Francis Yeats-Brown

WHAT THE MOVIES DIDN’T TELL ABOUT THE BENGAL LANCER
 
One afternoon about ten years ago, a slim, serious young Englishman by the name of Yeats-Brown sat before my fireplace in Forest Hills and kept me spellbound for hours with tales of his adventures in the mystic and fabled lands of the East. He was thirty-nine years old then; and ever since he was nineteen, he had seen death on many battlefields.

He had been a prisoner of war in Baghdad and Constantinople. He had fought the Turks on the scorching hot desert sands of Mesopotamia, and he had fought the Germans on the muddy fields of Flanders. He had written a book entitled "The Bloody Years," and yet, like Lawrence of Arabia, I found him a quiet, soft-spoken English gentleman more interested in poetry and philosophy than in fighting.
 
Yeats-Brown had little money to show for his twenty years of soldiering. He had no idea what the future held in store for him. But he didn’t seem very much worried. Out there in the East, he had learned something of the calm philosophy of the Orient. He had become a disciple of mysticism and Yoga; he had studied under holy men and sought the secrets of the Vedanta.
 
He hadn’t lived just one life like most of us. In his thirty-nine years, he had lived many lives — in fact, when he finally wrote the story of his hectic career in which he related many of the things he told me that afternoon, he called the book, "The Lives of a Bengal Lancer." It was the sensational success of 1930. And it made one of the most engrossing films that ever came out of Hollywood. But, like most Hollywood films based on biographies, it deviated very, very far from the facts of Yeats-Brown’s astonishing career.
 
Francis Yeats-Brown was only nineteen years old when he first put on the dashing blue and gold uniform and the blue and gold turban of the Royal Bengal Lancers — the proudest and lordliest cavalry in all the far-flung dominions of his Britannic Majesty. They were a picked body of men, the crack regiment of India, these Bengal Lancers. Their pay was almost nothing — something like ten dollars a month — and they had to supply their own horses and their own equipment. But they didn’t go out there to Mother India for gain, these daring young men of England. They went there for glory — went out there imbued with the spirit that carried Kitchener and Chinese Gordon and Sir Frances Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh to the ends of the earth.
 
They were up every morning at five o’clock and drilled for hours until the sun rose in the sky and the barrels of their guns became so hot they couldn’t hold them any longer.
 
And, with the thermometer sizzling at one hundred degrees in the shade, they found their recreation tearing up and down the polo field. They were cut down by sun stroke and their bodies racked with malaria. But Yeats-Brown told me that the most dangerous and exciting sport in all India was "pig-sticking.” That’s what the English call it — "pig-sticking.” Actually, it’s galloping through forests of brambles and over rough, stony country hunting a wild boar with nothing but a but a bamboo pole with a spear stuck in the end of it.
 
No other animal in the world is so vicious as a wild boar that has been wounded. Three hundred pounds of bristling fury, sly as a fox, courageous as a lion, and as fast on his trotters as the swiftest cavalry horse. To fall within range of his razor-sharp tusks, means quick and certain death.
 
I asked Yeats-Brown to tell me of his narrowest escape from death. He said it occurred one day while he was out "pig-sticking.” He and his men had flushed a great boar out of the brambles. The savage pig was racing across the field, his huge tusks glistening in the sun. Yeats-Brown, mounted on his polo pony, was in hot pursuit. Just as he drove his spear into the pig, his horse stumbled; and horse, pig and Yeats-Brown went down in a screaming, whinnying, helpless mass of tangled legs and clawing forefeet. Yeats-Brown was pinned under his kicking horse; the pig, impaled upon the spear, was struggling to get up. The horse heaved. And the pig got loose just as Yeats-Brown leaped to his feet and tore for the nearest tree. There he sat until a rescue party rode up. He had lost a tooth, sprained a thumb, and was bruised and mashed from head to foot. The pig was dead from his wounds. The only one who was completely happy was the horse, who ambled about nibbling grass with the unhurried leisure of the East.
 
But I suppose the strangest episode in Yeats-Brown’s strange career was the time he disguised himself as a woman. He had been fighting the Turks out in Mesopotamia or "Mespot” as he called it. He had been taken prisoner by the Turks and had escaped from his vermin-infested cell in Constantinople, but had not been able to get out of the city. The Turkish authorities were searching for him frantically.
 
Naturally they were looking for an English officer, so they never suspected a German governess who used to meet a Russian prince in one of the cafes. The Russian Prince was also being watched by the authorities, but the sentimental Turks hadn’t the heart to interfere with a little harmless flirtation. So when Yeats-Brown, all dolled up as a German governess, in a picture hat, with a veil, a black fox scarf around his shoulders and a muff over his hands, minced into the cafe, the Russian Prince would jump to his feet, bow respectfully and kiss the lady's hand. And the Turkish detectives would smile at one another knowingly and shrug their shoulders. After all, even a suspect Russian Prince was entitled to a little romance.
 
He was unable to get out of Turkey disguised as Mademoiselle Josephine, so he played another role. Overnight, he changed his sex and nationality and became a Hungarian mechanic who had lost his job in a munitions factory. He grew a small turned-up mustache and wore a derby hat, a pair of steel-rimmed glasses, a stained white vest, and a pair of shoes with elastic sides. Actually he looked like a second-rate comedian, but the Turks never doubted that he was the real McCoy.
 
Finally he was caught and thrown back into prison again. Once more he escaped by passing himself off as one of a crowd of Greeks who ate their supper in the prison garden. When they went out he went out with them, and walked down the street as calm and serene as the ever-living Buddha.
 
I asked him what was the most terrible sight he ever saw in all his years of fighting, and he told me this story. When he was a prisoner of war, the Turks forced him to march two hundred miles to a prison camp; on the way, he marched through a town where there wasn’t a single living inhabitant. The Turkish army had butchered a whole village of Armenians. The silence of death was everywhere, and the only living creatures were a few dogs slinking through the silent streets and the buzzards circling in the sky overhead.