Warriors: Portraits From the Battle Field by Max Hastings

Author:Max Hastings [Hastings, Max]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307264688
Google: HcW74yF8pVkC
Published: 2006-01-03T11:24:09+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

AN INDIAN ODYSSEY

IN THE ANNALS of British military experience, for two and a half centuries India occupied a towering place. A host of famous soldiers served and fought there, from Robert Clive and the Duke of Wellington to Winston Churchill and Bill Slim. The Indian army, led by British officers immensely proud of their caste, dominated the raj legend. Generations of young imperialists grew up as familiar with Sikhs, Rajputs, Dogras and above all Gurkhas fighting under the Union flag as with the Grenadier Guards or Rifle Brigade.

John Masters represented the fifth generation of his family, and also the last, to serve in India. His own military career was notably colourful, but Masters’s lasting achievement was to preserve it for posterity in a succession of books which became an elegy for Britain’s experience in the subcontinent, and for the old Indian army. He joined its ranks as a twenty-year-old subaltern in 1935, served on and off the North-West Frontier until 1939, and afterwards commanded a brigade in one of the bloodiest and most painful nonsenses of the Second World War—the Chindit operation against the Japanese in Burma—all before he was thirty. His intelligence earned him respect. His ruthlessness and ready tongue made him enemies. He was always richly endowed with prickles, sharpened by malicious mess gossip that he was not really British but an Anglo-Indian, possessed of that gravest of all social embarrassments of the period, “a touch of the tarbrush.” That he was anyway an outsider, quite unlike the run of professional soldiers of his day, was plain to all. In his mid-thirties, Masters abandoned his military career. He moved to the United States, became a successful novelist and took up American citizenship. His most lasting memorial is his loving, exuberant memoir of service with the Gurkha Rifles, Bugles and a Tiger (1955), which ranks among the finest of all warriors’ rhapsodies.

He was born in Calcutta in 1914, son of an Indian army colonel, and lived in the subcontinent until he was seven. By the time he went to Wellington College, and thence somewhat unenthusiastically to the army, his father was eking out an impoverished retirement. Young Jack’s sensitivities were increased by consciousness of his own poverty and, in those class-conscious days, of his mother’s Yorkshire accent and pedigree as a shopkeeper’s daughter. At Sandhurst, the quick-witted young man prospered academically but not socially: “I knew what unpopularity was . . . I am good and bad, pleasant and unpleasant. The trouble in my case seemed to be that people first discovered all the good and then a little later, all the bad.” Shrewd, ambitious, iconoclastic, sexually precocious and intolerant of fools, it was plain to his comrades that Jack Masters was interesting and clever, but he seemed to possess few of the qualities of a gentleman, as defined by professional soldiers of his generation. He, in his turn, found the Royal Military Academy a harsh, brutal place, though he acknowledged its virtues in training cadets to live with each other, and to fit themselves for war.

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