by Brian Aldiss
‘It’s all right for him,’ one of the Forgotten Army types said dolefully. ‘He’s got a load of dead ’uns on his payroll what peg out in this fucking camp and aren’t never declared. You’re living on dead man’s wages, you are, mate.’
So I had a week exploring Calcutta on my own.
I tried to get in touch with my mates in the Mendips. To save money, I walked to the transit camp at Howrah. Our rear detail had upped and gone, leaving not a rack behind. Nobody knew anything about them, beyond the fact that they had moved in a fifteen-hundredweight Dodge truck early in the morning. A harassed lance-jack gave me a list of three other transit camps in the Calcutta area; but at this time troops were pouring in and out of the city, extra facilities were being set up, and in the confusion nobody seemed to know what was going on.
Another day, I walked to Sealdah railway station and found another transit camp. Nobody there had even heard of the Mendips.
At night, there was the irresistible temptation of the brothels – of being accosted, of giving in, of vanishing into the teeming stews, where cunt was as common as cockroaches. During the day, I wandered round the city, up to its gills in humanity, went round the gimcrack Jain temple, inspected the Rama Kristna Mart, watched the lorries, Sikh-driven taxis, and bullock-carts jostle each other over Howrah Bridge, looked at the docks, and had myself ferried down the Hooghly to the Botanical Gardens, where I sat under the biggest banyan tree in the world, propped up on its multitude of stilts like a too-successful beggar.
It was amazing to be alone again, away from other people. By the end of the week, with my arm out of the sling, I did a little sketching, half bashful at this display of artistic temperament.
When I got back to the camp one lunchtime – despite Harrison’s payments, I was almost broke again – the big sandy-haired sergeant called me over.
‘There’s a message come over the blower for you soon as you’d cleared off this morning.’
‘From “A” Company?’ I was leaning in the doorway.
‘Very likely. A gharri’s coming to pick you up here at sixteen hundred hours, and you’ve to report to 26 Reinforcement Camp.’
‘Where’s that, sarge?’
‘I hate to tell you this, lad, but it’s at Dimapur. You’re going to have a chance to stop the Japs marching on India. It’s action for you at last.’
It was stuffy in his little wooden office, almost as hot as outside. Among all the duty rosters and lists of units, there were pin-ups from ‘SEAC’ hanging on the wall.
In a moment of revelation, I wondered what the fuck I had been doing with my life. A glimpse came to me of myself as a kid, clinging on to my big brother Nelson in terror, while he fended off a furiously barking dog. Nelson was in action near Monte Cassino – for all I knew he was dead now! I’d never really had the chance to be myself, whoever that was, had I? These last bloody years had been occupied with pretending to be a Mendip – and this is where it had got me.
Am I capable of understanding my own life? I write it all down, and it comes back like someone else’s life. At that instant, half-inside the hot little office, with the sandy-haired sergeant watching me, I knew … no, I’ve forgotten what I knew then.
The month of March, 1944, was almost spent. The flow of events, of time itself, was heavier in the South-East Asian theatre of war than in Europe. In Europe, the Nazis were being smitten on every front, and victory seemed assured. In India, we had hardly made a start against the Japs, and the territory to be recovered was appalling in extent. The American general, ‘Vinegar Joe’, was battling away with his Chinese troops in the north of Burma, and British troops had managed local gains in the Arakan. But the Japs still enjoyed their dreadful reputation for being merciless as conquerors and impossible to defeat. Now they were moving west towards the gates of India, marching out of the plains of Central Burma – as even I knew from my reading of the newspaper.
So much for whatever plans McGuffie or Gor-Blimey might have. So much for me. Nodding to the sergeant, I went off to the marquee, a little pale about the gills. Dimapur was the capital of Dimapur State, next to Assam, on the very brink of Burma, and a long way forward from the randy glitter of Calcutta.
The dregs of the Fourteenth Army sensed there was something up, and soon got my news out of me. Shrieks of delight greeted it.
‘You lucky fucker! Now’s your bloody chance to get some service in! About time you bloody base-wallahs did your share! You’ll be marching the Dimapur Road in no time!’
One of the chief shits was a bent-nosed REME man called Cuxham. He was round-shouldered and talked indistinctly, spitting over his ‘s’es, as if he had an exceptionally tacky lower lip on which his protruding teeth were liable to stick. He strolled over as I was collecting my gear and said, ’Ffo, you’re going to be a Chindit, iff that it?’
‘I just hope I’m going to rejoin my mates, that’s all I know.’
‘You’ll be lucky!’
‘What a fucking way to run an army!’
‘It’f no good, mate, they’ve diffcovered you’re malingering – you’re for it, you’ll never ffee your matef again! You’re jufft fucking Jap fodder, you are!’
I hit him smack in the mush. Not very hard but pleasureably hard. My right fist did not hurt a great deal – not as much as his face hurt him. Cuxham lurched away and went down the far end of the ward to sit on his charpoy and clutch his head. His mates all gathered round him, pressing Wog Players on him. One of them looked sickly over at me and called, ‘You’re a cruel young bleeder, you are! Poor old Cuxy was caught by the Yellow-bellies in the Admin Box at Ngakyedauk – he didn’t mean no harm.’
‘No? Then why didn’t he leave me a-fucking-lone? He’s bloody puggle, that’s his trouble.’ All the same, I felt more ashamed than I showed, as I always did when I lashed out.
One of the other chaps said in a melancholy way, ‘We’re all going fucking puggle in this bastard climate. If you ask me, before we get out of here, the whole submukkin pack of us’ll be puggle!’
‘I didn’t mean to hurt him. Why didn’t he hit me back?’
‘You wouldn’t fucking ask that if you’d been at fucking Ngakyedauk, having to eat the mules and listening to the Japs boloing your name after dark. How can you know what it’s like if you’ve been no further fucking east than Firpo’s?’
‘I’m going to find out now, aren’t I?’
One of Cuxham’s muckers said sullenly, ‘It’ll be cushy from now on, what with fucking air-drops and everything. You can’t call it war any more.’
It did not take me long to get my few belongings together. I slung my pack over one shoulder and made for the entrance. There was a lance-corporal in the tent whom they called Lackeri, a clerk – I knew he had been caught in the Ngakyedauk admin box because I’d heard him gripping about it. He stopped me at the entrance. An old man of thirty, wearing Army specs, his identity discs swinging against his hollow chest, a sweat-rag tied round his neck.
‘Good luck, old boy! All the best! You’ll come through it okay. Pay no heed to this lot of admis – they’ve had it. Things are better than what they was in our time! Take it easy!’
I stared at him. We just looked at each other. People were always leaving places in those days and moving on.
‘I didn’t mean to sock your mate – I was sweating on the top line.’
‘Don’t you take no notice of these bods. They’ve been out in the sun too long. They’re due for repat. Take care of yourself, old lad!’ He clapped me on the shoulder, nodding his head once.
I hurried over to the bogs. Shutting myself in one of the cubicles, I burst into tears. There seemed to be no way to stop. I just sat there and cried; I couldn’t take being spoken to kindly like that.
After a bit, I pulled myself together and lit a fag. I was safe there. The other sounds of the shithouse – slamming doors, farts, pee escaping – came from far away, as I tried to survey my life. Burma. It was just that it was so final … it would be exciting. Bu
t not to get another screw in! My hand was okay again. Maybe I could go and see the MO, that sceptical bloke, and pretend that one of the bones … no, fuck that for a lark! But no screwing … When would I ever have a lovely long messy slobbering sexy love affair with a girl? A white girl; England. Or a Chinese girl, one of those beauties I’d seen in Chowringhee the other day, smashing faces, marvellous legs. God, Christ, what a twot I was not to have had a Chinese girl yesterday – today was too late. No dough. The Chinese girls were more expensive than the bibis. You could see why. Can you just imagine their sweet little tits and glorious little cunts …
Well, one could always dream, and wank at the same time. By sprawling right back on the seat and ignoring the stink of the shit-pit below me, I managed in no time to lob some spurts of spunk over my stomach, with some relief. It was not wholly a milestone as wanks go because the smoke from my fag got into my eye.
As I was getting up and industriously faking the sound of arse-wiping with the newspaper provided, I heard someone come into the shitter for a pee, I heard their snatch of song.
Could I but see thee stand before me …
It was sixteen hundred hours. The gharri had come to collect me, with at least one of my friends. Thank God, I’d be off to Burma with someone I knew!
Book Three
God’s Own Country
GOD’S own country was the ironical Fourteenth Army name for Burma. Perhaps it was so named because of the difficulty of getting there. The distance from Calcutta to Kohima in Assam – maintaining the celestial topography, Assam was God’s Frontier Post – had to be measured in more than miles. The rear detail of the First Battalion travelled northwards by train, on a railway taken over and run by US Railway Troops. From the train, we transferred to a ferry, and the ferry took us slowly across the wide Bramaputra. On that river’s eastern shores, we stood in Assam and the effects of the Japanese blight were already apparent. The chaos and splendour of India, the cheerful and hazardous trafficking of its people, all shrank away into the unnatural quiet of an invasion area. Such inhabitants as there were moved the way people do in war-zones – keeping close to the fence. We were far from home.
We climbed on to another train – this time of a narrower gauge than the first, as if the sinister Japanese spell had caused even the railway to contract with fear. This train started with more than Indian promptness and brought us to Dimapur.
Every change of transport meant delays. It also meant the unloading of stores – McGuffie might have lost a military bogie full of our stores, but there were plenty of other stores to be humped. This chain of supply, over different gauges, rivers, and mountains, was the only route to the central front in Burma, bar the air!
The country grew more tremendous as we advanced, as if it too was heading for some kind of crisis. Each change of transport entailed spending a night in a transit camp; each morning, we woke to chill air and, although the sun quickly became as blazingly hot as ever, we knew we were heading towards higher mountains. I don’t know how it was with the others, but for me those were days of excitement. I could have travelled on for ever.
On this journey, the foreign names stood out like names of an incantation: in particular, Dimapur, Kohima, and Imphal! Imphal, the most distant, was capital of the tiny state of Manipur – a capital yet a village – Kohima was just a village in the Naga Hills of Assam, some fifty miles beyond Dimapur. In the ranks, we made little distinction between Manipur and Assam and Burma – all tropical trouble-centres.
As we rolled into Dimapur, everyone stood at the windows of the train staring out in amazement.
‘Hey, I reckon the fucking Japs have taken over here already!’ Tertis said.
The pitiful little town was packed with soldiery and refugees and thousands of coolies. This was the bottle-neck between India and Burma and, for every man going forward, eastwards, there were ten trying to get back, westward. As the valley opened out, the panorama resembled an historical frieze more than reality. Dust roads stretched in all directions. Along them roared camouflaged lorries, one behind the other almost bumper to bumper, travelling at reckless speeds. There were long static lines of coolies, too, often engulfed in dust. In the valley and on the hillside, impromptu camps were being flung up. Digging was going on everywhere. The whole impression this great staging area gave was of chaos. An invasion had taken place, as Jackie Tertis implied.
In the centre of town stood a signpost with three fingers, each pointing in a different direction and reading, ‘NEW YORK 11,000 miles, TOKYO 5,300 miles, LONDON 8,300 miles’. As the pecking order of cities indicated, Americans were in town. As usual, the American troops looked more relaxed, more democratic, bigger, and decidedly better fed than our troops; they differed as much from us in those respects as we did from the Indian sepoys.
The mixture of races was staggering. It was as if all these thousands of strange men had suddenly arrived to build a new Tower of Babel in this unknown spot. We saw Chinese troops, who were reserved, and Gurkhas, who waved cheerily (‘Yon’s the best fucking fighting man in the world, after your Glaswegian,’ McGuffie said), and a contingent of West Africans – not to mention a baffling miscellany of Indian and Assamese troops. Everyone was on the move.
For all the over-crowding, our little party moved into a neat and almost empty staging camp. It had been set up for 2 Div. We were almost the first of the division to arrive at the scene of action. The rest were straggling, train-load by train-load, across India, towards this narrow and dangerous valley which pointed towards Kohima and the advancing Japanese.
Our party grabbed some food and then went to see a film show: Tom Conway in ‘The Falcon in Danger’. The film was projected on to canvas, so that the audience could sit on the ground on both sides of the screen. Who cared on which side of his head Conway parted his hair?
Chatting with other squaddies, we gained a basic picture of what was happening in the so-called real world about us. Japanese units were moving forward again, threatening Kohima and encroaching on the Dimapur-Kohima and Kohima-Imphal roads. Nobody knew precisely where they were. The Dimapur-Kohima road was overlooked by mountains, every mountain covered by jungle right up to its crest; some of the chaps had seen Japs moving about on the crests. 33 Corps was supposed to be guarding this vital length of road – ‘and they’re a bloody shower,’ someone lugubriously remarked.
‘The Mendips’ll sort them fucking Japs out!’ Carter the Farter said. He laughed.
We walked down the valley road, smoking and chatting, to a canteen in a tent where they were serving chicken buttis and beer. Over the Naga Hills, a half-moon sailed. London 8,300 miles. In the tent, a group of Cockneys were arguing drunkenly about the exact route a Number 15 bus took.
I stood outside drinking my pint and smoking. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. All the expectations of yesterday had been swept away. It was enough to stand in this magnificent valley.
My mates had told me their news: how they had been transferred to Barrackpore as soon as I had left for the Field Ambulance Unit, how Gore-Blakeley had been going spare about the missing equipment, and how everything had suddenly become irrelevant because the Japs were on the move and every able-bodied man in India was being pushed up to meet them. Whatever schemes McGuffie or Gore-Blakeley or anyone else had nourished – all were blown away. The lists had arrived, the orders went through, we did as we were told.
There was a remote outburst of firing, echoing down among the hills.
‘Probably Jap mortars – they’re bastards with their mortar-fire,’ Ernie said.
‘Some poor bastard’s getting it,’ Aylmer said. He and I walked back to our basha, leaving the others. It was the first firing – the first real firing – we had heard. Here and there, groups of men were singing in the darkness. Convoys were moving in both directions. Sepoys were on guard all along the road, at the stage of night with friends to keep them company smoking beadis, the pungent scents of which followed us down the road.
‘At least w
e should be going in with Yankee Lee-Grant tanks,’ Aylmer said reflectively. ‘The old Valentines they used in the Arakan were no use – should have been pegdoed long ago – obsolete. They’ve been handed over to the Chinese now, so I hear.’
I laughed. ‘They’ll do for the fucking Chinese!’
‘The Chinese are fine fighting men. The old Yanks won’t have a scrap without electric-razor sockets in their landing craft, but your Chink is brought up to fight on a handful of rice a day. A Chink’ll go for days on just a handful of rice. They’re like the Japs, given the chance I wouldn’t mind if they were going in with us.’
It was the second time he had used that expression ‘going in’. He seemed to savour it.
‘Christ, it’s a fucking lovely night!’ I said.
We heard firing again, followed by the plummy sound of mortars.
Next day was a waiting day for rear detail. Most of them were pressed into digging slit-trenches; McGuffie and I went off with Captain Gore-Blakeley, Jock driving his Jeep, I lugging my wireless set and passing an occasional message to or from White Knight, which was someone at Corps HQ. Gore-Blakeley had with him a Major Bedford, a Division Officer, in charge of supply dispersal or something. They seemed to enjoy themselves, driving about everywhere, walking miles. Jock was often able to sit tight in the Jeep while I tagged after them on foot, sweating beneath the set-harness, half-listening to their conversation.
They were both very cool and detached about the prospects for the battle, as though discussing the chances for a season’s football fixtures. Bedford was the senior prefect.
‘The sooner 8 Brigade moves in the better,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a very mixed bag defending Kohima, although they hold good defensive positions. The Japs are much thicker on the ground than we realized at first. Mutaguchi and Sato are first-class commanders and, if they overrun Kohima, Dimapur would be impossible to defend. I needn’t stress how disastrous it would be for India and the UK if they took Dimapur.’