SOLDIERS OF VIOLENCE v. SOLDIERS OF THE SPIRIT 1Q3
of Fielding King Hall's * description of a Khattak dance:
" Their feet stamped and they leapt, now witn the force of
elephants, then with grace of gazelles." And again, " the
grace and agility of the leading ' girl' f was beyond any-
thing I could have imagined. Mjinsky, Massine, Joos and
others whom 1 nave admired have a rival far away."
There was a public meeting at night when the forest
of matchlocks and service rifles, with which the gathering
was bristling, served vividly to reizind one thai it was no
audience of milksops that sat listening with rapt atten-
tion to GandfaljTs discourse on non-violence. It provided
a particularly appropriate background for his theme, viz.y
*' The Power of Disarmament" on which he spoke to
them: "I am here to tell you, with fifty years' expe-
rience of non-violence at my back, that it is an infinitely
superior power as compared to brute force. An armed
soldier relies on his weapons for his strength. Take away
from him his weapons — his gun or his sword — and he
generally becomes helpless, his resistance collapses and
nothing is left to him but surrender. But a person who
has truly realized the principle of non-violence has God-
given strength for his weapon of which he cannot be de-
prived and which the world has not known anything to
match. Man may, in a moment of unawareness, forget
God, but He keeps watch over him and protects him
always. If the Khudai Khidmatgars have understood this
secret, if they have realized that non-violence is the great-
est power on earth, well and good; otherwise it would
"be better for Badshah Khan to restore to them their wea-
pons which they have discarded at his instance. They
will then be at least brave after the manner of the world
that has today made the worship of brute force its cult.
But if they discard their old weapons and at the same
time remain strangers to the power of non-violence, it
would be a tragedy for which I for one am not and, so
far as I know, Badshah Khan too is not prepared."
* Fielding King Hall: Thirty Days of India.
t In the folk-dances of the Pathans female parts are always played
t>y males.