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BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE.

No. MCCCXLII.

AUGUST 1927.

VOL. CCXXII.

SOME KIPLING ORIGINS.

BY LIEUT.-GENERAL SIR GEORGE MACMUNN, K.C.B., K.C.S.I., D.S.O.

TERENCE MULVANEY.

THE story recently come home from India of the finding of two children, aged two and eight, children of an aboriginal tribe, in a wolf's lair in Bengal has revived interest in Mowgli, the wolf-cub-imp of charming memory in the Kipling story. But it is only one more instance of the genuine nature of the origins from which Mr Kipling's stories and characters have

been woven.

It has been my happy lot to soldier for the last thirtyseven years, and to spend twenty-five of them covering the length and breadth of India and Burma: sometimes at the head of a party of mounted infantry, sometimes on the mountain-side "along of my old brown mule," sometimes at the head of a battery of field artillery, lately as the Quartermaster-General of the VOL. CCXXII-NO. MCCCXLII.

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Army. When I first went out to the shiny East, the earlier stories of Rudyard Kipling were just appearing in volume form, to the huge delight of the services- Plain Tales from the Hills,' Wee Willie Winkie,' and the like,-and they at once stirred my imagination to observe, and enjoy all that the East could show me. It has since been my pleasure to look for the origins of these wonderful stories, and sometimes I have found them in simple places, and sometimes in tortuous ways. The old soldier in those early days in the Army had not quite disappeared, and a few were still to be seen not many, but sufficient of the Mulvaney type to show how true the study was to nature. The whole British Army in the first half of the nineteenth century was full of Irishry

F

The European troops of the Honourable East India Company were almost entirely drawn from the Emerald Isle, as witness the names on the battle memorials at Ferozeshah, Chillianwallah, and Delhi; and hence that delightful story of Namgay Doolah, the offspring of an Irish soldier married to a hill girl of the Himalaya, the shrine with the old shakoe and the wreath of marigolds, and the perverted folk-song that once was "The wearing o' wearing o' the green."

But the wealth of his Irish colour Mr Kipling picked up from Quartermaster - Sergeant Bancroft, late of the 1st Troop, Second Brigade, Bengal Horse Artillery, who had settled in the hills near Simla, and from whom Kipling must have either heard by word of mouth, or else seen the manuscript of an obscure and fascinating pamphlet that was published later with Mr Bancroft's memoirs. Listen to his stories of the wisdom of Gunner Terence O'Shaughnessy, and you will see where Terence Mulvaney got his knowledge of women. This old soldier in the same troop discourses to young Bancroft of the families of the troops away up in Kabul in 1840 who have been left behind at the then populous cantonment of Kurnaul, now abandoned, who had been waiting for a couple of years for their men to return, and are restive:

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husband is dead wants to git anither, then again thim grass widdy's isn't partiklar, thim anshint ould maids is av the same opinion wid thim, and as for the young crathurs, why, av coorse, they want to sail in the same boat. Begorra Kurnaul's a grate place for a tinder-harted yuth like me." There is Dinah Shad and old Pummeloe and "M'Kenna me man standing in the life in Bancroft's colour-box for the artist to make his inimitable pictures from. It was in Bancroft's troop of Horse Artillery, too, that the incident of Snarleyow occurred.

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Was ever a matter of importance hinted at more neatly? It was the voice of Mulvaney, who 'was a corporal wanst come down . . . down to tramping the roads and begging for the love of God. The old professional soldier hard put to it is such an old story that even the writer of Ecclesiasticusthe wisdom of Ben Sirachmust write of it: 'There are two things that grieve me, and

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the third maketh my heart sad, and the first is a man of war that is in poverty." Shade of Nelly Gwyn! In the sonorous inscription above the colonnade at the Royal Hospital at Chelsea it is written thus “In subsidium et levamen senio belloque fractorum" ... broken by old age and the wars. And then my Mulvaney friend went on, "Did iver ye meet the Wilch Rigimint, sorr; we were all Irishmen and Wilshmen, glory be to God! A foine corps, sorr! "

There was a poem appeared years ago in the Lahore paper, 'The Civil and Military Gazette,' on the staff of which Mr Kipling then was, which has never been reprinted in any of his collected verse. It described the Lieutenant-Governor's levee at the Capital of the Punjab as seen by the Irish sentry at the door. If I do not disremember, a fragment ran thus, but I've forgotten the rest

"Oh, the dignity and the moild benignity,

Whin the Hoigh Coort judges tuk the floor,

And the Shubedars wid their midals

and shtars,

Stud up to attinshun foreninst the

door."

"Oi will, sorr," and in came a thin soldierly figure, resembling my friend of Lewes Jail, in a thin, grey, cotton suit. Three medal ribbons were sewn on his coat, and the last was that for the Mutiny . . . the others the Gwalior ribbon and that for the second Sikh War. Mr Doyle sat down and wiped his forehead.

"It's a long toime since oi was here, sorr! It was in Jim Turnbull's troop of Bombay Horse Artillery in the Mutiny toime in '58. Did you know Captain Jim Turnbull, sorr?” Now as this was 1903 and he was talking of 1858, it happened that I did not, and then he told me stories of the conversion of the Bombay Horse Artillery to Royal Artillery in 1859, and how Jim Turnbull would have none of it, and how now he was on his way to Kilmainham, the "Ould Soldiers' Home." Mr Kitchener, him that was brother to the commander-in-chief (viz., Walter K.), had sent him there;

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'for Oi'm an ould man, sorr, and at Umballa the judge's lady came to see me in hospital, and she said, 'Go home to Doblin, ould man, for you've bin in India longer than me, and God knows that's long enough,' so Oi'm on me way now, sorr. At Allahabad in the Boer War I saw the officer commanding the battery, and said I heard the Quane wanted her ould soldiers. He laughed at me, sorr, and said to the come in, Mr sergeant major, 'Take him away, and give him a hundred

Then I met Mulvaney once again in Central India, in that old - world cantonment of Saugor. Sitting in my bungalow one hot-weather day, my bearer brought me in a dirty card, on which was inscribed "Mr Patrick Doyle."

"Will you Doyle!"

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rupees from the canteen fund, for he's an oulder soldier than you or me,' '" and so on in that

soft Irish accent that was a pleasure to listen to in its soothe and coax.

FORT AMARA.

Many of the stories of the three soldiers are told round Fort Amara, the guardroom of what in reality is the old fortress of the Kings of Delhi, which frowns high over the great city of Lahore, inside which fortress the Mogul Emperors of Delhi, the last of the thousand years of Turkish dynasties in India, built their spring palace. It would be used in the months of March, April, and May in their yearly migration from Agra to Delhi, and Delhi to Lahore, and Lahore to Kashmir, which began in January and ended in June, bringing their northern provinces into complete review as they moved from one palace fortress to another. These Turkish emperors built their palaces in the same style at each of their centres and in Kashmir. Fountains and cascades, avenues of cypress, a hall of public and a hall of private audience, a pattern as sealed as the Roman Forum. Opposite the guardroom in Fort Amara stood within a stone's-throw these graceful buildings, with grills and terraces of marble inlaid with jasper and lapis lazuli and red cornelian, partly picked out by the rude soldiers of the Sikh period.

Here the master gunner tended the big guns that frown on the city from the high interior plinth, which were once in my charge, and here overhanging the wall are the barracks in which the company of British infantry from the Mian Mir Cantonment spend a dreary month of guard duty in turn. Here Mulvaney and Learoyd and Ortheris chewed the cud of discontent through sweltering summer months, when the heat haze had hidden in pea-soup the view of the Punjab which in winter furnishes so beautiful a sight to those who climb to the high battlements of Fort Amara (which is not its real name).

Out to those high battlements Kipling himself would drive in a "tikka garri," anglice hired phaton, from his irksome editorial chair in the 'Civil and Military Gazette' office. It was to that office came also one summer night Peachy Carneghan and Michael Dravot, looking for looking for a map of the country of Kafiristan, that land of romance of which Sir George Scott-Robertson has since explored some of the valleys, and dispelled the legends of an an Alexandrine Colony marooned in the far mountains of Ao Safai.

SNARLEYOW.

In Quartermaster Sergeant Bancroft's pamphlet, to which I have already referred, comes also the story of Snarleyow ... that was the horse's real name . . . Snarleyow, the artillery draught horse whose tragedy is so inimitably told in the ballad of that name. You will remember the refrain"Down in the infantry nobody cares, Down in the cavalry colonel 'ee

swears,

Down in the lead with the wheel at the flog

Turns the bold bombardier to a little whipped dog."

That third line means when the lead horses and driver of a gun team are down, and the pace has been so fast that the wheel driver is flogging his horses. Now that close on a million Britons have served in the Royal Artillery during the Great War, guns and gun horses are household words. Here is the story as told in the song, of the battery moving into action, at a gallop

..they were tucking down the brow

When a tricky trundling round shot gave the knock to Snarleyow.

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"There ain't no stop, conductor, when a battery's changing ground!" And he swore that he could not even pull up for his brother with his head between his heels. A shell burst over the limber wheels, and

"There lay the Driver's Brother with 'is 'ead between 'is 'eels."

Now Snarleyow was a real horse, the off pole horse, or, as we should now say, the off wheel horse of the waggon of No. 5 gun in the 1st Troop, 2nd Brigade, of the Bengal Horse Artillery (a battery of horse artillery being then called vice of the East India Coma troop), that magnificent serpany's immortal Army, at the battle of Ferozeshah fought in the first Sikh War on the 21st22nd of February 1846. It was the battle in which the Governor-General, as well as the Commander-in-Chief, spent of battle but in the middle of the night not only on the field the dead and dying, the roar of the Sikh artillery, and the blaze of the burning Sikh camps, wondering what the morning would bring forth. The Governor-General's staff had mostly been killed, and the Governor-General, Sir Henry Hardinge, had ordered his imThe picture of the "Midnight portant papers to be destroyed. Bivouac by Martens is well known.

"Snarley," as he was usually called in the troop, was evi

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