XLVAMRITSAR, APRIL 13, 1919
TOWARD the end of the afternoon of Sunday, the 13th, Richard Cobden ordered a carriage. He was still bandaged about the head, his left arm in a sling. This was his first descent from the room since his hurts on the 10th, and meanwhile General Fyatt had taken control of the city, bringing in troops from nearby stations. Dicky had met Fyatt in France, and was on his way now to pay his respects to the General at his Headquarters in the Ram Bagh. He was getting it very clearly just now that if it were observed that he had any sort of affiliation with the natives, he would promptly be placed out of reach of all Punjabi events, even as a spectator.
The American was personally and intensely interested in Nagar and Gandhi, but still he did not feel that he had taken sides in the least. He looked upon Gandhi’s work as visionary, and the work of the British in India as substantial, and the more likely to endure. He had seen Nagar but a moment or two each day since the 10th, and had kept in touch with developments through the English sources.
The air was still furiously hot, though it was after four in the afternoon. The streets were crowded, this being the day of theBaisakifair, and thousands werein from the country. Dicky heard the roar of a ’plane over the city, and craned out of the window of his half-closed carriage for a glance at its flight. The pilot was making circles over a point at a little distance ahead—a low peculiar hovering.
Dicky inquired of his driver the meaning, and was told that the ’plane appeared to be hanging over the great crowd assembled in the Jallianwalla Bagh—that thousands of the visitors attending the fair were there, listening to the speakers, as well as many townsfolk.
“But didn’t the General give orders for no public assemblies?”
The driver had not heard. Dicky reflected that the ’plane didn’t appear to be there for the amusement of a crowd—no circus ’plane, but an effective bit of government property, rather, with an air of business. It rose now and vanished over the city.
The carriage continued on the way to the Ram Bagh, until it was halted for the passage of troops in the street. A half-hundred Gurkhas and Baluchees, two motor cars with English officers and civilians, the whole outfit trailed by a pair of armored cars, and moving in the direction where the government ’plane had hovered.
“Where are they going?” Dicky asked of his driver.
The man was not sure, but suggested the Jallianwalla Bagh.
“What is that place?”
“It is amaidan,” the man said, “a big open square, a public place.”
“Public square,” Dicky muttered. “Turn in shortafter the armored cars,” he commanded the driver. “Follow close.”
“Ram Bagh is not so.”
It is a difficult proceeding, requiring formalities, to alter one’s orders in Asia.
“Listen. I am changing my purpose. Not Ram Bagh, but Jallianwalla. Turn in after the soldiers—now!”
The driver obeyed, but was hurt and murmuring.
To Dicky, that afternoon, Amritsar was a place of heated and offensive stenches. As they passed through hot and narrow streets, certain of these odors startled his comprehension, because they were so subtly vindictive. The thought occurred to him, as he watched the naked children playing in the wet shadows, of what a correspondent had remarked in Cawnpore: that it was hard to tell whether the streets soiled the children, or the children soiled the streets. The movement forward was very slow, and Dicky bent to inquire at length if they were still moving toward Jallianwalla Bagh.
“Yes, it is very near,” said the driver, churning at the lines with both hands.
The American did not let himself think further. He fell into his old queer absorption; the reporter of his makeup taking him over. He shut out Amritsar from mind; the Native Idea, the English Idea, and his own that hovered between. He was just a stranger in a half-closed carriage looking out from under a bandaged brow. He heard the flies in the air. He did not seem to have any mental guard to shut out that distractingbuzz—flies winging across the vapors of filth. They came to a narrow lane, akucha, the driver called it. The armored cars ahead were having difficulty in this constricted place. Finally they halted and Dicky heard a British soldier on the nearest turret call out that the cars could proceed no further.
His own carriage was of course blocked. Thekuchaappeared less than eight feet wide. He was still lame, and had not intended to do much walking about in the furious heat, but beyond the armored cars he had glimpsed the Gurkhas filing forward and the officers stepping out of their machines. He let himself to the ground, ordered the driver to wait, and followed the soldiers through the wet trampled lane.
A minute later he was in the broken ranks of the Gurkhas—little muttering men with big sprawly hands holding fast to their rifles, fingers running loosely over breech and stock and barrel. The halt had come because there was a sudden rise to the ground—a mound of earth closing the lane, and running at angles to each side. The soldiers were ordered up and deployed along the mound; equally divided to the right and left.
Now Richard Cobden, in the midst of the officers and civilians who had occupied the two motor cars, also gained the eminence with some pains; and at this point he saw the man he had started out to find that afternoon—General Fyatt, a significant picture, indeed, here in Amritsar, who had been but a small obscure exhibit in the broad gallery of France.
Fyatt didn’t see him, and the American looked overthe vast assembly of natives in the burning light. On a raised frame toward the center, a Sikh speaker stood. Dicky could hear his words, but did not understand. He saw, however, that the coming of the soldiers had interrupted the tenor of the speech and that many of the people were frightened and drawing away. An English officer beside him, after listening a moment, spoke with an ironical laugh:
“We have nothing to fear. Sarkar is our father and our mother. Government would not injure its children——”
Dicky realized that the young officer had quoted a translation of words the Sikh speaker had just spoken to the people—from twelve to fifteen thousand in themaidan, he reckoned. All faces were now turned to the soldiers—waves of faces. It was as if the color of a tree had changed by a steady pressure of wind that showed the under side of all the leaves. A nervous laugh from the young Englishman who had interpreted; then from General Fyatt, the low single sentence:
“You may give the order.”
“Fire!” the young officer called to his Gurkhas.
To Richard Cobden it was quite incredible, but another officer on the far side of the lane repeated the command, and the line of leveled rifles spurted on either side. Dicky winced at the crashes. He had been in the firing pits many times, but one can never remember how these concussions close by hurt one’s head and spine.... Of course, they were firing blanks. Thiswas Martial Law. The people had been ordered not to assemble and they had disobeyed—twelve thousand of them, or more. General Fyatt had undertaken to impress upon them that his word was Law, Martial Law. Of course, this was also the English answer to April 10th, at the Hallgate Bridge. A bit uncouth to stampede a big crowd like this.
Surely Fyatt couldn’t have realized what this firing of blanks would mean.
They were trampling themselves to death already. This wasn’t English humor. It was more like the fool who yells, “Fire!” in a packed theater.
The great open place was walled. There were no broad exits. The several narrow vents had locked of themselves by the pressing of bodies against them. “Why,” Dicky thought, with a wrench and shiver at the sight of the monster throng in the process of constricting itself, “why, this is a womb of death!”
Cries were sustained at the end of this April holiday—cries of battle and accident and pestilence, the cries from a great ship going down.
Dicky thought of a pot beginning to boil. He thought of a yard of leaves suddenly caught in a swirling wind. He thought of all the old stale similes used and over-used since bloodshed began, and his mind sank back in the hollow of hopelessness. It couldn’t be told, but his faculties tried again and again, even though his heart sobbed with the people.
A great square of colored cloths in the sunlight—from twelve to fifteen thousand human beings listeningto a man who cried out against violence, who cried out thatSarkarcouldn’t hurt his children—suddenly being ground in the great crush of Fear, being sprayed with rifle fire—blanks, of course—but to a result almost as deadly, for the people were destroying each other. They didn’t mean to, but they were trampling each other to death. Thus his mind viewed and reviewed—all this in a matter of seconds.
Now Mr. Cobden saw something he didn’t understand. Down in themaidanon the ground, not fifty feet away—a giant Sikh in white turban, running forward with raised hands, like a messenger—a close-up possibly for Dicky’s eyes alone—suddenly halted, spun and slapped limply to the ground with a curving fling. A glorious fall, if it had been a bit of acting—the fall a man makes when a bullet hits him.
But Dicky was quite possessed with the idea that the soldiers were firing blanks.
At this point, an English officer roared at his Gurkhas, who apparently had been firing high. His words were in vernacular, but the American saw the little dark men shorten their range.
Thus it dawned upon him slowly, as if he were a very stupid man, that Fyatt was punishing Amritsar indeed—in fact, that the General was making a day of it. Also at the same time it dawned upon him that the public square was walled. He had seen the wall before, partly formed of buildings, but it hadn’t properly registered in connection with the words of the twisted ascetic of Cawnpore.
Now he knew also that the several narrow throats of the walled square, none so wide as thekuchathrough which he had entered, had become points of intensified death, because the great throng had divided to crush itself against these impossible apertures. The English officers appeared to be directing the fire of the soldiers toward these points where the maddened masses were most dense.
Almost directly across the square the wall was low, less than six feet. Hundreds were jammed against it, but their bodies were so locked by the pressure from behind that no one could climb or be pushed over into safety.
The Gurkhas looked like monkey men. They stamped queerly as they pumped. They were being told what to do and were in a great concentration to obey exactly. They emptied their magazines, each man taking his own time, and halted to fill them again, carefully avoiding with their fingers the burning metal of the barrels, as they refilled and fired.
An English civilian, an elderly man, face livid, bumped Cobden’s wounded shoulder, as he lurched past, muttering:
“My God! I can’t watch this.”
Another Englishman followed him, venting an hysterical laughter—both faces Dicky had seen in one of the motor cars. For an instant it seemed the only sane action left in the world—to rush out into the lane the way he had come, as these Englishmen were doing, tocover face and ears, to rush forth, to continue to the ends of India and the uttermost parts of the earth.
Dicky started to follow, but turned back.... No, he wouldn’t rush off to be sick. This was the wall that he was to come to. It was something else.... What was it? Oh, yes, it was the Big Story that he had been pacing up and down the world to find.... Of course, it would be like this. He would find himself in the midst of it, without knowing at first.
He ducked forward under the rifles of threesepoysto reach the staff. He couldn’t go away without paying his respects to the General. Was not this what he had started out for to-day? He stumbled over a soldier on his knees—a Baluchee, vomiting with all his might. He saw Fyatt a few paces forward—Fyatt, grizzled, square-shouldered, behind a field glass. A mocking laugh rose in Richard Cobden’s heart. A man didn’t need a field glass to cover themaidan. One could see the faces; one could see the fallen; one could see the writhing cords of human bodies. Oh, no, one didn’t need a field glass. One could see the thousands on themaidannow—as one up-turned face, the face of a child betrayed, but unable to believe. Fyatt merely chose this way to cover his own face. His back looked stiff and blocky as he swung slowly around behind the glasses. His shoulders and neck didn’t move. He turned from the hips, Dicky perceived, as he touched the General’s sleeve.