Ways of Escape

by Graham Greene

One must be fair. It is partly a question of geography. Malaya is nearer the Equator; it steams away under the almost daily rainfall, sapping the energy of tired, over-worked men, too few for the jobs that the Emergency produced: too few directors of labour, too few planters. Apart from the planters and the officials belonging to the Malayan Civil Service, most men were here on a short-term basis: in their minds they were already on that boat going home. If the Emergency were over (like the French in Indo-China the Government did not officially call it a war), release might come sooner. But the war (to call it by the right name) showed no sign of ever reaching a climax. While the whole world became excited over whether war was on or off in Korea, the forgotten war in Malaya dragged on. There was the daily drip of casualties: four hundred civilians had been killed in the first eleven months of 1950, one guerrilla camp destroyed, three guerrillas shot and six escaped. The war was like a mist: it pervaded everything; it sapped the spirits; it wouldn’t clear. It certainly wasn’t la vie sportive.

  Of all civilians in Malaya the rubber planter was in the position of greatest danger. One aim of the Communist commandos was to ruin the country economically, to make it a territory not worth while maintaining, and the wealth of Malaya was chiefly tin and rubber. A tin mine compared to a rubber estate was relatively easy to defend, and so the main attack was directed against the planter. Who was the planter?

  I had an idea before I went to Malaya, an idea picked up from an unsympathetic Press, of a group of men, the harsh overseers of great capitalist enterprises, intransigent, unconstructive exploiters of native labour, drinking stengah after stengah in the local club, probably in the Somerset Maugham manner making love to each other’s wives. But before I had stayed long in Malaya I learned that there was no such thing as the Planter – there was only X or Y.

  Take X. He lived with his wife in a small house of two floors surrounded by barbed wire, the ground lit at night by searchlights as far as the first trees. He was a man of late middle age, a former prisoner of the Japanese, who should have been looking forward to the final, easier, more prosperous years. He was a great hunter, and much more of his time ought to have been given to his work as a game warden (for elephants had to be contended with as well as Communists, and of his plantation one block about the size of Trafalgar Square had been devastated by them as though by bombs – not a tree left standing).

  But the life that remained for him was very different – if one could call life this slow approach of inevitable violence. He had no assistant, for his assistant had been murdered on the estate some months before, and he could not get another. Night and day the telephone rang at half-hour intervals from the nearest village to make sure the line had not been cut. He was ambushed once only a mile from his house but shot his way out and saved his wounded companions. A short while before I came to stay, Communists had come into the estate to question his tappers about his movements (his assistant had made the mistake of visiting the blocks of the estate in regular order at a regular time). When he moved outside the wire, if only to the estate office a hundred yards away, he carried a Sten gun over his arm, an automatic pistol on his hip and two hand grenades at his belt. A man of great courage, vitality, and a kind of buccaneering kindliness, he would not contemplate retirement – he was in the front line for life and there was no expectation of peace but death. The closest to peace was an occasional visit to relatively safe, bureaucratic Kuala Lumpur, the capital.

  One could hardly be surprised if he drank a brandy and ginger ale for breakfast instead of coffee. ‘Dutch courage,’ he said to me, pushing the starter of the little inadequately armoured car, setting off for a round of the estate or moving slowly out at the blind corner past which the road to the village ran and where one day, from the jungle opposite, a Sten gun would almost certainly open fire. In the village a glass of warm beer with the ambiguous Chinese shopkeeper, surrounded by Chinese candles and chests of tea, who bought his cheap rubber and acted as his banker (paying out ten thousand Malay dollars at sight) – and probably reported his movements to the guerrillas. Then a pink gin or two at the rest-house, where the army officers lived, before he drove back along the lonely two-mile stretch, slowed down at the turn before that jungle wall, ten seconds of stretched nerves, and then the false security of the rubber plantation, where death was just as likely to happen but where at least you could see it coming from some way between the grey monotonous uniform trunks. One morning he and I were half an hour late in returning, and his wife waited with the anger of love for the sound of the engine, until he was safely back in the prison of wire. That night the radio announced the murder of three more planters.

  Or take B, who was another civilian doing his peace-time job in the atmosphere of emergency. He was not a planter but a traffic superintendent at an important railway junction, where the East Coast Railway joins the line that runs from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore: a big broad man with an unexpected taste for books, a sensitivity in human relations (all his assistants were Indian) and a patience I never saw impaired. He looked like a sergeant major and behaved like a doctor.

  The East Coast Railway ended in the state of Pahang. The Japanese had destroyed the farther reaches of the line and this section was being laid down again – with rather mixed feelings, for already it was impossible to maintain safe service on the line that existed. The night mail on the southern Singapore line had been abandoned altogether; on the East Coast line eight engines were out of commission, and I don’t know how many freight cars. In one year there were forty-nine derailments on the whole system. As with the casualties among planters, most armies would find it hard to maintain their morale at this percentage of loss. A railway notice in each compartment conveyed in English, Malay, Tamil and Chinese the ordinariness of the situation:

  WARNING: TERRORISM

  IN THE EVENT OF FIRING ON THE LINESIDE PASSENGERS ARE ADVISED TO LIE ON THE FLOOR AND IN NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD THEY LEAVE THE TRAIN

  I spent a few days with B in the January rains. His house faced the inevitable jungle a hundred yards away; barbed wire, a police sentry, the sense of constriction. Then the rains came, the worst for twenty-five years. To bandits was added the problem of floods, washouts, landslides. One had a sense of unfairness, as when a serious incident occurred during the blitz on London in one’s own civil defence area, and then the raids just went on instead of ending there. God, one felt, should allot each man one problem at a time.

  Here is the schedule of the two allies, the Communists and nature, for a couple of days. The first move was nature’s.

  Friday, 10 a.m. One landslide on the southern line to Singapore. The morning mail train from Kuala Lumpur however had just got through, so nature had to move again. 2 p.m. Two more landslides to the south. By this time the breakdown train with a guard of troops was off to try to clear the line for the next morning’s train.

  At intervals through the night I could hear the telephone ringing – I was reminded of the planter’s house. At 1 a.m. on Saturday the power plant was flooded and electricity failed. At 2.15 a.m. the Communists emerged from the jungle and derailed the breakdown train. At 4 a.m. the junction was completely cut off by road and the East Coast line was cut by floods. By breakfast time the water supply had failed – an odd discomfort in the pouring rain. Even the station a quarter of a mile away must now be reached by wading. To the north a new landslide had taken place.

  In the evening we waded through to the station and sat in the little refreshment room by the light of candles while the messages came in. Even the signal boxes were lit only dimly by oil lamps; figures disappeared in the dark of the long platform, and the whole obscure station and its wet acres had a strangely Victorian air as though electricity had not yet come into use. At 6 p.m. there was a washout to the south, and another landslide to the north. At 8.45 p.m. an East Coast train was derailed – by floods this time, not Communists. All the labour of the little town had to be called in to load freight cars with ballast by the light of lamps, but was there e
nough labour, enough ballast, enough freight cars? And at intervals the big patient man padded away back to his glass, laughing at the wet, the cold, the enemy, and waited unruffled for the next telegram of disaster. One talks in terms of soldiers and civilians, but there was never a better soldier than B. This campaign was as serious as the long plodding search in the jungle, his troops were ambushed by floods as well as commandos, and like a good officer he was loved by his men. So often in Kuala Lumpur I found myself thinking: if only government officials could work as these men, X and B, worked, but perhaps you do not find courage where there is no danger, and love, too, may be a product of active war.

  The nature of this war had been little understood abroad. It was not a nationalist war; ninety-five per cent of the enemy combatants were Chinese and of the few Malays in the jungle the greater part were Indonesian terrorists. I visited Kelantan, a state where the Malays are in an overwhelming majority, and it was like visiting a foreign land. Here was peace: you could walk at will unarmed; no need for convoys on the road; there was an air of happiness and content; the clothes were brighter; even the sun seemed to shine more brightly because the jungle had, literally, receded. How tired I had become of that dark green hostile wall: the jungle was no longer neutral.

  Our British consciences could be clear – we were not holding down the Malays against their will; we were fighting with them against Communism and its Chinese adherents, and it was a more serious war than the use in the Press of the word ‘bandit’ suggested. Bandits could not year after year survive the hard jungle life as these men did: a few thousand bandits could not continue to operate against a hundred thousand armed Malayan police and twenty-five thousand British, Gurkha and Malay troops. These men were the commandos of Communism, organised like a Russian division, with their political branches, their educational branches, their political commissars, their tireless and industrious intelligence service. No one knew where their GHQ lay – perhaps in one of the cities, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, perhaps even in the old and relatively peaceful city of Malacca – but the leader was known. He had fought the Japanese bravely in World War II and marched in the Victory Parade in London.

  One had to spend at least a few days in the Malayan jungle to realise its difficulties and its tediums. A far denser jungle than that of Burma, it restricted movement to less than a mile an hour. Visibility was sometimes twenty feet. Almost every day water poured down upon it, making the steep slippery slopes of the innumerable hills a cruel effort to climb. One was never dry and at night one was never in quiet – the ugly din of insects came between the newcomer and sleep. When you paused for a halt on the march you could see the leeches make for your boots – thin matchsticks looping with blind purpose across the wet leaves, later to swell into fat grey slugs if they found an opening in your clothing. And always there was the jungle stench – the heavy odour of decaying vegetation. It clung to your clothes. When you came out, your friends would avoid you until you had bathed and changed.

  There were many British units operating in Malaya – the Royal Fusiliers, the Royal Marines, the Worcestershires, the Seaforth Highlanders, to name only a few – and if I take my example from the Gurkha Rifles it is only because they were hospitable enough to have me with them on one of their smallest routine operations in Pahang. The enemy, however, did distinguish between the Gurkhas and its other opponents. A captured intelligence report exhibited a rather unfair contempt for the Malay Regiment. British troops were described as courageous but noisy – they could be heard coming a long way off – while the Gurkhas were ferocious and silent.

  The Gurkha is a mercenary. His vocation is to kill his official enemy, and perhaps because he has a genuine vocation he is extremely tractable. There was no woman trouble with the Gurkhas – they carried with them to their cantonments a happy, domesticated life of wives and children. In return for their pay the Gurkhas gave their British officers absolute loyalty, and their officers returned them a quality of love you would not find in any other unit. Officers of the British regiments complained that their colleagues in the Gurkhas never stopped talking of their men. Their men were their passion.

  A Gurkha patrol worked by the compass, and not by paths. It moved as the crow flies. The RAF had bombed a certain area and two hundred Communist commandos were believed to be milling around somewhere within those particular map squares. One Gurkha platoon of fourteen men under a British officer was considered a sufficiently strong reconnaissance. The patrol struck straight out from camp through the kitchen quarters, through the thin belt of rubber, into the jungle. Only nine miles separated us from our objective, the main road on the other side of the block of jungle, but it took two and a half days of walking and two nights to get there. We had started late and we began to camp after five hours’ march. When our position was plotted we had penetrated rather more than three miles. There had been an interminable succession of five-hundred-foot hills, the slippery laterite slopes set at an angle of almost forty-five degrees. Even the Gurkhas sometimes slipped and fell as they tried to hold themselves up by the branches of trees, the rubber soles of their jungle boots taking no grip in the mud and slime of leaves.

  Experience had justified this arduous compass trail. If, like the British troops, you patrolled by paths, you avoided the worst hills, which sometimes rose in this area to two thousand feet, and you never had to carve your way through the undergrowth, but you were staking all on finding tracks on the one path you followed. The Gurkha technique meant that in the course of a day you cut across many paths in your search for signs of the enemy; a newly broken bamboo with the juice still wet might be the only indication.

  The march was halted by four thirty to allow time for camp to be made before dark. First the sentry posts were chosen, then with their kukris (that wonderful all-purpose weapon) boughs were cut, shelters made for the men in pairs with one ground sheet stretched overhead to keep out the night rains and one laid on the bed of branches and leaves, a clearing hacked out for the radio with its aerial tossed up to a height of a hundred feet. Darkness had begun to fall when the kukri became a can opener. In a can about 9 × 4 × 3 inches was the Gurkha ration – rice, raisins, curry powder, tea, sugar and a little spirit lamp with hard fuel for cooking. The small flames glowed like nursery night-lights in the dark. My companion, Major Cheers, stood upright listening, but not for Communists. He whispered, ‘There is one bird I always listen for – at dark and at dawn. There it is. Like a bell. Do you hear it?’ I could hear nothing but the clamour of the jungle barnyard. At six in the morning he was standing by our bed in the new mud of the night’s downpour. ‘There. Do you hear it?’ he whispered. ‘Like a bell.’

  And so after two and a half days’ heavy marching and scrambling, with no result but the discovery of two abandoned camps, we emerged nine miles from where we started – two little buttons could be added to the map in the operations room, that was all; no sign even of the air strike except an empty shell and a landslide that might have been caused by rain; a routine patrol, routine leeches, routine fatigue and routine stench.

  But we could bathe and change, while for the Communist troops in their wet green prison there was no change.

  And so to keep the spirits up they had lectures, courses in Marxism, the hectographed Lenin News and the Red Star, meetings for self-criticism. What an odd, naive contrast it was to the remorseless terrorism. One could build up a picture of this life from captured documents, in which one learned of Lee Kheng who is ‘not hygienic enough’; of Ah Chye who ‘possesses the friendly group spirit’; of Lau Beng who is a little lazy, slipshod in his studies and ‘not too agreeable’ in his behaviour (he is sometimes ‘fearful of the situation’ and his comrades regard him as ‘rather immature’).

  Love is treated with a stern sympathy (the jungle troops include many women). One learned from a captured copy of the Lenin News that male and female comrades who were not married were forbidden to stay together, but in special cases permission might be obtained from the highe
r authorities. ‘We do not prohibit anybody making love. But such love must be proper. Once love is established, one should report it to the organisation and the exact circumstances. The matter will have to undergo the organisation’s investigation, then both parties will be informed in accordance with the resolution.’ Questions are set for discussion.

  Why is the love of Communists a serious instinct?

  What is the proper view of love?

  Are the present few kinds of improper love still appearing in our area?

  Under what circumstances are they appearing?

  What is the cause?

  What is our attitude towards love?

  How are we to overcome improper love? How deal with it?

  It is strange to think of such questions written in that script running backwards in a beautiful formal pattern that seems to the uninstructed eye nearly unchanged since it was made by the brush of the poet Mei Sheng when, more than two thousand years ago, he wrote of love (as translated by Ezra Pound):

  Blue, blue, is the grass about the river

  And the willows have overfilled the close garden.

  And within, the mistress, in the midmost of her youth,

  White, white of face, hesitates, passing the door.

  Slender, she puts forth a slender hand…

  One cannot picture this slow, dreary Malayan conflict without the strange contrasts. A patrol finds a lone guerrilla apparently engaged in a literary exercise – hectographed sentences in which he had to spot and correct mistakes. A planter and his wife have driven into the Kuala Lumpur Club to a Scottish dinner, with ‘Scotch Broth, Salmon Frae the Dee, A Wee Bit Haggis, Champit Tatties and Bashed Neeps, Moor O’Dinnet Special, Sugar Peas and Roast Potatoes, Balmoral Sundae.’ Had they reached that wee bit haggis when the news was brought them that their two-year-old daughter had been shot by Chinese Communists at point-blank range? ‘The Party has resolved the question of love.’