Freedom at Midnight by Larry Collins, Dominique Lapierre Page A

their rulers with gratitude and affection; that the politicians agitating for independence were a petty-minded, half-educated elite, unrepresentative of the masses' desires or interests. Churchill understood India, his own Secretary of State for India had noted acidly, "about as well as George III understood the American colonies."
    Since 1910 he had stubbornly resisted every effort to bring India toward independence. He contemptuously dismissed Gandhi and his Congress followers as     The brief text in Clement Attlee's hand had been largely written by the young admiral he was sending to New Delhi to negotiate Britain's departure from India and whose name he was about to reveal for the first time. Louis Mountbatten had, with characteristic boldness, proposed the text as a substitute for the lengthy document that Attlee himself had drafted. It defined the new viceroy's task in simple terms. Above all, it contained the new and salient point that Mountbatten had maintained was essential if there was to be any hope of breaking the Indian logjam; he had wrestled with Attlee for six weeks to nail it down with the precision he wanted.
    The chilly assembly stirred as Attlee began to read the historic announcement. "His Majesty's Government wishes to make it clear," he began, "that it is their definite intention to take the necessary steps to effect the transference of power into responsible Indian hands by a date not later than June 1948."
    A stunned silence followed as his words struck home to the men in Commons. That they were the inevitable result of history and Britain's own avowed course in India did not mitigate the sadness produced by the realization that
    barely fourteen months remained to the British raj. An era in British life was ending. What the Manchester Guardian would call the following morning "the greatest disengagement in history" was about to begin.
    The bulky figure slumped on his bench rose when his turn came to protest, to hurl out one last eloquent plea for empire. Shaking slightly from cold and emotion, Churchill declared the whole business was "an attempt by the government to make use of brilliant war figures in order to cover up a melancholy and disastrous transaction." By fixing a date for independence, Attlee was adopting one of Gandhi's "most scatterbrained observations—'Leave India to God.'
    "It is with deep grief," Churchill lamented, "that I watch the tattering down of the British Empire with all its glories and all the services it has rendered mankind. Many have defended Britain against her foes. None can defend her against herself ... let us not add by shameful flight, by a premature, hurried scuttle—at least let us not add to the pangs of sorrow so many of us feel, the taint and sneer of shame."
    They were the words of a master orator, but they were also a futile railing against the setting of a sun. When the division bell rang, the Commons acknowledged the dictate of history. By an overwhelming majority, it voted to end British rule in India no later than June 1948.
    Penitent's Progress II
    The deeper ms little party penetrated into Noakhali's bayous, the more difficult Gandhi's mission became. The success that he had enjoyed with the Moslems in the first villages through which he had passed had aroused the leadership in those that lay ahead. Sensing in it a challenge to their