The Sepoy

The Pathan's code is very simple and distinct in primal and essential things. The laws of hospitality, retaliation, and the sanctuary of his hearth to the guest or fugitive are seldom violated. But acting within the code the Pathan can indulge his bloodthirstiness, treachery, and vindictiveness to an extent unsanctioned by the tables of the law prescribed by other races and creeds. It is a savage code, and the only saving grace about the business is that the Pathan is true to it, such as it is, and expects to be dealt with by others as he deals by them. The main fact in life across the border is the badi, or blood-feud. Few families or tribes are without their vendettas. Everything that matters hinges on them, and if an old feud is settled by mediation through the Jirgah, there are seeds of a new one ready to spring up in every contact of life. The favour of women, insults, injuries, murder, debt, inheritance, boundaries, water-rights, – all these disputes are taken up by the kin of the men concerned, and it is a point of honour to assassinate, openly or by stealth, any one connected by blood with the other side, however innocent he may be of the original provocation. Truces are arranged at times by mutual convenience for ploughing, sowing, or harvest; but as a rule it is very difficult for a man involved in a badi to leave his watch-tower, and still more difficult for him to return to it. It will be understood that the Pathan is an artist in taking cover. He probably has a communication trench of his own from his stronghold to his field, and no one better understands the uses of dead ground.

What makes these blood-feuds so endless and uncompromising is that quarrels begun in passion are continued in cold blood for good form. The Malik Din and Kambur Khil have been at war for nearly a century and nobody remembers how it all began. It is a point of honour to retaliate, however inconvenient the state of siege may be. The most ordinary routine of life may become impossible. The young Pathan may be itching to stroll out and lie on a bank and bask or fall asleep in the sun. But this would be to deliver himself into the hands of his enemy. There is no dishonour in creeping up and stabbing a man in the back when he is sleeping; but there is very great dishonour in failing to take an advantage of an adversary or neglecting to prosecute a blood feud to its finish. Such softness is a kind of moral leprosy in the eyes of the Pathan.

With so much at stake the Pathan cannot afford to be long away from home. In peacetime he frequently puts in for short leave. "Sahib," Sher Ali explains, "it is the most pressing matter." And the Sahib gathers that evil is likely to befall either Sher Ali's family or his neighbour Akbar Khan's during the next two weeks, and is bound by the brotherhood of arms to provide, so far as he is able, that it is not Sher Ali's. So the Pathan slips away from his regiment, anticipating the advertised date of his leave by consent, for there are men in his company connected by blood ties with the other party-men perhaps who are so far committed that they would lie up for Sher Ali themselves on a dark night if they were away on leave in their own country at the same time. But the code does not permit the prosecution of a vendetta in the regiment. A Pathan may find himself stretched beside his heart's abhorrence in a night picquet, the two of them alone together, alert, with finger on the trigger. They may have spent interminable long hours stalking each other in their own hills, but here they are safe as in sanctuary.

The trans-frontier Pathan would not wittingly have enlisted in the Indian Army if he could have foreseen the prospect of a three years' campaign in a foreign land. The security of his wife, his children, his cattle, his land, depend on his occasional appearance in his village. The interests of the Indian sepoy are protected by the magistrate and the police, but across the border the property of the man who goes away and fights may become the property of the man who stays at home. The exile is putting all the trump cards into his enemy's hands. The score will be mounting up against him. His name will become less, if not his kin; his womenkind may be dishonoured. In the event of his return the other party will have put up such a tally that it will take him all his time to pay off old scores. After a year of "the insane war" in which he has no real stake, and from which he can see no probable retreat, he is likely to take thought and brood. Government cannot protect his land and family; continued exile may mean the abandonment of all he has. In the tribal feud the man away on long service is likely to go under; the man on the spot has things all his own way.

Now the Pathan is a casuist. He is more strict in the observance of the letter of his code than in the observance of the spirit. An oath on the Koran is generally binding where there is no opening for equivocation, but it is not always respected if it can be evaded by a quibble. A Pathan informer was tempted by a police officer to give the names of a gang of dacoits.

"Sahib," he said, "I've sworn not to betray any son of man."

"You need not betray them," the officer suggested. "Don't tell me, tell the wall."

The Pathan was sorely tempted. He thought over the ethics. Then he smiled, and, like Pyramus, he addressed the wall:

"Oh! whited wall," he began, "their names are Mirza Yahya, Abdulla Khan…"

The code was not violated, as with a robust conscience the Pathan gave away the name of every man in the gang.

A tribesman who boasts that he would not injure a hair of an unclean swine which took sanctuary in his house, will conduct the guest with whom he has broken bread just beyond the limits of his property and shoot him. In a land dispute a mullah ordained that the two rival claimants should walk the boundary of the property in question on oath, each carrying a Koran on his head. They walked over the same ground, and each bore witness that he trod his paternal acres, and they did so without shame, for each had concealed a bit of his own undoubted soil in his shoe. When a round or two of ammunition are missing, the subadar of the company will raise a little heap of dust on the parade ground and make each man as he passes by plunge his clenched fist in it, and swear that he has not got the ammunition. The rounds are generally found in the dustheap, and nobody is perjured.

An officer in a Pathan militia regiment found a stumpy little tree stuck in the sand near the gate of the camp where trees do not grow. He was puzzled, and asked one Indian officer after another to explain. They all grinned rather sheepishly. "It is this way, Sahib," one of them said at last. "We lose a number of small things in the camp. Now when an object is lost the theft is announced, and each man as he passes the tree says, 'Allah curse the Budmash who stole the boots,' or the dish, or the turban, or whatever it may be. And so it will happen sometimes that the article will be found hanging in the fork of the tree in the morning when darkness gives place to light."

The Pathan cannot bear up under the weight of such commination, it spoils his sleep at night. Not that he has a sensitive conscience: theft, murder, and adultery are not crimes to him in the abstract, but only so far as they violate hospitality or loyalty to a bond. He has no sentiment, or inkling of chivalry; but he must save his face, avoid shame, follow the code, and prefer death to ridicule or dishonour. One of the axioms of his code is that he must be true to his salt. The trans-frontier Pathan is not a subject of the King as is the British Indian sepoy, but he has taken an oath. An oath is in the ordinary way binding, but if it can be shown that he has sworn unwittingly and against his religion-every text in the Koran is capable of a double interpretation-why, then the obligation is annulled. "Your religion comes first" – the argument is put to him by the Hun and the Turk. "No oath sworn to infidels can compel you to break your faith with Allah." The Pathan is not normally a religious fanatic any more than the Punjabi Mussalman. Had he been so he would not have ranged himself with us against an Islamic enemy, as he has done in every frontier campaign for the last half-century. But in this war Islam offered him the one decent retreat from an intolerable position.

There were one or two cases of desertion among the Pathans in France and Mesopotamia. The Pathan did not expect absolution if he fell into our hands afterwards, or if he were caught trying to slip away. Forgiveness is not in his nature. But think of the temptation, the easiness of self-persuasion. Remember how subtly the maggot of sophistry works even in the head of the Christian divine. Then listen to the burning words of the Jehad: -

"Act not so that the history of your family may be stained with the ink of disgrace and the blood of your Muhammadan brethren be shed for the attainment of the objects of unbelievers. We write this to you in compliance with the orders of God Almighty, the kind and also stern Avenger."

A hundred texts might be quoted, and have been quoted, from the Koran to show that it is obligatory for the Moslem soldier to fight against his King's enemies, whether they be of his own faith or no. But how many, after taking thought and counsel of expediency, are quite sure that black is not white after all! The deserter may not escape to the Hun lines and the pretended converts of Islam, whom instinct, stirring beneath the Jehadist's logic, must teach him to despise. And he is for the wall if he is caught, shamefully led out and bandaged and shot in the eyes of his brethren who have been true to their oath. None of us would hesitate to slip the trigger against a traitor of his kidney. The man's very memory is abhorred. Yet in dealing out summary execution one should remember the strong bias that deflected his mind. Out of the mud and poisoned gas of Flanders. Out of Mesopotamia. Out of the blood and fruitless sacrifice, the doom of celibacy, the monotony which is only broken by the variety it offers of different shapes of disease and death. Back to his tower and maize field if his kin have held them, and his wife if she has waited for him, and all in the name of honour and religion.

It may seem a mistake in writing of a brave people to take note of backsliders; but the instances in which the Pathan has been seduced from loyalty have been so discussed that it is better for the collective honour of the race to examine the psychological side of it frankly. It would be a great injustice to the Pathan if it were thought that any failed us through fear.

In courage and coolness the Pathan is the unquestioned equal of any man. Mir Dast, of Coke's Rifles F.F., attached to Wilde's Rifles F.F. in France, the first Indian officer to win the V.C., was a type of the best class of Afridi. No one who knew him was surprised to hear how, at the second battle of Ypres, after all his officers had fallen, he selected and consolidated a line with his small handful of men; how, though wounded and gassed himself, he held the ground he had hastily scratched up, walking fearlessly up and down encouraging his men; how, satisfied at last that the line was secure, he continued to carry in one disabled man after another, British and Indian, back to safety under heavy fire. Mir Dast had told the Colonel of the 55th, when he left the battalion in Bannu to join the regiment he was attached to in France, that he would not come back without the Victoria Cross. "Now that Indians may compete for this greatest of all bahadris," he said, "I shall return with it or remain on the field." And he did not say this in a boastful manner, but quietly as a matter of course, as though there were no other alternative; just as a boxer might tell you by way of assurance, repeating an understood thing, that he was going to fight on until the other man was knocked out. I met Mir Dast afterwards in hospital, and was struck with the extraordinary dignity and quiet reserve of the man; an impression of gallantry was conveyed in his brow and eyes, like a stamp on metal.

It was in the Mohmand campaign that Mir Dast won the I.O.M., in those days the nearest Indian equivalent to the V.C. An officer friend of mine and his who spoke to him in his stretcher after the fight, told me that he found Mir Dast beaming. "I am very pleased, Sahib," he said. "I've had a good fight, and I've killed the man that wounded me." And he held up his bayonet and pointed to a foot-long stain of blood. He had been shot through the thigh at three yards, but had lunged forward and got his man. On the same day another Afridi did a very Pathan-like thing. I will tell the story here, as it is typical of the impetuous, reckless daring of the breed, that sudden lust for honour which sweeps the Pathan off his feet, and carries him sometimes to the achievement of the impossible-an impulse, brilliant while it lasts, but not so admirable as the more enduring flame that is always trimmed and burns steadily without flaring.

Nur Baz was a younger man than Mir Dast, and one of the same Afridi company. It entered his head, just as it entered the head of Mir Dast when he left Bannu for France, that he must achieve something really remarkable. The young man was of the volatile, boastful sort, very different from the hero of Ypres, and to his quick imagination the conception of his bahadri was the same thing as the accomplishment of it, or the difference, if there were any, was only one of tense. So he began to talk about what he was going to do until he wearied the young officer to whom he was orderly. "Bring me your bahadri first, Nur Baz," the subaltern said a little impatiently, "then I shall congratulate you, but don't bukh so much about it."

The pride went out of Nur Baz at this snub as the air out of a pricked bladder, and he was very shamefaced until his opportunity came. This was in the same attack in which Mir Dast fell. The regiment were burning a village, and the Afridi company had to clear the ridge behind which commanded it; they and another Pathan company were attacking up parallel spurs. Nur Baz, finding that his orderly work committed him to a secondary rôle in the operations, asked if he might join his section, which was to lead the attack. He obtained his officer's consent, and was soon scrambling up the hillside in the pursuit. When the leading section extended he found the advance too slow, so he squatted behind a boulder, waited until the wave had got on a few yards, then dived down to the bottom of the nullah, climbed up again under cover, and in a few minutes appeared on the edge of the spur some 250 yards in advance of the assault. A yell of rage went up from the Pathans behind when they found that Nur Baz had forestalled them and was going to be first in at the death. But Nur Baz was happy as he leapt from one great boulder to another, the ground spitting up under him, and stopped every moment to get in a shot at the men in the sangar in front. Just as he reached it a Martini bullet struck his rifle in the small of the butt and broke off the stock. He could not fire now, but he fixed his bayonet and charged the sangar with his broken weapon. There were three men in it when he clambered over the parapet. One was dead, another who had missed him with his muzzle-loader a second or two before was reloading, and the third was slipping away. Nur Baz bayoneted the man who was reloading just as he withdrew the rod with which he was ramming the charge home; then he picked up the dead man's rifle and shot the fugitive; thus he cleared his little bit of front alone.

His subaltern had watched this very spectacular bit of bahadri from the parallel spur; but he only discovered that the central figure of it was his orderly when Mir Dast in his stretcher remarked, "Nur Baz has done well, Sahib, hasn't he?" Afterwards Nur Baz appeared "with a jaw like a bulldog, grinning all over, and the three rifles slung to his shoulder," and received the congratulations of his Sahib.

"Sahib," he said, "will you honour me by taking one of these? Choose the one you like best."

The subaltern selected the muzzle-loader, but Nur Baz demurred.

"I must first see the Colonel Sahib," he said, "if you choose that one."

"And why?"

"It is loaded, and it is not permitted to fire off a round in the camp without the Colonel Sahib's permission."

Just then the Colonel arrived, and Nur Baz, having obtained permission, raised the rifle jauntily to his shoulder and with evident satisfaction loosed the bullet which ought to have cracked his brain pan into the empty air. Nur Baz and Mir Dast, though differing much in style, both had a great deal of the original Pathan in them.

One more story of an Afridi. It was in France. There had been an unsuccessful attack on the German lines. A sergeant of the Black Watch was lying dead in no-man's land, and the Hun sniper who had accounted for him lay somewhere in his near neighbourhood; he had lain there for hours taking toll of all who exposed themselves. It was getting dark when an officer of the 57th Rifles saw a Pathan, Sher Khan, pushing his way along the trench towards the spot. The man was wasting no time; he was evidently on some errand, only he carried no rifle. The officer called after him:

"Hello, Sher Khan, where are you off to?"

"I am going to get the sniper, Sahib, who shot the sergeant."

"But why haven't you got a rifle?"

"I am not going to dirty mine, Sahib. I'll take the sergeant's."

It was still light when he crawled over the parapet and wriggled his way down a furrow to where the sergeant lay. The sniper saw him, and missed him twice. Sher Khan did not reply to this fire. He lay quite still by the side of the Highlander and gently detached one of his spats. This he arranged so that in the half light it looked like a white face peeping over the man's body. Then he withdrew twenty yards to one side and waited. Soon the Hun's head appeared from his pit a few yards off and disappeared quickly. But Sher Khan bided his time. The sniper was evidently intrigued, and as it grew darker he exposed himself a little more each time he raised his head peering at the white face over the dead Highlander's shoulder. At last he knelt upright, reassured-the thing was so motionless; nevertheless he decided that another bullet in it would do no harm. He was taking steady aim when the Pathan fired. The range was too close for a miss even in that light, and the Hun rolled over. Half an hour afterwards Sher Khan returned with the Hun's rifle and the Highlander's under his arm; in his right hand he carried the Hun's helmet, a grisly sight, as his bullet had crashed through the man's brain.

It is his individual touch, his brilliancy in initiative and coolness and daring in execution that has earned the Afridi his high reputation among Pathans. The trans-frontier Pathan with his eternal blood-feuds would naturally have the advantage in this kind of work over the Pathan from our side of the border; his whole life from his boyhood up is a preparation for it. That is why some of the most brilliant soldiers in the Indian Army have been Afridis. On the other hand, collectively and in companies, the cis-frontier Yusafzais and Khattaks have maintained a higher aggregate of the military virtues, especially in the matter of steadiness and "sticking it out."

A strange thing about the Pathan, and inconsistent with his hard-grained, practical nature, is that he is given to visions and epileptic fits. He is visited by the fairies, to use his own expressive phrase. I knew a fine old subadar who believed that these visitations came to him because he had shot a pigeon on a mosque. He became a prey to remorse, and made ineffectual pilgrimages to various shrines to exorcise the spirit. How much of this subconscious side of the Pathan is responsible for his state of mind when he runs amok would be an interesting point for the psychologist. The man broods over some injury or wrong and he is not content until he has translated his vision into fact. Sometimes he goes to work like the Malay, killing in a hot, blind fury. But there is often method in the orgy. It is an orgy of blood, one glorious hour, perhaps, or a few rapturous seconds in which vengeance is attained and satisfaction demanded of collective humanity, and the price to be paid for it, the Pathan's own life, is perfectly well understood.

Take the case of Ashgar Ali. He learnt that a disparaging report as to the work of his brother had been sent in to the O.C. of the battalion by one Fazal-ud-din, a non-commissioned Pathan officer. Fazal-ud-din slept with him in the same tent, and Ashgar Ali lay brooding and sleepless all night. Before daybreak he had devised a plan. In the darkness he removed all the rifles from the tent and hid them outside. He waited till the moon rose. Then standing by the door he shot the betrayer through the head as he slept. He shot another Pathan by his side who leapt to his feet, awakened by the report. Then he slipped away stealthily to the little round knoll which he had marked out for the catastrophe of his drama. Here he kept up a steady fire at any human shape that came within range, a stern dispenser of justice in full measure making good the errors of a too-biased Providence. It was a calculated adjustment of right and wrong, and he kept a cool head as he counted up his tally. He saw his Colonel stalking him, an iron-grey head lifted cautiously from behind a hummock at fifty yards, an easy target. But Ashgar Ali called out, "Keep away, Sahib. I have no quarrel with you. My account is with the men. Keep away, or I must shoot." Snipers were firing at him at long range; a sepoy was creeping up behind, and almost as he spoke he rolled over and lay still.

A Pathan murder, as viewed by the assassin, generally stands for judgment and execution at the same time. There must be some such system among a people who have no Government or police. When a Pathan comes over the frontier and is arraigned by our code for a crime sanctioned by his own there is trouble. It is a tragic matter when law, especially if it is the Indian Penal Code, defeats the natural dispensations of justice. A splendid young Pathan, the pick of his battalion, was tried for shooting a man in his company. The act was deliberate, and to the Pathan mind justified by the provocation. The man who was put away meanly denied an obligation of honour. The Pathan shot him like a dog before a dozen witnesses, and no doubt felt the same generous thrill of satisfaction as he would have done in passing judgment in his own land. But to the disgust of the regiment, and more especially of the British officer, who understood the Pathan code, the upholder of honour, one of the best and straightest men they had, was hanged.

The great difference between the Pathan and the Sikh is that the Pathan is for himself. He has a certain amount of tribal, but no national, pride. His assurance is personal. Family pride depends on what the family has done within the memory of a generation; for there is little or no distinction in birth. The Pathan is genuinely a democrat, the Sikh only theoretically so. In strict accordance with his code the Sikh should be democratic, but whatever he may profess, he is aristocratic in spirit. His pride is in the community and in himself as one of the community. The prestige of the Khalsa is always in his mind. The Pathan's pride is there, but is latent. It leaps out quickly enough when challenged. But when the Pathan is boastful it is in a casual manner. Normally he does not bother his head about appearances. He is more like an Englishman in taking things as they come. But the Sikh is always acquisitive of honour. One cannot imagine Sikhs turning out old kit in order to save the new issue for handing in to the quartermaster when they "cut their name." Yet the Pathan, with his eye on the main chance, is quite content to go shabby if when he retires he can get more for his equipment on valuation. On one occasion on manœuvres, when a Pathan company had carried their economy in this respect a bit too far, their company commander got even with them in the kind of way they respect. Haversacks, water-bottles, coats, bandoliers, were laid on the ground for inspection. Then he sent them off to dig the perimeter. While they were digging some distance away, he went round quietly with an Indian officer and weeded out all the unserviceable kit. Then he sent for the men to come back. "I'm going to make a bonfire of these things," he said, "and what is more, you are going to dance round it." That young officer had the right way with the Pathan, who can enjoy a joke turned against himself better than most people. They danced round the fire, hugely amused, and no one resented it.