He jumped up onto the footplate at the rear doors. ‘Yeah?’
‘Thanks.’
‘What for?’
‘For… well, you know. You’re okay, Charlie.’
‘You’re not so dusty yourself, doc.’
‘You gonna come and visit me in hospital?’
‘Which hospital are you taking her to?’ Torrance asked the orderlies.
‘Royal Alexandra.’
‘That’s a military hospital. The doc’s a civilian.’
‘Have you been to a hospital in Singapore lately?’ retorted one of the orderlies. ‘They’re all overcrowded with people injured in the bombing raids. There’s no bleedin’ time to worry about whether they’re civilian or military, we squeeze in ’em in where we can.’
‘All right, keep your shirt on.’ Torrance turned back to Sheridan. ‘I’ll bring you some hard-boiled eggs and nuts.’
She laughed. ‘I’d like that.’
One of the orderlies shooed Torrance off the footplate and slammed the door. As the sun rose over the suburbs of Johore, the ambulance roared away.
‘Hard-boiled eggs and nuts?’ asked Rossi. ‘That’s no’ what you take a lassie when she’s in hospital!’
‘It’s a Stan and Ollie thing,’ said Torrance. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’ He turned to Captain Bartlett. ‘We still hold the causeway then, sir?’
‘For the next half an hour, at least. Colonel Stewart volunteered for us to be the last troops to pull back across the causeway before it’s blown.’
‘So there still is a second battalion, then?’
‘Oh, yes. “Bowed but not broken” is the expression, I believe. Well, you two had better get back to your platoon, I think. You’ll find it in the centre of town.’
Following the MO’s directions, Torrance and Rossi walked through the streets of Johore, Torrance still limping on his aching ankle. They found themselves back on the Trunk Road; almost the very beginning of it, in fact. To their right was the causeway, wide enough to accommodate both the road and the railway. At the far end, beyond the glittering waters of the Strait of Johore, they could see the emerald hump that was the island of Singapore.
A long convoy of army lorries came down the road from their left, passing sandbag machine-gun nests, where other Argylls guarded the drawbridge over the lock channel at the north end of the causeway. Hearing the clatter of tracks, Torrance and Rossi turned to see a Bren gun carrier come up the street from the opposite direction. CSM Fraser sat in the back. When he saw Torrance and Rossi gawping on the pavement, he called to the driver to stop.
‘Where the hell have you two been?’
‘Cavorting in a tropical lagoon with Dorothy Lamour,’ said Torrance. ‘What the bleedin’ hell d’you think?’
‘Let me guess – you got separated from your mob, and spent three weeks in the jungle trying to get back. Hop aboard, Rossi. You can tell me all about it on the drive to Singapore.’
‘What about me, sar’nt major?’ asked Torrance.
‘You can report to Corporal Campbell. You’ll find him in the town square, about two hundred yards that way.’ He gestured back the way he had come.
Torrance was about to protest against such unequal treatment when he remembered he had a score to settle with Campbell. ‘Very good, sar’nt major.’
‘And… Torrance?’ Fraser picked up a Lee-Enfield from the back of the carrier and tossed it to the private, who caught it with both hands. ‘Might be a good idea to carry one of those, just in case you run into any Japs, hmm?’
‘Yes, sar’nt major.’
‘We’re blowing the causeway in twenty-five minutes. Tell Campbell to make sure he and his men pull out in plenty of time.’ He turned to his driver. ‘Drive on!’
As the carrier clattered away up the street, Torrance hobbled to where a squad of men he knew vaguely from A Company were dismantling a Vickers machine gun in a nest of sandbags at one corner of the town square, getting ready to pull out.
‘All right, lads,’ Torrance greeted them. ‘Seen Soupy?’
‘Aye, you’ll find him in yon building.’ One of them indicated the bank.
‘Will I indeed?’ said Torrance. ‘Oh, I nearly forgot – the CSM says they’re blowing the causeway in twenty minutes. You lads are to pull out at once.’
‘Consider us gone. Will you let Soupy know, or shall I?’
‘Oh, don’t you worry your pretty little heads about Soupy. You just leave him to me.’
As Torrance approached the bank, he checked that the magazine of the rifle Fraser had given him was fully charged, and worked a round into the breech.
Campbell had forced the door. Torrance found him inside, stuffing his pack with banknotes. He levelled the rifle. ‘Wotcher, Soupy.’
For a moment there was a flash of fear and loathing in Campbell’s expression, but it was gone in the blink of an eye, and then he was all smiles, as if he had not left Torrance and the others stranded on the wrong side of the Slim River three weeks earlier.
‘Slugger! My God, it’s good to see you! Have you seen any o’ the others?’
‘Yeah, well, let’s see now – Dicky was murdered by Professor Ziegler, who turned out to be a Jerry spy. Titch went doolally. Primsie’s dead or a prisoner of the Japs. Jimmy got carved up by a Jap officer. Lefty’s okay, though.’
‘Just you and Lefty left, eh? That was a bad business.’ Campbell’s eyes darted to where he had left his Thompson on the counter, three feet away. Torrance could see him calculating chances and percentages.
Campbell flung the fistfuls of Straits dollars he was holding in Torrance’s face and lunged for his Thompson. As he swung the muzzle back, Torrance slammed the butt of his rifle into Campbell’s jaw. Campbell dropped the Thompson and crumpled to the floor.
Torrance tied him to a chair and went through his pockets. Then, finding a sink in a back room, he filled a mug with water and threw it in the corporal’s face.
Campbell blinked and eyed him woozily. ‘What the hell are you playing at, Slugger?’
‘Same thing you did to me, Soupy. Leaving you to the Japs’ tender mercies.’ Standing facing him, Torrance took out Mitsumoto’s cigarette case. ‘Smoke?’
‘Untie me, you bastard!’
Torrance plugged one of the cigarettes in the corner of his mouth, lit it with Mitsumoto’s lighter, and then tucked both cigarette case and lighter in Campbell’s pockets. Finally he took out Campbell’s wallet, and added the sixty yen he had taken off Mitsumoto’s corpse to the contents, before replacing it in the corporal’s pocket. He tutted. ‘Naughty boy, Soupy. The Japs are not gonna be happy when they find all that looted gear on you. They are not gonna warm to you at all.’
Campbell struggled furiously for a few seconds, then gave it up when he saw it was futile.
Torrance took a final drag on his cigarette and dropped it to the floor, crushing it out beneath a boot. He patted Campbell on the cheek. ‘Cheerio, Soupy.’ He turned on his heel and marched to the door.
‘Slugger! No! Don’t leave me, you bastard! Come back!’
Torrance closed the door behind him, muffling Campbell’s cries. Sticking his hands in the pockets of his shorts, he sauntered across the deserted square. As a lorry passed him on the Trunk Road, he heard the men in the back singing a familiar refrain in raucous Australian accents:
…So we’re saying goodbye to them all,
As back to their billets they crawl,
You’ll get no promotion
This side of the ocean,
So cheer up, my lads, fuck ’em all!
Torrance nodded thoughtfully. It pretty much summed up the way he felt.
Ten minutes later, they blew up the causeway.
Afterword
The Second Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders first went into action against the Japanese on Sunday 14 December 1941, a mere six days after the Japanese invaded Malaya. The Battle of Slim River, fought on 7 January 1942, was in fact the last major encounter between the Japane
se and the Argylls prior to the blowing of the Johore causeway.
The battle may be seen as the turning point in the British defence of Malaya: in the month leading up to it, things had gone badly for the British; in the weeks after, things went really badly. The Argylls were scattered far and wide through the jungles of Malaya. A few bands somehow managed to struggle back to the British lines. Others, like a dwindling party led by Colonel Robertson, who commanded the battalion for a brief period while Colonel Stewart was acting brigadier, managed to stay at large behind the Japanese lines for six weeks, marching 150 miles in their efforts to rejoin the rest of the battalion, before running into a Japanese ambush. Weeks after Singapore fell, Freddie Spencer Chapman met two Argylls – ‘suffering from VD as well as beriberi’1 – at a camp of the Malayan Peoples Anti-Japanese Army near the Batu Caves. Chapman implies that both these men died of sickness while fighting with the Chinese guerrillas, so there is no reason to suppose they were Privates Bennett and Stewart who, likewise falling in with a band of communist guerrillas, acted as weapons instructors to them and continued to fight on in Japanese-occupied Malaya until the country was liberated (or at least restored to the British Empire) in 1945.
With the British in something akin to headlong flight down the Malayan peninsular in January 1942, it was time to send the Australians into action. They spectacularly blew up Gemenech Bridge under advancing Japanese forces, killing dozens and trapping many more – whom they proceeded to dispatch with machine guns and grenades – on the south side of the river. Thus blocked on the Trunk Road, the Japanese sought to outflank the Allies on the Muar River on the west coast. Brigadier Herbert Duncan’s Indian 45th Brigade – not only inexperienced but their basic training largely incomplete – found themselves hard pressed by troops that were subsequently discovered to be the Japanese Imperial Guard, and in their thousands rather than their hundreds as was first supposed. In response, General Gordon Bennett dispatched the Australian 2/29th and 2/19th Infantry Battalions to try to stiffen the line. But the Imperial Guards swiftly outflanked and cut off the brigade at Bakri. When Duncan’s headquarters were bombed on Monday 19 January, command of the mixed bag of Australians and Indians fell on Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Anderson, a South African of Scottish extraction and former big-game hunter who had married an Australian and settled in her homeland.
Duncan, it should be noted, recovered from the effects of concussion the day after the bombing, but died the following day leading a counter-attack against a Japanese attack on the brigade’s rear as it made its epic journey to Yong Peng. Accustomed to stalking big game in South Africa, Anderson was able to apply the same skills to hunting the Japanese who sought to trap the brigade at Bakri, and was awarded a well-deserved VC for his courage and leadership. The one hundred and ten Australians and Indians (some sources say one hundred and fifty) left behind because they were too badly wounded to make the trek to Yong Peng were butchered by the Japanese at Parit Sulong.
The last Allied troops to withdraw across the causeway – two hundred and fifty men of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders – did so on the morning of Sunday 1 February, to the bagpipes of Pipers Stuart and McLean playing the Argyll quick-march, ‘Hielan’ Laddie’. At the north end of the causeway, Major John Wyett, a staff officer from the Australian Eighth Division, observed how Colonel Stewart had a friendly, encouraging word for each of his men. He asked Stewart why the pipers were playing. ‘You know, Wyett, the trouble with you Australians is that you have no sense of history,’ the colonel replied. ‘When the story of the Argylls is written you will find that they go down in history as the last unit to cross the causeway and were piped across by their pipers.’2
Last to cross were Stewart himself and his batman, Drummer Hardy. When they reached the southern end, Stewart gave the order to blow up the causeway. Using naval depth charges, the Indian sappers set off a colossal explosion that hurled rocks for hundreds of yards and blew a seventy-foot gap. As a few stragglers stranded on the north side of the Strait discovered, however, it was still possible to cross the causeway on foot at low tide. Not that the Japanese used the causeway when they made their initial assault on Singapore a week later, but that is another story…
1. Chapman, Freddie Spencer, The Jungle is Neutral, p. 118.
2. Quoted in Moffatt, Jonathan and Audrey Holmes McCormick, Moon Over Malaya, p. 107.
First published in the United Kingdom in 2019 by Canelo
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Copyright © Jonathan Lunn, 2019
The moral right of Jonathan Lunn to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
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ISBN 9781788634441
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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