The Empire Trilogy (167 page)

The Brigadier in command of the 12th Brigade, which had been given the task of defending the defile, had established his Brigade HQ some distance into the Klapa Bali estate on the western side of the road. In the rubber on the other side of the road was the 2nd Battalion of his own regiment, the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, known since Balaclava as ‘The Thin Red Line'; the presence of the Argylls was naturally a source of comfort to the Brigadier for unlike many of the other troops at his disposal, who were ill-trained and inexperienced, they had proved an effective fighting force against the Japanese, thanks largely to his own efforts in training them for jungle warfare before the campaign began. The Brigadier was a tall man with a long, lean, intelligent face which wore, as a rule, a somewhat grim and determined expression. A luxuriant moustache flourished on his upper lip, as surprising on those craggy features as a clump of wild flowers lodged on a rock face. His arms were thin, his body was thin, his knees under his shorts were thin, all of him was thin. It was surprising then that, despite this lack of manifest strength, he should radiate such purpose and such confidence. Even now, exhausted though he was by three weeks of retreating, digging in, fighting, and again retreating, invariably under appalling conditions, his confidence appeared undiminished.

Nevertheless, as darkness now began to fall on 6 January and he awaited developments, the Brigadier was seriously concerned. Because of the eerie quietness which had prevailed all day he had dared to hope that the Japanese might have been halted by the severe blow they had received in an ambush sprung by the Argylls on the railway the previous day. General Paris, on the other hand, whom he had contacted by telephone, had gloomily postulated a wide flanking movement through the dense jungle which would suddenly develop into an attack in the rear. It had happened before.

The Brigadier had pondered the problems of fighting in the jungle and had noticed that instead of a wary advance on a broad front the Japanese preferred a swift and violent attack down the narrow corridor of the road itself to a considerable depth. For whoever had control of the road, as the Brigadier had already realized, in a situation where maps and wireless were scarce, had control of the only practical means of communication. In dense jungle or in a trackless ocean of identical rubber trees it was hard, or impossible, to calculate your exact position; without an accurate idea of where you were it was out of the question to organize an effective manoeuvre. If you had the road, on the other hand, you had everything.

The Brigadier, therefore, was expecting the Japanese to attack straight down the road: given the position they could, in any case, do little else; only if this assault were stopped could they be expected to leave the road and attempt to encircle its defenders. He had, therefore, disposed his 12th Brigade in depth along the road and railway where they ran together for some distance, with two battalions in the defile: one, the Hyderabads, in a forward position to take the first assault and then fall back; the other, the Punjabis, to deal with the main attack. He was counting on the Japanese being stopped at this point and finding themselves committed to encircling through the jungle. To deal with this eventuality, at the southern end of the defile four companies of the Argylls were positioned on either side of the road to meet flanking attacks at the point where the Japanese would emerge from the jungle into the rubber.

But what made the Brigadier's long face look even sterner than usual as he awaited developments was the knowledge of the weakened state the brigade was in. Even his own Argylls were reaching the end of their physical resources: what they needed, and the Indian battalions even more so, was just a little time to recover … even a few hours would make a difference. But throughout the campaign the Japanese had, time and again, followed up their attacks more quickly than expected. The Brigadier was hardly surprised in consequence when Captain Sinclair presently informed him that Chinese refugees filtering through the British positions ahead of the advancing Japanese had brought news of a large column of tanks they had seen moving up the trunk road.

‘They say their engineers have been suh … suh … suh … warming like ants at every demolished bridge for miles back, sir,' stammered Sinclair excitedly. He was surprised and deeply impressed that the Brigadier should remain his imperturbable self at this news of approaching tanks.
He
knew, and the Brigadier knew, just how much could be hoped for from the anti-tank defences in the defile … In the four days that had elapsed since the decision had been taken to make a stand here, work on the defences had continued whenever the constant Japanese air-raids permitted. Weapons pits had been dug and wire had been strung by Chinese and Indian coolies supervised by engineers sent forward by 11th Division; no sooner had the troops themselves arrived, tired though they were by this latest withdrawal, than they, too, had been obliged to join in the work on the defences. But the only defences that could be found that might, at a pinch, stop tanks were a few concrete blocks and a couple of dozen anti-tank mines, both of which had been disposed in the defile. All well and good. Sinclair knew, however (he was a much keener soldier than he had been a diplomat), that tanks are distinctly solid objects: the only point in stopping them with your concrete blocks, which you won't do for long, in any case, with these improvised methods, is to allow your anti-tank guns to get in a good shot at them while motionless. Unfortunately, the slender obstacles which the 12th Brigade had been able to erect in the defile were covered by a mere three anti-tank guns manned, into the bargain, by gunners who had, alas, never been trained to cope with tanks at all, even in daylight, let alone tanks most likely firing tracer at close range in pitch darkness. That should be enough to make even a seasoned gunner's hair stand on end, never mind a raw Indian recruit.

Well then, what else was there to stop the Japs? A railway bridge, forward, had been blown up (the Japanese had tanks with wheels that would run on the rails, it was thought). The Argylls, in common with the rest of the British forces in Malaya, had no tanks of their own, only armoured cars and bren-gun carriers; although these might come in handy on the estate roads to cope with a flanking movement by the Jap infantry into the rubber they were quite useless, of course, against tanks. Most serious of all, the British anti-tank rifles would not penetrate the armour of the Japanese medium tanks. And so what could be done? If the tanks once got through the defile there was only the bridge at Trolak and the Slim River Bridge, both prepared for demolition, which lay between the tanks and the open road to Singapore. And now, into the bargain, it seemed that the Japanese attack would come twenty-four hours sooner than expected.

If the Brigadier received this news of an impending attack from young Sinclair without making a fuss, it was partly because it was his business to be imperturbable, partly because he knew that one can never predict quite how things will turn out: battles cannot be decided on paper by subtracting the armour of one side from the armour of the other and giving the victory to the side which has the surplus. There was a probability, certainly, that the tanks would have the advantage … but so much depends on the quality of the men and on what is going on in their minds. True, the Indian battalions were in very poor shape and the Argylls were not much better. But a quick success or two and who could tell? Thank heaven, anyway, for the few dozen reinforcements who had just arrived from Singapore on this dark, rain-lashed night, under Captain Hamish Ross, for they included some of the best men in the battalion. The few words he had had with Ross had cheered him.

‘We had a wee spot o' bother, sir, at Tyersall Park,' Ross had said, eyeing the Brigadier slyly. ‘I suppose ye might call it a mutiny.'

‘A mutiny, man? Ye'll no expect me to believe that, Hamish Ross!'

And so Captain Ross had explained. When his party of reinforcements had paraded at the Tyersall camp in Singapore a number of Argylls on staff duty whom Malaya Command had specifically ordered him to leave behind had paraded too, demanding to return to the regiment to join in the scrap.

‘Aye, now that's more like it,' nodded the Brigadier and, though his expression was no less forbidding, Hamish Ross could tell by the glint in his eye that he was pleased. These new arrivals would help put heart into the other men, given enough time for them to settle in.

Outside, the rain had slackened now. Making his way through the rubber trees back to the road to find out whether anything more had been gleaned from Chinese refugees, Sinclair paused, gripped by the sense of unreality which comes from excitement and lack of sleep. In the course of the afternoon he had gone forward with the Brigadier to inspect the progress that the Hyderabads and the Punjabis were making with their defences and there he had met Charlie Tyrrell, Mrs Blackett's brother. He did not know Charlie very well. In Singapore they had not met more than once or twice at the Blacketts' house and even then had scarcely exchanged more than a few words. But seeing each other now in these unusual, even desperate circumstances, they had immediately begun to talk as if they were old friends. Charlie had come back with him for an hour to the Argylls' area in the rubber.

Sinclair had been shocked to see the state that Charlie was in. His handsome face was hollow-cheeked with fatigue, dirty and inflamed with insect bites; even his khaki was in tatters. But it was not so much Charlie's physical appearance that had given Sinclair a shock, for in the middle of a jungle campaign one does not expect to see a soldier looking as if he has just turned out on parade: it was the feverish look in his eyes and the obsessive, fatalistic way in which he talked … almost as if he were talking to himself, as if Sinclair had not been there at all. Charlie talked incessantly about his men: he had never seen them so apathetic and dejected! They were at the end of their tether, that much was clear! ‘How can you blame them?' he had demanded without waiting for a reply. ‘Most of them are barely trained recruits.'

Sinclair had nodded sympathetically. Unlike the Argylls down the road the Punjabis did not possess that extra strength for living and fighting in the jungle which comes from training in atrocious conditions, from discipline, from regimental traditions which, combining all together, temper each individual and form what Sinclair thought of as a collective willpower, imperious and inflexible (yet even some of his own Argylls were close to cracking).

He had watched his men for the past two days, Charlie went on, and it was clear that their only thought (though these were the bravest of men!) was to huddle in their slit trenches, the nearest approach to security they could find. But who could blame them? In the course of their long retreat through northern and central Malaya the battalion had lost two hundred and fifty men, of whom many had been killed. From dawn the day before yesterday, there had been a steady stream of Jap bombers and fighters blasting away at the edges of the jungle on both sides of the defile where, though hidden, they knew the British forces to be. These planes had robbed the Punjabis of any chance they might have had of resting before the next attack; they had also caused a further trickle of casualties. And yet, somehow, even that was not the worst of it … It was …

They were standing a little way off the road in the shade. Charlie was leaning his back against the trunk of a rubber tree. As he spoke he kept wearily slapping his sweating face with his hand as if to drive off insects but mechanically, with resignation (besides, Sinclair could see no insects around Charlie's face) … Abruptly Sinclair was afraid that the Brigadier might come by and see Charlie in this state. He felt that that could not be allowed to happen, he could not quite say why, except that you only had to glance at the way Charlie was leaning against the rubber tree, talking and slapping himself, his gaunt and desperate face dappled by sunlight and shadow filtering through the leaves, to know that he had very nearly reached the point where he simply
would not care
any longer!

But still Charlie was trying to explain himself to Sinclair, with an almost pathetic determination that he should understand … He was trying to say that, however bad it might be when the Jap Zero was roaring along the road machine-gunning the fringes of the jungle, it was no better when the plane had dipped its wing and swung away over the tree tops. Because within a few seconds an eerie silence had fallen, blanketing even the sound of the departing plane. ‘When you've been in this bloody place a bit longer, Sinclair,' he said, grinning now as if there was something amusing about what he was saying, but at the same time scratching his ribs viciously through his tattered shirt, ‘you'll understand exactly what I mean.'

‘Well, I've been trying to get up here for the past three weeks,' said Sinclair defensively, for it was true that it was only four days since he had left Singapore, ‘but I think I know what you mean.'

There was something about this silence, went on Charlie, ignoring him: it gave the sound of your voice a distant, unreal quality. Even quite sharp sounds, like the dropping of a mess tin on the metalled road, would be blotted up immediately by the dense green walls on either side. The sound did not seem to
go
anywhere, that was it. There was no resonance. It gave you a baffling sensation, like speaking into a dead telephone. Only at night did you begin to hear sounds again. But so disturbing were the night sounds that the silence was almost better. Another thing, action here seemed to have no more resonance than sounds. During the daytime when you stopped moving, everything stopped, as if you were on the floor of a dead ocean. Everything had to come from
you
, that was what was so intolerable. His men felt the same way, he could tell by watching them. For men already exhausted this need to initiate all movement from their own resources was unendurable.

The two men were silent for a few moments. Charlie had evidently come to the end of what he had wanted to say. Although he still leaned dejectedly against the tree, he had stopped slapping himself and appeared calmer. ‘Sorry to go on like that about it,' he said presently. ‘It's the same for everyone, of course. Besides, it's not much better for you blokes here in the rubber.' It was true, Sinclair reflected, that even at the best of times there was something unnerving about a rubber plantation; wherever you stood you found yourself at the centre of a bewildering maze of identical trees which stretched out geometrically in every direction as far as the eye could see. But in Malaya the eye, as a rule, could not see very far; you seldom found a place from where you could get a prospect
over
the jungle or rubber which covered the country like a green lid on a saucepan.