To The Coral Strand

by John Masters

  Then an announcer said it again, in Hindi, Gurjrati, and English, with a note that the announcement would be repeated throughout the day.

  ‘Good!’ I said. ‘The old boy’s showing his mettle.’ That definitely committed us to a break with India, even more perhaps than the air raid, still in progress. For the Nawab there was no turning back now, no chance of accepting a compromise. The proclamation definitely divided us into the sheep and the goats.

  The announcer said, ‘Attention!’ This time it was about the air raid. Indian aircraft, without warning or shadow of justification, were attacking the peaceful inhabitants of Chambal. Naked aggression - resistance to the utmost - keep off the streets - take cover - persons spreading rumours will be shot - victory.

  Sumitra had dressed while I did, she also in the unsuitable finery of the evening before. She looked pale and frightened. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, hugging her. ‘They’re not attacking the city, and they won’t, except perhaps with leaflets. They’re making a surprise raid on the airfield - but most of our fighters aren’t there ... This is it, at last.’

  ‘I’m not frightened,’ she said, ‘I’m afraid ...’

  ‘What’s the difference?’ I began.

  Knock knock knock on the door. Who’s there? Servant. A man to see you, sahib. He says it is very urgent. What kind of man? A village man. The voice of the fat servant trembled with terror. Well, at least he hadn’t run away, yet.

  ‘He says his name is the Marquess.’

  The Marquess came in, very tired, but his old eyes gleaming. He said, ‘At ten o’clock last night, sahib, while I and another were hiding on the escarpment a little east of Dhain, a man came past, moving hurriedly and secretly. We hit him with our axes and he died. He was carrying this.

  He held out his hand and I took the envelope. It was addressed to Lieutenant General Gokal Singh in English.

  ‘I cannot read English,’ the Marquess said, ‘but the other with me has worked with the cement factory, and he could. He read it. So I brought it to you.’

  He was wearing only a loincloth and the high-backed slippers, his legs grey with the patina of age and the dust of travel.

  The letter was from L. P. Roy. The text was short and clear: My dear General, We agree with your proposal to keep your tanks on the south side of the Sakti Plain. Circumstances where a surrender would be proper will probably occur about 12 noon. If you will place yourself somewhere near the Sakti dak bungalow at that hour, bloodshed can be more rapidly brought to an end. We hope that shooting can be kept to an absolute minimum even before then. Sincerely.

  I folded the letter carefully and put it away in my trouser pocket. The old man had brought it eighty miles, through the night. God knows what feats of persuasion and bribery he had performed to get here, probably on returning supply trucks from Gokal’s corps.

  ‘All right,’ I said slowly. ‘Wait down in the servants’ quarters. Tell them from me to give you food and drink. Be quick.’

  He said, ‘I must get back, sahib. There is fighting.’

  I wheeled round, ‘Fighting? Where? When?’

  He said, ‘The news has not reached you? ... At midnight Indian soldiers left the gorge below Lapri on the north side and began to move west. They crossed the border there, and our men from Gidha ambushed some, killing two. I heard a machine gun just after we killed the messenger. The news of the Indian advance reached the post at Sakti, I know.’

  I said, ‘Eat fast, then, I shall take you back with me.’

  He made a perfunctory salaam and left the room. Sumitra and I were alone, the sound of aircraft faint and far now. The click of the closing latch was like a trigger to my mind.

  I said to Sumitra, ‘What are you afraid of?’

  She stood taller, her back straightening and her head coming up.

  ‘Tell me,’ I repeated, ‘what are you afraid of?’

  A hundred incidents dropped into their proper slots, like the latch, click click click, so fast that there was no sense of progression, rather of a whole pattern falling into place at once. There had been hints, careless words, inexplicable actions. She had not been careful, rather the opposite. Love is blind. Whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad. There are a dozen proverbs to meet the case.

  ‘You know,’ she said.

  Yes, I knew.

  Once, wounded by bullets, I saw my blood flowing out of me on to the ground, staining it a dark red, and knew that at an uncertain moment the continuing outpour of blood would relieve me of consciousness, which I would welcome because my wounds then hurt severely. While I lay temporarily bereft of awareness and pain the blood would still flow out on to the ground, and after another time I would be relieved of life, and neither awareness nor pain would ever come back.

  So it was now with the spirit, the soul, the whatever one calls it, however one defines it, which makes us human. That spirit, which had overflowed in love a few hours earlier, now flowed out of me on to the carpet, staining the whole world a pale grey. This time there could be no doctor, no comrade, no shell dressing to stanch the flow. The sharer and giver of love stood opposite me, the knife still in her hand. She did right to be afraid, but perhaps she did not then realise just why. It was not love for her that was draining out of me, it was my capacity for any love.

  She broke down first, and flung herself to the carpet, clasping me round the knees. ‘Rodney, my darling, I tried to show you, to let you know, so that you could send me away, at least protect yourself. I do believe in the new India. I know Chambal cannot survive alone, I know it cannot achieve what you believe in, because the Nawab, these men here, don’t want it to! Your ideals are not theirs - but that doesn’t matter. It’s all over, and we can go now. I’ll go anywhere with you, do anything for you. I can protect you against Roy, anyone. I have the Prime Minister’s own word.’

  It was she who had betrayed Gulu and the Gonds of Bhilghat, and allowed the blame to fall on Margaret Wood. She who had kept Gokal in touch with Roy. She who had caused Indian agents, their names given to her by Roy, to be thrown into jail, so that her own loyalty should be above suspicion. She ... the list was too long. I felt strong, strong enough to strangle her with one hand. The flowing wound still hurt, but already I could feel the waning capacity for feeling. Unconsciousness, sleep of the spirit, would come soon, and then, while it slept, its death. Cauterisation might help. I must get to the fight, at once.

  I said ‘I am going to keep my promises. Remember, sometimes, what might have come to us if you had kept yours. When they bow down and worship you, the heroine, the lady minister, the ambassador - remember. When you are lonely and alone - remember.’

  ‘Rodney!’ she cried. ‘I have a car ready. We can go, we can hide in any one of a dozen places and they’ll never find us. The Indian Army will be here tomorrow. Then you’ll know how hopeless it all was from the beginning, how everybody here tricked you and used you and betrayed you, far worse than I have.’

  I said, ‘I don’t want to know and, with luck, I shall not.’

  She clung harder to me. Without deliberate effort, I threw her across the room. She crashed against the wall, fell to the floor by the window, and lay there, pulling herself up on her arms, weeping, her hair in the disarray of the night, after love.

  I strapped on my automatic and its belt, went out, locked the door behind me, and called the servant. I told him the Rani was under arrest, on the King’s order, and was on no account to be let out, or allowed to pass any messages to anyone. I telephoned Hayden, and after a delay got through, and told him. I tried to ring the commander-in-chief, but was told he had left the house in his car, with an aide-de-camp, a groom, and his charger in the horsebox.

  I found the Marquess eating cold chicken, left over from our dinner last night, watched by no one. Most of the servants were out on the lawn, staring at the sky. Some held leaflets in their hands. I took one and saw that it was an official notification from the Government of India, in three languages. In response to public
demand, in answer to intolerable provocation, and to end the misrule of the Nawab the Government of India was temporarily taking over the administration of the State. Everyone was to keep calm, stay at home, and take no part in any fighting which the foolish Nawab and his wicked advisers might cause.

  The Bentley’s tank was full. I backed her out of the garage at high speed, pulled her round, and waiting only for the Marquess to clamber in beside me, rammed her out into the road. It was about eight o’clock. I gunned her along the boulevard round the lake as fast as the cold engine would take. Beside me the grim, fearless old man shook with terror. I patted him on the bare knee and shouted, ‘Relax, father! If death comes to us today, it won’t be in this machine.’ He closed his eyes and held on tight.

  There were no police about, and very few people, just one or two huddled inside doorways, staring upwards or reading the leaflets. I went through the winding streets of the city more carefully, and at the far end passed through the Bhowani Gate and out into the open country.

  I pressed the accelerator against the floor boards and snugged down in the bucket seat, ready to drive as I’d never done. I saw a khaki staff car racing towards me under a cloud of dust. I recognised it as the air marshal’s, just in time, skidded to a stop across the road and jumped out. I ran to his car, saluted (though hatless- a serious military crime) and said, ‘What’s happened, sir?’

  ‘Lost three on the ground,’ he said. ‘Shot down one, chased the rest back. What’s happening at Sakti?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘but Gokal’s in Indian pay.’

  He swore. ‘That explains ... He’s just sent me a message - nothing to report. We have another raid reported coming in from the north and I’ve sent one squadron off to intercept it.’

  I had been calculating and interpreting ever since the old guerrilla gave me the time and place of the earliest clashes. ‘I’m going to Sakti, sir,’ I said. ‘I don’t think anything serious can happen until near noon, perhaps eleven. Then we’ll need every plane you can put over.’

  ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’ll do my best ... but the Nawab - the King - just called, ordering me to send all my planes north. I’m going in to protest.’

  I saluted, got the Bentley out of the way, and we passed. I rammed my foot down, jammed the gears through the box without using the clutch. We had foreseen all this - the Indian feint attacks by land and air to draw our air force away from Sakti. Was the King trying to cut his own throat now? No, probably some bloody tinpot rajahling up north had telephoned that he’d go over to the Indians unless he was protected. Nothing more I could do about it.

  The yellow sun climbed straight ahead over the hills. The air rushed past cool and solid, the tyres whined and even that old slow-breathing monster of an engine began to roar. After a minute the blower cut in and we went east behind a banshee shriek that sent chickens and children diving into the ditch and bullocks lumbering away across the fields. We left the Chambalpur plain, and the white stones marking the edges of the road flashed by. Bridges passed, the exhaust wavering against the pillars like running a stick along a railing... A dak bungalow, white under a red roof, set back in a clearing, whitewashed stones leading to the round arches of the veranda, two men staring at us. I could observe, but not feel. Past, present, and future blended, the material and the immaterial, as in the dawn.

  That was the bungalow in the Dun where at dusk I brought back a thirty-pound mahseer after a four-hour fight, knee-deep in the river. Twelve years ago? Ten? I remembered utter exhaustion, and exhilaration, but could feel neither.

  One, two, five, six, fifteen bullock carts in file, steep hill, swinging down in the whining shriek of the tyres, past, behind. Army trucks, soldiers standing up in the back, staring up at the sky, blare of the old klaxon, past, behind. Tank transporter broken down, overturned, the tank upside down lower on the hill, men squatting round it, smoking, past. Another plain, open her full out again, and again the rising whine of the supercharger. Maize in the fields, women at the well, men with sickles, infantry marching in the slow dust column that infantry carry with them always, like the packs on their backs.

  These are the fields, five hundred miles away, I marched through with the two stars of a lieutenant on my shoulders and not a care in the world, a field company of purple-black Madrasi sappers and miners in front of me. They couldn’t speak a word of Hindustani, only Tamil and English, and I had to translate their occasional shouted comments to the pert girl children running and leaping beside them, pointing at their black faces. Tall stovepipe khaki hats and names like Coomaramangaladamaswami that made them all address each other by their numbers, very polite, ‘Please,’498, adjust my left pack strap, for it is aching into my back.’

  Rise of trees and jungle and the sun hot as fire against my eyeballs. Hills and rocks and the whitewashed stones again, dulled under dust, more soldiers, a long reach of scrub and a deer transfixed beside the road, monkeys crashing away in yellow green of the bushes. Down and around, this was the last hill line, the last gap, the plain of Sakti beginning to spread out, seen small, gradually larger through the trees as the road swung, tilting, fading, foreshortening as we reached the foot of the slope. Open land, rocks, almost desert, soldiers waiting in a dry nullah.

  Dogras they’d been, a platoon of them under a jemadar, as soft spoken as the Madrasis, but high-caste pale-skinned Hindus, always decorous and well-mannered, escorting fifteen Mahsud prisoners back to the Political Officer after a North-West Frontier fight. Hardly prisoners, just men found wandering about the hills in their baggy cotton, with or without rifles, unable to account for themselves. I rode past with the Dogra colonel, him nearest the prisoners in the narrow nullah. One of them sprang out of the ruck and up at him, dragged him off his horse, a knife flashed, Colonel Dougherty struggling and kicking, both of them practically under the horse.

  The nearest Dogra ran his bayonet through the Mahsud. Then no one gave an order, and I was bending over the colonel, pulling him to his feet and holding both horses’ bridles with the other hand, and hardly realised what was happening until I looked up. By then only two of the prisoners were still alive, and the shy, quiet Dogras were cleaning their bayonets. A sepoy methodically ran the last two through the stomach. Then they set the colonel on his horse, asked politely whether I was sure I had suffered no hurt, and marched on.

  Tanks moving, far to the right, the south. If there was firing, I could not have heard it. Many trucks jammed together at the foot of the hill and the empty road running straight as an arrow across the plain, to the clustered houses of Sakti, and, on the near side, by itself, the white dot of the dak bungalow. In the distance the line of hills, and the cleft marking the top of the Lapri Gorge.

  Many transporters were parked off the road. I stopped the Bentley and called to a worried-looking major. ‘Where’s General Gokal Singh?’

  He pointed up the road. ‘At the Sakti dak bungalow, sir. He’s holding an orders conference, I think.’

  ‘Thank you. Have you got a car to spare?’

  ‘For a few minutes, I think,’ he said doubtfully.

  ‘This man is the leader of the local guerrillas, and must get as far forward as possible, quickly. Send him up, will you?’

  I explained quickly to the Marquess. He clambered out of the Bentley, his legs trembled so much that he nearly fell down. We shook hands.

  Then I went on. I stopped the Bentley off the main road, and walked down the driveway, between the inevitable whitewashed stones, towards the dak bungalow. Staff cars and jeeps lined the drive, nearly all flying pennants showing the commands of their owners. A company of infantry was waiting about in the compound, more or less at the alert.

  Two sepoys with tommy guns and a naik with a pistol stood on sentry at the foot of the veranda steps. The naik held up his hand. I said, ‘I carry a message from His Majesty to General Gokal Singh. It is most urgent and important. I showed him the intercepted letter, trusting that he could not read English. He saluted an
d stood aside.

  As I walked up the steps I had no idea what I was going to do.

  But on the top step I distinctly saw the Dogra who had saved Colonel Dougherty’s life in 1937, his face unemotional, thrusting his bayonet forward in the long point just as though he were practising it on the drill ground. I quietly pushed open the double doors which, in bungalows like this all over India, lead into a central hall.

  I knew exactly where everything would be. Sure enough, the hall was full of officers. Maps, map cases, and map boards covered the table and hung over the backs of chairs. A larger map was tacked to the far wall. General Gokal Singh, his back to me, was saying in Urdu: ‘There is no need -- ‘ It was a quarter past nine.

  I drew my automatic as I went in, and shot him three times in the back of the head. He jerked, spewed a stream of bright blood across the maps, then lay still, sprawled on the table.

  I said, ‘He was a traitor. There’s the proof.’ I flung the letter on the table and swung round. The sentries burst in. They were Muslims. Holding the automatic on the naik I said, ‘Wait. The Hindu general was betraying us. I act on His Majesty’s own orders.’

  They hung back, perplexed and doubtful. A brigadier began to read the letter out loud. ‘It’s true,’ he said at the end. He motioned to the sentries and they backed out.

  A colonel retched noisily in a corner. The rest, though they may have been listening with some part of their attention while the brigadier read the letter, stared at the mess on the table. Their faces were an unpleasant grey colour under the varying shades of brown, and, if I’d had to do this earlier, say the day before, mine would have been, too. Gokal’s head was twisted sideways, revealing that the bullets had come out mushroomed, blowing half his face, one eye and a mess of blood, brains, and mucus on to the table. Sumitra would not have looked different.