The Chequer Board

by Nevil Shute

  Presently their voices died down, and they slept uneasily on the hard ground.

  At dawn they got up, cooked another meal, and marched on. That day took them to within five miles of Bassein; they camped for the night in a small spinney. They made no fire, eating the cold porridge-like remains of rice that they had cooked at lunch. Thet Shay and one other man went out along the path they were following to find a near-by village, to enquire how the land lay regarding Japanese, and to find the man who knew where they could make a contact with Major Williams.

  They came back an hour later in a state of agitation. The Burmans and the girl clustered round Thet Shay; he had urgent and important news for them, and it was not good news. So much was obvious to Morgan. They squatted down together in an earnest conference; from time to time the men threw anxious glances in his direction. He waited for enlightenment with all the patience he could command. Something had happened to upset their plans; so much was evident. He took the surmise fatalistically; it had been too good to be true, that he would get away from Burma easily.

  Presently the girl left the group, and came and squatted down beside him. “It is bad news,” she said quietly. “A Japanese patrol has caught this Major Williams. They surrounded the village and took him while he was asleep. Now he is dead.”

  The pilot nodded; he had been prepared for some news of the sort. “That’s a bad one,” he said quietly. “What is Thet Shay going to do now?”

  She said, “He has sent out scouts.” Morgan glanced at the group and noticed that three men had melted away into the darkness. “It is very dangerous here. There are Japanese patrols everywhere in these villages.” She hesitated. “They are on the lookout for parties such as ours, who may be trying to make contact with the Englishman.”

  “Do they know anything about us?” the pilot asked.

  “I do not think they do. The Englishman said nothing, according to the village people, although the Japanese soldiers were very cruel to him. He took fifteen hours to die.”

  Morgan bit his lip. No man is immune to fear, though he may be able to control himself. “Nice story,” he said quietly.

  She stared at him, and then laughed shortly. “I suppose that is an English joke.”

  He grinned at her, “Well, one’s got to make a joke of something.”

  She said, “You must stay very quiet. We are going to wait here until the scouts come back and tell us which way we must go.”

  She went back to the group of men. Morgan sat a short distance from them, his back against a tree, watching them and thinking. It seemed to him that they were in a most colossal jam. The Japanese had tortured this Major Williams to make him reveal his connection with the Independence Army. If they caught any members of the Independence Army they would certainly be tortured, too—men or women—to make them reveal the extent of the conspiracy. Thet Shay would be tortured without doubt. Nay Htohn would be tortured.

  If the party were taken with himself amongst them, it would be clear evidence that they were members of the Burma Independence Army. That meant torture and death for the lot of them. Nay Htohn, also, would take fifteen hours to die.

  “Well, that’s the way it was,” Morgan said. He set down his glass and called the bearer for another couple of drinks. “The only one who might have got away with it if the Japs had caught us as a party was me. I could always plead I was an enemy in uniform doing what I could to get home—they couldn’t have much against me for that.”

  Mr Turner said, “You was in a spot all right.” He paused. “What did you do?”

  Morgan said, “Oh, I skipped off out of the party and lay up in the bushes for a couple of days to let them get away; then I walked into Bassein and gave myself up to the Japs. I mean, it was the only thing to do.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  IT was about three in the morning, when the scouts had been back for an hour, that the pilot decided to act. The news had been altogether bad. Japanese patrols were moving on all the paths; they had closed round behind them, and no direct return along the path that they had come by was now possible. They had decided to get a little sleep, and to send out scouts again at dawn to try to find a safe escape route backwards from the trap.

  There was one safe escape route which was obvious to Morgan, and it was obvious to him that several of the men would like to take it. That was, that he should be murdered there and then, and buried under a tree; without him the party could split up into twos and threes and appear as peaceful villagers going about their business in the normal way. That was the safe way out for them, the way in which they could get back unquestioned and so join up with Utt Nee again. From time to time as they squatted around in conclave there was a hot argument between Thet Shay and Nay Htohn on the one side and certain of the men on the other, and in these arguments bitter, hostile glances were thrown at him. It was clear to Morgan that in the party things were moving to a crisis; that their new-found loyalty was being put to an unbearable test.

  They lay down presently to sleep, with Morgan placed carefully between the girl and Thet Shay. He waited till he had heard the regular, even breathing of the girl for half an hour, to indicate that she was deeply asleep; then he shook the Burman gently by the arm.

  He could not talk to him in any language, but Thet Shay was intelligent and caught on to the pilot’s sign language readily. Morgan said “Bassein?” in enquiry, and pointed to each path in turn in the dim light. The Burman understood him, and showed an alley between trees, with wonder and suspicion on his broad face.

  The pilot nodded, pointed to himself, then to the path. He held both hands above his head in token of surrender, and said again, “Bassein.” Then he glanced at the sleeping girl and made the sign for silence.

  The next part was more difficult. He got very quietly to his feet; the Burman got up with him; they stood together in the dim starlight beneath the trees. Morgan pointed to himself and to the path for Bassein; then he pointed to the rest of the party and to the path in the opposite direction, and made a comprehensive gesture with both hands. Thet Shay nodded. Morgan went on to an elaborate pantomime of sleeping twice, and hiding in the bushes, and surrendering. He could not get that through to the Burman, and repeated it; but he was very doubtful if Thet Shay understood.

  He thought for a moment, and then reached for his pencil. He had only the paper on which he had made his list of Burmese words; he wrote on this at right angles to the list,

  I have gone in to Bassein to surrender to the Japs; don’t try to follow me. I shall try and hide for two days before surrendering so that you can get away. The English will send another officer to replace Major Williams; tell him about me. I will try and see you when the war is over if I get away with it. Don’t think too badly of us. We may be stupid but we do our best.

  He gave this note to Thet Shay, and indicated that he should show it to Nay Htohn when he had gone. The Burman nodded. Morgan picked up his haversack and turned to him, and held out his hand. Thet Shay took it, smiling, and they shook hands, and Morgan turned and walked off softly up the path towards Bassein. He never looked back at the sleeping girl.

  Mr Turner said in wonder, “Must have took a bit of doing, that.”

  Morgan laughed. “Never been so frightened in my life. I tell you, I was simply pissed with fright. I was banking everything on getting right into Bassein before surrendering, and not meeting a patrol.” He turned to Mr Turner. “It was the junior officers and N.C.O.s who did most of the torturing. If you had to surrender to the Japs, you wanted to try and pick a senior officer, and give yourself up to him. You wanted to keep clear of sergeants out on a patrol …”

  “My Christ,” said Mr Turner, “I’d want to keep clear of the whole bloody lot, myself.”

  The two days of waiting were a bad time for Morgan He went up the path about a mile, and then turned into a thicket and made his way into the woods. After a hundred yards or so he came out in a little glade, and he sat down there on a fallen tree. He had no food with him, and
no water.

  With his intellect he did not regret these omissions. The tale that he had formulated for the Japanese was that he had been hiding and walking across country by night, guided by the stars, from where he had forced-landed the Spitfire to Bassein. His story was that he had been told at the briefing before taking off that this Major Williams was in the neighbourhood of Bassein, and that after his forced landing he had marched by night across country to get in touch with him, hiding in the woods each day. He had finally asked a group of Burmans to lead him to the Major; they had told him that the Englishman was dead, and had then run away. With nothing else to do, he had walked in and had given himself up.

  The more he thought about this yarn the more it seemed convincing; he could not see how he could be tripped up on it in interrogation if he kept his head. It was important, however, that he should not be in too good a physical condition if his story was to be that he had lived in the jungle for five or six days without much equipment If he was half starved, crazy with thirst, and mercilessly bitten by all kinds of bugs, it would be better for his story. In the next two days in the forest he suffered all three torments. He stuck it out.

  At dawn, two days later, he found the path again, and wandered down it in the direction of Bassein. He went carelessly, with a raging thirst and with the high temperature of a fever on him. He was bareheaded, for he had thrown away his conical straw sun hat as not being in the part, and he was dressed in the soiled green blouse and trousers of a jungle suit. He wore no under clothes. He had canvas Wellingtons on his feet, muddy and somewhat torn, and a soiled white scarf around his neck. He carried his haversack still with the remains of his emergency kit in it, and he had a five-day growth of beard on his face. In that condition he walked straight into Bassein.

  It was not until he was actually walking down the main street of the town that a Japanese officer arrested him, a heavy automatic pistol in his hand.

  He was taken to the military headquarters in a villa and given a drink of water, and then interrogated. He was interrogated again at the headquarters of the Kempeitai, who took all his papers from him. He played his part well, as if crushed with disappointment at his failure to escape. They did not bother a great deal about him; the arrest and imprisonment of airmen who had forced-landed in the country was a normal routine to the Japanese. The only feature which made this case unusual was that he had wandered for six days about the countryside, and that was satisfactorily explained by the presence of the English Major, now liquidated.

  In a couple of days he was taken by river in a landing craft to Rangoon, and put in the jail there with other prisoners, mostly R.A.F.

  In Rangoon jail there was no torture but a great deal of indignity. Minor infractions of the regulations were disciplined by the Japanese kicking the shins or slapping the face, the same treatment that was meted out by Japanese officers to privates in their own Army. The food was a revolting mess of boiled rice with a few vegetables occasionally as flavouring; it was deficient in every sort of vitamin because the bulk rice supply from which it came had been more than two years in store. Old rice eaten in this way causes beri-beri, and the prisoners in Rangoon jail suffered a lot from this progressive disease.

  The cells were not unpleasant in that tropical climate, if prisoners had to be kept in cells at all. The jail was a fairly modern building. Morgan was put into an empty cell on the first floor of a long building that radiated with six others from a central hexagonal building which contained a well. His cell was thirteen feet long and nine feet wide, with a grating door and a grating window which permitted the cool air to blow straight through it, in itself a comfort in that climate. The walls were whitewashed, and the only furniture was a plank bed.

  The cell had housed a succession of previous occupants, some of whom had been moved down to the communal prison on the ground floor after an initial period of solitary confinement, some of whom had died. There were calendars and messages written on the wall, half erased by the Japanese guards—“F/O J. D. Scott R.A.F. 698443 shot down near Prome in a Hurricane 7.2.43. I shall stay in this bloody hole until the bugs carry me out they are big enough.” Behind the door where it was not easily seen from the corridor there was written on the wall a little dictionary of a dozen elementary words necessary for prisoners, with their Japanese equivalents—Water, Food, Doctor, Cold, Hot, Latrine, Good, Bad. Below was a verse:

  Only one life,

  ’Twill soon be past,

  Only what’s done for Christ

  Will last.

  Attached to it was the signature of F/O J. K. Davidson, of Kilburn. Morgan wondered grimly what had happened to F/O Davidson.

  Morgan had a pencil and he immediately made a calendar on the walls to cross the days off, the first act of the prisoner in solitary confinement. Later on he added a little to the Japanese dictionary, and for a mental exercise wrote down all the counties in the United Kingdom. He also wrote down all the Burmese words that Nay Htohn had told him, with their English equivalents, in case he should forget them.

  He stayed in that cell from November 29, 1944, until the Japanese left Rangoon before the advance on April 29, 1945.

  His life was monotonous, and his health gradually deteriorated with deficiency of vitamins. But he was not very unhappy. He used to lie for long hours on the plank bed, thinking, and what he thought about was principally Nay Htohn. His idea of women became focussed about Nay Htohn. Bitterly hurt by the treatment he had received from his wife, he clung to the idea of the Burmese girl, so much more intelligent and so much wiser than any woman he had come in contact with in his short life. He wanted to see her again when he got out of prison, wanted to find out what had happened to her after he had left them, wanted her assurance that she had escaped the Japanese. He never had much doubt about it, but he wanted to see her again to make quite sure. He wanted to talk to her again, to be with her, to see her move and hear her lilting voice. It came to him, queerly, that he had been happy on that day that he had spent mostly in the bamboo lock-up in that nameless village in the jungle.

  As the months passed, the Royal Air Force gradually faded from his mind. He was still desperately interested in air operations, and when the massed flights of Mitchells and Thunderbolts, Liberators and Spitfires, came raiding military objectives in Rangoon, he used to stand glued to the grating of his window, his heart with the air crews, well aware from his own briefings that they would be particularly careful not to hit the jail. But as time went by, he gradually became accustomed to the thought that he would never fly again, that by the time he was released, new air crews would have superseded him, that the very war might be over. The tropical and Burman scene became more real to him than his life in the Royal Air Force; England itself seemed very far away, a place of bitter hurt that he did not particularly want to go back to. He wanted to get back and see Nay Htohn, and listen to her talking, and watch her smile.

  April 29, 1945, was a Sunday. In the few weeks before, with the Fourteenth Army driving down past Mandalay towards Rangoon, and with the Fifteenth Corps advancing down the coast of Arakan, the Japanese had grown much less severe in Rangoon jail; food had improved, and the surveillance was relaxed. A large proportion of the prisoners were suffering from dysentery, and for this reason the Japanese at night had fallen into the way of leaving the cell doors unlocked in order that the prisoners might visit the latrine, keeping guard only on the block compound. In the middle of the night an R.A.F. officer, thin and wasted and trembling, hurried from his cell to the latrine outside. There was a paper pinned to the door, unusual. He could not wait to look at it, but presently, when he came out, he raised his hurricane lamp to look at it. It read:

  English and American prisoners, you are now free. By order of the Emperor the Japanese Army has withdrawn from Rangoon, and so we have left you to regain your liberty. We shall hope to meet you again honourably on the field of battle. The keys are on the table in the guardroom.

  He stared at it amazed, and hurried back to the
cells and woke the others in his building. Two senior officers ventured out of the block compound into the walled lane outside that led down from the central well towards the guardroom, half expecting to be met by a sharp squirt of submachine gun fire. But there were no Japanese. They walked down to the guardroom, and there the keys were, lying on the table, three great bunches of them. It was all quite true.

  For half an hour there had been a growing clamour from the town. They unlocked the main gates and walked out into the street. From the centre of the town there was a roar of crowds rioting, and shots were going off continually. Over the houses they could see the glow of fires. It was all rather alarming to weakened, totally unarmed men isolated in a tropical city. The prisoners went back into the jail and locked themselves in. It could be a matter of only a very few days now before the Fourteenth Army marched in to relieve them.

  At dawn they set about communicating with the R.A.F. aircraft on patrol above the city. Morgan and others got a long ladder and climbed to the roof of their block, and with limewash painted in huge letters—

  JAPS GONE

  They were rewarded by a Mosquito which came down to a thousand feet and circled round, photographing what they had done. Later in the morning they became apprehensive that the High Command might think their sign a Jap ruse. They searched their minds for a code message which would carry conviction, and in their impatience for release they had no hesitation in framing a rude one. They got up on the other side of the pitched roof and painted in large letters—

  EXTRACT DIGIT

  A Thunderbolt came by and waggled its wings at them.

  Firing was easier in the afternoon, and there was less noise from the city. The prisoners were urgently in need of better food; fresh meat and vegetables and fruit were probably available in the city. Under the command of a young major in the Indian Army, Morgan and three others left the jail as a compact little group and walked into the town; they were quite unarmed, and went very warily. They went slowly, for they were all suffering from swollen legs due to incipient beri-beri. They came first to the Chinese quarter and were welcomed heartily. They found that the Chinese had erected barricades across the streets to protect their shops and godowns from the looters who were ravaging the remainder of Rangoon. They got everything they wanted in the Chinese quarter in a couple of hours without the slightest difficulty, including a few automatic pistols stolen from the Japanese. They made arrangements for the delivery of two lorry loads of fruit and vegetables to the jail. Curiously, there was plenty of petrol left behind in the town, which was damaged only by our own bombardment and by looters.