Her Majesty's Servants

The Viceregal camp, the night before a great military review. The animals of Her Majesty's Indian forces are camped together: artillery horses, transport mules, supply camels, gun bullocks, and the two thousand elephants of the baggage train. Each belongs to a different corps; each has its own temperament and its own understanding of its work. The story is built from their conversation, overheard by the narrator, who moves invisibly among the tethered animals in the dark.

The mules discuss the camels: specifically, why the camels panic at nothing and why their panic spreads to every creature nearby. The camels, questioned directly, explain that they cannot help what they are — their nerves are made in a particular way, and the solution is not to trust camels with anything that requires steadiness. The bullocks discuss the work of pulling the big guns — specific, disciplined, unglamorous, and essential. The elephant Vixen explains her relationship to her mahout with a clarity that the other animals find either admirable or mysterious: she obeys because he tells her to, and because the chain of obedience runs upward to the Queen herself, and because that is how things are arranged.

A young native prince, listening from behind a hedge with the narrator, asks how the English manage to make so many different kinds of animals work together without disorder. The narrator explains: by making each animal obey the one set immediately above it, up a chain that reaches the Commander-in-Chief. The prince says that his own people have not yet learned this — that his soldiers would refuse orders they considered beneath their dignity, or would break formation if they thought they knew better. The story ends on that observation. It is the only story in the book that is openly political, and it is the one that has dated most. Read it for what it reveals about 1894, and for the animals' conversation, which has not dated at all.