CHAPTER II PESHAWUR AND THE KHYBER PASS A Day with the Peshawur Vale Hunt-The Native City-Through the Khyber Pass-Lunch in Camp on Active Service- General Hart's Brigade-Ali Musjid-Khyber in Old Days. CHAPTER II PESHAWUR AND THE KHYBER PASS Are those billions of men really gone? Are those women of the old experience of the earth gone? Did they achieve nothing for good for themselves? I believe of all those men and women that filled the unnamed lands, every one exists this hour here or elsewhere, invisible to us. BACK WALT WHITMAN. ACK again in Mian Mir. It is itself a hideous station and a most unhealthy one. Most of it was originally an old Sikh burying-ground, and it is now known as the "Graveyard of India. For this reason it has not been made as much use of, as a military station, as was at first intended. It possesses a fine church, close to the General's house, where we were staying, and an indifferent polo-ground. The ordinary Tommies in India are much to be pitied: people out there are very good to them, getting up sports, matches, sing-songs, and so forth, and I have heard it argued that they are quite "spoiled." At the same time, they have no Society, and when a Tommy wants to be lazy, when he wants to shake off a fit of the "blue devils" and to be amused, to be anywhere but in the sight of the eternal lines and the eternal uniform and the fellow-Tommy he sees every day, every hour of his life, where is he to go? Where is his Mary Ann? Where is the friendly pub? Where are the lanes and the villages to saunter and gossip in? Where are the shops, the omnibuses, the parks? Instead of which, in his own words: "I'm a Tommy -a blooming, eight-anna, dog-stealing Tommy, with a number instead of a decent name. If I had stayed at home I might ha' married that gal, and kept a little shop in the 'Ammersmith 'Igh. 'PRACTICAL TAXIDERMIST,' with a stuffed fox, like as they has in the Aylesbury Dairies, in the window, and a little case with blue and yellow glass eyes, and a little wife to call 'Shop-shop' when the door-bell rung. I'm sick to go 'ome-go 'ome-go 'ome. I'm sick for London again; sick for the sounds and sights and smells of her-orange peel! and asphalte! and gas! sick for Vauxhall Bridge, for the railway going down to Box Hill, with your gal on your knee, and a new clay pipe in your face-that, and the Strand lights, where you knows every one, and the bobby that takes you up is an old friend as has taken you up before. No more blooming rotten-stone, nor khāki, nor guard-mounting, and yourself your own master with a gal to take and see the Humaners practising hooking dead corpses out of the Serpentine on Sundays; ... instead of which here I am, where there ain't no women, and there ain't no liquor worth having, and there's nothing to do, nor see, nor say, nor think, nor feel." Of all God-forsaken spots to be quartered in, Mian Mir must be one of the worst. To begin with, the climate, cold in winter, cold enough for a log fire and fur coats, becomes unbearably hot by the last week in March, and develops into an oven later on. As for the place itself, coming out to India and expecting to see palms and cocoanut-trees, jungles and tropical vegetation, I found-flat, brown plains, broken in parts by cultivation or by dried-up, stunted bushes, roads buried in thick white dust, and overhead a sun which scorched and glared from morning to night in a sky which never possessed a cloud upon its brazen face. The lines stretch some distance in Mian Mirwhite, dazzling buildings; brown flats of earth baked like bricks reaching up to the walls and forming the Tommies' "play-ground." Besides the lines was the hospital, also the dusty, grassless polo-ground, and the little club, the garden of which was kept well watered. Officers' bungalows on either side of roads which were ruled across the station and shaded by that dusty and tired-looking tree the tamarisk, completed Mian Mir. The church, as I have said, is the feature of a place which has nothing in it or round it to please the eye, except flat, endless monotony, dust and heat. The very bungalows themselves looked as though they might have been built yesterday, the débris of building hardly yet removed from the bare, brown compound, edged by a mud wall and innocent of any suspicion of green. Nothing will grow without copious waterings, and as the life of a soldier is one of many moves, few people |