Forgotten Life

by Brian Aldiss

  I squeezed the trigger and fired at once. Ron fired at the same moment.

  The rifle kicked against my shoulder. The world seemed full of noise. Above that noise I heard a shrill cry. I ceased fire.

  A long silence fell. Gradually the noises of the furtive birds in the undergrowth returned. Neither Ron nor I dared to get up.

  Another message was offered over the wireless. Ron gave the wait signal, and then we rose and went forward together, rifles raised.

  The Japs had run off, all but one. He lay face downwards in the sand of the chaung. Next morning, we examined him in a squeamish way. A bullet had gone through his chest. He was a poor thin diseased specimen.

  Then I was glad it was Ron with me. We argued a bit about which one of us had shot him, but did not pursue the matter too far. Ron said laughingly, ‘You must have shot him. With my wandering eye, I’m not much of a marksman.’ Neither of us wanted full responsibility.

  Not until several years later, when I was back in England, did the nightmares come. Then I woke screaming. The Japs were after me again. And again it would be moonlight. But those nightmares, like so many other things, gradually worked their way through the system and were dissipated into thin air.

  Ron and I ate our frugal breakfasts a few paces away from the dead Jap. About midday, the linesmen showed up in their truck and took us back to Signal HQ. We reported the Jap, and were briefly regarded as heroes by the rest of ‘S’ Section. But there was a war to be going on with, and the incident was soon forgotten – except in the fertile beds of Ron’s and my memory.

  Japanese resistance broke. The Chindwin was crossed, and bridged by long Bailey bridges. We were now on the famous Road to Mandalay, still a good cobbled road, its miles marked by two waves of war, burning villages from which Japs had just retreated, and the rusty carcasses of old cars, abandoned during the retreat towards India, three years earlier. In contrast to this thrilling chaos, the trees with which the sides of the road were planted looked suburban, painted as their trunks were with whitewash up to a height of four feet.

  This was the habitat of death. The victorious Japs were victorious no longer. Their units were in retreat, their soldiers often starving and diseased. Very little mercy was shown them; their reputations were too ghastly for that; for too long, the British had looked on them as both superhuman and subhuman. ‘Though kings they were, as men they died.’

  We drove among the paraphernalia of defeat: burnt-out Japanese trucks by the roadside, overturned 8-wheelers, scattered ammunition, dead bodies, vehicles and buildings burning quietly to themselves in the middle of nowhere. We drove. The infantrymen slogged it all on foot, every mile. We were now about 400 miles from the old base, Dimapur.

  Even when in grimly victorious mood, the Fourteenth Army remained bitter. Newsreels were shown with the odd film show, so that we were accustomed to seeing coverage of triumphal Allied advances in Italy, France and Belgium. Entry into towns was always marked by pretty girls rushing out to present the soldiers with wine or flowers or, even better, kisses. These were the traditional rewards of liberators. The miserable ‘towns’ we liberated, sometimes little more than names on Ordnance Survey maps, were utterly deserted. No pretty girls came running to us. The fruits of victory had a bitter taste.

  Since time immemorial, the prizes for soldiers after a battle have been loot, drink, and women. In that respect, ours was a remarkably chaste war.

  Three Indian soldiers were caught raping a Burmese woman. She was very irate about the whole business and said, ‘Just when I was getting interested, they gave up.’ We took this story for truth at the time.

  At this stage in the great upheaval of nations, the division I was to join in the future, 26 Indian Division, was in action in one of the worst areas of Burma, the dreaded Arakan, mopping up the Japs on Ramree Island. Such names as Arakan and Ramree acquired a special and dread significance.

  The object of 2 Div’s immediate attention was Mandalay. The Japs were now withdrawing from round the city, where they could muster eight divisions against our five. Commander Bill Slim’s plan was to switch IV Corps, to which we belonged, from the north to the south to attack Meiktila while XXXIII Corps attacked from the north. Meiktila was a focus for road, rail, and air communications south of Mandalay; Mandalay was of relatively little strategic but of immense symbolic importance, its name known all over the world – a poor man’s inland Singapore.

  Mandalay fell towards the end of March after an intense struggle. In Meiktila, even Japanese hospital patients were ordered to fight to the death. The Japs fought in strong-points, alleys, and cellars. They were all exterminated by bullet, bayonet, or flame-thrower.

  When I rolled into Mandalay in our signal truck, I was all but prostrate from dysentery, though still working. The city had once been a seat of Buddhist learning, and its hill was covered with white icing pagodas, many of them damaged in the fighting. The thick walls of Fort Dufferin were also much damaged. But Slim had given orders that Mandalay should not be bombed.

  It was an empty city, doomed and desolate. The smell of corruption hung over it, while birds sat on trees overhead, waiting. Stray dogs wandered about the streets, many of them suspiciously fat, but disconsolate. Perhaps they, like us, felt a sense of anti-climax.

  Before we left Burma, there was one more adventure. 2 Div had completed its task with the defeat of the Japanese in the plains and the retaking of Mandalay. It was the task of other units to drive the Japs south towards Rangoon and, if possible, eliminate them entirely. We were to be flown out – an unusual operation in those days on that front.

  I was one of the rear detail. Four of us manned a skeleton signal office in a small tent. After we had passed the last traffic, we closed down for good. There was now no one to answer our signals.

  The radio and line apparatus we loaded into a Dodge truck, which set off into the wilderness. We returned to pick up our kit. We had camped under a large tree with generously spreading branches. For the flight back to a base in Bengal, we were allowed only 40 lbs. of personal kit; the rest had to be dumped – pegdoed, in our corruption of Urdu. A lot of pegdoing went on in India and Burma. So we got our packs on our backs and our kitbags on our shoulders with our bivouacs and mosquito nets, and started to walk to the airfield. Behind us, a wind whipped up dust, fluttering the pages of the books, so lovingly accumulated, which I had been forced to pegdo. Stapledon’s Last and First Men was left behind. The wind grew stronger, whipping about our legs, reminding us that the monsoons were on the way to revivify the torn land. Out of their hiding places among tossing bushes came dark figures, rushing forward and seizing the abandoned loot. Partridge raised his rifle, half in fun. Before the tree was out of sight, the Burmese had borne all our pegdoed possessions away.

  The airstrip was marked only by a small windsock, rippling in the new winds. The strip consisted of a runway of knee-high grass perhaps two hundred yards wide and a mile or more long. Perhaps it had once been designed as a fire-break. Nothing was to be seen but grass and trees, stretching across the plain. No one else was about, not a shack, not a truck, no personnel in sight. We had water and rations but no means of communication with the world.

  The four of us settled in the shade of the trees and waited, smoking, chatting. Idle chat. I had found no way of communicating my inward feelings to my friends, sensing that anything I said on an emotional level would be laughed at. Nor did I impart my feelings to my parents; my few letters home were miracles of superficiality. Now, under the trees, I found myself alone in having some regrets at leaving Burma. With a great victory behind us and the unknown ahead, here was surely an hour of communing. We continued to talk in trivialities, all perhaps afraid to reveal our true selves.

  One thing we vowed, sprawling in the shade, was that when we got back to the Blight we would tell everyone what we had been through. We would – as the expression had it – ‘grip them ragged’. The Ancient Mariner would have nothing on us. It can be seen that this process of tel
ling all would have had great therapeutic value. I was with three men who were about to be sent home after long service abroad; for myself, I had still a lot of time to serve out. So I never knew if the requisite grips were applied. But for me, returning to Blighty when the war had been over some while, and put out of mind, I found that no one wished to hear. The jungle experience was too alien.

  Why did no novelists or poets spring up to celebrate the experience of Burma from the common soldier’s point of view? It was an undemocratic war. Only officers spoke about it later – heroes like Bernard Fergusson and ‘Mad’ Mike Calvert, and of course Slim’s own fine book on the campaigns, Defeat into Victory. They all stuck to autobiography or fact. Hardly a poet spoke up. There was Alun Lewis, but he shot himself before going into action.

  One of Lewis’s poems tells how:

  But leisurely my fellow soldiers stroll among the trees.

  The cheapest dance-song utters all they feel.

  It’s a lie, an officer’s snotty lie; Lewis did not know what he was talking about. Delightful irony reposed in singing those ‘dance-songs’. Their superficiality, like our chatter, served to cover momentous upheavals of feeling. ‘Paper Doll’ and ‘Moonlight Cocktail’ had marvellous surreal effect in our jungle hideouts.

  We woke the next morning under the great trees, eating a hunk of bread and marmalade for breakfast without washing. The place was as waterless as a desert – and as deserted. No sign of our plane, and the monsoon-bearing wind blew stronger. The smell of smoke came to us.

  Hour succeeded hour. We strolled about in the sun, hats off – it was our pride that we never got sunstroke or wore topis, as an earlier generation of regular soldiers had done. The smoke could be seen. It thickened until gradually it shrouded the blue sky. A forest fire was approaching. We could hear its roar and crackle. It was as if a stampede of animals was coming our way.

  What were we to do? There was no escaping from our position. The fire was approaching at brisk walking pace, burning up the trees in huge brands on either side of the airstrip, triumphant and furious. Rapidly it came, and still no rescuing plane.

  We moved into the centre of the grass strip. Jungle blouses went on, to protect our skins from flying sparks. The sky was black, the whole forest on either side blazing red. We crouched to the ground. The heat seemed to swell about us.

  The fires on either side moved parallel with each other like friendly rival expresses. Linking them across the open space ran a wave of flame, consuming the grass, turning what was green black, leaving behind it cindered ground. It dashed towards us like a rip tide.

  Standing, we heaved our kit on to our backs. As the wave reached us, we jumped. That is how you evade a forest fire. You jump over it.

  ‘So much for fucking Burma,’ said Bert Lyons.

  There we stood, in a land of black ash. The great fire swept majestically on, about its own purposes, leaving smouldering destruction on either flank. We looked at each other and laughed. Then we lit up cigarettes.

  ‘Where’s that bloody plane?’ we asked.

  We spent another night out in the open, on the burnt earth. Next morning, an aged Dakota with the American star on its wings landed on the black airstrip; we climbed readily enough into its hold, and soon were flying westward, over the Chin Hills towards India and a quieter life.

  History is what happens to contemporary events when they have receded enough for us to draw a moral from them. What is the moral of the Burma campaign?

  That change is all. Three years after the victory of the Forgotten Army, Burma was granted independence. Although the Japanese had packed their bags and left, Britain was unable to regain the confidence of the Burmese people, who had twice seen their fair country reduced to a battlefield – Burma, that most religious of countries. Nor could the brave Indian Army be relied on to hold down Burma by force. India was being returned to the Indians. That was the British will: while behind that will was American pressure; righteous to a fault about British and Dutch Far East possessions, the United States nevertheless let itself be led into another war that has been seen since to have caused more damage and destruction in Vietnam, Cambodia, and surrounding regions than even the Japanese dreamed of.

  Nineteen thousand men of British and Commonwealth origin – the greatest number being Indian other ranks – died in the Irrawaddy crossings by Mandalay and Meiktila. In the earlier battle of Kohima, over two thousand men of British 2 Div, for which I was a pale-skinned reinforcement, died. All told, in Burma, there were seventy-one thousand British and Commonwealth casualties. Japanese casualties have been numbered at 185,000.

  A memorial was erected to the British dead at Kohima. On the memorial is carved a free translation of a Greek epitaph, which reads:

  When you go home

  Tell them of us and say

  For your tomorrow

  We gave our today.

  Sadly, it was no one’s tomorrow, despite the brave words. The British got out. The Burmese then sank under a repressive regime. Various kinds of struggle still divide it. Visitors from outside are scarcely welcome.

  The bamboo grows beside the rivers where once we so bravely, so fruitlessly, drove from Milestone 81, through Kohima and Imphal, down the Tiddim Road, across Chindwin and Irrawaddy, to a ruined Mandalay. A lot of tomorrows lie buried along the route.

  4

  Clement sat over his brother’s old exercise book for a while, engaged in unconstructive musings. Then, sighing, he made a few phone calls. As he was setting the phone down, the intercom buzzed. It was Michelin.

  ‘Your supper’s all ready, Clem. And I’m just off out.’

  ‘Got another party?’

  ‘Yes, another party …’

  ‘Oh, well, enjoy yourself.’

  He went downstairs slowly, dragging his steps so that anyone observing him might imagine there was something weighty on his mind. Downstairs, where the temperature was cooler, Sheila was in the conservatory pouring herself another glass of white wine.

  ‘Where’s your glass?’

  ‘Oh, I left it on my desk upstairs.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. I’ll get another. It’s so hot, Michelin has laid a table outside by the pool for us. She’s just gone.’

  ‘Another party …’

  ‘Good drinking evening.’

  She was pouring wine slowly into the glass she had taken from the cabinet, letting the neck of the bottle chink once against the rim of the glass to emphasize the benefaction of what she was doing. It seemed to him, watching her, that her strong nose was slightly less sharp this evening, as if a certain watchfulness, apparent in her manner during their time in the States, had now relaxed.

  Passing him the brimming glass, she said, ‘If you go outside, I’ll bring the food. It’s all ready.’

  The garden was still mainly in sunlight, slanting over the old brick walls. The little pool was in the shadow cast by the Farrers’ house next door. But it was warm there, and in the patio area Michelin had laid a pink linen cloth on their white conservatory table.

  ‘Did you have a dip?’ he asked, when she emerged with avocados.

  ‘I spent a whole hour on the phone catching up with news since we’ve been away.’ She passed on various items of gossip.

  ‘The film contract’s come alive again,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t believe it.’

  They chatted about the Kerinth film contract with Obispo Artists. A letter had been awaiting her from Tarleton Broker, film agent in London for the Green Mouth novels. A deal with Obispo had been on and off for over a year; now they were involved with a director-producer called Calvin Boas Lee, whom both Sheila and Clement had met, and liked tolerably. Now the deal was alive. Tarleton had a contract ready. After they had demolished most of Michelin’s strawberry shortcake, Sheila produced Tarleton’s letter, and they read it over between them.

  ‘So I’ll go up to London on Thursday and work over the contract page by page with Tarleton.’

  ‘Looks as if you
’re going to be rich and famous. Even more of both.’

  She pulled a face at him. ‘Don’t say it. It frightens me. Poor me. Everyone will hate me even more.’

  ‘Love you even more.’

  She squeezed his hand. ‘I’ll keep my head. Promise.’

  ‘Don’t count your chickens, love.’

  ‘That’s right …’

  Thursday, the day that Sheila took the train up to London to see her film agent, was also the day of the week when Clement drove to Headington for his regular appointment with a fellow analyst. This analyst, a Jungian like Clement, was a Czech exile called Mrs Vikki Emerova. They had known each other for some years, and occasionally met in the Department of Psychiatry in the Warneford, or at official functions. He always addressed her as Mrs Emerova, and she him as Dr Winter.

  Clement’s clinic, which these days he held only once a week, was in central Oxford. Mrs Emerova had a downstairs room in a small Edwardian house with a neglected garden off Headington High Street. Headington was full of similar houses with similar rooms, each occupied by people much like Mrs Emerova. The Emerovas of this world sat in chairs listening to the woes of people sitting opposite them. Anything could be said to them. One could talk in intimate detail about sexual perversions, or one could enter on a lengthy diversion concerning politics. One could be fearfully academic or downright coarse. The Mrs Emerovas would never flinch.

  Unnatural though this arrangement might appear, many of the academics of Oxford, burdened with personal problems, made their pilgrimage weekly to the shabby rooms in the discreet houses of Headington.

  In the back garden at Mrs Emerova’s were three ancient apple trees, and nothing else. The grass did not seem to grow. It was never short and never particularly long. Perhaps, Clement surmised, there were special nurseries – garden centres, they were called nowadays – in the wilds beyond Headington, in Wheatley and Holton and Horspath and Garsington which supplied special grass seed for analysts’ gardens, guaranteed to lull their clients with its monotony. His own clinic had no garden.