Читать книгу: «The Sepoy», страница 5

This was at El Hannah on the 21st January. There was a freezing wind and the wounded lay out in pools of rain and flooded marsh all night; some were drowned; others died of exposure. It was a Dogra-like act of Lala to strip himself, and to make a shield of his body for his Adjutant, an act of devotion often repeated by the sepoy in Mesopotamia; and the Adjutant was only one of five officers and comrades whom Lala saved that day.

In a special issue of orders the Divisional General spoke of the splendid gallantry of the 41st Dogras in aiding the Black Watch to storm and occupy the enemy's trenches. The 6th Jats and 97th Infantry were mentioned with the Dogras. Of the collective achievement of the four regiments on that day the General wrote: -

"Their advance had to be made across a perfectly open, bullet-swept area, against sunken loop-holed trenches in broad daylight, and their noble achievement is one of the highest. The great and most admirable gallantry of all ranks, and especially that of the British officers, is worthy of the highest commendation. They showed the highest qualities of endurance and courage under circumstances so adverse as to be almost phenomenal."

THE MAHRATTA

I saw it stated in a newspaper that one of the surprises of the war has been the Mahratta. "Surprise" is hardly a tactful word; and it points back to a time when two or three classes of sepoy were praised indiscriminately to the disparagement of others. The war has brought about a readjustment of values. Not that the more tried and proven types have disappointed expectation; the surprise is that less conspicuous types have made good.

In France one heard a great deal about the Garhwali; in Mesopotamia the Cinderella of the Indian Army was undoubtedly the Mahratta.

That his emergence should be a surprise was illogical. The Mahratta horseman was once a name to conjure with, and the sword of Siwoji has left a dint in history legible enough. He was once the "Malbrovck" of Hindustan. If the modern Mahratta has fallen under an eclipse the cause has been largely geographical. Our frontier campaigns have never offered the Indian Army active service enough to go round; certainly the Bombay Army has not come in for its share, and Saihan, on the 15th of November, 1914, was the first pitched battle in which a Mahratta regiment, constituted as such, had been engaged. What honour he earned before that went to swell the collective prestige of class-company regiments; for it was not until the Indian Army was reorganised in 1897 that the Mahratta battalion came into being. The British officer, of course, in these regiments knew his sepoy; he believed that the Dekkan and Konkan produced as stout a breed as any other soil, and he would tell you so in the most definite terms, and remind you how the Mahrattas proved their mettle at Maiwand. But then one never listened seriously to a regimental officer when he talked about his own men.

The Sapper in a field company with divers races under his command is listened to with less suspicion. It was a Sapper who first opened my eyes to the virtue of a Mahratta, and that was before the war.

"Who do you think the pick of your lot?" I asked.

"The Mahratta," he replied, unhesitatingly.

"Because he can dig?"

"None better. But it is his grit I was thinking of. I'd as soon have a Mahratta with me in a scrap as any one."

One heard little or nothing of the Mahratta in France. Yet it was a Mahratta who earned the Médaille Militaire-I believe the first bestowed on an Indian-for an unobtrusive bit of work at Givenchy on the 11th of December, 1914. We took a German saphead that day and drove the Huns down their communication trench, and then we had to sap back to our own lines, while another sap was being driven forward to meet us. For twenty-three hours the small party was cut off from the rest of the lines, and they worked steadily with their backs to the enemy, bombed at and fired on the whole time. Supplies and ammunition ran short, and we threw them a rope with a stone on it, and they dragged ammunition and food and bombs into the trench, bumping over the German dead, and the Mahratta took his turn at the traverse covering the party, as cool as a Scot.

There were but a sprinkling of them in Flanders, a few Sappers and Miners and two companies of the 107th Pioneers. It was left to Force "D" to discover that the Mahratta has as big a heart for his size as any sepoy in the Indian Army. To follow the exploits of the Mahratta battalions from the battle of Saihan on the 15th November, 1914, to Ctesiphon is to follow the glorious history of the 6th Division. Up to and including Ctesiphon, no Mahratta battalion was given a position to attack which it did not take, and in the retirement on Kut-el-Amarah their steadiness was well proved. It is a record which is shared with other regiments; but this chapter is concerned with the Mahratta alone. They were in nearly every fight, and for a long time they made up a fourth part of the whole force.

It was the 117th who, with the Dorsets, took the wood, and cleared the Turks out of their trenches at Saihan. It was the 110th, with the Norfolks, who led the attack on Mazeera village on the 4th December, clearing the left bank of the river; and a double company of the regiment captured the north face of the Qurnah position four days afterwards. Two battalions of the Mahrattas were in the front line again at Shaiba when the Turks were routed in one of the hardest fought and most critical battles of the campaign. They were at Nasiriyeh and Amara, and they were a tower of strength in the action at Sinn which gave us Kut-el-Amarah. Here all three battalions-the 103rd, 110th, and 117th-were engaged. They went without water and fought three consecutive engagements in forty-eight hours. The 117th, with the Dorsets, and the 22nd company of Sappers and Miners, were the first troops to enter the enemy's trenches. They broke through the wire and rushed the big redoubt, led by a subadar-major when all their British officers had fallen. At Ctesiphon again they covered themselves with glory. The British regiment brigaded with them speak well of these hard-bitten men, and many a villager of Dorset, Norfolk, or Oxford will remember the Mahratta, and think of him as a person one can trust.

"What was the Indian regiment on your right?" I heard a Norfolk man ask another, in discussing some obscure action on the Tigris of a year ago.

"The – Mahrattas."

The Bungay man nodded. "Ah, they wouldn't leave you up a tree."

"Not likely."

And being familiar with the speech of Norfolk men, who are sparing of tribute, or admiration, or surprise, I knew that the "Mahratta" had received a better "chit" than even the Sapper had given him.

It was in the trenches, and I had been getting the Norfolks to tell me about the thrust up the river in the winter of 1914.

There was a lull in the firing. The Turks, 200 yards ahead, were screened from us by the parapet; and as I stood with my back to this looking eastward, there was nothing visible but earth and sky and the Norfolk men, and a patch of untrodden field, like a neglected lawn, running up to the next earth-work, and yellow with a kind of wild mustard. The flowers and grasses and a small yellow trefoil, wild barley, dwarf mallow, and shepherd's purse were Norfolk flowers. They and the broad, familiar accent of the men made the place a little plot of Norfolk. Nothing Mesopotamian impinged on the homeliness of the scene.

And beyond the traverse were the Mahrattas, sons of another soil. They were a new draft, most of them mere boys who had come straight from the plough into this hard school. They looked dreamy and pensive, with a not very intelligent wistfulness, but they were ready for anything that was going on. Two of them were sniping from a loophole. One of them was shot in the shoulder through a sandbag while I was there. Soon after dark I saw a batch of six with an officer step over the parapet into that particularly horrid zone called no-man's-land. They were to look for surface mines and to be careful not to tread on one. The bullets cracked against the parapet, but they were as casual as if they were going out to pick mushrooms.

The "mines" were charged shell-cases lying flat on the ground. The difficulty with these young recruits was to prevent them feeling for them with their feet or prodding them with a bayonet. They were quite untrained, but there was the same stuff in them as in the men who fought at Shaiba and Ctesiphon, and boasted that they had never been beaten by the Turks. A boy of seventeen who had gone out a few nights before was shot in the leg and lost his patrol. In the morning he found he was crawling up to the Turkish trenches. He was out all that day, but got back to his regiment at night, and all the while he hung on to his rifle.

The Subaltern had been a little depressed with this new batch of recruits. There was so little time to knock them into shape, and he was particularly pleased that Ghopade had brought back his rifle.

"They've got the right spirit," he said. "It's only a question of a month or two. But look at these children."

They certainly did not look very smart or alert or particularly robust.

"This one doesn't look as if he could stick a Turk," I said, and pointed to a thin hatchet-faced lad who could not have weighed much more than eight stone.

"Oh, I expect he'd do that all right. They are much wirier than you would think. It's their turn-out I mean."

"They've been in the trenches a week," I said, by way of extenuation. But the Subaltern and I had passed by the – th and the – th in the same brigade, equally trench-bound, and they were comparatively spick and span.

The Mahratta sepoy is certainly no swashbuckler. To look at him, with his dark skin and irregular features, you would not take him for a member of a military caste. No one cares less for appearance; and his native dress-the big, flat pagri, dhoti, and large loose shoes of the Dekkan and Konkan-do not lend themselves to smartness. Nor does the King's uniform bring with it an immediate transformation. The unaccustomed military turban, which the Sikh or Pathan ties deftly as if with one fold, falls about the head and down the neck of the Mahratta in the most capricious convolutions. If he is a Bayard he does not look the part, and looks, no doubt, as well as his geographical position, have stood in the way of his finding himself. Anyhow, the men who move the pawns on the board in the war-game had long passed him over.

The Mahratta battalions are not, strictly speaking, class regiments, for they each contain a double company of Dekkan Muhammadans. These, but for their inherited religion, are not very widely separated from the Mahrattas. They too have brought honour to the Dekkan. At Ctesiphon a double company of them were attacking a position. They lost all five officers, the British subaltern killed, two jemadars wounded, two subadars killed. One subadar, Mirza Rustum Beg, was wounded twice in the attack, but went on and received his death-wound within twenty-five yards of the enemy. The rest of the company went on, led by the havildars, and took the trench at the point of the bayonet.

That is not a bad record for a class of sepoy who has probably never been mentioned in the newspapers during the war. But it has been a war of "surprises," and one of the morals of Mesopotamia is that one ought not to be surprised at anything. What the Mahratta and Dekkani Muhammadan have done may be expected from-has, indeed, been paralleled by-other hardened stocks. With good leading and discipline and the moral that tradition inspires, you can make good troops out of the agriculturist in most lands, provided he is not softened by a too yielding soil.

The Mahratta has no very marked characteristics to distinguish him from other sepoys. He is just the bedrock type of the Indian cultivator, the real backbone of the country. And he has all the virtues and limitations which you will find in the agriculturist whether he be Sikh, Rajput, Dogra, Jat, or Mussalman, whether he tills the land in the Dekkan or Peshawar. A prey to the priests, money-lenders and vakils, litigious, slow-thinking, unsophisticated-but of strong affections, long-enduring and brave. The small landowner, where the soil resists him and the elements chastise, is much the same all over the world.

THE JAT

The Jat, as we have seen, is the backbone of the Punjab; for it is from this Scythian breed that most of the Sikhs and a number of the Punjabi Mussalmans derive their sinews and stout-heartedness. If you used the word in its broad ethnic sense, signifying all classes of Jat descent, the muster would include the best part of the roll of modern Indian chivalry. But it is with the Hindu Jat, whose ancestors were not seduced or intimidated by Islam and who himself is not sufficiently attracted by the Khalsa to become a Sikh, that this chapter deals. That neither material expediency, love of honour, nor the glamour of an ideal has turned him aside from the immemorial path of his ancestors presupposes a certain stolidity, in which one is not disappointed when one knows the man.

I have passed many years in a district where there are Jats, but the Jat villager is not the same man as the Jat sepoy, and I did not make acquaintance with the sepoy breed until I ran across the bomb-havildar of the 6th Jats in Mesopotamia.

I was taking my bully, and "Tigris" and whisky, with a Jat regiment, the 6th, when the discussion arose as to why the Jat wears gold in his teeth. The doctor thought the idea was that gold carried you over the Styx; it was a kind of Elysian toll. I persuaded the Colonel to call one of the men into the dug-out and to draw him on the point. So Tara, the bomb-havildar, was sent for, a jiwan of five years' service and the quickest intelligence in the regiment.

Tara entered, saluted and stood at attention, each joint of him independently stiff and inflexible, the stiffest wooden soldier could not be more stiff than he, and his rifle was speckless in spite of the mud. At the O.C.'s command his limbs became more independent of one another, but rigidity was still the prominent note.

"Why do Jats wear gold in their teeth, Tara?" the Colonel asked: "this Sahib wants to know."

Tara pondered.

"For the sake of appearance, Sahib," he said, "to give them an air."

"Is there no other reason?"

Tara consulted the tarpaulin overhead, the mud walls, the mud table of the mess, where "La Vie Parisienne" and a Christmas annual gave the only bit of relief to this dun-coloured habitation. Then he smiled and delivered himself slowly, "There is a saying among my people, Sahib, that he who wears gold in his teeth must always speak what is true. Gold in the teeth stops the passage of lies."

"But you have no gold in your teeth?"

"No, Sahib."

"Is that why you tell the tall story about all those Germans you killed at Festubert?"

Tara smiled at this thrust.

"No, Sahib," he said, laughing. "It is true I killed ten between two traverses."

"Better ask him right out, sir," the doctor suggested.

"I have heard some story about gold helping the Jat to heaven," the Colonel observed to Tara.

The gleam of reminiscence in the havildar's eyes, as he confirmed this legend, showed that he was not speaking merely to please. It was the old story of Charon. Gold, he explained, was a passport in the other world as in this, and it was not safe to carry it on the finger or on the ear where it might be detached, so it was worn in the teeth.

"And who puts it there?"

"The goldsmith, Sahib," and he enlarged upon the exorbitance of the Sonari; for the Jat is as thrifty as the Scot.

It was on account of these charges that Tara had omitted the rite.

"When you go back to your village," the Colonel said, dismissing him, "don't forget to visit the Sonari, and then you will not tell any more lies."

Tara saluted with an irradiating smile.

"Assuredly, Sahib, I will not forget," he said. "I shall go straight to the Sonari."

This was quite a sally for Tara, and we all laughed, for the Jat is not quick at repartee. The way we had to dig the story out of him was characteristic, but he is not as a rule so responsive to badinage. The Jat has no time for play. When he is a boy he is too busy looking after the cows, and his nose is kept at the grindstone until he crumbles into the soil that bore him. He has no badges, flags, emblems, no peculiar way of tying his turban or wearing his clothes; and he has very little sentiment. It was a stroke of genius in Guru Gobind Singh when he turned the Jat into a Sikh, gave him the five badges, and wedded him to steel. Tradition grew with the title of Singh, and a great military brotherhood was founded: but in the unconverted Jat there is the same strong fibre, the stronger, the regimental officer will tell you, for not having been uprooted or pruned, and he prides himself that he will make as good a soldier out of the Jat as ever the Guru did.

The Jat is primarily a farmer. He has not the ancient military traditions of the Rajput, Mahratta, or Sikh, though none so stubborn as he to fight for his own land. He does not figure in history among the adventurers, builders of kingdoms, leaders of men, but circumstance has moulded him from time to time into a fighting man. Prosperity may soften him, but adversity only stiffens the impression of the mould.

It was during the reconstitution of the Indian Army in 1893, that the Jats were built up again into a fighting race. A good regimental officer can make anything he will out of the Jat. It takes earthquakes and volcanoes to turn a regiment of these hard-bitten men out of a position they have been given to hold. If the Jat is wanting in initiative and enterprise, this is merely a defect of a virtue, for once set going it never enters his honest hard head to do anything else but go on. And that is why the Jat has done so well in this war. Every knock hardens him. Courage is often the outcome of ignorance, but the remnants of a Jat battalion which has been wiped out half a dozen times will go into the attack again as unconcerned as a new draft.

The 6th Jats was one of the first of the Indian regiments to be engaged in France. As early as the 16th of November, 1914, they had broken into the German trenches. It was on the 23rd of the same month that they made the gallant counter-attack over the snow at Festubert with the Garhwalis and won back the lost trenches. At Givenchy, on December 20th, they held their ground against the German wave when they were left practically in the air; and they would not let go their hold at Neuve Chapelle when they were enfiladed from the Port Arthur position, still intact, on their right. Two months afterwards, on the 9th of May, they made their frontal attack on Port Arthur. A double company penetrated the German lines; only seven men returned unwounded. History repeated itself in Mesopotamia. It has been the part of this gallant stock to arrive on the scene in the nick of time and to be thrown into the brunt of the attack.

The Jat is not troubled with nerves or imagination, and he is seemingly unacquainted with fear. Alarums, bombardments, and excursions having become his normal walk of life, he will continue on his path, probably with fewer inward questionings than most folk, until the end of the war. Give him a trench to hold and he will stick to it as a matter of course until he is ordered to come out.

The regiment in the trenches were mostly Jats of Hissar and Rohtak, and the Colonel told me with the pride that is right and natural in the regimental officer that this was the best stock. "You must get the Jat where he is top dog in his own country," he said, "and not where he lives among folk who think they are his betters. And he is best where the land is poor. In districts where the sub-division of the soil among large families does not leave enough to go round you will get a good recruit." Locality is all important; a dividing river may make all the difference. The Colonel admired the Jats of A, but he had no good word for the Jats of B. The Rajput Jat, especially from Bikaner, he admitted, were stout fellows, though they were not of his crew. There were well-to-do districts in which the Jat would not follow the pursuit of arms whether in peace or in war. "And if you want recruits," he enjoined on me, "don't go to an irrigated district." Water demoralises them. When a Jat sits down and watches the canal water and the sun raise his crop, his fibre slackens, for his stubborn qualities proceed from the soil. It is the same with other agricultural classes in the Indian Army, but the Jat is probably the best living advertisement of the uses of adversity. There is a proverb in the Punjab on the lines of our own tag about the three things that are most improved by flagellation, but woman is the only item recommended in both cases. The Hindu variant adds "flax" and "the Jat."

There is another rude proverb of the country. "Like Jat, like byle (ox)." There are many Jats and most of them have some peculiar virtue of their own, but quickness of apprehension is not one of them. I had an amusing reminder of this before I left the trench. Bullets were spattering against the parapet with a crack as loud as the report of a rifle, and our own and the Turkish shells screamed over the dug-out with so confused a din that one was never quite sure which was which. It was the beginning of the afternoon "strafe." Still there was no call for casualties, and one only had to keep one's head low. In the middle of it a subaltern coming down "Queen Street" looked in and told us that one of the Jats was hit. "Loophole?" the Colonel asked. But it was not a loophole. The jiwan had got hold of somebody's periscope; he had heard that it was a charm which enables you to see without being hit-he was standing up over the parapet trying to adjust it like a pair of field glasses, when a bullet flicked off part of his ear.

The supply of good Indian officers is sometimes a difficulty in a Jat regiment, for these children of labour follow better than they lead. But even in the acquisition of understanding it is hard plugging application that tells. "Continuing" is the Jat's virtue, or "carrying on" as we say, and he will sap through a course of signalling with the same doggedness as he saps up to the enemy's lines. "We've got some first class signallers," the Colonel boasted, "they can write their reports in Roman Urdu."

And the pick of the lot was Tara. What that youth has seen in France and Mesopotamia would keep old Homer in copy through a dozen Iliads, but it has left no wrinkle on his brow. Tara is still as fresh as paint.

"Sahib," he asks, "when may I go to the Turkish saphead with my bombs?" He lost a brother at Sheikh Saad and wants to make good.