Bugles and a
Tiger: My Life in the Gurkhas - John Masters
John Masters was a soldier before he became the popular novelist
of the best-selling
Nightrunners
of Bengal, the WWI novel
The Ravi
Lancers, and the light entertainment
The Venus
of Kompara. In 1933, at the age of eighteen, he attended Sandhurst, where all
officers in the British Army are trained. He was commissioned into the
4th Gurkha Rifles in time to take part in some of the last campaigns on the
turbulent north-west frontier of India before WWII.
Granted not all readers will be sympathetic with the
subjects of Sandhurst vigilantes enforcing The Code savagely and of violent
young men fighting massive brawls with each other. His hypothetical realist
replies to charges of hooliganism among cadets:
War is a dirty business, and we
are training these young men for war; we are not running a kindergarten; we do
not intend to snoop around seeing whether the cadets treat one another like
Little Lord Fauntleroys; we have learned
that a wild young man can learn wisdom
as he grows older — if he survives — but a
spiritless young man cannot learn the dash that wins battles. And, finally, we believe that a man’s
contemporaries are his fairest judges.
Nor will all readers relish the blunt stories that
illustrate why the Gurkhas have the legendary reputation that they do:
During World War II a Gurkha
patrol went out in the vicinity of Cassino to locate German positions. After
slipping by two enemy sentries in the dark of the night, they found the other four Germans of the post asleep in
a row in a barn. They beheaded the two
men on the inside, but left the two on
the outside to sleep — to wake up, to try to rouse their comrades ... It was a brilliant
improvisation, which went straight to
the unlovely heart of psychological warfare.
Though we have all had superiors we were loyal to despite
their silence, moodiness, micromanaging, and procrastination, it’s still a
challenge to meet a mind with a different sense of responsibility, of loyalty,
of discipline:
Burbury said, ‘Loyalty means
backing up a man even when he’s in the wrong. Even if he’s stupid and
inefficient. That’s why it’s so hard to be loyal. ….
Still better to be wary, I think, of bosses that are
especially sensitive to disloyalty – to them, the best obedience is exacted
when the subordinate is submitting against her better judgement.
And Masters was certainly a man of his generation.
Imagine what grad students in World Civilizations would do to this aside on
mid-19th century English attitudes in Inja:
There was also an increasingly
strong colour bar, though I get the impression from reading old books and
memoirs that the Englishman’s initial aversion was from Indian customs and habits,
especially those connected with Hinduism, and that he gradually transferred this
feeling to the colour of the Indians’
skin because, whereas the former could be explained, the latter could not, and
was thus indefensible.
Indeed, customs such as animal sacrifice do take up more
pages than we post-modern readers like to read. Suffice to say, even the
British in Indian quite blanched.
The morning wore steadily on and
the smell of blood grew thicker in the dust and glare. One of the British wives
turned green and went away, escorted by her husband, who was almost audibly
saying, ‘I told you so.’ The row of heads, each crowned with a live coal, lengthened.
The smell of burned hair grew stronger, and I was glad of those brandies. At
last the sacrifices came to an end. We hardly had time for a cigarette before
we were on our feet as the pipes began to wail and the drums to thud
But there are incredible stories of bee attacks and other
natural disasters endured:
That night we established camp
at Ghariom, half-way to the Faqir’s cave, and waited for more troops to arrive.
The wait was marked by a storm of appalling violence. In the afternoon the sky
began to darken over, and dust devils hurried down the valley. A drizzle of
rain set in, and after a few minutes changed to light hail. The hail quickly
strengthened and was soon coming down like a barrage from a million machine-guns,
I measured a hailstone 1.6 inches in diameter. The hail cracked tent poles,
tore canvas, and flattened every tent. It stunned five sepoys caught in the open,
though they were wearing turbans, and maddened all our thousand animals so that
they jerked up heel ropes and halters and crashed in snorting, frantic panic
through the shattered camp, leaped the low walls, burst in tethered droves
through the gates and scattered over the countryside. The hail changed to
sleet, back to rain, and for an hour fell like Niagara. It became dark. Thunder
volleyed across the low sky, and below our feet, under the earth, the mountains
shook and grumbled. Lightning flashes sent searing shafts of ruin through the
black rain. In one towering burst I saw four
linked horses galloping abreast over fallen tents and broken boxes, their eyes rolling white, teeth bared,
coats shining wet, a soldier in front of
them. The riderless four of the Apocalypse vanished through the sudden wall of
darkness
Readers into coming of age stories, the British in India,
and unique military memoirs will like this memoir. This volume goes up to WWII.
He chronicled his command of one of the Chindit columns behind enemy lines in
Burma in The Road Past Mandalay, a
classic WWII memoir available in many editions.
