The fight at Naini was waged for many weary hours. Its spectacular charm had soon worn off. The juxtaposition of fierce excitement and deadly boredom is a strange feature of warfare. There, two hundred yards away, men were killing one another, and here were some of us positively yawning!
Late in the afternoon, our pride of conquest somewhat chastened by the pangs of hunger, we marched onwards to Gyantse. As we drew nearer we heard what seemed like a very irregular artillery salute fired by very drunken gunners in honour of some personage entitled to a very large number of guns. It was only the jingals in the Gyantse-jong firing away at us patiently and solemnly, in the pious hope that they one day might hit something. Their main objective was a ricketty bridge across the Gyantse river which we had to cross before reaching our camp. Some jingal bullets did on occasion fall fairly near the bridge, and one mule was actually hit in the act of crossing. The crossing of that bridge took till late into the night. All the way from Naini the path was intersected with irrigation nullahs, of which most were full of water. This caused many checks, which culminated in the block at the bridge. The latter began to fall to pieces before all the transport was over, some animals occasionally falling off into the water. The last of the rearguard reached camp about midnight.
CHAPTER X
AT GYANTSE: FIGHTING: FORAGING: TIBETAN RELIGIOUS ART
The ten days or so spent at Gyantse were occupied in fighting, in waiting, through periodical armistices, for the result of negotiations which came to nothing, in sightseeing and in foraging for our present needs, and for the advance to Lhassa.
The two fights here alluded to were the taking of Tsechin and the taking of Gyantse-jong. At the former I again had a front seat in the stalls, watching the show in company with the headquarters' Staff, but had to leave, with some aggravating message to camp, just as the curtain was rising on the last act. During that long day, at the end of which Gyantse-jong was taken, I saw very little of the fighting till just the very climax, when certain duties took me to the village Pálá, where the Staff were watching the final phase. No boredom on this occasion, but intense excitement. The final assault on the jong was a sight well worth remembering, coming as it did at the close of so tedious an action. The artistic effect of the Maxim on what one might call spectacular warfare is, I think, greater than that of artillery. Shells going off at intervals of course bring out the tragedy of war by the awful noise which they make, but the rapid ping-ping-ping of the Maxim sets your blood tingling and really excites you. It was a glorious spectacle, that last assault. The rush through the breach of those Ghurkhas and their comrades into that frowning impregnable-looking jong to the tune of artillery, dynamite, and Maxims would have appealed to the veriest man of peace. And as the jong became ours, the cheer that went up from every point where troops and followers stood in knots, watching the outcome, was a glorious climax to that long day.
A flying column that followed the retreating enemy to Dongtse failed to catch them up, but returned with a fine haul of useful forage. Foraging had for some time been the order of the day, except when fighting interfered with it. The Gyantse plain is very rich, with villages dotted about at close intervals, all standing among rich crops and nominally containing plenteous stores of what were our staple needs. But the art of hiding such stores is possessed in a high degree by the Tibetan. Some officers, who later on had much practice in foraging, became experts in finding the hidden store-rooms, knowing at a glance at what point on a given wall in an upper chamber the wall painting ceased to be of a permanent nature, and was merely a temporary daub concealing the rough cement and pile of loose unbaked bricks which blocked the doorway of what, after use of crowbar and mallet, proved a veritable mine of grain or barley flour.
Of course, while at Gyantse, the towns and lamasarais of Gyantse and Tsechin were our happiest hunting-grounds. In one lofty room alone we one day found eight thousand maunds of barley flour, all neatly bagged and sealed with a Tibetan official seal, doubtless a mobilisation reserve of the Tibetan army, and, alongside of it, another similar room filled with loose grain to a height which we could never really explore, since the weight of the grain made it impossible to open the door more than an inch or so, from which small aperture our requirements trickled out by the mule load. If we had had enough transport to carry on from Gyantse all the supplies which we found there, our commissariat problems would have been easy.
As we foraged on the days following these fights our way was strewn with corpses. The warriors from the Khám country, who formed a large part of the Tibetan army, were glorious in death, long-haired giants, lying as they fell with their crude weapons lying beside them, and usually with a peaceful, patient look in their faces. As types of physical humanity they could not be easily excelled. I remember one day one of the Khám men, a prisoner, was helping me to set in order a refractory watermill stone with which I was trying to grind wheat into flour. My commanding officer came to see how I was getting on and caught sight of the prisoner. He gazed at him in admiration and then exclaimed: