One Man and a World at War 199loyalty to the king- emperor. Yet Bose wondered: Could a larger cause—
that of Indian in de pen dence—be broached to them as an alternative to
the oath they had taken to buttress the Empire? The question had oc-
curred to anticolonial revolutionaries, but attempts to wean soldiers
away from imperial ser vice had achieved limited success during World
War I. The crisis of an even bigger international war provided another
opportunity to do so. Once Indian soldiers began to fall into the hands
of Britain’s enemies, it was possible to imagine a concerted effort to
turn them against their rulers. An army of liberation raised outside
India could potentially serve as a catalyst for another mass movement
within the country. Bose was convinced that an armed struggle in aid
of the nonviolent agitation at home was imperative to bring the British
raj to its knees.
While immersed in his escape plans to fulfill his po lit i cal mission in
Europe, Bose also desired to see his Emilie. In June and July 1939, he
had written to her saying that by early September he would probably
come to Badgastein, their favorite hill resort near Salzburg.^43 The out-
break of the Second World War on September 1 had upset these travel
plans. Now, in April 1941, Subhas asked Emilie to come and join him
in Berlin. “Please write at once to Orlando Mazzotta, Hotel Nürnberger
Hof, near Anhalter Bahnhof, Berlin,” he urged. “Please give my best re-
gards to your mother and greetings to your sister.”^44 In a short while,
they were reunited in Berlin.
Yet, for Bose, the personal was always subordinate to the po lit i cal.
For Indian anticolonial activists, Berlin was not just the cap ital of Ger-
many, but a strategic diasporic space they had inhabited since the
Swadeshi era at the beginning of the twentieth century, in their efforts
to undermine the British raj.^45 For the moment it was Bose’s destina-
tion, as Germany was once again at war with Britain. He would not
hesitate to leave, however, if he could not extract the right terms for
India’s in de pen dence or if circumstances changed. Bose had succeeded
in his dramatic escape from British India. Instead of languishing in
prison, he had thrown himself into the vortex of the mighty upheavals
that were convulsing the entire globe. Once Subhas had safely reached
Europe, Sarat Chandra Bose, during a visit to the ailing Rabindranath