Freedom at Midnight (61 page)

At the opening meeting, the Committee got a stunning glimpse of the toughness of which Mountbatten was capable. If the security guards on trains failed to open fire on their assailants, he had a solution to propose. Any time a train was successfully attacked, Mountbatten said, round up its security guards. Sort out those that were wounded. Then, court-martial and shoot the rest on the spot. That, he told the meeting, would have a salutary effect on the guards' discipline.

It was the situation in Delhi, however, that most concerned Mountbatten in that opening meeting. "If we go down in Delhi," he said, "the whole country will go down with us." The city had to have first call on resources. He ordered the Army to get additional troops into the capital in forty-eight hours, assigned his own Governor General's Bodyguard to security duties, requisitioned civilian transport, arranged to collect and burn the corpses littering the streets. Public and Sunday holidays were canceled, and steps were taken to get government employees back to their offices and the telephone system working again. Above all, he ordered a program begun to get Sikh and Hindu refugees out of the capital and to prevent more from coming in.

It would take weeks before the Committee's efforts would have their impact on the catacylsm overwhelming northern India. But at last, as one Indian participant noted, at the vital center things had shifted almost overnight "from the pace of the bullock cart to the speed of a jet airplane."

For the next two months the iteparalleled tide of human misery washing across the face of the Punjab would be counted in rows of little red pins on the maps in Government House. They symbolized an enormity of anguish and suffering almost beyond imagining and beyond the human spirit's capacity to endure. One of them alone represented 800,000 people, a caravan almost mind-numbing in dimension, the largest single column of refugees that man's turbulent history had ever produced. It was as though all

of Boston, every man, woman and child in the city in 1947, had been forced by some prodigious tragedy to flee on foot to New York.

At the outset, Jinnah, Nehru and Liaquat Ali Khan had opposed the fantastic flow, so contrary to their own ideals, by urging their terrified populations to remain in place. The amplitude of the problem, however, had overwhelmed them and forced them to accept this massive exchange of populations as the price of their independence. On both sides of the Punjab, civil authorities now sought to hasten the exchange, both to make room for the flood tide of humans sweeping toward them and to finish it before winter would add still one more horror to the nightmare enveloping their once lovely province.

Each day in that Government House map room, the tortuous progress of each column's advance was recorded by the inching forward of another red pin.*

And each day at dawn the reconnaissance pilots took off to pick the columns up again as they emerged from under the mantle of night to crawl a few more miles toward safety. The sight spread out below their wings on those September mornings was a spectacle such as no human eyes had ever beheld. One pilot, Flight Lieutenant Patwant Singh, would always remember "whole antlike herds of human beings walking over open country spread out like cattle in the cattle drives of the Westerns Fd seen, slipping in droves past the fires of the villages burning all around them." Another remembered flying for over fifteen breathtaking moments at 200 miles per hour, without reaching

* Even Gandhi was impressed by the air of purpose and decisiveness with which Mountbatten infused Government House. When his "One Man Boundary Force" finally reached New Delhi he came to call on the former viceroy. After being shown around the new headquarters, he settled into the study in which he had begged Mountbatten not to partition India.

"My friend," he said, "I'm glad you listened to the voice of God, and not the voice of Gandhi."

"Well, Gandhiji," Mountbatten replied, somewhat puzzled, "His is the only voice Fd sooner listen to than yours, but in what respect did I take God's advice against yours?"

"God must have told you not to listen to old Gandhi, who's a fool, when he urged you to give up this house," the Mahatma said. "Now I see this is the heart of India. Here is where India is governed from. This is the sanctuary in the storm. We must keep it up and all your successors must live here."

the end of one column. Sometimes, slowed by some inexplicable bottleneck, it bulged into a thick cluster of humans and carts, then became a thin trickle a few miles on, only to coagulate once more into a bundle of people at the next roadblock.

By day, pale clouds of dust churned by the hoofs of thousands of buffaloes and bullocks hung above each column, stains along the horizon plotting the refugees' advance. At night, collapsing by the side of the road, the refugees built thousands of little fires to cook their few scraps of food. From a distance, the light of their fires diffused by the dust settling above the columns merged into one dull red glow.

It was only on the ground, however, there among those numb and wretched creatures, that the appalling awfulness of what was happening became apparent. Eyes and throats raw with dust, feet bruised by stones or the searing asphalt, tortured by hunger and thirst, enrobed in a stench of urine, sweat and defecation, the refugees plodded dumbly forward. They flowed on in filthy dhotis, saris, baggy trousers, frayed sandals, sometimes only one shoe, often none at all. Elderly women clung to their sons, pregnant women to their husbands. Men carried invalid wives and mothers on their shoulders, women their infants. They had to endure their burden not for a mile or two, but for a hundred, two hundred miles, for days on end, with nothing to nourish their strength but a chapati and a few sips of water a day.

The crippled, the sick and the dying were sometimes hung in a sling tied to the middle of a pole each end of which rested on the shoulder of a son or friend. Strapped to backs collapsing under their burden were bundles surpassing a man's weight. Balanced on their women's heads were precarious piles of what a desperate people had been able to salvage from their homes: a few cooking utensils, a portrait of Shiva, the guru Nanak, a copy of the Koran. Some men balanced long bamboo staves on their shoulders from each end of which, like the pans of a balance, hung their belongings: an infant, perhaps, in a sack on one end, the ingredients with which to begin a new life, a shovel, a wooden hoe, a sack of seed grain, hanging from the other.

Bullocks, buffaloes, camels, horses, ponies, sheep mixed their misery with that of the distraught owners forcing

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them on. Bullocks and buffaloes lurched forward, pulling the shipping vans of this grotesque exodus, wooden-wheeled platforms heaped with goods. There were pyramids of charpoys, straw pallets, rakes, plows, pickaxes, bags of last year's harvest. Life rafts to their owners' shipwrecked lives, they were heaped with bundles of old clothes; occasionally a wedding sari N glittering in gold and silver peeping from tawdry piles, hookahs: the souvenirs of a better time, a couple's wedding presents, pots and pans, their number, if they were Hindus, always ending in 1, because a number ending in 0 like 10 was inauspicious. There were, in those columns, sledges, tongas, the burqa carts used by the Moslems to carry women in purdah, hay wagons, anything with wheels or runners to which the emaciated frame of a horse or bullock could be hitched.

It was not just a brief trip to another village those helpless Indians and Pakistanis were making. Theirs was the trek of the uprooted, a journey with no return across hundreds of miles, each mile menaced with exhaustion, starvation, cholera, attacks against which there was often no defense. Hindu, Moslem and Sikh, those refugees were the innocent and the unarmed, illiterate peasants whose only life had been the fields they worked, most of whom did not know what a viceroy was, who were indifferent to the Congress Party and the Moslem League, who had never bothered with issues like partition or boundary lines or even the freedom in whose name they had been plunged into misery.

And always, stalking them from one end of the horizon to the other, was the sun, the cruel, remorseless sun compounding their miseries, forcing their haggard faces to a blazing sky to beg Allah, Shiva, the guru Nanak for the relief of a monsoon that refused to come.

For Lieutenant Ram Sardilal, escorting a column of Moslem refugees out of India, one image would always remain of that harrowing experience—"the Sikhs like vultures following along the caravan line bargaining with the unhappy refugees over the few possessions they were trying to take away, holding out as the price dropped with each passing mile until the desperate refugees were prepared to give away their possessions for a cup of water."

Captain R. E. Atkins and his Gurkhas spent weeks es-

corting refugee columns, taking Sikhs into India, then bringing a horde of Moslems back over the same route. At the beginning of a march, he remembered, the refugees would be relieved, almost happy to be en route. "Then, with the heat, the thirst, the fatigue, the endless miles, they started throwing things away until, at the end, they had almost nothing left." Occasionally, a plane would appear in the merciless sky to drop food. A panicked rush would follow. Atkins's Gurkhas would have to protect the pitiful rations with fixed bayonets to insure their just distribution. Once, he was startled by the sight of a black-and-white dog running away with a chapati and a crowd chasing it, ready to kill the dog to get the chapati back.

Worst of all were those who could not survive, those who were too young or too old, too weakened by illness, exhaustion or hunger, to go on. There was the pitiful sight of children whose parents no longer had the strength to carry them, left, behind to die in the wake of an on-moving caravan. There were the elderly, resigned to death, tottering off into the fields in search of the shade of a tree under whose comforting branches they might await death. Engraved in the memory of Margaret Bourke-White would be the image of a child left by the side of the road tugging the arms of its dead mother, failing to comprehend why those arms would never pick it up again.

Kuldip Singh, an Indian journalist, could never forget "an old Sikh, flowing beard flecked with gray," thrusting his baby grandson toward his jeep, begging him to take him. "So, at least he will live to see India." H. V. R. Iyengar, Nehru's principal secretary, came upon two Indian Army lieutenants in a station wagon riding behind a column of 100,000 refugees. Their job, they explained, was to look after the newborn and the dead. When a woman went into labor, they would put her into the back of their wagon with a midwife. They would stop just long enough to allow her to deliver. Then, when the next candidate for their improvised delivery room arrived, the mother, only hours, perhaps, from delivery, would have to take her newborn infant, leave the wagon, and resume her walk to India.

The human debris left behind by those columns was terrible. The forty-five miles of roadside from Lahore to Amritsar along which so many passed became a long,

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open graveyard. Before going down it, Captain Atkins would always sprinkle a handkerchief with after-shave lotion and tie it around his face to temper the terrible smell. "Every yard of the way," he remembered, "there was a body, some butchered, some dead of cholera. The vultures had become so bloated by their feasts they could no longer fly, and the wild dogs so demanding in their taste they ate only the livers of the corpses littering the road."

Protecting those chaotic columns spread out over miles of road and field was a staggering problem. They were likely to be attacked almost anywhere along their march. As always, it was the Sikhs whose attacks were the most formidable and the most savage. They would rise in shrieking hordes from the sugar-cane and wheat fields to strike helpless stragglers or those parts of a caravan that were most vulnerable. Lieutenant G. D. Lai would never forget an old Moslem in a column that he was escorting tugging toward Pakistan the only possession he had saved from his homestead, a goat. A dozen miles from the frontier of his new home, the old man's goat began a panicked dash toward a stand of sugar cane. The old man followed in frantic pursuit. Suddenly, like a vengeful wraith, a Sikh rose from the sugar cane, beheaded the old man and ran off with his goat.

Often it fell to a handful of heroic Sikh army officers to oppose the sentiments of their own people by defending helpless Moslems. Outside of Ferozepore, Lieutenant Colonel Gurba Singh came upon the most ghastly sight he had ever seen: the cadavers of a Moslem column waylaid by Sikhs, being devoured by vultures. He marched his two Sikh platoons to the site. He made them stand at attention in the heat and stench while he told them, "The Sikhs who did this disgraced their people. For you to let it happen to those under your protection would be an even worse disgrace to our people."

Marching columns of refugees often passed each other on the highways of their exodus. Occasionally their embittered members leaped on one another in a last spasm of hate, adding a few final victims on the toll each group had suffered. More rarely, a strange miracle would happen. Hindu or Moslem peasants would call to each other the locations of the homesteads they had fled, urging those passing in the other direction to lay claim to their lands.

Ashwini Kumar, a young police officer, would always remember the sight of two refugee columns streaming down the Grand Trunk Highway between Amritsar and Jullundur. There, where the Macedonians of Alexander the Great and the hordes of the Moguls had trod, a line of Moslems flowed toward Pakistan, a line of Hindus into India. They passed in eerie silence. They did not look at each other. They exchanged no hostile gestures, no menacing glances. Occasionally, a crow escaped from one column to the other in a mooing gallop. Otherwise, the creak of wooden wheels, the weary shuffling of thousands of feet were the only sounds rising from the columns. It was as though, in the depths of their own misery, the refugees in each column had instinctively understood the misery of the refugees passing the other way.

Whether moving east or west, those columns all eventually spilled into human pools by the river banks of the three of the Punjab's great rivers barring their route, the Ravi, the Sutlej, and the Beas. There, around each of the inadequate ferries, canal headworks and bridges offering a route across the waters, they waited for hours, sometimes days. These bridges and ferries were, for ten million Indians and Pakistanis in that awful autumn, an end and a beginning, a point of transition from the lives and lands they had left behind to the uncertain destinies toward which they were fleeing.