by John Masters
The DC said, ‘The Hindus have cut the mullah’s tree.’
‘No time to waste then, eh?’ the general said, his blue eyes bulging. He turned to Fred, ‘Just do what you have to, and no more. Keep tight control. I’ll back you up. Now I’m going back to headquarters … Think it would be wise to move the rest of the Wealds closer to the city, Jordan?’
The DC said, ‘Not yet, general. I’ll phone you in an hour and we can discuss the situation then.’
The general nodded, said ‘Good luck,’ and strode out to his waiting horse and groom. Jordan said, ‘We’d better get moving, fast.’
The Assistant Commissioner was a Muslim, a man in his sixties, grizzled in service and, as he at once told Fred, about to retire, here in Hassanpore. He would obviously do anything he could to avoid reading the Riot Act, or letting it be thought in the city that he had caused the soldiers to open fire, He followed Fred from street to street as Fred visited his platoons, each of them split into two, one-half under the platoon commander, the other under the platoon sergeant; the halves could usually communicate, down transverse alleys, and so far, an hour after the message had come in, no crowd had approached. Several individuals had come, men and women, and the soldiers had let them pass. These few were obviously not going to assault the Hindus at the Raj Mandir. The heat was growing, the sun beating down into the narrow trenches of the streets, shimmering down the battered walls. The smells of the city grew with the heat, the piles of cow dung, pools of human, horse, donkey, and camel urine, offal, piled grain outside the food shops.
Then Fred heard it, a growing murmurous roar, as of a train in a distant tunnel, to the west … the direction of the mullah’s tree, where the Muslims had been gathering. ‘Here they come, sir,’ CSM Lodge said cheerfully. ‘About time, too.’
The Assistant Commissioner wailed, ‘Oh, sahib … I … I am feeling not well …’ He staggered back, his hands to his head.
Fred said, ‘Fix your bayonets, sarn’t-major, and if Mr Akbar Ali here tries to bunk, stick an inch or two into his arse. Mr Ali, sign the card and give it to me.’
‘Very good, sir.’ Lodge fixed his bayonet and said menacingly to the old Muslim, ‘You baitho here, got it? No chalo or I’ll stick this up your pichche.’ Mr Ali signed the card with a shaky hand, and gave it to Fred, then groaned and leaned against the wall in the shade. The crowd roar increased. Fred said, ‘Stand your men to, Mr O’Connor.’ He stepped a pace or two forward and looked down the alley leading to the next street. Sergeant Bickers was there, waving back. Fred heard his shout, ‘All ready here, sir!’
Fred cupped his hands and shouted, ‘Remember, don’t let them get closer than fifty feet.’
The sergeant shouted, ‘Got it, sir!’
Then they came, round the corner 200 yards away, debouching into the street, a solid mass, filling the street from wall to wall, coming on like a bore up a river carrying debris before it, as the crowd carried a scum of weapons, old swords, clubs, fence stakes, pitchforks, pickaxes. There would be knives, too, plenty of them, but hidden for the moment.
Lieutenant O’Connor said, ‘Fall in! One round, standing, load! Apply your cut-offs! Corporal Waggoner, you will fire the first shot, on my order.’
Fred said, ‘Bugler, blow a G.’
The bugle blared and the crowd, now a hundred yards away, stopped, hesitant, falling silent. Fred said, ‘Mr Ali, tell them they can’t come down here, or any other road this way. Tell them to disperse. Then read the Riot Act.’
The Assistant Commissioner groaned and moaned. CSM Lodge stuck a little of his bayonet into his skinny behind. The old man yelled, blood welling through his white pyjamas. He croaked in Hindustani, ‘The road is closed, by order of the Deputy Commissioner Sahib. Go back to your homes, or the soldiers will fire on you.’ Then he recited the few lines of the Riot Act, and suddenly disappeared.
The crowd may have heard every word, though Fred doubted it. But they understood the situation clearly enough. The road was closed and they had been warned to disperse. He said, ‘Mr O’Connor, when I say the word, have that man in the front shot, the one waving a big club … now he’s turning to harangue the others …’
‘Very good, sir. Have you got that, corporal?’
‘Yes, sir.’
The crowd advanced again, now shouting, ‘Death to the Hindus! Death to the infidels … death, death, death … !’
A hundred feet … eighty … Once more Fred ordered the bugle blown. Once more the crowd stopped. But only for a few seconds, then they came on again.
Fred said, ‘Kill that man.’
‘Corporal Waggoner, fire!’
The corporal fired. The tall man waving the club dropped as though all his muscles had been simultaneously cut, a bullet between the eyes. Another man behind him fell, grasping his face, which was spouting blood; the mangled bullet had gone through the first man’s head and was now lodged in this second’s, behind the cheek.
‘Next, the man who’s just drawn a big knife …’
‘Private Jenner, got him?’
‘Got him, sir.’
The crowd was still coming on.
‘Private Jenner, fire!’
The bullet rang loud in the echoing street and the man fell, shot through the heart. Now the crowd wavered, and the shouting of ‘Death to the Hindus’ changed to a formless, aimless yelling. ‘They’re panicking,’ CSM Lodge muttered. ‘God knows what they’ll do now.’
Fred waited, his nerves taut. This was worse than going over the top, even though you knew you weren’t going to get hurt.
‘They’re coming on, sir,’ O’Connor called. So they were … but Fred stared … those men in front were trying to get back … the crowd behind was pushing them. That wouldn’t make any difference, if they got close enough to grab the soldiers’ rifles, and simply run over them, but …
O’Connor said, ‘Can we fire another two or three shots, sir? They’re getting awfully close.’
Fred thought, God, what should I do? If I fire, there’ll be another Jallianwala Bagh. He cried, ‘Bugler, blow a G!’ As the brazen notes died away between the houses Fred shouted to the CSM, ‘Tell them to turn round … Top of your voice … Now!’
Lodge stepped forward and roared in his parade-ground bellow, ‘Pichche dekko! Pichche dekko … jaldi!’ O’Connor’s platoon was lined up, ready to fire. O’Connor’s hand was shaking.
The crowd turned slowly round, in twos and threes, singly and in whole groups. Fred said, ‘Now tell them to march, go!’
‘Hut jao!’ the CSM bellowed. ‘Chalo, chalo!’
The crowd began to thin. Looking over their heads Fred saw that the people at the back were running now – so the people here at the front would soon be able to follow. They waited. O’Connor took off his helmet and mopped his forehead. In five minutes the street was empty, except for the two dead and one groaning wounded. Fred said, ‘Sarn’t-Major, take a runner, go to the Kotwali and tell Mr Jordan what’s happened, and that we need something to take that man to the hospital.’
He breathed out a long sigh and said, ‘Stand down three sections, Mr O’Connor. Tell them they did well. The stood-down sections can smoke, and rest, of course. I’m going to see what happened to the other platoons.’
They were at tiffin, and since it was a Thursday, which was a whole holiday in India, they were having curry and rice – today, egg curry. Beside Fred’s plate there was a pewter tankard of Murree beer; Daphne was drinking nimbu soda. She was in the seventh month of her pregnancy. She emptied her glass and said, ‘Ashraf, aur nimbu soda.’ The khitmatgar, wearing the embroidered regimental crest over his dark-green achkan, poured some more of the ready-squeezed lemon juice into the empty glass; then opened a bottle of soda in the corner, first covering the top with the leather shield which prevented injury if the bottle burst when the glass ball in the neck was pressed down.
Fred finished his beer and signalled Ashraf to bring him another bottle. Daphne said, ‘That’s your third beer.�
�
He said, ‘It’s Thursday. I’m going to do some studying for the Staff College after tiffin.’
‘You should really study for the Staff College,’ she said. ‘You’ll never get on if you don’t go to the Staff College.’
‘Well, your dad didn’t,’ he said. ‘And he seems to have enjoyed himself.’
‘It didn’t matter in those days,’ she said, lifting her heavy body impatiently. ‘Besides, everything was much cheaper. We’re going to need more money when the baby comes. If you were p.s.c. you’d be getting staff pay.’
He said, ‘I’m not cut out for the staff, Daphne, and that’s that. Saw too much of them in France … damn pansies with shiny boots and red tabs … didn’t see them at all, though, when the Boches were close.’
She said, ‘Well, you’ll have to transfer to the Indian Army, then.’
He said nothing. He knew that an Indian Army captain would be getting about fifty rupees a month more than he was; that came to fifty pounds a year – not to be sneezed at. But then he’d spend the rest of his service out here, and when the time finally came to retire, he’d have to settle down all over again in England.
As though she had been reading his thoughts, his wife said, ‘I don’t want to go back to England … rain, cold, freezing houses …’
And no servants, Fred thought. That was what really worried her about the thought of going home. She’d been born out here; and though she’d returned to England for education, she had come back to India before she was eighteen, and her dependence on many servants and the memsahib’s way of life had never been broken.
She said, ‘We could retire to Kashmir … a houseboat … the Dal Lake in winter, move to Nagim in summer … They’re very cheap and it’s so beautiful … dances at Nedou’s … shopping on the Bund …’
‘We must go there next time I can get a month’s leave,’ Fred said. ‘I’ve heard so much about it from all the blokes … but retire there? Or anywhere in India? We might find our house burned down round our ears one day. I tell you, what I saw down in the bazaar made me see that things are a lot more dicky out here than they seem.’
She said, ‘It would be all right if more people acted like General Dyer did at Amritsar. My father wrote that it’s a pity you didn’t give that crowd a real lesson. He read all about it in the Civil & Military, of course.’
Fred said, ‘But I couldn’t fire into the crowd when I saw that they were trying to get away. General Dyer fired 1600 rounds. I fired two.’
‘Jordan’s a weakling,’ she snapped. ‘Like most of the ICS. He cares more for the natives than he does for us. We’ll be raped in our beds if they’re not kept in their place. And it’ll be worse with these Montagu-Chelmsford reforms … kowtowing to Gandhi, they are! Disgraceful!’
Fred gulped down some beer and returned to his curry, signalling for the khitmatgar to serve him more lemon pickle and mango chutney. He thought he wouldn’t ‘study for the Staff College’, i.e. sleep, after all, but go out for a walk along the canal bank, with Satan, the bull terrier. Satan liked to bite natives, but there wouldn’t be many on the canal road. Perhaps he should have taken Satan with him into the city on Aid to the Civil. There’d been plenty of natives for him to bite there. Perhaps a dozen Satans would have done better than a company of British infantry, and not killed anybody.
Fred and Daphne arrived at Flagstaff House for the ‘cocktail’ party by tonga, a two-wheeled pony-drawn cart where the driver usually perched on the swingletree, otherwise the weight of the two passengers in the transverse back seat would almost lift the underfed pony off the ground. It was not a dignified conveyance, and tonga ponies always farted excessively from the green grass that was their staple diet; but for the Strattons there was no other way to get about – they could not afford a car, and bicycling was unsuitable for the occasion.
The general’s khitmatgar met them at the door as they climbed the steps under the porte cochère, and led them into the big high-ceilinged bungalow. Mrs Rowland came forward to greet them, both hands out – ‘Ah, Captain Stratton … Mrs Stratton … we are so glad you could come … Quentin’s talking shop over there with Mr Jordan, I’m sure, but you can say hullo to him when you have been given a drink. We’re serving sherry, chhota pegs, and Bronxes.’
The drinks were set out on a side table. They contained no ice – no drink in India ever did, because the water from which the ice was made was certainly full of germs and bacteria. Bottles were nestled on ice, instead. Here, there were several sodas in a big bucket full of ice, with other bottles labelled BRONX. Daphne doubtfully poured some into a glass, while Fred helped himself to a chhota peg. Then Fiona said, ‘Now … you know Major and Mrs Ruthling, of the Punjabis … and this is Mr Trainor, who owns the big flour mills on the Jullundur road … and Mrs Trainor … and this is Mr Matra Singh. He’s a painter, and a very good one …’
The painter was a tall young man with a curled and tied beard and a pale blue turban tied in the manner which Fred knew to be particular to the Sikhs. Daphne felt shocked; she had not expected to meet an Indian at Flagstaff House, of all places. She was sure General Rowland was not responsible for inviting him. His wife sometimes did and said the most extraordinary things: and Mrs Courtney had assured her that in their bedroom there was a large oil painting of Mrs Rowland playing golf in the nude – an obscene painting, hiding nothing. That was the kind of thing that made the natives think that memsahibs were no different from their own women.
The Sikh said, ‘Ah, Captain Stratton! You’re the man responsible for seeing that the trouble in the city last week didn’t cost more lives. Congratulations.’
Fred said a little stiffly, ‘Thank you.’ He didn’t know what to make of this Indian here, any more than Daphne did. And he didn’t know how to discuss Aid to the Civil with an Indian. It was a contradiction in terms.
The Indian said, ‘I’d like to give you a painting, to show my appreciation. Would you care to come to my studio and choose one? It’s in the Bazaar, just off Larkana, next to Ananda Ram’s.’
Daphne said, ‘We really don’t have room for any more pictures in our house. My father gave us a large collection of water colours of Kashmir, done by his father.’
‘Thank you all the same,’ Fred put in. Daphne moved away and Fred followed. For a few moments they were standing isolated in the middle of the room, then the general glanced round, saw them, and beckoned. When they joined him, he said, ‘Jordan and I were talking about this fellow Gandhi and the Congress. He thinks that the civil disobedience movement will be very effective, in the long run.’
Jordan blinked at Fred through his glasses – ‘I do. And we won’t be able to handle it – or any other Indian political movement – unless we have a policy.’
‘Keep the peace,’ General Rowland said, his eyes very blue in his red face. ‘That’s what we’re here for, isn’t it? Otherwise these fellows would be killing each other off like flies … as we saw the other day in the city, eh, Stratton? Or the Pathans would come down and there wouldn’t be a rupee or a, ah, unravished woman between the Indus and the Jumna.’
The Sikh painter had somehow appeared at the general’s other side; and his eyes were gleaming. Fred thought, that fellow had a drink or two before he came here, and that’s a pretty stiff peg in his hand now. The painter said, ‘We can defend ourselves and our women, general. We did it well enough under Ranjit Singh, before the British came.’
The general said, ‘But there was always fighting between Hindu and Muslim and Sikh, rajahs and nawabs.’
‘And the British kept the spirit alive,’ the Sikh said. ‘Divide et impera. But Mr Jordan’s right, things would be much better if there was a policy. The British Government declared a century ago that they were only here to make India fit to rule itself. When is that moment going to be? Who is going to decide it? More Indians are coming into the ICS every year … and now Indians can go to Sandhurst and get the King’s Commission. But, the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms point one
way, while Mr Justice Rowlatt’s recommendations, and the Rowlatt laws, go exactly the other … So, what? And when?’
The Deputy Commissioner said, ‘I think the Home Government should make a statement about our exact aim, inside a stated time frame, so that we out here will know what we are committed to achieving. In the end they are the government, we are the governors, which is a very different kettle of fish. They can censure and deplore General Dyer, but we have to remember that the European community out here has subscribed a huge sum for the general. They don’t think he’s a butcher.’
‘Say twenty years,’ the Sikh said energetically, waving his glass so that some whisky spilled on Daphne’s dress. She drew back in disgust. The Sikh didn’t notice – ‘Or, say, we’ll hold elections in ten years, and the resulting Parliament can write a constitution … and when it’s all agreed, you promise to abide by it … then either go, or perhaps stay under some sort of defence and commercial treaty, for a fixed number of years more.’
Fred saw General Rowland’s jaw set obstinately. Old Rowley wasn’t going to march off just because a lot of natives told him to.
The Sikh said, ‘My dear general, the British Empire has seen its finest hour, in the war. Now it is about to break up, nibbled to death by people like Mahatma Gandhi … the Dominions will go first, becoming fully independent … then us … then Africa … then Oceania … It’s inevitable. It won’t be so bad. You’ll see …’
Fred sat in the mess, drinking. It was midnight, and he was the only officer still here. Wednesdays were always guest nights; and as married officers had to dine in mess twice a month, they usually chose Wednesdays, though they didn’t have to. His mess jacket and cummerbund felt tight and hot. Next week they’d be changing to cold-weather uniforms, including mess kit, but for now it was still the white drill jacket and trousers. The scarlet and blue would be hot as hell for a few weeks.
He pressed the bell for a waiter. A mess waiter came in and Fred said, ‘Another chhota peg, please, Thomson … no, make it a bara.’
