The object of a short tour planned for September was formally to take over a strip of land known as the Toba Plateau, which had been recently ceded to the Government of India under an arrangement effected by a Frontier Delimitation Commission. As this was a desolate land with few inhabitants, the General planned to combine this political object with military training in the way of practice in field-firing. He arranged that detachments of the 1st Bombay Grenadiers and of the 26th Beluchis should take part in the manoeuvres, and that the 25th Bombay Rifles should meet him at the camping-ground. It was the first time a white man had been seen in the country. The march abounded with picturesque and amusing incidents. For instance, there was the day when the camel transport lost their way. Their pace being a little slower than that of the mules, and the country that day with its low round sandhills being peculiarly puzzling, they lost touch with the tail of the column. A transport duffedar was sent back to look for the string of camels, but came not again; a corporal was sent on a mule to look for the duffedar, and he came not again. It was now getting late, and darkness would soon fall, so the General himself started on a pony to look for the corporal. It was six o'clock before the camels, who were carrying our tents, mess kit, and clothing, reached the camp, from a point exactly opposite to the direction whence they were expected.
Field-firing
When the rendezvous on Toba Plateau was reached, after about three days' march from Chaman, we settled down for a week, and field-firing in the miniature valleys took place daily. The day before the proposed attack newspapers are spread out with the help of stones in the positions where tribesmen defending their homes would be likely to erect sangars and make a stand. The attacking column, being supplied with ball cartridges, shoot at these targets till they disappear, and then advance till a bend of the valley discloses another imaginary concentration of the enemy. This device presents a very realistic counterfeit of hill warfare.
It seems to me now that all our time at Quetta was spent in such mimic fighting. The wild and desolate country, in which the cantonments lay like an oasis, lent itself admirably to military training; the garrison, complete in all its units, provided the necessary troops of all arms, so that a succession of field-officers were sent up for tactical examination, the practical side of which meant a series of field-days. The General's A.D.C., when called upon for reminiscences, sends the following anecdote:
"His good temper and quiet way of rebuking people was, I have always thought, remarkable. I remember a field-day when an officer had got a company in a very badly chosen spot. The General, in his usual innocent sort of way, went up to him to gather, as it were, information. He always did that: he looked as if he was dying to learn, while really he was leading on the man to talk and show what he knew, or else to convict him out of his own mouth. The Major had no good reason for his dispositions, and when cornered began to quote the drill-book. The General quietly said: 'It's not very good form to throw the drill-book at your General.'"
On a similar occasion, at an outpost parade, the captain in charge of the picquet was unaccountably nervous, and had great difficulty in explaining the "idea." With two words the General put him out of his pain and signalised his incompetence: "You're shot," he said. "Who is next in command?"
On the Sind-Pishin Railway, as the branch line is called that runs from Ruk Junction on the Indus through Quetta and on to Chaman, there is only one train in each direction in the twenty-four hours. The railroad runs for miles over the wildest and most desolate tracts. It is 150 miles from Quetta to Sibi, and Sibi is 100 miles north of Jacobabad. The roadside stations consist merely of a few planks as platform, a hut for the station-master, who is commonly an Eurasian, and a standpipe; sometimes there is a second hut, in which a bunnia does business in food-stuffs and other simple trading.
A massacre
Sunari Station, lying about 100 miles east of Quetta, must have been a place of slightly more importance, for when the Marris fell upon it they found fifteen persons to murder. Unfortunately for him, a European youth, named Canning, a sub-inspector of the line, and son of the station-master at Sibi, happened to be there that fatal morning. As the daily train approached the station between 9 and 10 a.m., the engine-driver was puzzled at not receiving the customary greeting on the signals, but decided to crawl on carefully into the station. It was only too clear that a wholesale slaughter with swords had been perpetrated; the place was strewn with dead bodies, terribly slashed about, and the bunnia's shop had been set on fire. The terrified driver and guard found the station-master with his arm cut off, but still breathing, and carefully laid him on the train, but even this sole survivor of this unparalleled outrage died before the next station was reached. In the meantime the pointsman had fled on foot to the next station, and telegraphed the startling news from there to Quetta.
Very shortly after the arrival of the news the telegraph wires were found to be cut; to imaginative minds a rising of the whole powerful tribe of Marris was imminent. The railroad, which ran for miles through the Marris' country, might be destroyed, the telegraph lines were already severed, all communication with India would thus be cut off, and Quetta isolated might have added another picturesque story to the romantic series of frontier annals.