EN AVANT LES ENFANTS PERDUS! Quand un gendarme rit dans la gendarmerie, THIS is a story of the good old happy days in the Shiny East, when Abereigh MacKay wrote of his friends the Cee-Ai-Ees, and planters plotted to deport Viceroys whose politics suited them not; when leave was leave, and hill captains were hill captains, and delightful grass widows went to the hills to meet those same delightful captains, and banjoes and bonhomie led to preferinent, and General Staffs had not set their hoof on the land; when poor old general-duty-wallah colonels brought up families of larky daughters in roomy hill forts, and Lachman Hulwai sold sweets and purveyed news to passers-by in the Khyber Pass, and troubled not his head concerning his putative grandfather, the Irish peer. In those good days there was once a general so famous that people wrote verses about him and grass widows and heliographs tempestuously at play. In addition to which he was a very notable soldier and a fighting man too, which is rather different, and had been among the first into the Sekunder Bagh as a young man, and at the head of his brigade on the Peiwar as an old one. An outspoken man too, who, as a Staff officer, told his general what he thought, and that Admiral Byng had been shot for less,' and the like. He also possessed a power of picturesque blasphemy which endeared him to the rank and file and the young officer. It is to be conceived, therefore, that he might furnish suitable material for a conte drolatique. But every story must have its setting, and this one must be set in the outer hills of the great Himalaya, the home of the eternal snows, to the fringe of which the British hitch their summer stations. The Himalaya is apt to get into a man's blood, so that he will tramp them to the end of his days, and lay his bones by rock and pine and mountain ash. To the hills, as is well known, the great sirkar and all the lesser sirkars betake themselves for many reasons, but primarily because you cannot rule an empire from the kitchen, and men's minds work clearer in 70° Fahrenheit than 120°. But however pleasant may be Ephesus or Capua to the real traveller, there is no variety like the come and go of the Himalayan road from the grand trunk in the plains to the foot of the eternal snow. Many and various are the ways to the hills, wide trunk roads to the foot, and a winding carriage road to the top, or nothing but a bridle-path and sedan-chair gradient; and some times in this twentieth century a circling narrow-gauge rockrailway, which latter is a wilful throwing away of the delights of the road. In the early summer are to be seen young regiments, mountain batteries, ladies, children, nurses, struggling out of the sweltering trains, chaffering for conveyances, struggling with bullock trains, in the rush from stifling heat for the right to breathe. With the sahib logue go the entourage of the English -traders, merchant pedlars, tailors, tramps, and beggars—and, heedless of them all, the pilgrim making for some shrine away under the snows. Out of the clatter and heat of the station you drive through miles of ripening corn, amid clouds of white dust to the thin haze that gradually shapes into mountains as the tonga ponies eat the road. A long line of hooded bullock carts contains the wives and children of a regiment moving to the hills. A few miles on the regiment itself is nearing its camp, with the sound of drums and fifes or pipes lilting high above the acrid dust. You pass a small travellers' rest-house, with a solitary grave by its side to tell how someone dropped by the way; and the cemetery by the military camping-ground tells of a cholera outbreak, the chastisement of the grim stepmother of our kind.' But happily cholera no longer haunts the British soldier and drives him to tramp the country-side in the midst of summer to get away from the pestilence. But if it is not one terror it is another, and the cry is: To the hills! So, past rest-house and cemetery and ripening crops, past river bed and oleanders, past scrub and cheer pine, to blue pine and deodar, tramps the regiment, jolts the bullock train, and rattles the tonga; and the air gets fresher and the light cool breezes play, and the tired soldiers' babies revive. The agent at the turnpike bar, the aged Mohammedan servant who has set up in life as a purveyor of poor tea, the beggar who rattles his gourd under the loquat trees in the old Mogul garden, the blind boy with the zither, who plays Tommy, make room for your uncle' or Cocky North,' or what ever he fancies is the latest thing, are all old friends that you meet on the way to the hills. As the first sail top on the Sussex coast, or the first Martello tower and curling sea horse, or the man cut in the chalk downs, are signs on the way of the return to the sea, so are the landmarks on a road to the hills. So, as your tonga changes pony for the last time at the brewery to a smell of hops, and you enter the rhododendron forest that means the last lap, and you pass the convent and the orphanage, and oaks and chestnuts prove that the East is left miles below, you feel that you have once again earned the right to drink good Bass for dinner and to sleep in the cool till tea time. : So much for the wanderer's journey to the hills in the summer; now for the hills and the story of the famous general, and how the story became a story at all. It does not much matter which of the hill stations the story is about all of them, while distinctive enough in their way, have much in common. There are little cottages and villas scattered about among the forest, up hill and down hill; there are Government offices; there are military offices; there are shops of all kinds, from the attractive window of a London street to the native shop with lattice-alcoved verandah that has stepped out of Delhi. On the best spur the convent; on as good a one the club; down a side path the Masonic temple veiled in allegory and symbol, with no man knows what high jinks inside. Close to them all, perhaps, is the old cemetery, containing little glimpses of the history of the British in India on its decaying stones, and down on a lower spur the new one. Mrs. Lollipop in a dandy or rickshaw hurrying off to pay calls, or discuss an ice with her best hill captain-a pillar of the State-and his daughter riding down the circular way, sing ho, sing hey, for Arcady. And then away over the valleys to the East, the eternal snow, that is close on a hundred miles away, and yet looks as if you could throw a stone on to it, each peak higher and more dazzling than the other, and the great trade road to Tibet winding its way towards them, with the pilgrim searching peace and ever looking forward—θάρσει, ἐγείραι, φώνει σε. But besides the ordinary officer on leave, or official at his task, and those that sojourn with them, is an important class that is a portion of that domiciled community whose existence VOL. XXXI-NO. 186, N.S. 52 so inextricably binds us to India. That domiciled community, which ranges from the pure-bred country-born Englishman that has only lacked English air and English beef in his development to the man with the minutest share of white blood in his veins, whose future and fate is so peculiarly ours to care for. In all the Himalaya are colonies of the domiciled community. Retired warrant officers, with commissioned rank at the end of their service; retired clerks from Government offices, owning houses, dairies and fruit farms; children of earlier settlers carrying on their fathers' business; imported tradespeople from England-all combine to swell the non-official population. The older businesses, it is interesting to note, were often founded by soldiers and non-commissioned officers of the old Bengal Artillery, whose initiative has followed them from the field to the desk. Old officers placed on the Company's invalid establishment for ill health when young were to be met here and there till a few years ago; indeed, may still answer to their name in this world, perhaps. Then, too, may be found some children of those sent in days gone by to carve a new name in the East-children, perhaps, of one who lost her place in heaven for the glamour of a sword,' with the bar-sinister across their name for ever. Some, too, whose mothers minded goats upon a hill, sing hey, sing ho, a grassy hill,' for there are attractive women born in the shepherds' huts in the Himalayan glacis, and there is as much romance in the inner history of the community of a hill station as any lover of fiction could ask to read of. It was to a station such as this, therefore, that the general of our story wended his way one early summer many a year ago to command his division in peace and the cool. Now among the many results of 1857 has been the fashioning of volunteer corps from the civilian and domiciled community. so that the hand may keep the head next time it pleases the cauldron to boil. With a miscellaneous white and Christian community such as has been described it was but natural that the hill station in question, which was a large one, should have a volunteer corps. A volunteer corps, too, of a creditable size, with two cadet companies attached, not to mention a machine gun. During the summer the corps would put in its more extended training, and it was the general's custom to arrange once each summer a combined field day for the volunteers in the hills and the Gurkha battalions and the mountain battery that lay at the foot of them. This would be a very popular occasion. All the shops and offices would close down and release all the white employés, and everyone who could would get into khaki clothing and shoulder his Martini and hie to the rendezvous in front of the church. The civil surgeon, who was medical officer, would join the other two messengers of comfort, the chaplain to the corps in the Anglican interest and the Belgian priest for that of Rome, to stand cheek by jowl in the supernumerary rank. The original sergeant-major of the corps, who had helped blow up the magazine at Delhi or some other tragic event, would be carried to see the parade in a dandy, his large wife, the quondam army schoolmistress, with him. It was this very lady who once said to the very imposing lady of a small but very famous commander-in-chief: It was my good man, your ladyship, who taught your good man his drill.' After the heat of the battle it was the wont of the volunteer corps to entertain its lady friends at a picnic lunch under the pines and the deodars, while the general had an equally select party under his pet chestnut. So, as may be imagined, the volunteer field day was much looked forward to, and the ladies of the station would turn out in their prettiest blouses and brightest parasols. It was Francis Bacon who said: 'I know not how it is, but the soldier's heart turns to wine as it turns to love, probably because perils demand to be paid in pleasures,' or words to that effect. At any rate, all the ladies were there, and as it was best that the battle should take place where they could see, it was the usual thing for the regulars from below to advance in due and ancient form up the sides. of the cart road and deploy below the mall, and through the school grounds and the orchards. Then from the stone parapets of the mall and the last curve of the tonga road the defenders would pour volley after volley on the heads of the advancing foe from the plains, till the beautiful hillside reeked of villainous saltpetre, and all the world applauded. On this occasion all had been arranged as usual. The defenders had been skilfully posted. Men with flags wagged them busily from various points, for all the world as if sending messages. The general and his staff were there with the necessary quota of umpires; the stage was ready and half the performers. But the other half tarried. Along the mall behind |