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Автор Richard Holmes
Sahib
The British Soldier In India 1750-1914
Richard Holmes
To Lizzie, Jessica and Corinna, the women in my life
Table of Contents
The Indian sub-continent
Punjab and the North-West Frontier
Bengal
Riding through the densely packed bazaars of Bareilly City on Judy, my mare, passing village temples, cantering across the magical plains that stretched away to the Himalayas, I shivered at the millions and immensities and secrecies of India. I liked to finish my day at the club, in a world whose limits were known and where people answered my beck. An incandescent lamp coughed its light over shrivelled grass and dusty shrubbery; in its circle of illumination exiled heads were bent over English newspapers, their thoughts far away, but close to mine. Outside, people prayed and plotted and mated and died on a scale unimaginable and uncomfortable. We English were a caste. White overlords or whiter monkeys – it was all the same.
The Brahmins made a circle within which they cooked their food. So did we. We were a caste: pariahs to them, princes in our own estimation.F. YEATS-BROWN,
