He thought: This is not happening. This could not be for real—this place on the other side of the world to which he had been shipped and flown, a piece of human freight. He was not here. Really, he was in his room in a small house on a council estate in Newcastle-upon-Tyne; he was back in the time of reason, two years ago, his books spread out on the table—R. H. Tawney and G. D. H. Cole and the Hammonds. There was a cup of Nescafé with wrinkled skin on it at his elbow, the lino was chilly under his feet, downstairs his mother had Housewives’ Choice on the wireless. That was where he was really, not here.
They were on stand-to. Somewhere out there in the darkness, on the other side of the river, the Chinese were moving. Many Chinese. The enemy. The map that they had been shown had this looping river, the Imjin; north of it lay the menacing territory out of which would come the enemy attack, to the south were their positions, Twenty-ninth Brigade—the Gloucesters to the left, the Belgian battalion to the right, themselves in the center, the Ulsters behind, in reserve. He had craned to see this map, spread out in front of them by an impatient officer who had more pressing things to do than brief a bunch of newly arrived national servicemen. He was struck by the bleak number references accorded to the hills—the height in meters, 257 and 194 and 398 and so on—and it occurred to him, even in the trauma of his hideous arrival, that they must have names. The people here would call them something. He had remembered the Lake District, where he had walked—Cat Bells and Langdale Pike, Skiddaw and Saddleback.
He thought he saw the darkness move. His stomach churned; his fingers tightened on his pistol. And then the movement defined itself: the shifting branch of a bush. A little gust of wind.
In his kit bag there was the War Office pamphlet: “Notes on Korea, August 1950.” He had read this several times on the voyage out, sitting on deck amid the wastes of the Indian Ocean, or lying in his bunk in the cramped cabin shared with three others. Officers’ quarters, relative comfort; elsewhere were the teeming fetid tiers below decks.
ON SUNDAY 25 JUNE 1950, SOUTH KOREA WAS INVADED BY THE NORTH KOREAN COMMUNIST ARMY; NOW YOU YOURSELVES ARE GOING TO FIGHT THESE NORTH KOREANS. WHAT IS OUR QUARREL WITH THEM? HOW DOES THIS AFFECT YOU? WHY, IN FACT, ARE YOU GOING TO KOREA?
Why indeed? But he knew why. It was because that is what history does to people. It picks them up by the scruff of the neck and puts them where they do not want to be. It scuppers them; it condemns them to national service and then throws them this, as an extra treat. He was interested in history; at school, he had sat at the feet of a charismatic history master; he had won the sixth-form history prize. At this moment, he would prefer to stand aside from history.
A sound. Scurrying. Someone coming. He tensed again. Then the reassurance of a hoarse whisper—a Geordie whisper, a Fusilier whisper, one of them, an NCO going from trench to trench: they could stand down for an hour, brew up. The men alongside him shuffled with relief, slumped in the trench, lit cigarettes.
YOU ARE GOING TO KOREA TO HELP THE SOUTH KOREANS TO REPEL AGGRESSION; AND, MORE IMPORTANTLY STILL, TO UPHOLD THE CHARTER OF THE UNITED NATIONS AND TO FIGHT FOR THE PRINCIPLE THAT THE WORLD MUST BE GOVERNED BY THE RULE OF LAW AND NOT BY FORCE.
Ah. So that was what they were there for. For noble, enlightened reasons. Never mind that the goalposts had now been subtly shifted and it was the Chinese that they must fight, and what had they been told, one asked? And a fat lot of consolation was all this high-mindedness out in the middle of the Indian Ocean, or in a transit camp in Japan, and least of all here, now, in a trench on a freezing hillside with people who intended to kill you somewhere out there in the darkness.
He was twenty-one. He was interested in social justice, the music of Mahler, Newcastle United, girls, books, and argument. He had been reading his way through Newcastle Central Library since he was fourteen. He played rugby, cricket, and the violin. He was a member of the Labour Party, the Youth Hostel Association, and the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society.
He owned a bicycle, a violin, a gramophone, three Beethoven symphonies and two of Mahler’s, the Concise Oxford Dictionary, the complete works of Evelyn Waugh and eighty-nine other books, a compass, a map of the Lake District, and not much else.
Someone handed him a mug of tea. He must have dozed off for an instant, leaning up against the wall of the trench, and was jolted back to consciousness by a thud and then an explosion that he recognized as mortar, quite near. Gunfire too, closer than before. The platoon commander was telling them to get back on watch. He stared out into the darkness, which was leeched with light, a proposal of dawn, and was hectic now with flashes, flares, tracer, the sound of firing, of explosions. Intensified, continuous rather than spasmodic—something going on out there, down there, over toward the other company positions, three miles away, nearer to the river.
“That’s Z Company getting it. And the Gloucesters.” His own former platoon sergeant was next to him in the trench, the familiar voice somehow reassuring, known from Catterick, from Salisbury Plain, from that other life a world away. Most of the men around him here were strangers, regulars and reservists, their Northumbrian accents the only unity. The officer commanding this platoon to which he had been attached as observer and second in command was a regular soldier, the men a mix of veterans and the raw, newly arrived national servicemen.
Daylight came. Now you could see the lumpy green hills again, this queer artificial terrain that had seemed alien as soon as he set eyes on it—no landscape he had ever seen was like this, with the row upon row of jagged peaks, seemingly endless, receding into the distance. W Company was stuck up on the side of one of these, looking down on the road that ran to the river, which was shallow and easily forded, no obstacle to the enemy—the briefing officer had told them that. They could see a bend of the road, with armored cars and lorries and sometimes one of the Eighth Hussars’ Centurion tanks, and a stream of the carts on which Korean porters brought up supplies. The river was invisible, beyond the next peaks, on one of which Z Company was dug in. And that was ablaze, it seemed—smoke, flying tracer, a barrage of noise.
The sergeant was looking at him: “You’ve lost your rose, sir.” It seemed like a reproach.
They had been issued yesterday with red and white roses for St. George’s Day, flown in specially from Japan, and many men still wore them, tucked into their battledress or their beret—limp, incongruous tokens.
Sir. The sergeant was older than he was. That “sir” always gave him a twinge of embarrassment. Army hierarchy offended his deepest instincts. The army trawled its catch and selected those who had higher educational qualifications or were apparently more intelligent—categories not always mutually compatible—and set them in authority. He was an officer because he was a grammar school boy and, yes, he was clever. And, yes, an army has to have a command structure. None of this made him feel easy with the sergeant’s “sir.” He and the sergeant shared a background—they spoke the same language, recognized the same codes; the crude dictation of the army had thrust him with public school boys whose attitudes and assumptions he despised, and who in their turn patronized grammar school types.
He knew that if the officer in command were killed or wounded he would have to lead this platoon, and a role that he had found possible at the barracks or on Salisbury Plain, if unnatural and occasionally alarming, became out here a nightmare. He thought of the time he had got lost on an exercise, with thirty men, and brought them back to base ten hours late. Here, a mistake could cost men’s lives. His training had all been in anticipation of this moment; a hypothetical event, back then, but now an incredible reality amid these foreign hills. Others depended on him; somehow, the sobriety of this knowledge helped to steady him.
The sun came up; a bright, clear, spring day. There were new green leaves on the stunted, windswept trees, and shrubs that had purple flowers. And every now and then the ground shook, the hills were exploding, sending up bushes of white smoke, and the whole place was frenzied, manic, treacherous. He f
ound that he was superficially calm, could do what he had to do, function correctly. But there was cold fear within. The thing was to keep it there—tamped down, in check. The routines of trench existence were a kind of solace; he was constantly busy—supervising the rotation of guards, checking signals procedures, overseeing the storage of greatcoats and surplus kit now that night was gone.
They had another brew up; they ate. He was surprised that he was able to do so, was even hungry. The ration packs were American and their contents seemed exotic—pork, beans, and pineapple slices, which were a luxury at home, a tin of them opened up for Christmas, or for Sunday supper. He sat eating, and the taste brought back his home, and the time before the army staked its claim.
He hated national service. In the initial weeks he had bitterly resented the way in which every minute of his time was allocated. He hated the bull, he hated having to change his clothes several times a day, he hated uniforms and weapons and sleeping every night on a thin hard bed, the blankets of which had to be folded in precise alignment every single morning. He hated the hours spent blacking boots and cleaning equipment. As an officer, he was spared the daily grind of basic chores, but his life was still commandeered. He had survived by counting the months, the weeks, the days. He was a rational being; he knew that this experience was finite. And then it had landed him with this.
The day inched on. There was intense activity down on the road, and several times mortar bombs fell close by. The action was still at some distance, and another sound was to be heard now. Bugles. A haunting sound that rose and fell, insistent against the crackle of rifle fire, the rattle of machine guns, the explosions. Chinese bugles—their system of command and communication.
He was straining his ears to evaluate this eerie, uncomfortable music when the officer came running from trench to trench: they were to prepare to advance. Z Company had been forced to retreat from the key hill position beyond them, which commanded the road junction. Both Z and Y Companies had withdrawn and were regrouping farther south. Their own company was to attempt an assault on the Chinese positions on the crucial hill: “Get cracking. We move in fifteen minutes.”
It was then that time went haywire. Before, he had been aware of the passage of hours and minutes, of the turning of the world. Now, all was one continuous moment, a helter-skelter process of kitting up, scrambling through undergrowth, sliding on slopes covered with loose shale, following the man ahead, listening for orders, plunging this way and that through the trackless landscape. And all the while the gunfire getting nearer, a whole tree flying apart once, hit by a mortar bomb, an aircraft roaring overhead, an American fighter, spawning silver sticks that fell and whined.
Afterward, he had no idea what had sustained him through the attack, how he had been able to go on, to stumble up that hill, to fire a rifle, and fire again, swept up it seemed in some unstoppable, unquestionable progress. Once, he had fallen, hitting his knee against a rock, and the pain had kept him momentarily slumped there, his heart banging, a brief instant that raised the possibility of simply staying like that, of not getting up, not going on. And that instant had fused at once with the next; he was on his feet again, forging ahead, going on up that hillside, from foothold to foothold, rock to rock, toward the flashing summit from which came bullets and grenades.
The assault line ahead of him was within range of the enemy positions now: the men were firing continuously. And the Chinese were screaming, up there invisible beyond the thick curtain of scrub below the brow of the hill—a thin, chilling noise that was presumably intended to do just that—curdle the blood. It was at this point that everything seemed to compact, so that later he could remember only that at one moment they were going on and up, and then suddenly men were running back toward them, shouting at them to pull back. He remembered an intensified barrage of fire from the summit, he saw other leaping figures beyond their own men, mustard-colored uniforms snaking through the bushes, waves of them, it seemed. A mortar bomb fell so near that the blast made him stagger. An officer was coming down the slope above, waving and shouting. He realized that the assault had failed, and then he was sliding and stumbling his way back down the hillside they had just climbed, and there were bullets whistling past.
They regrouped half a mile or so farther back, on high ground, near to the positions taken up by X and Y Companies. The rest of the day was spent digging in, a relentless task battering at the hard stony soil with picks and shovels. His direction of a group of men was interrupted by the platoon commander: “We’ll have to do without you for a bit. Pick a carrying party and get going—there’s a mortar and ammunition to be brought up from HQ.”
He was shown the map, given further instructions. Brigade HQ lay a few miles back. He should lead his group off the hill and join up with the road: “Report to Major Harrison. Watch it, though—you could run into an enemy assault party.”
They made their way down the hillside, the men relieved to be released from digging in, but jumpy as they wove their way through trees and scrub. One of them grabbed his arm as they approached an outcrop of rock: “Sir! Something moved behind there . . .” It was a man from his own platoon back home, a stunted, anxious lad from Ashington, as ill at ease in the army as he was himself. He told the men to get down, and left them lying there as he crept round through bushes until he could see beyond the outcrop, his heart racing. He found nothing, and turned to wave the men on. The road was now clearly visible, with its confusion of activity. They would be safe down there.
There were jeeps, armored cars, carts, lorries, the occasional tank. A lorryload of wounded passed them, ashen-faced men clinging grimly to the sides, shaken and jolted as the vehicle navigated the ruts and potholes. At one point he halted his men to check with a sergeant who was bent over a stalled motorbike as to how far there was still to go. As they spoke, the sky was ripped by two U.S. fighters; they circled and then came hurtling down toward the rise beyond the road. The sergeant stared up at them: “The enemy’s got a mortar position somewhere in there—that’s what those boys are after.” White smoke plumed up from the hillside; the fighters disappeared.
Once on the road, they could make quicker progress, and he was relieved to see the tents, vehicles and bustle that identified HQ, through which he had passed only a few days ago, on his way to the line. A time of innocence, that now seemed.
Major Harrison was a small, gingery man, preoccupied and brisk. “You’re who? Okay—I know, we’re expecting you, there was a signal. I’ve got another job for you. There’s some replacements for your company coming through at any moment, and you can take them up to the line. Send your men on ahead with the mortar. What’s wrong?”
His expression must have betrayed him. He found himself dismayed at the idea of leaving the men on their own. “The lance corporal can take over,” said the major impatiently—that clipped Sandhurst diction that he now knew so well but that still seemed to come from another planet. “Collect the equipment and get them going. You’d better go to the mess tent and hang on there till these chaps turn up.”
He was given tea and a meal. He sat about, feeling displaced, uncomfortable, surprised by some unsuspected need that made him want to be not here but with his men, with the unit. An hour passed, and another. After a further thirty minutes he sought out the major, who was conferring with another officer and looked up impatiently. “What’s the problem? Oh, didn’t they tell you? There’s been a transport hitch—those men won’t show up till later. You’d better get back to the line on your own, pronto.”
It was now late afternoon. There should be no difficulty about reaching the unit before darkness fell, but he resolved to try to get a lift if at all possible. In the event, every jeep or truck that passed him on the road was crammed; he resigned himself to the walk, suddenly grateful for this spell of solitude, the release from the monotonous swearing and repartee of the men, the sense of a fragile independence. Ahead, he could see the smoke of explosions, he could hear bursts of gunfire, fighters swept
across the sky; he was going back into all that, and there was no alternative, but he was able to savor this brief respite. He felt concerned about his carrying party. Would they have made it back all right? Would they have identified the right hillside, and the route up to the company position? He felt guilt at having had to abandon them—pointlessly as it turned out.
These fears were compounded as he reached the line of hills and himself had some difficulty in identifying the right crest. He left the road and set off up the hillside, panicking at points when he thought he might be losing his way. This landscape was confusingly repetitive: it rose and fell, and each incline offered you a false crest, beyond which was a dip and then a farther slope. He had tried to fix his direction on the way down by noting features like a prominent rock or tree (again, walking in the Lake District came achingly to mind), and it was when he paused to consider a particular rock that a Chinese soldier stepped out from behind it, looking directly at him.
He reached for his pistol at the same moment as the Chinese drew back his arm, flung a grenade, and then vanished.
The grenade fell short, into a clump of bushes, and he was on the ground before it exploded, his face buried in the grass. Dirt and twigs and stones spattered down onto him. There was a belt of small trees to his left, and he began to edge toward the cover of these, watching the rock, expecting another grenade, another of those sudden figures, so instantly perceived as hostile, alien.
But nothing happened. This slice of hillside was apparently empty again. Presumably he had been judged not worth further investigation. Or did they think him the forerunner of an attack and were biding their time? He waited for a while, then moved forward cautiously under cover of the trees. The rock terrified him, and he swung round to keep it parallel, but when he could see behind it there was nothing there, and beyond he recognized with relief a gully that lay immediately below their own position.
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