United States or Saint Pierre and Miquelon ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
I was talking to one of them as we came up the coast on the ship. "Nothing like them anywhere else in the world," he said. "They take to drill like their mother's milk, they thrive on it and discipline the slightest fault that might be overlooked elsewhere we punish severely. They like it and live up to it. You could lead a Ghurka regiment anywhere; fighting is their pastime.
The one holding the rope is a French sailor, the one at the bottom of the picture is a French gendarme, and the third is a Ghurka, one of our fine sturdy hillmen from India, who had come out to France to stand by the Empire.
The Ghurkas are considered bravest of the brave. Shall we not be proud to share a title such as this? As the religion of the Ghurka follows him to the battle-field, so in a different sense does the religion of the white man. We have our thoughts, our hopes and our aspirations. Some of us have our Bibles and our prayer-books, some of us have rosaries and crucifixes.
Compare the lances of the Indian cavalry regiments and the kukri, the Ghurka knife, with the petrol squirts, hand grenades, aëroplane darts and asphyxiating bombs of Germany, and call one barbarian to the advantage of the other! The truth is, of course, that war itself is barbarous. The road to Ham turned off the main highway south of Aire. It was a narrow clay road in unspeakable condition.
Their swinging stride would delight a soldier's heart, for it is like clockwork in its precision. They are born soldiers, brave and easily disciplined, devoted to their officers and without the knowledge of fear. They have faults, of course. The Ghurka is apt to be rather a gay dog; he gets drunk, and the girls he loves are many, but he is of the right stuff, and his officers are proud of him.
"My loss, my loss, without three hands Two for my pipes and one for my sword," the Ghurka bewails his great loss, also that he has not three hands, two for the pipes and one for his "crookie." That evening orders came through that we were to march out again and we followed the old line along the hedges and ditches back to our transport.
Her marriage too alienated them in the first place. She had refused so many before Basil Everard came along, and I suppose he had begun to think that she was not the marrying sort. But Everard caught her almost in a day. They met in India. Eustace and she were touring there one winter. Everard was a senior subaltern in a Ghurka regiment an awfully taking chap evidently.
A few days later a British officer was shot and killed in the camp outside the city by a Ghurka sentinel. This was not due to mutiny, however, but, on the contrary, to over-strict obedience to orders, the sentry having been instructed that he was to permit no one to cross his post without challenging.
He did not know very much English, and I no Hindustani at all, but in a short time one of the Ghurka officers approached. The officers and men of these regiments are very friendly, more chummy almost than are our officers to our men. This officer acted as an interpreter, and together they told me much that I was anxious to know.
There was a thundering great drain-pipe mounted on a bullock-cart and a naked man, painted blue, in a cocked-hat, laying an aim and firing a penny-pistol down the middle of it and yelling 'Pip! Ghurka knives.
Word Of The Day