Chindit Affair

by Brian Mooney

  The projectile which landed was, in fact, far from being a piece of conventional artillery. It was, in reality, a gigantic mortar-bomb. In due course we referred to these as ‘flying dustbins’.

  Mortar-bombs, unlike shells, do not bore their way through the air by means of revolutions communicated to them from rifled grooves along an extensive barrel. They are fitted with fins just like aerial bombs and they are lobbed at you from a short, smooth, unrifled tube which makes their muzzle velocity extremely low. Their high trajectory assures that the projectiles can soar over hills, and in this respect they resemble howitzers.

  The contrivance which imparted to our own particular flying dustbin its velocity and impetus was short and blunt. As a consequence of this, the projectile, which was cylindrical like a dustbin and not conical like a shell and was not fitted with fins to keep it straight, simply turned over and over. It was its erratic flight through the air, incorporating these uncompromising aerodynamics, which created the nightmarish screaming noise.

  As it was impossible to predict on which part of its anatomy it would land, it had fuses sticking out all over it. When this incredible artefact came howling across the hills at you, containing about a ton of TNT, it landed with the sort of thud that knocked the stuffing right out of you. However, it wasn’t very accurate. It didn’t have to be. It achieved its objective by stunning every live creature within miles into stupefaction.

  The huge howitzer shells came whizzing over at the rate of about one a minute, while the flying dustbins arrived so regularly at dawn and dusk that you could set your watch by them.

  Grabbing my two bottles of rum, I ran for shelter and dived into a trench. Shells were landing with a ‘crunch – crump’, and every so often a giant teak tree, its roots loosened up by the explosions, would cant slowly sideways, then crash majestically to earth. I was constantly showered with mud and dirt. The birds and beasts departed, and during the interval between detonations an astonished hush settled on nature. It rained incessantly.

  Suddenly my self-control cracked and my morale broke. The loneliness of enduring the bombardment in a solitary slit-trench without the comforting assurance of Dal Bahadur to support me became absolutely intolerable. I went in search of the others. On my way, I stumbled upon a trench occupied by Jack Masters and Doc Whyte. As I passed it, a shell plummeted beside them and ploughed up great fountains of clods and clay. A red-hot piece of shrapnel splinter went ripping by me with a terrific whizz, and buried itself in a tree-trunk. It was as big as my arm. I was interested to remark that both Jack Masters’s and Doc Whyte’s faces were contorted with rictus. It was a tremendous alleviation to my torturing guilt-complex to realize that other people were similarly affected.

  I then found the trench where Thaman Bahadur and my NCO’s were sheltering. They were not in much better shape. I jumped into the trench, where my two bottles of rum helped persuade the NCO’s to accept me.

  After about half-an-hour the shelling suddenly came to an end. The NCO’s returned to their sections and sectors, but I remained behind in the trench. I wanted to talk over some of the day’s events with Thaman Bahadur.

  Darkness had descended and the rain had ceased. The moon arose, white and waxy and, with its gigantic halo, disproportionately huge. I was about to call Thaman Bahadur’s attention to the sight, when I became aware that he was no longer listening to me. We were by now out of our trench and perched on its edge. His gaze, instead of engaging my eyes, suddenly slipped past me. It focused itself somewhere over and behind – beyond my left ear, a territory where entry was probably forbidden to me. I felt that we were in the presence of those chthonic entities – psychic scavengers, ghouls – who haunt every blood-saturated battlefield. No sooner was this thought established than a great flapping night-hawk or owl swooped low over us, hooting throbbingly.

  Suddenly from the distance, incredibly far away, I heard a voice appealing for succour. It was calling plaintively, in that peculiarly garbled mixture of Hindi, Bengali and Gurkhali with which my men communicated with me – and there was no question for whom it was intended. ‘Help. Save me – I’m dying. Help!’

  It was intended for me. My skin pimpled into goose-prickles and I leapt to my feet.

  ‘Help! Save me! Murgaya – murgaya – I’m dying!’ Thaman Bahadur had gone white as a sheet.

  ‘It’s someone who’s lost,’ I said. ‘It’s one of the wounded. He’s been left out in the open. I’m going to find him.’

  In spite of the fact that Thaman Bahadur was plainly terrified, he contradicted me flat.

  ‘No, sahib!’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘No, sahib!’

  We confronted each other eyeball to eyeball, but he did not flinch. With marvellous dexterity – almost a sleight of hand – he grasped me by the neck. Although he was only a little man, I felt forced by his powerful grip to yield to him.

  Suddenly the voice sounded nearer, right up close, pleading with heart-wrenching pathos.

  ‘Help me! Help – help! I’m dying!’

  With a rush of understanding, I yielded. Thaman Bahadur threw me down into the bottom of the trench and knelt on me. I now understood that the voice could not belong to a human agency. It would have been impossible for a wounded soldier to have so quickly covered the distance between the first far-off cries pleading for succour and this last one, so near at hand.

  Thaman Bahadur had rescued me form God knows what vile contagion. He had used the same stratagem as Odysseus’s sailors had employed in binding him to the mast to prevent him answering the song of the sirens.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘I understand.’

  Imperceptibly he relaxed. After an embarrassed silence, he explained: ‘It’s a bhuta, sahib – an infecting spirit – we know about such things. I’ve had experience of them (he had seen the action at Habbaniya in Iraq and other places), and you must never answer them. They can take possession of you. They feed on the dead.’

  The great flapping nightjar, hawk, owl, goatsucker or vampire bat flew back overhead. Again the voice pleaded, ‘I’m dying – dying – dying’ and then sank dispiritedly away. I knew that Thaman Bahadur was right.

  Over the next few days Dal Bahadur returned to consciousness, and he gradually grew stronger. Nonetheless, on the third day after he had been wounded, my health collapsed so completely that I was hard put to it to keep myself going. Under these circumstances, I was invited to a ‘medical supper’. These were special banquets prepared by Doc Whyte and his orderly, a young Gurkha called Borubdar Bahadur, who had developed a cordon bleu flair for high quality – if improvised – cooking.

  Doc Whyte and Borubdar Bahadur had at their disposal what are called ‘medical comforts’, namely all those choice ingredients which come within the purview of a Chief Medical Officer of Brigade. They could afford to make these suppers fairly lavish. They were also very exclusive. To be invited meant that Doc Whyte considered you to be a genuine casualty. Evidently he saw me as such a case.

  ‘It’s no good,’ I had excused myself. ‘You’ll simply be wasting all Borubdar Bahadur’s talent. I’ll not be able to keep it down. It seems a pity to go to all that trouble.’

  ‘Never mind. You’ll get the satisfaction of the taste. Don’t be so bloody independent. Just accept it and enjoy it.’

  So I consented. The meal came completely up to expectations and also included a glass of whisky topped by a raw egg. Even the whisky and egg, however, did not manage to meet the challenge. Fifteen minutes afterwards, I had to go outside, and was terribly sick.

  Doc Whyte laughed good-humouredly.

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ he suggested. ‘Why not go down to the medical basha and spend the night with Dal Bahadur.’

  Our meeting was initially somewhat constrained. His torso was encased in plaster-of-paris. He could hardly move and barely speak. I lay down beside him. We both of us surrendered to the kind of intimacy that gradually merges with sleep.

  I awoke some hours later, confused by
my new location, to find the moon shining full in my face.

  ‘Sahib! Sahib!’ Dal Bahadur’s whisper came urgently. ‘Are you awake?’

  A summons from Dal Bahadur in the middle of the night was, whatever its nature, one that could not go unanswered.

  He enunciated just one word: ‘Tutti.’

  Now this word, in our argot, meant that he wanted to have a shit. It was certainly something to be welcomed as a sign of an awakening metabolism, but it was almost as challenging in its implications as if he had wanted to do the other thing.

  Slightly stunned by the appalling prospect which his demand presented, and not quite knowing how to meet it, I remained lying on my side and initially pretended still to be asleep.

  Sahib! Sahib!’ his whisper came again insistently. ‘Tutti!’

  There was no denying his request.

  Perhaps I ought to explain something of my difficulty. High caste Hindus, of whom Dal Bahadur was one, can be extremely fussy about cleanliness in fulfilling bodily functions. This is particularly so with regard to going to lavatory.

  Although Gurkhas in general are much more broad-minded than are their co-religionists in the plains about the mass of observations and inhibitions which make up orthodox Hindu behaviour, I was by no means certain how Dal Bahadur would react. It was a critical situation. He had been very relaxed about love-making, but helping him to have a crap was altogether a different kettle of fish. It was impossible for me to be sure that one or other of us might not become irretrievably defiled during the process. Such an eventuality could put him off me for ever. But it had to be risked.

  I sat up and examined his face by the moon’s light. It had that baffled expression which very old people wear, or those who are going to die, when they realize that they are no longer capable of performing humble bodily functions without assistance.

  I felt a rush of sympathy for his undignified plight. I said quietly, as if to a child, meaning to reassure him, ‘Certainly – certainly. Only hold it! I’m trying to think how to do it.’

  I hopped down from the improvised couch where all the wounded were lying in long rows hissing and grunting, but not a soul was about. There was no-one to advise me.

  In those days I was not very skilful at nursing. I realized I would have to improvise according to the inspiration of the moment. As a matter of fact, I hate pulling sick people about; I am always afraid I am going to hurt them. It is only after long experience that you realize how ruggedly you can handle them. The human organism, moreover, is at once so unpredictable and so resilient that – on the one hand – it can die with the expiry of a tiny breath and without any sign of injury, as in the case of Tej Bahadur, or – on the other – survive the most frightful pummelling, like my little friend.

  A bright metal object, rudely pushed under the bed where we had been reclining, flashed back the moon’s reflections and attracted my attention with its roguish light. It was my mess tin. Before retiring with Dal Bahadur to bed, I had brewed up a weak mash of tea and persuaded him to drink it. It was pretty well the first sustenance which had passed his lips since the wounding. Perhaps it was the tea which had instigated the bowel-movement.

  The use of the mess tin as an impromptu jerry in such potentially degrading circumstances was fraught with danger. I had no idea whether Dal Bahadur would accept it. However I picked it up gingerly as if it were already polluted, and presented it to his gaze with a look of enquiry.

  ‘Do you mind?’

  To my surprise he never batted an eyelid. He began raising his body painfully on his elbows so that I could shove it under him. By merciful providence, the bottom half of his body was naked, so we didn’t have the awkward business of unbuttoning his trousers. I stood over him – my legs astride his body – and supported his buttocks with my hands. The procedure was a stunning success.

  ***

  One afternoon several days later I was told to take a defence platoon up to the top of the hill. I myself was not to remain with them but to come back down. I suspected that I had lost Jack Masters’s confidence.

  And it is true that I was in a very curious mood for a British officer. I had quite ceased to carry a weapon, and went about completely unarmed. This could hardly have failed to attract attention.

  It was the only symbol, however, which I could think of to emphasize that I bore no animosity towards anybody – least of all towards the Japanese. As a matter of fact, we had long since arrived at that point where the only people any of us felt like murdering were our own generals.

  Shells had been crumping and thumping into the hillside for more than half-an-hour and, when I set out it, looked as if we were in for an attack. It would be just my luck if I got to the top while it was going in.

  As I wound up the narrow path to the summit, now so churned up by the mules and ponies bearing arms and ammunition to the beleaguered garrison as to be almost impassable, I could not avoid speculating about how it would all end. One good thrust on the part of the Japanese and we would be finished. One ought to be grateful, I suppose, that the enemy was equally debilitated. But perhaps this attack would be it. At any rate, it could only be a question of time before the Japs accumulated sufficient forces. Then we should be done for!

  Gazing into the leaden faces and lacklustre eyes of the lonely soldiers on guard-duty in their slit-trenches, it was impossible not to surrender to morbid emotions.

  Musing thus, I passed away from the area of the fortifications (a grand word for very impoverished and improvised slit-trenches) into no-man’s-land. Huge trees shot up all round me, towering towards the sky, and the ground was thick with dead leaves – the earth heavy with humus.

  It was that part of the track, about three quarters of a mile in extent, which we did not have sufficient soldiers to cover, so traffic passing up and down it had to be prepared to run the gauntlet. It was indescribably lonely. It also partook of that ghostly aura which ground regularly fought over begins to possess when numbers of people have surrendered their lives there.

  Leading my little band of indomitables, I felt insignificant almost to vanishing point, where all discriminations and distinctions are extinguished. The trek seemed to be taking an unconscionably long time.

  As we neared the summit, the shelling became more intense. To be out in the open, under these circumstances, with no access to a slit-trench which one could call one’s own, would be most unpleasant. On this occasion, furthermore, I did not make the mistake of failing to recognize that the Japs were ranging.

  They were ranging, moreover, with heavy howitzers slinging huge projectiles of over one hundred pounds in weight. To be caught under such an attack without protection would be disastrous. Imperceptibly we increased our pace.

  Presently we passed the place where Jim Blaker had been killed – in some odd way I was surprised to observe that it possessed no distinguishing feature (had I been expecting a commemorative tablet?) – and emerged into an open space.

  The huge forest giants towered up all round it, and access was achieved via the narrow path which I had been following through an imposing barbed wire cheveux-de-frise. The trees inclined gently towards the centre as if silently worshipping a solemn narthex, and I have often wondered whether there might not in reality have been something magical about this place, for it, after all, was still the country of the Kachins, who were celebrated magicians.

  When I first put my foot within the circle, it was still humming with activity. A huge pile of boxes occupied the centre. They were empty crates of grenades. Even as I watched, Gurkhas were running like ants back and forth from this improvised ammunition dump, distributing to their fellows its deadly eggs.

  Suddenly a gigantic salvo of artillery – the anticipated one-round-gunfire – landed just beyond us on the forward slope. Its effect was instant: everyone vanished into their slit-trenches, leaving me and the platoons standing idly isolated.

  I shooshed them through the barbed-wire cheveux-de-frise like a nanny shepherding her charges
through the turnstiles at the zoo. Once inside, they still seemed completely dazed. It is a difficult situation taking over an unreconnoitred position at the inception of a powerful attack. I had to go around squeezing them into other people’s fox-holes.

  When I had done so, I found myself standing on my own. The tamped, naked earth of the hill feature began drumming with rain.

  I had to make a decision. One option was to promenade all round the place out in the open, searching for the headquarters trench of Colonel Harper, and report that my men were distributed over his position – thus passing the duration of the attack in his company, which I didn’t want to do. Without a weapon I was going to have an awful lot of explaining to do, and in any case I was going to look pretty silly. The second option was to return – I had been given my orders – the way I had come.

  Another salvo of projectiles crashed into the hillside just below where I was standing. One of the great teak trees canted crazily. I knew at once where the next one would land – it would land on me. I decided then and there that I had had enough.

  Little peaky faces with bright, beady eyes were peering at me from every nook and cranny. They were Alec Harper’s Gurkhas. Seeing as how not one of them, either by gesture or by nodding inclination, offered me shelter – after all, I was not their officer, I was a stranger to them, and Gurkhas are incurably clannish – I turned back.

  The path stretched down precipitously into the darkness of the forest. I felt sure that it was safe to follow, and I set off.

  When I come to contemplate what followed, it seems almost inconceivable that I did not disappear without trace. It ought to have been one of those cases which occasion the classic, ‘Missing – Believed Killed in Action’ formula of the casualties lists. Instead, I sustained a miraculous escape.