Pakistan array) joined the liberation, as indeed did Bengalis of every social class and political persuasion. The Bangladesh flag flew from primitive mud huts as well from city offices, from ox-carts as well as from jeep. The revolutionary slogan, “Joi Bangla” ("Victory to Bangla"), was shouted by peasant children as well as partly politicians.
An Army Without Arms
But there were things Bengalis didn't have and didn't do. Except for the militiamen of the East Pakistan Rifles, the liberation army was almost entirely lacking in arms and training. Even the Rifles had only light, old fashioned weapons. In many areas the Bengalis did little to supplement these arms with homemade weapons like Molotov cocktails or primitive mines.
The Bengalis were surprisingly unprepared for a war that many of them had deemed possible, even likely, for years. They had no effective communication and liaison system-not even by runners-and thus Bangladesh fortunes differed, and suffered district by district village by village. The leadership has been composed largely of Awami League functionaries and civil servants. They have tended to sit in the towns, first emotionally celebration of their people and later emotionally bewailing their lack of airplanes, artillery and foreign support. Sheikh Mujibur, now believed to be a captive of the Pakistani army, is typically Bengali. Says one critic, who is also Bengali: “An impossible man. Whenever you ask him a question, he answers with a quotation from Tagore.” Tagore was Bengali's greatest writer.
The West Pakistan army, perhaps cowed by the thought of 75 million hostile Bengalis spread across 55,000 square miles (East Pakistan is roughly the size of Arkansas), spent most of the first two weeks of the war holed up in urban military cantonment. But when the army finally began to move, behind air artillery cover, Bangladesh offered little opposition.
An Unopposed Army
By late last week Bangladesh forces were evacuating the towns, and the Pakistani army was rolling down the roads generally unopposed. In some areas there were reports of Bangladesh leaders and soldiers moving out into the villages to prepare for guerrilla war. But in other places-like Meherpur and additional towns near the border with Indian West Bengal-Bangladesh forces were simply fleeing into India.
At the Indian border town of Gede, a Bengali school principal who a week before had been welcoming journalists to the Bangladesh provisional capital, is taking up residence in an Indian guesthouse. “We will fight to the last of our 75 million people, to the last man,” he says.
Another refugee at Gede is perhaps over defeatist but sincere: “The Punjabis are trigger-happy men bent to rule us at whatever the cost. They are killing thousands of our people, but what can we do? We have no arms. The Indians gave us a few gun-sduck guns. But the Punjabis aren't sitting ducks. Yesterday we were tilling our land, and today we must be a guerrilla army. How can it be? Some say the monsoon will help us. But how? We have penknives and staves, and we will go through the watersplash, splash, splash. They have planes and cannons and carbines. What can we do?”
