“But, darling, you were always living person.” I could hear Sabby’s voice so clearly.
“You have to die once,” I said to her in my thoughts, “to know how rich life can be.”
“Darling, can you love life and love Sabby at same time?”
“It is really the same thing.”
“Then won’t you please come back to me?”
“I don’t think I shall be able to.”
“But you are not going to die. You are too young to die, darling, and I am not going to let you be killed by a bullet sent by Japanese man. I shall make you better.”
“If anyone could make me better, it would be you.”
“Really, you’re not going to die.”
“Let’s have a pact, then,” I said. “Neither of us will die.”
“You keep pact. It doesn’t matter about me.”
“Don’t say that. You must promise.”
“All right, I promise, darling. Please will you promise too?”
“I promise that I’ll do my best,” I said.
“That is cheating.”
“I know it is. But I’m terribly tired and I’ve got to go to sleep now. Please will you kiss me once more.”
Dawn was breaking behind the hills, and a pale light suffused the sky to the east over Burma. A few miles to the west a heavy gun began its morning’s work. A machine-gun coughed in reply. Over my face the stream water splashed gently, cool from the mountains. But it was the soft pressure of Sabby’s lips that I felt as I passed dreaming into sleep.
(3)
When I opened my eyes again I was puzzled to see blue sky and the branches of trees moving overhead. I thought for a moment: am I dead? Then at once I knew I was not, and I was about to try to sit up when I saw a face over me with long, dark eyes and a flat nose. I shut my eyes again.
I was lying prone on a crude bamboo stretcher. I could feel it being borne sturdily and hear heavy boots on the earth. When I looked through my lashes, without fully opening my eyes again, I could see the backs of the two men in front. They were smallstatured, with broad shoulders, and the hair was black on their necks.
I kept my eyes closed because I wanted time to think. I was sick with despair. There was a good deal of other pain in my body, but this utter black dead weight of despair held me like a girder fallen across my chest. In my mind were the confused pictures of a second captivity, infinitely worse than the first because this time I should be secured beyond hope of escape; and I should be mercilessly punished for this blundering attempt to get away, which had gained me only a wound and something like death. I felt as though I had died once, been through the awful process of dying, only to find myself back where I had started. It had been a swindle.
I did not think I was going to die now, unless they wished to let me do so. But in that case they would have left me to become a carcass where I lay, and not waste the strength of four good soldiers in carrying me back. I wondered why they were bothering to do this.
Looking up again, I said in Japanese:
“Please will you give me water?”
The face I could see had wide cheek-bones and dark eyes. The man returned my gaze with a flicker of humour, and he glanced at his companion who held the other rear handle of the stretcher.
He said at last, in laboured accents: “You do not speak English?”
“Of course,” I said. “I am English.”
“You are now better?”
“I would like some water.”
“At the top of this hill, I will give you my bottle.”
“Where are you taking me?” I said.
“To the field hospital.”
“Take me back to the British!” I began to plead with desperation. “If you take me back, I’ll see you’re well treated. Please take me back!”
He looked puzzled and then he smiled again, and I thought he was smiling at the naïveté of my suggestion.
“Of course we are taking you back to the British,” he said.
I pondered over his tone for a few moments, wondering why it had seemed to lack sarcasm. Was he only saying this for kind-ness . . .? My mind was not functioning properly, and I couldn’t make it out. “Of course we are taking you back. . . .” He spoke English, this man; and he had not understood my Japanese. Yet he looked like a Japanese. . . .
“We are Gurkhas,” the man said, as if reading my thoughts.
My face did not seem to be laughing, but my joy came in gasps, and my eyes must have lost all their dead, despairing look and begun to live and sparkle.
“Gurkhas?” I said after a long time.
“Yes. What did you think?”
“Of course you are Gurkhas,” I said. “Your hats. . . .”
I ought to have noticed their hats, but all I had looked at was their features, and with Mongolian eyes and swarthy skin they were not unlike the Japanese.
“What time is it?” I said.
“Three o’clock.”
“And what day?”
“Wednesday.”
“It’s April, isn’t it?”
“The fifth of April.”
“I shall always remember the fifth of April,” I said. “Talking to friends again.”
At the top of the hill I had a long draught from a water-bottle, and death was a long way behind.
“I will try to walk,” I said, and I started to push myself up from the stretcher which they had laid on the ground; but then I found the recovery was in my mind and my body was still sick. I caught sight of my arm. I had almost forgotten it, and it was a shock to see this dead thing at my side, and at the same time become aware of the offensive odour of the bandage. They would have to cut off the arm. A pretty beastly business. . . .
“You are all right?” said the Gurkha who spoke English.
“Yes,” I said. “I’ve been talking too much, that’s all.”
“We will continue. In an hour we shall reach the hospital.”
I felt very ill all the rest of the way back. I wanted to be sick and my stomach went into convulsions, but nothing came except a mouthful of the water. My head was dizzy. I opened my eyes some times and saw troops passing along the track, and there was a good deal of fighting going on somewhere. It seemed to break out afresh every quarter of an hour or so, with a frenzied din of machine-guns and rifles and metal whizzing through the air. When I heard it I felt ashamed of the self-pity in which I had been indulging. That stuff out there was worse than anything I had experienced, worse than a fortuitous rifle shot and pseudo-death in a river-bed. All the same, I wished I was right out of it. They could have my arm if only they’d take it quickly and send me back to Sabby. Whatever happened, I must get back to Sabby. My body was tired and starved and poisoned, but it had not forgotten how to yearn . . . all of it was yearning for her, yearning through its fears.
It was half-past four when we reached the hospital. I was put in a bamboo hut, and a medical orderly brought a bottle of soup. A little later another patient was carried in, with a bayonet wound underneath his right breast. The orderly said the doctor would be along in a minute. I tried to think of something to say, but there were no words in my head. It seemed ridiculous to lie side by side in silence, when you might come from the same town, and here you were wounded in the Indian jungle. In the end I worked up a sentence, and said:
“It’s funny having soup for tea.”
He said nothing at all, and afterwards the doctor came in and looked at him, and signalled at once to the orderlies to take him out. Then he came over to me, and began to cut off the bandage from my arm.
Chapter Six
(1)
I was taken off by ambulance that night. I had still got my arm, and the doctor said there was hope of keeping it: they would have to decide down in Imphal when they could tell the effect of the first aid. My luck seemed t
o be in all round. Touch wood, I thought, and I felt the side of the stretcher with my left hand, because I needed quite a bit more luck yet.
It was dark in the back of the ambulance. For a time we crawled at a few miles an hour over a rough track, and then I felt the smoother surface of a good road under our wheels. This was the Imphal Road, someone said; and I calculated that we must be about fifteen miles nearer Imphal than the spot where a fortnight before we had run into the road block. Only two weeks ago! It seemed more like two years since we had stopped at the rest-camp near Kohima, and sipped tea and said we would be in Imphal in a couple of hours. Since then Manning had been shot and the Sikh slaughtered, and the Major’s spirit broken. Yet even those things had passed into the back of my memory; and it surprised me to find that I had to grope there for a clear picture of Manning’s appearance. But in time I should remember him easily again. Time would set the events of the last fortnight in perspective, and perhaps enable me to understand those things which so puzzled me. Why, I wanted to know, had we been allowed to sit blithely in the rest-camp when all this had been round the next corner of our lives? And why was I alone allowed to escape? What pattern was working itself out, what scheme was there behind events? Or was there no pattern and no scheme, only chaos and endless unguided change? Perhaps to know the answer you must know God. Even the belief that I was dying had brought me no nearer to Him. Would Time do that, also?
I let myself relax. All the time I had been with the Japanese I had not relaxed, and now it was a luxury to give myself up freely to the motions of the ambulance, and know that friendly hands were at the wheel. I lay watching three red cigarette-tips moving in the darkness; and each time one was placed between lips and glowed brighter, lighting a friendly soldier’s face, a new warmth of gratitude glowed in my heart.
Running swiftly on the level road of the plain it seemed only a short while before we came to our destination. At once our stretchers were carried from the ambulance and up steps; and then there was a hospital ward, and a bed with white sheets and a pillow, and there was a nurse—and it all came back to me how I had come out of the jungle before and been through this, and it came back with a queer sensation that it was a repetition of something from another life, and that I was remembering ghosts.
I wanted to sleep. But the nurse came and washed me and put me into pyjamas, and her hands had a friendly efficiency. Then a doctor came, and he did something to my shoulder, but I was drifting away into a delicious unconsciousness, and I did not know until the morning that I was going to keep my arm.
I was overjoyed; but the most thrilling event of the morning was sending a letter to Sabby. I raised my knees so that I could write it against them without lifting my body, and I used my left hand. The writing was like a child’s, but I thought it would amuse Sabby if she didn’t worry too much about my right hand. I told her I had cut it; and since I could say nothing of what had actually happened, I filled a few pages with all the things we were fond of saying to one another, and sealed the letter and gave it to the nurse. I wondered how long I should have to wait for a reply. And I wondered, too, whether I should get sent back to India. Here in Imphal they had got the wind-up—and no wonder, for the Japanese were coming in from the mountains on every side. The Corps had gone into a ‘box,’ and even the hospital staff had their battle positions. There was no road left open for retreat. But the airfield was in use, and already the worst casualties were being flown out to Assam. I began to pray that I, too, might be thought sick enough for evacuation.
In my room there was a wireless, and that afternoon I had it tuned in to the Delhi wavelength. The suspense of waiting was unbearable. I knew that if Sabby spoke, all my fears would be wiped out in an instant and the colour of my life changed; but that if she didn’t, there could be no relief for my anguish. She didn’t speak. It was a man’s voice, but for me only a blankness.
I had to tell the whole story of my capture and escape to a Captain, who sat by my bedside scribbling like a reporter. He kept saying: “A wonderful experience, since you came out alive.” But it did not seem to me wonderful, and anybody could have had that experience in exchange for a straight run through from Kohima to Imphal. Then the next day Peter came.
For a time my happiness at seeing him left me speechless. He strode into the small ward wreathed in smiles, and his moustache seemed to be grinning on its own, and he seized my loose hand, which I shook madly in his. He had been sent to Imphal to take my place after I had been reported ‘missing.’ He had come in by air; and only now, after three days, had he heard of my presence in hospital.
“I’ve wasted an awful lot of sympathy on you,” he said. “You’re an old fraud! I thought you were dead, and I’ve played the part of a grieved friend with a histrionic talent that amounts almost to genius. And here you are looking the picture of health. Why couldn’t you at least have brought a few Japanese prisoners back with you, to have something to show for your escapade?”
“I would have done,” I said. “But I didn’t know you’d be here to interrogate them.”
“Of course I’m here—and feeling very important. There’s nobody here who can test my Japanese, so that it’s all right feeling important. I’m a key person. And it’s most desperately exciting being in a box, entirely surrounded by the enemy. It’ll provide stories to dine out on for years. Though, of course, when we demonstrate the box on the table, with the help of cutlery and the cruet, we won’t say that we could have escaped perfectly easily by air.”
“That’s what I want to do,” I said.
“You don’t want to get out?”
“Yes, I do.”
“You don’t really think that one bullet is enough to get you retired off on a pension?”
“It’s enough to get me retired out of Imphal,” I said.
“What a bitter disappointment you really are I. We all expected you to do something heroic, and then come back and say it was nothing at all and anybody would have done it. Instead you get yourself into this bungalow, when everybody else is living in bashas or tents or nothing at all, and start shooting the hell of a line about it.”
“I’m going to get out of Imphal, all the same,” I said.
“I suspect the real reason is that you’re pining for Sabby.”
“Yes,” I said. “I think that’s the real reason.”
I told him that I thought Sabby was ill and that nobody would be looking after her, and just for a moment the tender part of Peter glowed through the shell.
“In that case,” he said, “we’ll have to get your evacuation fixed up at once. It would have been nice to have you here—but if you want to know the truth, I think being in a box is a mug’s game. The Duke of Wellington, or whoever invented boxes, must have been out of his senses. Boxes are too damned difficult to get out of whether you’ve aeroplanes or not; and I’d much rather dine out on stories of how I spent the war at Simla drinking burra pegs at the Cecil.”
“You’re an impossible person to understand,” I said. “You’re my best friend, and I still don’t know whether you’d prefer to be in Imphal or Simla.”
“I don’t know, myself. But if I have to be in Imphal, I’m sorry you won’t be here to talk to. You’re the only person who doesn’t understand me, and that’s very refreshing. Anyhow, you’ll have a great story for your free dinners in country houses: how you flew out of the box in the last aircraft to leave before the sides caved in and your remarkable friend Peter died at his post.”
“Doing what?”
“Oh, doing something really incongruous. Discussing Frank Harris and Oscar Wilde would be rather good. Or do you think it’s better for me to have a rifle which I fire to the Last Round?”
“That would be much more incongruous.”
“Very well, I’ll have a rifle. And please don’t forget to tell everybody how I died on the battlefield. Tell your adopted daughter.”
“I’l
l tell her,” I said.
(2)
I had no difficulty in getting sent off by aircraft, because they wanted to make room for the steady flow of casualties that was coming in. It was ten days later when the drugs had got a grip on my dysentery again, and my only real trouble was the plaster cast that encased my arm. I was allowed on my feet to save space for another stretcher in the aircraft; but nothing I could say would make the authorities send me straight to Delhi. They told me I should be bundled off to bed again as soon as we reached the hospital in Calcutta, and I could reckon on another month there at least. And I thought to myself: so this is where I shape my own destiny for a change. . . .
Peter came to the airfield to say good-bye.
“I’ve got a feeling that I’ll come through this war all right,” he said. “And so will you.”
“You don’t happen to have a feeling about Sabby?” I said.
“I leave that to you. Maybe Sabby will be all right, too.”
“Maybe?”
“Oh, she’ll be all right.”
“You never really told me what you thought of Sabby,” I said.
“She’s the sweetest creature I’ve ever known.”
“That sounds like my own thoughts.”
“It’s what you wanted to hear, isn’t it?”
“Of course it is.”
“That’s why I said it.”
“All the same, you sounded as though you meant it.”
“I say all the right things in the right way. And I mean quite a lot of them as a matter of fact. I mean it when I say I’ll miss you. And if ever you want a shoulder to cry on, here it is.”
“I’d say that works the other way round, too, only you don’t cry.”
The Wind Cannot Read Page 30