The Wind Cannot Read

by Richard Mason

  “Perhaps you’re also lucky to be out of it,” I said to the escort.

  “Saa . . . there will be plenty more of that.”

  “Do you like fighting?”

  “Like it or not like it . . . it’s a thing that can’t be helped.”

  We must have walked three miles before we reached the encampment, and it took as many hours. There were a dozen little huts of the kind that are thrown up in a few hours in the jungle, of bamboo with straw roofs. Some distance away there were trenches and sentries on duty, and a platoon or so of soldiers squatting on the ground eating rice. They all watched us curiously, and one shouted “Banzai!” and the others laughed. Then they went on eating, and we stood together in a group whilst one of the escort disappeared into a hut. I could hear them talking about us:

  “Do you think they’ll cut off the black one’s beard?”

  “Will they send them back to Japan?”

  “They ought to make them clear up the bomb damage in Mandalay or Rangoon.”

  “It’s a pity we don’t take women prisoners and then we should know what to do with them.”

  “They don’t look very frightful.”

  “They are probably ashamed of being taken prisoner.”

  After a time we were taken to one of the huts and put inside, with a guard at the entrance. There was no furniture, and we sat down on the ground, leaning against the bamboo sides. I looked at my watch and saw that it was half-past five. It seemed impossible to realise that the same morning we had got up at Dimapur and motored through Kohima with our own troops all round us, and that six hours ago we had been drinking tea at the rest-camp; and that then Manning had been alive, not cherishing life and yet somehow immensely alive. Now he was dead, but cleanly dead, thank God, and dead as I think he would have wished, extinguished in the midst of that gesture: “What’s all the fuss about? What does it matter, anyway?” I rather liked to think that he made the gesture, not at us at all, but at the sniper whom he knew was going to kill him. Not that I think honestly, deep in his heart, he wanted to die—I believe he was no less afraid than the rest of us. But that elevated him in my mind; and though I had only come with him in the train and up the Brahmaputra, I thought that I had lost a friend. He was a good person. He had sold water-softeners from door to door, and made no success of his Rangoon cinema; and he thought his own life was a failure. But he was good; and he was dead.

  And I had hardly a scratch, only a dull bruise on my forehead where the rifle butt had hit me. My watch was still going from yesterday’s winding in Dimapur, and my clothes were untorn, the clothes I had bought with Sabby in the Army and Navy Stores in Bombay when the war had seemed infinitely remote—something I had already been through, not something I was going to go through again. I still had the tin of cigarettes in my pocket that my parents had sent out from England, and my wallet.

  I remembered suddenly—in my wallet there was a photograph of Sabby. I had always intended to destroy it if I went near the front line; but I had thought I was safe enough in taking it to Imphal and I had forgotten it until now in the excitement of events. It was a stroke of good luck that so far we had been searched for nothing but weapons.

  I took out my wallet and found the picture. It was taken in the Himalayas and there was Jennifer’s hand in it, too, and half Margaret’s face. And Sabby was full of the wonderful air, and you could see her eyes brimming with happiness. I would like to have kissed it, a thing I have never done before, kiss a photo­graph; but I was afraid of the guard glancing down from the doorway, and I kept it hidden beneath my knees, holding it for a moment before I tore it into tiny pieces. I felt treacherous, as though tearing up the happiness. But to have kept it would have been more treacherous, and in any case the happiness was gone. I pushed the pieces into the ground between the bamboos.

  (2)

  The Major was a broken man. He was almost twice my age, and he had been through the last war and been brave in it: his medal ribbons ran into two rows over his pocket. Before this war, the World War II, he had been in the railway offices in Leeds and on the point of retiring. He had joined up again as a transport Officer, and made his way via the railway stations in Cairo, Bombay and Delhi to Dimapur. He had been two years in India, and in another two years he would have gone home; and he wanted to go home because he hated India. He hated everywhere but Yorkshire, and in this hut in the jungle, cramped on the floor and guarded by a Japanese First Class Private, he looked as though he was finished. He took all the responsibility upon himself, and despite my reassurances was filled with remorse. He insisted that had he not suggested we came in his car, we should have been in the convoy that must still be near Kohima. Furthermore, Manning would still have been alive. It was wrong of him, above all, to have let Manning get out to remove the tree.

  He expected to be shot. They would spare me, he said, because I spoke Japanese and would be of use to them; but his own hours were numbered. They wouldn’t bother to take him right back to the rear, and waste their food supplies on him in the jungle. He showed me a photograph of his wife and two children, a dreadful posed study by a Boar Lane photographer, and made me promise to visit them after the war. I was to tell them that he had no fear of death and that his only concern had been for them. And­ whatever I thought of him for his behaviour in the car—I was to say to his son : “Your father was a fine man.” His son believed in him and must never be disillusioned. I told him there was no need for me to promise to do these things; we would both live through this, and perhaps even escape. But he insisted. I promised, and he began to weep. The Sikh hung his head respectfully.

  Some rice was brought us. It was only a small quantity, but it was given graciously by a private who was delighted with this duty. He bowed in the doorway with the bowl in his hands, and when I thanked him he said:

  “It is scarcely sufficient, but . . .”

  “Please don’t mention it,” I said.

  He wanted to stay and talk. He asked one or two questions quickly. Were we very miserable? Surely as I spoke Japanese I knew Kyushu where he lived? Did our badges mean we were very high-ranking officers? Then because he was afraid this conversation would receive official disapproval, he bowed several more times, and said, “Indeed, thank you, thank you,” and left.

  We were still chewing the rice when an N.C.O. appeared in the hut doorway. He said savagely in bad English:

  “You prisoners. Move outside quickly.”

  We trooped out, leaving some rice in the bowl. There was another escort waiting at attention with rifles and bayonets. We fell in with them and marched a hundred yards to a point in front of the huts, beneath the jungle trees. The N.C.O. was shouting at us, presumably telling us to march smartly, but whether his orders were in English or Japanese I could not tell. When we halted the escort turned about and we did likewise. We remained at attention, waiting. The N.C.O. went into one of the huts, and ten minutes later he came out behind an officer.

  I could see by the badges on his collar that this officer was a Lieutenant. He was a small man, not more than four foot six, but brisk and swaggering. His face was hard and bony, and his eyes were like bright black beads. At his side there was a sword. It was too big for him, almost trailing on the ground, so that it made him look like a child strutting about with a grown-up’s weapon.

  He strode up to us and glared at each of us in turn. His eyes were burning. He held his hands behind his back, and kept his shoulders erect to lose nothing of his height. Then he said, using the tersest form of the verb:

  “Which of you speaks Japanese?”

  “I have a slight knowledge of it,” I said.

  “You have been to Japan?”

  “No.”

  “Where did you learn it?”

  “From friends.”

  “You can understand me?”

  “If you don’t speak too fast.”

  “Very well. I
wish you to listen to my words, and afterwards to convey their meaning to the other two men.”

  He began to swagger up and down in front of us. In any other circumstances it would have been tremendously comic to have seen this: his chest thrown out and his sword dangling behind, and his speech as pompous as his walk. I did not understand it all, but I got the gist of it, and it was to the effect that we were now the captives of Dai-Nippon, whose present Emperor, the Son of Heaven, was the direct descendant of the Ancestral Divinity Amaterasu Omikami; and then there was a lot more history like a newspaper article on Japan, and it was all to tell us that to be a captive of a Power with such a heritage was a better fate for ourselves than to be free men of an inferior nation. It also seemed that by the Emperor’s will we were to receive clemency, though we were not to interpret this as meaning that we were to be precluded from getting our deserts. Henceforward our allegiance was only to the Emperor, in the direction of whose Palace—and this he indicated with a rigid finger—we would sometimes be called upon to bow. Furthermore, when in a short time we were asked a few simple questions it devolved upon us to answer them, any recalcitrance on our part being an insult to the said Emperor, and therefore punishable by any number of ingenious means. “Do you understand all that,” he said.

  “I understand your words,” I said.

  “Very well. You will all bow in the direction of the Imperial Palace.”

  I said to the other two in English:

  “You had better bow at that tree; it will save a lot of trouble.”

  We inclined our bodies. People have before now been put to death for refusing to do no more than that, and I admire them for having the courage of their unwavering principles. But I knew I was not that kind, and I made myself think of this hypocrisy as a joke, and I thought what a laugh Peter would get out of this bizarre scene of a Major, a Sikh and myself lined up somewhere in the jungle, bowing to the Emperor Hirohito beyond a continent and a sea.

  After that the Lieutenant strode up to me and glowered at me. He looked at the shoulder-straps on my bush shirt.

  “What are those?”

  “They are my badges of rank.”

  “You have no rank now,” he said.

  He reached up and tore off my Air Force rings savagely, dropping them on to the ground. When he was close to me I could see how tightly the skin of his face was stretched over his cheek-bones. His cheeks were hollow, so that his jaws projected, and his nostrils were wide and black. Only his eyes had a hard, steely life.

  He glanced at the Sikh’s rank badges and passed by; it was to try to humiliate us, I suppose, leaving the Indian with his rank. He went on to the Major, staring intently for a moment at the woven crowns on his shoulders.

  “What rank is this man?” he said.

  “Shosa.”

  He smiled, and ripped off one of the shoulder-straps. The Major raised one hand and placed it firmly over the other. The lieutenant’s smile disappeared and he glared angrily.

  “Tell him to take his hand away,” he said to the N.C.O.

  “Remove hand.”

  The Major kept his hand in place. I saw that the other hand by his side was quivering: but there was a new defiance in his face.

  “May I have permission to strike him?” the N.C.O. said.

  “No. The Indian will strike him. Tell them both to take a step forward.”

  They stepped forward, and the Major still had his hand on his shoulder. The other shoulder of his shirt was torn where the strap had been stripped off.

  “Face together,” the N.C.O. said. They turned inwards.

  “You, Indian, strike the Englishman on the face.”

  The Sikh remained perfectly still.

  “You understand English?” the N.C.O. said.

  “I understand.”

  “Then I order you to strike the Englishman.”

  “I will not strike my superior officer.”

  The N.C.O. interpreted this to the Lieutenant. The Lieutenant went up to the Sikh and stood nearly in front of him. He was like a little swollen-chested dwarf beside the other grandiloquent figure. The Sikh was looking into the sky over his head and his strong black beard was motionless. From the side I could see the white of his eyes and the noble curve of his nose. I could also see from the set of his face that nothing was going to make him carry out this order.

  Infuriated, the Lieutenant swung his clenched fist and hit the Sikh’s jaw. The Sikh was stone-still like a statue.

  “Tell him to hit the man like that,” the Lieutenant said.

  “You are ordered to strike your officer like that,” the N.C.O. said.

  “For God’s sake do it, man,” the Major said in a low voice. “It doesn’t matter.”

  We waited, but the Sikh did not move. His arms were frozen at his sides.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” he said. And then he made a dash. He pushed between the Major and the N.C.O. too quickly to be grabbed, and before the guard could raise his rifle he had leapt a trench twenty yards away and started through the trees. But there was no chance for him. He must have known there was no chance. A rifle went off by my side, and he went on running for a few seconds; but only loosely from the momentum, and gradually folding up. Then he sprawled forward on the ground and writhed over on to his back. He went on writhing, on to his face again as though trying to rise. The Lieutenant began to walk over to him. He walked slowly, concentrating on the powerful anguished body with deadly intent. He came to the trench, and it was two and a half feet broad, so he walked slowly round the end. I said to the guard “Shoot again!” but he kept his bayonet turned towards me to prevent my getting away, and the other guard was looking after the Major. A dozen other soldiers had come running out of the huts and were making for the spot where the Sikh was still twisting in agony. They fell behind the Lieutenant, and watched him in fascination as he slowly drew his sword. They stood quite still as he raised it with both hands above his head; and at that moment the Sikh was also quite still. The sword came down, and I did not see what happened, but there was no more movement at the spot, and the Lieutenant turned round, the soldiers falling back to make way for him. He came back to where we were standing, the hilt of the sword in one hand, and the point resting on the forefinger of the other. He held it for us to see. The bright steel was smeared with fresh blood like a butcher’s knife. Then he handed it to the N.C.O. and, pausing before the Major, he tore off the second shoulder-strap.

  Chapter Four

  (1)

  We were interrogated separately in the Lieutenant’s hut. I was dreading an interrogation, knowing the difficulties of keeping stead-fast silence in the face of threats. But I knew nothing, anyway, of the military set-up; and the Lieutenant’s method was transparent, and it seemed easy to lie.

  Ten minutes ago he had shown me the bloody sword; now he received me with a grin that bared his two rows of prognathous teeth. He slapped me on the back. It was obvious that he had never slapped anybody on the back before, but he had heard that Englishmen slapped each other on the back, and he meant it to be a winning gesture. He sat me on the floor of the hut and gave me a cigarette.

  “It was a great shame,” he said, “that we had to kill the Indian. But I am glad it was the Indian and not one of you.”

  “Oh yes,” I said.

  “As I have said, we wish to treat you with clemency.”

  He went on pretending to be jovial. He talked for a long time in a grim, casual way to camouflage the questions that followed, but when the questions arrived they stood out in ludicrous relief. I pretended in turn that I did not recognise his traps, and allowed myself to fall headlong into each, but with harmless replies. I could see him purring with success, and the cold smile of stretched yellow parchment over bone became genuinely warmer. But when he began to drop the camouflage and demand information directly, and I became more manifestly evasive, all the softer l
ight died immediately and he was hard and glittering again. His eyes were black and glassy, and the line of his cheekbones was ruthless. He started to recall the bloody sword, and to hint at other dark things, and I had to adopt new tactics, pretending to try to hold out on him, and finally give way under threat, but was feeding false stuff. It was childishly simple this, because he could not bear to think he was being fooled and losing face. It was so simple that I began to wonder if he knew what game I was up to and would suddenly order me out to be shot. But he looked pleased when he sent me back to the hut. Afterwards the Major went in, the N.C.O. interpreting. He was away two hours, and when he returned he looked so ill and haggard that I asked at once if he had been physically ill-treated. He shook his head.

  “They wanted to know all kinds of things that I had no idea about.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I said I didn’t know.”

  “That’s fatal,” I said. “Tell them anything. Any answer satisfies them.”

  “I didn’t know the answers,” he said as though he were dying.

  “I wouldn’t have told them if I had known.”

  “Of course you wouldn’t.”

  “They’re swine,” he said. “Did you see him cut off the Sikh’s head?”

  “Yes, I saw.”

  “My God, with a sword.”

  “It’s death whichever way you do it,” I said.