THE SEPOY'S HONOUR

Dominion, Volume 10, Issue 3049, 10 April 1917, Page 5

THE SEPOY'S HONOUR

(By Mr. Edmund Candler, the British ■ correspondent in Mesopotamia.) On service the essentials of caste are observed.: in the .Indian Army as -fastidiously as in peace tjmes, but a certain amount of is dispensed with. At ordir.ajy times the higlicaste Hindu, when he is away from home,- prepares his own dinner and eats it alone. A'small.square is marked off for cooking. : This is called the "chauka." It is smoothed and plastered over with mud, or cow-dung -when available. Even on service the Hindu preserves the sanctity of,the "chauka,'" and, if not a Brahmin, takes with'him a Brahmin cook, relaxes nothing in .regard to the purity of his water from contamination by the wrong kind- of people, and 'would rather starve than eat meat killed in an unorthodox way. A Ghurldia Subadar on board a transport between Bombay and Mikes: lies was (Isked if his men would eat frozen meat, and replied, after consulting them, "Sahib, they will have ho objecwhatever, provided one of them may' he-permitted each day to see the animal frozen alive." There have -been occasions, , even among sepoys, when ritualand casteexclusiveuess have b,een turned to disciplinary .'uses. There was a company of Rajputs somewhere in tbe neighbourhood .of Suez /which contained a draft of ,ver>; raw recruits. Four were holding a picket on the east bank of the canal when they lost their vlieids. One blazed off at a shadow. A panic set':in, and: all four threw down their rifles, bolted as if the devil - were-.be-hind them, and were only held up by, the barbed wire of their own outpost. The officer commanding and the adjutant' were considering how to deal with them when the Subadar major entered the orderly room. The man was a veteran, with a, double row of. ribbons on his breast, and he had never let the regiment down in all his service. He begged as a special 'favour that Rajput officers should be permitted to wipe out the stain. "Leave it to us', Sahib," he said; "we will put such an indignity on them that there will not be a 'jiwan' in the regiment who will shrink from 'bahadri' (bravo deeds)' again." ' The : colonel'saw the wisdom of this. So the lndjaii officers of the' regiment were deputed to deal with tho case themselves.\ The "jiwans" were tapthe head with a slipper, the last ignominy that' can befall a Rajput. After siioli disgrace they could not enter' the' "chauka" and mess with their caste companions. That is to say, they were socially excommunicated nufcil their honour' was retrieved. For nearly 'eighteen months they lit their outcast lire and took ' their meals apart irom at a measured distance.from the "chauka," atsuch a distance that no ray of contamination could procecd lrom tlidm to it. rijey were still under the ban when the regiment loft Egypt for -Mesopotamia. When they went into action with the : relieving column before Kut all four rehabilitated themselves.. Two died honourably,, one was awarded tbe Indian Order of Merit,' and the fourth was:promoted. The caste instinct made a man of him. 'Antofagasta (west coast of - South America) contains some of the greatest nitrate fields in the world. The country (according to the "Wide World Magazine") looks like a vast tract of slag, rock, and. cinders, shimmering and iridescent in the blazing heat. Rain falls so seldom 'that on one occasion a mail, who was carrying a furled umbrella, was mobbed in the street by a mocking crowd, and there is a valley near whore, according to tradition, it has never rained since tile world began. Owing ,to tly> barren nature of the country, every scrap of fresh meat, every green vegetable, and every drop of fresh water has to be brought hundreds of miles up the coast by steamer. There are, or were, two cows in Antofagasta. One was owned by the British Hospital and its milk jealously reserved for the patients, and the other belonged to. the wife of the manager of a comI niercial house.