‘One of the mules is lame, thakin.’
Gilling nodded, brushing the news aside. The unused message-pad protruded from the subedar’s webbing and to Gilling its continued prominence implied a deliberately sustained censure. Reaction smarted through the stranglehold of humiliation. ‘Why not say what you’re thinking, subedar? Why not get it off your chest?’ — but he swallowed the words back before they reached his lips. Nay Dun quickened his pace and went forward again, his short stride as tireless as ever, and, watching him draw away, Gilling thought sullenly: You won’t be happy until this company’s yours, will you?
With all his heart he began to wish for one last opportunity to prove himself; one chance to act strongly and decisively before it was too late and what was left of his pride was finally spent. He held to the wish with smouldering hostility. But as he thought of the Japanese and pictured what was to come, he found his defiance crumbling before the returning probes of fear. And, cowering, his mind asked Nay Dun: What d’you expect of me? What is it you want?
The road started to twist and switchback. It still bore northwards; still ran roughly parallel with the main L of C. Under the ice-blue stars the hills humped darkly on all sides, like overgrown slag-heaps, and every mile seemed longer, more intolerable, than the last. A few of the men began to straggle, and the rearguard — exhausted themselves — trapped them as they fell back; herded them on. Twice Gilling ordered a halt. Now and again Nay Dun stalked back and forth along the column’s length, chivvying, swearing, grabbing at an arm, slapping a shoulder. Steam rose from the labouring ranks and the stench of sweat hung strongly under the trees. Where the dust lay thin the clop of the mules’ tread sounded clearly above the whispering of the forest and the jiggle of harnesses and the monotonous scrape of barely-lifted boots.
The wounded sagged in their improvised stretchers and those who carried them would once in a while dispense what comfort there was in a tepid water-bottle. The first man died before they had marched for an hour; the second a mile later. On each occasion Nay Dun came back to report, and Gilling, growing insensitive under the bludgeoning of pain and bone-aching fatigue, no longer read an accusation into the subedar’s gruff announcement.
There was a noise in his ears as if shells were cupped against them and for quite long stretches at a time he plodded along with his eyes closed. An elephant trumpeted shrilly from a cavernous slope, bristling his neck-hair, but for the most part he was imprisoned within himself. Without his knowing, a star fell brilliantly across the gauzy blur of the Milky Way; fireflies floated in the lofty cathedrals of the forest. He had an awareness of futility, of failure, of impending dread; nothing was clear-cut, nothing dominant. Habit propelled him. By the time they passed the ninth milestone he was moving like a drunkard. Another of the wounded had died by then and the lame mule was lagging badly. He heard Nay Dun encouraging the men; bullying, cajoling — and once, quite clearly, he heard his own voice.
‘Bastard,’ it said quietly; savagely.
It took them forty minutes to cover the last mile. Gilling would have passed the stone but for Nay Dun bringing the company to a standstill. Unsteadily, he lit a match and squinted at the sodden plan which Church had given him. They were on a curving shelf under a high wall of rock and the road was mined with five linked charges. While the column moved clear he searched for, and found, the buried leads. Normally he had to steel himself to work with explosives, but he was so utterly spent that he approached the fuse-assembly with almost careless indifference. Secretly, his nerves made him awkward, but even when the detonators rattled against his teeth as he crimped them tight he wasn’t consciously alarmed. It was for all the world as if he were operating in his sleep.
He lit the fuse-ends; hobbled away. Two minutes later the starlight was obliterated by a shuddering gash of flame. Boiling clouds of dust spurted from the wall of rock and the blast followed with the stunning roar of a breaking wave. He waited a little while, then got up and went closer. Grit was still filtering down but he could see that about thirty yards of the shelf had completely disappeared. And, quite without feeling, he knew how useless it was going to be.
CHAPTER TWO
Arbitrarily, without making a reconnaissance, he sited the platoons from the road, pointing out the general area each was to occupy. He had neither the strength nor the will to do more.
‘Four men on watch, subedar — an hour at a time. Arrange it so that the Bren in your platoon is continuously manned.’ He couldn’t believe they would be spared for long, but this was the most his mind could do. With difficulty he saw that it was coming up to midnight. ‘You and I’ll take turns — a couple of hours each.’
Ramrod-straight, the subedar nodded. ‘Where will you be?’
‘Here,’ Gilling said. ‘Beside the road.’ He was ready to drop, but the assumption provoked him. Out of enmity he said: ‘I’ll do the first stint.’
Nay Dun looked at him sharply.
‘Get some rest,’ Gilling countered, ‘while you can.’
He turned away, senselessly committed, small-minded in his determination not to yield. Nay Dun seemed to hesitate before striding off and Gilling waited until he had gone before moving. The stars blinked down and the scratchy hum of the jungle filled his ears. An occasional rustle indicated that the platoons were struggling into position through the steep undergrowth. From somewhere in the rear there came the nasal sobbing of a mule.
‘You, too,’ he said to Saw Tun Shwe, gesturing. ‘Get some sleep.’
Alone on the road, he limped to the lip of the cratered shelf before returning to the shadows. He knew that if he once sat down he would lose consciousness. Black clouds fogged his brain, disarming his nerves, imbuing him with fatalism. If they came, they came. A battalion might hold them, but not twenty-five men. He could reconnoitre all night, site every man personally, bind the cross-fire together, indulge every tactical ploy — and the result would be the same. They would come when it suited them; blast their way through or find a way round ...
Stupefied into indifference he groped about the hillside until he located the men on watch. He stayed a minute or two with each of them, staring in silence at the mottled curve beyond the broken length of road. Even under the dead-weight of exhaustion he knew his supervision to be farcical. Since the bus went over the edge he had forfeited all claim to their respect. He was a civilian wearing the wrong clothes and every one of them must have seen through the charade by now.
A bruised-looking moon rose just before one and was greeted by eerie cries from the deep recesses of the hills. In an effort to keep awake he counted to a hundred, then towards a thousand, but somewhere near half-way he lost track and gave up. The time dragged by, harnessed to a snail. He walked back to where the wounded lay among the rice sacks and ammunition boxes. Nearby, like bas-reliefs, the mules stood darkly against some phosphorescent moss on the bank: the cooks slept. The wounded were as silent as the dead, their faces hard and drawn with suffering, but he could only tell which were which because the living sweated.
Their plight wrung his heart and eventually he could look at them no more. He went forward again, unsteady on his legs, the revived sense of guilt wilting. Every part of him seemed to be on fire; throbbing. It was as if gravity were pulling at his eyelids; salt under them. At two o’clock he roused Nay Dun. There should have been satisfaction in his slurred ‘You can take over now, subedar’ — but he was quite beyond its reach. He returned to his chosen place at the roadside and lay down, plummeting through a trap-door into sleep the moment his body slumped to the ground.
*
He dreamed.
Church was there immediately, Church and Crawford, under the gold-mohur tree by the shabby pagoda, and Church was saying: ‘You really needed another company, Tony. You’ll never do the job properly with what you’ve got.’ Eagerly, he broke in. ‘Can I have Abbott?’ and Church was about to agree when Crawford interrupted. ‘Abbott’s running a bonus scheme, sir. So much a head. It’s a private hate
arrangement. I don’t think it would fit in with Tony’s way of working, do you?’ And Church reflected: ‘Maybe not. Perhaps you’d best tackle it yourself after all, Tony. On second thoughts I can’t spare anyone. I’ve more than enough on my own plate.’ In the dream he felt no dismay. But for some reason, instead of saluting, he found himself shaking hands. And, when he looked at Church he saw, quite without surprise, that his wife was beside him. ‘Good luck, Tony,’ she smiled sadly. ‘Give our love to Bandaung.’
The scene faded; gave way to another. There was no chronological pattern. He danced with Ailsa in the bright, artificial lounge of the Bandaung Club and the radio-gramophone was playing ‘Deep Purple’. Earlier (he knew) they’d listened to the news of the German invasion of Norway and now, her body soft against his, she asked: ‘Does it all seem utterly remote to you, somehow? — almost impossible to grasp?’ He nodded, his temple nestling her red hair. She was wearing an emerald-green dress and her shoulders were very white against the colour. ‘It’ll spread, won’t it, Tony?’ to which he said: ‘It’s bound to. We’ll all be in it one day, I suppose.’ She raised her eyes as he turned her under the fans. ‘Even here?’ He shrugged. ‘Perhaps not here exactly — not in Bandaung — but it’ll spread all right. They’ve chucked a pretty big stone into the pond this time.’
There was a gap then, a kaleidoscope of shifting lights and hollow-sounding voices, during which he was somehow able to wonder what had become of her. Then the voices died away and all the lights became one. He sensed the weight of the Very pistol in his hand; saw the Japanese explode in a greenish froth of flame. Fear entered his stomach and he started to run — but soon it wasn’t him running. It was Rance — long-legged, canted forward, making for the culvert. ‘No!’ he cried, but Rance didn’t hear; didn’t know what was going to happen. He saw him fall; saw the posse of Japanese drag him out of sight behind the block — and in the dream shut his eyes.
The fear grew, and there was loneliness with it. ‘Ailsa,’ he was whispering. ‘Ailsa.’ There was a light beside the bed and he switched it off as he rolled towards her — but the moment fragmented. He was still lying prone but the darkness was there because he was blindfolded, learning to strip a Bren by touch, and the weapon-training sergeant at O.C.T.U. was bawling derisively: ‘Call yourself a soldier, Mr. Gilling? ... Now start again — right back at the bloody beginning.’ A procession of faces followed, chanting it as they passed, and all the while he struggled with the Bren, distressed and panicky because of his incompetence. Church’s face was there, and Crawford’s, and many others. ‘Call yourself a soldier, Mr. Gilling’ — the language had changed to Burmese; the voice to Nay Dun’s. And suddenly all the faces belonged to Karens and the chanting had become an indecipherable whimpering because of what the Japanese had done to their mouths ...
He twisted in his sleep, groaning, but the dream insisted. Somehow he escaped from the sequence to find himself at home, walking towards the old, redbrick library. His father was standing on the wide, white steps, talking to someone he didn’t recognize, and the stranger was saying: ‘Any news of Tony recently?’ His father had his back to him. ‘Not since the balloon went up.’ As he drew nearer the other man said, ‘Burma, isn’t it?’ and his father nodded. ‘He was getting pretty frustrated ... feeling out of it — you know what young men are. In several recent letters he’s complained of playing at soldiers while everyone else is mixed up in the real thing. It’s natural enough. I expect he’s relieved in a way; glad to be showing his mettle ...’ He called to them, hurrying still closer: ‘It isn’t like that at all’ — but they didn’t see him. He might not have been there. The two of them went up the steps together, still talking, and the door closed in his face. In despair he beat his fists against it. ‘You don’t understand,’ he shouted. ‘You don’t know what you’re saying’ — and the sound of his fists became a machine-gun’s drumming.
There was another gap then, another swirl of lights, before the dream evolved. He sat on the crest of the South Downs with Ailsa, looking at the town below, and she remarked: ‘It’s almost like Bandaung, isn’t it?’ And it was; it was. Then the rain came, sweet and cool on his skin. It moved across the Weald like a smoke-screen and the gentle distances were gradually blotted out. The gate on the nearby slope became the road-block; a discarded hat on the upright, Rance’s head. His intestines seemed to melt away as he put his binoculars on to it and saw the fish-slab gaze of Rance’s eyes, the trim moustache on the upper lip, the gleam of his bared teeth. ‘Oh Christ,’ he thought. ‘Oh Jesus Christ.’ The picture hazed out of focus and the next thing he knew was that Nay Dun had moved between him and the block, holding something in his hands; proffering it. In terror he asked: ‘What’s this for?’ and the subedar said: ‘For strength, thakin. For you.’ And all at once it wasn’t a monkey any more; nor was it Nay Dun, but a Japanese. ‘For you. It’s for you ...’
He was awake, though for a moment he couldn’t accept it. ‘Take it away,’ he mouthed, recoiling in horror from the face etched against the stars above him. ‘Take it away.’ The face solidified; took on flesh. Then he heard the subedar speak, no longer as if in an echo-chamber, and with a trembling start he knew that the nightmare had at last gone out of him.
‘Thakin,’ Nay Dun was whispering urgently. ‘Thakin.’
CHAPTER THREE
He jerked on to one elbow. Pain and fatigue throbbed into his consciousness but alarm pushed them back; held them at a distance. There was a peculiar tightness in his chest, as though it were banded with something cold.
‘By the demolition,’ Nay Dun breathed.
Water sloshed in the bottle on Gilling’s hip as he rolled over. Shadow and moonlight apart he could see nothing. Dry-mouthed, he said: ‘You’re sure?’
The query was ignored. ‘Scouts, I think. A patrol.’
‘I don’t see them.’
‘Near the milestone.’ Nay Dun used his head as a pointer. ‘Where the bamboo clump leans over.’
‘Now?’
‘Yes, now.’
Vainly, Gilling strained his eyes. ‘How many?’ The dream had gone but not the fear. It was dribbling through him like melting ice.
‘Six.’
Their whispers had wakened Saw Tun Shwe. Seeing him stir, Gilling ordered him to alert the company, but the subedar shook his head. ‘There is no need.’ He spoke to Saw Tun Shwe direct. ‘It is done.’
Resentfully, Gilling muttered: ‘I’m not dead yet, subedar.’ Again, without success, he searched the locality of the bamboos. ‘How long since you noticed them?’
‘A few minutes. They came to the edge of the gap, then went back to where they are now.’ Nay Dun paused. Then, suddenly, as if to test him: ‘One of them moved — see?’
‘Yes,’ Gilling lied.
The milestone was less than a hundred yards from where he lay — seventy-five at most. He didn’t need to distinguish them to sense their proximity, yet failure to do so gave his imagination rein; worsened his nerves. To have them close again was inevitable, but he was no longer reduced by exhaustion to suicidal indifference. Sleep had given him a fresh lease of dread.
He glanced quickly at his watch and, with disbelief, saw that it was only three-fifteen.
‘Now they are all moving,’ Nay Dun said, twisting the knife in the wound. ‘Together.’
For half a minute Gilling believed he glimpsed them, shadows among shadows, then realized he was mistaken. His mind was brittle; rigid with apprehension yet smarting under the subedar’s commentary. ‘Where?’ he wanted to ask. ‘Which way?’ But, since he dared not, he worked it out for himself. There were only two courses open to the patrol — to come forward or to go back. Back, then. They had done their job; located the demolition and studied its extent. A six-man patrol wouldn’t attack. They would withdraw to the main body and report. And at dawn ...
Nay Dun seemed to read his thoughts. In a low voice, he said: ‘They will be looking for another route.’
‘Or going back,’ G
illing ventured.
‘Not until they have found something better.’
The road pointed away from the company’s front in a gentle curve. To its left was a deep chasm; to its right the upward sweep of the hill-side, fuzzy in the moonlight.
‘There’s always a way round if you go far enough,’ Gilling countered. He was growing wrathful, believing himself played with, cat-and-mouse.
The subedar craned his head, apparently watching the Japanese out of sight. ‘There is no need for them to go far.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘They can get behind us along the path through the village.’
Gilling’s nostrils flared, ‘What village?’ he said, but even as alarm forced the question out of him he knew that the admission left him wide open to the subedar’s scorn. His blindness he could lie about — but not his failure to reconnoitre the company’s position. ‘What village?’
‘Above us on the right. Below the crest of the slope.’
Gilling closed his eyes, as if in defence against the surge of impotent rage that welled through him. Vaguely, he remembered having seen a village marked last time he had looked at the map. To anyone else he could have said: ‘I was done in when I did my stint. It was about all I could do to keep awake, even.’ Layers deep, the yearning to say it was there, crying weakly like a child in the night. With anyone else exhaustion would have been a bond, but Nay Dun’s inflexible expression conveyed only contempt and all Gilling could do was to hate him more.
The subedar went on: ‘The path south from the village goes over the other side of the hill.’
‘To the road?’
‘I did not follow it, but I expect so.’
A Battle Is Fought to Be Won Page 12
