Among Hindus, men of different castes cook and eat apart. A Brahmin must have his separate fireplace, prepare his own food and eat alone. Other castes are not so particular and can employ cooks. In an Indian regiment each company or double company is generally composed of men of one race; and Government allows and pays two cooks and a bhisti or water-carrier to each company, these menials, with Hindus, being necessarily of the same caste as the sepoys they serve. Thus in my own battalion we have a double company of Rajputs, one of Gujars, and one of Rawats—all these being Hindus. The fourth is composed of Mohammedans. Each company is officered by men of their own caste, a Subhedar or captain, and a Jemadar or lieutenant; and every two companies are under a double company commander and a double company officer, who are British, and with the commandant, adjutant and quartermaster make up the European officers of the regiment.
My double company in Buxa was composed of Rajputs; but, having had to detach signallers, bandsmen, clerks, and other employed men to go with the headquarters to Dibrugarh, some Mussulmans were temporarily attached to bring it up to its original strength of two hundred men. The Rajputs' method of eating their meals is rather peculiar. Before each they must bathe and put on a clean dhotie, a cotton cloth wrapped round the waist, passing between the legs and falling to the knees. They must eat inside the chauka, a space of ground marked out and swept clean. Food which they wish to carry away and consume outside the chauka, as, for instance, if they are going on a long march, must be prepared in a particular way with water instead of ghee, which is generally used by them in cooking.
In my daily visit to the hospital I would find our medical officer, Smith, hard at work. For, besides the sick of the detachment, he had to tend any natives from outside who chose to seek the white man's medicine. To help him he had a young Indian sub-assistant surgeon, who, despite the scanty medical training he had received, pined to perform major operations. With little knowledge of surgery he wished to resort to the knife on every possible occasion. Once, when left in sole charge of the hospital, he determined to amputate the leg of a Bhuttia suffering from gangrenous sores. The patient, however, was of a different opinion and during the night stole silently from the hospital and fled in terror across the hills to his village. Like most mountaineers the Bhuttias are very subject to goitre. Two out of every three are the proud possessors of these enormous appendages, in some cases nearly as large as the owner's head. They seemed to regard them as ornaments, and absolutely refused to allow our medico to operate on them. One day there was carried to the fort from Chunabatti, the only village for miles round, a Chinaman suffering from beriberi. This man, who knew no word of any language but his own, had made his way on foot from China across Tibet and Bhutan over the Himalayas endeavouring to reach Calcutta in search of work. Stricken down with this fell disease he had lain for months in the village, living on the charity of the Bhuttias, and was brought to our hospital only to die. Another interesting case was a boy about seven years old who was brought in, absolutely scalped by a blow from the paw of a bear which he had disturbed when gathering wood in the forest. From brow to nape of neck his skull had been left bare to the bone, in which were deep indentations from the animal's claws. The shock of the blow would probably have killed a European, but with the marvellous tenacity of life among savage races, the boy soon recovered.
RAJPUT SEPOYS COOKING.
BRITISH AND INDIAN OFFICERS.
Our morning's work finished, we climbed up the hill for breakfast in the Mess. This was a long, single-storied stone building with an iron roof, erected on pillars which raised it six feet from the ground. From the tangled wilderness of the garden, bright with the vivid colours of huge bushes of poinsettia and bougainvillias, a flight of steps led up to the railed veranda which ran along the front of the building, and on to which opened the four rooms—the end ones used as quarters by Creagh and Smith, the centre apartments being the ante-room and dining-room. I wonder what some writers of military fiction, who prate glibly of the luxury in which army officers live, would say to the bare rooms and whitewashed walls of our Mess, furnished only with a few rickety tables and unsteady chairs. Or my subaltern's abode. One room, an iron cot borrowed from the hospital, a kitchen table, one dilapidated chair, a tin bath, and an iron basin on an old packing-case, comprised the sum-total of his possessions. Other furniture we could not get in Buxa; for the nearest shops were three hundred miles away in Calcutta. Of course, crockery, cooking-pots, glassware, linen and cutlery, we had to provide for ourselves. These we had brought with us. Before long, by dint of colour-washing the stone walls, hanging curtains and draperies of native cloth, and decorating the bare walls with the heads of animals we shot, we succeeded in making the Mess quite habitable and cosy.