The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy Page 34

  ‘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 ser
vice 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.

  There was another noise. Tension all round, rifle butts gripped more firmly. A password called across the road. Men slipping across to our side. The Assamese!

  Then the firing broke out. We had heard a lot of shooting from Jotsoma an hour earlier – the Japs were going in there, by the sound of it. Now came rifle and automatic fire, punctuated by shell fire, from a greater distance. That would be Kohima getting it again! It sounded like a real pitched battle.

  But the Assam Battalion kept coming across the road, Kukis, Karsis, and all the other tribesmen. What was more, they formed up behind us, in proper order.

  It began to rain, a dull steady downpour. But the stragglers still arrived. They had walked over the hills from Imphal, and moved without hurry or apparent fatigue.

  One of them was saying something in a low excited voice, down on the road. I could hardly hear anything for the drum of rain on my monsoon cape, which was protecting the set. A minute later, Lieutenant Boyer fired a Verey pistol. As bright light broke over the scene, he gave the order to fire. The chaps lining the ditch by the road opened fire. Dusty Miller opened up on the Bren.

  There were yells from the thickets opposite, and some answering fire. The Japs were there all right, and must have been on the heels of the Assamese, but they did not venture to cross the road.

  Our shooting stopped, the rain petered out. The racket up at Jotsoma and Kohima was still going strong. Poor bastards! We waited for the order to move out, now that the job was done. Word came only when the survivors of the Assam Battalion were clear. We started moving up the track again. Dawn was just filtering in. Our first modest bit of action was over.

  By now, Kohima had been six days under siege.

  Only when you stood in that landscape, with your boots firm on the ground, could you understand why advances by either side were so slow. Whatever the country looked like from the air, from the ground it was baffling. To the confusion of whatever prehistoric calamity had thrown up this maze of small mountains and valleys, nature had added entangling forest. Every hill, valley, re-entrant, and salient was covered with vegetation which, although from a distance it looked little more than knee-high scrub – so large were the Assamese perspectives – on closer acquaintance proved to be a riot of thorn, bamboo, and towering trees. Every minor feature, nothing on a map, proved capable in actuality of swallowing a battalion. Every hillside mopped up men as a sponge mops up beer.

  Every now and then, pressure on the sponge caused a trickle of combatants to emerge. Often they were walking wounded, from one of the sites within the Kohima perimeter, from Garrison Hill, the GPT Ridge, or even the disputed area by the District Commissioner’s bungalow – then the most famous building in the world. They passed through our lines, V Force men, Burmese Regiment, Mahrattas, Gurkhas, Nepalese, Indian Infantry, Royal West Kents, and disappeared again into the consuming jungle, led by Naga warriors. Dimapur was far away, somewhere in the blue distance near Calcutta.

  Our attention hinged on Kohima, always Kohima, and what was happening there. The Japs never gave up. Their forces and ours were practically intermingled, and often fought for days on end within a few yards of each other. Behind the DC bungalow, centre of the dispute, the opposing sides lobbed grenades, volley after volley, across the tennis court. The RAF and the Americans were making air-drops of food, water, and ammunition to our beleaguered forces but, inevitably, some of these fell into Jap hands. It was hard to see how either side could survive for long.

  There were plenty of other factors we did not understand. Why didn’t Sato simply by-pass Kohima – there was nothing there anyone could possibly want, except the command of the Dimapur-Imphal road – and make for Dimapur, the gateway to India and impossible to defend? And why could we not make better progress in relieving Kohima?

  The Japs had command of the road at several strategic places. To try to advance down it was to invite ambush and withering fire. It was equally impossible to move along the valley, for similar reasons: that broad valley was constantly under observation. Equally, you could not move along the ridges of the hills – they were too broken, too directionless. We were forced into the undergrowth. And the undergrowth provided the Japs with unlimited cover. They had perfected a system of interdependent bunkers which protected each other with cross-fire; if you charged one, you came under attack from two more. 2 Div was well mechanized, but mechanization counted for little here. Many of us were practising guerilla warfare before we ever heard of the term.

  We were joined at Zubza by a detachment of Pathan muleteers, tall men with monstrous black animals in their charge, over a hundred strong. These cantankerous animals set off wild-eyed into the bush, bearing supplies. Our perimeter had to be extended so that we could give them protection, which caused a certain amount of ticking and grumbling. The culinary habits of the Pathans, the aroma and blood-sucking flies of their charges, made them unpopular. Besides, mules were so primitive. They had gone out with the Great War!

  Swinton dealt with that sort of attitude when he addressed us one morning, two days after we had gone down to the road to help the Assam Battalion.

  ‘You’ll all be glad to know that 2 Div is finally moving into action. We are going to relieve Kohima. The rest of the brigade is already in the vicinity, and 5 Brigade is taking up temporary positions nearby. The First Battalion will be moving into action tonight, at midnight. The cooks are laying on an extra issue of char, and then we go forward.

  ‘Naturally, we aren’t too keen for t
he Japs to know about this. They will have their heads down by then, although we are prepared to disturb their sleep if we have to.’ We laughed at his assumed consideration.

  ‘We shall all be glad of the chance to do something positive. And we need a little exercise. We have been sitting on our arses for too long. We shall proceed to Kohima along the Merema Ridge.’ He indicated it with a sweep of his arm. ‘We shall move along the Ridge, clearing it of enemy as we go, and we shall deliver a hefty punch at Sato from his left, where he will be least able to deal with it, and where it will hurt him most. He may be well dug in, but we shall dig him out – even if only to give him a decent burial!

  ‘On this operation, we have two objectives: to kill as many Nips as we can, and to relieve the Kohima garrison. I know you approve of both objectives.’ We cheered to show we did. ‘Good. After Kohima, things will be easier. The road will be opened to Imphal and the Chindwin, and life should be simple. This is the decisive point in the war in the Far East – so we all understand, don’t we, why the Powers-That-Be had to call in the Mendips for the job!’ More cheers.

  ‘Let me just remind you about the question of supplies. They are vital, as you know. We are going to want to eat up on Merema. We may get some air-drops, but cargoes are limited. It goes without saying that the Fourteenth Army is short of planes! We are lucky to have the Pathans and their mules with us, to bring up rations and ammunition. They are absolutely marvellous chaps and we shall depend upon them absolutely. They come from mountainous regions of Pakistan and are a warrior people; they must be given every respect, for our stomachs if not our lives are in their hands.

  ‘Good! This is not a picnic we are embarking on. You are all aware of that. We have a worthy foe, and we shall vanquish him worthily. I will remind you of the words of Shakespeare, which he gives to Henry V to speak before another great battle, the Battle of Agincourt.