The Day of the Scorpion (57 page)

Sarah shook her head.

‘The affection he has for his task, its end, its means and everyone who’s involved with him in it. Most professional soldiers are amateurs. They love their men, their equipment, their regiments. In a special way they love their enemies too. It’s common to most walks of life, isn’t it? To fall in love with the means as well as the end of an occupation?’

‘You think that’s wrong?’

‘Yes, I think it is. It’s a confusion. It dilutes the purity of an act. It blinds you to the truth of a situation. It hedges everything about with a mystique. One should not be confused in this way.’

‘Are you never confused, Ronald?’

‘I am – frequently confused. But I do try to act, unemotionally. I do try for a certain professional detachment.’

‘It’s funny,’ she said, ‘I should have said you were actually quite an emotional person. Underneath. And that it sometimes runs you into trouble.’

He was watching her, but she detected nothing in his expression except – and this so suddenly that she felt she had observed it the moment that it fell on him – a curious serenity. ‘Well, of course, you’re right,’ he said. ‘I’ve certainly
run into trouble in my time. It’s one thing to try to act unemotionally and quite another thing to do so. No act is performed without a decision being made to perform it. I suppose emotion goes into a decision, especially into a major decision. My decision to get out of the police and into the army was an emotional one, wasn’t it? Just like the one I made as a boy, to try to get into the Indian Police. But I don’t think I was ever an amateur, either as a copper or a soldier. I had no affection for the job, in either case. But I did the job. I tried not to be confused. That was the difference between Teddie and me – the
real
difference, not the one that had to do with the fact that Teddie was a Muzzy Guide and I was, well, what I am – a boy from an elementary school who won a scholarship to a better one and found it difficult later not to be a bit ashamed of his parents, and very much ashamed of his grandparents. But any difference that Teddie saw in our attitudes, he’d always put down to the fact that I wasn’t the same class. You can’t disguise it, can you? It comes out in subtle ways, even when you’ve learned the things to say and how to say them. It comes out in not knowing the places or the people your kind of people know, it comes out in the lack of points of common contact. People like me carry around with them the vacuum of their own anonymous history, and there comes a moment when a fellow like Teddie looks at us and honestly believes we lack a vital gift as well, some sort of sense of inborn decency that’s not our fault but makes us not quite trustworthy. I’m sorry. I’m not speaking ill of him. That’s what he thought. And that’s why he was killed. I’m only trying to make it clear, make this background clear. He was killed trying to show me how a thing should be done, because he didn’t trust me to do it right. Well, it was his own fault – but remove me from the situation and it wouldn’t have happened.’

‘What situation?’

He closed his eyes and turned his head away. ‘What situation? It was a simpler one than – another I remember. It began with a fellow called Mohammed Baksh. A Jiff. He was captured by a patrol from one of the companies of the British battalion of the Brigade that was probing forward on our right flank. Overnight things had become terribly confused and by
morning the British battalion had found itself out on a limb. The advance of the Indian battalion on their left had been held up and it looked as if the British battalion might get cut off or have its flank turned. They were astride a road in hill country and we hadn’t got a clear picture of the enemy’s strength, or of where the major enemy attack was likely to come from. And this particular Brigadier was suffering from a bout of jitters, he was jumpy about losing his British battalion and wanted to pull them back, but the General had other ideas, of pushing another battalion forward astride the road and deploying both battalions to encircle whatever enemy units there were in the immediate vicinity. But he didn’t want to issue the order without personal contact with the Brigadier. He decided to visit the Brigade and get things moving from there, unless he judged the Brigadier’s on-the-spot appreciation had something to be said for it, or he thought him incapable of pressing forward immediately with the right sort of enthusiasm. He took Teddie with him. And at the last moment he turned to me and told me to go with them to make sure the Brigade Intelligence Officer had a complete picture of what we knew, and to assess on the spot anything he might be able to add that would be new to us.’ A pause. ‘We went in two jeeps. There were three in the General’s. The General, Teddie, and the Indian driver, two in mine, myself and my driver. Teddie drove the other jeep. He loved driving. A jeep particularly. And the driver liked sitting perched at the back, with a Sten gun. It was a lovely morning. Bright and crisp. During the day of course it got very hot. Have you ever been in Manipur?’

‘No.’

‘On the plain itself, around Imphal, it’s like northern India up in the North-west Frontier, around Abbotabad; much the same view of hills and mountains. We were south of there, in the foothills. The road was pretty rough. Steep wooded banks one side, pretty long wooded drops the other – well, for much of its course. You flattened out every so often, when you went through a village. We reached the Brigade headquarters round about eight-thirty a.m. I wasn’t in on the talk that went on between the Brigadier and General. I was with the Brigade Intelligence Officer and he’d just had the IO of the
British battalion on the wireless, reporting that patrols had picked up this fellow Mohammed Baksh of the Jiffs. So far he hadn’t given any information. They said he looked half-starved and had probably deserted several days before. I wasn’t so sure. The picture I had was that most of the Jiffs looked pretty exhausted. They didn’t have the stamina of the Japanese. The whole force had crossed the Chindwin and come through hill jungle. The Japanese are old hands at that. Advance first and worry about your lines of communications and supplies afterwards. That’s their technique. It worked in Burma and Malaya, but it didn’t work this time because we were ready for it. That’s why the General wanted to push the other battalion forward. He guessed the Indian battalion on the left of the British was misinterpreting the strength of the opposition they’d met in the night. I realized it was important to know more about this Jiff fellow. If all that stood in the way of the British battalion was a Jiff formation, then the General could perform his containing operation easily.’

‘Didn’t the British battalion know what was in front of them?’

‘No, they’d reached their objective, and the only reason for the pause was their discovery that their left flank was unprotected, because the Indian battalion hadn’t kept pace. The Indians were stuck about two miles back, apparently contained by a Japanese force of at least battalion strength. But the General thought that if the Indian battalion was pinned down by the Japanese, so were the Japanese by the Indians, a sort of tactical stalemate, and since the British battalion was astride the road the initiative was still very much with the Brigade. The British battalion had sent patrols forward, of course, but found nothing except this stray Jiff and their patrols reported no apparent threat to their flank or rear. Down there, you know, it isn’t country you can stand and get a view of. You have to probe it more or less yard by yard. But they had found the Jiff, and I wondered whether the fact that he hadn’t given any information was because he spoke no English and the IO of the British battalion spoke hardly any Urdu. I asked the Brigade IO what was happening about Baksh. He said he’d asked the battalion to send him
back but the answer had been, Come and get him, we can’t spare either the transport or the men just to look after a Jiff.’

He stopped, said, ‘I’m sorry. Would you help me drink from that contraption on the table?’

She rose, went round by the bed for the teapot and held it for him.

‘Thanks.’

‘Would you like to share another cigarette?’

‘No, but you have one. I enjoy the smell.’

As she lit one she remembered having said much the same thing to him, the night of the fireflies.

‘Just then,’ he went on, ‘the General and the Brigadier came out from their conference. I could see there had been a flaming row. The Brig was about ten years the senior man and was all for caution because men’s lives were at stake, the lives of men he loved. The General on the other hand was all for modern ideas of dash, surprise, throwing away the book, using your equipment to its optimum limit, loving the whole impersonal power-game of move and counter-move.’ A pause. ‘They were both amateurs because they were both hot-headed. They were trying to make a lyric out of a situation that was merely prosaic. It only seemed problematical because we lacked information. But because it seemed problematical all this free emotional rein was given to the business of its solution. Well, there you are. If there are things you don’t know, you call the gap in your knowledge a mystery and fill it in with a wholly emotional answer. That morning it struck me as supremely silly because, do you know, there wasn’t a single sound of warfare anywhere. It was quite still. Sylvan almost – with the sunlight coming through the trees. A phrase came into my mind. The sweet indifference of man’s enviroment to his problems. Pathetic fallacy or no, I really felt it, an indifference to us that amounted to contempt. The Brig had installed himself in an old bungalow, probably a traveller’s resthouse. There was a village near by but the people had fled. The Brigade transport was harboured in a kind of glade – command truck, signals truck. Well, you can probably picture it, just like a Brigade command post on a field exercise. I was never able to get the picture of an exercise out of my mind, even when stuff was
flying. There’s something fundamentally childish about the arrangements for armed conflict. And there they were, the General and the Brigadier, both red in the face, and Teddie looking pink and embarrassed. They went over to the command truck. The IO was still with me. I told him that if I could get the General’s permission I’d go and collect that Jiff myself, and see what I could get out of him. The IO was all for it, glad not to be bothered with such a minor detail. I went to the command truck and saw that something had just happened to put the General back in a good temper. The CO of the Indian battalion had been on the radio. They now realized they’d got the Japanese into a pocket and had decided that the Japanese force wasn’t much more than company strength. It meant the Indians could mop the Japs up, complete their advance and make contact with the British battalion. The General asked me if there was anything new on my side, so I told him about the Jiff and that I’d like to go up and try and get him to talk and in any case bring him back. He said, “Yes, you do that, and make sure they understand the operational picture.”’

Again he closed his eyes, and said nothing for a while, as if conjuring the image of that morning. But she knew, instinctively, what was coming. Something Teddie had said that marked the beginning of the fatal occasion.

‘Of course the operational picture was Teddie’s side, not mine, but there was nothing about this picture that a G.3 I. couldn’t tell the battalion commander just as clearly as a G.3 Ops could. But Teddie said, “I’ll do that, sir, I’ll go with him.” And the General was in a good enough mood to agree. If he’d thought about it clearly he would have said no. It was absurd, two divisional staff officers going off to a forward battalion to collect one miserable prisoner and to confirm verbally operational information that the CO would get over the radio anyway. But there we were, doing just that, as a result of the General’s euphoria following the solution to his problem, but chiefly because of Teddie’s obsession, his belief that I was not the man to deal with an Indian soldier who had turned coat. I didn’t understand, I didn’t have the touch or the sense of the traditions that were involved. Teddie thought he did. The Jiff was the only reason Teddie volunteered to go.

‘But before we set off something else happened that gave him a better reason. I suppose we were about five minutes, checking with the Brigade IO, making sure of the location and route. We were about to leave when we were called back. I thought the General had changed his mind, but it wasn’t that. Division had been on. The whole operational picture had changed. The division had been drawn into what amounted in military terms to a blind alley. On the map it was advancing roughly south-west to oppose a threat from that quarter, but the major threat was now seen to be south to south-east. In less difficult country it would just have been a question of swinging round in the hope of cutting the advancing force in two, but it’s difficult to swing across the grain of hills like that. The reserve Brigade was the only one of the three not faced with that problem. But I won’t bore you with tactics. It’s enough for you to know there was a bit of a flap, and that this trip of Teddie’s and mine was suddenly much more important to both the General and the Brigadier. The Brigadier was already on the radio to the CO of the British battalion, telling him to send a company back to support the Indians who were going in to clear this pocket of Japanese, make sure they didn’t break through on to the road, but he wanted definite information about the Jiffs. He wanted to make sure there were no Jiff units waiting their chance to come in and command the road when our own troops swung away from it. He told the CO I was coming along, that the two of us were coming, one to help sort out the Jiff situation and relieve them of the prisoner and the other to put them in the picture as the General now saw it.

‘So off we went, in my jeep, the two of us and the driver. There were only three miles to go. That company of the British battalion must have moved. We met them debussing and scattering into the hill on our left. When we got to the battalion we found the headquarters bivouacked just beyond a village, commanding the junction of the road and a track that led off down into a valley on the right. The junction had been their objective the previous night. They had a company in the jungle between the road and the track and another company in the jungle on the left of the road. The whole thing was terribly brisk and businesslike, that is it was until
you realized that there were probably no enemy ahead. The CO was one of those cheery types with a wide moustache and a scarf in his neck – navy blue with white polka dots. We found him sitting on a shooting stick, drinking coffee. He had two spare mugs ready and got his batman filling them when he saw us coming. The complete host. At pains to appear quite unflappable.