Another man, not a workman, told me that the Guards' riot—it's impossible, as you know, to call this kick-up of the fatted flunkies of the army a mutiny—was only "a schoolboy's prank"; and he could not see that if it was what he said it was, the Guards were no regiment and should have been wiped out decently and quietly. There again the futility of a sheltered people cropped up. You mustn't treat a man like a machine in this country, but you can't get any work out of a man till he has learned to work like a machine. D—— has just come home for a few months from the charge of a mountain battery on the frontier. He used to begin work at eight, and he was thankful if he got off at six; most of the time on his feet. When he went to the Black Mountain he was extensively engaged for nearly sixteen hours a day; and that on food at which the "pore workin'man" would have turned up his state-lifted nose. D—— on the subject of labour as understood by the white man in his own home is worth hearing. Though coarse—considerably coarse! But D—— doesn't know all the hopeless misery of the business. When the small pig, oyster, furniture, carpet, builder or general shopman works his way out of the ruck he turns round and makes his old friends and employes sweat. He knows how near he can go to flaying 'em alive before they kick; and in this matter he is neither better nor worse than a bunnia or a havildar of our own blessed country. It's the small employer of labour that skins his servant, exactly as the forty-pound householder works her one white servant to the bone and goes to drop pennies into the plate to convert the heathen in the East.
Just at present, as you have read, the person who calls himself the pore workin'man—the man I saw kicking fallen men in the mud by the docks last winter—has discovered a real, fine, new original notion; and he is working it for all he is worth. He calls it the solidarity of labour bundobast; but it's caste—four thousand years old, caste of Menu—with old shetts, mahajuns, guildtolls, excommunication and all the rest of it. All things considered, there isn't anything much older than caste—it began with the second generation of man on earth—but to read the "advance" papers on the subject you'd imagine it was a revelation from Heaven. The real fun will begin—as it has begun and ended many times before—when the caste of skilled labour—that's the pore workin'man—are pushed up and knocked about by the lower and unrecognised castes, who will form castes of their own and outcaste on the decision of their own punchayats. How these castes will scuffle and fight among themselves, and how astonished the Englishman will be!
He is naturally lawless because he is a fighting animal; and his amazingly sheltered condition has made him inconsequent. I don't like inconsequent lawlessness. I've seen it down at Bow Street, at the docks, by the G.P.O., and elsewhere. Its chief home, of course, is in that queer place called the House of Commons, but no one goes there who isn't forced by business. It's shut up at present, and the persons who belong to it are loose all over the face of the country. I don't think—but I won't swear—that any of them are spitting at policemen. One man appears to have been poaching, others are advocating various forms of murder and outrage—and nobody seems to care. The residue talk—just heavens, how they talk, and what wonderful fictions they tell! And they firmly believe, being ignorant of the mechanism of Government, that they administer the country. In addition, certain of their newspapers have elaborately worked up a famine in Ireland that could be engineered by two Deputy Commissioners and four average Stunts into a "woe" and a "calamity" that is going to overshadow the peace of the nation—even the Empire. I suppose they have their own sense of proportion, but they manage to keep it to themselves very successfully. What do you, who have seen half a countryside in deadly fear of its life, suppose that this people would do if they were chukkered and gabraowed? If they really knew what the fear of death and the dread of injury implied? If they died very swiftly, indeed, and could not count their futile lives enduring beyond next sundown? Some of the men from your—I mean our—part of the world say that they would be afraid and break and scatter and run. But there is no room in the island to run. The sea catches you, midwaist, at the third step. I am curious to see if the cholera, of which these people stand in most lively dread, gets a firm foothold in London. In that case I have a notion that there will be scenes and panics. They live too well here, and have too much to make life worth clinging to—clubs, and shop fronts, and gas, and theatres, and so forth—things that they affect to despise, and whereon and whereby they live like leeches. But I have written enough. It doesn't exhaust the subject; but you won't be grateful for other epistles. De Vitre of the Poona Irregular Moguls will have it that they are a tiddy-iddy people. He says that all their visible use is to produce loans for the colonies and men to be used up in developing India. I honestly believe that the average Englishman would faint if you told him it was lawful to use up human life for any purpose whatever. He believes that it has to be developed and made beautiful for the possessor, and in that belief talkatively perpetrates cruelties that would make Torquemada jump in his grave. Go to Alipur if you want to see. I am off to foreign parts—forty miles away—to catch fish for my friend the char-cat; also to shoot a little bird if I have luck.
Yours,
Rudyard Kipling.
II
To Captain J. McHail,
151st (Kumharsen) N.I.,
Hakaiti via Tharanda.
Captain Sahib Bahadur! The last Pi gives me news of your step, and I'm more pleased about it than many. You've been "cavalry quick" in your promotion. Eight years and your company! Allahu! But it must have been that long, lean horse-head of yours that looks so wise and says so little that has imposed upon the authorities. My best congratulations. Let out your belt two holes, and be happy, as I am not.
Did I tell you in my last about going to Woking in search of a grave? The dust and the grime and the grey and the sausage-shop told on my spirits to such an extent that I solemnly took a train and went grave-hunting through the Necropolis—locally called the Necrapolis. I wanted an eligible, entirely detached site in a commanding position—six by three and bricked throughout. I found it, but the only drawback was that I must go back to town to the head office to buy it. One doesn't go to town to haggle for tomb-space, so I deferred the matter and went fishing. All the same, there are very nice graves at Woking, and I shall keep my eye on one of 'em.
Since that date I seem to have been in four or five places, because there are labels on the bag. One of the places was Plymouth, where I found half a regiment at field exercises on the Hoe. They were practising the attack in three lines with the mixed rush at the end, even as it is laid down in the drill-book, and they charged subduedly across the Hoe. The people laughed. I was much more inclined to cry. Except the Major, there didn't seem to be anything more than twenty years old in the regiment; and oh! but it was pink and white and chubby and undersized—just made to die succulently of disease. I fancied that some of our battalions out with you were more or less young and exposed, but a home battalion is a crêche, and it scares one to watch it. Eminent and distinguished Generals get up after dinner—I've listened to two of 'em—and explain that though the home battalion can only be regarded as a feeder to the foreign, yet all our battalions can be regarded as efficient; and if they aren't efficient we shall find in our military reserve the nucleus—how I loath that lying word!—of the Lord knows what, but the speeches always end with allusions to the spirit of the English, their glorious past, and the certainty that when the hour of need comes the nation will "emerge victorious." If (sic) the Engineer of the Hungerford Bridge told the Southeastern Railway that because a main girder had stood for thirty years without need of renewal it was therefore sure to stand for another fifty, he would probably get the sack. Our military authorities don't get the sack. They are allowed to make speeches in public. Some day, if we live long enough, we shall see the glories of the past and the "sublime instinct of an ancient people" without one complete army corps, pitted against a few unsentimental long-range guns and some efficiently organised troops. Then the band will begin to play, and it will not play Rule Britannia until it has played some funny tunes first.
Do you remember Tighe? He was in the Deccan Lancers and retired because he got married. He is in Ireland now, and I met him the other day, idle, unhappy and dying for some work to do. Mrs. Tighe is equally miserable. She wants to go back to Poona instead of administering a big barrack of a house somewhere at the back of a bog. I quote Tighe here. He has, you may remember, a pretty tongue about him, and he was describing to me at length how a home regiment behaves when it is solemnly turned out for a week or a month training under canvas: