ritsar where
the deliberate bloodshed at Jallianwala has marked out April 13, 1919,
as a black day in the annals of British India. One cannot possibly
realise the frightfulness of it until one has actually looked down on
the Jallianwala Bagh--once a garden, but in modern times a waste space
frequently used for fairs and public meetings, about the size perhaps of
Trafalgar Square, and closed in almost entirely by walls above which
rise the backs of native houses facing into the congested streets of the
city. I entered by the same narrow lane by which General Dyer--having
heard that a large crowd had assembled there, many doubtless in
defiance, but many also in ignorance of his proclamation forbidding all
public gatherings--entered with about fifty rifles. I stood on the same
rising ground on which he stood when, without a word of warning, he
opened fire at about 100 yards' range upon a dense crowd, collected
mainly in the lower and more distant part of the enclosure around a
platform from which speeches were being delivered. The crowd was
estimated by him at 6000, by others at 10,000 and more, but practically
unarmed, and all quite defenceless. The panic-stricken multitude broke
at once, but for ten consecutive minutes he kept up a merciless
fusillade--in all 1650 rounds--on that seething mass of humanity, caught
like rats in a trap, vainly rushing for the few narrow exits or lying
flat on the ground to escape the rain of bullets, which he personally
directed to the points where the crowd was thickest. The "targets," to
use his own word, were good, and when at the end of those ten minutes,
having almost exhausted his ammunition, he marched his men off by the
way they came, he had killed, according to the official figures only
wrung out of Government months later, 379, and he left about 1200
wounded on the ground, for whom, again to use his own word, he did not
consider it his "job" to take the slightest thought.

In going to Jallianwala I had passed through the streets where, on April
10, when the disorders suddenly broke out in Amritsar, the worst
excesses were committed by the Indian rioters. But for General Dyer's
own statements before the Hunter Commission, one might have pleaded
that, left to his own unbalanced judgment by the precipitate abdication
of the civil authority, he simply "saw red," though the outbreak of the
10th had been quelled before he arrived in Amritsar, and the city had
been free from actual viole