“It's not fair,” said Stanley, and everyone looked at him, for Stanley was not given to opinions. “They told us we were goin' to Rangoon,” he went on, going red under the general scrutiny. “That's what they said.”
“Lyin' bastards!” said Wattie. “They'll tell ye owt,an' then drop ye in't shit! Ah've aboot ’ed it, me!” And he stood up, looking about as though for support.
“An' me!” roared Forster. “Well, Ah's nut gan! Nut one fookin' step!”
I expected someone to say: “Wrap up, Foshie!” or “Give it a rest”, but no one spoke except Wedge, reminding us bitterly that we'd been told we'd be relieved at Meiktila by 5th Div, and the boogers had never arrived, and Morton who repeated with furious oaths what Stanley had said: we'd been promised we were going to Rangoon.
“Well, you ain't, my son,” said Parker flatly. “So you can forget it.”
“Bollocks!” This was Forster again. “You can fergit it, Parker, but Ah's nut!” He wheeled suddenly on Peel, who had been quietly donning his webbing and ignoring the outbursts. “Ah'm tellin' ye, Tommo—they've ’ed me! Bus! That's the whole sub-muckin'! Balls to ’em! Noo, then!”
Peel slung his rifle and picked up his pack. “Don't waste tha breath tellin' me,” he said. “Long John's just ower the road. Go an' tell him.” He turned to the door, said: “We fall in in ten minutes,” and went out, sensible man.
“Ah's nut fallin' in!” Forster bawled after him, and more ordures of speech followed, culminating in: “They can stick us away if they want till—Ah's nut gan, an' that's flat! Noo, then!”
To my dismay, Wattie said: “Fook it,” and turned to Grandarse. “W'at aboot you, owd feller?”
That was the moment when I wished that Peel hadn't left, for while one could ignore Forster, Wattie was another matter, and Grandarse was wearing a lowering, sullen look I hadn't seen before. It was all nonsense, of course—no one was going to defy orders, and once Forster's spleen had spent itself all would be well—but at the time it was beginning to sound serious—Grandarse's silence being the most serious sign of all.
“Aye—w'at say, then, Grandarse?” Forster sounded eager. “Coom on, lad—w'at say?”
Nick, who had not spoken until now, knocked out his pipe and got up. “Doan't talk sae bloody wet, Forster. Ye want tae shut yer gob an' give yer arse a chance.”
“You!” shouted Forster. “Git up tae me, ye mangy lal sod, an' Ah'll blitz ye! Noo, an' Ah'm warnin' ye!” He let go another stream of filth—and suddenly I'd had enough of him. I was the n.c.o., I'd probably been spoiling for a go at him ever since the Duke's burial, or perhaps I had a touch of fever, as many of us did at that time. Whatever the reason—and it was probably just that he was being so unbearably noisy and obscene—I raised my voice.
“Shut your bloody trap, Forster! No one's listening!”
He looked at me in genuine astonishment. “W'at the ’ell's it got tae dee wid thee? Y'evn't got yer bloody knees broon yet!”
That did it. “That's why I've got a stripe and you haven't!” I said. “And I don't mind losing it for the pleasure of breaking your lousy neck!” Leadership is an art, you see.
“That's me old Jock!” crowed Parker. “Kick ’is nuts in! Wiv my permish—”
He got no further because Forster called me a really disgusting name and I went for him in a blind rage and landed a lethal right on the brim of his hat, at which point fortunately Nick and Parker draped themselves round me—I say fortunately because someone would certainly have got hurt, and it might well have been me. And as they were heaving me away, and Forster was spitting vengeance, Grandarse got to his feet, and said in mild irritation:
“Haud on a minnit. Ah can't ’ear mesel' think!” He stood staring at the floor, and then gave a great despondent sigh: “Aw, it's nae fookin' use. There's nowt we can dee aboot it.” He began to put on his equipment, Stanley picked up the Bren, and Wattie, after a moment's hesitation, said “Aw, shite!” and began to gather his gear together. I contented myself with saying: “Any time you like, Foshie”, and he told me to piss off, in a Pickwickian way, and a few minutes later we were falling in outside in the downpour, after another glorious anti-climax. To quote a phrase I learned from the late Bill Shankly when he was managing Carlisle United, everyone had talked a good game.
Rangoon was never mentioned again, but it was a while before Nine Section got over their disappointment and returned to their normal state of belly-aching discontent. You can see their point; within a week of Rangoon's fall came the news of Hitler's death and the German surrender, crowds at home were giving way to the delirium of VE Day, and we were going back up the road to resume the debate with a Japanese enemy whom we'd hoped never to see again. I mentioned earlier the fiasco of the officer who announced the end of the European war just as we were about to start an attack; that could be laughed off, but the prospect of a longer haul was less amusing.
The fact that the end was definitely in sight was a mixed consolation; as in a game, where there's a peculiar cruelty about losing a last-minute deciding goal, so it is in war; no one wants to buy it at any time, but it seems doubly hard to buy it late in the day, especially from an adversary who by any normal standards should have packed in long ago.
For it was common knowledge now, even at rifle-pit level, that as an organised force Jap was finished. His armies had been cut in two and scattered at Meiktila, Pyawbwe, and Mandalay, and when 5th and 17th Divisions began leapfrogging to Pegu the last hope for the broken enemy was escape to Siam. Those to the east of the road could head south between the Salween and Sittang rivers, but those to the west, cut off by our drive to Pegu, could only take refuge in the jungly hills of the Pegu Yomas and wait for a chance to break across the road before heading south in turn.
For the next three months, being Jap and not knowing when he was beaten, he kept trying, and Fourteenth Army kept getting in his way. By the end of that time he would be on his chinstrap, short of food, out of ammo, plagued with malaria, dysentery, jungle sores, and foul weather, and sometimes barely able to stand, let alone walk, but he was still dangerous, and he kept coming. I dare say Japanese historians regard the last phase of the Burma war as something best forgotten; speaking as objectively as I can, I'd say that from what I saw of them, and what I heard, the remnants of the Japanese 15th, 28th, and 33rd Armies did their country proud. I shouldn't be surprised if some of them were still holed up around the Sittang Bend, waiting to die for their emperor.
It's a time which I cannot hope to write about systematically, because it lacks the big points of reference which I think of as milestones, and which have enabled me to give some narrative form, however erratic, to my story so far. With the help of written histories I have been able to trace Nine Section's progress through Meiktila and Pyawbwe to Pegu, but after that there were no major actions for us, no obvious objectives, and for me no plotted course to follow. For most of the time from May to August we were engaged on the Rangoon road and its surrounds, trying to stop Jap breaking across it, which meant a deal of shuttling up and down, manning road-stops, occupying outlying villages, laying ambushes which often came to nothing, constantly patrolling in search of Jap and rumours of Jap, and getting wet enough to grow fins, for by now great stretches of the country were under water. In those three months the battalion shrank to about half its former size, through repatriation, bore a distinguished part in the final destruction of the Japanese 28th Army when it tried to make its big break across the road in late July (at which time I was with another unit), and accounted for 119 enemy dead in the last two weeks of the war. All this is a matter of record, but my memories of those three months are random and confused; I have plenty of my coloured “film strips”, of incidents lasting anything from a few seconds to a few days, but there is not room for them all, and often I have no clear recollection of when or where they happened, or how they fitted into the overall scheme of things. I can only plead my erratic memory; when I consider the things I must have known and have for
gotten, I can only shake my head.
For example: at some point the battalion was reorganised into three new companies—and I don't even know which one I belonged to. Two of the companies consisted of the longer-served men with low demobilisation numbers who were due for repatriation; my demob number was 57, God help me, so presumably I was in the third. I was sent on leave to Calcutta, but I can't remember when, or the details of how I got there and back. On my return I was detached to another unit because of my alleged specialist knowledge (ha!), and did not return to the battalion until just before VJ Day. So, having catalogued my deficiencies of memory, I shall record what I'm sure of.
For some weeks after turning back from Pegu we were in and around a godforsaken village on the Rangoon road called Penwegon, foraying occasionally to outlying places, but always coming back to the section billet, which was a fine bungalow with a verandah, more or less surrounded by water. There I received from my father, God bless him, a copy of Bernard Fergusson's account of the Chindit expedition, Beyond the Chindwin—just the reading I didn't need, but Long John seemed to enjoy it. And it was on a patrol from Penwegon that Morton had hallucinations about midget Japanese commanded by Sir Walter Womersley, Minister of Pensions, and repulsed them with his kukri. We thought at the time that he was suffering a mild bout of jungle happiness, but it may have been fever; I had a touch of malaria at Penwegon and lost a couple of days out of my life. The M.O., whom I shall call McMenemy, accused me of not taking my mepacrin tablets (which was a military offence), but when I pointed out that, like everyone else, I was a rich yellow in colour from swallowing the bloody things, he admitted grudgingly that they were not an infallible prophylactic. Half the section was feverish to some degree, and scoured by dysentery in its various forms (“Ah ’m crappin' ivvery colour bar blue” was Grandarse's diagnosis). We blamed the monsoon, which certainly had one alarming effect: it puckered the skin in a revoltingly puffy fashion, and brought forth a great plague of jungle sores on wrists and ankles. McMenemy painted them purple and gave us constipating draughts, and when the company radio picked up Bing Crosby singing
And where will you take her, Reynaldo?
I'll take her to San Pedro.
And where will she live in San Pedro?
In my little house on the bay.
it was immediately parodied as
And where will you take him, McMenemy?
I'll take him to the sick bay.
And what will he do in the sick bay?
Eat mepacrin all bloody day.
He was a good and popular M.O., noted for going in with the troops in attacks, during one of which, on a village, he was observed running ahead with a rifle, hopefully crying: “Pig-pig-pig-pig-pig.”
We were kept busy at Penwegon, but there was still time for occasional recreation. A makeshift cinema had been set up in a disused rice mill, and showed two British films, Champagne Charlie and Noel Coward's This Happy Breed, both featuring Stanley Holloway (what British film of that time didn't?), and even if most of the dialogue was inaudible, with hundreds of tons of monsoon water battering the roof, the screen images were welcome reminders of home for men sweating on repatriation. A few of Nine Section preferred more esoteric diversions, like cock-fighting, to which the villagers of Penwegon were devoted, and which must be about the only cultural link between Burma and West Cumberland. I never saw a cockfight myself, but I remember Grandarse counting his rupees and crying: “Awoy, Wattie, ista coomin' tae the main?”—an expression I wouldn't have expected to encounter outside the pages of Georgette Heyer. But then, Cumbrians are a breed apart from the rest of England, in sport as in other things; who else still wrestles on the green and whistles in the trail hounds from their fellside races and pursues foxes on foot for astonishing distances up and down the lake hills? Since the war a Cumberland farmer has stood for Parliament on a platform for the legalisation of cock-fighting and the docking of horses' tails; he lost his deposit, but his election meetings were packed out, and he left behind one of the great Parliamentary slogans: “Git the spurs oot, an' let's git crackin'!” Grandarse probably voted for him.
It may have been at Penwegon, but I rather fancy it was at a road-stop farther south and later on, that Corporal Peel received a deserved promotion to sergeant in another platoon, and since no corporal appeared to replace him, Nine Section found themselves groaning under the iron heel of their lance-corporal, a fate which they bore with commendable indifference, but which filled me with dismay, for this was Responsibility (unpaid, too), and I didn't welcome my first independent exercise of it.
Less than ten miles from the road and running parallel with it lay the Sittang river, now a dread name in Japanese memory, since it saw the final extinction of their armies; those from the north fled down along it, and for those to the west of the road it was the great barrier as they tried to escape east. I don't think I was ever across it, but we patrolled towards and along its west bank, saw scores of enemy bodies, bloated and disfigured, coming down in the swift-flowing current, and from time to time set up temporary posts between it and the road, and it was from one of these that I had my first taste of leading the section on patrol, probably some time in late June or early July.
We had a new platoon officer by this time, and he briefed me and other patrol leaders in a hut in a miserable hamlet not far from the west bank. I've forgotten his name, but not his moustache, which was luxuriant and apparently endowed with a life of its own, for it heaved and undulated even when he wasn't talking. Sergeant Hutton, who was taking another patrol (across the Sittang, I think), stood at his elbow as I was instructed to take the section to a village several miles down the river, settle in for the night, scout the country round the following day, wait overnight at the village, and come home the morning after. In the event of sighting or hearing of any significant Japanese activity I was to send a runner back at speed, and wait.
It was routine stuff, but I was quite sure it was being entrusted to me only because there was no one more experienced to send. With the battalion short of officers and n.c.o.s, and the platoon operating independently, the new subaltern was having to make do with what he had, and (doubtless on Hutton's advice) I was being given the cushiest of the three patrols, to an area where there was little likelihood of encountering Jap; the other hazard, Burmese bands engaged in the national pastime of brigandage, might be anywhere; the battalion had already had to deal with some of them.
My chief worry was not the bandits out there, but the ones at my back. When you've just escaped from your teens you have doubts about your ability to control and direct that kind of hard-bitten gang for two days in the field, there and back across twenty-odd miles of roughish country. However, the officer, who was possibly even more nervous than I was, seemed to take me for granted; he gave me a map and a compass and wished me luck, and Hutton cuffed my shoulder and said: “Awreet, son? Tek time, stick wid the river, an' ye'll be fine. Aye, and see if ye can pick oop a few eggs, eh?”
He was a psychologist, was Hutton; the mention of eggs made it seem a less desperate venture, somehow.
We struck across country in the rain to the river, which twists and turns a good deal in those parts. Sticking to it, as Hutton had advised, would add miles to our journey, but it was insurance against getting lost. The country was fairly open, but there were jungly patches and I wanted to avoid them as much as possible, so I kept the brown oily flood in view and before we'd gone more than a couple of miles we had made contact with the enemy—only one of him, fortunately, a short, bespectacled figure festooned with equipment, hanging about disconsolately and looking thoroughly lost. Forster, who was on point, covered him, and the Jap unslung his rifle and sat down. By the time I came up Forster had relieved him of his watch and was rifling his pack; the Jap sat blinking and looking wet.
I had no Japanese beyond “Banzai” and “Sayonara”, and when Parker tried him in Chinese he just gaped in a forlorn way; the contents of his pack suggested he was a medical orderly—certa
inly he was the least combatant Jap I'd ever seen. He looked about sixteen, and unlike most of his countrymen at that time was carrying a fair bit of fat. There was nothing for it but to send him back to the platoon, where he would be passed on for interrogation, and I was tempted to detail Forster, my most insubordinate element, as escort, but he was too useful altogether, so I sent Wedge. They trudged off, the Jap stolid and bandy-legged, with Wedge talking to him in Birminghamese. I said nothing about the watch, partly out of weakness, partly because while I disapprove of robbing prisoners, Forster had taken him and was entitled.
We marched on, and after an hour came to our first obstacle, a chaung (not marked on my map) which ran across our front and emptied into the main river. It was sluggish but deep, and I was just wondering whether to try it farther inland or swim across when Wattie pointed out that there was a canoe-like craft beached on the bank where the two streams met.
The Sittang, according to the gazetteer, is unnavigable in this region, and I'm not arguing, if its monsoon tributaries are anything to go by. The canoe made it across the chaung and back three times, but foundered on its final trip, and Parker and I had to flounder ashore. Fortunately it wasn't far, and the current was even slower than it looked, possibly because, to quote the gazetteer, the waters hereabout “carry a great deal of silt in suspension”: it was like wading through dirty custard.
We squelched on along the bank, and as the rain slackened and the sun became visible through the mist and cloud across the river, my spirits rose. We'd taken a prisoner, such as he was, and the fact that he was alone suggested that there was no large Jap presence in the neighbourhood, or he'd have been with them. That left the dacoits, who were reported to be using discarded Japanese weapons in their attacks on villages, and I've no doubt that as we marched I was remembering:
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