Very different was the intensive enforcement of martial law in the Punjab.  Even when all allowance is made for the more dangerous situation created by a more martial population and the proximity of an always turbulent North-Western Frontier with the added menace at that time of an Afghan invasion, nothing can justify what was done at Amritsar 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 violence for the best part of three days.  But, on his own showing, he deliberately made up his mind whilst marching his men to Jallianwala, and would not have flinched from still greater slaughter if the narrowness