The warfare which the Assam Brigade would be called upon to wage would generally be against the savage jungle dwellers along the north-east borders. Consequently the training of the troops composing it demanded much practice in forest country; for, in the jungle, wide extensions and thin lines suitable to troops attacking in the open would be replaced by close formations, and the bayonet more often used than the bullet. Timber barriers would be substituted for earthworks, and the axe for the spade. In a jungle campaign, as the fighting column moved forward, stockaded posts would be established on the line of communication, in which convoys of supplies going to the front or of wounded or prisoners sent back to the rear could halt for the night under the protection of the permanent garrisons.
When General Bower announced his intention of coming to hold his annual inspection of our detachment at the end of November, I determined to build such a stockaded post in the forest below Buxa Duar for him to see, and as useful instruction for my men. Consequently, three weeks before his arrival, I moved the double company down into the jungle. While Captain Balderston and I took up our abode in Forest Lodge, the sepoys bivouacked a few hundred yards away on a high bluff over a broad river-bed now almost dry. Here I proposed building our forest fort.
Our first task consisted in clearing away the undergrowth, now denser than ever after the fires and Rains. With curved kukris and straight dahs the sepoys fell to work on the thick scrub and tangle of thorny bushes. Then came the harder labour of felling the trees for the stockades—and the tools that contractors supply the Government with are not of the best quality. The forest rang to the stroke of axes and the shouts of the sepoys who, delighted at the change from their ordinary routine, vied with each other in bringing the trees crashing to the ground. As I watched them one day I saw a sudden commotion among a group. The men scattered, then closed in again; and vicious blows at the ground, mingled with cries of "samp!", told me that they had disturbed a snake. Then on poles bending under its weight they brought me the body of a beautifully marked python nearly ten and a half feet long. Though not poisonous, such a beast would be a formidable antagonist. With the driving-power of its weight and muscle, its head could strike with the force of a battering ram; and a man's body, crushed in its folds, would soon be a shapeless pulp. I kept its skin as a companion to the king-cobra we had killed in Buxa.
The plan I had decided on for the fort was a square, each side fifty yards long. For instructional purposes I varied the design of the faces. That on the river-bank was to be a sungar—a loopholed wall, seven feet high and three feet thick, of large boulders from the nullah below. The east side opposite it was to be a loopholed stockade of single timbers two feet thick and fourteen feet above the ground. Each of the other two faces was to be a "double stockade" of shorter trees, that is, each two timber walls four feet apart, the space between them being filled with earth. At opposite corners were bastions, or towers, eighteen feet high, projecting out, and thus each giving a flanking fire along two faces of the fort. They were arranged for three tiers of fire, one row of loopholes three feet from the ground for men kneeling, one four and a half feet for others standing, the third above a gallery running round inside the top. Below the galleries the bastions were roofed in and formed barrack-rooms for the guards.
THE WALLED FACE OF FORT BOWER OVER THE RIVER.
THE STOCKADE AND DITCH AT FORT BOWER.