A Mighty Endeavor (35 page)

A runner came up to the command post, his bearing filled with urgency. “Sir, they approach.” Captain Madhav’s voice was heavy. It was a hard thing to order troops to open fire on their own comrades, especially misguided ones that had been mislead by their commanders. Even with his devotion to his new India, Madhav had studiously avoided calling such men ‘the enemy’.

Garry breathed heavily; to his great embarrassment, his eyes moistened. Suddenly, he bitterly regretted his thoughts of only a few seconds before about firing the first shots needed to put down this rebellion. He wished devoutly that the burden could have fallen to another battalion, even one of Ghurkas. He shook his head and breathed deeply for a second to steady his voice.

“Are our machine guns in position to stop them?”

“They are, sir.” Garry was shaken to hear Madhav’s voice trembling. A quick glance showed that he, too had tears in his eyes.

The machine guns were Vickers-Berthiers, a weapon the Indian Army had chosen when the British had selected the Bren Gun. The virtues of the two weapons were hotly disputed Both armies thought they had made the better decision. But, this was India, and the Vickers-Berthier was the weapon that would be used.

“We will give them a warning burst on my order. If that is ignored, instruct the gunners to fire at the engines of the lorries. They are to try and stop them without hitting the men in the cab or the back. If it is at all humanly possible, I would have this night go without bloodshed.”

Madhav nodded in acknowledgement and passed the orders through. The end of the road suddenly seemed to brighten. The first of the approaching lorries turned the corner. Its headlights illuminated the buildings on either side. Silently, Colonel Garry damned Sir Richard Cardew for starting this whole sordid business. By the time he had finished the words in his mind, the lorries were rumbling towards the administration complex. He could temporize no longer.

“Captain Madhav, open fire on those lorries.”

A stream of tracers from a single Vickers-Berthier light machine gun streaked through the night across the front of the lead lorry. From his vantage point by the side of the road. Lieutenant Colonel Pierce Harvey Garry saw it swerve to a halt and stand, swaying, in the middle of the road. The suddenness of the turn and braking came very close to causing the lorry to roll over.

Behind it, other lorries in the convoy were also coming to a halt, swerving to avoid each other. What had once been a neat, orderly convoy was now chaos. Troops started to jump down from the back of the stopped vehicles. Some formed a perimeter; others stood around in confusion. Which group did what said much about the junior officers and NCOs in the individual units.

There is still time.
Garry knew it, but he also knew that time was the critical element in the situation that was developing. He desperately did not want this confrontation to end in a bloodbath. Once the firing started in earnest, that is exactly what it would do. He had to put a stop to it. His course was clear. For the first time in weeks, he felt happy with what his sense of duty demanded he do.

“Stop right there. Stand down immediately.”

His voice rang across the road, cutting over the rumble of lorry engines. The lighting was dim but it still reflected off his rank insignia.

“Sir, we are under orders to enter the government building complex and aid in securing it.”

The reply came from the cab of the first lorry, the one that had so nearly turned over. An officer dismounted. The same dim light revealed his rank as Captain. There was uncertainty and a hint of nervousness in his manner.

“And I am under orders to deny you access to this complex.” Garry’s voice continued to dominate the sounds of the street. In his mind, he could hear echoes of the burst of gunfire that had halted the trucks.
Would that they were the last shots fired.

“I was told that you would be occupying the area and awaiting our assistance.” The confusion was growing by the second.

“You were misinformed. The Third Battalion, 7th Rajputs remain true to their salt. Do the Garwhalis do the same?”

The comment stung every man who heard it. There was no worse accusation one could make to an Indian soldier than suggest he had not been true to his salt. Some historians had suggested that the horrors of the Indian Mutiny had come from the mutineers feeling so dishonored by their infidelity that nothing they could do would make matters worse. The Garwhali Regiment Captain looked as if he had been slapped across the face. British he might be, but he knew his men and knew the accusation would destroy his position if left unanswered.

“First Battalion, The Royal Garwhal Rifles also remains true to its salt. We move in obedience of orders from London.”

Garry knew how to trump that. “And the 7th Rajputs move on the orders of the Viceroy acting on behalf of the King-Emperor himself.”

The Garwhali captain showed nothing but confusion and near-panic. He had expected nothing like this. The whole situation was outside his experience. In that he was not alone. Nobody on the street that night had experience in this. In the end, he fell back on the one thing that he could rely on, the orders he had received from his Colonel.

“We have our orders. If you will not obey yours, stand aside.”

Garry looked at him and then made his decision. He walked firmly, precisely, to the lead lorry and stood in front of it. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the Garwhali Captain’s hand move. Garry glimpsed the flash, but heard nothing. All he felt was the heavy impact that he knew was a bullet from a .455 Webley revolver.

Standing at the side of the road, Captain Shashi Madhav saw both the flash and heard the shot that had killed his Colonel. A brief hammer burst from a Vickers-Berthier cut down the Captain. The man hadn’t even tried to take cover. He stood there with a dumbstruck expression on his face, a man pole-axed by the shock of what he had done. He died with that expression still on his face.

Madhav never thought about what he did next; nor did he have anything in mind other than to stop the killing. He ran out into the street, his arms held high.

“Stop! Cease fire! India is free. Shall we mark that freedom by spilling our own blood?”

His anguished words echoed around the street, reflecting off the buildings. As the sound faded away, there was a profound silence. It seemed strangely louder than his shout. It was broken by a rattle from the lorries on the road; the rattle of rifles being lowered, weapons made safe. Madhav’s heart lifted as he realized the crisis was ending. His men wouldn’t have to massacre the Garwhalis after all. Four Gharwalis came out and picked up the body of Colonel Garry, carrying it with respect and honor to the lorries. A few feet away, four Rajputs did the same for the body of the Garwhali who had killed their Colonel.

In his heart, Madhav knew he was watching the birth of a new, national Indian Army.

Cabinet Room, Government House, Calcutta, India

“What is happening out there, Sir Eric?” Pandit Nehru asked the question amid an office filled with foreboding.

Sir Eric Haohoa had entered the room with a sheath of signals. He shook his head sadly; the night was not one that he would remember with pride. “The attempt by elements of the Army to remove the existing government and return control of India to London is turning into a fiasco. The units that moved on New Delhi were intercepted by loyal regiments. There was some exchange of fire, but the hearts of the mutineers were not in their work. So far, the dead total eleven with another twenty wounded. Mostly they were British officers; their deaths left the men they commanded without a figure to whom their loyalty was attached. In the absence of such figures, they placed their loyalty to India above all else.”

Those words were met with silence. The Indian Army had been the foundation stone of the Empire. It was disturbing for the British administration to see its final allegiance switching away from the Empire to the new state that was growing in India. On the other hand, Nehru was quietly delighted with the news; he had the tact and discretion not to make that fact public.

“The rest of the mutiny?”

Sir Eric continued after the silence had stretched for long enough. “Mostly a fizzle; units refusing orders until loyal troops turned up. The Royal Deccan Horse are holed up in their barracks area and putting up a fight, but they’re the only ones who are making a real show. Everywhere else, it was the same story as in New Delhi. The officers led, but their men only followed out of loyalty to them. Once the chips went down and they saw they were being led down a blind alley, they gave it up in the name of a greater loyalty.”

“What about the Deccan Horse?” Viscount Linlithgow was almost afraid of the answer.

“A Ghurka regiment is moving in to deal with them. We’re sending Blenheim bombers in to hit their base at dawn, with an assault to follow. Once that’s over, this sordid little affair will be done. One thing I should mention. One of the dead officers in New Delhi was Colonel Garry of the Rajputs.”

“The man who alerted us to the danger.” Sir Martyn Sharpe spoke sadly. “India is in his debt. And what of Sir Richard Cardew?”

“Under arrest.” Sir Eric spoke grimly. This was, perhaps, the most difficult aspect of the whole situation. “A policy decision with regard to him and his fellow conspirators will have to be made.”

That thought caused another long silence. Eventually, Nehru voiced the thought that had caused so much concern.

“And the decision we make will decide what kind of country we would like this to be.”

Room 208, Munitions Building, Washington, DC, USA

“China.” Cordell Hull’s voice echoed around the room with tones that portended doom.

“China.” Henry Stimson repeated the words with equally gloomy connotations.

“What’s happening in China?” Henry Morgenthau was curious. His long visit to Jamaica left him out of touch with the developing world situation.

“Nothing good and that’s the problem.” Stimson shook his head. “Ever since the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, the Chinese have been trying to prolong the war for as long as possible, with the aim of exhausting Japanese resources while they build up their own military capacity. They showed they could fight at the Battle of Shanghai. Their German-trained divisions there held the Japanese back for three months and chewed them up, but they still ended up retreating towards Nanking. At least they proved their army could fight, which was a relief.

“Since then, they’ve adopted a strategy they call ‘magnetic warfare:’ attracting advancing Japanese troops to definite points where they are subjected to ambush, flanking attacks, and encirclements in major engagements. They did this during the successful defense of Changsha last year and the defeat of the Japanese at Guanxi soon afterwards. They followed that by launching a large-scale counter-offensive against the IJA a few months ago. That got beaten back.

“The truth is that China has a low military-industrial capacity, limited experience in modern warfare and their army is poorly-trained, underequipped, and disorganized. They lost the only well-trained and equipped units they had in the Battle of Shanghai. The only things that are saving them is the influx of supplies from abroad and that the Japanese have encountered tremendous difficulties in administering and garrisoning the territory they have seized. They recruited a large collaborationist Chinese Army to maintain public security in those occupied areas, but it’s largely ineffective. Japanese control is limited to just railroads and major cities and vast Chinese countryside is a hotbed of Chinese partisan activities.

“In short, Japan has occupied much of north and coastal China, but the central government and military have successfully retreated to the western interior and are continuing their resistance. However, the Chinese ability to continue fighting is dependent upon supplies from outside. They just don’t have the resources to continue fighting on their own. The Japanese have realized that it’s going to be impossible for them to achieve a decisive victory in the interior of China as long as those supplies flow in. So, they’ve started a major effort to cut them off. They’re occupying the ports along China’s coast for a start and they’re pressuring the French to shut down the Yunnan railway from Indo-China. If they succeed in doing all that, the supply line to China will be shut. The stalemate in the Chinese interior won’t last that long after that happens.”

“It is U.S. Government policy to support China in its defense against Japanese aggression. We have some rather odd allies in doing that. The Soviets have their own hand in the game. They’re supplying arms and equipment, mostly to the Chinese communist forces, but some is going to Chiang Kai Shek and his nationalists.” Cordell Hull grimaced. As a classical liberal, in his eyes the Communists were little better than the Japanese when it came to totalitarianism. On the other hand, he was realist enough to know that ‘a little better’ was still ‘better’ and the memories of what had happened at Nanking still sickened him.

“What we need is a new supply line.” Stuyvesant sounded thoughtful, but his mind was already ranging through the possibilities. “One way or another, the Indo-China ports and railways are going to be closed to us sooner or later. We have to build an alternative.”

“Easier said than done, Phillip. Have you seen the ground out there?”

In greater detail than you can possibly imagine.
Stuyvesant thought. “I have. It is bad, but there is a road already out there. It runs from Kunming to the Burmese border. It was built between 1937 and 1938; by hand, if you can believe that. It’s amazing what 200,000 people working with their bare hands can achieve. If we can hook up to that, then we can shift supplies through there. Roads aren’t as good as railways for shifting large quantities of good, but they’re better than nothing. We can use the ports in Burma, especially Rangoon, shift the goodies by train to Lashio on the China-Burma border and then along the Kunming Road into China proper. At the very least, we can replace the Yunnan Railway that way.”