by M. M. Kaye
Senior Indian Army officers in those days were apt to be elderly and liverish grey-beards, and on one frontier campaign (the border was seldom at peace) Tacklow and his Subadar-Major and about a hundred jawans† of the 21st Punjabis, who were perched on a stony ridge overlooking tribal territory, were kept waiting for over an hour for the arrival of the Brigadier in charge of operations — that dignitary being so old and fat and infirm that the only way he could reach the ridge was with the help of three hefty young sepoys, two of whom towed him from in front while the third pushed hard from behind. When at last they made it, puffing and panting in the chill air of early dawn, the Subadar-Major turned to Tacklow and remarked acidly in Punjabi: ‘Now that all the halt and lame have arrived, perhaps we may be permitted to begin the battle?’
Tacklow got on with Indians. All Indians; irrespective of religion, caste or kind. He felt completely at ease in their company, for being one of those fortunate individuals who can pick up languages as easily as other people pick up pebbles off a beach, he never had the slightest difficulty in communicating with them. He spoke and wrote nine major languages besides his own (eleven, if one counts Latin and Greek, which he himself would not have thought of including, since in his day anyone with a public school education was automatically expected to have a sound working knowledge of both). The nine were French, German, Italian, Spanish, Persian, Arabic, Hindustani (which included Hindi and Urdu), Pushtu and Chinese — Mandarin as well as Cantonese. In addition to these he spoke eighteen dialects; which by no means covers all those spoken in India and her border countries, but should do to go on with. As a consequence of this he acquired a great many lifelong friends in far-away places. Yet he was never any good at making friends among his own people. Partly, I suspect, because the attitude of some of the British in India irritated him, but largely because he was, at heart, a loner. He did not really need other people. … Take, for instance, the case of the fort —
Somewhere in the vast area in which his regiment operated in the 1890s there was a small, isolated and almost forgotten fort which, at that time, it was the unpopular duty of the 21st Punjabis to garrison. This they did with a token force consisting of one junior British officer and a small detachment of jawans who faced the unenviable prospect of spending three months there before being relieved by the next batch; and so on. … The assignment was dreaded by one and all, for the ancient fort lay in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by an endless sea of sand dotted with small islands of pampas grass and outcrops of rock, and in the opinion of the Punjabis a term of garrison duty there was the equivalent of three months’ solitary in a particularly spartan jail. In the course of time it came to the turn of Second-Lieutenant C. Kaye to take over this unenviable chore, and accompanied by a reluctant but resigned platoon of Punjabis he set off into the wide and sandy yonder. Only to put in for an extension when the three months were up.
Such a thing had never happened before in the history of the regiment, but the astonished Adjutant (having first made sure that young Kaye had not gone off his head) agreed to his taking over the new platoon. And at the end of the next spell of duty received another request for a further extension. Tacklow eventually succeeded in spending nine months there — and would probably have been quite content to spend the rest of his life there had his seniors not decided that enough was enough. He told me that he enjoyed every minute of it because, apart from inventing a number of new and original ploys to keep the platoon interested and on their toes, it gave him time to think and read and write. And also, of course, because he quite literally did not know what it was like to be bored; which is a trait that I have been fortunate enough to inherit from him, and for which I have always been truly grateful.
He was deeply interested in languages, butterflies, astrology, history, cricket and stamps. And fly-fishing, of course. So he was never without something to think about or puzzle over, study, watch, make notes on or collect, and it is my belief that he could have recited Wisden* from memory — probably backwards as well as forwards! He had an outsize brain, but not a grain of common-sense; or of social sense either. Like the Cat That Walked By Himself, ‘all places were alike to him’, and he was perfectly content with his own company.
He liked peace and quiet. Especially the latter. And he would not have liked our present-day world at all. The noise! The squabbling; the recrimination. The whingeing and complaining. The fuss! I don’t believe I ever saw Tacklow lose his temper or heard him raise his voice in anger. Which does not mean that he could not be angry. But never shouting-angry, or worse, cold, unpleasant, up-tight angry. And at no time did he ever let the sun go down on his wrath.
He was interested, too, in the strange workings of fate. For instance when he was in his twenties he became acquainted with a man who, many years previously, having fallen sick while on garrison duty in an isolated outpost on India’s North-West Frontier, had been sent off to the nearest hospital in a dooly* escorted by half-a-dozen sepoys only a few hours before the outpost was attacked and overrun, leaving no survivors. The dooly with its carriers and escort had been ambushed among the hills and met a similar fate — with one exception: the sick man, though badly wounded and left for dead, was found to be alive by the relief column that arrived too late to save the garrison of the outpost. He recovered and was sent home on sick leave; only to become, once again, the sole survivor of a tragedy when the transport in which he sailed went down in a great storm in the Indian Ocean. Later still, on another wild night of storm the hansom cab in which he had been driving to the station to catch a train was delayed by the gale, so that by the time he reached the station the guard had already blown his whistle and the train had begun to move. He sprinted down the platform in a frantic attempt to catch it, and only just failed to do so; thereby saving his life yet again, for the train happened to be the one that toppled into the black, icy, gale-whipped water in the terrible Tay Bridge disaster of 1879.
Tacklow was enormously intrigued by this story, for he, like the little Padre in Thornton Wilder’s Bridge of San Luis Rey, was convinced that if there was any underlying pattern in individual human existence, it must show in a case such as this, and that anyone who had escaped death by the very narrowest of margins on four separate occasions must have been spared by God for a very special purpose. He believed, as I do, that nothing happens without a reason; even though the reason may not necessarily be a good one. One cannot believe in God and deny the existence of the Devil. Or in Good without accepting that there is Evil. I remember Tacklow reading The Bridge of San Luis Rey and saying: ‘That’s what I mean. That’s exactly what I mean!’
* Hunter.
* A seat to contain two or more persons, fitted with a railing (and, on occasions, a canopy), strapped onto the back of an elephant.
*Lit. ‘small breakfast’. An Indian institution to this day, consisting of early-morning tea and fruit.
* Tutor.
* The long-barrelled muzzle-loading guns that can still sometimes be seen on the Frontier to this day.
† Sepoys: Indian other-ranks.
* The bible of all cricket-lovers.
* Palanquin.
Chapter 5
An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ‘crost the Bay!
Kipling, ‘Mandalay’
If there were any fairy-godmothers at the cradle of the twentieth century, their gifts, as far as those proud parents of the British Empire, John Bull and Britannia, were concerned, were far from good ones.
The new century was only six days old when the Boers besieged Ladysmith, a small town in South Africa. A few days later the British forces suffered defeat and severe losses at the battle of Spion Kop, and though news of the relief of another besieged and comparatively unimportant town, Mafeking, was greeted in Britain with as much hysterical enthusiasm as though it had been a glorious victory on the scale of Waterloo or Agincourt, the lamentable Boer War was to drag on for another year.…
On the other side of the world a band of m
ilitant and violently anti-Western Chinese, calling themselves ‘The Harmonious Fists’ (a name that the Westerners translated as ‘The Boxers’), turned in fury on the ‘strangers within their gates’ and all those of their own race who had become Christians — plus any of their fellow countrymen with whom they happened to have fallen out! When the centre of their aggression became Peking, any ‘foreign devil’ who could do so took refuge in the walled compounds of the Legations; the majority of them in the British Legation where they were besieged for nearly nine weeks. The Dowager Empress, Tzu Hsi, widely known as ‘the only man in China’, while unwilling to get on the wrong side of the Boxers (whose aims she was inclined to sympathize with), was careful to send the beleaguered foreigners gifts of food, fresh fruit and vegetables. But apart from that she made no move to come to their support and kept cautiously — and barely — on the safe side of a very finely drawn line. Her Majesty was nothing if not wily.
The Boxer Rising fizzled out after a nasty, nerve-racking interval. And as the international army marching to the relief of the Legation neared Peking, ‘the only man in China’ fled from her capital disguised as a peasant woman in a covered cart such as country folk use; accompanied by a handful of her courtiers and her nephew, the youthful, reluctant and weeping Emperor, now technically ruler of all China though his masterful aunt continued to act as Regent. Tzu Hsi had paused only long enough to order his favourite concubine, who had had the temerity to urge him to stay and face the ‘foreign devils’, to be torn from his arms and thrown shrieking down a nearby well, before hastily quitting the Forbidden City by a back gate. The foreign troops marched into Peking and Siege of the Legations came to an end.
On 22 January 1901, Victoria, Queen and Empress, died at Osborne in the arms of her grandson, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany. And in the following year Tacklow’s regiment received orders to sail for North China and help clear up the ruinous mess left by those far-from-Harmonious Fists.
The 21st Punjabis embarked for Tientsin from Kidderpore Docks in Calcutta, and it was left to Tacklow, as the best linguist among the British officers, to explain to the rank-and-file what a long sea voyage would entail; or, for that matter, any sea voyage, since none of them had ever laid eyes on the sea before or had the haziest idea of geography. In fact it is doubtful if any of them, even the VCOs* or the noncommissioned Havildars and Havildar-Majors, had the remotest idea where China was or knew anything much about it. They listened attentively to everything that Tacklow had to say until he warned them about seasickness. Seasickness? — what sort of illness was that and why did he think they might suffer from it? What caused it? Tacklow explained that it was caused by the motion of the ship in windy weather; the pitching and tossing of the boat was apt to make landsmen feel ill, though such people as lascars (Indian seamen) and other seafaring men became immune to it. The men of the 21st Punjabis rejected the whole idea, declaring scornfully that they did not believe for a moment that the mere motion of a ship could make them feel ill. Foreigners and Sahib-log might do so, but not them! They were not sissies to fall sick because of a little jogging about. The Sahib would see!
The Sahib did. He said he had never seen anything like it. The first few days had been calm and hot and the sepoys laughed at him and pointed out that not one of them had suffered any of the ill-effects he had described. ‘Wait until the wind rises,’ said Tacklow. And sure enough, before long the ship ran into bad weather and within a matter of hours the entire battalion was laid flat on its collective stomach, vomiting its heart out. ‘Never,’ said Tacklow, ‘had any regiment disintegrated so swiftly.’ Every available inch of deck space, passageway or cabin was strewn with groaning bodies which the ship’s company and those of their own officers who were not also laid low had to step over as they went about their duties, since they were wholly incapable of moving. Tacklow said it was just like one of Gustave Doré’s illustrations of ‘The Flood’ — or Dante’s ‘Inferno’.
By the time they reached Singapore and ran out of the bad weather they had decided that perhaps they were not going to die after all. And as it was fortunately not the season for storms and typhoons on the China Seas, they arrived in Tientsin in excellent shape. But when, some three years later, they completed their tour of duty in North China and heard that they were about to return to India, a deputation headed by a Subadar lined up in front of the Colonel to ask if this was true. Were they indeed going home? ‘Assuredly,’ said the Colonel. ‘By ship?’ ‘Certainly by ship.’ Well in that case, said the Subadar, they had come to the unanimous conclusion that they would prefer to walk. They had been studying an atlas which clearly showed that it was possible to return to India without crossing the sea, and as they would not ask the Sikār to feed them, but would undertake to feed themselves during the journey, the Sikār would save a great deal of money not only on the price of their food but on their passages as well.
It took a long time to explain exactly how and why this generous offer must be rejected as impractical, and Tacklow said that he wasn’t sure that they believed the Colonel in the end. But the fact that they were prepared to undertake a year-long trek on foot through trackless jungles, fording rivers, crossing swamps and mountain ranges, and fighting off hostile tribes en route — not to mention head-hunters! — shows what they thought of seasickness. They have all my sympathy. I’m a terrible sailor myself.
Tacklow fell in love with China at first sight, and his tour of ‘China-side service’ was probably the happiest period of his life. The fact that he already spoke Mandarin and Cantonese, and had passed the higher standard in both, may have had something to do with it; for languages being one of his hobbies he had added these two to his collection for fun and not because it had ever crossed his mind that he might be posted to China one day. In fact it was his firm opinion (and one that was only too frequently proved to be true) that any young Army officer who passed the higher standard in, say, Persian could be certain, on the grounds of his ‘proficiency at languages’, of being posted to Burma or Kathmandu; though never on any account to Persia. Tacklow said that one could safely bet on this, because that was how the official mind at Headquarters worked.
Being able to speak two of China’s languages made a great difference to his feelings for that country, since it meant that he could always make himself understood without having to fall back on sign-language, or on Pidgin-English — that fascinating lingua franca of the China coast. Though he confessed that any ordinary Chinaman whom he met, whether in town or country, took it for granted, when addressed, that the ‘foreign devil’ would naturally be speaking in some strange barbaric tongue that would be unintelligible to him, and therefore made his mind a blank. The way out of this impasse was simple. One merely threatened the man with a stick and announced loudly and clearly: ‘I AM SPEAKING CHINESE!’ whereupon the amiable Son of Han would beam with intelligence, and from there on it was all plain sailing.
That magic formula has become a catchword in our family, and if there is anything one of us wishes to impress on another who shows signs of inattention, we say: ‘I am speaking Chinese!’, which not only underlines its importance but invariably works like a charm, making the listener snap to attention. My sister and I use it to this day.
I heard innumerable stories from Tacklow about the years that the regiment spent in China. Stories about the looting of the Summer Palace, where the British troops ran riot and behaved like hooligans, destroying or vandalizing anything they could not carry away. One of these vandalized treasures was a wonderful red lacquer screen that, according to Tacklow, could only have been made in situ since it was far too large to be taken through any doorway. There were also the huge pair of lion-dogs, carved from jade-coloured marble, that stood guard on either side of a central pavilion at the top of the long flight of stone steps, and like the priceless lacquer screen were far too heavy to remove. They were simply smashed up; the superb lion-dogs being toppled from their pedestals and sent crashing down the stone stairway to end up in mutilat
ed fragments; an example of crude and stupid yobbism that in Tacklow’s opinion was enough to reduce any thinking person to tears of despair. But the orders were that since the Empress and not the Chinese people must be held responsible for the death and destruction caused by the Boxers, it was therefore only just and right that her personal property should suffer. It did.
The loot taken in Peking and its environs must have been fabulous. Tacklow bought one item of it, offered to him for a modest sum by a corporal in the French contingent of the International Force that had marched to the rescue of the Europeans in Peking. It was a Kossu scroll, meant to be hung on a wall, depicting a Chinese lady attended by a serving boy carrying a censer that is giving off a cloud of incense. Kossu is a hand-woven picture or design in which each separate colour is cunningly woven into the fabric; though in this one a number of small details and decorations have been superimposed with a paintbrush — which reduces its value considerably.
I have the scroll still. It was the only piece of loot — if you can call it that, since he paid for it — that Tacklow brought back from Peking. Others acquired far more valuable objects, and he told me about an acquaintance of his, the adjutant of one of the British regiments, whose men would bring him any item of bric-à-brac that they had looted, in the certainty that if he fancied it he would say ‘All right — stand yourself a pint of beer on me at the canteen’; which was considered adequate payment and gratefully received. One day a private soldier brought him a necklace, describing it as ‘this ‘ere string o’ glass beads, sir’. The adjutant, no expert, examined the gaudy thing carefully and had his doubts, so he decided to take a gamble and offered the man five pounds. The private, whose pay was a shilling a day, looked very taken aback at the vastness of the sum, but after mulling it over for a moment or two, said he’d changed his mind about selling it and took it back. The adjutant thought no more about it; but a long while later, happening to meet my father again, he told him the end of the story.…