Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey (3 page)

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.

The hot weather began to make the dusty nights oppressive, Barbara's pregnancy advanced and she went up to Ranikhet to prepare for the baby. In a parallel move the British Government sent out a committee of the cabinet, headed by the old socialist peer Lord Pethwick Lawrence, to prepare the birth of Indian independence. The noble lord arrived, and apologized for his and our existence, while Congress and the Muslim League dug in for the decisive negotiations. Their points of view, which had once been close, were now opposed. A few years back the Muslim League had been asking only that when independence came the Muslims, as a large and generally under-educated minority, should have certain cultural, employment, and representational rights guaranteed to them. The Congress consistently refused to agree, and the League as consistently increased their demands, until now they wanted a separate country of their own, to be called Pakistan.

Late one burning afternoon a month or so later Roddy sent for me and said, 'The Viceroy wants a paper on the strategic results of splitting India. Here are the approximate partition lines you have to consider. I want a draft, about five pages, at eight o'clock tomorrow morning.'

I went back to my office and sat down with a sigh and a curse. Could this mean that the Cabinet Committee's plan which, I knew, offered adequate safeguards for minorities in a federated form of government but resolutely refused to yield to the demand for the creation of a separate Muslim state, had been refused by both sides? I didn't know and I had no time to think about it. My job was to give an unbiased answer to a technical question. I called for my two G.2s (majors).

We worked all evening collecting facts. The telephones hummed while we spoke to the quartermaster-general's people, gunners, ordnance, military farms and lands, engineers, signals, railways. Clerks pinned up and took down map after map. At seven Mohammed Ali, looking very serious, talked to me for an hour. I began to correlate the facts. How would the existing army divide? Would the new countries be militarily viable? It didn't look like it. Pakistan would be like the peel of an orange. It would have all the dangerous frontiers, and much of the military accommodation — but no flesh, no core of industry, manpower, or finance. Everywhere the lines of defence or counter-attack would be in Pakistan, the base depots to support them in India.

Late at night I began drafting. At one in the morning I took my paper home and went to bed. At four I got up and drafted again. At six my telephone rang, and Roddy told me that the Cabinet Committee had changed its schedule. There was not going to be time for anyone to review my work. I must make it fair at once, and it would go direct to the Chief at eight, for him to take to the Viceroy. I broke into a light sweat. The Auk must have been thinking about this problem. What if his opinion was entirely different from mine? Well, to hell with it. This wasn't really a matter of opinions but of facts and trained military deductions from them. I bicycled furiously up to G.H.Q., routed out the General Staff duty clerk, and gave him my draft. At ten to eight Roddy took it to the Chief for his signature.

Briefly, my paper declared that the partition of India was militarily possible, but unsound. For over a century military problems had been worked out on the basis of one country, its natural boundaries the Himalayas and the sea, and this unity was built into the military fabric. Indeed, I said, military unity had helped to unify India, and could continue to do so. I concluded that partition would place a very severe strain on Pakistan, particularly. The official advice of the Defence Department therefore was: don't.

Next day congratulatory messages descended like a Wall Street ticker tape on to my head, starting with a warm note from Roddy and ending with a laudatory epistle from Archie Wavell, the Viceroy. I had, apparently, hit the nail on the head, in fact Told It Like It Is.

As everyone knows, India was, in fact, divided, but it is not perhaps so widely appreciated that the responsibility for this tragedy lies with Mr Nehru. For when the Congress, the Muslim League, and other parties had at last been persuaded to agree to the Cabinet Committee Plan, he gave a press conference at which he stated that the Congress considered itself 'completely unfettered by agreements and free to meet all situations as they arise'. As he was the president of the Congress this could only mean that his party, once it attained the majority power promised to it under the Plan, would be free to break the terms under which the other parties had agreed. With a sigh of delight — for in accepting the plan they had been forced to give up the goal of Pakistan — Mr Jinnah and the Muslim League also reneged on their agreement and returned to the old and now unalterable demand for a separate country of their own.