|
Book Review by kind permission of Chowkidar, the journal of the British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia
|
|
This is a slight book, a memoir, as the author says, but it is engagingly
written, and probably one of the final first-person accounts of army
service in undivided India. It was family connections that persuaded
the eighteen-year-old to join up, initially to the Royal Scots, after a
crash course in Urdu. The autumn of I 942 was a dangerous time for a
sea journey, because of U-boat attacks, but the Cape Town Castle
reached Bombay safely in mid-December that year, having to go via the
Cape Officers' Training School followed in Bangalore, before young
Elliot was posted to Abbottabad with the Frontier Force Rifles. Here,
as a newly-commissioned officer, and with an increasingly good
command of Urdu, he was in charge of training new recruits. 'It was a
peaceful but strenuous existence,' he recalls. 'We worked hard and with
enthusiasm to turn Indian villagers into good sepoys.' A huge war-time
demand for soldiers meant that normal areas of recruitment had no
more men to offer, so recruiting teams combed the Punjab, although it
was difficult to train men accustomed only to village life, and there
were a number of desertions.
Few of the new recruits were literate, so education played an important
part of sepoy training. 'They knew that for 30 rupees a month they had
to be soldiers and fight the enemy' (the Japanese). By this time, there
were senior Indian officers who had been recruited under the Viceroy's
Commissioned Officers scheme (VCO) and Emergency Commissioned
Officers (ECO), although the latter faced resentment from older
soldiers who would not mix socially with them. But Captain Elliot
made a number of Indian friends during his service. At the end of the
war he decided to return to civilian life and did not have the
opportunity to revisit India until the 1970s. An enjoyable and
informative little book.
|
|
|
|
