Another Man's War

by Barnaby Phillips

  Isaac had stayed awake those nights, listening to the jackals. He couldn’t fight back the horrible thought that they would be feasting on his body next. He was clinging on to life against the odds. His leg pounded him with pain. He remembered what Major Murphy had told them in their training about diseases in the jungle, how germs and bacteria multiplied in the heat and humidity. Isaac knew that, if his wound turned gangrenous, he was finished. Two days passed, and nobody from the village came to them. He felt faint and weak with hunger. At times, he knew that David was talking to him, speculating about whether their friends had run out of food, or were too frightened to help because more Japanese soldiers had moved into the area. He could not summon the strength to reply.

  Their next visitor was not from the village. He was a young Buddhist man, someone they had never seen before. ‘English,’ he said, pointing in the opposite direction to Mairong. He repeated the word again and again, pointing more emphatically now. He seemed to be saying that British soldiers were nearby, and that Isaac and David should follow him. He was tugging at David’s shirt. Even in Isaac’s condition, there was something about this stranger, his nervous eyes and breathless voice, which made him uneasy. Feebly, he tried to tell David not to go with him, but, when he looked up, he saw that David was on his feet. ‘We are dying here, we have nothing to lose,’ David said. ‘If our soldiers are close, we must find them. They can rescue us.’

  Isaac watched David follow the young man into the jungle. Some fifteen minutes later, the young man returned, alone and carrying a dagger. He looked down at Isaac, and pulled a knife from his longyi, which he held to Isaac’s throat. Then he took Isaac’s jacket, torn and covered in blood though it was, and his stinking, pus-stained blanket. Clutching his bounty, the man ran into the forest. Shortly afterwards, a crestfallen David reappeared, wearing only his trousers. In the nearby undergrowth, he too had been robbed of his jacket.

  They were in a fix. The thief had been callous enough to rob them in their desperate condition. He would surely not hesitate to inform the Japanese of their presence, in the hope of further reward. He would use their British Army jackets as proof that there were injured enemy soldiers hiding in the jungle, and he would guide the Japanese back to where they lay. That same night, their fears were confirmed. They heard the crunch of footsteps on the dry leaves, and voices. Isaac strained to listen. One man was talking quickly, as if he was giving orders, but Isaac could not understand the language. The footsteps grew louder, then there was a long silence, broken by two gunshots in quick succession. The shots came from the place where David had tried to cover up the remains of Sergeant Lamina. Isaac grew still, his cheek pressed tight against the soil. He could hear himself panting, and felt the sweat running down his brow, and stinging his eye. It was a bright, moonlit night. The footsteps came even closer, and seemed to go round and round in circles. The Japanese knew they were there, and were looking for them. Then, the sounds started to grow fainter.

  Isaac and David knew they had no time to waste. They had to move. They held a tense, whispered conversation, trying to concentrate on where they should go. They knew little of the geography of the area where they been hiding these past weeks. David suggested they cross the nearby paddy field, and look for shelter in the dense jungle on the far side. Isaac doubted he could make it that far, but resolved to give it a go. They set out around midnight, by which time they were reasonably confident the Japanese soldiers had gone away. Isaac sat up, but even this was enough to make him feel dizzy and nauseous. David staggered ahead, trying not to put too much weight on his damaged ankle. Isaac followed, pulling himself along the ground, with his back facing the direction he was going. His fractured leg dragged along behind him, a useless inconvenience. It was an awkward and slow way to move, and it wasn’t long before he collapsed. By now, he had reached the paddy field. David came back and urged him to carry on. If Isaac stopped here, on open ground, he would be seen by the Japanese come daylight. They would kill him, David said, and pleaded with him not to give up. Isaac replied that anything, even death, was better than this. Then he passed out. David left a bamboo flask containing the little water they had, and limped on alone to the far side of the field, and the safety of the jungle.

  Isaac woke at dawn, on a ridge in the middle of the field. The sun rose and blazed down on him all day. He was naked, save for a pair of shorts. He drank the water David had left him, but he was soon delirious with thirst. He urinated into the bamboo container, and tried to drink his own piss, but recoiled in disgust from the taste. At one point, he thought that two villagers had come to look at him. They were above him, shaking their heads slowly, but, when he opened his eyes again, they were not there. He could not hide from the fierce sun. For the first time since the day he’d been shot, he prayed to God to put an end to this agony, to end his life.

  When Isaac next came to, the moon was out again, and he could feel a cool breeze on his face. He started to sing his favourite hymn, ‘Abide With Me’, in Yoruba, just as he knew his father Joshua did every evening, back in Emure-Ile. He didn’t care if his voice was weak or croaking or that the Japanese might hear him. In fact, he still wanted to die. But let him first drink from the comfort of those familiar words, and the memories they evoked; of a village in a clearing in the Nigerian forest, of the laughter at dusk as people walked back together from the fields, of the smell of wood-smoke and of the rhythmic, homely thud of pestles on wooden mortars, and of the candlelit face of his father, mouthing the words of this hymn in their family home:

  Wa ba mi gbe, ale fere le tan

  Okunkun nsu, Oluwa ba mi gbe

  Bi oluranlowo miran ba ye

  Iranwo alaini, wa ba mi gbe

  Ojo aye mi nsare lo s’opin

  Ayo aye nku, ogo re nwomi

  Ayida at’ibaje ni mo n ri

  ’wo ti ki yipada, wa ba mi gbe

  In the silver moonlight, Isaac saw two people coming towards him, one carrying a large piece of wood, the other a bamboo container full of water. They were from Mairong, and they had come to save him, no matter what he wanted now. They gave him water, lifted him onto the plank and carried him into the jungle, where David was waiting for him. Dear Sergeant Kargbo. He had spent an anxious day, trying to attract the attention of any passing villager, then struggling to explain to them that his friend needed rescuing.

  They slept on the bare ground in their new hiding place. They were safer, but they felt miserable nonetheless. They had lost their blankets, and most of their clothes, and by now Isaac, so restricted in his movements, had developed bedsores along his back. The sores had started as a line of purple welts, like bruises, on his spine and hip, but they soon burst open, livid red craters. The flies buzzed above him that afternoon with renewed fury. In the evening, it started to rain, and it did not stop for hours. They lay there, getting soaked. Even after the rain stopped, they could not stop their shivering. The following evening, it rained again, and once more they were soaked to the skin.

  David suggested they pray three times a day, at morning, noon and in the evening, to keep their minds focused. What he meant was to try to keep the will to stay alive. Isaac mouthed the prayers, but he thought the end was near. They had gone without food for days, and the hunger had grown almost unbearable, when another Indian man came to see them. He was older than most of the other villagers, perhaps in his mid-forties. He wore a tattered shirt and a faded longyi wrapped around his waist, and he was barefoot. His thin face was filled with his large mournful eyes, so at odds with his small moustache. Much later, David would describe this moment, mixing biblical undertones and West African vernacular, as well as a canny sense of what a British censor might want to read:

  After twelve days hunger lying down hidden in this jungle, we saw an Indian Mohammedan coming towards us. On his arrival in this jungle he said unto us, ‘Oh African brothers, have you had chop?’

  We said, ‘Oh, our father, for twelve days we have had no chop.’

  Tears ran down
his eyes, and he said to us, ‘I will sacrifice my life to be feeding you from today till your troops come; no matter what will be the cost to Japanese wickedness.’*

  This man, the Indian Mohammedan with tears in his eyes, said he was called Shuyiman.

  ‌

  ‌8

  ‌Cover me, Lord

  Let this world cease

  In a cool deluge drowning consciousness;

  Cover me, Lord, with the lovely oblivion of rain.

  Captain K.R. Gray,

  Royal Signals, ‘Monsoon’*

  June 1944

  Mairong, Burma

  It was a gradual process, but, as the weeks passed, Shuyiman became more important to Isaac and David than all the other villagers who had helped to keep them alive. Their first big challenge together was the coming monsoon. Shuyiman built a shelter for the Africans, a simple structure fitted along the side of a slope in which they could lie side by side. The low roof, which gave them just enough height to crouch and look out, was made of raffia mat smeared with cow-dung – camouflage. Shuyiman laid down a floor of straw and brought them a blanket that they could share at night. He also gave them a pair of British Army jackets. Isaac and David wondered how this Muslim man had come across them. Maybe he had joined in the looting of their rafts after the Japanese surprise attack. Or perhaps someone in the village had found a load of airdropped British supplies that had gone astray. But, in the end, what did it matter? They had some clothing again.

  That cramped shelter was to be Isaac and David’s home for the monsoon season. It was neither snug nor dry – the cow-dung roof leaked, and rain poured in from the open sides – but they were more comfortable now than at any stage since the attack. It was just as well. The rainy seasons that they knew back home in Southern Nigeria and Sierra Leone could bring long and violent downpours, but this was even worse. Day after day, they lay huddled under their blanket, watching the sky turn grey, then slate, then near black. Eventually, the first drops would fall, then get faster and faster, heavier and heavier. Isaac thought it was as if somebody above them was deliberately emptying bucketload after bucketload. It went on for hours. The hills around them were covered in a gurgling sheet of running water. The trees shook as great gusts of wind from the Bay of Bengal tore up the Kaladan Valley. It was so noisy they could not even talk. Then, and often quite suddenly, the rain would stop, and the sun would come out. They would smell the damp earth, admire the glistening vegetation, count the seconds it took for the mist to rise from the trees and enjoy the concert of birds singing in dizzy celebration. But over time such interludes grew briefer and briefer, and the rain pounded down for longer and longer. At one point, Isaac thought, it must have rained for five days without pause.

  Shuyiman brought them rice, water and, on occasion, fresh milk. He did not make it to the shelter every day, but, when he’d missed one, he would often reappear the following morning looking anxious and apologetic. With a regular supply of food, Isaac began to feel stronger. His stomach wound and bedsores had healed. The inflammation around his leg injury had come down, and the flesh had hardened and sealed over the previously exposed bone. But he noticed that his right knee had stiffened, with his leg stuck at an angle of about 160 degrees. He was able to crawl a few yards from the shelter to empty his bowels, but, when he tried to stand up, he still felt sick and wobbly. For the first time, it occurred to Isaac that, even were he to escape from this jungle alive, he might never be able to walk properly again. One day, Shuyiman brought an ointment, a mysterious grey paste, which he indicated should be rubbed onto Isaac’s leg. David did this, dutifully, day after day, week after week, but they never knew if it made any difference.

  Shuyiman’s visits started to last a little longer. In the beginning, he would hurriedly drop off the food and rush back in the direction of the village. He seemed – understandably – to be worried that the Japanese might catch him with the wounded Africans. But now, he was eager to talk. This was difficult, as they struggled to follow the meaning of his words, but this did not seem to deter Shuyiman. He spoke at length, and with more and more passion, using his hands for emphasis. ‘Allah’ was invoked many times, of that Isaac and David – or Suleman and Dauda Ali, as they tried to think of themselves – were sure. David would reply by reciting a Koranic prayer in Arabic, and Shuyiman would beam with delight. But their conversations, if that’s what they might be called, started to stray beyond religion.

  One day, Shuyiman stayed a long time, perhaps more than an hour. With movements of his hands in the air, and then with the aid of diagrams that he drew in the dirt with his fingers, he tried to convey information to them about the state of the war. ‘Japan’, ‘English’, those words he knew. He seemed to be saying that the Japanese were surrounded by the British. But how could he know this? Surrounded where? After Shuyiman left, Isaac and David discussed the meaning of what he had told them. Could help be on its way? It seemed unlikely, in the middle of the monsoon season. They had not even heard any fighting since the days immediately after they’d been attacked. No distant artillery, no aeroplanes overhead. Isaac told David that he was worried Shuyiman was only trying to lift their spirits. Their friend, he said, was doing his best to keep a little hope burning in their hearts.

  Despite Shuyiman’s efforts, Isaac and David felt utterly isolated. For how long, they asked themselves, would they have to lie in this shelter, cowering from the rain and relying on the charity of impoverished strangers? For how long would they have to pray that the Japanese would not find them? Apart from their fleeting contact with the Captain and the two Gambian soldiers, they’d had no news of what had happened to the 81st Division, or how the war was going. To their frustration, they had completely lost track of time. Was it Monday, Tuesday or Friday? And which month were they in anyway? Try as they might, they were unable to make Shuyiman understand this question, or maybe they could not make sense of his answer.

  At dusk, as the darkness deepened, Isaac and David would sing ‘Abide With Me’. Their voices were tired and frightened, and rarely in harmony. But, as they sang the hymn evening after evening, they found that the familiar words brought solace: ‘When other helpers fail and comfort flee, help of the helpless, o abide with me.’ They had to cling to their faith. And, in Shuyiman and the others who’d kept them alive, they did have helpers.

  They were encouraged when a new visitor came to see them from the village. He was relatively well dressed, and made them understand that his name was Lalu, and that he was a teacher. Yet even Lalu could not tell them the date. However, he did give them the piece of paper and pencil that they had been wanting. With these tools, Isaac and David set about calculating. They didn’t have much to go on. They knew they’d been attacked at the beginning of March, that the rains had probably begun sometime in May, and that they could compare the amount of time they had spent in their shelter to the time where they had been before. They dutifully ticked off the passing days, and, when they had covered their single sheet of damp paper, Shuyiman brought them a piece of split bamboo that they could also mark. But they carried out their calculations with no real confidence. ‘We are like cavemen,’ Isaac said to David, flinging the bamboo aside in frustration, ‘hopelessly cut off.’

  There were whole days when they said very little to each other, and did very little, when Isaac slept, and David watched the rain come down. But there were other days when David, in particular, was full of schemes: patching up the roof; building a platform to keep food away from the ants; scooping out channels of dirt to drain water away from the shelter. On those days, when David was busy with his hands, he liked to talk. He talked about his beautiful fiancée, the woman who was waiting for him back home, and he talked about his life in Freetown before the war.

  He’d worked at a newspaper, he said, as a sales clerk for the Sierra Leone Daily Mail, at the office on Rawdon Street. It wasn’t much of a job, he had to admit. The pay was poor, and the hours were long. He had to be in the office long before dawn, tic
king off the bundles of newspapers as the boys came to collect their loads for delivery. Sometimes David would help them, dropping off the papers at the Krio shops on Westmoreland and Trelawney Streets. Isaac would close his eyes, and try to picture David, walking up and down the steep streets of Freetown, newspapers under his arm. The best thing about the job, David said, was that he could read about what was happening in the world. He knew there was a war coming, and that young men would probably be wanted for the Army. Soon people on the streets were talking, all excited, about joining up to fight Hitler. One morning, David saw a khaki Bedford truck parked on Rawdon Street, just beside his office. He weighed up his options in a flash. The British Army offered adventure, certainly more than he was getting at the time, and he’d heard that the pay was good. Young men were leaping onto the back of the truck. He held out his hand, and somebody pulled him aboard. He didn’t even have time to go back to his office to tell them what he was doing. The truck had already pulled away and was heading in the direction of Juba barracks. David was measured for his uniform that same day.

  Just like Isaac, David had taken an impulsive decision, with little understanding of where it might take him. As they talked, the two men learnt that they had other things in common. They were both the first of their siblings to have gone to school. This had brought them opportunities, but also a sense of separation from their families. For David, this feeling grew stronger when he converted from Islam to Christianity at the Wesleyan Mission School. As a small boy, he had been inquisitive, often mischievous. At school, friends admired him for his sharp memory and wit. They gave him a nickname in their Temne language – An sarr a kli, meaning ‘the stone that has life’, taken from the first epistle of Peter, in which God chooses his ‘living stones’. David proudly adapted this nickname to ‘Livingstone’, and thereafter came to be known as David Livingstone Kargbo. It was a name derived, he always liked to say, not from the famous explorer, but from his own mental prowess.