The Loved One

Deep in a spectacularly beautiful gorge of the River Jhelum last week a 25-pounder boomed. From the distance came an answering roar, and an Indian commander pointed to the top of a hill. "Our men are up there," he said. "Pakistan's army holds the hills beyond."

Thus last week the soldiers of Britain's youngest dominions shot it out with each other for the favors of the beautiful, fabled State of Kashmir lying between them. Neither side was willing to admit that it was war. To a U.N. commission on hand seeking for a way to peace, the Indian government explained over & over again that Kashmir had voluntarily acceded to India, that India's soldiers were there only to clear Kashmir's soil of all enemies so that her 3,000,000 independent citizens could vote peaceably on their own future.

Officially, Pakistan was as altruistic as India. Its troops were there, said Jinnah's government, to prevent refugees from crossing the borders. Meanwhile, on a 300-mile front that stretched crescent-like across India's biggest state, the fighting raged in one of the strangest wars of modern times.

Azad Kashmir. In mountain passes of the north and east the Indian army engaged fierce Waziris, Afridis and Kashmiri tribesmen from areas where Kashmir blends with the North West Frontier Province in rugged mountain wasteland. There, in remote Gilgit, where the Indian subcontinent touches Soviet Russia, is quartered a government called Azad Kashmir (Free Kashmir) headed by an ambitious onetime petty civil servant named Sirdar Ibrahim.

To engage Ibrahim's men, Indian soldiers seasoned in the steaming jungles of Burma slogged up snowy mountainsides. Bombers took their missiles over Nanga Parbat, fifth highest mountain in the world. At the extreme east end of the front, at Ladak, a strange land where the people are Buddhists and feel more affinity to Tibet than Kashmir, an Indian division was flown in by planes that climbed 20,000 feet over the Himalayas.

"They Drop Over." In the Jhelum valley, to the west, last week an Indian officer showed TIME Correspondent Robert Lubar a map on which numbers of regular Pakistan units were labeled in. Lubar asked what was the source of his information. "Partly from prisoners," he answered. "Also they drop over and see us sometimes. The Pakistan battalion commander here and the Indian battalion commander here are both former platoon commanders of mine."

The Jhelum front is a succession of giant hills which must be taken in turn. There are men on these hilltops who have been without baths and hot meals for three months, supplied by coolies who have to crawl up the mountain. On one 11,000-foot peak it takes a coolie 24 hours to carry up three mortar shells, and the wounded must be carried down on a man's back.

"Who Gives the Most?" "I feel about Kashmir as one feels about a woman," says India's Premier Nehru, who comes often to sip the cold spring water in a Kashmir garden or to spin down the Jhelum River with Kashmir's Premier Sheik Abdullah (see cut). Many a tourist has shared his view, but last week the tourist flood that might have rushed to enjoy the coolness and romance of Kashmir's capital city Srinagar was dammed off by Nehru's government.

Last week, while the U.N. commission tried to find a way out for Kashmir, Correspondent Lubar conducted an informal poll by asking a Kashmiri if he knew what Pakistan was. He answered: "The place that belongs to Jinnah." Did he know what India was? "Yes, the place that belongs to Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru." Which did he prefer? "The one who gives me most help."

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