Golden Afternoon by M. M. Kaye Read Free Book Online Page A

matter into their own hands — and did so. The results have been collected in detail in a book entitled
The Other Side of the Medal
, which does not make pretty reading.
    A little over sixty years later, in a last echo of those terrible days, the terrified, bloodstained little ghosts of those who died in the
Bibi-ghur
at Cawnpore crept out from the blackness of the well into which their bodies had been thrown, to haunt a man by the name of Dyer, who, though born seven years after their deaths, had been brought up by people to whom the Mutiny and its horror-stories were part of current history and their day-to-day lives.
    He had joined the army and done well there, and shortly after the end of the First World War (by which time he had reached the rank of General) he was called upon to cope with a savage explosion of violence, anarchy and rioting that had broken out in the Punjab, whipped up by agitators demanding immediate independence. The burning and looting inevitably led to bloodshed, and in Amritsar, a centre of the violence, the mob killed five Europeans, three of them, Scott, Stewart and Thompson, bank managers whom they beat up with
lathis
* before dragging them up to the flat rooftops of their respective banks and throwing them down onto the pavements below, where the mob doused them with kerosene oil and set them alight. Mr Robinson, a railway guard, was also beaten to death by the
lathis
of another ‘unarmed’ mob, while Sergeant Rowlands, an electrician peacefully on his way to work at the Municipal Power House and unaware of any trouble, was attacked and had his hands hacked off before being battered to death.
    There was very nearly a sixth victim, a Miss Sherwood, whom the mob beat and left for dead. Poor Marcella Sherwood, a woman doctor who for fifteen years had worked selflessly for the Zenana Mission Society and the women of Amritsar, heard of the rioting and, though warned of the danger, sped off on her bicycle to make sure that all her pupils got safely back to their homes. She was well known and liked by the citizens. But by now the mob had embarked on an orgy of blood and violence, and seeing her appear a group of youths began yelling, ‘She’s English! Kill her! She’s English!’ A man in the crowd shouted back that she was a good woman, a healer and a teacher; but the crowds were drunk on destruction and one of the youths pulled her off her bicycle by her hair and pushed her to the ground. She managed to scramble up and run, only to be brought down again; and at that the frenzied mob closed in like hounds at a kill, snarling, ripping and kicking the defenceless woman until they reduced her to a bloodstained pulp. Shouting exultantly that she was dead, they left her lying in the gutter and rushed away in search of further entertainment; yelling, of
all
things, ‘Victory to Gandhi!’
    For it was Gandhi’s tragedy (and India’s even more so) that this Mahatma who preached peace and non-violence understood the mind of the British so much better than the mind of his own people, and never seems to have realized that any gathering of the latter must, when whipped up by inflammatory speeches by an agitator, inevitably lead to violence. It is only too possible that this revered and world-famous apostle may, after all, have been personally responsible for more deaths than Stalin. Though not, as it happened, for Marcella’s, who by some miracle survived — her battered and unrecognizable body having been retrieved and cared for, at the risk of their lives, by a bazaar shopkeeper and his wife. But this savage attack on a harmless woman, and the brutal murders of the five non-combatant Europeans for no better reason than their nationality, served to convince many more people than Dyer that what they were seeing was a rerun of the opening days of the Mutiny.
    Murderers like Dundu Pant are extolled as heroic freedom fighters,while men like Dyer are execrated in films,