Freedom at Midnight: Inspiration for the major motion picture Viceroy’s House. Dominique Lapierre

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СКАЧАТЬ realism. As they talked, the two men rapidly agreed on two major points: a quick decision was essential to avoid a bloodbath; the division of India would be a tragedy.

      Then Nehru turned to the actions of the next Indian leader who would enter Mountbatten’s study, the penitent marching his lonely path through Noakhali and Bihar. The man to whom he’d been so long devoted was, Nehru said, ‘going around with ointment trying to heal one sore spot after another on the body of India instead of diagnosing the cause of the eruption of the sores and participating in the treatment of the body as a whole’.

      In offering a glimpse into the growing gulf separating the Liberator of India and his closest companions, Nehru’s words provided Mountbatten with a vital insight into the form his actions in Delhi should take. If he could not persuade India’s leaders to keep their country united, he was going to have to persuade them to divide it. Gandhi’s unremitting hostility to partition could place an insurmountable barrier in his path. His only hope in that event would be to persuade the leaders of Congress to break with their leader and agree to divide India as the only solution to their country’s dilemma. Nehru would be the key if that happened. He was the one ally Mountbatten had to have. Only he, Mountbatten thought, might have the authority to stand out against the Mahatma.

      Now his words had revealed the discord between Gandhi and his party chiefs. Mountbatten might be forced to widen and exploit that gap. He spared no effort to win Nehru’s support. On none of India’s leaders would Operation Seduction have more impact than the realistic Kashmiri Brahmin. A friendship that would prove decisive in the months to come was beginning that afternoon.

      Taking Nehru to the door, Mountbatten told him: ‘Mr Nehru, I want you to regard me not as the last British Viceroy winding up the Raj, but as the first to lead the way to a new India.’ Nehru turned and looked at the man he had wanted to see on the viceregal throne. ‘Ah,’ he said, a faint smile creasing his face, ‘now, I know what they mean when they speak of your charm as being so dangerous.’

      Once again, Churchill’s half-naked fakir was sitting in the viceregal study, there ‘to negotiate and parley on equal terms with the representative of the King Emperor’.

      ‘He’s rather like a little bird,’ Louis Mountbatten thought, as he contemplated that famous figure at his side, ‘a kind of sweet, sad sparrow perched on my armchair.’^*

      They made an odd couple: the royal sailor who loved to dress up in uniformed splendour and the elderly Indian who refused to cover his nakedness with anything more than a sheet of rough cotton. Mountbatten, handsome, the vitality surging from his muscled athlete’s body; Gandhi, whose little frame almost disappeared into his armchair; the advocate of non-violence and the professional warrior; the aristocrat and the man who had chosen to live his life immersed in the poverty of the most destitute masses on the globe; Mountbatten, the wartime master of the technology of communications, for ever searching for some new electronic gadget to enhance the complex signal net that linked him to the millions of his command; Gandhi, the fragile Messiah who mistrusted all that paraphernalia and yet still communicated with his public as few figures in this century had been able to.

      All of those elements, almost everything in their backgrounds, seemed to destine the two men to disagreement. And yet, in the months ahead, Gandhi the pacifist would, according to one of his intimates, find in the soul of the professional warrior ‘the echo of certain of the moral values that stirred in his own soul’. For his part, Mountbatten would become so attached to Gandhi that on his death he would predict that ‘Mahatma Gandhi will go down in history on a par with Christ and Buddha’.

      So important had Mountbatten considered this first meeting with Gandhi that he had written to the Mahatma inviting him to Delhi even before the ceremony enthroning him as Viceroy, Gandhi had drafted his reply immediately, then with a chuckle, told an aide, ‘wait a couple of days before putting it in the mail. I don’t want that young man to think I’m dying for his invitation.’

      That ‘young man’ had accompanied his invitation with one of those gestures for which he was becoming noted and which sometimes infuriated his fellow Englishmen. He had offered to send his personal aircraft to Bihar to fly Gandhi to Delhi. Gandhi, however, had declined the offer. He had insisted on travelling, as he always did, in a third-class railway carriage.

      To underline the importance he attached to their first contact and to give their meeting a special cordiality, Mountbatten had asked his wife to be present. Now, contemplating the famous figure opposite them, worry and concern swept over the viceregal couple. The Mahatma, they both immediately sensed, was profoundly unhappy, trapped in the grip of some mysterious remorse. Had they done something wrong? Neglected some arcane law of protocol?

      Mountbatten gave his wife an anxious glance. ‘God,’ he thought, ‘what a terrible way to start things off!’ As politely as he could, he asked Gandhi if something was troubling him.

      A slow, sorrowful sigh escaped the Indian leader. ‘You know,’ he replied, ‘all my life, since I was in South Africa, I’ve renounced physical possessions.’ He owned virtually nothing, he explained: his Gita, the tin utensils from which he ate, mementoes of his stay in Yeravda prison, his three ‘gurus’. And his watch, his old eight-shilling Ingersoll he hung from a string around his waist because, if he was going to devote every minute of his day to God’s work, he had to know what time it was.

      ‘Do you know what?’ he asked sadly. ‘They stole it. Someone in my railway compartment coming down to Delhi stole the watch.’ As the frail figure lost in his armchair spoke those words, Mountbatten saw tears shining in his eyes. In an instant, the Viceroy understood. It was not the loss of his watch that so pained Gandhi. What hurt was that they had not understood. It was not an eight-shilling watch an unknown hand had plucked from him in that congested railway car, but a particle of his faith.^*

      Finally, after a long silence, Gandhi began to talk of India’s current dilemma. Mountbatten interrupted with a friendly wave of his hand. ‘Mr Gandhi,’ he said, ‘first, I want to know who you are.’

      The Viceroy’s words reflected a deliberate tactic. He was determined to get to know those Indian leaders before allowing them to begin assailing him with their minimum demands and final conditions. By putting them at ease, by getting them to confide in him, he hoped to create an atmosphere of mutual confidence and sympathy in which his own dynamic personality could have greater impact.

      The Mahatma was delighted by the ploy. He loved to talk about himself and in the Mountbattens he had a pair of people genuinely interested in what he had to say. He rambled on about South Africa, his days as a stretcher-bearer in the Boer War, civil disobedience, the Salt March. Once he said, the West had received its inspiration from the East in the messages of Zoroaster, Buddha, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Rama. For centuries, however, the East had been conquered culturally by the West. Now the West, haunted by spectres like the atomic bomb, had need to look eastwards once again. There, he hoped, it might find the message of love and fraternal understanding he sought to preach.

      Their conversation went on for two hours. It was punctuated by a simple, yet extraordinary gesture, a gesture which provided a clue as to how successful Mountbatten’s overtures had been, how responsive a chord they were striking in Gandhi.

      Halfway through their talks, the trio strolled into the Moghul Gardens for photographs. When they finished, they turned to re-enter the house. The 77-year-old leader loved to walk with his hands resting upon the shoulders of two young girls, to whom he fondly referred as his ‘crutches’. Now, the revolutionary who’d spent a lifetime struggling with the British, instinctively laid his hand upon the shoulder of Britain’s last Vicereine and, as tranquilly as if he were strolling off to his evening СКАЧАТЬ