The Exceptional Career of the Madras Engineer Group's ‘Grey Mule’

Chandigarh: The recent requiem in The Wire for the Indian Army (IA)’s age-old mule contingent, which is in the process of being replaced by bizarre-looking robotic substitutes, has provoked nostalgic and wistful responses from numerous veterans.

Retired soldiers narrated absorbingly charming tales associated with these sure-footed and intrepid mules – who for nearly two centuries were the IA’s abiding logistic backbone, especially at high altitudes – that merit recounting as their extended era heads for closure.

Responsible for transporting dismantled mortars, ammunition, medical supplies and assorted stores and fuel to remotely stationed troops, these mules are poised to imminently cede the sheer Himalayan slopes and hostile environments they effortlessly traversed to modularly constructed robots, gracelessly dubbed Quadruped Unmanned Ground Vehicles (Q-UGVs).

One such riveting account centres on the wide deployments and exploits of the Grey Mule, who joined the Madras Engineer Group (MEG) – also known then as the Queen’s Own Madras Sappers and Miners – in 1891 and served for 31 years in the restive mountainous North West Frontier Province (NWFP) now in Pakistan, Tibet as well as in Egypt and Palestine before and during World War I.

Over three decades this celebrated Grey Mule, according to regimental accounts, tenaciously and unerringly transported engineering tools, supplies and sundry equipment through inhospitable terrain and under enemy fire to the Madras Sappers in battle situations, where other animals faltered.

Its exceptional and treasured pack animal qualities first came to regimental notice during a British Indian Army-led operation of the Malakand Field Force, to relieve the siege of the precipitous Chiral Fort in the Hindu Kush mountains. Thereafter, the mule was formally adopted as the MEG’s mascot, symbolising as it did the Sappers resilience, determination and overall josh or indomitable spirit in combat.

Also read | The Last March: Indian Army’s Iconic Mules Make Way for Robotic Replacements

After extended tenures in the NWFP in Tirah and Malakand, the mule was part of the Younghusband Expedition to Tibet in 1903, before embarking to Abor in Iraq in 1911, ahead of joining the Egyptian Expeditionary Force and transferring to Egypt in 1915, and later Palestine to combat the Ottoman Empire.

It was in these latter manoeuvres in fighting in the Sinai Peninsula that its muleteer Sapper Muniswamy was injured in combat, resulting in both him and Grey Mule being conferred with the 1865 General Service Medal for participating in military operations.

The Madras Sappers were renowned for their professionalism and expertise during this campaign, earning them recognition as one of the most ‘dependable’ engineering units in the British Indian Army.

But soon after, calamity struck the Grey Mule.

As the Sappers readied to return home around 1919, after their campaign against the Ottomans had ended, XX Corps commander Sir Philip Chetwode – later field marshal and India’s commander-in-chief between 1930-1935 – ordered the sale of several thousand mules under his command to the Egyptians.

According to the Sappers’ regimental accounts, Lieutenant Colonel Basset, a Madras Sapper, pleaded on behalf of the much-commended Grey Mule, but in vain and the pack animals’ 10 Field Company returned home to Madras without him.

However, a year later, providence intervened.

One March morning in 1922, the MEG’s adjutant received a telephone call from the station master of the Bangalore Cantonment railway station, informing him of the unusual arrival of a consignment of army mules.

Somewhat unclear and hazy regimental accounts state that the unexpected pack animal load miraculously included the celebrated Grey Mule, whose arrival at the Centre understandably generated unbounded excitement amongst Sappers.

Shortly after, the Mule, then aged around 30 years, was pensioned off in Bangalore and given the freedom of the Lines to be fed and cared for by troops stationed there.

“This gentle, quiet creature wandered around, never leaving the neighbourhood of the (unit) Lines, as an honoured veteran and pensioner” declares one regimental account.

Subsequently, on the Madras Sappers 150th founding anniversary in 1930, the aforementioned regimental narrative revealed that the Grey Mule was the “cynosure of all eyes as he headed the march past of the pensioners, wearing its campaign ribbons on its brow band, accompanied by his old muleteer Sapper Muniswamy.

“The spectators in the stands and on the benches stood up and lustily cheered the column as it went past them and paid their tributes,” it stated.

This was to be the Mule’s last parade, as he died soon after in 1933 aged 42 years – the rough equivalent of 80 human years – and was buried with full military honours in a portion of the Regimental Centre in Bangalore and commemorated with an elaborate polished stone memorial, detailing his numerous operational assignments.

Furthermore, its hooves were made into inkstands, two of which are still preserved in the Sappers’ Officers Mess on Promenade Road in Bengaluru, irreverently known as ‘Monkey House’ after the many simians that populated it in the late 19th century, compared to the humans inside it.

The other two are divided between the IA’s 4 Engineer Regiment and Lieutenant Colonel Basset’s great-grandson in London. “After the Grey Mule’s faithful tenure, there has been no other known Regimental mascot,” states the regimental account.

The Grey Mule’s extensive peregrinations and mystifying return to Madras from Egypt echo in some manner the drama that befell Warrior, a British thoroughbred horse who spent four traumatic, horrific and gory years on the killing fields of France and Belgium during World War I.

Warrior’s incredibly remarkable tale is related by his owner General Jack Seely in My Horse Warrior in 1934 which, in turn, was further dramatised in the gripping film War Horse, directed by Hollywood director Steven Spielberg in 2011.

In his deployments, including the Battle of the Somme in which three million soldiers participated and a third died or were wounded, Warrior endured incessant artillery fire, vicious barbed wire fencing, mud-filled trenches and unending and unbelievable chaos and devastation.

But a combination of inherent survival instincts, a sharp horse sense, grit and of course, fortuitous coincidences, assisted Warrior in surviving World War I, in which over eight million horses, mules and donkeys died.

And like the Grey Mule mystifyingly arrived in Madras in 1922, Warrior returned home to the Isle of Wight, where he died peacefully in 1941 aged 33 years.

In his obituary, London’s Evening Standard dubbed him the “horse the Germans could not kill”, while the Sunday Times designated Warrior as the “true equine hero of 1914-18”.

In conclusion, the Grey Mule’s journey may not be the stuff of Hollywood legend, but its extraordinary military career will inexorably be the stuff of folklore compared with what the remotely controlled, triangularly-shaped modular Q-UGVs with four articulated legs, will ever be.

But then the Indian military is embarked on the inevitable artificial intelligence-driven modernisation drive in which flesh-and-blood beings, including mules, have little or no role.