The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy (42 page)

‘No? Then why didn't he leave me a-fucking-lone? He's bloody
puggle
, that's his trouble.' All the same, I felt more ashamed than I showed, as I always did when I lashed out.

One of the other chaps said in a melancholy way, ‘We're all going fucking
puggle
in this bastard climate. If you ask me, before we get out of here, the whole
submukkin
pack of us'll be
puggle
!'

‘I didn't mean to hurt him. Why didn't he hit me back?'

‘You wouldn't fucking ask that if you'd been at fucking Ngakyedauk, having to eat the mules and listening to the Japs
bolo
ing your name after dark. How can you know what it's like if you've been no further fucking east than Firpo's?'

‘I'm going to find out now, aren't I?'

One of Cuxham's muckers said sullenly, ‘It'll be cushy from now on, what with fucking air-drops and everything. You can't call it war any more.'

It did not take me long to get my few belongings together. I slung my pack over one shoulder and made for the entrance. There was a lance-corporal in the tent whom they called Lackeri, a clerk – I knew he had been caught in the Ngakyedauk admin box because I'd heard him gripping about it. He stopped me at the entrance. An old man of thirty, wearing Army specs, his identity discs swinging against his hollow chest, a sweat-rag tied round his neck.

‘Good luck, old boy! All the best! You'll come through it okay. Pay no heed to this lot of
admis
– they've had it. Things are better than what they was in our time! Take it easy!'

I stared at him. We just looked at each other. People were always leaving places in those days and moving on.

‘I didn't mean to sock your mate – I was sweating on the top line.'

‘Don't you take no notice of these bods. They've been out in the sun too long. They're due for repat. Take care of yourself, old lad!' He clapped me on the shoulder, nodding his head once.

I hurried over to the bogs. Shutting myself in one of the cubicles, I burst into tears. There seemed to be no way to stop. I just sat there and cried; I couldn't take being spoken to kindly like that.

After a bit, I pulled myself together and lit a fag. I was safe there. The other sounds of the shithouse – slamming doors, farts, pee escaping – came from far away, as I tried to survey my life. Burma. It was just that it was so final … it would be exciting. But not to get another screw in! My hand
was okay again. Maybe I could go and see the MO, that sceptical bloke, and pretend that one of the bones … no, fuck that for a lark! But no screwing … When would I ever have a lovely long messy slobbering sexy love affair with a girl? A white girl; England. Or a Chinese girl, one of those beauties I'd seen in Chowringhee the other day, smashing faces, marvellous legs. God, Christ, what a twot I was not to have had a Chinese girl yesterday – today was too late. No dough. The Chinese girls were more expensive than the
bibis.
You could see why. Can you just imagine their sweet little tits and glorious little cunts …

Well, one could always dream, and wank at the same time. By sprawling right back on the seat and ignoring the stink of the shit-pit below me, I managed in no time to lob some spurts of spunk over my stomach, with some relief. It was not wholly a milestone as wanks go because the smoke from my fag got into my eye.

As I was getting up and industriously faking the sound of arse-wiping with the newspaper provided, I heard someone come into the shitter for a pee, I heard their snatch of song.

Could I but see thee stand before me
 …

It was sixteen hundred hours. The
gharri
had come to collect me, with at least one of my friends. Thank God, I'd be off to Burma with someone I knew!

G
OD'S
own country was the ironical Fourteenth Army name for Burma. Perhaps it was so named because of the difficulty of getting there. The distance from Calcutta to Kohima in Assam – maintaining the celestial topography, Assam was God's Frontier Post – had to be measured in more than miles. The rear detail of the First Battalion travelled northwards by train, on a railway taken over and run by US Railway Troops. From the train, we transferred to a ferry, and the ferry took us slowly across the wide Bramaputra. On that river's eastern shores, we stood in Assam and the effects of the Japanese blight were already apparent. The chaos and splendour of India, the cheerful and hazardous trafficking of its people, all shrank away into the unnatural quiet of an invasion area. Such inhabitants as there were moved the way people do in war-zones – keeping close to the fence. We were far from home.

We climbed on to another train – this time of a narrower gauge than the first, as if the sinister Japanese spell had caused even the railway to contract with fear. This train started with more than Indian promptness and brought us to Dimapur.

Every change of transport meant delays. It also meant the unloading of stores – McGuffie might have lost a military bogie full of our stores, but there were plenty of other stores to be humped. This chain of supply, over different gauges, rivers, and mountains, was the only route to the central front in Burma, bar the air!

The country grew more tremendous as we advanced, as if it too was heading for some kind of crisis. Each change of transport entailed spending a night in a transit camp; each morning, we woke to chill air and, although the sun quickly
became as blazingly hot as ever, we knew we were heading towards higher mountains. I don't know how it was with the others, but for me those were days of excitement. I could have travelled on for ever.

On this journey, the foreign names stood out like names of an incantation: in particular, Dimapur, Kohima, and Imphal! Imphal, the most distant, was capital of the tiny state of Manipur – a capital yet a village – Kohima was just a village in the Naga Hills of Assam, some fifty miles beyond Dimapur. In the ranks, we made little distinction between Manipur and Assam and Burma – all tropical trouble-centres.

As we rolled into Dimapur, everyone stood at the windows of the train staring out in amazement.

‘Hey, I reckon the fucking Japs have taken over here already!' Tertis said.

The pitiful little town was packed with soldiery and refugees and thousands of coolies. This was the bottle-neck between India and Burma and, for every man going forward, eastwards, there were ten trying to get back, westward. As the valley opened out, the panorama resembled an historical frieze more than reality. Dust roads stretched in all directions. Along them roared camouflaged lorries, one behind the other almost bumper to bumper, travelling at reckless speeds. There were long static lines of coolies, too, often engulfed in dust. In the valley and on the hillside, impromptu camps were being flung up. Digging was going on everywhere. The whole impression this great staging area gave was of chaos. An invasion had taken place, as Jackie Tertis implied.

In the centre of town stood a signpost with three fingers, each pointing in a different direction and reading, ‘
NEW YORK
11,000 miles,
TOKYO
5,300 miles,
LONDON
8,300 miles'. As the pecking order of cities indicated, Americans were in town. As usual, the American troops looked more relaxed, more democratic, bigger, and decidedly better fed than our troops; they differed as much from us in those respects as we did from the Indian sepoys.

The mixture of races was staggering. It was as if all these thousands of strange men had suddenly arrived to build a new Tower of Babel in this unknown spot. We saw Chinese troops, who were reserved, and Gurkhas, who waved cheerily (‘Yon's the best fucking fighting man in the world, after your Glaswegian,' McGuffie said), and a contingent of West
Africans – not to mention a baffling miscellany of Indian and Assamese troops. Everyone was on the move.

For all the over-crowding, our little party moved into a neat and almost empty staging camp. It had been set up for 2 Div. We were almost the first of the division to arrive at the scene of action. The rest were straggling, train-load by train-load, across India, towards this narrow and dangerous valley which pointed towards Kohima and the advancing Japanese.

Our party grabbed some food and then went to see a film show: Tom Conway in ‘The Falcon in Danger'. The film was projected on to canvas, so that the audience could sit on the ground on both sides of the screen. Who cared on which side of his head Conway parted his hair?

Chatting with other squaddies, we gained a basic picture of what was happening in the so-called real world about us. Japanese units were moving forward again, threatening Kohima and encroaching on the Dimapur-Kohima and Kohima-Imphal roads. Nobody knew precisely where they were. The Dimapur-Kohima road was overlooked by mountains, every mountain covered by jungle right up to its crest; some of the chaps had seen Japs moving about on the crests. 33 Corps was supposed to be guarding this vital length of road – ‘and they're a bloody shower,' someone lugubriously remarked.

‘The Mendips'll sort them fucking Japs out!' Carter the Farter said. He laughed.

We walked down the valley road, smoking and chatting, to a canteen in a tent where they were serving chicken buttis and beer. Over the Naga Hills, a half-moon sailed. London 8,300 miles. In the tent, a group of Cockneys were arguing drunkenly about the exact route a Number 15 bus took.

I stood outside drinking my pint and smoking. I didn't want to talk to anyone. All the expectations of yesterday had been swept away. It was enough to stand in this magnificent valley.

My mates had told me their news: how they had been transferred to Barrackpore as soon as I had left for the Field Ambulance Unit, how Gore-Blakeley had been going spare about the missing equipment, and how everything had suddenly become irrelevant because the Japs were on the move and every able-bodied man in India was being pushed up to meet them. Whatever schemes McGuffie or Gore-Blakeley
or anyone else had nourished – all were blown away. The lists had arrived, the orders went through, we did as we were told.

There was a remote outburst of firing, echoing down among the hills.

‘Probably Jap mortars – they're bastards with their mortar-fire,' Ernie said.

‘Some poor bastard's getting it,' Aylmer said. He and I walked back to our
basha
, leaving the others. It was the first firing – the first real firing – we had heard. Here and there, groups of men were singing in the darkness. Convoys were moving in both directions. Sepoys were on guard all along the road, at the stage of night with friends to keep them company smoking
beadis
, the pungent scents of which followed us down the road.

‘At least we should be going in with Yankee Lee-Grant tanks,' Aylmer said reflectively. ‘The old Valentines they used in the Arakan were no use – should have been
pegdoed
long ago – obsolete. They've been handed over to the Chinese now, so I hear.'

I laughed. ‘They'll do for the fucking Chinese!'

‘The Chinese are fine fighting men. The old Yanks won't have a scrap without electric-razor sockets in their landing craft, but your Chink is brought up to fight on a handful of rice a day. A Chink'll go for days on just a handful of rice. They're like the Japs, given the chance I wouldn't mind if they were going in with us.'

It was the second time he had used that expression ‘going in'. He seemed to savour it.

‘Christ, it's a fucking lovely night!' I said.

We heard firing again, followed by the plummy sound of mortars.

Next day was a waiting day for rear detail. Most of them were pressed into digging slit-trenches; McGuffie and I went off with Captain Gore-Blakeley, Jock driving his Jeep, I lugging my wireless set and passing an occasional message to or from White Knight, which was someone at Corps HQ. Gore-Blakeley had with him a Major Bedford, a Division Officer, in charge of supply dispersal or something. They seemed to enjoy themselves, driving about everywhere, walking miles. Jock was often able to sit tight in the Jeep
while I tagged after them on foot, sweating beneath the set-harness, half-listening to their conversation.

They were both very cool and detached about the prospects for the battle, as though discussing the chances for a season's football fixtures. Bedford was the senior prefect.

‘The sooner 8 Brigade moves in the better,' he said. ‘We've got a very mixed bag defending Kohima, although they hold good defensive positions. The Japs are much thicker on the ground than we realized at first. Mutaguchi and Sato are first-class commanders and, if they overrun Kohima, Dimapur would be impossible to defend. I needn't stress how disastrous it would be for India and the UK if they took Dimapur.'

‘Supposing they by-pass Kohima, as they have Imphal?'

‘We shall have to do the best we can.'

‘Naturally.' Perhaps Gor-Blimey felt at a disadvantage. He said quickly, ‘2 Div is moving into its concentration areas as fast as possible. As you know, units have to assemble from as far afield as Chittagong and Ahmednagar.'

‘It's that damned line of communication back to India! Fortunately, the Japs' lines are even more extended.'

‘The monsoons will make everything impossible. I hate to think of the water that pours off these hillsides in the wet season.'

Bedford had a way of wiping his moustache with an open hand as if it kept filling with sweat and needed to be frequently squeezed dry. He wiped it now with some perseverance. ‘We're learning to fight over any terrain, under any conditions.'

‘Agreed entirely. But it would clearly be better if we could drive Sato back into the central Burmese plains before the wet season. The British soldier is more accustomed to fighting in open country.'

Lowering his voice in the hope that I, trudging along in the rear, would not hear, Bedford said, ‘Most of the units in this area are unaccustomed to
any
mode of fighting – with notable exceptions, they've never fired a rifle in anger in their lives.'