Wahidullah was to be my first bearer or personal servant. He was a Pathan; his English was halting and I knew little Urdu but he managed to explain that I should go with him. I was to stay in a hotel in Peshawar until the following day, when a party from the Essex Regiment would be coming down the Khyber, and I could go back with them.
It seemed strange to me that there was no official communication from the battalion to which I had been attached; but I thought what the hell, this is India, things are obviously different here. Back in Bombay I had sent a telegram to the battalion, in accordance with what I’d learnt of service customs and etiquette while at Sandhurst, indicating my expected time of arrival at the station in Peshawar. But I might have known: no one was particularly interested in the arrival of another attached officer – no one, that is, save Wahidullah.
In fact it was pure chance that led Wahidullah to meet me. He had got the buzz from one of the battalion’s mess servants, who overheard the Adjutant mention my expected arrival to the CO at breakfast. Wahidullah was without a job; he decided to appoint himself my bearer. He collected his ‘chits’ (references from previous masters) and caught the next bus to Peshawar.
Wahidullah took control of all my gear, tipped the coolies (porters) and hailed two tongas, one for himself and one for me. The tonga was the most common form of public hire vehicle in those days when taxis were so few and far between; it was a two-wheeled trap, usually drawn by an emaciated pony, with the driver sitting up front and the passenger behind him, facing backwards. My luggage was piled up around me and off we set for Dean’s Hotel.
Dean’s was the only European-style hotel in Peshawar, well known before I was born. Officers usually stayed at the Officers’ Club but of course I was not yet a member. It was my first introduction to an up-country hotel and I founded it clean and quite comfortable. My accommodation consisted of a bed/sitting-room with a bathroom leading off it. The principal piece of furniture was a charpoy, a wooden-framed bed strung with broad bands of cotton tape; above the bed a mosquito net was supported by light bamboo poles. One had to supply one’s own bedding – every sahib travelled with a canvas holdall containing mattresses, sheets, blanket and pillow. To complete the furniture there was a plain wooden writing desk with an upright chair and a lounging chair made of cane with long extensions upon which to stretch one’s legs. A large electric fan hung overhead.
The bathroom was equally basic: an enamel washbasin and jug reposing on a wooden stand and a large galvanized tin washtub stood on the brick floor. Beside the tub was a big earthenware pot called a chatti containing cold water. When one wanted to bathe, one’s bearer sent for the bhisti, the water-carrier, as all who have read Kipling’s Gunga Din will know. The bhisti kept a number of five-gallon kerosene drums heating on an open fire and when called he would dump ten gallons of boiling water into the tub, then add cold water from the chatti. As for that final necessity, the bathroom contained an enamel chamber pot – the ‘peespa’ as the bearer called it – and also a ‘thunder box’, a wooden commode holding an enamel receptacle with a lid. These two pots were removed for emptying and cleaning by the sweeper, a low-caste person, for none of the other servants would do such dirty work; he dumped the contents into a large can which was itself emptied after dark into a wheeled canister drawn by a bullock and driven by another sweeper. Such was the crude but universal system throughout up-country India.
The following day the party duly arrived from the Essex Regiment: a subaltern named 2nd Lt Hazelton, a couple of NCOs and twenty men. But they had come to Peshawar not to escort me to my new battalion at Landi Kotal, but to collect the battalion’s pay for the month.
First the men were given a couple of days off, though there was nothing much for them to do other than meet the men of another British battalion, the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, stationed in Peshawar. Hazelton booked into the Officers Club; I stayed on at Dean’s but naturally I spent the days with him, eager to hear about Landi Kotal and the battalion to which I was now attached.
As soon as their short break was over, Hazelton and his men went to the Imperial Bank of India in Peshawar and I went with them. I was astonished to find that, according to regulations, we had to count the money ourselves, a very long and laborious procedure. Not only did we have to count each individual note, already counted out into bundles by the bank’s staff, but we also had to open every single roll of coins, count them and stuff them back into the original packets; then Hazelton had to certify that every last coin and note had been checked. At that time the Imperial Bank of India was not a commercial bank but a part of the machinery of government, and it struck me as odd that the certification of a very junior officer should carry more weight than the head cashier of a government bank.
Eventually the money was counted. It was loaded into a large cast-iron cash box, the lid was shut and secured with a massive padlock, and the whole box was wrapped with a huge chain with links as big as a man’s index finger. Then the box was heaved onto a tonga for transport to the railway station – the poor pony could barely stagger forward under its weight – with the escort marching alongside.
For the final part of my rail journey from Peshawar to Landi Kotal I discovered that I would be travelling in a second-class carriage, along with the soldiers and the cash box. We were all herded into the train and the box was secured to the compartment floor, the chain being passed through iron rings let into the floor. This was the regular procedure; every local knew that this was how the battalion’s cash was transported. Even if the local tribesmen raided the train and overran the very small escort, their efforts would meet with doubtful rewards for they would have to destroy the coach to get at the box.
Our train consisted of only a few coaches, but even so we had two locomotives at the front and two more at the rear, to pull and push us up the steep sides of the Khyber Pass. As a romantically inclined newcomer to this famous outpost of Empire, I was impatient to get going, but to Hazelton and the others this was just part of their routine. At last the train pulled out of Peshawar, heading for the ever-turbulent Frontier. This was where the young soldier could learn his business of fighting a real enemy – and perhaps win his spurs.
The Frontier, as opposed to the North West Frontier Province of which Peshawar was the capital, was a strip of land some fifty to a hundred miles wide between British India and Afghanistan. Nowhere was there a clear demarcation except at road crossing places such as Landi Khana, only a few miles beyond Landi Kotal where I was destined to live.
Part settled and part unsettled, the Frontier was inhabited by various warrior tribes: Afridi, Mahsud, Shinwari and others. All are fair-skinned, many are blue-eyed; it is said they are descended from Alexander’s phalanxes. Generically they are Pathans and speak a language of their own called Pashto; in some areas the language is soft, in others harsh and guttural, but it is the same from north to south.
In those days the tribal areas were defined within a theoretical boundary known as the Durand Line, an arbitrary line drawn on a map in 1893 by a civil servant of that name in the Government of India. But the Frontier was always in turmoil and many of the Frontier towns had quite large garrisons of the regular army to protect local settlers as well as to police the border. There were also some garrisons stationed inside tribal territory, the largest being at Razmak, and the road connecting Razmak with the outside world was picketed with troops to project those escorting the convoys of supplies. Like many a remote garrison, Razmak was plagued by tribal raiders; armed and belligerent, the tribesmen were a constant threat. Even among themselves, any disagreement was customarily settled in blood and blood feuds were carried on from generation to generation.
In addition to the regular army garrisons, some tribal areas were semi-controlled by groups of irregulars recruited from among the tribesmen, generally called Levies or Scouts; this served not only to relieve the pressure on the regular army but also to keep at least some of the tribesmen out of trouble. Their officers were British, seconded from the regular army, and their corps were famous: the South Waziristan Scouts, the Kurrum Militia, the Zhob Militia and the Gilgit Scouts, to name just a few. Many British officers, once bitten with this type of service, stayed for ever, sacrificing advancement in their own regiments.
Britishers were not permitted to move about in tribal territory, unless in a formal convoy or with an escort of khassadars – ‘insurance men’ as I called them. They were hired from the local villages, recruited and paid by the Political Officer who lived in the fort located within the Landi Kotal camp; he also provided them with a uniform of sorts, a khaki shirt and trousers, and some .303 ammunition. The khassadars all had their own rifles, either stolen or copies of the Army’s .303 SMLE (Short Muzzle Lee-Enfield); to them the ammunition – the real stuff, as opposed to the doubtful homemade variety – was worth more than gold. And they were effective. Had any British officer been killed while under their care, not only would official retribution follow swiftly but the khassadar system would be stopped, drawing down the ire of the tribal chiefs; the miscreants would probably be killed in their turn by their own people, for ‘spoiling the market’. I was to spend many days escorted by these men, wandering over this grand country on the borders with Afghanistan.
As our train puffed and pulled its way up into the Khyber Pass I became ever more fascinated by the wild mountainous scenery and eagerly hopped out at each station, along with the riflemen posted on either side of the coach.
The overall impression was of a rocky barren country dotted with tribal villages and the occasional military post or fort. All the villages were walled in, each with a watchtower standing over it; not even the locals moved about at night unless on some nefarious foray. There were small patches of cultivation surrounding each village, but the soil was poor and their attempts at agriculture looked pretty ineffectual to me. Indeed, as I later learned, were it not for the annual subsidy the villagers received from the government – in return for good behaviour – and the rake-off they got from camel caravans travelling through the Pass, they would have been penniless and forced to pursue a life of banditry. At the India end of the Pass was the ominous-looking fort of Jamrud. Standing like a huge brown battleship, its walls and bastions over ten feet thick, it guarded the entrance to the Pass as well as being a checkpoint for the endless kafilas (caravans) that daily crossed the border with Afghanistan. Three routes run through the Pass: the caravan road, the motor road and the railway. The caravans follow the stream bed, motor vehicles the easier contours, and the railway zigzags its way along the cliffsides through dozens of tunnels. The railway climbs over two thousand feet in twenty miles, often up gradients of 1 in 33. When it was built, for strategic reasons, in 1920–25 it was considered an impossible undertaking and on completion it excited the admiration of railway engineers all over the world.
The first twelve miles of the Pass are particularly impressive as the railway runs through Ali Masjid gorge, between narrow clefts and towering cliffs dominated by the peak of Tartarra, rising sheer to 6800 feet. Here one can see how impregnable the Pass must have seemed to ancient invaders. After the gorge the Pass widens out considerably, in some places to a mile or two, and there are more villages and signs of cultivation.
At last we reached Landi Kotal, the military cantonment where I would spend the next few months on attachment to the Essex Regiment.
Apart from the military cantonment, Landi Kotal comprised a fort, a caravanserai or inn to accommodate travellers with the camel trains, and of course the railway station. The cantonment housed two infantry battalions, one British and one Indian, as well as a mountain battery, a brigade HQ and several ancillary units including a joint (British and Indian) hospital. The third battalion of the brigade, usually Gurkhas, held the frontier post five miles away at Landi Khana, on the Frontier with Afghanistan.
In my day the camp was not a very aesthetic picture, but it was compact: row upon row of neatly spaced mud-walled barracks with corrugated iron roofs. As Landi Kotal stands on a high plateau the winters here were bitterly cold and these corrugated iron roofs provided very little insulation from the weather, allowing the cold to penetrate in winter and acting as a griddle during the searing heat of summer. The camp was enclosed within a triple barbed-wire apron with defensive posts sited at tactical intervals and gates that were normally kept locked. Outside the gates was the area of the fort and just beyond the perimeter to the east lay an emergency landing ground. The gates were manned by day and all local people needed a valid pass to enter, but at night the various posts were also manned, with searchlights playing upon the terrain outside the barbed wire. Anyone approaching the camp was challenged and if he didn’t respond he would be fired upon. The fort itself was small and out of date; it played no part in the cantonment’s defences.
The caravanserai was fascinating, an endless scene of movement and colour. The traders and travellers came from all over Central Asia and the bulk of their goods was carried on camels, ponies and donkeys. On any given day one might hear a dozen different languages and dialects being spoken. I spent many interesting hours in the serai – escorted, of course, by two or more khassadars to ensure the sightseer’s safety. Few of the traders bothered to open their bales at Landi Kotal, preferring to keep their wares for sale at the big city markets of Peshawar and Delhi; but I did manage to make one precious buy. This was an Isfahan carpet, depicting the Tree of Life in the most luscious colours with all the animals looking very lifelike. I have the carpet to this day and have been told by experts that these Tree of Life carpets were usually made in pairs; so I suspect that the one I have was stolen – particularly as the dealer was so eager to sell.
As for the Essex Regiment itself, I found it efficient but typically dull. As in many British infantry battalions at that time, the officers were enmeshed in a stultifying promotion block. Many of the subalterns had more than twenty years’ service behind them, but still were only responsible for platoons of thirty men and had no prospect of getting command of a company for years to come. The Colonel himself, a rather pompous man and lacking in any sense of humour, wasn’t going any further after his tenure of command. My company commander, Captain Grimwood, had had an excellent career during the First World War when he won the DSO and attained the rank of full colonel; later he was sent with a detachment aboard a British cruiser to Danzig, to install the great Polish pianist Paderewski as the first premier of an independent Poland. But now Grimwood was way down the list of captains in the regular army, though at least he had his own company.
The men were a good lot, mosdy from London and the eastern counties, but they led a very dull life. The majority had signed on for seven years with the colours and five years with the reserve. This meant that if a man who enlisted in England had been posted to a battalion just about to start its tour of foreign service, he might spend all of his seven years overseas – a dim prospect in places like Landi Kotal. They were poorly paid, something over a shilling a day, but the only place they could spend it was in the ‘wet canteen’ on beer, eggs and potatoes or in a poorly stocked Indian bazaar selling cheap brass pieces and the like. Amusement was limited to sport or the occasional film show in the so-called cinema, featuring old silent movies accompanied by someone playing a rinkidink piano. The terrain was too rocky for football, so the main game was field hockey at which the men excelled. The only other entertainment was a twice-yearly concert party, with lots of talent and generally a topical rollicking show.
On the whole I got on well with the men of Eleven Platoon. They were an ordinary bunch, none of them outstanding soldiers, but good dependable footsloggers who would fight doggedly when called upon, and I learned a lot from them – above all, how to deal with miscreants. The key, I found, was to be fair but firm. Each man had a crime sheet, or ‘sheet roll’ as it was called, which followed him throughout his service; but most crimes were of such a trivial nature that it struck me as unfair to enter them for ever on the records. A sharp ‘dressing down’ was enough to meet the needs of most situations; I made it plain that I was not to be fooled with and the men clearly respected this.
In Eleven Platoon there was one man who had a whole book of minor crimes: Private Connolly. When he joined the Army he had been asked if he had any ‘previous trade or profession’ and he had answered ‘burglary’; at the top of his sheet, therefore, was the one word ‘Burglar’. This was followed by scores of minor misdemeanours committed throughout his career. But the first time he came before me, I told him that his sheet roll was full enough already without me adding to it and that he and I were going to have a new and better relationship. And we did.
Private Worts was more of a problem. He was continually scrapping with his comrades and all because of his name. Otherwise a rather insignificant character, he could be roused to a fury by anyone calling him ‘Warts’; he insisted that his name should be pronounced ‘Wens’. Naturally the others enjoyed baiting him, until he resorted to fisticuffs and thus ended up with a formal rebuke from me.
Another problem character in my platoon was Private Carter who had family trouble at home in England; long before I joined he had started applying for compassionate transfer but all his requests had been denied. About this time a man from another company was invalided home to the UK as a mental case, genuinely and seriously ill. It seemed that Carter had been studying him and decided that he too would go ‘mental’. He stopped talking to anyone and started doing odd things like sleepwalking around the barrack square in the early hours of the morning. The day came when he felt he had built up a sufficient dossier of strange behaviour and he reported sick. Now in a British battalion, a ‘sick parade’ is just that, a parade: the sick are marched to hospital and stand to attention when being questioned by the doctor. No CO likes a long sick roll; it reflects badly on the discipline of the battalion, so any man given ‘M & D’ (Medicine and Duty) usually ends up being treated as a company defaulter. But this was no deterrent to Private Carter. He told the orderly sergeant simply that he had ‘a pain’ and was marched off to the military hospital.
The hospital was commanded by a charming but tough Irishman, Major Power. He asked Carter what was wrong with him, and listened with growing interest to a moving story of stomach pains, early morning sickness and a swollen belly.
‘I’m pregnant, that’s what I am, sir, I’m pregnant!’ Carter ended triumphantly. ‘An’ I can prove it too, sir. I got ’ere a list o’ the prospective fathers – Colonel Bowen, Captain Prowse, the Adjutant and …’
Needless to say, Carter ended up on a charge and one more crime was added to his military case sheet. But I had a word with Captain Grimwood and we managed to have Carter transferred to another battalion, one that was due for posting to the UK in the near future. I can only hope that once he was home Carter was able to settle his family trouble.
Like everyone else, I found that life at Landi Kotal soon began to pall. Our duties were never very onerous and I longed with youthful eagerness for my year on attachment to be over, yearning to join the Bengal Lancers and perhaps see some real action. Fortunately, towards the end of the summer, the battalion was transferred to a much more civilized place, Nowshera, only a few miles from Peshawar.
Nowshera was hardly a centre of social activity but at least we were no longer cooped up inside barbed wire all day and night. There was a cricket club, a golf course and even English ladies to keep us amused. I began to enjoy life again. But before I left to join my own Regiment, I was to fall foul of the CO.
For a while I could do no wrong in the CO’s eyes. He discovered that I was good at map reading, so he made me the battalion’s Intelligence Officer and gave me a pony to carry out my duties. He also approved of my cricketing prowess for I had made a fair number of runs for the battalion cricket team and we had reached the final of the Northern Cricket Championship. It was about three weeks before I was due to leave and I knew the CO had already submitted his report about me to my future commanding officer; I also knew that this report was good.
Then it happened: the sergeants’ mess ball, which fell on a Saturday, the eve of the championship final. Along with some other junior officers I had been invited to attend this ball, given by a British cavalry regiment stationed some fourteen miles away. Little did I know it then, but there was a tradition at sergeants’ dances to waylay young officers from another unit and make them drunk. The favoured method involved ‘heel-taps’, when the victim’s glass would be surreptitiously filled and refilled with all kinds of mixed drinks. I was only twenty years of age and I knew precious little about hard liquor – or the world itself, come to that. My father had brought me up to enjoy good wine and to drink whisky in moderation, but in fact I couldn’t afford to drink much anyway.
Needless to say I became one of the victims that night. Well after midnight I was poured into someone’s car and decanted at my quarters. I felt no pain. But at 5 am the next morning I was retching my heart out. I had never experienced anything like it before, nor have I experienced anything like it since. I was sick. My bearer, knowing that I was due on battalion church parade at 9 am, sent for my friends and together they did what they could with ice packs, aspirin, cold tea, black coffee. But I was still vomiting. The world seemed upside down. How I made it on parade I shall never know, but my sword was shaking like a feather in my right hand. There then followed the six-mile march to church, and back again after the service. Returning to my quarters I was still drunk when I fell into bed. Again my faithful bearer sent for the relief squad – who reminded me that the cricket final was due to start at 1.30 pm, and poured more tea, coffee and aspirin down my throat. At last I was on my feet; my vision was blurred and I felt awful, but apparently I looked compos mentis.
It was about 4.30 pm when I wobbled on to the cricket ground on my bicycle. My team was batting, eight men were already out and two men were at the wickets. There was only me left. Then, as I was strapping on my pads and selecting a bat, another batsman was out. But the team needed only five more runs to win – a mere bagatelle. I strolled to the crease and prepared to receive the first ball.
Before the first delivery, however, the wicket keeper ambled past me down the pitch and had a word with the bowler; I realized later that he must have seen my shaky hand and smelt my breath. At the time I only realized that the man I faced had a reputation as a fast bowler. I wound myself up in readiness.
The bowler grinned, walked slowly up to deliver, and tossed the ball gently at me: a simple shot, what children call ‘a lollipop’. I swung my bat frantically – and missed. The ball had knocked my wicket down. I was out. My team had lost.
I don’t think I have ever felt so ashamed. I deserved an imperial blast, and got it. The CO called me every despicable name he could think of, right there in front of the two assembled teams. He said that if it were possible he would retrieve the report on me and tear it up. Fortunately, he couldn’t. Three weeks later I was on my way to join my own Regiment, reputation unsullied but with a very useful lesson learned. I have basically stuck to scotch and soda ever since.