05 THE CHRISTIAN'S REVENGE

Chapter 5 THE CHRISTIAN’S REVENGE

I WAS once urging on a certain official the need of a Government dispensary in a certain frontier district. " There is no need there," he replied ; " the people are quiet and law abiding. Now A__ , that is a disturbed area: there we ought to have medical work " -- an unintentional testimony to one result of the doctor’s work, though rather hard on the law abiding section of the populace that they should have no hope of a hospital unless they can organize a few raids, or get a reputation for truculence. Which will be better, a punitive police post or a civil dispensary? This seems a not very logical conundrum, yet it is based on sound reasoning, and a well managed establishment of the latter kind will often remove the necessity of setting up the former. The doctor is a confidant in more matters than one, and the right man will often smooth down little frictions and mollify sorenesses which bid fair to cause widespread conflagrations. A medical mission is a pacific, as well as an essentially pioneer, agency.

There was a little missionary dispensary on the frontier, in charge of a native doctor, a convert from Muhammadanism, who had gone in and out among the people till he was a household friend all down the country-side. One day he was sitting in his dispensary seeing out-patients, when he heard the following conversation :

ABDULTALIB. " The Sarkar has sent out agents to kill the Mussulmans by poisoning their drinking-water."

BALYAMIN. "Mauzbillah! how do you know that ?"

A. " Mullah D. arrived last night, and, sitting in the chauk, he told how he had seen a man throwing pills into the well at Dabb village. He went after him, but as soon as the man saw him he ran away."

B. " What is to be done F

A. " First we must tell the women not to draw water from the wells they have certainly been poisoned in the night but they can take their pitchers to the tank in the big mosque ; no one would interfere with that."

B. " If we can catch the miscreant, we will show him plainly enough who is the Mussulman and who the infidel." As the news spread through the village, the excitement grew ; women who had already filled their pitchers from the wells hurriedly emptied them and started off afresh to the mosque tank. Guards were placed at the well, both to warn the faithful and to give short shrift to any hapless stranger on whom suspicion might fall. The men about the bazaar had procured thick sticks, and seemed only waiting for the opportunity of using them, and things looked black all round. News was brought to the police-station, and, without waiting to don his uniform, the inspector buckled on a revolver, and, taking a constable with him, hurried off to the most disturbed portion of the village. The men there were sullen, and would give no information, and two or three of the more truculent seemed inclined to hustle the police-officer. Just then the native doctor appeared on the scene, and recognized the gravity of the situation at once. One rash act, and the police might have to use their firearms in self-defence. The people, however, trusted the doctor. Had he not often championed them when subjected to little police tyrannies, and had they not often sought counsel from him in their village quarrels, and always found his advice had helped them to come to an amicable settlement ? So now, when he quietly slipped his arm into that of the inspector, and led him out of the dangerous quarter, chatting the while, till he got him safely into a house without loss of official dignity, not even the most truculent tried to resist his passage. Then he returned and reasoned with them on the groundlessness of their suspicions. Had any of them ever seen anyone throw anything into the wells ? Had anyone even got a stomach-ache from drinking the water? Did any King ever want to kill off all his own subjects? If so, whom would he rule, and where would be his kingdom ? Finally, he bantered them out of their warlike intentions: the sticks were returned home, business resumed, the inspector came back as though his authority had never been questioned, and a very ugly situation was successfully negotiated. In the year 1879 the tribe of the Wazirs had been incited by their Mullahs to rise, and they came down suddenly with their lashkar on the little frontier town of Tank. There was a mission hospital there, in charge of an Indian doctor, the Rev. John Williams. Before the authorities could summon the troops the Wazir warriors had overrun town and bazaar, and were burning and looting. Some young bloods went for the mission hospital, but they were at once restrained by the tribal elders, who forbade them to meddle with the property of " our own Daktar Sahib" as they called him. Had they not often been inmates of his hospital and partakers of his hospitality ? Not a hair of his head was to be injured. They at once set a guard of their own men on the mission hospital, who warned off any excited tribesmen who might have done it injury, and that was the only place in the bazaar that escaped fire and sword and pillage. Some of his surgical instruments had been carried off before the posting of the guard ; but upon this being made known, search was made through Waziristan, and the friends of the doctor were not satisfied until all were returned to him.

Revenge is a word sweet to the Afghan ear, and even a revenge satisfied by the culminating murder is the sweeter if the fatal blow, preferably on some dark night, is so managed that the murdered man has a few minutes of life in which to realize that he has been outwitted, and to hear the words of exultation with which his enemy gluts his hatred. In one case that came to my knowledge, after strangling his victim, but before he was quite gone, the murderer dealt his victim a terrific blow on his jaw, shattering the bone, with the taunt : " Do you remember the day when I told you I would knock out your teeth for you ?" In the autumn of 1907 a fine stalwart Wazir was brought to the Bannu Mission Hospital in a pitiable state : both of his eyes had been slashed about and utterly blinded with a knife. His story was that his enemies came on him unexpectedly in his cottage one day, beat his wife into insensibility, tied him to a bed, and then deliberately destroyed his eyes with a knife. His wife came to hospital with him, suffering from severe contusions and some broken ribs, and we put them both into one of our small " family wards " so called because father, mother, and children, if there be any, can all stop together for treatment. It was painful to have to tell him that he would never see again, and still more painful to hear him as he piteously said : " Oh, Sahib, if you can give me some sight only just long enough to go and shoot my enemy, then I shall be satisfied to be blind all the rest of my life." It could not be. His lot would probably become that of the numerous blind beggars that throng Eastern bazaars; for who would plough his land now or speak for him in the village council ? Yet of pure pity we kept him a few weeks, that he might hear the story of the Gospel of goodwill and forgiveness ; but he would shake his head and sigh. " No, that teaching is not for us. What I want is revenge revenge !" Then, because a concrete case will sometimes accomplish what a mere statement cannot effect, I told him the story of the Conolly bed. Over each bed is a little framed card denoting the benefactor or supporter of that bed and the person commemorated thereby, and over this particular bed is written :

CONOLLY BED In Memory of Captain Conolly, beheaded at Bukhara. As long ago as 1841 this brave English officer was sent on a political mission to Bukhara, which was then an independent State, and not under the rule of Russia, as now. The Muhammadan ruler, Bahadur Khan, affected to be suspicious of his intentions, and threw him into prison, where another English officer, Colonel Stoddart, had already been incarcerated. It was in vain for them to protest and to claim the consideration due to a representative of the British Government ; they were met by the answer that no letter had come from the Queen in reply to one sent by the Amir, and that therefore they had certainly come to stir up Khiva and Khokand to war against the Amir of Bukhara. Their effects were confiscated ; even their very clothes were taken from them, till they only had their shirts and drawers left, when a filthy sheepskin was given to Captain Conolly as some protection against the winter cold of Bukhara. Their servants were thrown into a horrible dungeon called the Black Well, into which each man had to be lowered by a rope from the aperture at the top, and was then left to rot in the filth below.

Captain Conolly managed to secrete a small English Prayer-Book about his person, and this was a daily source of comfort to him and his companion in prison, and he marked verses in the Psalms and passages in the prayers from which they derived comfort. On the fly-leaves and the margins he wrote a diary of their sufferings; month succeeded month, and their hearts grew sick with hope deferred, and their bodies worn with fever, wasting and wounds. On February 10, 1842, he writes : " We have now been fifty-three days and nights without means of changing or washing our linen. This book will probably not leave me, so I now will, as opportunity serves, write in it the last blessing of my best affection to all my friends."" Again, on March 11, he writes : " At first we had viewed the Amir’s conduct as perhaps dictated by mad caprice, but now, looking back upon the whole, we saw indeed that it had been the deliberate malice of a demon, questioning and raising our hopes and ascertaining our condition, only to see how our hearts were going on in the process of breaking.

" I did not think to shed one more tear among such coldblooded men, but yesterday evening, as I looked upon Stod dart’s half-naked and much lacerated body, conceiving that I was the especial object of the King’s hatred, because of my having come to him after visiting Khiva and Khok, and told him that the British Government was too great to stir up secret enmity against any of its enemies, I wept on, entreating one of our keepers to have conveyed to the chief my humble request that he would direct his anger upon me, and not further destroy by it my poor broken Stoddart, who had suffered so much and so meekly here for three years. My earnest words were answered by a ’ Don’t cry and distress yourself.’ He, alas ! would do nothing, so we turned and kissed each other and prayed together, and we have risen again from our knees with hearts comforted, as if an angel had spoken to us, resolved, please God, to wear our English honesty and dignity to the last, within all the misery and filth that this monster may try to degrade us with."

Again, on March 28: "We have been ninety-nine days and nights without a change of clothes."

One of the native agents of the mission, Salih Muhammad by name, subsequently escaped to India, and thus relates the closing scene of the tragedy.

" On Tuesday night (June 14, 1842) their quarters were entered by several men, who stripped them and carried them off, but I do not know whether it was to the Black Well or to some other prison. In stripping Colonel Stoddart a lead pencil was found in the lining of his coat and some papers in his waist. These were taken to the Amir, who gave orders that he should be beaten with heavy sticks till he disclosed who brought the papers, and to whom he wrote. He was most violently beaten, but he revealed nothing. He was beaten repeatedly for two or three days. On Friday the Amir gave orders that Colonel Stoddart should be killed in the presence of Captain Conolly, who should be offered his life if he would become a Muhammadan. In the afternoon they were taken outside the prison into the street, which is a kind of small square. Their hands were tied across in front. Many people assembled to behold the spectacle. Their graves were dug before their eyes.

" Colonel Stoddart’s head was then cut off with a knife. The chief executioner then turned to Captain Conolly and said : ’ The Amir spares your life if you will become a Mussulman.’ Captain Conolly answered : ’ I will not be a Mussulman, and I am ready to die!’ saying which he stretched forth his neck, and his head was then struck off. Their bodies were then interred in the graves which had been dug." For a long time the fate of these two officers was unknown in England, and, indeed, overshadowed by the greater disaster in Kabul. Then a missionary, the Rev. Joseph Wolff, undertook a journey to Bukhara, and after many sufferings and dangers, ascertained that they had been murdered two years before. He did not, however, come across the little PrayerBook, which appears to have been lying about in some shop in Bukhara for seven years after the officers’ death, when a Russian officer, passing through the bazaar, happened to light on it. He picked it up, and, observing its interesting nature, purchased it from the shopkeeper. For another fourteen years the little book was lying on his table at St. Petersburg, when a visitor who knew Captain Conolly^s relations saw it, and obtained leave to take the precious relic and place it in the hands of the relatives of the deceased; and thus, twenty-one years after her brother’s death, Miss Conolly obtained the full account of his sufferings, written with his own hand. So far no vengeance had been exacted for the Amir^s atrocity ; now the murdered man’s sister thought she would like to have her revenge, so when the Bannu Mission Hospital was inaugurated, she wrote out to the medical missionary, expressing her desire to support a bed in memory of her brother, and that bed has been supported in his name ever since, and we tell the Afghans in it that that is THE CHRISTIAN’S REVENGE. When I sit by the bedside of some sick or wounded Afghan in that bed, and tell him and the others round him that it was their co-religionists who killed this officer because he would not forsake Christianity for Islam, and that now his sister is paying for them to be nursed and tended, and praying for them that they may learn of the Saviour who bid us forgive our enemies, and do good to those who despitefully use us and persecute us, then it is easy to see that the story has set them thinking. And when it is further brought home by their experiences in the mission hospital, where they have been lovingly tended by the very native converts whom they have abused and perhaps maltreated in the bazaar, they return to their Afghan homes with very different feelings towards Christians.

It is thus that the medical missionary gets his passport to all their villages, not only in British India, but across the border among the independent tribes. While visiting a Wazir chief once in his border fort, he said to me : " You can do what we cannot possibly do. I cannot go into that village over there, because I have enmity with the people there. The chief of that tribe across the river a few miles off has a blood-feud with me, and I have always to go armed and with a guard lest he should waylay me; at night I cannot leave my fort, but have to sleep ready armed in my tower. And I am like most of us in this country : we all have our enemies, and never know when we may meet them. But you can go into any of our villages and among all the tribes, although you have not even got a revolver with you, and, more than that, you get a welcome, too." In some parts of the country across the border it is necessary to take a fresh guide every few miles, as the various villages are on bad terms, and might injure the traveller on the lands of the opposing village merely in order to get their enemies involved in a feud, or into trouble with the Government. These guides are called badragga, and within the tribal boundary any member of the clan, even a child, is often sufficient protection, as that is sufficient to show that the traveller has received the sanction of the tribe to move about within their boundaries. If, however, marauding bands are known to be about, or if the tribe is at feud with a neighbouring one, then they will send a fully armed badragga of several men with you. I have, however, seen a traveller consigned to the care of a boy of nine years or so, and, no doubt, with perfect security. On one occasion when it had been arranged that the badragga of a certain clan was to meet me at a prearranged rendezvous, I arrived at the appointed time and place under the care of the badragga of the clan through whose territories I had just passed, but no one was forthcoming. We waited an hour or so, but still no one came ; my badragga then accompanied us a little way forward till we came in view of the first village of the next clan. Here they stopped and said : " We can go no farther. If we were to go into that village, there would very likely be bloodshed, as there is enmity between us and them; but we will sit at the top of this knoll here and watch you while you go on to the village, and if anyone interferes with you on the way we will shoot." I went on with an Indian hospital assistant who was with me, and when nearing the village a man came up and shook hands with great heartiness, saying : " Don’t you remember me ? I brought my brother to your hospital when he was shot and his leg broken, and we were with you for two months." He brought me to the village and to his brother, who hobbled out on a crutch to meet us, and was very pleased. They insisted on our stopping while they called some of the other villagers, who were anxious to see the doctor, and finally sent us forward on our journey with a fresh escort and a hearty " God-speed."