We were all halted a day or two at Kangma. There was some truth after all in the yarn of the first two mounted infantrymen whom we had met on the road, for some of the enemy had been located not far away, and a flying column had gone out after them. The enemy evaded the column successfully, and the latter returned after no other incident except the death of a man and one or two mules from the effects of drinking water which the brave enemy, ignorant of such Western vagaries as the Geneva Convention, had artfully poisoned.
Some unladen mules, of which we stood in considerable need, were brought in thatsame day by a small escort from Gyantse. They had been fired onen route, and so everything began to point to the chance of a bit of fighting in the near future.
From here onwards we amalgamated into one column, and that first march out of Kangma was particularly typical of the inconveniences of a comparatively long column when marching on a narrow hill-road. It may seem strange, but was really quite natural, that our small force with its transport should occupy five miles of road-way, which was, I believe, its approximate length, and to get this five-mile-long serpent to crawl successfully through the 'Red Idol gorge,' and later on wriggle over a certain very narrow, rather ricketty bridge, that barred the way close to camp, was a matter of many tedious hours. Horribly cold it was too that afternoon, as one waited for one's kit to turn up, the valley just there being a veritable chimney that drew a terrific draught up from the Gyantse direction.
Our labours were also beginning to increase somewhat, owing both to the compressed fodder from India having run out, and our being no longer in a peaceful region, where we could procure fodder by contract. Both at Kangma and here we had to send out foraging parties. We were still observing a most courteous attitude towards the enemy, and were paying the villagers handsome sums for what fodder we took, provided any villagers showed themselves. However, in many cases the villages were completely deserted.
That afternoon a reconnoitring party of mounted infantry returned with one man badly wounded, and the report that the village of Naini, seven miles ahead, was strongly held by the enemy. This meant fighting on the morrow.
On the morrow we marched early to Naini, and disposed ourselves for battle. Below the road, and quite out of range from the village, were some convenient fields ofyoung barley, upon which we closed up all the transport, and removed the loads. We were dreadfully punctilious at that period of hostilities about commandeering fodder or damaging crops, and as soon as the fight began I remember the late Major Bretherton—the chief Supply and Transport officer—sending me with a delightfully worded message to the commandants of transport units regarding the extent to which their animals might graze. I was to tell them that, though all damage to crops was to be rigidly avoided, yet if by any chance a mule did so far forget himself as to nibble a blade or two of young barley, the matter need not on the present occasion be taken too seriously, as the only ground available for closing up the transport was the ground on which that nice young barley was growing. So while 'all day long the noise of battle rolled' a hundred feet above them and two hundred yards away, the transport animals did themselves 'top-hole' on the enemy's best young barley; a goodthing too, for they got precious little fodder when they reached camp that night.
I got a good view of the Naini fight, seeing most of it in company with the General's Staff. A portion of the Gyantse garrison had come out to assist, and peppered the village and lamasarai from a high hill above, while our own column enveloped them from other directions. We made some fine big holes in their walls, and many a bee's nest of laymen and fighting monks was disturbed by a well-directed shell. Later on came the turn of the infantry at what must have been unpleasantly close quarters.
The fighting in Tibet was of course, in one sense, quite a minor matter. But, on the other hand, it was quite a distinctive kind of fighting, and, as such, does not deserve to be ignored. My share in those fights was mainly that of an interested spectator, and in this capacity I give my opinion of it.
I should say that for any one who, like myself, never had to go within a certaindistance of the position, there could be no more gentlemanly way of getting your baptism of fire than on a Tibetan battlefield. The jingal, for instance, is a delightful weapon at that range. Of course, if a jingal bullet hit you (a heavy rough-hewn thing of about three inches diameter), it would make a hole that it would take a lot of surgery to fill up. But normally, in the latter stages of its flight, the jingal bullet lets you know it is coming. Furthermore, except at close range, it is very inaccurate. So if what you desire on the battlefield is mild excitement, with the minimum of risk, I would recommend exposing yourself to jingal-fire at, say, from six to twelve hundred yards.
A very different tale would be that of the fighter in the firing line. Most of the fights in Tibet involved not only street-fighting but house-fighting, and this species of fun generally began immediately after a steep climb of several hundred feet. I can imagine few greater physical and moral trials in modernwarfare than that endured by those officers and men of ours, who, while gasping for breath after a race up a steep slope in that rare air, penetrated in small parties first through narrow streets, then into dingy courtyards, and lastly into byres and store-rooms and living-rooms that were generally pitch dark, not knowing from what hole or corner, or with what murderous form of clumsy firearm, they might not at any moment be fired upon by an unseen foe at close quarters. For the sake of those who went through this trial and were not found wanting, Tibetan warfare should not be despised.
The fight at Naini was waged for many weary hours. Its spectacular charm had soon worn off. The juxtaposition of fierce excitement and deadly boredom is a strange feature of warfare. There, two hundred yards away, men were killing one another, and here were some of us positively yawning!
Late in the afternoon, our pride of conquest somewhat chastened by the pangs ofhunger, we marched onwards to Gyantse. As we drew nearer we heard what seemed like a very irregular artillery salute fired by very drunken gunners in honour of some personage entitled to a very large number of guns. It was only the jingals in the Gyantse-jong firing away at us patiently and solemnly, in the pious hope that they one day might hit something. Their main objective was a ricketty bridge across the Gyantse river which we had to cross before reaching our camp. Some jingal bullets did on occasion fall fairly near the bridge, and one mule was actually hit in the act of crossing. The crossing of that bridge took till late into the night. All the way from Naini the path was intersected with irrigation nullahs, of which most were full of water. This caused many checks, which culminated in the block at the bridge. The latter began to fall to pieces before all the transport was over, some animals occasionally falling off into the water. The last of the rearguard reached camp about midnight.
The ten days or so spent at Gyantse were occupied in fighting, in waiting, through periodical armistices, for the result of negotiations which came to nothing, in sightseeing and in foraging for our present needs, and for the advance to Lhassa.
The two fights here alluded to were the taking of Tsechin and the taking of Gyantse-jong. At the former I again had a front seat in the stalls, watching the show in company with the headquarters' Staff, but had to leave, with some aggravating message to camp, just as the curtain was rising on the last act. During that long day, atthe end of which Gyantse-jong was taken, I saw very little of the fighting till just the very climax, when certain duties took me to the village Pálá, where the Staff were watching the final phase. No boredom on this occasion, but intense excitement. The final assault on the jong was a sight well worth remembering, coming as it did at the close of so tedious an action. The artistic effect of the Maxim on what one might call spectacular warfare is, I think, greater than that of artillery. Shells going off at intervals of course bring out the tragedy of war by the awful noise which they make, but the rapid ping-ping-ping of the Maxim sets your blood tingling and really excites you. It was a glorious spectacle, that last assault. The rush through the breach of those Ghurkhas and their comrades into that frowning impregnable-looking jong to the tune of artillery, dynamite, and Maxims would have appealed to the veriest man of peace. And as the jong became ours, the cheer that went upfrom every point where troops and followers stood in knots, watching the outcome, was a glorious climax to that long day.
A flying column that followed the retreating enemy to Dongtse failed to catch them up, but returned with a fine haul of useful forage. Foraging had for some time been the order of the day, except when fighting interfered with it. The Gyantse plain is very rich, with villages dotted about at close intervals, all standing among rich crops and nominally containing plenteous stores of what were our staple needs. But the art of hiding such stores is possessed in a high degree by the Tibetan. Some officers, who later on had much practice in foraging, became experts in finding the hidden store-rooms, knowing at a glance at what point on a given wall in an upper chamber the wall painting ceased to be of a permanent nature, and was merely a temporary daub concealing the rough cement and pile of loose unbaked bricks which blocked the doorway of what,after use of crowbar and mallet, proved a veritable mine of grain or barley flour.
Of course, while at Gyantse, the towns and lamasarais of Gyantse and Tsechin were our happiest hunting-grounds. In one lofty room alone we one day found eight thousand maunds of barley flour, all neatly bagged and sealed with a Tibetan official seal, doubtless a mobilisation reserve of the Tibetan army, and, alongside of it, another similar room filled with loose grain to a height which we could never really explore, since the weight of the grain made it impossible to open the door more than an inch or so, from which small aperture our requirements trickled out by the mule load. If we had had enough transport to carry on from Gyantse all the supplies which we found there, our commissariat problems would have been easy.
As we foraged on the days following these fights our way was strewn with corpses. The warriors from the Khám country, who formed a large part of the Tibetan army,were glorious in death, long-haired giants, lying as they fell with their crude weapons lying beside them, and usually with a peaceful, patient look in their faces. As types of physical humanity they could not be easily excelled. I remember one day one of the Khám men, a prisoner, was helping me to set in order a refractory watermill stone with which I was trying to grind wheat into flour. My commanding officer came to see how I was getting on and caught sight of the prisoner. He gazed at him in admiration and then exclaimed:
'By Jove! what a fine corpse he would make!'
Very brutal of him I thought it was till I had seen more corpses, and then I realised the true artistic insight of the remark.
I suppose it would be no more possible for an ordinary person to do justice to Gyantse as a sightseer than for any one who had had no classical education to visit Rome or Athens in the true academic spirit. Just as the key to those places lies in aknowledge of classical history, mythology, and archæology, so would the true key to Gyantse lie in a knowledge of the history of Buddhism in general, and of the Tibetan variations of Buddhism in particular. The main tenets of Buddhist doctrine, as one may acquire them in a handbook or an occasional magazine article, afford very little clue to Tibetan religious art. Buddha himself one can understand, and one becomes quite to know and admire the gently supercilious, ever-smiling expression that is faithfully caught in every statue and picture of him which one sees. And one can understand the motive in exemplifying the variations of human fortune by pictures of the wheel of life which show types of all the degrees of human happiness and unhappiness—instances of indescribable tortures at one side of the wheel, lesser miseries adjoining it, followed by similar gradations so arranged that as we go round the circle we come at last to fair scenes of ideal human bliss. But the applicationof the same kind of gradation to deities worshipped, and to the representations of them given in art, is not so easily understood. There is a certain highly symmetrical edifice standing in Gyantse monastery. The centre of it consists of one huge Buddha reaching from the ground to the height of, I should say, one hundred and fifty feet. Round this are built tiers upon tiers of small shrines; each tier contains one less shrine than the tier below it. The shrines are of equal size, so that the general effect of the whole edifice is that of a pyramid. You rise from tier to tier by a narrow hidden staircase. Each shrine contains one idol. If you start at a certain point on any of the tiers, and go round that tier, you will first enter the shrine of a perfect Buddha, for whom you will feel at least some reverence. The next shrine will contain an idol that impresses you less, and has about it some taint of the world. The next is a thoroughly worldly idol, the next is ugly, the next is obviouslywicked, and the next a demon. The demons grow in demoniacal qualities till suddenly you arrive again at the Buddha from whom you started. The tiers above are all arranged on the same principle, except that, the number of shrines decreasing by one in each case, the gradation from Buddha to demon grows more abrupt as you ascend.
Then again, in the most holy of spots, not only in Gyantse but even, for instance, in the audience hall in the sacred 'Potá-Là,' or palace-monastery of Lhassa, one comes across images of what to European eyes appears the lewdest character, and similar representations are constantly found on the painted scrolls, which everywhere are seen hanging in the monasteries.
Such strange excrescences on the external face of a religion that ranks so high in regard to the spirituality of its essential tenets, and the extent and depth of its influence on human life, as does Buddhism, seem only to point to the endless intertwiningsof religions that must ever have been in process since the world began. Here we have, for instance, one of the noblest and purest of religions tainted—at any rate as regards the art which is ancillary to it—with those twin poisons of demon-worship and priapism; all contact with which one would have imagined it to have been pure enough and strong enough to throw off centuries ago.
That strange similarity on less essential points that exists between religions which are far removed from each other, both in history and in doctrine, makes one long to read some really comprehensive history of human religion that will, by dipping down into the furthest depths of the past, reveal to us the answer to such problems as, for instance, the strong and apparently family likeness between the joss-sticks and tallow altar-lamp of the Buddhist, and the incense and wax-candle of ornate Christian ritual.
Though it would appear that what isbarbaric may survive, in the form of ritual, as an acknowledged and in some cases, it may be, even a helpful adjunct to a religion which in every other respect has cast off all that is barbarous, yet some of those demons and those licentious pictures that we saw in Tibet seemed to the Western mind altogether too vile to be thus explained away.
But, even so, what fool shall rush in and criticise the East?
Suddenly the order came that we were to march to Lhassa forthwith. Who should and who should not form the Lhassa column must have been a difficult question to settle. To perform invidious tasks of this sort must be the most trying feature of generalship. It would be hard to find an occasion on any expedition when, to the individual soldier, going on seemed to mean so much, and staying behind so little. Forbidden cities are so fascinating, and the idea of assisting in drawing aside a pardah so appeals to our rude imaginations, that thedesire to reach Lhassa was especially great. Those high passes in front of us, the shores of the great Palti lake and the upper Brahmaputra, that we knew not how we should cross, all seemed also to point to a varied adventure, and there was a spice of excitement in the thought of marching through a country, on the resources of which we should have largely to maintain ourselves, while as yet we knew hardly anything of their kind and extent.
We left the sad Gyantse garrison behind us, and marched off one morning in threatening weather that soon turned to rain, our path for the first few miles lying across a veritable bog. We consisted of the whole of a British and a section of a native mountain battery, of a wing of the Royal Fusiliers, of two companies of mounted infantry (drawn from various native regiments, and consisting of Sikhs, Ghurkhas, and Pathans) of the 8th Ghurkha Rifles, several companies of the 32nd Sikh Pioneers and the 40th Pathans,one company of Sappers and Miners, and two machine gun detachments. Several field hospitals or sections of field hospitals accompanied us, besides, of course, many other miscellaneous necessities such as ammunition column, treasure, supply column, post-office, veterinary establishment, and field park. The telegraph department was conspicuous by its absence, it being a feature of the advance to Lhassa that we left the telegraph behind at Gyantse—a proceeding which doubtless had both its inconvenient and its convenient results. Last but not least came the transport. One may divide this into regular and irregular. The regular transport consisted of the whole or portions of five Indian mule corps, the 6th, the 7th, the 9th, the 10th, and the 12th; the irregular of a cooli corps, and two locally raised corps—one of yaks and the other of donkeys.
Our transport was so big an item and so big a necessity that a short sketch of it as itploughed through the sodden fields outside Gyantse that wet July morning may not come amiss.
The average Indian transport pack mule, aged probably fifteen to eighteen years old, is the finest old soldier we have got. If, like Lord Roberts's gray arab, he were allowed to record his services round his neck, he would display a fine collection of medals and clasps. Allowing that he is now fifteen and that he joined the ranks ten years ago, and allowing as a general principle that where a frontier expedition of any size takes place the bulk of the regular mule transport of the army in India is required for it, we can take it that at the age of six he had a rough breaking-in to war conditions in Chitral; that, after a year or so of peace, he carried convoy stores or troops' baggage over many weary marches in the Malakand or the Tochi valley, or in Tirah. In 1900, as likely as not, he was entrained one hot midsummer day, carried off to Calcutta, and shipped to China. As analternative he may have been wanted in South Africa. Later on he very probably served in the Mahsud blockade. Between whiles he has had a few spells of cantonment life, but has probably spent his hot weathers daily carrying the needful water supply up to some hill station, perched on a hilltop, from a reservoir two thousand feet below, and a portion of his cold weathers in the feverish sham warfare of manœuvres. All the time he has preserved the same dogged, cheery temperament, getting out of the train at the base of an expedition, seeing there the familiar sights that portend field service, then having a good roll in the dust, getting up and shaking himself, as though to say, 'Here we are again,' like the clown in the pantomime; or plodding along through rain or snow or hot weather duststorm with two maunds on his back, and only wondering casually what will be the next practical joke which his masters will perpetrate on him. His is a rough lot, but he takes it kindly, and with good grain and fodder is not unhappy.
The mule driver also is a man of parts. Compare him with that fine soldier—the cavalryman. The former has to feed, groom, fit and clean the gear of, and sometimes forage for, three or four animals instead of one, as is the case of the latter. Further, the cavalryman mounts his beast, while the mule driver marches on foot.
The case of the mule and his attendant came before the Government of India a few years ago, who decided to improve their status. They have since accomplished a great deal by introducing an organised corps system among Indian transport. The system was worked experimentally for some years, and is now an authorised and accomplished fact. The mule and his driver, instead of, as was formerly the case, being no men's children in particular, belong to their troop, to their subdivision, and to their corps. Every corps is distinguishable by its uniform, and is commanded by a British officer, who has under him his own permanent subordinatestaff, and who is responsible for the well-being and efficiency of all the men and beasts in his charge.
The enhancement of efficiency and well-being, and, perhaps more than all, of the personal self-respect of the individual driver, which has been the result both of the new organised discipline and of the newesprit de corps, is very marked. It remains only to prove conclusively that in the field, the inter-organisation of transport can be sufficiently maintained to serve its object, without interfering with other military considerations. The allotting of their transport to combatant units, according to their exact requirements, without destroying the organisation of the transport units themselves, often constitutes a problem which a chief transport officer has difficulty in solving. Thevia media, which on this Expedition has afforded a solution, has been to let the transport organisation, if necessary, go to the winds on the march itself, but to give it the first claimto consideration when once a column has reached camp.
Those irregular corps which supplemented the permanent military pack transport were most indispensable but delightfully heterogeneous. It may be interesting to describe the journey of, say, a maund of rice from Siliguri to Lhassa on these various forms of transport. Wrapped in its waterproof to keep off the rain torrents, the rice was dumped into a bullock-cart at Siliguri. If the road did not collapse from a landslip at any awkward moment and so drop the bullock-cart and its contentsen masseinto the Teesta river—a not infrequent occurrence—the rice-bag probably reached Rangpo. From there it probably proceeded for a few marches on the back of a pack bullock, a patient beast who moved slowly, and whose feet in that damp climate got very tender, and on those stony paths very sore. Later on it reached steep gradients where the pack bullock could no longer carry it, and it washanded over for several marches to a cooli. The cooli would be a native of some hill district of India (Panch, for instance, or Darjiling). He and the comrades to whom he passed it on would take it over either the Jalap-Là or the Natu-Là, down into the Chumbi valley. From here a pack mule or an 'irregular' pack pony would take it up to Phári. From here across the Phári plain through Tuna and Kalatso and as far as Menza it would lie in an ekka, for this was flat country, and it had seemed worth while and eventually proved a signal success to drag up from India several hundred of those plainly built but strong little two-wheeled carts called ekkas, which hold five maunds each, and can be used on almost any road, however rough, provided it is wide enough to hold both wheels. These ekkas had been run up behind their ponies as far as possible, then taken to pieces, and carried in fragments on the backs of coolis over the passes and up on to the Phári plain, where, ata height of 15,000 feet, they were put together again and plied to and fro, at first greatly to the astonishment of the resident Tibetan, who had never seen any wheels other than prayer-wheels. Most of the ekkas were drawn by ponies of the small 'country-bred' type brought from India, but the casualties among these were sometimes replaced by draught yaks.
From Menza onwards our rice-bag had a choice of mounts. It might go on a pack mule, or meander slowly along on the back of a pack yak, or, with the other bag alongside it, entirely eclipse from human view the most miniature of donkeys, who, nevertheless, if allowed ample time to look about him, and to pick up weird grazing by the roadside, would eventually arrive in camp none the worse, and with his load intact after a uniform progress of about one mile an hour.
On one or other of these animals the rice-bag would eventually reach Lhassa, or, if it foregathered with the Lhassa column on itsway up, it might be handed over to one of the coolis who accompanied that column. It probably reached Lhassa intact, its waterproof bag having protected it from all weathers; but it might also have got a small hole somewhere among its ample coverings, and lost a pound or two on the way, or—for such is human nature—arrive still weighing the original eighty pounds, but containing a stone or two in the place where some few odd pounds of rice ought to have been.
The manners and customs of our various transport animals would form an interesting study in natural history. The yak, to the uninitiated intruder, was of course the most striking. The mule we know, and the donkey we know, and the cooli was more or less of the same species as ourselves; but the yak was a novelty. The yak is a buffalo in petticoats. This seems an incongruous combination, for theà prioriidea of a buffalo is of something fierce, and of petticoats, of something not fierce. But in this case petticoat influencehas altogether prevailed, for the yak is the mildest natured of animals. He moves very slowly, takes life very quietly, and is content with little here below, or rather here above, for if you take him below 9,000 feet he pines for the heights. I believe he is really at his cosiest when lying in a snowdrift on a winter's day with his petticoats around him and only his horns showing. He then feels really well tucked up.
Both yaks and donkeys were very cheap forms of transport. It is true that yaks had a way of dying and donkeys of deserting, but even so their initial cost was very small, they needed very few drivers in proportion to their numbers, and possessed the art of living on the country. An animal that along a line of communications of some four hundred miles' length, and lying in an inhospitable country, neither asks you to bring him up fodder or even grain from the base, nor yet expects you to go foraging for him, is indeed a treasure.
The yak and donkey drivers were Tibetans, as also were many of the hospital ambulance carriers. The most noticeable points about these Tibetans were that they were inveterate gamblers, and were also very much married. The idea of accompanying us without their womenkind was quite foreign to them, and we had to accede to their prejudices in the matter. Merry little souls those women mostly were. Their foreheads and noses usually smeared with that pigment of sows' blood which proclaims to the world the Tibetan woman's chastity, they were ever to be seen laughing or chaffing one another, either on the march or else in camp, over their domestic duties or their knitting. Their stocking-knitting was of a high order, except that the art of 'turning a heel' was unknown to them.
I remember passing a knot of them one day as we climbed one of the worst passes that we had to encounter on the march—a climb of four thousand feet without a break. Hillpeople know better than any one the advantage of breathing rhythmically, and the Tibetan loves to acquire this rhythm by singing over any work that strains him at all. Tibetan men and women, as they thresh their corn with the flail, chant pretty ditties in unison, and Tibetan boatmen on the Sangpo will sometimes sing to their work. And here was this band of women singing cheerily as they climbed that mountain side, and never pausing in their song. They were well up with the advance guard too, and the chorus could be heard all down the column—a novel sort of band with which to cheer a British army onwards on a toilsome march!
The cooli too, especially he who hied from the hinterland of Darjiling, was as merry a soul as you meet on a day's march. Some were quite boys, not more than sixteen, yet the way they shouldered their loads was wonderful. The regulation load was eighty pounds, but I have often seen quite a youngster with a hundred pounds on his back, taking itsteadily along up thousands of feet, and taking it as a matter of course, and giving you a grinning greeting as you passed him. When off duty, they would be for ever skipping about like mountain goats, skylarking, and pulling one another about. The supervising staff of Ghurkhas, too, all had the jolly Ghurkha face. For a cheery family party it would be hard to beat that cooli corps.
But that Lhassa column with its train of transport has got well out of the bog by now, and it behoves us to overtake it.
From Gyantse to Ralung is a steady upward incline, and took us three days. It rained most of the time, both day and night; it was difficult to get dry again when once you were wet, and there was a good deal of discomfort experienced in all quarters. One camping ground was particularly unpleasant, which for the most part consisted of ploughed land that was not only soaking with the rain, but had recently been irrigated. As we had risen considerably higher than the Gyantse plain, the crops on this and similar ground had hardly begun to show. In fact, from here onwards for many days to come, thereseemed very little chance of obtaining any grazing for our animals. We had taken all the transport we could, and loaded it with as many supplies as possible, all selected according to our known needs on the one hand, and the possible but unknown resources of the country on the other; but even so our prospects were not rosy. The mule, for instance, cannot live on grain alone: he must have fodder, and one mule in a very few days will consume as much fodder as is equivalent in weight to his own authorised load. Hence, if you provide a mule with a reserve of fodder to last him that number of days and make him carry it, you might just as well leave him behind, since he will then be able to carry nothing else except his own fodder. This, in a country where fodder is not locally procurable, is, at any rate in the case of the pack mule, one of the great problems of army transport, and we were brought face to face with it more than once during this march. Grain too is heavy stuff, or, in otherwords, gets quickly consumed. We used over two hundred maunds a day, or more than a hundred mule loads, and so could not start our march with many days' supply in reserve without excluding other things that also had to be carried. The next heaviest item was tsampa (the Tibetan barley flour which we were now using as a substitute for the 'áta' or coarsely ground wheat flour usually consumed by natives). Of this we used seventy maunds daily, and so had only a few days in reserve. Meat, though a large item, is much more tractable stuff, for it walks on its four feet till you kill it. It can even be of use in carrying other things. For instance, we had made up our minds that, if sheep and cows ran short, we would eat each yak that, on account of the depletion of supplies, had no longer a load to carry! The other items of food, though many of them costly and highly essential, were none of them very bulky, and of these we had been able to bring along some weeks' reserve.
Our more pressing needs were therefore confined to fodder and grain and tsampa, and many were the foraging parties that went forth on arrival in camp, or that made a detour from the line of march in search of these articles, some drawing blank, some getting very little, and some occasionally a fair haul. At Ralung we got a fair haul. There is a very fine monastery there, situated up a valley five miles from where we camped. I remember spending a very pleasant afternoon there. I had gone there, immediately after arriving in camp, with my commanding officer to see what could be got out of the place. We found some whole barley, some tsampa, and a fair stock of straw. My commanding officer left me there to await the necessary transport while he went back to camp to send it. I really had a very pleasant time, being hospitably entertained both by the monks and also the nuns—especially the latter. They brought me out 'chang' to drink, a home-brewed light wine, made I believe frombarley, and the carcass of a sheep that had been cooked whole, and from which you were expected to pick off your individual requirements. It had already had a lot taken from it, and from a certain self-assertiveness that there was about it, I concluded that it had been a standing dish for a considerable period, and contented myself with my own sandwiches. Then they came and talked to me through the interpreter whom I had with me, and quite a youthful little nun in a picturesque woolly red cap came and sat beside me and did her knitting. My overcoat had been wet through for three days, and the sun coming out gave me a chance of drying it. Quite warm and cosy it all was, with ladies' society and all thrown in. I was quite sorry when, after several hours of waiting, a long serpent-shaped line of mules slowly trailed up the valley and came for the grain, the tsampa, and the straw.
We were paying again for what we foraged, and I remember doling out what must haveseemed to the recipients a prodigious number of rupees. Tibetan monasteries are undeniably rich, but, especially in outlying parts, I fancy they do all their buying and selling in kind. For instance, they collect their taxes in kind, and it is certainly feasible for them to obtain labour, clothing, and such necessaries without having recourse to coin. The fact that the average Lama was unused to dealing in large sums of money seemed to always have one of two opposite effects. He either did not seem to grasp the fact that a large sum of money really represented 'articles of value,' and had no desire whatever to part with any of his possessions in exchange for it, or else, being either less ignorant and knowing its value, or more simple-minded and attracted by its glitter, he would accept the money with pronounced greed.
The effect of all the coin that we took to and left in the country must have had a curious economic effect on Tibet. For a country that trades largely by barter to besuddenly flooded with rupees should, according to the ordinary principles of political economy, raise the current prices of all commodities to an extraordinary extent. However, Tibet, queer country that it is, has probably a political economy all of its very own, and will arrange such a matter entirely differently from Western expectation.
Even our rupees, as such, were not always approved, a distinction being sometimes drawn between those enfaced with King Edward's head and those enfaced with Queen Victoria's. The latter were approved on the ground that they were 'Kampani' rupees, the Queen's face being apparently regarded as the trade mark of the East India Company, of which the past generation of Tibetans must have heard and passed on the memory to their children, who still thought it was in existence. A new symbol, such as that of a man's head, was thus naturally viewed at first with suspicion.
The next day brought us just under the Karo-Là pass, and we camped at a height of 16,600 feet, with a great mass of snow so near us on the hillside that, while the sun was still up, it quite hurt our eyes to look in that direction. Avalanches of snow kept falling from the mass, coming down with a great thud that was almost startling. There was a little mountain sickness that night; but, considering the height and the fatigue that had been involved in reaching it, there was remarkably little. A very little reconnoitring to the front in the early afternoon had revealed the enemy in position a mile or so the other side of the pass. They had builttwo walls, one behind the other, on what appeared to be admirably selected ground. They seemed in fact to have been studying tactics to some purpose.
It was pleasant to get up the next morning in a sharp frost, and to get, as it were, one glimpse into winter—a glimpse, however, that only lasted till the sun got up. Cold for the past few months had not been our bugbear, but rain, and to-day there was no rain, the sky was cloudless, and the air crisp and fresh, and as soon as the sun was up, even moderately warm.
A few minutes' walk took us to the top of the pass, 16,800 feet. From there the road descended gradually, but the headquarters' Staff, whom for the moment I was accompanying, kept to the hillside at the same level as the top of the pass till they came to a goodcoin de vantagefrom which to view the first phase of the fight. For it was obvious that we were to be opposed.
The artillery stayed close by us, whiletwo parties of Ghurkhas were sent to scale the heights on either side, and the Fusiliers and some more infantry sent along the valley to attack the formidable-looking walls which the Tibetans had erected ahead of us.
It soon appeared that the enemy had decided at the last to leave the two walls down in the valley, behind either of which they could have assuredly made a useful stand, and had instead betaken themselves to the top of an almost inaccessible ridge overlooking the walls and about two thousand feet above them, on what was to us the right side of the valley. From near the top of this ridge a jingal soon began firing, and kept up an intermittent cannonade for several hours. Our artillery fired a great many rounds in that direction, but it was difficult to ascertain what effect they had. It was apparent that the brunt of the fighting during this phase of the action would fall upon the right party of Ghurkhas, who now in the distance, as they climbed steadily up the steep cliffs to ourright front, looked like a string of tiny ants. They must have climbed two to three thousand feet before they reached the ridge, and thus gone into action at a height bordering on 20,000 feet. Before they could get near the enemy they had to cross a steep strip of snow. Ploughing through that within range of the enemy must have been somewhat trying. They got near them at last and accounted for a good many, including, it was afterwards ascertained, two important leaders. The ridge on which the Tibetans made their stand contained several caves, in which the enemy proceeded to hide, so that what followed must have been a species of ratting, which resulted in the capture of a good many prisoners.
Meanwhile the rest of our forces moved onwards, and the 40th Pathans were at length sent in pursuit of several of the enemy who were seen escaping upwards in the direction of a glacier, while the artillery from their new position kept the latter movingwith a few rounds of shrapnel. After a lot of ammunition, breath, and muscular tissue had been expended in this uphill pursuit, there was no sign left anywhere of the enemy on or below the skyline. They had apparently disappeared over the glacier.
We were then ready to march to camp. After a very short distance we passed Zara, a small village alongside of which is a Chinese rest-house. Close to the village we came upon our enemy's camp standing as they had left it in the morning. We got from it a good deal of tsampa and found more in the village itself, where they had evidently stored their reserve of this, their only article of food. We were in need of firewood too, and found a lot of useful logs lying about the camping ground, not to mention a large number of tent poles made of good seasoned wood, which burnt well that night in our own camp.
We camped about five miles further on, and about a thousand feet lower down. Todescend into a somewhat more plentiful air was a relief after a night and a day on the Karo-Là.
Our great difficulty that night was the lack of fodder. The mules had had a long day and no grazing, and there was not a blade of anything to give them. We did the best we could by doling out an extra pound of grain per animal, which was issued, after a long soaking, in small quantities at frequent intervals. This helped to fill the gaps left by the lack of fodder. A weed resembling vetch with a small purple flower grew on the hillside. We also cut some of this and gave it to the mules, who ate some of it, but on the whole preferred any loose ends of their next-door neighbours' jules or blankets. There was a great deal of woollen texture consumed that night, and some of the jules were a sorry sight in the morning.
The noise made at night by hungry mules who have no fodder is very distressing. That night they kept up a constant complaining.
Next day we reached Nagartse. This is a village surmounted by a jong which is perched at the end of a rocky ridge which runs from higher hills close down to a corner of the Lake Palti. There is one monastery inside the jong itself, and another on the hillside close by. There was a belt of standing crops close to the jong which were more advanced than those on the other side of the Karo-Là. On the whole we appeared to have reached something of an oasis. If the enemy had decided to make a stand against us here, we should have had very little difficulty in oustingthem. It would have been quite easy to send our mountain guns up on to the ridge above the jong, and a very few shells from that position would have probably secured a speedy evacuation. As a matter of fact, after a little parleying, they decided to evacuate, and we were to be free of the jong and all it contained, while of course we respected all property of theirs that pertained to religion.
From here onwards we were constantly met by deputations of envoys. The sight, which first of all used greatly to tickle the fancy, of important Tibetan personages under bright umbrellas and riding splendid mules splendidly caparisoned, and led by servants in gorgeous liveries, soon grew quitecommon.At every point of any importance along the line of our advance, this or a similar cavalcade would come hurrying up. What exactly used to take place at the interviews which followed, I am not privileged to know, but apparently fresh reasons were advanced oneach occasion for our not going further on our way to Lhassa, and fresh specious promises of considering our demands in a conciliatory though vague spirit were never wanting. But after a pleasant talk of many hours the purple and fine linen used to ride away baffled.
We halted at Nagartse for two nights. We found it a useful place to have captured. Unfortunately it contained little grain, of which now we were growing very short, but we found in it a large storehouse of bagged tsampa, which was very welcome. It proved also to have been used by the enemy as an arsenal, and several boxes of gunpowder were discovered in it, hidden away in a barn among quantities of straw. We had grown wary in searching jongs since the day, a fortnight or so before, when some accident such as a lighted match falling through a flooring in Gyantse-jong had caused the explosion of a store of gunpowder which had done much havoc among a party of Fusiliersclose by, several of whom had been seriously injured.
The gunpowder found at Nagartse was destroyed by us, and certain portions of the buildings demolished, the latter process producing a fine haul of firewood in the shape of the beams and rafters of the demolished houses. That process of demolition, in which the Sappers and Miners were past masters, is one of the dirtiest jobs I know. I was there to collect wood from thedébris, which the Sappers and Miners demolished. As each wall falls it throws up a cloud of dust, and the filth of ages in small particles enters your eyes, your ears, your hair, and your mouth, and covers your clothes: no small matter when the clothes in which you stand may be the only suit you possess, and the function of having a bath cannot be undertaken lightly, but needs due warning, ample preparation, and assured leisure.
Many of us who serve in India have, for considerations of health, which to the Englishmanat home seem absurd, but are nevertheless proved by Anglo-Indian experience to be imperative, had to abjure the cold bath. For such a hot bath is the only form of complete ablution. Your tent, if you do not exceed your scale of transport, will be small and will have no bath-room attached; then for preparing the bath, you have to remove all the ordinary contents of the tent outside into the open. Then will follow the setting in position of whatever form of camp bath you may possess, or may be able to borrow. Meanwhile an extra allowance of firewood has to be procured and the water made hot. By the time all is ready and you are beginning to take off your clothes a considerable time will have passed. If, during that period, some exigency of field service does not arise which requires you to leave all those preparations regretfully, and postpone the bath to another day, you are lucky. Even if you get through with your project without being disturbed, it is as likelyas not that the day for getting your clothes washed being a movable feast, you will have nothing to put on that will not seem a defilement to your freshly polished skin. Getting water hot enough was sometimes difficult when you wanted as much as is necessary for a bath, if the wind blew high and firewood was scanty. But this was nothing compared with the difficulty experienced in such forms of cookery as were associated with boiling water. The temperature at which water boils at an altitude of, say, 15,000 feet is, I believe, some forty degrees lower than boiling point on the sea-level. I wondered for a long time why my tea never seemed to have been made with boiling water, and I am afraid a certain faithful youth who used to make it for me got rather harsh treatment till my scientific education was sufficiently advanced to absolve him. Tea that is served up at a temperature of forty degrees below the normal boiling point can never be very nice. Andit got cool very quickly, which of course was natural. When I returned to India the other day, I could not make out why I was always burning my tongue over my tea, till I remembered that of course the tea which I was now drinking was made with water that boiled at an ordinary boiling temperature, and so remained too hot to drink till it had been allowed to stand for a decent interval.
It was in its effect upon rice as part of the natives' ration that this low boiling point was really of serious import. Rice well boiled is a good ration for natives, but there was many a case of indigestion and colic attributed to the rice which had been spuriously boiled at one of these high altitudes, but never really cooked.
We left Nagartse in very wretched weather, and for the next few days marched in rain and camped in rain. A spell of bad weather like this, bad enough as it is for every one, man or beast, is perhaps worst of all for the mules who carry the tents, for a thoroughly soaked tent is literally twice its normal weight; and ours on this occasion, after the initial soaking, got no drier for several days in succession.
We were now marching alongside the Lake Palti. Once or twice the clouds broke for an hour or so, and the sun and sky lit up the lake, and so showed it us in its true colour—that unique shade of turquoise, unlike anythingin water scenery that the most travelled of us had ever seen before. I forget whether any scientific explanation of the peculiar colour was forthcoming among the learned, but the water of the lake being distinctly brackish may contain certain salts which, being diluted throughout the whole extent of the lake, produces some faint effect of colour on the water, and this, in combination with the sky's reflection, results in the turquoise shade which we so admired.
The Tibetans, with that large-mindedness which characterises their disposal of their dead, do not forget the fishes of the Lake Palti, and in that region corpses are made away with by being thrown into the lake.
It would thus appear that, what with its salts and functions as a cemetery, the lake supplied but indifferent drinking water. At one or two camps that we occupied by its side, there were no streams flowing down from the hills, so we had to be content with the lake, but no ill effects resulted.
Many were the fish that were caught in Lake Palti, as we skirted its banks, and that embellished those dinners that were now getting so plain. The regular trout fishing appliances—greenheart rod, reel and silk-spun line, catgut cast and choice Zulu or March-brown fly—accounted for large numbers; but side by side with the sportsman so equipped would stand some sepoy or follower with a lengthy stick, a bit of string, and a bent pin baited with a bit of tsampa, whose efforts would be crowned with success quite similar. Really accommodating fish those were, that gave the skilled angler the entertainment he sought, and yet did not disdain that humbler one who with simpler devices fished only for the pot.
Yasig was our first camp out of Nagartse.
There was a village two miles from camp, but it contained no supplies, and was deserted except for a few old women. In those days, to the casual traveller through Tibet, old women would have appeared to form thebulk of the population. A useful thing, an old woman! You can use her as a cat's-paw. Though afraid to go yourself into the vicinity of the invading foe, you can yet send your old woman to watch over your interests in the village, to feed and milk the cows that you have left hidden there, to perform such small agricultural functions generally as may save the farm from utter ruin, and to return periodically with the latest news of the foe. That seemed to be the idea which dominated the Tibetans in this matter, and perhaps it was a sound one. I can certainly imagine no more effective 'chowkidar' upon a village than an ancient, toothless, slatternly Tibetan woman, who greets you with tongue out and thumbs upturned (the conventional symbols of submission), and weeps long and loud from the moment you approach her until you leave her. I believe Aristotle has defined tragedy as 'a purging of the emotions with sympathy and a kind of horror.' According to thisdefinition the sight of these old women was essentially tragic. You went to a village hoping to find in it a stock of good things, and you found only this old woman and nothing else. You were sorry for the old girl, of course; but when you saw the filth encasing her and the lice enveloping her, you were filled indeed with 'a kind of horror,' and rode away promptly with your emotions thoroughly purged after the correct Aristotelian method. The Tibetan of course knew that this would happen, and this was why he sent his old woman to guard his property.
We hoped not to draw blank at the next halt, for here we came to the village Pete, surmounted by Pete-jong, an important landmark on our route. But now we began to discover that some one had stolen a march on us, and was looting ahead of us. It appeared that, of the army that had opposed us at the Karo-Là, one portion had disappeared over the glacier, but that another was in retreat towards Lhassa, and wasfeeding itself somewhat ruthlessly on the country as it went. From reports that reached us, it appeared also that the paymasters of the Tibetan army regarded their duties lightly, and that the force in front of us, consisting mainly of mercenaries, had no compunction in looting not only the bare means of subsistence, but also any supplementary stores which by a generous calculation might seem equivalent in value to the arrears of their pay. Even so it was not so much what they took that spoilt our chance of finding stores to purchase, as the fact that each act of looting on their part at once became known in all the villages ahead, with the result that stores of all kinds, but especially grain and tsampa, were being hidden away from the reach of either the Tibetan army or ourselves with the utmost possible despatch. Hence our prospects again became far from rosy. There was fortunately some grazing at Pete-jong for the animals, but both grain and tsampa weregrowing short. A day or two more, without some addition of these articles, would see us depleted.
Pete-jong, a fine square-topped fort, built on a rock, overtopped by high mountains on one side, and overlooking the blue waters of Lake Palti on the other, looked magnificent, and more than ever reminded one of that drop-scene in the theatre. 'What a shame,' my wife says, 'to draw such horrid comparisons!' But I tell her they are not horrid really. In fact, a short sojourn in Tibet, a country freed from the obscurities of a thick atmosphere, and full of great dense mountains and lakes, and of startlingly crude contrasts of bright colours, quite revolutionises for the time being one's ideas of landscape art. In one of those diffident modern impressionist pictures, in which the artist is afraid to make his sky or water really blue, or his snow really white, or his mountain-tops really lofty or distinct, one finds nothing that appeals to one's sense ofvivid truth. But in that drop-scene above alluded to, lit up as it would be by glaring footlights, or in that glorious wealth of colour that is daubed by machinery on to even so low a thing as a tradesman's almanac, or, again, in that magic lantern slide reflected on a sheet, which gave to one as a child such romantic ideas of nature rampant in Switzerland or the Holy Land, there is more that represents the clear form and crude colour of the uplands of Tibet than would ever be found in the works of any up-to-date Royal Academician. As memory fades, and one becomes used again to denser atmospheres and to features of the earth's surface that are less pronounced, I suppose one's ideas will revert to their normal orthodoxy.
Pete-jong, fair and romantic from the outside, is the reverse within. We left a few troops there, making it a post on our line of communication (as we had done also in the cases of Nagartse and Ralung). I was sorry for the Pete-jong garrison. The lowerpart of the jong was occupied by byres and barns and dark chambers, all of them empty of all but filth. Through the centre of the jong, and through the rock on which it was built, a rough stone track, half path, half staircase, ran upwards, mostly in pitch darkness. From the walls at the side, from the roof overhead, and from the ground beneath, moisture seemed to be always exuding, the walls and roof being all slimy and musty, while greasy mud oozed perpetually from the interstices of the stones on the floor. No sunlight ever reached this dark passage, so that the moisture could dry no faster than it was replenished by that hidden spring in the rock which apparently was its source. The only suitable habitable rooms were high up at the top of the jong, and these were designed as barracks, hospital, store depot, and post commandant's quarters. But every time any one went outside the jong from his quarters, he had to go down this slimy black artery and return the same way.
After halting one night at Pete-jong the column marched on in soaking rain to the foot of the Kamba-Là. Here we were to leave Lake Palti and mount the pass that stood above our camp.
About a thousand feet of zig-zag climbing were to bring us to the top of the pass, where we would again for the moment stand over 16,000 feet. The morning was fairly fine, and the clouds high. It took hours, of course, before our five-mile-long column had reached the top. We toiled up slowly, many of us with sad misgivings, for that supply column in the rear was grievously light, and its further depletion would mean much to all of us. To any one whose thoughts were for official reasons specially driven into this channel, the moment of arrival at the cairn that marked the summit of the Kamba-Là was perhaps the most critical moment ofthe Expedition, if not even its veritable turning point. Since leaving Gyantse we had marched through a country that seemed to grow more and more destitute of the supplies we needed. Chance had given us an occasional largess, and here and there we had lighted upon something of an oasis; but latterly in places upon which we had set our hopes we had found nothing. And here we were leaving even the sparsely cultivated shores of the Lake Palti, climbing into the barren mountains, and then descending into the unknown. But, as that eventful summit was reached, what a view met our gaze! Beyond us a deep gully sloped down to a valley four thousand feet below. The descent for the first two thousand feet would be over bare bleak hillside: after that we would descend across the wood-line, below which firewood, at any rate (an article for which, in certain altitudes, yak-dung had often been substituted), would be found in plenty. And below that belt of forest, and on either sideof a broad river, we saw thick green crops that meant grazing galore, and here and there among the crops large prosperous-looking villages, or stately monasteries that should assuredly be well stocked with grain and tsampa and other delights. One thought of Moses when he caught his first glimpse of the promised land!
Our only fear was of the Tibetan army fleeing in front of us—whether they might not have looted this valley also, and frightened the inhabitants into hiding all their stores. But the valley was so large and prosperous-looking that it seemed certain that their depredations could not have affected the whole of it. So we went down the hill with glad hearts. The first two villages we passed, as we entered the main valley, were empty, and for a moment we were afraid again; but a mile further on we came upon a large village—that of Kamba Baji—which on inspection proved a veritable mine of wealth.
We camped for that night beside it, and spent the afternoon probing its resources. The Kazi (or headman) of Kamba Baji was our friend from the first. He gave us all he had, taking our coin in exchange in the spirit in which it was offered. He owned a great deal of land up and down the valley, and that land and its products both then and afterwards, he placed ungrudgingly at our service, even though the rupees which he received in exchange, albeit generous payment, hardly compensated him for the annoyance which, as a substantial country gentleman, he must have felt at our unwarrantable intrusion upon his property. Our relations remained cordial ever afterwards. His house lay on the road which the escort to the post always took between Chaksam and Pete-jong. For that escort, as they rode up, two elderly handmaidens of the Kazi's household were ever found waiting with brimful jugs of new milk in their arms, with which to refresh the travellers.