by Robert Payne
Charlestown was a small town with scarcely more than a thousand inhabitants. There were a few Indian merchants, and they readily offered their houses and gardens to the marchers. The food was cooked in the local mosque. There were mealie pap with sugar and bread in the morning, rice, dal and vegetables in the evening. No one went hungry, and everyone was in good spirits. From Newcastle there came about four hundred more miners with stories of terrorism and violence. The mineowners were not backing down; neither were the strikers.
Gandhi calculated that once across the border “the army of peace” could march twenty to twenty-four miles a day for eight days without any difficulty, for Kallenbach had made arrangements for supplies along the way. At the end of the eight days they would be at Tolstoy Farm. Dr. Briscoe, a friendly physician at Charlestown, had given them a small medical chest. Bread could be purchased from bakeries, and there was no lack of camping sites.
Before leaving Charlestown Gandhi decided to make one last appeal to General Smuts. He had two reasons for this long-distance call to Pretoria. First, he hoped that at the last minute the Union government would remove the £3 tax, and secondly he hoped to avert any possibility of bloodshed at the border, which was only a few hundred yards beyond Charlestown. Some Europeans had threatened to shoot down the Indians as they crossed into the Transvaal, and Gandhi was inclined to take these threats seriously. “If the General promises to abolish the £3 tax, I will stop the march, as I will not break the law merely for the sake of breaking it,” he told the secretary. There was a short pause, while the secretary reported the message to General Smuts. Then he came back to the telephone and said: “General Smuts will have nothing to do with you. You may do just as you please.”
There was now nothing more he could do, and at six thirty the next morning, November 6, 1913, after offering prayers and giving last-minute instructions, he marched with his army to the border, which was only a mile away. The sun was up, a mounted patrol stood against the skyline, and he knew he was taking terrible risks. It was an easy matter to send women over the border, but it was a far more dangerous matter to send a crowd of miners, ill-dressed and half-starving, with little discipline among them, against the police. Beyond the border lay the town of Volksrust, where some Europeans had threatened to shoot the Indians on sight.
Gandhi had devised a clever if somewhat unorthodox strategy. The mounted police were grouped together at the border gate which stood across the main road, but there were no fences or barbed-wire entanglements at the border. To cross into the Transvaal there was no need to go through the gate. He therefore walked up to the police at the border gate and while engaging them in conversation gave a secret signal to the army, which immediately rushed over the border, paying no attention to the police who attempted to halt them, but were outnumbered and could do nothing. In the confusion Gandhi had no difficulty in slipping past the police.
The march into the Transvaal had begun without bloodshed and with no arrests being made. It was much easier than he expected. Once all the men were across the border, Gandhi lined them up and continued the march to a town called Palmford, where they intended to camp in the open air. Some women with babes in their arms were given into the care of local Indians; they were to follow later by train. That night, just as Gandhi was about to go to sleep, a police officer with a lantern made his way cautiously across the field until he came to the place where Gandhi was resting and told him he was under arrest. It was very dark, and most of the men were asleep.
“Where will you take me?” Gandhi asked.
“To the railroad station now, and to Volksrust when we get a train for it.”
“I will go with you without informing anyone, but I will leave some instructions with one of my co-workers.”
“You may do so.”
Gandhi awoke the man sleeping next to him and told him that on no account should the news of his arrest be given to the pilgrims during the night. They should begin marching before sunrise, and they should be told of his arrest at breakfast when they halted. Then Gandhi walked off with the policeman to the railroad station, and the next morning he sent a lengthy telegram to Abraham Fischer, the Minister of the Interior. He was in an angry and embittered mood, and the telegram reflects his anger and bitterness. He wrote:
While I appreciate the fact of Government having at last arrested prime mover in passive resistance struggle, cannot help remarking that from point view humanity moment chosen most unfortunate. Government probably knows that marchers included 122 women, fifty tender children, all voluntarily marching on starvation rations without provision of shelter during stages. Tearing me away under such circumstances from them is violation all considerations justice. When arrested last night left men without informing them. They might become infuriated. I, therefore, ask either that I may be allowed continue march with men or that Government send them by rail Tolstoy Farm and provide full rations for them. Leaving them without one in whom they have confidence and without Government making provision for them is in my opinion an act from which I hope on reconsideration Government will recoil. If untoward incidents happen during further progress march or if deaths occur, especially among women with babies in arms, responsibility will be Government’s.
There are very few communications from Gandhi written in such urgent, uncompromising terms, so full of threats. Some of the statements were untrue: there was no danger of the women with babies suffering because Gandhi could no longer shield them with a protective hand. Sonja Schlesin, Kallenbach and Gandhi himself had already made special arrangements for them. The threat that the men would become “infuriated” when they learned of Gandhi’s arrest was an empty one. If deaths or “untoward incidents” occurred, Gandhi had no right to blame the government, for he had assumed the entire responsibility for the long march. The government had committed enough sins against the Indians, and nothing was to be gained by accusing them of crimes they had not committed. But what is strangest of all is Gandhi’s insistence upon his own importance, his dominant role as “the prime mover.” What he objects to is any interference in his own plans, and though the telegram was ostensibly written about the marchers, it was largely concerned with himself.
When he began the march, he hoped to be arrested. Now that he was arrested, he was furious. In fact, as he well knew, his arrest would have little effect on the marchers, for precautions had already been taken to provide new leaders if he was removed from the scene.
Taken before the magistrate at Volksrust, he asked for time to put the affairs of the marchers in order. The magistrate was sympathetic, and on his promise to furnish £50 bail he was granted a week’s freedom. The bail was immediately paid by an Indian merchant. He had been under arrest for a little more than twelve hours. The government sent orders from Pretoria that none of the marchers should be arrested, only the leaders. Gandhi was understandably annoyed when he learned of the government strategy, because his own strategy was based on the hope that the government would arrest all the marchers. It had not occurred to him that in the eyes of the government he was the guilty party and alone deserving of punishment.
The pilgrims continued to march in the direction of Tolstoy Farm. When they reached Standerton Gandhi was distributing marmalade, the gift of a friendly Indian storekeeper, when he observed that he was being closely watched by the local magistrate, who waited until all the marmalade was distributed before saying quietly: “You are my prisoner” and leading him off to the courtroom. Once again the case was remanded and he was released on his own recognizance of £50, although the public prosecutor violently objected. On the following day when he was marching with his army through Teakworth, he was arrested for the third time in four days by no less a personage than the Principal Immigration Officer of the Transvaal. This time there could be no question of being released on bail. The charge was that he had induced indentured laborers to leave the province of Natal, and he was found guilty and sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment with hard labor or the payment of a
fine of £60. In a clear voice Gandhi said: “I elect to go to jail.”
There followed another trial at Volksrust, where he was sentenced to a further three months’ imprisonment, but since Kallenbach and Polak were sentenced at the same time, he regarded this new penalty with enthusiasm, believing that the three of them would be permitted to share a cell. But the government was not in a particularly charitable mood and soon arranged to separate the three prisoners, sending Gandhi to the jail at Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State, where, as he observed mildly, there were not more than fifty Indians in the state, and all of them were waiters.
Before leaving Volksrust he met a seventy-year-old Indian prisoner called Hurbatsingh, a man of great dignity, six feet tall, who had been arrested for crossing the border and had been given an eight-month sentence.
“Why are you in jail?” Gandhi asked the old man.
“How could I help it?” Hurbatsingh replied, “when you, your wife, and even your boys went to jail for our sake?”
“You will not be able to endure the hardships of jail life. I would advise you to leave jail. Shall I arrange for your release?”
“No, please. I will never leave jail. I must die one of these days, and how happy I should be to die in jail.”
When Gandhi heard of the old man’s death from pneumonia some weeks later, he was deeply moved. He was well aware of his responsibility, but it was one which he willingly accepted, for had not Hurbatsingh shown himself to be a worthy sacrifice? God demanded sacrifices; the world could not endure without them; penance and voluntary suffering were the pillars supporting the earth. When he learned that the prison officers had buried Hurbatsingh, he demanded that the body should be disinterred and given to the flames according to Hindu rites. And then, thinking about death, the flames and the sacrifice, and also his own terrible responsibility, he wrote a remarkable letter to Indian Opinion:
I grew sad as I reflected: “Dear self of mine! If you have led your innocent brother, unlearned but wise, into a wrong path, what a burden of sin will you have to bear? If ever you discovered that you had made a mistake, what good would your remorse do then? The men whom you had led to death would not come back to life; those who, following your advice, endured the hardships of gaol-life, would never forget them.”
At this thought I felt sad. But then I considered: “No blame would attach to you if you acted sincerely in advising your brothers to go to gaol. Truly it is said that without yagna [sacrifice] this world would perish. But yagna is not merely kindling wood and pouring ghee and other things into it. This may purify the air, but surely it will not purify the spirit. When we offer up our bones to bum like wood, pouring out our blood like ghee in order that they may bum, and sacrifice our flesh to the flames, that alone will be true yagna, and by such sacrifice will the earth be sustained.
Without such yagna, such sacrifice of self, it cannot be sustained.
When we offer up our bones to burn like wood . . . In such sentences he showed that he was wrestling with the demon and the violence of the combat only increased his faith. In the flames of the funeral pyre he saw the vindication of the world. Through the remaining years of his life he liked to remember Hurbatsingh, the man of perfect faith.
While Gandhi was in prison, he heard that the government had devised a brilliant plan for resolving the problem of the striking miners. All the survivors of the ragtail army were rounded up and sent back to the mines at Newcastle after being sentenced to varying terms of imprisonment, with the mines designated as the place where they must suffer their punishment. The company foremen were sworn in as special constables. The mines were their prison, the foremen became prison guards. It was a brilliant solution to the problem, but it failed in its purpose. The prisoners refused to descend to the coal face even though they were whipped and beaten. Once more there was a stalemate.
Gandhi was a special prisoner, and was therefore treated far more leniently. Prison came as a welcome relief after the excitement of leading the campaign. He spent his days in uninterrupted reading and writing; he was especially interested in learning Tamil. From Bloemfontein Jail, where he was prisoner No. 1739, he was permitted to write occasional letters to Phoenix, which showed that he was still in complete charge. He had no complaints about his treatment, and when he was released suddenly on December 18, he confessed that he preferred the solitude and peace of the jail to the noisy uproar outside. Polak and Kallenbach had also been released, and all three of them appeared at mass meetings, where they were greeted enthusiastically by the Indians.
At these meetings Gandhi often wore a long white cotton coat and flowing dhoti, which reached down to his heels, and he would say that he had assumed this costume in honor of the martyred Indians who fell during the campaign. At least ten Indians had died in skirmishes with the police while he was in prison, and the thought of his own responsibility in their deaths haunted him. In one of his public speeches, he asked whether he was not the murderer, for surely he had led them to their deaths. “How glorious it would have been if one of those bullets had struck me!” he exclaimed. About this time a photograph was taken of him with a long bamboo staff in his hand and a canvas bag slung over his shoulders. His hair has been partly shaven as a sign of mourning. He stands there barefoot, looking like the commander of an army, superbly militant, and there is on that face, the most vivid and beautiful he ever presented to the world, a look of power and awakened fury. Under the heavy curve of his brows the eyes smolder, deep-set, luminous, commanding. He is wearing the costume he wore during the campaign, and the whiteness of the costume only emphasizes the dark brilliance of the features, the high cheekbones, the heavy chin, the lips carved like those of a Burmese buddha. It is the face of a conqueror.
The reason for his sudden release from Bloemfontein Jail was simple. The South African government had hoped that its quarrel with the Indians would remain an internal affair. It had suddenly become an international affair. Lord Willingdon, the Governor of Bombay, had insisted two days before Gandhi’s release that “the South African question is in its very essence a highly Imperial question.” Lord Hardinge, the Viceroy of India, had spoken of his own, and all India’s, “deep and burning sympathy” for the sufferings undergone by the Indian laborers in South Africa. “The most recent developments have taken a very serious turn,” he declared in a speech in Madras, “and we have seen the widest publicity given to allegations that this movement of passive resistance had been dealt with by measures which would not for one moment be tolerated by any country that calls itself civilized.”
The effect of these words was to make the Viceroy the most popular man in India. No other Viceroy had ever identified himself so vigorously with suffering Indian laborers. General Smuts and General Botha were incensed by the interference of the Viceroy in South African affairs, and pressed for his recall. The British cabinet, sitting in solemn session, briefly pondered the recall of a popular Viceroy and decided that there must be a simpler way to deal with the problem. General Smuts, as Gandhi observed, was now “in the same predicament as a snake which has taken a rat in its mouth and can neither gulp it down nor cast it out.” He was forced to deal with the problem in the knowledge that the Viceroy held a watching brief for the Indians. The time-honored institution of a commission of inquiry was revived. There was no Indian on the commission, and two of the three members were noted for their anti-Indian bias, while one of them, Gandhi remembered ruefully, was so opposed to the Indians that he had led the demonstration against the landing of Indians from the S.S. Courland in 1897. It seemed to Gandhi that the commission was so heavily stacked against him that nothing could be hoped from it.
Lord Hardinge sent his own envoy, Sir Benjamin Robertson, to South Africa. Gokhale also sent his emissaries—Charles Frere Andrews and William Pearson, both missionaries, both possessing a deep knowledge of India, and both intimately connected with Rabindranath Tagore and his foundation for the arts at Santiniketan. When Andrews and Pearson reached Durban after a wee
k of storms in the Indian Ocean, Gandhi, Polak and Kallenbach were waiting for them at the dock. Andrews had met Polak, but he had never met Gandhi. “Where is Mr. Gandhi?” he asked, and Polak pointed to a small, slight figure beside him, wearing the coarse dhoti of an indentured laborer. Andrews swiftly bent down and touched Gandhi’s feet.
The gesture, though made as quickly and unobtrusively as possible, did not pass unnoticed, and there was some discussion about the propriety of a white man bowing low to an Indian. It was such a gesture as a peasant might make to his lord, or an Indian prime minister to his rajah. Charles Andrews, who had learned a great deal about Gandhi from Gokhale and had read much of their correspondence, was simply paying tribute to a man he had loved at a distance and hoped to serve.
Among the first things that Andrews and Pearson learned was that Gandhi refused to give evidence before the commission or to acknowledge its existence. Gandhi sent off a flurry of telegrams, some of them of enormous length, defending his action. Gokhale, Lord Ampthill, and many others received these telegrams written in peremptory tones. Lord Ampthill was disturbed by the tone and wondered whether such peremptory announcements were in accordance with the spirit of passive resistance. In fact, the peremptory tone was largely dictated by the nature of telegraphese, a language which is precise rather than polite, and always expensive. Gandhi had no desire to show politeness to a stacked commission. The £3 tax, the statutory insult to Indian women, the murders and the beatings were very fresh in his mind, and he was not disposed to forgive the unforgivable. Andrews was at first puzzled by Gandhi’s intolerant attitude. Suddenly the real reason occurred to him.