by Cecil Beaton
Suddenly the salt hills, cedar coloured, and looking like jags of flake chocolate, swam by at a great rate, and very much too near our aircraft, yet we felt brow-beaten by the heavy ceiling which made it impossible for us to fly any higher. At last the captain came through with a map and a bright face. ‘We’re all right now,’ he told us. ‘We’re in the plains — a straight run of twenty minutes and we shall be at Chaklala.’
No one knew of my arrival — yet, in a few seconds of landing, with that extraordinary generosity shown to outsiders by the RAF, I found myself whisked off for a drink in the mess, and forthwith taken to the home of an unknown young man, who made himself responsible for my needs. He turned out of his own room so that I should spend the night in the more comfortable bed, and he dosed me with his precious whisky before motoring me, as a preliminary to showing me all the glitter of this famous station now used as a training ground for India Command, to Rawalpindi. Here he introduced me to his friends at the club, who gave me the best dinner I had eaten since the war began. The steak was as thick as a dictionary.
The town of Peshawar has been sacked so many times that nothing of architectural interest remains. But the streets are crowded with interesting types — Asiatics, Pathans and many Persians. The shops are a series of enlarged peep-shows. The fruit- seller kneels on his prettily built structure of oranges, melons, magenta aubergines. The hatter squats among the bead and tinsel headdresses, designed especially for a bridegroom. The florist is busy stringing garlands of white, peppermint-pink and orange flowers for a woman’s wrist and ankles or for a horse’s head. Most mysterious of all is the ‘flour-sifter’ on his white stage; he wears a white smock and a white dunce’s cap, his face, beard and eyelashes are powdered white, his sieves and strings are covered with a frosty film, and he stares back amusedly as we gaze at him as if he were from some other world. The monochrome grain shops look like models of mountain ranges. Some spectacular shops display jewellery, bed-posts like toys, Ali Baba pots of brass for incense or warm, pungent perfumes and highly-coloured stolen goods.
‘This is a tough corner of the earth,’ my escort explained, ‘where no value is given to a man’s life. You notice everyone carries a gun; robbery, hold-ups, murder and rape are not uncommon.’ If the police should turn its back for ten minutes, this quarter, filled with a fermenting mass of the world’s most dangerous characters, would break out in chaos. ‘You never know when it will be necessary to turn on the tear gas.’
Alexander the Great and Timur the Tartar had chosen the Khyber Pass for their invasions of India; I felt nevertheless today that the Khyber belonged rather to Kipling than to any earlier period of history.
In the officers’ mess, polished silver cups stand in rows against the dark oak panelling. Another round is ordered: ‘Yes, we get beer from the factory at Pindi — or how about a cherry brandy?’ A young subaltern comes in and lays his revolver on the table, by the reading lamp with the crimson silk shade. ‘Heard about old Claude’s near shave? His lamp shot to blazes! Great stuff — maybe the beginning of something.’
Life on the North-West Frontier has changed very little since the Victorian age, when warfare was so well-conducted as to seem comparatively civilized.
The Wazirs, subnormal mountaineers, are still a restless gang and remain the inspiration of a thousand mess-room stories. But a hundred years ago, this frontier possessed a romantic quality, which it has largely lost since the invention of more modern forms of frightfulness — the flame-throwing tank and the flying bomb. The Fort Shagai, housing the Second Kashmir Infantry, combined for me all the least attractive features of a soldier’s life: early calls for parades on the asphalt yard, draughty bare rooms, hard gritty ugliness.
A battalion of the Seventh Rajput Regiment was starting off down the bare, slate-coloured hills, towards Afghanistan, on a tactical exercise in frontier warfare. Everywhere one was watched by pickets looking down from camouflaged pillboxes on the mountain heights. ‘You must understand what a poor life these tribesmen lead. They see, next to them, the most fertile plains of all India, yielding four crops a year; they cannot help coveting such richness, and they make continuous short, sharp sorties to grab a bit of someone else’s wealth. The hostile tribal territory here is always a problem; and the rugged terrain makes it impossible to winkle them out of their caves without an enormous expeditionary force.’
I have seen Carmen and The Maid of the Mountains on tour, and can recognize a third-rate chorus of operetta brigands. Here they were again — the wild Wazirs who, though not a menace, are nevertheless of a nuisance value: toothless, squinting, stunted, with inane grins, unkempt beards and dirty undergarments swathed round their shaggy heads. One wore a long green tweed overcoat of loud check with emerald celluloid buttons; another sported an old tail-coat.
On the peaks of these gaunt hills, white sheets placed as indications to aircraft and guards signalled from slope to slope. Tochi scouts, with the agility of goats, scaled in thirty-nine minutes a height that would take a white man two and a half hours to achieve.
‘TAKING THE STICK’
Flying away, the only passenger in a small aircraft, I noticed that the little Indian pilot was trying very hard to unwind a wheel — something to do with pumping down the undercarriage when the automatic release goes wrong. It proved too stiff; try as he might, he could not get it down. We were flying over nasty, tooth-like rocks, and into large lumps of dirty cotton-wool cloud. The Indian, sweating as he struggled with the levers, then beckoned me to join him in the cockpit. I shook my head and winked — No, I had had enough of the cockpit: I would remain with my novel! The pilot continued to beckon; it was only after a considerable time that I understood that the invitation had now become an order. The pilot was signalling for me to sit by him, to ‘take the stick’.
Suddenly, flying an aeroplane for the first time, I felt like Harold Lloyd. I held on to the wheel rather gingerly, not knowing how much leeway I could allow before the aircraft reacted violently. Like a monkey, the sweating pilot crawled to and fro, among the hundred gadgets on the dashboard and the floor. The engine responded to my very tentative suggestion to climb a little higher, and I found this effort a relief.
Just as I was contemplating his having to climb out on the wings, to tie something together with string, the pilot put up his thumb with a jerk: he had mended the aeroplane.
‘May I go back to my novel?’
Thumb up again. When we circled over Lahore Air Station, however, it seemed the thumb-jerk had been premature. As we came in to land, and were just about to touch down, we shot up again high into the air. The undercarriage was not lowered. We ‘stooged’ around the airfield, while the pilot tried to unwind the undercarriage. He kept re-adjusting fuses; we circled many times, looking down wistfully at the strip below. The pilot took control again. Perhaps he had decided to ‘do a pancake’ without the landing gear? Here goes. In which direction would I be thrown? I adopted several suitable poses in which to receive the shock. We skimmed low, bumped, and were relieved to find the undercarriage was in position. Only the wing-flaps were not working, so that our speed was greater than usual, and when we hit ground we bounced high like a rubber ball — but at last the land lay motionless beneath us.
ASSAM, BURMA AND THE ARAKAN FRONT
We landed in a bowl scooped from the mountains of Imphal. The year is at its best; sun all day; cold at night; the cherry-trees in blossom, rhododendrons ablaze. Soon the vast tropical trees will be sprouting with orchids and the troops will pick the parasite blossoms and put them in their large brimmed hats.
My first impression would have been less idyllic had I arrived during the monsoon period. This continues for nearly two-thirds of the year. The troops must exist soaked to the skin for weeks on end in an almost solid tropical rain. There is no chance of drying their clothes. In this fetid atmosphere, to wear a macintosh is to sweat so much that soon you are wet through. Boots are never dry, so that your toes begin to rot. Supplies suffer; the
coarse flour breeds bugs. Mud reaches up to the thighs. Everything grows mouldy; even the bamboo poles grow internal fungus, and the smell of decay is everywhere.
Living in small holes dug in the mountainsides, supplied by a narrow mule track which zigzags up and down the mountains for over 300 miles from the nearest supply base, transport becomes impossible and essential supplies have to be dropped by air. Yet, strange as it may seem, water is often short — the mountains are so steep that the rain shoots off the sides before it can be cupped — and washing is permitted only once in three days. The enormous trees, garlanded with festoons of moss, drip heavily, ceaselessly, for months on end. Mosquitoes thrive in the elephant grass; millions of leeches appear, wagging their heads from side to side. They are small until they have feasted on human blood. Then their bodies swell to the size of your thumb. The soldiers have learnt that they will drop off if touched with a lighted cigarette; but, if you try to pull at their greasy black skin, the head remains embedded in your body and the wound becomes septic.
Jungle warfare, consisting as it does of lonely treks and skirmishes — at the most, men go out in twos and threes — demands the highest degree of courage on the part of each individual. Most men prefer desert warfare, although here there is shade, the roots and growths are a salutary substitute for fresh vegetables and a palatable addition to iron rations, and occasionally there is wild game. But the feeling of loneliness is greater; groups seldom trespass on one another’s terrain. There is reassurance to be gained from fighting in numbers. Each man knows that, after a terrifying game of blindman’s buff played through the coarse undergrowth, any encounter may end with a clash of knives. No quarter is asked or given. Every moment of the day each man must be on the alert; for the Jap sniper may be hidden behind that distant cliff, or in the nearest tree. There is the continual strain of listening for the sound of a footfall. Even during their sleep most men keep one ear open for the sounds of the night. They develop a sixth sense, so that they can distinguish every animal step, the calls of the birds, the laughter of hyenas, the yells of jackals, the creak of bamboo, the snapping of a twig and the Aristophanic chorus of frogs and crickets. After a time, even the most robust may show signs of nervous stress. One man, hearing steps coming closer to his basha, ran out in the dark and bayoneted a bear.
We were awakened in the dark; shaving in a small basin in a cold semi-outdoor was depressing. We started off for Tiddim in a fifteen-hundredweight lorry. The hearty onslaught of the captain of our party, so early in the morning, was the hardest cross to bear: he whistled through his teeth in imitation of a cockney tram conductor, and shouted abuse in four-letter English words and in Urdu to fellow-travellers.
By degrees the sun had warmed the icy cold air; one side of the mountain became brilliant, the other half remaining in dark shadow. Then the sun sank behind the hills where the Japs were in occupation, and everything became pitch black. Still we motored along the small ridges, past perpendicular drops of 400 feet; sometimes a passing lorry scraped our mudguards.
Our truck bounded about in a cloud of dust thrown up by the convoy of trucks ahead. Tropical vegetation through which we passed was coated with salmon-pink dust, churned by ceaseless traffic. The bamboos, their fronds of dead branches looking like fishing-rods, rose in a perfect pure arc.
Our trucks are the least suitable vehicles for negotiating narrow ridges cut into the precipices of the mountainsides; but there was no jeep available. For hours we were tossed from one side to the other, thrown high in the air to land painfully on the little iron seat, or on the sharp edges of our baggage. We continued in semicircles up or down a mountainside, over a surface of dust and potholes until, like Hitler’s, our captain’s patience was at an end. He had taken on the Herculean job of steering this heavy lorry around hundreds of hairpin bends throughout the day. We barged, crashed, thudded, ricocheted on into the night. The mountains were dotted with the small glowing fires of native encampments. After many dark vicissitudes, with distant lorries approaching like glow-worms, and passing us in a crescendo of noise and blinding light, we at last arrived, after 160 miles, on the top of a precipice covered with fir trees. We did some unpacking, sat over a fire, and waited while the sure, but very slow, black servant prepared tea and sardines and unrolled our beds.
Five thousand people live in rush-matted tents, in the encampment of Divisional Headquarters. Already by early morning the men are slick and polished as if for the paradeground; shoes shiny, everyone immaculately shaved.
The British gift of improvization is here, fully exploited, everywhere an ant-like activity. Typewriters are buzzing, and the most elaborate systems of telephone and wireless installed. The khaki dhobi (laundry) festoons the branches of the trees; the ‘furniture’ is made of the strangest objects, and the whole picture is reminiscent of Robert Louis Stevenson. Everyone, young clerks and grey-haired brigadiers alike, wear shorts and swashbuckling bush-hats.
But living conditions are tough and work almost unending. The men sleep in fox-holes dug into the peat-like earth. After working at highest pressure all day, often another batch of work appears that must be completed after the evening meal. The day’s activity starts again before sunrise.
This pressure of work helps to maintain morale. At a place so remote — it is a ten days’ journey to the nearest town — there is little else to do. Everyone is extraordinarily cheerful, though it is almost more than they can bear to ask for news of England.
‘What’s the blackout like?’ — ‘Do they have enough to eat?’ — ‘How’s the bomb damage?’ — they inquire rather shyly. When I tell them that only five weeks ago I was in England, they eye me as if I were from another planet. They touch my civilian jacket and remark: ‘Can’t remember how long it is since we’ve seen tweeds.’
Monday
After nightfall I sat in a cavern dug in the red earth, in front of a blazing fire, talking to Colonel Younger. My companion was one of the most charming and cultivated young men that one could ever hope to meet in a grey stone eighteenth-century house in the shires. Tall, good-looking, with clear complexion and brown silk hair, he was just the type to have inspired the romantic yearnings of a heroine in a Henry James novel. How strange to discover that this slightly sophisticated Adonis, with the well-tended fingernails, was one of the men who had built the mountain road over which we had travelled.
‘It’s a promenade now, compared to what it was a few weeks ago,’ he said, ‘since the bulldozers do each day as much work as fifty Chins, though it’s difficult to aggregate Chin manpower with women and children included. I’ll take you up to Kennedy Peak tomorrow; I’d like to show you the flowering trees on the way.’ He talked about the local wild flowers and orchids as if he were showing me around his estates. It was pleasant sitting drinking a liqueur in this caveman dwelling, but Younger suddenly flashed his wrist watch. ‘We mustn’t be late for the guns,’ he said. We ran in the dark up the mountainside. The night air was bitter. When we arrived at the summit I was panting for breath in the unaccustomed altitude.
‘Two minutes to go — one minute to go — half a minute — FIRE!’ A twenty-five pounder gun let loose eight rounds. The noise hurt: it brought to the surface all the soft spots in one’s body — the places where one’s teeth had been filled — the nerve centres and the dormant fibrositis in the nape of the neck. The blackness of the night became vivid with the flashes.
I handed over a package of about 250 undeveloped rolls I had exposed during the past two weeks to be sent back by air for processing at HQ in Delhi. The aeroplane which took them did not crash; the package was merely ‘mislaid’. Ceaseless, but nevertheless vain, attempts have been made to discover its whereabouts. The chances are small that I shall ever be able to send the promised pictures to the men living in jungle fox-holes, firing the twenty-five-pound guns, the Howitzer teams, the Gurkhas of the 7th Regiment, the men of the Queen’s Regiment and West Yorks who showed such enthusiasm and co-operation.
Friday
> The Provost-Marshal misinformed us about the timing of the convoy’s departure with the result that we found ourselves in a gigantic crocodile of trucks that were to accompany us throughout the mountainous journey home. A truck would get over-heated and stall, causing a halt for all others in the rear: an abortive start: another breakdown. Again the stream of traffic would remain at a standstill. It was impossible to pass on the narrow crags overhanging precipices. After six hours, we had travelled only thirty miles.
The captain’s display of vile temper was in itself an incentive for me to remain calm; but one sympathized with him, knowing that the mere physical exertion of steering the wheel round the hairpin bends, apart from the shock of sudden stops and starts on the knife-edge precipices, with a drop of 1,000 feet over the side, was a terrible strain on nerves. We trickled along the passes at a rate of five miles an hour, if lucky. The heat increased: at each enforced stop we became obsessed with trying to gauge if a distant truck was on the move or not. Although we never gave up trying, we could never pass any vehicle.
I hated the captain bitterly at the outset of our trip, but I thawed towards him when one afternoon I found him poring over a map giving his moth-eaten Chin servant a lesson in geography. The old native had never seen a map before and had no idea which shapes signified India or Burma. He made hopeless gestures with his dark fingers.
During the next ten or twelve hours of the nightmare journey I learnt about the captain’s life. He had been a Regular, wounded in an arm and leg by the Japs; had been towed across a river in a net kept afloat by empty bottles; had started to walk out of Burma on foot with a dozen others, most of whom died from exposure and starvation on the way. Now he wished to return to his regiment but was ‘unfit’. Soldiering was the only profession he knew. Hence his bitterness.
