Land of the Living

by Georgina Harding

  We have to take him prisoner, one says, holding all that back. One says it because one knows it’s what one’s supposed to say. A man with his hands in the air is surrendering, even if Japs don’t surrender.

  Maybe it was just a ruse and there were other Japs right by them, waiting, watching, but this man seemed so abject that you just had to believe in him.

  Taking him prisoner was the only thing to do. Or was it? What were the rules for such a situation, out here? Tommy and Luke were closest. They moved forward, pulled him up from where he grovelled, tied his hands behind his back, but slowly, without conviction. What was the point of taking a prisoner here, of tying a man’s hands, when you were nowhere and had nowhere to go? You took him prisoner simply because you could not leave him where he was and alive. That would have been careless, stupid. But stupid also to take him with you. You led him on along the track, stumbling behind, and when you stopped you shared your water with him, and he wiped his mouth with the muddied backs of his tied hands so that his face became muddy too, and after a while one of you untied his hands because he was stumbling so much and holding you all back, and he grunted some thanks. And he muttered and grunted in that language of his, for all your efforts to hush him, you knowing all the time the need to be silent, knowing that in the jungle sound made a man visible and that only silence allowed him to see.

  Then you had him quiet for a stretch. Five of you then, not four, but walking as before, he making no more or less noise than anyone else. Five men in step, and the dullness returning.

  Until something alarmed him. Did he hear something, some call that you took to be a bird call but was actually some sign they had? Or possibly he recognised some point on the track. Most likely it was that, that he noticed some tree or rock and suddenly knew where it was that they were going. Because he cracked again. Burst out into his gibberish.

  Tommy, quick as a flash, put a hand across his mouth.

  You all must have been thinking it, all four of you. But it was Tommy who took the initiative. Tommy who was so quick. Who would be most himself high above the saddle, bent to the horse’s neck, whipping it on, no thought but for the finish.

  Little Tommy was pretty much the same height as the other man. Stronger, though. The Jap was weak. He was not a young man anyway and he had the pinched look of a clerk, someone who had been desk-bound until he was brought out to this war, and the more feeble and pinched for all the time he had spent in the jungle. There was no contest.

  You saw it, and in your mind, in the future, you would see it again and again.

  Jap and jockey, two wiry little men clasped together, and one takes out his knife. And one folds over as the other steps back and raises his arm, fastidiously from what must no more be touched, and lets him go.

  So quickly, it happened, and the rest of you saw it. You saw it and you heard it, heard a sound you’d never forget. The action happened in the space of a glance, you hearing, turning, seeing, the man folding and falling, all done before you could speak.

  Only you didn’t speak. You were silent.

  Even the jungle seemed to have been silent, but for only that moment. Now the sounds started up again, loud, so loud, the insects and the birds and the monkeys, separate eerie calls from above and around and below them.

  And Tommy said – with that cocky Newmarket look of his, or maybe defensive as much as cocky at that moment, chin up, eyes direct, face taut – Well we couldn’t take him on any more, could we?

  What could one say to that?

  So they said nothing, but left it to the jungle. The jungle seemed to be saying what hadn’t been said. The sounds must have been the same sounds that they had been hearing all day, only now the meaning of them was different. Strange, how the jungle’s sounds could mean whatever you thought them to mean, as if all that wild and savage place became only the reflection of your thoughts. Before, it had been the jungle that was frightening. The jungle held the evil and the danger, it so vast about them and they so small within it, lost, searching. Sometimes there was a moment when the light and the sound magnified and there was hope. Here, the birds and the insects and the creatures had said. Here, this must be your way through, as the sun’s rays penetrated from some sky high above. This is the way back to the rest of the force and safety. And then, as the air darkened once more, No, this isn’t the way, this isn’t your place, this is not your world, not for your kind. This is nature and you are nothing. You, your footsteps, your guns, are utterly insignificant.

  Small, they were. Even smaller, whatever paltry argument of necessity they might offer in their defence. When wrong was done, the jungle knew.

  Walter was walking again, and the rest of them had fallen in behind him. It was the four of them again now, and the jungle went on speaking.

  That was when Walter lost the path and led them into the thorny bamboos. He couldn’t have been watching where he was going. None of them perhaps was watching too well just then. When they got out from the thicket and the vegetation opened up they searched and found the path again, more focused now. They fell back into diamond formation, Walter ahead, he to one side, Luke at the rear, Tommy away to the other side where they did not have to face him. There was that thicket between them now and what they had left behind. But still, none of them could quite face him.

  He wouldn’t have had a word for it then. He had one now. He had it from Hussey and Hussey had it from the Nagas. It was genna, wasn’t it? There were rules one played by, and it didn’t do to break the rules.

  Though actually, what happened next didn’t need any special explanation. If you looked at it rationally, it could all be connected, the one event to the other, cause and effect, plus just an element of chance.

  This thing with the Sikhs might have been why the Jap had fled, come to them blubbing, and why he had cracked again when he saw that they had come close to the spot.

  Tommy saw first and whistled.

  A single sharp bird-like note, but there seemed to be a kind of self-justification in it. See, this is what Japs do.

  That miserable little man must have had something to do with this.

  There would have been some sense in that.

  Yet when he looked inside himself it seemed to him that all that was to follow was a consequence of what had just been done, or not consequence but intertwining. All these events intertwined.

  They took every caution with their approach. They circled without a sound. First the Jap, and now this. They had known that he could not have existed entirely alone. That was why Tommy had done what he had done. Where one Jap was, there must have been others, other Japs about not so far away or long before. There had been the tracks they had followed. Now there was this clearing. They circled until they were sure that the space was empty – empty, that is, save for the death it contained, a bare clearing in the jungle that had been a Jap camp, and all that was left were marks on the ground and the remains of a fire and the Sikhs, and nothing alive. They had been tied with their turbans, their bared heads falling forward, the beards and the long loosed black hair, their torsos tied round and round with the khaki cloth, the cloth knotted and the loose ends falling away ribboning into the mud.

  There was barbed wire twisted about their heads. You’d think the Japs would have used the turbans as blindfolds and the wire to tie, but no, they hadn’t done that. Two of them had their eyes gouged out by the wire. The third had seen, and his eyes were open still.

  The horror went to their guts. Over the hum of the flies came the crude human sound of Luke vomiting.

  Words dropped heavy as stones.

  Devils.

  They must be close.

  How close?

  Can’t leave these men here. Take out your spades and dig.

  What about the Japs?

  They’ve gone, haven’t they?

  But these chaps, they must be Hindus? Don’t they get cremated or something?

  Hindus, whatever they are, they’re men.

  Walter spoke
as he would have wanted to speak before. Walter’s face stern, the hollows on his cheeks running deep, Walter in that minute seeming stern as a preacher in a pulpit.

  They’re men and we’ll bury them as we’d like to be buried ourselves.

  As if decency could mend atrocity.

  Oh Walter.

  Did Walter see the pattern too?

  Three graves to be dug and they had been digging in turn, digging hard and fast, each of them in turn standing lookout. They weren’t digging the graves deep but even so there were numerous roots to be broken through close to the surface, and it had taken an undue amount of time. He had handed his spade to Tommy and walked a distance up to the edge of what had been the Jap camp, and taken out a new bundle of bidis to have a smoke, and as he walked the mist came in between him and the others. Mist could move here in the high jungle suddenly and unpredictably, as if it had a will of its own. He heard someone swear. Luke, maybe. Luke was the closest to where he stood, the others working on the graves just below. Luke had got bolder since they’d been on patrol. He was going to make a good soldier after all. Now we’re in the bloody clouds, whoever it was – most probably Luke – said. The digging becoming the more determined. Surely they were deep enough now? They were all of them impatient to move on and make camp somewhere else. They did not want to spend the night here with the ghosts.

  He tore the paper from the bidis, put one to his mouth. These little Indian matches were poor enough anyway, having to be struck away from the body in case they broke, then nurtured in a cupped hand, making it a job to get the bidi alight in the damp of the enclosing cloud. From below came the sound of the spades. Only with hindsight would he hear the Japs coming. At the time it seemed almost that it was the mist itself that was making the sound, moving down on them so thickly between the trees.

  But there was no mistaking the shrieks. He knew them exactly. He had heard them before, in battle. The cries that the Japs made in attack.

  Take cover.

  Crouch down, the wood of a tree between you and the sound. One hand to the tree, to the damp bark, the red tip of the bidi put out amid the leaves at your feet.

  See the sounds: shadows turning into leaping splay-kneed grotesques with shrieking mouths and bulging eyes, thrusting with bayonets and thrashing with swords.

  Hear a cry that is recognisably Luke’s. See Luke coming out of the cloud, close to your tree, Luke the graceful runner, running towards you, half his face cut off yet still he is running, so close to you he runs before he falls.

  You have your gun in your hand by now, but there is only mist into which to shoot, white, thick, blinding. And if you shoot then they’ll know that you’re there. Because they might not know you exist. They might think there are only three soldiers, not four. They might never have seen you coming.

  So he didn’t shoot after all. He did nothing but run, run upwards first through the trees, telling himself that he would circle back, he would find a break in the mist and the trees through which he would turn and come back and fight. And he kept running and stumbling upwards and upwards, and the trees seemed to close behind and to the side of him and not to let him through, and the mist never broke, and he ran and ran.

  When he stopped, the shrieking was over. He didn’t know if he stopped because it ended or if it had ended while he was running. He listened now to the quiet that seemed to close in around him. He heard sporadic harsh calls from the Japs that seemed to get closer together and then recede. He tried to place them, the way they went. Then after a while he didn’t hear them. Once the quiet was complete there was no distance any more. He dared not move. He didn’t know how far he had run. He had come in the only direction that had seemed open to him, stopped at last at a point where creepers twisted together in a wall across his path, and there he stayed, until suddenly the mist turned to darkness. It happened in an instant. After that he couldn’t very well go anywhere, but only hunker down in a night that was like dank black velvet and wait out the hours, and try to empty his mind and make that dark too.

  The blankness lasted a breath at a time. He inhaled. Exhaled. Felt all of his body trembling. Felt the sweat chill on him, on his skin and in his clothes. Then the horror came back.

  He turned to reason. Reason wasn’t sleep but it was calm. Order. Man-made and measurable, like the minutes. He reasoned so deliberately that almost he saw the shapes of the words he was telling himself as he told them. His being there was sheer bloody fluke. It was one of those damn chances that saved a life, that he had exchanged places with Tommy just then – damn chance again, bloody, stupid fluke that he had wanted a smoke just then, and that they had finished a short time earlier the last of the bidis he carried on him, so that he had picked up his pack to get out another bundle of bidis, so that he had his pack and his water bottle and even some rations, and his blanket and his cape. All of his kit except his spade. His spade had been left behind. Poor bloody Tommy had his spade. Don’t think, just don’t think, not of Tommy, not of any of them. Don’t think of the digging or of Walter or the graves or the Sikhs, or of Tommy and the Jap, before. That way thoughts are no longer words but pictures, and pictures you cannot deal with, not right now, maybe not ever.

  He heard dawn before he saw it, a signal passed down from high in the canopy where for the birds at least there must be sky. Down on the underfloor there was only a seep of light. He looked about him in the blur, packed up his things, rolled up the blanket and cape with which he had wrapped himself and strapped them to his pack. Everything there, all neat, except for the spade. But that didn’t matter, did it? A soldier needed his spade only to bury his shit, and his comrades. And he didn’t feel like a soldier any more, not here, not now. He felt no more than a man, or an animal, only an animal crouched on the forest floor watching for the dawn. Which way had he come? He knew that he had climbed upwards, so he looked down the slope. He had run in panic. Everywhere he looked, it looked the same. He could find no track of himself on the ground. There was a compass in his pocket but it could not give him the directions that mattered, if he wanted to find the place where they had been. He had come up. If he wanted to go back, he must go down. If he wanted to go back, to find them. That simple thing was clear. So he would go down. But should he go straight, or to the right, or to the left? There was something else they had been taught in training, that when men were lost one man tended to veer to the right and another to the left. Which way then should he go, if he was to find them? What sort of man was he? And what was he looking for and what would he find and what would he do when he found it? They were surely dead. The spade then, he would have to find the spade. His spade – or someone else’s spade would do. But there were graves already dug. He thought that they would not mind sharing graves, with only one man there to dig. Three graves. Three Sikhs. Three British soldiers. The spade then would be only for filling the graves. But why all this burying, what need was there? Because Walter must do it. If Walter saw the need, then he must do what Walter wanted. Walter would have them do it because of what had gone before, because of what the four of them had done – and it was four, wasn’t it, not Tommy alone?

  What Tommy had done, the four of them had done. All for one and one for all. That was how the words went, wasn’t it? The words came from a story he once knew. Men with swords and curling feathers in their hats. Three Musketeers, and D’Artagnan, four men in all, and one survives.

  Was it possible that any of the others had survived? He must see, and at least he must bury. And if he was the only one, then he would carry the memory for the four of them. All for one. It would be his, all his, to carry on.

  He checked his watch, reckoned the time he had spent searching. He had tried to search systematically, as far as the vegetation permitted, zigzagging down the slope, trying to control his direction and his thoughts, this way and that but always down, always looking about him, covering what must surely be a wide enough swathe of ground.

  Incrementally, it seemed, the mist had thinned as h
e walked, one layer removed and then another, and as it thinned he heard increasingly the chitter of insects, and birds close above him, enlivened by the light. But it was a tenuous grey light that would soon turn to rain. The living sounds died, to be replaced by the sound of rain on the canopy, rain that hammered the tops of the trees and then washed down between the leaves, erratic at first, held where the leaves were most dense, finding its way along and between and pouring through the openings, then converging in streams on the forest floor, destroying whatever tracks remained, if he could have found them, pouring over whatever lay there on the ground, stumps, rotten branches like bodies, as if there was only one element to which everything must return. And he had his rain cape, and though the water streamed down his face, his body within the cape was dry. He had never felt so entirely alone as he did beneath that rain, with his cape over his head and the world dissolving about him. After three hours he abandoned the search. He took a compass bearing and determined what he thought was most likely to be the direction of the British force.

  Most courageous are the Belgae

  An airmail envelope. A sheet of onionskin paper scrawled in Hussey’s tight slanting script.

  Mokokchung, 14 December 1947

  My dear Charlie,

  I hope demob life is treating you well. I shall be back myself sometime in March, the first time I’ll have been back in poor old England since before the war. I will be handing over shortly to my Indian replacement. Goodness only knows what he’ll make of it, he’ll be as alien to the place as I ever was, coming up from the plains – and there’s no kind of man a Naga distrusts more than the Indian from the plains. I think they don’t give a damn about us, in either London or Delhi – or I don’t mean myself, but the Nagas, who are nothing but a nuisance to them all. So much easier it would be if they just disappeared into the jungle and the past. But enough of that. I can bore you with that when I see you. What I wondered was whether I might take you up, when I do get home, on your possibly careless invitation of some time ago, and come and see you and see your farm? What a good thing that must be to be doing, these days of all days, to be working the land. The best, in fact. My regards to your wife. It will be a pleasure to meet her.