The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy (44 page)

‘That's all you care, like! Fine mucker you turned out to be!' He moved off and I went to help Carter. Some of our natural excitement had begun to wear off by the time Carter the Farter and I had dug ourselves a slit-trench. The ground was tough and stoney and needed a lot of work. We pitched our two-man bivouac over it and breathed deep, while sweat poured off us.

‘This is a right way to start our holidays in Assam,' I said.

Carter patted the tent affectionately. ‘What the hell, it's home!' We began to sing together:

It's only a shanty in old shanty town
 …

We were still singing when Sergeant Chota Morris, my old buddy in No. I Platoon, came up the trail. He too looked wilder and browner than in Kanchapur.

‘How does it feel to know that there are twenty thousand murdering little sods of Japs out there, creeping towards you, Horry?'

‘Christ, they don't know I'm here yet, do they?'

‘'Course they do, boy – the news is back in Tokyo by now!'

‘When do we actually have a go at them?'

‘No good asking me. Nobody seems to know exactly where the Japs are, or how many divisions they've got in the area. They're attacking Imphal in strength – that's sixty-five road miles south of Kohima, but they may have a couple more divisions between here and Imphal.'

‘And how far's Kohima from here? Only about ten miles, isn't it?'

‘That's not the point. We've got to hang on till the whole Div gets here, and then we can't just move up the road, not just like that.'

‘Why the fuck not?'

‘Because it would be too easy for this bloody army!' Carter interposed.

Chota said, ‘Anything moving along that road is liable to be picked off from the hills. It's a perfect target! You can't hold the road without holding the hills, can you? So my bet is that we'll soon get cracking into these ridges behind us – and we won't get cracking until all the gash bods in the area are sent back to base.'

We stood contemplating the savage planes of jungle all round us.

‘Makes a change from Kanchapur!'

‘We'll knock the shit out of the Japs. It's going to come out in bucketsful. They've had their own way out here too long. Once we stop them here, we can bowl them back into Burma and out the other side.'

He made it sound like a village cricket match played with turds for balls.

‘Why should we bloody bother about what happens to Burma?' Carter the Farter asked. ‘I'd never heard of the bloody dump till I come out to India.'

‘It's not Burma so much, we've got to hold on to India, haven't we?'

‘Why?'

‘Don't be fucking daft, man, because it's ours, isn't it?'

‘Carter's a Communist,' I said. ‘You don't want to take any notice of what he says! He thinks the king and queen should move out of Buckingham Palace and live in a council flat.'

Chota Morris laughed. ‘I suppose you think we're oppressing the Indians, do you? They'd be a fucking sight worse off without us looking after them.'

Carter always rose to such bait. ‘Balls! Arseholes! The British ruling classes are oppressing the Indians just as they oppress the British working man. If we stood back and let the Japs have India, we'd all be freer.'

‘You'd be working on the fucking Death Railway for one!'

‘Besides, what about the rights of the Japanese working man?' I asked.

‘I'll shoot the bastard when I see him,' Carter said, and we all burst out laughing.

I stood under a low tree to cool off and look about at the superb landscape through which the Japanese working man
might even now be crawling. A leaf fell off a twig and spiralled down to the ground. It lay there in the sun, green at my feet. I had a fag. My mind wandered. I just felt fucking lucky to be there, to be among my mates again, to be standing in the middle of that marvellous country. I was fitter and tougher than I had ever been, wanking twice a day without noticing it, burning off surplus energy. The air was like armour – it blazed and it had advanced from the Himalayas, not so far away. You could suck it down your throat like beer.

In twenty minutes, the leaf by my boots had turned brown. In half-an-hour, it was shrivelled and dead, lost, forgotten among the debris underfoot.

That night, the garrison at Kohima was heavily attacked; the concentration of Japs in the area was growing. Two nights later, the siege was on in earnest. We lay awake in our slit-tenches, listening to the firing.

The tremendous task of moving in our division, with all its guns and equipment, through that crazy line of supply from India, went on. Behind our defences above Zubza, we passed our days as picturesquely as outlaws. Our handkerchiefs and sweat-rags and any white articles of clothing we possessed were dyed jungle-green in a vat made from an oil drum, cut in two and placed over an open fire. We were issued with an amazing new American chemical called DDT, which we rubbed along the seams of our clothes to keep bugs out, since we were unlikely to be washing clothes for a while. We ate mepacrine and vitamin tablets. We cleaned rifles, and I was issued with a sten gun instead of a rifle. I worked the wireless set, and found how baffling it was to establish communication by short wave in a mountainous area.

We were also addressed by the CO of the Battalion, Willie Swinton. He told us that we were about to fight and win one of the great victories of the war, that our fame was assured, and that never again would we be called the Forgotten Army.

‘While we're winning victories, we aren't doing anything worse,' Bamber said, parodying himself.

We patrolled. We picketed. We watched. We waited. It was all rather exciting. We were playing soldiers.

Only a few days before, I had been in Calcutta, surrounded by all sorts of petty worries. They had gone, they were obsolete. We were in action now. We had nothing, or
nothing that we couldn't carry with us. We were hunters.

I felt myself stripped to the bone. For once, I understood everything that was going on around me, because everything had been reduced to its most primitive. We had to crawl round our allotted hillsides, keeping in touch with neighbouring units, watching for the enemy. Although I had never considered myself cut out for that sort of thing, ancient instincts woke and growled in pleasure.

That Assamese landscape had a lot to do with it. How back-breakingly tremendous it was! Sometimes we had to move up to the top of a ridge, two thousand feet above the road and another thousand above the valley. Clouds drifted below us. We scrambled over burning rock or moved in single file up sandy
chaungs
, which would be raging streams when the monsoons came. But the monsoons were weeks away yet. Perfect summer reigned and the pure air could burn by day and freeze by night with hardly a dusty bush stirring in its sleep.

The mountainside was covered with trails. The first time that we were near enough to any Japs to shoot them, we had to hold our fire. A column of them passed, and we were only a section patrol. They were moving along one of the trails, only a few yards above us. When they had gone, Charley Meadows passed the word back over my set to HQ, reporting strength and direction of the column.

As I crouched over the wireless, I looked round at the faces of my mates. A memory returned of how I had at first priggishly thought those faces grotesque with ugliness and stupidity. Now that they had grown familiar, I saw only how brave they were – ready for anything. We were the stuff heroes were made of.

The mountain trails belonged to the Naga hill-tribes. They were the people we admired most. Prejudices against anything foreign disappeared before the sight of those extraordinary brown-limbed men and women who insisted on carrying on life in the midst of a potential battlefield. Their villages, poor simple places, stood on the crest of the mountain ridges. Their fields of rice and maize were two or three thousand feet sheer down in the valley below. The women climbed down to work and back again with their
chickos
strapped to their backs. The kids, wearing no more than a ragged waistcoat, never made a sound.

On one occasion when we were resting, during a recce, a
party of Naga women overtook us and gestured that they wanted food for their children. I gave one of the women a cigarette. She gestured for the child to have one too, took it, and stuck it in her black hair. She was fairly young, lean, wearing a long skirt, barefoot.

‘Speak English?' I asked.

She looked at me, a long troubling look, and said something incomprehensible. Would she have consented to have a spot of intercourse in the nearest
chaung
, buttocks sinking into the soft sand? Of course I did not make a move towards her. That night, when the moon floated above the mountains, I thought of her again and burned her out of my skull with rough fantasy.

Along the wild trails came news and rumours. The rest of 2 Div was delayed. Extra units were being flown in from the Arakan. Imphal had fallen. Imphal was holding out. The Japs were outflanking us. Kohima was surrounded. The Chindits, operating with Gurkhas and Kachins, were trying to join up with Vinegar Joe Stilwell in Northern Burma. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek was assassinated. Our water ration was going up soon.

Water was one of our troubles. It arrived at Brigade HQ in a water-truck, having come from the Jiri River, several miles away. It always stank of chlorine; even the
char
stank of chlorine. When you watered the rum ration with it, the rum stank of chlorine. Water was always short. We shaved and washed in one mug-full each morning – or you could shave in the dregs of your
char
, which was the only way to get warm water. Apart from that, we never washed or took our clothes off. We kept our boots and ankle-puttees on all day, to guard against typhus.

It was all a big fucking lark at first.

Belgaum had been much rougher than this. We had here, too, the interest of learning about the situation – of acquiring, for instance, the names of the Jap generals, Mutaguchi attacking Imphal, and Sato attacking Kohima, which seemed to give us an extraordinary and paradoxical intimacy with them. It was difficult to think of them in human terms; they were much more like H. G. Wells's invading Martians.

The area was now stiff with Sato's men, although our forces were building up. The Worcesters moved in next to us along the road though the rest of 2 Div was still assembling
in Dimapur. We slowly gained a clearer picture of the situation. Four or five miles nearer Kohima than our positions, a defensive box was built at Jotsoma, where artillery could lay down fire on Kohima Ridge, on which the Japs had established themselves at several points – notably the Naga village. When Japs cut the road between Zubza and Jotsoma, the artillery carried on as usual.

It was on Easter Sunday that we were ordered to move down to the road behind the Japs and make contact with a detachment of the Assam Battalion which was withdrawing after holding off the Japs near Imphal. On that same day, the Mendips suffered their first casualties.

Jock McGuffie had been into the village of Zubza and reported it as a mankey, stinking hole.

‘The only bloody attraction Zubza's got is a pontoon school,' Jock said. ‘They're playing for fucking mepacrine tablets – let's go and show them how one evening, you and me, Stubby?' But, when the chips were down, I was infantry and Jock was not, and our paths did not cross again for several rugged weeks.

Whatever its shortcomings, Zubza was usefully situated as regards the trails, and a small outdoor church service was held there on the morning of Easter Sunday. Our blokes were strolling about openly after the service, when a Jap 75mm. opened up from Merema Ridge. A sapper officer called Lodge and two BORs were killed. From then on, we began treating the whole business as less of a game.

The foray down to the road was also no fun. We were getting some bully beef hash inside our pullovers when Major Inskipp came over with Lieutenant Boyer and addressed us. Inskipp was Company CO, a smiling old boy with a wide face and a gaze that could go through you like a bullet when necessary. He told us that the new campaign was about to begin and that the Mendips were about to add a new name to their list of battle honours. Tonight we were simply concerned with helping the Assam Battalion to safety. Tomorrow, we should probably be allowed to kill as many Japs as we wanted – there was a good supply in the neighbourhood. The usual sort of stuff. With something touching in the way he finished with ‘Good luck, boys!', as if we really were his boys.

We began to move in column file before night came down. Occasional vistas through tree-cover showed darkness rising
out of the valleys, while the upper world was serene and in mellow light. It all looked so peaceful, you could hardly credit that the place was swarming with Japs. Over Mount Japvo way, black cloud was piling up. Easter fucking Sunday!

Scouts came back, we halted, spread out along a gully, squinting down through the bushes. An Indian file moved through us, heading up towards Zubza. Members of both parties gave a whispered
‘Thik-hai!
' to each other in passing as if it was a code-name. The Indians left behind them the individual smell of Indian troops, sweetly rancid with a touch of wood smoke and damp.

It took us two hours to get into position near the road. By then, night was absolute and the black clouds had closed overhead.

We waited. I was stuck behind a tree trunk with the radio set, and could not even see the road, but it was somewhere just below and ahead. There was a blown bridge nearby, round a curve of the road, although it was too dark to see the curve either. Messages came through saying the Assam Regiment was on its way.

In the Assamese night, silence was never complete. Cicadas chirped, night birds called, an occasional wild dog yelped, and countless little things scuttled through the undergrowth. Something moved all the time. There was silence as well, felt like an echo in a shell, rolling down off the hilltops. Totally different from India, where you had but to kick a sacred cow and villages woke all round you. Here, the place was deserted except for the poor buggers who had to fight in it.