By the mid-1930s the farthest east any previous expedition—punitive or otherwise—had reached into the Naga Hills was Tuensang. From here one could look out at the dark blue smudge on the horizon that denoted the Patkoi Range, on the other side of which lay Burma, but no white man had ever reached these distant hills, from the Indian side at least. There was no intelligence to suggest that any European had ever set foot in these hills from the Burmese side either. One Naga chief from the village of Chingmei, Chingmak, had nevertheless visited Mokokchung several times, beginning about 1920, and did so again in 1934 to complain that Tuensang was restricting his village’s trade—and to swear his fealty to the British king-emperor, George V. This visit followed a tour of Chang territory in January that year by Philip Mills, the subdivisional officer in Mokokchung. Chingmak and Mills got on famously from the first time they met and remained firm friends thereafter. Chingmak had even gone so far as to send one of his sons, Sangbah, to Mokokchung to learn something of the ways of the British overseers of this green and pleasant land. Although the relationship was a distant one, geographically speaking, Chingmak nevertheless kept Mokokchung abreast of affairs in eastern Tuensang as regularly as was needed.
One day in early 1936 a man named Matche, a Kalyo Kengyu from the mixed village of Yimpang, rushed into Chingmei asking for sanctuary. He was lucky to be able to do so without losing his head—Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf described traveling alone in the Naga Hills as akin to suicide—but Matche brought news that was of considerable use to Chingmak, as he was able to provide the chief with information directly from the seat of power of their greatest rival: the village of Pangsha. It is unclear why Matche fled to Chingmei in the first place, but he had upset the people of Pangsha for some reason and was now in fear of his life. The news he brought concerned the extent of the recent ravaging of local villages by Pangsha and its allies on the Burmese side of the Patkoi Hills. Chingmak duly fed this information to Philip Mills in Kohima, where Mills had moved following his promotion to the rank of deputy commissioner in 1935.
Pangsha’s reign of terror was well known in these territories, of course. Survivors had managed to escape the pillaging to spread the alarm to other villages, which served to further propagate Pangsha’s message. Under the leadership of its three principal khel headmen—Mongu, Mongsen, and Santing—it had recently attacked the neighboring villages of Saochu and Kejok, taking a substantial number of heads, and young slaves, in the process. Reports reaching Mokokchung on January 6, 1936, stated that Pangsha and Yimpang had exterminated Kejok on Christmas Day 1935 and that fifty-three heads had been taken. Pangsha had already taken nine heads from Panso and seven from Ngobe in recent weeks. Then, on April 16, 1936, the subdivisional officer reported to Kohima that Pangsha had raided Agching or Saochu and killed about fifty and that since the start of the year Pangsha had taken 140 heads from this village.
Mills estimated in a letter to Shillong on April 29, 1936, that 200 people had lost their lives as a result of this raiding. The future for those who survived as slaves was a terrifying one: they could look forward only to being put to death at some later date as part of a human sacrifice, their heads to adorn the village head tree and other body parts—limbs, hands, and so on—to decorate various parts of the village. Both villages were close to the Control Area—the boundary of which ran through Tuensang—and instability caused by Pangsha, in addition to its rank lawlessness, could have a destabilizing effect on the whole of the Naga Hills. It was also a direct challenge to the authority and prestige of the Raj. Could it not enforce its law even in these remote places? Pangsha didn’t think so and was content to thumb its nose at the king-emperor as a result. Pangsha’s aim was to sow terror among its neighbors; by so doing, it could dominate the region and guarantee its own security from attack. It was the only village in the Naga Hills that had no defenses. As has been seen, intermittent head-hunting was tacitly accepted by the British as part of the Naga way of life; widespread and systematic terror could not, however, be condoned.
For Philip Mills, the reports of Pangsha’s depredations were deeply worrisome. His primary worry was that, if left unchecked, such lawlessness would lap up against the administered territories, for whose security he was directly responsible. He was also concerned for the security of those Naga villages in the Control Area—such as Chingmei—that had demonstrated loyalty, albeit in a distant sense, to the Raj. In these circumstances the question “Who is my neighbor?” was not a difficult one to answer. His friends were in trouble, the peace of the realm was being threatened, and Mills’s conception of his role as the upholder of the king’s peace demanded action. The government of Assam in Shillong and the government of India in Delhi agreed, and Mills was authorized to proceed with a military expedition to punish Pangsha and by so doing to persuade it to desist from its violent practices. The role of the mission was to proceed into the Control Area not to threaten Pangsha but expressly to punish it. If Pangsha, under the threat of British action, appeared to back down during the operation, it was not to be forgiven for its recent activities without formal retribution.
From the outset, the sacking of Pangsha was to be the principal purpose of the raid. New Delhi’s permission was carefully couched in terms that Mills had first advised, namely, the abolition of slavery as an adjunct to both head-hunting and human sacrifice.
India is a party to the Slavery Convention, 1926, and has undertaken to bring about progressively and as soon as possible the complete abolition of slavery in all its forms. It was, however, found necessary to make a reservation in respect of certain outlying and inaccessible areas bordering on Assam and Burma where, it was thought, it would be difficult to implement our undertaking effectively. Recently the Government of India have agreed to the reservation being withdrawn in respect of certain cases including the Naga Hills area in Assam. As a first step towards the fulfilment of the requirement under the Slave Convention to bring about the abolition of slavery in this area, the Government of India, at the request of the Government of Assam, agreed to an expedition, headed by the Deputy Commissioner, Naga Hills, and composed of a column of Assam Rifles. The object of the expedition was to acquaint the headmen of the villages with the determination of Government to suppress the practice of slavery and, if they persisted in an attitude of defiance, to punish them. This action was rendered imperative by the conduct of one of the villages in that area, namely, Pangsha, which, with the assistance of certain other villages, had been raiding and destroying the weaker villages in their neighborhood and holding their captives as slaves in defiance of warning from Government.
It wasn’t the prospect of punishing Pangsha, however, that excited the anthropologist, as well as the administrator, in Mills but rather the prospect of traveling as far as the Patkoi Range, to which no white man had ever journeyed. The entire area beyond Tuensang was unsurveyed, and there was much to discover about the tribespeople living in areas never before exposed to the gaze of Europeans. He knew of the villages that lay beyond—he had met Chingmak, of course—but he had never, nor had any of his predecessors, set foot in these territories. The prospect was an exciting one. He half suspected that it would be his last professional opportunity to undertake a journey of this kind.
Shillong had agreed to Mills’s request that an invitation be extended to Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf to accompany the expedition, and it was an eager Austrian at Wakching who received instructions from Mills to proceed to Mokokchung to prepare for the start of the expedition on November 10, 1936. He traveled—delayed for five days by a bout of malaria that he worried might cause him to miss the expedition altogether—accompanied by his Konyak friend Nlamo and some porters carrying the camping equipment Europeans regarded as indispensable in this terrain: a canvas tent, bedroll, mosquito net, and camp bed.
The normally tiny settlement of Mokokchung was a hive of noisy activity. The home of the local subdivisional officer, G. W. J. Smith, who occupied a European-style bungalow in the town, was now swarming with hundreds of Nagas from neighboring villages—Aos, Lhotas, Rengmas, and Sangtams in particular—who wanted to be hired as porters. They were unable to bear arms against the brutal Pangsherites, who were legend in these parts, so traveling with the expedition as porters was the next best thing to being warriors on a war party. Mills had determined that to sustain the 150 men of the Assam Rifles and the command party, they would need 360 porters to carry their food and camp equipment so far into unknown territory. It was Smith’s responsibility to hire the porters and allocate their loads.
One of the distinctive features of Nagadom was and remains the complete linguistic separation of each tribe. This separation is not so much a difference in dialects as it is entirely different languages. Accordingly, British-appointed interpreters wearing the distinctive red sashes, dobashis, denoting their appointment bustled about, attempting to create seamless communication between the British overseer and the men of many different Naga tribes—few of whom could communicate with each other in their own tongue—who were queuing up for the chance of being a warrior once more. The local doctor, Dr. Vierya, who accompanied the expedition, insisted on inoculating those selected, much to the annoyance of Philip Mills, who regarded the eager medic as something of a fusspot and meddler.
They would be able to count on very little provisioning from the villages through which they passed, even those that were friendly. As subsistence farmers, Nagas rarely had spare food available, barely extracting a living for themselves from the thin soil of their hilltop homes. The expedition would need to carry all its provisions on its back. It would receive gifts from friendly villages along the way, but not enough to support the requirements of 500 hungry mouths. Of course it wasn’t portering that these Nagas in Mokokchung wanted but battle. The prospect of joining a punitive expedition whose task was to fight the rebels at Pangsha was an exciting one for young Naga men whose warrior culture had been emasculated by British laws prohibiting head-hunting and yet for whom taking a head was an important part of their tribal and masculine identities. The irony that they were joining a British military expedition designed to stamp out head-hunting in territories far beyond their own so that they could have the opportunity to take heads probably passed them by. In any case this moral confusion—if it was ever seriously contemplated—was quietly ignored in the face of the eagerly awaited prospect of a fight. The presence among them of the uniformed platoons of the Assam Rifles, smart in their light blue uniforms, canvas webbing, and British Service Lee-Enfield .303 rifles, together with the long sword-bayonet that, when fixed to the end of the rifle, looked very much like a Naga spear, only served to generate more martial excitement.
For their part, Mills and Major W. R. B. (“Bill”) Williams, the commandant of the Third Battalion, Assam Rifles, were considerably less enthusiastic about the prospect of violence. Their task was to execute the law, not conduct a war, and if the expedition could be undertaken without bloodshed, so much the better. The prospects of a nonviolent resolution were slim, however, they mused over supper that night with Fürer-Haimendorf and Smith. The Nagas’ favorite military tactic was the ambush, in which they were very proficient, and the deep ravines and thick vegetation of the hill country made attacks of this kind very successful against long, strung-out columns. They thought of the previous infamous punitive expedition against the Konyak village of Chinglong on February 5, 1913, when so many men had been killed. It had taken four months to subdue the Nagas on that occasion. Would this be any different? Whatever happened, they all believed—unlike the excited porters who were already considering the prospects of victory—that the subjugation of Pangsha would not be a walkover.
Two days of organization were required before, at 8 a.m. on Friday, November 13, the long files of men left Mokokchung for their distant adventure. Bamboo cups of zu, a traditional farewell gift to departing war parties, were offered by the gaonbura to the command party (Mills, Williams, and Fürer-Haimendorf) as the mile-long column began to wind its way down into the valley leading east, most of the village watching the events with a solemnity that contrasted starkly with the excitement and noise of previous days. After leaving Mokokchung the route wound down around the cultivated hillsides deep into the Dikhu Valley and crossed the river, which flowed lightly in this postmonsoon period, before climbing stiffly into the hills once more, with the first day’s camp located at Chare. An advance guard of twelve sepoys led the way, followed by the command party leading the main party of Assam Rifles. The porters followed, led by Smith and guarded by small groups of sepoys, a group of whom also brought up the rear.
The track down to the Dikhu River was poor, and the ramshackle bridge across it was too slight to accept more than a few men at a time. Most men waded across. It was a hard first day’s march. The weather was warm, and Mills described himself as “fairly cooked” but was somewhat dismissive of the fitness and attitude of Smith, who appeared to struggle with the terrain. It would get worse, Mills considered. He was right. That day’s march was a foretaste of what was to come, as the route east ran against the grain of the country, in which the mountain ranges ran roughly north-south. Steep climbs into the hills were followed by equally steep descents into thick, warm valley bottoms before heading, it seemed, directly up into the skies again.
When they reached their destination toward the end of the afternoon, they were met by a delegation of village elders offering gifts of fish taken from the Dikhu. Later these gifts were added to by five enormous pigs, four goats, “and chickens without number.” “Of course,” Mills noted, “we shan’t do as well as that everywhere.” The first task on arriving outside Chare was the organization of the campsite for 500 men. The village had prepared the site and built a number of rudimentary shelters, which the porters and sepoys immediately got to work improving. There were tents for Williams’s sepoys and the command element, but most of the porters slept under the stars. Chare was friendly territory, and defenses were not required. Before long fires were lit across the hillside, soon followed by the smell of roast goat, pig, and chicken that would satisfy the hungriest of appetites.
The following day—Saturday, November 14—dawned wet and cold. A heavy mist had draped itself over the mountains. It failed, however, to dampen the enthusiasm of the expectant warriors. What did this more effectively than anything else was the extreme difficulty of the march. As the crow flies, the distance between Chare and Phire-ahire, their destination that night, was a mere ten miles. But in miles walked it seemed three or four times as long. Mills admitted to his wife, Pamela, in his daily letter that he had had a “bellyful of hills today.” On leaving Chare the path dropped steeply 2,000 feet into the valley (a descent undertaken in heavy rain), climbed 1,500 feet to the village of Thurigare before dropping into another valley, through which flowed the Chimei River, and then rose yet again some 3,000 feet to their camp.
The welcome they received from the villagers of Phire-ahire made up for the agony of the march. Mills and Fürer-Haimendorf (to whom Mills referred affectionately in his letters as “the Baron”) were well received by the villagers and were given a demonstration of the crossbow, a weapon in common use in the Sangtam territory into which they had moved, and the usual gifts of food—“three enormous pigs, a cow, three goats, ten chickens, some excellent fish.” Mills was quick to identify deficiencies in Smith, who was responsible for the logistics of the expedition and for managing the porters, who by some oversight (one of many, it seemed) had neglected to provide sufficient vegetables among the foodstuffs to feed the column. They enjoyed a pleasant meal of soup, fish, barking deer, dried fruit, and, because of Smith’s carelessness, tinned baked beans rather than fresh vegetables. For his part, Fürer-Haimendorf was less concerned with the lack of vegetables than with the demonstration by Phire-ahire’s gaonbura of the crossbow. It was a wicked-looking weapon firing foot-long poisoned bamboo arrows tipped with iron-barbed heads.aa The gaonbura boasted that a wild boar struck by such an arrow would not run more than thirty yards: “The poison is applied in thick layers just behind the head, and the shaft nicked so that it breaks off easily, leaving the poisoned head in the wound. Sometime ago Mills had obtained a small quantity of this substance and sent it to Calcutta to be analyzed. It had not been identified, but experiments proved that it was a powerful poison, causing death by paralyzing the respiratory organs. The victim, the report continued, could be saved by the administration of oxygen through artificial respiration. Not exactly a comforting thought many days’ march from medical aid.”
A calm and much more pleasant day followed as the column wound its way through Sangtam territory to the village of Chongtore, where the men were to spend two nights. They left Phire-ahire at 7:30 a.m. The first steep descent of some 2,500 feet was followed by a long climb to 6,500 feet. Mills and Fürer-Haimendorf left the column to find its own way to Chongtore while they indulged their anthropological instincts by visiting a string of Sangtam villages never before visited by Europeans—Holongba, Sangsomo, and Anangba—but whose inhabitants knew Mills through their own regular visits to Mokokchung. Many of these villagers had volunteered to serve in the 2,000-strong Naga Labour Corps, which had been recruited by the British to serve in France during World War I. Most had thought they were signing up for the head-hunting expedition of a lifetime and had been disappointed to find that they were not even allowed to fight against the enemies of the empire, instead expending their martial energies in road building in France. One of these veterans whom Mills wanted to visit at Anangba was Chirongchi. It was with some amusement that he discovered that this incorrigible old rogue—a “magnificent specimen” who had plenty of enemies—had secreted a Lee-Enfield rifle down his trouser leg when he was discharged and brought the weapon, together with ninety rounds of ammunition, back to his khel. How many bullets had he discharged over the years? Rather reluctantly, Mills was forced to confiscate the gun. “I simply couldn’t let him go round slugging his enemies with it,” he told Pamela. The expedition left Anangba after Fürer-Haimendorf had taken a photograph of Chirongchi with the skull of Pukovi, a notorious Sema scoundrel whom he had killed, presumably to local approbation. With his military rifle? Possibly. Mills looked at the Viennese anthropologist’s camera with envy. Such things had not been invented, he observed, when he had begun his work twenty years before.bb
They stayed comfortably at Chongtore, the last place in the hills where they didn’t need to consider security and therefore have to build a palisade around the camp. When they traveled farther east into Yimsungr and Chang territory, their safety would become increasingly less sure. The gifts of food from Chongtore that night were listed by Mills as “one cow, five pigs, four goats and a mass of chickens and eggs.” That evening they received visits from the gaonburas of the neighboring villages, all coming to pay their respects to the deputy commissioner for the Naga Hills—“a pretty hard bitten lot,” Mills noted as they drank their proffered zu. As the campfires blazed across the hillside that night, the column enjoyed its last night of peace.
Although the next day was spent in Chongtore and was designed to be a rest day for the porters, who were bearing the brunt of the expedition’s physical challenge, the day was wet, bitingly cold, and miserable. The expedition was being conducted outside the monsoon period, which runs from April until October, as travel in the hills was much more difficult during the rainy season. Yet here was weather that was unusually unseasonable. Mills and Fürer-Haimendorf managed to visit both Chongtore and a neighboring village, Liresu, but concluded that these communities were rather poor and miserable. That night a storm blew wildly through the hills, blowing the flimsy roofs off the porter’s shelters and soaking them before the day’s march to Helipong, which Mills knew from experience would be a hard one. Yet it would also be a high point of the journey, as Helipong sat majestically at the highest point between Mokokchung and the Patkois. From its peak one could see all the way back to the Brahmaputra, glistening in the far distance to the west, and the long blue stain in the lower sky of the Patkoi Hills to the east.
On Tuesday, November 17, the entire caravan packed itself up and, in good heart despite the rain, begin the inevitable descent far into the valley below. The river crossings in this valley—four in a row—were made over logs, which Mills hated because he had very poor balance. Then began the steep ascent to Helipong, some 7,280 feet above sea level. The forest ran out at about 7,000 feet, and the men climbed slowly upward into the cold clouds. As they reached the summit of Mount Helipong, they emerged from the mist into bright sunshine and the welcome of the tiny Chang village of some twenty houses, an outpost of the Yimsungr tribe. The view in every direction was magnificent, making up for the poverty of the hamlet. Mills was always astonished at the view from Helipong: “You can see from the Burma boundary to the Plains. . . . I loved every minute of the view, for I saw for the first time villages I had heard of for years. I could see from the Konyak country I visited in the north, to the Sangtams I have been to in the south.” Fürer-Haimendorf was equally astonished at the view:
We overlooked the land of the Lhotas and Aos and beyond the distant hills of the Konyaks. The country of the Changs and Sangtams lay at our feet and in the east the unexplored mountains of the Kalyo Kengyus and the Patkoi Range, with the 12,622 feet peak of Mount Saramati, were clearly visible. Here in Helipong we were on the watershed between the Brahmaputra and the Irrawaddy. The rivers to the east belong to the basin of the Chindwin; following them, if you were lucky enough not to lose your head en route, you would arrive in Burma. All these high ridges, running almost at right angles to our proposed route, were not a very encouraging sight, and yet the glimpse we had caught of the distant Patkoi Range only sharpened the wish to set foot in that distant, unknown land.
This was a location from which the sun allowed the Assam Rifles’ heliograph to send messages in Morse code back to the rear party at Mokokchung, confirming the status of the column. The next time they would be able to communicate with Mokokchung would be on the return journey—if they got back, and if the sun allowed the heliograph apparatus to function.
Camp was set up, and for the first time security drills were practiced by both the sepoys and porters. Local gaonburas were entertained in traditional fashion as they came to discuss the affairs of their villages with Mills while Williams busied himself with ensuring that his sepoys and Smith’s eager porters were prepared for any alarm now that they were entering territory that harbored uncertain sensibilities. As quietness fell over the camp that night, the rain began to drum against the canvas of the Europeans’ tents, thudding heavily against the flimsy banana-leaf roofs of the shelters and saturating the blankets of those unfortunate enough to be huddled around the dying embers of the fires. No threat emerged during the night, as indeed none was expected, but it was best to be prepared.
As the dawn struggled to appear the following morning—Wednesday, November 18—the camp emerged quickly from its sodden slumbers and the column made haste to climb down from Helipong’s heights. The objective that day was to move from the territory of the Chang to that of the Yimsungr, resting at the end of the day at the village of Kuthurr. There the column found that although outward appearances were civil, an underlying hostility sat like a heavy blanket over the village. Despite the customary gift of pigs and chickens, considered Fürer-Haimendorf, had “we arrived singly, or even in a small number, there can be no doubt that their joy at such unusual guests would have taken other forms, and our chances of ever leaving Kuthurr would have been slight, for our skulls would have certainly occupied places of honor in the men’s house.” That night, for the first time, Williams supervised the construction of a strong bamboo palisade and practiced the call to arms several times before he was satisfied that his men, and the porters, who formed a second line of defense inside the perimeter, were satisfactorily prepared for the possibility of an attack. None came, however. Indeed, Nagas tended not to attack at night, which was a boon for the exhausted column, giving it a chance to recover each night from its daily exertions up hill and down dale. But the palisade was an insurance policy, and an attitude of alertness generated by the practice alarms and nightly picket duty ensured that all the men knew the expedition was a military and not an anthropological one, with the ever-present prospect of danger.
Kuthurr’s reluctant duty was followed the next day by a march to the village of Chentang. Although some villages beyond—most notably Chingmei—would be overwhelmingly friendly, the affections of the rest of the region were uncertain. This was a traditionally troubled area, the ethnic nexus of three often-warring tribes: Changs, Yimsungrs, and Kalyo Kengyus. While the expedition was encamped outside Chentang on November 19, the last message came by runner from Pangsha, laughing at Mills’s diplomatic overtures and suggesting that the villagers would not give up their legitimately acquired slaves and that the members of the expedition “were probably all women, and the sooner they came to attack them the better.”
News of the progress of the 500 or so imperial troops, the bayonets of the 150 sepoys fixed to the ends of their rifles so that the sun—when it shone in these unusually cold and overcast days—could glint off the highly polished steel and resemble the long Naga spears of their enemies, was being reported nervously through the hills. Mills’s hope was that this threat of force would persuade the Pangsha leaders to parley rather than commit their menfolk to what must inevitably be a one-sided battle given the difference in armaments. Early indications, however, were that Pangsha refused to be intimidated. Would Pangsha fight? If so, it represented a fearsome proposition: over a thousand warriors desperate both to demonstrate resistance to the demands of the distant Raj and to protect their village, massive by Naga standards and the center of all power in the mid–Patkoi Range. It would be a mistake for anyone, even armed with the dead-accurate Lee-Enfield rifle, to take this threat lightly. A wrong move in unknown terrain or an ambush by Nagas, for whom this country was their well-known backyard, could quickly upset the balance between the two sides that in terms of firepower clearly favored the Assam Rifles but in terms of local knowledge vastly favored Pangsha. Not only were the Nagas adept at close-quarters fighting in this terrain but they were armed with weapons that favored fighting in the close scrub, high grass, and thick vegetation of the hillsides and valleys. The traditional Naga spear—deadly at twenty paces in the hands of a trained warrior—was accompanied by poisoned arrows (with fearsome iron-barbed heads) fired from crossbows of the sort they had seen at Chare, with an effective range of seventy-five yards. In addition, the many paths and tracks leading into the village would be thickly covered with panji.
Nagas rarely attacked at night, preferring ambush. Because Naga villages were perched precariously on the tops of mountains and were well protected, pitched battles were unusual. Heads tended to be taken in one-to-one combat or when lone individuals or groups of unprotected villagers—such as women and children fetching water—were caught by their enemies and slaughtered. Ambush was perfected. Panji were one threat, but there were others. Pits dug deep into the ground on paths, in which sharp spikes were hammered into the bottom to impale their victim, were another, as were rope tripwires stretched across jungle paths to release a poisoned bolt from a hidden crossbow into the chest of the unwary victim. But at no stage were Mills and Williams concerned that they might come off worse in an encounter with the rebel Nagas, even though the possibility that they might receive a bloody nose was a very real one. On November 22 Philip Mills wrote to Pamela in far-distant Kohima with instructions should he not return, noting, presumably for her comfort, that if he were to die, the “effect of the local poison is pleasingly instantaneous.”
In all other respects the two men were confident of success. They had enough friendly Nagas around them in the region from villages that had long borne the brunt of Pangsha’s slaving and head-hunting aggression; their force of 150 Lee-Enfields was strong; most of the sepoys, although now members of Assam’s paramilitary police regiment—the five-battalion-strong Assam Rifles—were former long-service regular Gurkha soldiers who would be staunch in a fight, and they were commanded by a professional Gurkha officer, Major Williams. Mills and Williams also knew from personal experience the truth of Hilaire Belloc’s dictum in this kind of imperial encounter, expressed powerfully only a few short decades before in the ditty “Whatever happens, we have got / The Maxim gun, and they have not.”cc It wasn’t Maxim guns with which the force was armed but drum-fed Lewis guns and bolt-action .303-inch Lee-Enfields that, well deployed by disciplined troops, would be more than a match for even the fiercest Kalyo Kengyu army. The expedition was now deep in hostile territory, and Mills and Williams went to some lengths to drill their baggage train—the 360 Naga porters (“coolies,” as Mills described them) carrying the expedition’s supplies—in erecting, patrolling, and defending the bamboo stockades they now had to build around their encampment at the end of each day’s march.
Mills observed that the village of Chentang was overlooked by the huge enemy village of Sangpurr, which belonged to the Yimsungr tribe, and was shown the location outside the village where recently a Sangpurr raiding party had caught a Chentang villager unawares, first spearing him and then lopping off his head. Chentang was a miserable, muddy assortment of ill-made houses, the dilapidation the result of repeated Sangpurr attacks that placed its unfortunate villagers in a perpetual state of insecurity and anxiety, not to mention homelessness. There was in effect a continuous, if somewhat spluttering, state of war between these villages, and it is no surprise that the hard-put-upon people of Chentang were delighted to see Mills arrive in such force, the neatly accoutered sepoys impressive in their uniforms and canvas webbing. Allegiance to the Raj would deliver substantial security benefits for those villages on the side of the (British) law from far-distant Mokokchung, but it took a brave gaonbura to ally his village wholeheartedly with a far-distant power when this was its first armed foray into territory not in either the Administered or Control Areas, and there was no guarantee of return visits anytime soon. But the “stout hearts” of Chentang, as Mills described the villagers, seemed to be doing well enough on their own account.
One of Mills’s ambitions was to persuade, by his version of armed diplomacy, any villages in the region that might otherwise side with Pangsha. His intent quite simply was to divide and rule, and while at Chentang he invited emissaries from the local villages to parley. He succeeded in persuading elders from Sangpurr to meet him, and they were offered gifts of food and clothes, all the while eyeing the impressive parade of heavily armed sepoys. Likewise, too, the village of Panso, which Mills described as “big and truculent,” sent representatives. They received gifts of rum and red cloth (prized by Nagas because the color red denoted high social status: gaonburas in the Administered Area received red blankets from the British as a sign of their exalted status as village leaders) but accepted them with impassive faces, undoubtedly nevertheless drinking in with their eyes, as Mills intended them to, the large size, purposeful demeanor, and disciplined authority of his small army. He had every intention of ensuring that the authority of the Raj and of the king-emperor, Edward VIII, was respected throughout these fractured lands. And he was pleased with the effects of his overtures at Chentang. “I could not help admiring the pluck of the Sangpurr and Panso headmen,” he recalled. “There they were, in our camp, disarmed and surrounded by Sepoys, yet they showed no emotion. I told Panso I would visit their village and that if they did us no harm we would do them none.”
The following day the expedition said its farewells to Chentang and marched to Chingmei, which would be the advanced base for the final move to Pangsha. The village and the nearby camp were at 6,000 feet, although the men had to climb a saddle at over 7,000 feet to reach their destination. Chingmei, forewarned, send an advance party to guide the long single file (it stretched for over a mile) to safety, as the region was notorious for ambushes and the sepoys, who marched together, could not protect every one of the porters when they were strung out on the march. In his report Mills recorded, “On November 20th we reached our advanced base at Chingmei where the loyalty of my old friend Chingmak was of inestimable value. There we found that Pangsha had handed over to him all their slaves but one; they still defied us to visit them, and I found they had terrorised the whole neighbourhood, threatening to destroy any village which helped us.” Chingmak had already prepared eleven large bamboo huts in the midst of the camp area. Chingmei lived in a perpetual state of war with its neighbors, and Chingmak proudly displayed the head of a notorious Panso rogue who himself had had fifty heads to his credit. Chingmei gained some consolation from the sight of this withered specimen being stuck ignominiously on the “head tree” at the outskirts of the village, where it would be seen with a shiver (hopefully) of fear and concern by any Panso native approaching the village with nefarious intent. The biggest surprise was the news that Pangsha had voluntarily given up three of the four slaves it had taken and had left them with Chingmei as a sign of its good intentions. The fourth slave had already been sold into Burma and was, by all accounts, unrecoverable. By now five surrendered slaves had been collected. Mills looked at them with interest: “A girl about 17 or 18, a boy about 12, two little boys and a little girl. All except the little boy are in a pretty bad way, and seem stupid with all they have been through. . . . A very pathetic sight. I am having them fed on the best in the land and they are being treated with every kindness. Language is a real difficulty, as four of them are from up north and can’t understand more than a word or two of Chang.”
It was imperative that the stockade be secure and the discipline of the porters exemplary if they were not to be picked off individually by Pangsha raiders, or if by their inattention they inadvertently made the entire camp vulnerable to attack. And yet Mills fumed at the ineptitude of the men. It had been many years since the last punitive expedition, and the skills and drills of setting up such a large camp in the midst of enemy territory had clearly been lost. The retreat was sounded repeatedly by the bugles of the Assam Rifles as a practice to rehearse the camp for any attack, the bamboo gates of the stockade being closed and barred at each time. Slowly the performance of the porters improved, and Williams, Mills, and Smith were gradually satisfied that a disciplined routine was being adopted and that the Naga porters understood what to do in an emergency. Despite the drills, as darkness fell a foolish sentry opened the gate to allow a number of men to wander out and collect water, strictly against orders. They managed to return, however, with their heads still attached to their bodies in time for a severe admonishment from an angry Williams.
Mills continued his policy of armed diplomacy in the area of Chingmei, although the following day, November 21, was unseasonably wet, with heavy rain all day. But on November 22 he set out to visit the village of Yimpang. It was a slave-raiding village, and although Mills expected it to be relatively friendly, he took with him fifty sepoys and a piper. It was to be a day of firsts for the people of Yimpang. None had ever before seen a white man, and none had ever enjoyed the pleasure until then of hearing the skirl of the great Highland bagpipe.
To say we got a hearty welcome would be an exaggeration. The people were pretty frightened for no white man has ever been there before. It is over 7,000 feet up, and the first thing we did was to look at the view. It was rather thrilling, looking down on to unsurveyed country, and we were busy for some time taking bearings and putting on the map villages which were mere names before. . . .
The sight of the Sepoys with rifles and fixed bayonets must have been rather shaking to Yimpang’s nerves, but we had a piper with us and after [a Scottish air] the people began to look more cheerful.
One needed to look no further than the prominent head tree in the village to see the grisly fruits of the villagers’ recent labors. Five heads from the village of Saochu were impaled on it. The villagers’ pride in taking these heads, Mills determined, needed to be tempered, and he decided to insist on their confiscation. But he would not do so while inside Yimpang, where he and his men were at a disadvantage. He bided his time until safely outside the village’s fortifications and was able to observe carefully that these comprised a “double fence with a ditch in the middle [that] was simply bristling with poisoned bamboo spikes.” Once outside, he successfully demanded the heads, which he told his wife he would send to his friend Henry Balfour at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Yimpang at least was trying to be friendly and was determined to make peace, which Mills hoped would also have a positive effect on Pangsha.
The next and last village that the expedition would reach before Pangsha was Noklak. Mills likewise wanted peace there, but so far no emissaries had been received from the village, which was an ominous sign. After the twelve-mile march to Yimpang was concluded, however, Mills was told that a Noklak war party had been keeping track of his progress on a parallel ridge. Would Noklak fight? Mills could not be sure, although as each day passed the certainty of a fight with Pangsha became surer.
On November 23, 1936, tumultuous news arrived in the camp with the mail, which was followed by a runner from Mokokchung. The newspapers were full of rumors that the king-emperor, the man who underwrote Mills’s very authority, was threatening to marry the divorced American Mrs. Wallace Simpson. It was simply not possible, Mills remarked indignantly to his wife—because the people would not support it—for Mrs. Simpson to be crowned queen of England. Something would have to give. The loss of prestige for the monarchy suddenly loomed large in both Mills’s and Williams’s consciousness, and they determined to deploy a stiff upper lip and not to say anything of it in the camp so as not to depress the men.
aSee the drawing in Appendix A.
bFürer-Haimendorf took some 1,157 photographs during 1936 and 1937 and approximately 291 during the punitive expedition to Pangsha. All can be seen online at http://himalaya.socanth.cam.ac.uk.
cBelloc, The Modern Traveller.