A Division Of The Spoils (Raj Quartet 4) (36 page)

‘Coppers,’ he said for my benefit before I reached the door. ‘The competition’s been something cruel since they started sending them to college.’

A row of men, smiling, interested to see how I took it. Still smiling when I left. The next time I saw them they were not even civil; as though in the interval the gloom that began to settle on me during the long irritating afternoon had conveyed itself to them. I was deprived of the comic relief, of an antidote to Merrick who had surpassed himself to the extent when for two pins I would have set about undermining the whole subtly balanced structure of mystification and intimidation which was what he erected to get what he wanted.

From the medical
NCOS
’ mess I was translated to a world of old barracks and hutments, parade grounds, flagpoles in beds of white-washed stones, the smell of creosoted wood warmed by the sun; a hot breeze blowing in from hills which were rigid in the torpor of an Indian afternoon. The distant coppersmith.
I was delivered to the adjutant’s office in the lines of the Pankot Rifles and conducted from there to a low block – square stuccoed whitewashed pillars of brick supporting the overhang of a steep-pitched roof to form a verandah – into a room that was being emptied of benches by a squad of sepoys. A school- or lecture-room. The walls were hung with posters, aids to recognition of enemy planes, tanks and personnel. At a table on the dais sat Merrick. Three officers stood round him: a pale middle-aged Englishman (who was the adjutant, Coley), a youngish Indian captain and a very young English subaltern, smart as paint, stiff as starch with a lot of fine blond hair showing on his arms between immaculately turned up and laundered sleeves and on his legs between the hem of knife-edged khaki shorts and the tops of stockings worn with puttees and brown boots. Of the four only Merrick failed to respond to my energetic entrance and salute. But he was facing the door and although he didn’t look up from the file he was reading he knew who it was. There were a couple of jemadars, a havildar who looked like a clerk and a naik in charge of the sepoy work-squad.

When the last bench had been taken out Merrick said, ‘We shan’t need the dais either.’ The three officers got down from it. Merrick remained. ‘And if it’s not too much trouble, Coley, I’d like this table placed where the light falls as fully as possible on whoever’s sitting behind it.’

‘Of course.’

No one asked why he wanted this light. He had the trick of directing people’s minds from strategy to tactics. The table was tried several ways while Merrick stayed enthroned on the dais. The subaltern was used as a stand-in to test for the light. When the right place was found Merrick got up to allow the chair to be taken over and placed behind the table. Then he went across and sat down again. The sepoys took the dais out. ‘We shall want another table and several more chairs,’ he said, ‘including another one with arms to go in front of
this
table.’ All this was attended to. Then a medium scale map of the Pankot District was sent for. A box of pins with different coloured heads. A pair of compasses. The maps were brought. The jemadars pinned them to the wall in sequence. Mugs of
tea arrived, followed by the compasses and pins which turned out to be my cue.

‘This is where you can make yourself useful, sergeant,’ he said. He gave me a copy of the list of
VCOS,
NCOS
and men who had been prisoners-of war in Germany. Against each man’s name was the name of his village. With the compasses a circle was described on the map with its centre at the depot and with a radius equal to five miles on the ground. Then, as I read out the men’s names and villages the jemadar stuck a pin in the map, a different coloured pin for each different rank. Whenever a pin was stuck inside the pencilled circle I had to mark the name on the list with an asterisk.

We must have been occupied thus for well over an hour. Merrick came and went, sometimes with Coley, sometimes with the Indian officer. The subaltern remained with me and the jemadar, absolutely enthralled because he had no idea what we were up to. By the time we had finished the map showed at a glance how many of the ex-prisoners-of-war, now on leave, could be fairly easily got hold of; how many of them, in other words, lived within five miles of the depot. When I explained this to the subaltern he seemed quite bowled over at such an efficient – and humane – bit of staff-work. No one liked to interrupt such well-earned leave, so the first set of interviews would be with men who could be collected from and returned to their villages in the course of a single day.

He also saw why the table had been placed so that the light fell on the faces of the officers asking for statements and not on the faces of men who were to be encouraged to make them. The table tops had already been covered by blankets, and there was a vase of flowers on one of them. From Delhi Merrick had brought with him poster-size blow-ups of smiling victorious generals: Monty, Alex and Wavell (chosen for their connections with the Middle East where the 1st Pankots had fought). There were also posters of Bill Slim and Dickie Mountbatten as Supremo. These were all pinned in strategic places on the walls. The master-stroke was the inclusion of a much enlarged photograph of a group of Indian officers leaning out of tanks and shaking hands with Americans, and of
VCOS,
NCOS
and sepoys being matey with
European other ranks in what looked like a street in devastated Berlin or Cologne. Everything in the room now conspired to make the ex-prisoners-of-war who had been true to the salt and not gone over to Bose – proud and helpfully talkative. The subaltern, so obviously newly commissioned, and perhaps secretly relieved that he would now never have to lead his men into battle, was almost visibly moved. He interpreted the whole
mise en scène
as a compliment to men of a fine regiment and as a stroke of genius on the part of the one-armed Lieutenant-Colonel who, although coming from Delhi, obviously knew a thing or two and respected what he knew.

What the subaltern didn’t know (how could he?) was that the whole business of the interviews and statements was utterly pointless. The Indian lieutenant suspected of being implicated in the death of a sepoy in Königsberg was himself dead – so I had discovered from the files in Delhi. Karim Muzzafir Khan’s name, far from ‘cropping up several times’ in depositions taken in Germany about the dead sepoy had cropped up once. Moreover, the death of the sepoy might well have been due to natural causes. Suspicions had arisen solely from accusations and counter-accusations among Frei Hind sepoys who had been questioned after the Germans collapsed and who had no connections with the Pankot Rifles and one of whom may well have chosen to cast doubts on Havildar Karim Muzzafir Khan’s conduct simply because he was an infantryman from a stuck-up regiment. There was no statement to be taken from any of the returned Pankot Rifles prisoners that could have any bearing on the dead sepoy, the dead lieutenant or on the dead Karim Muzzafir Khan’s behaviour. The only things the ex-
POWS
would be able to tell us were the things they had already told Colonel Layton and their other officers directly they were reunited: their experiences of being talked to or intimidated by Bose’s officers. Brief statements were already on the file. Eventually these might have to be elaborated but the cases against the Frei Hind officers were a long way down on the list of priorities.

I said the arrangements being made for these interviews were utterly pointless. That’s not quite accurate. They
weren’t pointless in terms of Merrick’s passionate exploration outwards from the hollow centre of his self-invented personality, and in these terms they were in every detail an exposition of his determining will and of his profound contempt for anything, for anybody, that crumbled without resisting. Some hindsight here; but whenever I think of him nowadays this little
mise en scène
comes back to me as a vivid illustration of the extraordinary care he took to manipulate things, people and objects, into some kind of significant objective/subjective order with himself at the dominating and controlling centre.

What arguments he used to convince senior officers in his department in Delhi that he should leave at once on a statement-taking mission, accompanied by his newly acquired sergeant, I don’t know. If there was opposition I wasn’t aware of it; the operation was mounted smoothly, swiftly – as if Merrick had anticipated the havildar’s suicide and planned in advance so that the only impediment to the scheme had been the havildar’s tiresome stubbornness in staying alive. I certainly had no doubt that one of the chief reasons for the sudden journey was his desire to tell Colonel Layton to his face that the havildar was dead.

He had this effect on me. I attributed to him the grossest motives and the darkest intentions without a scrap of real evidence. The interesting thing is that I was convinced that he knew this, that my instinct to hold him in such intense dislike and suspicion was clear to him from the beginning and was one of the reasons why he had chosen me. I believe he found it necessary to be close to someone whose antagonism he knew he could depend on and that without this antagonism he had nothing really satisfactory by which to measure the effect of his behaviour. My antagonism was like an acid, acting on a blank photographic plate which had been exposed to his powerful and inventive imagination. It made the picture emerge for him. This excited him, the more so because my antagonism could not be expressed openly without risk to myself of being guilty of insubordination. There were moments in our association when I felt that my animosity inspired in him a gratitude and a contempt both so overwhelming that he felt for me the same tender compassion
that is often said to overcome the inveterate slaughterer of game in the split second before he squeezes the trigger.

*

Pankot, then: the evening of August 14, 1945. On this same evening things were taking place of much greater consequence; for instance, in Tokyo, where the Japanese War Cabinet, persuaded by the Emperor, had finally decided to ‘bear the unbearable’. In the past week since the incident in Hiroshima and its follow-up in Nagasaki it had become obvious to them that when the bomb-owning governments said Unconditional Surrender this was precisely what was meant. No trimming; no understanding even as between gentlemen that there would be no allied occupation of the Japanese mainland (that had been tried). No promise that the Emperor’s person would be respected (that had been sought). So, on this evening the decision to surrender unconditionally was made, and perhaps as Merrick and I were driven away from the Pankot Rifles depot, having left the
mise en scene
in a state of readiness for the commencement of the charade the next day – the Emperor of Japan was at his desk recording the edict which was to be broadcast to his weeping subjects at midday tomorrow August 15, well before which time the decision would have been conveyed to us through the Swiss.

And at the very moment Merrick and I drove out into Rifle Range Road heading for Cantonment Approach Road and the Pankot General Hospital, it is probable that the handful of dissenting Japanese officers who tried to break into the Emperor’s palace later that night to destroy the recorded edict before it could be broadcast were already gathering and working out ways and means and the odds against the success of this last ditch Samurai act of patriotic defiance.

In Pankot the height of the surrounding hills made for a longer evening than one was accustomed to down on the plains and instead of encroaching from the east night seemed to lap slowly down the inner slope of west hill (where rich Indians had built their hillstation houses) and glide across the valley and. then inch its way up east hill where the English lived and on whose peak, amid conifers, one could make out
the roofs and upper-windows (last reflectors of the light of day) of the Summer Residence. Once the light had gone from the roof of this dominant but unoccupied building night fell – you might say – with the Government’s permission. Sarah smiled when I suggested this to her. She knew the view well from the lines of the Pankot Rifles but its symbolism had not struck her before.

My recollection is of seeing it first when waiting on the verandah outside the room that had been got ready for the interviews with the ex-
POWS,
because I’m sure I retained a visual impression of it on the journey back and that when Merrick turned round and said, ‘You know where to reach me?’ I pictured him standing at the window of one of those blazing upper rooms of the Summer Residence, getting burnt on the other side of his face but feeling nothing. The real answer to the question where he could be reached was only slightly less impressive. He was staying at Flagstaff House with the Area Commander.

One question I longed to ask him was how Colonel Layton had taken the news of Karim Muzzafir Khan’s death. I assumed the news had been passed on and that by the afternoon it was generally known by the other Pankot Rifles officers and the senior
NCOS
and
VCOS,
and that this had accounted for the heavy pause – the brief but significant silence that followed my intentionally clear announcement of his name and village when I got to it on the list and the jemadar fumbled with the coloured pins as if looking for a black one.

But I restrained my curiosity and said nothing; even when the truck drove inexplicably
past
the hospital entrance and made for the bazaar. The crowds who must have attended the funeral seemed to have gone but left hostages, groups of people still
en fête
and bunches of idle police. We stopped outside a general store. The driver got out and walked down the crowded road towards War Memorial Square – by prearrangement, obviously, since Merrick didn’t question him. In fact he lit a cigarette. Without turning – addressing the windscreen – he said, ‘Do you expect to see your friend Captain Rowan again while he’s in Pankot?’

I told him we had no actual arrangement.