Among the Headhunters

by Robert Lyman

  On November 23, 1936, tumultuous news arrived in the camp with the mail, which was followed by a runner from Mokokchung. The newspapers were full of rumors that the king-emperor, the man who underwrote Mills’s very authority, was threatening to marry the divorced American Mrs. Wallace Simpson. It was simply not possible, Mills remarked indignantly to his wife—because the people would not support it—for Mrs. Simpson to be crowned queen of England. Something would have to give. The loss of prestige for the monarchy suddenly loomed large in both Mills’s and Williams’s consciousness, and they determined to deploy a stiff upper lip and not to say anything of it in the camp so as not to depress the men.

  10

  THE BATTLE OF PANGSHA

  Tuesday, November 24, began with reveille at 4 a.m. Mills wrote in his daily letter to Pamela that the immediate tragedy was that the bitters for the gin had somehow been left behind, but to all other intents and purposes, progress was good. The 150 sepoys and 120 porters (240 porters remained at the forward camp at Chingmei) of the “forward” expedition were under way by 6 a.m., dropping down a steep hill to a stream running through the valley below. It was now that they heard from Noklak. The villagers would not clear the path to their village, they said, and although they would not impede the expedition, neither would they help it. The message demonstrated neither hostility nor friendship, merely fear. The people of Noklak were unsure who would be successful in the coming fight with Pangsha and clearly wished to hedge their bets, even if it meant incurring Mills’s wrath. Chingmak, however, was eager to lend a hand and provided Mills and Williams with six men to show them the way and to scout out the land as the expedition wove its slow way through the hills. The immediate problem was that the boundaries between Chingmei and Noklak were liberally spiked with panji, since the two villages of course were at war. Clearing the path was tedious and painful. The last two hours proved very slow going, with thick vegetation having to be removed slowly by dao along an overgrown path that boasted a steep precipice down its right-hand side. And the panji began to take their toll: “One Chingmei man got a panji clean through his foot, and one was badly cut up by a panji on the shin, and one Sepoy was badly cut in the calf. Also one Sepoy was terribly stung in a mysterious way and had enormous swellings on his throat, arms and thighs.” When Noklak finally appeared before them the village seemed entirely devoid of life. Then a large body of armed men appeared on a path farther down the hill. Williams ordered his sepoys to advance purposefully on the Noklak warriors with their bayonets fixed, and the confidence and discipline of the troops made an immediate impact on the Nagas, who offered if not obeisance then certainly nervous subservience. More practically, they made a peace offering of ten pigs, ten fowls, and an enormous smelly goat. Two men who came forward, clearly leaders, greeted Chingmak like an old friend, to Mills’s amusement, given the two tribes’ historic animosity. The Noklak men showed Mills and Williams an area of grass that provided cramped but adequate space for the tented camp but did nothing to help in the construction of the final camp and stockade. As a result of their noncooperation, the village’s precious stocks of bamboo were pillaged freely by the expedition to build the palisade. The work took all afternoon. All the while, as Mills admitted, they nervously waited for the flights of arrows that might come from the thickets of vegetation. But they were unmolested by the people of Noklak, or anyone else, for that matter, and the expedition settled into its last night before battle.

  The morning of the final march on Pangsha—Wednesday, November 25—began early, with the camp stirring at 3 a.m. At 6 a.m. the sepoys and Naga porters began moving out in a long line toward their destination, the Langnyu River just below Pangsha, where they aimed to arrive, notwithstanding any impediments (such as ambuscade and panji) they might encounter on the way, by early afternoon. The plan was to build yet another stockade in which to demonstrate the military strength of the expedition and to conduct what Mills intended to be one-way discussions with the headmen of the village about the problem of persistent slaving, after which a major part of the village was to be burned in punishment for Pangsha’s historical rejection of the imperial antislavery injunctions. During the day little was seen of anyone from Pangsha, although the expedition moved warily, anticipating an ambush at any moment. It was during the advance that the expedition was at its most vulnerable, yet the Pangsha warriors failed to exploit the opportunity. On one occasion the voice of a Pangsha scout was heard calling, “They’re coming,” and to reinforce the point Mills had an entire hillside of ripening millet burned to the ground. He meant business, and it was important that Pangsha realized it.

  At midday a party of Pangsha natives was encountered on a track, and after much long-distance shouting four men were persuaded to come and talk. They came with a peace offering of a goat and a chicken, perhaps in the hope that this would be sufficient to persuade the British to withdraw. Mills spoke to them, reinforcing the message that the village was to be burned for its wanton disregard of the law and to demonstrate that the arm of the Raj extended into the Patkoi Hills even if representatives of the king-emperor were not seen in these remote parts every day. Unknown to Mills, one of the Pangsha party was Mongsen, one of the village’s headmen and a famous fighter. They would have cause to meet again very soon. After keeping the four men as hostages as the expedition moved through a particularly dangerous stretch of jungle, Mills had them released in the hope that the message would get to the village so that precautions such as the evacuation of women and children to a place of safety could take place. It was already accepted that the element of surprise had been lost and that Pangsha would be well defended, but Mills’s hope was that fear would do the rest and that a pitched battle—with inevitable loss of life on both sides—could be avoided. In his official report Mills wrote of this encounter:

  Soon after passing the Noklak-Pangsha boundary we saw a small unarmed party of Pangsha men in the distance. Four were induced to come and speak to us, and brought with them a goat and a chicken. They asked whether we would make peace. There was not the slightest doubt as to the only possible answer. To have made peace, turned back and abandoned the remaining slave at the price of a goat, a fowl and some smooth words would inevitably have been interpreted as a sign of weakness. Friends who’d helped us would have been massacred and raids would have continued. I therefore told the envoys, that I did not believe their statement that they could not produce the slave girl, and that I was going to punish them for their conduct and insults to the Government.

  For the next two hours the expedition moved along the western edge of the Langnyu River Valley and saw large bodies of armed men in front crossing the river with what Mills and Williams assumed to be a plan to block their further advance. Instead of engaging with this group, Williams turned the column right, down to the river bottom, in order to build a stockade for the night. He wanted to avoid a direct confrontation that might lead to battle, as his purpose was to burn the village, not fight its populace. If the latter wanted to attack, then so be it, but he didn’t wish to provoke it. The march had taken longer than expected, and instead of challenging Pangsha that day, they decided to rest after an exhausting approach march and deal with Pangsha, on the east bank, the following day. A grassy island in the middle of the river valley was chosen for the defensive position, and the men immediately started building the palisade. Thirty porters were sent across the river to cut bamboo, protected by a section of sepoys. Williams mounted watch within the stockade with a Lewis gun. Before long three armed Pangsha men could be seen 300 yards away, edging their way down the eastern slope toward the working party, clearly with the intention of taking a coolie’s head. Without much ado the Lewis gun promptly opened fire and knocked over two of the three. Mills, watching, was annoyed that both men were able to pick themselves up and limp away, but he noted that it was good shooting at long range.

  Would Pangsha fight on the morrow? Mills couldn’t believe that in the face of such force the villagers would take the ri
sk, but there was no guarantee that the Pangsha headmen—Mongu and Mongsen—would consider that numbers were not in their favor. Was the prospect of attacking the interlopers riskier than giving in to this egregious threat of British force? A possibility, Mills considered, was that the stockade would be attacked that night. They were well within crossbow range of the eastern slopes, where dense vegetation provided cover for attackers down to the water’s edge. The following day, he thought, the culminating point of the expedition, would be a very hard one for all. His plan was to leave a guard on the river stockade before marching on the main Pangsha village and burning it, or a major part of it, to the ground. They would then return, pack up the stockade, continue down the river valley for three miles, and repeat the procedure on the Pangsha khel of Wenshoyl. Afterward, as dusk drew near, they would pretend to make another camp in the Langnyu Valley but would slip away at moonrise to the comparative safety of the stockade at Noklak. Remaining in the Langnyu River for a second night, especially after the burning of the two Pangsha villages, would be too much like tempting fate.

  The stockade was unmolested again that night, and Mills got his sleep without any of the arrows he half expected to be fired at his prominent white canvas tent. Once again the Pangsha strategists had failed to take advantage of the night. This, of course, was understandable. They had never battled Europeans before, and Mills’s expedition had arrived in considerable numbers. The British also possessed discipline and a disturbing purpose, and the Pangsherites must have been nervous that they no longer held the military advantage, even on their own ground.

  The night was bitterly cold. The arrival of dawn did little to bring any much-needed warmth. During the night only the Europeans enjoyed the benefit of a canvas tent; each of the Naga porters and sepoys stretched out on the grass protected from the cold by a single blanket. With dawn fully upon them, the troops marched out at 6:30 a.m. after a brief, cold breakfast. Even before the stockade gate was opened, the Pangsha scouts were able to observe what was going on below them, and when the gate finally opened to release the sepoys they began to shout, “Come along, come along!” as if urging them on to their destruction. It was bravado, of course; the men of Pangsha clearly worried about the disciplined determination of all those sepoys advancing toward their village with their Lee-Enfield rifles fixed with long, shiny bayonets pointing menacingly in their direction.

  From the outset of the march on Pangsha that morning a running fire was maintained with any Naga warriors who were impertinent enough to try to come close to the sepoys. Williams sent an advance guard to the front, in sight of the main party, and flank guards with Lewis guns protected the extremities. Most of the firing, Mills observed, was at long range except for an occasion when one of the Assam Rifles officers, Subedar Balbahadur, fired at a group of men at about 300 yards and bowled over six. Much to Mills’s chagrin, the men seemed only lightly wounded and all got away. “These modern bullets go right through without doing much harm,” he observed crossly to Pamela in his daily letter. “They are meant to be humane and to wound a man without killing him. The porters’ feelings can be imagined at seeing no one killed. I am very sorry, too. Pangsha will be able to boast that they lost no lives.”

  Mills’s irritation at the sight of six wounded Nagas picking themselves up off the ground and making their escape was compounded by his failure that day to inflict the sort of damage on Pangsha that he would have liked. The village was extensive—far larger than he had expected—and divided into many separate khels, some with deep ravines between them. It would have taken many more men, and more time than they had available, to destroy everything they saw. The inhabitants had had time to remove their most precious possessions and livestock into the hinterland, and there was little left to do but to destroy as many of the houses as possible by burning. One dobashi later admitted shooting thirteen mithan cows; certainly any livestock found alive was unceremoniously slaughtered. Mills’s aim was not to destroy everything, however. That would end up hurting many of those—such as the women and children—who were the unwanted victims of the political policies pursued by the village’s elders.

  The sheer size of the place almost got four of the Lhota porters into trouble. They had wandered away from the main party into a different khel in search of material wanted by Fürer-Haimendorf and didn’t hear the bugle calls giving the order to withdraw. The bulk of the expedition had returned to the Langnyu River stockade by 11:45 a.m. when they realized that the four men were missing. They could hear Pangsha men shouting, “Cut them off, cut them off!” Mills wrote, “We thought they were certainly dead and a party was just going out as a forlorn hope when they appeared, breathless and sweating. The idiots had gone the wrong way and met Pangsha men at short range. I can’t imagine which side was most surprised. Nlamo [Fürer-Haimendorf’s Konyak friend] peppered a man with buckshot and they got away. It was a near squeak.”

  Mills finally had his battle on Friday, November 27, a day after the burning of the main part of Pangsha and by his own reckoning “by far the most serious there has been in these trans-border shows here.” All of the Naga porters and the bulk of the sepoys were sent back to Noklak after the firing of the main village, and Mills, Smith, and Fürer-Haimendorf accompanied Williams and a reinforced platoon of fifty men to march along the Langnyu River Valley to the Pangsha khel of Wenshoyl, about three miles from the main village. As on the previous day, the plan was to burn the khel to the ground. But Wenshoyl proved difficult to reach, and after struggling for most of that afternoon they were forced to camp out in the open because it was too late to attempt an attack and achieve a successful withdrawal that evening. The following morning the small party climbed into the hills and found the khel. Fortunately, it was undefended, for it sat on a prominent spur and could have easily been protected, even against troops armed with rifles and Lewis guns. But it was during their withdrawal that the Pangsha attack finally came. “We had to go about 3,000 feet down a long spur,” recalled Mills, when they were suddenly attacked by a huge number of screaming warriors. He counted as many as 500: “Very soon down on our right we saw hundreds of men from the main village streaming along a path to cut us off. We knew the supreme moment had come, and that Pangsha were going to try and overwhelm us and annihilate us by sheer weight of numbers. They disappeared into dead ground, and then came at us over a ridge with a roar.” The Pangsha attack came at the small group of sepoys through fields of millet standing some ten feet high, so the first running warriors were not seen until they were through and into the open, a matter of yards in front of the troops. The intention was to wipe out the British in one overwhelming and terrifying attack. Williams, however, had positioned a section of his platoon on high ground to provide covering fire if it were needed. It was. They were able to fire over the heads of their fellows when the first wave of warriors broke from the millet field and swarmed against the British position. “It was an experience I shall never forget,” recalled Mills. “I should think the nearest man rolled over like a rabbit with a bullet in the chest not more than 50 feet away. They were just drawing back their arms for a shower of spears. Of course they outnumbered us by ten to one. We beat them off. The men were splendid, firing calmly and carefully. At one point, Williams, two yards from me, snatched a rifle from a Sepoy’s hand and fired himself.” Once the initial enemy charge had been so decisively halted, Williams organized a textbook “withdrawal in contact,” which Mills admired for its slick professionalism. While one line of sepoys engaged the enemy in deliberate aimed fire in ragged volleys, the remainder withdrew down the slope at a run. The Lewis gun pumped automatic fire in short bursts into the mass of rushing Nagas, leaving them to fall in crumpled heaps amid the millet. After every fifty yards the sepoys stopped, turned, and fired their rifles to give cover for the first section to retire. So it was that the entire platoon of sepoys leapfrogged down the spur to the riverbed, all the while ensuring that the Pangsha warriors were unable to interfere with the withdrawal in any me
aningful way. Again, Pangsha failed to exploit all its advantages that morning and didn’t ambush the retreating British force when it reached the river. Perhaps the Pangsherites had considered that an all-out frontal assault at the top of the spur, through the high millet, would be sufficient to overwhelm Williams’s men, but they had not, to their ultimate discomfort, properly considered the true potential effect on their own ranks of volleys of Lee-Enfield fire. In his daily letter to Pamela, Mills wrote, “We got down and across all right without a single casualty. We had to keep them off, we couldn’t afford to have even a few wounded. In civilized warfare you can leave wounded knowing they will be looked after, but in Naga warfare every man has to be brought along, even in a retreat, and that hangs up things frightfully.”

  The truth was that the withdrawal to Noklak was something of an exhausting scramble for the men of the Wenshoyl force. They rushed back to the protection of the remainder of the column somewhat in fear of the possibility of aggressive follow-up by a swarm of angry Pangsha warriors, stung to anger by the Lee-Enfields of the Assam Rifles. The sepoys had largely exhausted their ammunition in the frantic volleys fired to staunch the Pangsherite counterattack. The sun blazed down as the eight miles were rapidly covered, four heads that had been confiscated from Pangsha banging uncomfortably on Fürer-Haimendorf’s back. The discomfort, however, was not enough to persuade him to relinquish these prizes. No sign of follow-up appeared, and the welcoming sight of Noklak soon emerged on the high ground in front of them, rising above the tall grasslands of the valley. It was a hard and hot climb into the hills, and when they reached the stockade and the remainder of the forward expedition at Noklak, they were all completely exhausted. Two sepoys were close to collapse, and Smith took himself straight to bed. “The worst part was a frightful thirst,” noted Mills to Pamela. “We were running hard in boiling sun, and my running days are really over.”