THE scene is the officers' mess of the 1st Battalion, the Royal Gurkha Rifles. On the walls hang pictures of 19th century battle scenes and ceremonial swords. French windows lead onto a manicured lawn. In an armchair in a corner sits the Sandhurst-educated battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Bijaykumar Rawat, reading a three-day-old copy of the Sun. Across the room his second-in-command, Major John White, a tall, charming, very British officer, chats with the battalion doctor and a visitor. A waiter serves drinks.
At first glance it seems like a typical scene in the life of the British army regiment whose presence has become synonymous with colonial rule in Hong Kong.
But it is a facade. The furnished officers' mess is as functional as a stage set in an empty film lot. The other rooms in the building have been stripped bare. Nearby barracks along the leafy avenues of the battalion headquarters, located at Sek Kong in the countryside near Hong Kong's border with China, are empty. Most of the soldiers, the remnants of a 5,000-strong Gurkha force which once garrisoned Hong Kong, have left.
On the floor of the adjoining bar room, waiting for collection and shipment to England, are the trophies of 150 years' service with the Crown: five rather moth-eaten, mounted animal heads (three leopards, a tiger and a lion), a dozen glass-fronted cases of medals and ribbons, five statuettes, three silver cups, and a framed photograph of a Colonel D. R. d'A Willis with an inscription: "Colonel Brigade of Gurkhas".
Only the officers' mess and the entrance hall with a portrait hung between elephant tusks of Prince Charles, Colonel in Chief of the 2nd Gurkha Battalion, have been left untouched for now so that guests arriving for a ceremonial Beating of the Retreat and a farewell cocktail party last weekend could enjoy for a final lingering few moments the feeling that the sun has not quite yet set on one of the last citadels of the British empire in the Far East.
Major White put a brave face on things as he contemplated the end of his own five-year tour. "It's a sad moment, yes," he says. "But a lot of us are not sorry to leave. We've noticed Hong Kong change dramatically in the last few years. People have become slightly less friendly, more materialistic, more pushy. Hong Kong has become much more crowded and expensive. It's the Gurkhas who have to go home I feel sorry for. I feel a closer affinity with these soldiers than with British soldiers. They are extremely hard-working and loyal, excellent companions, loyal friends and good soldiers."
Hong Kong will become off-limits to all British forces on July 1st next year, when China takes over the territory, but most of the British garrison will have gone long before that date. The Gurkhas formally ended their active association with the colony at the beginning of October and have been packing up and trickling out since then. The 67 Gurkha Independent Field Squadron was disbanded a month earlier.
Their Beating of the Retreat marks the final act in a colourful chapter of British colonial history. The Gurkhas, Nepalese soldiers with a reputation for ferocity in battle, have been serving the British Crown for 180 years, first as irregulars, then, after saving British power in India during the Bengal mutiny in 1857, as fully-integrated regiments. For their ferocious fighting during the siege of Delhi, they were awarded the privilege of access to British canteens, out of bounds to other non-British troops. Later in the 19th century they fought for the Crown in Afghanistan, China and Tibet. During the first World War over 200,000 Gurkhas served with British forces, and in the second World War a quarter of a million joined up.
No other unit in the British army has the capacity of the Gurkhas to strike terror in the enemy camp. Armed with their traditional 18-inch fighting knife, the khoti mota khakart, the Gurkhas are fearless in battle. Five Victoria Crosses adorned their guardroom walls. They were sent into the front line in the 1982 Falklands war mainly to demoralise the Argentinians.
They have never served in Northern Ireland. An officer at British Army headquarters in Hong Kong told me: "Imagine these little men with their certain culinary skills in Armagh. They make the Paras look nice! Anyway a soldier (in Northern Ireland) has got to be able to say `good morning' and be understood."
For the last 40 years the Gurkhas have been mainly identified with the garrisoning of Hong Kong. During this time all the young men recruited from Nepal, a country of over 19 million between India and Tibet, were sent to the Battalion's base at Sek Kong for training. Many came from the Mahabharat hills, home to the traditional Gurkha where competition to join up has always been intense.
For them Hong Kong has now become a second home. The 350 inhabitants of the village of Kam Tin, beside the camp, are Nepalese, many of whom came originally to Hong Kong to be close to serving relatives. Corporal Paljar Rai from Katmandu explained that after three years a soldier got six month's leave and after the third leave he could bring his wife to live with him. When the Gurkhas held a fair at Sek Kong last year, thousands of Nepalese turned up.
Many want to return to Hong Kong and find work, as there is no work in Nepal," he said as soldiers removed a canon, seized at the battle of Kandehar, from its wheels, and wrapped it in hessian like a dead body. "The pension we get from the army is not adequate compared to what British soldiers get."
Gurkhas were always paid less than soldiers recruited in the United kingdom, unless they were stationed in Britain. Army pay was four pounds a week. The corporal would have a pension of 700 Nepalese rupees (£8) a month on retirement.
All Gurkhas are returned by the British Army to their kingdom in the shadow of the Himalayas after being pensioned off or made redundant. Nepalese soldiers who come back to Hong Kong as civilians need a job offer to become residents. Many find work with the big firm of Jardine Security, whose personnel are almost exclusively former Gurkhas. They can be seen in the corridors of the top Hong Kong hotels and outside plush homes, dark-skinned, alert men dressed in the uniform and blue berets of Jardine Security.
CAPTAIN Kamal Gurung (44) joined the Gurkhas as a private in 1970 and was commissioned in 1990. He refuses to accept that the Nepalese are mercenaries. "It was a tradition of my ancestors to fight for the British," he said. "Two of my uncles fought in the war in Burma. One was a major. My mother was 13 years as midwife with the battalion." A platoon commander in a rifle company, he will now give it all up to attend a small-business' course. "The cost of living in Nepal is very high," he said. "The boys who are being sent back will leave to find work somewhere else."
Twenty years ago there were 14,000 Gurkhas in the British army but the figure will be down to 3,000 in June, mostly in battalions based in Brunei, where they are funded "by the Sultan, and in Hampshire. The British recruiting office in Pokhera in Nepal is now looking for only 150 men a year.
Some Gurkhas will be kept on to reinforce under-strength battalions. The Royal Scots has a Gurkha company. Last year for the first time in its 54-year history, the Special Air Service (SAS) accepted a Gurkha into its elite ranks. Several of the Nepalese infantrymen are serving in the Parachute regiment.
The prospect of using Gurkhas in this way has been condemned by British shadow defence secretary, David Clarke, who accused the government of "gross mismanagement". Much the same sentiments were expressed by a retired colonel visiting the Sek Kong barracks as a guest of the commanding officer. "The British Army is short of 3,000 men and we're sending these men home on pension," he snorted as a removal lorry roared past. "I don't know what sort of blithering idiots we have in our government."
The farewell cocktail party in the officers' mess marks the end of 40 years continuous service by Gurkha infantrymen in Hong Kong. On the same day the four Wessex helicopters using the Sek Kong base will be flown to the international airport to operate from their during the remaining 242 days of British rule.
The mess will be quickly cleared out and the swords and pictures put in boxes and sent to England to join the medal displays and stuffed animal heads. The base will then become just another piece of Hong Kong real estate.