The Towers Of Silence (The Raj quartet)

by Paul Scott

‘I think you may assume,’ the general ended, ‘that our role will be there, to the east. Some of us are familiar with jungle conditions. My advice to you is to forget them because we knew them at a bad time. We have the wrong picture. Fortunately I don’t think any of us is affected by the myth of Japanese invincibility. Man for man there’s no problem. That’s all I have to say this morning but I ask you now to give your attention to one of my junior officers, a man recently appointed to my Intelligence staff. If any senior officers wonder why they should stay to hear what a mere captain has to say they may restrain their natural impatience if I explain first that what he will tell you is confidential and of importance to the picture we need of the enemy we may expect to meet, and secondly that he has been in the service of the Indian government for longer than quite a number of the officers present today. He is something of a rare bird, an officer of the civil authority who has managed to persuade his department to let him into the army for the duration of the war. Captain Merrick’s civilian rank was a senior and responsible one. I scarcely believe him when he tells me that there was so little going on in his district that even his superior officers agreed he might be more usefully employed. I do believe him when he tells me he first applied to join the armed forces as far back as 1939 and has continually renewed his application and I suspect it was not a case of nothing much going on but of his department deciding that if they wanted any peace they would have to let him come to the war. The kind of work he was doing meant that the most suitable branch for him to serve in was intelligence and his civilian rank would have qualified him for a more senior army rank than the one he holds. I happen to know, and I have no wish to embarrass him, in any case he is now stuck with what he’s got, that he had a choice between this appointment and one elsewhere which would have given him more glamorous epaulettes. He chose the more active role and the lower rank because it was an active role he was looking for. I am glad to welcome him to this formation. I repeat that what he has to tell us is confidential. There should be no general discussion of the subject inside units and certainly not outside. Although Captain Merrick will perform the ordinary tasks of a G3 this particular subject is likely to become one of his special interests and he will continue to keep in touch with brigade and battalion intelligence staffs in regard to it and to the level at which it remains a restricted subject. Brigadier Crawford, Captain Sowton and I will not stay to listen to his address because he gave us a full and detailed account last night after dinner. Thank you gentlemen. No standing if you don’t mind, it only makes for disruption. Colonel Selby-Smith, will you take over please?’

  The general came down from the stage, was joined by Crawford and Sowton, and left by the main aisle. From the foyer on the other side of the doors came the sound of boots stamped on the tiled floor as the men on guard duty came to attention. Selby-Smith got up and now made a gesture of invitation. On the far side of the right-hand second row of seats Teddie saw his elusive room companion rise. At first sight he looked younger than the general’s reference to seniority had led Teddie to expect. Tall, fair-haired, slim and well-built, he moved with a sort of snap that Teddie would have expected in a smart cadet or a young hard-case sar’major. But once on the platform, behind the lectern, in stage-lighting, the fairness of the hair faded and the used quality of the face was revealed. He could have been any age between thirty and forty.

  The hall was remarkably quiet. The general’s recommendation and explanation had alerted an old instinct to dislike on sight anyone about whom there was a faint mystery, a difference, anyone who was not fully defined by rank, occupation and regiment, who appeared to have an obscure but real advantage over his fellows. Teddie was aware of this because he felt a prick of resentment himself. I would have waited and joined you for dinner but I have an appointment. Dinner with the general. How and when had that been arranged? The general would have got back in his staff car from Premanagar two or three hours before Teddie spluttered in on his motor-bike after playing messenger-boy over several square miles of bloody awful country and then helping off-station officers to find accommodation in Mirat for the night. The three fingers of whisky represented something ambiguous like the postcards his mother used to send from Singapore saying ‘Miss you’ while all the time she was having a high old time with that chap Hunter.

  For the first few minutes of Merrick’s address the silence persisted, but during these minutes it lost density, became riddled with receptive channels drilled one way by Merrick’s strong and resonant voice and the other way by the audience’s growing interest in what the voice was saying until the two sides met like tunnellers who had worked from opposite sides of a mountain and come face to face at the centre point of a clear uninterrupted passage. As if he knew that contact had been made Merrick now made a dry joke and was rewarded by more laughter than the joke deserved. Thinking about it afterwards Teddie believed that most men would have attempted a joke right at the beginning to break down the unfriendly atmosphere. Merrick must have been conscious of the critical silence that greeted his appearance on the platform. But he ignored it, simply started to speak, standing at the lectern removing his papers from his briefcase then dropping the case on a nearby chair and sorting out his notes, apparently in no hurry to look like a man giving a lecture but already giving it.

  *

  ‘In December nineteen-forty an eminent member of the All India National Congress whose extremist views had become something of an embarrassment to other members of the Congress High Command, not to say an annoyance to ourselves, escaped from India, so far as we can ascertain through Afghanistan. His name was Subhas Chandra Bose. Although arrested early on in the war he had been released to his home after staging a hunger strike in captivity which the Indian Government feared might lead to his death. In spite of rigorous surveillance by the police and CID of the house he now lived in he managed to get away presumably in some sort of disguise and make his way to Kabul where it seems he was in touch with the German consulate. Thereafter, quite logically, he turned up in Berlin with the declared intention of carrying on what he called India’s fight for freedom from there. There are two points worth noting about this situation. The first is that a man who has such a high opinion of himself and his talents as to believe that single-handed he might achieve what the Congress as a whole has not managed to and takes the trouble to put such a great distance between himself and his jailers, is in all likelihood suffering to some extent from delusions of grandeur. The second point to note is the direction of his flight and its final destination. Berlin. The two factors, the kind of man one may think Bose is and the place he went to are not incompatible as factors in our assessment of the meaning of the situation. Indeed, all this makes a perfectly sensible pattern. Hitler, Ribbentrop, Goebbels, Subhas Chandra Bose.

  ‘At this stage of the war of course, in 1940, Mr Bose might have been excused for believing that the Germans were going to win it anyway and that his mission was a merciful step taken to minimize any suffering Indians might have undergone following a British defeat. One can quite see that the appearance of Mr Bose as Gauleiter of India could have militated against the excesses of storm-troopers in cities such as Delhi. Once again one learns the lesson that historically a man’s actions – however questionable they appear at the time – can usually be satisfactorily explained away afterwards as altruistic. No doubt Mr Bose has been sacrificing himself in the interests of his country. His is an odyssey that deserves to be better known and no doubt will be because it is not over yet. Like many great adventures it has its marginally amusing elements. I am assured on the best authority that although Mr Bose stumbled most of the way through Afghanistan on foot he effected his entry into Kabul in a tonga.’

  The laughter swept the hall at this point. Teddie laughed too. He was not sure he knew just who Subhas Chandra Bose was. There were so many Indians called Bose. His interest in Indian politics and politicians had always been minimal. He had a generally comic idea about them. The picture of a portly chap i
n dhoti, shirt and Gandhi cap bumping up and down in the back of a rickety horse-drawn two-wheeled trap on his way to meet the German consul struck him as perfectly splendid. Teddie folded his arms, always a sign of his contentment. This Merrick fellow certainly knew his stuff even though his voice, confident and carrying, was – well – not quite pukka, a shade middle-class in the vowel sounds.

  ‘Nothing I’ve said so far is confidential. The business of Bose’s escape and activities in Berlin, although soft-pedalled by Government, is known to many people – perhaps better known to civilians than to army personnel and to Indian officers better than to British. Civilians have more time to gossip and read the minor items in the newspapers. Indian officers are probably more interested in what an Indian politician gets up to than their British colleagues are. But by and large the Bose situation is treated more as a joke than a threat. He has broadcast from Berlin and has made as little impression as the Anglo-British commentator Lord Haw-Haw. Men like Bose tend to appear to live, publicly, in isolation from what we are inclined to think of as the realities. What he actually did in Germany may therefore come as a surprise to some of you. With Hitler’s permission, to assist Hitler in fighting us, he raised a unit of battalion strength from Indian prisoners-of-war who presumably volunteered for this distinction.’

  The temperature in the hall seemed to drop perceptibly. For an instant the barrier between audience and speaker fell again. Teddie looked at the necks of the two Indian officers in front of him and wondered what on earth it felt like being one of them.

  ‘This unit,’ Merrick continued, ‘is first reported as officially in existence in January 1942. In other words it took Mr Bose at least a year to find eight or nine hundred men to accept the bait of ostensible freedom from prison-camp and to form a group which no doubt he described as the nucleus of a great army of patriotic Indians whose quarrel was with the British and no other nation. Whether Hitler was disappointed at the feeble response or was merely amused to have his views of Mr Bose confirmed we do not know. The unit does not seem to have survived as a fighting force or even as a coherent one. It is reported scattered around Hitler’s Europe, particularly in the Low Countries, doing the odd spot of beach defence, police and guard duties. But before we criticize these men, remember that as prisoners-of-war forcibly separated from their company and battalion commanders, and very far from home, they were deprived of the one thing the Indian Army has always been especially rightly proud of – the high level of trust between men and officers which is based on the real concern shown for the men’s welfare by those officers, be those officers British or Indian. It is clear that Bose’s failure in Germany stems from the fact that he simply couldn’t find enough Indian King’s commissioned officers to help him in his work of suborning cold, hungry and miserable Indian sepoys.’

  There was an appreciative murmur from the front row where the most senior British officers sat.

  ‘Bose was still in Berlin when the Japanese launched their lightning attacks in the Far East, on Pearl Harbour, Malaya and Burma. Intelligence reports reveal that he was in touch with the Japanese ambassador in Berlin and it takes little imagination to work out that one of the things he must have suggested to that gentleman was that the Japanese should encourage the raising of similar forces from Indian prisoners-of-war to assist them in their operations in the Far Eastern theatre. But now we come across yet another gentleman with the name of Bose–’

  Teddie smiled. There you were. Common as Smith.

  ‘—Rash Behari Bose, an old Indian revolutionary living in exile in Japan. Rash Behari Bose also approached the Japanese with a scheme of this kind. He was unsuccessful in his first contact, with Field-Marshal Suguyama, who took the practical soldier’s view that since India was part of the British Empire Indians could never be anything but enemy subjects. He had more success with the Japanese war ministry. Rash Behari was already head of a thing called the Indian Independence League in Japan. With the backing of the Japanese government he was now in a position to extend this as a going concern in all the invaded territories. A branch of the Indian Independence League, or IIL, was set up for instance in Bangkok and it sent representatives with the Japanese forces that invaded Malaya. You see which way the wind begins to blow. Mr Rash Behari Bose probably makes great play with the fact that the IIL saved Indian lives and property during the period of hostilities. Indeed there are many instances reported of Japanese soldiers having approached Indian civilians in Malaya asking them if they followed the Mahatma and leaving them unmolested when hearing that they did.—’

  ‘But the dividing line between saving innocent civilian lives from Japanese bestiality and suborning Indian troops was very thin. You could say it was non-existent. At this stage of our story there emerges I’m afraid not a cold and hungry sepoy but an officer, Captain Mohan Singh of the 1/14th Punjab Regiment. Captain Mohan Singh was captured in Northern Malaya very early in the campaign in, so the report we have states, Alor Star. The next thing we hear about him is that he is head of a small group of Indian officers working with a Japanese intelligence officer called Fujiwara. Fujiwara also had with him a representative from the IIL in Bangkok. Consequently one can trace a direct line from Rash Behari Bose through Bangkok and Fujiwara to Captain Mohan Singh. Mohan Singh proceeded to organize captured Indian soldiers into small fighting groups which accompanied Japanese forces during the rest of the Malayan and Burma campaigns.

  ‘Here again evidence exists of lives of Indian soldiers and civilians having been saved. But to what end? The answer comes to us unequivocally in the extraordinary event which took place in Singapore in February last year on the occasion of General Percival’s surrender to the Japanese commander. Contrary to normal procedure Indians – that is to say Indian officers – were separated from British officers as well as Indian troops from British. The Indian officers and troops were congregated in Farrer Park and there publicly handed over by the Japanese commander – to whom? To none other than our old friend, no longer Captain, but General Mohan Singh who thereupon addressed these troops, blamed the British for losing the battle and deserting their Indian comrades, announced that the days of British imperialism were over and that it was the duty of every patriotic Indian to form an army to help the Japanese drive them out from India for good and all.’

  For the first time Merrick paused and glanced at the audience as if to judge its temper.

  ‘Circumstances ideal for both the Boses’ purpose now obtained, a potential – numbered in thousands – of well-trained and experienced Indian soldiers who only had to be persuaded to abandon their allegiance to a regime which appeared to have been utterly, perhaps one might say disgracefully defeated, and muster into a force of the kind envisaged by Rash Behari in Tokyo and Subhas Chand in Berlin, the army of new India, of free India. The Azad Hind Fauj. The Indian National Army. An army that would march alongside the Japanese not as traitors and stooges but as patriots and men of destiny. I think we should be clear about that – about the emotional feelings that lie behind an act of what in strictly legal terms must be defined as treachery. I have named Captain Mohan Singh. There were others with him whose names are also known. Perhaps it is unfair to single him out and his subsequent actions do not all contribute to the portrait of a man without a sense of honour, a man on the make. He has in fact suffered what we call vicissitudes. But history must name him as the King’s commissioned officer who stood on the wrong side of the rail at Farrer Park and accepted a gift from the Japanese, the gift of command over men who were prisoners but still soldiers of the King-Emperor.

  ‘We don’t know how easy or difficult it was for Mohan Singh to come to the decision he obviously came to back in Alor Star at a time when even if a British defeat looked likely it had not yet been suffered. The timing of his transfer of allegiance and its apparent swiftness are rather damaging as I’m sure you will agree, but one must not forget the presence of that man of Rash Behari Bose’s, the civilian representative of the IIL from Bangkok. Su
rely a persuasive fellow when talking to Indian officers taken prisoner. Possibly though, Mohan Singh had been brooding for some time on the situation he was in as an Indian who held the King’s commission. He may finally have felt that incompatible with his nationalist ardour. Information come to hand shows that during his time as head of the Indian National Army he made great play with allegations that in Malaya the Indian KCO had always been treated as a second-class officer with a lower rate of pay and fewer privileges than his British comrade, that British officers arrogated superior status to themselves as members of a ruling class on whom the security of India mainly depended, that during hostilities with the Japanese and quite apart from the so-called gross incompetence of the high command, British officers panicked and thought of nothing but their own skins, in short got the hell out whenever they could and left Indian officers in the lurch by putting them in command of rearguards covering retreat.

  ‘Since Mohan Singh’s own British battalion commander is known to have been captured with him at the same time and in the same place, his views are not in this instance notably supported by the evidence. Nevertheless, I think we must say that Mohan Singh had decided to be disenchanted, to believe that the Malayan catastrophe destroyed forever the myth of the raj’s supremacy and therefore its right to remain even a day longer in control of India’s future, and furthermore to believe that it was now his duty to think only of how best to serve his country and his countrymen.

  ‘Here in India in some Indian nationalist circles there has been as you know a curious and to most of us naïve argument that the Japanese have no quarrel with India and Indians, that it is only the British presence and the use of India as a base for armed operations that forces Tokyo to adopt a threatening attitude to the sub-continent. It was a Gandhian idea and it lay behind the serious civil disturbances of twelve months ago.