Naturally I accepted the invitation to set up the Pakistan Military Academy. As Sir Claude Auchinleck and Liaquat Ali Khan explained, the new Pakistan Army obviously needed its own supply of young officers – and quickly. In short, Pakistan would need a Sandhurst, a West Point, a Duntroon of her own. During the war I had spent a short but successful term as Commandant of the Armoured Corps Officers’ Training School at Ahmednagar, near Bombay; I thus had some first-hand knowledge of what this job would entail. The appointment would carry the rank of brigadier to begin with and would last as long as it took to get the place established and producing first-class young officers on a regular basis, though in the first instance I signed an agreement to serve Pakistan for three years, until August, 1950.
Not everyone thought I was doing the right thing. The Adjutant-General, Sir Reginald Savory, told me bluntly that he thought me a fool; he had taken an interest in my career ever since the day he inspected the OTS at Ahmednagar while I was in command. I ought to opt for transfer to the British Army, he said; he even showed me my grade and said that as an officer with ‘A1’ against my name I would have an excellent future in the British Army. ‘Damn few in that bracket,’ he barked. ‘You’ll be a damn fool not to transfer to them.’
But I had made up my mind. I had once hoped I might return to Sandhurst as an instructor; but this was even better. To create a military academy from scratch and command it – I just could not resist.
Time was short, however, and there were innumerable preparations to be made before I could leave Delhi. The whole country seemed to be erupting in violence and I wondered how best I could reach Rawalpindi, a large city in the north of what would be Pakistan, where the Pakistan Army would have its headquarters. Eventually I decided to drive up from Delhi on 14 August, the day before ‘P-Day’.
One of my chief worries concerned my old and faithful servant, Adalat Khan. A Muslim, he had been in my employ some ten years; obviously I would take him to Pakistan with me. The roads between Delhi and Rawalpindi were very unsafe, however; every day came news of Muslims being attacked and massacred by Hindus, as well as vice versa. As an Englishman I knew I would probably be safe enough if I ran into an ambush, but if Adalat were with me and we encountered a hostile bunch of Hindus, his safety would be less certain. It seemed a better bet to send him by train; so far they had not been attacked and I had heard that, as so many Muslims would be travelling north to reach Pakistan at Partition, armed escorts would be provided. I booked Adalat on the train to Rawalpindi on the 13th.
The days sped past. While I rushed around completing my arrangements and saying goodbye to everyone in Delhi, Adalat packed up all my gear; by this time I had accumulated rather a lot and it amounted to several boxes full. It was 13 August. I took Adalat to the main Delhi railway station, along with all my belongings. Then we discovered that the special escorts had not yet started on the refugee trains heading for Pakistan. I was not too worried, however; railway passengers were still far less likely to be attacked than travellers on the roads. To be on the safe side I told Adalat to stay on the train no matter what happened; he wasn’t to worry about my baggage which would in any case be loaded into the goods van. I bade him farewell, promising to meet him in two or three days at Flashman’s Hotel in Rawalpindi. Even I didn’t know to what extent we were tempting Fate.
The escorted trains which started a few days later were a disaster. Coming south they were full of Hindu refugees, going north they carried Muslims; either way they were liable to attack by opposing factions. The trains were stormed by hundreds, sometimes thousands, of men, and the small escorts of a dozen or so men were totally inadequate. No one had anticipated the ferocity of these attacks or the careful planning that went into them. Ambushes were laid either in stations or in the open country where the track had been tampered with. The raiders were often armed with mortars and light machine guns, acquired from Assam and the borders of Burma where a mass of redundant weapons had been dumped at the end of the war, buried in huge pits to save transportation costs.
The escorts were invariably swamped by the sheer number of attackers. In some cases they were worse than useless, particularly if the insurgents were their co-religionists, when they simply stood by and watched the slaughter. There were too few British officers to spare for this duty, but when they were available they often put up a fantastic show. One such escort commander heard, while they were already under way, that the engine crew of his train had been bribed to stop at a prearranged place; an ambush would almost certainly await them. He was in the rear coach and the trains in those days did not have communicating corridors. Nothing daunted, he climbed out on to the roof and staggered forward from coach-top to coach-top, swaying perilously, until he reached the locomotive. The engine driver, guessing his mission, slammed on the brakes; but the officer was not to be denied. He bashed the driver and the fireman with the butt of his pistol, then drove the train through the prospective ambushers at sixty miles an hour!
Alas, many British officers were killed carrying out this sort of duty. There was a party of twenty men of the Queen Victoria’s Own Corps of Guides, under one of their own officers, returning from southern India to their home station of Mardan, now in Pakistan. With the exception of the British officer they were all Muslims. Somewhere in central India their train was stopped and attacked by Hindus. Naturally the officer fought alongside his men. It is said they fought until their ammunition ran out, then fought on with their bayonets, but eventually all were overwhelmed by the Hindu mob. Their bodies were never found.
Not content with slaughter, the attackers usually ended by looting the contents of the trains, searching the bodies of their victims for valuables and rifling through boxes of belongings.
But I could only assume that Adalat was safe as I set out on my own journey north on 14 August. Had I waited another week, I am sure I would not have got through in one piece.
The distance from Delhi to Rawalpindi is approximately 500 miles by road. I planned to do it in two stages. First I would drive the two hundred and thirty miles to Jullundur and spend the night there. I hoped to have a chance of meeting an old cavalry officer friend, Brigadier Thyrett-Wheeler, who was in command of a brigade of the Punjab Boundary Force; their HQ was at Jullundur. The next stage would take me across the Beas River and on via Amritsar to the new border and thence to Lahore. Lahore would be the first Pakistani town on my route, and I thought I might spend another night there before pushing on to Rawalpindi.
Early on the morning of 14 August I duly set off in my small black drop-head Vauxhall, with my two Australian terriers in the back. The top was rolled down, my bedding roll and hand luggage were slung in any old how, but on the front seat beside me I placed a .45 Colt automatic. I was wearing uniform, with my black 6th Lancer beret on my head.
The first stage was quite uneventful. I had some sandwiches and beer (very hot by the time I opened it!) and, pausing only for refreshment, made steady progress towards Jullundur. There was much more traffic than usual on the Grand Trunk Road, but I encountered no special cause for delay. Arriving in Jullundur in the late afternoon I found myself a bed at the local dak bungalow, a traveller’s resthouse, and unloaded my gear from the car, noticing as I did so that one of my tyres looked rather jaded; I thus had to put off my visit to Brigade HQ for a while in order to visit the bazaar and search for a replacement. I was in luck, however, and the problem was soon resolved.
I found Brigadier Thyrett-Wheeler in his office; he was too busy to talk at the time but invited me to dinner that evening. I returned to the dak bungalow and took the dogs out for a walk, remarking how peaceful everything seemed in Jullundur, then rejoined my friend for dinner. After an excellent meal and a brandy or two, my host asked where I was heading. Lahore, I told him, then Rawalpindi. His reaction rather startled me.
‘Lahore?’ he echoed. ‘You’re mad!’
Tomorrow was Partition Day and anyone crossing the new border would certainly run into trouble, he said; for my own safety I should be travelling with an escort of armed men. I argued, but he was insistent. He arranged for some watchdogs to join me on my departure at 6 am the following morning.
He should have locked me up. By 5 am I had already left – no escort, just me and my two little dogs. I felt I would be much safer on my own.
I already knew that the most dangerous part of my journey would be between the Beas River and the border, thirty miles beyond Amritsar. This was the heart of the Sikh country. I was not surprised, therefore, when nearing the Beas River bridge I had to stop for a wild party of Sikhs, three to four hundred strong, who were streaming across the road towards a nearby village. They looked to me like a real Sikhjatha, an organized raiding party; all were armed to the teeth. But a casual glance told them that I was alone and unlikely to interfere with their plans, and I took the precaution of keeping my pistol out of sight. They paid me no attention. They rushed past shouting their war cries: ‘Wah, Guru-ji ka Khalsa! Wah, Guru-ji ki fateh!’ (Hail to the Guru of the Sikh religion! Hail to his victory!)
I drove on towards Amristar. The road was now increasingly littered with the pathetic flotsam of a people in flight: shoes, old pots, broken wheels, bits of cloth. And then I started to come upon the bodies. There were scenes of carnage everywhere. In the distance I could see the smoke and flame of innumerable fires, I could hear yelling hordes. Amritsar itself was like the cities I’d seen in Europe in the war, just after the enemy had withdrawn: burning houses, smashed doors and windows, broken carts, telephone lines down, streets empty. There wasn’t a living soul to be seen.
I began to feel I had made a mistake; perhaps my friend in Jullundur had been right. The presence of a company of infantry would undoubtedly have been comforting here. But the Boundary Force could hardly have spared the men; they were already fully stretched as they responded to one call after another, following reports of trouble.
As I left the outskirts of Amritsar I passed through one of the most bestial scenes I have ever witnessed, though it wasn’t till later that I heard what had happened. Four or five hundred Powindah nomads had been ambling peacefully along the Grand Trunk Road towards Amritsar, following their usual route. Half the year they wandered through the lower highlands of Afghanistan and surrounding states, but at this time of year they were starting to filter down through the Punjab towards winter grazing for their animals and the cities where they could do some trading. If they had any religion at all it was Islam, but as nomads they were loners, apolitical, non-violent. Near Amritsar this nomadic party was set upon by a jatha of Sikhs, hiding under cover of crops and armed with automatics and light mortars. Men, women and babies were all slaughtered, even the goats, donkeys and camels.
It must have happened very shortly before I arrived, for I could hear the survivors being chased through the crops by their killers. It was horrible, like a scene from Dante’s Inferno. There was nothing I could do; I simply had to keep going. I picked my way through the corpses and was past the worst of the shambles when some of the murderers must have spotted me. They opened fire on the car. I swung onto the dirt berm at the side of the road, confusing any pursuers with a spume of dust as I sped towards the border. Later I stopped to inspect the damage: two bullet holes through one fender. We’d been lucky, I told my two very shaken little dogs.
I crossed the border with no further trouble and drove into Lahore, the capital city of the Punjab, which I had come to know so well while stationed there in the thirties. The outskirts appeared normal. I drove past that bastion of British officialdom, the Punjab Club, and opposite it the Gymkhana Club where I had had such fun at all the dances. Government House seemed just as aloof and austere as I remembered it. But then I entered the Mall with all its European shops and cafés, and the scene began to change. Alongside Queen Victoria’s statue stood a Sherman tank, obviously cleared for action. Houses were burning or half-demolished, telephone wires were festooned everywhere, shops had been broken into by looters.
I felt quite sick and disheartened. Where was the wonderful freedom that my people had granted so hastily? Everyone seemed to be grabbing their freedom on the end of a knife or cudgel. I drove to Faletti’s Hotel and ordered a drink. Some of the old servants were there, most of them Muslims, and one or two recognized me. All were horrified and apprehensive, despite the fact that they were safely within the confines of their new homeland. I thought of their co-religionists struggling to reach that promised land from the Muslim areas of India.
And there was the other side of the coin: desperate Sikhs and Hindus trying to cross the border in the opposite direction. More than ever now I was convinced that Wavell had been right, Attlee and Mountbatten wrong. As for Sir Cyril Radcliffe, the man whose pencil drew the partition lines on the map, he had done his best; but, with no understanding of India or things Indian, he had made several crass errors. The worst mistake was to allot that predominantly Muslim area, Gurdaspur, to India; the effects of this will be felt for decades, possibly for ever.
I decided not to stay the night in Lahore after all. I finished my drink and started the last leg of my journey. Personally I felt somewhat safer in that I was coming to serve the state of Pakistan. But there were madmen everywhere and one could not relax for a moment. Near Wazirabad there were further signs of recent atrocities: a Muslim mob had stormed a stationary train, looting and murdering the Hindu occupants. Such was the backdrop to the first day of partitioned India.
Late in the evening I drove into the compound of Flashman’s Hotel in Rawalpindi. The strange, incomprehensible bush telegraph of the East was still working. I did not have time to walk from my car to the hotel office before Adalat Khan appeared to take charge of my life again. After my hideous journey I was delighted and relieved to see his open, honest face. He greeted me equally warmly, but with an anxious look. I soon discovered why.
Adalat’s journey, in fact, had been much less eventful than mine. It later turned out that his had been the last of the refugee trains to cross the border unmolested. A Hindu crew had driven as far as the embryo border, then a Muslim crew had taken over. He had reached Rawalpindi safe and sound.
Not so my luggage. I had not been on Adalat’s train – hence his anxious greeting. Wearily I decided that it had probably never even left Delhi and I gave it up for lost.
Weeks later, when I had settled down at Army HQ in Rawalpindi pending selection of a site for the new Academy, a warrant officer walked into my office one morning and told me he had just seen some boxes addressed to me on the platform at Pindi station. I grabbed Adalat and we rushed down to the station. It was there, all of it! I just could not believe it, in view of the daily reports of assaults on trains and the complete looting of their contents. The goods had arrived some six weeks after despatch from Delhi.
It seemed so strange that I instituted enquiries. It turned out that my belongings had been sent on a regular goods train; these trains carried no passengers and were staffed by Hindu crews up to the border, then handed over to Pakistani crews. Supposedly, on the Indian side of the border the locals assumed a goods train was destined for Indian stations, and vice versa on the Pakistan side. And a goods train contained no refugees so it was not considered worthy of an attack!
So I did get my household goods and souvenirs back after all. Indeed, most of them are still in my possession to this day.