Another Man's War

by Barnaby Phillips

  Isaac and David’s hair had grown over the months into filthy, tangled mats. Their heads itched, and crawled with lice. They looked like lunatics, they would say to each other. So they were grateful when Shuyiman offered to cut their hair off, and to shave David’s beard, with a razor and a bowl of water. Afterwards, Isaac crawled to a stream some twenty yards from their shelter, and lowered his body into the cold water. He had not washed since the day he had been shot. He had no soap, but just to feel the cake of mud and sweat fall off his skin was exhilarating.

  Something was changing, and it wasn’t only that the rain had all but stopped, and the nights were a little cooler. They had more and more visitors, including some villagers whom they had not seen for months. Shuyiman, who had never faltered, seemed more upbeat. He brought happy news one day; his wife, Khatoun, had given birth to a baby boy. He had already spoken many times of his young daughter, Gulasha. In fact, many of the other villagers referred to him as Gulasha bap, or ‘Gulasha’s father’. Now Isaac and David shook his hand, and Shuyiman beamed. His attempts to convey news of what the ‘Japan’ and ‘English’ were up to carried a greater air of certainty, a more convincing sense of optimism.

  One night, David shook Isaac awake. He’d heard noises coming from the direction of the other side of the river. It sounded like artillery, he thought. Isaac did hear something, but it was far, far off, and could have been thunder, so he went back to sleep. The following night, it was David who was asleep and Isaac who lay awake, listening to faint thuds. Maybe David was right; they did sound like explosions.

  The next morning, Shuyiman came to them. He was not carrying food. He said they should prepare for a short journey after dusk that day. He would be taking them to his house in the village, where they would be staying from now on.

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  ‌9

  ‌Loyalty and patience

  I have come to love and respect these Mussulmen. They are liars ‘par excellence’ and are out for what they can get. But who is to blame them; they’ve done us well enough. They have had to put up with two British withdrawals, and yet they have come back with us and fought, and died with and for us. I sometimes wonder if any other people in like circumstances can tell the same story of loyalty and patience as can these Mussulman Arakanese.

  British officer,

  writing about the Muslims of the Arakan, 1944*

  August 1944

  Mairong, Burma

  Isaac was anxious during that final afternoon in the shelter. He was not convinced that he and David would be safer in Shuyiman’s house than they had been in the jungle. But he also knew that they were beholden to Shuyiman after so many months of assistance. They had no right to doubt his good faith, and they were in no position to spurn his invitation. They would simply have to trust him. David saw things differently. He worried there were more Japanese troops moving through the area, and it was only a matter of time before they were discovered. Better, he argued, to be in the village, where they would be more likely to have some warning that the Japanese were coming.

  Just after dusk, Shuyiman returned with two other men from Mairong. The village, which Isaac had never actually seen during his months in hiding, turned out to be only five hundred yards or so away. Still, it took him about an hour and a half to cover the distance. Shuyiman had brought him a roughly hewn walking stick, but this snapped under his weight almost immediately after he’d left the shelter. Isaac was left to crawl and pull himself round the edge of a paddy field, trying with all his might not to slip into the water. At one point, he fell and lay in the mud, wishing he could be carried on a stretcher. He thought he could make out David and Shuyiman, about twenty yards ahead of him, anxiously beckoning him to follow. Isaac knew that they were keeping their distance from him in case a Japanese patrol came past. Then, he would be on his own. He looked up and rallied himself. He could feel mud plastered on his cheek and the damp of his tattered jacket clinging to his skin. He clenched his teeth and dragged himself forward. When he finally reached Shuyiman’s house, he was at the point of collapse.

  It was the greatest physical exertion he had made in months, but there was one final obstacle. Shuyiman’s bungalow was raised several feet above the ground. David and Shuyiman had already climbed the bamboo ladder into the house and he could see them peering down at him. Isaac nestled his back against the ladder, and pulled himself up close to it with his arms. He reached behind him, feeling in the dark, until his fingers found the notches carved on the first rung. He tightened his grasp as much as he could. He was pouring with sweat. His heart was pounding. He lifted himself up one rung, then another. Then he felt someone’s arms around his waist, pulling him over the threshold into the house. He lay there panting, and as his eyes adjusted to the candlelight he realised that his thin body was covered in leeches. Shuyiman held a small stick of burning bamboo to the bloated creatures and, as they released their grip on Isaac’s skin, pulled them off one by one. Then he removed Isaac’s dirty jacket and brought him a bowl of water to wash in.

  Shuyiman introduced his wife, Khatoun, and their daughter Gulasha, a little girl who must have been six or seven years old and who stared at the two African men with astonished wide eyes through a tangle of dark hair that draped across her face. Then Shuyiman handed Isaac and David the sleeping baby boy, Kalu, and they held and embraced him in turns. Shuyiman had moved his family out of the only bedroom so that Isaac and David could sleep there. They were honoured guests. That first night, Isaac lay awake. It felt strange, lying on a reed mat in a dark enclosed space after months in the jungle. He heard Kalu crying softly in the room next door.

  In the morning, he and David got a better sense of their surroundings. They were in a basha, a typical house of the Kaladan Valley. Its frame and floor were built of bamboo, and the whole structure was raised on stilts. The African men were confined to a single room, shielded from view by a blind hanging over the entrance to their door, but they could still manage to see something of the village from their new hiding spot. The weave and latticework of the walls had many gaps, and they would peek out through these, confident that nobody passing by – villager or Japanese – would realise they were there. They glimpsed water through the vegetation, and worked out that they were just yards from the banks of the Kaladan. A path ran past the house, parallel with the river, and they could see everyone who walked along it. There were a couple more bashas within their limited range of sight, identical structures to the one they were in. A few dozen houses built from bamboo, strung alone a muddy lane. This was all there was to Mairong.

  Shuyiman brought rice and stew to them twice a day. Isaac was sure that his hosts were making sacrifices to accommodate them, but to his embarrassment he found that after months of deprivation he now struggled to eat more than a small amount, so he often returned most of the food that Khatoun prepared for them. Khatoun was soft-spoken and modest. He and David rarely saw her, but her voice grew reassuringly familiar, as did Gulasha’s. When Khatoun finished cooking, Isaac could hear mother and daughter calling out to Shuyiman: ‘Eh! Gulasha Bap, Eh! Gulasha Bap, bath kai, bath kai, bath kai!’ Shortly afterwards, Shuyiman would push aside the blind and appear smiling, carrying the food on banana leaves. They ate with their fingers. Once in a while, when he had some milk, Shuyiman would bring cha, tea, in a bamboo cane, jokingly referring to himself as the cha-wallah. Discreetly, each evening, he would remove the bedpan from the corner of their room.

  At night, the village was quiet. There was no sound of radios, no distant engines or generators. Occasionally, a dog would bark or a jackal would scream in the distance, or Kalu would start to cry next door. Then Isaac would hear Khatoun’s murmurs of comfort, and he pictured her holding her baby in her arms, rocking back and forth. He liked to think he was at home in Emure-Ile, where the nights were also dark and still, just as David imagined that he was in his own village of Rogbin. But sometimes here in Mairong there was a splash from the river, perhaps a fish leaping out of the water, or a t
rader drawing up in his khisti. They would wake with a jolt, and hold their breath until they felt sure that it wasn’t the sound of a Japanese patrol. And then, as dawn broke, was that an Imam, a Moulovi, calling for prayers to Allah from the far side of the village? Isaac would strain to listen, feeling a sudden puff of wind as a bat fluttered across their room.* Otherwise, there was silence. At night, he could make out one or two flickering lanterns swinging from the roofs of surrounding bashas.

  Just as in the jungle, days passed into weeks, and Isaac and David faithfully marked them off on their bamboo calendar. From their basha spy-hole, they had a new clue about the passing of time. They noticed that on particular days the men who walked along the path wore their cleanest longyis and little white lace caps, while the women were in their smartest saris. Shuyiman, too, seemed to dress up for this day. And they were all walking in the direction from where they heard the Moulovi calling. It was Jumaat – the Muslim Holy Day, or Friday. Once they had worked this out, Isaac and David knew the day of the week, but they were none the wiser as to the actual date.

  The morning after one such Jumaat Shuyiman rushed into their room. ‘Japan, Japan, Japan!’ he said, with a panic-stricken face. David was on his feet and Isaac was already crawling towards the door. Japanese soldiers had returned to Mairong. They were carrying out a house-by-house search. It was only a matter of minutes before they’d be at Shuyiman’s door. Shuyiman and David carried Isaac down the ladder at the front of the basha and shoved him into the undergrowth. He crawled deeper into the vegetation, trying to keep up with David, scratching around for a safe place, thorns slicing into his face. David had rushed ahead. Where had he gone? Isaac realised he was only wearing his shorts; there had been no time to grab his jacket. But he had to press on.

  He found himself lying face down in the reeds by the Kaladan River, just as he had on the day he’d been shot all those months ago. He sensed that David was somewhere nearby, but he could not see him. His mind raced with the possibilities. The Japanese must have received some information that had prompted their search. Had somebody betrayed them? In recent days, some of the villagers who had brought them food in the jungle had turned up at Shuyiman’s house. Isaac thought he had heard the villagers asking Shuyiman about them. Two black African soldiers in a basha in the middle of a village – it was too fantastic a story to keep under wraps for long. If only, thought Isaac, he had insisted that they stay in the jungle.

  It was dusk by the time they saw Shuyiman on the riverside path, making signals with his arms that all was well, and that they could emerge from their hiding place. That night, Isaac and David talked in hushed voices about the risk Shuyiman was taking. Isaac was in no doubt: if the Japanese were to find them in the hut, they would be killed, but so too would Shuyiman. The Japanese would make an example of him, argued Isaac. Shuyiman was looking after the enemy, and, from the Japanese point of view, that made him an enemy as well. Isaac’s worries were not unfounded. Anthony Irwin, the British officer who survived the battle of the Admin Box, was a major with V-Force, the reconnaissance and intelligence operation on the Burma–India border. He described what happened to a Muslim village chief when the Japanese learnt he was supplying information to the British. ‘They stripped him. They laid him down in the sun and then pinioned him to the ground with bayonets through his hands and feet, and then carefully, and with skill, they stripped the skin from his back and rubbed rock salt into the tortured flesh. His village was forced to watch this execution, and stay watching until he was dead, which, though he was over sixty, did not come to him until six hours later.’* Shuyiman’s fate would presumably be just as gruesome if the Japanese ever found his African guests.

  In the nights that followed their narrow escape, Isaac listened carefully not just for any sound of the returning Japanese, but also for arguments between Shuyiman and Khatoun. By giving shelter to Isaac and David, Shuyiman was putting his entire family in grave danger, and yet Isaac never heard any serious disagreements coming from the other part of the basha. Khatoun remained a kind, but near-invisible presence. If she was anxious or angry about the effect all this would have on her family’s safety, she did not seem to show it to Shuyiman in their home.

  As the weeks progressed, Isaac came to think of Shuyiman as much more than a friend. Shuyiman had done everything in his power to keep him and David alive. He was their saviour.

  The Second World War, through its scope and scale, spread violence and cruelty across much of the globe. Strangers killed or maimed strangers, sometimes at close quarters, sometimes, with the aid of mechanisation, in large numbers from a great distance. Invariably, soldiers didn’t know the names of the people they were fighting, nor did they often care much for the others’ race or culture. But amid this savagery, the war also created the occasional, wonderful tie between very different kinds of people. The bond formed by two Africans and a Burmese Muslim in the Arakan jungle was an unlikely but beautiful thing. They came from opposite sides of the world, they struggled to communicate with each other, and they faced seemingly insurmountable odds. Yet an attachment grew up between them, one that would inspire each of them for the rest of their lives. The war brought the basest of human instincts to the fore, but also the finest. Shuyiman found strangers in deep trouble on the doorstep of his own village, and he responded with compassion.

  All of which does not mean that Shuyiman’s actions were entirely selfless, or that he was not looking to the future. Isaac and David had the constant impression that the various villagers who had brought food to them in the jungle were hoping for a reward one day. Many eventually stopped coming, apparently disillusioned at the prospect of the British Army ever returning to the Kaladan Valley. Shuyiman was the exception, and he was at pains to remind Isaac that he had brought food after the others had given up. Later, when Shuyiman invited Isaac and David into his house, there were those in the village who thought he was being foolish, that he was taking an enormous risk that he would later regret. Shuyiman listened to these warnings, but shrugged them off. At home, he liked to tell Khatoun of the generous present the British would surely give him if they were to discover their wounded soldiers safely under his roof.

  Shuyiman knew that he was taking a dangerous gamble, but he had calculated the odds, and, as the months passed, he grew increasingly confident that he had made the right decision. By October, the monsoon rains had begun to clear and traders working up and down the Kaladan Valley from Akyab and Kyauktaw brought news of the British advance following the battles of Kohima and Imphal. Time was running out for the Japanese. As he worked alone in the rice fields, Shuyiman thought carefully about what he was doing. He had a strong idea that it would somehow be honourable if the British were to discover the African soldiers in his house. It would show that he had been a good host, in a deeply hospitable culture.

  If Isaac and David suspected some of Shuyiman’s motives for helping them, there were others of which they were unaware. For Shuyiman was being swept along by events, which, he believed, compelled him to help the British cause in any way he could. When he and the other villagers had rescued Isaac and David in March 1944, they would have had every reason to doubt that the British were capable of winning the war in Burma. After all, the British had only just recorded their first-ever victory over the Japanese, at the Battle of the Admin Box. This had brought an end to the long list of defeats and retreats that dated back to the Japanese invasion of Malaya in December 1941, but it was far from a guarantee that the British would emerge triumphant. And yet the villagers of Mairong desperately wanted the British to win. This was because they were caught up in another conflict that tore through the Arakan in the early 1940s, one that pitted Muslims against Buddhists. The larger war between the British and Japanese had both influenced and encroached on this local struggle, and Isaac and David became unwitting beneficiaries of this overlap. Shuyiman had come to believe that the future of his family, his village and indeed all his fellow Arakanese Muslims, depended on a British vi
ctory over the Japanese.

  Many Burmese had welcomed the Japanese invasion. ‘Asia for the Asiatics’, said Tokyo Radio, promising independence for the Burmese if they would co-operate in getting rid of the British colonisers. The British, after all, had toppled the Burmese monarchy in the 1880s, looted the Mandalay palace and ruthlessly suppressed revolts ever since, right up to the Saya San rebellion of 1930–32.

  In 1941, the Japanese had transported a group of thirty Burmese nationalists to Tokyo, where they were given weapons and training. One of these ‘Thirty Comrades’ was a young man called Aung San. At Rangoon University, he had been an austere and socially awkward figure, but his passionate devotion to the overthrow of British rule and establishment of an independent Burma impressed both his contemporaries and the Japanese. Soon enough, Aung San was the leader of the newly formed Burma Independence Army.

  When Japanese soldiers marched into Burma in January 1942, the soldiers of the Burma Independence Army were by their side. The two armies were greeted as heroes and liberators in the towns and villages where they arrived just as the British fled. ‘Dobama! Dobama!’ – ‘We Burmans! We Burmans!’ shouted Aung San’s men and the welcoming crowds in unison.* The Japanese, for their part, celebrated a victory for Buddhist solidarity ‘over exploiters and blood suckers and devils who intended to hold East Asiatics in perpetual bondage’.* A British general trying to stem the Japanese advance complained that the Burmese were providing the invaders with ‘information of our every movement’, as well as practical support in the form of guides, rafts, ponies and elephants. To the general’s dejection, these were things the British ‘could not get for love, and only with great difficulty, for money’.*