Bugles and a Tiger: My Life in the Gurkhas (Cassell Military Paperbacks)

Excellent. I found it to be an interesting, informative, and often an entertaining read. John Masters gives a brief biography of himself and his background prior to going to the Royal Military College Sandhurst. He then gives a brief description of his life as a Gentleman Cadet, and how he came to join the Gurkhas. The rest of the book is about his life as a junior officer in the Gurkhas up until the outbreak of World War II.There are three main points of possible interest to the reader. (i) It would appear that there was always a significant amount of fighting on what is today the Pakistan - Afganistan border, which was then called the North West Frontier, and how British India kept the peace there, militarily.(ii) The author's religious views. In 1935-1939 it is Christian with a significant dose of tolerance, maybe even interest, in the religion of his Gurkhas - basically Hinduism.(iii) Sex. It would seem that marriage was less than universal. The question then is: How did the unmarried ones in the British Indian Army get any? Pages 139 to 146 cover the topic in detail, and there are little bits throughout the book. In essence, they had affairs or went to brothels. Some did, of course, marry, and John Masters tells us who they married (lower caste / class Indians) and what happened to their offspring (ended up working as Anglo-Indians on the railways). For most of the time the British were in India there was a shortage of white women.The solution in the Dutch East Indies was the concubine. See in particular De njai: het concubinaat in Nederlands-Indie by Reggie Baay. The book is in Dutch. In essence, a local girl would be the concubine of the soldier. When the soldier moved elsewhere, the concubine would either follow him or go to a new soldier or go back to her village with the children. Sometimes the concubine would marry the soldier and they would settle down in the East Indies, or, if the soldier was from Holland / The Netherlands, and the soldier was going back home, if she converted to Christianity should could go with him.In both British India and the Dutch East Indies well meant interventions by politicians and people back home would result in an increase in venereal disease. The men were not going to stop having sex, and there was always going to be some women willing to give it to them. In essence the solution in the Dutch East Indies was to have the men in a monogamous relationship more or less from Day One, whilst the solution in British India was to check the women in the brothels for Sexually Transmitted Diseases on a regular basis. Take your pick on which solution is the most acceptable to your sensibilities. Just don't expect everybody to abstain forever from having sex, because, as John Masters points out in Bugles and a Tiger, My life in the Gurkhas, that is not going to happen.The author does, briefly, mention the independence movement in India at that time in the run-up to World War II, but the impression I get is that it barely impinged on life in the military, and, by extension, on the general population of India.This book is a snap-shot of life in British India in the run-up to World War II, written by a person who was there at the time, and, as such, is an historical record of interest to a multitude of people in Britain, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.As an anecdotal aside I did myself meet the great man himself when I was a young boy. John Masters says in his book that he likes mountains, and it was in the mountains of northern Spain that I met him. He was about a dozen years older than my Dad, but I remember John Masters organising a day-long walk for a small group of people which included my father. To some extent the walk itself was a first for my Dad, (who did a lot of walking in his capacity as a field geologist, though never solely to paraphrase George Mallory "Because it is there"), which says a lot about the powers of persuasion and leadeship ability of John Masters. I also remember that John Masters in effect walked my Dad into the ground that day, which says a lot for his physical fitness. My Dad was a chunk younger and not at all physically unfit himself, so walking him into the ground was quite a feat.

Having recently read the second part of the author's autobiographical trilogy, I knew that I would enjoy this earlier account, and in hindsight should have read them chronologically - note to self.The book tells of the author's life from leaving school and Sandhurst in the U.K, and joining a Gurkha unit in the old British Indian Army, pre-war and independence. It is a time gone by, and for that reason, it seems slightly anachronistic to relate to it now. It's a book about Service to the country, when Britain was an Empire, and held the (misguided) respect of all its subjects - the story about servicemen having the imperialist right to attend a first-class lounge even although travelling in economy class was an example.The book started well, and I really enjoyed the stories of his passage from boy to man, but I felt it got a bit bogged down when he moved on to India ( the sole reason for the mark down), and his obvious love for the country. I've been to modern metropol India, and have not see the northern rural setting he spoke so well of, but can relate to some of his people and location observations.What I found interesting was his desire to be a famous Staff officer was waylayed by his love of people management you can only find in regimental Field posting. Once hooked, the ambition will never be the same.

This book is simply wonderful from start to finish. It paints a picture of life in the remote postings of Empire shortly before they were lost to time following the war. While many seek to erase that past this book shows a mutual respect and admiration that they would fail to comprehend.This book and it’s sequel The Road to Mandalay are a must have for students of history or amateur buffs alike.

Memoir of a Military Education: John Masters's Bugles and a TigerIn his foreword to Bugles and a Tiger (1956), the first volume of his autobiography, John Masters defines his book clearly:This is a factual story but not a history. [ . . . The] purpose is to tell the story of how a schoolboy became a professional soldier of the old Indian Army [. . . and to give] an idea of what India was like in those last twilit days of the Indian Empire, and something more than a tourist's view of some of the people who lived there.As heir to Kipling, a much greater writer though Masters has genuine writing talent, and to lesser-known figures like Jim Corbett, Anglo-Indians in love with India and having the double perspective of Englishmen born in that country, Masters succeeds in his purpose. Bugles is a classic of its genre, a memoir of a military education but also a homage to India, its flora and fauna, its peoples and cultures, with particular attention to the Ghurkhas of Nepal.Bugles covers the years 1933-39, moving from Masters's training and education at Sandhurst, through his experiences on the North-West Frontier of India, first with a British infantry regiment and then with the Ghurkhas, to a brief visit to Japan and a journey across North America, return to India and the outbreak of World War Two. A large part of the impulse behind these experiences is what Kipling describes as "for to see and for to behold, ever the world so wide," a desire appropriate to youth and to the first volume of an autobiography.Such adventures give Masters a mass of experience made exotic to most readers by time and distance. For a writer, vast and varied experience is a great resource but poses the problem of structure: How to select from and represent such multiplicity in a clear, coherent way? At one point Masters remarks that impressions "were received not in a continuous chain [. . .] but in separate cameos," and this provides a structural principle based on the anecdote or episode, inset into the larger, chronological narrative. Such anecdotes, for example about Pathans' night sniping or the withdrawal of picquets under fire, give a lot of detailed, expert information but present this in action, with an emphasis on showing rather than merely telling. Smaller episodes take their place within the linear narrative of Masters's life, which they partly comprise, and the whole is framed by frequent reference to the long historical perspective which reaches back, say, to Alexander and forward to an independent India. This almost Russian-doll structure works wonderfully to enable Masters to move from the specific detail of his individual experience to the larger issues of Indian and world history.Much of what Masters describes is directly relevant to our period and its political problems. When, for example, he writes of the difficulties of "the Indo-Afghan border" with its armed tribes "fanatically adhering to the Moslem law, addicted to blood feuds and vendettas" and "owning no king or central authority," we recognise the currency of the description in the early twenty-first century. Specific details like the hunt for the Faqir of Ipi, an enemy tribal leader who lives in a cave, immediately invoke the more recent version of Osama bin Laden. Even though from 75 or 80 years ago, the situation Masters describes is depressingly familiar and relevant, placing our experience in a longer historical perspective, too.On some issues, political and social change has overtaken Masters's world and views and this is perhaps where a modern reader feels the difference of period. Friendship with an Anglo-Indian causes Masters "for the first time to consider the political aspects" of his position in India: "they wanted us to go and I at once saw the justice of this." Masters is very critical of the Indian Congress party and his paragraphs on Indian nationalism hardly constitute an in-depth analysis, but that is not the purpose of his narrative and it's clear he is far from being a blinkered, Colonel-Blimp-type imperialist.Despite the continuing relevance of the political situations and issues Bugles describes, the book's heart is not political but personal, informed by extensive first-hand experience. When Masters describes the Central Provinces, for example, the country of Kipling's Jungle Books, the specific detail of the flora, fauna and geology carries the authority of lived experience. Masters is not a tourist but has near-native knowledge while, as part-outsider, he has the careful and recording eye of an observer, and his descriptions are dynamic because they represent the landscape and its inhabitants in action.Also, the language of his descriptions shows a talent for the perfect word choice. So he describes the Frontier as "a tilted wilderness of rock and scrub," a phrase in which the adjective changes a near cliché to something original and striking. Similarly, a phrase like "the ether stillness of the hospital" immediately conveys the smell, the near silence, the deadness. Occasionally, Masters tries too hard, as in his description of a ship's wake as "like a knurled white scarf, embroidering the darkness with points of violet fire," where the poetical prose tends to the purple, or violet, but the scenes Masters describes are colourful and he doesn't usually stray too far into the technicolour.Masters's descriptions also gain power from native terms, used more substantially and authentically than as mere local colour. His eye, and ear, produce a text tinged with the polyglot, a feature in common with Kipling's work and, to a lesser extent, the writings of that great lover of India, the hunter and conservationist, Jim Corbett, whom Masters had surely read. These writers, with their interest in the languages of India, have long since anticipated the macaronic of the postcolonial novel.If Masters shows his attention to and love for the landscapes, the flora and fauna and peoples of India, their languages and cultures, the heart of that love is his relationship with his regiment, the 4th Ghurkhas. Throughout, he gives a lot of information about Ghurkha culture and customs, individualising this with specific portraits of named soldiers, whose photographs are the only ones in the book. Masters doesn't prettify their culture as, for example, when he describes in full detail their ritual execution of animals. But his respect and admiration for the Ghurkhas' knowledge, intelligence and courage are clear, and we believe Masters when he tells us, of Ghurkha Gumparsad: "He was a man whose honesty of purpose shone through his speech and his silence alike. I loved him and could have hugged him then." Masters uses that wonderful phrase from Henry V, "band of brothers," to describe the regiment and it's clear that he genuinely believes in a brotherhood that transcends cultural, racial and national distinctions though, for him, that brotherhood is forged partly through the extremes of a soldier's life, as is self-knowledge.Bugles ends, appropriately, at the beginning of a local military action, a figure for the larger war to come, with Masters no longer the novice but part of the "spiritual unity" of the battalion, his apprenticeship as a soldier and a man complete.