96 A PILGRIMAGE FOR PEACE
by teaching them industry and thereby removing the
principal motive that leads them into the raiding habit.
" I am having talks with Khudai Khidmatgars in this
connection and evolving a plan in collaboration with Bad-
shah Khan. If the plan bears fruit, and the Khudai Khid-
matgars truly become what their name signifies, the in-
fluence of their example, like the sweet fragrance of the
rose, will spread to the tribes and might provide a per-
manent solution of the Frontier question/'
Before leaving Bannu Gandhiji allowed himself to be
taken to the site of the recent raid. In the course of our
brief visit several facts were brought to his attention.
From what one saw and heard, It was clear that the raid
could have been aborted if there had been the slightest
wish on the part of the officers immediately concerned.
They had notice of the coming raid. The raiders were
practically under observation all the time. Why the raid
was allowed to run its full course is a mystery.
But the reader should have some knowledge of the
theatre of the raiders' action. The fertile and beautiful
Bannu plain watered by the Kurram and the Gambila
rivers has a varied and woeful history. Surrounded as
it is by the bleak and waterless salt range in the Kohat
District on the north, by the sandy tract of Dera Ismail
Khan on the south, and on the west and north-west by
the howling wilderness of the Waziristan hills, where life
is a perpetual struggle, not only of man against nature,
but also of man against man, it naturally became an ob-
ject of temptation to its fierce border neighbours. Its early
history reads more like a blood-curdling narrative of the
battles between hawks, kites and other birds of prey than
anything else. The following excerpt taken at random
from Thorburn's monograph on Bannu will serve as an
apt illustration :
" Now the children of Shah Farid, who was also called
Shitak, were glad for they were sore pressed at the hands of
men of the tribe Wazir, and they girded up their loins, and with
their wives and little ones came down from the mountains, and
camped at the mouth of the pass called Tochi. Then their elders
assembled together and said, 'Let us send three pigeons to the