Road of Bones (53 page)

True to form, Private Norman was thinking of his stomach again. On the night they reached Dimapur he took care to record what the 4th battalion was given for dinner. At 1800 hours the survivors of Kohima sat down to bully-beef rissoles, potatoes, fried tomatoes, gravy, plum duff and treacle. That was followed with ‘unlimited supplies of canned fruit, jam, bars of plain chocolate, ½ packets of biscuits. Soap, chewing gum, fags, matches, playing cards.’ Reading his diaries of the siege and its aftermath, one ceases to regard his obsession with the minutiae of each meal as pedantic; food, its rituals and timings, was the way for Private Norman to keep a grip on his sanity. While he could still eat, and meticulously detail the food, Harold Norman could believe that he was alive and that some part of his old self was surviving.

He was glad to see that Padre Randolph had reopened his canteen and was selling tea and half-packets of biscuits between meals. The men got mail. Norman opened five parcels, which included letters from home, a copy of the
Hotspur
, a
Hampshire Chronicle
and two crime novels. The following day he set off into Dimapur to visit Sergeant Tacon, the famous Bren gunner who had mown down the Japanese fleeing Detail Hill in the early days of the siege. Tacon had just been told that his brother had been killed in action in Europe. The sergeant was making a good recovery, but Norman’s diary does not record his reaction to the loss of his brother. The schoolmaster, Captain Harry Smith, had spent an uncomfortable night, the result not of his own head wound, but of ‘listening to the cries of the wounded’ in the beds around him.

Private Norman was shocked by the conditions in the hospital. ‘Our lads have not yet had their wounds dressed, their sheets changed or been bathed yet.’ He also ran into Private Charlie Howell, who told him that a sniper had killed five West Kents with seven shots in fifteen minutes near the bungalow. For troops who had been in different sectors of the defence, cut off from each other by noise and by snipers, the first days of peace were a chance to find out what had really happened at Kohima. Some men sat in clusters and talked, others went off by themselves, and many simply slept. Those who chatted heard which of their friends had lived and which died. There was no drama. The 4th battalion had lived with sudden deaths for so long now that the men did no more than shake their heads at such news. The grief simply became part of all the other grief that they suppressed in order to survive.

John Winstanley wondered what news, if any, had reached his mother. She lived alone in a cottage in Kent and had already had ‘those awful telegrams’ telling her he had been wounded in the Arakan, and about the wounding of his brother in Europe. ‘You don’t know, is he dead or is he scratched or is he badly wounded.’ She had heard no news of him since he had gone into battle in the Arakan. What would she be thinking now, this woman who had lost her husband in the last war, and who had devoted her life to her two sons’ upbringing and education? He wrote immediately to tell her he was safe.

Lieutenant Bruce Hayllar was able to write to his parents from hospital in Dimapur on 20 April, two days after he had limped out of Kohima with the rest of the wounded. The experience had convinced him, he wrote, to devote his life to God. ‘I have never seen, and never shall again see, such bravery and unselfishness as I saw up there.’ There was in his letter a deep undercurrent of anger, not only at the war, but at some of those who had never experienced the hell of a front line. ‘A man with an M.C. or D.S.O. is so far, far superior to a successful businessman or politician. Again, some people are a bit lazy about the war … content to let it run on without worrying much about it except as to how it affects themselves. They should just see
what a battle involves. It is a terrific and most disgusting thing. Far worse than any slum or brothel and far bigger. As long as fighting is going on people should be conscious of this. And do all they can to help, so that it can be finished quickly.’

John Laverty was up early on the morning after their arrival at Dimapur. He called a conference of his officers for half past nine. A diminished band arrived, clean-shaven but haggard. Laverty went through the events of the previous fortnight and then read out a congratulatory message from General Grover. They discussed plans for sports for the men and for reorganising the shattered companies. Fresh drafts of troops were available in Dimapur to join the battalion. They would do what they had done after Dunkirk and after Alam Halfa. Start again with unfamiliar faces and trust the old warriors to keep the new ones alive long enough to become proper jungle fighters. Before he finished, Laverty told his officers to come back to him with recommendations for decorations among the troops. The most obvious contender was John Harman of Easten’s D company, who had charged two machine-gun nests and given his life in the process. Easten decided he should be put forward for the highest medal in the armed forces, the Victoria Cross. He felt Laverty should know something of Harman’s eccentric personality before he made a decision.

‘He was a man who took the law into his own hands … I went to Colonel Laverty and told him all this and he said, “There is really only one thing you can do and that is put him up for the VC.”’ Easten then decided to share the story Harman had told him about the old man in Spain promising he would live to old age. ‘There is one thing, Sir,’ he told the CO, ‘I think Harman believed he was immortal.’ Laverty took the news in his stride. ‘Well Donald,’ he replied, ‘you don’t judge people by that, you judge them by comparison with ordinary men and their fellow soldiers around them.’ Harman would get his VC.

The following day, 22 April, Brigadier Warren, CO of 161 Brigade, arrived and spent the day with 4th battalion. The men were gathered together and Warren read out the special message of congratulations from General Grover. ‘This is the first time in history that one battalion has stopped an enemy division.’ It was a statement meant for the
ears of the West Kents only, but it set them apart from their fellow defenders of Kohima. The war diary does not record whether the men cheered or not. Laverty told them he was being put up for the DSO for the defence of Kohima, but ‘it was for all of us’. For some of those gathered listening, the time of rest and backslapping would be short.

That afternoon word went around that a composite company, made up from B and D companies, was being put together to guard a position at Milestone 32 on the road to Kohima. This was not the front line, and the job was simply to guard the line of communications up to the troops starting the fight for Kohima Ridge. But the men heard the news barely forty-eight hours after getting out of Kohima. Lance Corporal Dennis Wykes was not happy. ‘We scraped out by the skin of our teeth. We weren’t happy to be going back again.’ The rest of the battalion would stay at Dimapur for the time being. For some of the Kohima veterans, this was an order too far. What happened next has never been mentioned in any of the written accounts of the siege, nor is it referred to in 4th battalion’s war diary.

Dennis Wykes remembered it taking a week to reorganise the battalion, and during this time a corporal and ten men vanished. They walked out of the gates and into Dimapur and got on to a train. The medic, Frank ‘Doc’ Infanti, had sympathy with them. ‘Some of them were brave men, one of them was recommended for a military medal, but they couldn’t face going back up.’ Dennis Wykes was called in by his company commander and told to pick three men and find the deserters. It took about a fortnight to find them. They had travelled across India and reached Bombay, where they promptly handed themselves in to the military police. There was nowhere else for them to go in India and boarding a ship home to England was out of the question. When Wykes arrived to collect them the men were lined up outside the guardroom. ‘I said, “You know the score. You’ve all been through the siege. We’ve all seen that and known what you felt.”’ One of the men told Wykes that a bullet had parted his hair and creased his scalp at Kohima. After that he didn’t worry about what the army might do to him. On the train back the corporal told Wykes
that he and the other guards should get some sleep. ‘It took about a week to get across India. The corporal said, “You can get yer heads down and get some sleep and we won’t try to escape.” So we trusted them and they didn’t escape.’ In the First World War such men would have been shot. But the army had moved some way in its understanding of what battle can do to the human mind. Laverty knew what the men had endured and he realised what a blot a court martial would place on the 4th battalion’s achievement at Kohima. There was no court martial. According to Wykes, the men were used as ammunition-carriers for the remainder of the war.

The story of Kohima’s epic defence had already reached the newspapers. As early as 18 April, a military correspondent with South-East Asia Command was quoting a West Kent private, presumably one of the evacuated wounded, praising padre Randolph, who ‘used to sleep in the hospital trenches alongside the wounded and did everything to make us comfortable’. By their deeds the West Kents and the 1st Assam Regiment, and all the other defenders of Kohima, provided the army publicity machine with a boon. Within a week, public relations officers had descended on Dimapur, ‘all eager to get at first hand personal stories of the doings of the battalion’. They were directed not to any of the Indian regiments but to the West Kents, where the bemused soldiery were interrogated by military correspondents.

One of them was a Captain Kitchen, described as an ‘Observer with the 14th Army’, who collected the first account of John Harman’s death, perhaps embellishing the story in his telling of his final minutes. ‘Officially he shot four and bayoneted a fifth, but it is probable he killed ten,’ Kitchen announced. ‘He was severely wounded by machine-gun fire, but got back to his trench. There he took off his equipment, lay back and said “It was worth it – I got them all.” He refused aid from stretcher-bearers, crossed his arms, closed his eyes and, two minutes after the action, died.’

For reasons of wartime secrecy, the name of the battalion was not given. Instead, 4th battalion was referred to as ‘a home counties unit’. This infuriated several of the officers, including padre Randolph, who fired off a stiff missive regretting ‘the abrupt dismissal of the
work of the Royal West Kents’ to
SEAC
, the newspaper of South-East Asia Command, edited by Mountbatten’s propaganda chief and former Fleet Street editor, Frank Owen. It took until 13 June for
SEAC
to name the West Kents under the headline ‘First Story of a Proud Battalion’, by Reg Foster.

If the West Kents received little publicity by name, the Assam Regiment, Assam Rifles and other garrison troops saw even less. But the Assam soldiers were treated to a visit by the man they revered above all others. On 2 May, General Slim came and ‘walked round and spoke to all the V.C.O.
^*
and men in the area. He asked us to pass on his message of congratulations to all other men in the Bn.’ Within a month the 1st battalion, Assam Regiment, was on a train to barracks at Shillong, where the road was lined with cheering men from the training battalion. They were given a hot meal and rum and two days’ holiday.

There was never a conspiracy to play down the achievements of the men who had fought in the siege of Kohima; they suffered the fate of all warriors on remote fronts. By the time the full story was told to the press, the excitement over D-Day was inevitably dominating public attention.

Charles Pawsey had little concern for publicity. He had spent the last twenty years of his life cut off from daily newspapers, in a place where the happenings of the wider world were known to him only via the crackly airwaves of the BBC, and reception was never very good. But, the newspaper men found him. His was a story too good to be ignored. He is described in one account as ‘Pawsey Sahib’ and in another as ‘The White Chief’, the headline writers indulging with abandon their fondness for the colonial stereotype. Graham Stanford of the
Daily Mail
met Pawsey – ‘tall, sinewy with graying hair’ – near Kohima at the end of April and described him as ‘the type of Englishman that I always thought lived only in the pages of Somerset
Maugham novels’. He recorded Pawsey’s sadness at losing his collection of Naga ‘craft-work’ which had taken him years to accumulate.

Had Pawsey read a later dispatch of Stanford’s he might have been roused from his customary good manners, for the
Mail
writer denigrated his Naga friends. ‘Perched 5,000 feet up in the border mountains,’ wrote Stanford, ‘Kohima in peace time was a place of no importance to anyone save grinning, grunting Naga headhunters.’ It was writing of its time, and little changed from the discourse of ‘savages’ that had informed the accounts of nineteenth-century travellers in Nagaland. Only later would the British generals and writers publicly outdo each other in their lavish praise of the Nagas.

By late April, Naga men were still heavily engaged in war work for the British, and Charles Pawsey was touring the refugee camps and villages and seeing the scale of the disaster suffered by civilians. He estimated that 7,000 Nagas needed rations immediately but warned the figure could rise to 30,000; he wanted 10,000 blankets, 12,000 earthenware pots and 3,000 mosquito nets. Some American Baptist missionaries appeared on the scene, offering to help Christians. Pawsey replied firmly that ‘unless they are willing to help everybody their offer will not be accepted’. Pawsey made sure that the army chiefs knew of the Nagas’ devotion to the British cause. He told a correspondent travelling with 14th Army that Nagas were supplying the army with 4,000 day-labourers, none of whom would take payment. ‘They are very gentle with the wounded always carrying them at the same level no matter how steep the gradient is.’