Another Man's War

by Barnaby Phillips

  In truth, I was not hopeful that I would find him. The British academic who’d edited A Stroke of Unbelievable Luck had not heard from him in ten years. I knew that, even if Isaac were still alive, he would be an old man, and I wondered what sort of health he’d be in. But I managed to get hold of an address in Surelere, and asked a friend in Lagos to pass by there and see if there was, by any chance, a venerable Mr Fadoyebo at home. I heard nothing back for several weeks, and assumed the worst. Then I got an email from my friend: ‘I went there. I found him! But his leg is bad, and he has difficulty moving. He says you should call him. I think you should do so quickly.’ At the bottom of the email was a phone number.

  I was living in Athens at the time. I went up to the rooftop terrace of my apartment, where the mobile phone signal was strongest. I remembered the capricious nature of Nigerian telecommunications; the rooftop would be a good place to shout if the line was weak. I looked over the domes and cupolas of the Byzantine chapels of our Plaka neighbourhood, to the Acropolis above, and mouthed a prayer. The ringing tone in Lagos was faint, but the voice that answered was strong, stronger than I had dared to hope. ‘Mr Phillips,’ it boomed, ‘when are you coming?’

  Isaac was eighty-five years old when I met him and he told me his story. We sat facing each other on a pair of the white, not-quite sturdy plastic chairs that are ubiquitous at any social occasion in Nigeria, our knees almost touching. I was leaning forward, holding a small digital recording machine. Isaac spoke methodically, and punctuated his sentences with the occasional deep, slow chuckle. ‘Poor Essien whispered to me,’ said Isaac, now whispering himself in a suddenly hoarse voice, ‘“Take me, God, take me home, O God.”’ He re-enacted Essien’s dying gasps, just as he had heard them the first time, and then came to a sudden stop. When he was explaining how he nearly died crossing the paddy field, he said that, had the villagers not come to rescue him with a stretcher, his bones would still be lying in that field, ‘turned over and over at yearly intervals by the ploughing implements of the local rice farmers’. He was silent for a long time, looking down and shaking his head, as if he could see his neglected bones jutting out of that damp soil and the enormity of his adventure was hitting him for the first time. ‘At yearly intervals,’ he repeated, with just a hint of relish.

  When Isaac tried to explain why he’d joined the Army, he blamed it on ‘youthful exuberance’. A particularly cruel British officer was a ‘bad egg’ and an ill-disciplined colleague was ‘a miscreant’. The young thief with the knife in the jungle was guilty of great ‘wickedness against my haggard and pathetic figure’. Each archaic turn of phrase gave me a little insight into his character. His self-effacing manner, his stoicism, was somehow familiar. I realised that Isaac reminded me of my grandparents’ generation at home in England, of their emotional restraint, and how they would talk about the war when I was a small boy. Or, in fact, not talk about it very much, unless prompted. My grandfather would mention his experiences on D-Day in an off-hand way, but only if I badgered him. Isaac had some of the same mannerisms. In a peculiar way, he was very ‘British’.

  We talked in the bare courtyard of his home in Surelere. Blue lizards, with bobbing red heads and fat tails of a faded orange colour, ran along the tops of the walls that hemmed us in. There was no breeze, and we had to shift our chairs to catch the retreating shade. Isaac lived alone, not in the main house of the compound, which was a small bungalow that he was now renting out, but in an even more modest, two-room house, at the back of the property, with sun-bleached yellow walls streaked with grey smears. Inside, his possessions were piled chaotically in the dark living room, and the windows were covered in dust. ‘Forgive the mess,’ he would say, embarrassed, before adding, by way of explanation, ‘when I move back to the village, I’ll be taking all this with me.’

  There had been no electricity in his neighbourhood for a week. Each time Isaac wanted to watch football on television, he had to turn on the noisy generator. Still, he did his best to be an attentive host. I sipped a warm Coca-Cola, and, when I had finished, a small boy loitering on the street outside was brusquely dispatched to bring another bottle.

  The first day that I visited happened to coincide with Nigeria’s presidential election. After we had spoken for some time, Isaac and I made our way to the polling station at the end of his little cul-de-sac. Isaac’s movements were slow. It took him some time to get out of his chair and onto his feet, getting into position by manoeuvring his weight onto his good leg, and then heaving himself up with trembling arms. He walked stiffly, with a limp. But, when he was upright, he was still a tall, impressive man. Isaac maintained a steady, dignified pace as he walked down the street. Everybody greeted him, and he seemed to know who they were without turning his head, greeting everyone back by name. At the polling station, he was ushered to the front. ‘Make way for Pa, make way for Pa,’ urged the electoral officials. They didn’t need to; the long line of voters, some of whom had been waiting for hours, had already moved aside for him. ‘Thank you, Sistah,’ Isaac said to a female official, before dropping his neatly folded voting slip into the ballot box.

  Nearly all of Isaac’s daughters and many grandchildren lived somewhere in the vast sprawl of Lagos. They visited him regularly, bringing food and checking on his health. They gave him lifts around the city, and at weekends accompanied him to the innumerable weddings, baptisms, birthday parties, chieftaincy ceremonies and funerals that are the essence of every Lagosian’s social life. He was clearly a much-loved man, yet he struck me as being lonely. Who is not, really, at the age of eighty-five? I sensed he had not spoken about all of his memories for some time. His family knew the outline of his experiences in Burma, but it had been many years since he had shared them in their entirety. He was not one to volunteer too much if he felt he lacked an enthusiastic audience. He only really got going with me after he saw my interest. Maybe it was the very intensity of Isaac’s recollections that was the basis of his loneliness.

  It would be tempting to say that Isaac was haunted by his months in the jungle, but that’s not quite accurate. He looked back on his survival with a sense of wonder. Was that really me? How did I come through it? He remembered many details with extraordinary clarity; not just the dramatic moments such as when he was shot or rescued, but also the names of colleagues and officers and the words he’d picked up when trying to converse with Shuyiman and the other villagers. In all our conversations, I only ever noticed one major inaccuracy. Isaac had a recollection of seeing Gandhi in India, on the journey from Bombay to Calcutta. A stationmaster – he thought it was at Nagpur – needed help controlling the crowds who had come to see the hero of India’s independence struggle. ‘Otherwise they would have mobbed him to death,’ Isaac said. ‘People thought that if you had any problems, and you touched him, everything would be solved, if you were sick you’d be healed…they saw him as a saint.’ So the African soldiers were asked to guard Gandhi. ‘We soldiers saw him, very small fellow, in his loin-cloth, very small frame,’ said Isaac, ‘and we protected him. I didn’t hear him talk, I just saw him.’ Later, as I read more about Gandhi’s life, I realised this encounter could not have taken place. At least it could not have been in November 1943, when Isaac was travelling to Calcutta, because Gandhi was in prison from August 1942 to May 1944. Perhaps it happened on Isaac’s return journey to Bombay, in early 1945, but by then he was recuperating from his injuries, and moving on crutches with some difficulty. He would not have been asked to police a political rally. Still, Nagpur is on the railway line from Bombay to Calcutta. Maybe another African soldier helped guard Gandhi there, and told Isaac about it. Memories can slip away from us, but they can also be preserved in a distorted form that calcifies over time. Perhaps Isaac, at some subconscious level, wished he had seen Gandhi.

  Isaac often talked about David Kargbo. And yet, after the day they said goodbye in Freetown harbour, the two men never wrote or spoke to each other again. Isaac struggled to answer my question as to why they had n
ot swapped addresses and written in subsequent years. ‘It was not something that occurred to me’ was all he said, but he seemed perplexed and saddened by his own answer. By the time Isaac had wanted to get in touch, he did not know how to even start looking for David. It could be that, in the years immediately after the war, they had both associated letter-writing with being in the Army. Or that Isaac, always conscious of David’s seniority in rank and age, had felt somewhat inhibited from maintaining a friendship. Or perhaps, as they set out on new lives in Africa, each of them intent on finding work and starting a family, they did not want to dwell on what they had endured together.

  Captain Brown was also in Isaac’s thoughts these many years later. Sometimes he speculated that the Captain had survived Japanese captivity after all. He would rerun in his mind those last moments he had seen him. ‘He gave me tea, I took it to be my Last Supper,’ he said, ‘then the Japanese took him away. I thought he would make it. He had no scratch on him.’ A few hours later, he’d recall, with sadness, that Captain Brown had never been seen again. I think Isaac sensed that he was drawing closer to the end of his life. He was thinking of those who had helped him on the previous occasion when he had confronted death. Maybe he expected to be reunited with them one day soon. In his old age, Isaac only went to church on rare occasions, but it seemed that his faith never wavered.

  Isaac wanted to show me something that he kept in a box under his bed. He brought out a yellowed piece of paper, carefully folded but thin and brittle after all these years. It was a certificate, from 4 February 1946, signed by a British officer, Major General R.L. Bond, thanking ‘NA/46573 Private Isaac Fadoyebo’ for ‘Loyal Service’ with the Royal West African Frontier Force. Then he produced a little grey booklet, his Service Record from his time in the British Army. Under ‘Campaigns Fought’, a civil servant with a neat hand had written ‘Burma’. Under the next column, entitled ‘Medals’, the same hand had written ‘Not Yet Decided’. I read the words and looked at Isaac. Not yet decided? That was six-and-a-half decades ago, since when Isaac had heard nothing more. How long did the British Army need to make up its mind, and how much courage did a man need to show to merit a medal? There was a long and awkward silence, broken by Isaac, as if he could see my embarrassment. ‘Medals? Why would I want medals? These are enough, they show I was there.’ These documents mattered to him, I realised, because they were incontrovertible proof that he was entitled to his military pension. He did not keep them for sentimental reasons.

  Winston Churchill once wrote that there is nothing more exhilarating in war than being shot at by the enemy but the bullets missing. Isaac wouldn’t have known; the only time he had been shot at, he was hit. In that sense, his taste of ‘real war’ had lasted only a matter of minutes. But it was what happened to him in the weeks and months that followed that was so extraordinary.

  Isaac knew that he was sharing his old age with his family only because of the courage and generosity of a man with whom he had had no contact for sixty-seven years. He said, ‘Not a day goes by without me thinking of my debt of gratitude to Shuyiman. How I would love to see him again.’

  ‌

  ‌14

  ‌Here you left us

  Wait and look at this sight, you people who are passing by

  From West Africa, from the cold parts of Europe,

  from the hottest parts of India

  and from faraway Australia

  We came to lay down our lives

  Six feet under the ground

  Our bones rest

  When you get home, help us tell those people

  that we won’t have the chance to

  Meet in this world again, that

  Here you left us

  Inscription on makeshift grave in Burma*

  April 2011

  Lagos

  Isaac’s words stuck in my head: ‘How I wish I could see Shuyiman and his people again. Himself, his wife Khatoun, his daughter Gulasha, and the baby. They were wonderful, they were sent by God to take care of me.’ The reality, which neither of us voiced but which I think we both understood, was that he would not see Shuyiman again. Isaac was frail and his world was shrinking. He was in no condition to make the journey back to a remote part of Burma, even if his daughters allowed him to go. As for Shuyiman, he had not been a young man in 1944; surely he would have died many years ago. And yet I knew Isaac was still troubled by the fact that he had never said goodbye to Shuyiman. He had never thanked him for everything he’d done to save his life.

  Over the course of my trips to Nigeria, and as Isaac shared more of his memories with me, I had warmed to his modesty, integrity and gentle humour. He had become my friend. I was growing close to Isaac’s family as well; his children and grandchildren represented a snapshot of the vitality and ingenuity of Lagos that I had always enjoyed. I wanted to help Isaac. When I suggested that I should try to find Shuyiman’s family, he leapt at the idea. He would write a letter that I could carry to Burma.

  The further I delved into Isaac’s story – in long conversations with him and other British and African veterans – the more I understood that it revealed another, far greater debt, the one between Britain and Africa. The African men who volunteered to fight for Britain, and who did so in a system that gave them scant reward, are among the least celebrated of all the soldiers of the Second World War. A West African contingent took part in the Victory Parade through the streets of London in June 1946, but thereafter their contribution quickly faded from memory. More than half a century would pass before the British authorities would put up a monument, on Constitution Hill, honouring the millions of Indian, Caribbean and African troops who fought in the two World Wars. There is a pavilion beside the monument, which records the names of seventy-four soldiers from the Empire who were awarded the highest medals for valour and gallantry – the George Cross and the Victoria Cross. Not a single one of them is a black African. I was in no position to atone for all the crimes and mistakes of Empire, nor, in fact, was I oblivious to the sincere intentions of some of those who helped run the colonies. I was not even sure in what form the debt to the African soldiers who went to Burma could ever be repaid. But I had the strong conviction that remembering them was a good place to start.

  I found myself in a dispiriting correspondence with an official at the British Ministry of Defence, trying to find out what could be done about Isaac’s medals. The official, whose job it was specifically to deal with such historic cases, bafflingly said that the British did not issue medals ‘to overseas personnel as it was the responsibility of their own nation’. It was difficult to know whether he wrote these words out of ignorance, or just plain indifference to the claim of an old man living in faraway Nigeria. I explained that Isaac was a subject of the British Crown at the time of the war, and, secondly, that in 1945 even those who did envisage a self-governing Nigeria had no idea when it would achieve that status. Was every African who fought in Burma supposed to wait for a notional independence date before finding out whether he would get a medal? And why should this have been the responsibility of African countries anyway, rather than the British for whom these men had fought? In fact, the British did give medals to some African soldiers immediately after the war, so it seemed that Isaac had been the victim of some sort of oversight at that time. According to my reading of the regulations, he was at least eligible for the ‘Burma Star’, awarded to all those who fought for the British in the Burma campaign. The official at the Ministry of Defence promised to look into the matter, but, despite my repeated enquiries, I never heard from him again. Later, I learnt that Captain Brown, who served alongside Isaac and died in the Burmese jungle, received four posthumous, and fully deserved, medals. Isaac was not treated with similar decency. ‘Not Yet Decided’ were destined to be the final words on his military decorations.

  On my last morning in Lagos, I went to Isaac’s house in Surelere to say goodbye. He had not heard me enter the compound. I found him in the yard, hunched over a table, half-dres
sed in shorts and an old vest, but writing intently. For the first time, I saw Isaac’s misshapen right leg. He had no right knee as such, just a long dark scar underneath where his kneecap had once been. He was absorbed in composing the letter that he wanted me to deliver to Shuyiman’s family.

  In it, he confessed that Suleman and Dauda Ali were actually named Isaac and David, that they had pretended to be Muslims because of their desperate need for help. He felt it was important for the villagers to know this. He folded up the sheet and told me to take it away. ‘There must be remnants of Shuyiman’s village still standing,’ he said unreassuringly. ‘It’s a farm in a rural area,’ he added, waving his hand dismissively, ‘completely rural.’ I took the letter, and said my farewell.

  I chose not to share with Isaac my fears as to how difficult it would be to find Mairong, or track down Shuyiman’s family.

  Taukkyan Cemetery is twenty miles north of Rangoon, set back from a busy road. The forest around the cemetery is thick and tangled, but inside the grounds the gravestones are set in regimented rows, the grass neatly cut, the bushes symmetrically shaped. A grey stone cenotaph with a central rotunda stands in the middle of the cleared land, a sort of temple dedicated to those soldiers whose bodies were never recovered. On each of its multiple faces are the names of the men who died fighting for Britain. There are no dates or ages for these men, and they have no epitaphs; just desolate rows of British, Indian and African names, inscribed side by side, regiment by regiment, the fallen of the Burma campaign, 26,380 in all. Whatever people think of the British Empire, it is meticulous in recording its dead.