“If I was the kind of person who cared where he was buried,” Manning said, “I should like to have a simple grave up here.”
“You won’t look at it when you’ve been over once or twice,” the Major said. “I do it every week. It’s all right once. But you get tired of it. Give me something more compact. The Lake District, for instance.”
He was not at all awed by the vastness; nor were the British Army. We passed a column of men, with all their equipment, and later on another convoy of lorries. There were some field-guns pulled into the roadside, and two light tanks travelling along on their own. We overtook them all, and a few miles beyond stopped at an Army rest-camp for a cup of tea. We sat down on benches at a rough table in the open, looking across a valley to a Naga village on a hilltop, and it all seemed like the happiest of summer holidays. In a tree close by a bird was going mad with joy, its song soaring up and up till we thought it could go no higher, but still it went up and up to a little trembling note that sounded in the top of our heads.
A bearer came out with the cups. He had a skin like milk chocolate, and long Mongolian eyes. He put the tray down on the table, and the Major began to pour out, saying: “Shall I be mother? One spoonful or two?”
The tanks had caught us up. Two officers came in, and half a dozen soldiers, and sat down at adjacent tables. One of the soldiers said:
“Another bleedin’ doss-house. What wouldn’t I give for five minutes in the Odeon Café.”
“You wouldn’t know what to do with it.”
“Do with what?”
“The Odeon.”
“Blimey, you wait and see.”
“Wait and see what?”
“What I won’t do with the Odeon.”
“I’ll tell you what you can do with the Odeon. Of course, if you’re talking about one of them bits of flashlight girls, that’s a different blinkin’ story.”
They were all smoking cigarettes. Their faces were tanned and healthy, and it was hard to think of them in cheap suits in the Edgware Road. Their hands were grimy and looked competent in an unsubtle way. The two officers were quiet middle-class boys with new moustaches. One had sad eyes and a half-intelligent look, and the other was tall with a shock of black hair and a full mouth that the sun had dried and hardened.
“Where are you making for?” the Major said.
“Blimey, that’s asking,” said one of the soldiers.
“We don’t really know ourselves,” the tall officer said.
“We’re just wandering about lookin’ at the blinkin’ scenery.”
“No Japs around here yet?”
“I’ll say there are Japs! Those little beggars get anywhere, they do.”
“No, as a matter of fact,” the tall officer said, “they seem to be pushing up a bit into the Nagas, but the real trouble’s on the other side of Imphal. They’re coming up the Tiddim Road. You’ll probably find Imphal’s got the wind-up.”
“As long as they don’t get this road . . .”
“Not with our little tin boxes, they won’t,” the soldier said. “We’ll keep ’em off till you get back.”
“Keep them off altogether,” I said. “We all want to come back.” When we set off again, the tail end of the lorry convoy was just passing the rest-camp. The road clung to the hillside, and there were only short stretches in between the blind corners, so that it took us several miles to pass all the lorries. The Sikh driver nosed up behind one vehicle, and when the opportunity came shot out on to the outside of the road, giving the car full throttle, and then braked suddenly and pulled up behind the next. Occasionally a lorry or a jeep came up from the opposite direction and we had a near collision; but we put the convoy behind us truck by truck and in a quarter of an hour we were free and racing ahead on our own. We passed by one or two little villages of mud houses, and then the road began to snake downwards, still cut out of the hill and sometimes half blocked with small landslides. We saw milestone 85 from Dimapur and 47 from Imphal, and reckoned we should be down on the plain in an hour.
The Major was dozing in the back seat, and Manning looking out of the window with a far-away, reflective gaze. I took out Sabby’s letter and read it through, and I read through the last paragraph several times more. I thought it was as characteristic of her as her nose, or her ears, or her tenderly loving eyes, and if there were no tears in my own eyes then it was only because beside this princely Sikh there seemed something quite unmanly in crying. Afterwards I read Margaret and Jennifer’s letter again, trying to give it a less bitter interpretation. But I had no bitterness against them for writing to me like this; their instinctive understanding was unerring. If, later still, I had found this thing out, I should have paid even more heavily for my ignorance. It was infinitely better to know now, though my helplessness intensified my anxiety and my remorse. To know . . . Yes, there was only one meaning to the letter. The children knew and I knew now, not only by the incidents that I had remembered, but by some sense of fatality. I began to feel that subconsciously I had known ever since the night in our house when the drums had sounded down the hill; and I had not dared to accept the knowledge into my conscious mind lest a shadow should fall across my happiness. . . .
All of a sudden the car swerved. The Sikh jammed down his foot and the brakes screamed like an animal suddenly wounded. We were thrown forward and fell back, and were abruptly still. The engine stopped. We all stared out through the windscreen.
Across the road there was a barricade—a small tree trunk and a pile of loose branches. Either side the road was empty; behind us was the sharp corner round which we had swung at thirty miles an hour, and in front another blind bend. On the right the ground fell away steeply to a ravine, and on the left a jungle-covered bank rose out of sight.
We all sat staring, and in the short silence the possible explanations for this road blockage came to us one by one, and we at once dismissed the worst.
“Can it have fallen?” I said.
“Perhaps.”
“It is very simply removed, sir,” the Sikh said. “I will remove it quickly.”
“Wait!” said the Major. He made it quite clear he had taken command. We waited, and we looked more carefully at the tree across the road, and saw no root from which it had broken. There was a long silence this time, and without moving our shoulders we turned our heads to look sideways into the jungle. We could see nothing but the creepers hanging from the trees and the intermingling mass of undergrowth. We listened, and there was only the raucous screech of a mating bird. We looked back at the tree, and the silence seemed unbearable, so that I longed for the Major to speak again.
“There is obviously a reason for this,” he said at last. “There has perhaps been an accident farther on.”
We considered this. We were all thinking the same thing. The Major was also thinking it, but it was Manning who had the courage to say it, and he did so with an extraordinarily unaffected simplicity.
“I think it is very probably the Japs. They are waiting for us to get out of the car.”
I was petrified by a cold horror that went into all my limbs. I thought this was the end, and in a moment or two I was going to die, to leave Sabby alone to die too, and in that instant I saw, not all my life unfolding before my eyes, but a number of imaginary scenes, of which the clearest was in the hall of the house at Tewkesbury, where my mother was about to tear open a telegram that she held in her hands. Then I gripped myself a little and told myself that there were four of us in this, and as yet nothing had happened. I looked at the Sikh. His face was set and wooden and he was staring directly in front of him. The Major had become jittery. His hands were quivering, and when he tried to speak his mouth moved and no sound came. Then he pulled himself together, too, and his voice came out gruffly.
“Better sit tight. The convoy will be along in twenty minutes.” The mating bird clamoured peevishly. It was somewhere in
the branches of the trees that overhung the road. I looked out, and ran my eye slowly over the spaces between the leaves. I couldn’t see the bird, and I couldn’t see any Japanese either. But I knew the bird was there.
Manning took out a cigarette-case and opening it slowly passed it to each of us. My hand was quivering slightly, and I pulled out the cigarette quickly and stuck it in my mouth at a purposely careless angle. The Sikh said graciously:
“Thank you, we Sikhs do not smoke.”
The Major lit a match and the flame was unsteady too. Manning leant forward and drew it into the end of his cigarette, and then he leant back in his corner and let out a long, pensive puff of smoke. After that he said to the Major quietly:
“I would like to suggest, sir, that if this is a trap we might be able to save the convoy from falling into it.”
“Turn round and go back, you mean?”
“That would make us look foolish if we were mistaken.” The Major barked with nervous impatience.
“Then what the hell do you mean?”
“We could remove the tree, and if nothing happens, go on slowly.”
“Remove it?”
“It’s only light. A one-man job.”
“And what happens if there’s trouble?”
“There’s only one thing to do. Reverse the car as fast as possible and shoot back up the road until you think you’re clear, and then turn round and go to meet the convoy.”
“We may be getting ourselves worked up over nothing,” the Major said.
“Yes, we may be.”
“The Lieutenant at the rest-camp said there were no Japs around here. They’d certainly keep ’em off the road.”
“The jungle is very large to hide in.”
“Very well. We’ll move the tree.”
“I would like to do that, sir,” the Sikh said. “Will you kindly instruct me to get out of the car.”
“It doesn’t matter who does it. We’re all pretty much in the same boat.”
“I think it had better be left to me,” Manning said. “The driver may be required.”
“Yes, better let Manning go.”
“Start the engine,” Manning said, “and put her in reverse. Keep your foot ready on the clutch.”
“What about you?” said the Major.
“If anything breaks out, don’t hesitate for a moment. There won’t be a hope, if you do. Get out of it for all you’re worth. You understand?” he said to the driver.
“Yes, sir.”
“Very well. Here goes. In a couple of minutes we shall probably think ourselves damned idiots for all this melodrama.”
“I hope so,” I said.
He had a revolver, like the rest of us. He drew it out of its holster, and opened the door of the car, slamming it behind him when he was out. He began to walk at a steady pace past the front of the car. He was very tall and walked erectly. He had left his hat behind and his hair was curly and unbrushed. The cigarette was still drooping from his mouth.
There was only the sound of the engine ticking over, and still the maddening love-call of the jungle bird. We all sat gazing at Manning in a paralysis of apprehension. We saw him cover a dozen yards to the tree without looking either side of him. He surveyed it for a moment, and then stepped over it, and turning to face us he made a French gesture, shrugging his shoulders and splaying out one hand, as though to say, “What’s all the fuss about?”
And that is how the bullet caught him. We heard the shot, so close that my body convulsed with the sudden ear-splitting explosion. At the same time Manning seemed to be transfixed in that gesture. It can only have been a second, but it seemed an age that his body hung there, like a moving figure stilled in a snapshot. Then the revolver fell out of his hand and the cigarette out of his mouth. He seemed to move slowly backwards, his legs folded beneath him, and he toppled. The car lurched as the Sikh let out the clutch and pressed the accelerator. We began to career madly in reverse, swaying over the road; and simultaneously there was the deadly hammer of a machine-gun. The windscreen was shattered, and the steering-wheel spun in the Sikh’s hands. Then the back of the car tilted downwards over the road’s edge, and I thought we were all going over into the ravine; I hoped so, the smash would be over in a few moments.
But the front wheels clung to the road. The engine kicked and stopped, and we were at a standstill. There was an immediate onrush of little khaki figures with rifles and fixed bayonets. My own revolver had fallen to the floor. I searched for it blindly with one hand, but I knew it was too late. The Major fired one shot, wildly. Then we saw half a dozen bright steel blades menacing through the windows, and as many blurred faces.
I expected to feel the steel, but when I got out on the slope it was the butt end of a rifle that hit me across the forehead, a kind of salutary warning, I suppose, and only hard enough to stun me momentarily. When I recovered and was clear-headed enough to take stock I saw that the Japs were pushing the car right across the road.
One of them, a private, was covering me closely with a bayonet. I moved a hand, and he shook the bayonet threateningly. His eyes were bright and zealous, and his teeth half bared. He looked rough and stocky, like the peasant types I had seen in the Fort at Cawnpore; but he was on the right side of the bayonet, and in his expression there was none of the rather pathetic and smiling philosophy. He was full of grim conscientiousness, ready to jab with the steel as a duty.
There was one officer amongst them. When he had finished directing the blockage of the road with the car, he gave orders to two of the soldiers to escort us away. The three of us were pushed together, and the bayonets flicked to indicate the direction in which we were to turn. We started to walk up the steep bank into the jungle. There was a path through the undergrowth, and we followed it in single file, the Major leading with a slow, depressed pace. His head was hanging from sheer exhaustion and shock. He occasionally looked round at me over his shoulder, and I noticed that his face was infinitely more haggard than it had been twenty minutes ago. He looked like a condemned man slouching to the scaffold. I said to him in a low voice:
“It’s not the end yet.”
He looked back wearily and grunted, and one of the escorts shouted full of officiousness, to shut us up. But I could hear the two of them, some yards behind us, talking between themselves, though I caught only snatches of their conversation; and although they were pretending with their tone to be tough soldiery, I knew they were full of excitement. One of them said:
“They are probably important officers travelling in a car like that.”
“We shall get praised if they are.”
“Who was it who shot the first one?”
“Kusano.”
“Do you wish it was you?”
“It might be a good thing to fire such a fine shot, but . . .”
“We may have to shoot these if they try to escape.”
“They would rather have them alive.”
“I would like to have something off them as a souvenir.”
“I would like to have the Indian’s hat.”
A few minutes later they became more daring, and one of them prodded the Sikh with his bayonet, ostensibly to make him hurry, but I believe it was only to see what would happen, and because they felt they ought to show some aggressiveness. Instead of increasing his pace the Sikh stopped in the middle of the path and swung round to face them, letting out a vituperation in Hindustani. The soldier behind him jumped back and held his bayonet levelled, glowering from behind it. He began to shout in Japanese, “Go on, get a move on,” but the Sikh stood proudly and unintimidated. I was afraid that there was going to be trouble, and I said to the soldiers:
“It was unnecessary to touch him.”
My use of Japanese seemed to take the wind out of their sails. They stared at me in surprise.
“You speak Japanese?”
“Do the other two speak it?”
“No.”
“Tell the Indian to continue walking.”
I told him, and we set off again, but this time I went immediately in front of the Japanese, because I wanted to talk to them.
“It was very clever, catching us like that on the road,” I said.
“No more transport will get through.”
“What are your people hoping to do?”
“The Japanese are going to take Imphal.”
“How do you know?”
“That is what we are told.”
“And what are you going to do with us?”
“We are going to take you to the unit headquarters, and then we don’t know what will happen to you.”
We had walked about a mile from the road, uphill and through jungle all the way. Suddenly we heard a heavy gun fire close to us, and immediately afterwards two more went off, each farther away. Then the first fired again, and a moment later we saw it ahead of us, buried in the trees on a little promontory. The escort volunteered the information:
“They are shelling the road. You are lucky to have got out of it in time.”
It was quite clear what had happened. They had sneaked in with their mountain artillery and got the range on to the road, and then blocked it and waited for a good catch. We had only been small fry; but now the lorries would be right under the shells. They were pouring them down for all they were worth from the three guns. As we came nearer, we could see the gun crew working feverishly, reloading the moment the barrel had recoiled and was still. It was an awful thing, to watch this and be helpless; I wondered if the young fellows in the tanks were getting it too, the fellows who had talked about the Odeon Café and the flashlight girls.
Two or three minutes later there was some answering fire, and then the artillery dropped out and there was only rifle and machine-gun fire to be heard down on the road. It sounded as if a terrific battle was in progress. It went on for a quarter of an hour without a pause, and as we got farther away the sound of the shots became hollower and the machine-gun fire was like a sudden, rapid hammering. Once there was a resounding explosion, a mighty boom with half a dozen smaller ones in its wake; that must have been an ammunition car going up. Then there was a deep silence. We could hear the cries of birds and the everlasting rasp of the crickets. But the shooting had stopped, and it seemed like silence; and we could imagine the silence down below—the smoking chaos on the road.
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