‘But that is against the law,’ said the fat man unhappily. ‘We must go back.’
‘Drive on the pavement,’ repeated Dupigny harshly, ‘or we’ll never get out of this place. Go forward. I see where you can cross the storm-drain.’
They drove on, managing with inches to spare to find a way through. Looking to his right Dupigny searched for some sign of life from the fire station in Chulia Street but all he could see was the unbroken curtain of smoke: perhaps the station itself had been hit. Turning inland to follow Maxwell Road they saw that a hysterical crowd had gathered around the dead and wounded in the market, which itself was a shambles in which carcasses of animals and humans had become indistinguishable.
‘We’ll never get through there,’ whimpered the fat man. ‘They’ll kill us like dogs.’
‘Don’t be stupid. Drive up Magazine Road instead. It looks more clear.’
At a junction with another road they crossed over the tramlines again. Here there was not so much damage and the overhead cables had not been brought down. Macalister Road was crowded with excited people but otherwise the way was clear. Presently they turned north, then west on to Burmah Road. Now they found themselves in almost deserted countryside. ‘Where are we going?’ Dupigny wondered.
Suddenly the fat man stamped on the brake pedal and the car drifted sideways, locked tyres screaming, until it came to a halt by some sugar cane. Dupigny could see no reason for stopping. The road ahead was empty. But the fat man had bounded out of the car and with his little arms working vigorously on his rotund body he scurried across the road and plunged into the sugar cane. The foliage swallowed him immediately and he gave no further sign of life.
‘Ah!’ Dupigny now saw why he had taken to his heels. A two-engined Mitsubishi bomber had crept into view following the coastline in a westerly direction but already beginning to turn inland towards the stalled motor-car where Dupigny was sitting. It was flying very slowly and very low. He could see every detail of it. Its wing dipped and it began to turn on a wide curve that would bring it back over George Town and the shipping once more. Dupigny sat there too tired to move and watched the nose of the aeroplane coming towards him, looking, he thought, like the cruel head of a pike. For a moment he could see the four bomb-doors under the belly of the plane and one wheel, half tucked into its undercarriage like an acorn in its cup. Now its camouflaged surface was hard to follow against the dark green flank of Penang Hill but then, as it banked more steeply, the underneath of the plane was eclipsed and the sunlight flared first on one facet of the glass cockpit, then on another, to be picked up in turn by the machine-gun turret just above and behind the wing; as the glare died Dupigny saw the dark silhouette of the gunner’s head and of the gun itself with its barrel swivelling and he realized that the pilot was banking to give the gunner a view of the ground. Now he, too, felt like running for the sugar cane but he knew it was too late: he sat perfectly still, hoping that the gunner would think the car was abandoned. The bomber came curving nearer, only a few feet above the church and market at Pulau Tikus and the rooftops along Cantonment Road. Dust and gravel spurted from the road and seemed to hang there printed on his retina like a formation of stalagmites. A great roar of engines and a draught of wind rocked the car and then the plane had passed over, leaving him with a singing in his ears. Silence fell again. Nothing stirred. Dupigny continued to sit there where he was. In the glove compartment there was a tin of Capstan cigarettes and a box of matches. Dupigny lit one and waited. There was no sign of the fat man.
After he had finished the cigarette, he put the gear lever in neutral and got out the starting-handle again. When the motor was running he sounded the horn, waited for a while, then drove away, thinking that he might find some sheltered and isolated place to stay until the ‘all clear’ sounded. He was obliged to drive slowly because in the absence of a windscreen he could not see properly. Soon, however, he was on the coast road to Tanjong Bungah. Several civilian cars, an Army lorry and a bren-gun carrier passed him, driving quickly in the direction of George Town. He saw a sign then for the Swimming Club and turned off the road into some trees on the right, parking the car in the shade of one of them.
The Swimming Club’s doors and shutters were open but it seemed deserted except for a frightened looking Chinese at the bar. Dupigny ordered a beer and told the boy to serve it on the verandah. While he was waiting he paused to examine a couple of framed photographs on the wall. One of them, dating from about 1910 to judge by the clothes, showed the ladies and gentlemen of the Penang Swimming Club attending what was evidently an annual prize-giving. The ladies, wearing long dresses and broad-brimmed Edwardian hats swagged with silk and taffeta, sat demurely in the foreground beside a small table laden with silver cups and trophies. The gentlemen, meanwhile, were disposed in studied little groups here and there at the windows and on the verandah of the club-house, suggesting the crowd-scene of a musical comedy when the members of the chorus in the background talk to each other with animation, roar with laughter or slap their thighs with delight … but all in silence, while some other matter is being dealt with by the leading players in the foreground. ‘Ah, what a great deal can change even in a place like Penang in thirty years!’
The other photograph, from about the same period, also showed a group of ladies and gentlemen, assembled this time for a picnic, perhaps. The padre was there looking young and vigorous, a watch-chain visible against his black waistcoat and with a white sun-helmet on his head. The ladies were still sitting in the rickshaws that had brought them; but only one coolie had remained to appear in the picture and there he was, still gripping the shafts as if he had only just trundled his fair cargo up. The European standing beside the rickshaw had reached out a hand as the photograph was being taken and forced the coolie’s head down so that only his straw hat and not his face should be visible in the picture.
With a sigh Dupigny stretched out on a comfortable rattan chair on the verandah, musing on the confident assumption of superiority embodied in that hand forcing the coolie to hide his face. He himself had often seen Europeans in the East treating the Asiatics in that way in his earlier days but now it looked … well, slightly incongruous when seen with the modern eye of 1941. Imperceptibly ideas had been changing, the relative power of the races had been changing, and not only in the British colonies but in the French and Dutch as well. Even without Vichy it would have been attempting the impossible to continue governing Indo-China from Hanoi for very much longer. Both he and Catroux had been aware of it at the time without acknowledging it. Whatever happened with the Japanese the old colonial life in the East, the European’s hand on the coolie’s straw hat, was finished. The boy had brought his beer. He took the chit and, not without pleasure, signed it ‘Ballereau’. The Chinese boy had lingered on the verandah looking east to the vast canopy of smoke that hung over George Town.
37
‘In human affairs things tend inevitably to go wrong. Things are slightly worse at any given moment than at any preceding moment.’ This proposition, known as the Second Law, its discoverer now had the opportunity of seeing demonstrated on a remarkably generous scale. His vantage point for watching its operation was 111 Corps Headquarters in Kuala Lumpur where a strong smell of incipient disaster hung in the air, like the smoke that hangs in a theatre after the firing of a blank cartridge. Not only, he discovered, had a great deal gone wrong before his arrival but almost every message which now arrived in the Operations room signified that something else had just gone wrong, with the probability of more to follow.
Ehrendorf had arrived at 111 Corps Headquarters shortly after nine o’clock in the morning, very weary after his night in the train. His arrival coincided almost to the minute with a crucial development in the struggle for northern Malaya, for General Murray-Lyon, commander of the 11th Division which had been given the principal rôle in its defence, had just telephoned. Murray-Lyon had been trying to contact General Heath, to request permission to withdraw from the preordained defensive posit
ion he had occupied at Jitra. He was afraid that unless he did so the 11th Division might be destroyed. General Heath, however, could not be found: Ehrendorf had not been deceived when in the middle of the night he had seen that illuminated compartment with its little cluster of brightly lit officers around General Heath vanishing into the jungle darkness. Heath had gone to Singapore to confer with General Percival. Ehrendorf also learned on arrival that Japanese bombers had given Penang and Butterworth a pounding on the previous day. Since there were no ack-ack guns on the island it had been defenceless.
‘But what about the RAF at Butterworth?’
‘Partly damaged, partly withdrawn to Singapore,’ he was told.
Somewhat surprisingly in the circumstances Ehrendorf found that he was given a warm welcome by General Heath’s staff. During the lengthy period he had spent in Singapore he had become accustomed to being treated with reserve by the British staff officers he had come across in the course of his duties, even sometimes in recent months with veiled contempt. But now he was warmly shaken by the hand, found a billet and given some breakfast. It was a little time before he realized that this was probably because he was the first American officer to be seen in KL since America had entered the war. The welcome was symbolic. Perhaps, too, since the unfortunate start to the campaign in Malaya a feeling was beginning to take root that the power of the United States might well become necessary if the Japanese were to be contained and subdued in the Pacific. It had been the habit of British officers to scoff at the Japanese Army. Had they not been battling fruitlessly with a rabble of Chinese since 1937, unable to get the upper hand? The military engagements of the last three or four days, however, had revealed that the Japanese invaders were far from being the ineffectual enemy they had expected. Finally there was another, more human reason for the warmth of Ehrendorf’s welcome: he had arrived at a moment when General Heath’s staff was secretly heaving a collective sigh of relief.
For a moment, half an hour earlier, it had seemed possible that in the General’s absence they might themselves have to come to a decision on Murray-Lyon’s request to withdraw the 11th Division from Jitra to a new position behind the Kedah River. Only 111 Corps HQ had detailed knowledge, after all, of the grave way the situation had developed. But think of it! After a night without sleep (for in KL the lights had been burning, too, while men pored over maps) to be presented with such a dilemma! To be asked at a moment’s notice when a telephone rang to sanction the abandonment of a defensive position established months, even years, in advance … and that in favour of a position not yet prepared!
No wonder, mused Ehrendorf, enjoying toast and marmalade and a welcome cup of hot coffee, that this particular potato which Murray-Lyon had just raked out of the embers and presented to HQ 111 Corps, after some moments of frenzied juggling from one hand to another should be got rid of with relief into the less sensitive palms of Malaya Command. When Murray-Lyon’s request had been considered, however, and judgement passed on it by Percival and Heath in Singapore, their verdict being that the 11th Division should stand its ground and fight the battle at Jitra as planned, gloom descended on the staff once more, in time for lunch … for it had turned out that there was, after all, a drawback to passing this crucial decision on to Malaya Command, which was simply that Malaya Command had made the wrong choice. That much was clear, even to Ehrendorf who had studied the positions and managed by tea-time to get the hang of what was going on. And what he saw on the battlefield in his mind’s eye as he sat eating cherry cake and drinking tea, and even enjoying them in the rather bleak sort of way of someone who considers that he might as well be dead, was everywhere the Second Law triumphant.
But even in terms of the Second Law the tribulations of the 11th Division were to be wondered at, for they had spent two whole days (while Brooke-Popham inspected his thoughts) waiting at the Siamese border under a tropical downpour for the order to spring forward and give the Japs a sock on the jaw as they were trying to land at Singora. And when Brooke-Popham had at last decided not to push forward into Siam, after all, helped out of his dilemma by the fact that it was now too late, anyway, the Japanese in the meantime having completed their landing satisfactorily, the two brigades of 11th Division (there was another brigade waiting in the wings somewhere, Ehrendorf had not yet discovered where) had trudged back to find their prepared defences at Jitra flooded out and far from ‘prepared’ … for the key part they were supposed to play in defending Malaya from the main Japanese thrust across the border.
What this amounted to, he was thinking as he said, yes, he would like another cup of tea, thanks, to the saturnine and upper-class young captain at his elbow, was that the British had been caught half-way between one plan and another and were in imminent danger of not succeeding with either. But in the meantime the plot had been thickening ominously elsewhere, for the column of two battalions under Lieutenant-Colonel Moorehead which was supposed to dash forward into Siam and deny the Japanese the road through the mountains from Patani by capturing the only defensible position on it: the Ledge … had not managed to do so. The Japanese had got there first. What could one say about this except that it was a pity? It was worse than a pity, it was a catastrophe, for it meant that even if the 11th Division succeeded in baling out their flooded defences, repairing the barbed wire and putting down their signals equipment in time to meet the Japanese attack, they would still have to face the prospect of having their lines of communication with the rest of the British forces severed by a Japanese column coming along that road through the mountains.
The best that one could say of the situation, as Ehrendorf saw it, was that one catastrophe (unprepared defences at Jitra) more or less cancelled out the other catastrophe (failure to secure the road through the mountains) because, after all, you could only lose Jitra to the enemy once and it was immaterial whether you did so by unprepared defences, or loss of a road behind you, or most generously of all, by both at the same time. Although, mused Ehrendorf, if it were possible to lose Jitra twice, these guys would certainly stand a good chance of doing so. All the same, they were treating him very hospitably and someone in their outfit clearly knew how to make a good cup of tea.
To make matters just a little worse, the ‘prepared’ position at Jitra was even at the best of times a long way from being the ideal place to make a stand, scattered as it was over a front of a dozen miles or so on each side of the main road from the Siamese border. Probing attacks by Japanese infantry and tanks had already put to flight or partly destroyed two reserve battalions sent forward to delay them, thereby rendering the defences even more shallow than they had been to begin with. Ehrendorf, whose favourite bedside reading since boyhood had been military strategy and who considered himself an unrecognized military genius obliged to fritter away his talents on diplomatic and administrative matters, shook his head over the lack of reserves; there should have another battalion of the reserve brigade (the 28th) but it had been left behind to guard the airfields at Alor Star and Sungei Patani against a possible parachute attack. There was, therefore, nothing serious in the way of reserve which could be used for a counter-attack. During the night, while he had been dozing in the train, the Japanese advance guard had attacked twice, the first time straight down the road against the position held by the Leicesters, who had succeeded in driving them back, the second time to the east of the road where they had managed to find a slight opening between the Leicesters’ right flank and the Jats’ left, thus threatening them both. Attempts to dislodge them and restore the integrity of the line had so far failed.
The day was unbearably hot and sultry with intermittent downpours and thunderstorms. Ehrendorf, whose digestion had barely recovered from the strain of eating up the odds and ends of food from his refrigerator in Singapore but who was still obliged to rely heavily upon eating, both as a comfort to keep up his own leaden spirits and as a means of social contact with the staff officers of 111 Corps, by tea-time had begun to feel dangerously bloated once more. So pres
ently, while news was circulating that the Japs had attacked again and driven yet further into the already dented line between the Leicesters and the Jats, he asked to be directed to the ‘bathroom’ so that he could ‘wash up’, a locution which caused some of his new comrades to titter vaguely while they considered this new instalment of bad news from the front. Once in the ‘bathroom’ he forced himself to throw up: this was a disagreeable sensation but he soon felt somewhat better and found that on his return he could manage another slice of cake and cup of tea.
Over supper, which began with rather dry ikan merah fried in butter with lemon, there was talk of a counter-attack, but also of straightening out the line by withdrawing the Leicesters to a position farther back along the Bata River. While drinking beer and eating a creamy chicken curry whose fire was somewhat moderated by the fresh grapefruit and papaya with which it was served, Ehrendorf discovered, by a heroic effort of concentration on what his fellow-diners were saying, that some of them believed it had been decided that the Leicesters and East Surreys were to counter-attack, while others believed that the identical units were to retreat. He tried to draw attention to these discrepant opinions but found it hard to get anyone’s attention and was rewarded only with one or two baffled, toothy grins and, when he persisted, signs of offence being taken. It was true that he himself had had one or two beers … ‘But what a gang of clowns, all the same!’ he thought in wonder.
In due course, as the evening advanced, the first signs began to appear that the confusion at 111 Corps HQ was mirrored among the troops at Jitra. It also became clear that if the 11th Division was having such difficulty containing the advance guard of the Japanese force they would have little prospect of resisting the main assault which was bound to come in a matter of hours. Between the pudding, which was prunes and custard, and the cheese, things continued to go wrong at a comfortable rate. News came that Penang, still defenceless to air attack, had been heavily bombed for the second day running and that the docks and much of George Town were on fire. There was also word that the force commanded by Moorehead, which had failed to reach the Ledge in time and which had instead retired to take up a defensive position at Kroh, had suffered considerable losses. Would it have any chance now of resisting a Japanese thrust through the mountains led by tanks?
The Empire Trilogy Page 121