The Labour Corps in Mesopotamia introduced the nearest thing to Babel since the original confusion of tongues. Coolies and artisans came in from China and Egypt, and from the East and West Indies, the aboriginal Santals and Paharias from Bengal, Moplahs, Thyas and Nayars from the West Coast, Nepalese quarrymen, Indians of all races and creeds, as well as the Arabs and Chaldeans of the country. They made roads and bunds, built houses, loaded and unloaded steamers and trucks, supplied carpenters, smiths and masons, followed the fighting man and improved the communications behind him, and made the land habitable which he had won.

One day I ran into a crowd of Santals on the Bridge of Boats in Baghdad. It was probably the first time that Babylon had drawn into its vortex the aboriginals of the hill tracts of Bengal. They were scurrying like a flock of sheep, not because they were rushed, I was told, but simply for fun. Some one had started it, and the others had broken into a jog-trot. One of them, with bricks balanced on his head, was playing a small reed flute--the Pipe of Pan. Another had stuck a spray of salmon-pink oleander in his hair. The full, round cheeks of the little men made their black skin look as if it had been sewn up tightly and tucked under the chin. They were like happy, black, gollywogs, and the dust in their elfin locks, the colour of tow, increased the impish suggestion of the toy-shop. The expression on their faces is singularly happy and innocent, and endorses everything Rousseau said about primitive content. Evolution has spared them; they have even escaped the unkindness of war.

When the Santal left his home, all he took with him was two brass cooking-pots, his stick, and a bottle of mustard oil. The stick he uses to sling his belongings over his shoulder, with a net attached, and generally his boots inside. He loves to rub himself all over with oil, but in this unfruitful land he can find little or none, and he had not even time to refill at Bombay. On board ship he saw coal for the first time. Each man was given a brickette with his rations, for fuel, and Jangal, Baski, Goomda Kisku, and others put their vessel on the strange, black substance, and expected it to boil. A very simple, happy, and contented person is the Santal. Once gain his confidence, and he will work for you all day and half the night; abuse it, and he will not work at all.

I found them in their camp afterwards in a palm grove by the Tigris, not unlike a camp in their own land, only the palms were dates and not cocoanuts. Here the Santals were very much at home. The pensioned Indian officer in charge, a magnificent veteran, of the 34th Sikh Pioneers, with snowy beard and moustache and two rows of ribbons on his breast, was pacing up and down among these little dark men like a Colossus or a benevolent god. The old Subadar was loud in their praises. He had been on the staff of a convict Labour Corps, and so spoke from his heart.

"There is no fighting, quarrelling, thieving, lying among them, Sahib. If you leave anything on the ground, they won't pick it up. No trouble with women folk. No gambling. No tricks of deceit."

A British officer of the company who knew them in their own country told me the same tale.

"They are the straightest people I have ever struck," he said. "We raised nearly 1700 of them in the district, paid them a month's wages in advance, and told them to find their way to the nearest railway station, a journey of two or three days. They all turned up but one, and the others told us he had probably hanged himself because his wife would not let him go. They are very honest, law-abiding folk. They leave their money lying about in their tents, and it is quite safe. They have no police in their villages; the headman settles all their troubles. And there is no humbug about them. Other coolies slack off if you don't watch them, and put on a tremendous spurt when they see an officer coming along, and keep it up till he is out of sight. But the dear old Santal is much too simple for this. If the Army Commander came to see them they'd throw down their picks and shovels and stare at him till he went away. They are not thrusters; they go their own pace, but they do their day's work all right. And they are extraordinarily patient and willing. They'll work over time if you don't tell them to stop; and they'll turn out, if you ask them, and do an extra turn at a pinch, without grumbling, even if they have only just got back to camp and haven't had time to cook their food."

All this sounded very Utopian, but the glimpse of them on the Bridge of Boats, and an hour spent in their camp on Sunday morning, gave one the impression of children who had not been spoilt. We went the round of their tents, and they played to us on their flutes, the same pastoral strains one hears in villages all over the East; and they showed us the sika mark burnt in their forearms, always an odd number, which, like Charon's Obol, is supposed to give them a good send-off in the next world. They burn themselves, too, when they have aches and pains. One man had a scar on his forehead a week old, where he had applied a brand as a cure for headache. Nearly every Santal is a musician, and plays the drum or pipe. The skins of the drums had cracked in the heat at Makina, and they had left them behind, but they make flutes out of any material they can pick up. One of them blew off two of his fingers boring stops in the brass tube of a Turkish shell which had a fuse and an unexploded charge left in it. That is the only casualty among the Santals remotely connected with arms. It is an understood thing that they should not go near the firing line. Once an aeroplane bomb fell near the corps. They looked up like a frightened herd. A second came sizzling down within a hundred yards of them, and they took to their heels. A little man showed me how he had run, rehearsing a pantomime of panic fright, with his bandy legs, and doubled fist pummelling the air.

The Santals came out on a one year's agreement, as they must get back to their harvest. But they will sign on again. They have no quarrel with Mesopotamia. Twenty rupees a month, and everything found, is a wage that a few years ago would have seemed beyond the dreams of avarice. They are putting on weight; fare better than they have ever done, and their families are growing rich. Most of them have their wages paid in family allotments at home, generally to their elder brother, father, or son, rather than their wife. The Santals are distrustful of women as a sex. "What if I were labouring here," one of them said, "and she were to run off with another man and the money?" The women are not permitted to attend the sacrifices in the Holy Grove, or to eat the flesh of offerings, or to climb the consecrated trees, or to know the name of the family's secret god lest they should betray it; or even, save in the case of a wife or unmarried daughter, to enter the chamber where the household god dwells in silent communion with the ancestors. Save for these restrictions the relations between men and women in the tribe are happy and free. In social life the women are very independent and often masters in the house. They are a finer physical type, and the men of the tribe are proud to admit it. The corps was collecting firewood when one of the officers twitted a man on the meagre size of his bundle.

"Look at the Arabs," he said. "Even the women carry a bigger load than you."

But the Santal was not abashed. He did not resent this reflection upon himself; it was the carrying power of his own women he defended. "Our women, too, carry much bigger loads than we do," he said ingenuously.

There is a curious reticence about names among the Santals. Husband and wife will not mention each other's names, not even when speaking of some one else bearing the same name. When receiving her allotment from a British officer the Santal woman has to call in a third person to name the absent husband. It would be a species of blasphemy to divulge the secret herself. There is a table of degrees of relationship in which the mention of names is taboo among the tribes, similar to the catalogue prohibiting intermarriage of kin in our Prayer Book. And, of course, it is quite useless to ask a Santal his age. Dates and sums of money are remembered by the knots tied in a string; but the birth date is not accounted of any importance. "How old are you?" the O. C. of the corps asked one of these bearded men of the woods. "Sahib," the Santal replied, after some puckering of the brow in calculation, "I am at least five years old."

There is one comfort the Santal misses when away from home. He must have his handi, or rice beer, or if not his handi, at least some substitute that warms his inside. They said they would make their own handi in Mesopotamia if we gave them the rice; but they discovered it could not be done. Either they had not the full ingredients, or their women had the secret of the brew. Hence the order for a tri-weekly issue of rum. Many of the Santals were once debarred from becoming Christians, fearing that the new faith meant abstention from the tribal drink.

This summer the Santals will be at home again, drinking their handi, looking after their crops and herds, reaping the same harvest, thinking the same thoughts, playing the same plaintive melodies on their pipes, as when Nebuchadnezzar ruled in Babylon. Three dynasties of Babylon, Assyria, Chaldea, and the Empire of the Chosroes, have risen and crumbled away on the soil where he is labouring now, and all the while the Santal has led the simple life, never straying far from the Golden Age, never caught up in the unhappy train of Progress. And so his peace is undisturbed by the seismic convulsions of Armageddon; he has escaped the crown that Kultur has evolved at Karlsruhe and Essen and Potsdam. At harvest-time, while the Aryan is still doing military duties, the Santal will be reaping in the fields. As soon as the crops are in, there is the blessing of the cattle, then five days and nights of junketing, drinking and dancing, bathing and sacrifice, shooting at a target with the bow, and all the license of high festival. Then after a month or two he will return to the fringe of the Great War, and bring with him his friends. He will fall to again, and take up his pick and shovel, the most contented man in Iraq.