Book Review: Bugles and a Tiger by John Masters
Former WWII British Army officer John Masters is one of my heroes. His memoir 'Bugles and a Tiger' ranks among one of the finest of all warrior narratives.
"The Gurkha keeps faith not only with his fellow men but with great spiritual concepts, and above all, with himself." - John Masters, Bugles and a Tiger
Bugles and a Tiger
One of my heroes is a former British Army officer named John Masters. He was a soldier turned novelist. His lasting memorial is his loving, exuberant memoir of service, Bugles and a Tiger: My Life in the Gurkhas. Written in 1956, it ranks among the finest warrior narratives.
Masters the Writer
At 35, after distinguished service in Burma in World War II, he moved to the United States and took up writing. His military career was notably colorful. His lasting achievement was to preserve the British experience in India in the mid-20th century through a succession of memoirs and novels. His works are an elegy for Britain's colonial experience in the subcontinent and the old Indian Army, which British officers commanded.
Distinguished Military Career
Masters was born in Calcutta, India. He was the son of John Masters Sr., a Captain in the 16th Rajput regiment, and his wife Ada (nee Coulthard).
At fourteen, his parents sent him back to his "home country" [England] for his education as a British gentleman.
After being educated in England at Wellington (1928-33), he won a prize cadetship to the Royal Military College, Sandhurst (1933-34). the British West Point. He returned to India in 1934 as a twenty-year-old subaltern (cadet officer) with the 1st Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry. He joined the Prince of Wales Own Gurkha Rifles a year later as a 2nd Lieutenant, then served on the North-West Frontier. He saw active service in Waziristan and Razmak in 1936-38 and Baluchistan in 1939. After the outbreak of war, he served in Iraq, Syria, and Persia.
In 1939, he commanded a brigade in the Chindit Operation against the Japanese in Burma (the same operation as Merrill's Marauders). He left his division in 1942 for training at Staff College and became a Brigadier Major with General Wingate's Chindits in Burma in 1944. Later, as Chief of Staff to the 19th Indian Division, he fought at the Singu Bridgehead, the capture of Mandalay and Toungoo, and on the Mawchi Road.
Masters saw all this action before he was thirty.
After the war, he was assigned to teach mountain and jungle warfare at the Staff College, Camberley. Masters retired from the Army in 1948 as Lieutenant-Colonel with the DSO (awarded in 1944) and OBE (1945). Shortly afterward, he moved to the U.S., which he had visited in 1938 and liked.
He was a prolific writer. He published five highly regarded novels about India in four years. Bugles and a Tiger was his first volume of an autobiography. Masters wrote three well-received volumes of autobiography: Bugles and a Tiger, The Road Past Mandalay, and Pilgrim Son.
His dark skin and love for his indigenous soldiers who served with him gave rise to gossip among his enemies that he was not British at all. Still, an Anglo-Indian possessed of all the social embarrassments of the period, "a touch of the tar brush," he wrote in his memoir.
Masters and his forefathers had served through some of Britain's toughest times. This slander of being of mixed race was almost too much for a man of his proud attitude to bear.
The Gurkhas
At the heart of his experience was his service with soldiers from Nepal. His sympathetic portrayal of his Gurkha soldiers is the basis for his memoir. He loved and admired their toughness and bravery.
The Gurkhas are compact mercenaries from Nepal who are matchless fighting men. The British Indian army commanders claimed they were the "finest soldiers in the world in any army," and they may have been right. Masters certainly thought so. The Gurkhas generally act as infantrymen, carrying a heavy-bladed curved knife called a kukri. There are countless legendary stories of these five-foot, 120-pound dynamos decapitating their enemies while charging machine gun nests armed with only a kukri.
Masters wrote about his beloved Gurkhas:
"As I write these last words, my thoughts return to you, who were my comrades, the stubborn and indomitable peasants of Nepal. Once more, I hear the laughter with which you greeted every hardship. Once more, I see you in your bivouacs or about your fires, on forced march or in the trenches, now shivering with wet and cold, now scorched by a pitiless and burning sun. Uncomplaining, you endure hunger and thirst and wounds, and at last, your unwavering lines disappear into the smoke and wrath of battle. Bravest of the brave, most generous of the generous, never had country more faithful friends than you."
As the book progresses, in 1934, we find Lt. Masters on the Afghan frontier assigned to the 2nd Battalion of the 4th Prince of Wales's Own Gurkha Rifles. Over the next six years, he served in Iraq and Syria in the campaign against the Vichy French. When independence came to India in 1947, his Gurkha regiment was not one of those selected to remain in the British Army. After the war, Masters settled in America, where he started to write.
A Love of India
Masters' enthusiasm and love for those bygone days of the Raj are brought vividly to life. His memoir is heartfelt, full of warm recollections of colorful personalities. Vigorous youth, bivouacs in the freezing sleet, ambushes in remote gorges, marching through tropical jungles, jeweled cities glimpsed at night, and a flood of exotic place names that make music. Through it all runs the vibrant color and eccentricity of India. The author paints an incredible picture of the precarious years before World War II fighting the warring tribes along India's northern mountain border.
North-West Frontier, India (now Pakistan)
Some 75 years ago, Masters was a young officer campaigning against the Pashtuns. He had some choice words in Bugles and a Tiger about fighting the grandfathers and great-grandfathers of today's Taliban, the tough Pashtun tribesmen who fought American troops opposite the Afghan border eighty years after Masters did.
The British often recruited a Pashtun tribe to fight against other Pashtun tribes. The Afghan reputation for duplicity is undeserved. A proverb about Afghans from India is, "You can rent an Afghan's loyalty, but you can't buy it."
In Kim, the classic Kipling tale about India, the protagonist Kimball O'Hara tells his Afghan Mentor, Mahabu Ali, the horse trader: "Trust a Brahmin before a harlot, a harlot before a snake, and a snake before an Afghan."
Masters, like a young calvary lieutenant named Winston Churchill before him, clearly admired the Pashtuns for their endurance and bravery. He said the Pashtuns could cover "… enormous distances at high speed on foot." He continues, "Each man carried 30 or 40 rounds of ammunition, a water bottle, a bag of raisins, a few disks of unleavened bread, and a lump or two of course sugar … loping ceaselessly on at five miles an hour for 20 or 35 miles at a time."
Masters has a lot of lessons to teach us about fighting a war in Afghanistan. A century later, no matter on what side of the Afghan Border the Pashtuns fought, their enemies have never restrained or defeated them.
Kipling and Masters
It's not fair to compare John Masters with Rudyard Kipling, the bard of the British-Indian Raj. Both were born and raised in India, both suffered the typical Anglo-Indian childhood separation from their parents at a young age while being educated back in the "home country" [England], both had a happy reunion with India from public school, and both loved the subcontinent- its culture, history, and people. Both men's peers suspected them of having Indian blood at a time when that was an insult. It was false in Kipling's case. It was correct in Masters' case, and some British officers he served with disliked him because of it.
Bugles and a Tiger is a highly readable and enjoyable account of an action-packed youth. It is a beautiful piece of prose written deeply from the heart of a British officer who loved India. The Indian and Pakistani military academies use the book as a text for young officers before joining their regiments.
Impact
Most of Masters's other works are historical novels set in India. Using his family history as an outline, his writings portray the multi-generational members of the Savage family serving in the British Indian Army. The novels cover approximately 320 years between 1627 and the 1950s.
Told with charm and a considerable amount of self-deprecation, Bugles, and a Tiger is a chronicle of grand adventure. In 1956, when the memoir was published, the British Indian Army seemed, even then, strangely remote. The book represents a universe that vanished a decade after India gained independence. Masters' memoir is a love letter for the last days of the British Raj in India.
The book is the culmination of a young man learning to be an officer and leader. It's a matchless evocation of the British Army in India on the eve of the Second World War. Still, like the Army depicted by Kipling, it stands on the threshold of a war that transformed the world.
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