Freedom at Midnight Read Online Free PDF

sight those graveyards offered was sadder, nor more poignantly revealing of the human price the British paid for their Indian adventure, than their rows upon rows of undersize graves. They crowded every cemetery in India in appalling number. They were the graves of children and infants killed in a climate for which they had not been
    bred, by diseases they would never have known in their native England.
    Sometimes a lone tomb, sometimes three or four in a row, those of an entire family wiped out by cholera or jungle fever, the epitaphs upon those graves were a parent's heartbreak frozen in stone.
    In Asigarh, two stones side by side offer for eternity the measure of what England's glorious imperial adventure meant to one ordinary Englishman. "April 19, 1845. Alexander, 7 months old son of Conductor Johnson and Martha Scott. Died of cholera," reads the first. The second: beside it, reads: "April 30, 1845, William John, 4 year old son of Conductor Johnson and Martha Scott. Died of cholera." Under them, on a larger stone, their grieving parents chiseled a last farewell:
    One blessing, one sire, one womb
    Their being gave.
    They had one mortal sickness
    And share one grave
    Far from an England they never knew.
    Obscure clerks or dashing blades such as those immortalized by Gary Cooper galloping at the head of his Bengal Lancers, those generations of Englishmen policed and administered India as no one before them had done.
    Their rule was paternalistic, that of the old public-school master disciplining an unruly band of boys, forcing on them the education that he was sure was good for them. With an occasional exception they were able and incorruptible, determined to administer India in its own best interests—but it was always they who decided what those interests were.
    Their great weakness was the distance from which they exercised their authority, the terrible racial smugness setting them apart from those they ruled. Never was that attitude of racial superiority summed up more succinctly than it was by a former officer of the Indian Civil Service in a parliamentary debate at the turn of the century. There was, he said, "a cherished conviction shared by every Englishman in India, from the highest to the lowest, by the planter's assistant in his lonely bungalow and by the editor in the full light of his presidency town, from the Chief Commissioner in charge of an important province to the
    Viceroy upon his throne—the conviction in every man that he belongs to a race which God has destined to govern and subdue."
    The massacre of 680,000 members of that race that God had destined to govern and subdue in the trenches of World War I wrote an end to the legend of a certain India. A whole generation of young men who might have patrolled the Frontier, administered the lonely districts or galloped their polo ponies down the long maidans was left behind in Flanders fields. From 1918 on, recruiting for the Indian Civil Service became increasingly difficult. Sensing the evolution of history, the survivors of the war turned away from careers that seemed certain to end before they reached retirement age. Increasingly, a brilliant coterie of Indians was accepted into the ranks of the Indian Civil Service and the Indian Army's officer corps.
    On New Year's Day, 1947, barely a thousand British members of the Indian Civil Service remained in India, still somehow holding 400 million people in their administrative grasp. They were the last standard-bearers of an elite that had outlived its time, condemned at last by a secret conversation in London and the inexorable currents of history.
    "WALK ALONE, WALK ALONE'
    Srirampur, Noakhali, India, New Year's Day, 1947
    Six thousand $iiles from Downing Street, in a village of the Gangetic Delta above the Bay of Bengal, an elderly man stretched out on the dirt floor of a peasant's hut. It was exactly twelve noon. As he did every day at that hour, he reached up for the dripping wet cotton sack that an aide