Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey Read Online Free

earlier.)
    'Yes, sir,' I said.
    'Well, you're the most extraordinary O.W. I've ever come across. Have a drink.' He chuckled delightedly. Waddy joined us and we talked with the Chief about the preservation of the Long Range Squadron in the post-war army, if that were at all possible, in order not to lose all that it had learned in its short and experimental existence. As to maintaining the Squadron in Persia, the Chief said, 'I don't see any military reason for keeping you here, Waddilove, whatever the Russians do. I'll talk to the Viceroy when we get back, but I expect you'll be leaving before March 20.'
    It was a hot, bumbling flight back to Quetta. An hour after take-off I looked up from my papers to see that across the aisle from me Betty Collins had leaned back in her chair and was asleep. Behind her the Quetta general was asleep. The staff officers were asleep. His Excellency General Sir Claude John Eyre Auchinleck, G.C.B., G.C.I.E., C.S.I., D.S.O., O.B.E, Commander-in-Chief in India, was asleep, and snoring lightly I went forward, and into the pilot's compartment. The radio operator was asleep. The co-pilot was asleep The pilot, Squadron-Leader Ken Booth had a book spread over the wheel, and was hunched forward over it. I leaned forward to see what interested the best transport pilot in India. (Ken had been the Viceroy's pilot until he came back from a test flight one day with straw in the D.C.3's undercarriage. He had buzzed an overloaded bullock cart, and they demoted him to the Chief's plane.) Ken's book was Forever Amber. I read over his shoulder with increasing enthusiasm. Shoulders gleamed, busts heaved, swains panted... but Ken's breathing renamed low and even. he was asleep, too.
    The aircraft found its way back to its stable, and I to my desk. Tito turned the first of the once free states of eastern Europe into a Communist dictatorship by staging, one-party 'elections', and I thought wearily, here we go again. Examining India's borders I thought that the most likely target for communist expansion in our area was Tibet. For the moment the most likely aggressor was Russia, though if China ever ended her civil wars and was united under a strong central government, then she would be. I began to work out what effort Russia would have to exert to invade Tibet, or give military support to a fake revolution there, and how we could stop them if the Government of India were to accede to a plea from the Dalai Lama for help. When I had come to the conclusion that the Russians would need some 240 squadrons of transport aircraft to do anything effective, or they would have to give us two years warning by a massive road-building programme, I put the file away; but China would be a different proposition.
    Roddy kept throwing problems at me. Which of the many airfields built for the expanded wartime air forcesshould be kept in being? The air force had its needs, of course, but we too were vitally interested, as the location of the airfields affected the speed of troop movement, the location of reserves, internal security methods, and a hundred other matters.
    Next, railways. In addition to the broad gauge network which covered the whole country, there were two metre-gauge networks, one in the north and one in the south. It is hard to believe, bur a gap of seventy miles separated them, Surely now that gap must be bridged, so that civil and military freight. and passengers could move freely over the whole metre-gauge system. Every branch in G.H.Q. agreed, all the civil departments of the government agreed. The Home Department wailed that they had been trying to get that line built, as a famine relief measure, for thirty years, so they were entirely for our proposal. Fine! Now, how much is it going to cost and who's going to pay for it? Civil or military budget? Split it? Well, old boy, we have managed without it all these years, and you did say it was a strategic necessity, didn't you? The Army should pay. Over my dead body, if we