Quartered Safe Out Here (19 page)

Finally we turned in, which consisted of rolling up in our blankets beside our pits, but I wasn't like sleep at all. It was one of those tropic nights that travel agents dream about, warm and still, with a huge Burmese moon high in the deep purple sky, so silver-bright that it lit up the perimeter and the whole open ground to the feathery jungle edge. With the Jat guns and their crews in among us, the perimeter was thick with blanket-wrapped bodies; everyone was down except the men standing stag, two every thirty yards or so in their slit-trenches, and the Jat duty gunners sitting by their weapons. I was having a last (unlawful, since it was after dark) cigarette, shielding the glow in my cupped hands, when a figure approached from the far end of our section position: it was the Duke, his blanket round his shoulders, picking his way through the sleepers.

“Can't kip,” said he, squatting down. “Too bloody riled. I should have pushed that griping sod's face in. Shouldn't I?”

“No point. He was just letting off steam.”

“Yeah—in my direction, as usual. He's a needling bastard. I can do without it.” He pulled his blanket closer. “Anyway, I'm buggered if I'll tailor my conversation to suit him. What the hell did I say, anyway?”

If he couldn't see what had irritated Forster, there was no point in telling him; it wouldn't have been easy, and I wasn't inclined to try.

“God knows. Maybe he's got a touch of malaria; he's looking pretty yellow.”

“Who isn't? Anyway, as a matter of principle, I want to finish our discussion. So say something educated to me, will you?” I stared. “Anything, go on!”

“Have you been hoarding your rum ration?” I wondered.

“No. I just want a minute's civilised conversation in which every other word isn't ’fook'. So humour me. Or tell me to piss off, if you can't be bothered. Anything'll do, so long as it isn't about the bloody Army, or Burma, or Japs—just for a moment, before, I was remembering school, and it was a pleasant change.”

Being curious, I asked: “What school was that?”

“Oh, you've never heard of it.” The moon was on his face, and I saw the wry grin. “Little place in the West Country, run by a retired I.C.S. wallah who liked to imagine he was a housemaster at a big public school. He had us playing the Eton field game, no kidding. But it was all right.” He shivered, huddling in his blanket. “Come on, for God's sake—conjugate something, or tell me the principal exports of Bolivia. Or the Corn Laws. Or valency tables. Any damned thing.”

He was in a curious state; if action had been imminent I'd have said he was edgy. It came to me that I really didn't know the Duke at all; we were so used to his languid, damn-you-me-lad style that it never occurred to us that there might be someone else behind it. However, if he wanted eccentric diversion…

“You mentioned isosceles triangles…will it do if I prove Pythagoras for you?”

“Jesus,” he said, “the square on the hypotenuse. I'll bet you can't.”

I did it with a bayonet, on the earth beside my pit—which may have been how Pythagoras himself did it originally, for all I know. I went wrong once, having forgotten where you drop the perpendicular, but in the end there it was, and the Duke's satisfaction was such that I went on, flown with success, to prove that an angle at the centre of a circle is twice an angle at the circumference. He followed it so intently that I felt slightly worried: after all, it's hardly normal to be utterly absorbed in triangles and circles when the surrounding night may be stiff with Japanese. When I confessed that that was as far as my mathematical genius went, he seemed contented enough, and settled himself to sleep, having thanked me between yawns. I asked if he wasn't going back to his own pit, and he said he couldn't be bothered.

“You ought to have your bundook with you,” I told him.

“Oh, don't get regimental on me, Jock; I'm tired.” He yawned again. “D'you think Foshie did get fired for crossing his hands on the wheel?”

“Yes. He isn't likely to forget it, either.”

“Well, I didn't fire him. What's he got against me?”

“He's got something against everybody. Get your head down.”

I was just dropping off when he spoke again. “Can't stand him. Pity. He's a bloody good soldier…bar his belly-aching…”

That was all I heard. For the next four hours I must have been dead to the world, and when I woke it was to the deafening rattle of a Vickers and people yelling; there was the inevitable split second of bewildered panic and then I was rolling into my pit and grabbing my Thompson simultaneously, shouting for Stanley and his number two. They tumbled in beside me and Stanley got the Bren to his shoulder as we watched our front—not that we could see a thing, for the moon was down and even the nearest pits were lost in the gloom. The guns of the Jats on either side were chattering, sending tracers scudding out into the darkness, and then someone roared “Cease fire!” and in an instant there was nothing but the echoes dying away, a subdued call for quiet, and the drift of cordite. Suddenly a Verey was fired, and then another, and we were staring out across the empty ground lit by the flickering crimson flares. But there were no Japs to be seen, no movement at all, and no sound but the puzzled muttering along the line of pits, and the clatter of the Jats changing the belts on their guns.

We stood to until dawn, half an hour later, and when the light grew someone spotted the body lying a few yards in front of the pit to our immediate right. It was the Duke. He had been cut almost in half by the Vickers fire.

It soon became plain what had happened. Someone had got up to go to the latrine, and in the dark had trod on one of the sleeping Jats, who had cried out—not loudly, but still loud enough to wake a third
party, who had asked what was up. A fourth man had said something like: “It's just one of the Jats”, and a fifth man, probably half-awake, had misheard the last word of the sentence and exclaimed: “Japs?” In an instant someone else had shouted “Japs!”, and there was a mad scramble for the pits, with the Jat gunners starting to blaze away—and at some point the Duke must have come awake, remembered that he was away from his pit and his rifle, and made a bee-line for them. Only it was pitch dark, and he had run the wrong way.

I can't be certain when we buried him, but I imagine it must have been the same afternoon. It was quick and simple, as usual: we dug a slit-trench beside a line of bamboo saplings, the platoon gathered round, the blanket-wrapped corpse was lowered in on log lines, Long John read the burial service and saluted, and we shovelled in the soil.

I should be able to describe the section's reaction, but I can't because all my attention was taken up by Forster. He was one of the men on the log-lines, and as he withdrew the cord and stood back I saw his face, and the hair rose on my neck. He looked like a madman, glaring at the grave as he coiled the line, and when we dismissed he stalked off a few paces and then turned back, mouthing and looking from one to the other of us. Then he started talking, in a bitter cursing stream, demanding to know why the burial had been conducted with such haste, and with so little reverence for the dead, and without proper ceremony. I
can't reproduce what he said, possibly because it came out in a semi-coherent flood, and possibly because I found it shocking and unreal. If I were writing fiction I might have a stab at it—if I didn't dismiss the scene as too far-fetched—but I'm recording fact, and that was how Forster reacted. Some things I remember: the phrase “shoovelled in as if ’e wez cattle!”, and a furious demand to know what the Duke's family would have thought if they could have seen it, and more in the same strain.

What the section thought, God knows. They just dispersed, and only Sergeant Hutton, presumably in an effort to quieten Forster down, assured him that in due time the Duke would be properly reinterred in a military ceremony. Forster fell silent at that, and presently moved off to one side, and Hutton left him to it.

I was heart-sick sorry for the man. He and the Duke had disliked each other as bitterly as men can, but they had seen a lot of hard service together, and their last exchange had seen Forster at his obscenely vitriolic worst. Now the Duke was dead, in circumstances far crueller than if he'd bought his lot in a duffy, and Forster was in a private hell of his own, made all the worse for his being the kind of hard man whose emotions are stark and simple, and not subject to rationalisation. His remorse had come out in the only way he knew, looking for something to vent itself on, and finding the perfunctory burial—which, as he knew perfectly well, was standard procedure in a swift-moving war.

Forster, and his comrades, had seen too much death to be outwardly moved by it, whatever they felt. His was the only reaction I ever saw which verged on the theatrical, and he had special cause. But there was nothing to be done but let him come out of it in his own time, and I was walking away when he turned and fell into step beside me. He seemed to have settled a little, but I was uncomfortably aware that he was still glaring and breathing hard. Why he chose my company, I don't know, unless it was that he felt I had been a particular friend of the Duke's—which I hadn't been, in fact. But abruptly he stopped, and I automatically stopped with him. He looked back at the grave, and then rasped out:

“Wadda
you
think aboot it, then?” I answered with care.

“It'll be all right, Foshie,” I said. “You heard Hutton—they'll do it properly, later on.” I should have left it there, I suppose, but I honestly felt compassion for him, and in my folly I dropped an enormous brick on the road to hell. I can only say it was kindly meant, and his question had taken me by surprise. Anyway, I blurted out:

“He thought you were a bloody good soldier.”

He frowned at me, his lantern jaw working. “Ye w'at?”

“The Duke. He said it to me, last night, after…just before we went to sleep. He said you were a bloody good soldier.”

He blinked, looked down at the rope still coiled in
his hand, and then back at the grave again. For a long moment he said nothing, and for no reason that I can think of I took out my cigarettes and offered him one. He lit it with his hands cupped against the slight breeze, inhaled, blew out smoke, and gave me his most unpleasant grin, without any mirth in it at all.

“Doan't give us yer shit, Jock,” he sneered, and walked away.

I have nothing to add, either in comment or attempted explanation, after forty-five years. That is what happened, and that's all.

With only 140 miles to go to Rangoon, Grandarse was triumphantly vindicated: we leapfrogged over 5th Div at a place called Pyu, and now the road was clear except for the last Jap bastion at Pegu, 100 miles farther south—and the monsoon was still a fortnight away. Delight and excitement ran through the division, and when “Punch” Cowan's jeep was seen on the road, with the Black Cat fluttering on its bonnet, he passed to the kind of reception that generals must dream about, with his men cheering and hammering on the sides of the trucks. We hadn't seen him since the start of the year, at Ranchi, and I remember thinking, as he drove through somewhere about Penwegon, how old he looked, with his silver hair and the hooked nose that gave him his nickname. But he was grinning like a schoolboy; we were almost there.

There were portents, too, of impending final victory. Parties of British and American prisoners of war, turned loose by the retreating Japs, were being reported, and one day an American flier wandered into our position (I've no idea of the date). He had been several months in Japanese hands and had escaped somewhere near Rangoon and set out north; he was in a
fair old state, and when the master-gyppo put porridge and a fried breakfast in front of him he burst into tears and, according to an eye-witness, buried his head in the bosom of the nearest soldier and kept repeating “Oh, boys, boys!” while they assured him he was awreet, noo. Hatred of the Japs rose a notch higher—and this was before we knew about the horrors of the River Kwai and the Moulmein railway.

The battalion took a prisoner, too, about ten miles north of Pegu, in a combined attack with the Gurkhas on a Jap position from which the enemy withdrew during the opening barrage, leaving one unfortunate who was found hiding under a blanket.

My one memory of Pegu town is of a dirty pot-holed road leading to a metal-girdered bridge across a swollen brown river. Jap was well dug in, and there was some stiff fighting for the town, but we took no part in it and were still on the wrong side of the river when the leading elements of the division had fought their way over. But it would only be a matter of hours before we were all across, guns, tanks, and men; Jap was reported to be pulling out, the last few miles to Rangoon would be wide open, and there would be nothing to do but motor down to the sea and the golden Shwe Dagon, that “bonny kirk a' set wi' rubies braw”, and wait (in our imagination) for the big boats to India and home.

Then, two weeks early, the monsoon broke.

The section were in a jungly clearing, brewing up, when it began. There had been a few showers in the previous week, and it had been one of those dull,
steamy days when breathing is an effort and the sweat runs off you in buckets, but the official wisdom was that we would be snug in Rangoon before the real downpour set in. I was in the act of bending over the brew-tin, stirring in the leaves, when the first big drops landed in the boiling water, and I looked up in the gathering dusk at a sky that had suddenly turned dark grey and seemed to be descending slowly. There were cries of disgust and alarm, and repetition of the section's favourite four-letter word, and then it hit.

If you haven't seen the monsoon burst, it's difficult to imagine. There are the first huge drops, growing heavier and heavier, and then God opens the sluices and the jets of a million high-pressure hoses are being directed straight down, and the deluge comes with a great roar, crashing against the leaves and rebounding from the earth for perhaps a minute—after that the earth is under a skin of water which looks as though it's being churned up by buckshot. Before you know it you are sodden and streaming, the fire's out, the level in the brew tin is rising visibly, and the whole clearing is a welter of soaked blaspheming men trying to snatch arms and equipment from the streams coursing underfoot. The din is deafening, partly from the storm and partly from Grandarse's stentorian bellowings: “Git the tent afore we droon! Coom on, ye idle boogers, gi'es a hand!”

The tent, a massive mildewed slab of canvas and cord, was in the truck, and it took four men to drag it out and carry it to the clearing. Fortunately the
ground was uneven, and there were a few raised areas on which to pitch it once we had got it unfolded, something which had not been done since its issue long before. In the interval, and especially since the first showers, it had become home to assorted jungle crawlies, spiders, leeches, and worms—and to as splendid a specimen of the mirapod of the class Chilopoda as I ever hope to see.

The giant centipede is exactly like the little amber beastie found in civilised gardens, except that he is literally twenty times bigger. This baby was just short of sixteen inches, with a body as thick as a golf ball, and when he scuttled out with his pincers to the fore and his myriad legs going like the oars of a galley, the section dispersed at speed. He snaked out on to the muddy ground and took stock of his position, and I for one was on the top of the grub-box with a single bound.

“Doan't ga near it!” shouted Morton, as if anyone wanted to. “The boogers is poisonous! If ’e nips ye, ye've ’ad it!”

“That's cobblers!” said Nick, keeping his distance. “There's nowt tae worry aboot unless ’e gits on ye—doan't try tae broosh ’im off backwards or ’e'll dig ’is claws intil ye, an' there's ’oondreds on ’em, an' they'll fester! ’It ’im oop the arse an' ’e'll fa' off ’eid foorst!”

“‘It ’im oop the arse yersel’!” cried Wattie. “By, will ye look at the oogly sod! That's it, Tommo lad, ’it ’im wid yer dah!”

Corporal Peel had drawn his machete and was
approaching the brute warily, for when it scuttled it moved like lightning. He took a swipe and missed, jumping back as Little-Many-Legs shot in his direction, and then it changed its mind and scurried to the grub-box, nestling in at one side while I left precipitately at the other. But I'm proud to say that even in my haste I hadn't lost sight of the interests of zoology.

“
Tairo
—hold on!” I cried. “Don't kill it! It must be about two feet long—my God, I'll bet it's a record! If we can bottle the bugger, and preserve it in petrol, it could be sent home to a museum. We might even”, I added hopefully, appealing to their better instincts, “flog it. No kidding, the Imperial Science people would give their back teeth for it!”

I can only say that it seemed a good idea at the time, but the weight of opinion was against me, crying “Barmy booger!” and suggesting that I catch and bottle it myself. By then it was too late; Peel had bisected it neatly, but the top part continued to wriggle until he hit it again, after which it was beyond repair. I still think it was a pity, because when I measured the pieces next morning (without touching them) they amounted to almost three times the amount of tropical centipede previously known to science, six inches being the norm according to the encyclopedia. It was a genuine monster, and possibly lethal, for all centipedes are poisonous to some degree, and if size is anything to go by that one was in the cobra class.

But the vandals destroyed it, and it seemed to me a judgment on them when the tent proved to be rotten at
the seams, falling apart when we stretched it. We stood about in the pouring rain, damning the government, and to make matters worse the truck, in or under which we could have found shelter, was sent off on some equipment-ferrying business or other. So we spent the night under bushes, sleeping in six inches or so of warmish water, all except Grandarse, who lay out in the open, beaming contentedly up at the downpour and exclaiming: “Aye, gran' growin' weather!” Strange to tell, I never slept better; in a hot climate there's something soothing about sodden clothing and a blanket that's nine parts water, so long as you don't sleep on your face, because that way you drown.

It rained steadily for about a week, but in the first twelve hours the Pegu river had risen to an uncrossable level, and the bridge approaches turned into a morass in which no vehicles could operate; the airfields were rained out of commission, and the drive south came to a squelching halt. We began a month on half rations, which I have to say I don't remember, so it can't have been a great privation, presumably because we eked out our issue food with bananas, mangoes, and whatever else that company of expert foragers could win from the waterlogged countryside. But short rations and the incessant downpour and the impossibility of keeping dry were small matters beside the news which dropped like a bombshell on the division just two days after the rains started.

We were not going to Rangoon. It had been taken by seaborne assault while we were held up in the
monsoon mud. The old division that had endured the retreat three years before, had been in the thick of the great battle that stopped Jap at the gates of India, and had led the way south, was denied the ultimate prize at the last minute. I couldn't complain, I was a newcomer, but even I felt disappointed, and to the old sweats like Nick and Grandarse and Forster, who had soldiered through the Burma war, it seemed like a betrayal, and hit them harder than their commanders ever knew. It may seem a small, selfish thing; the taking of Rangoon was what mattered, not who took it. But soldiers have a strong primitive sense of fairness: no one had promised them Rangoon, but they felt there had been an understanding, and it had been broken.

And that wasn't the half of it: as though to add injury to insult, we were ordered back up the road which we had just come down, to deal with whatever was left of the Japanese armies. In blunt terms, no big boats, just a return to the war.

How other parts of the division reacted, I can't say, but for a little while the atmosphere in Nine Section was mutinous, in the everyday rather than the military sense. No one publicly flung down his hat and belt and announced, in the immortal words of the Army Act: “I'll soldier no more, you may say what you please.” But looking back, in the knowledge that British troops
did
mutiny more than once in the last war, I can say that I'd have hated to see the section any closer to the edge than they were that morning. It was just talk, but
it was ugly while it lasted, and I report it for what it was worth.

We had found ourselves a basha to live in by now, a neat little one-roomed wooden bungalow on stilts which raised it above the level of the flooded ground, and when Peel came in with the word that we were going north again there was a long moment of disbelief in which the only sound was the steady roaring of rain on the palm thatch. We just stared at each other, and then the swearing and raging began, and Forster threw aside the rifle he had been cleaning and shouted:

“They're nut gittin' me up yon fookin' road again! Ah's nut gan! Noo, then! Booger the lot on them!” He fulminated on, while everyone else sat glum and paying no heed, for it was only the Foshie we knew and loved giving vent to his feelings, but when he suddenly rounded on us, demanding: “Is thoo lot gonna stand for it, then? Ista?” I was startled to hear Grandarse, from whom I'd have expected a shrug of resignation, say in a grim harsh voice: “It's a bad do. By Christ, it's a bad do!”

“Bad do?” cried Forster. “It's a bloody stab in't back! That's w'at ’tis! Well, they can stoof it—bastard Louie Mountbatten an' a'!”

“It's not fair,” said Stanley, and everyone looked at him, for Stanley was not given to opinions. “They told us we were goin' to Rangoon,” he went on, going red under the general scrutiny. “That's what they said.”

“Lyin' bastards!” said Wattie. “They'll tell ye owt,
an' then drop ye in't shit! Ah've aboot ’ed it, me!” And he stood up, looking about as though for support.

“An' me!” roared Forster. “Well, Ah's nut gan! Nut one fookin' step!”

I expected someone to say: “Wrap up, Foshie!” or “Give it a rest”, but no one spoke except Wedge, reminding us bitterly that we'd been told we'd be relieved at Meiktila by 5th Div, and the boogers had never arrived, and Morton who repeated with furious oaths what Stanley had said: we'd been promised we were going to Rangoon.

“Well, you ain't, my son,” said Parker flatly. “So you can forget it.”

“Bollocks!” This was Forster again. “You can fergit it, Parker, but Ah's nut!” He wheeled suddenly on Peel, who had been quietly donning his webbing and ignoring the outbursts. “Ah'm tellin' ye, Tommo—they've ’ed me!
Bus!
That's the whole sub-muckin'! Balls to ’em! Noo, then!”

Peel slung his rifle and picked up his pack. “Don't waste tha breath tellin' me,” he said. “Long John's just ower the road. Go an' tell him.” He turned to the door, said: “We fall in in ten minutes,” and went out, sensible man.

“Ah's nut fallin' in!” Forster bawled after him, and more ordures of speech followed, culminating in: “They can stick us away if they want till—Ah's nut gan, an' that's flat! Noo, then!”

To my dismay, Wattie said: “Fook it,” and turned to Grandarse. “W'at aboot you, owd feller?”

That was the moment when I wished that Peel hadn't left, for while one could ignore Forster, Wattie was another matter, and Grandarse was wearing a lowering, sullen look I hadn't seen before. It was all nonsense, of course—no one was going to defy orders, and once Forster's spleen had spent itself all would be well—but at the time it was beginning to sound serious—Grandarse's silence being the most serious sign of all.

“Aye—w'at say, then, Grandarse?” Forster sounded eager. “Coom on, lad—w'at say?”

Nick, who had not spoken until now, knocked out his pipe and got up. “Doan't talk sae bloody wet, Forster. Ye want tae shut yer gob an' give yer arse a chance.”

“You!” shouted Forster. “Git up tae me, ye mangy lal sod, an' Ah'll blitz ye! Noo, an' Ah'm warnin' ye!” He let go another stream of filth—and suddenly I'd had enough of him. I was the n.c.o., I'd probably been spoiling for a go at him ever since the Duke's burial, or perhaps I had a touch of fever, as many of us did at that time. Whatever the reason—and it was probably just that he was being so unbearably noisy and obscene—I raised my voice.

“Shut your bloody trap, Forster! No one's listening!”

He looked at me in genuine astonishment. “W'at the ’ell's it got tae dee wid thee? Y'evn't got yer bloody knees broon yet!”

That did it. “That's why I've got a stripe and you
haven't!” I said. “And I don't mind losing it for the pleasure of breaking your lousy neck!” Leadership is an art, you see.