k-leather trimmings; and friends called
them the "Wuddars," which means a race of low-caste people who dig
up rats to eat. But the Wuddars did not resent it. They were the only
Wuddars, and their points of pride were these:

Firstly, they had fewer English officers than any native regiment.
Secondly, their subalterns were not mounted on parade, as is the general
rule, but walked at the head of their men. A man who can hold his own
with the Wuddars at their quickstep must be sound in wind and limb.
Thirdly, they were the most pukka shikarries (out-and-out hunters)
in all India. Fourthly-up to one-hundredthly--they were the
Wuddars--Chinn's Irregular Bhil Levies of the old days, but now,
henceforward and for ever, the Wuddars.

No Englishman entered their mess except for love or through family
usage. The officers talked to their soldiers in a tongue not two hundred
white folk in India understood; and the men were their children, all
drawn from the Bhils, who are, perhaps, the strangest of the many
strange races in India. They were, and at heart are, wild men, furtive,
shy, full of untold superstitions. The races whom we call natives of the
country found the Bhil in possession of the land when they first broke
into that part of the world thousands of years ago. The books call them
Pre-Aryan, Aboriginal, Dravidian, and so forth; and, in other words,
that is what the Bhils call themselves. When a Rajput chief whose bards
can sing his pedigree backwards for twelve hundred years is set on the
throne, his investiture is not complete till he has been marked on
the forehead with blood from the veins of a Bhil. The Rajputs say the
ceremony has no meaning, but the Bhil knows that it is the last, last
shadow of his old rights as the long-ago owner of the soil.

Centuries of oppression and massacre made the Bhil a cruel and
half-crazy thief and cattle-stealer, and when the English came he seemed
to be almost as open to civilisation as the tigers of his own jungles.
But John Chinn the First, father of Lionel, grandfather of our John,
went into his country, lived with him, learned his language, shot the
deer that stole his poor crops, and won his confidence, so that some
Bhils learned to plough and sow, while others were coaxed into the
Company's service to police their friends.

When they understood that standing in line did not mean instant
execution, they accepted soldiering as a cumbrous but amusing kind of
sport, and were zeal