Quartered Safe Out Here (16 page)

Pyawbwe fell next day without a shot fired. A patrol from the battalion went into the town centre at dawn, but Jap was dead or gone away. There were more than 1100 of his bodies on the ground, and thirteen guns abandoned; his army had finally, to quote Slim, been torn apart, and while the remnants would fight on desperately in the jungly swamp of southern Burma in the monsoon, they were never a coherent force again. Which makes a private soldier wonder why Tokyo, surveying its battered lines from Burma to the Pacific, didn't acknowledge that all hope was gone, and call it a day. But governments, of course, never do. They're not lying with a shattered leg in the wreckage of a little room, too far gone to hear the footsteps outside the door.

It must have been on that following day that we shifted our pits, for I remember a slow sweep across open rubble-strewn ground where the Japs had died in their tracks, and their corpses were lying where they had fallen, in stiff grotesque attitudes. I don't remember any vultures or kites; our advance may have scared them off. One body had its stomach ripped open, and the swollen intestine protruded like a great balloon;
someone pricked it with his bayonet, idly, and there was a most disgusting stench.

“Aw, Jesus—pack it oop!” cried Grandarse, and Nick looked about him and upbraided the dead in withering terms.

“Ye stupid sods! Ye stupid Japanni sods! Look at the fookin' state of ye! Ye wadn't listen—an' yer all fookin' deid! Tojo's way! Ye dumb bastards! Ye coulda bin suppin' chah an' screwin' geeshas in yer fookin' lal paper ’ooses—an' look at ye! Ah doan't knaw.” He shook his head. “All the way frae fookin' Japan!”

If it sounds shocking, it didn't at the time. Nick had a bitter sense of humour, but I'm sure that on this occasion he was simply saying what he thought. He didn't pity the Japs; none of us did. If anything, he was angry, not only at the folly that those bodies represented, but because only yesterday they had been alive and trying to kill us, and if he had added: “An' serve ye right!” I wouldn't have been surprised—or disagreed.

There is much talk today of guilt as an aftermath of war—guilt over killing the enemy, and even guilt for surviving. Much depends on the circumstances, but I doubt if many of Fourteenth Army lose much sleep over dead Japanese. For one thing, they were a no-surrender enemy and if we hadn't killed them they would surely have killed us. But there was more to it than that. It may appal a generation who have been dragooned into considering racism the ultimate crime, but I believe there was a feeling (there was in me) that
the Jap was farther down the human scale than the European. It is a feeling that I see reflected today in institutions and people who would deny hotly that they are subconscious racists—the presence of TV cameras ensured a superficial concern for the Kurdish refugees and Bangladeshi flood victims, but we all know that the Western reaction would have been immeasurably greater if a similar disaster had occurred in Australia or Canada or Europe; some people seem to count more than others, with liberals as well as reactionaries, and it is folly to pretend that racial kinship and likeness are not at the bottom of it.

As to the Japanese of fifty years ago, there is no question that he was viewed in an entirely different light from our European enemies. Would the atomic bomb have been dropped on Berlin, or Rome, or Vienna? No doubt newspaper reports and broadcasts had encouraged us, civilians and military, to regard him as an evil, misshapen, buck-toothed barbarian who looked and behaved like something sub-Stone Age; the experiences of Allied prisoners of war demonstrated that the reports had not lied and reinforced the view that the only good Jap was a dead one. And we were right, then.

It is difficult for me to equate the Japanese of the ’forties with those neat, eager, apparently polite young men whom I see in airports and tourist centres, bustling, smiling, and clicking their Leicas. But old feelings persist, and I prefer not to sit beside them. Nor will I buy a Japanese car (for one thing, I think that German
cars are better). And if I am a foolish and bigoted old man, I can only plead the excuse that apologists are forever advancing on behalf of modern criminals—like them, I am a victim of my environment and upbringing; I need understanding. So, I suspect, do most of my old comrades who gave the best years of their lives (and sometimes life itself) to decreasing the population of Japan. Do not reproach them with it, but be thankful.

As to old grudges and hatreds…well, one cannot help what one feels, and guilt and regret just don't come into it. At the same time, I remember watching, a year or two ago, televised interviews with old Japanese soldiers who had fought in the war, and being conscious, despite myself, of a sort of…not sympathy, but a curious sort of recognition of the wrinkled old bastards, sitting in their gardens in their sports shirts, blinking cheerfully in the sunlight, reminiscing in throat-clearing croaks about battles long ago. It crossed my mind: were any of you on the Pyawbwe slope, and lived to tell the tale? Well, if they did, at this time of day I don't mind.

We were at Pyawbwe a week, but it seemed longer, possibly because all of a sudden there was nothing very active to do—no stags, no patrols, no fatigues even. We were waiting for the war to catch up with us, and there was time to get a decent all-over bath, to collect our big packs from the trucks and rummage through them,
to write letters at leisure, to re-read and abandon the short story I'd begun the night Jap broke through the wire, to give kit and weapons a thorough going-over—in my case, to take possession of a tommy-gun, much against my will. I had grown to love my old snub-nosed Lee Enfield, and resented having to part with it, but it was usual for a section 2i/c to carry a Thompson if one were available, so I accepted the thing and detested it. It was ugly, ungainly, I hadn't been trained in its use or taught to regard it as a wife, and it couldn't have come within ten feet of a falling plate at two hundred yards. Its whole purpose was automatic, and my view was that if single aimed shots had been good enough for the Duke of Wellington, they were good enough for me. For some reason I felt like a bully, just carrying it, and it rusted like an old bed-frame. I threw it in a Sittang creek, eventually, but in the meantime I had to go about like Lance-corporal Capone.

I associate that week at Pyawbwe with the first return to something like normal life since the campaign began. A mobile cinema arrived and showed us a film,
Northern Pursuit
, in which Errol Flynn was a dashing Mountie foiling Nazi agents in Canada—I assume he foiled them, for the projector broke down halfway, to howls of rage from the groundlings. Flynn was in terribly bad odour at that time, for having appeared in a movie called
Objective Burma
which had given great offence in Britain because it had concentrated on America's part in the Burma campaign; it had been withdrawn from U.K. cinemas after outraged baying
from the popular press and, I believe, politicians. That being so, a Flynn movie might have seemed an odd choice for a Fourteenth Army audience, but it wasn't: Flynn, his absence from the war notwithstanding, was popular with the forces, who admired his lifestyle and wished they'd had half his bother. And we would have liked to see
Objective Burma
for ourselves, if only in the hope of discovering inaccuracies and being able to hurl abuse at the screen. In that we would have been disappointed; I saw it years later, and it was an above-average war picture which may well have been a fair reflection of the Stilwell–Merrill operations in the north for all I know. The Americans did play a supporting role in the Burma land war, and if they wanted to make a movie about it, good luck to them.

We liked war movies, British or American, but I realise that their popularity in war-time may seem strange nowadays, when super-sensitivity is the rule. I suppose it is natural enough to postpone the TV showing of an air disaster movie when there is a real air crash in the news, or even to withhold an American prison drama of the ’forties at a time when rioters are hurling slates from the roof of a British jail. But when the showing of
Carry On up the Khyber
was cancelled during the Gulf crisis because it showed comic British troops opposed to comic Muslims, one couldn't help recalling the delight with which war-time audiences hailed movies in which George Formby and Will Hay, among others, made merry of the struggle against the Nazis. No one took the war less seriously because of
such entertainments; they did not offend taste, and far from undermining morale, they strengthened it. Times, and perhaps the sense of humour, have changed.

Half of
Northern Pursuit
was not our only relaxation; a great bundle of magazines was distributed, and one of them contained, to the delight of Wedge, a full-page pin-up of the idolised Susanna Foster displaying her celebrated legs; he affixed it to the rusted side of the railway wagon and contemplated it with deep-breathing worship, and even Grandarse was moved to admit that she was “not a bad bit stoof” which from him was the equivalent of a poem from Herrick.

I got two paperbacks from home which I had requested:
Henry V
, which we had done in my last year at school and for which I had developed a deep affection, and
Three Men in a Boat
—not that I was a devotee of Jerome's, but I had felt that comedy and a reminder of the beauties of the English countryside wouldn't come amiss. I had also thought that it might be acceptable when passed round the section, but I didn't expect any takers for Shakespeare, intellectual snob that I was. The result was instructive.

I was lying on my groundsheet, renewing acquaintance with Jerome and the tin of pineapple, when Sergeant Hutton squatted down beside me.

“W'at ye readin', then? W'at's this? ’Enry Vee—bloody ’ell, by William Shekspeer!” He gave me a withering look, and leafed over a page. “Enter Chorus. O for a muse of fire that wad…Fook me!” He riffled the pages. “Aye, weel, we'll ’ev a look.” And such is the
way of sergeants, he removed it without by-your-leave; that's one that won't be away long, I thought.

I was wrong. Three days later it had not been returned, and having exhausted Jerome and the magazines I was making do with the Fourteenth Army newspaper,
SEAC
, famous for its little cartoon character, Professor Flitt,
^*
a jungle infantryman who commented memorably on the passing scene. And I was reading a verse by the paper's film critic

when Hutton loafed up and tossed
Henry V
down beside me and seated himself on the section grub-box. A silence followed, and I asked if he had liked it. He indicated the book.

“Was Shekspeer ivver in th' Army?”

I said that most scholars thought not, but that there were blanks in his life, so it was possible that, like his friend Ben Jonson, he had served in the Low Countries, or even in Italy. Hutton shook his head.

“If ’e wesn't in th' Army, Ah'll stand tappin'.
†
’E knaws too bloody much aboot it, man.”

This was fascinating. Hutton was a military hard
case who had probably left school long before 14, and his speech and manner suggested that his normal and infrequent reading consisted of company orders and the sports headlines. But Shakespeare had talked to him across the centuries—admittedly on his own subject. I suggested hesitantly that the Bard might have picked up a good deal just from talking to military men; Hutton brushed the notion aside.

“Nivver! Ye knaw them three—Bates, an' them, talkin' afore the battle? Ye doan't git that frae lissenin' in pubs, son. Naw, ’e's bin theer.” He gave me the hard, aggressive stare of the Cumbrian who is not to be contradicted. “That's my opinion, any roads. An' them oothers—the Frenchmen, the nawblemen, tryin' to kid on that they couldn't care less, w'en they're shittin' blue lights? Girraway! An' the Constable tekkin' the piss oot o' watsisname—”

“The Dauphin.”

“Aye.” He shook his head in admiration. “Naw, ye've ’eerd it a' afore—in different wurrds, like. Them fower officers, the Englishman an' the Scotsman an' the Irishman an' the Welshman—Ah mean, ’e's got their chat off, ’esn't ’e? Ye could tell w'ich wez w'ich, widoot bein' told. That Welsh booger!” He laughed aloud, a thing he rarely did. “Talk till the bloody coos coom yam, the Taffies!” He frowned. “Naw, Ah nivver rid owt be Shekspeer afore—Ah mean, ye ’ear the name, like…” He shrugged eloquently. “Mind, there's times Ah doan't knaw w'at th' ’ell ’e's talkin' aboot—”

“You and me both,” I said, wondering uneasily if
there were more passages obscure to me than there were to him. He sat for a moment and then misquoted (and I'm not sure that Shakespeare's version is better):

“There's nut many dies weel that dies in a battle. By Christ, ’e's reet theer. It's a good bit, that.” He got up. “Thanks for the lend on't, Jock.”

I said that if he'd liked it, he would like
Henry IV
, too. “Falstaff's bloody funny, and you'd like Hotspur—”

“’Ev ye got it?”

I apologised that I hadn't, and promised to write for it. By way of a trailer I told him as much as I remembered of Hotspur's “When the fight was done” speech, but I'm no Sean Connery, and although he nodded politely I could see I was a poor substitute for the written word.

He went off, leaving me to reflect that I had learned something more about
Henry V
, and Shakespeare. In his own way Hutton was as expert a commentator as Dover Wilson or Peter Alexander; he was a lot closer to Bates and Court and Williams (and Captains Jamy and Fluellen) than they could ever hope to be. And I still wonder if Shakespeare
was
in the Army.

My other strongest memory of Pyawbwe is of getting to know the Gurkhas, whose pits were close to ours, and to whom I made regular visits to trade rations. As Grandarse said, they would have sold their souls for tinned herrings in tomato sauce, or for sardines, and I only had to stroll across to their positions with a couple of the oval tins in my hand to be greeted with
huge smiles and squeals of “Hey, Jock—chapatti, dood, cheeny!
Shabash!
”
^*
And out would come the sugar and condensed milk, or the big flat chapattis which they baked on their company fire, by way of exchange, the deal being cemented by the offer of cigarettes on my part and the acceptance of a huge mug of their sickly sweet tea, to be drunk sitting in the middle of a grinning chattering group of those wonderful little men. There is nothing like tea in the afternoon, whether it is in snug comfort at home on a winter's day, or on the terrace of Reid's or in the cool white peace of the old Raffles in Singapore, or the Hong Kong Peninsula (even if they did put onion with the salmon sandwiches), or in an English tea-shop—but having tea with the Gurkhas is something special, for they radiate a cheer and good-fellowship that has to be experienced, and once you have, you understand why British soldiers have always held them in an affection that is pretty close to love.