I was influenced in my decision to march through the surrounding; country and "show the flag" by private representations made to me by civil officers of the district. They pointed out the advisability of letting the natives of the neighbourhood see soldiers, probably for the first time in the lives of many of them. Asiatics have short memories; and the inhabitants of the Bengals, who rarely see troops, are inclined to forget that the British Army still exists. At that time sedition was supposed to be spreading among them. For it is a curious fact that it chiefly makes headway among the unwarlike races of India, probably for the very reason that they have never learned in the field the respect that the brave man feels for the still braver antagonist who has conquered him. And British rule is more popular among the races that we have only vanquished after a hard struggle than it is among those whose ancestors never dared to meet us in battle. In all history the Bengali never was, never could be, a fighting-man. He was the easy prey of every invader; and, like the cowardly Corean, only the extreme suppleness of his back saved him from extermination. If the British left India the cities and rich lands of Bengal would be scrambled for by every warrior race in India; and her sons would not venture to lift a hand to defend themselves. But cowards are ingrates. Forgetful of all this the so-called educated Bengali whispers of the day to come when the English tyrants will be driven into the sea. He does not suggest that he and his kind will do it themselves. The young Calcutta student, crammed with undigested, ill-understood European knowledge, will talk treason glibly. Insulting women, hurling bombs, assassinating in secret or, gun in hand, plundering unarmed villagers even more timorous than himself, he is a hero in his own eyes. But even in the wildest frenzy of his ill-balanced brain he never pictures himself facing British troops in battle. The cowardly agitator allots that task to the native soldiers when we shall have succeeded in seducing them from their allegiance. But the sepoys, recruited from races that hold only the warrior in honour, look on him and his race as something more despicable than dogs. My Rajputs—descendants of the gallant fighters who conquered half India, who struggled through bloody centuries against the Mohammedan invaders, whose women killed themselves when their lords had been slain and preferred death to dishonour—my sepoys regarded the effeminate Bengalis as unsexed beings.
The Duars abound in tea states; and each manager rules six or seven hundred coolies by moral force. Several planters hinted to me that it would be a good thing to let these coolies see the gleam of bayonets for once, and realise that the white man has something more than the baton of an occasional native policeman to rely on if need arise.
Thrown on our own resources as we were in Buxa, the question of transporting the supplies and baggage of nearly two hundred men required some thinking out. We had no funds at our disposal to hire coolies; and all we could depend on was our three elephants. Ten days' food supply for so many men weighs a good deal; and we had to carry with us as well their bedding, cooking-pots, blank ammunition, pickaxes and shovels for entrenching. It needed some careful arrangement to enable three elephants to do the work of ten. I was obliged to send them out to form depots of sacks of flour, grain, and other food-stuffs at places along the route, and bring them back again to accompany us carrying the other things we required with us. Each sepoy was limited to two blankets and a change of clothing and boots rolled up in his dhurri or strip of carpet. Contrary to the usual custom on peace manœuvres each man carried a packet of ten rounds of ball cartridge in his pocket; for, had any sudden call for our services come before we could communicate with the magazine in our fort, we would have been of little use with only blank ammunition for our rifles. And in the forest at night we might require ball to protect ourselves against wild animals.
At last, our arrangements complete, we left forty men behind at Buxa to guard the Station; and one morning in February saw us, a hundred and sixty strong, marching through the jungle in the direction of Rajabhatkawa. We moved with fixed bayonets and all the proper precautions of a column passing through an enemy's country. Advanced, rear and flank guards protected us on all sides. These detachments, instead of being thrown out a mile or more from the main body, as they would have been in open country, were not a hundred yards from it. And even that was often too much in the dense jungle. Every man carried at his belt a kukri, the Gurkha's heavy, curved knife, and used it to hack his way through the tangle of creepers and undergrowth. The progress was necessarily very slow, and we hardly advanced a mile an hour. We marched by compass, no easy task in thick forest.
"MY SEPOYS DRILLING."
BUGLERS AND NON-COMMISSIONED OFFICERS OF MY DETACHMENT.