" AN UNARMED CROWD."
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " BPECTATOR."1
Srs,—Public opinion on General Dyer's action at Amritsar has been greatly prejudiced by the difficulty that we here have of realizing conditions as they exist in India. Thus indignation is expressed at the cowardice of troops firing on an unarmed crowd. To us an unarmed mob means a harmless on inoffensive mob. That is a mob not on the offensive, or on the war path.
The temper of a crowd in a European city may be judged at once by it being unarmed or armed. There, arms of sorts, muskets, &c., are ready to hand, and one of the first acts of a dangerous crowd is to pillage armourers' shops. In India an unarmed crowd—that is, one which does not bristle with guns, spears, &e.—does not not necessarily mean a harmless crowd. It is unarmed for the simple reason that in India the Arms Act is so rigidly enforced that no arms are available, only a few persons of high character and position being permitted to possess arms under licence. And as for plundering armourers' shops, these are not to be found save in the headquarter towns, where arms are imported and sold to Europeans with licences and registered under very strict conditions.
But because the Amritsar crowd did not bristle with guns, and other offensive weapons, it is not to be assumed that it was unarmed. No estimate can be made of the knives, hatchets, or crowbars and other murderous implements which were to hand. But this at least is known, that a large proportion of the men carried the Danda or quarter-staff, of stout bamboo, four or five feet long, shod with iron rings and clamps, a most murder- ous weapon with which a powerful man can, it is said, kill a buffalo or a tiger at a blow. It was with such weapons that the European Bank officials, murdered on a previous day, are said to have been done to death. Large numbers of these staves were imported into Amritsar about this time. The marauders who came in from the villages most probably carried them, and it has been stated that they formed into bodies called the Danda Fauge, or the Quarter Staff Brigade, for offensive pur- poses. Then the temper of the crowd is to be considered. The firing took place on April 14th. The disturbances and murder of the Europeans and destruction of property commenced on the 10th of the month, and for days the neighbourhood had been in a state of revolution. Telegraphs cut, the railway line torn up, stations and public buildings, including a church, destroyed. Europeans murdered. The mob had already been fired on two or three occasions, a state of siege existed, and the populace had been forbidden by proclamation to assemble in crowds. It is specially to be remembered that the rioters, some of them at least, had tasted blood, that in joining the mob all had been guilty of an offence against the law, and that they might thus all be judged to be on the war path. Had General Dyer on the first day of the excitement before the murders of Europeans and other atrocities had been committed fired on a mob, his action might be otherwise judged, but no one with any know- ledge of India will consider him to blame for inflicting severe punishment on a so-called unarmed mob whose temper was evident, and who, if they had received but a slight warning, might have so dispersed as to be able to attack the Europeans, men, women and children, collected together in the Civil Station. What this might have meant may be best described in the words of the Archbishop of Simla at the close of his letter to the Times of May 26th, 1920 :— " Let the British public be under no illusion. This peril of murder and lust, loot and desecration, at the hands of an Oriental mob, excited by unscrupulous propaganda to racial and fanatic frenzy, is not the wild fancy of a timid imagina- tion; it is a clear inference from ascertained facts. Is there nobody to tell you the whole truth? You have perhaps heard of the destruction of buildings sacred and profane. Did you ever hear of the eighty European women and children gathered together at a rallying point in Lyallpur, waiting for the troops to protect them, and concerning whom the mob put up notices saying there were so many English women to be ravished? "
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