AN ARMY’S FAITH AND HONOUR

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33929, 23 August 1975, Page 10

AN ARMY’S FAITH AND HONOUR

A Matter of Honour; An Account of the Indian Army. Its Officers and Men. By Philip Mason. Jonathan Cape. 534 pp. Notes, bibliography and index. N.Z. price $13.90.

From its earliest days on the southeast coast f India, the Honourable Fast India Company employed armed Indians to guard its' trading posts. By rhe middle of the eighteenth century handfuls of French and English traders were fighting each other in India with both sides employing much larger numbers of local tr<x>ps.

Two hundred years later, during the Second World War. 2.5 million Indians volunteered to fight for George VI. their King-Emporor. in his wars with Germany. Italy and Japan. The largest volunteer army the world has ever seen flocked to the colours of an alien ruler. This magnificent demonstration of loyalty was the most profound mark of approval and justification which British rule in Indian could have received. British rule for 200 years had been established and maintained, finally, by an army which always included a great majority of Indian volunteers. The British ruled India by the consent of its peoples; as that consent began to be questioned in the twentieth century, the British withdrew. No other mperial power in history has held an empire — or given it up — in such a manner And the key to it all was the Indian Arms, first the company’s army, the “beautiful sepoy regiments" in red jackets and pipeclay, and after the mutiny of 1857, the soldiers of the Queen-Empress and her successors.

To write a history of that army is to write an account of courage, endurance and loyalty without parallel

in modern times. To other imperial powers the Indian .Army was inexplicable. Even today, the new imperialists in Moscow and Peking dare not garrison their conquests in Eastern Europe or Tibet almost entirely with local troops.

But the British held the North-West Frontier with Indian troops and policed the whole of India with them. Mr Mason finds the explanation for the loyalty the British evoked in the great, if now unfashionable concepts of honour and confidence. British officers had confidence in their men; Indian soldiers had confidence in their officers. Not only confidence that they would care for them and lead them well, but confidence in the stability and continuity and fairness of British rule.

The army as a career and as a guarantor of stability offered something unkown in Indian experience — the promise of a stable future for all Indians, and especially for the old soldier and his family and village. To serve the army faithfully, the sepoy’s oath bound him in a matter of honour with his officers which was real and personal and intense. Outsiders might insist it was an army of mercenaries, but while men might join for pay. they did not win Victoria Crosses in the winter mud in Flanders for a few rupees a week.

Few men can be better qualified to write a history of this remarkable army and its achievements. Mr Mason had a long career in the Indian Civil Service before independence: his twovolume history, "The Men Who Rule India.” published under the name of Philip Woodruff, is a standard work on British rule.

If his obvious love for India and the old Indian Army infuses a bias, that is no more than’ the subject deserves. And Mason’s treatment of the army’s blackest times — during the mutiny and in the Indian National Army built up by the Japanese in the Second World War — is never less than fair British behaviour towards Indians, and, Indian attitudes to the British, were not an unrelieved tale of mutual respect.

The dark areas are more than overshadowed by honour and courage, even in the darkest times. The behaviour of Gurkhas and Sikhs on the ridge at Delhi and in the relief of Lucknow during the mutiny, for example, were outstanding justifications of the British treatment of recently conquered peoples.

The events in the mutiny led to a predisposition among the British to recruit in future from what were believed to be the “martial peoples” of the north and west was. however, unfortunate. The lesson of the time of Lord Clive — that even the “softest” Madrassis, properly trained and led. could fight like heroes — was forgotten until the Second World War. Ihe question of Indian nationalism in the twentieth century also receives a good deal of attention Jn the end it

split the army between the new States of India and Pakistan, but the army remained surprisingly remote from the political furore of Gandhism and the Indian Congress. Mr Mason carefully eschews discussing events since 1947, but the reader, after following the growth of this superb and diverse institution for 200 years, can only grieve for its fate. Partition was bad enough. Both Indian and Pakistan since have put their armies to base purposes — fighting one another, suppressing political dissidents, encroaching on neighbour’s territory. Against China in 1962, Indian politicians asked and received a super-human effort from their army without providing it the weapons or •supplies for the task. Perhaps its worst duty of all is being required now by Mrs Gandhi — to impose dictatorship on its own people. Fidelity to honour must be split today between loyalty to the Government, whose oath the army has taken, and loyalty to the peoples from which it is drawn. The army has become the arbiter of the fate of democracy and civility in India. Mr Mason’s remarkable book is a magnificent introduction to the ways in which it can be expected to behave.