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Masters Autobiography Trilogy #1
Bugles and a Tiger: A Volume of Autobiography
John Masters was a soldier before he became a bestselling novelist. He went to Sandhurst in 1933 at the age of eighteen and was commissioned into the 4th Gurkha Rifles in time to take part in some of the last campaigns on the turbulent north-west frontier of India. John Masters joined a Gurhka regiment on receiving his commission, and his depiction of garrison life and campaigning on the North-West Frontier has never been surpassed. BUGLES AND A TIGER is a matchless evocation of the British Army in India on the eve of the Second World War. Still very much the army depicted by Kipling, it stands on the threshold of a war that will transform the world. This book is the first of three volumes of autobiography that touched a chord in the post-war world.
312 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1956
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696 people want to read
About the author
John Masters
146 books51 followersMasters was the son of a lieutenant-colonel whose family had a long tradition of service in the Indian Army. He was educated at Wellington and Sandhurst. On graduating from Sandhurst in 1933, he was seconded to the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry (DCLI) for a year before applying to serve with the 4th Prince of Wales's Own Gurkha Rifles. He saw service on the North-West Frontier with the 2nd battalion of the regiment, and was rapidly given a variety of appointments within the battalion and the regimental depot, becoming the Adjutant of the 2nd battalion in early 1939.
During World War II his battalion was sent to Basra in Iraq, during the brief Anglo-Iraqi War. Masters subsequently served in Iraq, Syria and Persia. In early 1942, he attended the Indian Army Staff College at Quetta. Here he met the wife of a fellow officer and began an affair. They were later to marry. This caused a small scandal at the time.
After Staff College he first served as Brigade Major in 114th Indian Infantry Brigade before being "poached" by "Joe" Lentaigne, another officer from 4th Gurkhas, to be Brigade Major in 111th Indian Infantry Brigade, a Chindit formation. From March, 1944, the brigade served behind the Japanese lines in Burma. On the death of General Orde Wingate on 24 April, Lentaigne became the Chindits' overall commander and Masters commanded the main body of 111 Brigade.
In May, the brigade was ordered to hold a position code-named ‘Blackpool’ near Mogaung in northern Burma. The isolated position was attacked with great intensity for seventeen days and eventually the brigade was forced to withdraw. Masters had to order the medical orderlies to shoot 19 of his own men, casualties who had no hope of recovery or rescue. Masters later wrote about these events in the second volume of his autobiography, The Road Past Mandalay.
After briefly commanding the 3rd battalion of his regiment, Masters subsequently became GSO1 (the Chief of Staff) of Indian 19th Infantry Division, which was heavily involved in the later stages of the Burma Campaign, until the end of the war. After a spell as a staff officer in GHQ India in Delhi, he then served as an instructor at the British Army Staff College, Camberley. He left the army after this posting, and moved to the United States, where he attempted to set up a business promoting walking tours in the Himalayas, one of his hobbies. The business was not a success and, to make ends meet, he decided to write of his experiences in the army. When his novels proved popular, he became a full-time writer.
In later life, Masters and his wife Barbara moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. He died in 1983 from complications following heart surgery. His family and friends scattered his ashes from an aeroplane over the mountain trails he loved to hike. General Sir Michael Rose, the former UN commander in Bosnia, is a stepson of Masters.
During World War II his battalion was sent to Basra in Iraq, during the brief Anglo-Iraqi War. Masters subsequently served in Iraq, Syria and Persia. In early 1942, he attended the Indian Army Staff College at Quetta. Here he met the wife of a fellow officer and began an affair. They were later to marry. This caused a small scandal at the time.
After Staff College he first served as Brigade Major in 114th Indian Infantry Brigade before being "poached" by "Joe" Lentaigne, another officer from 4th Gurkhas, to be Brigade Major in 111th Indian Infantry Brigade, a Chindit formation. From March, 1944, the brigade served behind the Japanese lines in Burma. On the death of General Orde Wingate on 24 April, Lentaigne became the Chindits' overall commander and Masters commanded the main body of 111 Brigade.
In May, the brigade was ordered to hold a position code-named ‘Blackpool’ near Mogaung in northern Burma. The isolated position was attacked with great intensity for seventeen days and eventually the brigade was forced to withdraw. Masters had to order the medical orderlies to shoot 19 of his own men, casualties who had no hope of recovery or rescue. Masters later wrote about these events in the second volume of his autobiography, The Road Past Mandalay.
After briefly commanding the 3rd battalion of his regiment, Masters subsequently became GSO1 (the Chief of Staff) of Indian 19th Infantry Division, which was heavily involved in the later stages of the Burma Campaign, until the end of the war. After a spell as a staff officer in GHQ India in Delhi, he then served as an instructor at the British Army Staff College, Camberley. He left the army after this posting, and moved to the United States, where he attempted to set up a business promoting walking tours in the Himalayas, one of his hobbies. The business was not a success and, to make ends meet, he decided to write of his experiences in the army. When his novels proved popular, he became a full-time writer.
In later life, Masters and his wife Barbara moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. He died in 1983 from complications following heart surgery. His family and friends scattered his ashes from an aeroplane over the mountain trails he loved to hike. General Sir Michael Rose, the former UN commander in Bosnia, is a stepson of Masters.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 52 reviews
May 5, 2025
The first of Jack Masters' three autobiographies, this was an excellent and detailed view of Masters' career in the Indian Army. After graduating from Sandhurst (officer training school) in 1933, he was seconded to the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry for a year before applying to serve with the 4th Prince of Wales's Own Gurkha Rifles. He saw service on the North-West Frontier (in Pakistan, at the border with Afghanistan) with the 2nd battalion of the regiment, and was rapidly given a variety of appointments within the battalion and the regimental depot, becoming the Adjutant of the 2nd battalion in early 1939 (where this book ends).
It is generally told in a linear fashion, although it does duck back and forward in time to provide explanation or background to a situation. The writing I found very good, with very detailed descriptions of all manner of aspects of life. Where I believe he excelled was describing the nature of his Gurkha soldiers - whom he clearly has an affinity with, and great respect for. There were some very astute observations made by Masters, who really proved his understanding of his men.
There was plenty of humour in the telling of his stories, often Masters himself was the source, but he also recalls stories about fellow officers (although he doesn't name names). There was also enough light history, where appropriate in the narrative, to fill in some explanations.
Also covered is and impromptu tiger hunt and Masters' travel through the USA when on ferlough, enroute back to Britain - again interesting perceptions of the States in this era.
The book comes to a close as Germany ramps up the war by invading Poland.
There were many great quotes, although I didn't mark them as I read, but if interested I suggest taking a look at reviews from Michael and Chrisl who both have a lot of the memorable quotes.
4.5 stars, rounded down.
It is generally told in a linear fashion, although it does duck back and forward in time to provide explanation or background to a situation. The writing I found very good, with very detailed descriptions of all manner of aspects of life. Where I believe he excelled was describing the nature of his Gurkha soldiers - whom he clearly has an affinity with, and great respect for. There were some very astute observations made by Masters, who really proved his understanding of his men.
There was plenty of humour in the telling of his stories, often Masters himself was the source, but he also recalls stories about fellow officers (although he doesn't name names). There was also enough light history, where appropriate in the narrative, to fill in some explanations.
Also covered is and impromptu tiger hunt and Masters' travel through the USA when on ferlough, enroute back to Britain - again interesting perceptions of the States in this era.
The book comes to a close as Germany ramps up the war by invading Poland.
There were many great quotes, although I didn't mark them as I read, but if interested I suggest taking a look at reviews from Michael and Chrisl who both have a lot of the memorable quotes.
4.5 stars, rounded down.
April 7, 2018
It’s a shame something this good should only be subject to 25 reviews on Goodreads. This first of the novelist’s three volumes of autobiography is quite an interesting addition to the tradition of a soldier’s account of his transformations from experiences as a youth with military training and subsequent maturation through service in the field. That’s because of its setting in India in the twilight of the British Empire in the 1930s and because of his personal collision between the elitism experienced at the Sandhurst Royal Military Academy and the family-like sense of belonging he gained from serving in a Gurkha regiment of the British Indian Army.
Personally, I was drawn to this book from an interest in learning how Masters’ background accounts for his sensitive treatment of Indians in his novels. The two I enjoyed includes “The Night Runners of Bengal” (1951; featuring events of the Sepoy Revolt of 1857) and “Bhowani Junction” (1954; with a backdrop of Indian independence and devastations of Partition). I also wanted to tap into the origins of his special affinity the Gurkha people, which I had already marveled at in the second volume of his autobiography, “The Road Past Mandalay”, in which he served during WW2 as a staff officer for Gurkha forces in the Middle East and Burma.
Gurkhas came to northern India from Nepal. After the Anglo-Nepalese War of 1815, the East India Company recognized their fighting mettle and initiated regular recruitment for service with the colonial army, a tradition continued when the Brits instituted government control of the Raj under a Viceroy after the Sepoy Revolt. These legendary regiments of Gurkhas keep showing up in hot spots in my reading of British military campaigns, such as in Africa and Gallipoli battles in WW1 and, in WW2, in tough battles in North Africa and sometimes alongside Lawrence of Arabia in the Middle East.
Masters comes off as quite lonely through his youth and early career, speaking very little of family or friends. By tradition, children of colonial military families are sent back to the mother ship for schooling to be instilled with the proper class consciousness, moral deportment, and loyalty to the empire. He had already gone “native” it seems and didn’t appreciate the games of the aristocracy. Awkward and shy, he took to literature for escape and achievement in the Wellington boarding school and at Sandhurst used his smarts to compensate for modest physical prowess and manly grit. When it came time to pick a permanent placement, he already knew he wanted to serve with an Indian regiment instead of a regular British unit. When he picked the 4th Gurkhas (and they picked him as part of the process), he didn’t know how much joining their society would abate his long sense of isolation. I was charmed by his regard and respect for these people:
Though there are, of course, exceptions, the distinguishing marks of the Gurkha are usually a Mongolian appearance, short stature, a merry disposition, and an indefinable quality that is hard to pin down with one word. Straightness, honesty, naturalness, loyalty, courage—all these are near it, but none is quite right, for the quality embraces all of these. … In a Gurkha regiment nothing was ever stolen. Desertions were unheard of …There were no excuses, no grumbling, no shirking, no lying. There was no intrigue, no apple-polishing, and no servility.
The perfect man—or, at the least, the perfect soldier? Not quite. The Gurkha was slow at book-learning, and he liked gambling, rum, and women; and, in his own home, he was apt to be unkempt.
But these large generalizations are vague and patronizing. It is impossible to give an idea of the Gurkha by such mean, because each Gurkha is a separate man.
…The Gurkha keeps faith not only with his fellow men but with great spiritual concepts, and, above all, with himself. He seems to be born with the ability to see the heart of a problem regardless of distracting circumstances, red herrings, or conflicting advice. He does not think, cogitate—he will tell you shyly that he is not clever enough for that—but he bends facts, arguments, and logic to fit what he somehow knows is right.
Masters is aware of the potential of contributing to a whitewash of the inequities of British colonialism. He doesn’t hold back on examples of brutality and snobbery among British officers. For most of his tour, his regiment served in the North West Frontier region (now Pakistan adjacent to Afghanistan) with a duty mainly to quell tribal conflicts and bandit raids across the border. But in 1935, a case of a Hindu girl kidnapped and forcibly converted to Islam by a Pashtun (he uses “Pathan”) escalated into a prolonged series of battles with these fierce fighters. After experiencing their merciless practice of torturing, killing, and mutilation of captives, Masters suggests that examples of payback brutality were not uncommon. The hit and run guerilla tactics of their foe was hard to counter. As with so many armies that have faced rebels in these mountainous regions from Alexander on down, the limitations of traditional ways of waging war go out the window.
A saving grace of the narrative is plenty of self-deprecation and comic interludes. He also provides plenty of examples of the Gurkha sense of humor. As a great example, he describes here the lift provided on a grim and brutal march of their column by a messenger boy trotting along a line of pack camels:
As he went he leaped up and tweaked each male animal’s testicles. The load on our backs became as nothing from that moment, and, as for me, apart from the satisfaction of a second-hand catharsis, I shall never forget the sudden alteration of expression on each camel’s face as Dhansing reached its hind end. Camels wear a conceited and abominably supercilious look, because it was into a camel’s ear alone that Mohammed whispered the hundredth name of God. The memory of these ungainly beasts, starting forward, the expression on their faces changing from pompous omniscience to alarmed outrage, has often made me wish to introduce Dhansing among a roomful of literary critics. I am sure he would see the resemblance.
All along the way in this tale there are some colorful or comic adaptations of British officers to the limited access to appropriate women. With so few British officers with wives in residence, the taboo against adultery gets regularly assailed. I appreciated Masters’ insights in this summary of the situation:
It is useless to pretend that our life was a normal one. Ours was a one-sexed society, with the women hanging on to the edges. Married or unmarried, their status was really that of camp followers. …In India there was always an unnatural tension, and every man who pursued the physical aim of sexual relief was in danger of developing a cynical hardness and a lack of sympathy which he had no business to learn until many more years had maltreated him. …And some took up the most unlikely hobbies, and some went to diseased harlots …and some married in haste, only to worry over who was now seducing their wives in the hill stations where they had seduced so many other peoples’ wives. And a few homosexuals followed their secret star with comparative comfort in that large and easy-going country, where there are so many sins that there is no sin, except inhospitality.
Throughout this read I wondered what the proper level of sympathy I should be feeling for Masters, who after all was acting as the instrument of imperialism. As with Kipling, I recognize his love of the place and the people and appreciate his art in conveying them in a multidimensional portrait. Though Masters at one point claims “Kim” to be the best book written in English about India, he does identify in Kipling a racial superiority that he himself decries. Wiki tells me that Masters was sometimes defensive about having Indian blood and later had to accommodate to the discovery that it was true. Wiki also tells me that the Indian writer Khushwant Singh “remarked that while Kipling understood India, John Masters understood Indians.”
Personally, I was drawn to this book from an interest in learning how Masters’ background accounts for his sensitive treatment of Indians in his novels. The two I enjoyed includes “The Night Runners of Bengal” (1951; featuring events of the Sepoy Revolt of 1857) and “Bhowani Junction” (1954; with a backdrop of Indian independence and devastations of Partition). I also wanted to tap into the origins of his special affinity the Gurkha people, which I had already marveled at in the second volume of his autobiography, “The Road Past Mandalay”, in which he served during WW2 as a staff officer for Gurkha forces in the Middle East and Burma.
Gurkhas came to northern India from Nepal. After the Anglo-Nepalese War of 1815, the East India Company recognized their fighting mettle and initiated regular recruitment for service with the colonial army, a tradition continued when the Brits instituted government control of the Raj under a Viceroy after the Sepoy Revolt. These legendary regiments of Gurkhas keep showing up in hot spots in my reading of British military campaigns, such as in Africa and Gallipoli battles in WW1 and, in WW2, in tough battles in North Africa and sometimes alongside Lawrence of Arabia in the Middle East.
Masters comes off as quite lonely through his youth and early career, speaking very little of family or friends. By tradition, children of colonial military families are sent back to the mother ship for schooling to be instilled with the proper class consciousness, moral deportment, and loyalty to the empire. He had already gone “native” it seems and didn’t appreciate the games of the aristocracy. Awkward and shy, he took to literature for escape and achievement in the Wellington boarding school and at Sandhurst used his smarts to compensate for modest physical prowess and manly grit. When it came time to pick a permanent placement, he already knew he wanted to serve with an Indian regiment instead of a regular British unit. When he picked the 4th Gurkhas (and they picked him as part of the process), he didn’t know how much joining their society would abate his long sense of isolation. I was charmed by his regard and respect for these people:
Though there are, of course, exceptions, the distinguishing marks of the Gurkha are usually a Mongolian appearance, short stature, a merry disposition, and an indefinable quality that is hard to pin down with one word. Straightness, honesty, naturalness, loyalty, courage—all these are near it, but none is quite right, for the quality embraces all of these. … In a Gurkha regiment nothing was ever stolen. Desertions were unheard of …There were no excuses, no grumbling, no shirking, no lying. There was no intrigue, no apple-polishing, and no servility.
The perfect man—or, at the least, the perfect soldier? Not quite. The Gurkha was slow at book-learning, and he liked gambling, rum, and women; and, in his own home, he was apt to be unkempt.
But these large generalizations are vague and patronizing. It is impossible to give an idea of the Gurkha by such mean, because each Gurkha is a separate man.
…The Gurkha keeps faith not only with his fellow men but with great spiritual concepts, and, above all, with himself. He seems to be born with the ability to see the heart of a problem regardless of distracting circumstances, red herrings, or conflicting advice. He does not think, cogitate—he will tell you shyly that he is not clever enough for that—but he bends facts, arguments, and logic to fit what he somehow knows is right.
Masters is aware of the potential of contributing to a whitewash of the inequities of British colonialism. He doesn’t hold back on examples of brutality and snobbery among British officers. For most of his tour, his regiment served in the North West Frontier region (now Pakistan adjacent to Afghanistan) with a duty mainly to quell tribal conflicts and bandit raids across the border. But in 1935, a case of a Hindu girl kidnapped and forcibly converted to Islam by a Pashtun (he uses “Pathan”) escalated into a prolonged series of battles with these fierce fighters. After experiencing their merciless practice of torturing, killing, and mutilation of captives, Masters suggests that examples of payback brutality were not uncommon. The hit and run guerilla tactics of their foe was hard to counter. As with so many armies that have faced rebels in these mountainous regions from Alexander on down, the limitations of traditional ways of waging war go out the window.
A saving grace of the narrative is plenty of self-deprecation and comic interludes. He also provides plenty of examples of the Gurkha sense of humor. As a great example, he describes here the lift provided on a grim and brutal march of their column by a messenger boy trotting along a line of pack camels:
As he went he leaped up and tweaked each male animal’s testicles. The load on our backs became as nothing from that moment, and, as for me, apart from the satisfaction of a second-hand catharsis, I shall never forget the sudden alteration of expression on each camel’s face as Dhansing reached its hind end. Camels wear a conceited and abominably supercilious look, because it was into a camel’s ear alone that Mohammed whispered the hundredth name of God. The memory of these ungainly beasts, starting forward, the expression on their faces changing from pompous omniscience to alarmed outrage, has often made me wish to introduce Dhansing among a roomful of literary critics. I am sure he would see the resemblance.
All along the way in this tale there are some colorful or comic adaptations of British officers to the limited access to appropriate women. With so few British officers with wives in residence, the taboo against adultery gets regularly assailed. I appreciated Masters’ insights in this summary of the situation:
It is useless to pretend that our life was a normal one. Ours was a one-sexed society, with the women hanging on to the edges. Married or unmarried, their status was really that of camp followers. …In India there was always an unnatural tension, and every man who pursued the physical aim of sexual relief was in danger of developing a cynical hardness and a lack of sympathy which he had no business to learn until many more years had maltreated him. …And some took up the most unlikely hobbies, and some went to diseased harlots …and some married in haste, only to worry over who was now seducing their wives in the hill stations where they had seduced so many other peoples’ wives. And a few homosexuals followed their secret star with comparative comfort in that large and easy-going country, where there are so many sins that there is no sin, except inhospitality.
Throughout this read I wondered what the proper level of sympathy I should be feeling for Masters, who after all was acting as the instrument of imperialism. As with Kipling, I recognize his love of the place and the people and appreciate his art in conveying them in a multidimensional portrait. Though Masters at one point claims “Kim” to be the best book written in English about India, he does identify in Kipling a racial superiority that he himself decries. Wiki tells me that Masters was sometimes defensive about having Indian blood and later had to accommodate to the discovery that it was true. Wiki also tells me that the Indian writer Khushwant Singh “remarked that while Kipling understood India, John Masters understood Indians.”
January 7, 2019
1/3/'19 - Starting re-read and surprised to see front of book map with no Pakistan. ... It's 1935. Waziristan.
Lost interest in reading about the military elements again ... have read about Indian Army in multiple other contexts.
Recommend for readers interested in subject area. India-history-1930s
Suggest reading some of the following quotes for the travel flavor.
In years gone by, Masters' novels were among those that provided my perspective on India.
Readers of the new historical fiction series set in India (by Mukherjee) might appreciate the India Masters reveals in Bugles ...
**
Other, previously unexplored books to delve await at the library.
Need to return ILL before ordering another.
***
quote, page 8:
"As the conquering British, more than a hundred years ago, moved diagonally northwestward across India from their original trading posts in Surat, Calcutta, and Madras, they eventually reached the mountains that separate the sub continent from Afghanistan. These mountains extend four hundred miles from the Khyber Pass in the north to the Bolan Pass in the deserts of Baluchistan to the south. They are raw and bare, and a proudly independent people lives in them. These people, Semitic in origin, Moslem in religion, Pushtu in speech, are the Pathans. (The name is pronounced 'P'tahn,' except by British soldiers, who use 'Paythan.'
"The Pathans, subdivided into various tribes, live astride the Indo-Afghan border, which runs roughly down the middle of the mountain chain. Not only do different members of the same tribe live on opposite sides of the international boundary, but the same family or subtribe may own winter fields on the Indian side and summer grazing on the Afghan side. In all historical time the Pathans have kept themselves alive by a combination of nomad life, half-hearted tillage of the barren earth, armed raids into the settled farmlands of the plains, and levying tolls on the commercial traffic that must use the few routes through their hills. ..."
"Well armed, owning no king or central authority, loosely organized into soviets of tribes, subtribes, and families, fanatically adhering to the Moslem law, addicted to blood feuds and vendettas, the Pathans gave the oncoming British serious pause ..."
page 9
"Since the Government of India was, until 1947, entirely controlled by the British it is hardly necessary to say ... The government actually administered the country as far as a line known as the Administrative Border. West of this, in a belt varying from ten to a hundred miles in width, was Tribal Territory. Here the Pathans could govern themselves as they pleased ..."
page 10
" ... to hold the strategic passes, the government built forts and stationed soldiers at a few places of particular importance inside Tribal Territory ..."
"Razmak, whence we had marched out on this column a few days earlier, was the largest of the garrisons in Tribal Territory. Here, on a plateau 6500 feet above sea level, secluded behind a triple circle of barbed wire and arc lights, had sprung up an unnatural town with a population of ten thousand men and three thousand mules ..."
page 11
"At evening, the day's march done and the stone wall built, we sat, sweat-stained, around the cookers and smoked and drank strong tea. At night, as we made our rounds of duty, the stars gleamed on the bayonets of the silent sentries along the wall. At dawn we awoke to the shrill, sweet call of the mountain artillery trumpets blowing a long reveille. ..."
page 16
"They were small and cheerful and they had the air of so many gamboling bullpups--ugly, independent, good-humored. I was determined to go to Gurkas.
page 17
"I found to my surprise that the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry thought rifles were for firing, not just for drill. The soldiers had to use oil on them, and any attempt to burn them clean with methylated spirits, as we had done at Sandhurst, would have ended in a court martial."
page 23
"I knew where I was going, in both the metaphorical and the literal senses, for the 4th Gurkhas had not accepted me without sending for me and taking a look at me, as I explain later. Literally, I knew that where the blinding white road ended the narrow-gauge railway would begin. A little locomotive would chuff across the burning desert to the Indus at ten miles an hours. That train was called the Heatstroke Express, and it would rumble over the dark red girders of the Indus Bridge, and there on the other side would be the broad-gauge train. On, slowly north along the arid left bank of the Indus, in the Punjab now--two changes, two days, and I'd arrive at railhead. From there, another mountain road, another Indian bus. At last the red roofs of Bakloh, a little military colony crouched on a narrow, forested ridge in the foothills of the Himalaya. Bakloh was the home of my regiment, and my regiment was to be my home for as long as I, a young man, could foresee."
***
page 63
"The wings of my luck beat strongly over me when I was vetted in July of 1935. One of India's typically confused religious disputes had been going on for some months in Lahore ...
"The Shadiganj Affair boiled over while I was being vetted in Bakloh, 140 miles away ...
page 64
"But the blessed cantankerousness of India's religions saved me ... so this train was taking me at a dignified pace ...
"The broad-gauge railway ends at Pathankot. In the outside world Pathankot is probably known only by those who remember Kipling's story, 'The Arrest of Lieutenant Golightly.' To us, who used it frequently, it was famous for its station restaurant, where a decrepit staff rigidly adhered, at all seasons and through many years, to the best Indian traditions of catering for travelers. The menu for lunch and dinner was always the same--chicken curry and caramel custard. The bottles of Pan Yan pickle ... The hand punkah was always in the same state of dusty disrepair, its rope frayed but never broken. ... This was only my third passage through the place, but I geeted the familiar dead flies and cobwebs with affection and was happily stuffed full of curry when I set off to find the bus ...
"Indian buses were all built on the same lines. On an American chassis--Ford, Chevrolet ... local carpenters mounted an ill-fitting wooden body, painted the whole in garish colors, and added representations of a few temples, cows, and tigers. On the road the vehicle rattled, squeaked, groaned, and swayed. The cautious traveler never put his finger or his person close to two separate parts because when the bus started they would become moving parts and would pinch him. Behind the driver there was one first-class seat, thinly padded. ...
page 65
"I found my bus in its stable, its tires looking wan. About thirty minutes after the advertised time of departure the Sikh driver appeared and started up the engine. Impatient now, I jumped into the first-class seat--and we were away.
"We traveled fifty yards to the bus office and stopped. There seemed to be a hundred people and a thousand cubic feet of baggage to be loaded. After twenty or thirty minutes all was on board, the driver jumped in--and we were away.
"We traveled fifty yards and stopped. We filled up with gas. Many of the passengers, who had been hanging on by their nails or bulging through the windows, got out and relieved themselves in the dust. The second-class passengers began to look carsick. The driver jumped in--and we were away.
"We traveled fifty yards, back to the bus office, and stopped. The driver disappeared inside to check his invoices and bills of lading. Our tickets were inspected and three stowaways thrown off. After twenty minutes the driver jumped in--and we were away.
"There were only two more stops before we finally did leave the town, one to pick up a goat ... and one at the octroi post. In all my time in India I never saw a bus driver or anyone else actually pay any octroi, but there was an octroi post on the outskirts of almost every town, and buses always stopped there. This time the resident tax collector, who was sitting inside with his feet on the table, in the pompous trance of oriental officialdom, came out and went through a slow-motion routine of inspecting us, our baggage, and the merchandise. Then he waved a finger--and we were away.
page 66
"We were away through the unspeakable squalor of the out-skirts of Pathankot and then on the wide road between the mango trees. The world was green, and little convoys of overloaded donkeys and gaily shawled women walked along the grass verge under the trees. We honked ... The bus had an electric horn, but it was disconnected to save the battery and to enable the driver to show his virtuosity on the winding mountain road, where one hand perpetually lonked at the rubber bulb of the old-fashioned horn, and the other changed gear--'Look, no hands!' To the left as the road swung, the forested hills climbed up and away, rolling higher and higher till they disappeared into the hazy surge of the Himalaya. ... gap in the trees ... unveil an austere, blue-white wall of ice a hundred miles away ... A little later we rushed heedlessly under a cliff of conglomerate and the sign guarding it: DRIVE CAREFULLY, LOOKING UPWARDS.
"After three hours of terrifying effort, after the radiator had boiled twice ... after everyone in the back of the bus had been sick ... we stopped on the edge of a precipice and I got out. This was Tuni Hatti, and I had arrived. There was said to be a truck coming down the three miles from Bakloh to the road junction here. It would (perhaps) arrive in an hour, or (perhaps) two.
"'Salaam, sahib,' said the driver. The bus roared away down a curving slope, the engine switched off, out of gear, the top load swaying, the paper-thin tires sliding on the loose surface ...
"I left my bags and boxes and started walking up the hill ...
I saw the rifle range, and on the grassy knoll above the butts, a clump of trees. They were a rare kind of date palm and looked out of place among the pines. An exactly similar clump of the same rare date trees crowned the end of the next spur ... next lower spur ... was another clump of palms. I sat down to draw breath, and to look at the palms. I felt the grip of the same awed fascination that had overtaken me when I firest heard the legend about them.
"The local hillmen said that these palms marked the line of Alexander the Great's outposts. The clumps were descended from the dates Alexander's soldiers had brought from the banks of the Tigris. Certainly the trees rose in the places any officer would have chosen for an out post line, and history confirms that this was indeed the farthest limit of Alexander's penetration to the east. I thought: Perhaps a young Macedonian officer climbed this path to inspect his posts. They were strangers here too ..."
page 68
" ... I reached the crest, which was occupied by the parade ground--another major feat of landscape enginerring. Then came barracks, more pines, ... past the tiny church and the German trophy guns from Flanders, and onto the mess lawn, into the mess itself. ...
"The Victorian founders of our regiment had built the mess low, of stone, and set it on the edge of the ridge, its front turned to the Himalaya. The Edwardians had glassed in the back veranda, which faced south over the edge of the ridge, toward India. And so, near the end of the century-long dream, we Georgians took our ease there, as on the promenade deck of a moored airship. Beyond the glass, forests and terraced fields dropped steeply away for 2500 feet, then climbed with the same precipitousness to a ridge two miles distant ... To the right the Ravi River burst through a clift in the foothills ... To the left the Beas River curled out of Kulu, the Valley of the Gods ... I had come to my home."
page 75
" ... In England I had tried to ape the fashionable ignorance of India, but now already I found myself resenting England's total unawareness of this country, which she owned and governed at so long a distance of distaste. I did not like hearing Indians spoken of as 'niggers,' 'wogs,' 'Hindoos,' ... the standard terms of the British soldier and often of the British Service officer. To me already ... they were Dogras, Bengalis, Afridis, Konkani Mahrattas.
"Then there was Kipling ... Why had Kipling gone out of his way to underline with sadistic approval attitudes of mind and habits of race-consciousness that must have caused pain to anyone who loved India? But his descriptions--the turn of a phrase that caught exactly some intonation I had just heard, some sight and smell of the Indian road I had just traveled, some breath from the mountains beyond my window--what of these? These proved that he did love India. No one could write like that except from love. ..."
" ... Kipling later. What was all that recurring nonsense of his about 'Black Infantry'? Had he meant to speak of Gurkhas in that derogatory sense? If so, he was a color-crazy ass. "
***
page 77 - The Gurkhas are the people of Nepal ... conquered the original Newar inhabitants in 1768. The immediately subsequent history of Nepal is a tale of court intrigue, poisoning, murder, and civil war, that makes Renaissance Florence seem like a kindergarten. Yet the Gurkhas also found time to fight the Tibetans to the north, keep their independence against the grasping, ubiquitous fingers of the Chinese Empire, and, at last, spill out into India."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolan_Pass
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khyber_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balochi...
more later
***
Original review
copied and pasted KIRKUS REVIEW
If any writer could persuade the American reading public to read a detailed record of five years as a very junior officer of the 2nd Battalion, 4th Prince of Wales's Own Gurkha Rifles, that one might well be John Masters. For he was that young officer, fifth generation of his family to serve in India. He is known in the U.S.A. for a number of distinguished novels, with Indian backgrounds. Here we have his authority. Born in Calcutta, of English parentage, he was educated in England- there is something of that English education here, too- then came back to India, and ""fell in love with it"". There are long stretches of analysis of the composition of the British military organization in India that will- even written as Masters can write- bore most Americans. But there is a great deal more:- the human side, the just slightly tongue-in-cheek response to the traditional attitudes and disciplines of the soldier's life. (One understands a great deal more about the British sense of responsibility after reading this, even if the sympathy is still lacking.) Then, too, there is adventure,- ambushes, attack by tiger, bivouacs in sleet, frontier troubles, the jungles, the mountains. There's a glimpse into the psychology of the color problem, too. There's flavor and richness here, in a portrait of a modern India with something of the Kipling aura, while at the same time detachment from it. Pick your market -- definitely for those eager to broaden their horizons beyond the limited understanding we have of Britain and India. This volume goes up to World War II- the phony war behind them. Selected for January Book of the Month, this will have that head start over the hurdle of some of the difficulties."
Lost interest in reading about the military elements again ... have read about Indian Army in multiple other contexts.
Recommend for readers interested in subject area. India-history-1930s
Suggest reading some of the following quotes for the travel flavor.
In years gone by, Masters' novels were among those that provided my perspective on India.
Readers of the new historical fiction series set in India (by Mukherjee) might appreciate the India Masters reveals in Bugles ...
**
Other, previously unexplored books to delve await at the library.
Need to return ILL before ordering another.
***
quote, page 8:
"As the conquering British, more than a hundred years ago, moved diagonally northwestward across India from their original trading posts in Surat, Calcutta, and Madras, they eventually reached the mountains that separate the sub continent from Afghanistan. These mountains extend four hundred miles from the Khyber Pass in the north to the Bolan Pass in the deserts of Baluchistan to the south. They are raw and bare, and a proudly independent people lives in them. These people, Semitic in origin, Moslem in religion, Pushtu in speech, are the Pathans. (The name is pronounced 'P'tahn,' except by British soldiers, who use 'Paythan.'
"The Pathans, subdivided into various tribes, live astride the Indo-Afghan border, which runs roughly down the middle of the mountain chain. Not only do different members of the same tribe live on opposite sides of the international boundary, but the same family or subtribe may own winter fields on the Indian side and summer grazing on the Afghan side. In all historical time the Pathans have kept themselves alive by a combination of nomad life, half-hearted tillage of the barren earth, armed raids into the settled farmlands of the plains, and levying tolls on the commercial traffic that must use the few routes through their hills. ..."
"Well armed, owning no king or central authority, loosely organized into soviets of tribes, subtribes, and families, fanatically adhering to the Moslem law, addicted to blood feuds and vendettas, the Pathans gave the oncoming British serious pause ..."
page 9
"Since the Government of India was, until 1947, entirely controlled by the British it is hardly necessary to say ... The government actually administered the country as far as a line known as the Administrative Border. West of this, in a belt varying from ten to a hundred miles in width, was Tribal Territory. Here the Pathans could govern themselves as they pleased ..."
page 10
" ... to hold the strategic passes, the government built forts and stationed soldiers at a few places of particular importance inside Tribal Territory ..."
"Razmak, whence we had marched out on this column a few days earlier, was the largest of the garrisons in Tribal Territory. Here, on a plateau 6500 feet above sea level, secluded behind a triple circle of barbed wire and arc lights, had sprung up an unnatural town with a population of ten thousand men and three thousand mules ..."
page 11
"At evening, the day's march done and the stone wall built, we sat, sweat-stained, around the cookers and smoked and drank strong tea. At night, as we made our rounds of duty, the stars gleamed on the bayonets of the silent sentries along the wall. At dawn we awoke to the shrill, sweet call of the mountain artillery trumpets blowing a long reveille. ..."
page 16
"They were small and cheerful and they had the air of so many gamboling bullpups--ugly, independent, good-humored. I was determined to go to Gurkas.
page 17
"I found to my surprise that the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry thought rifles were for firing, not just for drill. The soldiers had to use oil on them, and any attempt to burn them clean with methylated spirits, as we had done at Sandhurst, would have ended in a court martial."
page 23
"I knew where I was going, in both the metaphorical and the literal senses, for the 4th Gurkhas had not accepted me without sending for me and taking a look at me, as I explain later. Literally, I knew that where the blinding white road ended the narrow-gauge railway would begin. A little locomotive would chuff across the burning desert to the Indus at ten miles an hours. That train was called the Heatstroke Express, and it would rumble over the dark red girders of the Indus Bridge, and there on the other side would be the broad-gauge train. On, slowly north along the arid left bank of the Indus, in the Punjab now--two changes, two days, and I'd arrive at railhead. From there, another mountain road, another Indian bus. At last the red roofs of Bakloh, a little military colony crouched on a narrow, forested ridge in the foothills of the Himalaya. Bakloh was the home of my regiment, and my regiment was to be my home for as long as I, a young man, could foresee."
***
page 63
"The wings of my luck beat strongly over me when I was vetted in July of 1935. One of India's typically confused religious disputes had been going on for some months in Lahore ...
"The Shadiganj Affair boiled over while I was being vetted in Bakloh, 140 miles away ...
page 64
"But the blessed cantankerousness of India's religions saved me ... so this train was taking me at a dignified pace ...
"The broad-gauge railway ends at Pathankot. In the outside world Pathankot is probably known only by those who remember Kipling's story, 'The Arrest of Lieutenant Golightly.' To us, who used it frequently, it was famous for its station restaurant, where a decrepit staff rigidly adhered, at all seasons and through many years, to the best Indian traditions of catering for travelers. The menu for lunch and dinner was always the same--chicken curry and caramel custard. The bottles of Pan Yan pickle ... The hand punkah was always in the same state of dusty disrepair, its rope frayed but never broken. ... This was only my third passage through the place, but I geeted the familiar dead flies and cobwebs with affection and was happily stuffed full of curry when I set off to find the bus ...
"Indian buses were all built on the same lines. On an American chassis--Ford, Chevrolet ... local carpenters mounted an ill-fitting wooden body, painted the whole in garish colors, and added representations of a few temples, cows, and tigers. On the road the vehicle rattled, squeaked, groaned, and swayed. The cautious traveler never put his finger or his person close to two separate parts because when the bus started they would become moving parts and would pinch him. Behind the driver there was one first-class seat, thinly padded. ...
page 65
"I found my bus in its stable, its tires looking wan. About thirty minutes after the advertised time of departure the Sikh driver appeared and started up the engine. Impatient now, I jumped into the first-class seat--and we were away.
"We traveled fifty yards to the bus office and stopped. There seemed to be a hundred people and a thousand cubic feet of baggage to be loaded. After twenty or thirty minutes all was on board, the driver jumped in--and we were away.
"We traveled fifty yards and stopped. We filled up with gas. Many of the passengers, who had been hanging on by their nails or bulging through the windows, got out and relieved themselves in the dust. The second-class passengers began to look carsick. The driver jumped in--and we were away.
"We traveled fifty yards, back to the bus office, and stopped. The driver disappeared inside to check his invoices and bills of lading. Our tickets were inspected and three stowaways thrown off. After twenty minutes the driver jumped in--and we were away.
"There were only two more stops before we finally did leave the town, one to pick up a goat ... and one at the octroi post. In all my time in India I never saw a bus driver or anyone else actually pay any octroi, but there was an octroi post on the outskirts of almost every town, and buses always stopped there. This time the resident tax collector, who was sitting inside with his feet on the table, in the pompous trance of oriental officialdom, came out and went through a slow-motion routine of inspecting us, our baggage, and the merchandise. Then he waved a finger--and we were away.
page 66
"We were away through the unspeakable squalor of the out-skirts of Pathankot and then on the wide road between the mango trees. The world was green, and little convoys of overloaded donkeys and gaily shawled women walked along the grass verge under the trees. We honked ... The bus had an electric horn, but it was disconnected to save the battery and to enable the driver to show his virtuosity on the winding mountain road, where one hand perpetually lonked at the rubber bulb of the old-fashioned horn, and the other changed gear--'Look, no hands!' To the left as the road swung, the forested hills climbed up and away, rolling higher and higher till they disappeared into the hazy surge of the Himalaya. ... gap in the trees ... unveil an austere, blue-white wall of ice a hundred miles away ... A little later we rushed heedlessly under a cliff of conglomerate and the sign guarding it: DRIVE CAREFULLY, LOOKING UPWARDS.
"After three hours of terrifying effort, after the radiator had boiled twice ... after everyone in the back of the bus had been sick ... we stopped on the edge of a precipice and I got out. This was Tuni Hatti, and I had arrived. There was said to be a truck coming down the three miles from Bakloh to the road junction here. It would (perhaps) arrive in an hour, or (perhaps) two.
"'Salaam, sahib,' said the driver. The bus roared away down a curving slope, the engine switched off, out of gear, the top load swaying, the paper-thin tires sliding on the loose surface ...
"I left my bags and boxes and started walking up the hill ...
I saw the rifle range, and on the grassy knoll above the butts, a clump of trees. They were a rare kind of date palm and looked out of place among the pines. An exactly similar clump of the same rare date trees crowned the end of the next spur ... next lower spur ... was another clump of palms. I sat down to draw breath, and to look at the palms. I felt the grip of the same awed fascination that had overtaken me when I firest heard the legend about them.
"The local hillmen said that these palms marked the line of Alexander the Great's outposts. The clumps were descended from the dates Alexander's soldiers had brought from the banks of the Tigris. Certainly the trees rose in the places any officer would have chosen for an out post line, and history confirms that this was indeed the farthest limit of Alexander's penetration to the east. I thought: Perhaps a young Macedonian officer climbed this path to inspect his posts. They were strangers here too ..."
page 68
" ... I reached the crest, which was occupied by the parade ground--another major feat of landscape enginerring. Then came barracks, more pines, ... past the tiny church and the German trophy guns from Flanders, and onto the mess lawn, into the mess itself. ...
"The Victorian founders of our regiment had built the mess low, of stone, and set it on the edge of the ridge, its front turned to the Himalaya. The Edwardians had glassed in the back veranda, which faced south over the edge of the ridge, toward India. And so, near the end of the century-long dream, we Georgians took our ease there, as on the promenade deck of a moored airship. Beyond the glass, forests and terraced fields dropped steeply away for 2500 feet, then climbed with the same precipitousness to a ridge two miles distant ... To the right the Ravi River burst through a clift in the foothills ... To the left the Beas River curled out of Kulu, the Valley of the Gods ... I had come to my home."
page 75
" ... In England I had tried to ape the fashionable ignorance of India, but now already I found myself resenting England's total unawareness of this country, which she owned and governed at so long a distance of distaste. I did not like hearing Indians spoken of as 'niggers,' 'wogs,' 'Hindoos,' ... the standard terms of the British soldier and often of the British Service officer. To me already ... they were Dogras, Bengalis, Afridis, Konkani Mahrattas.
"Then there was Kipling ... Why had Kipling gone out of his way to underline with sadistic approval attitudes of mind and habits of race-consciousness that must have caused pain to anyone who loved India? But his descriptions--the turn of a phrase that caught exactly some intonation I had just heard, some sight and smell of the Indian road I had just traveled, some breath from the mountains beyond my window--what of these? These proved that he did love India. No one could write like that except from love. ..."
" ... Kipling later. What was all that recurring nonsense of his about 'Black Infantry'? Had he meant to speak of Gurkhas in that derogatory sense? If so, he was a color-crazy ass. "
***
page 77 - The Gurkhas are the people of Nepal ... conquered the original Newar inhabitants in 1768. The immediately subsequent history of Nepal is a tale of court intrigue, poisoning, murder, and civil war, that makes Renaissance Florence seem like a kindergarten. Yet the Gurkhas also found time to fight the Tibetans to the north, keep their independence against the grasping, ubiquitous fingers of the Chinese Empire, and, at last, spill out into India."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolan_Pass
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khyber_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balochi...
more later
***
Original review
copied and pasted KIRKUS REVIEW
If any writer could persuade the American reading public to read a detailed record of five years as a very junior officer of the 2nd Battalion, 4th Prince of Wales's Own Gurkha Rifles, that one might well be John Masters. For he was that young officer, fifth generation of his family to serve in India. He is known in the U.S.A. for a number of distinguished novels, with Indian backgrounds. Here we have his authority. Born in Calcutta, of English parentage, he was educated in England- there is something of that English education here, too- then came back to India, and ""fell in love with it"". There are long stretches of analysis of the composition of the British military organization in India that will- even written as Masters can write- bore most Americans. But there is a great deal more:- the human side, the just slightly tongue-in-cheek response to the traditional attitudes and disciplines of the soldier's life. (One understands a great deal more about the British sense of responsibility after reading this, even if the sympathy is still lacking.) Then, too, there is adventure,- ambushes, attack by tiger, bivouacs in sleet, frontier troubles, the jungles, the mountains. There's a glimpse into the psychology of the color problem, too. There's flavor and richness here, in a portrait of a modern India with something of the Kipling aura, while at the same time detachment from it. Pick your market -- definitely for those eager to broaden their horizons beyond the limited understanding we have of Britain and India. This volume goes up to World War II- the phony war behind them. Selected for January Book of the Month, this will have that head start over the hurdle of some of the difficulties."
February 17, 2015
A previous reviewer warned that if a potential reader was looking for an account of what war was like with the predecessors of today's Taliban, they would be somewhat disappointed. Indeed, John Master's account of war with the Pathans only accounts for roughly 10-15% of this book. However- that isn't to say what is there, isn't of value. There are descriptions of combat and the region which may be of interest to someone familiar with the most recent conflict, not to mention that Master's complaints about restrictive rules of engagement are as bitter as anything written about Afghanistan in the last 14 years. It seems that the conflict between the guidance to wage a humanistic campaign that limited civilian casualties, while attempting to utilize tactics that were "effective", is not a new dilemma. The more things change, etc.
The rest of the book, to put it mildly, is fascinating. Masters is a very evocative writer and paints a vivid picture of a world that no longer exists- the life of a British officer, in a storied regiment of Gurkhas in the North West Frontier Province (and what today is the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan) of the late 1930's. There is also a long section on Master's education at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, as well as in-depth observations of the tribal customs, traditions, rituals and mores of the British Officer Class and the Gurkhas themselves. Equally interesting are his perceptions of 1938 America which he visited on a furlough. The book opened my eyes to a place and period of history that I'd previously had no interest in, but now has intrigued me significantly.
The book ends with the start of hostilities with Germany. Given what I've just read about John Master's evolution from green Subaltern to seasoned professional soldier, and I can't see stopping now. His memoir of WWII is next.
"Bugles and a Tiger" is an excellent slice of history.
The rest of the book, to put it mildly, is fascinating. Masters is a very evocative writer and paints a vivid picture of a world that no longer exists- the life of a British officer, in a storied regiment of Gurkhas in the North West Frontier Province (and what today is the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan) of the late 1930's. There is also a long section on Master's education at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, as well as in-depth observations of the tribal customs, traditions, rituals and mores of the British Officer Class and the Gurkhas themselves. Equally interesting are his perceptions of 1938 America which he visited on a furlough. The book opened my eyes to a place and period of history that I'd previously had no interest in, but now has intrigued me significantly.
The book ends with the start of hostilities with Germany. Given what I've just read about John Master's evolution from green Subaltern to seasoned professional soldier, and I can't see stopping now. His memoir of WWII is next.
"Bugles and a Tiger" is an excellent slice of history.
January 26, 2018
John Masters' memoir of his early life as a soldier in India is a joy to read. Later very successful as a novelist, his sense of place, character and history is unerring. This might be one of the best written military memoirs you will ever read.
Due to family penury, but a long history with the Raj Army, John was destined for imperial service. His attendance at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst and further service with first British and then Gurkha troops in India, just prior to the beginning of World War II, makes up the bulk of the prose. But there are also tales from a trip across America, a impromptu Tiger hunt and many long discussions of India as both a place and state of mind. In all he grabs your attention and keeps the pace compelling at all times.
The junior reader will find a great introduction to India and the Empire, the discussion is always simple and direct, although the vocabulary will be challenging. Well worth the effort. Military Enthusiasts/Gamers/Modellers will find this a treasure trove of information and scenario/diorama concept development. Gurkha fans will not want to have missed this book, as a British Officers' eloquent discussion of their best soldiers is always a treat.
Due to family penury, but a long history with the Raj Army, John was destined for imperial service. His attendance at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst and further service with first British and then Gurkha troops in India, just prior to the beginning of World War II, makes up the bulk of the prose. But there are also tales from a trip across America, a impromptu Tiger hunt and many long discussions of India as both a place and state of mind. In all he grabs your attention and keeps the pace compelling at all times.
The junior reader will find a great introduction to India and the Empire, the discussion is always simple and direct, although the vocabulary will be challenging. Well worth the effort. Military Enthusiasts/Gamers/Modellers will find this a treasure trove of information and scenario/diorama concept development. Gurkha fans will not want to have missed this book, as a British Officers' eloquent discussion of their best soldiers is always a treat.
January 18, 2017
Some years ago I actually read the second book in this autobiographical trilogy, "The Road Past Mandalay", which relates John Masters' experiences in WWII. I have a 1961 edition of that book which had belonged to my father, who had himself been part of the 14th Army in India and Burma in WWII. After reading it I always had it in mind to read the series from the beginning.
In this book the author lays out his life story from the early 1930s and the beginning of his time at Sandhurst (the officer training school for the British Army), up to the outbreak of the Second World War. Masters is quite honest that as a young man he was quite full of himself, and as a result wasn't always well-liked. One of the book's themes is about how he developed as a person as a result of his time as an Indian Army officer.
The book certainly has its moments, but on the whole I wasn't as impressed with it as I was with "The Road Past Mandalay". Much of the humour is of the English public school variety, which leaves me cold, though I did laugh my way through the chapter where Masters, as a serving Indian Army officer, goes to the cinema to see "Lives of a Bengal Lancer" - his first sight of India as it was envisaged by 1930s Hollywood. On a personal level I also had to smile at the author's reference to the phrase "Ek dum", an expression my dad used when I was a boy and he wanted me to do something quickly. (I understand it is Hindi for "At once!").
Part of the book relates how, in 1936, Masters took part in one of the last full-scale campaigns fought on the North West Frontier during the time of the Raj. It took place in Waziristan, today the centre of the Taliban inspired insurgency in Pakistan, and reading Masters' account of the fighting the reader is struck by the similarities with today, with the local tribesmen calling Jihad against the British and fighting a guerrilla style campaign that led Masters to describe the British response as akin to "using a crowbar to swat wasps." The more things change...
Taking the book as a whole, I swithered between 3 and 4 stars. It's enjoyable but patchy. I think that within the next few months I may try re-reading " The Road Past Mandalay".
In this book the author lays out his life story from the early 1930s and the beginning of his time at Sandhurst (the officer training school for the British Army), up to the outbreak of the Second World War. Masters is quite honest that as a young man he was quite full of himself, and as a result wasn't always well-liked. One of the book's themes is about how he developed as a person as a result of his time as an Indian Army officer.
The book certainly has its moments, but on the whole I wasn't as impressed with it as I was with "The Road Past Mandalay". Much of the humour is of the English public school variety, which leaves me cold, though I did laugh my way through the chapter where Masters, as a serving Indian Army officer, goes to the cinema to see "Lives of a Bengal Lancer" - his first sight of India as it was envisaged by 1930s Hollywood. On a personal level I also had to smile at the author's reference to the phrase "Ek dum", an expression my dad used when I was a boy and he wanted me to do something quickly. (I understand it is Hindi for "At once!").
Part of the book relates how, in 1936, Masters took part in one of the last full-scale campaigns fought on the North West Frontier during the time of the Raj. It took place in Waziristan, today the centre of the Taliban inspired insurgency in Pakistan, and reading Masters' account of the fighting the reader is struck by the similarities with today, with the local tribesmen calling Jihad against the British and fighting a guerrilla style campaign that led Masters to describe the British response as akin to "using a crowbar to swat wasps." The more things change...
Taking the book as a whole, I swithered between 3 and 4 stars. It's enjoyable but patchy. I think that within the next few months I may try re-reading " The Road Past Mandalay".
November 4, 2010
Masters wrote three books of autobiography. This is the first. I read the second (The Road Past Mandalay, his WW II years) last year. This one covers the years from his enrollment at Sandhurst to the start of the second world war. It is a story of conflict, but not simply battles. It is the conflict within the young man, born in India but not Indian; a British officer but not in the British army; his love of India and understanding that the place he loved was bound for change.
June 23, 2018
The autobiography – or at least a part of it – of a man who went from a student at Sandhurst to officer in the Prince of Wales’ Own Gurkha Regiment in what is now Afghanistan. Masters came of age during the last days of the British Raj, and loves India as a true home (even as he recognizes how silly that sounds to independent Indians).
He writes with perspicacious detachment on growing up, on becoming a man, on valor and discipline and honor, and has a lot of sensible things to say on British rule of India. But more that that, his book is full of charming and lurid anecdotes on the life of the memsahib in India, the trysts of the soldiers, the foibles of the officers, and of course the hardiness of the Gurkha. There’s only a taste of the life, customs, strengths and weaknesses of the Gurkhas, and it left me wanting more. (How can you not be fascinated in Gurkha military life after hearing the story of the parachute volunteers?) The book is sparse in its purely military aspects: it’s big on the customs and polish of Indian Army officers’ codes, but only a tantalizing glimpse of the martial attributes of the nomadic Afghan fighters – Pathans, mostly – they fought against on the eve of WWII. He is full of respect, however, for these hardy people, their way of life, and their tactical ingenuity. A superb memoir of British India, in all.
He writes with perspicacious detachment on growing up, on becoming a man, on valor and discipline and honor, and has a lot of sensible things to say on British rule of India. But more that that, his book is full of charming and lurid anecdotes on the life of the memsahib in India, the trysts of the soldiers, the foibles of the officers, and of course the hardiness of the Gurkha. There’s only a taste of the life, customs, strengths and weaknesses of the Gurkhas, and it left me wanting more. (How can you not be fascinated in Gurkha military life after hearing the story of the parachute volunteers?) The book is sparse in its purely military aspects: it’s big on the customs and polish of Indian Army officers’ codes, but only a tantalizing glimpse of the martial attributes of the nomadic Afghan fighters – Pathans, mostly – they fought against on the eve of WWII. He is full of respect, however, for these hardy people, their way of life, and their tactical ingenuity. A superb memoir of British India, in all.
January 16, 2013
If you are a fan of writing about India and the British Raj, you shouldn't miss this one. John Masters wrote many books about India featuring the Savage family, most famous among them being "Bhowani Junction." This book is about his own career as an officer in the British Indian Army. It is the first part of the two part autobiography, the second being ' The Road Past Mandalay."
Masters portrays a realistic picture of what it was to be a young British officer in the Indian Army, its social norms, traditions and taboos are covered vividly. Masters has a dry sense of humour and uses this effectively from time to time.
Those days are gone but if you like stories of the old days in India when the British Empire was still around, Masters' autobiography should be a good addition to your reading list
Masters portrays a realistic picture of what it was to be a young British officer in the Indian Army, its social norms, traditions and taboos are covered vividly. Masters has a dry sense of humour and uses this effectively from time to time.
Those days are gone but if you like stories of the old days in India when the British Empire was still around, Masters' autobiography should be a good addition to your reading list
September 13, 2010
This is an important book for readers who like to scour military memoirs for a certain type of on-the-ground insight. I appreciated Masters' commentary about the Ghurkas and their fighting history. And I found his descriptions of the Northwest Frontier (i.e. Afghanistan/Pakistan) eerie and worrisome. A solid book. A memoir that doesn't reach too far.
April 18, 2014
Fantastic story of a piece of history slipping ever more into the past. This is In the tradition of Heroditus, with Masters writing so we can remember what things were like at a specific time and place. Don't read this for a battlefield analysis of Imperial counterinsurgency in the Northwest Frontier Area, but read it for the good yarn it is, the excellent writing, and the reminder that things really haven't changed that much.
August 31, 2025
A longing for something I never had
February 5, 2013
This is a fascinating autobiography of a young British officer in a Ghurka regiment in India in the last years of the British Raj. Masters provides insight into India during this period, British military tradition (particularly the role of "the Regiment"), the Ghurkas, and military action on the NW Frontier of India. He describes his development as a young officer without hiding his foibles and mistakes, as well as his successes. The book ranges from action, to descriptive, to reflective, to humorous. This book would appeal to anyone interested in life in India during this period, or those interested in British military. It is also a book that should be read by young officers in the process of learning how to command.
January 6, 2018
I was drawn to this really because my father served in the army alongside the Gurkhas. John Masters has a very easy-going style and a good eye for interesting little details. The place and the people spring to life and this story seems to be a candid snap-shot of life in the British army in a corner of the empire towards the end of the empire. Convincingly ordinary and at moments quite extraordinary by turn.
June 21, 2011
The life of a british officer in the Indian Army in the 30s and 40s, very good.
December 8, 2012
A very period piece. I felt at a disadvantage for a number of reasons. First, I'm not British. I don't have a military background. The world has changed quite a bit since pre WWII. And I think I would have a different view of India if I had also read some Kipling.
But, it is pretty insightful of life as a soldier in India. For instance, I can totally understand needing a letter invitation from a host, before your commander would issue your leave. In the true military sense, this story was so laughable. I didn't hate this, I just feel like I can't relate to the character quite as well as I think I should.
But, it is pretty insightful of life as a soldier in India. For instance, I can totally understand needing a letter invitation from a host, before your commander would issue your leave. In the true military sense, this story was so laughable. I didn't hate this, I just feel like I can't relate to the character quite as well as I think I should.
August 24, 2025
John Masters' 1956 Bugles and a Tiger: A Volume of Autobiography, the first of a 3-volume memoir, tells the story of the author from his entrance to the famed Royal Military College at Sandhurst, through his service with a Gurkha regiment in the Northwest Frontier Province of British India in the late 1930s, to the beginning of the Second World War. Throughout Masters gives not only a richly detailed travelogue of three continents--for near the end he takes the long way home to Britain, across the Pacific rather than back through the Suez Canal, and crosses the United States--but also a very interesting and, for its time, fairly open-minded exploration of a number of cultures.
The author "went to Sandhurst early in 1933, being then a few months past [his] eighteenth birthday" (1956 Viking hardcover, page 26). Although he calls his father "Daddy" in bidding the older man goodbye, the pair "[do] not embrace, because [they] never do" (page 26). Some things are done in Great Britain in the '30s, we will see, and some are not. Upon arrival, for example, the young military student is assigned a "room servant, to be shared with two or three other cadets on the same floor" (page 26), and although he and his fellows "[are] expected to be efficient and win competitions," "on no account" are they "to be seen trying" (page 32).
Interestingly, Masters reports that the students of Sandhurst were drawn "from every level of British society" (page 38). That is, in addition to the "scores of titles and heirs to titles" (page 38), there also are more middle-class boys like the author, who himself is "rather glad" no one noticed the unstylish and shabby years-old coat made from "an ex-carriage rug" (page 26) worn by his father, a former Lieutenant Colonel who now tends hogs at "a farm laborer's wage" (page 52). The school even includes "some" from "the other end of the social scale," "the lower-middle and working classes"; getting to know them "was a considerable discovery to most of us," Masters explains, "for we had never before been exposed to such people on equal terms" (page 39).
Despite a little bit of leveling, therefore, it is a place of hierarchy--a military is not a democracy, after all--and discipline, with most of the lessons, as the still-green Masters later naively responds in answer to a general's question, "not seem[ing] of much direct and practical use to a second lieutenant" (page 25). Perhaps the more lasting lessons of Sandhurst were the social ones. On the one hand, "No one cared how 'different' you chose to be in your way of living," Masters claims. "You could write poems or paint, work hard or not at all, get drunk every night or stay sober--that was your business. Inside the limits set by the code--and they gave a reasonable man plenty of room--it was an amazingly free life" (page 41).
On the other hand, "it was a violent life just the same" (page 42). The punishments meted out by the cadets themselves, who "had an unerring sense of crime," were "barbaric" (page 41). One fellow, for example, "several years older than the rest of [them]," claimed to be a masterful rugby player but somehow "always seemed to be ill" during a game and then, after being "dragged...onto the field," revealed himself to have "seldom played rugger" and to be "a coward" as well (pages 39-40). "He suffered considerably during the game, what with boots and elbows flying in his vicinity, but that was not enough. Not at the R.M.C."--the others then wrecked "the would-be hero's room and shav[ed] off half his luxuriant mustache" (page 40). Someone else was "found pilfering things from another cadet's pocket [and] was tarred and feathered, horsewhipped across four hundred yards of lawn, and thrown into the freezing lake. He too left" (page 41). Even comparatively inoffensive and straight-arrow Masters once found his own room trashed, perhaps, he can only hypothesize later, for "seeking the limelight" (pages 40-41).
And why "such hooliganism," which in previous years even included just-for-fun "ferocious set-tos" of "a couple hundred cadets...battl[ing] up and down the corridors, for the space of an hour or so," using "[b]rass knuckle-dusters, loaded canes, chair legs, and practically any other weapon that came to hand," with "two cadets...injured for life, and thousands of pounds' worth of damage...done"? (page 42) According to Masters, "[t]he true answer," if it could have been spoken, was this:
"War is a dirty business, and we are training these young men for war; we are not running a kindergarten; we do not intend to snoop around seeing whether the cadets treat one another like Little Lord Fauntleroys; we have learned that a wild young man can learn wisdom as he grows older--if he survives--but a spiritless young man cannot learn the dash that wins battles. And, finally, we believe that a man's contemporaries are his fairest judges." (page 42)
Despite some truth there, I really do think that preventing youth from battling one another until their own classmates are crippled does not reduce anyone's "spirit" or produce "Little Lord Fauntleroys," but oh, well--such was the culture of a hundred years back. Interestingly, though, "[t]he honor system as practiced at West Point...was unknown, and [they] would have regarded it as the height of caddishness," for these cadets never would have "reported[ed] the dishonorable actions of another" (page 43). At Sandhurst, after all, even cheating on tests "was recognized as a form of work and had its own customs. It was permissible, indeed almost laudable, to cheat if that was your only hope of passing out and getting your commission. .... It was not permissible to cheat...in order to get a reward" (page 43).
In any event, the author-to-be indeed is a top-notch student, finishing his final exams "in half the time allotted, or less," and winning several monetary prizes and a scholarship (page 56), and in October 1934 the newly commissioned young second lieutenant reaches Karachi by troopship (page 59).
At first, however, Masters sees the hard work of soldiering in British India--which occasionally included a fair bit of combat against various independent and warlike folk in the North West Frontier Province--only as a steppingstone to something more glamourous. Yes, "the Masters family had served continuously in India, in many fields of endeavor, since 1805. In fact[,] they had neither served nor worked anywhere else," and the author himself had been born there (page 28). But as he recalls,
"I would not be caught the way my father had been--broke, with nothing to show for his service but a few fading photographs of himself among brown-skinned and turbaned soldiers, or in the jungle with his dog, or in the mountains at dawn, or by the banks of a great river, rod in hand. I would get on the [general] staff and tell the infantry what to do. Or I would serve a few years and then get away altogether--join the Political Department with its vastly greater pay, or transfer somehow to the Indian Civil Service, the white Brahmins of India. Better still, I would wangle my way into the legal department and thence out into the great, free civilian world and be a barrister after all. Or I would become an interpreter and spend my days in Paris, Warsaw, Madrid...." (page 29; ellipsis Masters')
As one might gather from the book's rather romantic title, though, he learns. He learns.
Even early on, during his first year out, the fanciful notion of rising to general or escaping into prosperous civilian life "had become blurred," intruded upon by other thoughts: "Visions of men kept edging in to distort it--men on the march, men drinking tea, men working under the sun, men smiling in the shade, men loading their rifles. And there were in my head unclear words and ideas, such as 'loyalty,' 'tradition,' and indeed 'the Colours'..." (page 23). The once-ambitious soldier is smitten with the panoramas of the high Himalayas he soon calls "home" (page 69), and with the Nepalese soldiers, whom he admires for their "[s]traightness, honesty, naturalness, loyalty, courage" (page 80). While "these large generalizations are vague and patronizing" (page 80), he admits, never does Masters waver in his love of the Gurkhas with whom he serves.
As the memoir of a colonizer of a far-off land, this book written not even a decade after the independence of India and Pakistan actually is rather nuanced. The NWFP of 1930s British India is a place where a sahib finished in the toilet merely "shouts, 'Mehtar! into the empty air, and forgets all about it," for soon the native servant for that duty--and there are many other servants for other duties, of course--takes out the chamber pot, "cleans it out, with a broom and by hand, into a pit or a burning-oven, and returns it to its place. In prewar days his pay was sixteen rupees, or about five dollars, per month" (page 73).
Yet Masters also does "not like hearing Indians spoken of" in "the standard terms of the British soldier and often of the British Service officer," such as "'wogs,' 'Hindoos,' or even 'black-bellied bastards'" or...well, even worse, which nowadays it seems one cannot even quote, no matter how disapprovingly (page 75). From many "evenings...spent in the messes of Indian regiments," he recognizes the various cultures of the Subcontinent's inhabitants, and rather than falling into the Othering trap of "think[ing] of India as quaint, picturesque, exploited, inscrutable, or other-worldly," he knows it is "ugly, beautiful, smelly, predictable, and as material as the West," "inhabited not by yogis and saints, but by people--knaves, giants, dwarfs, and plain people--of various shades of brown" (page 75). He cannot understand why Kipling "had...gone out of his way to underline with sadistic approval attitudes of mind and habits of race-consciousness that must have caused pain to anyone who loved India"...while at the same time "his descriptions" instead "proved that he did love India. No one," Masters concludes with a longing ellipsis, "could write like that except from love..." (page 75).
John Masters' Bugles and a Tiger is written from love as well, and although we might have to shrug at certain items here and there, forward-looking though the author truly is, the book remains a colorful, often admiring 5-star read even a full lifetime after the events it chronicles.
The author "went to Sandhurst early in 1933, being then a few months past [his] eighteenth birthday" (1956 Viking hardcover, page 26). Although he calls his father "Daddy" in bidding the older man goodbye, the pair "[do] not embrace, because [they] never do" (page 26). Some things are done in Great Britain in the '30s, we will see, and some are not. Upon arrival, for example, the young military student is assigned a "room servant, to be shared with two or three other cadets on the same floor" (page 26), and although he and his fellows "[are] expected to be efficient and win competitions," "on no account" are they "to be seen trying" (page 32).
Interestingly, Masters reports that the students of Sandhurst were drawn "from every level of British society" (page 38). That is, in addition to the "scores of titles and heirs to titles" (page 38), there also are more middle-class boys like the author, who himself is "rather glad" no one noticed the unstylish and shabby years-old coat made from "an ex-carriage rug" (page 26) worn by his father, a former Lieutenant Colonel who now tends hogs at "a farm laborer's wage" (page 52). The school even includes "some" from "the other end of the social scale," "the lower-middle and working classes"; getting to know them "was a considerable discovery to most of us," Masters explains, "for we had never before been exposed to such people on equal terms" (page 39).
Despite a little bit of leveling, therefore, it is a place of hierarchy--a military is not a democracy, after all--and discipline, with most of the lessons, as the still-green Masters later naively responds in answer to a general's question, "not seem[ing] of much direct and practical use to a second lieutenant" (page 25). Perhaps the more lasting lessons of Sandhurst were the social ones. On the one hand, "No one cared how 'different' you chose to be in your way of living," Masters claims. "You could write poems or paint, work hard or not at all, get drunk every night or stay sober--that was your business. Inside the limits set by the code--and they gave a reasonable man plenty of room--it was an amazingly free life" (page 41).
On the other hand, "it was a violent life just the same" (page 42). The punishments meted out by the cadets themselves, who "had an unerring sense of crime," were "barbaric" (page 41). One fellow, for example, "several years older than the rest of [them]," claimed to be a masterful rugby player but somehow "always seemed to be ill" during a game and then, after being "dragged...onto the field," revealed himself to have "seldom played rugger" and to be "a coward" as well (pages 39-40). "He suffered considerably during the game, what with boots and elbows flying in his vicinity, but that was not enough. Not at the R.M.C."--the others then wrecked "the would-be hero's room and shav[ed] off half his luxuriant mustache" (page 40). Someone else was "found pilfering things from another cadet's pocket [and] was tarred and feathered, horsewhipped across four hundred yards of lawn, and thrown into the freezing lake. He too left" (page 41). Even comparatively inoffensive and straight-arrow Masters once found his own room trashed, perhaps, he can only hypothesize later, for "seeking the limelight" (pages 40-41).
And why "such hooliganism," which in previous years even included just-for-fun "ferocious set-tos" of "a couple hundred cadets...battl[ing] up and down the corridors, for the space of an hour or so," using "[b]rass knuckle-dusters, loaded canes, chair legs, and practically any other weapon that came to hand," with "two cadets...injured for life, and thousands of pounds' worth of damage...done"? (page 42) According to Masters, "[t]he true answer," if it could have been spoken, was this:
"War is a dirty business, and we are training these young men for war; we are not running a kindergarten; we do not intend to snoop around seeing whether the cadets treat one another like Little Lord Fauntleroys; we have learned that a wild young man can learn wisdom as he grows older--if he survives--but a spiritless young man cannot learn the dash that wins battles. And, finally, we believe that a man's contemporaries are his fairest judges." (page 42)
Despite some truth there, I really do think that preventing youth from battling one another until their own classmates are crippled does not reduce anyone's "spirit" or produce "Little Lord Fauntleroys," but oh, well--such was the culture of a hundred years back. Interestingly, though, "[t]he honor system as practiced at West Point...was unknown, and [they] would have regarded it as the height of caddishness," for these cadets never would have "reported[ed] the dishonorable actions of another" (page 43). At Sandhurst, after all, even cheating on tests "was recognized as a form of work and had its own customs. It was permissible, indeed almost laudable, to cheat if that was your only hope of passing out and getting your commission. .... It was not permissible to cheat...in order to get a reward" (page 43).
In any event, the author-to-be indeed is a top-notch student, finishing his final exams "in half the time allotted, or less," and winning several monetary prizes and a scholarship (page 56), and in October 1934 the newly commissioned young second lieutenant reaches Karachi by troopship (page 59).
At first, however, Masters sees the hard work of soldiering in British India--which occasionally included a fair bit of combat against various independent and warlike folk in the North West Frontier Province--only as a steppingstone to something more glamourous. Yes, "the Masters family had served continuously in India, in many fields of endeavor, since 1805. In fact[,] they had neither served nor worked anywhere else," and the author himself had been born there (page 28). But as he recalls,
"I would not be caught the way my father had been--broke, with nothing to show for his service but a few fading photographs of himself among brown-skinned and turbaned soldiers, or in the jungle with his dog, or in the mountains at dawn, or by the banks of a great river, rod in hand. I would get on the [general] staff and tell the infantry what to do. Or I would serve a few years and then get away altogether--join the Political Department with its vastly greater pay, or transfer somehow to the Indian Civil Service, the white Brahmins of India. Better still, I would wangle my way into the legal department and thence out into the great, free civilian world and be a barrister after all. Or I would become an interpreter and spend my days in Paris, Warsaw, Madrid...." (page 29; ellipsis Masters')
As one might gather from the book's rather romantic title, though, he learns. He learns.
Even early on, during his first year out, the fanciful notion of rising to general or escaping into prosperous civilian life "had become blurred," intruded upon by other thoughts: "Visions of men kept edging in to distort it--men on the march, men drinking tea, men working under the sun, men smiling in the shade, men loading their rifles. And there were in my head unclear words and ideas, such as 'loyalty,' 'tradition,' and indeed 'the Colours'..." (page 23). The once-ambitious soldier is smitten with the panoramas of the high Himalayas he soon calls "home" (page 69), and with the Nepalese soldiers, whom he admires for their "[s]traightness, honesty, naturalness, loyalty, courage" (page 80). While "these large generalizations are vague and patronizing" (page 80), he admits, never does Masters waver in his love of the Gurkhas with whom he serves.
As the memoir of a colonizer of a far-off land, this book written not even a decade after the independence of India and Pakistan actually is rather nuanced. The NWFP of 1930s British India is a place where a sahib finished in the toilet merely "shouts, 'Mehtar! into the empty air, and forgets all about it," for soon the native servant for that duty--and there are many other servants for other duties, of course--takes out the chamber pot, "cleans it out, with a broom and by hand, into a pit or a burning-oven, and returns it to its place. In prewar days his pay was sixteen rupees, or about five dollars, per month" (page 73).
Yet Masters also does "not like hearing Indians spoken of" in "the standard terms of the British soldier and often of the British Service officer," such as "'wogs,' 'Hindoos,' or even 'black-bellied bastards'" or...well, even worse, which nowadays it seems one cannot even quote, no matter how disapprovingly (page 75). From many "evenings...spent in the messes of Indian regiments," he recognizes the various cultures of the Subcontinent's inhabitants, and rather than falling into the Othering trap of "think[ing] of India as quaint, picturesque, exploited, inscrutable, or other-worldly," he knows it is "ugly, beautiful, smelly, predictable, and as material as the West," "inhabited not by yogis and saints, but by people--knaves, giants, dwarfs, and plain people--of various shades of brown" (page 75). He cannot understand why Kipling "had...gone out of his way to underline with sadistic approval attitudes of mind and habits of race-consciousness that must have caused pain to anyone who loved India"...while at the same time "his descriptions" instead "proved that he did love India. No one," Masters concludes with a longing ellipsis, "could write like that except from love..." (page 75).
John Masters' Bugles and a Tiger is written from love as well, and although we might have to shrug at certain items here and there, forward-looking though the author truly is, the book remains a colorful, often admiring 5-star read even a full lifetime after the events it chronicles.
Read
April 26, 2021I've always been somewhat fascinated by the Gurkhas, reputedly the toughest warriors around for the last hundred years or so, so I was glad to gain a bit more Gurkha-lore by reading Masters' tale of his service with the Prince of Wales Own Gurkha Rifles in the 1930s. Masters went on to a career as a novelist, and it's evident by his turns of phrase that he had both a narrative and descriptive gift.
Masters led his men against the Waziri tribes in that part of India that today has become Pakistan, which rings a familiar tone with what's happening with U.S. forces today. I'd like to quote, verbatem, a passage from the book that also sounds uncannily familiar for our soldiers, where Masters gives first the military wisdom, and then follows with the civil government's opinion on the battles they were fighting.
"Get there fustest with the mostest men.
Do not get there at all until we have referred the matter to the Governor-General-in-Council, which will take months.
Shoot first, shoot fastest, shoot last, and shoot to kill.
Do not shoot unless you have been shot at, and then try not to hurt anyone, there's a good chap!
Mystify, mislead and surprise the enemny, then never leave him a moment to gather himself again, but fall on him like a thunderclap and pursue him to his utter destruction, regardless of fatigue, casualties, or cost.
Announce your intention to the enemy, in order that he may have time to remove his women and children to a place of safety - and to counter your plan. At all events stop what you are doing as soon as he pretends to have had enough, so that he may gather again somewhere else.
Casualties, damage, losses, cost, are only some of the many factors to be considered when making a battle plan. If any factor is given undue weight, the plan is likely to fail.
Pardon us, but you plan does not interest us. We are happy to say that that is your business. However, casualties cause questions in the House, damage brings complaints in the Assembly, losses get into the newspapers, and cost we cannot stand...Remember all that, and get the war over quickly."
Some things never change.
This isn't a terribly exciting read, though Masters does describe one battle he fought in with great detail, but it does contain a lot of background on the British Army's time in India, some Indian customs and festivals, the Gurkha culture, and some perspective on the tribal warfare that's still going on in the remote mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Just something a little out of the ordinary for me.
Masters led his men against the Waziri tribes in that part of India that today has become Pakistan, which rings a familiar tone with what's happening with U.S. forces today. I'd like to quote, verbatem, a passage from the book that also sounds uncannily familiar for our soldiers, where Masters gives first the military wisdom, and then follows with the civil government's opinion on the battles they were fighting.
"Get there fustest with the mostest men.
Do not get there at all until we have referred the matter to the Governor-General-in-Council, which will take months.
Shoot first, shoot fastest, shoot last, and shoot to kill.
Do not shoot unless you have been shot at, and then try not to hurt anyone, there's a good chap!
Mystify, mislead and surprise the enemny, then never leave him a moment to gather himself again, but fall on him like a thunderclap and pursue him to his utter destruction, regardless of fatigue, casualties, or cost.
Announce your intention to the enemy, in order that he may have time to remove his women and children to a place of safety - and to counter your plan. At all events stop what you are doing as soon as he pretends to have had enough, so that he may gather again somewhere else.
Casualties, damage, losses, cost, are only some of the many factors to be considered when making a battle plan. If any factor is given undue weight, the plan is likely to fail.
Pardon us, but you plan does not interest us. We are happy to say that that is your business. However, casualties cause questions in the House, damage brings complaints in the Assembly, losses get into the newspapers, and cost we cannot stand...Remember all that, and get the war over quickly."
Some things never change.
This isn't a terribly exciting read, though Masters does describe one battle he fought in with great detail, but it does contain a lot of background on the British Army's time in India, some Indian customs and festivals, the Gurkha culture, and some perspective on the tribal warfare that's still going on in the remote mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Just something a little out of the ordinary for me.
September 11, 2017
A well written, informative and entertaining memoir by a British officer who became a novelist after WW2. This one deals with his pre-war years as a newly minted lieutenant serving in India as a company commander of Nepalese Gurkhas in the Indian Army. He writes with the practiced novelist's skill which can transform the routine and regulation of army life into illustrations of human experience and behavior, the curious and bizarre into comedy and the occasional periods of danger into exciting and interesting reading. The story feels honest and deals with many themes. It is in part a coming of age story, in part a portrait of Colonial rule complete with a cast characters from India's Northwest Frontier. The native soldiers and their families, the bachelor British Officers, the Pathan tribesmen both bandits and allies are all vividly drawn. Surprisingly it also offers a glimpse into prewar America as experienced by an evidently high spirited, footloose young man making the most of his temporary freedom as he travels across the US from the West Coast to New York during the period of the phony war. I really enjoyed this effort and look forward to his sequel.
March 18, 2020
Written by a subaltern of the Gurkhas who was stationed in Waristan. He has a wry sense of humor which makes this an enjoyable read. Because I live near New Orleans I enjoyed reading about his visit there in January of 1940 during which he went to the 1939 Sugar Bowl @ Tulane Stadium. The Times Picayune paid him $8.98 (167.12 in 2020) to write an article for their paper. I think he spent a week there and seems to have really enjoyed it. The book took me to what life and travel was like in the 1930's and I found that very interesting.
April 11, 2021
Having spent much time in both Nepal and Northern India, I have some familiarity with the landscape and its peoples. I have also read widely about the subcontinent and its history. Masters’ book is very evocative of the time, place and social milieu. He doesn’t sugarcoat the terrible cruelties that were (and remain) the backdrop to the ongoing warfare. Likewise the British military establishment doesn’t escape criticism. His depiction of his Gurkha comrades is realistic and not romantic. A great read.
September 7, 2023
I read this many years ago as a teenager and I remember being thrilled by the account of Masters life in India as a Gurkha officer. It was even better on re-reading. The book is a candid revelation of his sojourn at Sandhurst and growing from being a foolish youth to being a competent and popular soldier. His love of the Gurkhas is obvious and the book is totally honest about life in the regiment. Add to that the description of India, the climate and fighting on the North-West Frontier and you have a rattling good story. It paves the way to his military career in the Second World War.
December 4, 2023
I fascinating book about John Masters life as a Gurkha officer prior to the World War 2. A fan of his fictional books, for many years, "Bugles and A Tiger" gives an insight into a life that no longer exists but comes from the heart. That the Gurkhas remain friends of this country is something Britain should ever be grateful for. Masters love of the "Little Men", as my dad called them, comes across as does the trial and tribulations of understanding and respecting another culture. A terrific read.
February 20, 2025
Excellent autobiographical book a out a young man joining the British army in the 1930s. His family has served in India since 1803 in various positions mostly the army. After graduating from Sandhurst he joins a Ghurkha regiment in the Indian Army. He tells of all the trials, tribulations, and incidents in regimental life on the Northwest Frontier. This a a real interesting autobiography of a soldier's life life before WWII breaks. His working with his Ghurkha troops and even shooting a tiger that made its way in the cantonment. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Five stars.
November 12, 2017
Tremendous memoir. Anyone who has served in Afghanistan will feel a connection to the eternal nature of war in South Asia, and the longing for an era that will never return. John Masters served in the last bit of imperial India, just before history took an abrupt turn. He helps us to understand something that we can never really know.
He was an excellent storyteller, and infantry officer. I am so glad I found this book.
He was an excellent storyteller, and infantry officer. I am so glad I found this book.
September 16, 2021
I never met my grandfather, so never got to hear of his exploits in the India Army, so reading Masters accounts of his time in the Subcontinent allowed me to better imagine his experiences too … Masters candid account is as honest portrayal into that era, from the privileged viewpoint of an officer, as you’ll get IMHO and his love for the many states and peoples that make up modern India shines through.
May 9, 2021
If you want to know about life of a British soldier in the Indian army before WW11 ,this is a good place to start.Very detailed and usually interesting but I fear of limited interest today unless you are an historian.Not really my interest but I was intrigued to see his early life before he settled in the US and became a famous novelist
January 4, 2022
A superbly written, authentic, humorous and thoroughly enjoyable book. Even though it is set nearly 100 years ago, the descriptions are so vivid it is as if things are happening today. Towards the end his tongue in cheek humour is like a film running before your eyes. Now I have to read all the three books in the Trilogy.
September 23, 2024
A bit of history in part of the British Empire told from the first person perspective by a self-deprecating and authentic gentleman. Sometimes funny, sometimes frightening, always admiring of the Gurkhas -- a fighting force made from several different ethnic groups, clans and tribes including a high-caste Hindu group.
March 18, 2024
Paints a vivid picture of the pre war landscape of the frontier and the soldiers guarding it. His love of the Gurkhas and India shine through.He comes across as sensitive philosophical and reflective even though he is a product of his time and imperial values
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