The Mysticism of India

REVIEWING "The Lives of a Bengal Lancer" is a hard lot. The reviewer, goaded by an unreasoning desire for hyperbole, is consciously bound by a definitive knowledge of the dullness of critical prose when compared with the brilliant nervousness of Yeats-Brown.

A young subaltern, a few years out of Harrow, joins the colonial army on New Year's Eve, 1905. The book, then, is a chronicle of the experiences of an Anglo-Indian Army officer over a period of years. Put in that way, nothing could seem more tedious and dull. Yet, the casual reader who has scrupously avoided, perhaps through laziness, the countless "Mother Indias" and now watches the columns of the daily press with some dismay, can be assured that the "Bengal Lancer" has come closer to India than any of his predecessors. Lowell Thomas, no mean adventurer himself, said: "I have read several hundred books on India and this surpasses them all."

To return to the book. The word "Lives" in the title is its keynote. His lives as a hard riding cavalry-officer, as a member of the finest polo team in the colony, as a pig-sticker as an aerial observer during the Great War, as a prisoner in a Turkish dungeon and his subsequent escape, are but a few of the many sides of Major Yeats-Brown. That description of the polo game has already received its columns of praise; the midnight excursion to the haunts of the Nautch-girls has been written with a consummate delicacy and just as consummate a sincere frankness. The objectivity of the book, the chronicle of the details of a masterly adventurer places it above the brief span of a best-seller.

But its eternal appeal does not lie with these adventures of the body alone. Kipling and Keyserling have done as well with India. It is when Yeats-Brown travels off the beaten-path of the senses that Kim and Gunga Din pale into insignificance. Strange stories have come out of the East for years; the cobra-enchanter, the sacred animals and the mystical rites along the Ganges, the horrible parade of the Juggernaut in the Temple Square. The Bengal Lancer wondered about these. And wondering, he took to the path of the great Yogi, he sat at the feet of the guru, a holy man, studied breathing exercises and renunciation of the body, learned new definitions of purity and love. He heard the guru say that the worst enemy is not death, but wrong desire, that wars are "mass-perversions of the sexual instinct," and that discipline is paramount. To this mystery, this wisdom of the East, the Western writer brought a rare and tolerant sympathy and a rarer understanding of his own deficiencies:

It is vain for the reviewer to twist and turn phrases in an attempt to catch the curious interest and charm of this autobiography of man and of nation. But he can at least promise that in reading it, there will be no waste and no regret.