Quartered Safe Out Here

by George MacDonald Fraser

  It happened in split seconds, as such things do, but in retrospect it seems to have lasted forever. The figure was plainly silhouetted against the half-dark night sky, it was short and crouched and furtive, but what shocked me into momentary numbness was that it seemed to be wearing knickerbockers, loose above the knee, tight beneath. All in an instant I remembered how Nick had identified the Gurkhas a few nights earlier, realised that this was a Jap inside the wire, that my rifle was empty, that my hand was on my knife-hilt…the figure took a quick step, his foot slipped over the edge of my pit, as he stumbled I grabbed him with my left hand and heaved him bodily across the pit, my right hand whipped the knife out, down and up in a frantic lunge, and the fallen figure exclaimed: “Fookin' ’ell!”

  God bless the electric impulses of the brain. I couldn't stop the thrust, but I did open my fingers, the knife dropped, and my open hand hit him one hell of a clout in the kidneys. He yelped, echoing me, I should think, and then he fell into the pit, swearing, and I dragged him upright with my left hand still clutching his shirt.

  “Nick! What the hell are you on!”

  I probably sounded hysterical for he said:

  “Bloody ’ell, Jock! Ye've bloody ruined me!”

  “You dumb sod!” I remember shouting, and then the section Bren interrupted me, and I let him go and found my bandolier, my hands shaking as I jammed in fresh clips. The air was thick with cordite smell, the shooting farther along the wire redoubled, the mortars were thumping away, and down at the south end a star-shell burst high up—at least, I think it must have done, for suddenly it was light for a moment, and Corporal Little was running past the pit shouting:

  “Come on, Nine Section!”

  I scrambled out, Nick swearing in my wake, and ran after Little, who was heading down into the village. That was the moment when I caught a fleeting glimpse of Long John; he was issuing an order to someone, I think, but you couldn't hear above the firing; he had a rifle in one hand, the bayonet bent almost at right angles—I learned later that he'd bayonetted a Jap, and couldn't get it out until his batman reminded him that the way to free a bayonet is to fire a shot into the body. The theory is that it lets in air, or releases pressure on the blade, or something; how it worked with that bayonet, God knows, but it did. Hutton was striding towards us out of the dark.

  “W'eer the ’ell ye gan, Tich?”

  “W'eer d'ye want us?” shouted Little.

  Hutton swore, jerked his head round towards the firing, and made up his mind.

  “Nivver mind that! They're in doon yonder! Git in yer pits an' watch the wire! They're all ower the bloody place!”

  Stanley was beside him, trying to attract his attention—he had been on o.p. beyond the wire. Hutton spoke to him, and as we ran back to our pits Stanley followed us, throwing himself down beside my pit. Rifle fire seemed to be rattling everywhere, the flashes of the mortar explosions were visible over the bashas, and from the road within the village came the sharp crash of grenades.

  “Where's Wells?” shouted Stanley, grabbing my shoulder.

  I didn't know who Wells was, even. Stanley cursed, stood up, looked about him, let out a stream of oaths—which wasn't like him at all—and suddenly ran off, down into the village. Someone shouted after him, but he was lost in the darkness, and here was Hutton again, running in a crouch.

  “Fook me! Gidoon!” He was kneeling by my pit. “W'ees got grenades? Coom on, man—gi' them ’ere!”

  I was half into my webbing by now, so I tore open a pouch, Hutton grabbed my grenades, and then he was off towards the road. He disappeared behind a basha, and a moment later we heard one of the grenades going off on the road. Little came crouched out of the dark, dropping beside my pit.

  “W'ee's that? Jock? W'ee's wid thee?”

  “Nobody! I don't know where Parker is.”

  “Back theer! ’Ev ye seen Stanley?”

  “He went off, that way!”

  He swore. “All ’ere, bar him, anyway. Watch yer froont!”

  There was nothing outside the wire now but empty dark; behind us, in the village and down towards the south entrance, it sounded like Dunkirk, and then gradually the firing died away. There were a few more mortar explosions, but the voices that sounded in the dark were less urgent now, and I had time to get my breath back, wondering what the hell had happened.

  The attack had been one of those mad accidents. A column of Japanese had come up the road from the south in trucks, driven right up to the wire, climbed out, and then realised that we were in the village. They'd attacked the wire, with our mortars hammering their trucks and their drivers trying to reverse or turn round and ruining their gears while the bombs rained down on them; it must have been chaos out yonder, but about a dozen Japs had got inside the wire, and a hand-to-hand battle had broken out. Most of them had been killed on the road within the village, by grenades. As many more were killed by patrols which went out at dawn to look for stragglers, and others had died outside the wire during the night's fighting; whether Parker and I had done any damage with our expenditure of about five shillings' worth of ammunition we never knew. The word passed that more than fifty Japs had bought it, for the loss of three of us, including one of the men I'd talked to just before turning in.

  My knife was still lying at the bottom of my pit when dawn broke, and I was considering its eight-inch blade and feeling slightly sick at the thought of what I'd nearly done with it, when Nick loafed over, mess-tins in hand, rubbing his back-ribs.

  “By, yer a stark booger, you! Sic a bloody belt—man, ye joost aboot kilt us!”

  How little you know, I thought—and decided then and there not to tell him how close he'd come to dying not Tojo's way, or his own way, but my way—or that only his penchant for four-letter exclamations had saved him at the last instant. After all, you don't want your comrades-in-arms thinking that they can't even go to the latrine at night without the risk of being knifed by the maniac in the next pit. But one thing I must tell him, for his own safety in the future—for he still had on the p.t. shoes he'd worn on patrol, and his trousers were still tucked inside the socks, grey, long, soldiers for the use of, giving him that fashionable stream-lined look almost up to the knee.

  I waited till we had been to the cookhouse, and had returned with our bread, tea, and burgoo, keeping a wary eye open for the kites which could swoop down like Spitfires and whip half your breakfast with surgical skill. When we were settled and munching contentedly, talking of other things, I asked casually:

  “Why d'you wear your socks like that, Nick?”

  “W'at for not? Me legs was cold.”

  “You want to watch it, marra. One of these nights somebody's liable to take you for a Jap—remember what you told me in the o.p.?”

  He surveyed his legs. “Girraway, man! Do Ah look like a fookin' Jap, me?”

  “From the knees down—yes.”

  No penny dropped. “Aw, git ’ired, man! Ye knaw, Jock, for an eddicated feller you doan't ’alf talk soom crap!”

  Well, there was no denying that, so I said no more about it; no one ever did take him for a Jap by night after that, and my near-murder has remained a secret until now.

  I was not the only one in the section guilty of suppressio veri over the night's work, but Stanley had a much more creditable reason for his reticence.

  He had been in the o.p. with Wells, and when Jap arrived they had cut out for the wire. Stanley had made it into the perimeter, only to find that there was no sign of Wells. So he had slipped out again, without a word to anyone, when the fighting was at its height, into the Jap-infested dark, to look for him. By sheer luck he found him, near the o.p., dying of bayonet wounds; there was no way of helping him, but Stanley had stayed with him; he could have sought cover for himself, but he didn't. I suppose he brought the dead man in at dawn, but my informant—who was not Stanley himself—wasn't sure of all the details: he had only learned the bare facts months later.

  I lost touch with Stanley after the war. We
served together for most of the rest of the campaign, and he is one of the few men of whom I can say that we literally fought side by side (that came later), but I never knew him well; the picture of the tall, quiet, fair youth is not as sharp in my mind as that of Grandarse or Nick or most of the others. But whenever I heard the word “hero” loosely used, as it so often is of professional athletes and media celebrities and people who may have done no more than wear uniform for a while, I think of Stanley going back into the dark.

  * porridge

  * porter

  † long staff, the truncheon of Indian police

  * While Parker's song has an obvious origin among the mercenaries of the pre-war era, “Deolali Sahib” is considerably older, probably from the last century. Many of our marching songs were of even greater antiquity; I cannot guess where the famous “One-eyed Riley” originated, but “Samuel Hall” dates at least from the time of Captain Kidd, and “Three German Officers Crossed the Rhine” is an echo from the Middle Ages—the Three Captains, or the Three Knights, have been in folk-song for many centuries. Unfortunately most of them are obscene in the extreme, and I am too old-fashioned to quote them. In my time they were sung with vim, especially the scatological bits; maybe they still are.

  One which was entirely clean was “South of Meiktila”, a parody of “South of the Border”, which is now to be found in anthologies. I mention it because I was present at its composition, in the back of a truck jolting down the Rangoon road after we had cleared Pyawbwe. It is, with respect, a pretty execrable piece of work, but it is exclusively about my old battalion, like that other jolly little parody of “Argentina”, which begins:

  Oh, you can climb a big hill

  On a mepacrin pill

  A favourite pastime was to sing popular songs partly in Urdu, with no regard for the niceties of that language. Thus:

  I'd rather have a paper doll became Ham rather have a coggage bint

  To call my own, Of mera own,

  A doll that other fellows A bint that duser admis

  Cannot steal… Klifty nay…

  What the British soldier was capable of in mistreating Urdu may be judged from his translation of “You would, would you?” as “Tum lakri, lakri tum?”. Tum is “you”, lakri is “wood”.

  * My impression was that it was a truck, but the official history says it was a tank.

  * In effect, a fighting patrol as distinct from a purely reconnaissance patrol.

  * shooting

  * But only in my imagination, not in blacked-out Britain.

  Chapter 9

  A few miles south of Meiktila there was, and probably still is, a wood containing a little temple. The trees were very tall and close together on its outskirts, forming a thick protective screen, but within the wood they were more widely spaced, with dim clearings under the high spreading branches. How wide the wood was I never discovered, but it can't have been more than fifty or sixty yards in depth, and beyond there was open ground stretching to another belt of trees. It must have been quite a pretty place, with those shaded clearings and the tall trunks reaching up to the high foliage through which the light filtered. I sometimes wonder what it looks like now.

  That wood and a nearby village were among the places used by the Japanese as concentration points for their counter-attack on Meiktila, and I believe our intelligence pin-pointed it as a result of a chance discovery made following the night action I've just described. Among the Japanese killed by our dawn patrols outside the wire was an officer—I heard he had taken cover in a culvert—and on his body were found plans listing the Jap concentration points: one of them was the temple wood, and our div command marked it for urgent attention.

  Nine Section, of course, was not aware of this. Following the night action the whole battalion withdrew to Meiktila, after an excursion which had lasted several days, accounted for more than a hundred Japanese, and more importantly had helped to embarrass his build-up. Similar actions had been fought all round Meiktila at this time—the official history likens Cowan to a boxer using straight lefts to prevent his opponent getting close in, and it's a good simile: Jap was never given time to settle for a major assault.

  Nine Section's impression—and it is still mine—is that Jap had taken far worse than he gave, and I am surprised by the official history's statement that our battalion took 141 casualties in two days during our foray from Meiktila. The regimental histories don't confirm the figure, and I wonder if the official version isn't referring to a longer period. But not for me to argue; I can only say that if the battalion did take that kind of punishment, we weren't aware of it.

  We came back to Meiktila and spent the next week or so in our pits, watching the wire, brewing up, and waiting, and in that time other units of 17th Div threw two of Cowan's straight lefts at the little temple wood and its adjacent village. According to the official history the first attack ended in failure, with three tanks brewed up, and Jap following our withdrawal uncomfortably closely; the second attempt was also repulsed, and two more tanks were lost. Then it was our turn.

  We rode out on the Shermans of Probyn's Horse on a fine sunny morning, knowing that something was in the wind, for three men had been added to the section. One was a lance-corporal (for some reason we had been short of a section second-in-command until now), another a rotund South Cumbrian, a sort of miniature Grandarse, called Wattie, and the third was reputed to be a recaptured deserter, and looked it. So Corporal Little had been told, anyway; he and I were riding on the front of the tank, either side of the gun with our backs to the turret, flanked by Forster and the Duke, and with Grandarse, who needed room, reclining on the sloping front at our feet and delivering judgement:

  “Ah doan't see the point o' desertion, mesel'. Not oot ’ere, anyways. Ah mean, in Blighty a feller can stay on the roon, livin' in the railway Naafis an' Toc H canteens, but w'eer the ’ell ye gan to ga in India—unless yer Jock theer, an' look like a bloody wog—”

  “Much obliged.”

  “No offence, lad, but ye doan't ’alf ga broon. Admit it, noo. Put a dhoti on ye, an' ye could git a job dishin' oot egg banjoes at Wazir Ali's.* Any roads, w'at Ah'm sayin' is that if ye desert oot ’ere—Ah mean, in India; ye'd ’ev to be doolally† to booger off in Boorma—the ridcaps is bound to cotch thee, an' court-martial gi'es thee the choice o' five years in Trimulghari or Paint Joongle, or coomin' oop t'road to get tha bollicks shot off. It's a moog's game.”

  “You don't have to be a deserter to be sent up the road and have your bollocks shot off,” said the Duke. “Or hadn't you noticed?”

  “Mind you,” continued Grandarse, “there's this to be said for bein' a deserter—they say that if ye ask t'ga oop the road, an' ye gits kilt or wounded, the Army reckons ye've made amends, like, an' scroobs yer record. Ah doan't think that's bloody fair—they gid me sivven days in close tack for ga'in' absent in Blighty once, an' if Ah git kilt, it'll still be on me crime-sheet.”

  “That's ’cos ye didn't try ’ard enoof,” said Little. “Ye've got to commit a big crime to git a big remission.”

  “Why did you go absent, Grandarse?” I asked.

  “Aw, there was this tart in Silloth. An' Ah was yoong an' daft.” He sighed. “She wasn't woorth it. Ah was grossly deceived. Aye, things ’as coom tae siccan a pass, thoo can't tell mistress f'ae servant lass. She wore troosers, an' a'. Bloody foony. Ah fancied ’er in troosers.”

  “Yer a bloody pervert, you are,” said Forster.

  “Oh, aye, lissen to Dr Freud!”

  “Oo's Doctor Freud?”

  “A fookin' professor.”

  “I don't suppose that's what they called him in Vienna,” said the Duke, “but it's a not inaccurate description.”

  “Anyways,” said Grandarse with finality, “if Ah was ivver daft enoof to desert, an' got done for it, Ah'd sooner tek the chance of a bullet in me bum than spend five year fillin' an' emptyin' wells in't glass'oose! So theer!”

  Someone said unkindly that anybody shooting Granda
rse could hardly fail to hit him in the bum, and Grandarse retorted that at least he wadn't git ’is brains blew oot if they did, not like soom clivver boogers; they were having to shout to make themselves heard above the rattle of the tracks as the Shermans rumbled over the sunlit paddy, and the swirling dust was becoming a nuisance, so I withdrew from the conversation to read for the third or fourth time the letter that had arrived from home last night.

  My parents knew I was in Burma, and that (with the possible exception of air crew) it was generally believed to be the worst ticket you could draw in the lottery of active service. Those months must have been the longest of their lives; whatever anxieties the soldier may experience in the field can be nothing to the torment of those at home. I don't know how parents and wives stand it. Perhaps family experience is a help: every generation of my people, as far back as we knew, had sent somebody to war, and my grandmother's comment on Chamberlain's speech on September 3, 1939, had been simply: “Well, the men will be going away again.” Her uncle had served in the Crimea, her brother had died in the Second Afghan, two of my aunts had lost sweethearts in the Great War, my father had been wounded in East Africa, and two uncles had been in the trenches; probably it was a not untypical record for a British family over a century, but whether it made my absence easier or harder to bear, who knows?