Quartered Safe Out Here (23 page)

After which there was nothing for it but to rest in Ferrazini's and linger over a Desert Sunrise, which was about a gallon of ice creams and syrups of every flavour and colour. And a Turkish coffee.

It was all new and exotic and dazzling to us, in those days before package travelling, when Britain was in the grip of war-time austerity; what is now commonplace was a novelty. For example, I had never had a shoeshine until Calcutta; I had never eaten a steak until we treated ourselves at Jimmy's Kitchen to a mysterious thing called a T-Bone, with chips. Nor had I known the exhilaration of being massaged by an Indian barber, all across the shoulders and down the arms to the fingers, each joint of which he cracked resoundingly, and produced a feeling of well-being beyond anything I had experienced.

Being eccentric, I had to hunt out the Black Hole of Calcutta, and found it (in Strand Road, if memory serves), a low archway just above pavement level through which you could look into the infamous dark dungeon; I wonder if the little plaque to the 23 who died inside it is still there; knowing the Indians, I imagine it is.

But sightseeing and riding in tongas and rubber-necking at the wonders of Chowringhee was all very well; what I was starved of was reading, and the booksellers made enough out of me to retire. They had a simple system: you bought a book for ten rupees
and when you had read it they bought it back for seven. I have mentioned the works of Jeffery Farnol, and I think I know why he was so available in Calcutta; whatever his literary merits, he was the great romantic conjurer of Old England, painting his word-pictures of leafy lanes and bosky woods and green fields and pints of ale and rosy-cheeked milkmaids and saturnine squires and all those never-never things that were so far away from the heat and dust and smells of India. I went through him like a devouring flame, and counted him cheap at the price.

The movies then being what T.V. is nowadays, we spent hours in the Lighthouse and the Tiger and the other cinemas, but (and this is unusual for me, for my memory for old films is prodigious) I can give the title of only one of the dozen or so pictures I must have seen in Calcutta, and that is
Chal, Chal Re Navjavan
(“March, March the Youth”) which I went to out of sheer curiosity, never having seen an Indian movie. From its title I imagine it must have been aimed at those supporting the Indian independence movement, but it consisted largely of winsome young females in saris riding bicycles and glancing coyly at intense young men; there were interminable shots of blossoms and lily ponds, all to the accompaniment of zithers and keening half-tone singing, and after about ten minutes Grandarse exclaimed: “Booger this for a lark, Ah's gan for anoother dekko at Grable,” and left. That is my total recall of Calcutta cinemas, except for the item which probably displaced all the Hollywood features
from my memory, and that was the newsreel which accompanied them: the first pictures to come out of Belsen concentration camp.

We were not a squeamish group in Nine Section; if anyone had seen war in the raw, we had, but that newsreel left us numb. If we hadn't seen those ghastly walking skeletons and great heaps of emaciated bodies, I don't think we'd have believed it. Even now it doesn't seem possible that human behaviour could sink to such depths. Some people left the cinema, and one woman was physically sick. I stood in the foyer afterwards reflecting that if Robert Burns had seen those pictures he would have revised his famous lines about man's inhumanity to man making countless thousands mourn, and substituted a much stronger verb.

“If Ah'd my way,” said Forster, over his beer, “ye knaw w'at Ah'd dee? Ah'd roond oop ivvery fookin' Hun in Germany, an Ah'd boorn the boogers alive. Noo, then!”

This was weighed, and Stanley asked, what about women and children?

“The whole bloody
sub-cheese
, the lot!”

“Not on,” said Parker. “You'd be just as bad as the bleedin' Nazis.”

“Don't talk cock!” retorted Forster, and produced an analogy of which I'd not have thought him capable. “Ye tellin' me, if soom booger commits a moorder, an' Ah hing ’im for't, that Ah'm as bad as ’e is? Ga'n git stoofed!”

This was at a time when the death penalty was
not an issue, except among a few intellectuals, so the ethical point was not pursued. The practical one was, though.

“Wimmen an' kids didn't starve them poor boogers tae death,” said Nick.

“Naw!” insisted Forster. “But ’oo aboot w'en the kids grow oop? Think they'll be any better? Look at yer bloody ’Itler Youth, man! They're a' the same! Christ, man, fowk like them isn't fit tae live! That's my opinion.”

“Tell ye w'at Ah'd dee,” said Nick. “Ah'd hing the boogers that did it, an' chop the goolies off a' the Jerry men, an' gi' the German wimmen till the Rooshans—by God, that'd larn the bitches!—”

“Sod that,” said Parker. “I'm shot if I'd do them red bastards any favours.”

“—an' Ah'd send a' the kids till Australia, an' nivver let on tae them w'ee they were, or w'eer they cam' frae.”

“Stone me! What's Australia done? An' wot's the point?”

“Gi' the kids a chance tae grow oop decent. Australia's a big place—an' a bloody lang way frae Germany.”

“Fat bloody chance they'd grow up decent!” scoffed Forster. “Look, man—my owd Dad got blew tae boogery in Flanders, lost a leg, nivver wez any use efter. Weel, the fookin' Jerries started
that!
Aye, an' w'en we'd lathered ’em, we let ’em be—an' w'at ’appened? Fookin' ’Itler ’appened—an' the likes o' them that did w'at ye've joost seen in't newsreel! An'
ye'd gi' the swine anoother chance? They'll dee it again, mark my woords! Ah'd wipe oot the bloody lot—
bus!
Durty Hun bastards!' He sat drumming his fingers. ‘An’ Ah'll tell ye this, Nick! They're lower than bloody Jap, the Germans! Theer, noo! Jap's a fookin' gentleman compared wid that lot!” Irrelevantly, for him, he added: “An' they ca' theirsels Christians!”

“Doan't talk sae wet, Foshie,” said Grandarse patiently. “Ye can't wipe oot a whole coontry, man. W'eer ye ganna stop, eh? Ye ganna kill Conrad Veet?” He meant Conrad Veidt.

“Conrad w'ee? W'at the hell ye talkin' aboot, man?”

“Conrad Veet, the film star. ’E's a Jerry.”

“Conrad Veet's a British subject,” said Wedge, the authority. “Marlene Dietrich's German, an' all.”

“Can't give Marlene to the Russians,” sighed Parker. “Wasted on ’em. Give ’er to me, Foshie. I'll volunteer.”

“Ah's nut talkin' aboot Conrad Veet and Marlene bloody Dietrich!” cried Forster, enraged at this levity. “’E's a reet slimy-lookin' sod, mind—prob'ly a Fifth Columnist. Ah'm talkin' aboot the Huns in Germany! Coom on, man,” he appealed to Parker. “Ye seen that film—mek ye spew yer guts oop! Ye ganna let them off?” He stared angrily round the table. “Are ye?”

“It won't be up to us, Foshie,” I said. “Even if it was, Grandarse is right—you can't wipe out a nation. At least, I don't think you can.” My grasshopper mind had immediately skipped to the Picts. I wasn't sure about the Aztecs and Incas.

“Ah'd ’ev a bloody good try,” said Forster. “An' Ah
tell ye w'ee else would—the Russkis. Let them loose on Germany—by Christ, they'd sort it oot!”

There was no support for this. Whatever the view of the Soviet Union among C. P. Snow's men of the left, there was a definite feeling at the grass roots of the British Army—or what I saw of it—that after Berlin and Tokyo, “next stop Moscow” would be not a bad idea. I remembered a conversation I'd heard on a bus just after war broke out, and an elderly working man saying: “Ah telt oor boy, w'en ’e joined oop: Nivver mind ’Itler, son, but if ye meet that booger Staylin, put a bay'net oop ’is arse.” Labour voters they might be, but for Communism few of them had any use.

Forster's solution to the German problem, if I may call it that, was held by most of the section to be impractical—which is not to say that it was received unsympathetically. The spirit of revenge was strong, especially after the horrors of Belsen and the other camps were revealed, and it was realised what the Germans had been doing and why. I imagine that the Nuremberg trials (which seemed to me, even at the time, to be proceedings of doubtful wisdom) were staged to satisfy this feeling, but there may have been loftier motives. My own instinct would have been to shoot the leading Nazis out of hand, and the devil with legal forms, but I concede that that wouldn't have been as simple as it sounds.

Our beery discussion sounds terribly naïve now, but at that time the term “war criminal” had not been coined; even the concept was unknown to us. After all,
no one in 1945 was pursuing war criminals from the First World War, let alone the Boer War of forty-five years ago, and we could not have envisaged that war crimes from
our
war would still be being prosecuted forty-five years into the future. And the notion that the House of Commons in 1991 would be violating a vital principle of British justice by legislating to prosecute people who had committed no crime in British jurisdiction, would have been laughed out of the room. (Pursuit of a just feud, outside the law, would have been another matter; that we would have understood, none better.)

But if we had known the concept of war crimes, we would have thought of them as exclusively German and Japanese. After all, we were the winners, and it would have seemed incredible, then, that the day would ever come when a former British Prime Minister, and a Secretary-General of the United Nations (which didn't exist then) would be “linked” to allegations of atrocities, however distant. And the thought that any of
us
, Nine Section, could ever have had the finger pointed at us…really.

Yet, having followed the Waldheim affair and the brouhaha over the Cossacks, and being aware of how fashionable perspectives (to say nothing of common sense) have changed in half a century, I am fairly sure that the section, myself included, could well be charged with war crimes, if anyone wanted to take the trouble. It seems to be established that knowing of a war crime, and winking at it, is to be guilty, at least as
an accessory, or by association. Of course, we survivors of Nine Section are of no eminence or importance, and no one can grind a political axe by pursuing us, and they'd have a hell of a job collecting evidence at this time of day, so Nick and Grandarse and the rest of us can probably sleep in peace. But by today's standards, we're dead to rights.

There was a village, no matter where, which contained a curious building, roofed but open at the sides, and its floor was about forty feet by twenty, and made of concrete. Down the length of the floor ran a central trench, also of concrete, perhaps eight feet wide by six deep, rather like a very big garage inspection pit. The building was used as a prison hospital for sick and wounded Japanese, who were laid on stretchers and palliasses down both sides, but not in the central trench. They were guarded, night and day, by picquets drawn from various units. I was never on guard myself, but I was in the building a couple of times, and saw the Japanese, who may have numbered anything from twenty to fifty; I can't be sure. They were all in pretty poor shape.

One morning, after an Indian unit had been on guard, there were no Japanese to be seen in the building, and the central trench was full of rocks. The Japanese were found underneath them, dead. They had been thrown into the trench in the night, and the rocks hurled down on them.

I heard this from one of the section, in the presence of my comrades. We didn't go to the building, so I had
only that man's word for it, but from what I heard later from other sources, there was no doubt his report was accurate. I know it happened, although I never saw the evidence.

What had happened was a “war crime”, no question. So, what should I have done? Investigated, like a good n.c.o.? Informed my superior—and gone higher if necessary? Written to my M.P.?

It did not even cross my mind to do any of these things. I probably grimaced, remarked “Hard buggers, those jawans”, shrugged, and forgot about it. If I had made an issue of it with higher authority, I'd have been regarded as eccentric. I'd have regarded
myself
as eccentric. By the standards which I have heard applied recently to those who turned a blind eye to similar incidents, and by all the canons of popular moralists of 1991, I should have made a stir, demanded an inquiry, and not rested until the offenders were brought to book. I didn't, not because of any conscious decision on the point, or weighing of pro's and con's, but simply because it didn't matter to me. It had happened, beyond repair, and I felt no dereliction of duty, military or moral, in ignoring it. I still don't.

That is not to say that I condone major war crimes, or would take any but a short way with those who commit them. I know that the killing (or murder, which is what it was) of those Japanese was well beyond the civilised borderline. But being of my generation, in the year 1945, towards the end of a war of a peculiarly vicious, close-quarter kind, against an enemy who wouldn't
have known the Geneva Convention if it fell on him, I never gave it a second thought. And if I had, the notion of crying for redress against the perpetrators (my own comrades-in-arms, Indian soldiers who had gone the mile for us, and we for them), on behalf of a pack of Japs, would have been obnoxious, dishonourable even.

To the modern mind, accustomed to hearing soldiers asked, after a terrorist has been killed in Ulster: “Was it necessary to open fire? Could he not have been taken prisoner?”, and to being bombarded with emotive phrases like “shoot to kill”, and being lectured about “reasonable force”, my attitude may seem shocking. But we did not share today's obsession with guilt, or its manic desire to find someone (preferably in uniform) to blame, or from whom to seek compensation; we were not over-worried about virtue for mere appearance's sake. We were in the business of killing Japanese; it was what we were trained for; it was our livelihood, in a very real sense.

I am not justifying, but explaining, when I say those were the days when, if a selection board chairman asked (and he did): “Wouldn't you like to stick a bayonet in a German's guts, eh?”, he was not expecting an answer drawn from the Sermon on the Mount. An American movie of the time, I remember, showed a Japanese plane exploding in flames, and an American air gunner (I think it was George Tobias) chortling: “Fried Jap going down!” The audience chuckled (and last year a film commentator singled out the clip for
a shocked comment). That was the atmosphere of the time, and it would be a bold man who said it was a
wrong
atmosphere for the time, however ugly it may look now. I can see that the incident I mentioned earlier, about Japanese soldiers being wakened, and
then
shot, must seem barbaric now—yes, they probably could have been taken prisoner; excessive force was used, and that too was probably a war crime. But they do come in different sizes, and it is possible to react with revulsion and rage to Belsen, and at the same time to regard the killing of those Jap stretcher cases as a matter of little account. And to anyone who disputes that, I can only say: Get yourself to the sharp end, against an enemy like the Japanese, encounter a similar incident…and let me know how you get on.