Chindit Affair

by Brian Mooney

  105mm shells were crumping into the crest as I descended and to hear the crack and splinter of teak trees disintegrating under their impact was a tempering experience. It was like being pursued by a giant. Even more disturbing was the fact that the flying dustbin had joined in. The combination of all these noises – the wail of the passing projectiles and the howl of the mighty mortar-bomb together with the wrench and shiver of timber – was truly terrifying. It is hardly surprising that I panicked.

  Mysterious explosions – or rather, explosions that presented themselves to my awareness as mysterious because at the end of their trajectory the shells were not audible – kept up hunt-the-slipper with me, and it became possible to conceive of them as endowed with a seeker-device targeted on me. Looking back over my shoulder in that characteristic gesture symptomatic of fear, I started to run.

  All at once, I spied something happening just ahead of me which halted me dead in my tracks. I had stumbled on a group of soldiers. Who the hell were they? They looked indefinably different. An officer, easily distinguishable by his more confident manner and masterful attitude, was marshalling them, but the soldiers were responding to him clumsily, their face revealing them as inexperienced boys.

  I was on the point of going up to them and explaining that I was lost, and asking where the hell were we, and in which direction, pray, was Brigade, when something withheld me.

  Their high cheek bones, slit eyes and small stature did, indeed, make them almost indistinguishable from Gurkhas. But why the carefully camouflaged combat uniforms they were wearing – so neat and clean – which we did not have? And why the funny, flower-pot-shaped tin hats? Even if they could just possibly be confused with our own soldiers on account of facial resemblance and similar characteristics, it was inconceivable that the officer could be one of ours, for he was totally unlike anything we possessed.

  Belatedly the realisation dawned on me that they must be Japs!

  Several of them began coming in my direction. They seemed to look me directly in the face. The jungle, at that point, was pretty thick – but composed largely of tall teak trees with sparse undergrowth, a circumstance which, however, could be confusing to vision. But they were only twenty yards away. I was certainly convinced that they saw me.

  It was nothing short of a godsend that I was not carrying a gun. Had I possessed one, I should certainly have responded by making some sort of movement. As it was, I leaned quietly against a tree.

  I had discovered in myself a propensity for acting unpredictably, and in a calm and collected manner, at the moment of danger. I can only explain this in the present instance by further insisting that I had lost my bellicosity. My outlook was that of the unprejudiced observer – a sort of referee. I am convinced that this attitude had its effect.

  The Japanese soldiers advancing towards me regarded me so incuriously that I might have been a statue. They were quite near enough for me to see their eyes. These remained unenlightened by any spark of recognition.

  I did not move. Presently they turned to their right and disappeared up

  the hill.

  After a short interval, the machine-guns began rat-tat-tat-tat-tatting and there was the crash of grenades. My panic returned in full force and I began running like one possessed.

  Luckily this time I was running in the right direction. I landed up flat on my belly on the lip of one of our machine-gun posts. It was manned by two soldiers of the King’s Own and I found myself gazing at them full in the face.

  ‘Hullo,’ I said to them stupidly, making no attempt to conceal that I was frightened.

  ‘Come inside,’ they said laconically, without demanding any explanations.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Getting Out

  Somewhere about 15 July orders arrived for us to abandon Point 2171 and withdraw. At much the same time we received news of Mike Calvert’s success with 77 Brigade in capturing Mogaung. Chinese troops were also sweeping south towards that city. Such developments all made things considerably easier for us.

  I had been aware for some time that Jack Masters was locked in an unprecedented struggle with his higher commanders. It revolved around the bitter controversy then raging about whether or not the Brigade was physically fit and whether we all ought to be flown out. Stilwell still insisted that we were in perfectly good shape and were simply not doing our duty.

  The argument had been conducted via signal and counter-signal under the most testing conditions. It had continued throughout the whole period of occupation of Point 2171. We did not, however, foresee it resulting in such a resounding victory on Masters’s part as actually to cause us to retreat.

  A rustle of excitement rippled through the ranks when this news reached us, but it didn’t do to let it run away with you. There still remained many intractable problems to be solved, many insuperable obstacles to be surmounted.

  Principal among these, I need hardly say, was our commitment to caring for our casualties. In view of Dal Bahadur’s injuries – although he was now making excellent progress – this was naturally an important priority for me. Excluding the walking wounded, we had about sixty serious stretcher cases to carry out and convey to some point where we could build a light-plane strip and get them evacuated.

  The decision over our evacuation had been wrested out of Stilwell by sheer argumentative skill, but – oddly – the day set for the final execution of the project arrived almost too quickly. I was in a lather of apprehension about the whole thing. Only the preceding evening one of our patrols had returned with information that the Jap presence was still straddling our rear. It did not seem that we would be able to get away without fighting for it, yet a battle – with so many wounded to care for – was to my mind unthinkable.

  At eight o’clock that night Jack Masters summoned his inner cabinet. It was the first occasion during the operations that such a Council of War had been convened. It was a measure of the desperation of all concerned that it was even considered. All the column commanders attended. Masters presented his decision to withdraw along a particular route as a calculated risk. The assembled mandarins endorsed it. It was the only path which offered the slightest prospect of success and to have hesitated over the choice would have been tantamount to surrendering the initiative.

  It was as a consequence of this decision that on the following morning I found myself leading the whole bloody Brigade in its attempt to get away.

  It was a beautiful day. As the sun rose, it shone with dazzling splendour upon the droplets of moisture decorating the feathery bamboo. I was three miles from the crest of Point 2171 and well on my way.

  Since long before dawn the wounded had been assembled and got out onto the path escort. It was a pathetic sight. This collection of the wrecks of battle hobbled forth on their sticks and crutches and out into the night. When Dal Bahadur rode past me on his pony, however – such had been the speed of his recovery – I felt strangely proud.

  As the defence platoons had been pressed into service for stretcher-bearers, all Masters could muster by way of an advance guard was one section. That section was the one led by Shiv Jung.

  He and I were together, therefore – we were already high on the slope of the opposite mountain and were congratulating ourselves that the withdrawal was going splendidly – when two of our foremost scouts came rushing back and reported they had stumbled on a party of Japs.

  I honestly didn’t know what to do. Shiv Jung and Thaman Bahadur and I gazed at each other in consternation. Already the stretcher-bearers and the walking and mounted wounded were bunching dangerously as the momentum of our advance checked, and then came to halt. Dal Bahadur sat on his pony close to me. Just behind was Doc Whyte. If we encountered the enemy – even in the shape of a scattered machine-gun burst – it would rip directly into this vulnerable soft belly.

  I consulted Doc Whyte. The varieties of tactical disposition you can make with one section are severely limited. He agreed that I should return to the bed of the chaung where Mas
ters had probably established temporary headquarters and try to rustle up some reinforcements. Meanwhile, he would take responsibility for Shiv Jung’s section and attempt to keep the impetus of our movement going.

  I thanked him, consigned my men and Dal Bahadur to his merciful care, and hurried the two miles back. So great was my mental intensity that I seemed to make this journey in a matter of minutes. The bed of the chaung, however, when I arrived there, presented such a scene of disorganisation as made the slopes of the mountain which I had left seem by comparison a veritable paradise.

  Alec Harper was down there. He was perched on a huge banyan root and appeared to be wrestling with a mule. He looked like Mithras in the act of killing the bull. The giant peepul tree towered above and around him, extending downwards from its boughs its aerial radicles, and at exactly the point where he was standing the floodwater of some past inundation had excavated the bank. It had exposed a tangle of serpentine roots of labyrinthine complexity. The whole tableau – a sort of Laocoön – looked like a glyph of some stupendous group of antique statuary.

  Nobody took any notice of me. They were too busy rescuing the mule which had shed its load and tripped over the bank.

  From the opposite incline – that incline up and down which I had pounded so many times on the afternoon of Dal Bahadur’s wounding, and which stretched upwards towards the top of the hill – there extended an eerie silence. It was that slope which erstwhile had accommodated the slit-trenches of the defence platoons, Masters’s command post, and Doc Whyte’s Forward Dressing Station. Heretofore it had been humming with activity. Now it looked bleak and deserted. Only one or two derelict pieces of equipment and the abandoned earthworks bore witness to its former importance.

  Every so often, plainly in accordance with some complicated plan, groups of Gurkhas scuttled across it, as they withdrew from Point 2171. I watched them with admiration as they retreated into their lay-backs. Neither Masters nor the Japs were anywhere in evidence.

  I transferred my attention to the bed of the chaung. Everything seethed with chaos. The mules seemed to have taken it into their heads to behave with the temperament of prima donnas. The mule-leaders were swearing at them under their breaths, with restrained passion. The whole place was chock-a-block.

  Still there was no sign from the top. The Japs, apparently, were still in blissful ignorance of the fact that we had gone. I went up to Alec Harper and asked him who was in command there. As he was the only officer it sight, it was pretty obvious he was.

  ‘I am,’ he snapped.

  I apologized and told him what I wanted but he declined to grant my request. Nor did he seem, on receiving my news that there were Japs ahead, unduly put out. We were all so hard pressed to fulfil our own obligations that no-one was much concerned with those of others.

  I realized that I had wasted my time and my energy and, frantically pushing past the mass of mules and men who were blocking the path, set off back to my own men.

  Rather an euphoric air prevailed among my forward section when I reached them, and Shiv Jung, Thaman Bahadur and Doc Whyte were laughing – presumably from relief.

  ‘What is it? What’s happened?’ I enquired, somewhat dazed.

  Doc Whyte was wearing a smug expression. Smithy appeared from the rear with another officer, apparently alerted by Alex Harper that all was not well with the head of the column – and would we please get a move on!

  Shiv Jung beckoned me ahead. I followed him down the path into the bamboos to see what he had discovered. It was a perfectly co-ordinated, yet quite unarmed, defensive position. Going around this strong-point where the enemy had planned, with considerable ingenuity, to receive us, was rather creepy. It could only have been abandoned, according to the indications, a few minutes before. Several cooking-fires were still smouldering and beside them, dumped from upturned eating-bowls, were the remains of the morning rice.

  Shiv Jung plunged his index finger disrespectfully into one pile to demonstrate that it was hot. It seemed like a sort of miracle.

  So we got out. Several days after the retreat from Point 2171, we had retired sufficiently beyond the possibility of Jap pursuit to be able to consolidate ourselves, search out a strip of paddy cultivation, construct a light landing strip, and fly out our wounded. Dal Bahadur was evacuated.

  Mogaung, when we entered it, was in a condition of disorganisation and decay which was almost beyond belief. It occupied a low-lying site near the river and, as the ground seemed to be more or less permanently water logged, the houses were built on stilts. They were also constructed of timber. This fact alone was sufficient to account for most of them having been burnt to the ground. Those that had escaped this calamity were roofless.

  Luckily the defence platoons managed to misappropriate a relatively sound Burmese-style mansion in the quarter allotted to them.

  Corpses – our own and the enemy’s – were lying about everywhere without any attempt having been made to bury them. They turned up in the most disagreeable places – rotting on the lavatory, for example – and were in every state of decomposition. Their putrefying smell hung over the city like a miasma.

  One day I took at trip into town to inspect the Buddhist Monastery. It, also, was without a roof. The mighty teak timbers of its columns rose up all round me, looking inappropriately garish, for they were covered in gilding and red lacquer, their lower members encrusted with mirror-fragments in mosaic.

  A colossal reclining statue of Buddha, using its hand as its pillow, occupied the centre of the building – now a space open to the sky. The lush vegetation of a tropical climate sprouted up all round it, and through the cracks in the pavement, liberally manured by the heaps of elephant dung which lay around – for the place had been used as a stable – there thrust seedling peepul and banyan trees, some of them ten feet high, although only two years old.

  That a place of worship should have fallen into such a state distressed me quite disproportionately. I returned to my billet chilled to the bone. As daylight drained away and evening descended with its sombre invitation to deeper depression, I was visited by an onset of twitches and shivers. Every joint and tendon in my body complained with an intolerable ache.

  Surrendering to the malaise, I crawled to that part of the house where the defence platoons had laid out my groundsheet. Stretching myself upon it, I pulled the blanket up over my head and went to sleep.

  My temperature must have doubled as I slept, for I awoke suddenly bathed in sweat and reeking of that strange rubbery smell which characterizes the body when it is feverish. Thaman Bahadur was kneeling beside me. A ring of my Gurkhas stood at a respectful distance, solemn as owls, and I gained the impression that they were expecting my demise.

  A brilliant moon shone outside, lapping the ground like quicksilver. It was plainly visible from where I lay. The place had no walls; it was simply a roof and a few pieces of floor on stilts five feet above the floodwaters.

  My fever had not abated during my sleep. I was consumed with ague and thought I was dying. I did not want any witness to my passing – much less interference – and eventually managed to persuade Thaman Bahadur to leave me and take the Gurkhas away. They retired through several side rooms to a place practically opposite me, where I could observe them, and call to them if I needed assistance. It was across a great, gulf-like, central living-room which had lost its floor and from the depths of which the frogs croaked continually. I was submerged once more in the swamp of delirium.

  Suddenly young Lawrence appeared – but so realistically that I forgot for a moment that he had been killed. I made a movement to welcome him and my heart dilated with joy. Instead of responding to me, he assumed a sullen and threatening mien totally unlike his real personality, and I recalled with a sensation something like a blow on the chest that he was dead.

  ‘Why didn’t you stop him,’ he hectored me ‘when you knew by your own confession what it meant? Why didn’t you stop him?’ ‘Who? ’ I stammered.

  ‘The shoe-sh
ine boy – I mean the shoe-shine boy at Jhansi station – the one who presented me the garland. You knew then that it meant I was done for. Why didn’t you prevent it? Why didn’t you prevent it?’

  He wailed as his wraith disappeared like a mist into the glittery moonlight.

  Then in his place there stood another figure, also a British officer. I recognized it as Mike MacGillicuddy. There was a little round red hole neatly drilled in the middle of his forehead, and he had taken off its hat the better for me to see this.

  ‘Why weren’t you in your platoon position?’ he asked, shaking his head sadly, ‘when I waited specially for you in order to make up our quarrel? Why weren’t you in your platoon position?’

  ‘It isn’t fair to hold me responsible for that.’ I yelled after him. ‘I was on a recce. I was doing my duty.’

  He vanished. Next came Tulbir Gurung.

  ‘Why did you send me down to Brigade Headquarters?’ he demanded fiercely, making no bones about his anger, and using that persuasive, conspiratorial mode of address he always adopted when speaking to me, as if making me a party to whatever cunning plot he was hatching. ‘You knew it was a false message. You deceived me into carrying the instrument of my own death. They kept on putting me in the front rank of all the storming parties. They knew eventually I’d cop it. Why did you send me down with that false message?’

  I started to say ‘It wasn’t like that.’ Then I fell silent. It was true what he said. Calculatingly I had sent him down there, rejoicing in my cleverness and in this crafty way of disposing of him. I honestly didn’t realize – it never occurred to me – that they would deliberately expose him to all the hazards of battle. That was too great a retribution for his trifling fault.

  ‘Honestly, Tulbir, I didn’t realize.’

  But he too, without waiting for my explanations, had vanished.

  I knew who the next one would be, and I was right. It was Ganga Bahadur. He was wringing his hands. I attempted to forestall his expostulations by rising from my couch pre-emptively and apologising.