Freedom at Midnight (31 page)

Certain things simply could not be divided. The Home Department noted with laconic foresight that "the responsibilities of the existing intelligence bureau are not likely to decrease with the division of the country," and its officers stubbornly refused to yield up so much as a file or an inkpot to Pakistan.

There was only one press on the subcontinent capable of printing two of the indispensable insignia of national identity, postage stamps and currency. The Indians refused to share it with their future neighbors. As a result, thousands of Moslems had to manufacture a provisional currency for their new state by stamping huge piles of India rupee notes with a rubber stamp marked "Pakistan."

Inevitably India's ancient ills found a reflection in the division of her assets. East Bengal, destined for Pakistan, would be short 70,000 tons of rice and 30,000 tons of wheat in 1947. The Moslems begged the Indian government for the return of the 11,000 tons of surplus rice their western province of Sind had already sent to Delhi. They did not get it—not because of Hindu meanness, but for a reason sadly consistent with the reality of India: it had already been eaten.

Beyond the bureaucrats, there were the extremists with their claims. The Moslems wanted the Taj Mahal broken up and shipped to Pakistan because it had been built by a Mogul. Hindu sadhus insisted the Indus river flowing through the very heart of Moslem India should somehow be theirs because their sacred Vedas had been written on its banks twenty-five centuries before.

Neither dominion displayed the faintest reluctance to

grasp after the gaudiest symbols of the imperial power which had ruled them for so long. The gold-and-white viceregal train whose majestic silhouette had crossed the parched plains of the Deccan on the best-guarded tracks in history went to India. The private cars of the commander in chief of the Indian Army and the governor of the Punjab were assigned to Pakistan.

The most remarkable division of all, however, took place in the stable yards of Viceroy's House. At issue were twelve horse-drawn carriages. With their ornate, hand-wrought gold and silver designs, their glittering harnesses, their scarlet cushions, they embodied all the pretentious pomp, all the majestic disdain that had both fascinated and infuriated the raj's Indian subjects. Every viceroy, every visiting sovereign, every royal dignitary passing through India in modern times had promenaded through the raj's capital in one of them. They were the formal, viceregal carriages, six of them trimmed in gold, six semi-state carriages in silver. To break up the sets had seemed a tragedy; one dominion, it was decided, would get the gold carriages, the other would have to settle for the silver.

Mountbatten's A.D.C., Lieutenant Commander Peter Howes, proposed to determine which dominion would get which set of those regal vehicles with a profoundly plebeian gesture, the flip of a coin. Beside him, Major Yacoub Khan, newly appointed commander of the Pakistan bodyguard, and Major Gobind Singh, the commander of the Viceroy's bodyguard, watched as a silver piece went glittering up in the air.

"Heads!" shouted Gobind Singh.

The coin clattered onto the stable yard. The three men stopped to look at it. A whoop escaped from the Sikh major. Luck had decided that the gold carriages of India's imperial rulers might convey the leaders of a new, socialist India through the streets of their capital.

Howes then divided up the harnesses, the whips, the coachmen's boots, wigs and uniforms that went with each set of carriages. When he reached the end of that stack of equipment a last item remained. It was the viceroy's post horn, the flaring ceremonial horn used by the coachman.

The young naval officer pondered a minute. Quite obviously, if the horn was broken in two, it would never emit another sound. He could, of course, flip a coin again. Suddenly Howes had a better idea. He held it up to his Indian

colleagues. "You know," he said, "you can't divide this. I think there's only one fair solution. I'll have to keep it."

With a smile, Howes tucked the horn under his arm and sauntered out of the stable yard.*

It was not just the books, bank notes and bureaucratic chairs of one fifth of mankind that had to be sorted out and divided up in those frantic summer weeks of 1947. So, too, did hundreds of thousands of human beings, members of the vast army of India's public employees from railroad presidents and junior ministers to sweepers, errand boys, bearers and babus, those infuriating, petty-minded clerks who grew like weeds through India's administration. Each was given the choice of serving India or Pakistan. Then, separated into human piles, they were shunted off to one dominion or the other.

The most painful division of all, however, involved 1.2 million Hindus, Sikhs, Moslems and Englishmen assembled in the proudest institution Britain had produced in India, the Indian Army.

Mountbatten had pleaded with Jinnah to leave the army intact for a year under a British Supreme Commander responsible to both India and Pakistan as the best guarantor of the subcontinent's peace in the troubled weeks sure to follow partition. Jinnah had refused: an army was the indispensable attribute of a nation's sovereignty. He wanted Pakistan's in being, inside its borders by August 15. Carved up two thirds to India, one third to Pakistan, the men of the Indian Army, along with everything else on the subcontinent, would have to be divided and a great legend laid to rest.

The Indian Army . . . The words alone were enough to conjure up the old romantic images: Gunga Din, Gentlemen Rankers off on a spree, the Road to Mandalay, the Night Runners of Bengal, White Feathers, and Gary Cooper urging his Bengal Lancers up a rocky defile. For generations of English schoolboys, stuck in unheated

* The viceroy's post horn rests, a quarter of a century later, on the mantelpiece of Howes's living room. Occasionally, Howes, now a retired admiral, will recount to his guests of an evening the story of the horn and give it a playful toot for old times' sake.

classrooms, their eyes looking out on some forlorn, rainswept heath, the names of its regiments—Skinner's and Hodson's and Probyn's Horse, the "Piffers" of the Frontier Force Rifles, the First Sikhs, the Rajputana Rifles, the Guides Cavalry—were synonymous with glory and adventure.

It had epitomized the Victorian ideal of India better than anything else—dark, plucky soldiers staunchly loyal to their distant empress, led by doughty young Englishmen, straight arrows all, steady under the Pathans' fire, good at games, stern but devoted fathers to their men, chaps who could hold their liquor in the mess. Its deeds, the exploits of its heroes were the stuff of the British Indian legend.

There were the sepoys, Indian infantry men, at the siege of Arcot offering their British officers their last rice rations because they knew better how to endure the agonies of starvation; the Guides, galloping down to Delhi to assault the mutineers in 1857; the 6th Gurkhas swarming up the ridge from which the Turks dominated the beaches of Gal-lipoli, the sowars, or cavalry troopers, of the 11th Prince Albert Victor's Own Cavalry, the 2nd Royal Lancers, and the 18th Lancers stemming the rush of Rommel's armor at Meikili in the Western Desert, spurning the Field Marshal's call to surrender, and perhaps saving all Egypt by their stand.

The Army had begun as a collection of private armies at the service of the East India Company. Its early chieftains were free-booting mercenaries who raised their private armies, then hired them out to the Company. The passage of time placed a certain aura about their names; many had, in fact, been avaricious, brutal louts, interested principally in the accumulation of wealth. William Hodson, the founder of Hodson's Horse, was a hard-drinking, sadistic, personally courageous man who made his fortune by falsifying his mess accounts and borrowing large sums of money that he had no intention of repaying from the wealthy Indian subalterns he recruited to his colors. When one of them, in the company of a young son, was foolish enough to present himself at Hodson's door to inquire about the repayment of a loan, Hodson discharged his debt with a pistol, killing both the officer and his boy. He died trying to relieve the besieged Residence at Lucknow on March 11, 1858. His awed fel-

lows set him under a tombstone that noted, "Here lieth all that could die of William Steven Raikes Hodson, Commandant of Hodson's Horse."

That mutiny changed the nature of the Army as it changed almost everything else in India. With the changes, its real saga began. For the next seventy-five years, the Indian Army siphoned off the best products of Sandhurst, the intense, ambitious sons of the middle and upper-middle classes, determined to make a career at arms but unable to afford the good British regiments in which an officer could not keep up in the mess on his pay. While the pampered sons of the rich went off to the Guards to become amateur soldiers, the bright young men at the top of the class went out to India, where life was cheaper and the pay 50 percent higher, to become professionals.

While the British Army paraded and drilled through the long years of Pax Britannica, the Indian Army fought. It fought almost incessantly along the passes and peaks of the Frontier, at Landi Kotal and up and down the Khyber. It was desolate, forbidding terrain, serrated ridges, rocky slopes, barren valleys with hardly a bush for cover, scorched by the sun in summer, swept by wild, freezing rains in winter. The enemy was cruel, Pathans like the Wazirs and Mahsuds, who finished their wounded prisoners with their knives.

But the Pathan was a brave enemy, clever and cunning, and his British foes extended him the grudging admiration due to the members of a "good side." Those Frontier wars were a kind of deadly game, fought to cruel rules but still infused with just a touch of the playing fields of Eton. Its actions were small-scale, an officer and a few men manning a picket, securing a hilltop. They placed a premium on courage, personal leadership, resourcefulness and initiative, and required a close, trusting relationship between officers and men.

If a young officer's life was grueling during Frontier campaigns, back in quarters it was led with style and panache. Given the abundance of servants in India, the low cost of living, the special privileges accorded the Army, it was easy for those young men to live like the gentlemen they were supposed to be. "Pug" Ismay, Mountbatten's chief of staff, recalled his arrival in his regimental mess as a young subaltern exhausted by a hot and dirty trip across half of India. His future brother officers "in our mag-

nificent mess kit of scarlet, dark blue and gold" sat around the table, a servant behind each "in spotless white muslin with belts of the regimental colours and the regimental

crest in their turbans Two or three bowls of red roses

and a few pieces of superbly cleaned silver" reposed on the immaculate linen tablecloth, and above the mantelpiece over the fireplace was an oil of the regiment's royal colonel in chief and on the wall "the heads of tigers, leopards, markhor and ibex."

It was an era when Army officers dressed like figures from an operetta. The "Yellowboys" of Skinner's Horse wore apricot mess kits. Others wore scarlet and gold, azure, mint green and silver. Once a month, each regiment held its "Dining In" night, a formal, ceremonial banquet. On his first such occasion, a newly arrived officer was expected to drink himself to a stupor, then show up for morning parade at six o'clock. A trumpet call usually opened those banquets and, all gold braid and polished boots, the officers marched into their mess behind their colonel. There in the candlelight, before a table loaded with crystal, flowers and glistening silver, they ate meals as fine as any in India. When the last dish was cleared, a decanter of port was brought out and passed clockwise around the table from the colonel. Any breach of that tradition was unthinkable.

Three toasts proposed by the colonel commanding invariably followed: the King-Emperor, the viceroy, the regiment. In the 7th Cavalry, the commanding officer flipped his glass over his shoulder after each toast. Behind him, stern and expressionless, the Indian mess sergeant waited to crush the shards of each under his right heel as he banged his boot down to attention. The messes of the army were well stocked with whiskey, claret and champagne, all accessible to an officer with his signature on a chit; and the man to avoid at all costs, one army chronicler noted, was "a brother officer who drank water at mess."

Each regiment's most precious possession was its silver collection, an assortment of trophies that were its unwritten history. Every new officer joining its ranks presented the mess with a piece inscribed with his name and the date of his arrival. Others marked a regiment's triumphs on the polo or cricket grounds, or celebrated its exploits on the battlefield. A tradition went with each piece.

One wide cup of the 7th Cavalry received its nickname at a roisterous Dining In night in the thirties. Like drunken college boys, the regiment's lieutenants had clambered onto their mess table that night and gleefully urinated in unison into the cup. Unable to contain the outpouring of their champagne swollen bladders, it had been immediately dubbed the "Overflow Cup."

An officer's mornings were devoted to drill and soldiering, but the rest of the day was his. There was one acceptable way to use it—at games. Whether at polo, pigsticking, shooting, cricket, hockey or riding to the hounds, the young officer was expected to work off his youthful energies in some healthy exercise. It was a discipline akin to a Jesuit seminarian's cold baths, because one pleasure was notably absent from that idyllic life, sex. The officers of the Indian Army were subtly encouraged not to marry until their middle thirties. Since the Mutiny, Indian mistresses were very much in disfavor, and while brothels were considered necessary and proper outlets for men, officers and gentlemen were not encouraged to patronize them. A hard ride on a horse was proposed instead.

Every officer got two months' leave a year, but it was easy to get far more when the Frontier was quiet. Then, the Army's young officers went off to hunt panther and tiger in the jungles of Central India, the snow leopard, ibex and the black bear in the foothills of the Himalayas, to fish the tenacious mahseer from the quick-flowing streams of Kashmir. Ismay had spent his early leaves on a houseboat in Srinagar, his polo ponies tethered on the bank nearby, flaming lotus flowers on the waters around him. When the hot weather came, he moved up to Gulmarg at 8,000 feet, where "the polo ground was of real English turf and there was a club where we could all meet to settle the affairs of the world."