Missionaries were the first to open schools on modern lines, but at the present time Muhammadans, Hindus, and Sikhs are endowing their own schools and colleges on the most lavish scale, and teaching their own religions therein, just as the mission schools teach Christianity. This certainly has many advantages over the Government system, where religion is ignored. His Majesty the Amir of Afghanistan is alive to the necessity of keeping up with the times, and is founding a college on modern lines at Kabul, which will be the first step towards the foundation of an Afghan University. During his recent visit to India he selected a number of trained Muhammadan graduates from Lahore and elsewhere, who are to inaugurate the new scheme. He will, no doubt, encounter the opposition of some of the more fanatical Mullahs, who already look upon him as having been contaminated with many Western and heretical ideas; but the ultimate result will be good, and the attempt shows that even for Afghanistan a new era is approaching. Perhaps it may not be long before a mission school at Kabul will receive the royal sanction.
The following episode I relate in this place because it shows the striking contrast between the uneducated ghazi fanatic of the hills and young men of the same race and antecedents who have passed through the humanizing and civilizing influences of a mission school.
It is a lovely autumn afternoon in the little frontier town of Bannu. The trees round the recreation-ground between the city and cantonments are becoming sere and showing variegated tints of yellow and brown. There is an unusual crowd round the greensward which forms the station cricket-pitch, and as it is Friday, the Bannu market-day, a number of Wazirs and other hillmen who are coming to and from market stop for a few minutes to gaze on the scene that lies before them, and probably to wonder in their minds what mysterious ultimate object the Feringis have in the evolutions they are watching enacted, or whether it is some preliminary to military operations on their own hill fastnesses.
Turning to the recreation-ground itself, we find that it is a cricket-match between the garrison officers and the Mission High School students. The boys have been stealing a number of runs, and their score is beginning to draw on towards a century, when the officers put on a new slow bowler, and a succession of unwary batsmen fall victims to his wiles, and soon the innings is over with a score of eighty-eight. The officers begin to bat, and the score rises rapidly; then some good catches send several players back to the pavilion (here represented by some shady shisham-trees). The score reaches eighty-eight, and the last player goes in, a young fair-haired boy, the son of the slow bowler; the winning run is made, and the boy caught at point next ball, and the innings is over.
Just one week has passed. Again it is market-day, but no tribesmen can be seen anywhere near the recreation-ground; instead we see long lines of khaki-dressed native infantry, while sentries and patrols guard all the roads leading thereto, and all is silent as the grave. Then we see a long procession slowly, silently moving out of the fort, long ranks of native infantry—Sikh, Pathan, and Punjabi Mussulmans—with slow, measured tread and arms reversed; then a gun-carriage surmounted by a coffin covered with the Union Jack and wreaths, the masterless steed, the mourners; a group of sunburnt officers of the Frontier Force and some more troops bring up the rear. It is the funeral of a distinguished frontier officer, and the slow bowler of last Friday, now borne to his last resting-place, the victim of a dastardly ghazi outrage the day before.
Just facing the cricket-ground is a shady and flowery patch of ground, enclosed by a simple brick wall and containing a number of white tombstones. Here lie many gallant officers, military and civil—some killed in action; others, like the present Captain Donaldson, killed by religious fanatics in Bannu and the neighbourhood while in the execution of their duties; others, again, carried off by pestilence and disease. Here, too, in lowlier grass-grown graves, lie a number of the native Christian community. East and West, high and low, all gathered in one small plot, covered with the same Mother Earth to await their common resurrection—so glorious in its expectations for some, so dread in its possibilities for others.
Here, just facing the now deserted cricket-ground, the long procession halts; the chaplain, just arrived after a hasty drive of ninety miles from Dera Ismaïl Khan, begins to recite the solemn verses of the Burial Service, and the booted and spurred officers do their last brotherly service and shoulder their comrade’s coffin from the gun-carriage to the grave. The strains of the “Last Post” sound forth—a shrill call to the sombre mountains round as the last rays of the setting sun fall slanting through the foliage on the faces of the mourners; some sharp words of command ring forth from a native officer; the troops wheel about, and all is solitude and silence.
Only the day before a new regiment was to arrive in Bannu, and, as the custom is, the station regiments were marching out with their band to welcome them in. At the head of the regiment a group of officers were riding, including the officer commanding the district, Colonel Aylmer, V. C., and his Brigade-Major, Captain Donaldson. Just beyond the fort the road narrows a little to pass over a culvert, and the officer on the outside of Captain Donaldson fell back a little to make room for him.
Behind that culvert a Mahsud Wazir was in hiding, determined to kill an infidel and gain a martyrdom in the most sensational manner possible, so that for many an evening in years to come the tribal bards might sing his praises round the camp-fires and in the village chauks. Just as Captain Donaldson, now on the outside rank, came abreast of him, he sprang out; a pistol shot rang through the air, and the officer fell mortally wounded. There was, of course, no escape for the Mahsud; bullet and bayonet at once disabled him, though he lived long enough to be hanged that afternoon. Our first feelings are those of horror at the enormity of the act—killing a stranger who has never seen or injured him—but who is worthy of our severer judgment, this young and ignorant soldier (for he had recently served in the Border Militia), thirsting for religious fame by a deed of daring, or the Muhammadan priest who had assiduously taught him that all Feringis were kafirs, and that to kill one of them, in no matter how dastardly a manner, was a sure passport to Paradise, and that eternal joys were awaiting him as the reward of the valour and righteousness of his deed? Here, at any rate, we see the two extremes—the gentlemanly Afghan from the mission school, entering with zest and sport into the game of cricket with the officers, and, so far from feeling any resentment towards them, ready, if need be, to fight with them shoulder to shoulder in the common cause of humanity, under the same flag, and defend them with their own blood from the fanaticism of their fellow-countrymen; on the other hand, the fanatical tool of the Mullah, who quails before his ex-cathedrâ denunciations, but is ready at his suggestion to meet a bloody death as a martyr in the cause of his religion.