Quartered Safe Out Here (17 page)

Exuberance is a poor word for their social behaviour. Except for a few exchanges in broken Urdu we could not converse, but having heard me addressed as Jock they knew I was Scotch, which sent them into peals of delight, with half a dozen of them scurrying away to bring their company piper, who regaled me with “Scotland the Brave” and “Cock o' the North” while sundry of his comrades marched up and down, scowling horribly in what I took to be Caledonian
imitation. One of them got so carried away that he suddenly leaped in front of me, grimacing and yelling: “Hey, Jock—Japanni
mat karo!
” (which very loosely translates as “Death to the Japanese!”) and went into a violent pantomime in which he clove the air with his kukri, to enthusiastic applause, and then enacted the dying enemy, writhing on the ground screaming: “Banzai
bus!
Banzai
bus!
” and feigning death while his friends sat round and hurled abuse at his corpse. After which they all collapsed in laughter, and we had some more tea.

A Gurkha subaltern whom I met later told me that commanding a platoon of them was like leading a group of perfectly-disciplined ten-year-olds, and I believe him. Watching them playing football, for example, was like watching very small children, for they had not the least idea of playing the game; they had no interest in teams or goals or anything of the sort. Their one idea was to chase the ball in a screaming, laughing mob, booting it as far as possible and running after it with their little skulls gleaming and pigtails bobbing, to boot it again. Unless chance directed the ball back to where they started, they were liable to vanish into the distance, yelling: “Futtbal! Futtbal!”—and the extraordinary thing was that they did it properly dressed, with their puttees on and shirts buttoned at the wrists.

Their only other recreation that I saw was the catapult—the Y-and-elastic toy which the Americans call a slingshot. Many Gurkhas carried them in their hip-pockets, and if you were suddenly stung
a tergo
and
heard a smothered giggle from behind a tree, it was worth stopping and shouting: “
Idderao
, Johnny!
Ham dekko
,
^*
you little bugger!” just for the pleasure of seeing the small face come peeping cautiously out, followed by the marksman himself, wearing a sheepish grin and holding up his catapult by way of explanation, as if you didn't know. So far as I could see they confined themselves to British targets (there seemed to be no great love lost between them and the Indian regiments, especially the Sikhs), and we took it as a compliment. No one would have dreamed of taking offence; it would have been downright cruel, for the Gurkha was as eager to please as a playful grandchild. The thought of quarrelling with one of them never even occurred—for one thing, you'd be better picking a fight with a king cobra.

That was a thing that was often hard to remember: that this delightful little man, with his ungainly walk and protruding backside and impish grin, who barely came up to your shoulder and was one of nature's born comedians, was also probably the most fatal fighting man on earth. Their reckless courage was legendary, and I imagine that in proportion to their numbers they must have won more Victoria Crosses than any other race in the Army. I was never among them during an action, but I was once privileged to watch, from a distance, a company of them attacking a Japanese position. There was a Highland unit on their
left, advancing with that slow, deliberate 110-paces-to-the-minute tread which used to be the trademark of the kilted regiments; the Gurkhas had to trot to keep up, little green figures with their bush-hats at the rakish Gurkha angle, each man with his rifle at the trail in his left hand and his drawn kukri in his right. Over the last few yards the Highlanders suddenly accelerated, but any noise they made was drowned by the ear-splitting scream of the little hillmen going like demented dwarves, brandishing their knives as they scampered into the trees—and I was profoundly glad that I was not Japanese. One of the Highlanders told me later that when they came out again they found the ground before the position littered with Gurkha rifles: most of them had gone in with kukris alone.

There was another occasion when a Gurkha platoon close to us held a position against two companies of Japanese who wouldn't take no for answer, but kept coming time and again, yelling “Banzai!”; the Gurkhas just stood fast and stopped them until the position was littered with Jap dead. When the Gurkhas were finally withdrawn it was discovered that they hadn't a single round of ammunition among them.

I knew only one Gurkha really well, a fellow-cadet at Officers' Training School after the war. Unlike the Gurkhas I'd known in Burma, he was far from child-like, being as bright intellectually as anyone in the cadet company, but if he had a sharpness and dignity beyond the jolly little killers of the 17th Division, he was quite as genial and given to merriment. Like many
Gurkhas, he answered to the name of Thapa (the h is silent), and played in front of me in the company soccer team, a quicksilver terrier of an inside man who was everywhere at once, clapping his hands and clucking “Jock-Jock-Jock-Jock-Jock!” like a hysterical hen if I didn't give him the ball fast enough, savaging opponents twice his weight and giggling as he held the goalkeeper's jersey at corner kicks (he was one who had learned the rules, and then some).

Naturally, he was a general favourite in that company of young men, half of us British, the other half drawn from most of the warrior races of India; Thapa was the only Gurkha, but there was also a black Nigerian and I think one or two Malays—it was a remarkable international mix with one common goal, a commission in H.M. Forces, and I wish some of our race relations experts could have seen us, and heard the entirely uninhibited mess discussions on politics (this was shortly before Indian independence and, just for interest, a majority of the Indian cadets were against it), religion, sport, military shop, social gossip, world affairs, and so on. Indeed, I wish I had tapes of them myself: our average age would be in the early twenties, ranging from pink schoolboys from England to a gnarled Pathan (he must have been all of twenty-nine) with three rows of ribbons, and we talked and argued with a freedom that would have had a T.V. discussion host reaching for his panic button. One result of this was that I saw a most disturbing phenomenon: an angry Gurkha.

We were talking politics, and a clever and articulate Congress Party supporter, who happened to be extremely swarthy, got very emotional. “You British,” he cried, “with the help of this type of people—” here he indicated Thapa and a couple of Sikhs “—have been exploiting this land for centuries! You have bled India white!”

One of the Sikhs murmured behind his gin and tonic: “It hasn't had much visible effect on you,” which was well below the belt, but it might have passed if the Nigerian hadn't laughed fit to rattle the chandelier. Thapa elbowed him, muttering to him to shut up, and the Congress boy, mistaking the gesture, rounded on Thapa and was ill-advised enough to call him “a monkey bastard”.

Thapa's grin vanished as though it had been wiped off. He didn't say anything, just stared at the other, and then suddenly turned and
ran
out of the mess. Some of us went after him, calling him to come back, but he ran full tilt to his quarters, where we found him unearthing his kukri from a tin trunk while his native bearer gibbered in a corner. Thapa was mouthing dreadful things about sons of owls and swine, and it took four of us to wrestle him down while some brave soul stood on his wrist and secured the kukri. Then we sat on him until the Senior Under Officer arrived, by which time he had stopped struggling and we judged it safe to let him go. But he was still grey with rage, and when the S.U.O. had finished tearing strips off him he flatly announced his intention of killing the Congress
boy at the earliest opportunity; there was no doubt whatever that he meant it. We reasoned with him, literally for hours, pointing out that he'd certainly swing for it; that meant nothing, and it was only when the S.U.O., inspired, assured him that as a murderer he hadn't a hope of a commission, that he showed signs of weakening. Finally, round about lights out, he gave his word of honour not to avenge the insult provided the Congress wallah apologised—which I'm bound to say the latter did with a good grace. But Thapa would not shake hands, or even look at him thereafter, and he was never quite the same cheery companion again. I suppose he's dead now—Gurkhas are not noted for longevity—and I sometimes wonder where the Congress boy is, and the laughing Nigerian, and the Sikh whose snide crack started it all.

With the Army reduced to a shadow of its old self, there are many fewer Gurkhas in British service nowadays, and they look subtly different from the happy little toughs of forty years ago: they are taller and better shaped, and the broad grinning faces I remember have given way to more refined and serious features. The race can hardly have changed in so short a time, and I wonder if they are being recruited with a view to size. Or perhaps I'm just imagining the change; even half a century ago a Gurkha on parade was as regimental and poker-faced a soldier as any, and it was only up the road, with his catapult in his pocket and his pigtail and kukri bouncing as he trotted along, that you got the big grin and the cheery wave and the high-pitched
yell of “
Shabash
, Jock! Rangoon
jao!
” That's how I remember him, and always will.

Towards the end of our week at Pyawbwe I went for a walk at random, to think about things. A letter from my parents had referred to the imminent collapse of Germany, and the possibility of the whole war being over soon—it must have been natural at home to suppose that once Hitler was out of the way, the whole Axis would collapse, but the thought hadn't even crossed Nine Section's mind. We were in our own hot little world, our own private war, and it wouldn't be over until we reached Rangoon, 300 miles due south, with Jap in between. It might well not be over even then; there would still be Malaya and Siam to clear, as far as Bangkok and Singapore. In Delhi and London they might know that the Japanese position in Burma was beyond repair, but that didn't mean a great deal at our level; he had been bad to shift in the first 100 miles south of the Irrawaddy, and with three times that distance still to go, the outlook wasn't promising. It's all in the point of view: armchair strategists can look at the last stages of a campaign and say there's nothing left but mopping-up, but if you're holding the mop it's different. The last Jap in the last bunker on the last day can be just as fatal to you personally as the biggest battle at the height of the campaign, and you don't look or think much beyond him—wherever he is.

Perhaps you have to be an old soldier, watching
the T.V. news telling you that the Iraqis are on the run and another couple of days will do it and hip-hip-hooray it'll be a glorious victory and the boys will be home before you know it, to feel mounting anger as you watch pictures of the tanks rolling and staff officers looking confident at press conferences and studio pundits pontificating—because you know, even if the complacent commentators don't, that some poor sod is still at the sharp end hoping to God that that bunker is empty and that the ground before it isn't mined. (Forgive me if all my sympathy is with Jamy and Fluellen and Bates, Court, and Williams. After all, what else are the commentators going to say?)

So, in April ’45 we didn't think of the war ending; it would happen some day, but in the meantime what was the name of the next Jap stronghold down the road, and would our company have to take it? (It's strange, thinking back and remembering, you find yourself falling into the habits of forty-five years ago—bitch, bitch, bitch, moan, moan, moan. That's how soldiers are; before you know it I'll have developed sore feet just sitting at my typewriter.)

As I walked that afternoon, I was digesting the fact that my parents had reached that stage of desperate hope when the end is in sight. Churchill's broad, sunlit uplands were coming into view, and the closer that prospect seemed, the more they must have worried, and asked themselves for the thousandth time what cruel fate had determined that while other campaigns were ended or ending, and other people's children could be
accounted safe, their wandering boy should be caught up on the last front of all. It must have been a bitter thought, but they kept it to themselves; their last letter had been full of optimism, and even talk of what I might do after the war. Re-sit my exams in the hope of getting into medicine? That, I knew, was what they wanted, and in my first year in the Army I had gone along with it, even to the extent of getting Highers papers from the education office and brooding disconsolately over Livy and quadratics and volumetric analysis, whatever that was. I hadn't the heart to tell them, now, that I had about as much chance of getting into medicine as I had of beating Joe Davis at snooker. It wasn't that war had blunted my brain and blighted my hopes; it was just sheer bloody laziness, reinforced by distaste at the thought of peering at boils and rectums. (Or should it be recta? Which reminded me of the old military joke about the fellow who was wounded in the backside. “Rectum? Bloody near killed him!”)

No, I had only one ambition now: to get my commission. It was sheer naked pride, nothing else. I thought, with all the conceit of youth, that I was good enough. Better equipped, too, than those contemporaries who had passed where I had failed, and would now be dispersing from their OCTUs with their new pips, wondering what active service would be like, and could they lead people in action. I knew what it was like, now, and that if I shouted: “Come on, Grandarse, Parker, Nick, Forster!” they would follow, even if I did fall down a well along the way. Yes, I would pass the
next board if I had to kill the psychiatrist to do it, and get through OCTU, and with Burma in my pay-book I'd apply for the Gurkhas (oh, lord, I'd have to learn Gurkhali as well as Urdu) or the Dogras, or if I opted for British service, the Gordons, my family's regiment, or the Black Watch…provided the war lasted long enough, for I supposed that once it was over there would be no demand for new subalterns—which shows how little I knew.