CHAPTER XI
THE START FOR LHASSA: A DIGRESSION ON SUPPLY AND TRANSPORT
Suddenly the order came that we were to march to Lhassa forthwith. Who should and who should not form the Lhassa column must have been a difficult question to settle. To perform invidious tasks of this sort must be the most trying feature of generalship. It would be hard to find an occasion on any expedition when, to the individual soldier, going on seemed to mean so much, and staying behind so little. Forbidden cities are so fascinating, and the idea of assisting in drawing aside a pardah so appeals to our rude imaginations, that the desire to reach Lhassa was especially great. Those high passes in front of us, the shores of the great Palti lake and the upper Brahmaputra, that we knew not how we should cross, all seemed also to point to a varied adventure, and there was a spice of excitement in the thought of marching through a country, on the resources of which we should have largely to maintain ourselves, while as yet we knew hardly anything of their kind and extent.
We left the sad Gyantse garrison behind us, and marched off one morning in threatening weather that soon turned to rain, our path for the first few miles lying across a veritable bog. We consisted of the whole of a British and a section of a native mountain battery, of a wing of the Royal Fusiliers, of two companies of mounted infantry (drawn from various native regiments, and consisting of Sikhs, Ghurkhas, and Pathans) of the 8th Ghurkha Rifles, several companies of the 32nd Sikh Pioneers and the 40th Pathans, one company of Sappers and Miners, and two machine gun detachments. Several field hospitals or sections of field hospitals accompanied us, besides, of course, many other miscellaneous necessities such as ammunition column, treasure, supply column, post-office, veterinary establishment, and field park. The telegraph department was conspicuous by its absence, it being a feature of the advance to Lhassa that we left the telegraph behind at Gyantse—a proceeding which doubtless had both its inconvenient and its convenient results. Last but not least came the transport. One may divide this into regular and irregular. The regular transport consisted of the whole or portions of five Indian mule corps, the 6th, the 7th, the 9th, the 10th, and the 12th; the irregular of a cooli corps, and two locally raised corps—one of yaks and the other of donkeys.
Our transport was so big an item and so big a necessity that a short sketch of it as it ploughed through the sodden fields outside Gyantse that wet July morning may not come amiss.
The average Indian transport pack mule, aged probably fifteen to eighteen years old, is the finest old soldier we have got. If, like Lord Roberts's gray arab, he were allowed to record his services round his neck, he would display a fine collection of medals and clasps. Allowing that he is now fifteen and that he joined the ranks ten years ago, and allowing as a general principle that where a frontier expedition of any size takes place the bulk of the regular mule transport of the army in India is required for it, we can take it that at the age of six he had a rough breaking-in to war conditions in Chitral; that, after a year or so of peace, he carried convoy stores or troops' baggage over many weary marches in the Malakand or the Tochi valley, or in Tirah. In 1900, as likely as not, he was entrained one hot midsummer day, carried off to Calcutta, and shipped to China. As an alternative he may have been wanted in South Africa. Later on he very probably served in the Mahsud blockade. Between whiles he has had a few spells of cantonment life, but has probably spent his hot weathers daily carrying the needful water supply up to some hill station, perched on a hilltop, from a reservoir two thousand feet below, and a portion of his cold weathers in the feverish sham warfare of manœuvres. All the time he has preserved the same dogged, cheery temperament, getting out of the train at the base of an expedition, seeing there the familiar sights that portend field service, then having a good roll in the dust, getting up and shaking himself, as though to say, 'Here we are again,' like the clown in the pantomime; or plodding along through rain or snow or hot weather duststorm with two maunds on his back, and only wondering casually what will be the next practical joke which his masters will perpetrate on him. His is a rough lot, but he takes it kindly, and with good grain and fodder is not unhappy.
The mule driver also is a man of parts. Compare him with that fine soldier—the cavalryman. The former has to feed, groom, fit and clean the gear of, and sometimes forage for, three or four animals instead of one, as is the case of the latter. Further, the cavalryman mounts his beast, while the mule driver marches on foot.
The case of the mule and his attendant came before the Government of India a few years ago, who decided to improve their status. They have since accomplished a great deal by introducing an organised corps system among Indian transport. The system was worked experimentally for some years, and is now an authorised and accomplished fact. The mule and his driver, instead of, as was formerly the case, being no men's children in particular, belong to their troop, to their subdivision, and to their corps. Every corps is distinguishable by its uniform, and is commanded by a British officer, who has under him his own permanent subordinate staff, and who is responsible for the well-being and efficiency of all the men and beasts in his charge.
The enhancement of efficiency and well-being, and, perhaps more than all, of the personal self-respect of the individual driver, which has been the result both of the new organised discipline and of the new esprit de corps, is very marked. It remains only to prove conclusively that in the field, the inter-organisation of transport can be sufficiently maintained to serve its object, without interfering with other military considerations. The allotting of their transport to combatant units, according to their exact requirements, without destroying the organisation of the transport units themselves, often constitutes a problem which a chief transport officer has difficulty in solving. The via media, which on this Expedition has afforded a solution, has been to let the transport organisation, if necessary, go to the winds on the march itself, but to give it the first claim to consideration when once a column has reached camp.
Those irregular corps which supplemented the permanent military pack transport were most indispensable but delightfully heterogeneous. It may be interesting to describe the journey of, say, a maund of rice from Siliguri to Lhassa on these various forms of transport. Wrapped in its waterproof to keep off the rain torrents, the rice was dumped into a bullock-cart at Siliguri. If the road did not collapse from a landslip at any awkward moment and so drop the bullock-cart and its contents en masse into the Teesta river—a not infrequent occurrence—the rice-bag probably reached Rangpo. From there it probably proceeded for a few marches on the back of a pack bullock, a patient beast who moved slowly, and whose feet in that damp climate got very tender, and on those stony paths very sore. Later on it reached steep gradients where the pack bullock could no longer carry it, and it was handed over for several marches to a cooli. The cooli would be a native of some hill district of India (Panch, for instance, or Darjiling). He and the comrades to whom he passed it on would take it over either the Jalap-Là or the Natu-Là, down into the Chumbi valley. From here a pack mule or an 'irregular' pack pony would take it up to Phári. From here across the Phári plain through Tuna and Kalatso and as far as Menza it would lie in an ekka, for this was flat country, and it had seemed worth while and eventually proved a signal success to drag up from India several hundred of those plainly built but strong little two-wheeled carts called ekkas, which hold five maunds each, and can be used on almost any road, however rough, provided it is wide enough to hold both wheels. These ekkas had been run up behind their ponies as far as possible, then taken to pieces, and carried in fragments on the backs of coolis over the passes and up on to the Phári plain, where, at a height of 15,000 feet, they were put together again and plied to and fro, at first greatly to the astonishment of the resident Tibetan, who had never seen any wheels other than prayer-wheels. Most of the ekkas were drawn by ponies of the small 'country-bred' type brought from India, but the casualties among these were sometimes replaced by draught yaks.
From Menza onwards our rice-bag had a choice of mounts. It might go on a pack mule, or meander slowly along on the back of a pack yak, or, with the other bag alongside it, entirely eclipse from human view the most miniature of donkeys, who, nevertheless, if allowed ample time to look about him, and to pick up weird grazing by the roadside, would eventually arrive in camp none the worse, and with his load intact after a uniform progress of about one mile an hour.