THE WELSH MARCHES

Greymouth Evening Star, 30 October 1933, Page 10

THE WELSH MARCHES

BRITAIN’S OWN “N.W. FRONTIER.” It chanced that about the time the latest little war broke out on the Indian Frontier I was approaching another frontier nearer home but scarcely less romantic (writes Major A. AV. Howlett in the “Manchester Guardian”). It was the AA’elsh border, to wit, and I wondered why I had not discovered it before. AVe may go far afield and find romance, after all, waiting on our doorstep. But the sight of it and tho long infolding valleys’ mystical suggestiveness, and the implication of multitudinous great hills behind and beyond those that already bounded my view, awoke in me strange recollections of frontiers I had seen elsewhere in the world, and stirred again mightily the dry bones of youthful imaginings. 1 learnt, the thrill of frontiers wellniglit a quarter of a century ago, when i rst crossed the one where they are fighting again now. Not that that is anything fresh; they are always fighting there. It is almost like a harvest, thanksgiving. As soon as the crops are safely gathered in they start

| shooting. The deep slumbrous river | valleys all splayed out flat between the jagged' ranges and erstwhile patterned into the shining green of rice fields, are painfully jarred into life by the ringing out of sudden shots from the rocks on the hill-tops and (.he flutter of dusty white skirts dodging among the thorn bushes. But. I was young when I first; cressed that border, and had not escaped long enough from school to have foigotten the joys of trespassing Only, instead of irate farmers. 1 had I now to confront, as a possible penalty, tribesmen among the most cruel and ruthless in the world, all hating me with the bigoted malice of fanatics and anxious to pave their way into paradise over my mutilated corpse. But still, the mystical appeal of the frontier was there, the primitive human instinct to look into the other fellow’s cave and see what he is doing, the inborn curiosity to see how other neople live.

THE FIRST BULLET. i Long before 1 went to India I had | react and dreamed of the Frontier, and it. was with something of the shock a j man might get if he found himself enacting a scene in broad daylight wl.ii'di be had dreamed the night before that I found myself actually crossing it. I'Mr the first time then I knew what it was to be a target tor a rifle bullet. AA’e were all straggling in a cloud of powdery dust along a rocky uneven road that ran beside the great green-watered Panjkora River, the sepoys in long columns of dark brown sweating bodies, and the mules, laden with the tools and' uiachim-guns, rattling along on their dainty little hoots, when something hummed and whizzed like a nasty struck the blade of a spade with a horrid whang, and then sang off info space. A second later the sharp report rang out from the hillside. But

"P therm among the dun rocks and grey-brown thorn hushes, u ot a, movement. I tried not to feel concerned, and wo ail marched on as if nothing had happened; but J, for one, had that sea

sick sensation that comes on the best of men when they first come under fire, and the brown countenances of some of the sepoys near me had gone an uncomfortable green. Across the river it was the Bajour country, always turbulent and uncertain. On tops of the hills could be seen small uots and heaps marking the sites of old Buddihst monasteries which-dated before Christ; and these same ravines and the broken nullahs running down to them had re-echoed the rattle of harness and mail and chariots of the troops of Alexander. To this day the profiles of many of these savages; are plainly Greek. But a frontier it was then and a frontier, with all its problems, it will ever be, whatever changes may come over the rest of India.

PAST THE WREKIN. So now I had an odd fancy, knowing what frontiers were to soldiers and all that they implied, as I drove nearer and nearer to the marches of Wales, that I was a Roman legionary and all England' behind me was India, and this land I was entering was terra incognita and, at any moment now, I might expect, to have a sling stone singing round my head or an arrow whistling from a thicket. I had just come past AVroxeter, the ancient border fortress town of Uriconium, under the shadow of the mighty AVrekin, which must have been to the Romans in Britain what Peshawar in India is tc- us. And now here I was again leaving civilisation and security benind me and challenging Fate in the wild hills. My conveyance was a small Austin car, but it might easily have been a chariot, thought I. And, so thinking the beautiful AA’elsh hills closed about me, and' I thought I had never seen a lovelier corner of the earth. As the Roman soldier gazed on them two milenniums ago, so I beheld them now, and, what was more, 1 could enter into his feelings, knowing myself only too well what such an entry means. No change seems to have come over them. Alone in all Britain they see as if they had esescaped the common lot. My own cat seemed a. desecration, except that, as 1 say, it had become a chariot.

J he little blacky-white sheep wandered on the patches of velvet turf among tho rocks and bracken, and a hawk sailed round a bastion of cliff with the effortless flight of a javelin, whilst purling streamlets full of trout glimmered down in the hollows beside the road through veils of willow herb and blackberry. T had, therefore, the exhilarating sense of being in a dangerous and enchanting country, without, any danger, it was easy to imagine it, which really is much bettor than the real thing. But beyond those lulls there were so plainly other hills and many others beyond those that, it was easy to understand why the Romans did not conquer AVales hut. built instead the three great frontier fortresses of Chester, Uriconiuni and Carleon, from which they could' content themselves with looking on. b