Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey

by John Masters

  To answer this sort of question (on one sheet of paper, with a six-hour deadline) I sometimes had to find and study files going back nearly 150 years, for there was a continuity of policy, and most of my problems had occupied wiser heads than mine. I would dig up minutes composed by Warren Hastings, Dalhousie, Dufferin, Curzon, Roberts, or Kitchener, and memoranda written by Chief Secretaries and lieutenant-generals long dead and forgotten. I would try to grasp the fundamentals behind what they had written, and then think whether political or military progress had vitiated the old position. I tried to weigh the present and future postures of the great powers, and of India's neighbours. Then I drafted; and, if there was time, sent the draft round to one or two other sections, including, almost always, the Financial Adviser. Then I pruned. Then I rewrote. Then my paper was typed; and then it went to my boss, Roddy McLeod.

  Roddy was a bald, burly, youngish brigadier of Royal Artillery, with a bulging forehead, a magnificently incisive intelligence, a markedly abrasive personality, and a total inability to suffer fools gladly, or even glumly. Many in the army had an equal inability to suffer Roddy, but drive and sheer brainpower such as his don't often come with automatic charm and silk steering. Having my papers gone over by Roddy was rather like being bombarded by a howitzer at five feet range.

  What does this sentence mean? He looks up at me. I have to agree, the sentence is woolly. Make it clear... Redundant. You've said this already. Another sentence to come out. Are you sure of this figure? Where's the authority? The Chinese didn't have any prisoners working on the railway, did they? Then don't mention them. Don't muddy the issue... This is babu-ese. Write English, for Christ's sake.

  I return to my office, and re-draft the paper. Words come to have exact meanings, and the putting together of them becomes an art and a science.

  The Chief doesn't have time to work out your meaning. You've got to make it clear.

  I use fewer and fewer adjectives and adverbs, and aim at drafting a paper without any at all. I try to choose verbs that are forceful without being flamboyant, and will do the work of extra words.

  Don't ask the Viceroy questions, Jack. Tell him the military alternatives and the probable consequences of each, with a single clear recommendation.

  I found time to launch out on my own. I had fought on the North West Frontier, off and on, for four years before the war. Since then enormous changes had taken place in weapons, communications, mobility. Could we not now improve the old Frontier system? We were spending a hundred million rupees a year on the army up there. Surely there were too many heavy-footed soldiers, not enough reliance on the air, on the Scouts (tribal light infantry)? I worked on a plan which could save eight or nine millions, police the Frontier better, and increase local responsibility. But it would mean a major change in Frontier policy a change in the civil policy, too, perhaps. Who was I, a mere soldier, to suggest such a thing?

  Damn it, I was chief of M.O.1!

  I drafted a paper... too long, twenty pages... cut it to ten... to four... Finally got it into two sheets of paper, double spaced. Object. How to achieve it. Preparations necessary. Estimated costs and savings.

  Roddy accepted it at once. Next day my proposal started for the heights, and I knew the heady excitement of seeing it cheered on all the way, though now of course it was no longer mine. Successively it was the plan of the Directorate of Military Operations, of the General Staff, and with the Chief's agreement, of the Army in India. The Experimental Frontier Brigade came into being... and my child flew the nest. As practically everyone else became involved, M.0.1 moved to other fields.

  My job called for me to travel extensively, and if it hadn't I would have invented reasons to go anyway. I went to Burma once and Assam twice. On one of these latter journeys Lieutenant-General Tuker was on the plane. Knowing that I was in M.O. he came down the aisle and handed me a thickish folder. 'Read that,' he said. 'When you get back to Delhi, see that the Chief sees it, will you?'

  'Yes, sir,' I said, wondering why he hadn't given it to the Chief himself.

  The paper was a brilliantly worked out plan to give Burma and India independence but keep under British dominion a circle of Mongol peoples — the Mongol Shield, he named it — all round them, from Gilgit and Hunza in the north-west to the Shan States in the south-east. As an idea — welding together mountain-dwelling minorities who have always been hostile to and often victimized by the plainsmen below, who are of different religions and cultures — it was great. As a practical proposal it was a waste of time. It had no conceivable chance of fruition. Back in Delhi I gave it to the Chief, as ordered. Field-Marshal Lord Auchinleck; then General Auchinleck, and universally known as the Auk, glanced up at me — 'What's it like?'

  'Er, interesting,' I said. 'But I don't think it has any practical application.'

  'I haven't got to read it, then?'

  'No, sir.'

  But he did; for a week later he sent for me, gave the paper back, and said with a shake of his heavy head, 'Gertie Tuker is a very strange man.'

  In November I accompanied the Chief into South Persia. The origins of this trip lay in the armistice terms that had ended the war. Under them all foreign powers had agreed to remove their troops from Persia by March 21, 1946. (Persia had been occupied by Russia and Britain, simultaneously, in August 1941, because the old Shah was helping the Nazis.) By late 1945 the Russians still had over two divisions in Azerbaijan, North West Persia, and apparently intended to keep them there indefinitely. The only other foreign troops in the country were the Indian Long Range Desert Squadron, stationed at Zahidan, in the extreme south-east of the country. If the Russians kept their 40,000 men in one end, should we not keep our 140 in the other, as a matter of principle? Cables began to fly between Delhi, London, and Washington. The Chief decided to go and have a look for himself and since he was going to take his DC3 there would be room for quite a large party. I found good reason (major policy matter, old boy!) to go with him. Also in the party were the Countess of Carlisle, who was queen bee of the Women's Auxiliary Corps (India), her aide Betty Collins (a lieutenant-colonel, like myself), and a few other staff officers.

  Keeping well in the background, I watched with delight the evident nervous awe, in the presence of the Auk, of the various lesser generals we picked up en route. As we set off from Quetta on the last leg my spirits rose. For three hours we flew over a savagely exhilarating tangle of deserts and mountains, the Afghan plain to the north, the Indian Ocean far to the south. At Zahidan's bleak airstrip we were met by the local Persian general, and by Major Tim Waddilove, commanding our Squadron. Tim and I had been fellow students at the Staff College, and greeted each other warmly. Dinner was in a Nissen hut, the night bitter cold outside, the Persian stars as fierce as tiger's eyes. An American major had come from Teheran to meet us, having travelled two days in a truck loaded with vodka and caviare. After dinner we seemed to have the makings of a good regimental guest night, and I let myself go. With the American major I danced on a table top and sang 'Casey Jones'. Then I started on 'Who'll take the mail to Dead Man's Gulch?' a mass recitative with penalties for errors. The vodka loosened tongues, the mistakes came faster and faster and soon everyone except the Chief and a major-general from Quetta were helpless with laughter. The Chief was sitting back with a happy grin; the major-general's face was frozen in apprehension (I had called the Chief some outrageous names because he kept stumbling over the Dead Man's Gulch responses) as he waited for a thunderbolt to annihilate me. But I had no fear. I admired and liked the Auk, and I had no reason to be afraid of him. I was too junior for his opinion, whatever it may have been, to have a permanent effect on my career, whereas he could pension the major-general off with a word. That night I felt, too, that the Auk needed a respite from his enormous responsibility. His power encouraged sycophancy and his wisdom, quite apart from his four (soon to be five) stars, meant that he was always surrounded by a rather funereal respect. I thought he would enjoy the follies of young men in the old regim
ental way. So Waddy and I spared him nothing, except a few acts unsuitable for Ladies' Guest nights. After a couple of hours we collapsed into chairs. The Chief beckoned me and I staggered over to him.

  He said, 'You're an Old Wellingtonian, aren't you, Jack?' (He had been at Wellington too — actually in the same dormitory as myself, the Beresford, but some thirty years earlier.)

  'Yes, sir,' I said.

  'Well, you're the most extraordinary O.W. I've ever come across. Have a drink.' He chuckled delightedly. Waddy joined us and we talked with the Chief about the preservation of the Long Range Squadron in the post-war army, if that were at all possible, in order not to lose all that it had learned in its short and experimental existence. As to maintaining the Squadron in Persia, the Chief said, 'I don't see any military reason for keeping you here, Waddilove, whatever the Russians do. I'll talk to the Viceroy when we get back, but I expect you'll be leaving before March 20.'

  It was a hot, bumbling flight back to Quetta. An hour after take-off I looked up from my papers to see that across the aisle from me Betty Collins had leaned back in her chair and was asleep. Behind her the Quetta general was asleep. The staff officers were asleep. His Excellency General Sir Claude John Eyre Auchinleck, G.C.B., G.C.I.E., C.S.I., D.S.O., O.B.E, Commander-in-Chief in India, was asleep, and snoring lightly I went forward, and into the pilot's compartment. The radio operator was asleep. The co-pilot was asleep The pilot, Squadron-Leader Ken Booth had a book spread over the wheel, and was hunched forward over it. I leaned forward to see what interested the best transport pilot in India. (Ken had been the Viceroy's pilot until he came back from a test flight one day with straw in the D.C.3's undercarriage. He had buzzed an overloaded bullock cart, and they demoted him to the Chief's plane.) Ken's book was Forever Amber. I read over his shoulder with increasing enthusiasm. Shoulders gleamed, busts heaved, swains panted... but Ken's breathing renamed low and even. he was asleep, too.

  The aircraft found its way back to its stable, and I to my desk. Tito turned the first of the once free states of eastern Europe into a Communist dictatorship by staging, one-party 'elections', and I thought wearily, here we go again. Examining India's borders I thought that the most likely target for communist expansion in our area was Tibet. For the moment the most likely aggressor was Russia, though if China ever ended her civil wars and was united under a strong central government, then she would be. I began to work out what effort Russia would have to exert to invade Tibet, or give military support to a fake revolution there, and how we could stop them if the Government of India were to accede to a plea from the Dalai Lama for help. When I had come to the conclusion that the Russians would need some 240 squadrons of transport aircraft to do anything effective, or they would have to give us two years warning by a massive road-building programme, I put the file away; but China would be a different proposition.

  Roddy kept throwing problems at me. Which of the many airfields built for the expanded wartime air forcesshould be kept in being? The air force had its needs, of course, but we too were vitally interested, as the location of the airfields affected the speed of troop movement, the location of reserves, internal security methods, and a hundred other matters.

  Next, railways. In addition to the broad gauge network which covered the whole country, there were two metre-gauge networks, one in the north and one in the south. It is hard to believe, bur a gap of seventy miles separated them, Surely now that gap must be bridged, so that civil and military freight. and passengers could move freely over the whole metre-gauge system. Every branch in G.H.Q. agreed, all the civil departments of the government agreed. The Home Department wailed that they had been trying to get that line built, as a famine relief measure, for thirty years, so they were entirely for our proposal. Fine! Now, how much is it going to cost and who's going to pay for it? Civil or military budget? Split it? Well, old boy, we have managed without it all these years, and you did say it was a strategic necessity, didn't you? The Army should pay. Over my dead body, if we have to pay for all of it, I muttered, and went off to enlist the help of the Financial Adviser to G.H.Q. This was Mr Mohammed Ali, later Prime Minister of Pakistan — a brilliant financier and civil servant, a tough watchdog over the country's money, but always a helpful guide to us simple soldiers through the mazes of his speciality; and a gentleman. Mohammed Ali patted me on the shoulder, laughing, and said, 'Next time, come to me before you mention costs to the civil side.'

  The winds heralding political change began to blow through G.H.Q. For many years the Commander-in-Chief had been the head of the Defence Department, and a Member of the Viceroy's Council. Now an interim provisional government was formed, and Mr Nehru agreed to accept the Department of Defence. His long political struggle had pitted the army against him for most of his life, and I think he expected to find that was just another organism designed to further British interests and retain power as long as possible. I know he was relieved and surprised to find that he was mistaken. The Auk had always been a strong and dedicated advocate of early independence for India and from his example all of us took immense pains to separate India's interests from Britain’s in the problems that came to us. Several times, especially on financial matters, we received blasts from London to the effect that we seemed to be treating Britain as a hostile power; but we were not, we were simply pressing India's interests, as we saw them, against anyone else's, including Britain's. I did not find this difficult, for India seemed more home-like to me than Britain did. My family had worked here for 150 years. I was the fifth generation to serve here, as part of the British overlordship. All those years were coming to a head now, and at last one of us had reached the centre of power, at a time when that power would be real, total, and here, not delegated by distant politicians elected by unconcerned and uninformed strangers. I could never be Indian, of course, but surely I could go on serving, as I had served already. Life would go on as before: two or three years in Delhi, then back to the regiment; long leave to England, short leave trekking in the Himalayas. Perhaps we could take Susan next time. (But Barbara was pregnant, the child due in July, 1946.) Sunday lunches of lamb pilao, dal, curried vegetables, pink gins before; and afterwards a sleep on the grass under a tree while Susan crawled over us and the kitten crawled over Susan; dances at the club, old jokes, old friends, British and Indian...

  Sam Lewis came up to me one evening in the club. He was some years older than I, and a personal friend of the Chief's. He said, 'I was having lunch with the Auk yesterday. He mentioned you and I told him you were going to be a future Commander-in-Chief.'

  'What did he say?' I asked, while Barbara glanced at me with a look of quizzical pride.

  'He said, "So I have heard... if there is such an appointment by then. And if he becomes an Indian." '

  I went home in a thoughtful mood. Whether I attained two, three, four or five stars was not at that time a sensible thing to worry about. What was important was the prospect put into perspective by the Auk's words. The Indian Army was the outgrowth of forces first raised in 1695 by the Honourable East India Company and in 1859 placed under the British Crown when John Company was wound up. The enlisted men (other ranks) had always been Indian. The officers had all been British until 1919, when the first Indianization programme began. By now we were about half and half. In peacetime the whole of the Indian Army was stationed in India, together with British Army troops hired from the London government to help defend India against foreign attack and internal dissension. When India became independent it was obvious that the British Army troops would be asked to leave as soon as possible. The Auk's political sense told him that the same invitation would be extended, at once, to the remaining British officers of the Indian Army. I realized that I had been a fool to imagine that I would go on moving upward with Philip Mortimer and Bogey Sen, Hugh Pettigrew and Mohammed Usman, Derek Horsford and Shahid Hamid. The phasing out of British officers would not be gradual, as the phasing-in of Indians had been: it would be sudden and final.

 
; I said to Barbara, 'It looks as though a promising career is about to end with a bang, not a whimper.'

  'Not your career,' she said. 'I'm sure they'll give you all a chance to transfer to the British Service. They must.'

  Perhaps not my career, then, I thought; but my work, surely. England was a place to retire to, not to work in. My work was here.

  My dreams that night were not of careers or airfields but of my regiment, of the men with whom I had fought and sweated and bled — Manjang, Gumparsad, Hotu, Rudrabahadur, a thousand others. What was to become of us?

  But I was no longer even weakly in control of my fate. Events moved faster and more violently, in India and the world. Ratings of the Royal Indian Navy mutinied at Karachi and Bombay. British soldiers put down the mutiny in Karachi, Indian soldiers in Bombay. The Chief steadfastly refused to ask for aid from cruisers of the Royal Navy, then in Indian waters. Indian officers captured in Malaya and Burma, who had helped to form and lead the Indian Traitor Army against us, were tried by court martial. There was exultant talk in Congress circles that the verdicts would not matter anyway. It was certain that the men would never be executed. When India became independent they would be released and given high honour. This talk ceased suddenly when a number of Indian colonels and majors, who had kept to their loyalty, often under bestial Japanese and Indian traitor torture, let it be known that they would not serve in the same army with men who had failed in that loyalty. The Congress were stayed (at least until Krishna Menon's time as Minister of Defence, fifteen years later) from making the disastrous mistake — far more dangerous to them than it could ever have been during the British dominance — of forming a 'political' army. The officers they were about to inherit had disagreed with many British policies, but had faithfully carried them out. They would do no less when the civil power was wholly Indian.