Quartered Safe Out Here (13 page)

“What are you doing with this shower? You sound Scotch. Ah, well, bad luck, son. Tell you what, I'll give
you this stretch, near the trucks, where I can keep an eye on them. Right, carry on—here they come!”

There was no time to protest or question; the first of the big Dakotas was droning in, circling the drop zone just above our heads, the Sikh unloaders visible in its open doorway. Behind came the other planes, following the slow circle, banking slightly while the Sikhs thrust out the big bales. It was a spectacular sight, the aircraft glittering in the sunlight, the bales falling in a continuous shower; a few of them, containing machine parts and other delicate cargo, came waltzing down on little white parachutes, but most of the great canvas bundles fell in what was called “free drop”, hitting the paddy with resounding thumps and clouds of dust, bouncing high and careering across the plain. The fatigue parties ran to them, and in a few minutes the zone was like an antheap as the covers were ripped away and the contents dragged out—crates and boxes and metal containers by the thousand, to be carried towards the parked three-tonners, where they were stacked for loading under the eye of the W.O. and his shouting, sweating assistants.

It was an uplifting sight, too—Fourteenth Army exercising its talent for improvisation on the grand scale, feeding and arming its spearhead deep inside enemy country, demonstrating that this was a siege which the Japanese, for all their superior numbers, could not hope to win; those leisurely wheeling American planes were symbolic, and the sight of them droning unhindered
overhead must have been a bitter one to the withdrawing Japanese armies: not a Zero in the sky,
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and food and ammunition in massive quantities pouring down to their opponents.

You had to keep an eye on that pouring process, for it continued while we worked, the big bales booming down while we scattered out of the drop line; I saw one misdirected bale come streaking down to hit a jeep on the edge of the zone; it struck fair and square on the bonnet, flattening the vehicle in a tangled wreck and exploding a great cascade of Indian butter for fifty yards around.

“Ye'll be gittin' yer chapattis dry the neet, Johnny!” Nixon shouted to a party of Gurkhas, and the little men beamed and squealed, pigtails flapping on their shaven skulls as they wrestled with bundles as tall as themselves; they worked, as they did everything, with all their might, slashing the covers with their kukris, staggering away laden to the trucks, racing back for more, and bubbling with chatter and laughter, treating it as a great game. The rest of us worked as hard; in that heat it was as exhausting as any labour I've ever done, even stevedoring in Port Said, but it was exhilarating, too; our arms ached with swinging our kukris, and our hands were raw from the canvas, but we enjoyed it.

As Nine Section beavered away, ripping, dragging, lifting, and carrying with a fine energetic rhythm, the
W.O. would stride over every now and then to peer suspiciously at our stacks, obviously comparing them with those of the other units. After a while he seemed to grow less anxious, and when we broke for tiffin he even remarked favourably on the amount we'd shifted.

“’Ard graft,” panted Wattie, reclining against a wheel of our 15cwt and mopping his chest. “By God, it beats ’ay-mekkin’!”

“Ah could stand that, an' a',” said Grandarse, a rich cerise from his exertions. “Aye, w'at? A lang day i' the Lorton Valley, wid the farm lassies bringin' the
bait
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an' nasty big pints! Eh? Ah could fettle a coople this minnit, could Ah nut?”

“Pints or lassies?” jeered Forster. “That's a' the ’ay-mekkin' thoo ivver did, Ah'll bet. Aye, oonder the bloody stacks, wid yer arse gan like a fiddler's elbow. Shaggin' an' suppin', that's your idea o' woork.” But Grandarse was too intent on his chaggle to retort.

“I'd sooner be working down here than up there,” said the Duke, watching a Dakota wheel lazily away, its bearded unloader leaning out at a perilous angle to watch a falling bale. “You know they have to change those Sikh crews every few trips? Fact—after a while they get disoriented, forget that they're two hundred feet up. They think they can step out, that the ground's just a yard beneath them—and some of ’em do. Lost a few men that way, I heard.”

“Aw, cobblers!” said Forster. “Ye tellin' us they can't tell ’oo ’igh up they are?”

“It's reet, tho',” said Nick. “Ah ’eerd that f'ae a feller that seen it ’appen. Big Sikh joost walked oot efter a boondle; they ’ed to scrape ’im intil a mess-tin; nowt left but ’is beard an' bangle.” He raised his voice to the skies. “Doan't loup oot, Singh lad! This isn't Spiattri!
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Ye'll nivver bounce!”

We worked through the afternoon, and none more zealous than Nine Section; when the other fatigue parties were calling it a day, sitting or lying in the shadow of their transport, draining chaggles or emptying them over sweat-plastered heads and dusty torsos, Nick and Wattie and Grandarse and even the egregious Forster were still scouring the littered plain, finding overlooked boxes, plodding back with their burdens, and generally heaping coals of fire, it seemed to me, on the head of the mistrustful W.O. It had its effect; I heard him saying “Good lads”, as they trudged by, setting down the last loads with the sighs of men who have toiled well in the vineyard; Grandarse responded with hearty affability. “Aye, wahm woork, staff! Nowt like a good job weel dyun, eh?”

By the time the last crate was in place, and the three-tonners were rumbling away to the central depot, the W.O. was being almost amiable. He waited until the other parties had gone, and Nine Section had completed a lengthy toilet in our 15cwt and emerged in shirts and hats, and told me to fall them in. As they fell in, tired but decent, behind them two of the W.O.'s minions were going over our truck with practised hands; he waited for their nod, and surveyed the section with a knowing, satisfied smirk.

“Good enough, then. They've worked well, corporal—and you've behaved yourselves, haven't you? Yerss, I know you have!” He was looking positively roguish. “Oh, yerss, because I had the eye down on you—and you knew it, didn't you? You couldn't old-soldier me, my sons—the name's Croft, not soft. Well, fair's fair; I'm a man of my word—over there, corporal, under that tarpaulin. Help yourselves, lads, and don't say I'm not good to you!”

Beneath the tarpaulin were a few bags of tea and sugar, a carton of Lucky Strike, and a couple of cans of condensed milk, and the section fell on them with cries of astonishment and gratitude that were touching to hear. The W.O. watched with a tolerant eye as they climbed into the 15cwt, exclaiming over his bounty.

“I didn't body search ’em,” he told me confidentially. “Creates a bad impression. Anyway, no need—I've got eyes in my arse, and they knew better'n to try it on.” He shook his head. “Desperate lot, your mob. Notorious—have been since Marlborough's day, I
shouldn't wonder. Well, they don't call you the Reivers for nothing!” He chuckled indulgently. “I just showed I was fly to them, promised ’em buckshees—a bit o' stick, a bit o' carrot, works wonders. All right, corporal, fall out!”

If he hadn't been four ranks above me I might well have given him my opinion of his aspersions on my regiment. As it was, I felt I owed the section an apology on his behalf, but since I was up front with the driver I didn't get a chance to make it, although when we debussed I remarked to Nick that the W.O. was a cheeky son-of-a-bitch. He looked blank.

“Ah didn't knaw w'at ’e was talkin' aboot. Did you, Wattie?”

“Ah wasn't listenin',” said Wattie with contempt. “Service Corps, Ah've shit ’em. Pathetic.”

We were at the pits. “Awreet,” said Forster, “git the groond-sheet doon, an' let's git crackin'. ’Ey, Duke, bring them chaggles ower ’ere.”

The Duke, bent under the weight of a dozen bulging chaggles, gave me an apologetic look. “I feel like one of Fagin's apprentices…oh, well, when in Rome. Here, Foshie.”

Forster upended the chaggles one after another, and before my astonished eyes a mound of sugar grew on the groundsheet. Nick fingered it critically.

“Soom barmy booger didn't sup a' ’is watter. Ah, weel, it'll dry oot.” He took off his hat, disclosing half a dozen packets of cigarettes, then stooped and opened his bush-shirt to release a deluge of cigarette packets.
Forster contributed even more from within his shirt; he then pulled his trousers out of their puttees, and wriggled, and more packets piled up round his ankles. Further sensational revelations followed: Grandarse's capacious britches yielded, of all things, several pounds of loose tea (“Ah doan't fancy the flavour o' that bloody lot,” said Forster) and from beneath his vest he brought out flat tins of fish in tomato sauce. “We'll swap ’em tae the Goorkas for chapattis, an' that. The lal sods'd sell their sowls for ’errin's.”

It was the same with the rest of them—every man-jack had plundered comestibles about him, inside buttoned sleeves and trouser legs, under shirts, in hats; tea, sugar, and cigarettes, mostly, but of condensed milk, pipe tobacco, tinned fish, bacon, spam, and sausage there was no lack, and by the time they were finished that groundsheet looked like Harrods food hall. I felt quite guilty, not contributing. Then they stood around and admired it.

“We'd best gi' soom t'Sivven an' Eight Sections,” said Nick.

“W'at for?” said Forster, shocked. “We kliftied
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the bloody stoof!”

“Gan, ye greedy booger! This lot'll last tae Rangoon, easy! Any roads, they knaw we were oot on the drop, an' Ah doan't want Jonty Armstrang gan through oor groob box w'en we're in kip. He's a thievin' bastard, yon. Tell ye w'at—we'll let ’em ’ave the
bookshees that gormless Service Corps wallah gev us!”

So they did, with the loose tea and sugar that wouldn't cram into our chah and cheeny boxes, and the odds and ends of tins left over when the mortar box containing our delicacies had been filled. Hearing Nick setting aside cigarettes for Hutton, I felt absolved of all qualms of conscience; my main concern was how the devil they'd managed it; lined up before the W.O. there hadn't been a suspicious bulge anywhere, and I hadn't noticed any surreptitious work during the drop collection.

“Ask their ancestors,” said the Duke, when I put it to him. “It's a gift—and from what I've heard, a regimental tradition. If he'd frisked them, they were dead men, but they had him weighed up, I suppose. Mind you, I thought Grandarse was looking a bit too dropsical for comfort, and if that clever W.O. had thought to walk round them, he couldn't have helped noticing that half of them had humps like Quasimodo. Silly ass, asking for it!”

“How d'you mean?”

“All that fly-man stuff about the Pink Elephant—it was like a red rag to a bull. Oh, they came prepared to fill the chaggles with sugar or tea, but it was his smart cracks that made ’em rob him blind. He's lucky they left the wheels on his jeep.”

“What's the Pink Elephant?”

“It was a pub or club sign, in Kandy or Colombo—somewhere in Ceylon, when the—–th Battalion were
there. Sodding great thing, I believe, about twenty feet high. Someone made a bet—and it vanished. Turned up months later in the corporals' mess at the depot, back home. So I'm told.”

I reflected on all this, sitting round the fire that night, full of illicit tea and condensed milk, excellent chapatti obtained from the Gurkhas for looted tinned fish, plundered peaches, and enjoying unlimited ill-gotten cigarettes, pondering the old West March saying that there's nothing too hot or too heavy, thinking about regimental tradition, looking at the hard brown faces, and reaching a remarkable, paradoxical conclusion which I hold by to this day: in word and deed, I never knew such honest men.

Dust and sunlight and dry rocky plain dotted with mounds and low bunds and an occasional small broken ruin, all stretching away to a distant line of shattered buildings, and beyond them, dim through the heat haze, a long gradual slope ending in a ridge: that is Pyawbwe in my mind. We crossed the plain with the Japanese whizz-bangs exploding just overhead, and reached the
line of buildings, and the Japanese died on the long slope, and my feet were killing me through all that scorching, thirsty day: that was the battle.

Those are the first images, at any rate, that I see when the name of Pyawbwe is mentioned. The incidents of the day come back in a rough, unconnected sequence only when I consider them at length, starting in a Burmese lavatory and ending with a long, sound sleep in a wrecked and rusty railway wagon; I shall fill them in as I come to them—the man who was sick, the row of bodies wrapped in blood-stained blankets in the lee of a little bank, the whine and crack of the Jap 75s, “Remember Arroyo!”, the shell-burst right in Morton's face which never touched him, the cool scummy depths of the well, Long John smiling and adjusting his bush-hat, the sergeant who went stone deaf in the last stage of the advance, the rattle of our rapid fire as we knelt among the ancient rolling stock, the figures running and falling across our front on the slope, the long painful trudge back from the sniper's nest to the section's final position, the faint pfft! of shots fired by some distant Japanese optimist passing high overhead, and the Dubarry–Foster debate which brought proceedings to a close.

That is my corresponding summary to the official history's. Of the preliminary activity on the preceding days I have absolutely no recollection; we must have come down from Meiktila to the outskirts of Pyawbwe as part of Cowan's encircling movement whereby the town was hemmed in, taking up our position for the
final assault in what was to be the last set-piece battle of the Second World War—at least I know of no later one. I suppose it was Jap's last big organised stand; what happened in the following months was the mopping-up of southern Burma. Pyawbwe broke him; we took it before the monsoon, and he had no hope of turning the tide after that.

The advance to Pyawbwe, as detailed in the official history, is complicated, but since Nine Section played no remarkable part in it I am content to pass it by; Jap was swept aside piecemeal, and took heavy casualties, and once Cowan had the town surrounded it was a question of closing in from all sides. Nine Section's starting point in the grand design was a cluster of Burmese bashas, not big enough to be called a village, where we had dug in the night before. It was just large enough to boast a communal toilet, of which I availed myself when I came off stag at dawn.

Burmese conveniences are curious structures, consisting of a flimsy and barely concealing cabin built on very high stilts and reached by a ladder. The cabin is the upper works, so to speak; there is a hole in the floor, and far beneath is what you might call the pan, except that there isn't one, just the ground. Why the Southern Burmese (for I never saw a skyscraper bog in the north) found it necessary to perform natural functions at such a dizzy height, I never discovered; Parker, who had returned to the section after his convalescence, and had shared the stag with me, supposed that it arose from sheer laziness; the higher the structure, the
less frequently would it need to be moved to a new location, for obvious reasons. He may have been right. The Burmese of the south had discovered a dimension of leisure unknown to the West; they lived in their bashas, planted their rice, ate mangoes and bananas, sat on their verandahs and smoked by way of exercise, and enjoyed an existence of complete tranquility which even a full-scale war seldom disturbed. Probably no people on earth move so slowly or so infrequently.

Which could not be said of me, secluded in the cabin, when a shell burst close by. It would be hard to think of a worse place to be caught during a barrage, and I came down without recourse to the ladder and was crouching in my pit before the echo had died away. It must have been a ranging shot, for no others followed, but it was a sign of things to come, and I time the start of the battle of Pyawbwe from that moment.

Breakfast was a generous affair that day; guessing what was ahead, the cook-sergeant was lavish with the burgoo, bacon and beans; as a rule he was harassed and defensive, like all master gyppos, but that morning he was solicitous, even anxious, scanning our faces as we came by the dixies with our mess-tins. Perhaps he was wondering how many of us would be queuing for supper. “Git that doon ye, Jock—d'ye fancy a boiled egg an' a', son?” was a far cry from “Ah dae me bloody best wi' the bloody stoof—wadyas expect, sivven courses at the Croon an' bloody Mitre?”

Not everyone took advantage of his bounty. One of the section, a newcomer from another regiment,
was sitting on the edge of his pit, hunched up, when his mucker called me over; he was giving little gasps, holding his stomach, and looking green.

“What is it, the shits?” Mild dysentery was common enough, and more of a nuisance than an illness; the genuine article, which was to become increasingly common as we went south in the monsoon, can be a killer. He shook his head, groaning, and when I pressed his lower right abdomen he yelped. I told him to report to the M.O. and went over to tell Peel, who was falling the section in.

“He'll have to go sick,” I said.

“Aye,” said Forster. “Sick wid nerves.”

I said it might be appendicitis—being from a medical family you feel obliged to give idiotic diagnoses every so often—and Forster spat and said: “Ah doot it.” Peel said nothing, and we moved off to the assembly point.

It wasn't appendicitis, but I'm not saying Forster was right; the man was in pain, and it would have taken an expert to determine what caused it. What was interesting was the section's indifference; whether he was sick or scared made no odds, since either would make him an unreliable quantity in action, and it was never referred to again. They were very practical about that sort of thing, and I don't pretend to know what went on deep in their minds, for it is a highly personal matter, and they didn't talk about it, much less show the least emotion. They belonged to a culture in which “windy” is the ultimate insult, and in which the synonym for brave is “mad”, and that is all there is to be said about it.

It was at the assembly point, or shortly after, that I saw the bodies, three or four of them, entirely covered in blankets secured by log-lines; there were patches of dried blood staining the coarse khaki. My impression remains that they were not of our company; I don't remember shell-fire at this time, and can only suppose that they were casualties from an early skirmish. No one drew attention to the discouraging sight.

Then we were moving out from under the trees on to the edge of the dry plain. It was to be a two-company attack, with ourselves on the left, and we formed up in extended lines, a couple of hundred green-clad figures well spread out, with our platoon roughly in the middle behind the vanguard. This was not lost on Sergeant Hutton as he moved among us, making his last-minute checks.

“It'll be heids doon an' keep movin' the day,” I heard him say to Peel. “An' we'll be the ones that catch the shit, an' a', stook in the middle.” He sounded more irritable than usual, possibly because, since we had been given no replacement for Gale, he was de facto platoon commander, responsible for thirty-odd men, a job which no sergeant cares for. He came across to me. “Jock—keep close to the Bren, mind, when we git in.” As 2i/c of the section, the Bren gunner and his number two were my immediate concern. I said I would, and asked him why being in the middle of the advance was a bad thing.

“When Jap artillery oppens oop, he'll ga for the middle o' the target—an' that's us. So keep weel
spread oot, all on ye, an' keep movin'. The farther ye git in, the less chance there is o' the whizz-bangs gittin' ye. Reet, Nick?” But Nick was enjoying his pessimism, as usual.

“Jap's got ’is eye on Nine Section,” he announced. “Special orders f'ae Tojo—’Git them boogers, me jolly lal Japs, an' there's a sivven-day pass for the gooner that puts a whizz-bang oop Grandarse'.” He cackled and leaned forward to shout to Grandarse, in the line in front of us. “Are ye reet, owd lad? Nivver bother, we'll a' git killed!”

“Aw, fookin' shurroop!” snapped Forster, and for once I sympathised: Nick's eternal parrot-cry isn't exactly what you want to hear before going in under Jap artillery without a scrap of cover. Mind you, I'd have felt there was something wrong if he hadn't said it; I'd probably have been superstitious enough to regard it as a bad omen.

We waited in the sunlit morning, listening for our own divisional artillery whose barrage would signal the start of the battle, and I was interested to find myself less nervous than I had been before we went over the bund to the temple wood. It was a primitive thing, no doubt: then there had been no one between me and the enemy position; now there was the lead platoon ahead—I wasn't an old enough soldier to appreciate Hutton's warning about being in the second wave. I heard someone laugh, and saw to my surprise that it was Long John, the company commander, checking his watch as he talked to the sergeant-major. I couldn't
recall hearing him laugh before; the quiet smile was more in his line, but today he was looking as though he hadn't a care in the world, joking with the C.S.M.

“Happy as a pig in shit,” muttered Hutton, and added, with a sour grin that had a deep affection behind it: “’E's a lad, oor John.”

That, incidentally, is about as high a compliment as a Cumbrian soldier can pay, and was a just reflection of the company's feeling. They didn't give their admiration lightly, but they wouldn't have swapped Long John for any officer in the Army. He was a wild cat in action and a gentle man out of it; forty years on I watched him finding seats for latecomers to a memorial service in Carlisle Cathedral, mild and unobtrusive as he handed them their hymn-sheets—and remembered him coming out of the dark with that bent bayonet on his rifle.
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The artillery opened up behind us with a thunder that made the ground shake, every gun in 17th Division throwing its high explosive at the Japanese positions far ahead; the green lines stirred and the bush-hats tilted back as everyone craned to see what was happening beyond the haze, with the ritual murmurs of “Send it doon, David!”—whoever David might be. The bursts were invisible, but the rumble of the distant explosions came back to us in a continuous wave of sound. For
five minutes the barrage continued, and as it died away Nine Section expressed their appreciation.

“Is that a', fer fook's sake! Christ, Ah could ’ev farted better than yon! Aye, weel, that's a' we're gonna git—an' nae air coover, neether! Sod that for a game o' sojers! Bloody madness! Gooners, Ah've shit ’em!” etc. etc. Actually, by their standards it was practically a hymn of gratitude.

A word of command sounded from the platoon ahead. All around men were hitching their rifles to the trail, settling their hats, twitching pouch-straps and water-bottles to make sure all was secure, tapping the hilts of kukris and bayonets; the lead platoon was advancing out on to the plain, three extended lines of them, the right markers keeping distance from the company on our right—I'm told there were Shermans of Probyn's Horse somewhere, but I didn't see them. We moved off in the lead platoon's wake, extending as we came into the open until there was five or six yards between each man; Nick was on my immediate right and Stanley with the Bren to my left; a few yards ahead were Morton the Yorkshireman and Grandarse—and between Grandarse and the lead platoon the tall figure of the battalion chaplain, swinging along good style with his .38 on his hip.

I wondered then, and I wonder now, what the Church of England's policy was about padres who put themselves in harm's way; giving comfort to the wounded and dying, fine, but ethical problems must surely arise if Jap came raging out of a bunker into
his reverence's path; the purple pips on the chaplain's shoulder wouldn't mean a thing to the enemy, so…And if a padre shot a Jap, what would the harvest be—apart from three ringing cheers from the whole battalion? In my own Church, the highly practical Scottish one, it would doubtless be classed as a work of necessity and mercy, but I wasn't sure about the Anglicans. If this seems an unlikely field of speculation when you're going into battle, well, my mind had been running on religion lately. I'd been given the hand of fellowship by the Scots Kirk at Deolali (mainly because it would be welcome news to my father), and had accidentally strayed into a C. of E. communion service at Meiktila, receiving wafers and wine to which I obviously wasn't entitled, and escaping detection only by copying the actions of the other communicants. Also, after being an agnostic from the age of ten, I'd started saying my prayers again—there's nothing like mortal danger for putting you in the mood; as Voltaire observed, it's no time to be making enemies.

I came out of my reverie to realise that we'd gone several hundred yards, and were well out on the plain. The advance was swift but not hurried, about a regulation marching pace, and the rhythm of it, the steady tramp across the hard earth, and the companionship of those long green lines ahead and to either side produced a momentary exhilaration; someone nearby was whistling “Bye-bye, Shanghai”—it must be Parker, somewhere to my right—and I found I was hissing it through
my teeth and keeping time in my head, left-right-left-right, as we strode ahead, watching Grandarse's small pack bumping to the step, the dust drifting past from the boots stepping out ahead…