Wings of Duty — Page 31

31 disorientate them. I made this manoeuvre repeatedly. Those Sikhs who were on foot ran away and hid while those on horseback dispersed in different directions. I buzzed one of the horsemen so low that it terrified his mount and the animal flung him hard onto the ground. Seeing this gave me a great deal of satisfaction. By the third week of August, burning villages and rising smoke were so common a sight that the flames could be seen from Amritsar to the River Beas. Livestock numbering in the hundreds of thousands grazed freely in the area. It was both frightening and painful to see and yet we would have to look upon such terrors on an almost daily basis. After 17 August our air surveys were discontinued. Since Qadian was now a part of India, we had to fly more frequently from Qadian to Lahore and back. Each day we would take a worker of the community to Walton Airport, who carried with him important papers, documents, records and funds belonging to Sadar Anjuman Ahmadiyya and Tehrik-e-Jadid, as well as detailed accounts, historical records and photographs. The community worker would spend the day in Lahore taking care of essential business and then return to the airport late in the afternoon before being flown back to Qadian around sunset. On the return journey, the