The Unveiling of Lhasa Part 6

Perhaps no British victory has been greeted with less enthusiasm than the action at the Hot Springs. Certainly the officers, who did their duty so thoroughly, had no heart in the business at all. After the first futile rush the Tibetans made no further resistance. There was no more fighting, only the slaughter of helpless men.

It is easy to criticise after the event, but it seems to me that the only way to have avoided the lamentable affair at the Hot Springs would have been to have drawn up more troops round the redan, and, when the Tibetans were hemmed in with the cliff in their rear, to have given them at least twenty minutes to lay down their arms. In the interval the situation might have been made clear to everyone. If after the time-limit they still hesitated, two shots might have brought them to reason. Then, if they were mad enough to decide on resistance, their suicide would be on their own heads. But to send two dozen sepoys into that sullen mob to take away their arms was to invite disaster. Given the same circ.u.mstances, and any mob in the world of men, women, or children, civilized or savage, and there would be found at least one rash spirit to explode the mine and set a spark to a general conflagration.

It was thought at the time that the lesson would save much future bloodshed. But the Tibetan is so stubborn and convinced of his self-sufficiency that it took many lessons to teach him the disparity between his armed rabble and the resources of the British Raj. In the light of after-events it is clear that we could have made no progress without inflicting terrible punishment. The slaughter at Guru only forestalled the inevitable. We were drawn into the vortex of war by the Tibetans' own folly. There was no hope of their regarding the British as a formidable Power, and a force to be reckoned with, until we had killed several thousand of their men.

After the action the Tibetan wounded were brought into Tuna, and an abandoned dwelling-house was fitted up as a hospital. An empty cowshed outside served as an operating-theatre. The patients showed extraordinary hardihood and stoicism. After the Dzama Tang engagement many of the wounded came in riding on yaks from a distance of fifty or sixty miles. They were consistently cheerful, and always ready to appreciate a joke. One man, who lost both legs, said: 'In my next battle I must be a hero, as I cannot run away.' Some of the wounded were terribly mutilated by sh.e.l.l. Two men who were shot through the brain, and two who were shot through the lungs, survived. For two days Lieutenant Davys, Indian Medical Service, was operating nearly all day.

I think the Tibetans were really impressed with our humanity, and looked upon Davys as some incarnation of a medicine Buddha. They never hesitated to undergo operations, did not flinch at pain, and took chloroform without fear. Their recuperative power was marvellous. Of the 168 who were received in hospital, only 20 died; 148 were sent to their homes on hired yaks cured. Everyone who visited the hospital at Tuna left it with an increased respect for the Tibetans.

Three months after the action I found the Tibetans still lying where they fell. One shot through the shoulder in retreat had spun as he fell facing our rifles. Another tore at the gra.s.s with futile fingers through which a delicate pink primula was now blossoming. Shrunk arms and shanks looked hideously dwarfish. By the stream the bodies lay in heaps with parched skin, like mummies, rusty brown. A knot of coa.r.s.e black hair, detached from a skull, was circling round in an eddy of wind. Everything had been stripped from the corpses save here and there a wisp of cloth, looking more grim than the nakedness it covered, or round the neck some inexpensive charm, which no one had thought worth taking for its occult powers. Nature, more kindly, had strewn round them beautiful spring flowers--primulas, b.u.t.tercups, potentils. The stream 'bubbled oilily,'

and in the ruined house bees were swarming.

Ten miles beyond the Springs an officer was watering his horse in the Bamtso Lake. The beast swung round trembling, with eyes astare. Among the weeds lay the last victim.

CHAPTER VII

A HUMAN MISCELLANY

The Tibetans stood on the roofs of their houses like a row of cormorants, and watched the doolie pa.s.s underneath. At a little distance it was hard to distinguish the children, so motionless were they, from the squat praying-flags wrapped in black skin and projecting from the parapets of the roof. The very babes were impa.s.sive and inscrutable.

Beside them perched ravens of an ebony blackness, sleek and well groomed, and so consequential that they seemed the most human element of the group.

My Tibetan bearers stopped to converse with a woman on the roof who wore a huge red hoop in her hair, which was matted and touzled like a negress's. A child behind was searching it, with apparent success. The woman asked a question, and the bearers jerked out a few guttural monosyllables, which she received with indifference. She was not visibly elated when she heard that the doolie contained the first victim of the Tibetan arms. I should like to have heard her views on the political situation and the question of a settlement. Some of her relatives, perhaps, were killed in the melee at the Hot Springs. Others who had been taken prisoners might be enlisted in the new doolie corps, and receiving an unexpected wage; others, perhaps, were wounded and being treated in our hospitals with all the skill and resources of modern science; or they were bringing in food-stuffs for our troops, or setting b.o.o.by-traps for them, and lying in wait behind sangars to snipe them in the Red Idol Gorge.

The bearers started again; the hot sun and the continued exertion made them stink intolerably. Every now and then they put down the doolie, and began discussing their loot--ear-rings and charms, rough turquoises and ruby-coloured stones, torn from the bodies of the dead and wounded. For the moment I was tired of Tibet.

I remembered another exodus when I was disgusted with the country. I had been allured across the Himalayas by the dazzling purity of the snows. I had escaped the Avernus of the plains, and I might have been content, but there was the seduction of the snows. I had gained an upper story, but I must climb on to the roof. Every morning the Sun-G.o.d threw open the magnificent portals of his domain, dazzling rifts and spires, black cliffs glacier-bitten, the flawless vaulted roof of Kinchenjunga--

'Myriads of topaz lights and jacinth work Of subtlest jewellery.'

One morning the roof of the Sun-G.o.d's palace was clear and cloudless, but about its base hung little clouds of snow-dust, as though the Olympians had been holding tourney, and the dust had risen in the tracks of their chariots. All this was seen over galvanized iron roofs. The Sun-G.o.d had thrown open his palace, and we were playing pitch and toss on the steps. While I was so engrossed I looked up. Columns of white cloud were rising to obscure the entrance. Then a sudden shaft of sunlight broke the fumes. There was a vivid flash, a dazzle of jewel-work, and the portals closed. I was covered with bashfulness and shame. It was a direct invitation. I made some excuse to my companion, said I had an engagement, went straight to my rooms, and packed.

But while the aroma of my carriers insulted the pure air, and their chatter over their tawdry spoil profaned the silent precincts of Chumulari, their mountain G.o.ddess, I thought more of the disenchantment of that earlier visit. I remembered sitting on a hillside near a lamasery, which was surrounded by a small village of Lamas' houses.

Outside the temple a priest was operating on a yak for vaccine. He had bored a large hole in the shoulder, into which he alternately buried his forearm and squirted hot water copiously. A hideous yellow trickle beneath indicated that the poor beast was entirely perforated. A crowd of admiring little boys and girls looked on with relish. The smell of the poor yak was distressing, but the smell of the Lama was worse. I turned away in disgust--turned my back contentedly and without regret on the mysterious land and the road to the Forbidden City. At that moment, if the Dalai Lama himself had sent me a chaise with a dozen outriders and implored me to come, I would not have visited him, not for a thousand yaks. The scales of vagabondage fell from my eyes; the spirit of unrest died within me. I had a longing for fragrant soap, snowy white linen, fresh-complexioned ladies and clean-shaven, well-groomed men.

And here again I was returning very slowly to civilization; but I was coming back with half an army corps to shake the Dalai Lama on his throne--or if there were no throne or Dalai Lama, to do what? I wondered if the gentlemen sitting snugly in Downing Street had any idea.

At Phari I was snow-bound for a week, and there were no doolie-bearers.

The Darjeeling dandy-wallahs were no doubt at the front, where they were most wanted, as the trained army doolie corps are plainsmen, who can barely breathe, much less work, at these high elevations. At last we secured some Bhutias who were returning to the front.

The Bhutia is a type I have long known, though not in the capacity of bearer. These men regarded the doolie with the invalid inside as a piece of baggage that had to be conveyed from one camp to another, no matter how. Of the art of their craft they knew nothing, but they battled with the elements so stoutly that one forgave them their awkwardness. They carried me along mountain-paths so slippery that a mule could find no foothold, through snow so deep and clogging that with all their toil they could make barely half a mile an hour; and they took shelter once from a hailstorm in which exposure without thick head-covering might have been fatal. Often they dropped the doolie, sometimes on the edge of a precipice, in places where one perspired with fright; they collided quite unnecessarily with stones and rocks; but they got through, and that was the main point. Men who have carried a doolie over a difficult mountain-pa.s.s (14,350 feet), slipping and stumbling through snow and ice in the face of a hurricane of wind, deserve well of the great Raj which they serve.

On the road into Darjeeling, owing to the absence of trained doolie-bearers, I met a human miscellany that I am not likely to forget.

Eight miles beyond the Jelap lies the fort of Gnatong, whence there is a continual descent to the plains of India. The neighbouring hills and valleys had been searched for men; high wages were offered, and at last from some remote village in Sikkim came a dozen weedy Lepchas, simian in appearance, and of uncouth speech, who understood no civilized tongue.

They had never seen a doolie, but in default of better they were employed. It was n.o.body's fault; bearers must be had, and the profession was unpopular. I was their 'first job.' I settled myself comfortably, all unconscious of my impending fate. They started off with a wild whoop, threw the doolie up in the air, caught it on their shoulders, and played cup and ball with the contents until they were tired. I swore at them in Spanish, English, and Hindustani, but it was small relief, as they didn't take the slightest notice, and I had neither hands to beat them nor feet to kick them over the _khud_. My orderly followed and told them in a mild North-Country accent that they would be punished if they did it again; there is some absurd army regulation about British soldiers striking followers. For all they knew, he was addressing the stars. They dropped the thing a dozen times in ten miles, and thought it the hugest joke in the world. I shall shy at a hospital doolie for the rest of my natural life.

There is a certain Mongol smell which is the most unpleasant human odour I know. It is common to Lepchas, Bhutanese, and Tibetans, but it is found in its purest essence in these low-country, cross-bred Lepchas, who were my close companions for two days. When we reached the heat of the valley, they jumped into the stream and bathed, but they emerged more unsavoury than ever. It was a relief to pa.s.s a dead mule. At the next village they got drunk, after which they developed an amazing surefootedness, and carried me in without mishap.

After two days with my Lepchas we reached Rungli (2,000 feet), whence the road to the plains is almost level. Here a friend introduced me to a Jemadar in a Gurkha regiment.

'He writes all about our soldiers and the fighting in Tibet,' he said.

'It all goes home to England on the telegraph-wire, and people at home are reading what he says an hour or two after he has given _khubber_ to the office here.'

'Oh yes,' said the Jemadar in Hindustani, 'and if things are well the people in England will be very glad; and if we are ill and die, and there is too much cold, they will be very sorry.'

The Jemadar smiled. He was most sincere and sympathetic. If an Englishman had said the same thing, he would have been thought half-witted, but Orientals have a way of talking plat.i.tudes as if they were epigrams.

The Jemadar's speech was so much to the point that it called up a little picture in my mind of the London Underground and a liveried official dealing out _Daily Mails_ to crowds of inquirers anxious for news of Tibet. Only the sun blazed overhead and the stream made music at our feet.

I left the little rest-hut in the morning, resigned to the inevitable jolting, and expecting another promiscuous collection of humanity to do duty as _kahars_. But, to my great joy, I found twelve Lucknow doolie-wallahs waiting by the veranda, lithe and erect, and part of a drilled corps. Drill discipline is good, but in the art of their trade these men needed no teaching. For centuries their ancestors had carried palanquins in the plains, bearing Rajas and ladies of high estate, perhaps even the Great Mogul himself. The running step to their strange rhythmic chants must be an instinct to them. That morning I knew my troubles were at an end. They started off with steps of velvet, improvising as they went a kind of plaintive song like an intoned litany.

The leading man chanted a dimeter line, generally with an iambus in the first foot; but when the road was difficult or the ascent toilsome, the metre became trochaic, in accordance with the best traditions of cla.s.sical poetry. The hind-men responded with a sing-song trochaic dimeter which sounded like a long-drawn-out monosyllable. They never initiated anything. It was not custom; it had never been done. The laws of Nature are not so immutable as the ritual of a Hindu guild.

We sped on smoothly for eight miles, and when I asked the _kahars_ if they were tired, they said they would not rest, as relays were waiting on the road. All the way they chanted their hymn of the obvious:--

'Mountains are steep; _Chorus_: Yes, they are.

The road is narrow; Yes, it is.

The sahib is wounded; That is so.

With many wounds; They are many.

The road goes down; Yes, it does.

Now we are hurrying; Yes, we are.'

Here they ran swiftly till the next rise in the hill.

Waiting in the shade for relays, I heard two Englishmen meet on the road. One had evidently been attached, and was going down to join his regiment; the other was coming up on special service. I caught fragments of our crisp expressive argot.

_Officer going down_ (_apparently disillusioned_): 'Oh, it's the same old bald-headed maidan we usually muddle into.'

_Officer coming up_: '... Up above Phari ideal country for native cavalry, isn't it?... A few men with lances prodding those fellows in the back would soon put the fear of G.o.d into them. Why don't they send up the --th Light Cavalry?'

_Officer going down_: 'They've Walers, and you can't feed 'em, and the --th are all Jats. They're no good; can't do without a devil of a lot of milk. They want bucketsful of it. Well, bye-bye; you'll soon get fed up with it.'

The doolie was. .h.i.tched up, and the _kahars_ resumed their chant:

'A sahib goes up; Yes, he does.

A sahib goes down; That is so.'

The heat and the monotonous cadence induced drowsiness, and one fell to thinking of this odd motley of men, all of one genus, descended from the anthropoid ape, and exhibiting various phases of evolution--the primitive Lepcha, advanced little further than his domestic dog; the Tibetan _kahar_ caught in the wheel of civilization, and forming part of the mechanism used to bring his own people into line; the Lucknow doolie-bearer and the Jemadar Sahib, products of a h.o.a.ry civilization that have escaped complexity and nerves; and lord of all these, by virtue of his race, the most evolved, the English subaltern. All these folk are brought together because the people on the other side of the hills will insist on being obsolete anachronisms, who have been asleep for hundreds of years while we have been developing the sense of our duty towards our neighbour. They must come into line; it is the will of the most evolved.

The next day I was carried for miles through a tropical forest. The damp earth sweated in the sun after last night's thunder-storm, and the vegetation seemed to grow visibly in the steaming moisture. Gorgeous b.u.t.terflies, the epicures of a season, came out to indulge a love of sunshine and suck nectar from all this profusion. Overhead, birds shrieked and whistled and beat metal, and did everything but sing. The cicadas raised a deafening din in praise of their Maker, seeming to think, in their natural egoism, that He had made the forest, oak, and gossamer for their sakes. We were not a thousand feet above the sea.

Thousands of feet above us, where we were camping a day or two ago, our troops were marching through snow.

The next morning we crossed the Tista River, and the road led up through sal forests to a tea-garden at 3,500 feet. Here we entered the most perfect climate in the world, and I enjoyed genial hospitality and a foretaste of civilization: a bed, sheets, a warm bath, clean linen, fruit, sparkling soda, a roomy veranda with easy-chairs, and outside roses and trellis-work, and a garden bright with orchids and wild-turmeric and a profusion of semi-tropical and English flowers--all the things which the spoilt children of civilization take as a matter of course, because they have never slept under the stars, or known what it is to be hungry and cold, or exhausted by struggling against the forces of untamed Nature.