by Brian Mooney
I can only speculate that it had something to do with the responsibilities of commanding troops in battle – an occupation at which he had reputedly proved extremely successful during the 1941-42 retreat from Burma but which now he did not seem quite capable of.
I watched him day by day, during the course of that march, become weaker physically, more vacillating in character, and more indecisive in command. I thus began to wonder what on earth was going to happen to the rest of us.
But if Lentaigne was finding the march taxing, I was finding it revitalising and stimulating. I was bubbling over with vigour. Until we came to that mountain torrent which gave us all dysentery, where Lentaigne met his Waterloo, I was even under the impression that the terrain was healthy.
I suppose it was a natural enough misconception. It was hard to imagine that the clear water contained deadly elements of contamination. It was just another example of our total inexperience.
From the military point of view also we were comically ineffectual. We were inclined to expect a Jap to be hiding behind every bush. Lentaigne plunged us into an unnecessary night-alarm on one occasion and the defence platoons had to perform, in deepest darkness and under the most spooky conditions, an unnerving search through some small, mysterious huts discovered in the jungle. Mercifully they proved empty, but that didn’t prevent my men and I from becoming extremely frightened. We were afraid not of encountering some rage-intoxicated samurai, which seemed unlikely under the circumstances, but rather that, as we plunged our bayonets about recklessly in the heaps of straw lying piled on the floors, we might puncture a human body. Luckily, however, the only casualty from these operations turned out to be Agam Singh – thank God it missed his bloody eye – lightly japed in the forehead by my bayonet!
In actual fact the Japs were rather thin on the ground. I imagine that at this point in the campaign they were far too busy defending themselves from 77 Brigade around Mawlu (White City). In the battle for the group of small hills which made up that Stronghold, Calvert himself led the opening bayonet charge on 18 March. According to all the histories, the fighting was characterized by almost medieval hand-to-hand ferocity. Lieutenant Cairns, of the South Staffordshires, was attacked by a Japanese office wielding a two-handled feudal sword. The officer hacked off his arm. Lieutenant Cairns shot him. He then seized the sword and continued to lead his men until he dropped dying to the ground.
While this sort of engagement was going on within a hundred and twenty miles of us, we were being over-cautious. Yet from the point of view of natural hazards and obstacles we had become over-confident. We refused to believe in the presence of debilitating diseases. However, in the long run the climate and terrain were to prove even more destructive than the Japs.
The ubiquitous little men we had expected to discover everywhere were notably absent, but bloodsucking leeches, the disgust-evoking propensities of which we had considerably underestimated, lurked beneath every leaf.
The graceful fronds of the pampas grasses, supposedly elegant enough for the most refined flower arrangement, had blades on them as sharp as knives and as serrated as saw-edges which would cut your army-issue denims to ribbons with a single slash.
The elephant grass clumps and the romantic cane-brakes harboured blood-sucking ticks which carried typhus. They bored into your skin within minutes, leaving their blood-inflating bags of bodies like black bubbles on the surface of your skin. When you pulled them out, you invariably severed their rear parts – which were composed all of stomach – from their heads which contained the boring mechanism. The heads remained deep in your skin to suppurate, forming ulcers full of purulent matter which the flies fed on.
At night, the deadly anopheles mosquito brought its fearful doses of malaria, heralding its attack by a burning puncture and a scalding itch.
Several forms of bacillary and amoebic dysentery flourished, and naturally we all suffered from jaundice. From the face and eyes of the sufferer, however, this was difficult to diagnose, because we were all so heavily dyed by the yellow-coloured anti-malarial drug called mepacrine, which imparts a bright, brassy tinge to the skin, that jaundice is difficult to distinguish. But we knew all right when we had it, because it makes your shit turn white!
The ground round the villages teemed with hook-worm on account of the rooting pigs.
In the bamboo forests through which we were often forced to march uphill for mile after mile, the half-rotten stems fallen beneath the clumps were so thickly strewn that walking over them elevated you two to three feet above the ground. They were so slippery that it was almost impossible to retain your balance. In such a situation, our clothes drenched and discoloured with sweat, we had to struggle desperately to navigate the mules along the best possible line of advance. Often enough they could find no sure footing either and similarly got stuck. Then you would have a nervy, jumpy animal on your hands whose load had probably wedged in the low, overarching stems ahead.
When you fell flat you were presented with the frightful hazard of the sharp bamboo spikes which projected from their joints. Their purple, blackberry-coloured thorns were livid with poison, and were so sharp and punctured you so easily that you were not even aware of a prick.
At night, the air droned with mosquitoes; during the day it buzzed with flies of gnats. I sometimes saw Dal Bahadur’s hat, shoulders and pack black with them. We used to stagger along in single-file, dead-beat from exhaustion, every man holding in his hand a switch of greenery with which to beat the flies from the back and shoulders of the man in front of him.
Every so often a tiger-striped or panther-spotted horsefly would alight on your neck and make straight for your jugular. Before you could put your hand up, it would have drawn blood and flown off, leaving a swollen contusion.
The heat was intense. The plants in the jungle grew with fearsome vitality. I always felt they could hardly wait for one of us to fall dead. When that happened, they would barely bother to restrain their impatience. They just pounced. They laid hold of the corpse at once. In a matter of minutes the process had started which would reduce it to tilth.
I remember a particular occasion during one of our mid-day halts – it lasted about an hour – when Dal Bahadur sliced through the trunk of a plantain tree and laid out the leaves for us to sit on. When the time arrived for us to depart, Dal Bahadur pointed out that the centre of the trunk projected beyond the outward skin by the length of two feet. It had grown that much during the space of sixty minutes.
We harboured one night in a thicket of brambles. Where they sprang out of the ground they were as thick as your arm. They had transparent, ruby-red thorns on them as big as mussel shells and as sharp as scimitars, and where they arched over and trailed back to the ground would have covered a house.
I established Dal Bahadur to lay out our kits as comfortably as possible inside this hideous cage and then went off to attend Brigade Major’s conference. When I got back, he wasn’t there. Instead, Briggo had pinched the place and laid out his blanket. Dal Bahadur was skulking some distance away, looking rather hurt.
My own equipment was still in the place where he had put it, and all that was required was for me to make up my bed, stretch out beside Briggo, and go to sleep.
Instead, I decided to make a scene. After all, I had promised Dal Bahadur that I would look after him, and the occasion now seemed to have arisen where it was necessary to fulfil it.
‘Where’s Dal Bahadur?’ I demanded shortly.
‘He’s over there. I told him to go and make his bed somewhere else. It’s difficult to get a decent kip in private. He’ll be all right. Don’t worry.’ I saw red.
‘Get fuckin’ out! Get fuckin’ out and go back to where you came from. Don’t dare talk about privacy as if you were too good for a sepoy, or I’ll rip out your gizzard.’
I paused, panting with fury, to take a breath. Briggo looked shattered.
‘I will!’ I reiterated with murderous intensity. ‘I’ll rip out your gizzard. You know perfe
ctly well that we’re supposed to go round in pairs and officers must not make a pair with each other but must pair with their orderlies. Well, Dal Bahadur’s my orderly and I want him here!’
I pointed at Briggo’s bed like an avenging demon. My voice had risen several semi-tones in pitch and was verging on hysteria, and it looked as if I might do something silly. Dal Bahadur came slithering on his belly under the bramble branches to calm me down, but Briggo had already decided that discretion was the better part of valour. He capitulated and went away.
‘It’s a very funny sort of relationship you have with your orderly,’ he flung over his shoulder as his Parthian shot. ‘I don’t profess to understand
it.’
‘And what precisely do you mean by that? Are you implying that there’s something improper in it? Is that what you mean?’
My sheer boldness startled me as much as it must have shaken him. If he had said ‘yes’, it would have set in train a whole string of incalculable consequences – and we had enough on our plate already.
‘Well,’ he prevaricated, hardly knowing what to say.
‘I’m waiting for you to explain yourself.’
Waves of righteous indignation radiated from me, not on account of my innocence, which was non-existent, but on account of the fact that I intended to make an issue of it.
It did the trick.
‘Of course I don’t mean any such thing. You’re making a mountain out of a molehill.’
The concession did him great credit, and proved, moreover, that he was a wise and tolerant man. My behaviour had been perfectly outrageous.
There the incident ended. It does not redound to my credit, but I was in love! Thereafter nobody ventured to say a thing.
But if it was a pyrrhic victory, the encounter was still one I could not have avoided. I had pledged myself to Dal Bahadur. I could not permit anyone to kick him around. I would have felt dishonoured. It is, after all, precisely on its adherence to such droll concepts that the quasi-feudal, hierarchical structure of an army is founded.
What a sublime period that was! How full of moving experience and tender impressions!
I used to awaken every morning before dawn, then watch and wait for the light. One or two stars would be shining, wanly emphasising the ephemeral darkness. Sometimes they twinkled, but mostly they just stared at you and it was the leaves on the trees that winked. Then gradually the stars would lose their intensity and sink exhaustedly into day. Slowly the surroundings would assume shapes, yet remain empty of colour.
A dawn mist might flit between the towering trees, low down among the undergrowth. It would be so diaphanous – so removed from any suggestion of bodiliness – that you thought you might have seen a wraith, a genuine tree-sprite. Yet the leaves would be wet. A faint wind would stir tiredly the trembling tree-tops and the condensation would fall in drops. It would patter down in great plops. The dead leaves on the ground would respond with a positive clatter.
No matter how exhausting the previous day might have been or how late to sleep the night before, such awakening became my invariable pattern. I would find myself drawn outwards and upwards without any conscious volition. Imperceptibly such a state would expand to embrace a relationship with the world outside and with others. But the process was slow. It was so natural, however, that it appealed to me as having something elemental about it. Indeed, I felt myself to be indistinguishable from the subterranean life of gnomes and undines and sylphs and salamanders and plants and flowers.
I awake refreshed. As daylight increases and colour floods once more into the earth, it is like the flowing back through long disused channels, of rejuvenating blood to a corpse. Nothing is moving. Dal Bahadur lies beside me on his back, his blanket thrown carelessly aside.
Down the slope to my left, a valley plunges precipitately into shadow. Down there something is lurking indistinguishably – maybe a monkey, maybe panther, maybe Jap. Whatever it is, it is untouched as yet by any redemption of daylight.
But look! Beyond the tree-tops in the bleaching sky the sun is already tinting some wisps of cirrus.One early riser stalks past, hawking throatily. It is Shiv Jung. He has in his hand the entrenching tool with which to bury the tell-tale spoor – not out of concern for hygiene but for concealment. He will shortly be followed by others.
Some of the mules are eating; there is a crisp, crunching sound of cut-bamboo leaves being munched like breakfast cereal. The soldiers are beginning to get about and to light their fires.
Dal Bahadur sits up and contemplates his surroundings as if he does not believe in them. Evidently he is half asleep. He looks doubtfully towards me. I shut tight my eyes and pretend to snore gently but he is not deceived.
He leans lightly across my stomach in such a way that I cannot possibly ignore him. I gave him a light punch and he slumps back swiftly on his hunches. He regards me quizzically just at the moment when I decide to embrace him. He must have read my intention from my face.
Throughout most of the march we were accompanied by troops of monkeys. Exceedingly beautiful to look at and bubbling over with fun and vitality, their movements were correspondingly graceful.
Breathing the cooler air of the higher plateaux, we would break cover from the thickly afforested lower slopes to crest over the crown of some park-like expanse of hill. Here the trees would be growing extraordinarily tall and placed independently, like specimens in a botanical garden. In the tops of them, browsing languidly off the tips of the best, we would come upon a family troop.
They would not, however, on that account always take off prematurely. If we did not too obviously interfere with them, they would stay with us, eventually developing an almost child-like capacity to attract attention. They had to be liked.
Then suddenly on receipt of some preconcerted signal they would be away. Racing through the tree-tops at incredible speed, they used to remind me in their herd personality of a beautiful sailing ship. Each individual would represent one unit of her sails, but all drawing furiously to thrust that corporate personality onwards. They were bowling over the other side of the ridge, lolloping lazily from branch to branch in a movement that was almost slow motion, so suspended it was in its suspicion of speed withheld.
Most wonderful, though, in all their breathtaking performances, were their mellow and mellifluous voices – so high and pure in key and of such a carrying quality as could be heard for miles. Disappearing into the distance and getting fainter and fainter, their cries had a certain sort of sadness which never failed to tear at your heart.
They seemed somehow special. They did not indulge in the senseless pastimes and foolish chatter of others of their kind, but retained their dignity in front of humans. There was a sort of nobility in their demeanour – something priest-like – which made me understand why certain breeds of monkey have been worshipped. During the dry season, however, these monkeys were seldom encountered at lower levels.
Here, in the flat-lands through which ran the roads and railways – for example, in the paddy-cultivation and bamboo-jungle on either side of the Meza River – everything took on a completely different configuration and complexion.
Tramping through this sort of country in the height of the hot weather, you had to be quite an exceptional person to resist the manifold temptations which assailed you – temptations to succumb to panic.
Noon, after all, is the hour of Pan! At noon, then, this whole basking paddy-cultivation, with its carefully contrived bunds and levels shimmering and shivering under the blaze of the noontide sun, would don its special mask of equivocation and indifference. It would half-raise its saurian eyelids and assume a smooth, semi-sphinx-like smile as it simmered in the quaking silence of the sinister heat.
Across the flat, parched clearings where the earth gaped in cracks and fissures, the wall of the opposite jungle would be dancing and quivering. Inside it, the shadows would be black as ink.
A flock of snow-white egrets might take off swoopingly from a nearby mud-hole where
the tepid water still harboured a few gasping fish. They would rise triumphantly upon a lifting thermal, to circle centripetally like pieces of flapping paper. The piled-up concentration of interiorly boiling cumulus provided a stunning background of hot-weather, blue-blacked thunderheads.
All plant and animal life was suspended – dazed or dumbfounded by the heat. Teak jungles are the same. The trees shed their leaves at the onset of the hot weather and didn’t regain them till the rains. They exerted a peculiar, illusionist effect upon the onlooker. The columns of men trampling through them seemed strangely unreal. First you thought you saw a section shuffling through the leaf-carpet; then you didn’t see them; then you did again.
During our hourly halts, when we dumped our packs to the ground and stretched ourselves out to suck at cigarettes, the silence was palpably present. After the susurration of countless footfalls shuffling through dead leaves, you strained after some sound which would exorcize the numbing stillness. Yet words, if formed, failed you; they died on your lips for want of the will to articulate them.The sun, vertically overhead, beat down on the top of your skull.
It was at such moments, when the whole of Brigade Headquarters Column had been bulldozed into a stunned insensibility by the sheer weight of heat, and the quality of the silence induced by high temperatures was at its most torrid, that I used to try and detect, as a sort of private pastime, first the detachment, then the fall downwards, of every leaf.
As soon as the column had come to rest, unhitched its packs, dropped to the ground, and lit its cigarettes, I would unleash my antennae and obtrude them. Yes – I have a reaction – I can feel a leaf detaching itself – I can hear that crack!
Tracked with mathematical precision as it knocks – tock, tock, tock, tock – against various obstructions, it hits the ground with a crash.
Another leaf from a different direction detaches itself and strikes the ground – tock … tock, tock, tock, tock (not quite so regular this one). It has been blown off course by a slight wind. Rather a serious deviation actually. It nearly hit me!
