The Jharwa is a curious creature in many ways. He has nothing in common with the Gurkha, except his religion, and to a certain extent his appearance; nor is he even a hillman. Till he joins, he has probably never done a hard day's work, nor any regular work, but has earned his living by cutting timber, or doing a little farming in a rich and fertile country where a man does not need to do much to keep himself. He is more intelligent than the Gurkha, and has, as a rule, a fairly good ear for music; he is lazy, hard to train, and not very clean in his person, unless well looked after, but he is a first-class man at any jungle work. The last of the old lot of Jharwas in the 1/8th Gurkhas, Havildar Madho Ram (Garoo), won the Macgregor Memorial medal, in 1905, for exploration and survey work in Bhutan. Others again are intensely stupid. In October 1916, a Military Police havildar came out in charge of a small draft to Mesopotamia, and his C.O. tried to find out how much he knew about practical soldiering. He put him in charge of a squad of men, and told him to exercise them. The worthy havildar was soon in a fix. When asked how he rose to be havildar, he replied that he was promoted because he was a good woodcutter and repairer of buildings. The C.O. asked him where he was to get wood to cut in Mesopotamia, upon which he looked round vacantly on all sides and remarked, "Jhar na hoi" ("there is no jungle"), whereupon he was sent back to look after the regimental dump. Where the Jharwa fails is as an officer or non-commissioned officer, since for generations he has never been in a position to enforce or give implicit and prompt obedience. In Assam, it is all one to the ordinary villager whether he does a thing now or next week; a high standard of work or punctuality has never been expected of him, consequently he does not expect it of anyone else, and a good many N.C.O.'s got the surprise of their life when they found that the excuse, "I told them, but they didn't do it," would not go down. But in jungle work there are few to touch him, and he has proved his grit in the stress of modern battle. Many years ago, I was following up a wounded buffalo in the Nambhar forest, and one of our men was walking in front of me, snicking the creepers and branches, which stretched across the track, with a little knife as sharp as a razor. Suddenly, without a word, he sprang to one side to clear my front, and there lay the huge beast about ten yards off, luckily stone dead. It requires some nerve to walk up to a wounded buffalo, without any sort of weapon to defend oneself with. In the winter of 1916-17, a small party of the 7th Gurkhas swam the Tigris, to reconnoitre the Turk position near Chahela. They carried out their work successfully, but two Jharwas, who had volunteered to go with the party, were overcome with the cold, and were drowned coming back. The surviving Gurkhas all got the I.O.M. or D.S.M. On February 17th, 1917, at Sannaiyat, a signaller, attached to the 1/8th Gurkhas, Lataram Mech, took across his telephone wire into the second Turkish line under very heavy shell-fire, which wiped out the N.C.O. and another of his party of four, established communication with battalion headquarters and the line behind him, and, when that part of the trench was recaptured, came back across the open and rolled up his wire, under fire all the time. On the same day another Jharwa lad, when he got into the Turkish trench, flung away his rifle and belt, and ran amok with his kukri. He broke that one and came back, covered with blood from head to foot, into our front trench to get another, when he went forward again. I could never find out his name. If he was not killed, he lay low, probably thinking he would be punished for losing his rifle.
At Istabulat, another Jharwa (Holiram Garo) got separated from the rest of his party, and attacked a part of the Turk position by himself. Although wounded in the head, he lay on the front of the enemy's parapet, and sniped away till dark, when he returned to his platoon, and asked for more ammunition. For this he got the I.O.M. The poor little Jharwa did wonderfully well, seeing that, till he left Assam, his horizon had been bounded by the Bhootan-Tibet range on one side and the Patkoi on the other. He had never seen guns, cavalry, trenches, or anything to do with real warfare. Although reared in the damp enervating climate of the plains of Assam, he stuck the intense cold and heat, as well as food to which he had never been accustomed, without grumbling, whilst the doctors said his endurance of pain in hospital was every bit as good as the Gurkha's, and an example to all the other patients. Till 1915, the authorities knew nothing about him, his antecedents, or peculiarities, so he was looked on as merely an untidy sort of Gurkha, with whom, as said before, he had no affinity, besides not having anything like the same physical strength.
Before we went out to Mesopotamia, my regiment was detailed to counter an expected raid on a certain part of the Indian coast. We entrained at midnight, and in the morning it was reported we had fifty more men than we started with. It turned out that a party of fifty Jharwas had arrived at the railway station, just before we left, and when they realised that the regiment was going off without them, they made a rush, crowded in where they could, and came along, leaving all their kit on the platform. This, if not exactly proving good discipline, showed at any rate they were not lacking in keenness and enterprise.
THE DRABI
In the Great War the Drabi has come by his own. He is now a recognised combatant. At Shaiba and Sahil alone six members of the transport corps were awarded the Indian Order of Merit. This is as it should be, for before August, 1914, there was only one instance recorded of a Drabi receiving a decoration.
The Drabi is recruited from diverse classes, but he is generally a Punjabi Mussalman, not as a rule of the highest social grade, though he is almost invariably a very worthy person. If I were asked to name the agents to whom we owe the maintenance of our empire in the East, I should mention, very high in the list, the Drabi and the mule. No other man, no other beast, could adequately replace them. There are combinations of the elements which defeat the last word of scientific transport. And that is where the Drabi, with his pack mules or A.T. carts, comes in.
In France, when the motor-lorries were stuck in the mud, we thanked God for the mule and the Drabi. I remember my delight one day when I saw a convoy of Indian A.T. carts swinging down the road, the mules leaning against one another as pack mules will do when trained to the yoke. The little convoy pulled up outside the courtyard of an abattoir in an old town in Picardy, where it had been raining in torrents for days, until earth and water had produced a third element which resembled neither. The red-peaked kula protruding from the khaki turban of the Drabi proclaimed a Punjabi Mussalman. Little else was distinguishable in the mist and rain, which enveloped everything in a dismal pall. The inert bundle of misery unrolled itself and, seeing a Sahib by the gate, saluted.
"Bad climate," I suggested.
"Yes, Sahib, very bad climate."