Less than a month later I was passing through Deolali to embark at Bombay on a homeward-bound ship in a mood alternating between the exhilaration of a man released to follow his own bent and the depression of one who retires from a situation gratefully but with some doubts about the means he’s adopted to extricate himself. There were as well some unexpected regrets.
If I had been with Ronald Merrick right up to the time when the signal came ordering me to report to Deolali, I doubt that I should have felt anything except relief and grateful astonishment at the speed with which Aunt Charlotte had apparently worked. But I wasn’t with him; rather, he wasn’t with me and the signal happened to arrive at a moment when I was aware of being comfortably situated and pleasantly occupied.
*
In the morning, after that night journey from Ranpur in the Governor’s special coach, when Rowan and I bumped into each other in the narrow passage between Their Excellencies’ compartments (w.c. on one side, shower on the other) he was polite but (I thought) a little cool. I think he assumed I was lying when I told him I had no hangover, or assumed that I had already started on one of the bottles in my kit-bag so that I could face up to another day with Merrick and the Red Shadow.
He may have been right about the hangover because my recollections of the arrival in Pankot aren’t very clear. But there could be another reason for that. To have travelled on the same train as a coffin without knowing it is one thing. To be greeted by a large crowd banging on drums another. I don’t recall how soon it was before I connected the crowds and the drums with a funeral, or the funeral with a coffin that had come in on the train, or the coffin with the body of Mr Kasim’s secretary, and I’m not sure whether it was Merrick’s information alone, or Merrick’s and the Red Shadow’s plus other people’s that helped me to fit the pieces together. What I do remember is that it was nothing Nigel Rowan said because he said very little. An impression I had that morning was of not inspiring his confidence; another was that as a result of whatever conversation he’d had with Merrick the night before there was an amiability between them now which seemed, on Rowan’s part, advertised to show me that he discounted everything I had told him about that officer’s behaviour. Without caring much what the answer was I wondered whether Nigel had said anything to Merrick about my attitude to him, and whether Merrick’s silence in the 15 cwt that Area HQ had sent to the station for us was especially ominous.
Nigel’s detachment, Merrick’s silence, the distracting crowds at the station, the drums and the shouting, the revolting stink of the Red Shadow’s stale breath and unwashed body in the confined luggage-loaded space at the tarpaulin-covered back of the truck: these have stayed with me as parts of the jig-saw. Another part of it is waiting, in several places; keeping upwind of the Pathan if on the same verandah with him and moving if he came too near. The waiting was done in the complex of old Victorian barracks and huts of more recent origin that was Area Headquarters. A dry sunny morning? Something cool but hard – metallic – in the air, the smell of a century or more of Pankot’s experience of military occupation. A late breakfast in a British NCOS’ mess. Eating it alone at a long table as yet uncleared of used plates and cups and saucers. The depredations of white ants in wooden window frames set in crumbling plaster. Views from these windows of the hills. The sound of a coppersmith. Shafts of sunlight? A padlocked glass-fronted cupboard that displayed a few silver cups, sporting-trophies. A dartboard and last night’s chalked scores. A little bit of Salisbury Plain in the Indian hills. I had never hated the army so much as I did in this hour or two in this drearily familiar and horribly anonymous area of roads and pathways, directional signs, inhospitable huts and characterless rooms – the makeshift impermanent jerry-built structures that seem to rest for sole support on the implacable and rigid authority of military hierarchy. The fire of hatred (so intense, so unexpected, so out of character) was stoked and fanned by a sudden and utter lack of confidence in the machine I thought I had set in motion with the telegram and letter to Aunt Charlotte. The illusion of imminent escape withered away in this uncompromising and heartless reality.
Another piece of the jig-saw: as I sat beneath the dartboard, stupefied by this misery, there was a distant crackling fusillade of shots whose echoes bounced from one hill to another. When the echoes were finally spent I heard the uninterrupted song of the coppersmith. No barking. The birds and dogs of Pankot – wild or tame – were used to the sound of range practice.
And I remember relief when the truck came back from wherever it had been with Merrick and the Red Shadow and I was taken by the driver (a surly, solitary man) from the NCOS’ mess; relief that was short-lived because it ended in another anonymous room, an annexe in the grounds of the General Hospital (military wing) which I later discovered lay approximately half-way between Area Headquarters and the lines of the Pankot Rifles depot.
From the window of this room there was no view at all. The hospital was well provided with shade trees and the annexe was half-hidden in bushes. I didn’t bother to ask the driver why I was to be quartered there, nor did I ask where Merrick and the Red Shadow were. One of the pleasures of being a sergeant is of feeling under no obligation to satisfy your curiosity about the background to events. You don’t originate anything if you can help it. Delivered by the driver, admitted by a servant (who must have had an instruction from somewhere) I entered the room in the annexe and because it had a bed had no difficulty in assuming that this was where I was to sleep while in Pankot. I dumped pack and kit-bag and lay down.
Out of this phase (morning of August 14 to morning of August 16) one important minor figure emerges: that of an RAMC corporal, a young man from Bermondsey. I shall call him Corporal Dixon. The British NCOS on the hospital staff messed together and formed a little clique. It was a very unmilitary set-up: sergeants, corporals, but not lance-corporals. Driven by hunger to leave the room in the annexe and find the mess-hut I found I was expected, but I think only as a man with a name and the barest identification. I was received in a friendly easy-going fashion and given a beer. The mess conveyed an idea of intellectual superiority. There was a Van Gogh reproduction on one wall and the sound of Mozart from the portable gramophone. A few of the NCOS had seen service in the field. For them, Pankot was a relief station. Among these front-line veterans was Corporal Dixon, known affectionately as Sophie, or Miss Dixon, or Mum.
I was told that he kept the patients in the wards in stitches and that he had tamed the QA nursing sisters and the medical officers. I was also told that a wounded officer who had watched him at work at a casualty clearing station in the Arakan and listened to the stream of morale-boosting queenly chat – a mocking commentary on the sounds of battle near by – had said: ‘You deserve the MM, Corporal.’ Sophie had said, ‘Oh that would never do, sir, I wouldn’t presume, and where would they pin it, the cheeky things?’
But these tales came later when I set about trying to find out how I had offended, what had caused the temperature to drop. Between the friendly reception and the freezing up no more than a few hours passed. Dixon’s first appearance was at lunch. ‘A copper!’ he said, fingering my green armband. ‘Has someone been at the drugs? It’s no good looking here, sergeant, we’re all clean-living boys. It’s that Matron over at Private. She’s never been the same since she visited Cox’s Bazaar looking for a bargain and found it closed for stocktaking.’
I laughed and was introduced. Dixon was rather welcome comic relief. Perhaps if I hadn’t laughed he would have been tipped the wink to quieten down. Lunch was at a long table. White cloth. A vase or two of marigolds. I was at one end, as I remember, and Dixon at the other. The atmosphere was amiable. Once it was established that I wasn’t at the hospital on duty but only quartered temporarily in the annexe I don’t think any further questions were asked. I remember that towards the end of the meal all conversation died away because Dixon had taken the stage and was recounting a series of scurrilous but very funny stories, most of them delivered in a tone of prim
outrage, of astonishment at the trickery and under-handedness of the world. It took me some time to sort out the code. After failing to see the point several times I realized that ‘she’ almost invariably meant ‘he’. A sentence such as ‘Well you should have seen her, got up to the nines in her new frock, preening she was, poor old thing, well she doesn’t often have one does she?’ didn’t, I discovered, refer to a matron at a hospital dance but to a senior officer of the RAMC or the IMS who was wearing a new uniform, hadn’t been looking where he was going and had bumped into and knocked Corporal Dixon over at a moment when he happened to be carrying a bed-pan full of urine. ‘So there she was, drenched with Private Thingummy’s piss, new dress ruined, and there was me flat on me bum and covered in piss too, thinking I’d really ask for me cards this time. But you can’t beat breeding, can you? “Is that Corporal Dixon?” she says to Matron looking down her nose, oh very ladylike. “I’m afraid it is,” Matron says. “I see,” she says. “I suppose it was not entirely his fault so we won’t hold it against him.” Well as to that, I thinks to meself, chance would be a fine thing.’
How much of Dixon’s tale was true one could only guess. (Did RAMC corporals carry bedpans in India?) What was clear was his rôle. He was the safety-valve. How well-timed and sustained his performances were over a period I could not judge except from the behaviour of his companions in the mess. Presumably he knew when to play up and when to give it a rest. I detected no signs either of boredom or aggression. Before the meal was quite over the steward brought in a note. It was for me; from Merrick. The truck-driver had brought it. I got up to leave.
‘Are you with us for long, Sergeant?’ Sophie Dixon called out. I told him probably for a day or two; added that I’d see them tonight anyway.
‘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 questione
d 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.