Freedom at Midnight (14 page)

Smith stepped back to contemplate his work. No one in the world was more demanding when it came to dressing a uniform than Mountbatten, and this was not a morning to make a mistake. Smith unbuttoned the jacket and sash, and gingerly lifted it from the dress dummy on which it rested. He eased it over his own shoulders and turned to a mirror for a final check. There, for a brief and poignant moment before that mirror, Charles Smith was out of the shadows. For just a second, Charles Smith too could dream he was the viceroy of India.

Slipping his tunic, heavy with its load of orders and decorations, gold and brass, over his torso, Louis Mountbatten could not help thinking of those magic weeks a quarter of a century earlier when he had discovered India by the side of his cousin the Prince of Wales. Both of them had been dazzled by the majestic air surrounding the legendary personage of the viceroy of India as he presided over his empire. So much pomp, so much luxury, such homage seemed to accompany his slightest gesture that the Prince of Wales himself had remarked, "I never understood how a king should live until I saw the viceroy of India."

Mountbatten remembered his own youthful amazement at the panoply of imperial power that focused on the person of one Englishman the allegiance of the world's densest masses. He recalled his awe at the manner in which the viceregal establishment had blended the glitter of a European court and the faintly decadent aura of the ceremonials of the Orient. Now, against his will, that viceregal

throne with all its pomp and splendor was about to be his. His viceroyalty, alas, would bear little resemblance to that gay round of ceremonies and hunting that had stirred his youthful dreamings. His youthful ambitions were to be fulfilled, but in the real world, not the fairy-tale world of 1921.

A knock on the door interrupted his meditation. He turned. The rigorously unemotional Mountbatten started at the sight framed in the doorway of his bedroom. It was his wife, a diamond tiara glittering in her auburn hair, her white silk gown clinging to the curves of a figure as slim and supple as it had been that day she had walked out of St. Margaret's, Westminster, on his arm.

Like her husband, Edwina Mountbatten seemed to have been sought out for the blessings of a capricious Providence. She had beauty. She possessed a fine intellect, more penetrating, some thought, than her husband's. She had inherited great wealth from her maternal grandfather, Sir Ernest Cassel, and social position from her father's family whose forebears included England's great nineteenth-century Prime Minister Lord Palmerston and the philanthropic politician, the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury. There had been clouds in her paradise. An intensely unhappy childhood, after her mother's early death, left her with an introverted nature. She was easily hurt and kept the pain of those hurts locked inside her, where they corroded the lining of her being. Small things pained her. Unlike her ebullient husband, who never hesitated to criticize anything that displeased him and accepted criticism with lofty aplomb, Edwina Mountbatten took offense easily. "You could tell Lord Mountbatten what you wanted, any way you wanted to," recalled one of their senior aides; "with Lady Louis, you had to proceed with the utmost care."

She had locked her shyness, her introverted nature into the straitjacket of an unyielding will. With the intensity of that will, she made herself into something that nature had not intended her to be: a seemingly extroverted, outgoing woman. But the price was always to be paid. She had been speaking in public for a decade, sometimes two or three times a week. Yet, before any major speech, her hands shook almost uncontrollably. Her health was fragile as

a porcelain vase. She suffered almost daily from the cruel thrusts of a migraine headache, but no one outside her family knew, because physical weakness was not something she was prepared to indulge. Unlike her self-confident husband, who could boast that he "never, never worried," Edwina worried constantly. While he slept immediately and soundly, sleep's solace came to her only with a pill-induced torpor.

Two distinctly separate periods had marked the Mount-battens' quarter of a century together. During the first fourteen years of their marriage, while Louis Mountbatten was slowly moving up the naval ladder, he had insisted that they exclude her wealth and their social position from the naval environment in which they spent much of their time. Away from the naval stations, however, in London, Paris and on the Riviera, Edwina became, her daughter recalled, "the perfect social butterfly," a zealous party-giver and party-goer, blazing through the twenties with the intensity of a Fitzgerald heroine. When she was not dancing, she sought the stimulation of adventure—chartering a copra schooner in the South Pacific, flying on the first flight from Sydney to London, crossing the Andes on horseback, being the first European woman up the Burma Road.

That carefree, innocent period in their life together had ended with Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia. By Munich, the transformation was complete. From then on, her life was dominated by the conviction that it was immoral not to be fully occupied by the pursuit of some social or political good. The giddy heiress became a social reformer, the social butterfly a concerned activist with a liberal outlook little appreciated by her peers.

During the war, she led the St. John Ambulance Brigade's 60,000 people, the most important organization of its kind in Britain. When Japan surrendered, her husband urgently requested her to tour the Japanese prisoner-of-war camps to organize the care and evacuation of their most desperate inmates. Before the first soldiers of his command had set foot on the Malayan Peninsula, Edwina Mountbatten, armed only with a letter from her husband, her only escort a secretary, three of her husband's staff officers and an Indian A.D.C., plunged into territory still under full Japanese control. She continued all the way to Balikpan, Manila and Hong Kong, fearlessly berating the Japanese, forcing them to provide food and medicine for

their prisoners until Allied help could arrive. Thousands of starving, wretchedly ill men were saved by her actions.

Like her husband, she ended the war with a row of well-earned decorations. Now, she was to play a vital role at his side in New Delhi. She would be his first and most trusted confidante, his discreet and private emissary in moments of crisis, his most effective ambassador to the Indian leaders with whom he would have to deal.

Like her husband, she would leave behind in India the imprint of her style and character. A woman of extraordinary versatility, Edwina Mountbatten would be able in an evening to preside over a formal banquet for a hundred, in a silk evening dress, a diamond tiara glittering in her hair, and, the following morning, in a simple St. John uniform, walk through ankle-deep mud to cradle in her lap the head of a child dying of cholera in the filth of an Indian hovel. She would display in those moments a human compassion some found lacking in her husband. Hers was not the condescending gesture of a great lady perfunctorily acknowledging the misery of the poor, but a heartfelt sorrow for India's sufferings. The Indians would see the sincerity of Edwina Mountbatten's feelings and respond in turn to her as they had never responded before to an Englishwoman.

As his wife advanced across the room toward him, Mountbatten could not help thinking what a strange resolution this day was to their destinies. Less than a mile separated the bedroom in which they stood contemplating each other and the spot on which he had asked Edwina Ashley to marry him a quarter of a century before. It was February 14, 1922, and they had been sitting out the fifth dance of a viceroy's ball in honor of the Prince of Wales. Their hostess that evening, the Vicereine, Lady Reading, had not been overjoyed at the news. The young Mountbatten, she had written to his new fianc6e's aunt, did not have much of a career before him.,

Mountbatten remembered her words now. Unable to suppress a smile, he took his wife's arm and set out to install her on Lady Reading's gold-and-crimson throne.

India was always a land of ceremonial splendor and on that March morning in 1947, when Louis Mountbatten

was to be made viceroy, the blend of Victorian pomp and Mogul munificence that had stamped the rites of the raj was still intact. Spread before the broad staircase leading to the Durbar Hall, the heart of Viceroy's House, were honor guards from the Indian Army, Navy and Air Force. Sabers glittering in the morning sunlight, Mountbatten's bodyguard, in scarlet-and-gold tunics, white breeches and glistening black leather jackboots, lined his march to the hall.

Inside, under its white marble dome, the elite of India waited—high court judges, their black robes and curling wigs as British as the law they administered; the Romans of the raj, senior officers of the Indian Civil Service, the pale purity of their Anglo-Saxon profiles leavened by a smattering of more somber Indian faces; a delegation of maharajas gleaming like gilded peacocks in their satin and jewels; and, above all, Jawaharlal Nehru and his colleagues in Gandhi's Congress, their rough, homespun cotton khadi harbingers of the onrushing future.

When the first members of Mountbatten's cortege stepped into the hall, four trumpeters concealed in niches around the base of the dome began a muted fanfare, their notes rising as the procession moved forward. The lights of the great hall, dimmed at first, rose in rhythm to the trumpets' gathering crescendo. At the instant India's new viceroy and vicereine passed through the great doorway, they blazed to an incandescent glare, and the trumpets sent a triumphant swirl of sound reverberating around the vaulted dome. Solemn and unsmiling, the Mountbattens marched slowly down the carpeted aisles toward their waiting thrones.

A kind of apprehension, a rising tension not unlike that which he had once known on the bridge of the Kelly in the uncertain moments before battle, crowded in on Mount-batten. Each gesture measured to the grandeur of the moment, he and his wife moved under the crimson velvet canopy spread over their gilded thrones and turned to face the assembly. The Chief Justice stepped forward and, his right hand raised, Mountbatten solemnly pronounced, the oath that made him India's last viceroy.

As he pronounced its concluding words, the rumble of the cannon of the Royal Horse Artillery outside rolled through the hall. At the same instant all across the subcontinent, other cannon took up the ponderous thirty-one gun

salute. At Landi Kotal, at the head of the Khyber Pass; at Fort William in Calcutta, where Clive had inadvertently set Britain on the road to her Indian Empire at the battle of Plassey; at the Lucknow Residence, where the Union Jack was never struck, in honor of the men and women who had defended it in the Mutiny of 1857; Cape Comorin, past whose monazite sands the galleons of Queen Elizabeth I had sailed; Fort St. George in Madras, where the First India Company had its first land grant inscribed on a plate of gold; in Poona, Peshawar and Simla—wherever there was a military garrison in India— troops on parade presented arms as the first gun exploded in Delhi. Frontier Force Rifles, the Guides Cavalry, Hodsons and Skinners Horse, Sikhs and Dogras, Jats and Pathans, Gurkhas and Madrassis poised while the cannon thundered out their last tattoo for the British raj.

As the sound of the last report faded through the dome of Durbar Hall, the new viceroy stepped to the microphone. The situation he faced was so serious that, against the advice of his staff, Mountbatten had decided to break with tradition by addressing the gathering before him.

"I am under no illusion about the difficulty of my task," he said. "I shall need the greatest good will of the greatest possible number, and I am asking India today for that good will."

As he finished, the guards threw open the massive Assam teak doors of the Hall. Before Mountbatten was the breathtaking vista of Kingsway and its glistening pools, plunging down the heart of New Delhi. Overhead the trumpets sent out another strident call. Suddenly, walking back down the aisle, Mountbatten felt his apprehension slip away. That brief ceremony, he realized, had turned him into one of the most powerful men on earth. He now held in his hand an almost life-and-death power over four hundred million people, one fifth of mankind.

Forty-five minutes later, back in civilian clothes, Mountbatten settled into his desk. As he did, his jamadhar chaprassi, his office footman, wearing his gold turban, walked in bearing a green leather dispatch box, which he ceremoniously set in front of Mountbatten. Mountbatten opened it and pulled out the document inside. It was a stark confirmation of the power that he had just inherited, the final appeal for mercy of a man condemned to death. Fascinated and horrified, Mountbatten read his way

through each detail in it. The ease involved a man who had savagely beaten his wife to death in front of a crowd of witnesses. It had been so thoroughly combed, passed through so many appeals, that there were no extenuating circumstances to be found. Mountbatten hesitated for a long minute. Then, sadly, he took a pen and performed the first official act of his viceroyalty.

"There are no grounds for the exercise of the Royal prerogative of mercy," he noted on the cover.

Before setting out to impose his ideas on India's political leaders, Louis Mountbatten sensed that he had first to impose his own personality on India. India's last viceroy might, as he had glumly predicted at Northolt Airport, come home with a bullet in his back, but he would be a viceroy unlike any other that India had seen. Mountbatten firmly believed "it was impossible to be viceroy without putting up a great, brilliant show." He had been sent to New Delhi to get the British out of India, but he was determined that they would go in a shimmer of scarlet and gold, all the old glories of the raj honed to the highest pitch one last time.

He ordered all the ceremonial trappings that had been suppressed during the war restored—A.D.C.'s in dazzling full dress, guard-mounting ceremonies, bands playing, sabers flashing—"the lot." He loved every splendid moment of it, but a far shrewder concern than his own delight in pageantry underlay it.

The pomp and panoply were designed to give him a viceregal aura of glamor and power, to provide him a psychological framework that would give his actions added dimension. He intended to replace the "Operation Madhouse" of his predecessor with a kind of "Operation Seduction" of his own, a minirevolution in style directed as much toward India's masses as toward their leaders, with whom he would have to negotiate. It would be a shrewd blend of contrasting values, of patrician pomp and a common touch, of the old spectacles of the dying raj and new initiatives prefiguring the India of tomorrow.