AS THE OTHER FELLOW SEES IT

Evening Star, Issue 19760, 10 January 1928, Page 11

AS THE OTHER FELLOW SEES IT

NATIONAL POINTS OF VIEW

[By Major-general T. D. Piloiiee, in the ‘ English Review.’]

The different angles from which two persons view an occurrence will often throw a truer light on their characters than can bo conveyed by much description. The same principle holds good with regard to nations, where it is possible to find incidents with regard to which the opinion of the large majority concurs, and is dissimilar to that of the majority of another nation. The following stories are to the point;— In pre-war days 1 was much in Germany, and, although aware that the conception of duty ingrained in the mind of even the best of their officers was not quite similar to, that of our own, I had always found it impossible to define what that difference was until one day 1 told the story of Colonel Halkett.

Halkett, an officer in the array of King George 111., was taken prisoner ■by Prince Charles Edward, but was afterwards released on parole, and rejoined his regiment. Soon afterwards ho was ordered by King George to fight' against the Highlanders, but he _ refused, and was tried by court-martial. Halkett’s defence consisted in the words:—

“ The King is lord of my person, but not of my honor.” Halkett was acquitted. [ have told this story to many German officers and have asked thorn ■whether Halkett was right. The invariable answer has been; “No, he was wrong. The King issued his orders, and that should have sufficed. The King’s command absolved him from all other considerations.” I have never met a British officer who did not concur with the verdict of the court-martial.

This divergence of opinion explains many things. Another illustrative story is the following : A few years ago wc. were travelling in California, when one day at dinner at a friend’s house—for wherever we w’ent wc were treated with true American hospitality—a man to whom I had been introduced said: _“ I am always pleased to meet an Englishman, for one of your countrymen paid me the greatest compliment which had ever been made to me.” “What was it?” I asked. “It was like this,” ho replied. “Colonel A., a wealthy Englishman whom I saw a good deal of at San Francisco, bought an estate, but things were not settled until he had left California. Before he had been gone a fortnight, however, I received a letter from him asking me to settle the whole business, with which he knew I was conversant, and enclosing mo a draft cheque for 600,000dol.” After saying this my newly-mado acquaintance stopped and looked at me. “Well?” I said after a pause, “what next?” “ He enclosed a draft made out to me for GOO.OOOdol,” he repeated. “ 1 could have done what I liked with it.” “I may bo very stupid,” I replied, “but I don’t see the point of the narrative.”

He regarded mo with astonishment ns ho answered: “No American would have clone that!” “How do you mean?” I ejaculated. “I hardly know a man in my regiment or belonging to my club to whom I should hesitate to send a cheque for any amount if ] thought him capable ot putting the business through.” I have told this story to many Americans, who have all admitted that my acquaintance’s point of view expressed that of the majority of his countrymen. Is it the fact that a certain class of Englishmen, by shibboleths known to themselves, recognise each other ’ for what they are and trust each other, that enables ns to hold our own among men of other nationalities who aro sharper than we are, but have not this advantage? Has envy of this possession on the part of those who have not gob it anything to do with class hatred ? I wonder! Again: A few years ago a Russian and his wife, people who had been rich beyond the dreams of avarice, but were then wearing clothes which were threadbare, entered our bouse at Meran.

“ We have splendid news from .Russia !” they exclaimed, simultaneously. “What is it?” I asked, thinking that they had received news of some successful anti-Bolshevist rising. “The ikons in all the churches which had become dull and tarnished have all been reburnished by some supernatural agency.” The Count looked at his wife as he spoke.

Ordinary consideration for my guests’ feelings obliged me to conceal my incredulity, and ail that I replied was: “ What do you make of it?” “ The inference is plain. The reign of anti-Christ is coming to an end,” they exclaimed together. , Count A. and his wife were highlyeducated people, masters of many languages, and delightful companions, but were, as 1 knew, very orthodox members of the Greek Church, and I attributed their belief in something which I could not myself believe to an abnormal excess of religions fervor, and thought no more about the matter at the time. Last summer, however, T found myself for two days in the company of another Russian, a man who had spent three years at Cambridge and had generally been educated as an Englishman. To him I related what Count A. had told me, expressing at the same time my surprise at his credulity. “I see nothing peculiar about it,” my friend replied, to my astonishment. “ I believe it entirely.” About a week later the same man, who had been an officer in a Guards’ regiment at Petrograd. in the course of a conversation at which I was a listener, told ns of the Russian Zigeuner. “When one goes to hear them one take up one’s abode with them,” ho said. “ Night becomes day, and day night, and time passes without one heeding it. Once I absented myself from my regiment for seven days without leave.” “ And what did your colonel sav?” someone demanded. “He asked mo what I had been doing, and my reply was; ‘l’ve been with the Zigeuner. Djinka was dancing and singing. I couldn’t tear myself away,’ ‘What! Djinka was singing?’ was all the colonel said. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? I’d have come too, if I’d known.’ ” So the matter ended. An ordinary Englishman can understand the points of view of the Gorman and the American in the first two of these stories, even though he does not agree with them, but to comprehend the Russian is beyond him.

“ We belong to the East and you to the West, and you will never be able to understand us,” is the way an old Russian gentleman once ■ summed things up, or, as a countryman of our own who had an exceptional knowledge of Eastern races once remarked to me: “ If you are dealing with an Asiatic and want to fathom what he will do in given circumstances, consider carefully the two or three courses which you might follow if similarly situated. Having done this, you may rest assured that he will adopt none of these.” If, however, Western nations differ one from the other in their mental angles of vision, those of the East do so' to a far greater extent, and we have no more right to bunch the people of Asia together than we have those of Europe. Could, indeed, anything be more diametrically diverse than the mental and moral codes of the different castes and tribes of India?

To begin with, I will tell a tale of a gallant, but characteristically vain->-ir.«inus Raft'nn f " ; ” '~ c

handsome, and lithe as a panther. A few days before I met him he had, single-handed, tackled an infuriated bull which was running riot in a fair, whilst the bunyiahs (traders) and lowcaste men fled in terror. When he came to see mo ho "brought with him a photograph of himself dressed in his best clothes, holding by the horns a beast which did not look half so fierce as himself. It was palpably evident that the photograph had been taken on the following day. “Why, General sahib?” be said, as wo sat at lunch, “do you allow the Bengalis to give you so much trouble in Calcutta and tf throw bombs at your women? Give mo half a dozen of my. young men with sticks and 1 will keep the whole of Bengal in order.” The Bengalis are many,” 1 carelessly replied. “ Does a leopard fear because a Hock of sheep is large?” was his retort. Khan Mozaffar Khan was a terrible braggart, but he was, nevertheless, a brave man, and there w r as -an underlying stratum of truth in his remarks. When a Bengali apothecary attached to my regiment in a frontier expedition was tried by court martial for creating an alarm by night because a few bullets bad fallen into our camp his plea wras: “I am not a fighting man; I belong to a nation of cowrards; I throw myself on the mercy of the court.”

The Pathan would rather have been cut into small pieces than make such a statement.

At the conclusion of one of our frontier wars the leader of the tribesmen said to the British general, whom he had previously known and who was on the point of death owing to the hardships of the campaign: “ But why didn’t you send word to me and say that you were ill? I would have suspended hostilities until you were well again. _ It breaks my heart to see you like this and to know that 1 am responsible. All I wanted wras a good fight.” On the Afghan hills the eagle kills, the goat, the snow leopard the ibex, and the buzzard the - partridges, and man, who is a fighting animal and assured of eternal bliss if ho dies in the true faith, must also fight and kill. It is this winch gives zest to the life of a Pathan.

Perhaps the greatest contrast to the Pathan is the Jain, who, although he will squeeze the last anna out of his debtor, wears a veil in front of his mouth that may not commit the sin of swallowing a fly, and has the ground swept before him that he may not step on an ant.

Except in so far that he is a bravo warrior and belongs to a ruling race, the point of view of the Rajput is no more like that of the Pathan than it is like that of the Jain or the Bengali. The words of the late Sir Pertab Singh carrying a British officer’s body to the grave in defiance of caste prejudices are striking enough to bear repetition. “ There is only one caste which counts in the eyes of God,” he said; “that is the cast of brave gentlemen, and both the sahib and T belong to that caste.” The Pathan chief who apologised to his opponent for fighting when he was ill uras a sportsman, but it is only a knightly Rajput who could have made this speech or that given in the following anecdote.

During the early part of the war, when Sir Pertab was attached to the Indian Cavalry a British trooper rode up to the staff with a, message, jumped off his horse and threw the reins to the rajah, shouting as he did so: “ Pukero turn” (“Catch hold, you”), as if he had been a cycc. When an officer apologised for the man’s behaviour, Sir Pertab replied: “ Since I saw your men make an attack the other day I regard every British soldier as my equal.”