Quartered Safe Out Here

They put us where Slim wanted us to be, south of the river, in that strange land known as the Dry Belt. People think of Burma as one great jungle, but in its centre there are large tracts which are almost desert; stony, sun-baked plain dotted with jungly patches and paddy-fields and criss-crossed by nullahs† and river beds which, outside the summer monsoon, are bone dry. This was where Slim wanted to catch Jap in the open, by pretending to make his main drive at Mandalay, to the east, while we, the 17th Division, crossed the river farther west, making for Meiktila, eighty miles below Mandalay, in Jap country. This had been explained to us by our divisional commander, a kindly, hook-nosed Glasgow graduate called Cowan and nicknamed “Punch”; we would take Meiktila with a fast thrust, hold it against the surrounding Japanese forces, and wait for 5th Division (tastefully known, from their red disc insignia, as the Flaming Arseholes) to fight through to our relief.

“We are the anvil,” Punch had said gently, “and they are the hammer.”

“An’ they won’t be the only fookin’ ’ammer,” little Nixon had observed. “Bloody great Jap Imperial Guardsmen – aye, White Tigers, runnin’ all ower the shop, shoutin’ ‘Banzai!’ Aye, weel, we’ll all get killed.”

So much for the broad picture. At one point it narrowed down to our platoon, making a sweep across a huge, dusty plain, looking for Japanese positions; it was not expected that we would find any. We were in extended line, twenty yards apart, and I was on the extreme left flank; a deep nullah was opening up to my left, forcing me to close on the next man, who was little Nixon.

“Keep yer bloody distance, Jock!” bawled Sergeant Hutton, from his station right and rear, so I obediently scrambled down the side of the nullah, dropping the tin of fruit en route and missing my footing, so that I rolled the last fifteen feet and ended up winded in the nullah bottom.

It seemed to run fairly straight, and as long as it did I would be moving parallel with the rest of the platoon, now hidden from sight by the steep nullah side. So I shouldered the fruit tin again and set off along the nullah, with that awkward burden digging into my shoulder. It had been part of the big pack of compo rations which was the section’s food for the day and which had been divided among us at daybreak, to be eaten that night when we dug in. I had suggested opening it when we tiffined on the march, but Grandarse and Forster had said no, it would make a grand pudding at supper. So I’d cursed those Epicureans through the long hot afternoon, wondering if P. C. Wren had ever carried a gallon of fruit in the Foreign Legion, and muttering “Boots, boots, boots, boots”, to myself – not that it had been much of a march; ten or twelve miles, maybe, not enough to be foot-sore. But the tin was getting heavier by the minute as I trudged up the nullah, and I was going to have a hell of a job climbing the bank with it, as I would have to do in a minute, for the nullah was starting to tend left, carrying me away from the section’s line of march.

I stopped for a swig of chlorinated water from the canvas chaggle slung on my right shoulder, and took stock. There wasn’t a breath of air in the nullah – and not a sound, either. I scanned the twenty-foot red banks, looking for a place to scramble up. There wasn’t one; I would have to carry on, hoping to find one soon – either that or retrace my steps to the spot where I’d climbed down, which would leave me a long way behind the section, with night not far off. I couldn’t see the sun, but it had been dipping to the horizon when last seen, and I’d no wish to be traipsing about in the dark, getting shot by one side or the other. I heaved the tin to a less painful position, and started to walk quickly up the nullah – and it was just then that I saw the bunkers.

Usually a bunker is a large hole in the ground, roofed with timber or bamboo and covered with sandbags or hard-packed earth, with firing slits at ground level. These were different: three dark doorways about ten yards apart, cut in the side of the nullah, with manmade caves within. Jap bunkers, without a doubt … empty? Or not?

They were on the right side of the nullah, and on the plain above and beyond, the rest of the section would be moving forward – they might be a quarter of a mile away by now, or still level with where I stood; I couldn’t tell. Ideally, I should have climbed out and alerted them, but the banks were sheer. If I shouted, and brought them down into the nullah, and the bunkers were old and long abandoned, a lot of thanks I’d get – and if there were Japs in the bunkers, and I shouted … quite. Or I could pass quickly by on the other side, leaving them unexamined, and find some spot ahead to climb up and rejoin the lads … No, you can’t do that – but you’re a very keen young soldier if you don’t think about it.

I’ve never felt lonelier. Suddenly it was cold in the nullah, and the sun had sunk so low that there wasn’t a shadow. Five minutes earlier I had been sweating hot; now I was trickling ice. I stood hesitant, looking at those three long black slits in the bank, wondering what to do …

It was then I smelt Jap, rank and nasty. The question was, did it come from Jap in situ, or had he just left his stink behind him? Was he lurking within, wondering who was outside throwing tins of fruit about, or was he long gone to the south’ard? If he was present, was he as scared as I was? No, he couldn’t be.

The lunatic thought crossed my mind that the best way of finding out was to heave one of my two grenades into the nearest doorway and hit the deck, finger on trigger, waiting to see what emerged. And bloody clever I’d look when the section came running to the scene and found me bombing empty bunkers – I was a very young soldier then, you understand, and sensitive; I had no wish to be looked at askance by veterans of Oyster Box and K.P.* (Three months later I’d have heaved in both grenades and the tin of fruit, and anything else handy; better to be laughed at than dead – and I wouldn’t have been laughed at.)

Anyway, hesitation was pointless. I couldn’t leave the bunkers uninvestigated; I couldn’t tell young Gale, our platoon commander, that I’d been too terrified; I couldn’t leave them unreported. It was that simple; anyway, they looked empty.

I lowered the fruit tin carefully to the ground, pushed the safety catch forward on my rifle, made sure my kukri was loose in its sheath, touched the hilt of the dirk in my small pack for luck, and moved delicately towards the nearest entrance, hugging the nullah side. I waited, listening; not a sound, just that hellish smell. I edged closer, and saw where most of it was coming from.

Just inside the doorway, where an unwary foot would tread on it, was a punji, which is a sharpened stake set in the ground point upwards, that point usually being smeared with something nice and rotten, guaranteed to purify the victim’s bloodstream. Some punjis are elaborate cantilevered affairs set to swing out of a darkened bunker and impale you; I had even heard of a crossbow variety, triggered by touching a taut cord. This was a conventional one, decorated with excrement by the look of it. But how old was it? (The things one does for a living: trying to determine the age of Jap crap, for eighteen rupees a week.)

Old or new, it didn’t suggest anyone in residence. I took a huge breath and slipped inside, dropping to one knee – and there wasn’t a thing to be seen but dim earth walls and a couple of Jap mess-tins, still half full of rice. I crouched there, wet with fear and relief, keeping my trembling finger well away from the trigger. I’d willingly have stayed there permanently, recovering, but it would be dark soon, so, carefully avoiding the punji (modern war is a pretty Stone Age business, when you think about it), I stepped outside again.

The second bunker looked much more promising. The earth on one side of the doorway had fallen in, and the dead fire in its entrance was days old. There seemed to be rubbish piled within, and the whole thing had an ancient, neglected look, so I passed it by and cautiously approached Number 3. Its doorway was so wide that I could see in to the back of the little cavern. I tossed a stone in, listening, and then nipped inside – empty, bare walls, and nothing but a crumpled Kooa* packet in one corner.

I came out of that bunker feeling pretty heroic, and was retrieving my fruit tin when it occurred to me that I ought to go into the second one, too, just to make a job of it. And I was moving towards it when I heard a faint, distant whistle from over the top of the bank – little Nixon, for certain, wondering where his wandering boy had got to. I ran up the nullah, and found a crack in its side only about twenty yards farther on. I scrambled up, heaving the tin ahead of me, clawing my way over the lip to find Nick standing about ten yards off, and Sergeant Hutton hastening towards me with blood in his eye.

“Where the hell ’ave you been?” he blared. “Wanderin’ aboot like a bloody lost soul, what d’ye think yer on?”

“There were bunkers,” I began, but before I could get out another word Nick had shouted “Doon, Jock!” and whipped up his rifle.

How I managed it I have no idea, but I know my feet left the ground and I hit the deck facing back the way I had come. Whatever Nick had seen was in that direction, and I wanted to get a good look at it – I suppose it was instinct and training combined, for I was scrabbling my rifle forward as I fell and turned together. And I can see him now, and he doesn’t improve with age.

Five yards away, not far from where the bunkers must have been, a Jap was looking towards us. Half his naked torso was visible over the lip of the bank – how the hell he had climbed up there, God knows – and he was in the act of raising a large dark object, about a foot across, holding it above his head. I had a glimpse of a contorted yellow face before Nick’s rifle cracked behind me, three quick shots, and I’d got off one of my own when there was a deafening explosion and I was blinded by an enormous flash as the edge of the nullah dissolved in a cloud of dust and smoke. I rolled away, deafened, and then debris came raining down – earth and stones and bits of Jap – and when I could see again there was a great yawning bite out of the lip of the nullah, and the smoke and dust was clearing above it.

“Git doon!” snapped Hutton, as I started to rise. Suddenly, as if by magic, the section were there behind me, on the deck or kneeling, every rifle covering the lip, and Hutton walked forward and looked into the nullah.

“Fook me,” he said. “Land mine. Fook me. Y’awreet, Jock?”

I said I was.

“Wheer th’ell did’e coom frae? The booger!”

I told him, no doubt incoherently, about the bunkers: that I’d checked two and been on the way to the third when Nick had whistled. “It looked empty,” I said.

“Well, it bloody well wasn’t, was it?” he shouted, and I realised he was not only angry, but shaken. “Duke, giddoon theer an’ ’ev a dekko! Rest o’ you, git back in extended line – move!”

Nick was recharging his magazine. I realised that I was trembling. “Land mine?” I said. “Did you hit it?”

“Nivver,” said he. “Ah hit him, though. Naw, he would have it wired. Suicide squad, waitin’ to blaw oop anyone that cam’ near ’im.” He grinned at me. “Might ha’ bin thee, Jock boy. Ye shoulda give us a shout, man.”

I explained why I hadn’t, and he shook his head. “Nivver ga in on yer own, son. That’s ’ow ye finish up dyin’ Tojo’s way. Ye wanna die yer own fookin’ way.”

“Git fell in, you two!” It was Hutton again. “Standin’ aboot natterin’ wid yer thumbs in yer bums an’ yer minds in neutral! Awreet, Duke? Ad-vance! Coom on, it’ll be bloody dark in a minute!”

That evening, when we had dug in and were sitting round the fire eating our Maconochie’s,* Hutton, who had been talking apart with the Duke, called me over. He was jotting in his notebook.

“Three boonkers, reet?” he said. “What was in the two ye looked in?”

“Nothing, sarn’t. Well, there was a punji in one, and a couple of Jap mess tins. Nothing at all in t’other.”

“Nowt at a’?”

“No … well, nothing but a Kooa packet over in a corner. Empty.”

He didn’t glance up from his notes, but his glance flicked sideways for a second, and out of the tail of my eye I caught the Duke’s almost imperceptible nod. Hutton finished writing, and when he looked up I’ll swear there was relief in the battered face. It took me a moment to understand why.

“Awreet, Jock.” Then suddenly he was angry again. “Nivver – nivver go in a boonker by yersel!” He stabbed me in the chest. “Mallum?* Git yer mucker to cover you, or git me! Ye’re not fookin’ Gary Cooper!” Irrelevantly, it seemed to me, he added: “Fookin’ Scotsmen!” He feinted a jab at my chin. “Reet, son, fall oot.”

By this time the gastronomes round the fire were clamouring for their dessert. Grandarse produced a can of condensed milk which he punctured with a pig-sticker bayonet, while Corporal Little set to work on my gallon tin with his jack-knife.

Grandarse, mess-tin in hand, smacked his lips. “By Christ, eh! Peaches an’ Nessles, w’at? Aye, that’ll joost aboot do!”

“Might be pears,” suggested the Duke.

“Or pineapple,” I said.

“Ah don’t give a fook w’at it is,” said Grandarse, Penrith’s answer to Lucullus. “Eh, tho’, mebbe it’s fruit salad!”

It wasn’t. It was carrots, in brine. Inevitably, since I’d been carrying the tin, they blamed me.

* native houses, large huts

* Box = a defensible position, containing anything from thousands of men to platoon boxes of 30 men or fewer

† jungle hills

* bus = finished

† gullies, dry watercourses

* Kennedy Peak

* A brand of Chinese cigarettes, presumably looted by the Japanese. We smoked captured supplies of them; they weren’t bad.

* tinned stewed steak, and very good

* understand?

Chapter 2

Back in Blighty, or even out of the line, a soldier’s first loyalty was to his regiment, and even the most cynical reluctant conscript was conscious of belonging to something special. If he came from the regimental area, the tie was all the stronger; he could call himself a Devon, an Argyll, a Gloucester, or a Middlesex, and take some pride in belonging to the Bloody Eleventh, the Thin Red Line, the Back-to-Backs, or the Diehards, as those regiments were nicknamed; he would probably know how they got them. And regimental pride would stay with him, as I’m sure it does still, even after amalgamation has played havoc with the old territorial system.

On active service, in my experience, the loyalty, or perhaps I should call it dependence, narrowed down to the infantry section of ten. Each battalion normally had four rifle companies (apart from headquarter and perhaps support companies for transport and 3-inch mortars); each company was split into three platoons, each commanded by a lieutenant and sergeant; and each platoon into three sections. In parade-ground theory, a section consisted of ten men (corporal, lance-corporal, Bren gunner, and seven riflemen, one of whom was the Bren gunner’s “number two”), but in practice the strength was more likely to be about eight; six was the operational minimum.* But whatever its strength, the section was the essential unit, operating as a team; of course on platoon operations it acted in concert with the two other sections; and half-company, company, and battalion actions were common also; but whatever the size of the action it was the section that mattered to the private soldier. It was his military family; those seven or eight other men were his constant companions, waking, sleeping, standing guard, eating, digging, patrolling, marching, and fighting, and he got to know them better, perhaps, than anyone in his whole life except his wife, parents, and children. He counted on them, and they on him.

Within the section he would have his own immediate comrade, his “mucker”, known in some units as oppos or mates. Our own battalion was predominantly Cumbrian, and the men from the west coast called each other “marrow”,† pronounced marra. I had three muckers in the course of the campaign, as a result of death and promotion. There was nothing official about the mucker arrangement, it just happened of necessity and mutual consent, and is certainly as old as war itself.

My first mucker was the section leader, Corporal Little – no doubt because at nineteen I was the youngest and least experienced man in the section. He was a Cumbrian by birth and race, which is to say he was the descendant of one of the hardest breeds of men in Britain, with warfare (if not soldiering) bred into him from the distant past. Like their enemies on the Scottish side of the frontier, the Cumbrians of old lived by raid, cattle theft, extortion, and murder; in war they were England’s vanguard, and in peace her most unruly and bloody nuisance. They hadn’t changed much in four centuries, either; the expertise in irregular warfare, to say nothing of the old reiver spirit of “nothing too hot or too heavy”, was strong in the battalion; their names (and nicknames) are to be found in the bills of warden courts four centuries ago, opposite charges of slaughter, spoil, ambush, and arson, and if you could have seen Nine Section, honestly, you wouldn’t have been a bit surprised. To all of which must be added the virtues of endurance, courage, and deep tribal loyalty; they were, as the chronicler said of their forefathers, “a martial kind of men”.

Little, known inevitably as “Tich” (just as I, the only Scot, was “Jock”), was typical – lean, dark, wiry, speaking seldom and then usually in the harsh derisive fashion of the Border. An outsider would have found him wary and decidedly bleak, and marked him as a dangerous customer, which he was; he was also remarkably kind and, when least expected, as gentle as a nurse.

Nixon was small, sprightly, and wicked, with a drooping gunfighter moustache and his own line of cheerful pessimism. His parrot-cry of “You’ll all get killed” was rendered in the wail of a mueddin at prayer, and one thing no one doubted: whoever got killed, it wouldn’t be Nick. That is not a criticism: no one took a greater share of rough work and risk; it was just that he had survivor written all over him. There are such men; they seem to have an Achilles-immunity. In Nick’s case it probably came of long and very active service, for he had been continuously at war for six years; he was cool and wise and never ruffled.

Grandarse, as his name implies, was on Falstaffian lines; I had slept on the lower bunk of a double-decked cot at Ranchi with his ponderous bulk creaking the lashings just overhead, and prayed nightly that they didn’t break. He was red and hearty and given to rich oaths; as a wrestler – and the wrestlers of Cumberland have no peers anywhere – he could hold his own against Sergeant Bellas of Gilsland, who had won Grasmere before the war.* In civilian life Grandarse was a forester, and had spent his spare time rescuing climbers in the Lake mountains, “an’ nivver got a bloody penny for it, the boogers!”

Forster was a fly man who never had a cigarette to his name. “W’ee’s smeukin’?”,* in an aggressive wheedle, was his watch-word, generally responded to with “Iveryone but thee”. He was crafty, foul-mouthed, ignorant, and dishonest; sufficient to say that in a battalion of expert scroungers, Forster was gifted beyond the ordinary; there are Burmese villages which must be wondering still where their pigs and chickens went to in ’45.

Steele was a Carlisle boy, tough and combative and noisy, but something of a mate of mine, even if he did use the word “Scotch” to me with occasional undue emphasis; once he added “bastard” to it (there was no race relations legislation in those happy days), and I responded with a fist; we battered each other furiously until Corporal Little, who was half our size, flew at us with a savagery that took us aback; he knocked me down and half-strangled Steele before dragging us face to face. “Noo shek ’ands! Shek ’ands! By Christ, ye will! Barmy boogers, ye’ll ’ev enoof fightin’ wid Jap, nivver mind each other! Ga on – shek ’ands!” Confronted by that raging lightweight, we shook hands, with a fairly ill grace, which was not lost on him. Then, being a skilled man manager, he put us on guard, together.

Stanley was large and fair and quiet, and had the unusual ability of sleeping on his feet, which was a genuine torment to him when he had to stand stag.* He had been a cinema projectionist, and for sheer cold courage I never saw his like, as I shall tell later. He might have had a decoration, but his heroism manifested itself in a lonely place, by night, and no one in authority ever knew about it.

Wedge was a Midlander, and said “Ace, king, quine,” among other vocal peculiarities, like “waiter” for “water”. Being used to carry saggars† in the Potteries, he would bear his big pack and other impedimenta on his head when necessary, leaving his hands free for other burdens. When we were cut off in Meiktila he developed an obsession about the 5th Division, who were to be the “hammer” to our “anvil”. “Wheer’s 5th Div, then?” was his stock question at the section O-group (the little conference which took place each evening, when the corporal passed on news and orders from the platoon commander). No one could tell him, and he would lapse into gloomy silence. He was deeply religious, and eager for education because, he told me, “Ah want to improve meself. Ah want a trade efter t’war, not carryin’ bloody saggars. A reet trade, Jock – Ah dunno what, though; Ah’ll ’ave to see.” Once, I remember, when we were on stag together, he told me how much he had enjoyed the pirate movie, The Black Swan, and I told him something of Morgan’s buccaneers and their exploits; from that moment he seemed to regard me as a latter-day Macaulay and pestered me for historical information, and since I am God’s own history bore, he got plenty, and his gratitude was touching. I doubt if it helped him to get a trade, but you never know.

The Duke, whose surname I have forgotten, if I ever knew it, was so called from his refined public school accent. He was tall and lethargic and swarthy as a gypsy, with a slow smile and a manner which grew more supercilious in proportion to the rank of whomever he was addressing; he was almost humble to Corporal Little, but I have heard him talk – with studied courtesy, mind you – to a brigadier as though the man were the veriest trash. He got away with it, too. The rumour ran that he was related to the royal family, but informed opinion was against this: Grandarse had seen him in the shower at Ranchi and had detected no sign of a birthmark.

Parker I have left to the last because he was easily the most interesting, a dapper, barrel-chested Cockney who was that rare bird, a professional soldier of fortune. He was in his forties, and had been in one uniform or another since boyhood, having just got into the tail of the First World War before serving as a mercenary in China in the ’twenties, in what capacity I never discovered, and thereafter in South America, the Spanish Civil War (from a pungent comment on the International Brigade I deduced that he had been with the Nationalists), and China again in the late ’thirties. He re-enlisted in 1939, came out at Dunkirk, and had been with Eighth Army before being posted east. He was a brisk and leathery old soldier, as brash and opinionated as only a Londoner can be, but only rarely did you see the unusual man behind the Cockney banter.

I first noticed him on the dusty long haul by troop-train across India, when the rest of us slept on the floor or the cramped wooden seats, while Parker improvised himself a hammock with his groundsheet and lengths of signal cable. But I didn’t speak to him until the end of a marathon game of nine-card brag in which I had amassed the astonishing sum of 800 rupees (about £60, which was money then). I’m no card-player, let alone a gambler, but the priles* kept coming for once, and I was just wondering how to quit in the face of the chagrined opposition, which included various blue chins and hairy chests of Australian, American, and mixed origin, when Parker, who had been watching but not playing, leaned over, picked up my winnings, and stuck them inside his shirt.