MY BACHELOR ESTABLISHMENT.
After breakfast I returned to my house to pass the hours until the afternoon parade. After the dilapidated bungalows of most stations in India, with their thatched roofs sheltering rats, squirrels and even snakes, and their floors of pounded earth and decayed matting full of fleas, ants and the myriad plagues of insect life of the East, my small house seemed luxurious. It was built strongly of rough stone blocks to withstand the awful mountain storms. The roof was of iron which rang like a drum to the heavy rain and monster hailstones of the Monsoon. It contained four small rooms with ceilings and floors of wood, each with its fireplace. For during the winter we found it cold enough to have fires going day and night, the jungle around furnishing us with an ample supply of fuel. The meagre furniture which I had bought from the major of the Punjabis was soon supplemented with a few more articles sent from Calcutta. The little garden contained mango trees and a tree bearing the huge and evil-smelling jack-fruit, of which natives are very fond, though its sickening odour and oversweet taste repel most Europeans. The hedges around my compound were of wild roses. At one side stood my stable and the stone outhouses in which my servants lived; for in India the domestics are not lodged in the bungalow.
The afternoon was occupied with drills, signalling practice and military lectures to the non-commissioned officers.
Buxa offered scant amusement within its limits to us Britishers. We had hockey-matches with the men two or three times a week. Creagh, being a keen golfer, tried to make miniature links about the fort; but, after losing six balls in his first game in the jungle around, he gave it up. We turned our attention to tennis. A comparatively level space hewed out of the mountain-side was fixed on as a court. Rocks four or five feet high were dug out of it; and the elephants were employed for days in bringing up earth from the plains below to spread on it. But more rocks seemed to grow in it and shove their heads through the thin covering of mould, grass came in thick, wiry patches; and altogether our tennis court could not be pronounced a success.
Evening brought with it the dullest hours of the day. The Calcutta newspaper, which arrived by post every afternoon, was soon read; and the English journals sent to us from regimental headquarters were a month old. None of us were keen card players. Our library was small; and, as light literature, drill books soon cease to charm. Our daily life was too uneventful to afford many subjects of conversation; and as topics the incompetency of Naik Chandu Singh or the slackness on parade of Sepoy Pem Singh were not engrossing. England seemed too far away for the discussion of its politics to interest us. The pitiable limitations of men as talkers was painfully evident. Not being women we had no ever-ready subjects of conversation in dress, babies and servants' misdemeanours; and we could not talk scandal about ourselves. So, after the meagre dinner that our Gurkha cook contrived out of the athletic hen or tinned sausage, we threw ourselves into long chairs around the fire; Creagh betook himself to the study of military books for his forthcoming examination for promotion, and the doctor and I thumbed tattered novels we had read a dozen times.
But Buxa was not the loneliest spot in which I have been quartered. As a subaltern I was stationed alone for many months in Asirgarh in the Central Provinces, an old Indian fortress on a hill lost in the jungle. That was solitude itself. My nearest European neighbour was forty miles away. I saw no white face and spoke no word of English for months at a time. Once a year a General was supposed to pay it the compliment of an official inspection, although the garrison consisted only of a British subaltern and fifty sepoys. But I think that after one occasion when the General and his staff officers nearly died on my hands of ptomaine poisoning—really contracted on their journey thither, but ascribed by the uncharitable among my friends to my base devices and resentment at having my peace disturbed by this officious intrusion—this duty grew out of favour with generals who valued their lives. This detachment has since been abolished.
The fortress was wonderfully interesting, with a history reaching back to the eighth century. It had passed through the hands of the various masters of India in turn, and every stone of its walls had a story to tell. Taken by the British from the Maharajah of Gwalior twice, it remained in our possession from 1818, and was formerly garrisoned by a company of Artillery, a British regiment and a wing of a native battalion. Fallen from its high estate, a subaltern and half a company were considered enough for it in my time. And the subaltern combined in his own person the important offices of Commandant of Asirgarh Fortress, officer commanding the troops, officer in charge of military treasure chest, Cantonment Magistrate third class, and Church Trustee. For inside the fort were a Protestant Church in disused barracks, a ruined Catholic Chapel on the altar of which wild monkeys perched, and two cemeteries full of graves of English dead. The post was a lonely one for a young officer. I lived in the only habitable European building, formerly the general hospital, for which I paid twenty-four pounds a year to Government. The dead house was just outside my bedroom window. The interior of the fort, the fifty-feet-high walls of which were a mile and a half in circumference, was crowded with the ruins of an ancient palace, a large mosque, an old Moghul prison with wonderful underground passages and cells, and—most depressing of all—the gaunt wrecks of English bungalows with bare rafters and tattered ceiling-cloths. A fit habitation for ghosts. And ghosts there were. No native would venture about the fort alone at night. Weird tales had my sepoys to tell of the Shaitans and bhuts, as they termed the spectral beings that wandered within the walls in the dark hours and were seen again and again by my men. They invariably took the form of British soldiers. And actually one night when I was miles away out shooting in the jungle the sentry at the gate turned out the guard to an approaching white officer, whom he took to be me. The whole guard, eleven men in all, swore next day to the ghostly visitant.
Few English folk at home, who fondly picture an officer's life in India as one long round of social gaieties, of polo, sport, races and balls, realise the tragedies of loneliness of many who serve the Empire. Of the dreary solitude of a military police post in the jungles of Burma, of a fort on the Indian frontier, where a young subaltern lives for months, for years, alone. A boy brought up in the comfort of an English home, used to the pleasant fellowship of a regimental mess, is there condemned to isolation from his kind, to food that a pauper would reject, and a lodging a cottager would scorn. Should one of the many diseases of India lay its grisly hand on him he is far from medical aid. He must fight his illness alone, lying unattended in his comfortless quarters. Outside, a pitiless sun in a sky of brass pours down its rays on the glaring, shadowless desert. Inside, the droning whine of the punkah mocks him throughout the weary day, as it scarcely stirs the heated air. Night brings only the more terrible hours of darkness when sleep is banished from the tired eyes and the fever-racked brain knows no relief. Small wonder that too often in his agony he seeks death by his own hand. I have gone through the hell of sickness in a lonely post, when day after day the awful pains of jungle fever tortured me and night brought no relief. I have known what it is to gaze in my delirium at my revolver and think it the kindly friend that alone could end my misery, until a sane moment made me realise that its touch meant death and I had it taken away from me. But I have known, too, many a poor fellow to whom that saving interval of sanity was denied, to whom a bullet through the tortured brain brought oblivion.