CALCUTTA—As a war, it's got everything—good guys and bad guys, little people cheering and hugging the liberators and weeping with joy, battles in which the bad guys win grudging respect by standing and fighting and dying, though vastly outnumbered and outgunned.

And then there is the birth‐of‐a-nation part of it. A people long dominated and exploited by a racially different and disdainful class is about to throw the exploiters — with Indian help — out of East Pakistan. In a short while the land will be Bangla Desh, its 75 million people making it the seventh most populous in the world.

How did the Indian troops, already moving on the regional capital of Dacca, in the country's heartland, get there so fast?

The Pakistanis were supposed to be well dug in. The country is a lacework of shifting rivers and waterways, difficult for an army to cross. Much of the terrain is soft and marshy, far from ideal for the Indian tanks.

But the Indians had every advantage. The Pakistanis were strung too thin along East Pakistan's 1,350 mile border to try to stop any Indian attempt to punch through.

The Pakistanis have 70,000 to 80,000 men in East Pakistan, the Indians twice that number. The Pakistanis had only 23 fighter planes in East Pakistan—old F‐86 Sabre jets. The Indians have many more planes—and they are newer and better. When the war was only two days old, they had shot all but two or three of the Sabre jets out of the Bengal sky. In Rawalpindi, after a week of confident communiques, a military spokesman conceded on Friday that the “overstressed” Pakistani troops were without air support.

But perhaps more important than any other factor in this war is the isolation of the Pakistani soldier. He is hated by the vast majority of the population, for he was let loose in East Pakistan over eight months ago to kill and brutalize until the population was cowed and the autonomy movement dead.

But the Bengalis proved to have more staying power than the Pakistanis ever imagined. And now the Pakistani is a fish in a hostile sea. As he retreats, there is always a Bengali guerrilla somewhere who may jump him and cut off his fingers to watch him die slowly.

Many Pakistani soldiers are trying to escape the Indian advance by getting into civilian clothes and trying to slip through the countryside. But will be futile. The Pakistani soldier cannot hide in a land of Bengalis. He is taller and broader and lighter-skinned than they. Even if he has learned the Bengali language, they will detect the accent. And if he can speak only his own Urdu or Pushtu, then surrender is his only hope.

Yet with all these millstones, the Pakistanis have not been a pushover for the Indians.

True, the Indians have regularly outflanked them, using country lanes when the Pakistanis had built heavy bunkers and other defenses across the main road. And the Indians are getting the best local intelligence in the history of fighting in a foreign land.

It is also true that the Pakistanis have been withdrawing from places with elaborate defenses, like Jessore, where the Indians would have had a harder and longer time dislodging them, in order to retreat deeper into the country, as though deeper were safer.

Yet when the Pakistanis have turned and made a stand, either to help the rest of their unit get away or simply because there was no place left to go, they have fought fiercely, almost fanatically—and the Indians have taken more casualties than they care to admit.

But now the Indian Army is closing in, drawing a noose around the 30,000 troops in the Dacca area and isolating the other Pakistani pickets in the outer reaches of the country. All the escape routes have been cut. As the Pakistanis have fallen back on the river ports, the Indians have blocked the port exits—cutting down any boat that tries to slip through with ground and air fire.

The Indians have called on the Pakistanis to surrender, but the Pakistani generals are known for their Moslem holy‐war mentality, and it is just possible that they will order their men to fight to the last round of ammunition—insane, but possible.

It would be a bloodbath, a Dunkirk, but it would not be the first time nation was born that way.