Sahib (18 page)

The regimental bheesties – water-carriers, like Kipling’s Gunga Din – tried to ensure that there was always water to drink on the line of march. Gunga Din was drawn from life, because, as William Forbes-Mitchell observed, bheesties and
doolie
-bearers ‘were the only camp followers who did not desert us when we crossed into Oudh
 … The bheesties … have been noted for fidelity and bravery in every Indian campaign.’
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Many old hands, however, maintained that a man could damage his health by drinking too much water, and Private Robert Waterfield, marching from Umballa to Ferozepore in May 1848 in sultry weather, observed that:

The remaining bheesties kept well up with the column, with a good supply of water. The water is warm and has a sickly taste with it. A great many men bring sickness on themselves by overloading the stomach with water on the line of march. I always refrain from smoking my pipe as much as I possibly can, and generally carry a small pebble in my mouth which keeps it moist. I refrain from talking as much as I can, and find myself less fatigued when I arrived in camp than most men. I always draw my two drams of ration rum which I find does one good.
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Private Richards marched from Meerut to the hill station of Chakrata, about 160 miles away, in March 1903. First the battalion struck camp, and its large tents were sent on ahead to Chakrata, with smaller ‘mountain tents’ taking their place for the march. Large bags called
sleetahs
held the kit and blankets of four men and were carried on pack animals, bullocks in this instance:

The dairy, bakery, cooks and camp followers moved off each evening twelve hours in advance of the Battalion, so that rations could be drawn and breakfast ready by the time the Battalion arrived. There was no breakfast before we started our march, which on some days was stiffer than on others, but any man who chose to could give his name to the Colour-Sergeant who would put it down on the list of men who would daily be supplied with a good meat-sandwich and a pint of tea at the coffee-halt, for which two
annas
a day was deducted from their pay … We always knew we were approaching the coffee-halt, where we had an hour’s rest, by the drums striking up the tune of ‘Polly put the kettle on and we’ll all have tea’.

We started each day’s march at dawn and the only parade we did after arriving at camp was rifle-and-foot inspection. Unless a man was on guard he had the rest of the day to spend how he liked … Most of the men passed the day away by
playing House, which was the most popular of the games played … The majority of the men were inveterate gamblers and those who were stony broke would collect in schools of five and play Kitty-nap ‘for noses’ as it was called. When a player called Nap and he made it, he would bunch his five cards together and give each of the others twelve smacks on the nose with them; if he failed to make his contract he received six smacks on the nose from each of the others.
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John Fraser remembered ‘jolly and convivial’ campfire concerts on the line of march in the 1880s, evenings when discipline was almost wholly absent and officers and senior NCOs might oblige with their signature tunes, like ‘the Sergeant-Major with “Robin Tamson’s Smiddy” or Sergeant Foley with “Paddy Heagerty’s Ould Leather Breeches”’.
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Even on the march itself not all soldiers preferred to step it out in silence. Major Bayley of HM’s 52nd remembered the march from Allahabad to Umballa in 1853–54:

As soon as the sun was up, and the pipes finished, the men usually began to sing, by companies generally, one man taking the solo and the rest the chorus; but this was not always possible, unless there was a side wind, the dust rose in thick clouds and hung over the column. Of course it was worse in the rear than in the front; so, in order that everyone should have a fair chance, the order of march was changed daily, the company marching in rear today, going to the front tomorrow.
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Ensign Reginald Wilberforce, also of the 52nd, this time on the move from Sialcot to Delhi, remembered that:

Half way along the line of march we always halted for half an hour; the men had rum served out to them, and the officers used to have coffee as well as other things [this was generally known as ‘coffee-stop’]. One of the favourite songs was of a most revolutionary character; it had about thirty verses and a long chorus. I forget the song, but I recall that ‘Confound our Officers!’ held a place in the chorus, and used to be lustily shouted. At first the men would not sing this song – they thought it would hurt our feelings, but it had such a good
tune that nearly every night one of our captains would call for it.
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The level of banter accepted on the march varied from unit to unit. Gunner Bancroft marched from the Bengal Artillery depot at Dum Dum for the Upper Provinces in February 1842. With the column were 400 recruits of the 1st Bengal European Regiment (popularly known as the 1st Yeos) marching to join their unit without their own officers or senior NCOs. Bancroft remembered:

jolly times they were on that blessed march, wiling away the tedium of the marches by whistling, singing, cracking jokes, playing practical tricks, and all sorts of what is commonly called ‘divilment’! There was a very large contingent of Irishmen among the number, and the well-known tendency of the Hibernian to mind everything humorous was very fully developed. There was little or no restraint imposed upon them. If a dispute arose between any two of the number which could not be amicably settled, they turned off the road and had a set to, discovered who was the best man, and manfully resumed their march, after having afforded no small gratification to a crowd of admiring lookers-on and settled their dispute to their own satisfaction. There was no officer in charge of the recruits; usually two mounted non-commissioned officer of the [horse artillery] troop were told off to keep them together if possible, a task as difficult as that of Sisyphus.
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Death also tramped the road. Even if a regiment avoided an epidemic, it was likely to leave a number of its officers and men in camp cemeteries, or in roadside graves, where they were ‘buried and brushed’, spaded under layers of earth interspersed with brushwood which made it harder for jackals to exhume them. On 5 October 1851, Captain Samuel Best died at Chittoor ‘of jungle fever contracted in a few hours passed in the Yailigherry Hills, aged 43’.
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In 1852, Major Augustus Pates was struck dead by a
coup de soleil,
and in 1878, Major S. H. Desborough was killed when his horse collided with a buffalo, after it ran across its path. Sergeant Jackson, Corporal Cunningham and Private Carter of the 15th Hussars died in the train in Bahawalpur state on their way to the war in Afghanistan. And not long after the 50th had reached its barracks in Ludhiana, following
the Sutlej Campaign, ‘a dreadful
taffaun
[typhoon] succeeded by heavy rain’ brought the barracks down: one sergeant, three corporals, two drummers, forty-four privates, sixteen women and seventeen children were killed, and some 135 men, women and children were injured.
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Some men were able to jest at the doors of death. In 1845 the 3rd Light Dragoons, not long in India, were on the move near Cawnpore, a day’s march behind HM’s 52nd Light Infantry:

They had a man die, and buried him in a
tope
[grove] of mango trees, but the jackals had taken the trouble to get him up and pick his bones. His head was off his body and his flesh eaten off. The women had just arrived in camp and got out of their hackeries [bullock carts], when a man of our regiment named H.J. Potter took up the head and ran after the women with it and very much alarmed them. They did screwl out! Potter was stopped three days’ grog for his pains.
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When a unit arrived at its camp site a well-rehearsed routine quickly peopled what had been an empty landscape. The quartermaster would usually move a day’s march ahead of his unit, taking with him the camp colourmen, each of whom carried a small flag which was used to mark the boundaries of the camp and the ground to be occupied by each company. In British units – dreadfully carnivorous by the standards of the subcontinent – butchers also went ahead to ensure that butchered meat was available when the regiment came up. ‘Choosing a site for an encampment is no easy matter,’ reflected Albert Hervey;

at every town or village, or halting place, there is a piece of ground allotted for the use of troops, and the quartermaster of a regiment is always sent on with his establishment of camp-colour-men, for the express purpose of looking over the ground, pitching the flags, and arranging for the disposal of the followers as well as the fighting men.

The whole area or space is, as nearly as possible, a square, or … parallelogram, enclosed within the camp colours, which indicate the bounds of the same. The front being decided upon, the first tent pitched is that intended to hold the advanced or outlying piquet, as it is called; this is usually placed
some yards in front of the first line, which is composed of the men’s tents, four to each company, and capable of containing each twenty-five men. In rear of this are the subalterns’ tents, at a convenient distance; the next is the captains’ line; but when there are so few officers present with a regiment as now-a-days, captains and subalterns generally pitch in one line.

The next line is the commanding officer’s, on each side of which stand the adjutant’s and quartermaster’s tents, his right- and left-hand men, his staff, the commanding officer’s or headquarters being distinguished by a large Union Jack floating on a tolerably sized staff, or pole. On one flank of this last-mentioned line is pitched the mess-tent, and on the other the hospital.
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Camp followers were allocated their own camping places, and the first time that Hervey saw his regiment encamp, with all its families and followers, he was astonished that within an hour the whole camp was ‘as quiet and still as if we had been stationary for months’. For planned regimental moves in peacetime the quartermaster general’s department informed the civil authorities of routes and timings, enabling local
bunnias,
or shopkeepers, to set up a camp bazaar.

New arrivals in India had a lot to learn. When HM’s 52nd Light Infantry arrived at Allahabad in 1853, they found that tents for the men were provided by the East India Company, but the officers had to buy their own:

Now, there were two rival tent-makers in Futteghur, and we sent all our orders to one of them. Each of us ordered a hill tent ten feet square; but the maker, grateful for so large an order, sent us all tents twelve feet square, charging only for the price of the smaller one, about £22 each. This made a great increase in our comfort on the march. In England a tent is unknown; there is a poor thing made of a single thickness of canvas which goes by that name, but an Indian tent was a reality. The sides of the inner portion, or inner fly as it was called, were perpendicular, strengthened with bamboos, and about five and a half feet high; from these the roof sloped upwards to the pole, by which it was supported at the height of about twelve feet. The outer fly, which was much broader,
and extended much further than the inner one, was held up by and fastened to the top of the pole, which was, perhaps, fifteen feet high. By this arrangement there was a space of three feet between the two flies, under the outer of which the servants lived. In a good tent the inner fly was made of five thicknesses of cotton cloth, and the outer of three.
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The double-fly tent did at least enable an officer’s servants to sleep under cover without actually joining him in the tent. As Innes Munro discovered in the 1780s, servants would cram into their master’s tent if it rained heavily outside:

The captain in the midst of all his luxuries has to repose in a close tent, surrounded by twenty or thirty of these black miscreants, lying compactly on the floor to keep each other warm. Some are shivering and snoring, others putrifying the damp smell of the ground with still more poignant flavours, whilst a few more, whose rest may have been disturbed by a fit of the cold gripes, light a piece of stinking tobacco and without the least ceremony or respect commence a conversation together in a kind of undertone, which to a stranger sounds as if they were deeply engaged in a quarrel. Some gentlemen, forgetting their interest, get so enraged upon these occasions with the impudence and presumption of the fellows as to disperse them with a smack of the whip, but they are frequently left in the morning to repent at leisure of this rash proceeding.
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Young officers arriving in India, whether in the Company’s or the Crown’s service, were known as griffins or ‘griffs’ for their first year. They were the targets of advice from the authors of a dozen helpful handbooks; subjects of Charles D’Oyley’s wonderful 1828 spoof
Tom Raw: The Griffin;
the source of added bitterness in 1857 when a party of newly arrived cadets and ensigns were cut down by the mutineers (‘Remember the poor little griffins!’), the topic of disbelieving comments from old hands, and the victims of merry japes. One Madras griffin in the 1830s was told by a kindly friend that there was no need to bother with learning the language:
‘Acha’ –
meaning very good – was a suitable reply to anything a native might say. He was orderly officer when a series of sepoys arrived at his
bungalow with messages of growing complexity, but he dismissed them all with a blithe
‘Acha’.
There was also a certain amount of drumming and bugling from the sepoys’ lines: evidently a band practice, he surmised. Eventually:

in galloped the adjutant. ‘Hallo! Is Mr— at home?’

Up jumped the unfortunate griffin, puffing his cigar, with a glass of brandy pawney [brandy and water] in his hand, and went out.

‘Do you want me? What is the matter?’

‘Matter, sir?’ Asked the adjutant. ‘Don’t you know that the lines are on fire and you should be there? The major has sent twice for you, and you are not moving! You have got yourself into a precious scrape! Make haste and put on your things, and hurry down to barracks.’