The Lost Legion
When the Indian Mutiny broke out, and a little time before the
siege of Delhi, a regiment of Native Irregular Horse was stationed
at Peshawur on the frontier of India. That regiment caught what
John Lawrence called at the time "the prevalent mania," and would
have thrown in its lot with the mutineers, had it been allowed to
do so. The chance never came, for, as the regiment swept off down
south, it was headed off by a remnant of an English corps into the
hills of Afghanistan, and there the newly conquered tribesmen
turned against it as wolves turn against buck. It was hunted for
the sake of its arms and accoutrements from hill to hill, from
ravine to ravine, up and down the dried beds of rivers and round
the shoulders of bluffs, till it disappeared as water sinks in the
sand
- this officerless rebel regiment. The only trace left of its
existence to-day is a nominal roll drawn up in neat round hand and
countersigned by an officer who called himself, "Adjutant, late
Irregular Cavalry." The paper is yellow with years and dirt, but
on the back of it you can still read a pencil-note by John
Lawrence, to this effect: "See that the two native officers who
remained loyal are not deprived of their estates. -J. L." Of six
hundred and fifty sabres only two stood strain, and John Lawrence
in the midst of all the agony of the first months of the Mutiny
found time to think about their merits.
That was more than thirty years ago, and the tribesmen across the
Afghan border who helped to annihilate the regiment are now old
men. Sometimes a graybeard speaks of his share in the massacre.
"They came," he will say, "across the border, very proud, calling
upon us to rise and kill the English, and go down to the sack of
Delhi. But we who had just been conquered by the same English knew
that they were over-bold, and that the Government could account
easily for those down-country dogs. This Hindustani regiment,
therefore, we treated with fair words, and kept standing in one
place till the redcoats came after them very hot and angry. Then
this regiment ran forward a little more into our hills to avoid
the wrath of the English, and we lay upon their flanks watching
from the sides of the hills till we were well assured that their
path was lost behind them. Then we came down, for we desired their
clothes, and their bridles, and their rifles, and their boots -
more especially their boots. That was a great killing - done
slowly." Here the old man will rub his nose, and shake his long
snaky
locks, and lick his bearded lips, and grin till the yellow tooth-
stumps show. "Yea, we killed them because we needed their gear,
and we knew that their lives had been forfeited to God on account
of their sin - the sin of treachery to the salt which they had
eaten. They rode up and down the valleys, stumbling and rocking in
their saddles, and howling for mercy. We drove them slowly like
cattle till they were all assembled in one place, the flat wide
valley of Sheor K“t. Many had died from want of water, but there
still were many left, and they could not make any stand. We went
among them pulling them down with our hands two at a time, and our
boys killed them who were new to the sword. My share of the
plunder was such and such - so many guns, and so many saddles. The
guns were good in those days. Now we steal the Government rifles,
and despise smooth barrels. Yes, beyond doubt we wiped that
regiment from off the face of the earth, and even the memory of
the deed is now dying. But men say -"
At this point the tale would stop abruptly, and it was impossible
to find out what men said across the border. The Afghans were
always a secretive race, and vastly preferred doing something
wicked to saying anything at all. They would be quiet and well-
behaved for months, till one night, without word or warning, they
would rush a police-post, cut the throats of a constable or two,
dash through a village, carry away three or four women, and
withdraw, in the red glare of burning thatch, driving the cattle
and goats before them to their own desolate hills. The Indian
Government would become almost tearful on these occasions. First
it would say, "Please be good and we'll forgive you." The tribe
concerned in the latest depredation would collectively put its
thumb to its nose and answer rudely. Then the Government would
say: "Hadn't you better pay up a little money for those few
corpses you left behind you the other night?" Here the tribe would
temporise, and lie and bully, and some of the younger men, merely
to show contempt of authority, would raid another police-post and
fire into some frontier mud-fort, and, if lucky, kill a real
English officer. Then the Government would say: -" Observe; if you
really persist in this line of conduct, you will be hurt." If the
tribe knew exactly what was going on in India, it would apologise
or be rude, according as it learned whether the Government was
busy with other things or able to devote its full attention to
their performances. Some of the tribes knew to one corpse how far
to go. Others became excited, lost their heads, and told the
Government to come on. With sorrow and tears, and one eye on the
British taxpayer at home, who insisted on regarding these
exercises as brutal wars of annexation, the Government would
prepare an expensive little field-brigade and some guns, and send
all up into the hills to chase the wicked tribe out of the
valleys, where the corn grew, into the hill-tops, where there was
nothing to eat. The tribe would turn out in full strength and
enjoy the campaign, for they knew that their women would never be
touched, that their wounded would be nursed, not mutilated, and
that as soon as each man's bag of corn was spent they could
surrender and palaver with the English General as though they had
been a real enemy. Afterwards, years afterwards, they would pay
the blood-money, driblet by driblet, to the Government, and tell
their children how they had slain the redcoats by thousands. The
only drawback to this kind of picnic-war was the weakness of the
redcoats for solemnly blowing up with powder their fortified
towers and keeps. This the tribes always considered mean.
Chief among the leaders of the smaller tribes - the little clans
who knew to a penny the expense of moving white troops against
them - was a priest-bandit-chief whom we will call the Gulla Kutta
Mullah. His enthusiasm for Border murder as an art was almost
dignified. He would cut down a mail-runner from pure wantonness,
or bombard a mud-fort with rifle-fire when he knew that our men
needed to sleep. In his leisure moments he would go on circuit
among his neighbours, and try to incite other tribes to devilry.
Also, he kept a kind of hotel for fellow-outlaws in his own
village, which lay in a valley called Bersund. Any respectable
murderer on that section of the frontier was sure to lie up at
Bersund, for it was reckoned an exceedingly safe place. The sole
entry to it ran through a narrow gorge which could be converted
into a death-trap in five minutes. It was surrounded by high
hills, reckoned inaccessible to all save born mountaineers, and
here the Gulla Kutta Mullah lived in great state, the head of a
colony of mud and stone huts, and in each mud hut hung some
portion of a red uniform and the plunder of dead men. The
Government particularly wished for his capture, and once invited
him formally to come out and be hanged on account of the many
murders in which he had taken a direct part. He replied: -
"I am only twenty miles, as the crow flies, from your border. Come
and fetch me."
"Some day we will come," said the Government, "and hanged you will
be."
The Gulla Kutta Mullah let the matter slip from his mind. He knew
that the patience of the Government was as long as a summer day;
but he did not realise that its arm was as long as a winter night.
Months afterwards, when there was peace on the border, and all
India was quiet, the Indian Government turned in its sleep and
remembered the Gulla Kutta Mullah at Bersund, with his thirteen
outlaws. The movement against him of one single regiment - which
the telegrams would have translated as war - would have been
highly impolitic. This was a time for silence and speed, and,
above all, absence of bloodshed.
You must know that all along the north-west frontier of India
there is spread a force of some thirty thousand foot and horse,
whose duty it is to quietly and unostentatiously shepherd the
tribes in front of them. They move up and down, and down and up,
from one desolate little post to another; they are ready to take
the field at ten minutes' notice; they are always half in and half
out of a difficulty somewhere along the monotonous line; their
lives are as hard as their own muscles, and the papers never say
anything about them. It was from this force that the Government
picked its men.
One night, at a station where the mounted Night Patrol fire as
they challenge, and the wheat rolls in great blue-green waves
under our cold northern moon, the officers were playing billiards
in the mud-walled club-house, when orders came to them that they
were to go on parade at once for a night-drill. They grumbled, and
went to turn out their men - a hundred English troops, let us say,
two hundred Goorkhas, and about a hundred cavalry of the finest
native cavalry in the world.
When they were on the parade-ground, it was explained to them in
whispers that they must set off at once across the hills to
Bersund. The English troops were to post themselves round the
hills at the side of the valley; the Goorkhas would command the
gorge and the death-trap, and the cavalry would fetch a long march
round and get to the back of the circle of hills, whence, if there
were any difficulty, they could charge down on the Mullah's men.
But orders were very strict that there should be no fighting and
no noise. They were to return in the morning with every round of
ammunition intact, and the Mullah and the thirteen outlaws bound
in their midst. If they were successful, no one would know or care
anything about their work; but failure meant probably a small
border war, in which the Gulla Kutta Mullah would pose as a
popular leader against a big bullying power, instead of a common
Border murderer.
Then there was silence, broken only by the clicking of the
compass-needles and snapping of watch-cases, as the heads of
columns compared bearings and made appointments for the
rendezvous. Five minutes later the parade-ground was empty; the
green coats of the Goorkhas and the overcoats of the English
troops had faded into the darkness, and the cavalry were cantering
away in the face of a blinding drizzle.
What the Goorkhas and the English did will be seen later on. The
heavy work lay with the horses, for they had to go far and pick
their way clear of habitations. Many of the troopers were natives
of that part of the world, ready and anxious to fight against
their kin, and some of the officers had made private and
unofficial excursions into those hills before. They crossed the
border, found a dried river-bed, cantered up that, walked through
a stony gorge, risked crossing a low hill under cover of the
darkness, skirted another hill, leaving their hoof-marks deep in
some ploughed ground, felt their way along another water-course,
ran over the neck of a spur praying that no one would hear their
horses grunting, and so worked on in the rain and the darkness
till they had left Bersund and its crater of hills a little behind
them, and to the left, and it was time to swing round. The ascent
commanding the back of Bersund was steep, and they halted to draw
breath in a broad level valley below the height. That is to say,
the men reined up, but the horses, blown as they were, refused to
halt. There was unchristian language, the worse for being
delivered in a whisper, and you heard the saddles squeaking in the
darkness as the horses plunged.
The subaltern at the rear of one troop turned in his saddle and
said very softly: -
"Carter, what the blessed heavens are you doing at the rear? Bring
your men up, man."
There was no answer, till a trooper replied: -
"Carter Sahib is forward - not here. There is nothing behind us."
"There is," said the subaltern. "The squadron's walking on its own
tail."
Then the Major in command moved down to the rear, swearing softly
and asking for the blood of Lieutenant Halley - the subaltern who
had just spoken.
"Look after your rearguard," said the Major. "Some of your
infernal thieves have got lost. They're at the head of the
squadron, and you're a several kinds of idiot."
"Shall I tell off my men, sir?" said the subaltern sulkily, for he
was feeling wet and cold.
"Tell 'em off!" said the Major. "Whip 'em off, by Gad! You're
squandering them all over the place. There's a troop behind you
now!"
"So I was thinking," said the subaltern calmly. "I have all my men
here, sir. Better speak to Carter."
"Carter Sahib sends salaam and wants to know why the regiment is
stopping," said a trooper to Lieutenant Halley.
"Where under heaven is Carter," said the Major.
"Forward with his troop," was the answer.
"Are we walking in a ring, then, or are we the centre of a blessed
brigade?" said the Major.
By this time there was silence all along the column. The horses
were still; but, through the drive of the fine rain, men could
hear the feet of many horses moving over stony ground.
"We're being stalked," said Lieutenant Halley.
"They've no horses here. Besides they'd have fired before this,"
said the Major. "It's - it's villagers' ponies."
"Then our horses would have neighed and spoilt the attack long
ago. They must have been near us for half an hour," said the
subaltern.
"Queer that we can't smell the horses," said the Major, damping
his finger and rubbing it on his nose as he sniffed up wind.
"Well, it's a bad start," said the subaltern, shaking the wet from
his overcoat. "What shall we do, sir?"
"Get on," said the Major. "We shall catch it to-night."
The column moved forward very gingerly for a few paces. Then there
was an oath, a shower of blue sparks as shod hooves crashed on
small stones, and a man rolled over with a jangle of accoutrements
that would have waked the dead.
"Now we've gone and done it," said Lieutenant Halley. "All the
hillside awake and all the hillside to climb in the face of
musketry-fire! This comes of trying to do night-hawk work."
The trembling trooper picked himself up and tried to explain that
his horse had fallen over one of the little cairns that are built
of loose stones on the spot where a man has been murdered. There
was no need to give reasons. The Major's big Australian charger
blundered next, and the column came to a halt in what seemed to be
a very graveyard of little cairns, all about two feet high. The
manoeuvres of the squadron are not reported. Men said that it felt
like mounted quadrilles without training and without the music;
but at last the horses, breaking rank and choosing their own way,
walked clear of the cairns, till every man of the squadron
reformed and drew rein a few yards up the slope of the hill. Then,
according to Lieutenant Halley, there was another scene very like
the one which has been described. The Major and Carter insisted
that all the men had not joined rank, and that there were more of
them in the rear, clicking and blundering among the dead men's
cairns. Lieutenant Halley told off his own troopers again and
resigned himself to wait. Later on he said to me:
"I didn't much know and I didn't much care what was going on. The
row of that trooper falling ought to have scared half the country,
and I would take my oath that we were being stalked by a full
regiment in the rear, and they were making row enough to rouse all
Afghanistan. I sat tight, but nothing happened."
The mysterious part of the night's work was the silence on the
hillside. Everybody knew that the Gulla Kutta Mullah had his
outpost-huts on the reverse side of the hill, and everybody
expected, by the time that the Major had sworn himself into quiet,
that the watchmen there would open fire. When nothing happened,
they said that the gusts of the rain had deadened the sound of the
horses, and thanked Providence. At last the Major satisfied
himself (a) that he had left no one behind among the cairns, and
(b) that he was not being taken in the rear by a large and
powerful body of cavalry. The men's tempers were thoroughly
spoiled, the horses were lathered and unquiet, and one and all
prayed for the daylight.
They set themselves to climb up the hill, each man leading his
mount carefully. Before they had covered the lower slopes or the
breast-plates had begun to tighten, a thunderstorm came up behind,
rolling across the low hills and drowning any noise less than that
of cannon. The first flash of the lightning showed the bare ribs
of the ascent, thc hill-crest standing steely-blue against the
black sky, the little falling lines of the rain, and, a few yards
to their left flank, an Afghan watch-tower, two-storied, built of
stone, and entered by a ladder from the upper story. The ladder
was up, and a man with a rifle was leaning from the window. The
darkness and the thunder rolled down in an instant, and, when the
lull followed, a voice from the watch-tower cried, "Who goes
there?"
The cavalry were very quiet, but each man gripped his carbine and
stood beside his horse. Again the voice called, "Who goes there?"
and in a louder key, "0 brothers, give the alarm!" Now, every man
in the cavalry would have died in his long boots sooner than have
asked for quarter, but it is a fact that the answer to the second
call was a long wail of "Marf karo! Marf karo!" which means, "Have
mercy! Have mercy!" It came from the climbing regiment.
The cavalry stood dumbfoundered, till the big troopers had time to
whisper one to another:
"Mir Khan, was that thy voice? Abdullah, didst thou call?"
Lieutenant Halley stood beside his charger and waited. So long as
no firing was going on he was content. Another flash of lightning
showed the horses with heaving flanks and nodding heads; the men,
white eye-balled, glaring beside them, and the stone watch-tower
to the left. This time there was no head at the window, and the
rude iron-clamped shutter that could turn a rifle-bullet was
closed.
"Go on, men," said the Major. "Get up to the top at any rate!" The
squadron toiled forward, the horses wagging their tails and the
men pulling at the bridles, the stones rolling down the hillside
and the sparks flying. Lieutenant Halley declares that he never
heard a squadron make so much noise in his life. They scrambled
up, he said, as though each horse had eight legs and a spare horse
to follow him. Even then there was no sound from the watch-tower,
and the men stopped exhausted on the ridge that overlooked the pit
of darkness in which the village of Bersund lay. Girths were
loosed, curb-chains shifted, and saddles adjusted, and the men
dropped down among the stones. Whatever might happen now, they
held the upper ground of any attack.
The thunder ceased, and with it the rain, and the soft thick
darkness of a winter night before the dawn covered them all.
Except for the sound of falling water among the ravines below,
everything was still. They heard the shutter of the watch-tower
below them thrown back with a clang, and the voice of the watcher
calling, "Oh, Hafiz Ullah!"
The echoes took up the call, "La-la-la!" and an answer came from
the watch-tower hidden round the curve of the hill, "What is it,
Shahbaz Khan?"
Shahbaz Khan replied in the high-pitched voice of the mountaineer:
"Hast thou seen?"
The answer came back: "Yes. God deliver us from all evil spirits!
There was a pause, and then: "Hafiz Ullah, I am alone! Come to
me."
"Shahbaz Khan, I am alone also; but I dare not leave my post!"
"That is a lie; thou art afraid."
A longer pause followed, and then: "I am afraid. Be silent! They
are below us still. Pray to God and sleep."
The troopers listened and wondered, for they could not understand
what save earth and stone could lie below the watch-towers.
Shahbaz Khan began to call again: "They are below us. I can see
them! For the pity of God come over to me, Hafiz Ullah! My father
slew ten of them. Come over!"
Hafiz Ullah answered in a very loud voice, "Mine was guiltless.
Hear, ye Men of the Night, neither my father nor my blood had any
part in that sin. Bear thou thine own punishment, Shahbaz Khan."
"Oh, some one ought to stop those two chaps crowing away like
cocks there," said the Lieutenant, shivering under his rock.
He had hardly turned round to expose a new side of him to the rain
before a bearded, long-locked, evil-smelling Afghan rushed up the
hill, and tumbled into his arms. Halley sat upon him, and thrust
as much of a sword-hilt as could be spared down the man's gullet.
"If you cry out, I kill you," he said cheerfully.
The man was beyond any expression of terror. He lay and quaked,
gasping. When Halley took the sword-hilt from between his teeth,
he was still inarticulate, but clung to Halley's arm, feeling it
from elbow to wrist.
"The Rissala! The dead Rissala! " he gasped, "It is down there!"
"No; the Rissala, the very much alive Rissala. It is up here,"
said Halley, unshipping his watering-bridle and fastening the
man's hands. "Why were you in the towers so foolish as to let us
pass?"
"The valley is full of the dead," said the Afghan. "It is better
to fall into the hands of the English than the hands of the dead.
They march to and fro below there. I saw them in the lightning."
He recovered his composure after a little, and whispering, because
Halley's pistol was at his stomach, said: "What is this? There is
no war between us now, and the Mullah will kill me for not seeing
you pass!"
"Rest easy," said Halley; "we are coming to kill the Mullah, if
God please. His teeth have grown too long. No harm will come to
thee unless the daylight shows thee as a face which is desired by
the gallows for crime done. But what of the dead regiment?"
"I only kill within my own border," said the man, immensely
relieved. "The dead regiment is below. The men must have passed
through it on their journey - four hundred dead on horses,
stumbling among their own graves, among the little heaps - dead
men all, whom we slew."
"Whew!" said Halley. "That accounts for my cursing Carter and the
Major cursing me. Four hundred sabres, eh? No wonder we thought
there were a few extra men in the troop. Kurruk Shah," he
whispered to a grizzled native officer that lay within a few feet
of him, "hast thou heard anything of a dead Rissala in these
hills?
"Assuredly," said Kurruk Shah with a grim chuckle. "Otherwise, why
did I, who have served the Queen for seven-and-twenty years, and
killed many hill-dogs, shout aloud for quarter when the lightning
revealed us to the watch-towers? When I was a young man I saw the
killing in the valley of Sheor-K“t there at our feet, and I know
the tale that grew up therefrom. But how can the ghosts of
unbelievers prevail against us who are of the Faith? Strap that
dog's hands a little tighter, Sahib. An Afghan is like an eel."
"But a dead Rissala," said Halley, jerking his captive's wrist.
"That is foolish talk, Kurruk Shah. The dead are dead. Hold still,
Sag." The Afghan wriggled.
"The dead are dead, and for that reason they walk at night. What
need to talk? We be men; we have our eyes and ears. Thou canst
both see and hear them down the hillside," said Kurruk Shah
composedly.
Halley stared and listened long and intently. The valley was full
of stifled noises, as every valley must be at night; but whether
he saw or heard more than was natural Halley alone knows, and he
does not choose to speak on the subject.
At last, and just before the dawn, a green rocket shot up from the
far side of the valley of Bersund, at the head of the gorge, to
show that the Goorkhas were in position. A red light from the
infantry at left and right answered it, and the cavalry burnt a
white flare. Afghans in winter are late sleepers, and it was not
till full day that the Gulla Kutta Mullah's men began to straggle
from their huts, rubbing their eyes. They saw men in green, and
red, and brown uniforms, leaning on their arms, neatly arranged
all round the crater of the village of Bersund, in a cordon that
not even a wolf could have broken. They rubbed their eyes the more
when a pink-faced young man, who was not even in the Army, but
represented the Political Department, tripped down the hillside
with two orderlies, rapped at the door of the Gulla Kutta Mullah's
house, and told him quietly to step out and be tied up for safe
transport. That same young man passed on through the huts, tapping
here one cateran and there another lightly with his cane; and as
each was pointed out, so he was tied up, staring hopelessly at the
crowned heights around where the English soldiers looked down with
incurious eyes. Only the Mullah tried to carry it off with curses
and high words, till a soldier who was tying his hands said: -
"None o' your lip! Why didn't you come out when you was ordered,
instead o' keeping us awake all night? You're no better than my
own barrack-sweeper, you white-'eaded old polyanthus! Kim up!"
Half an hour later the troops had gone away with the Mullah and
his thirteen friends. The dazed villagers were looking ruefully at
a pile of broken muskets and snapped swords, and wondering how in
the world they had come so to miscalculate the forbearance of the
Indian Government.
It was a very neat little affair, neatly carried out, and the men
concerned were unofficially thanked for their services.
Yet it seems to me that much credit is also due to another
regiment whose name did not appear in brigade orders, and whose
very existence is in danger of being forgotten.
-THE END-
Rudyard Kipling's short story: The Lost Legion
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