363 বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ চতুর্দশ খন্ড In some towns we were taken to see whiskery old man with swagger sticks shouting commands in English to squads of youths learning their left from their right as they drilled in columns of threes. Then they would amble off under the trees, where another old soldier began naming the parts of a 25 year old Lee-Enfield rifle.
- We've Got A Lot To Kill”
But at the market town of Jhenida we met Captain Mahbubuddin -a 26 year old former assistant superintendent of police. He was tall for a Bengali and looked a bit of a playboy with the lanyard of his police revolver threaded through the collar of a buttoned-down shirt. He is officially credited with starting resistance in his area. As soon as he heard of the Army's attack in Dacca, he opened his armory and handed out the rifles. He had a nice style, flopping his feet up into a leather-backed armchair in the local government offices where he had set up his headquarters and saying: "Those bastard Punjabis and those bastard Biharis-we've got a lot to kill." I asked him where he learnt his excellent English and he came out with some familiar Maoist phrases about his country being exploited for 200 years, a legacy of the imperialistic yoke. His men were armed with anything from 12-bore shotguns to AK assault rifles, with which the East Bengal Regiment had been reequipped. They had dug L-shaped slit trenches against air attack and stood out as being a thoughtful, well organised bunch. For the first 90 miles of the trip-up to the Ganges fishing village of Goalundowooden bridges had been burnt down, roads blocked with freshly felled trees, and wide anti-tank ditches dug deep into the tarmac highways. At times we had to detour for miles across dry paddy fields-an operation the Army will not be able to repeat in June when the monsoon starts in earnest. We saw our first sign of Pakistan Army air activity as we crossed the Ganges from Goalundo to Bilashpur in a packed old motor launch steered by a white-bearded captain who sat cross-legged on a bench behind the wheel. When we were in midstream, an Army helicopter-it looked like a Westerland Wesscx-came quite close and we joined the captain in the wheelhouse. Coming back, a five-hour journey in a canoe, we stayed under the curved bamboo shelter all the time. When we reached Faridpur, we heard that Goaiundo had been bombed. We went straight there and found that it had. in fact, been straffed with cannon and rocket fire. The villagers showed us bits of aluminum from the rockets. The attack had taken place at about two in the afternoon on Easter Sunday. Four people were killed and eight wounded. Like the cropses in this place overnight the huts looked as if they had been dead for three months: sagging roofs and ashes and an occasional cheap moulded rubber sandal of the kind most Bengali peasants wear when they're not barefoot. There were flies, everywhere, because some of the villagers had received direct hits from the cannon shells and bits of them were still in the ground.
