Free FULL MARKS FOR TRYING by BRIGID KEENAN

longing for the Boundary to be announced and get it over . . .’ – but, if anything, when that happened it made the situation worse. In his own areas, Lahore district was divided between India and Pakistan; Ferozepur went to India (though 50 per cent of its inhabitants were Muslims who began to move out) and Montgomery went to Pakistan, though it had a similarly huge Hindu population who also began to move, in the opposite direction.
    Now more and more refugees – hundreds of thousands – were on the road. ‘I have about 8 lacks [800,000] refugees, both Muslim and Sikh/Hindu, passing through my districts and as they are going against each other there is grave danger of mass encounters en route,’ Dad wrote. ‘Our troops are fully extended and going all out to make sure this mass migration is coloured with as little blood as possible, yet a heavy toll is taken every time . . . You see, columns of a lack [100,000] are at least 8 miles long and usually one can spare only one platoon to do the job of escorting them. Crops, grass, etc are good cover, right up to the road, and the murderers come in with their swords and spears and do their killing before escort troops can come up . . .
    â€˜You cannot realise what it looks like, seeing thousands of people go through here. Men, women and children, all with bundles or
charpoys
, bullock carts laden sky-high, tongas, handcarts, barrows, camels, buffaloes, cattle, goats, sheep, dogs, all miserable, all heavily laden, all with some tale of woe, all with very little to look forward to, most of them having left all or most of their most valuable possessions, human, animal or property, in some robber’s or murderer’s hands. My darling, I am glad you don’t know what these poor people go through . . . my heart bleeds for them.’
    A day or two later Dad wrote, ‘I have never felt the animosity between Muslims and Sikhs more in all my service in India . . .’ and he went on to lament the fast-growing communal hatred – particularly of the Sikhs for the Muslims – as being like ‘some foul loathsome disease . . . the lust to kill and burn, to destroy members of the hated other side and all they possess, be they the most innocent babes or harmless women. I shan’t go into what happens every day, everywhere, but I think the saddest thing are abductions of women – or they kill them or slash their breasts and kill their babies . . . It’s a Hitlerian campaign to eliminate as many child-bearers of the other side as possible. A lot of this I have not wanted to tell you before . . .’
    Every day Dad’s litany of death and misery continues: ‘The papers are quiet about it all, but there is butchery, arson, murder, rape and theft on a large scale of everything conceivable going on in the Punjab now – chiefly done by Sikhs. It never lets up . . . they have begun to produce implements of all kinds, pitchforks, spears, lances, daggers, swords, pistols, revolvers, rifles, shotguns, automatic weapons and grenades.
    â€˜Firing a village is a normal occurrence like having breakfast, murder is like having a cigarette, and on the long trails to the main roads, you see everything from headless corpses and maimed women and butchered children to smouldering bullock carts and other property, marking the way . . . I tell you, darling, it is just sheer hell, and I have never conceived of such sufferings as I have witnessed . . . I don’t think there is a parallel in history of two communities as numerous as these two (Muslims and Hindus) just going for each other hammer and tongs . . . We must hurry up and leave this country . . . The misery just makes one feel devastated and one’s thoughts are of God and one’s prayers are for mercy to suffering mankind.’
    At one point, Dad writes that the refugees all