Quartered Safe Out Here (9 page)

I came awake to the crash of explosions and the hard ground vibrating under me. All round men were starting up, there were yells of command in the darkness, the stutter of a Bren, the thump of grenades, flashes in the black, random shouts. I rolled into my pit, blanket and all, scrambling for rifle and pouches. Parker tumbled in beside me, and we ducked instinctively as tracer streaked across our front beyond the wire. There were exclamations and blasphemous inquiries from the pits on either side, and then the word was passing along: “Jap's inside the wire!”

“Ah, sod it!” said Parker, fumbling in the dark, and light flashed on his kukri as he laid it on the lip of the pit. “Wot the ’ell! Those are mortars—our three-inch mortars!”

They were thumping away at the southern end of the village, away from us. That was where most of the firing was; beyond our wire there seemed to be nothing doing, but men were hurrying past close behind us, someone was yelling: “Reiver platoon!”, and I thought I heard Long John's voice, and then Hutton's bawling: “Eight section, close on me! Coom on!” The firing was sporadic, a few shots, a burst of automatic, then a scream that froze the blood, and from the left end of our position a shocking worrying sound, as though a dog were tearing at something.
“Jesus wept! Come on, Jocky!” Parker was out of the pit, and I was following when a burst of fire came from beyond the wire, right to our front. Parker dropped, and I stopped dead, staring at the darkness outside the wire—there were figures there, running, and they couldn't be any of ours. Parker was on one knee, firing towards them; I emptied my magazine, rapid fire, working the bolt for dear life until it clicked on an empty chamber. I heaved out of the pit, scrabbling for my bandolier; Parker had vanished, but another figure, rifle in hand, was on the top of the embankment before my pit, not a yard away, and even as my hand, rummaging in the dark for that damned bandolier, fell on the hilt of the dirk in my small pack, I froze in genuine horror.

It happened in split seconds, as such things do, but in retrospect it seems to have lasted forever. The figure was plainly silhouetted against the half-dark night sky, it was short and crouched and furtive, but what shocked me into momentary numbness was that it seemed to be wearing knickerbockers, loose above the knee, tight beneath. All in an instant I remembered how Nick had identified the Gurkhas a few nights earlier, realised that this was a Jap inside the wire, that my rifle was empty, that my hand was on my knife-hilt…the figure took a quick step, his foot slipped over the edge of my pit, as he stumbled I grabbed him with my left hand and heaved him bodily across the pit, my right hand whipped the knife out, down and up in a frantic lunge, and the fallen figure exclaimed: “Fookin' ’ell!”

God bless the electric impulses of the brain. I couldn't stop the thrust, but I did open my fingers, the knife dropped, and my open hand hit him one hell of a clout in the kidneys. He yelped, echoing me, I should think, and then he fell into the pit, swearing, and I dragged him upright with my left hand still clutching his shirt.

“Nick! What the hell are you on!”

I probably sounded hysterical for he said:

“Bloody ’ell, Jock! Ye've bloody ruined me!”

“You dumb sod!” I remember shouting, and then the section Bren interrupted me, and I let him go and found my bandolier, my hands shaking as I jammed in fresh clips. The air was thick with cordite smell, the shooting farther along the wire redoubled, the mortars were thumping away, and down at the south end a star-shell burst high up—at least, I think it must have done, for suddenly it was light for a moment, and Corporal Little was running past the pit shouting:

“Come on, Nine Section!”

I scrambled out, Nick swearing in my wake, and ran after Little, who was heading down into the village. That was the moment when I caught a fleeting glimpse of Long John; he was issuing an order to someone, I think, but you couldn't hear above the firing; he had a rifle in one hand, the bayonet bent almost at right angles—I learned later that he'd bayonetted a Jap, and couldn't get it out until his batman reminded him that the way to free a bayonet is to fire a shot into the body. The theory is that it lets in air, or releases pressure on the blade, or something; how it worked
with
that
bayonet, God knows, but it did. Hutton was striding towards us out of the dark.

“W'eer the ’ell ye gan, Tich?”

“W'eer d'ye want us?” shouted Little.

Hutton swore, jerked his head round towards the firing, and made up his mind.

“Nivver mind that! They're in doon yonder! Git in yer pits an' watch the wire! They're all ower the bloody place!”

Stanley was beside him, trying to attract his attention—he had been on o.p. beyond the wire. Hutton spoke to him, and as we ran back to our pits Stanley followed us, throwing himself down beside my pit. Rifle fire seemed to be rattling everywhere, the flashes of the mortar explosions were visible over the bashas, and from the road within the village came the sharp crash of grenades.

“Where's Wells?” shouted Stanley, grabbing my shoulder.

I didn't know who Wells was, even. Stanley cursed, stood up, looked about him, let out a stream of oaths—which wasn't like him at all—and suddenly ran off, down into the village. Someone shouted after him, but he was lost in the darkness, and here was Hutton again, running in a crouch.

“Fook me! Gidoon!” He was kneeling by my pit. “W'ees got grenades? Coom on, man—gi' them ’ere!”

I was half into my webbing by now, so I tore open a pouch, Hutton grabbed my grenades, and then he was off towards the road. He disappeared behind a basha,
and a moment later we heard one of the grenades going off on the road. Little came crouched out of the dark, dropping beside my pit.

“W'ee's that? Jock? W'ee's wid thee?”

“Nobody! I don't know where Parker is.”

“Back theer! ’Ev ye seen Stanley?”

“He went off, that way!”

He swore. “All ’ere, bar him, anyway. Watch yer froont!”

There was nothing outside the wire now but empty dark; behind us, in the village and down towards the south entrance, it sounded like Dunkirk, and then gradually the firing died away. There were a few more mortar explosions, but the voices that sounded in the dark were less urgent now, and I had time to get my breath back, wondering what the hell had happened.

The attack had been one of those mad accidents. A column of Japanese had come up the road from the south in trucks, driven right up to the wire, climbed out, and then realised that we were in the village. They'd attacked the wire, with our mortars hammering their trucks and their drivers trying to reverse or turn round and ruining their gears while the bombs rained down on them; it must have been chaos out yonder, but about a dozen Japs had got inside the wire, and a hand-to-hand battle had broken out. Most of them had been killed on the road within the village, by grenades. As many more were killed by patrols which went out at dawn to look for stragglers, and others had died outside the wire during the night's fighting; whether Parker and
I had done any damage with our expenditure of about five shillings' worth of ammunition we never knew. The word passed that more than fifty Japs had bought it, for the loss of three of us, including one of the men I'd talked to just before turning in.

My knife was still lying at the bottom of my pit when dawn broke, and I was considering its eight-inch blade and feeling slightly sick at the thought of what I'd nearly done with it, when Nick loafed over, mess-tins in hand, rubbing his back-ribs.

“By, yer a stark booger, you! Sic a bloody belt—man, ye joost aboot kilt us!”

How little you know, I thought—and decided then and there not to tell him how close he'd come to dying not Tojo's way, or his own way, but my way—or that only his penchant for four-letter exclamations had saved him at the last instant. After all, you don't want your comrades-in-arms thinking that they can't even go to the latrine at night without the risk of being knifed by the maniac in the next pit. But one thing I must tell him, for his own safety in the future—for he still had on the p.t. shoes he'd worn on patrol, and his trousers were still tucked inside the socks, grey, long, soldiers for the use of, giving him that fashionable stream-lined look almost up to the knee.

I waited till we had been to the cookhouse, and had returned with our bread, tea, and burgoo, keeping a wary eye open for the kites which could swoop down like Spitfires and whip half your breakfast with surgical skill. When we were settled and munching
contentedly, talking of other things, I asked casually:

“Why d'you wear your socks like that, Nick?”

“W'at for not? Me legs was cold.”

“You want to watch it, marra. One of these nights somebody's liable to take you for a Jap—remember what you told me in the o.p.?”

He surveyed his legs. “Girraway, man! Do Ah look like a fookin' Jap, me?”

“From the knees down—yes.”

No penny dropped. “Aw, git ’ired, man! Ye knaw, Jock, for an eddicated feller you doan't ’alf talk soom crap!”

Well, there was no denying that, so I said no more about it; no one ever did take him for a Jap by night after that, and my near-murder has remained a secret until now.

I was not the only one in the section guilty of
suppressio veri
over the night's work, but Stanley had a much more creditable reason for his reticence.

He had been in the o.p. with Wells, and when Jap arrived they had cut out for the wire. Stanley had made it into the perimeter, only to find that there was no sign of Wells. So he had slipped out again, without a word to anyone, when the fighting was at its height, into the Jap-infested dark, to look for him. By sheer luck he found him, near the o.p., dying of bayonet wounds; there was no way of helping him, but Stanley had stayed with him; he could have sought cover for himself, but he didn't. I suppose he brought
the dead man in at dawn, but my informant—who was not Stanley himself—wasn't sure of all the details: he had only learned the bare facts months later.

I lost touch with Stanley after the war. We served together for most of the rest of the campaign, and he is one of the few men of whom I can say that we literally fought side by side (that came later), but I never knew him well; the picture of the tall, quiet, fair youth is not as sharp in my mind as that of Grandarse or Nick or most of the others. But whenever I heard the word “hero” loosely used, as it so often is of professional athletes and media celebrities and people who may have done no more than wear uniform for a while, I think of Stanley going back into the dark.

A few miles south of Meiktila there was, and probably still is, a wood containing a little temple. The trees were very tall and close together on its outskirts, forming a thick protective screen, but within the wood they were more widely spaced, with dim clearings under the high spreading branches. How wide the wood was I never discovered, but it can't have been more than fifty or sixty yards in depth, and beyond there was open ground stretching to another belt of trees. It must have been quite a pretty place, with those shaded clearings and the tall trunks reaching up to the high foliage through which the light filtered. I sometimes wonder what it looks like now.

That wood and a nearby village were among the places used by the Japanese as concentration points for their counter-attack on Meiktila, and I believe our intelligence pin-pointed it as a result of a chance discovery made following the night action I've just described. Among the Japanese killed by our dawn patrols outside the wire was an officer—I heard he had taken cover in a culvert—and on his body were found plans listing the Jap concentration points: one of them was the temple wood, and our div command
marked it for urgent attention.

Nine Section, of course, was not aware of this. Following the night action the whole battalion withdrew to Meiktila, after an excursion which had lasted several days, accounted for more than a hundred Japanese, and more importantly had helped to embarrass his build-up. Similar actions had been fought all round Meiktila at this time—the official history likens Cowan to a boxer using straight lefts to prevent his opponent getting close in, and it's a good simile: Jap was never given time to settle for a major assault.

Nine Section's impression—and it is still mine—is that Jap had taken far worse than he gave, and I am surprised by the official history's statement that our battalion took 141 casualties in two days during our foray from Meiktila. The regimental histories don't confirm the figure, and I wonder if the official version isn't referring to a longer period. But not for me to argue; I can only say that if the battalion did take that kind of punishment, we weren't aware of it.

We came back to Meiktila and spent the next week or so in our pits, watching the wire, brewing up, and waiting, and in that time other units of 17th Div threw two of Cowan's straight lefts at the little temple wood and its adjacent village. According to the official history the first attack ended in failure, with three tanks brewed up, and Jap following our withdrawal uncomfortably closely; the second attempt was also repulsed, and two more tanks were lost. Then it was our turn.

We rode out on the Shermans of Probyn's Horse on a fine sunny morning, knowing that something was in the wind, for three men had been added to the section. One was a lance-corporal (for some reason we had been short of a section second-in-command until now), another a rotund South Cumbrian, a sort of miniature Grandarse, called Wattie, and the third was reputed to be a recaptured deserter, and looked it. So Corporal Little had been told, anyway; he and I were riding on the front of the tank, either side of the gun with our backs to the turret, flanked by Forster and the Duke, and with Grandarse, who needed room, reclining on the sloping front at our feet and delivering judgement:

“Ah doan't see the point o' desertion, mesel'. Not oot ’ere, anyways. Ah mean, in Blighty a feller can stay on the roon, livin' in the railway Naafis an' Toc H canteens, but w'eer the ’ell ye gan to ga in India—unless yer Jock theer, an' look like a bloody wog—”

“Much obliged.”

“No offence, lad, but ye doan't ’alf ga broon. Admit it, noo. Put a
dhoti
on ye, an' ye could git a job dishin' oot egg banjoes at Wazir Ali's.
^*
Any roads, w'at Ah'm sayin' is that if ye desert oot ’ere—Ah mean, in India; ye'd ’ev to be
doolally
†
to booger off in Boorma—the
ridcaps is bound to cotch thee, an' court-martial gi'es thee the choice o' five years in Trimulghari or Paint Joongle, or coomin' oop t'road to get tha bollicks shot off. It's a moog's game.”

“You don't have to be a deserter to be sent up the road and have your bollocks shot off,” said the Duke. “Or hadn't you noticed?”

“Mind you,” continued Grandarse, “there's this to be said for bein' a deserter—they say that if ye ask t'ga oop the road, an' ye gits kilt or wounded, the Army reckons ye've made amends, like, an' scroobs yer record. Ah doan't think that's bloody fair—they gid me sivven days in close tack for ga'in' absent in Blighty once, an' if Ah git kilt, it'll still be on me crime-sheet.”

“That's ’cos ye didn't try ’ard enoof,” said Little. “Ye've got to commit a big crime to git a big remission.”

“Why did you go absent, Grandarse?” I asked.

“Aw, there was this tart in Silloth. An' Ah was yoong an' daft.” He sighed. “She wasn't woorth it. Ah was grossly deceived. Aye, things ’as coom tae siccan a pass, thoo can't tell mistress f'ae servant lass. She wore troosers, an' a'. Bloody foony. Ah fancied ’er in troosers.”

“Yer a bloody pervert, you are,” said Forster.

“Oh, aye, lissen to Dr Freud!”

“Oo's Doctor Freud?”

“A fookin' professor.”

“I don't suppose that's what they called him in
Vienna,” said the Duke, “but it's a not inaccurate description.”

“Anyways,” said Grandarse with finality, “if Ah was ivver daft enoof to desert, an' got done for it, Ah'd sooner tek the chance of a bullet in me bum than spend five year fillin' an' emptyin' wells in't
glass'oose
! So theer!”

Someone said unkindly that anybody shooting Grandarse could hardly fail to hit him in the bum, and Grandarse retorted that at least he wadn't git ’is brains blew oot if they did, not like soom clivver boogers; they were having to shout to make themselves heard above the rattle of the tracks as the Shermans rumbled over the sunlit paddy, and the swirling dust was becoming a nuisance, so I withdrew from the conversation to read for the third or fourth time the letter that had arrived from home last night.

My parents knew I was in Burma, and that (with the possible exception of air crew) it was generally believed to be the worst ticket you could draw in the lottery of active service. Those months must have been the longest of their lives; whatever anxieties the soldier may experience in the field can be nothing to the torment of those at home. I don't know how parents and wives stand it. Perhaps family experience is a help: every generation of my people, as far back as we knew, had sent somebody to war, and my grandmother's comment on Chamberlain's speech on September 3, 1939, had been simply: “Well, the men will be going away again.” Her uncle had served in the Crimea, her
brother had died in the Second Afghan, two of my aunts had lost sweethearts in the Great War, my father had been wounded in East Africa, and two uncles had been in the trenches; probably it was a not untypical record for a British family over a century, but whether it made my absence easier or harder to bear, who knows?

One thing was certain: they were not going to distress me by letting a hint of worry show in their letters, which were full of news and trivia and comedy. (I hope mine were, too; I was guiltily aware of being a poor correspondent who wrote briefly and usually when I wanted something; my last had contained a request for cigarettes.) My father wrote that they were on their way, and described how my aunts, those genteel maiden ladies, had exclaimed in dismay on learning that I had started
smoking
, at which my grandmother, a lively nonagenarian, had demanded to know if they would deny the solace of tobacco to a man who was standing at Armageddon; she had added mischievously that there were worse temptations than cigarettes for a young soldier in the Orient, and she didn't mean drink, either. This had opened up such visions of their nephew's possible depravity that they couldn't sleep, and in the waking small hours my elder aunt had been sure she'd heard the rattles which meant that the German bombers were dropping poison gas; she had ventured out, in dressing-gown, slippers, and gas-mask, with her handkerchief steeped in eau-de-cologne, and the A.R.P. wardens had found her shining her torch on the local pillar-box to see if it
had changed colour.
^*
And so on…my grandmother had taken to referring to two of the Nazi leaders as “Ribbonstrip” and “Gorbals”; my father had been to see
A Night at the Opera
and wished that
he
could swing on trapezes like the Marx Brothers; there had been unpleasant scenes, with allegations of fixing and corruption, at the church jumble sale, because the minister's daughter had won the prize doll by correctly guessing its name (“Wellwoodina”!); my father and mother, respectively Liberal and Conservative, were thinking of voting Labour at the forthcoming election because the candidate was one of my father's patients and an old friend—it was a picture of that happy, funny, eccentric family of mine and their little world, so far and yet so near.

Corporal Little asked me what I was grinning about, and Forster opined that it was a loov-letter frae soom bint, an' yer wastin' yer time, Jock, she'll be gittin' shagged by soom Yank pilot, and Grandarse said, leave the lad alone, he'll larn for hissel'. Oh, yes, you got the cream of intellectual discourse in Nine Section.

The tanks rumbled to a halt not far from a low bund, and about fifty yards beyond it lay the temple wood, dense and silent in the sunlight. We debussed, and Long John and Gale and Sergeant Hutton passed among us, checking that all was as it should be. There were three companies of the battalion spread across the
paddy facing the wood, with the Shermans at intervals, but we were aware only of the sections immediately on either side. And there we waited, the section in a rough line, settling our equipment, taking a last swig from the chaggles, charging our magazines, and finally, at a word from Little, fixing bayonets.

So it was going to be a pukka attack—until that moment I, for one, had not been sure what the object of the operation was; the strength of our force, the presence of the tanks, had suggested something big, and now it was confirmed. The screen of trees beyond the little bund looked peaceful enough, but Jap would be there, well dug in; he would be watching us at this moment.

There are few sounds as menacing as a bayonet being fixed. Mine was the old sword type with the locking ring clicking into place with the smoothness of good Edwardian machinery; Grandarse, on my immediate right, was nipping his fingers with one of the new pigstickers, and cursing, his face crimson in the heat; on my left Parker was drawing his kukri and re-sheathing it, and automatically I reached back to make sure mine was loose in its sheath, and that my knife-hilt was handy in my small pack. Suddenly it seemed very hot indeed, with hardly a breath of wind; just behind us the Sherman's engine coughed and roared; a bearded and turbanned head peered out of the turret and shouted in Hindustani to someone inside and the roaring died to a murmur.

Little came towards me, two grenades in his hands.
“Gi'es yer Bren magazines, Jock, an' tek these; they're Stan's.” Stanley was number two to Steele, the Bren gunner, and Little was seeing to it that he had plenty of spares.

“Are we going in, corp?”

“Aye, in a bit. When the Yanks ’ev doon their stoof.” He nodded past me, and as I tested the grenade pins and put them in my pouch I turned to look; I had been aware of a far-off murmur, growing louder; from behind us three distant dots in the sky were coming closer—Tomahawk fighters in camouflage paint which covered the famous shark's jaws with which the Flying Tigers decorated their engine cowlings. They came roaring in at tree-top level over us and zoomed up in a climb as they passed above the wood, banking as they soared up into the blue.

“Advance to the bund!” shouted Hutton. “Take cover—an' keep yer ’eids doon!”

We moved forward and lay against the low bank, and from overhead came the thundering whine as the first Tomahawk hurtled down in a steep dive; while it was still behind us two small dark objects detached from it, falling at a steep angle to land on the edge of the wood with a crashing double explosion and sheets of orange flame. Smoke and dust billowed up, obscuring the trees, and then the second Tomahawk came, repeating the performance, with the third on its heels. The ground shook as they pounded the wood, which was now entirely hidden by a great cloud; in came the Tomahawks again, unloading their bombs,
and this time three of them failed to explode. The aircraft banked away in a great arc, and soon the whine of their engines died away; that was the air strike over, and now it was the Shermans' turn.

As the engines roared, Grandarse, lying on the bank two yards away, looked along at me.

“Loocky boogers, them Yank pilots. They'll be sittin' in the Casanova in Cal the neet, suppin' cocktails. Warra life, eh?”

Parker must have heard him, for he laughed on my other side and turned on his back, looking up at the sky, and hummed:

“Aw reet, pipe doon!” said Hutton, but he was grinning; it must have been a new one to him. But now the Sherman was clanking forward, through a gap in the bund; the great mass of dust-coloured steel rolled on a few yards, and stopped. Its hatch was closed, but the big gun was traversing from side to side, and lowering to the point-blank position. Suddenly it crashed, the tank shook, and the shell burst with an almighty roar in the depths of the wood. Up and down the line the other tanks began blazing away, and then the machine-guns started chattering, and the whole screen of trees was shaking as though in a gale; through the
slowly-dispersing haze left by the Tomahawks' bombs we could see the foliage being ripped to shreds. All along the bank men were craning as they watched; I stole a glance behind and saw Hutton was on his feet; farther along Long John was checking his watch; Gale, rifle in hand, his bush-hat at a rakish angle, was talking to his runner. Abruptly the firing stopped.

“On yer feet!” roared Hutton, and as we stood up: “Wait for it!”