Farthest Field

by Karnad, Raghu

  Britain was in his germ plasm, as much as Persia and as much as Malabar. For the first time Bobby understood the tradition of loyalty that reached him from his father; and from his uncle Kobad, the MBE, the Kaiser-e-Hind; even from the icon of his grandfather Dhanjibhoy, who received a Certificate of Honour on Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. Soon, Bobby thought, he would like to win a medal of his own. But he began by putting officer’s pips on his shoulder, and becoming one of King George V’s Own Bengal Sappers.

  While the August kranti – revolution – raged, to be an Indian officer-cadet was to be marked as a potential threat. The twin shadows of treachery, cast by Subhas Bose abroad and the vandals at home, fell as a double-umbra on Indian subalterns. Engineers especially. The skills they learned, like the use of dynamite, were the skills the terrorists needed to seed anarchy in Bihar and Bengal. The fact was that most new Indian officers were nationalists: patient nationalists, unmoved by the Congress mania. In the mood of general distrust, however, all offences levelled out: nationalism, insubordination and sabotage; defection at the front with dropping your fork at the dinner table. If a cadet went AWOL it was assumed that he was headed east to blow up a rail bridge.5

  Old troubles resurfaced. British NCOs refused to salute Indian cadets, feigning distraction, as they used to in the days of the ‘Indianised battalions’. The attitude was taken up by some White cadets, typically the ones who grew up in India: young masters from the tea estates, most resistant to seeing Indians as anything but a servant class. Parsis were exempt, of course, so Bobby was privy to the insinuations about the Wogs. ‘Why’s a brigade need two native battalions and one British?’ was popular: ‘So the Indians advance and don’t run away.’

  For two decades before the war, native officers had faced hostility and disdain from their colleagues, especially off duty. Their appearance in the officers’ mess was a sort of miscegenation, blackening the pure-White complexion of command. It was a deep cut to be turned away at the door of an officers’ club, when lamps glowed and music tootled inside, and outside only the wind danced through the campus of a Frontier fort. Still, for twenty years they were stoical and silent, stitching up their psychic injuries and doing their duty.

  Their solid deportment smoothed the path for the thousands of Indian subalterns who tumbled in at the start of the war. The integration of the Emergency Commissioned Officers was also a priority for the Commander-in-Chief of India, General Sir Claude Auchinleck. He went as far as banning black-tie occasions, where Indians were regularly embarrassed. It took a person like ‘the Auk’ to put it out that: ‘No Indian officer must be regarded as suspect and disloyal merely because he is what is called a “Nationalist” or in other words, a good Indian.’6

  A new sort of story began to circulate, like the one about the five subalterns drinking at a club in Bombay. Interrupted by the club secretary, who regretted that one of them – an Indian – would have to leave, all five rose and marched out together – after flinging their high-balls into the mirror behind the bar.7 The officers’ mess, once a place to avoid, full of bland meats and pungent rebukes, grew comfortable for Indians as well as Englishmen.

  Of course Gandhi would spoil it. Luckily for Bobby, the atmosphere had lifted by November, and his induction to the officers’ mess was in the same spirit as those before him: drunken harassment. ‘Doing Pooja’ meant rough and gymnastic games, and a racket that swelled until the ancient silver and regimental bric-a-brac trembled on their shelves. It ended around the billiards table, where Bobby, his arms pinioned and body rigid, was inserted through the bottle racks fixed beneath the table’s edge. Hanging thus, with his legs sticking out at one end and head and shoulders at the other, he was walloped with billiard cues and rolled-up newspapers until he had to blink and beat back sudden, stupid tears.

  From the start, Bobby sensed that the Army at home might be out of touch with the emergency abroad. On their first day attached to the regiment, the subalterns had lectures. First was ‘A History of the Corps of Indian Engineers’, which gave the impression that the Bengal Sappers had spent longer fighting in India than it had fighting foreign enemies (which was in fact the case) and the second, curiously, was ‘How to Buy a Persian Rug’. That was meant to be a bit of fun, Bobby supposed. But there was a war on, and he was already late to it.

  In the evenings, washed and dressed, he retreated into the musty cool of the mess, where ancient rites prevailed. Bobby wore coat and tie to dinner, and stood at the table until senior officers were seated. Old soldiers, Sandhurst-trained, never permitted a word about politics, religion or women, although the subalterns cared about little else. Still, it was in the stiffly colonial and oddly familiar world of the mess that Bobby felt most at home. Young officers played sports together and rode, but to Bobby’s mind, the real officers’ game was billiards in the mess. The click of the cue ball, as it conveyed its force into red, matched the sharp tattoo of boots when his orders conveyed their force into the recruits. Order and precision – rare qualities in India, but the best qualities of its Army.

  The single incident that disturbed that order was one Bobby heard of, a story that echoed in regiments throughout the Army. One evening, an Indian subaltern, or was it a group of them, settled into the empty officers’ mess. The radio was droning out news of the war, or was it London swing, and one of the Indians rose to fiddle with the dial until he found a station playing film songs from Bombay. In short order, they were joined by a band of British subalterns, who tuned it back to London, commenting aloud that an officers’ mess was no place for native drumming and wailing. The Indian rose and tuned it back again.

  Depending on which mess, which regiment, or which soldier recounted it, there are hot words or hands on throats. A fist fight begins; fellow officers either pitch in or pull it apart, and the radio set is either broken or flung at the Brit, and either the Indian or Briton is marched before the adjutant to be either reassured or cashiered. The truth of the event was lost, and the story itself was re-tuned this way or that, giving voices to the muted frequencies of anger that hummed in the colonial army.

  With no deployment orders, Bobby stayed put, slack-sailed in the doldrums of Roorkee Cantonment. If he had walked in with his eyes shut, he might have guessed he was in a farming village or a boarding school, not the depot of an army at war. Morning reveille was bugled through the lanes by boy-soldiers on bicycles. At the polo ground he heard the panicky rumble of horses’ hooves, and from inside the officers’ bungalows, the creak of punkahs heaving the warm afternoon air. Beyond the drill grounds, the wind carried the chink of pickaxes striking gravel, and the scrape of shovels accepting their scoops, while jemadars called out, ‘Ready! Raise! Strike! Break! Rake!’ At the canal, ropes squealed and timbers splashed through wet-bridging exercises. As evening lifted, the crunch of bicycle bells began again; the high-pitched hubbub of boys’ voices from the hockey fields; the snipping of shears at the grass and the snap of flags on the mast.

  Beneath the cantonment’s surface stillness, however, was a groundswell of new manpower: enough to fight, and not just to lose, this war.

  At the end of the First World War, the Army had retrenched, shunting thousands of soldiers back into the wretched market for work. Old, proud regiments were decommissioned en masse. Most secure on the Army rolls were regiments of the ‘enlisted classes’, the supposed martial races of the north and west – Rajputs, Gujjars, Jats, Sikhs, Pathans, Marathas and Ahirs8 – men whose fields had been sprinkled for centuries with the blood of invaders. Castes that had put in decades of service to British masters, but did not belong to the imagined natural garrison of India, were abruptly shut out.9

  Once the new war began, and as the worldwide scale of India’s commitments became apparent, the Army was forced to forget its cherished principles of selection. The Indian Army, the most pure-bred institution of the Raj, would have to take rough transfusions of untested blood. Recruitment officers learned to roam into new territory. They learnt new skills
– such as how to fix the delicate spring balance in a weighing machine bumped over rural tracks, or how to weigh candidates in a balance used for grain and forest produce. They learned to time their efforts around plantings and harvests, around Ramzan or the months most favoured for Hindu marriage, around seasonal epidemics of plague, cholera and malaria that cut into the enlistment yield.10

  In January 1942, when Bobby was still at Guindy, the Defence Services Exhibition Train pulled up at Madras Central Station and rested there a few days. A quarter of a mile long, its six coaches were a rolling museum of the war, exhibiting uniforms, rifles and artillery shells, photographs from the recent battles of Keren. There were models of a Grant tank and a dreadnought-class battleship. In the middle coach, stripped of its wings, was the sleek fuselage of a Hawker Hurricane fighter. The admission price of four annas made it clear that this was all for the benefit of the middle class, to stoke their enthusiasm and sell them war bonds. Out in the villages the displays were more bluntly transactional and included piles of ‘model rupees’ communicating Army scales of pay.

  By the time Bobby arrived at Roorkee, the Army was enlisting 50,000 new volunteers a month.11 The three services opened their arms to all the runt races formerly deemed unfit to serve.12 Once again they enlisted the Mahars, Bengalis and Kodavas, but also Lingayats from the Deccan, Assamese from the north-east frontier, Mahsuds from the north-west. Roman Catholic missionaries in Bihar urged their tribal wards, Santhals and Mundas, to join up. Oriyas went to the Pioneer Corps; Anglo-Indian girls to the Women’s Auxiliary Corps (Indian). The spine-cracking encyclopaedia of Indian castes was ironed flat onto a single khaki page.13

  They did not serve out of love of the King-Emperor. Their allegiance was to the pulton – the regiment, to its izzat – its honour, and to the sahibs in its command. And the factor that most aided recruitment was hunger. At the end of a tour of Indian recruit depots, one officer of the Department of Hygiene recorded that ‘the great majority of these recruits are poor material from the point of view of physique … Almost all were thin, some almost to the point of emaciation by European standards.’14 Upon enlisting, every sepoy was entitled to a full service ration, beginning with the bada khana (grand dinner) they received on arrival. Within five months of enlistment, the body weight of most soldiers had increased by twenty per cent.

  Hundreds of thousands of famished men were now flooding into regimental properties and units where, for decades, exclusivity had been the foundation of pulton ki ghairath, regimental honour. Even as the officer class changed to represent more Indians, so did the other ranks: to represent for the first time India altogether.

  Around the world, mobilisation and slaughter meant rapid change in who was being brought to the front. In India it meant harvesting from new fields, almost literally – nations unknown to soldiering, as unlike as rice to wheat. Who was the Indian soldier today? A question mark. Why had he enlisted? A question mark.

  It was like the poster which many years before Bobby had seen peeling off a wall – a recruitment poster from the last war. It depicted the privileges of the jawan with these images: cupped hands full of coins, a rifle with bayonet fixed, and a turbaned uniform, belt and boots, filled by an invisible figure. In bold strokes was written: ‘Ye roop-e-banduq aur wardi kaun lega?’ – ‘Who will assume this figure with rifle and uniform?’ Beneath the invisible trooper’s turban, painted out in black to form his face, was a question mark.

  Bobby stared out at a line of those dark, inscrutable faces as they attempted to parade in the early winter sunshine. He scanned their shadowed eyes, their bulging cheekbones, and hadn’t the faintest idea of what to do. He pulled down the brim of his pith helmet to cover for any nervousness apparent in his face. But he would still have to say something. In Malayalam, Bobby was sure he could talk a school of fish into a marching column. In Urdu, he wasn’t yet up for much more than shopping in the bazaar.

  This aspect of his commission was dawning on him, that it meant giving orders to men, real men, and having them obey out of trust rather than the fear of court martial. An officer and his troops were struts that reinforced each other, producing in the unit more strength than existed in either individually. He might soon have to order them to the edge of the abyss – yet he wasn’t sure he knew how to make them form up for a light morning parade.

  He kept his chin high and his mouth firm, and counted the seconds until the foghorn voice of the VCO15 blasted over his shoulder.

  ‘Atthara-chaubees party, sa’ab! Ek aadmi ghairhazir hai!’ (Eighteen twenty-four party, sir! One man is missing.)

  Bobby nodded hard, and murmured, ‘Theek, theek hai.’

  Now, under Bobby’s supervision, the day’s training could begin – and there was no shortage of things a sapper needed to learn. The sapper was the first to enter, and the last to leave a fight. His job was to alter the lay of land and water, and get its brigade where it needed to go. It was to build bridges, lay tracks and roads, run rafts or river ferries, clear mines and demolish obstacles using explosives. Alternatively, it was to demolish bridges, mine tracks and roads, and create obstacles using explosives. To speed or to impede. Sometimes this meant that sappers moved in advance of the main body of infantry. Sometimes they fought as combat troops. And when things were quiet, they were over-qualified mistris, knocking together huts for senior staff and water points for the ranks.

  They had to learn to hit targets with a rifle or machine gun, on their bellies or kneeling; manage a ten-mile route march on a stomach green with diarrhoea; to work in all conditions and all terrains; to read a map, use a prismatic compass, lay three kinds of barbed wire. They learned techniques for improvising a bamboo raft, a sangar, a space heater, or a booby trap in a tobacco tin; to paint a fake shadow onto a military vehicle to conceal it from enemy recon; to lay a mule track, a timber road, a macadam road, a concrete road, a motorable mesh path over loose sand; to destroy any and all of the above with guncotton, ammonal or dynamite. Besides being trained in soldiering and sapper skills, every recruit learned a military trade – as a carpenter, blacksmith, fitter, or other.

  The recruits started out as hapless as Bobby felt himself. They cut open their lips from the kick of the .303 rifles, and wore their gas masks upside down. At the end of the tool drill, a classic bumble: when the subedar said ‘Ground tools!’ they set down picks and shovels too far ahead of them. When he shouted ‘Raise tools!’ they bent, and their rifles slipped off their backs, knocking them in the head.

  At sapper drills, however, they were naturals. Most were farm boys, fresh from the winter planting, manure still black under their fingernails. Farmers made good sappers because they both worked the earth. Both had to dig and carry, to work and move while keeping their bodies low. A bare six weeks’ training separated their life in the millet fields from their life in the field companies. And then they would go, and Bobby would have to lead them, into the field of fire.

  By and large, Roorkee remained adrift in its imperial reverie. Week after week slid by, and Bobby felt his brothers sliding away, far ahead of him. He had been drowsing for so long that he began to feel like the regimental elephant, a great sleepwalking brute that did nothing but haul timber back and forth for bridging exercises. Every day, he woke in the expectation that movement orders would be on his table. On the fifteenth day, a telegram arrived for him. But it was from Madras.

  It informed him that, at the start of December, Ganny had had an attack that was too painful to ignore. The winter cold had weakened him, and he had been diagnosed with bronchitis. Nugs, large with child, had boarded a train that carried her all the way back to Thal, and found him there, bedridden. He drew breath through a fist clenched around his lungs. He paused, exhausted, measuring the seconds until he had to take in air again. He was sleeping between breaths.

  For three nights Nugs was with him, trying every trick she had learned over six years to help him. Six years, and it felt like it had all been preparation for this attack: their long l
ove, the bleary nights awake as he wheezed, the boiling water spilled on hands and bedsheets. The hours she had spent, muscles knotting in her back as she kept him sitting upright. The hours.

  On the morning of 10 December the hospital staff had placed him on the dangerously ill list. In the afternoon, when he closed his eyes as if to sleep, and Nugs rose to take a breath of her own, he died while she was out of the room.

  Crickets poured their apologetic dirge into Roorkee’s cold air. Ganny was dead. The world was breaking up, while Bobby dragged his heels in Roorkee. There was nobody waiting for him at the Frontier now, not even an enemy on whom to take revenge. Inky night fell over Roorkee, blotting out the flat acres, and Bobby blinked into the darkness, wondering where he would go instead.

  PART TWO

  West

  9

  Second Field

  Baghdad, March 1943

  Here at last came the second lieutenant, solitary and unnoticed, to the Alexandra Dock in Bombay. Madras harbour seemed a duck pond in comparison. Beyond the Alexandra lay wharf after wharf, dry dock and lock: fifty berths, with ships doubled up beside most of them, while still more rode at anchor. High overhead, silver barrage balloons glinted, fish-like in the sun, and the dock cranes drifted among them angling for a bite. Carrier pigeons shuttled messages from ship to shore. A freighter blasted its horn across the docks and was answered by a bagpipe’s light skirling, as they prepared to send him off to war.

  Bombay was the Hellespont of the world war, the intercept of the theatres in the West and East. The elation of return mixed with the nausea of embarkation. Thousands of dockers and coolies milled around the corrals of Italian prisoners, Chinese refugees and Yankee quartermasters, and the whole crowd was meshed with Indian soldiers in their plumage, uniforms spic and span, with bright hackles and puttees. Many were buried neck deep in marigold garlands.