malice and 'perversion' of good order. Gandhi will not lead India to capable self-government. The British Raj must continue, firm and unshaken in its administration of justice to all men. In his official response to the Hunter commission that inquired into the shooting, Dyer was unremorseful and stated: "I think it quite possible that I could have dispersed the crowd without firing but they would have come back again and laughed, and I would have made, what I consider, a fool of myself." However, in his account of the massacre Nick Lloyd comments that although Dyer later claimed to have undertaken the massacre to "save" British India, he had had no such idea in his mind that fateful afternoon. As well as being "dazed and shaken up" – hardly the response of a soldier who had had murder in his mind – all the witnesses recall how Dyer "was unnerved and deeply upset about what had happened". Nigel Collett – author of the biography The Butcher of Amritsar – is convinced that the Amritsar massacre preyed on Dyer's mind from the very day he opened fire. "He spent the rest of his life trying to justify himself. He persuaded himself it had been his duty to act as he did, but he could not persuade his soul that he had done right. It rotted his mind and, I am guessing here, added to his sickness." Collett, in his book, portrays Dyer as a man who got on extremely well with his men and his juniors, while his contemporaries and seniors were always wary of him. When he approached a complex political problem, his one thought was to have order; his one tool to get it was the gun. He notes that, at the time of the Amritsar massacre, Dyer was wracked by ill-health and separated from his beloved family. Collett speculates that perhaps this encouraged Dyer's extreme view that the Punjab was on the brink of rebellion, with the empire about to collapse, and feared a mutiny like that of 1857. The solution, he decided, was not just to restore order but to show that the state was in charge. It was not enough to have shops and businesses reopen in Amritsar – an example was needed of the consequences of insubordination. Collett quotes Dyer himself on the motivations that drove him to act as he did: "...It was no