Bullocks

Bullocks are the heavy draft animals of the military camp, specifically the paired teams that haul siege guns when other animals cannot bring them closer to the firing line. Though they receive little individual characterization, their blunt steadiness, shared speech, and exact knowledge of military routine make them central to the book’s portrait of an imperial army as a chain of command carried out through animal bodies.

Identity and Military Function

Bullocks appear among the vast mixed population gathered at Rawal Pindi for the Viceroy’s review: thirty thousand men, thousands of camels, elephants, horses, bullocks, and mules assembled in persistent rain. Their specialized duty is to drag the heavy siege guns after the elephants refuse to approach the smoke. They therefore occupy a practical position between transport and combat: they do not fire the weapons, but their strength places those weapons where they can be used.

The animals are organized by yoke and battery rather than presented as independent heroes. The pair encountered during the night identifies themselves as the seventh yoke of the first gun of the Big Gun Battery. Their designation reduces them to a place within an apparatus, yet it also records the precision on which that apparatus depends. The army’s power rests not only on commanders and weapons but on teams capable of moving the weapons across difficult ground.

The Camp Stampede

The Bullocks enter the narrative during a night of confusion caused by the escape of the Amir of Afghanistan’s unfamiliar horses and camels. A young mule, already frightened by the uproar, encounters them after the camp has been thoroughly disturbed. The Bullocks explain that the camels trampled them while they were asleep, causing them to rise and walk away from their bedding. Their response is not panic but irritation at being disturbed: they maintain that lying quietly in mud would have been preferable to being awakened on good bedding.

Their reaction establishes a sharp contrast with the young mule and the camels. The mule mistakes unfamiliar noises and movement for dangers, while the Bullocks have experienced the disturbance directly and yet treat it as an inconvenience rather than an existential threat. They continue chewing their cud as they speak. This physical routine makes their composure concrete: their steadiness is expressed not through heroic display but through the refusal to abandon ordinary bodily habits.

The Bullocks also mock the young mule’s assumption that knowledge makes him safe. He has run from the camp with the camels because he cannot understand what is happening, and the Bullocks’ dry reply exposes the difference between imagined danger and experienced discipline. Their laughter does not make them sentimental figures; it places them within the camp’s rough hierarchy, where frightened recruits are corrected by animals accustomed to military conditions.

Discipline, Fear, and Collective Action

When the animals discuss what happens on active service, the Bullocks provide the clearest account of their combat role. They say that there is only one way of fighting: when Two Tails, the camp term for the elephant, trumpets to show that he will go no nearer to the smoke, all twenty yoke are put to the big gun. The teams then pull together across the level plain until they are unyoked, after which they graze while the guns fire toward a walled town.

This procedure reframes courage as coordination. The Bullocks do not climb, charge, or act individually. They move in twenty paired units, synchronized by harness, command, and shared exertion. Their work carries them toward the danger that another powerful animal has refused, but the text does not turn them into fearless creatures. Their achievement lies in performing a defined task despite the presence of smoke, noise, and artillery.

The distinction becomes part of a wider argument among the camp animals. The young mule asks why fighting is necessary at all; the troop horse answers that orders determine the matter, while Billy the mule reduces the principle to the single word “Orders.” The Bullocks embody that answer materially. They do not explain the political purpose of the war, and they do not claim ownership of the decision to fight. They obey the structure that reaches them through their drivers and harnesses.

The Command Chain

The Bullocks’ function is later incorporated into an explicit account of military hierarchy. A native officer explains that animals obey their drivers, drivers obey sergeants, sergeants obey lieutenants, and the chain continues through captains, majors, colonels, brigadiers, and the general, who obeys the Viceroy, himself described as servant of the Empress. The Bullocks are therefore the lowest visible end of a command system whose political authority extends from the animals’ labor to imperial government.

The scene presents obedience as the mechanism that converts disparate beings into a deployable force. Mule, horse, elephant, or bullock obeys the immediate handler; the handler transmits an order originating far above the camp. The Bullocks’ paired speech reinforces the idea of collective identity: they answer together, apparently as twins, and their military designation is expressed in a shared voice rather than through separate names.

Yet the narrative does not make obedience identical with wisdom. The officer’s explanation is offered to an Afghan chief who observes the spectacle and contrasts it with a society in which people obey their own wills. The Bullocks’ efficiency thus carries an implicit political ambiguity. Their discipline enables order and coordinated action, but it also shows how imperial power depends on subordinating animal strength to a hierarchy whose purposes the animals do not determine.

Narrative Significance

The Bullocks function as a grounded counterpoint to the camp’s more dramatic animals. Kala Nag carries a long memory of government service, war, transport, and punishment; the Bullocks appear instead as a collective working unit whose identity is defined by yokes, batteries, harnesses, and repeated labor. Their presence widens the book’s attention from singular animal personalities to the systems that organize bodies for military and economic ends.

Their scene also challenges simple divisions between bravery and cowardice. The troop horse admits that animals may stampede in camp, Billy distinguishes recreational panic from conduct on active service, and the Bullocks show that fear is managed through routine, command, and mutual effort. The young mule’s question about the necessity of fighting remains morally sharper than the Bullocks’ practical answer, but their conduct supplies the book’s concrete image of how obedience operates.

In the accompanying military song, the Bullocks are celebrated as “Those heroes in their harnesses” who avoid cannon-balls while remaining indispensable to the movement of the guns. The phrase both honors and confines them. They are heroes because their harnessed bodies perform dangerous labor; they are also heroes only within a system that measures their value by service. Their quiet chewing, paired voice, and twenty-yoke formation preserve a final tension at the heart of their portrayal: the animals possess judgment and experience, yet the army recognizes them chiefly as disciplined power made available to command.