The Empire Trilogy

by J. G. Farrell

  Well then, what else was there to stop the Japs? A railway bridge, forward, had been blown up (the Japanese had tanks with wheels that would run on the rails, it was thought). The Argylls, in common with the rest of the British forces in Malaya, had no tanks of their own, only armoured cars and bren-gun carriers; although these might come in handy on the estate roads to cope with a flanking movement by the Jap infantry into the rubber they were quite useless, of course, against tanks. Most serious of all, the British anti-tank rifles would not penetrate the armour of the Japanese medium tanks. And so what could be done? If the tanks once got through the defile there was only the bridge at Trolak and the Slim River Bridge, both prepared for demolition, which lay between the tanks and the open road to Singapore. And now, into the bargain, it seemed that the Japanese attack would come twenty-four hours sooner than expected.

  If the Brigadier received this news of an impending attack from young Sinclair without making a fuss, it was partly because it was his business to be imperturbable, partly because he knew that one can never predict quite how things will turn out: battles cannot be decided on paper by subtracting the armour of one side from the armour of the other and giving the victory to the side which has the surplus. There was a probability, certainly, that the tanks would have the advantage … but so much depends on the quality of the men and on what is going on in their minds. True, the Indian battalions were in very poor shape and the Argylls were not much better. But a quick success or two and who could tell? Thank heaven, anyway, for the few dozen reinforcements who had just arrived from Singapore on this dark, rain-lashed night, under Captain Hamish Ross, for they included some of the best men in the battalion. The few words he had had with Ross had cheered him.

  ‘We had a wee spot o’ bother, sir, at Tyersall Park,’ Ross had said, eyeing the Brigadier slyly. ‘I suppose ye might call it a mutiny.’

  ‘A mutiny, man? Ye’ll no expect me to believe that, Hamish Ross!’

  And so Captain Ross had explained. When his party of reinforcements had paraded at the Tyersall camp in Singapore a number of Argylls on staff duty whom Malaya Command had specifically ordered him to leave behind had paraded too, demanding to return to the regiment to join in the scrap.

  ‘Aye, now that’s more like it,’ nodded the Brigadier and, though his expression was no less forbidding, Hamish Ross could tell by the glint in his eye that he was pleased. These new arrivals would help put heart into the other men, given enough time for them to settle in.

  Outside, the rain had slackened now. Making his way through the rubber trees back to the road to find out whether anything more had been gleaned from Chinese refugees, Sinclair paused, gripped by the sense of unreality which comes from excitement and lack of sleep. In the course of the afternoon he had gone forward with the Brigadier to inspect the progress that the Hyderabads and the Punjabis were making with their defences and there he had met Charlie Tyrrell, Mrs Blackett’s brother. He did not know Charlie very well. In Singapore they had not met more than once or twice at the Blacketts’ house and even then had scarcely exchanged more than a few words. But seeing each other now in these unusual, even desperate circumstances, they had immediately begun to talk as if they were old friends. Charlie had come back with him for an hour to the Argylls’ area in the rubber.

  Sinclair had been shocked to see the state that Charlie was in. His handsome face was hollow-cheeked with fatigue, dirty and inflamed with insect bites; even his khaki was in tatters. But it was not so much Charlie’s physical appearance that had given Sinclair a shock, for in the middle of a jungle campaign one does not expect to see a soldier looking as if he has just turned out on parade: it was the feverish look in his eyes and the obsessive, fatalistic way in which he talked … almost as if he were talking to himself, as if Sinclair had not been there at all. Charlie talked incessantly about his men: he had never seen them so apathetic and dejected! They were at the end of their tether, that much was clear! ‘How can you blame them?’ he had demanded without waiting for a reply. ‘Most of them are barely trained recruits.’

  Sinclair had nodded sympathetically. Unlike the Argylls down the road the Punjabis did not possess that extra strength for living and fighting in the jungle which comes from training in atrocious conditions, from discipline, from regimental traditions which, combining all together, temper each individual and form what Sinclair thought of as a collective willpower, imperious and inflexible (yet even some of his own Argylls were close to cracking).

  He had watched his men for the past two days, Charlie went on, and it was clear that their only thought (though these were the bravest of men!) was to huddle in their slit trenches, the nearest approach to security they could find. But who could blame them? In the course of their long retreat through northern and central Malaya the battalion had lost two hundred and fifty men, of whom many had been killed. From dawn the day before yesterday, there had been a steady stream of Jap bombers and fighters blasting away at the edges of the jungle on both sides of the defile where, though hidden, they knew the British forces to be. These planes had robbed the Punjabis of any chance they might have had of resting before the next attack; they had also caused a further trickle of casualties. And yet, somehow, even that was not the worst of it … It was …

  They were standing a little way off the road in the shade. Charlie was leaning his back against the trunk of a rubber tree. As he spoke he kept wearily slapping his sweating face with his hand as if to drive off insects but mechanically, with resignation (besides, Sinclair could see no insects around Charlie’s face) … Abruptly Sinclair was afraid that the Brigadier might come by and see Charlie in this state. He felt that that could not be allowed to happen, he could not quite say why, except that you only had to glance at the way Charlie was leaning against the rubber tree, talking and slapping himself, his gaunt and desperate face dappled by sunlight and shadow filtering through the leaves, to know that he had very nearly reached the point where he simply would not care any longer!

  But still Charlie was trying to explain himself to Sinclair, with an almost pathetic determination that he should understand … He was trying to say that, however bad it might be when the Jap Zero was roaring along the road machine-gunning the fringes of the jungle, it was no better when the plane had dipped its wing and swung away over the tree tops. Because within a few seconds an eerie silence had fallen, blanketing even the sound of the departing plane. ‘When you’ve been in this bloody place a bit longer, Sinclair,’ he said, grinning now as if there was something amusing about what he was saying, but at the same time scratching his ribs viciously through his tattered shirt, ‘you’ll understand exactly what I mean.’

  ‘Well, I’ve been trying to get up here for the past three weeks,’ said Sinclair defensively, for it was true that it was only four days since he had left Singapore, ‘but I think I know what you mean.’

  There was something about this silence, went on Charlie, ignoring him: it gave the sound of your voice a distant, unreal quality. Even quite sharp sounds, like the dropping of a mess tin on the metalled road, would be blotted up immediately by the dense green walls on either side. The sound did not seem to go anywhere, that was it. There was no resonance. It gave you a baffling sensation, like speaking into a dead telephone. Only at night did you begin to hear sounds again. But so disturbing were the night sounds that the silence was almost better. Another thing, action here seemed to have no more resonance than sounds. During the daytime when you stopped moving, everything stopped, as if you were on the floor of a dead ocean. Everything had to come from you, that was what was so intolerable. His men felt the same way, he could tell by watching them. For men already exhausted this need to initiate all movement from their own resources was unendurable.

  The two men were silent for a few moments. Charlie had evidently come to the end of what he had wanted to say. Although he still leaned dejectedly against the tree, he had stopped slapping himself and appeared calmer. ‘Sorry to go on like that about it,’ he s
aid presently. ‘It’s the same for everyone, of course. Besides, it’s not much better for you blokes here in the rubber.’ It was true, Sinclair reflected, that even at the best of times there was something unnerving about a rubber plantation; wherever you stood you found yourself at the centre of a bewildering maze of identical trees which stretched out geometrically in every direction as far as the eye could see. But in Malaya the eye, as a rule, could not see very far; you seldom found a place from where you could get a prospect over the jungle or rubber which covered the country like a green lid on a saucepan.

  ‘D’you know Rilke’s poem about the panther?’ asked Charlie suddenly, smiling.

  Sein Blick ist vom Vorübergehen der Stäbe

  So müd geworden … dass er nichts mehr hält …

  ‘Roughly translated it means: “His gaze from looking through the bars has grown so tired he can’t take in anything more.”

  Ihm ist, als ob es tausend Stäbe gäbe

  Und hinter tausend Stäben keine Welt.

  “It seems to him as if there are a thousand bars and behind the thousand bars, no world.” That’s what I feel about all these bloody rubber trees.’

  Sinclair thought of this again as, now in darkness, he strode on through the dripping ranks of trees, trying to shake off the premonition that if the Japanese attacked tonight it would be the end of the line for the Punjabis, no matter how strong the position they occupied in the defile.

  As the night advanced the rain stopped and the moon began to appear, fitfully at first and then more frequently, between the clouds. From the jungle a dreadful odour of rotting vegetation crept out over the waiting Punjabis and hung there in the humid atmosphere. Now, more brilliant than ever, the moon hung like a great white lamp over the two black walls of jungle, shining so brightly that if you moved out of the covering foliage you could see your shadow clearly printed on the surface of the road. Behind them, a little way along the road, the Argylls guarding the exits from the defile into the rubber listened, skin crawling, to the steady churning of the jungle.

  Charlie looked at the luminous green face of his wrist watch: it was midnight. From close at hand there came the metallic sound of some insect he had never been able to identify … it resembled the winding-up of a clockwork toy. He was dreamily contemplating this sound and at the same time vowing to keep his eyes open when, like a paralysing blow from the darkness, there came at last the sound for which he had been listening for so long, the first thud of guns from the Hyderabads’ position up the road. The shelling continued. For a while nothing else happened. One, two, three hours passed. He began to nod off again. Suddenly, he woke. The noise of gunfire had ceased. The Japanese were beginning their attack.

  47

  Not far away from where Charlie waited with the Punjabis, a small, bespectacled figure in battledress sat in the back of a lorry gripping his knees tensely, his rifle locked between them. This was none other than Private Kikuchi and as he sat there in complete darkness he was doing his best to concentrate his thoughts on the heroic example of his uncle, Bugler Kikuchi, who had sounded his bugle with his dying breath. Private Kikuchi knew that in a few minutes, at a sign from his commander, Lieutenant Matsushita, he would have to hurl himself forward with his bayonet at the ready ‘like a blind man unafraid of snakes’, as Matsushita put it. Would he be able to follow Uncle Kikuchi’s immaculate example? Huddled beside him in the lorry as it crept forward without lights he sensed, but could not see, his comrades of the Ando Regiment. Perhaps they too, were wondering what the hours before dawn would bring? Would they even live to see the daylight again? Perhaps they were hoping, if possible, to die gloriously fighting for the Emperor. Certainly, Lieutenant Matsushita would be. He was an officer with strangely burning eyes who had already served in the Imperial Army, mopping up bandits in Manchuria.

  Kikuchi was astonished and awed by Lieutenant Matsushita. Every time he met those burning eyes it was as if he received an electric shock. The intensity of feeling in Matsushita, his utter devotion to the Emperor and to his country, had come as a revelation even to Kikuchi who, one might have thought, had little to learn about Japanese National Spirit with such an uncle. Yet there was something that Kikuchi found rather frightening about him at the same time … Sometimes it almost seemed as if he wanted to get not only himself but everyone else killed, too. He would dash forward sometimes with bullets falling about him like a spring shower while he might easily have advanced in relative security by some other route.

  To make matters worse (or better, depending how you looked at it) he had taken a particular liking to Kikuchi, either because of his glorious uncle or because he sensed Kikuchi’s fascination with him. On one occasion he had taken Kikuchi aside and shown him some of the medals he had been awarded and which he carried everywhere with him in a little waterproof pouch, even on the most desperate sorties into the jungle. He had allowed Kikuchi to gaze at his Order of the Rising Sun, Fourth Class, at his Decoration of Manchuria, Fourth and Fifth Classes, at his Campaign Medal of the Chinese Incident, at his Campaign Medal of the Manchurian Incident and at several others, including an Order of the Golden Kite, Fifth Class. ‘One day, Kikuchi, you too will have medals like these,’ he had said, his eyes fastened on Kikuchi’s and gripping them tightly as in two glowing chopsticks so that he could not turn away. ‘Or you will be dead,’ he added in a somewhat chilling manner, as an afterthought.

  It was not that Kikuchi minded exactly dying for his Emperor if he had to; after all, like his comrades he had left some hair and fingernail clippings behind in Japan for funerary purposes in case the rest of his body did not return. He was not a Kikuchi for nothing! And yet, once or twice, observing Matsushita and his bosom companion, Lieutenant Nakamura, with whom he had graduated from the Military Academy, the thought had crossed Kikuchi’s mind (indeed, it had had to be frogmarched across his mind under heavy guard and swiftly, like a deserter who must not be allowed to contaminate his fellows) that all things in human affairs, even battlefield glory, can be taken a tiny bit too far. Could it be that the High Command thought so, too? Well, no, that was unlikely. Yet despite their heroism neither Matsushita nor Nakamura had as yet risen very far in the Army. They were both still young, of course, but perhaps something else lay behind their lack of promotion … Kikuchi had heard a vague rumour that they might have been involved in an attempt to revive the November Affair at the Military Academy with a new revolt of ultra-patriotic cadets … or perhaps it was that they had led an assault on brother officers they suspected of aping European manners, something of the sort … Never mind, whatever the truth of the matter it was an honour, Kikuchi assured himself, gripping his knees more tightly than ever to take his mind off his churning stomach (perhaps he should have swallowed a couple of Jintan pills?), to serve under such fearless and patriotic officers. Both of them, as it happened, were nearby at this very moment: Matsushita was only a matter of inches away in the swaying darkness: Kikuchi could not see him but he pictured him sitting in his habitual pose, palms of both hands resting on the tasselled hilt of his sabre, his expression merciless.

  As for Nakamura, he was leading the medium tanks and so, you might have thought, could not possibly be anywhere near this lorry full of infantry. Nevertheless, Nakamura was only a few yards in front. What had happened was that Matsushita, reckless as ever, had insisted that a platoon of picked infantry, under his personal leadership, should come next to Nakamura’s leading tank in the assault column now moving down the road towards the British positions. He had wasted no time in picking Kikuchi to ride with him in his first lorry sandwiched between the two leading tanks; more troops of the Ando Detachment came in a position of somewhat greater security further down the armoured column. Kikuchi, naturally, was deeply conscious of the honour that had been done him. All the same, the leading vehicles in the column would certainly bear the brunt of the enemy fire. This would be bad enough for the tanks with their armour; what would it be like for a vulnerable lorry-load of infantry? Sti
ll, one must act heroically and hope for the best.

  The tanks and lorries continued to creep forward head to tail, without lights. It was very quiet, as if all the men in the lorry, were holding their breath; Kikuchi listened to the steady rattling of the tank tracks on the road’s surface but even this sound seemed barely audible, soaked up instantly by the dark mass of jungle on each side. How much longer would this go on for? He was weary and wanted to sleep. He was also hungry. How they had been driven! It seemed to him that this campaign, though it had lasted only three weeks, had been going on for ever. He sometimes found it hard to believe that he had ever known another kind of life … on and on they had trudged, seldom eating anything but dry bread and salt, not even pausing to consume the munificent food supplies left by the British as they retreated.