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Except for Chhamb and other isolated battles, both sides seemed to be going about the war with an "old boy" attitude: "If you don't really hit my important bases, I won't bomb yours." Behind all this, of course, is the fact that many Indian and Pakistani officers, including the two countries' commanding generals, went to school with one another at Sandhurst or Dehra Dun. India's commanding general in the east, Lieut. General Jagjit Singh Aurora, was a classmate of Pakistan's President Yahya. "We went to school together to learn how best to kill each other," said one Indian officer.
"To an outsider," TIME'S Marsh Clark cabled after a tour of the western front, "the Indian army seemed precise, old-fashioned and sane. The closer you get to the front, the more tea and cookies you get,' one American correspondent complained. But things get done. Convoys move up rapidly, artillery officers direct their fire with dispatch. Morale is extremely high, and Indian officers always refer to the Pakistanis, though rather condescendingly, as 'those chaps.' "
Abandoned Britches
On a visit to Sehjra, a key town in a Pakistani salient that pokes into Indian territory east of Lahore where Indian troops have been advancing, Clark found turbaned men working in the fields while jets flew overhead and artillery sounded in the distance. "There are free tea stalls along the road," he reported, "and teenagers throw bags of nuts, plus oranges and bananas, into the Jeeps carrying troops to the front, and shout encouragement. When our Jeep stops, kids surround it and yell at us, demanding that we write a story saying their village is still free and not captured, as claimed by Pakistani radio.
"As we come up on the border, the Indian commander receives us. He recounts how his Gurkha soldiers kicked off the operation at 9 o'clock at night and hit the well-entrenched Pakistanis at midnight. I think we took them by surprise,' he says, and an inspection of the hooch of the Pakistani area commanding officer confirms it. On his bed is a suitcase, its confusion indicating it was hastily packed. There are several shirts, some socks. And his trousers. Nice trousers of gray flannel made, according to the label, by Mr. Abass, a tailor in Rawalpindi. The colonel, it is clear, has departed town and left his britches behind."
South of Sehjra, Indian armored units have been plowing through sand across the West Pakistan border, taking hundreds of square miles of desert and announcing the advance of their troops to places that apparently consist of two palm trees and a shallow pool of brackish water. Among the enemy equipment reported captured: several camels. The reason behind this rather ridiculous adventure is the fear that Pakistan will try to seize large tracts of Indian territory to hold as ransom for the return of East Bengal. That now seems an impossibility with Bangladesh an independent nation, but India wants to have land in the west to bargain with.
The western part of India is on full wartime alert. All cities are completely blacked out at night, fulfilling, as it were, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's warning that it would be a "long, dark