Now the Pale Horse

Lest the amply fed think that India's immense misery had passed, an American missionary wrote home a letter: "It will take at least five years to recover from the effects [of 1943's famine] from a health standpoint, and more than that to recover from a moral standpoint. . . . The poor have sold off their goats, chickens, cattle, brass vessels, ornaments, and the like in the past hard year and are far less well prepared to meet the exigencies of another such year. . . ."

For the moment the rice would go around. Bengal's harvest had been good, Viceroy Lord Wavell's speed-up of food transport effective, foreign charity helpful. But all this was amelioration, not solution. The blown and shriveled masses who had not starved to death in the famine areas of northeastern India were scourged now by pestilence, by cholera, dysentery, malaria, dropsy, pneumonia. The famine had sharpened India's old and limitless needs: more rice, in steady supply; milk for her children; medicines for her sick; shelter for her homeless. Without these, thus far merely trickling in, there would be many added to the multitude of dead.

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