With the Gurkhas: Adventure on India's Frontier

by JOHN MASTERS

My FIRST summons to action came at eleven o’clock at night. The brigadier ordered our battalion to move at once to cut off a large party of Pathans said to be escaping from the Damdil battle area. At midnight, after a cup of tea, I went out to find my company. The moon was well past full and the night cold. The company stood bunched and shivering, equipment creaking, bayonets gleaming in the faint green light. The Gurkha officers were explaining the orders to the NCOs. B Company edged slowly past us in the dark. At the gate the sentries threw back the rolls of barbed wire, and I led A Company out behind B onto the metaled road. Our heavy, nailed sandals were in the Innersacks slung high on our shoulders, but even the shuffle of our sneakers sounded very loud.

Once we were on the road the pace quickened, and we swung past the dark bulk of Miranshah Fort at. four miles an hour. I saw no light and heard no sound from there, though inside the Scouts were getting ready to send a strong patrol across ihe river. The miles passed, and though the tension in the column never completely disappeared, it eased appreciably after we had moved for an hour and had our first rest, sitting down in the drainage ditch beside the road and holding up our feet to let the blood flow away from the congested soles.

The advance guard was strung out in double file a hundred yards ahead, rifles at the ready. The men moved fast and yet found time to search the little gullies beside the road and the narrow culverts that dived under it. Danger at night on the Frontier was great, but against an enemy who had no tripod-mounted weapons it was from close quarters. The risk we faced was from the silent group that might be right in the ditch, two yards away and unsuspected in the dirty light until they acted.

Twenty minutes before first light we were strung along the north bank of the Tochi River, crouched under a steep black bulk of hill. The colonel sent my company and the mountain battery up the hill and spread the others out to left and right on smaller features, or tucked them away in a ravine as reserve.

We started quickly on the climb, as the light began to etch in the jagged skyline across the Tochi behind us. There was no path, and wo worked our way up among boulders and scrub. I spread my leading platoon across the hillside ahead, and kept two more close at my side. Two hundred yards down the hill behind me stones clattered and rolled as the artillery mules heaved their own bulk and their 850-pound loads up the cliff.

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

We did not know whether then; would he anyone waiting for us on top. It was not likely, but it was possible, and we never took avoidable risks. The leading platoon went through the full battle drill of attack. In the hardening steel light, the men near the center of it crouched for half a minute below the last outcrop line of rock beneath the crest, while the outer horns of the platoon curved on and round the summit. There was a pause while all gathered themselves together and carried out the professional check — rifle, bayonet, ammunition pouches. On the extreme right the light-automatic gunner and his No. 2 ran forward and dropped down, ready to fire across the front. A hand waved, a voice whispered “Charge!” Each man drove strongly from bunched thighs, and all across the slope the bayonets flickered up and over the crest.

Silence.

Full dawn had hardly reached the valley when my glasses picked up movement across the Tochi. For a moment I found it difficult to focus in my sudden excitement. This was the first enemy I had ever seen. Then I got them. A group of nearly thirty men, less than a mile away, were moving down to the river across the stony ridges on the far bank. They came on unconcernedly, confident of their own safety, confident that no one would be in this place. They were already just within range of my light automatics.

It is a strange feeling to open lire for the first, time on a living human being with intent to kill him. No one had tried to kill me yet, and I had not seen anyone in the moment of being killed or torn by bullets. The men down there were armed tribesmen, and they had come from the Damdil baltle. Perhaps one of them had fired the dumdum that blew off Peter Nicholson’s leg. I had positive orders to fire on such people. Yet they were human and unsuspecting. Il is an emptiness in the stomach to kill. . . .

It seemed I had wasted half a day thinking, hesitating. In other circumstances that might have been true, and a fleeting opportunity would long since have gone. But this time, militarily, I should have waited even longer before I screwed up my will, broke loose from indecision, and said, “Fire!” Hut perhaps if I had waited any longer I would never have given that order. My company’s light automatics stammered furiously, but it was really too soon. The tribesmen were nearly eight hundred yards away on the edge of the low cliffs across the Tochi. We did not know the exact range, and light automatics are not suitable for such a target. Over there the sudden bullets smacked around them. In a flash the group broke up; men darted to left and right, disappeared among the rocks; they were gone.

Nothing else happened; no one else appeared; no one fired a shot in our direction. The ambush had been complete and, had I not sprung it too soon, might have been more successful. Hut then again a mule might have brayed and warned off the enemy before we had fired a shot. The colonel mildly reprimanded me for overimpatience — a form of correction that was at this time almost my staple food—and congratulated me on being so quick into position and so quick to spot the enemy at all.

We wound back to Miranshah late that afternoon more cautiously than we had conic out but still nothing happened. The Political Agent’s informers passed the word that between us we had killed eight of a party of twenty-seven tribesmen that morning. I did not believe it. Informers have to live, but I doubt if any Pat Man got more than a severe fright. — unless from the wonderful shooting of the mountain guns — in that unsung, exciting, and very minor engagement near Hoya, where Lieutenant J. Masters first tried to kill someone.

2

FIFTY miles to the south the Mahsuds ambushed a truck convoy in a savage gorge called the Shahur Tangi. The escort of armored ears got sandwiched on the narrow road so that they could use neither their weapons nor their mobility. Seventy-two officers and soldiers were killed or wounded. The government decided that the time had come to take the offensive. Our brigade, hovering in reserve off the north of the storm center, was ordered into battle.

We marched on May 5, 1987, and spent that night at Ta1-in-Tochi. The camp site was on a bare ridge above the Tochi River, and no matter how carefully a commander sited his camp picquels it was impossible to prevent the enemy from sniping onto the face of the slope at night. The crawlingsweet smell of death pervaded the place when we arrived, and as I marched in I passed three mules rotting in open graves at the foot of the camp. It. was late and we had not sufficient time to dig properly, but there were some shallow holes there already, and we used them.

At two minutes after eleven something exploded in the air over my head with a sharp whip-crack-slap. A second later a dull thump sounded from the dark ridge to the west. Both sounds were rapidly repeated several limes. At last I was hearing the real crack-thump I had imitated so often. At last I was under fire.

I was frightened. A dispassionate recognition of the enormous odds against being hit, an ability to measure the distance of passing bullets, a degree of stoicism — all these came later with experience and after many bullets had passed without hitting me or anyone near me. Thefirst time, in a six-inch pit on a stony hillside, alone with the murderous whip in the darkness, afraid to speak for fear of being thought to be afraid, my only companion the cruel necessity of lying still and doing nothing, I was frightened. I stared up at the stars and waited, hardly able to control my trembling. I wondered whether it would be my neck, stomach, legs, or eyes — what it would feel like.

Unhurriedly the sniper searched the camp, firing twenty or thirty rounds. I heard men moving about near me and called to them to be still. A mule snickered; water splashed on the dim ashes of a cooking fire. Then away to my left a voice muttered a Scottish curse, and I heard a long whistling sound, continued for several seconds.

The colonel called, “Hamish, are you hit?”

Major Hamish Mackay replied cautiously, “No, sir. I just let the air out of my Lilo.”

The tension on t he hillside relaxed almost audibly, and all around there was subdued laughter. I was released from fear by the picture of our quiet, farlooking Scots major sinking lower into the friendly earth while the air hissed loudly from the vent of his inflatable mattress.

The sniper killed nine mules as they stood in their tethered lines just below us on the slope.

Next day we moved on up the road to Damdil, and the day after, to Dosalli. All along I saw traces of battle. Dead mules lay in the ditch, their legs si uck out straight as children’s toys, bloodstains splashed the white stones; twigs and whole bushes lay broken in the road; and shell blasts pockmarked the ridges. On the right of the road just beyond Damdil camp stood a low knoll crowned with a sangar. Shreds of barbed wire lay round it. We stopped and examined it with respect, for here on the night of March 21—22 there had been a light, small in scale but heroically great in courage. Owing to a series of the classic blunders that touch off most of war’s resounding heroisms, nine Gurkhas of the 2nd Battalion, 5th Royal Gurkha Rifles (Frontier Force), had been left here, without support, to fight all night against fifty crazed Wazirs. By dawn, live of the nine were dead, and each of the other four had been wounded many times. The corporal in command fought until all his ammunition was gone. Then they struggled with kukris and bayonets inside the little enclosure, against outnumbering knives and daggers. Then they threw stones and kicked and clubbed men to death. They held the picquet, and when help came in the morning the corporal was found propped against the wall, still in command, still fighting. He had a broken thigh, a broken arm, a bullet through his chest, a bullet in his neck, and sixty-three knife wounds.

We went straiglit into the fighting around Dosalli. Two brigades began to force their way slowly up the Sre Mela toward the center of tinenemy’s resistance, the Sham plains. I thought back to the sleet and snow of my first visit here, that. February night with the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry. Now it was hot, and the Sre Mela was only a trickle of cool water among the stones.

3

AT LAST the army broke the tribal will to light, and I saw no more action. Then I fell ill with malaria, and the colonel sent me back to Bakloh 1o command the battalion’s main depot there. In the long journey I had time to think about the campaign, as two years before I had thought about Sandhurst. All the happenings and excitements formed a mosaic pattern in a general scene, and it. was too early yet to assess the true value or importance of the scene as a whole. Only the sharpedged incidents stuck in the eye and the memory; yet I was not the same young man who had gone to Bakloh two years before.

First, I belonged — not. only by title and courtesy, but by right. I could now join in any conversation, understand any allusion. Before, men had said, “ Do you remember . . . ?” and gone on to chuckle over maneuvers, personalities, and batik’s of the past. Now this campaign was, and would obviously continue to be, the staple of our reminiscence for many years to come — among the regular officers this remained true throughout the war — and I had been there.

Every man in the battalion knew me as I wandered round with my signalers. They all knew I would slip away from the mess when I could, to have curried goat in their cookhouses. They knew I had learned to eat properly without knives or forks, using my right hand only—because they had taught me. They knew that I liked a marrow bone and a tin plate to bang it on to get the marrow out, and that for me tea must be, inexplicably, burning hot — they liked it tepid. They knew that I always brought out a notebook and recorded the words and learned the tunes of the songs they sang.

From the strictly military .standpoint the campaign had taught me much that was to be of value in the coming world war. Many Aldershot-type officers maintained that we learned only bad habits in this tribal warfare against what they called “ragged-arsed barnshools.” It was not true. From the Frontier itself we learned unwinking, unsleeping alertness. From the Pal bans we learned more about the tactical value of ground than any of our competitors or future enemies knew. (In 1944 after a heavy Japanese night attack on my brigade had failed, for the reason that it was mounted across unfavorable ground, my Gurkha lieutenant shook his head and said to me with a slightly disapproving cheerfulness, “If these Japani-haru were Pathans we’d have had a very bad lime.”) I also learned to respect the enemy. Whoever he was, he was only a man doing something that he believed right.

I had had two years with the battalion, three years of total service, and I had acquired the second star of a full lieutenant. I thought it reasonable to assume that I was of at least average ability, or the colonel would not have given me both A Company and the signal platoon to command, often divergent tasks that kept me rushing from one end of the battle to the other, now checking a picquet’s sentries, now mending a telephone exchange, now panting up to take A Company into the attack, He said in his annual report on me that I was a very capable young officer, had done well in the war, and must learn not to be so impetuous. This was reasonable enough, and I did my best to improve, for I was definitely of the battalion and t he regiment, accepted and known everywhere as Jack Masters of the Second Fourth.

My dreams of the stall now seemed foolish and mean. Service with troops was not just a steppingstone to higher things, nor was the only purpose of an officer’s stay with a battalion that he should there learn how to be a field marshal. I still wanted to be a field marshal one day. I was still determined to go to the Staff College as soon as I could, but I began to see that the true purpose of the Stall College was to train a man to become in all ways a better commander of troops. For here, with the fighting men, was the spirit. Higher up, troops become dots on a map; there are too many of them, too much mathematics, too many graphs and maps. But I had seen the brigadiers and the generals look at us, and I could not mistake the envy in their eyes. Perhaps it was only their lost youth that made them stand beside the track as we of the regiments went by in our long, steady columns, but I do not think so. It was the spirit of the regiments that they envied, for they could never again belong with us. That was the price they had paid for the patches of red flannel on the lapels of their shirts.

It had been only a little war in which I had learned so much. In fact, from the point of view of the people in England it wasn’t even war but only imperial policing. For us it was war and experience. I was sunburned to the red of old Tudor bricks from hours of waiting in shadeless picquets, on treeless niountaintops, in arid valleys. Tbe chinstrap mark stood out like a white scar around my face. My knees were nearly black where they showed between shorts and hosetops. The sound ot bullets was familiar. My eyes ached from searching the hillsides through binoculars. Half-healed cuts and scratches covered me, and I could sleep anywhere, anytime, anyhow. My memory was bright with gallantry and sacrifice, harsh with pain and cruelty.

4

WHEN the battalion went up to the Frontier for war or down to the plains for collective training it left behind in Bakloh its recruits, the stall needed to train them, and all the Gurkha families. This mixed bag was collectively known as the depot. The colonel usually gave a newly married officer command of it, so that he could have a year in one place to settle down to his married life, and so that his wife could be useful in helping to administer the families. Now the colonel had selected me for the post, partly because no newly married officer was available, partly to enable me to recover from my illness.

Being almost twenty-three, I was quite confident of my ability to train up into soldiers some sixty wild boys of sixteen or seventeen straight from the farthest hills of Nepal. I was happy about the hundred or so trained soldiers, store men, clerks, instructors, and bandsmen who were also in the depot. The thought of all the buildings, stores, clothing, and equipment for which I would be held responsible did not worry me a bit. Being a bachelor, I was even fool enough to be calm about the two hundred women and four hundred children.

After three days of “ handing over,” my predecessor stepped into the truck that was to take him down the hill, the truck rolled off’, and I was alone. The full weight, of the new responsibilities settled on my shoulders so suddenly that I felt crushed. The battalion was three hundred miles away on the Frontier and liable to be called into action at any moment. The colonel could not send me detailed instructions even it he’d wanted to. He relied on me to run this complex organization well, for on its efficiency and happiness depended to a great extent the efficiency and happiness of his battalion. How could the battalion continue to fight well if my recruits joined it as ill-trained hobbledehoys? How could the men up there keep their minds on their duty if, back in Bakloh, their wives were being seduced and their children dying of neglect? Bowed and superhumanly serious, I set. to work and lor a few weeks wore the mien of a very old and careworn bank president.

The recruits were comparatively easy. In a fortnight, guided by the advice my predecessor had given me, I had made out a block syllabus for the whole of their eight-month training period and translated into detailed instructions the first week’s work. Then I divided the boys into squads of eight or nine and settled down to the final checking. This meant cross-referencing all lessons w ith the proper page of the proper Army Manual for that subject; allotting rifle ranges, parade grounds, dummy rifles, aiming rests, schoolrooms, and football and basketball grounds so that two squads did not end up trying to do the same thing in the same place at the same time; and issuing books, clothes, and weapons.

Away on the Frontier the fighting men went short of food so that the Colonel could wring back from the government a small monthly cash rebate on the battalion’s ration allowance. He sent this to me, with other money he allotted from our funds, to buy extra milk for the recruits and provide them with games equipment and nautch clothes. Every week I weighed the recruits, since failure to gain weight was usually a sign that a boy was debilitated by hookworm or chronic malaria. The extra milk had its effect, though the recruits sometimes gave it to pet dogs or otherwise misused it. One dark, slow-witted boy was not gaining as he should, and, after weighing him, I ordered him to be given still more milk, using the idiomatic phrase, “Aru dudh laga” —literally, “Put more milk (into him).” The boy got his extra milk, and “put” it. Lieutenant Hotu found him alone in the barrack room, massaging it into his thighs.

A week or two before they arrived in Bakloh the recruits had been hill boys from the uttermost back of nowhere. Their hair was long and matted; they had never felt the bite of boots or the bonds of discipline; they had never seen a train, a motorcar, or a road, let alone an airplane, a radio, or a telephone. To this cheerful, shaggy crowd of halfgrown puppies we gave boots at once, and they tripped over their feet in them. They laughed when they should have stood sternly silent, chattered freely in the ranks, and when on parade suggested to the NCOs that the sun was hot and they would like to rest under the trees — and of course they greeted each word of command with amused stares. Some of them did not even understand their own language, Gurkhali. These were boys from valleys on the Tibetan border so remote that the inhabitants spoke only an obscure local dialect, and I had to shift them to a squad whose instructor came from the same general area.

In those first days the recruits showed the basic qualities of the Gurkha — love of life, a warm and animal sense of humor, and fearless self-pride. I had one of them come into my office to give particulars of his home and family, and was lighting a cigarette te as he entered. Hotu, standing behind him, nearly exploded when the lad too pulled out a cigarette, asked me for a light, and sat carelessly on the edge of my desk. I motioned the quivering lieutenant into silence and asked the recruit his name.

He said, “Puranbahadur. What’s yours?”

The NCOs had the delicate task of superimposing on this confident self-respect, without injuring or diminishing it, the discipline that turns a brave man in uniform into a soldier. I watched Sergeant Sarbdhan, only thirty-four but mannered like a grandfather, stand patient in front of his squad for weeks on end, slowly and tenderly bringing them to heel. Then one day he suddenly spoke to a recruit, in the rear rank, the one who had in the dim past suggested they would all like a rest in the shade. “Well, Birkhabahadur, now what would you do it you felt hot on parade?”

Little Birkhe and the whole squad, appalled at the memory of their past misdeeds, stood blushingly silent — and then began working with the vicious all-out, all-together snap that later tore apart German panzers, Japanese guards, and many evil theories.

Our results were of course not perfect. It annoyed me to find that the boys, who had understood my Gurkhali well when they first came, were now so thoroughly aware of the colossal gap between an officer and an unattested recruit that they could not understand a word I said. And they were so pleased to have mastered the etiquette of military life that in the early afternoons, when we sent them to lie down and get. the rest their immature bodies required, I had to creep to my office by back ways and bridle paths because whenever I used the direct road past the barrack rooms some vigilant recruit would hear my step and ruin our efforts by bawling “Squad!" from a horizontal position on his bed, bringing the whole lot of them, in one motion, crashing delightedly to their feet, out of deep sleep.

Somehow everything prospered. No recruit ran away; there was no fire; no equipment was lost; my accounts passed the audit board; no old soldier was caught in drunkenness or gambling. The weight on my shoulders began to feel somewhat less heavy.

I might have been lonely, but there was so much to do that loneliness or boredom never had a chance to creep up on me. The days were full of work, and in the evenings I read greedily and cardindexed the fine mess library. I took the opportunity to read some of the books people freely quote but seldom seem actually to have opened. With varying enjoyment but an unwavering sense of superiority I plowed through Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, Motley’s Dutch Republic, Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico and Conquest of Peru, Thomas Trollope’s History of Florence, Frazer’s Golden Bough, all of Mahan, Machiavelli’s Prince, several of Hakluyt’s voyages, Froissart’s Chronicles, Spinoza’s Ethics, and Battles and Leaders of the American Civil II War, besides a flood of adventure novels and all available books about exploration and mountaineering.

It was at this time that John Strickland came through Bakloh on a short visit. He found me one bitter January night, sitting alone in the large, bare room of my bungalow, reading Spinoza by the ghostly light of a single hurricane lantern. Paper lay scattered all over the uncarpeted stone floor, and I was wearing a dark brown dressing gown made of an army blanket. The wind howled in the chimney and rattled the windows; rats scurried on the ceiling cloth.

I said, “John, I can’t understand more than one sentence in three of this stuff.”

I must have had a mad look in my eyes. John said, “What you need. Jack, is a damned great fat woman,” He shook his head and went back to Razmak.

In my spare time I made determined attempts to understand the theory of relativity, write a sonnet in Gurkhali, and extract some admission of affection out of a girl from Dalhousie. I was not bored.

5

WHILE the recruits filled out into young soldiers, and my other multitudinous responsibilities, real and imagined, became lighter and more formal, the two hundred women and four hundred children hung heavier around my neck.

I had three main worries — welfare, discipline, and morals. The government did nothing about family welfare, did not care whether the soldiers had families or not, and certainly was not going to spend a penny or lift a finger to look after them, so we did all this ourselves. Everyone In the regiment had subscribed to build, equip, and maintain a families’ clinic. The doctor, a British captain of the Indian Medical Service, gave up some of his time to work in it. Our funds paid the wages of a tiny staff and a dhai, or midwife, for each battalion.

It was always an uphill struggle. Gurkhas do not practice infanticide, but some of them are not averse to letting an already ailing girl-child die from lack of attention. Again, though the women had no purdah taboos, they came from so sequestered and backward a country and were so steeped in traditional and semi-religious cures that they were unwilling to bring themselves or their children to the clinic except as a last resort. Last resorts, in war and peace, produce a high rate of mortality, and the clinic’s occasional helpless failures made the Gurkhas even less willing to go to it. It once took me two hours of arguing to extract from a stubborn and frightened rifleman permission for the doctor to perform a. Caesarean on his wife — the only hope of saving woman or child.

The 2nd Battalion dhai, a pleasant and educated widow of middle age, was addressed by all of us as Didi, a respectful term meaning “elder sister.” Every day she went round the family quarters and reported to me, through Hotu, each domestic occurrence there — births, scratched knees, pinkeye, measles, miscarriages, everything. Then if the matter was not being properly dealt with I went into action. First I used the small guns of cajolery, flattery, and persuasion, usually acting through the Gurkha officers. If they failed I had a big gun. Once, as an example, in a particularly willful case of child neglect that had ended in the death of a girl baby, I used it. I ordered the mother to be evicted from her quarters and sent back to Nepal. This was done next day. The woman cursed and cried, but the riflemen put her and her other children and all their little bundled belongings into a truck. The men’s faces were quite wooden, and t heir minds, normally in close tune with mine, were now out of harmony and vaguely worried. If it had been a man-baby that had died . . . !

This power to allocate and take away quarters at a moment’s notice was a brutal weapon, particularly in a case where my ideas of right and wrong did not completely tally with those of the men. But, poised on a delicate point of duty, with the soldiers far away and lighting in Waziristan relying on a general tone of happiness in the lines, I did it ; and I would have done it again if there had been need.

Once a week I inspected fifty of the two hundred married quarters. I did this partly to see that they were in good repair and partly to award the cash prizes our funds gave to the woman with the best cared-for establishment. A woman with many children had to be allowed an appropriate handicap, so I spent many hours, while inspecting snotty noses and unwashed necks, in attempting to equate the relative merits of Mrs. A’s unkempt brood against Mrs. B’s one well-scrubbed little Lord Fauntleroy.

Officers carrying out. this duty were always chaperoned by a Gurkha officer just, in ease. It was as well. One spring morning I walked round the corner of a hut into the full force of a deliberately lip-parted, smoldering, hungry stare, sent burning into my eyes by a beautiful, passionate, and caged female animal. My stomach turned to water, and my masculinity tingled in my spine. The girl stared more longingly. I had only to w hisper a day and a time, I looked cautiously round and saw my chaperon, Lieutenant Sukdeo, a man of unusually humorous cynicism, interestedly examining the sky, the trees, the distant view, everything but me. I was in a cage too. I turned and walked away.

I wrestled with myself at night and after many nights managed to smother the memory of that open promise under the triple blankets of duty, example, and justice. She would have come to me at a word. The whole depot would have known, but such was the relationship between us in the regiment that, reading me like a book and believing I would not do what I was able to prevent myself from doing, the men would equally certainly have done all they could to keep anyone else from knowing— especially her husband and my colonel. Nor would blackmail have entered anyone’s head, even if I had severely punished one of them for precisely the same sort of activity. It was just these considerations that enabled me to pull the blankets up under my chin and keep them there.

The reactions of the women to these visits of inspection were usually “Oriental.” If there had been an Englishwoman with me, especially a wife, they would all have been smilingly natural and at ease, But in most of the East, and even to some extent among Gurkhas, it is unusual for a lone male to speak to a lone married female except on definitely furtive and amatory business -so unusual that though the women of llakloh knew I was chaperoned, on duty, and intended no harm, all those who were still young enough to see themselves as likely targets for male libidinousness aeled up in an alarmingly kittenish manner. Brown Ghincseiooking dolls, they blushed and hid their heads, looked sideways at me, fluttered their eyelashes, and spoke to me but not at me in giggling whispers. The lined old grandmothers of thirty-five, on the other hand, were frank, cheerful, and, where possible, Rabelaisian. I asked one such whether the roof was leaking badly. It had poured with rain the night before, and I could see the stains on the wall and the puddle on the floor. Puzzled by her denial, I repeated the question. She shook with laughter, hands on hips, and cried. “Oh, the roof! That leaks, all right. I thought you meant him”— pointing with her chin at the youngest of a gamboling platoon of infants.

Every Wednesday I weighed babies. In the early days this was a rough blend of torture and farce. I sat there, frozen with anxiety, among giggling women and howling children, while Didi deftly popped the babies in and out of the scale and I blindly wrote down the weights in a big book. To cap all, my nervously roving eyes kept striking naked breasts, for the women suckled their children all round me. Gurkhas breast-feed children to the age of four or five and at any hour of the day or night. I was a silly young fool, still tied by one of the more prurient Western taboos, to be so disturbed by this pleasant display of an affectionate motherly duty. The British public-school creed has its handicaps as well as its advantages.

I got to worrying because I found that no one, not even Didi, and least of all the mothers, knew enough about our children’s diseases—green diarrhea and conjunctivitis were the most common — to ensure their quick recognition and prompt cure. The 1st Battalion had just arrived back in Bakloh from the Malakand, so I sought out Barbara Hughes, the wife of their nicest major, and laid my problem before her. The Hugheses quickly became understanding friends to the forlorn commander of the 2nd Battalion depot. Barbara, who had two children of her own, came down to weigh babies with me and, when she had stopped laughing, gave me much practical advice. Then I went to the doctor, notebook in hand, and sat many evenings while he placed his lingers together and dictated notes on children’s ailments in his powerful Scots burr. Finally I produced a forty-page pamphlet in Gurkhali on the care of Gurkha children in Bakloh, with one appendix on running a household and another on how to win the family cash prizes. It was a remarkable feat, for a bachelor of twenty-three — far more remarkable than I thought at the time, though not in precisely the same way. Still, I meant well, and I dare say it was after all best to confront these responsibilities, the memory of which appalls me, with an unhesitating, self-confident ignorance.

The discipline of the families, my second worry, turned out to be very good. In spite of formidable temptations and a natural rowdiness, only once did two of the women come to blows. These two became so incensed, or were enjoying their hairpulling contest so much, that they threw stones at Hotu when he rushed along to stop the riot. It is a terrible thing to throw stones at a lieutenant of the 4th Gurkhas, and Hotu came back, his mustaches trembling at the indignity, with the two sulky wildcats in tow. The women squatted on the office veranda and stridently shouted their stories at me through the open door, both together. A little farther along, the quarter-guard sentries, standing rigidly at ease, were shaking with laughter, ft was a moment for which ihe army has a formula. (The army has a formula for every moment, and a good officer should know them all.) I jammed my hat on my head, said to Hotu, “Carry on, Subadarsahib,” and walked quickly down to the rifle range, which was a long way away.

The sexual problem was potentially the most serious of all. The East is not really fatalistic except about death and disease, and if a spark flies near its passion or pride there is an explosion. Gurkha men are very fond of rum, gambling, and women — especially, and sensibly, women. Gurkha women, on the whole, just like men best. Here there were two hundred women who had already been separated from their husbands for thirteen months — a parting that was to lengthen into twenty-five months before I left the depot. Not counting the recruits, who were not innocent but not forceful either, there were a hundred trained soldiers in my depot, and on the other side of the ridge the 1st Battalion, just back from four monastic years in the Malakand, contained another four hundred tough and tenacious bachelors.

What were my responsibilities, and what right did any of us have to interfere with the private lives of grown women? First, there were Regimental Standing Orders. Many years before, Gurkhas and British had combined to write them, and, in matters of behavior, they conformed to the customs of the Gurkha in his own country. They covered an enormous field, military and social, but the most important clause affecting me was one that said no mail might enter a married quarter other than his own unless on the invitation of the husband, the husband being present throughout. The men on the Frontier certainly expected me to enforce this clause, as they were not present to do it themselves. We doubled the guard over the married lines — but quis custodiet ipsos custodies? and, as Sukdeo said, “Sahib, if a woman means to commit adultery you can chain her to the top of a thin tree, and she’ll do it — with her knees and ankles roped,” he added wearily. But the East believes correctly that mankind is frail and should be protected against temptation, so we had to do our best.

There was noorgy of scandal in my depot. One case of adultery was dealt with by a court of Gurkha officers. Once the night paired saw a dark figure slipping into a quarter. They ran up, were met by a blank-faced girl, but were in time to see a man’s legs disappearing through the high back window. They failed to catch him, possibly deliberately, but brought me a cap belonging to one of my senior NCOs. After talking to the NCO and Hotu, I returned the former to the Frontier without giving any publie reason, and kept quiet, naming no names except privately to the colonel. A happy marriage, like California, is a state of mind.

6

MY YEAR with the depot did not pass without one exciting incident of the sort usually associated with India. A little after three o’clock in the afternoon of a cold and sunny February clay ”Poppa Donlea, who then shared a bungalow with me, came in and said that a grasseut ter had seen a leopard. We went out together to question the man. Oh, yes, he said, he’d seen a leopard, quite close. He pointed at Poppa’s golden retriever and added, “About that size, it was.” He had seen it first just below the squash-rackets court, and shouted at it. It had sneaked away through the long grass inwards Number 8 bungalow, which was unoccupied.

Leopards are not uncommon in bakloh, so we had no reason to doubt his story, I went up to the lines to got a .303 service rille and some heaters. Many men volunteered, and I selected five, including Corporal Cdiram and Pfe baliram. Turning back an eager mob of recruits, soldiers, small urchins, and the retriever, we set off to the squash court, where Poppa was waiting for us. He did not have a rifle, as we had agreed it would be safer in this crowded cantonment to keep down the number of weapons in action. The hunt began.

We spread into line across the narrow, shallow valley leading down from the squash court to Number 8 bungalow, and moved slowly iorward, throwing stones and beating the earth with sticks. Scrub and bushes dotted the valley floor, but Poppa and I moved along the right-hand slope, where it was clearer, and watched for the leopard to break cover ahead of the beaters.

We passed cautiously through the garden of Number 8. The empty servants’ huts belonging to it were just down the hill in a dense thicket below us, ten yards or less away, when we heard a sudden coughing roar. An incoherent scream followed, then shouts, and the ugly crackling of leaves and twigs in the thicket. I could hot gel down the bank direct to the hut because it was so steep and overgrown. I ran forward and round and crept back into the thicket along a narrow, overhung path.

Nerves tensed, ears straining for the slightest sound in thescrub round me, rille loaded, finger on the trigger, butt in my shoulder, I stepped steadily on, looking slowly right, left, up, down. On a flat ledge in front of the servants huts I saw baliram. staggering about and muttering, “Khayo!” (“It’s bit ten me!”)

I could see no damage to the right side of his face, which was toward me, but the corner of his mouth slowly dripped blood. I whispered urgently, “What’s happened? Where’s the leopard? Speak up, man!” He swung blindly to face me, and the pit of my stomach turned over as the left side of his head came into view. A blow or bite had torn half of it away, so that it hung loosely outward, laving bare the inside of his head, the convolutions of the inner ear, and a part of his brain. I saw no sign of the leopard, and baliram could no longer speak. I shouted to Edirani to come over from the other side of the valley and help, but no one came to me.

Silence hung heavy in the little clearing by the huts, and the bushes crowded in on me. baliram looked through me with bis dull eyes fixed on something miles away. The hanging flap of skin, muscle, and bone swayed with his slow movements, and the blood dripped soundlessly out from the corners of his mouth.

I leaned my rifle against the wall of the hut. I was trembling but managed to take off my thin tweed coat and knot the sleeves over baliram s head to hold his face in one piece. While my arms were above bis head, tying the awkward sleeves together, a huge blur of black and gold stripes streaked across the extreme corner of my vision. I turned and saw that a tiger was charging out of the cleft between the back of the hut and the slope of the hill, nine or ten feet away. A coughing, grunting roar shattered the nerves in my head. I jerked back and to the right; a steel-tipped forearm whistled past my face and blew the bat off my head. Baliram moaned wordlessly.

Seeing the way now clear for escape, the tiger ran on down the path by which I had entered the thieket.

Udiram had never liked the look of that place. As the beaters advanced he had shouted to baliram not to go into it hut to throw stones from the shelter of the huts, baliram had not heard, or did not heed. At the first roar Udiram looked across the valley, saw the tiger, saw it stand up and bite through Bahrain’s head, saw it creep into the narrow cleft between the hut and the slope. From then on he had been shouting desperately to warn me, but I had tensed my ears and brain to hear some tiny animal noise, some leaf crackling, so that they had dismissed these loud human shouts as being irrelevant. I had heard nothing. So Udiram watched helplessly while I walked up to a cornered tiger and laid my rille down within ten feet of it.

Action blew the uneasy, crawling fears out of me. Udiram and others came running. I left one man in charge of Baliram, sent another for the doctor, seized my rille, and ran after the tiger. The ground beyond Number 8 sloped down steeply in broken cliffs and ledges, lightly scattered with pine trees and underbrush, to a bridle trail and then to a rifle range below that. On the right were two-storied apartment buildings occupied by married soldiers and their children. Men were firing on the range; women and children were talking and playing in the afternoon sun; and a considerable crowd had attached itself to the tail of our own small party. It was like stalking a tiger through Central Park on the Fourth of July.

I stepped rather more cautiously over the brow of the hill and saw the tiger at once, bounding down just above the trail. I dropped flat, cuddled the rifle into my cheek, and waited till he leaped onto the path. There his stripes stood out clearly against the even yellow background, and Ids pace became a steady trot. I was above and behind him, and a hundred and fifty yards distant. As he settled into his stride I opened fire with three rapid shots, aiming at the tip of his nose. The first bullet broke his near hind leg high up, smashing into the great bone with such force that it spun him across the trail as though he had been a cat kicked by a big boy. The second shot went through his off forepaw, and the third grazed Ids shoulders.

I jumped up and ran down the hill to get closer. As I ran, he dragged himself off the road into thin bushes below it. I came to the place, and the tiger roared. I backed off. Then I moved along the trail for thirty yards and went over the edge into thick thorn undergrowth. The invisible tiger watched me and accompanied each step with a sighing roar. I have never felt so anxious, keyed up, and angry, all at the same time.

I sat down with my back against a rock on the hillside and waited for my breathing to settle. I brought the rifle into my shoulder and tried to see the tiger. Steady, gasping groans came from a patch of thin scrub thirty yards away. I stared and stared, trying to pick out his form, but could see nothing. Yet a very large black and gold animal lay stretched out there. It was an extraordinary demonstration of the art of camouflage.

Suddenly a. streak of gold caught my eye and, following along it, a patch of white which I hoped was his ruff. Aiming at that, I fired. The whole animal leaped into prominent focus as he started convulsively, and lay still.

I climbed up to the path and edged along it, meaning to look over above the tiger and make sure he was dead. I got to the place and raised my head slowly, the rifle pushed forward and every nerve quivering with tense alertness. Something tickled my back. A hot breath blew on the hairs at. the nape of my neck. I whipped round in a convulsion and all but shot Hotu.

His hand trembled on my back; his long mustaches quivered on my neck; his breath blew gustily down the collar of my shirt. He was carrying a twelve-gauge shotgun loaded with Number 8 shot, which is very useful for snipe. He asked me eagerly where the leopard was. I told him to take his mustache away, brought him up to date with the facts, and again nerved myself to look over the edge of the trail. The tiger lay stretched out twelve feet below, dead. My last shot had gone in just above the left eye and out behind the right ear, killing him instantly.

I left Udiram to guard the body, particularly to see that the whiskers and claws were not taken for use as aphrodisiacs, and went off with Poppa to the hospital. The doctor was in the middle of the long and delicate operation. We waited for two hours while he put forty stitches into Bahrain’s head.

My excitement slackened and at last failed altogether. Who had stricken Bahrain so that he lay near death — the tiger, or I? Should I not have allowed the beaters to take arms with them? As soon as I thought it I knew it was impossible. There could he only one rifle in such a hunt as ours. Had I made him come against his will? No, he had volunteered. He had not listened to Udiram’s warning, so it was his fault. But neither had I, and my head was in one piece.

The doctor came out, his face drawn with the long effort. He said there was not much hope, and nothing else that anyone could do. Hotu came, looked at me, and said curtly, “It’s no one’s fault, sahib. Come away.”

Bakloh had gone crazy while we waited in the ether stillness of the hospital. Men ran about, laughed, danced in the road, and slapped me on the back. Women kissed my knees; children brought flowers. Two hundred soldiers slung the tiger on poles and brought it up to the mess, singing as they came. Machhindra, with a touch of grim humor, put it in the guest room and surrounded it with a, circle of kerosene to keep off the ants. By midnight Poppa and I were again mad drunk with excitement. We sat in my room and drank and played my seven variations of “Tiger Bag” five times each on the portable phonograph. Gurkhas brought, rum and growled hilariously in time with the rhythmic roars coming out of the phonograph.

Bahrain had a good night and seemed to he recovering, but in the morning he died suddenly. Hotu said he was a good man, and a squad took him to the burning ghat.

The tiger was a young male, nine feet four inches between pegs, in perfect condition, with an empty stomach. No one knew what he had been doing in Bakloh, where no tigers had ever been heard of before, or where he was going. He became the Bakloh Tiger, and for the rest, of my service, though I achieved rank and decoration, to the Gurkhas I was the Sahib Who Shot the Bakloh Tiger.