The Soldier's Trade

BUGLES AND A TIGER (312 pp.]--John Masters--Viking ($3.95).

The most severe case of India fever in literature since Rudyard Kipling was brought down by it is undoubtedly that of Novelist John Masters (TIME, March 28). His goal is as massive as it is simple: to tell the whole story of the English in India in 35 historical novels covering 300 years. At 41, with five of the books behind him (including Bhowani Junction, Night Runners of Bengal and CoromandeU), he has a fair chance of carrying out his plan --particularly since he works on an electric typewriter, turning out first drafts at a clip of 11,000 words a day. But U.S.-naturalized Novelist Masters has paused in his fiction labors to write a memoir of his youth. Not surprisingly, it turns out to be about his service in India as an infantry officer in a Gurkha regiment.

Bugles and a Tiger is a soldier's book, and anyone who scoffs at the soldier's trade will not appreciate its virtues. But after two World Wars and a "police action," there should be quite a few U.S. readers who will applaud the sometimes sentimental, consistently knowledgeable and colorful account of one man's devo tion to duty.

Masters went to India as a 19-year-old second lieutenant fresh from Sandhurst.

Born in Calcutta of a family that had served in India since 1805, he was as excited about India as though he had gone there from a Midwestern farm. He was afire with the need to make good with his Gurkha troops, tribesmen from Nepal whose qualities as men and soldiers still excite his respect and imagination: "There were no excuses, no grumbling, no shirking, no lying. There was no intrigue, no apple-polishing, and no servility." Not until two years had passed did they put the seal of approval on the young subaltern. It was a loyalty worth having in the frontier wars of the '30s, when hostile tribes got their kicks from mutilating English prisoners and staking them out on the ground to die.

Masters made good in and out of combat. His descriptions of camp and barracks life often seem trivial in detail, but in the end they tell what it was that kept generations of Englishmen in a service that had little to offer but comradeship, pride in outfit and a sense of duty. Masters does not pretty up military service, and he does not try to pretty up India. Yet he obviously loved them both and manages to convey the quality of his. affection. His story closes in 1939 when, at 25, he was still a lieutenant in an army that never spoiled men with fast promotion.

In the larger theater of World War II, things happened faster. At 29, he was a lieutenant colonel and acting brigade commander in General Wingate's Chindits in Burma. He retired in 1948. India had taught him his trade; if at his new trade of novelist he is no Kipling--though not a bad substitute until another one comes along--this bit of autobiography proves that he would have made a fine Kipling hero.

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