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squash and field hockey would be, with the English language, the most enduring heritage they would eventually leave behind. Golf was introduced in Calcutta in 1829, thirty years before it reached New York, and the world's highest course was laid out in the Himalayas at 11,000 feet. No golf bag was considered more elegant on those courses than one made of an elephant's penis—provided, of course, that its owner had shot the beast himself.
    Every major city had its hunt, its hounds imported from England. Regularly its members went galloping off in their pink coats and white breeches chasing over the hot and dusty plains after the best substitute India offered for a fox—a jackal. The most dangerous sport was pigsticking, riding down wild boar with steel-tipped wooden lances. The foolhardy, it was claimed, even went after jackals, panthers and, on occasion, a tiger that way. The Indian national game, polo, was avidly taken up by the British and became a British institution.
    The British played in India, but they died there, too, in very great numbers, often young, and frequently in tragic circumstances. Every cantonment church had its adjacent graveyard to which the little community might carry its regular flow of dead, victims of India's cruel climate, her peculiar hazards, her epidemics of malaria, cholera, jungle fever. No more poignant account of the British in India was ever written than that inscribed upon the tombstones of those cemeteries.
    From the oldest recorded English grave in India, that of a woman, Elizabeth Baker, who died in childbirth two days out of Madras aboard the S.S. Roebuck en route to join her husband at Fort St. George, to the lonely grave of Lieutenant George Mitchell Richmond of the 20th Punjab Infantry, killed in the Eagles Nest picket in the Khyber Pass in 1863, those graveyards marched across India, marking with their presence the price of British conquest and the strains of British rule.
    Even in death India was faithful to its legends. Lieu-
    tenant St. John Shawe, of the Royal Horse Artillery, "died of wounds received from a panther on May 12th, 1866, at Chindwara." Major Archibald Hibbert died June 15, 1902, near Raipur after "being gored by a bison"; and Harris McQuaid was "trampled by an elephant" at Saugh, June 6, 1902. Thomas Henry Butler, an accountant in the Public Works Department, Jubbulpore, had the misfortune in 1897 to be "eaten by a tiger in Tilman Forest."
    Indian service had its bizarre hazards. Sister Mary of the Church of England Foreign Missionary Services died at the age of thirty-three, "killed while teaching at the Mission School Sinka when a beam eaten through by white ants fell on her head." Major General Henry Marion Durand, of the Royal Engineers, met his death on New Year's Day 1871 "in consequence of injuries received from a fall from a howdah while passing his elephant through Durand Gate, Tonk." Despite his engineering skill, the general had failed that morning to reach a just appreciation of the difference in height between the archway and his elephant. There proved to be room under it for the elephant, but none for him.
    More mundane, but a truer measure of the terrible toll taken by disease and unknown fevers on India's English settlers, were the stones of legions of Deputy Superintendents of Police, Railway Engineers, District Commissioners, Collectors of Revenues and their wives. No one was immune. Even the wife of India's first viceroy, Lady Canning, living in her palace seemingly beyond the reach of India's microbes, contracted jungle fever and died in 1861. Who could imagine the anguish that life in India had meant for Major W. R. Holroyd, Director of Public Instruction, Punjab, when he sadly inscribed on his wife's tombstone: "She died at Rawalpindi on 8th April, 1875, in sight of those mountains whose air one hoped would restore her health. Four little children are left in England unconscious of the depth of their loss and one lies here beside her."
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