Freedom at Midnight by Larry Collins, Dominique Lapierre Page B

own authority, they had begun to stir the populace's hostility to the Mahatma and his mission.

This morning, his pilgrim's route took him past a Moslem school where seven- and eight-year-old children sat around their sheikh in an open-air classroom. Beaming like an excited grandfather rushing to embrace his favorite grandchildren, Gandhi rushed over to speak to the youngsters. The sheikh leaped up at his approach. With quick,
    angry gestures, he shooed his pupils into his hut, as though the old man approaching was a bogeyman come to cast some evil spell over them. Deeply pained by their flight, Gandhi stood before the doorway of the sheikh's hut making sad little waves of his hand to the children whose faces he could make out in the shadow. Dark eyes wide with curiosity and incomprehension, they stared back at him. Finally Gandhi touched his hand to his heart and sent them the Moslem salaam. Not a single childish hand answered his gesture. Even those innocent children were not to be allowed to reply to the fraternal message that he was trying to bring to his people. With a pathetic sigh, Gandhi turned away and resumed his march.
    There had been other incidents. Four days earlier someone had weakened a bamboo support holding up a rickety bridge over which Gandhi was due to cross. Fortunately, it had been discovered before the bridge could collapse and send Gandhi and his party tumbling into the muddy waters ten feet below. On another morning, his route had taken him through a grove of bamboo and coconut trees. Every tree seemed to be festooned with a banner proclaiming slogans like "Leave. You have been warned"; "Accept Pakistan"; or "Go for your own good."
    Those signs had no effect on Gandhi. Physical courage, the courage to accept without protest a beating, to face danger with quiet resolution was, Gandhi maintained, the prime characteristic required of a nonviolent man. Since the first beating he had received in South Africa from a white coachman trying to drive him from his rightful place in a stagecoach, physical courage had been an attribute the frail Gandhi had displayed in abundance.
    Muffling the inner sorrow that those signs and the children's rejection had provoked, Gandhi trudged serenely toward his next stop. It had been a damp, humid night, and the alluvial soil on the narrow path along which his party walked was slick and slippery under the heavy dew. Suddenly, the little procession came to a halt. At its head, Gandhi laid aside his bamboo stave and bent down. Some unknown Moslem hands had littered the tight track, on which he was to walk barefoot, with shards of glass and clumps of human excrement. Tranquilly, Gandhi broke off the branch of a stubby palm. With it, he stooped over and humbly undertook the most defiling act a Hindu can per-
    form. Using his branch as a broom, the seventy-seven-year-old penitent began to sweep that human excrement from his path.
    For decades, the most persistent English foe of the elderly man patiently cleaning the feces from his way had been the master orator of the House of Commons. Winston Churchill had uttered in his long career enough memorable phrases to fill a volume of prose, but few of them had imprinted themselves as firmly on the public's imagination as those with which he had described Gandhi just sixteen years earlier, in February 1931: half-naked fakir.
    The occasion that prompted Churchill's outburst was a turning point in the history of the British Empire. It occurred February 17, 1931. One hand holding his bamboo stave, the other clutching the edges of his white shawl, Mahatma Gandhi had that morning shuffled up the red sandstone steps to Viceroy's House, New Delhi. He was still wan from his weeks in a British prison, but the man who had organized the Salt March did not come to that house as a supplicant for the Viceroy's favors. He came as India.
    With his fistful of salt and his bamboo stave, Gandhi had rent the veils of the temple. So widespread had support