The Unveiling of Lhasa

Three months after the action I found the Tibetans still lying where they fell. One shot through the shoulder in retreat had spun as he fell facing our rifles. Another tore at the grass with futile fingers through which a delicate pink primula was now blossoming. Shrunk arms and shanks looked hideously dwarfish. By the stream the bodies lay in heaps with parched skin, like mummies, rusty brown. A knot of coarse black hair, detached from a skull, was circling round in an eddy of wind. Everything had been stripped from the corpses save here and there a wisp of cloth, looking more grim than the nakedness it covered, or round the neck some inexpensive charm, which no one had thought worth taking for its occult powers. Nature, more kindly, had strewn round them beautiful spring flowers – primulas, buttercups, potentils. The stream 'bubbled oilily,' and in the ruined house bees were swarming.

Ten miles beyond the Springs an officer was watering his horse in the Bamtso Lake. The beast swung round trembling, with eyes astare. Among the weeds lay the last victim.

CHAPTER VII

A HUMAN MISCELLANY

The Tibetans stood on the roofs of their houses like a row of cormorants, and watched the doolie pass underneath. At a little distance it was hard to distinguish the children, so motionless were they, from the squat praying-flags wrapped in black skin and projecting from the parapets of the roof. The very babes were impassive and inscrutable. Beside them perched ravens of an ebony blackness, sleek and well groomed, and so consequential that they seemed the most human element of the group.

My Tibetan bearers stopped to converse with a woman on the roof who wore a huge red hoop in her hair, which was matted and touzled like a negress's. A child behind was searching it, with apparent success. The woman asked a question, and the bearers jerked out a few guttural monosyllables, which she received with indifference. She was not visibly elated when she heard that the doolie contained the first victim of the Tibetan arms. I should like to have heard her views on the political situation and the question of a settlement. Some of her relatives, perhaps, were killed in the mêlée at the Hot Springs. Others who had been taken prisoners might be enlisted in the new doolie corps, and receiving an unexpected wage; others, perhaps, were wounded and being treated in our hospitals with all the skill and resources of modern science; or they were bringing in food-stuffs for our troops, or setting booby-traps for them, and lying in wait behind sangars to snipe them in the Red Idol Gorge.

The bearers started again; the hot sun and the continued exertion made them stink intolerably. Every now and then they put down the doolie, and began discussing their loot – ear-rings and charms, rough turquoises and ruby-coloured stones, torn from the bodies of the dead and wounded. For the moment I was tired of Tibet.

I remembered another exodus when I was disgusted with the country. I had been allured across the Himalayas by the dazzling purity of the snows. I had escaped the Avernus of the plains, and I might have been content, but there was the seduction of the snows. I had gained an upper story, but I must climb on to the roof. Every morning the Sun-god threw open the magnificent portals of his domain, dazzling rifts and spires, black cliffs glacier-bitten, the flawless vaulted roof of Kinchenjunga —

'Myriads of topaz lights and jacinth workOf subtlest jewellery.'

One morning the roof of the Sun-god's palace was clear and cloudless, but about its base hung little clouds of snow-dust, as though the Olympians had been holding tourney, and the dust had risen in the tracks of their chariots. All this was seen over galvanized iron roofs. The Sun-god had thrown open his palace, and we were playing pitch and toss on the steps. While I was so engrossed I looked up. Columns of white cloud were rising to obscure the entrance. Then a sudden shaft of sunlight broke the fumes. There was a vivid flash, a dazzle of jewel-work, and the portals closed. I was covered with bashfulness and shame. It was a direct invitation. I made some excuse to my companion, said I had an engagement, went straight to my rooms, and packed.

But while the aroma of my carriers insulted the pure air, and their chatter over their tawdry spoil profaned the silent precincts of Chumulari, their mountain goddess, I thought more of the disenchantment of that earlier visit. I remembered sitting on a hillside near a lamasery, which was surrounded by a small village of Lamas' houses. Outside the temple a priest was operating on a yak for vaccine. He had bored a large hole in the shoulder, into which he alternately buried his forearm and squirted hot water copiously. A hideous yellow trickle beneath indicated that the poor beast was entirely perforated. A crowd of admiring little boys and girls looked on with relish. The smell of the poor yak was distressing, but the smell of the Lama was worse. I turned away in disgust – turned my back contentedly and without regret on the mysterious land and the road to the Forbidden City. At that moment, if the Dalai Lama himself had sent me a chaise with a dozen outriders and implored me to come, I would not have visited him, not for a thousand yaks. The scales of vagabondage fell from my eyes; the spirit of unrest died within me. I had a longing for fragrant soap, snowy white linen, fresh-complexioned ladies and clean-shaven, well-groomed men.

And here again I was returning very slowly to civilization; but I was coming back with half an army corps to shake the Dalai Lama on his throne – or if there were no throne or Dalai Lama, to do what? I wondered if the gentlemen sitting snugly in Downing Street had any idea.

At Phari I was snow-bound for a week, and there were no doolie-bearers. The Darjeeling dandy-wallahs were no doubt at the front, where they were most wanted, as the trained army doolie corps are plainsmen, who can barely breathe, much less work, at these high elevations. At last we secured some Bhutias who were returning to the front.

The Bhutia is a type I have long known, though not in the capacity of bearer. These men regarded the doolie with the invalid inside as a piece of baggage that had to be conveyed from one camp to another, no matter how. Of the art of their craft they knew nothing, but they battled with the elements so stoutly that one forgave them their awkwardness. They carried me along mountain-paths so slippery that a mule could find no foothold, through snow so deep and clogging that with all their toil they could make barely half a mile an hour; and they took shelter once from a hailstorm in which exposure without thick head-covering might have been fatal. Often they dropped the doolie, sometimes on the edge of a precipice, in places where one perspired with fright; they collided quite unnecessarily with stones and rocks; but they got through, and that was the main point. Men who have carried a doolie over a difficult mountain-pass (14,350 feet), slipping and stumbling through snow and ice in the face of a hurricane of wind, deserve well of the great Raj which they serve.

On the road into Darjeeling, owing to the absence of trained doolie-bearers, I met a human miscellany that I am not likely to forget. Eight miles beyond the Jelap lies the fort of Gnatong, whence there is a continual descent to the plains of India. The neighbouring hills and valleys had been searched for men; high wages were offered, and at last from some remote village in Sikkim came a dozen weedy Lepchas, simian in appearance, and of uncouth speech, who understood no civilized tongue. They had never seen a doolie, but in default of better they were employed. It was nobody's fault; bearers must be had, and the profession was unpopular. I was their 'first job.' I settled myself comfortably, all unconscious of my impending fate. They started off with a wild whoop, threw the doolie up in the air, caught it on their shoulders, and played cup and ball with the contents until they were tired. I swore at them in Spanish, English, and Hindustani, but it was small relief, as they didn't take the slightest notice, and I had neither hands to beat them nor feet to kick them over the khud. My orderly followed and told them in a mild North-Country accent that they would be punished if they did it again; there is some absurd army regulation about British soldiers striking followers. For all they knew, he was addressing the stars. They dropped the thing a dozen times in ten miles, and thought it the hugest joke in the world. I shall shy at a hospital doolie for the rest of my natural life.

There is a certain Mongol smell which is the most unpleasant human odour I know. It is common to Lepchas, Bhutanese, and Tibetans, but it is found in its purest essence in these low-country, cross-bred Lepchas, who were my close companions for two days. When we reached the heat of the valley, they jumped into the stream and bathed, but they emerged more unsavoury than ever. It was a relief to pass a dead mule. At the next village they got drunk, after which they developed an amazing surefootedness, and carried me in without mishap.

After two days with my Lepchas we reached Rungli (2,000 feet), whence the road to the plains is almost level. Here a friend introduced me to a Jemadar in a Gurkha regiment.

'He writes all about our soldiers and the fighting in Tibet,' he said. 'It all goes home to England on the telegraph-wire, and people at home are reading what he says an hour or two after he has given khubber to the office here.'

'Oh yes,' said the Jemadar in Hindustani, 'and if things are well the people in England will be very glad; and if we are ill and die, and there is too much cold, they will be very sorry.'

The Jemadar smiled. He was most sincere and sympathetic. If an Englishman had said the same thing, he would have been thought half-witted, but Orientals have a way of talking platitudes as if they were epigrams.

The Jemadar's speech was so much to the point that it called up a little picture in my mind of the London Underground and a liveried official dealing out Daily Mails to crowds of inquirers anxious for news of Tibet. Only the sun blazed overhead and the stream made music at our feet.

I left the little rest-hut in the morning, resigned to the inevitable jolting, and expecting another promiscuous collection of humanity to do duty as kahars. But, to my great joy, I found twelve Lucknow doolie-wallahs waiting by the veranda, lithe and erect, and part of a drilled corps. Drill discipline is good, but in the art of their trade these men needed no teaching. For centuries their ancestors had carried palanquins in the plains, bearing Rajas and ladies of high estate, perhaps even the Great Mogul himself. The running step to their strange rhythmic chants must be an instinct to them. That morning I knew my troubles were at an end. They started off with steps of velvet, improvising as they went a kind of plaintive song like an intoned litany.

The leading man chanted a dimeter line, generally with an iambus in the first foot; but when the road was difficult or the ascent toilsome, the metre became trochaic, in accordance with the best traditions of classical poetry. The hind-men responded with a sing-song trochaic dimeter which sounded like a long-drawn-out monosyllable. They never initiated anything. It was not custom; it had never been done. The laws of Nature are not so immutable as the ritual of a Hindu guild.

We sped on smoothly for eight miles, and when I asked the kahars if they were tired, they said they would not rest, as relays were waiting on the road. All the way they chanted their hymn of the obvious: —

'Mountains are steep;Chorus: Yes, they are.The road is narrow;Yes, it is.The sahib is wounded;That is so.With many wounds;They are many.The road goes down;Yes, it does.Now we are hurrying;Yes, we are.'

Here they ran swiftly till the next rise in the hill.

Waiting in the shade for relays, I heard two Englishmen meet on the road. One had evidently been attached, and was going down to join his regiment; the other was coming up on special service. I caught fragments of our crisp expressive argot.

Officer going down (apparently disillusioned): 'Oh, it's the same old bald-headed maidan we usually muddle into.'

Officer coming up: '… Up above Phari ideal country for native cavalry, isn't it?.. A few men with lances prodding those fellows in the back would soon put the fear of God into them. Why don't they send up the – th Light Cavalry?'

Officer going down: 'They've Walers, and you can't feed 'em, and the – th are all Jats. They're no good; can't do without a devil of a lot of milk. They want bucketsful of it. Well, bye-bye; you'll soon get fed up with it.'

The doolie was hitched up, and the kahars resumed their chant:

'A sahib goes up;Yes, he does.A sahib goes down;That is so.'

The heat and the monotonous cadence induced drowsiness, and one fell to thinking of this odd motley of men, all of one genus, descended from the anthropoid ape, and exhibiting various phases of evolution – the primitive Lepcha, advanced little further than his domestic dog; the Tibetan kahar caught in the wheel of civilization, and forming part of the mechanism used to bring his own people into line; the Lucknow doolie-bearer and the Jemadar Sahib, products of a hoary civilization that have escaped complexity and nerves; and lord of all these, by virtue of his race, the most evolved, the English subaltern. All these folk are brought together because the people on the other side of the hills will insist on being obsolete anachronisms, who have been asleep for hundreds of years while we have been developing the sense of our duty towards our neighbour. They must come into line; it is the will of the most evolved.

The next day I was carried for miles through a tropical forest. The damp earth sweated in the sun after last night's thunder-storm, and the vegetation seemed to grow visibly in the steaming moisture. Gorgeous butterflies, the epicures of a season, came out to indulge a love of sunshine and suck nectar from all this profusion. Overhead, birds shrieked and whistled and beat metal, and did everything but sing. The cicadas raised a deafening din in praise of their Maker, seeming to think, in their natural egoism, that He had made the forest, oak, and gossamer for their sakes. We were not a thousand feet above the sea. Thousands of feet above us, where we were camping a day or two ago, our troops were marching through snow.

The next morning we crossed the Tista River, and the road led up through sal forests to a tea-garden at 3,500 feet. Here we entered the most perfect climate in the world, and I enjoyed genial hospitality and a foretaste of civilization: a bed, sheets, a warm bath, clean linen, fruit, sparkling soda, a roomy veranda with easy-chairs, and outside roses and trellis-work, and a garden bright with orchids and wild-turmeric and a profusion of semi-tropical and English flowers – all the things which the spoilt children of civilization take as a matter of course, because they have never slept under the stars, or known what it is to be hungry and cold, or exhausted by struggling against the forces of untamed Nature.

At noon next day, in the cantonments at Jelapahar, an officer saw a strange sight – a field-hospital doolie with the red cross, and twelve kahars, Lucknow men, whose plaintive chant must have recalled old days on the North-West frontier. Behind on a mule rode a British orderly of the King's Own Scottish Borderers, bearded and weather-stained, and without a trace of the spick-and-spanness of cantonments. I saw the officer's face lighten; he became visibly excited; he could not restrain himself – he swung round, rode after my orderly, and began to question him without shame. Here was civilization longing for the wilderness, and over there, beyond the mist, under that snow-clad peak, were men in the wilderness longing for civilization.

A cloud swept down and obscured the Jelap, as if the chapter were closed. But it is not. That implacable barrier must be crossed again, and then, when we have won the most secret places of the earth, we may cry with Burton and his Arabs, 'Voyaging is victory!'

CHAPTER VIII

THE ADVANCE OF THE MISSION OPPOSED

The intention of the Tibetans at the Hot Springs has not been made clear. They say that their orders were to oppose our advance, but to avoid a battle, just as our orders were to take away their arms, if possible, without firing a shot. The muddle that ensued lends itself to several interpretations, and the Tibetans ascribe their loss to British treachery. They say that we ordered them to destroy the fuses of their matchlocks, and then fired on them. This story was taken to Lhasa, with the result that the new levies from the capital were not deterred by the terrible punishment inflicted on their comrades. Orders were given to oppose us on the road to Gyantse, and an armed force, which included many of the fugitives from Guru, gathered about Kangma.

The peace delegates always averred that we fired the first shot at Guru. But even if we give the Tibetans the benefit of the doubt, and admit that the action grew out of the natural excitement of two forces struggling for arms, both of whom were originally anxious to avoid a conflict, there is still no doubt that the responsibility of continuing the hostilities lies with the Tibetans.

On the morning of April 7 ten scouts of the 2nd Mounted Infantry, under Captain Peterson, found the Tibetans occupying the village of Samando, seventeen miles beyond Kalatso. As our men had orders not to fire or provoke an attack, they sent a messenger up to the walls to ask one of the Tibetans to come out and parley. They said they would send for a man, and invited us to come nearer. When we had ridden up to within a hundred yards of the village, they opened a heavy fire on us with their matchlocks. Our scouts spread out, rode back a few hundred yards, and took cover behind stones. Not a man or pony was hit. Before retiring, the mounted infantry fired a few volleys at the Tibetans who were lining the roofs of two large houses and a wall that connected them, their heads only appearing above the low turf parapets. Twice the Tibetans sent off a mounted man for reinforcements, but our shooting was so good that each time the horse returned riderless. The next morning we found the village unoccupied, and discovered six dead left on the roofs, most of whom were wounded about the chest. Our bullets had penetrated the two feet of turf and killed the man behind. Putting aside the question of Guru, the Samando affair was the first overt act of hostility directed against the mission.

After Samando there was no longer any doubt that the Tibetans intended to oppose our advance. On the 8th the mounted infantry discovered a wall built across the valley and up the hills just this side of Kangma, which they reported as occupied by about 1,000 men. As it was too late to attack that night, we formed camp. The next morning we found the wall evacuated, and the villagers reported that the Tibetans had retired to the gorge below. This habit of building formidable barriers across a valley, stretching from crest to crest of the flanking hills, is a well-known trait of Tibetan warfare. The wall is often built in the night and abandoned the next morning. One would imagine that, after toiling all night to make a strong position, the Tibetans would hold their wall if they intended to make a stand anywhere. But they do not grudge the labour. Wall-building is an instinct with them. When a Tibetan sees two stones by the roadside, he cannot resist placing one on the top of the other. So wherever one goes the whole countryside is studded with these monuments of wasted labour, erected to propitiate the genii of the place, or from mere force of habit to while away an idle hour. During the campaign of 1888 it was this practice of strengthening and abandoning positions more than anything else which gained the Tibetans the reputation of cowardice, which they have since shown to be totally undeserved.

On April 8, owing to the delay in reconnoitring the wall, we made only about eight miles, and camped. The next morning we had marched about two miles, when we found the high ridge on the left flank occupied by the enemy, and the mounted infantry reported them in the gorge beyond. Two companies of the 8th Gurkhas under Major Row were sent up to the hill on the left to turn the enemy's right flank, and the mountain battery (No. 7) came into action on the right at over 3,000 yards. The enemy kept up a continuous but ineffectual fire from the ridge, none of their jingal bullets falling anywhere near us. The Gurkhas had a very difficult climb. The hill was quite 2,000 feet above the valley; the lower and a good deal of the other slopes were of coarse sand mixed with shale, and the rest nothing but slippery rock. The summit of the hill was approached by a number of step-like shale terraces covered with snow. When only a short way up, a snowstorm came on and obscured the Gurkhas from view. The cold was intense, and the troops in the valley began to collect the sparse brushwood, and made fires to keep themselves warm.

On account of the nature of the hillside and the high altitude, the progress of the Gurkhas was very slow, and it took them nearly three hours to reach the ridge held by the enemy. When about two-thirds of the way up, they came under fire from the ridge, but all the shots went high. The jingals carried well over them at about 1,200 yards. The enemy also sent a detachment to meet them on the top, but these did not fire long, and retired as the Gurkhas advanced. When the 8th reached the summit, the Tibetans were in full flight down the opposite slope, which was also snow-covered. Thirty were shot down in the rout, and fifty-four who were hiding in the caves were made prisoners.

In the meanwhile the battery had been making very good practice at 3,000 yards. Seven men were found dead on the summit, and four wounded, evidently by their fire.

But to return to the main action in the gorge. The Tibetans held a very strong position among some loose boulders on the right, two miles beyond the gully which the Gurkhas had ascended to make their flank attack. The rocks extended from the bluff cliff to the path which skirted the stream. No one could ask for better cover; it was most difficult to distinguish the drab-coated Tibetans who lay concealed there. To attack this strong position General Macdonald sent Captain Bethune with one company of the 32nd Pioneers, placing Lieutenant Cook with his Maxim on a mound at 500 yards to cover Bethune's advance. Bethune led a frontal attack. The Tibetans fired wildly until the Sikhs were within eighty yards, and then fled up the valley. Not a single man of the 32nd was hit during the attack, though one sepoy was wounded in the pursuit by a bullet in the hand from a man who lay concealed behind a rock within a few yards of him. While the 32nd were dislodging the Tibetans from the path and the rocks above it, the mounted infantry galloped through them to reconnoitre ahead and cut off the fugitives in the valley. They also came through the enemy's fire at very close quarters without a casualty. On emerging from the gorge the mounted infantry discovered that the ridge the Tibetans had held was shaped like the letter S, so that by doubling back along an almost parallel valley they were able to intercept the enemy whom the Gurkhas had driven down the cliffs. The unfortunate Tibetans were now hemmed in between two fires, and hardly a man of them escaped.

The Tibetan casualties, as returned at the time, were much exaggerated. The killed amounted to 100, and, on the principle that the proportion of wounded must be at least two to one, it was estimated that their losses were 300. But, as a matter of fact, the wounded could not have numbered more than two dozen.

The prisoners taken by the Gurkhas on the top of the ridge turned out to be impressed peasants, who had been compelled to fight us by the Lamas. They were not soldiers by inclination or instinct, and I believe their greatest fear was that they might be released and driven on to fight us again.

The action at the Red Idol Gorge may be regarded as the end of the first phase of the Tibetan opposition. We reached Gyantse on April 11, and the fort was surrendered without resistance. Nothing had occurred on the march up to disturb our estimate of the enemy. Since the campaign of 1888 no one had given the Tibetans any credit for martial instincts, and until the Karo la action and the attack on Gyantse they certainly displayed none. It would be hard to exaggerate the strategical difficulties of the country through which we had to pass. The progress of the mission and its escort under similar conditions would have been impossible on the North-West frontier or in any country inhabited by a people with the rudiments of sense or spirit. The difficulties of transport were so great that the escort had to be cut down to the finest possible figure. There were barely enough men for pickets, and many of the ordinary precautions of field manœuvres were out of the question. But the Tibetan failed to realize his opportunities. He avoided the narrow forest-clad ravines of Sikkim and Chumbi, and made his first stand on the open plateau at Guru. Fortunately for us, he never learnt what transport means to a civilized army. A bag of barley-meal, some weighty degchies, and a massive copper teapot slung over the saddle are all he needs; evening may produce a sheep or a yak. His movements are not hampered by supplies. If the importance of the transport question had ever entered his head, he would have avoided the Tuna camp, with its Maxims and mounted infantry, and made a dash upon the line of communications. A band of hardy mountaineers in their own country might very easily surprise and annihilate an ill-guarded convoy in a narrow valley thickly forested and flanked by steep hills. To furtively cut an artery in your enemy's arm and let out the blood is just as effective as to knock him on the head from in front. But in this first phase of the operations the Tibetans showed no strategy; they were badly led, badly armed, and apparently devoid of all soldier-like qualities. Only on one or two occasions they displayed a desperate and fatal courage, and this new aspect of their character was the first indication that we might have to revise the views we had formed sixteen years ago of an enemy who has seemed to us since a unique exception to the rule that a hardy mountain people are never deficient in courage and the instinct of self-defence.