A DEED OF DARING. F EW more gallant deeds have ever
been done than the march on February 9th, of which Lieutenant G. F. MacMunn, R.A., an officer of three and a half years' service, sends his father and mother an account, published by them in the Times of Tuesday last. It is a real pleasure to read his letter, simple as that of a boy, for it enables the reader to understand how the English won, and why they continue to hold, their position in Asia. Mr. MacMunn bad been ordered to march with fourteen men, of whom, fortunately for him, twelve were Goorkhas, to convey some stores, principally rum, from Myitchina to SadOn, a small fortified post in Burmab, a distance of about fifty miles. The road was considered perfectly safe, and about twenty-five miles were passed in tranquillity, when the young Lieutenant— he cannot be above twenty-two—received information which showed that some rebels of the Kachyen tribe intended to bar his path. This meant that he must either retreat, or force his way along a rough road, continually crossed by streams, and lined with jungle on each side, through a hostile force which might number hundreds, and did number sixty at least, armed with muskets, and sufficiently instructed in the military art to build stockades both of timber and atone. Lieutenant MaeMunn, who had probably never beard a gun fired in anger in his life, seems not to have doubted for a moment about his duty. The people in Sadon, he thought, would want the ram, and he pushed on, to find the enemy holding a ford where the water was up to his shoulders. He plunged in with three Goorkhas, and forded the eighty yards of water, "getting volleyed at awfully," but was left unwounded, and " rushed " one side of the stockade, and then, bringing over the rest of his men, "rushed" the remaining works. The Kachyens fled, but four miles in advance towards Sadon halted again, constructed another stockade, and filled the jungle on each side of the road with musketeers, who poured in, as the Goorkhas advanced, a deadly fire. The jemadar was shot through the lungs, a Goorkha hit in the foot, and Lieutenant MacMunn wounded in the wrist ; but he went down into the jungle with two men only, the remainder forming a rear-guard, and carried the stockade, the Kachyens firing futile volleys, and the Englishman and his comrades, as he writes in schoolboy slang, "giving them beans." Sadon was now visible, and encouraged by the sight, Lieutenant MacMunn pressed on; but the Kachyens were not tired of the fight, and had erected another stockade, this time of stone, across the road, with a ditch 5 ft. deep by 10 ft. broad in front of it, a proof in itself of their considerable numbers and skilL The Lieutenant asked "the boys" if they would "follow straight," and they being Goorkhas, half-mad with fighting, and understanding by this time quite clearly what manner of lad was leading them, " yelled " that they would, and did. Into and out of the ditch, and up to the stockade, and again the Kachyens fled, only to turn once more, and—but we must let Lieutenant MacMunn tell the rest of his own story: —" It took us hall-an-hour to repair the road and pull down the stockade ; and on and on, wondering where our friends were. [The garrison of Sadon knew nothing of the advancing party or its danger.] One mile on they again fired at us from the jungle ; but the road was clear, and we hurried on down the hill, where we had to cross a river bridged by our sappers. On the way down they banged away at us, and near the river they had stuck in any amount of pointed spikes in the road, and while we pulled these up they fired again and again, and we volleyed in return. We then hurried down to the bridge; to our dismay it was destroyed, so we had to cross the river by wading lower down, and very deep it was. It was quite dark, and took us quite half-an-hour to get every one across, and then the road was blocked with spikes and trees, and the Kachins fired continually. At last we got to Sadon village, half-a. mile below the fort which our fellows had made. In the village from every house and corner they fired. My horse was shot in the hind-leg, the bullet going through the muscle, and a driver was hit, too. The Goorkha ponies broke loose and galloped about, the mules went in every direction, and the Goorkhas cursed and blazed away, and still no sign from our friends, and I began to fear the fort had been taken. I put the wounded driver on a pony, and we hurried on, col- lecting what ponies and mules we could. In ten minutes more we saw the fort in the darkness ahead, and I started off a ringing cheer, followed by my men ; bugles rang out, and they cheered in reply, and in another minute we were inside. I was sur- rounded by men on all sides, patting me on the back, holding me up, giving me water, asking questions." That is to say, Lieutenant MacMunn, a youngster, almost yesterday from Woolwich, had led twelve Goorkhas on a march down a jungle road of twenty-four miles, hampered with mules and commis- sariat stores ; had crossed two rivers by fording ; and carried three stockades, doing the whole work under continuous fire from an enemy far superior in numbers, far swifter of foot, and, as far as constructing defences went, almost as expert as sap- pers. No wonder that, after such a march, men in the fort "held the Lieutenant up," or that the Goorkhas, who know what a man is, admitted that, had their leader been hard hit, they could never have got in. It was a small thing, the march, done with a small force, for a small object ; but it was a genuine feat of derring-do of the old heroic kind, with this result, among others, that wherever that officer goes, or whatever deed he tries to perform, if there are Goorkhas about, though they cannot understand one word in ten he says, he will have in them, who are as brave as he is, comrades who will follow him, if it be straight to inevitable death. Be the duty what it may, or the distance of time what it may, if they recognise him, neither superiority of numbers nor weight of fire will make any difference ; they will go on while they live, and will
no more shrink from his side than he will shrink from the duty laid upon him by fate or superior orders.
It is by such feats done by such men that India was won and is now held, and we confess that after a lifetime of study of such narratives, they remain to our minds as perplexing a mystery as ever. Why were the Kachyens so utterly unable to stop that advance ? They belong, we believe, to precisely the same family of mankind as the Goorkhas, who are squat little Mongols crossed at some early period with an aboriginal race of the Himalayas ; they were sufficiently well armed ; they had a great superiority of numbers ; they had every advantage of position; and they had what we may fairly term, for such warfare, some scientific knowledge. They were not stricken with panic, but though they fled, turned always, and maintained a running fight for at least nine hours, till their enemy reached his destination. They had what in Europe we consider the better, that is the defensive cause, and they were animated with a hope of securing what to them would have been considerable plunder ; and yet they were as powerless to stop that one white man with his handful of dark followers, as if he had been a superior being and his comrades endowed with charmed lives. Why ? They would have stopped the Goorkhas alone fast enough, or killed them all, as the brave little warriors themselves acknowledge ; and what did the white lad lend to the dark soldiers that made them thus invincible ? It certainly was not courage, for Lieutenant MacMunn would be the first to acknowledge that the Goorkhas, man for man, were as brave as himself. It can hardly have been intelligence, for the Goorkhas, though wild men in some respects, understand this kind of fighting perfectly well, and have defended and carried much stiffer ways than the forest-road from Myitchina to Sadon. And as to discipline, it probably never came into play except in the way of obeying orders, which all fighting-men obey in battle ; for the condi- tions of the fight prevented formation, and compelled every man to do the best he could for his own hand. The gift con- veyed from the white man to the bronze men was clearly some gift of morale, or of energy, so that they felt that if he were hard hit they were all lost; bat though the observer may perceive the mere fact as clearly as they did, its true nature remains as much a mystery as ever. We may call the white man's gift the faculty of leadership if we like; but what that facility is other than courage, which was possessed equally by all, and resourcefulness, which only once came into play, is as little explained as ever. All we can say is, that some faculty, of which we can see nothing except the evidence, is inherent in superiority of race, so inherent that a sort of schoolboy strikes experienced soldiers under circumstances of the most pressing and extreme danger, as a leader -essential to their success.
It is a very puzzling thing, too, if we think of it carefully, that Lieutenant MacMunn should be so brave. We expect somehow that young soldiers should get panic-struck, and we tell stories about Nelson ducking his head to the shot as a boy; but it is probable that Lieutenant MacMunn, like all the Prussian soldiers before Diippel, and like most of the English privates at Waterloo, had never seen a shot fired in anger in his life. The truth is, that though experience helps to main- tam n discipline, soldiers learning slowly the comparative safety it confers, it does not help to sustain or to increase courage at all, the quality, though partly mental, being as independent of the effect of custom as it is of bodily size. But why is it also so little affected by intelligence ? By all the rules we are accustomed to believe, culture, by increasing foresight and the perception of adverse chances, ought to diminish daring; and Shakespeare, the closest of observers, positively affirmed that it did, the "native hue of resolution" getting " sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought ;" but as a matter of fact, it makes exceedingly little difference. We will not affirm that officers are braver than their men, fancying that the dif- ference, if any, is more in capacity to lead than in positive courage ; but they are certainly not less so, and by a priori rules they ought to be. It is all very well to talk about the sense of honour ; but that sense, though it will make timid men do their duty bravely, will no more change timidity into courage than it will change red hair into black; and the evidence is that the cultivated are, man for man, inherently quite as brave as the ignorant. The truth is, that courage, in its most complete form, the courage which is insensible to danger, though a quality partly physical and partly mental, is still a quality of the nature, and on natural qualities education has comparatively little effect. It may control, or even suppress, the manifestation of them ; but it leaves them there almost untouched. No training, however precisely similar, will make two boys alike, or convert a mean man into a generous one, or a selfish man into a man of wide affections. The substratum of character is always there, alterable, if at all, only infinitesimally, or after generations ; and it is to this substratum that the quality of courage belongs. It cannot be trained out of a man, or into him, though, for- tunately for conscripts, discipline and devotion will produce in almost all an excellent working substitute. Lieutenant MacMunn must, as compared with the rough Goorkhas, be a Crichton in knowledge, and therefore in the enlarged foresight as to possibilities which all knowledge must produce; but the little mountaineers perceived in a moment that he would no more shrink than they would ; while he possessed scimething, some incommunicable faculty, which enabled him to win when, as they saw and acknowledged, they would by themselves have been defeated. That faculty, which can be applied in all departments, and is independent of book-knowledge, and even of expansion of mind, is the moral basis of our position in India, and there is no other. The Indian is often as brave as the Englishman, and can be cultivated beyond the English- man's level ; but he lacks something still, and when there is fire in the forest or flood on the plain, he will tarn to the Englishman, whom he does not like, for a supply of the lacking force. Villagers in Southern India, utterly cowed by a man-eating tiger, will attack the beast on foot, and with insufficient weapons, because an Englishman who knows nothing of tigers is ready to lead the way.
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