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Hardened by such defeats, John Masters was a tough, battlewise lieutenant colonel during the final, crushing campaign against the Japanese. For six hours one day he got the chance to command the crack 19th Indian Infantry Division in combat—"the summit and culmination of my military life . . . The experience itself made me understand even more fully Lee's saying that it is fortunate war is so terrible, otherwise men would love it too much.''
Foxhounds & Champagne. There is more than the blood of battle in The Road Past Mandalay. Masters deftly relates the bizarre incidents of war—the middle-aged Japanese officer who drove unharmed through the startled brigade in a chugging Chevy, staring straight ahead and looking as though he had just committed "a grave social faux pas." Masters tells of monocled British officers who went off to war with a pack of foxhounds and 40 dozen cases of champagne, and who could turn a man to jelly just by peering with wonder at his clothes. And Masters writes frankly of his affair with a married woman, who proudly bore him an illegitimate daughter before they could be married.
Masters writes emotionally, sometimes overemotionally. But his style in these reminiscences is several cuts above the more self-conscious manner of his fiction. Masters is at his best writing about the peculiar, intense, masculine love a professional soldier has for the men he leads into battle. There came the day in 1945 when the Indian army—British, Sikhs, Gurkhas, Madrassis, Pathans—swept to the attack for the last time in its 87-year history. Masters, whose family had lived in India for more than 150 years, watched them go with a sudden surge of choking pride: "All these men knew their commanders, and as the vehicles crashed past, most of the soldiers were on their feet, cheering and yelling. The Gurkhas, of course, went by sitting stiffly to attention, whole truckloads bouncing four feet in the air without change of expression. The romance of war—but only a fool would begrudge us the excitement and the sense of glory, for no one on that plain had wanted war, and all of us had known enough terror to last several lifetimes."