Part 9 (2/2)

India in the hot weather--A land of torment--The drought--Forest fires--The cholera huts burned--Fighting the flames--Death of a sepoy--The bond between British officers and their men--The sepoy's funeral--A fortnight's vigil--Saving the Station--The hills ablaze--A sublime spectacle--The devastated forest--Fallen leaves on fire--Our elephants'

peril--Saving the zareba--A beat for game in the jungle--Trying to catch a wild elephant--A moonlight ramble--We meet a bear--The burst of the Monsoons--A dull existence--Three hundred inches of rain--The monotony of thunderstorms--A changed world--Leeches--Monster hailstones--Surveyors caught in a storm--A break in the Rains--The revived jungle--Useless lightning-conductors--The Monsoon again--The loneliness of Buxa.

Through the long months of the Indian summer the cool Hills look down in pity on the Plains steeped in the brooding heat, where the sun is an offence and a torture, where the hot wind, like a blast of fiery air from an opened furnace door, mocks with the thought of pleasant breezes in a temperate land, where night brings only the breathless hours of darkness when the parched earth gives out the heat it has stored by day, and only dawn affords a momentary relief.

From early March to the end of June India is indeed turned into a place of torment. In the crowded quarters of the cities millions of natives swelter and endure with the dumb resignation of animals. Shut up in darkened houses from morning to evening thousands of Englishwomen and children suffer through the weary months. The fortunate ones fly to the Hills; but Hill Stations are expensive and not for the poorer cla.s.ses of Europeans. And the white men of all ranks and professions must carry on their work. His drill done, the British soldier lies on his cot under the punkah of the barrack-room, thinks with regret of the cool land he has left and forgets the misery of the unemployed in the rain and frosts of England. And his officer, whose work takes him more frequently out into the sun than the soldier, envies the lucky mortals who can obtain leave and fly to Europe or the Hills. Through the hot night he tosses on his bed placed under a punkah out in his garden and dozes fitfully until the punkah coolie drops asleep and the faint wind of the overhead fan is stilled. Then, bathed in perspiration, devoured by mosquitoes, he wakes; and who can blame him if his language to the neglectful coolie, who can sleep all day while his master works, is as hot as the climate?

From our little post on the face of the Himalayas we gazed to the south over the lowlands, seen dimly through the heat haze, and pitied the suffering millions in the India that stretched away from the foot of our hills to the far-distant sea. Buxa is usually cool. The Monsoons which sweep up from the equator and bring the welcome Rains towards the end of June are here forestalled by other currents that deluge mountain and forest with tropical showers as early as February. But for our sins in our first year they failed us. And the heat crept up from its kingdom in the Plains below and laughed at our boasts of the coolness of our Hill Station. In March the only comfortable man in the detachment was a prisoner whom I had sentenced for desertion to two months' confinement in the one cell of the fort. For while we sweated on the hot parade ground below, he gazed at us through the barred window of his cool, stone-paved apartment beside the guard-room; and since I could find no hard labour for his idle hands, he must have laughed as he watched us, officers and men, toiling bare armed in the hot sun, digging earthworks and erecting stockades on the knolls around. It seemed hard to believe that only a few weeks before cheerful wood fires had burned in the grates of our bungalows and after dinner we had pulled our chairs in front of the comforting blaze and defied the cold with jorums of hot punch.

But soon we had more than enough of other fires. The vast forests stretching through a.s.sam, Bhutan, the Terai and Nepal, were dry as tinder owing to the unusual drought. From our eyrie in the hills we looked down at night on the glow in the sky, east, south and west, that told of jungles blazing around us. By day columns of smoke rose up in the distance and spread until a black pall covered the landscape. The hot wind brought the acrid smell of ashes and burning wood to us; and soon the air was full of s.m.u.ts. From a.s.sam and Bhutan came the tale of leagues of forest devoured by the flames. The dwellers in the pleasant Hill Station of Darjeeling, seven thousand feet above the sea, complained of the pall of smoke that veiled the mountains around them.

Day after day I gazed apprehensively on our happy hunting-grounds in the forest below and feared to see them invaded by the conquering fires.

I pictured with dismay the game destroyed by the rus.h.i.+ng flames or driven far from us. And at last doubt became cruel certainty. Our forests blazed. The legions of the victorious fire king swept through the jungles we loved and denied them to us.

But at first we did not realise that danger threatened us, that our small Station was itself imperilled. On a wooded spur below the fort stood two long bamboo-walled buildings, intended as a segregation hospital for cases of infectious disease. One afternoon news was brought me that the forest fires had crept up to the base of the hill on which they stood. I ran down to the fort and ordered out the whole detachment.

The men in whatever garb they were wearing at the moment turned out; and we raced through the back gate and down a zigzag path cut on the face of the precipice on the south side of the fort. Then we struggled up the steep hill to the threatened buildings. Below us the forest blazed. The flames were sweeping up the slopes towards us. The sight was a fine one; but we had little leisure or inclination to admire it. Breaking branches from the trees we fell upon the advancing enemy and endeavoured to beat it back. The wind was against us. Sparks and burning embers flew past and set alight to the hill-top behind us. It was curious to see how the flames ran up the trees and, leaving the trunks unscathed, seized on the ma.s.ses of orchids on the boughs. Their leaves and stems blazed fiercely as if filled with oil. Scorched by the heat, grimed with the flying ashes and s.m.u.ts, officers and men fought shoulder to shoulder against the encroaching flames. In a long line we descended to meet them and beat down the burning undergrowth. Suddenly a sharp gust of wind carried a burst of fire against us. Smothered by the smoke, our clothes alight from the red cinders, we were forced back. The flames lit up a patch of tall gra.s.s, dry as tinder, which went up in a sheet of fire. We turned and ran up to the summit. But one unfortunate sepoy stumbled and fell; and the wave of flame swept over him. It pa.s.sed him by and then died as suddenly as it had risen. He stood up and staggered towards the hill-top. The moment he was seen a dozen men rushed down over the smouldering ground to help him. They carried him up to the crest and, as he was badly burnt, took him to the hospital as soon as a litter could be brought for him.

The flames began to circle round the base of the hill and threatened to cut us off; so I was forced to abandon the position and order a retreat.

Hardly had we reached the zigzag path to the fort when the huts went up in pillars of flame.

In the evening I visited my unfortunate sepoy. Though in pain, he was conscious and able to speak to me; and I thought he would recover. But during the night he collapsed suddenly and died. This was the first death we had had in the detachment; and it cast a gloom over us all. The sepoys regretted a comrade; while the loss of one of his men always affects an officer. And in our isolated Station the death of one of our small number was acutely felt.

There exists more sympathy between the British officers of an Indian regiment and the sepoys than between the latter and the native officers.

Where the men imagine, not always without reason, that these last are swayed by considerations of different race or caste, of favouritism towards some and a dislike to others, of village and family feuds in their homes--for the Indian officers are generally promoted from the ranks--they know that the British officer is unaffected by such influences. Consequently, the men have far more confidence in his justice. When a sepoy is to be arraigned before a court martial for an offence, he is allowed to choose whether he will be tried by British or by Indian officers. In all my service I have known only one case in which the man elected for the latter. And when he came before the court and found it composed of native officers, he objected strongly and declared that he wished to be tried by the Sahibs. When it was pointed out to him that he had been given his choice of judges, he protested that he had not understood, and that he had no wish to be tried by men of his own nationality.

There is perhaps even a greater bond of union between the sepoys and the white officers of a native regiment than between the soldiers and the commissioned ranks in a British corps. In the first place the Indian Army is a long-service one; and so officers and men remain longer together. Many of my sepoys have watched me advance from subaltern to captain, from captain to major; and youngsters I knew as recruits are now native officers under me. Then the Indian soldier leans more on his British officer. He comes to him with all his troubles about lawsuits over land and his fields--for every man is a land-holder--and confidently expects that his Sahib will fight for justice for him. Some continental armies would be horrified to see the sepoy off parade talking with friendly freedom to his British officer or playing hockey with him on terms of perfect equality.

The flag of the fort was half-mast high, as the funeral-party marched out to pay the last honours to their dead comrade. As the deceased sepoy was a Rajput his body was carried down to Santrabari to be there placed on a pile of wood and burned with all the ceremonies of his religion; for, while Mohammedans are buried, Hindus are cremated.

But we had little leisure to brood over the dead man's fate. The position of the fort and of the Station of Buxa was very precarious, now that the fires had reached the hills. The former I safeguarded by burning the gra.s.s on the isolated mound on which it stood. But our bungalows, hemmed in by the jungle which grew to within a few yards of them, were in constant danger. The diary of parades which I was obliged to furnish every week to the brigade office in s.h.i.+llong for the information of the General bore for a fortnight the words ”fighting fires,” instead of the usual entries of ”company drill,” ”musketry,”

”field training,” and the like. Day and night whenever the bugles rang out the alarm, we had to turn out to fight the intruding flames. Once we had to battle the whole day to save the forest officer's bungalow from being burned. I well remember how, while we officers and men toiled in the heat and smoke to beat back the fire, the Bengali clerks, whose houses were also in danger, stood at a safe distance, weeping and wringing their hands, but never attempting to help.

At night the burning forests below were a gorgeous though pitiable sight. And when the fires, repelled from Buxa, swept past us upwards, and the semicircle of hills around blazed to the summit of Sinchula one night, the spectacle was sublime. In one spot, high overhead, the trees had been felled and left lying on the ground after a half-hearted attempt at cultivation by the Bhuttias. Here the long sparkling lines of fire from the burning undergrowth were changed to pillars of flame, as the huge, dry tree-trunks blazed fiercely up in the darkness.

But life was not pleasant in Buxa during those days. The atmosphere was filled with smoke which veiled the sun. The heat was intense. So when the danger had pa.s.sed our Station, I took the detachment down into the burned-out forest for a week's training in camp. The jungle was a sad sight for a sportsman's eyes. The big trees stood scorched, their trunks blackened and the branches charred where the ma.s.ses of orchids that clothed them had burned. Some of the hollow stems were still on fire inside and sent out smoke among the tree-tops as from a steamer's funnel. Dead trees, long supported by creepers, now lay smouldering on the ground. The undergrowth which sheltered the game was gone. It was strange to be able to see for a hundred yards or more between the tree-trunks, where formerly ten paces was the limit of vision. The earth was covered ankle-deep in ashes, which rose up in suffocating clouds at every breath of hot wind. And above them was strewn a thick layer of dead leaves; for the trees shed them in the hot weather. And these I soon found const.i.tuted a fresh danger.

To my surprise I discovered that the little corner in the foot-hills around Forest Lodge had been spared by the fire and my bamboo hut, twenty-two feet up in the air among the branches, was intact. So I halted the men and established the bivouac here. We had marched on ahead of the baggage, which was loaded on the elephants. While these were following us from Santrabari the ma.s.ses of dry leaves underfoot caught fire from some smouldering log; and a long line of flames swept down on the terrified animals. Fortunately they were near a broad, dry river-bed; and the scared _mahouts_ drove them into it for safety. A mile away the crackling of the burning leaves aroused us to our new danger. Breaking off branches, officers and men set to work to sweep the leaves around the bivouac into heaps and leave the ground bare for a couple of hundred yards on every side. By the morrow the fire had died out, all the leaves having been consumed.

As we manoeuvred through the forest every day I was astonished to still find traces of animal life in it. The destruction of the undergrowth and creepers having left the jungle more open, I determined to try a beat through it. On our last afternoon I sent all the men of the detachment a mile away across a broad river-bed with orders to drive towards it in a long line through the trees. On the near bank, which rose sheer to a height of thirty-three feet above the sand, the British and native officers, armed with rifles, took up their position. Lying flat on the ground at the edge of the bank, we listened to the shouts of the men coming nearer and nearer. The branches of the trees across the _nullah_ became violently agitated; and a large troop of monkeys swung through them, leaped to the ground, and rushed over the sand on all fours. Then a barking deer broke out about a hundred and fifty yards away, and I fired at it. I was using a 470 cordite rifle; yet, struck just behind the shoulder by a soft-nosed bullet, the little animal ran a furlong before dropping dead. Nothing else followed it. Soon the men came into view between the trees and halted below us. Draj Khan, who was managing the line of beaters, was berating his comrades vehemently. He told me that they had come across a large tusker elephant; and instead of shepherding it gently towards the guns, a number of foolish young sepoys, armed only with sticks, had rushed boldly at it with wild yells.

Luckily it did not attack them, but escaped out to one side of the beat.

At the other end of the line the men had come on a small herd of _sambhur_, including two stags, and in their excitement had valiantly charged them in the absurd hope of taking them alive. A _sambhur_ stag with his sharp horns and the driving-power of his great weight behind them is no mean foe; and it was just as well that the deer had fled from the men and broke out through a gap in the line.

We tried a beat lower down the river, which resulted in the men putting up a panther. But again some foolishly daring spirits rushed at it to attack it with their sticks; and the animal got away at one end of the beat. Draj Khan caught a young _sambhur_ fawn, a week old, and brought it to me in his arms. This and the _khakur_ were our whole bag.

I was surprised to find that the burnt forest still sheltered so much life. As the fires do not advance very rapidly the wild beasts can generally keep ahead of them and escape. But I cannot understand how the harmless animals support existence when all their fodder is destroyed.

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