by FERDINAND MOUNT
Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre by Kim A. WagnerYale, 325 pp., £20
Thirty seconds? after he first entered the Jallianwala Bagh, he ordered his men to open fire. There was no word of warning to the crowd, not a gesture. ‘My mind was made up as I came along in my motor car. If my orders were not obeyed, I would open fire immediately.’ After a bit, Sergeant Anderson, General Dyer’s personal bodyguard, ‘noticed that Captain Briggs was drawing up his face as if in pain, and was plucking at the general’s elbow. Mr Plomer, deputy superintendent of police, told the general during a lull that he had taught the crowd a lesson they would never forget. The general took no notice, and ordered fire to be resumed.’ At one point, the general turned to one of his officers and said: ‘Do you think they’ve had enough?’ He then answered himself: ‘No, we’ll give them four rounds more.’
By the end, the fifty Sikhs and Gurkhas under his command had fired 33 rounds each, a total of 1650 rounds. The official estimate was that 379 people had been killed and more than one thousand injured. But it was hard to be sure of the exact figure. Dyer explained that he’d returned to the Ram Bagh (the garden with palace at the heart of the British cantonment) ‘without counting or inspecting the casualties’ – or offering any medical assistance to the wounded – for fear, he said, that his little force might be ambushed. This was extremely unlikely. The crowd of fifteen thousand or more that had gathered on 13 April 1919 was unarmed and peaceable, some of them listening to speeches, others simply milling about and chatting, many of them having come in from the countryside for the Baisakhi festival, the Sikh New Year. The Jallianwala Bagh (Jalle was the garden’s original owner) was in fact a large, irregular walled wasteland, about 150 by 200 yards. It was a traditional place for the citizens of the closely packed holy city of Amritsar to meet and stretch their legs. General Dyer had paraded his men around the streets that morning, warning that any gathering of more than four men would be looked on as an unlawful assembly and might be dispersed by force. But he had processed only through the western half of the city, near the railway and the European quarter. He had not penetrated to the centre and east, where the Jallianwala Bagh and the Golden Temple lay. He himself was not stationed in Amritsar: ‘I do not know the city very well,’ he later admitted. He also admitted that as a result ‘there may have been a good many who had not heard the proclamation.’
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