FOREIGN NEWS

INDIA Competitive Massacre

While the orchestra at Lahore's Falett's Hotel played quietly for dancing, European guests drank cocktails on the moonlit terrace. Beyond earshot of the music, whole blocks of buildings lay gutted. Streets were bare and silent. Over the deserted railroad station the smell of corpses hung.

One-seventh of Lahore, capital of the Punjab, had been destroyed. Scores of nearby towns and villages had been razed. War--or rather, competitive massacre--between Moslems and Sikhs had reached a pitch of horror that made the Indian Mutiny of 1857 look like a mere street brawl. In two weeks, between 40,000 and 150,000 people had been killed in the Punjab. Most of the bodies were too hacked and charred to be recognized. At least a million were homeless.

"Never during two wars have I seen such sights as I have seen these last two days," said a middle-aged British colonel.

For months the Punjab's communal hatred had been boiling up into slaughter. A climax came last spring when hundreds were killed in riots. In August the partition of the Punjab between India and Pakistan left 1.6 million of the 3.8 million Sikhs in the province under Moslem rule; at least twice as many Moslems remained on the Indian side of the border in a new East Punjab state.

TIME'S Robert Neville cabled:

"Just flying over the Punjab today gives a feeling that terrible things have happened below. The number of smoking villages that can be counted from Ambala up to Lahore must be at least 150.

"In hitherto peaceful districts like Montgomery and Lyallpur there is not one town which has not been a battlefield. There is no bazaar which has not been burned out. Streams of refugees can be seen approaching all bridges, virtual convoys miles long. On a ten-mile stretch of road leading to the big bridge over the Sutlej River into Pakistan, there must have been 100,000 people, most of them walking beside bullock carts piled high with their sole possessions.

"At Lahore's Central Station, Sikh and Hindu refugees from North or West Punjab were mobbed on the platform, often stabbed to death and their few belongings looted. A major incident involved a big convoy carrying perhaps 1,000 from Sialkot to Amritsar. The convoy was stopped and attacked at the Ravi River bridge. Hundreds were stabbed to death and other hundreds wounded.

"Refugees from Lyallpur in West Punjab say that so many Sikhs and Hindus were murdered and their bodies thrown into the canal that the canal actually had a pinkish color for a day after. Moslem refugees told how Sikhs stripped and paraded Moslem women through the streets, raped them and then killed them."

GREAT BRITAIN Dearly Beloved A million watched; millions listened to the warm young voices, the sonorous old voices. Billions of words about it were printed, and closely read. In Accra, where the equatorial sun beats down on the white church steeples (relics of a vanished Danish empire), parties were held in celebration. Paris noted it, and Panama. In heedless Manhattan thousands got out of bed at 6 a.m. to hang over radios. Shanghai and Hankow had never seen so many weddings; Chinese brides deemed it lucky to be married on the day that Elizabeth, heiress to Britain's throne, became the wife of Philip Mountbatten.

This wedding, on a dark day of a troubled, distracted and most uncertain time, carried over six continents and seven seas a brightness so simple it was hard to understand. Its appeal was too nearly universal to be explained by such words as "glamor," "publicity," "sentimentality," or even by harsher and more present words, such as "power" or "wealth."

The great social victory of order, out of which freedom issues, had its source in marriage, whether in Westminster Abbey or in a country church. Thus, what would otherwise have been merely a flash of gems, a blare of horns and a hash of gossip took on a meaning by a fascinating interplay of dignity and earthiness, of humor, pomp and prayer. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.