Road of Bones: The Siege of Kohima 1944 – The Epic Story of the Last Great Stand of Empire. Fergal Keane

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СКАЧАТЬ the road linking Kohima with Imphal. It was built of wood with a red tin roof and a spacious veranda; it was pretty and spacious, surrounded by pale pink cannas and scarlet rhododendrons, but not lavish. When a small road had to be cut to the bungalow, Pawsey, following the service rules, paid for it himself. Above the bungalow, reached via a terraced hill, was a tennis court upon which Pawsey’s occasional visitors could enjoy an hour or two of civilised sport. His life there was comfortable but not luxurious, for he was a man of ascetic temperament, driven by his work and a conviction that the welfare of the Naga people was his life’s mission. That he was a paternalist is beyond doubt – those who knew him remembered how he spoke of the Naga as ‘my children’. But that is not to cast him as a cartoon figure, the dutiful imperialist shepherding the childlike natives. He was driven by a sense of imperial duty but also by a deep, empathetic humanity, a quality that the horror of his experiences in the First World War had only served to deepen. Sachu Angami, a Naga born and brought up in Kohima, remembered seeing Pawsey walk around his bungalow garden every morning. ‘He was always calm and he would smile when he saw us children. But we were too scared to talk to this white man, of course. This was a man who, when he spoke, the words turned into orders that would be carried out.’

      Pawsey rode out by mule on his visits to the villages, sometimes accompanied by an escort of police and stopping off for the night in government bungalows or huts, or at the homes of the handful of British residents. Pat Whyte was a young girl living at a coal-mining works in the hills and recalls Pawsey coming to stay with her family. She was about seven or eight years old when she walked in on him while he was reclining in the bath, causing the deputy commissioner considerable embarrassment. ‘I remember him calling to “get this child out of the bathroom”. He wasn’t very happy!’ Pawsey also acted as magistrate for the Naga Hills and would set up his court on the veranda of the Whytes’ bungalow where, surrounded by magnificently adorned warriors – Pat Whyte saw one man wear an entire bird as an earring – the deputy commissioner would consider the complaints of one clan against another. There were arguments over boundaries which could easily end in a blood feud if not handled with tact. Once, when Pawsey was hearing a case of murder after a headhunting expedition, a policeman emptied out an entire sack of heads in front of him as evidence. The deputy commissioner’s reaction is not recorded. It was also the magistrate’s duty – although this was usually carried out by Pat Whyte’s father – to disburse the opium ration to registered dealers. The supply, which smelt ‘sort of sickly sweet’, was meticulously weighed out before being hidden away again under lock and key.

      Until the arrival of the railhead at Dimapur, about forty-six miles from Kohima, in the early 1930s, the European residents of the Naga Hills largely depended on the land to feed them. With water drawn from wells and springs, and using local labour, they grew vegetables, and what could not be grown they bought or bartered for: rice, goat meat and fruit. The cooking was European; only on Saturdays did they eat curry, and then it was a bland concoction.

      The railway engineer W. H. Prendergast, who arrived in the area around the same time as Charles Pawsey, recalled nights in the government bungalows deep in the forest where a ‘fiendish shriek … made every nerve tingle, as some animal was chased to death’. Prendergast’s work on the railway line near Dimapur was hindered by the effects of earthquakes and by elephants which were in the habit of tearing up the wooden sleepers. For anybody travelling in the forests the tiger was the most dangerous enemy, stalking its prey through the thick foliage, a silent springing killer that could drag a man down from the back of an elephant. One man-eating tigress killed eleven people, including a soldier, before a Kuki tribesman, armed with an ancient muzzle-loading rifle, managed to kill her. By day the hills pulsated with the noise of wildlife. Gibbons and rhesus monkeys screeched in the canopy, while brilliantly coloured birds flashed through the trees – hornbills, the symbol of the Naga people, rare Burmese peafowl, and the bar-backed pheasant.

      In the monsoon months Pawsey could find himself severely restricted. The rain swamped the jungle tracks and whole hillsides would come crashing down, a wall of rock and mud blocking the paths, forcing diversions through the jungle with its abundant leeches and the danger of malaria. Pawsey’s friend, the anthropologist Henry Balfour, curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, described a typical day travelling in the Naga Hills during the 1920s: ‘The going was appallingly slippery and it was not easy to keep the horses on their legs on the narrow ledge-like track … Most of the way it is rather “trick-riding” along a ledge track with a nearly sheer fall on one side.’ Conditions had changed little twenty years later when British and Japanese troops operating in the hills would see animals and men plunge to their deaths over these sheer drops.

      When the Second World War broke out few in Delhi believed they would find Japanese armies sitting on the Burmese border. Once this situation presented itself, Charles Pawsey understood that it would fall to him to ensure that the Naga people and the other tribes of the Naga Hills did not go over to the Japanese. Given their history with the British they might have been tempted.

      The story of rebellion in the Naga Hills is one of the least known of the colonial wars of conquest, but, once the extent of the bloodshed and the repression meted out to the tribespeople is understood, the magnitude of Pawsey’s task not only in maintaining peace but in recruiting the Naga into the formidable network of fighters, spies, scouts and porters who would help save the British at Kohima becomes all the more remarkable.

      The British called them ‘barbarous tribes of independent savages’. Caught as they were between the advance of British imperialism and the equally ambitious kings of neighbouring Burma, the tribes of the Naga Hills could be forgiven for employing ‘savagery’ in defence of their independence. British interest in the Hills dated to the first Anglo-Burmese war of 1826 but the first military expedition was not launched until 1839 to punish villages that had raided into Assam. In the fighting that followed the invaders discovered that although ‘armed with only with spears, daos and a very few old muskets, [they] were a foe by no means to be despised’.

      Closer in appearance to the people of Tibet and Nepal than to the Indian people of the plains, the Naga people are believed to be descended from tribes of hunter-gatherers who roamed out of the Pacific region and settled across the central Asian plateau. The Nagas encountered by early British explorers were tough warriors, divided into clans and sub-clans, which might share a village but have separate allegiances. They were led by elders who debated important issues around a ceremonial fire. The Naga martial culture, and that of other mountain tribes like the Kuki, centred around the taking of heads. A Naga male could not consider himself a true man until he had taken his first head, and the greater the number of heads taken in battle, the greater the prestige of the warrior. It was believed that in capturing the head a warrior seized the spirit and vitality of his enemy. The rotting heads would decorate the eaves of the Nagas’ bamboo and thatch homes, or would be hung from ceremonial poles in the villages. When it came to warfare, men, women and children were all considered fair game. A British military observer in 1879 cited one witness: ‘A party from one village attacked one of the clans of another large village in pursuance of a blood feud while the men were all away in the fields, and massacred the whole of the women and children … One of the onlookers told me … that he never saw such “fine sport: it was just like killing fowls”.’

      Miekonu Angami grew up in the powerful village of Khonoma, which contained no fewer than three stone ‘khels’, or forts. As a child he saw the warriors returning home with the heads of their enemies. ‘They would cut close to the chin and catch the hair and carry the head that way … sometimes they brought the ears only. They put the heads and ears at the gate and everybody would come and touch the head and then could pass into the village. It was like saying a prayer. After that they would make a party and only the men could come to that.’ He could remember, too, a time between the wars when the British killed some warriors and dumped the bodies outside the village, laughing and shouting at the villagers. ‘Before, the British did not control us: there were brave men and great headhunters who were our leaders.’ Despite his feelings about the British, Miekonu would learn to prefer them to the Japanese.

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