features out of the ordinary run of frontier campaigns. It has, with the solitary exception of the gun teams of No. 6 Mountain Battery and the Air Force, been a purely Indian Army show from start to finish, with only four frontier force regiments out of the twenty or more engaged. The battle casualties have been the biggest ever recorded on the frontier, while the sickrate has been the lowest; and of late, now that frost-bite and pneumonia have vanished from our menu, our sick-list is less than that of many an Indian peace station. And lastly, it has proved for all time the absolute neeessity of plentiful aircraft on the frontier, most of all perhaps in their rôle of guardian angels to the P.B.I. No more shall the sweating columns of infantry stumble blindfold in the maze of frontier hills, but, casting our gaze afar by the eyes of our errant 'planes, we shall move orderly and with method, and our marchings and campings shall be free from that haunting dread of the past on the frontier-the sudden swirl of well-hidden lashkars on unready convoy or camp. CHAPTER VI.-THE AHNAI FIGHT, Recently there have been coming up the line daily parties of globe-trotters, chiefly officers of British units newly arrived in India, hidden for the most part under masses of the brilliant -coloured ribbons of every British and foreign Order known to the tailors. They are sent up in batches by A.H.Q. to see the frontier, presumably so that they may realise that there are certain slight differences between waging war with large masses in the mud of Flanders against dense crowds of semi-trained Huns, and fighting with small bodies of men against mountaineers in their own mountains-mountaineers, moreover, who have each to be a firstclass sniper and stalker to keep their lives in their own country even in peace-time. Having a fictitious reputa tion for lecturing ability, or, as my friends say, an infinite capacity for diffusing hot air of the worst type, it has been my fate to be detailed to conduct these parties over our sector, and in particular to show them over the ground of the Ahnai fighting. After a few days of this dragoman's work it occurred to me that this series of sketches would be incomplete without some account of what, in Sir Nigel's words, we might describe as "a certain small bickering" which took place in the long rock narrows of the Tank Zam known as the Ahnai Tangi. So, climbing one day to Flathead, I sat down a while and, looking round over Duke's Nose and Ahnai, Asa Khan and Dazzle Hill, Marble Arch and Plateau, sorted out my orowded jigsaw memories, jotting them down as coherently and consecutively as possible from the overture of concentrated camel at Seven Dials to the finale at blood-stained, orowded Asa Khan. The mess was comparatively speaking gloomy-not surprising, considering the weeness and smallness of the hour, the clinging cold, and the fact that the battalion had spent the night in an isolated camp known, presumably from its general slumminess, as "Seven Dials," guarding the bulk of the camel transport of Derajat Column. All night nigh upon 2000 close-packed camels had exuded perfume of the choicest in the midst of where we, the "nth P.B.I." (Nobody's Own) were spread over an exiguous perimeter, poorly camouflaged with a strand and a half of wire, dominated on one side by the steepest of hills, at whose ouplike foot nestled the camp, and up whose bald stony slopes ran the said exiguous perimeter. The little camp was orammed mass of camels and one camel refuse, covering a minusoule kach, in one whereof the last occupants had corner thoughtfully left us a charming series of deep-dug graves, into which we retired gratefally later, for Seven Dials had an undesirable reputation for sniping most nights. Deracol's Camp lay one and a half to two miles ahead, and at 6 A.M. we were to push off all the transport from our 567 oamp with two companies (that was my job) as baggageguard to join the column as it debouched from what was euphemistically Ahnai Camp. Thereafter the known 88 column was to force its way narrow passage that succeeds farther up-stream in the the mouth of the Ahnai Tangi, the actual entrance to which a really brilliantly conceived and executed night advance had given us for next to no casualties three days earlier. two companies, was to do rearThe C.O., with the other guard up as far as the entrance to the tangi, where he would column, rearguard being taken join the main body of the over by the 57th Rifles, who with the 2/9th Gurkhas were picqueting either side of the stream up to the tangi mouth. of the gods. The general plan The sequel lay on the knees of operations to be carried out by the bulk of the column was that the advance-guard, consisting of the 1/55th Coke's Rifles, more usually known as "Cookie's," should enter the tangi under cover of the alAhnai Left and Right, and ready established picquets of then push on, dropping picquets advanced) in the usual frontier on the right bank (left as we way. than the right, and most preThe left bank is far higher cipitous, being in parts utterly unclimbable, and any height the water-level. To deal with from 400 to 800 feet up from this side, therefore, H.Q. and two companies 2/5th Gurkhas were detailed as special right flank guard to advance from Ahnai Right picquet. Up to that point they would be under cover of the permanent picquets and of the picquets put out by the 57th Wilde's Rifles as far as the tangi. From there they were to advance along this high ground, their head level with the advance-guard, dropping picquets as they went. The rest of the columnto wit, two sections No. 27 Mountain Battery, a section of No. 6 Howitzer Battery, and the 2/76th Punjabis, together with the 3/34th Sikh Pioneers and the miscellaneous collection of sappers and miners, signal units, and so forth, which made up "column troops" formed the main body, while close up behind them was to march the transport. The column commander had announced in orders that he hoped to inflict severe punishment on the the enemy, who, Mahsud and Wana Wazir alike, were collected in large numbers to oppose our advance, and by the end of a day that was a stand-up infantry fight from early morning till dark, he did so, the most excellent hammering that the Mahsud has ever had. But we, the cane in the General's hand, felt a trifle squeamish before dawn, for the thought of possible horsehair is always present, even if only subconsciously, in a cane's mind ere the punishing process begins. As I have said, the mess was, comparatively speaking, gloomy. Shortleigh was reiterating the fact that it was Wednesday, and that his memsahib would be especially and frightfully annoyed if he was killed on a Wednesday-Wednesday the 14th in particular. He always tells us this before a show; last time I remember he quoted Friday the 9th as a date when if he should stop one his better-half would be doubly and trebly peeved. There was a subdued air of depression and camel over the whole of breakfast; even the C.O. seemed obsessed by it, while the Quartermonger wrestling with baggage tables was distinotly fractious, having mislaid half a camel or a mule and a quarter, I forget precisely which. Probably it was the stuffy atmosphere of the deep graves in camel-soiled ground wherein we had slept that preyed upon us, but undoubtedly breakfast was not the social success it usually is in Nobody's Own, even before the luridest of shows. People made uncharitable livery remarks about the quality of the food, while the signalling officer was positively rude concerning the cocoa-so rude as to make even our mildmannered doctor and mess president almost take offence. Eventually we dispersed into the gloom of dawn to sort out camels and mules, and generally get a move on things. Life was further brightened at the last moment by the discovery that the wily sappers had dumped a hundred loads of R.E. stores the previous day and left us to pack them. However, it was an exouse for us to lose further our already lost tempers, and by the time that lot was loaded up and the camels on the move, it was broad daylight, and we peeled off an outer layer of thick clothing and began to feel better. A and B companies, the Rajputanas and the Dekhani Mahrattas, were my children for the day, the C.O. having annexed the Konkani Mahrattas and the Punjabi Mussalmans. Having given some incoherent orders of the "carry on in column of lumps" type to Jacob and Shortleigh, my respective company commanders-about the only thing to do when you're baggage-guard for a few miles of camel-and seen them started off, I climbed on to Lady Nan's back and rode forth into the river, where various transport officers were busy assembling camels of which the river-bed was full, a great dense mass. Presently I let them go and they headed up-stream four and five rows abreast, being reinforced on the left after we had gone a mile or so, by the long strings and columns of dark mules and tawny camels spat out unceasingly by Dera Col Camp from the nullahs about Gana Kaoh as an ant-heap vomits forth ants. Where the two flows coalesced, the pace slowed a trifle as each string made for the shallower bits of the streams, and sulphurous-mouthed transport personnel struggled to keep their flooks together, each his own. The ammunition column fouled the R.E. park, and the supply crowd out a diagonal line across both, while into the resultant whirlpool swirled Cookie's second-line camels under a joyously Bolshevik baggage-guard, caring naught for any man, so that their sahibs' kit headed the procession. The brigade transport officer, on a tall bead-bedecked riding camel, swept into the mêlée with a stock - whip, restoring order, and the whirlpool flattened out again to a smoothflowing stream, until the hills closed in on the river, and lo! above us, Ahnai Left and Right picquets, and between them the tangi mouth. Picture to yourself three hundred-foot walls of stratified limestone heaved up on end and slit across the centre by a fifty-foot gap, through which boils the pent-up volume of the Tank Zam, orystal-clear save where it breaks into spatter of foam, glinting in the sunlight under the heavy shadows of the rooks, for the sun is not yet high. Through this gap is filing a column of 2800 camels and over 2000 mules-a column suddenly compelled to olese from a fifty-yard front to a thirty-foot one. Fill up the interstices between the splashing camels' legs with splashing men, sarwans, mule drabis, baggage-guard sepoys, followers of all sorts, and dot the edges of the moving mass with vociferous transport officers and N.C.O.'s, British and Indian, strenuously endeavouring to keep control of the traffic. Throw in a few wounded men, being slid-there is no other word-down the steep path from Ahnai Right: the special right-flank guard were hard at it by now, and for incidental music imagine the ohattering of the Lewis guns in Ahnai Left overhead, mingled with the deadened orash of guns and aeroplane bombs somewhere round the corner in front. You will then have some thing like the Ahnai Tangi as we struck it about 8.30 A.M. on 14th January. Lady Nan squeezed her way through between the outside camels and the rough rook walls, and we pushed along the widening river-bed for half a mile to where, the head of the transport having halted, the river was filling with camels, as a stream fills its banks when you dam it. On the right, high precipitous cliffs towering above us -easily the highest we'd yet seen-rose Flathead Left, the culminating point of the long unbroken rook wall which encloses the river from Ahnai Right to the gap at Marble Aroh: 800 feet above the river we found it to be when the survey section mapped that stretch later. A little in front of the halted camels the guns were in action at point-blank range in the river-bed, while on the nearer heights of Flathead Left clusters of figures worked along the skyline or below the orest; and in front of them, half-right above us, showed from time to time other figures, whose bullets sang on the gun shields, and splashed on the rocks, and whined and plunked round about the camels. To left, on the far lower right bank, little pioquets of Cookie's were sangaring themselves in and fighting duels with hidden snipers. The shells burst incessantly in front, 600, 700, 800 yards from the gun muzzles-open sights in the open-while overhead, ciroling low above the packed amphitheatre where Deracol, cooped up, was fighting its way up the slopes for literal life, two droning 'planes added to the din with crash of long yellow bomb and cackle of Lewis gun. Unless we could make good those frowning hill-tops we were in for disaster. My friend the brigade transport officer pushed his great bead-bedecked riding camel up to me through the crush and shouted-one had to shout in that noisy corner-"The blighters are killing my camels!" I can see his surprised indignant face still. His camels, mark you,-a silladar corps whose beasts were as the apples of their owner's eyes-none of your mere Government cattle-and here were the dirty Mahsuds killing them d their necks! Then he departed again, and later I caught sight of him parking his beloved beasts under a sheer wall of rock 500 feet high called Duke's Nose, where they could only get shot into from one and a half sides instead of three, and thereafter he seemed happier. |