a thousand rupees. Desertions were unheard of, although once the men had gone on furlough to their homes in Nepal they were quite inaccessible to us. There were no excuses, no grumbling, no lying. There was no intrigue, no apple-polishing, and no servility.

The perfect man — or, at the least, the perfect soldier? Not quite. The Gurkha was slow at booklearning, and he liked gambling, rum, and women; and in his own home he was apt to be unkempt.

But these large generalizations arc vague and patronizing. It is impossible to give an idea of the Gurkha by such means, because each Gurkha is a separate man. I have talked of “the Gurkhas” as doing this and “the Gurkhas” as being that, whereas, like other people, the Gurkhas have the sameness and the uniqueness of a snow field. We can say that the snow is wet or frozen or dry-powdered, but every snowflake is different from every other snowflake.

As the Gurkhas are an old-fashioned people, we can perhaps learn more about them by looking at a few old-fashioned magic-lantern slides than by trying to dissect the Gurkhas’ characteristics.

A naik (corporal) was cutting scrub with his kukri in order to clear a field of fire for his machine gun. His hand slipped, and the kukri all but severed his left thumb. He looked at the dangling thumb for a moment, then bit it off, put it in his pocket, bandaged the stump with a dirty handkerchief, and went on with his job. In the evening he went to the doctor, pulled the thumb from his pocket, and said, only half joking, “Can you put this back for me, sahib?”

Another slide: Someone was shooting at us, on the frontier, from an enormous scrub-covered hillside. Five British officers searched with binoculars— one of them was an artillery brigadier who had a pair of Zeiss glasses of magnification xl6. We saw nothing. Our colonel’s Gurkha orderly—he had no binoculars — stepped up, pointed, and said, “There he is, by that yellowish rock under the little cliff.”There he was indeed, eleven hundred yards away, motionless, and of the same color as his background. The brigadier could just pick him out, with the huge binoculars held steady on a tripod, when the Gurkha had shown him where to look.

5

Now a round of legends, for legends have accumulated about the Gurkha until it sometimes seems he is almost invisible behind them.

Many people have told me that the Gurkhas throw their kukris at their enemies. Some insist that the kukri returns like a boomerang to the hand of the thrower. Neither of these statements is true. The kukri is an all-purpose cutting tool, equally useful in the jungle to cut wood and in the field to cut flesh, but it has no magic qualities, and it is never thrown.

I have several times been told the story of the Gurkha sentry at Peking, during the Boxer Rebellion, who was insulted by a Russian officer. The Russian apparently thought he was dealing with a muzhik and tried to force his way past the Gurkha; but there had been an order that no one should go that way without a permit, which the Russian did not have. The Gurkha stopped him. The Russian drew his pistol and threatened. The Gurkha drew his kukri and acted — a short swing front the waist, up and round. The Russian put his hand to his head and snarled, “Drawing a weapon on an officer! You might have hit me!”

The rifleman replied grimly, “Take your hand off your head.” The Russian did, and his head rolled in the dust.

I don’t think this tale can be literally true. The only Gurkhas in China at that time were the 1st Battalion of the 4th Gurkhas. There is no trace in our regimental records of any rifleman having been able to speak Russian with the degree of fluency indicated by the story.

And there is the tale of the unwilling volunteers. This is about a Gurkha regiment that called for a hundred men to volunteer to become parachutists in 1940, a year when parachuting was thought to be the coming thing by many keen soldiers. The British officers explained that the jumps were made at first from balloons, and later from nice comfortable airplanes at a safe height of a thousand feet or more. The officers were surprised and pained to find that only seventy men volunteered. They reiterated their arguments. The Gurkhas still looked glum — if anything, glummer — and one lance naik was heard to mutter that in his opinion five hundred feet was quite high enough. The officers then called on the sacred honor of the regiment and vowed that parachutes never — well, hardly ever—failed to open, and explained the numerous devices that made parachuting so safe. The lance naik’s face cleared, and, speaking for all, he said, “Oh, we jump with these parachutes, do we? That’s different.”

Lastly, and to my mind most delightful and revealing of all, there is the case of the escaped prisoner of war. A Gurkha rifleman escaped from a Japanese prison in south Burma and walked six hundred miles alone through the jungles to freedom. The journey took him five months, but he never asked the way and he never lost the way. For one thing he could not speak Burmese, and for another he regarded all Burmese as traitors. He used a map, and when he reached India he showed it to the Intelligence officers, who wanted to know all about his odyssey. Marked in pencil were all the turns he had taken, all the roads and trail forks he had passed, all the rivers he had crossed. It had served him well, that map. The Intelligence officers did not find it so useful. It was a street map of London.

So legend, slide, and fact combine with a little analysis to limn the tremendous quality of this man, the Gurkha peasant. I have said that the phrase “I will keep faith” describes it. Yes, but on every level of human value. The Gurkha keeps faith not only with his fellow men but with great spiritual concepts and, above all, with himself. He seems to be born with the ability to see the heart of a problem regardless of distracting circumstances, red herrings, or conflicting advice. He does not think, cogitate — he will tell you shyly that he is not clever enough for that—but he bends facts, arguments, and logic to fit what he somehow knows is right. The London street map is a perfect example on the material plane.

Here he is, facing us. Just over five feet high, he has a low forehead, slanting brown eyes with the Mongolian fold over the inner corner, thin eyebrows, and a face either hairless or lined by a straggly mandarin mustache. Sometimes he shaves the black hair all round his skull, but he always leaves a long tuft at the crown, by which he hopes his God will pull him up to heaven when he dies. In repose he is expressionless, but he frequently shows perfect white teeth in a smile or just a plain grin. When he speaks he hardly moves his lips or teeth. He gesticulates little, grunts rather than shouts, and points with his chin, not his hands. He looks you straight in the eye and is not much interested in you unless he knows you well. He is the world’s best mimic and will use the gift whenever he feels like it—often to puncture the inflated egos of those who have the privilege of ordering him about. The muscles down his back, from neck to ankles, are tremendously developed; the thighs and calves are particularly strong and shapely. Ho runs awkwardly on the level, well uphill, and on a steep down hill no one on earth can touch him.

Perhaps he has been working for eight hours up to his waist in freezing water, helping to build a bridge. Now he has just gone to sleep in a blanket on the stones. Wake him, tell him there’s an emergency, that we must dig a trench. He rolls out with a “Jee-lo!", takes pick or shovel, and starts to dig, joking with the men around him and with the officers. The task is finished in three hours, to the stupefaction of the experts, who said it would take six. We who know him are not surprised; we expected it. He rolls back into his blankets. Wake him again an hour later and tell him someone has blundered, that now we are to gird for the assault, and the enemy is numerous and well armed. He stands up, si retches, fixes his bayonet, smiles at us in wry comradeship, and mows forward. . . . “At the last his unwavering lines disappear into the smoke and wrath of battle.”

Gurkhas enlisted between sixteen and nineteen years of age, and signed on for four years’ service. At the end of four years a man could either “cut his name” — that is, go — or sign for more service. His pay was sixteen rupees (about $5.00) a month. After fifteen years as a rifleman he had earned a retirement pension of five rupees a month, or about $1.75. During his service he would receive promotion according to his ability—from rifleman (private) to lance naik (pfc), naik (corporal), havildar (sergeant), havildar major, and quartermaster havildar of various kinds and grades. Then came a much bigger step, promotion to commissioned rank.

The GOs (Gurkha officers) were the backbone of the regiment and held much responsibility. Many lacked education, but that was what we were there for. Their job, besides the ordinary duties of command, was to act as a link between the Gurkha soldiers and the British officers. On any point of Gurkha custom, tradition, or religion, it was these Gurkha officers’ duty to give me the opinion and feeling of the enlisted men.

Commanding nothing, but omnipresent and almost omnipotent, was the senior Gurkha officer He and the colonel had probably grown up together for the past twenty-five or thirty years.

At the capture of Delhi in 1857, British soldiers of the 60th Rifles fought in the same force as the 2nd Gurkhas. Shoulder to shoulder they stormed the great wall, and together battered in the Kashmir Gate with their rifle butts. In honor of this feat, and to commemorate the outstanding work of the other Gurkha regiments during the Mutiny, Queen Victoria declared that they were all to wear the uniform of rifle regiments. Accordingly they all went into the dark green and wore it until full dress died out after the Kaiser’s War. After that the green lived on only in our officers’ mess kit and in the uniforms we bought with our own money for the pipers, the mess havildar, and a few others. Our regiment, the 4th, was handed over to India in 1947 and is now Indian in every respect — but it still has the black buttons embossed with a stringed bugle horn, a super-quick marching pace, and an overweening pride.

“Fourth” — an honorable number. I soon came to believe with a passion worthy of a religion that there was no regiment on earth like it. The 1st Gurkhas were earnest, the 2nd idle, the 3rd illiterate, the 5th narrow-minded, the 6th downtrodden, the 7th unshaven, the 8th exhibitionists, the 9th Brahminical (they enlisted high-caste Gurkhas), and the 10th alcoholic. As for the rest of the Indian Army — well, the Guides weren’t bad, but even they were not what they used to be in the old days, when they had a Gurkha company. The British Army, lock, stock, and barrel, was useless. But we — we were wonderful! We were stiff with battle honors. We had fought from France to China. We were witty, happy, carefree, tough, efficient, wise.

It was no bad state of mind to be in, and not inaccurate. The 4th Gurkhas would not have been even good unless we had believed it to be the best.

6

THE adjutant took me formally before the commanding officer on the first day after my arrival. The colonel did not say much, as serious words are never spoken on these occasions — only that he was pleased I had come to the battalion and hoped I would like it and do well. Then he told me I was to take over both A and B Companies for a week, since their commanders were going on a short course. After that I would command A Company only.

This instantaneous transition from the command of a British platoon, whose language, at least, I knew — and where there were a company commander and second-in-command to supervise me, and other platoon commanders to give advice — to the sole charge of two whole Gurkha companies was almost more than I could stand. I rushed out, found James, and wailed that I was sunk, my career ruined before it had begun. I didn’t know what to do.

James did not seem worried. He said, “Leave it to the GOs and the clerks. Do whatever seems to need doing, and ask me for help if you have to.” Since there was nothing else I could do, that is what I did. It turned out to be not so bad as I had expected. There was, besides, a humorous overtone that made the week a happy memory. A and B Companies were arguing about responsibility for a lost piece of equipment, and I went from one office to the other, signing acid letters to myself about it.

James also told me that I would avoid a lot of needless badgering if I always walked about at a pace slightly faster than normal, carrying a bunch of papers, and working my lips as though thinking aloud. It was good advice, and still is, and not only in the army.

In March the quickening exercises began. The old hands reminded us that battle is full of the unexpected, and if soldiers are going to survive and win they must react quickly to the unusual without stopping to think. I learned to clap my hands loudly together and at once bring the right hand on into my chest. The resultant crack-thump, I was assured, made a noise just like a bullet. The crack was the bullet smacking t hrough t he air overhead — or, more accurately, the air filling up the vacuum caused by its passing. The thump was the noise of t he actual explosion of t he cartridge in t he distant enemy’s rifle, which followed at about 110 feet per second behind the bullet’s 2200 feet per second. The interval between the two sounds thus showed the distance of the firer.

We made these crack-thumps suddenly and without warning anywhere — on the march, during drill parades, in school. Every soldier within earshot learned to react on the instant—that is, dive for cover and, if armed, prepare to return the fire and maneuver to kill the enemy.

We gave absurd commands like “On the hacks — down!” in the middle of a drill parade, or “Touch the ceiling—jump!” while the men were bent over schoolbooks, or, at any time, “Everyone catch Banbahadur!” It was a lesson in comparative psychology just to watch the varying speeds at which the minds worked. There was a sort of chain reaction as each man jerked free from some other thought, fastened on to the idea of Banbahadur, then of catching Banbahadur, then of remembering where he stood, and at last began to move. Banbahadur, by the same process, at last reached the thought: Banbahadur? Good God, that’s me! What am I doing here?'—and broke off for his life with the quicker-wilted of his pursuers hard on his heels.

Platoon training began. Sect ions coagulated into platoons, and we took our companies off, organized mock battles between the platoons, and afterward attempted to sum up the lessons learned and apportion the day’s crop of praise and bill me. The seniors went round with copies of our training programs in their hands, trying to find out what we were doing so that they could keep us on the right lines. We, in turn, tried to avoid them without actually cheating—that is, by leaving the area in which we had announced we could be found.

Every Saturday, whatever the current phase of the training cycle, the whole battalion came together to do either a route march or a simple battle maneuver. The route marches were done because it has been conclusively proved that there is no way of training soldiers for marching under load except by making them march under load. The maneuvers kept the mechanism of field command from rusting. Without them it would not have functioned when required for the big exercises of higher training, or for an unexpected war.

There is no apparent reason why route marches should not be very boring, since the essence of them is to march along a hard road at an even pace for a long time, with no excitement to help pass the time and no cross-country work to alter the scenery and ease the strain on the feet. Yet they never bored me. The men sang, the bugles blew ta-rn, fa-raah in the middle of the battalion, and I could look at the passing flowers and trees and animals, or could slide into a reverie and march along with my thoughts in England or China, the past or the future. I learned to bring my mind back every five minutes and sweep the company’s faces for signs of fatigue or illness, to recognize the proper pace by instinct, so that I did not have to look at my watch to know we were passing each furlong post 120 seconds after we had passed the last. I learned to feel the rhythm of the step so that a drag in it would drag af my brain and bring me back to correct it. This rhythm was important, and to keep it intact we marched straight through any streams or puddles that lay in the path. Wet boots and feet soon dried out, but a broken rhythm did not allow a man to relax while moving.

The route marches lengthened. Our early jaunts of eight or nine miles increased to marches of twelve, fifteen, twenty miles. At the end we always marched past the CO at a rifle regiment’s 140 paces to the minute. Then we really had to step out and march as though fresh from barracks for an imperial proclamation. Tired, hungry, sweaty, we willed ourselves to snap by with heads up, shoulders back; rifles sliding steadily along at the trail, exactly parallel to the ground, six inches from butt plate to nosecap; sleel boot heels biting the road in the urgent step. Sometimes we used another rifle regiment’s prerogative and went past at the double, still trying to breathe easily and look as though we would be happy to do another twenty miles.

At the very last we did not even dismiss after reaching the parade ground, but performed half an hour’s drill, and that too had to be perfect.

7

OUR fierce inter-regimental rivalries drove us to walk and climb a great deal faster than was comfortable in the heat of the day, and I, as a Gurkha, simply had to arrive first at the top of every hill — and that withoul showing a trace of breathlessness. As we sweated along we asked one another at every rest whether we would honestly at that moment prefer a gallon of iced lager beer or an hour with a complacent Marlene Dietrich. It was not done to choose the lager. Then, when we reached the stream that was our destination, we lay on our backs beside the water and discussed a problem which tradition said was set to officers about to qualify from the riding school of the French Army at Saumur. I didn’t believe the tradition at the time, but it is true; a couple of years ago I had the opportunity of confirming it from a French general and cabinet minister. When the French officer had passed all his tests in horsemanship and horsemastership, he had still another trial to undergo before he was passed as a true cavalryman, Frenchman, and heir of Murat. He was allotted three horses, three bottles of champagne, three whores, and a cross-country route of thirty miles. He had to cover the course in all particulars in three hours. The problem was, obviously, in what order should he tackle his fences? We reached no agreement on a single plan to solve the problem but we did a lot of laughing, and some wishing.

We were twenty-two or twenty-three on the average, and beginning to feel some of the peculiar pressure that our way of life exerted on us. Most of the earliest English to reach India, from the seventeenth century on, openly took Indian women as housekeeper-mistresses. In those times many of the women were ladies of breeding and accomplishment . Most old bungalows have bibikhanas (women’s rooms) in the compound, and in Assam some tea planters still use them for the purpose for which they were built.

The practice was immoral but perhaps not inhuman. It took a man many months to reach India and, once there, he stayed for twenty years or more without a break, until he had made his fortune or earned his pension. The English were not yet conquerors in possession, but traders and soldiers maneuvering about in a ramshackle and strife-torn subcontinent, so they were not concerned with putting up a godlike front. Few Englishwomen came out to India, because it was a hard and unhealthy life that faced them there. On the other hand, the men were always dreaming of their eventual return home and the suitable marriages they would be able to contract there with the money they had made in India, so they seldom married the Indian “wives" of their youth.

There was also an increasingly strong color bar, though I get the impression from reading old books and memoirs that the Englishman’s initial aversion was to Indian customs and habits, especially those connected with Hinduism, and that he gradually transferred this feeling to the color of the Indians’ skin because, whereas the former could be explained, the latter could not, and was thus indefensible.

As the country began to develop and settle into peace, increasing numbers of British soldiers were induced to stay on after their terms of service by offers of work on the railways. There were still few white women for them to marry, so they married or lived with Indians. Those Indian women were seldom of good family or high caste, because the soldiers had no opportunity of meeting such women, and because the women would have despised the soldiers if they had. These unions were the origin of the Eurasian or Anglo-Indian community which, until 1947, was still centered on the railways.

These affairs did not always come about in a deliberately cold-blooded way, and it gives a wrong sense of history to imagine a curt Englishman stepping off the ship, pointing sternly at a cowering Indian girl, and saying “I’ll have that one.”

The civilian reader might think that in these restricting circumstances the pastime of seeking women’s company in dancing, wining, riding, tennis, picnics, and theatricals would not be frowned on; but lie would be wrong. Such activities were called poodlefaking, and they were severely frowned on. When a subaltern applied for leave some colonels would ask him how he intended to spend it, and if it appeared that he was merely going to poodlefake they refused the leave.

Social life for the British in India was a goldfish bowl. The servants knew all about what was going on, and it was useless to attempt to conceal anything from them. Few people even tried, in spite of the danger of blackmail.

Ours was a one-sexed society, with the women hanging on to the edges. Married or unmarried, their status was really that of camp followers. But it is normal for men to live in the company of women, for if they do, they do not become rough or boorish, and the sex instinct does not torment them. In India there was always an unnatural tension, and every man who pursued the physical aim of sexual relief was in danger of developing a cynical hardness and a lack of sympathy with women which he had no business to learn until many more years had maltreated him. Of those who tried sublimation, some chased polo balls and some chased partridge, some buried themselves in their work, and all became unmitigated nuisances through the narrowness of their conversation. And some took up the most unlikely hobbies, and some went to diseased harlots—which didn’t count as poodlefaking — and some married in haste, only to worry over who was now seducing their wises in the hill stations where they had seduced so many other people’s wives. And a few homosexuals followed their secret star with comparative comfort in that large and easygoing country, where there are so many sins that there is no sin, except inhospitality.

(To be concluded)