Forty-one years in India | Page 8

myself,
especially by the senior military officers, many of whom were
personally known to my father, who had, I was aware, written to some
of them on my behalf. Under these circumstances, I think it is hardly to
be wondered at that I became terribly home-sick, and convinced that I
could never be happy in India. Worst of all, the prospects of promotion
seemed absolutely hopeless; I was a supernumerary Second Lieutenant,
and nearly every officer in the list of the Bengal Artillery had served
over fifteen years as a subaltern. This stagnation extended to every
branch of the Indian Army.
There were singularly few incidents to enliven this unpromising stage
of my career. I do, however, remember one rather notable experience
which came to me at that time, in the form of a bad cyclone. I was
dining out on the night in question. Gradually the wind grew higher and
higher, and it became evident that we were in for a storm of no ordinary
kind. Consequently, I left my friend's house early. A Native servant,
carrying a lantern, accompanied me to light me on my way. At an angle
of the road a sudden gust of wind extinguished the light. The servant,
who, like most Natives, was quite at home in the dark, walked on,
believing that I was following in his wake. I shouted to him as loudly
as I could, but the uproar was so terrific that he could not hear a word,

and there was nothing for it but to try and make my own way home.
The darkness was profound. As I was walking carefully along, I
suddenly came in contact with an object, which a timely flash of
lightning showed me was a column, standing in exactly the opposite
direction from my own house. I could now locate myself correctly, and
the lightning becoming every moment more vivid, I was enabled to
grope my way by slow degrees to the mess, where I expected to find
someone to show me my way home, but the servants, who knew from
experience the probable effects of a cyclone, had already closed the
outside Venetian shutters and barred all the doors. I could just see them
through the cracks engaged in making everything fast. In vain I banged
at the door and called at the top of my voice--they heard nothing.
Reluctantly I became convinced that there was no alternative but to
leave my shelter and face the rapidly increasing storm once more. My
bungalow was not more than half a mile away, but it took me an age to
accomplish this short distance, as I was only able to move a few steps
at a time whenever the lightning showed me the way. It was necessary
to be careful, as the road was raised, with a deep ditch on either side;
several trees had already been blown down, and lay across it, and huge
branches were being driven through the air like thistle-down. I found
extreme difficulty in keeping my feet, especially at the cross-roads,
where I was more than once all but blown over. At last I reached my
house, but even then my struggles were not quite at an end. It was a
very long time before I could gain admittance. The servant who had
been carrying the lantern had arrived, and, missing me, imagined that I
must have returned to the house at which I had dined. The men with
whom I chummed, thinking it unlikely that I should make a second
attempt to return home, had carefully fastened all the doors,
momentarily expecting the roof of the house to be blown off. I had to
continue hammering and shouting for a long time before they heard and
admitted me, thankful to be comparatively safe inside a house.
By morning the worst of the storm was over, but not before great
damage had been done. The Native bazaar was completely wrecked,
looking as if it had suffered a furious bombardment, and great havoc
had been made amongst the European houses, not a single verandah or
outside shutter being left in the station. As I walked to the mess, I

found the road almost impassable from fallen trees; and dead birds,
chiefly crows and kites, were so numerous that they had to be carried
off in cartloads. How I had made my way to my bungalow without
accident the night before was difficult to imagine. Even the column
against which I had stumbled was levelled by the fury of the blast. This
column had been raised a few years before to the memory of the
officers and men of the 1st Troop, 1st Brigade, Bengal Horse Artillery,
who were killed in the disastrous retreat from Kabul in 1841. It was
afterwards rebuilt.
Dum-Dum in ruins