There can be few military memoirs more exotic and colourful than John Masters’ two volumes on his life with the Gurkhas: Bugles and a Tiger and The Road Past Mandalay. The latter deals in harrowing detail with his fight against the Japanese in Burma, commanding a column of the famous Chindits on the eve of the Second World War. But it is the first volume that we will focus on here, relating to his transition from public school to Sandhurst, and then to the mountain passes of the old North-West Frontier.
By the time Masters wrote Bugles and a Tiger in 1956 he had already achieved fame as the author of a series of books chronicling the adventures of successive generations of an English family in India. These included Nightrunners of Bengal, The Deceivers, and Bhowani Junction – the last of which was made into a 1956 film starring Ava Gardner and Stewart Granger. In some ways, his career reflects that of another soldier-novelist, George MacDonald Fraser, author of the Flashman books (see ‘War Classics’, MHM 142, October/November 2024) and his own graphic memoir of the Burma campaign.
Masters’ fiction has been accused of being pro-Empire at the expense of Indians, but in reality his novels showed sympathy to the frictions experienced by both sides in the struggle for Indian independence, particularly the Eurasians (or Anglo-Indians) who found themselves caught in the middle. In 1962, Masters discovered that in his own long family history of military service there was indeed an Indian ancestor.
