AN OLD FRONTIER. So many of the great military events of British Indian history have been staged in the Peshawur Valley, that we are perhaps inclined to regard it as the whole of the great Frontier Province that fringes the Afghan marches. Since Pollock tried for many weary months to hearten his troops to face the Khyber, and avenge the Kabul disasters, and Avitabile kept the ring; or since Sidney Cotton and John Nicholson kept their own ring, blowing from the guns all who said them nay, while the border wondered; down to the days of the last Afghan War and Neville Chamberlain's mission, the '97 débâcle in the Khyber, or the prompt move against Zakkhas and Momands, Peshawur has always been the focus of frontier view. If we take a map, however, we shall see how small is the area of the Peshawur Valley, and the plain of the Sons of Joseph, compared with the rest of the Province and the long Trans-Indus strip that for over half a century was the special charge of the old Frontier Force. And largest of all the districts included in the charge was that of the Derajat, the "Country of the people that live in tents." Fringed by the Waziri ranges of the Suleiman Mountains on the north, it runs, with the red line of peace and order always at the hill-foot, south past the raiding gorges at the base of the Takht-i Suleiman, by broken gorge and raw red hill and robbers' nest, past Buddhist mounds and crumbling towers, till it joins the Sind border, some 300 miles south. And all the way live Afghan or Biloch tribes, to whom, from time immemorial, might has been right and will law, and he who had the better gun could hold the longer life. And over the alluvial horseshoe plain of the upper portion of the Derajat towers the Takht itself, the Throne of Solomon, 11,000 feet in the sheer, where, as tradition has it, the great King and his three hundredth wife, returning home from the East astride a prayercarpet, tarried a night as they skimmed the rugged crest,— tarried, at the bride's request, to take a farewell look at her native Hindustan. And where the pair tarried a shrine exists to this day, so that now and again, if the tribes be in the humour, it is given to the British officer to stand on the spot and look out as the royal pair looked, -north to the Himalayas, and round west to that great wall of snow that separates the Indus valleys from Kabul; or east to the great plains of the Five Rivers and the wide, wide streak of the mother Indus that flows to-day much as it flowed when Alexander came down from the Parapomisus and turned home down the Jhelum, the Jhelum, or the Greek kings came out of Bactria a couple of centuries later, to flood the Panjab with will show where a small force of regulars stiffens the militia and the levy, though in the early days of British rule, before we copied King George's Highland rule of a thief to catch a thief, all the border posts were held by regulars of the Frontier Force. The raid and counter - raid that have made the annals of that Force a romance on the frontier so long as its memory remains, took place for the most part on this same Derajat frontier. their buildings and coins which still remain. And if you want evidence of this raid inroad, why, look among the young tribesmen of the Marwat and Sherani and Wazir clans, and now and again you will see such a profile as shows to all time that the hand of the Greek soldiery fell heavy on the land of promise, after the manner of conquering soldiery. From the top of the Throne of Solomon, if you use your glasses, you will see for a hundred miles and more the little square mud forts and towers that fringe the border, that still lies-as in the days when Greeks held sway, till the British succeeded the Sikhs -a mile or so away from the base of the hills. And if you ask why the border still lies at the foot of the hills, you will be told that it is ill taking the breeks from off a Highlander; but some folk will tell you that Governments are like bad contractors, who make the easy portion of the road and shy at the rock-cutting; that the plains pay and are easy to control, and the hills the reverse, but that peace and ruth and civilisation should be spread as much in the mountains as in the rest of the world. All of which may be true, but tiresome and expensive. In the square towers and forts along the border, the militia keep watch and ward, waylaying raiders and being waylaid in turn: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, which is good border law. Here and there a larger post When the British first tried to bolster up the Khalsa oligarchy, they sent their chosen to show the Sikhs that peace and order and the collection of revenue was a simple enough thing to secure and collect, if only you knew how to set about it. Over the Indus and into the Derajat came John Nicholson and Herbert Edwardes, each in those pioneer days as much a law unto himself as the tribesman on the border, pose. but to better purWith the help of the regular troops of the Khalsa Raj, clansmen who knew no law were hustled back over the border, and the Ghilzai nomad tribes who wished to remain camped there, as they had camped, winter in winter out, for the best part of a thousand years, learnt at the point of the sabre to mind their P's and Q's. "The people who live in tents," and who have made the Derajat their own, come of three distinct peoples-Ghilzai, Pathan, and Biloch. Mingled with them on the Indus flats are Jats, that mysterious numerous people, from whom these strong men had brought some say come the Gypsies, the plains that lie for three and about whom Sir Denzil hundred miles between the Ibbetson may have left more Suleimans and the Indus to a lore. For the last thousand fair imitation of peaceful Hinyears and more the Afghan dustan. and Turki tribes of Central Asia have swept down to Delhi and the prize of soft Hindustan by way of the mountain-passes. Nine times out of ten the route has been by the two defiles that debouch on the Derajat the Gomal in the north and the Sangarh in the south. As Turks and Ghilzais and Slave kings and Tartars swept through the Derajat, they left a backlash, and some of the folk tarried, or were left of design to keep open the bolt-hole. Be that as it may, up against every hill in the Derajat that can boast a spring or a sweet well strata is to be found some small Afghan or Ghilzai settlement, each of a separate tribe. Some are extended to principalities, and others are but remnants of broken tribes. All are at feud, as becomes men of highland breeding. Little they recked of authority, of kings and emperors of Delhi, or later of the Sikh governors, and every ruler assessed his revenues and his rents at the sabre's point, while every kinglet and masterless man raided his neighbour. Thus it was that none knew his own property or his last hour, and all men welcomed the iron hands and strong will of Nicholson and Edwardes, and tendered them that worship and allegiance that, all the world over, is the prerogative of personality. In two years the wills of Besides the Afghan settlements in the Upper Derajat, for centuries an equally warlike folk, the Biloches, had been pressing up from the Persian Gulf and Mekran and the land of the Seistan swamps to find their own level with the Pathans in Suleiman Mountains. Pathan and Biloch had both fallen before the personality of Herbert Edwardes and the alluring prospect of peace and quiet which now and again appeals to the most lawless, especially when he has come to some estate. For when you come to think of it, good though it is to raid and to slaughter and to rape, and to carry off your neighbour's daughter screaming at your saddle-bow, still man is but human, and has his dark hours in which he reflects that having raided with success it would be as well if he could enjoy his plunder and his neighbour's daughter: when it is well to be free of the knowledge that he must watch for the avenger, and his hand keep his head till he die, lucky if it is late in life, to the enemy's knife or bullet. Thus thought the Derajat, and thus think at all times the lawless; and thus, too, thinks Afghanistan, ever since the Pax Britannica reigned for two short years in Kabul, and only melted when the English forgot to be strong. All law less lands yield readily to the strong ruler, with the proviso that strong he must remain. And so it came about that when the Sikhs tried to shake off the British hand on the shoulder and murdered Vans Agnew and Anderson at Mooltan, the tribes of the Derajat flocked with offers of service to Edwardes, who then and there marched with several thousand Pathan and Biloch horse straight on Multan. Twice en route at Kaneri and Sadusam -he defeated the Sikhs sent against him, and joined the British besieging the guilty city. And because Mool Raj had risen at Multan, and with him the Sikh army, all the Panjab came under the British rule, and with it the border marches. Out of the regular regiments of the Sikh Durbar were raised as corps of the Indian Army the Panjab Frontier Force horse, foot, and artillery,stationed, with a few exceptions, along the hills south from Peshawur to the Sind boundary. Five main cantonments were formed - Kohat, Bannu (or Edwardesabad), Dera Ismael Khan, Dera Ghazi Khan, and Asni,-of which the three last are in the Derajat. Out from the main cantonments were distributed those border posts to compete with the mountain raiders, which you look down on from the top of the Takht-i-Suleiman. Asni, conceived in malaria and born in heat, was in a few years abandoned for the better-known Rajanpur. All over India you will find de VOL. CLXXXVII.-NO. MCXXXIV. serted cantonments-half the history of India in their graveyards or on the tablets in their deserted churches-that have been left high and dry as the red frontier line rolled ever north. Asni, a big cantonment, has now a few gatepillars and an officer's grave as its sole relic in a howling desert of camel - thorn. The onward move that took the outer frontier to the Kojak left Rajanpur a derelict in the eighties, its cavalry lines and its bungalows crumbling to decay. Further changes have now removed all soldiery from Dera Ghazi Khan; and even the well-known border forts of Harrand and Mangrotah no longer have military garrisons. The frontier road that runs south from Dera Ghazi, and used to see the come and go of the Frontier Force officers, still remains, but the sahibs who use it are few. The travellers' registers in the old dak-bungalows are full of the names that you could conjure with on the frontier thirty years ago: 66 and Cavagnari Buster Brown, Vousden and Keene and Brownlow-famous politicals, daring leaders of horse, their autograph testimony long surviving them to the effect that Khuda Baksh had given them a good breakfast, or that the crockery needed replacing. From Rajanpur and Harrand and Mangrotah, in the twenty years that succeeded the coming of the British, daring counter-raid and sustained pursuit after the raiders 2 M thought of the Mutiny as it spluttered to a head, to see the old spirit of the Army when it is recorded in 'Maga' by an officer marching from Simla to Delhi: "At Kalka we found our adjutant waiting for us. He was actually reading a book on tactics. We wouldn't have that sort of rot in the 1st, and we soon put a stop to it." They got into Delhi all the same. If you travel north from the daman of the Derajat, from the hills fill the annals of the Frontier Force. Before and after the Mutiny, under Neville Chamberlain and Hodson and Kennedy, short sharp punitive expeditions had taken place against Sheranis, Bozdars, Maris, Mahsuds, and the like. Along this frontier and the neighbouring districts of Bannu and Kohat the Frontier Force lived their old self-contained life apart from the rest of the Army, yet with an individual training and experience of rough-and-tumble through the Pass of Pezu, you soldiering and a regimental will see perched on tumbled efficiency that has probably crags 4000 feet above you never been reached in its en- Sheikh - Budin, erstwhile the tirety by any other soldiers in summer paradise of of those the world, the Frontier Legion marooned to the terrors of a on the Great Wall in North Trans-Indus summer, now only Britain alone, perhaps, ex- the official residence of the cepted. The change of times, local civil and military authorthe opening out of railways, ities. No longer the hub of the principles of army training, "Piffer" summers, the bandhave all combined to alter the stand decayed, the rink a mass status of the frontier; and now of rubble, it stands almost a the old Frontier Force is, for derelict, the once flourishing weal or for woe, merged in club perched on a treeless crag the cavalry and infantry of like a Thibetan jong. The the line, and only takes the newest books in what was frontier stations in the process once a library date from the of roster. And as the Force Afghan War, and some bear has disposed of its old be- the legend, "Presented by longings, its club - houses, its Major Cavagnari.” A book messes, and its racquet-courts, lying in the verandah bears the old romance of the frontier the inscription, "Book Club, lies a-dying-dying slowly, for 3rd Irregular Cavalry." Why, off the beaten tracks the old the 3rd Irregulars mutinied life clings so long as the ink at Mianwali across the Indus, in the travellers' registers can opposite by the Kurram constill be read, and old bound fluence, half a century ago, 'Blackwoods' and 'Frasers' when the old India died and from the old regimental libra- the new India began. Fifty ries remain in the dak-bunga- years is a short time anywhere lows to cheer the wayfarer's outside British India; but here evening. It is good to read times change so fast, and men first-hand exactly what men come and go so quickly, that |