‘149. It is a fact that in the presence of a crowd numbering 300 to 400 people I did fire shots at Gandhiji in open daylight. I did not make any attempt to run away; in fact, I never entertained any idea of running away. I did not try to shoot myself, it was never my intention to do so, for it was my ardent desire to give vent to my thoughts in an open Court.

The conduct of the police at once changed even on the first day when the Hindus and Sikhs took out a procession in protest against the attempt at foisting Pakistan on the Punjab. The procession of Hindu and Sikh students was perfectly nonviolent. It only raised slogans, but these were in no way against Muslims as such. There was no evidence that this agitation would either grow violent or hold within itself any potentialities detrimental to peace. It was constitutional agitation. Yet the police fired on this procession and several students were killed; many were injured. This was, in the words of the Sikh leader Giani Kartar Singh ‘an attempt to crush, appositive to Pakistan with police aid.’ He further declared, ‘The police did not fire in Lahore for a single day during all the 34 days of Muslim League agitation. It is amazing they could not tolerate our meetings for a single day.’

However we may dwell upon the difficulties of General Dyer during the Amritsar riots, upon the anxious and critical situation in the Punjab, upon the danger to Europeans throughout that province, ... one tremendous fact stands out – I mean the slaughter of nearly 400 persons and the wounding of probably three to four times as many, at the Jallian Wallah Bagh on 13th April. That is an episode which appears to me to be without precedent or parallel in the modern history of the British Empire. ... It is an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation.

Before she could finish, a burst of machine-gun fire ripped up the stone tiles by our feet. We all dived to the ground, our hands raised. No one spoke as the soldiers came and confiscated the papers and took each of us in a different direction. p. 155

Arms they had none, nor scarcely any who knew the use of them: but desperate resolution, when every hope is at stake, supplies, for a while, the want of arms. Near where the Prince de Lambesc was drawn up, were large piles of stones collected for building the new bridge, and with these the people attacked the cavalry. A party of the French guards, upon hearing the firing, rushed from their quarters and joined the people; and the night coming on, the cavalry retreated.

Now [Gerhard] Cordes could see more shapes. The din of motors and clank of treads was tremendous. The earth trembled. He picked up a Panzerfaust. From behind came an abrupt, heavy-throated chorus; 88-mm shells screeched overhead and smashed into the first tanks. Flames shot up, parts of metal and shell fragments rained over the foxholes. At least six tanks were on fire, but others kept coming on and on. In the reddish glare they stood out with clarity and were helpless before the withering fire of the big guns. Red Army infantrymen began erupting from the middle of this massive conflagration. There must have been 800, and they scrambled up the hill shouting, Cordes thought, like madmen. The airmen fired rifles and burp guns, and hundreds of Russians toppled over. The rest came on, still yelling. More fell and at last, like a great wave that has shattered its strength against a jetty, the attackers fell back.

It was a time of tremendous unrest, of labour agitations, of strikes and lockouts. It was a time also when a most stupid reactionary spirit seemed to take possession of the Government and the authorities. The Salvation Army, the Socialists, the trade-unionists—in fact, all bodies holding outdoor meetings—were made special objects of attack. As a protest against this policy a Law and Liberty League was formed in London, and an immense Free Speech meeting was held in Trafalgar Square... I was present at this meeting, which resulted in a bloody riot between the police and the populace. The Trafalgar Square Riot is historic, and to it Mr. John Burns owes, in large part, his subsequent rise to political eminence. Both John Burns and Cunningham Graham served prison sentences for the part they played in the riot, but they gained fame, and they did much to establish the right of free speech for English men. English women are still contending for that right.

In short, when Muhammad Bakhtiyar became aware of the nature of the country, and saw that his men were tired and exhausted, and that many had been slain and disabled in the first day’s march, he consulted with his nobles, and they resolved that it was advisable to retreat, that in the following year they might return to the country in a state of greater preparation. On their way back there was not left on all the road a single blade of grass or a bit of wood. All had been set on fire and burnt. The inhabitants of the valleys and passes had all removed far away from the road, and for the space of fifteen days not a sir of food nor a blade of grass or fodder was to be found, and they were compelled to kill and eat their horses.

Yes, it was five months ago, when our troops in East Prussia caught up with the civilian population evacuating from Goldap, Insterburg and other towns abandoned by the German army. On wagons and cars, on foot, old men, women, children, large patriarchal families slowly on all roads and highways of the country went westwards. Our tankers, infantrymen, artillerymen, signalers overtook them to clear the way, threw their wagons with furniture, valises, suitcases, horses into the ditches on the sides of the highways, pushed aside old men and children and, forgetting about duty and honour and about the German units retreating without a fight, pounced on women and girls in thousands. Women, mothers and their daughters, lay right and left along the motorway, and in front of each one stood a cackling armada of men with their trousers down. The bleeding and fainting are dragged aside, the children who rush to their aid are shot. Cackling, roaring, laughing, screaming and moaning. And their commanders, their majors and colonels stand on the motorway, who laugh, and who conduct - no, rather, regulate. It's so that all their soldiers, without exception, participate. No, it's not circularity, and not at all revenge against the damned occupants - this infernal deadly group sex. Permissiveness, impunity, impersonality and the cruel logic of the maddened crowd. Shocked, I sat in the cab of a semi-truck, my chauffeur Demidov stood in the queue, and I saw Flaubert's Carthage, and I realised that the war would not write off everything. And the colonel, the one who had just been conducting, couldn't stand it and took the queue himself, and the major shot off witnesses, children and old people beating in hysterics.... And the next unit is already behind us. And again we stop, and I can't hold my liaison officers, who are also getting into new queues, and my telephonists are choking with laughter, and I feel nausea coming up to my throat. The corpses of women, old people, children are all the way to the horizon between the mountains of rags and overturned carts.

...from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife.

62. A Crowd is not Company.

To make you cry I’ll tell you about the twelve young impure men I saw executed at Dacca at the end of the Bangladesh war. They executed them on the field of Dacca stadium, with bayonet blows to the torso or abdomen, in the presence of twenty thousand faithful who applauded in the name of God from the bleachers. They thundered "Allah akbar, Allah akbar." Yes, I know: the ancient Romans, those ancient Romans of whom my culture is so proud, entertained themselves in the Coliseum by watching the deaths of Christians fed to the lions. I know, I know: in every country of Europe the Christians, those Christians whose contribution to the History of Thought I recognize despite my atheism, entertained themselves by watching the burning of heretics. But a lot of time has passed since then, we have become a little more civilized, and even the sons of Allah ought to have figured out by now that certain things are just not done. After the twelve impure young men they killed a little boy who had thrown himself at the executioners to save his brother who had been condemned to death. They smashed his head with their combat boots. And if you don’t believe it, well, reread my report or the reports of the French and German journalists who, horrified as I was, were there with me. Or better: look at the photographs that one of them took. Anyway this isn’t even what I want to underline. It’s that, at the conclusion of the slaughter, the twenty thousand faithful (many of whom were women) left the bleachers and went down on the field. Not as a disorganized mob, no. In an orderly manner, with solemnity. They slowly formed a line and, again in the name of God, walked over the cadavers. All the while thundering Allah–akbar, Allah–akbar. They destroyed them like the Twin Towers of New York. They reduced them to a bleeding carpet of smashed bones.

A whole class of people – an 'underclass' if you will – had been dragged back into the ranks of responsible society and asked to become not just dependants but citizens. The violent riots of 31 March in and around Trafalgar Square was their and the Left's response. And the eventual abandonment of the charge represented one of the greatest victories for these people ever conceded by a Conservative Government.

There would have been several dozen killed, burned, detained. And that would have been the end of it. But the flywheel of the war, which is continuing to this day, was spun by our unit. We mixed up all the cards on the table.