“Goorkas! Ey, and they nivver even smelt us!”
Sure enough, a few minutes later, came the faint sound of voices far behind us; they were at the wire, making their presence known.
Another anti-climax—and another lesson, which I learned when it grew light, and silence was no longer necessary.
“How the hell did you know they were Gurkhas? They looked bloody like Japs to me!”
“They did to me, an' a'—at foorst. They're a' shortarsed boogers, sitha, but there's one way ye can always tell Johnnie Goorka fra' Johnnie Jap—Ah mean, w'en it's dark-like, an' ye can't mek oot their fesses, joost their shapes. Ah didn't spot it till they was near on past us. Always look at their ankles, Jock! The Goorkas, see, wear short puttees, like oors, so their troosers is baggy reet the way doon till their ankles. Noo, Jap wears lang puttees, nigh on up till ’is knee, so ’is legs look thin, ez if ’e ’ad stockin's on!” Nick chuckled, well pleased. “An' they walked reet by us! Heh-hee! The boogers!”
“Shouldn't we have let on?” I realised the answer to the damfool question even before I'd finished asking it.
“Git hired,* Jock! Ye've bin on night patrol—if soom booger challenges from underfoot, ye're liable to do ’im! Ah want to die me own fookin' way, not wid a kukri up me gunga!” This seemed to prompt another thought. “Ayup, tho'. Look, we'll ’ev to tell Tut Hutton that we saw ’em, but we'll not let on till anybuddy bar ’im. Mind, noo, Jock—doan't tell nobuddy else.”
“If you say so—but why not?”
“Ah, they're grand lal lads, the Goorkas—but, man, they're proud! An' they tek their sojerin' seriously, an' a'.” He wagged a finger. “Ah tell ye, if they foond oot they'd coom near treadin' on us in't dark, an' ’edn't spotted us, they'd ga fookin' crackers! They wad, tho'! The naik* leadin' that patrol wadn't ’ev to git busted—’e'd bust ’is bloody sel', man, oot o' shame! An' Ah'm nut kiddin'.” He shook his head in admiration. “So we'll say nowt aboot it—bar to Hutton. Awreet, Jock? Good lad.” He had another chuckle to himself. “Walked reet by us, an' a'! Nut bad, eh?”
I sympathised with the Gurkhas, having no doubt that in similar circumstances I could have walked through the whole Japanese Imperial Guards Division without knowing it. “All we had to do was lie still,” I suggested.
“Aw, aye? Is that reet, Jock? Girraway! Ah'm glad ye told us.” Cumbrian sarcasm is never applied lightly. “Lissen—the Goorkas is the best night scoots in the bloody wurrld! By God, there isn't many can say the Goorkas nivver spotted their o.p.! Noo, an' Ah'm tellin' ye!”
“Right pair of Mohicans we must be.”
“Aye, laff, ye girt* Scotch git! Looksta, if they'd bin Japs, an' we'd fired oor Verey, they'd ha' bin nailed, ivvery bloody one, on the wire wid their arses oot the winder! Wadn't they?” He was quite belligerent about it. “Awreet, then! We did oor job, an' the Goorkas missed us! An' that's nut bad! That's a' Ah'm saying!”
Well, he was infinitely better qualified to judge these things than I, and his words prompted a disturbing thought: if I'd been alone in the o.p. I'd certainly have fired the Verey, the Gurkhas would have been caught in the glare, and might well have been wiped out by a nervous Bren gunner making the same mistake as I had done. Nick had identified them by the shape of their legs—and that is something you won't find in any infantry training manual. But then, he was what the Constable of France would have called a very valiant, expert gentleman. The irony was that it almost cost him his life a few nights later.
* embankment
* little
* I have been reminded that the rule of two men to a night stag was inviolable; nevertheless, I am positive that on this occasion I was on my own. The explanation can only be that the section strength had been so reduced by casualties in recent actions that two-men stags were, for a night or two, impossible.
* Ex-Fourteenth Army men may take issue with me for suggesting that a sentry would ever alert his comrades by shouting. The approved method was to have a log-line or creeper running from the sentry to the nearest sleeper, who could be aroused silently by tugging it, and I remember doing this in jungle country farther south. At Meiktila the ground was open, and I don't recall ever using log-lines there.
* Get hired = get a job. One of the Cumbrian's many expressions of derision, referring to the custom whereby an unemployed farm worker would stand with a straw in his mouth at Carlisle Cross during the hiring fair, waiting to be approached with an offer of work.
* Corporal
* Great, big, but like “lal” or “lyle” (little) it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with physical size, being just a familiar adjective.
Chapter 7
“‘Ey, Jock, are ye any good at ’rithmetic?”
“Not much, sarn't, I'm afraid.”
“Well, mek's nae matter. Ah'll keep thee reet. Noo them—’oo many fellers is there in't British Army?”
“Gosh, I dunno. Five million?”
“An' ’oo many o' them's in Boorma?”
“Half a million, maybe?”
“An' ’oo many o' them's in this battalion?”
“About a thousand.”
“An' ’oo many o' them's in Nine Section?”
“Ten, sarn't.”
“So if ye're in't Army, w'at's the odds against bein' in Nine Section? Tek time, noo.”
“I haven't the least idea.”
“Iggerant booger. Ah'll tell thee. It's ’alf a million to one.”
“If you say so. I'm fascinated.”
“Ye will be. Ye're the section scout, aren't ye?”
“I am, and I think I begin to see where your elaborate calculation is leading, sarn't—”
“Shurroop an' charge yer magazine. Noo, 17th Div's ahead o' Fourteenth Army, an' this battalion's leadin' 17th Div, an' Nine Section's oot in froont, foorther sooth than any oother boogers in Sooth-east Asia Command—are ye follerin' this, Jock?”
“With interest. Sarn't Hutton, do you know what a sadist is?”
“By, Jock, yer a loocky yoong feller! The odds against bein' the leadin' man in the whole fookin' war effort against Japan is five million to one—”
“And I'm the one. Thank you very bloody much.”
“So git thasel oot on point, keep yer eyes oppen, an' think on—me an' Choorchill's watchin' ye!”
Chapter 8
The fight to retain Meiktila was to be long and bitter since the Japanese concentrated every unit and formation they could to break Fourteenth Army's stranglehold…It is a tribute to the Japanese that nobody had any doubt that, rather than break off the fight and withdraw, they would launch a counteroffensive with every unit they could assemble…
Although 17th Division was surrounded…by numerically superior forces, Cowan's policy was to retain the initiative by using a very small number of troops for static defence and sending out columns in all directions to strike at Japanese communications and enemy forces which had cut his own land communication…
Official history
What I have described so far was the “static defence” of Meiktila, and so far as that was concerned Nine Section had it cushy—doing stag, mounting the occasional o.p., keeping our weapons clean, and waiting to be sent out Jap-hunting in force with the Sherman tanks of Probyn's Horse. Jap attacked the wire elsewhere, I believe, but never in our sector, and while we were inside the perimeter life was tranquil. Snapshots of memory:
Playing in one game of football on the bare space behind our rifle pits, and being impressed by the brilliance of a young centre-half from Workington who came close to an England cap a few years later, and the speedy reflexes of an officer from another platoon; he was a Cameron Highlander, and I had occasion to note his speed later on. Also the bone-shattering violence of the man marking me, the Regimental Sergeant-Major, no less, who was completely bald (what Parker called “a lovely head o' skin”) and who gave me the only wound I received in the war, a neat little scar on my left knee.
Watching someone do Number Two Field Puni
shment. Number One, which consisted of being tied to a gun-wheel, had gone out by that time, but Number Two looked decidedly unpleasant: having to run in circles, wearing full equipment, which included the big pack, pouches, rifle, etc., in the boiling sun under the supervision of a blue-chinned member of the Provost staff. I don't know what the accused had done, but he came off in a state of near-collapse. It did him no permanent damage, for only last year, as a sprightly pensioner, he was singing his head off at our reunion in Carlisle Cathedral. (If that kind of punishment seems barbaric, it should be noted that in the Chindits there was at least one case of flogging, with parachute cord. I think it was for sleeping on stag. The officer who ordered it was a charming man and a splendid soldier, with whom I had a friendly correspondence after the war. On the whole, though, much as I admired him, I think that if he'd tried it with me I'd have shot him.)
Being mocked for using a knife and fork. We had three meals a day, ideally: breakfast, tiffin, and supper, punctuated by brew-ups of tea whenever we got the chance. As I remember, breakfast was bacon, beans, burgoo,* and bread; tiffin was liable to be bully beef and biscuits and tinned fruit; supper would be either bully stew (a waste of good bully beef, in my opinion), or Maconochie's superb stewed steak, which came in dark green cans as part of the compo ration, a large tin container holding a day's food for the section, including potatoes and vegetables. These, with eggs boiled to bullet hardness, tinned fish (which we never ate, but used for barter), rice pudding, and occasional duff, were the basic foods, and very good they were. In Meiktila, and for most of the campaign, all food was dropped from the air, and later in the campaign, when the monsoon made flying impossible, we were on half rations for a month. This was no great hardship, since by then we were down south and could get mangoes, bananas, and occasional livestock from the villagers, usually by barter.
When we were away from the company cookhouse we made our own meals over the section fire, and it was on such an occasion that I remember being jeered at because, unlike the others, who scooped their stew from their mess-tins with their spoons, I insisted on using my knife and fork. (“’Ey, Nick, git a napkin for fookin’ Lord Fauntleroy!”) This, I maintain, wasn't affectation; I just wasn't at ease eating meat and potatoes with a spoon; it didn't feel right, and no doubt stamped me as hopelessly bourgeois and Christopher Robin. I noticed that the Duke, the section's aristo, shovelled his Maconochie's down with a spoon in the best Grandarse style.
Occasionally we had K-ration, that American abomination designed, I believe, by Wingate. It contained, among other things, a tiny tin of hideous eggy gunge, a nutty candy bar, three Camel cigarettes, and three sheets of toilet paper, which drew Rabelaisian comments from the section, who wondered if them Yank boogers ed nivver ’eerd o' grass.
I cannot leave our rations without mentioning that splendid item on which, in its various forms, British servicemen have thriven for centuries: the small, square rough half-biscuit half-oatcake known as hard tack. I, at least, never got tired of them; topped with little cubes of bully and accompanied by floods of tea, they make one of the great meals, and were in every way superior to the bread issue which, like all Indian loaves, was shiny, musty, and slightly stale.
The discovery that I had a genius for brewing tea. I am not modest about this: I am probably the greatest tea-brewer in the history of mankind. It is an art, and I have the unanimous word of Nine Section (even Forster, eventually) that I brought it to the pitch of perfection. They were connoisseurs, too, or at least I like to think that I imposed connoisseurship on them, once I had weaned them away from “Gurkha tea”, which consisted largely of condensed milk, to which the Gurkhas were addicted. Show me the Indian soldier who isn't.
Brewing up is not merely a matter of infusing tea; making the fire comes into it, and when you have lit and maintained fires in the monsoon, you have nothing more to learn. That came later; at Meiktila it was a simple business of assembling bamboo slivers, igniting them (no small thing, with Indian “Lion” matches which invariably broke and sprayed the striker with flaming phosphorus), and bringing about a gallon of water to the boil in the section brew-tin. This was a jealously-guarded article, about a foot cubed, made by cutting a compo ration tin in two and piercing the rim for a handle of signal wire. The casting in of the tea leaves from the section box was the crucial thing, followed by the ceremonial dropping in of two broken matchsticks to attract stray leaves; remove the tin from the heat, invite the guests to scoop out the brew with their piallas, and tea was served, each man adding sugar and condensed milk to taste. The ritual was complete when Grandarse had sipped, appraised, and exclaimed, “Eh, Christ, thoo brews a canny cup, Jock!” If he hadn't said it, or had even varied the phrase, it would have been like someone passing the port to the right.
“W'en we git back,” said Steele, “ye'll ev to oppen a shop, doon Botchergate, near th'auction mart. Brewin' chah; ye'll mek a bloody fortune.”
“Jock's Brewshop,” said Grandarse. “Ey, wid a sign—a Black Cat, wid its arsehole wreathed in smiles.”
“Hire a bloody big Sikh durwan,* an' a', wid a lathi.† Keep the coostomers in order.”
“Tanner a cup—naw, mek ivverybuddy bring ’is own pialla. Ye knaw, giv it atmosphere. Or ev a stack o' piallas an' mess-tins at the door.”
“Wot ’e wants,' said Parker, ’is to make it real authentic. First off, it ain't a shop—it's a backyard, knee-deep in shit. An' naow-body gets any chah till ’e's dug a slit-trench, see? ’Ere, an' it all ’as to ’appen in the pissin' rain! Issue picks, shovels, an' piallas at the door, then get soaked—you'll mebbe need a shower, Jock—then aht they goes, digs their pit, an' you give ’em a brew-up. Two chips a time, ’ow abaht that?”
“It sounds attractive,” I said. “Think anyone would come?”
“Bleedin' millions—Yank tourists, an' that. ’Re-live the joys of active service wiv ahr gallant lads. ’Ave an authentic Fourteenth Army cuppa from Jock, brewartist supreme!' I tell you, they'd come flockin'! You could import them big ants, an' put ’em in the sugar—ahr bleedin' tin's got thahsands of the bastards!”
“You wouldn't want to hire a Jap sniper, too?”
“Nah, that be overdoin' it…I dunno, though, you might give ’im blanks an' let the customers kill the little sod.”
They elaborated, with unmentionable details; I took it as a great tribute.
“Aye, but, think on,” said Forster. “Ye'll ev t'mek it pay. Rob the boogers blin', eh, Jock?” And he rubbed finger and thumb together, Shylock-like, and quoted: “Tora cheeny, tora dood”.
Which means, in Urdu, “a little sugar, a little milk”, and set him off singing “Deolali Sahib”, one of the forgotten soldier songs of India, to the tune of “There is a happy land”.
Tora cheeny, tora chah,
Bombay bibi, bahut achha!
Sixteen annas, ek rupee,
Seventeen annas, ek buckshee.
Oh, Deolali Sahib! Oh, Deolali Sahib!
May the boat that you go home on
Niche rakko pani, sahib!
I give only the printable lines, noting that “bibi” is a girl, “bahut achha” means very good, and the last line translates literally as “under rest water”, which was the nearest soldier's Urdu could come to “sink to the bottom of the sea”. It is an odd reflection on our present standards that if “Deolali Sahib” were sung on television today its obscenities would pass unremarked, since they are all in regular use in the media—but there would certainly be a prosecution under the Race Relations Act.
Like most of our songs, it was sung either on the march or when travelling by truck. Camp-fire vocalising was almost unknown, and Forster's was the only case I remember, not so much for itself but because it was followed by Parker's rendering of a ditty picked up in the China wars, to the tune of “Bye-bye, blackbird”.
Wrap up all my care and woe,
Here I go, swinging low,
Bye-bye, Shanghai!
Won't somebody wait for me,
Please get in a state for me,
Bye-bye, Shanghai!
Up before the colonel in the morning,
He gave me a rocket and a warning:
“You've been out with Sun-yat-sen,
You won't go out with him again”,
Shanghai, bye-bye!*
It was a section favourite, and perhaps I remember so vividly hearing it for the first time, sung softly in the firelight with Parker moving his pialla to the music, because that was almost the last time I brewed up for the whole of Nine Section as it was at the start of the campaign. Next day our part in the “static defence” of Meiktila ended, and we went out in strength to look for Jap.
The method was simplicity itself. A company, or perhaps two (more than 200 riflemen) would climb on the battered Sherman tanks and rumble out of the perimeter; if authority had marked down a Japanese concentration, the tanks would often take us all the way; if it was a probe, we dismounted and marched, sweeping the countryside until the enemy was encountered. Riding the Shermans spared the feet, but it had its disadvantages: after an hour or so the metal became so hot that you had constantly to change position to avoid being roasted, and the water chaggles took considerable punishment; by then we were coated so thick with dust that our faces looked as though we were wearing Number Nine make-up, and it was almost a relief to slide down and walk.
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