Quartered Safe Out There: A Harrowing Tale of World War II

by George MacDonald Fraser

  The light was beating down on the group by the bamboo thicket, almost close enough to touch—my frantic rollings had brought me right beside them. Jones was lying on the mortar base-plate, one hand steadying the upright tube of the barrel, the other on the firing-wheel. A kneeling Shan was shoving an uncapped high explosive shell into the muzzle, and he was doing what Grief had warned against, what every mortar instructor has nightmares about—inserting the gold-gleaming nose first! Upside bloody down, and when he let it go it would slide down the eighteen-inch tube with that metallic slither which would be the last thing that anyone within ten feet of the mortar would ever hear.

  The phrase “my heart stood still” isn't really adequate, because it didn't have time. Even if I hadn't been pinned under the Piat like a blasted beetle I couldn't have done anything, nor could Jones for the simple reason that he hadn't noticed, and why Grief, who should have been watching my bomb's flight, should have glanced aside, God alone knows, instinct, telepathy, search me, but in that split instant he was suddenly hurtling over me in a flat dive, yelling “Jesus!”, one hand outflung to drive the mortar barrel sideways, knocking the Shan arse over tip so that he and Grief hit the bamboo stalks in a tangle of limbs—and the bomb rolled gently over the wet grass, stopped, and lay there winking at us.

  Grief sat up, adjusted his hat, picked up the bomb, helped Jones to resurrect the mortar, took the goggling Shan gently by the ear, said: “Oh, you clumsy-clumsy!”, and carefully showed him how the bomb should go in, fins first. Then he said: “See? No sweat, no panic, tik hai?” and patted the Shan on the head before scrambling forward to look at the river. I snapped into action as one is liable to do after a moment's immobilising panic,cocking the Piat and rolling back into a firing position, but Grief wasn't bothering with a bomb, and the Shan scout beside me was pointing and shouting in excitement.

  I'd heard no explosion from my last shot, my attention being elsewhere, and it was a moment before I took in the significance of the small black cloud over by the far bank. Half-hidden by it, the boat had swung away from us and was lying at an odd angle, bow submerged, there were men in the water—and suddenly the last flare must have died in the river and there was pitch blackness with the red tracers flying and criss-crossing through it, two streams of them converging where the boat had been. Two more flares went up, in quick succession, illuminating river and far bank, and the boat was gone, heads bobbing in the broken water, the raft had split into chunks of bamboo debris, and shots were whipping overhead—the Japs on the far bank were firing back at the Bren flashes, but after a while the shots became sporadic and then stopped altogether, and Grief came scrambling back. “Cease fire!” sounded along the bank as the flares went out again, and I heard Grief telling Jones to put up another. The mortar whanged, the flare burst, and now the river was empty except for a few shreds of the raft drifting away to the right. Nothing was moving on the far bank; you couldn't see if there was anything hidden in the narrow shadow beneath its overhang, but either Grief or the Gurkha officer was taking no chances, for presently three of the Brens opened up again, raking the shallows and the face of the bank. The flare vanished, the firing stopped, the command came to ease springs, the stench of cordite began to clear, the Gurkhas were getting to their feet, and I pressed the trigger of the empty Piat which clanged resoundingly as the spring was released. Bad practice, I should have released it gradually, but I was too damned tired and shaken by the memory of that mortar bomb.

  So, I gathered, was Jones, for he held me spellbound with his description of how that bloody daft Shan, look you, had been puttin' an effin' H.E. down the spout the WRONG WAY for Chrissake, an' Jones hadn't seen nuthin', see, till Grief came flyin' an' knocked the silly bugger endways in the nick o' time, see, or we'd all have been blown to buggery, of all the stupid bloody wog tricks it would turn your hair white, bigod. Thanks to him I caught only snatches of what Grief and the Gurkha were saying…“None got over this side, anyway…about twenty on the raft…can't say about the boat…write ’em off, sick and wounded probably…God knows about those on the bank…Baluch'll take care of ’em.”

  From which I deduced that the fugitives on the far side could expect another ambush farther down, but how many were accounted for, by us or anyone else, I don't know. It was a not untypical operation for that time, fairly messy and of minor importance in military terms. It was the last time I ever heard a shot fired in war. For the rest, I'm not ashamed to admit that my most lasting memory of the night's work is of that dully gleaming bomb-nose poised at the muzzle of Jones's mortar with the thin brown fingers about to let it go—and if, considering what else happened in that faraway forgotten ambush, that seems unreasonably egoistic, I can only quote Macaulay on the folly of supposing that a man cares for his fellow-creatures as much as he cares for himself.

  The return journey I hardly remember, except that we reached the camp in broad daylight, knackered to a man, and I steeped my feet in hot salt water before collapsing on my blanket. After that it's vague: I think I was there for another day, possibly two, before being jeeped to the main road and hopping a truck to the battalion, but I certainly recall stripping, cleaning, and reassembling the Piat, handing it over to two grinning Shans and getting a receipt for it and its remaining bombs from Jones, and Grief sitting back in his canvas chair with his hands behind his head, holding forth:

  “There's a nasty secretive streak in you, Whatsit, and I take a pretty dim view of it—fact, I can hardly bloody see it, through a glass darkly. You knew dam' well you weren't a peepin' gremlin or a lurkin' firkin, didn't you, but did you let on, did you hell, and don't tell me you'd forgotten, either! Good God, one look in the mirror, plain as a pikestaff, even Jones can see it, can't you, Jones? Yes, blush, Whatsit, the murder's out—evil weevil written all over you! Can't think how I didn't spot it, got weevils in my own family, both sides, incestuous business, don't talk about it. So, you're going—well, so long, mind the step, don't lift anything on the way out, and keep an eye open for the roamin' gnomes, the bastards are everywhere! Who knows, we may meet at Philippi…”

  Thus far, I'm happy to say, we haven't.

  * business

  * A corruption, I believe, of iskar mafit (Arabic), signifying in Army slang, “the thing”. “Yagger”, of unknown origin, was synonymous.

  * quickly

  Chapter 18

  “’Ey, Grandarse, ’ear w'at they're sayin' on't wireless? The Yanks ’ave dropped a bomb the size of a pencil on Tokyo an' it's blown the whole fookin' place tae bits!”

  “Oh, aye. W'at were they aimin' at—’Ong Kong?”

  “Ah'm tellin' ye! Joost one lal bomb, an' they reckon ’alf Japan's in fookin' flames. That's w'at they're sayin'!”

  “W'ee's sayin'?”

  “Ivverybody, man! Ah'm tellin' ye, it's on't wireless! ’Ey, they reckon Jap'll pack in. It'll be th' end o' the war!”

  “Girraway? Do them yeller-skinned boogers oot theer knaw that?”

  “Aw, bloody ’ell! ’Oo can they, ye daft booger! They ’evn't got the fookin' wireless, ’ev they?”

  “Awreet, then. Ah's keepin' me ’eid doon until the Yanks've dropped a few more pencils on Tokyo. An' w'en them boogers oot theer ’ev packed in, Ah'll believe ye.”

  “Aw, Ah's wastin' me time talkin tae you! ’Ey, Foshie, ’ear aboot the Yanks? They've dropped a secret weapon on Tokyo, an' the whole fookin' toon's wiped oot!”

  “’Igh bloody time. W'ee's smeukin', then? Awoy, Jock, gi's one o' yer H.Q. Coompany fags, ye mean booger!”

  It was a fine sunny morning when the news, in its garbled form, ran round the battalion, and if it changed the world, it didn't change Nine Section. They sat on the floor of the basha, backs to the wall, supping chah and being sceptical. “Secret weapon” was an expression bandied about with cynical humour all through the war; Foshie's socks and Grandarse's flatulence, those were secret weapons, and super-bombs were the stuff of fantasy. I didn't believe it, that first day, although from the
talk at company H.Q. it was fairly clear that something big had happened, or was about to happen. And even when it was confirmed, and unheard of expressions like “atomic bomb” and “Hiroshima” (then pronounced Hirosheema) were bandied about, it all seemed very distant and unlikely. Three days after the first rumour, on the very day that the second bomb fell on Nagasaki, one of the battalion's companies was duffying with a Jap force on the Sittang bank and killing 21 of them—that was the war, not what was happening hundreds of miles away. As Grandarse so sagely observed: “They want tae drop their fookin' atoms on the Pegu Yomas, then we'll git the bleedin' war ower.” Even then, Nick wasn't prepared to bet that we wouldn't be going into Malaya with mules; we would all, he prophesied, get killed.

  It took a week, as all the world knows now, for the Japanese government to call it a day, but even after the official surrender of August 14 there was no cease-fire along the Rangoon road; it was almost a fortnight before the Japs in the field started to come in, and the business of rounding up and disarming the remnants began, but by that time I was over the hills and far away, perspiring before a selection board at Chittagong, playing idiotic games of word association, trying to convince psychiatrists that I combined the qualities of Francis of Assisi and Genghiz Khan, that I knew which knife and fork to use, and “actually, sir, the reason I want to be an officer is, honestly, that I'm sure it's how I can best serve the Army, if you know what I mean, sir.” “Quite so, corporal—now, when I say the word ‘rape’ what's the first thought that comes to your mind?” “Sir? Sorry, sir, I didn't quite catch that…”

  But that was still in the future. The war ended in mid-August, and even before then Nine Section had decided that the fight, if not necessarily done, had reached a stage where celebration was permissible. I joined them in the makeshift canteen, quantities of beer were shifted, Forster sang “Cumberland Way” and “The Horn of the Hunter” in an excruciating nasal croak with his eyes closed, Wedge wept and was sick, Wattie passed out, Morton became bellicose because, he alleged, Forster had pinched his pint, Parker and Stanley separated them, and harmony of a sort was restored with a thunderous rendering of “John Peel”, all verses, from Denton Holme to Scratchmere Scar with Peel's view-halloo awakening the dead—Cumbrians may be among the world's worst vocalists, but they alone can sing that rousing anthem of pursuit as it should be sung, with a wild primitive violence that makes the Horst Wessel sound like a lullaby, Grandarse red-faced and roaring and Nick pounding the time and somehow managing to sing with his pipe clenched in his teeth.

  Like everyone else, we were glad it was over, brought to a sudden, devastating stop by those two bombs that fell on Japan. We had no slightest thought of what it would mean for the future, or even what it meant at the time; we did not know what the immediate effect of those bombs had been on their targets, and we didn't much care. We were of a generation to whom Coventry and the London Blitz and Clydebank and Liverpool and Plymouth were more than just names; our country had been hammered mercilessly from the sky, and so had Germany; we had seen the pictures of Belsen and of the frozen horror of the Russian front; part of our higher education had been devoted to techniques of killing and destruction; we were not going to lose sleep because the Japanese homeland had taken its turn. If anything, at the time, remembering the kind of war it had been, and the kind of people we, personally, had been up against, we probably felt that justice had been done. But it was of small importance when weighed against the glorious fact that the war was over at last.

  There was certainly no moralising, no feeling at all of the guilt which some thinkers nowadays seem to want to attach to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And because so many myths have been carefully fostered about it, and so much emotion generated, all on one side, with no real thought for those most affected by it on the Allied side, I would like just to look at it, briefly, from our minority point of view. And not only ours, but perhaps yours, too.

  Some years ago I heard a man denounce the nuclear bombing of Japan as an obscenity; it was monstrous, barbarous, and no civilised people could even have contemplated it; we should all be thoroughly ashamed of it.

  I couldn't argue with him, or deny the obscenity, monstrosity, and barbarism. I could only ask him questions, such as:

  “Where were you when the war ended?”

  “In Glasgow.”

  “Will you answer a hypothetical question: if it were possible, would you give your life now, to restore one of the lives of Hiroshima?”

  He wriggled a good deal, said it wasn't relevant, or logical, or whatever, but in the end, to do him justice, he admitted that he wouldn't.

  So I asked him: “By what right, then, do you say that Allied lives should have been sacrificed to save the victims of Hiroshima? Because what you're saying is that, while you're not willing to give your life, Allied soldiers should have given theirs. Mine for one, possibly.”

  It was a bit unfair, perhaps, if only because I am rather heavily built and he was an elderly philosopher and I was obviously much moved, which may have flustered him, because he was unwise enough to say that that was the point—we were soldiers, the bomb victims were civilians. I did not pursue the question whether the lives of your own soldiers should be sacrificed for the safety of enemy civilians, because if you get into that particular moral jungle you'll never come out; but I did point out that we were, in fact, civilians, too—civilians in uniform, and could he understand our possible resentment that people whose lives and liberties we had been fighting to protect (him, in fact) should be ready to expend us for the sake of Japanese?

  He was getting quite alarmed now, because I do have a tendency to raise my voice in debate. But he stuck to his guns and cried “Japanese women and children!” I conceded this, and pointed out that I had three children—but if I'd gone down in Malaya they'd never have been born; they would, in fact, have been as effectively deprived of existence as the children of Nagasaki. Was he advocating that?

  He pointed out, fairly, that I might not have gone down in Malaya, to which I (only too glad to escape from the argumentum ad hominem which I'd introduced, because it makes you sound like a right moaning “I-was-there” jungle-basher) retorted that someone would surely have bought his lot in Malaya, and how about his children?

  He bolted, predictably, along the only escape route open to him—and a well-worn one it has become—by saying that the bombs were unnecessary because Japan was ready to surrender anyway, and it was only done because Truman wanted to use the thing to frighten the Russians, and all this talk that it would have cost 50,000 Allied lives to storm Japan was horse manure, because it would never have come to that.

  “You think,” I said, “you hope. But you don't know.”

  Yes, he did, and cited authorities.

  “All right,” I said. “Leave aside that I am arguably in a better position than you are to judge whether Jap was ready to surrender or not, at least at the sharp end, whatever Hirohito and Co were thinking—are you saying that the war would have ended on August 15 if the bombs hadn't been dropped?”

  “No, of course not. But not long after…a few weeks…”

  “Months, maybe?”

  “Possibly…not likely…”

  “But at any rate, some Allied lives would have been lost, after August 15—lives which in fact were saved by the bombs?” Not mine, because I'd been in India by then, and the war would have had to go on for several months for me to get involved again. I didn't tell him that; it would just have confused the issue.

  Yes, he admitted, some additional Allied lives would have been lost; he didn't say they were expendable, but he plainly thought so.

  “And that would have been all right with you? British, Indian, American, Australian, Chinese—my God, yes, even Russian—all right for them to die, but not the people of Hiroshima—or you?”

  He said something about military casualties being inevitable in war (he was telling me!), but that the scale of Hiroshima, the devastation, the after-effects, the
calculated immolation of a whole city's population…

  “Look,” I said, “I'm not arguing with you. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you. I just wanted to know where you stood, and to mention some points which you may not have considered, and to have you ask yourself if you are really in a position, morally speaking, to say who should have died and who shouldn't?”

  “Well!” he said, looking aggrieved. “Where do you stand?”

  “None of your goddam business,” I said, sweetly reasonable as always, “but wherever it is, or was, it's somewhere you have never been, among people whom you wouldn't understand.” Which was a bit over the score, but these armchair philosophers who live in their safe havens of the mind, and take their extensive moral views without ever really thinking, or exploring those unpleasant dark corners of debate which they don't like to think are there—they can, as Grandarse would have said, get on my wick.

  As to where I stand—oh, in so many different places. They change with time, and my view is coloured by many different considerations. These are some of them.

  The dropping of the bombs was a hideous thing, and I do not wonder that some of those who bore a part in it have been haunted by it all their lives. If it was not barbaric, the word has no meaning.

  I led Nine Section for a time; leading or not, I was part of it. They were my mates, and to them I was bound by ties of duty, loyalty, and honour. Now, take Nine Section as representing those Allied soldiers who would certainly have died if the bombs had not been dropped (and remember that Nine Section might well have been not representatives, but the men themselves). Could I say, yes, Grandarse or Nick or Forster were expendable, and should have died rather than the victims of Hiroshima? No, never. And that goes for every Indian, American, Australian, African, Chinese and other soldier whose life was on the line in August, 1945. So drop the bomb.