The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy

by Brian Aldiss

  As we watched, two or three of the Japs threw up their hands and collapsed. The rest immediately fell to the ground. Only then did the sound of a long burst of Bren-fire reach us. Someone had the trail dead in range, and had perhaps been waiting for the Jap party to reach the best firing point: 5 Brigade, the Dorsets, very likely. The elephant raised its trunk to trumpet. Now the soldiers were on their feet again and running. One went plunging over the khud. The elephant toppled to its knees. It waved its trunk about, opening its mouth wide. Then it too fell over the edge and was lost to view. The firing stopped. Nobody was to be seen, unless you counted one dead body.

  ‘Rotten fucking bastards, killing an innocent animal!’ Jackie Tertis said.

  ‘It wasn’t innocent – it was an enemy elephant!’ Bamber said.

  We fell back roaring with laughter. Everyone just stood, looking at their muckers and bellowing with laughter. Modern warfare, airlifts and everything, and fucking Sato was using elephants! The contrast was too much for us!

  What a scene that was! What a group we were! Others had been killed or wounded – we survived and we had complete trust in each other. We worked as a machine – hadn’t we proved that? All the training, all the ritualization of speech, had prepared us for this amazing, marvellous unity. Every fucker there loved every other fucker. The hierarchical structure of the British Army had triumphed over the class structure of the British; the difference between them came like illumination: class divides, is meant to divide; hierarchy unites, is meant to unite. Officers, NCOs, men, from the old Brig downwards, we were all comrades-in-arms.

  So I have to put it in clumsy words now, a quarter of a century and more since we came down from those barbaric hillsides, and so I think it was. At the time it came to me like a revelation out of the clear air, without words. It was the mystique of battle. Once you have experienced it, you never forget it.

  That evening, after a gruelling slog up and down the jungle-covered hillsides, after crossing the Manipur Road, the Mendips moved over the IGH Spur and took up defensive positions alongside the Punjabis. We were in Kohima!

  What should have been an hour of triumph was a time of utter disgust.

  One of the constant disappointments of the campaign was the way in which magical names turned out to be illusion. Later, there were Palel, Tamu, Sittaung, Tiddim, Kalewa, and Schwebo – syllables which proved themselves capable of rolling thrillingly right down a lifetime – and one by one these places, like Kohima, turned out to be little more than ruined bungalows, a few burnt-out bashas, a tin shack, and a temple. Our positions at Kohima were scarcely as much as that: just a few pimples of hills overlooked by enemy positions and the District Commissioner’s bungalow in its pockmarked grounds!

  A fortnight of siege, of attack and counter-attack, had turned Kohima into a minor Somme. As ‘A’ Company worked its way through the shattered trees, the slanting sunlight appeared to shift and tremble. The flies were there. This was their campaign! They feasted where human beings starved. And so many varieties of fly, little dun flies that no amount of gluttony could make fat, big flies that crawled everywhere like legged grapes, scintillating flies, flies that flicked their wings as they sipped, flies that would not go away, that returned twenty times to the very same spot on your face if you struck at it twenty times, perverted flies, drunk flies, dying flies, sportive flies. They made a patina over every single thing, and could dim the daylight when they rose in their swarms.

  What they fed and bred on were the pieces of human being that rotted in the churned mud. The whole site was mud, gouged by shells and trenches and running boots; bits of men, whole limbs, had been blasted all about the area. The dead bodies, fat and blackened in the heat, had at last been dragged away; but the bits that had fallen-off, or had been blown off or shot off or chopped off, still lay about, and poisoned the air with their stomach-curdling sweet stench of carrion. Some of the chaps were spewing their rings up as we dug ourselves in. Fortunately, the Jap sniping intensified, which kept our minds off the butcher’s compost all round.

  There were all sorts of other shit lying around, as well as shit itself – boxes, boots, shattered rifles, fragments of parachute, keys, a typewriter, bottles, bandage, kit-bags – you name it. Tertis found a little brass Buddha which he rubbed up on some flannelette and kept. A couple of days later, standing watching in a trench during a torrential downpour, I spotted a curious object in the mud just ahead of me. It looked like part of an ivory bracelet. I reached forward and tried to pick it up. It was a crescent of teeth, sticking out of a bit of lower jaw.

  I nearly went spare. Somehow, it was just too much. My mind flipped, and I was falling through the cracks of existence into a world where tiny yellow dentists swarmed underground like worms, extracting people’s jawbones through their gaping mouths. I was with them, another gaping mouth. Years later, that ghastly moment returned to me in nightmares over and over again.

  At the time, I did not recognize Chota Morris and the other blokes who piled on to me to stop me screaming and running wildly about. I didn’t recognize anything but panic. Mercifully, Chota Morris clipped me on the jaw and almost laid me out. When I came round properly, I was sitting propped against a tree, with several anxious faces staring down at me, Chota’s included.

  ‘Thik-hai, Stubby?’

  ‘Achibar, mucker. Roll on the boat that takes me home!’

  ‘You had us fucking worried there for a moment, mate! We thought you’d gone proper puggle. Geordie’s off to get you a mug of char.’

  It was hell on that bastarding hill. The garrison had been relieved, the position, so vital to the road from Dimapur to Imphal – where 4 Corps were still fighting on – was held. But all round it lay dozens of natural fortresses where Sato and his fiendish soldiery could hold out for years. Thank God we did not know then that we were to be stuck in that frightful place for all of five weeks. The siege of Kohima was off; the battle for Kohima was still on.

  The Japs never gave an inch. Although they were no longer the superhuman devils of the jungle they had been to the bods in the Arakhan, their courage and tenacity had something supernatural about it. They did not know when they were beaten. They launched bayonet charge after bayonet charge, running to certain death. They shouted and shrieked at us after dark. They never took prisoners, they never surrendered. We longed to blow their faces off their skulls, and at the same time we were proud that they were ten times more terrible than anything the Wehrmacht had to offer.

  Their snipers and mortar-men kept our heads down all the time. When you moved anywhere, you moved at the double, in fear for your life. Nights were hell – night or day, for all those five weeks, none of us ever notched up more than four consecutive hours of sleep. Of course you did learn to sleep whenever there was a spare minute. Not that it felt much like sleep; it was full of things moving, and you woke feeling as if whiskers were growing on the inside of your skull.

  And what were we battling for? Most of the time, we were battling for possession of the DC’s tennis court. Or were we battling for Burma – a country that no one in their right minds had heard of before or since!?

  Perhaps you could now construct a symbol out of that tennis court and make it stand as a monument to the futility of the Forties. Where the tea-planters of Assam, in the mellow Thirties afternoons, had lobbed tennis balls over the net, we now lobbed grenades. But, at the time it was deadly imperative for us to take that innocuous patch of ground, to blast out of existence the bunkers that lay on the other side of it, and thus to open up the road below the beak of Swinton’s imagined duck and clear the way south to Imphal and victory.

  Somehow we lived through it all, somehow we survived on a pint of water a day and an occasional tot of rum and meagre rations, somehow we kept back fear, somehow we survived the slow loss of our muckers. Carter the Farter came back from Field Ambulance with his arm bandaged, looking all fresh and smart, kidding us about our beards and how we smelt, and that very day fell beside me with his head
askew and the life-blood pouring out of his throat.

  April passed, May came. More of our lads got killed – steady old Di Jones, who had already had a wound on Merema, never to see his Welsh valley again, and his mucker, Taffy Evans, and too many other good men who stood at their posts to the last. Still we were stuck there.

  One bit of the perimeter would give. We would get it back. Then another would go. The tanks came up, but could not decide the issue. Desperate fighting went on in Naga Village. Our gunners back at Zubza and Jotsoma kept plastering the heights from which the Japs plastered us. The fighter-bombers came blasting up the valley day after day. Still nothing changed. The grape-vine said that the Japs were all starving at their posts and dying of every imaginable disease, especially the yaws, scurvy, starvation and syphilis. We had killed thousands of the bastards. But their bunkers still spewed out flying steel as unremittingly as ever.

  Our days up on Merema Ridge now seemed a bygone dream, a boy scout’s lark. You didn’t dare think how many engagements like this there would be before the Nips were pushed back into Burma, let alone out of Burma and into the oceans beyond. Nobody thought of the future, or remembered the past.

  The bags of mail from home arrived regularly. All the family wrote to me in turn, sending me as lavish a ration of news and love as possible. But the world had turned inside out. Their words came from a place we could not reach to a setting they could not visualize. Amid our dirty-arsed standtos, home and its people faded to myths; the Japs were a hell of a fucking sight more real.

  In May, with the rains settling in heavily, things began to give a bit. By the 13th, though the tennis court still held, some of the obstacles to the south fell into our hands. For the first time, we were treated to the sight of Japs running away. We cheered then, jumped out of our trenches against orders, and fired at the bastards as they went. Their figures flopped like puppets among the dismasted palms.

  The rumours were proving true. The Japs were becoming demoralized, were starving, although they were never to run out of their own savage version of courage. Sato could not hold out for ever. On 1st June, his men began to pull away from their beautifully-placed positions. Before that, we had had to undergo another spasm of fighting.

  The tennis court was left to the Dorsets, and welcome they were to it. On 24th May, our battalion moved south of the Kohima defences, and was set to climb Aradura Spur as a final test of stamina. This we did through thickest jungle, in pissing rain. Assam gets about twenty times as much rain as Britain, collecting most of it in three months. Most of it hit us. I was shitting six different kinds of dysentery at the time, and everyone else was practically puggle with weariness, illness, or jungle sores.

  ‘A’ Company was Tac. We were labouring upwards through the dripping undergrowth, while the path we followed was turning into a considerable stream. All the flies and ants of Aradura were clinging to us for safety, when some wag up the front called out a variant of our old catchphrase: ‘While you’re climbing up Aradura Spur you’re doing nothing worse.’

  Forty officers and men started pissing themselves with laughter. Progress stopped as we lay there in the gudge, helpless with mirth.

  We knew there was fighting to be done when we got to the top – but, Christ, the getting there! We were going up that spur for ever! As Dusty Miller said, the jungle was so thick you couldn’t tell your arse from your elbow. You couldn’t see ahead or behind or sideways. Massive trees reared overhead. The radio was not operating, so we were cut off from the Royal Berks, who were supposed to be somewhere on our flank. Our whole battalion was advancing in single file, against all the rules of warfare.

  The sodding soggy hillside was pitted with ravines. We went down into one, then had to climb again. We never appeared to advance. Birds ran through the undergrowth like rats. Of course we were lugging our ammo, machine-guns, mortars, and the whole subcheeze with us. That day cured me of mountaineering for good.

  Towards evening, the rain laid off, the sun appeared, the clouds scudded away to the Bramaputra to draw up fresh loads for the next day. This was not the true monsoon, merely what the Wogs called the chota barsat, or ‘little rains’. Everyone realized that the Japs had to be cleared out before the monsoons finally broke.

  Steaming slightly, we dug ourselves into a defensive box for the night. Anything was a relief from climbing. We brewed up char on our Tommy cookers and ate bully beef and biscuits from our personal rations. Then we got our heads down, and again came that peculiarly stunned sleep, where the body lay in something approaching rigor mortis and the mind stumbled along just below consciousness, always alert for danger, imagining horrors and terrible things coming up out of the mud. I never dreamed of home or sex. There was not even that escape from the present.

  Sex was in abeyance. During the night, I was hauled out for my spell on guard. My guts were twisting and writhing with the dysentery and I wondered if perhaps a wank might cheer things up. I felt my prick in the dark. It and my balls had shrunk to almost nothing. My ballbag was a little hard wrinkled thing, pathetically trying to turn itself into armour-plating against mortar-fire. I cudgelled my brain for fantasies, for pictures of brothels stuffed with gleaming fannies, but everything had been scoured dry. There was nothing left of me but the soldier.

  Next day, the trail went winding ever upwards, the bloody jungle kept growing. I got a Strength Two chirp out of the Royal Welsh, who were also climbing the shitheap to the top; they were uncertain of their whereabouts. Major Inskipp came and spoke to us, cheering us and saying that it was not far to the top of the Spur, and that the Pathans were bringing Lifebuoy flame-throwers up to help us burn the Japs out of their bunkers. Inskipp was as filthy as the rest of us. We looked every inch a forgotten army.

  This was another back-breaking day. The sodding rain came down again and never stopped. You just wanted to lie down and die. Afterwards – even long afterwards – you couldn’t tell anyone what it was like.

  ‘Where were you in the war?’

  ‘I was in Burma.’ Adding to yourself. ‘Fuck my bloody luck!’

  About noon, the khud-side was at its steepest. Nobody could move forward; it was just impossible. We were shagged out. We had to stop. Stopping was a matter of getting your crutch round the base of a tree, so that you didn’t fall back on to the next bloke. All the time, there was the dread that Japs would materialize out of the foliage to one side or other, and shoot us all up. Heads down to protect our fags from the rain, we sucked at de Reskes and stayed within the defensive perimeters of our own skulls, saying nothing. There was fuck all left to say.

  Firing broke out somewhere above us – how far, it was impossible to tell, and if you looked you could see nothing, just the water falling at you in great shards from the leaves above. The firing was nothing to do with us.

  We’d have been there still if a scout had not come slithering back down the trail to tell us that they had at last found the top of the ridge. The firing was coming from somewhere up there. Presumably we were so late that the other units had gone in without us.

  ‘Come on the Mendips! Let’s get up this bloody hill!’ Inskipp shouted. He pressed ahead himself and we followed.

  The rain redoubled its efforts too. The crest remained miles ahead. The firing was lost in the drumming of water and the squelch of boots.

  The jungle thinned. A miniature cliff loomed, water pouring off it in yellow streams. Orchids grew among the trees like weeds. Our forward patrol had fixed a rope to a tree, and we pulled ourselves up by it, fanning out as we got to the top, running, falling into position with weapons at the ready.

  More wilderness confronted us. You could not tell where we were. Still nothing could be seen more than seventy yards ahead, although the jungle had thinned. The Japs might be lying in wait, about to open up on us with all they’d got. A plane roared overhead. How we envied the bastard snug up there in his cabin, heading for a cosy mess, way back at Jorhat or Dimapur. Remember Dimapur? Dimapur had charpoys and showers and
beautiful canteens.

  No one opened fire on us. We advanced again, in line now, Inskipp leading. The jungle closed in. We were forced back into single file. The track No. 2 platoon was following started winding away to the left, separating us from the others, and we had to retrace our steps, fucking and blinding as we went. The other platoons had their own troubles. We had to reform, rest, go ahead, again in single line. After two hours and four rests, we found the ground beginning to rise again. We still weren’t at the top of Aradura!

  The wireless was yielding nothing, however much I fiddled with the bloody thing during rest periods. I could cheerfully have thrown it over the khud-side. I knew the blokes were willing me to get in touch with someone, one of our other companies, Brigade, anyone. Gore-Blakeley sat by me in the slit-trench staring grimly into the jungle. Occasionally, he would say, without turning his head, ‘Keep trying!’ But we could not raise anyone. We were just plain fucking lost on Aradura.

  We kept moving during the afternoon. The rain kept coming down, firing was maintained sporadically in the distance. Night fell, and the next day we moved on again, at once stiff and limp. Rations were getting low. We were running out of fags and water. We had the feeling that everyone had forgotten about us. Ominously, the firing had ceased, except for an odd round now and again.

  The weather improved towards mid-morning. The jungle still dripped even when the rain stopped. We halted in a sort of clearing for a bite of tiffin. A new awfulness crawled inside my blouse. I pulled the blouse off, and a stubby centipede in twelve grey segments fell to the mud. I plonked my boot down and ground it into mush. My chest was covered with dull red blisters.

  ‘That’s all you needed, mate – the fucking pox!’ Ernie said.

  I let my blouse dry off on a bush while we had another shot at raising someone. This time, we managed to pick up a section of the Welch Fusiliers, Strength Three. Gore-Blakeley got a report through, gave them our position as far as it could be established, and asked for the message to be relayed back to Battalion. The Welch had nothing good to report: they had reached the top of the Spur, only to encounter the Japs in strength. They had gone in more than once, but against well sited bunkers it was hopeless, and they had suffered heavy casualties. Yes, there was artillery support, but nothing had any bloody effect against those fornicating Jap bunkers.