Torrance hurried across to where Sheridan was injecting a wounded man with morphine. ‘Any of these cases in urgent need of hospital care?’ he asked her.
‘All of them,’ she snapped.
‘Right, but if you had to pick one? There’s a lorry just about to leave…’ He pointed, and looking up saw that someone else had already raised the tailgate and clipped it in place. He glanced across to where Venables was talking to Kerr. Catching the Australian’s eye, he jerked his head towards the lorry. Venables saw that the tailgate was up, and shrugged quizzically. Hearing the roar of its engine, Torrance started to run across to tell the driver to wait, and almost got knocked down by an armoured car pulling off the padang. As soon as it had passed the lorry and headed off down the road towards Yong Peng, the lorry’s driver put his own engine in gear and drove off in its wake. Torrance could only stand and watch helplessly as both vehicles disappeared around the next bend in the road.
Venables walked across to join him. ‘Bad luck. If you hadn’t been so worried about getting the sheila on board, you could’ve been on that lorry yourself. As it is, none of you are. You should’ve climbed aboard when you had the chance – it wouldn’t have made any difference to the doc.’
‘Yeah, well, you know what they say,’ said Torrance. ‘No good deed goes unpunished.’
For the next half an hour, Torrance was kept busy helping to carry stretcher cases back to the regimental aid post. Most of the bodies had been cleared away by the time he made his umpteenth trip back to the ruins of the bungalow, and he was thinking that this would be his last when he glanced up and saw a figure in charred and bloodstained khaki drills staggering back down the road from the direction of Yong Peng. When he was still fifty yards away, he fell to his knees on the tarmac, then flopped forward.
Torrance and Sheridan ran across to attend to him. His back was riddled with bullets. Sheridan cut away the blood-soaked rags of his shirt to clean and dress the wounds.
Venables and some other Australians crowded around them. ‘What happened, mate?’ asked one.
‘Bastards were waiting for us eight hundred yards up the road,’ said the wounded man. ‘They must’ve hit the tin lizzie with an anti-tank gun. The truck was riddled, just riddled – they got Snowy, Christ knows how they missed me.’
‘What about Major Julius?’
‘He’s dead, mate. They’re all dead but me.’
‘Christ! The bloody Nippos have cut the road to Yong Peng!’
Torrance turned to Venables. ‘Looks like me missing that lorry wasn’t such bad luck after all.’
Venables grinned crookedly. ‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that if I were you.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘With the Nippos holding the roads to Muar and Parit Jawa, that was the only road outta here. Now the Nippos have cut that one an’ all, that’s it – we’re cut off. Surrounded.’
Seventeen
‘Fuck this shite!’ Grabbing the Bren by the muzzle with both hands, Grant whirled it around his head like an athlete taking part in the hammer-throw at the Highland Games, finally releasing it to send it spinning into the undergrowth beneath the trees at the side of the road.
‘What the hell d’you think you’re doin’?’ spluttered Kerr, outraged. ‘You go and fetch that back at once, d’you hear? That’s army property, that is!’
Grant grabbed two massive fistfuls of the front of Kerr’s shirt. ‘It never ends!’ he raged. Thrusting the lance corporal away from him, he unbuckled his webbing belt and shrugged off the shoulder straps, letting it all fall to the road, then began tearing at the rags of his shirt until he had completely ripped it off and stood there, bare-chested.
Kerr blanched. ‘Calm down! Get a hold of yourself!’
One of the Australians tittered nervously.
‘I’ve had it wi’ this shite!’ roared Grant. ‘D’you hear me? I have had it! It never fuckin’ ends! It never—’ Too choked up with fury and despair to speak, he roared incoherently, then seized Kerr’s throat with two massive paws and began to choke the life out of him. His eyes bugging out of his skull, Kerr turned even redder in the face than usual, gasping for breath as he clawed futilely at Grant’s brawny arms.
‘Oh, shit!’ said Torrance. ‘Give us a hand, Lefty!’ Torrance and Rossi each grabbed one of Grant’s wrists and tried to break his grip on Kerr’s throat.
‘I think he’s having some kind of nervous breakdown,’ said Sheridan.
‘Oh, no kidding!’ said Torrance. ‘Haven’t you got something you can give him?’
‘Like a sedative?’ She shook her head.
Torrance gave up trying to prise Grant’s fingers from Kerr’s throat. Unslinging his Thompson, he moved behind Grant and tapped him on the back of the skull with the butt. The tap had no discernible effect. Torrance hit him again, slightly harder. It still made no difference. Strange gurgling sounds were issuing from Kerr’s mouth: in a few more seconds he would be dead. Realising that trying to knock a man unconscious gently was a contradiction in terms, Torrance stopped holding back, slamming the Thompson’s butt into the back of Grant’s head with all his might. This time Grant finally released Kerr, and Rossi had to pull the lance corporal aside as Grant pitched forward, unconscious. Torrance took the log-line from Grant’s pack and used it to tie the big man’s wrists behind his back. Kerr stood there, one hand on his throat, gulping air into his lungs.
‘Oh, nice work!’ Sheridan crouched by Grant’s head and prised open his eyelids to look into his eyes. ‘Give him a cerebral haemorrhage, that’s really gonna help.’
‘What was I s’posed to do?’ asked Torrance. ‘Stand by and let him throttle Primsie?’
‘There was no need to hit the poor guy with your gun.’ Finding blood oozing from a graze on the back of Grant’s head, Sheridan bandaged a gauze pad over it. ‘You may have given him permanent brain damage.’
‘He’s a poor guy?’ spluttered Kerr. ‘That bloody barmpot just tried to strangle me!’ Grimacing, he delivered a savage kick to Grant’s ribs. He would have delivered a second, if Rossi had not pulled him away.
‘Awreet, Primsie, lay off him. Can you no’ see he’s had enough? After what we’ve all been through these past two weeks, the wonder of it is we’re no’ all off our heads.’
It took the combined efforts of Kerr, MacLeod, Torrance and Rossi to carry Grant back to the regimental aid post. ‘Why’s this man tied up?’ demanded the medical officer.
‘He lost his head,’ explained Kerr. ‘Got violent. Laid hands on an NCO. It was necessary for us to restrain him.’
‘Could be he’s had a mental breakdown,’ Sheridan added. ‘I suggest we keep him under sedation. Do you have any sodium amytal?’
The medical officer stared at her. ‘Sodium amytal! I haven’t even got enough morphine.’
Venables led Torrance, Kerr, MacLeod and Rossi back up to where they had left Lieutenant Jennings. They found the subaltern just below the crest of the hill, supervising as his men dug slit trenches. He arched an eyebrow when he saw Venables returning with four of the Argylls. ‘You four still here?’
‘Seems our transfer back to our own mob’s been delayed, sir,’ said Torrance.
Jennings smiled without much humour. ‘Yes, so I heard.’
‘I thought maybe they could be attached to my section,’ said Venables. ‘For the purposes of drawing rations and the like, I mean.’
‘All right, corporal. I’ll let Sergeant Lynch know.’
‘You don’t need to clear it with the CO, sir?’
‘With Brigadier Duncan hors de combat and every other senior officer dead or dying, that leaves Colonel Anderson in command of this brigade,’ said Jennings. ‘We’re surrounded by Japs and running low on ammo and rations. I’d say the colonel has more important things to worry about right now than whether or not I let four stray jocks attach themselves to my platoon. Wouldn’t you agree?’
Venables grinned. ‘When you put it like that, sir…’
‘She’s attached herself to the RAP, sir.’
Jennings nodded thoughtfully. ‘Probably the best place for her, for now. Carry on, Venables.’
‘Right-oh, boss. Come on,’ to the corporal told Kerr, MacLeod, Torrance and Rossi. ‘I’ll introduce you to my cobbers.’
They headed off through the trees to where half a dozen Australians sat with their feet dangling in slit trenches, cleaning their Lee-Enfields. ‘Hey, Jim!’ called one. ‘Is it true what they’re saying about the Nippos cutting off the road to Yong Peng, the brigadier gone troppo and the wireless gone bung?’
‘Yeah, well, “Andy” Anderson’s in command now,’ said Venables, ‘so at least there’s someone in charge who knows what he’s doing.’
Venables’ comrades cheered: evidently they had a high opinion of their colonel.
One of them indicated the four Argylls. ‘Who are the Poms?’
‘Primsie Kerr, Slugger Torrance, Jimmy MacLeod and Lefty Rossi of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. Seems they got separated from their mob and somehow wound up here. They’re gonna be joining our section, at least until we get back to div. Lads, meet Bluey Quinn, Spud Edwards, Agony Payne, Florrie Ford, Mother Hubbard and Snip Taylor – collectively known as Jim Venables’ Bushrangers.’
‘Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, eh?’ Hubbard rose to his feet. ‘One of you bastards broke my jaw at the Union Jack Club last year, put me in the Royal Alexandra for six weeks.’
‘Sorry about that,’ said Kerr.
‘I’m not,’ Hubbard grinned. ‘I managed to tear it off a bit with one of the nurses while I was there, so it was well worth it.’
* * *
‘Get your gear on,’ Corporal Venables told his section early the following morning. ‘We’re pulling out.’
‘Isn’t there supposed to be a battalion of Nippos between us and Parit Sulong?’ asked Quinn.
‘There is, mate. But there’s something wrong if a few hundred of us with Marmon-Herringtons, Bren carriers, twenty-five-pounders, mortars and grenades can’t smash our way through a Nippo roadblock or two. The Poms are holding the bridge at Parit Sulong. That’s just a dozen miles up the road. And it’s only four miles to the start of the Parit Sulong causeway. If we can reach that by sundown, we’re home and dry.’
‘What’s the Parit Sulong causeway?’ asked Rossi.
‘That’s your worst nightmare,’ said Payne. ‘We drove along it on the way here – seven miles of causeway, straight as a die, with nothing but padi fields on either side. Any Nippo planes catch us crossing there will have a field day strafing our column – we’ll stand out like dogs’ balls.’
‘Which is why we’ve got to reach it by nightfall, you drongo,’ said Venables. ‘The Nippos can’t strafe us if they can’t see us. The CO’s got it all worked out – we’ve only got to worry about ambushes for the first four miles, so we’re doing that in daylight. They can’t ambush us once we reach the causeway – no cover, is there? It’ll be a snack, I tell ya.’
‘A snack?’ asked MacLeod.
‘A piece of cake,’ explained Quinn.
All was chaos on the road, where the officers were trying to marshal fifty vehicles into some semblance of order: there were armoured cars and Bren carriers, Quad tractors towing twenty-five-pounders, lorries of every shape and description, most of them laden with wounded. At either end of the convoy the infantry assembled to defend the vanguard and rear: Australians in tin hats, and turbaned sepoys. The column must have covered a mile of road.
‘Talk about a cast of thousands, eh?’ Torrance had to shout to make himself heard above the growl of engines and the occasional grating of a clumsily handled gearstick.
‘Aye,’ said Rossi. ‘Tell Mr DeMille I’m ready for my close-up.’
The column set off just after seven o’clock, the vehicles crawling forward in low gear to match their pace to that of the infantry. Torrance, Rossi, MacLeod and Kerr found themselves marching in the vanguard with Venables and his men. Colonel Anderson marched with them, a dark-haired man in his early forties, his rugged good looks marred only by the squinty, myopic gaze behind his round-framed spectacles. Flanking parties moved through the rubber plantations on either side, probing at the undergrowth with bayonets fixed to their rifles.
Hearing the drone of an aero-engine, Torrance glanced up and saw a plane circling far above the convoy. It was too high to make out the markings on its wings, not that he needed to: he had not seen a single RAF aircraft since the campaign had begun.
Rossi was gazing up at it, too. ‘Keeping tabs on us,’ Torrance told him, ‘like them vultures following Ralph Richardson across the desert in The Four Feathers.’
Rossi aimed the Bren at it, squinting along its sights.
‘Don’t waste your ammo,’ Torrance told him.
‘Aye, well,’ said Rossi. ‘The bastard’s fuel canna keep him up there all day.’
Eight hundred yards from the starting point, they passed the lorry Torrance had missed the day before, its wooden sides and canvas canopy riddled with bullet holes, three corpses in Australian uniforms sprawled on the tarmac nearby. In addition to shooting them, the Japanese had set about them with their bayonets, mutilating them savagely. Beyond the lorry, the armoured car that had been escorting it lay on its side, a charred and smouldering wreck.
Venables nodded at the corpses. ‘That could’ve been you,’ he reminded Torrance.
‘Oh, Christ!’ Torrance’s stomach heaved at the sight. ‘Kill a man, well… that’s all part of the game. But cutting him up after he’s dead? There’s no need for that. Bloody savages we’re up against here, Jim. Nothing but bloody savages.’
‘Aye,’ said Rossi. ‘Savages with the very latest in modern armaments.’
Searching the trees on either side of the road with his gaze, Torrance pulled back the cocking handle on his Thompson. ‘So where are the bastards that did it? I thought there was s’posed to be a roadblock here?’
MacLeod shrugged. ‘They must have pulled back. Who knows? Mebbe they’ve pulled out altogether, an’ yon road’s open all the way to Parit Sulong.’
‘Some hopes!’
The road led them through a cutting, the foliage-covered banks no more than seven or eight feet high even where it was deepest: a fine place for a roadblock, and an even better one for an ambush. Marching in two long columns ahead of the convoy, one on either side of the road, the infantrymen surveyed the trees closely, expecting the rattle of machine guns to send streams of lead spraying out of the gloom beneath the rubber trees at any moment. Torrance’s palms were sweaty where they gripped his Thompson, his mouth dry. He wiped his brow with the sweat-rag tied to his wrist, and wished he could take a pull from his water bottle; but to do that he needed to sling the Thompson from his shoulder, and he dared not risk it. Besides, he knew the convoy was short of purified water: he had to make what was in his bottle last until they reached Parit Sulong.
Hearing the drone of an aero-engine, he looked up and saw a Japanese dive-bomber screaming towards them, following the road as it came in at a height of no more than a couple of hundred feet. ‘Take cover!’ he shouted, ducking down behind a Bren carrier. Other men dashed into the trees on either side of the road.
The bomber’s machine guns stuttered. Bullets tore through the treetops to the south of the road, missing the convoy entirely. Torrance heard shrieks of agony coming from the undergrowth, and then the bomber flew directly overhead. Reaching the far end of the convoy, it banked steeply, made a wide circle, and then roared along the convoy from the other direction, strafing. Again it missed the vehicles, the streams of lead tearing through the canopy of the trees on the north side of the road. A few men fired Brens at it, until their officers told them not to waste ammo.
Kerr shaded his eyes against the sun, gazing back down the length of the convoy. ‘No’ a single vehicle hit!’ he crowed. ‘Did I no’ always say the Japs canna shoot for toffee?’
&
nbsp; ‘What are you blathering about?’ asked Torrance.
‘It’s their diets, you know – they’ve got poor eyesight because they dinna get enough vitamins.’
Torrance gazed across to where men were emerging from the trees, now carrying or supporting the men who had been wounded in the strafing runs, helping them aboard lorries already crowded with wounded. ‘Poor eyesight, my arse,’ he said. ‘He’s probably got orders to leave the vehicles so his mates on the ground can have them once we’re all dead. If you ask me, that Jap pilot hit exactly what he was aiming at.’
The aeroplane turned away and droned off to the north. ‘Did I no’ tell you his fuel would run out?’ asked Rossi. ‘Aye, well. At least he’ll no’ be keeping tabs on us any more.’
Torrance tapped him on the shoulder and pointed to where a second aeroplane now circled high overhead. ‘The day shift just clocked in.’
They had been marching for an hour when they came to the place where the brigade’s B Echelon had parked its vehicles. Here there were burned-out lorries, some with the drivers still seated upright, dimly seen through the starred windscreens. Cooks lay where they had fallen by the ashes of their cooking fires, their skin already blackened by the hot, tropical sun. Not expecting to be attacked this far behind the front line, they must have been taken completely by surprise by the Japanese. A couple of crows squabbling over a dead man’s eyeball took to wing, cawing noisily at the approach of the convoy.
A crimson mist seemed to explode from Snip Taylor’s face, and Torrance saw that half his cheek was missing. In the same instant, bullets whip-cracked past his head, and Spud Edwards shrieked in agony, falling to the tarmac with one hand clutching his shoulder.
The rest threw themselves flat and crawled to the side of the road. Beyond the transport harbour, the ground on either side was more open, too swampy for rubber. Lieutenant Jennings levelled his field glasses. ‘Where the hell is that shooting coming from?’
Torrance pointed to a low ridge covered with trees overlooking the road from the south. ‘There. That’s where I’d dig in if I wanted to hold this road.’
The Name of Valour Page 20