Smoke and Ashes

We could only control India through force of arms, but force was useless against a people who didn’t fight back; because you couldn’t kill people like that without killing a part of yourself too.

I hated this new breed of pacifist Indian revolutionary. So often they acted like we were all just good friends who happened to disagree about something, and that once the issue was resolved – obviously in their favour – we’d go back to taking tea and being the best of chums. It made punching them in the face morally difficult.

the sense of absurdity hit me: these men, born into bondage, seemed to bear no personal ill will towards me, a representative of the authority that made them second-class citizens in their own land.

God forbid the prince should meet an actual Indian on his tour of the country.

cricket, a game so insipid and with rules so arcane that it took five full days to play it properly and which even then, more often than not, ended in a draw?

A more sensible man might have kept quiet, but me – I preferred to give voice to my ignorance.

I'd never been one to give up on lost causes, maybe because I was one myself.

And in the expression on the constable’s face, I saw the future. This struggle we were engaged in — this battle to keep India British — was one we were destined to lose. If even our own men treated the enemy as saints, then what chance did we stand?

We'd arrested him for making a speech seeking equality, and thrown him in a makeshift prison camp, open to the elements on one of the coldest nights of the year, and here he was inviting us in for a cup of tea. It was hard to dislike the man, let alone classify him as a mortal foe.

And we British considered ourselves a moral people. What else was the vaunted British sense of fair play but a manifestation of our morality?

What else was the vaunted British sense of fair play but a manifestation of our morality? Gandhi and Das's genius was that they realised that better than we did ourselves. They recognised that when it came down to it, the British and the Indians weren't that different, and the way to beat us was to appeal to our better natures — to make us comprehend the moral incongruity of our position in India.

As he’d said, the purpose of non-violent non-cooperation was to provoke a reaction, and it was more likely he’d be plotting his next move before he’d even had breakfast.

To see a man as your enemy, you needed to hate him, and while it was easy to hate a man who fought you with bullets and bombs, it was bloody difficult to hate a man who opposed you by appealing to your own moral compass.

the kind of photographs that were popular during the war – mementos of a shared camaraderie; but more importantly in a time when death was indiscriminate and sudden, they were a record, in the event that the worst should happen, that you had actually lived – that you were more than just a name carved on a memorial to the fallen.

Oh, you're much more than a taxi service, Sam," said Taggert. "Think of yourselves as providing a chauffeur service with menaces.