Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey Read Online Free PDF Page A

job was to give an unbiased answer to a technical question. I called for my two G.2s (majors).
    We worked all evening collecting facts. The telephones hummed while we spoke to the quartermaster-general's people, gunners, ordnance, military farms and lands, engineers, signals, railways. Clerks pinned up and took down map after map. At seven Mohammed Ali, looking very serious, talked to me for an hour. I began to correlate the facts. How would the existing army divide? Would the new countries be militarily viable? It didn't look like it. Pakistan would be like the peel of an orange. It would have all the dangerous frontiers, and much of the military accommodation — but no flesh, no core of industry, manpower, or finance. Everywhere the lines of defence or counter-attack would be in Pakistan, the base depots to support them in India.
    Late at night I began drafting. At one in the morning I took my paper home and went to bed. At four I got up and drafted again. At six my telephone rang, and Roddy told me that the Cabinet Committee had changed its schedule. There was not going to be time for anyone to review my work. I must make it fair at once, and it would go direct to the Chief at eight, for him to take to the Viceroy. I broke into a light sweat. The Auk must have been thinking about this problem. What if his opinion was entirely different from mine? Well, to hell with it. This wasn't really a matter of opinions but of facts and trained military deductions from them. I bicycled furiously up to G.H.Q., routed out the General Staff duty clerk, and gave him my draft. At ten to eight Roddy took it to the Chief for his signature.
    Briefly, my paper declared that the partition of India was militarily possible, but unsound. For over a century military problems had been worked out on the basis of one country, its natural boundaries the Himalayas and the sea, and this unity was built into the military fabric. Indeed, I said, military unity had helped to unify India, and could continue to do so. I concluded that partition would place a very severe strain on Pakistan, particularly. The official advice of the Defence Department therefore was: don't.
    Next day congratulatory messages descended like a Wall Street ticker tape on to my head, starting with a warm note from Roddy and ending with a laudatory epistle from Archie Wavell, the Viceroy. I had, apparently, hit the nail on the head, in fact Told It Like It Is.
    As everyone knows, India was, in fact, divided, but it is not perhaps so widely appreciated that the responsibility for this tragedy lies with Mr Nehru. For when the Congress, the Muslim League, and other parties had at last been persuaded to agree to the Cabinet Committee Plan, he gave a press conference at which he stated that the Congress considered itself 'completely unfettered by agreements and free to meet all situations as they arise'. As he was the president of the Congress this could only mean that his party, once it attained the majority power promised to it under the Plan, would be free to break the terms under which the other parties had agreed. With a sigh of delight — for in accepting the plan they had been forced to give up the goal of Pakistan — Mr Jinnah and the Muslim League also reneged on their agreement and returned to the old and now unalterable demand for a separate country of their own.
    I went home warmed by the praise but tired and depressed. I could no longer float along like a piece of driftwood on the tides of these events. I had my family to think of, as well as my own goals and desires. Delhi was hot, sticky, and unpleasant. I had not seen my parents since June 1939, and they had never seen Barbara or Susan. The fate of the Gurkha Brigade had been thrown into the lap of the gods; or, rather worse than that, into the lap of the politicians. Soon after the Maharajah of Nepal allowed his Gurkha subjects to be enlisted into the Indian Army in 1819 he stipulated that only British officers should