At Gyantse we were halted for a few days, upon one of which the G.O.C. held his farewell parade, making us a sympathetic speech which will be remembered by all of us. Then we marched past. My lot was to command a squad of veterans whose duties for years had been confined to the supply of the army. We got along somehow, more by innate intelligence than knowledge of drill, going through various giddy evolutions in no particular formation and by the shortest cut, and arriving at the saluting base aided only by the bump of locality. There of course we braced ourselves and marched past, and turned our eyes sharply to the right as though we had never left the barrack square.
From Gyantse onwards I was in the first column, and thus missed certain hardships. It was nice bracing weather. We had cool fine days, at night twenty degrees of frost and often biting cold winds that took the skin off the nose and chapped the lips and the lobes of the ear, but were on the whole salubrious. The same weather was with us all the way, up through Kangma and the Red Idol gorge to Kalatso, past Dochen and into the Tuna plain, over the Tang-Là, into Phari and down through the Gautsa glens, where the pine-forests smelt of Indian hill stations, and into Chumbi. As we reached Chumbi the clouds were gathering.
That night, with the outer fly of my tent taken out of store and erected over me, I went to bed secure in its extra protection, thinking casually that it might perhaps rain in the night. In the early morning I was woken with a crash, and felt a great weight squeezing my whole body, but leaving my head clear. Striking a light I found the upright tent pole near my feet broken in two. Looking through a corner of the tent I saw the ground all covered with snow, and realised that the weight on my body was the snow that had accumulated on the tent, broken the tent pole, and fallen upon me. It was six o'clock. My orderly and syce came to my rescue. They lifted the snow off me and took away my tent pole to a carpenter to get it mended, while in what space was still left within the tent I found I could still breathe, and so slept peacefully till in an hour my tent pole was brought back mended and the tent reconstructed, and I could get up in comfort.
I had had a very mild experience. Grief of a worse kind had been widespread through the night, many officers and men losing their only shelter irretrievably at two or three in the morning. The second column came in that afternoon rather worn and battered, and the third column—for from Gyantse we had become three—was snowed up for two nights at Phari after a terrible march over the Tang-Là from Tuna. Their eventual march into Chumbi was also a severe ordeal. At Chumbi it remained to await one's day of release. The snow delayed the passage of the troops hardly at all. Leaving Chumbi in small detachments and using both the Jalap-Là and Natu-Là routes, they gradually disappeared. At length my own turn came. Leaving Chumbi one fine morning, and finding myself again a passenger, I hastened by double marches to India across the Natu-Là down to Gangtok, through Sikkim, and into Siliguri. Strange it was to think, as, after that last hot double march from Riang, one sat under the punkah in Siliguri refreshment room, drinking tumbler after tumbler of iced ginger-beer, that three days before one had pulled icicles from one's beard on the top of the Natu-Là.
Pleasant to get into the Darjiling mail that night and speed to Calcutta; pleasant to feel oneself wrapped in the civilisation of the Indian metropolis; pleasanter still to take train at Howrah, and be carried up country to the crisp cool autumn of the Panjab and to one's own fireside.
So the show was over—all over but for its memories, which for my own part were mainly agreeable. As he lays those memories aside, the selfish soldier's wish can hardly be other than that on some convenient date in spring time not too many years distant, ere the person is too stout and the legs too stiff to relish those high passes, some truculent grand lama may necessitate and a kind Government organise another summer trip to Lhassa.
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