The Pledge [antikvár]

.he many turns, twists, and circumstances that led Bruce Bacon down the curious path his Ufe took probably threaded back through all his years on earth. No one is constructed instantly—in terms of mind and outlook—any more than one is changed instantly. The making and the changing are part of a process. But there is no question that in Bacon's case, the process climaxed in Calcutta in 1945. Bacon had been in Europe since the Normandy landing, writing for the New York Tribune, with the understanding that he could do magazine pieces for other pubUcations, namely. The New Yorker and The Saturday Evening Post. His newspaper pieces were personalized and intimate, very much like the stuff that Ernie Pyle had been writing, and he had made a good name for himself, considering that he had just turned thirty. By the time Berlin fell to the Allied armies, Bruce Bacon felt that he had seen enough of war and a war-shattered Europe. He had heard vaguely, from an officer who had been transferred from India to France, that the British, fearing a Japanese penetration of Assam and India, where they might be welcomed as liberators, had cornered the rice supply and contrived a famine, which broke the will of the people in Assam and in part of Bengal. The rumor held that hundreds of thousands had already died of starvation, and that thousands more were now in the process of dying. Bruce decided that it was an interesting and important