Memoir of the Career of Thomas Edward Rogers [‎52r] (103/118)

As the night brought in report after report of killing and terrible injuries,
apart from widespread setting fire to houses and shops, a ghastly new necessity
arose - the disposal of corpses on a mass scale. For the number was thought
to reach around one thousand in the first twenty four hours and a few hundreds
more in the succeeding three or four days before the situation was fully under
control. I found myself organising round the clock coverage of corpse disposal,
ambulance, street cleaning and firefighting services and also making out rosters
for senior civil and police officers to be at City Police Station headquarters
on a shift basis. Special arrangements for extra manning of hospitals were also
made.
I remember one incident in particular. At some point in the first night the
Hindu brigadier in charge of the Quetta garrison had suddenly evacuated under
escort a large body of his understandably panic-stricken coreligionists and Sikhs
from their section of the bazaar to the racecourse outside the town. That he had
done this entirely without orders or consultation with the civil power responsible
was less important than that I thought the action a mistake. It may have
encouraged further deaths, assaults, arson and looting by appearing to abandon the
Hindu quarter, and many Hindus still there or in the neighbourhood, and it tended
to give the impression in my view that the attempt to maintain law and order had
been given up. At the same time the evacuees on the racecourse were exposed to
attack or harrassment by tribesmen unless a considerable body of troops were
retained to maintain continuous protection of them, thus diverting the troops
from their proper function. I asked the brigadier to call on me and pointed out
that the better course was surely to protect the minority communities inside their
own quarter by cordoning it off with barbed wire, after which it could be protected
with a minimum of men and much greater security for person and property. The return
of the evacuees at once would demonstrate that we were confident about early