by Brian Aldiss
During the Mandalay campaign, my job was to work that prehistoric line instrument, the Fullerphone. About the size of a shoe-box, and black, the Fullerphone scarcely resembled a weapon with which to defeat the ferocious Jap Army. It held none of the glamour of a wireless set. Being solely a line instrument, it had to be connected with forward units or rear units – brigade or Division HQ – which entailed, in a mobile war, the perpetual laying of cable.
The Fullerphone gave off a misanthropic buzz. But it did send and receive Morse. We worked at up to eighty letters a minute. We held the various units of the advance together. We kept everyone in touch. We were good.
When coming off the all-night shift, after perhaps twelve hours of intensive work by dim lights, we did not expect comfort. Sometimes, we had an hour in which to pack up everything, take down the signal office, and start another move. At the best of times, we could get breakfast and then sleep.
The cooks were compelled to wait for us until we came off duty. This did not please them, since sometimes, inevitably, we were late. The food – probably a fried egg and a soya link and a mug of tea – would be cooling or cold. Washing our mess tins was a particularly dismaying business. Two dixies filled with what had been hot water stood at the entrance to the mess area (we sat on the ground or on logs to eat); one dixie was for washing mess tins and ‘eating irons’, the other for a post-wash rinse. By the time we got to them, the liquid in the dixies resembled a particularly rich vomit. Water was scarce. We had to use what was there. Since we had nothing on which to dry tins and cutlery, we used our mosquito nets; by the end of the campaign, the nets had developed a ripe aroma.
Sleep after a busy night was not always easy. Our bivouacs were pitched over slit trenches, and so stood out away from shade, since no one attempts to dig slit trenches, an unrewarding occupation at the best of times, near the roots of trees. Temperatures under the canvas rose as rapidly as the sun. Inside our fragrant mosquito nets, necessary to keep off flies, the heat was suffocating. We fricasséed as we slept.
And there was a local defiler of sleep. Central Burma is the habitat of the Morse Code bird. The Morse Code bird sits in the leaves of the palm tree outside signalmen’s tents and utters random bursts of Morse Code. Dit dit-dit-dit dit-dah-dit-dit dit-dah dah dit … Endlessly, meaninglessly, while the weary brain of the operator who has been passing Morse all night perforce tries to transcribe the bird’s nonsense. Full grown men have been known to run naked, screaming, from their trenches, trying to drive the offender away. No raven of Edgar Allan Poe’s was ever more ill-omened than the Morse Code bird.
Few animals were to be seen; the birds were mainly those of the kind that earned their living by eating the dead. We passed through a copse outside Myingyang where Japanese troops lay scattered in death. Turkey-like vultures with creamy feathers ran among them, guts so swollen with food that they could scarcely hop into the lowest branches of the trees to escape us. The Japanese, British and Indians had between them made of Burma a terrible waste; ordinary life was suspended while the evil dream of war went by, first in a tide one way, then in a tide the other.
Our portion of tide moved forward about once a week. At one period, we pitched camp near Yeu. The four or five bivouacs of ‘S’ Relief were clustered near two large palms tethered to the ground by cordons of vines and creepers. Before us was open land, looking towards a canal; behind was a thicket, very noisy at night with the sound of things scuttling through the dead undergrowth. We were nervous in that camp, not knowing exactly where the enemy was. As the sun was setting on our first evening there, we heard noises in the topknots of the palms. Looking up, we saw black snakes dangling far above us. We came to realize that the snakes were the tails of some kind of big cat. The Cockneys among us became particularly nervous; war was one thing, tangling with wild life quite another.
The night was moonlit, the heartbreaking moonlight of a still Burma night, when the Moon hangs like a sacred gong in the next field but one, ancient with wisdom, gold with desire. I lay awake under my mosquito net, my rifle by my side. After a while, crashing noises sounded from the nearest tree. A shadow fell outside the bivouac. One of the cats was standing there.
Because we had camped so near to the tree for purposes of concealment, and because we had arrived in the dark the previous night, we had not dug slit trenches as usual. Our slender cover was propped up on poles in order to make it easier to enter and leave the tent. The big cat strolled in. I lay there, resting on one elbow, afraid to move. The cat came closer. It looked in at me. Only the net separated our faces. Neither of us spoke. Then it walked out the rear of the tent and was gone.
What communication could I have had with it?
That camp remains in memory my favourite. It was one of the few sites where there were Burmese nearby. They had not fled at our approach. They had harvested the crop on the field by whose perimeter we stayed and were busy threshing grain while we were there. We watched the operation with interest, talked to them, called to the women, and offered them cigarettes. Beyond the field of stubble was a grain field, the crop very much broken down, and beyond that lay a canal, with low-growing blossom trees on its banks and nine inches of water flowing in it. The whole neighbourhood was attractive, with small white pagodas here and there like silver pepper-pots set randomly on a lawn.
But it was water that was the attraction. Water we had not seen for six weeks at that time. Sweat and dust alone had kept our bodies clean. It was possible to lie in the canal and be almost totally submerged in water. All the relief went for a bathe that first day. Thereafter, they considered that nine inches of water was too tame, and so I went alone, accompanied only by Sid Feather’s rhesus monkey, Minnie. Minnie ran beside me on her long lead like a dog. In the water, she would enjoy a swim and then come and perch on my shoulder to dry herself. I lay there prone, watching a busy kingfisher which fished in the water from one of the low trees. The sun burned overhead, war was miles away. I communed with nature.
The trouble with communing with nature is that she does not commune back. One day, when returning through the flattened cereal crop from the canal, I almost stepped on a great snake, straw coloured, basking in the sun. It reared up to strike. Minnie immediately scaled the nearest tree, which happened to be me, and stood on the top of my head, screaming furiously and throwing handfuls of my hair at the snake.
Perhaps Minnie saved the day. The snake did not strike. It suddenly made off, shaking out its long coils. I watched it thrash its way through the burnished stalks. It was six or more feet long. It made its way rapidly across the field. Shaken, I walked back to camp. Minnie remained clinging to my ears until we were in safer surroundings.
The fear of snakes always haunted us. Army training in India taught us that the first thing we did on waking was lean out of bed and tip our boots upside down, in order to eject any nasties which might have lodged there during the night. It was a habit which took years to break, even in relatively scorpion-free England.
Although I never became fond of the army, I found a developing passion for the natural world, that great green system which encompassed us. It could bring my heart up from my boots. Burma is a varied country, by no means all jungle as some imagine. Its variety was beautiful and the Burmese appeared to have lived in harmony with its variety, embellishing it with their pagodas, and not overwhelming it – as India was overwhelmed – with humankind. But the Burmese had by and large vanished, taking cover like rabbits under the wing of war. We entered their buildings, moodily looking for souvenirs and poking about, rifles in hand, in the manner of invading soldiery. Some of the wooden houses were enchanting. I remember one in particular, with a verandah contained behind an ornamental rail. Of the four stilts on which it stood, only three remained. Inside, all was as it had been. Although chairs remained in place, everything listed to starboard, like a sinking ship.
In this surreal landscape, the British were surreal objects. The ethos of the Forgotten Army was to look as wild as possi
ble. We wore trousers with puttees and boots, to keep out insects, and bush hats. Our torsoes were mahogany brown, our backsides alabaster white. It was the custom to tie bits of the coloured signal scarves dropped with our airborne rations round our hats to serve as puggarees, and to grow our hair long. ‘In the depths of the Burmese jungle lived a strange white race …’ For me, this costume remained a kind of dressing up; for the older members of the army, it had become second nature. Many of them described themselves as puggle. It was the sun, the heat, the awful food, they’d tell you.
The maddest in ‘S’ Relief was Steve Dutt. It was rumoured that his father was a general; Steve was just a private and an orderly. A sweet-natured man, he was never heard to raise his voice in conversation. He would sit about, listening to our talk, smiling, stroking his moustache. His recreation was to drill himself as if he were a platoon. On these occasions, he put on a sergeant-major’s voice.
‘Steve Dutt, Steve Dutt, harten-shun. As you were. Wait for it. Steve Dutt, harten-SHUN. Saloope arms. By the right, quick – wait for the order, Dutt. Quick – MARCH. Ep, ep, ep, right, ep. Let’s see you swing that arm. Plenty of bullshit. Keep in line.
‘Steve Dutt, Ri-ight TURN. Chin up. Look to your front, man. Harbout TURN. Ep, ep, ep, right, ep.’
And so on. True, we all on occasions drilled ourselves, but it was Steve Dutt who drilled himself continually, for a half-hour at a time, up and down in whatever clear ground there was. We would hear him at night, outside the bivouacs. No one thought anything of it.
‘By the right, number. One, two, three, four, five – six. As you were. Wake up, Dutt, you know what comes after five, don’t you? Dutt, by the right, number. One, two, three, four, five, SIX, seven, eight, nine, ten. Pick up your dressing. Squad, diss – I want to see you smartly away. Diss-MISS.’
Then he would come in. ‘Sergeant put me through it today,’ he’d say cheerfully, lighting up a cigarette.
A few of us in ‘S’ Relief had small lanterns. We would sit and chat in the entrance of someone’s bivvy after dark. We spoke our own lingo of English and fractured Urdu. The conversation would often turn to London. There were frequent arguments about which number bus ran through Cockfosters, or where it went after it left the High Street.
My mates were homesick, and would talk about ‘our mum’ doing this or that, or ‘my old woman’ doing this or that, or how they went down to see the Spurs play every Saturday. Their small home worlds were continually resurrected. Homesickness was something I never felt. The present was too vivid.
Another favourite topic was how forgotten we were in this unearthly part of the world, and how we never featured in the news. It was the rule to find nothing good about overseas. To declare that one felt passionately about Burma would have been to invite ostracism, or else the scornful, ‘Wait till you’ve got a bit of service in.’
The man I was most fond of in ‘S’ Relief, after Bert Lyons, was Ron Grade. Ron was a slow-spoken farmer from Pinner way. One of his eyes was beyond his control and would wander about in the course of conversation. Ron was the only man with a camera; perhaps it was a sign of the interest he took in the world for which the others cared little.
Ron never ran out of film. He seemed to photograph everything, dead Japs, distant landscapes, ‘S’ Relief in transit. It must have been his roving eye. The few snaps I have of those times come from Ron’s camera. He photographed us when at last we reached the Mu river. So delighted was ‘S’ Relief by the charm of running water that Sid Feather drove us to bathe every time we were off duty.
Since the spirit of Romanticism is connected with ruin and destruction, the Mu site must be one of the most romantic places to choose for a swim. Two railway bridges had once crossed the river at this point, a low wooden bridge and a grander one, metal on sturdy brick piers. Both bridges had been blown up by the British in their retreat from Mandalay. Both had been blown up with engines and rolling stock on them, so that the invading Jap should have no use of them.
The wooden bridge had disappeared – swept downstream or eaten by ants. What remained to mark the spot was a small tank engine, only half-submerged by the river in its shrunken dry season state.
The greater bridge had left greater remains. Two stout double piers had not fallen in the doubtless hasty explosions, so that between it and the eastern, Mandalay-bound shore, a totally unworkable span of line had stayed in place, slightly buckled and laden with two locomotives and a selection of carriages and trucks which straggled back to the land. Vegetation was already devouring the rearmost trucks.
The next span, the one which, in the wet season, would cover the mid-point of the Mu, had fallen down. Left balanced on its pier were a locomotive and tender. The tender stood with its tail in the air on top of the pier; the engine, to which it remained attached, hung down, buffers clear of the water by some feet. There it dangled, in that precarious position, for three years of war. The metals were too hot to touch – that we knew from the sunken tank engine, on which we could climb only after splashing it with cooling water.
We went every day to the surviving narrow, green, fast-running channel of the Mu, rushing deeply entrenched in its bed of sand; and every day the engineering ruin presided over our relaxation.
In her book, The Pleasure of Ruins, Rose Macaulay remarks, ‘The ascendancy over men’s minds of the ruins of the stupendous past, the past of history, legend and myth, at once factual and fantastic, stretching back and back into ages that can but be surmised, is half-mystical in basis. The intoxication, at once so heady and so devout, is not the romantic melancholy engendered by broken towers and mouldered stones; it is the soaring of the imagination into the high empyrean where huge episodes are tangled with myths and dreams; it is the stunning impact of world history on its amazed heirs.’
Our three-year-old ruin was also part of world history; it had already become a symbol of the end of a myth, the myth of white supremacy. We did not know it then, but never again would the British ride from Mandalay to Dimapur in their first class carriages, relegating the Wog to the third, as if the land belonged to them. The Forgotten Army might – indeed, would – drive the Jap from Burma; but it was beyond even our powers to restore the country to the British crown. The tide of history had turned and, whatever his later victories, the white man had been defeated – in many cases with remarkable ease, in Hong Kong, the N.E.I., Singapore, and Burma. The British, not the most pragmatic of races, recognized their defeat in victory, and left their former colonies and dependencies with comparative good grace, so that some measure of good will attached to their memory. Not so the Dutch and French. The latter, in particular, clinging to Indo-China – a struggle in which the Americans soon rashly involved themselves – would bring further chaos to the regions of S.E. Asia, with the battle of Dien Bien Phu breaking out not ten years after the time we bathed below the broken bridge over the Mu.
I still have a faded photograph of the bridge, with ‘S’ Relief naked below it. Ron took the photograph.
Ron was not just a keen photographer. He was a pleasant man to be with – one of those people who, by some inner quality, make us feel slightly better than we are.
Ron never showed irritation or swore like the rest of us. ‘S’ Relief benefited from his presence when the battle for the Chindwin was on.
The Japs held the east bank of the Chindwin, the British the west. The fighting continued for several nights and days. Our signal office kept moving, sometimes only half a mile at a time. The firing could clearly be heard. In that period, the section had to be split up, and the detachment I was on worked six nights out of nine, passing messages all the while. In the day we had guard duty. It was a time of maximum exhaustion, and the Morse Code birds were at their most punitive. The constant hammer of shellfire, like a maniac pounding his sleepless pillow, was rendered more unreal by the brilliant sunlight; recalling my uncle’s experiences of World War I, I had believed warfare was conducted to the accompaniment of rain, or at least the famous North
European drizzle.
During this crisis period, Ron and I were sent on detachment to run a radio link on our own. This was the only time we encountered live Japs; on other occasions, we had seen them, reassuringly, trotting along with the naked point of a bayonet at their backs, prisoners.
There was no ‘front’ in the accepted sense. For forward momentum to be sustained, the tanks had to drive onward as fast as possible, giving the enemy no chance to rest or recoup. Any odd contingents of Japs left behind, separated by freak of war from the main body, could be mopped up later. So there was no way of telling when Japs might not pop up and surrender or, more likely, attack. Ron and I were dumped under three large trees with empty expanses on one side and a chaung on the other. We had some rations and water and the wireless set, and were told that a truck would collect us ‘within twenty-four hours’. Till then, the set was to be continually manned and, for our own safety, we were not to show a light, except for the one on the 22 set.
The night was moonlit and still. We had dug ourselves a trench in the sandy soil and were crouching over the set together. Ron had the headphones on and was receiving when I became certain I heard a low voice from the direction of the chaung. I took up a firing position with my rifle, and nudged Ron. Coolly, he went on scribbling down the message with his right hand, while taking up his rifle in his left.
When the message finished, he signed off and took up position beside me, still wearing headphones. We were in moonlight, dappled by the filtering branches of the trees. I felt that this made us highly visible; in fact, it was probably a help in dimming out the tiny downward-directed light on the set. We crouched together, aiming into the dark.
Bushes grew round the banks of the chaung. Night birds scuttled in the dry undergrowth. We began to think our nerves were playing us up, and that the slight breeze accounted for the supposed voices. Certainly the bushes were swaying slightly. I stared fixedly at them – to become suddenly aware that three figures stood behind their uncertain shapes, head and shoulders showing.
