by Paul Scott
‘No, but you have one. I enjoy the smell.’
As she lit one she remembered having said much the same thing to him, the night of the fireflies.
‘Just then,’ he went on, ‘the General and the Brigadier came out from their conference. I could see there had been a flaming row. The Brig was about ten years the senior man and was all for caution because men’s lives were at stake, the lives of men he loved. The General on the other hand was all for modern ideas of dash, surprise, throwing away the book, using your equipment to its optimum limit, loving the whole impersonal power-game of move and counter-move.’ A pause. ‘They were both amateurs because they were both hot-headed. They were trying to make a lyric out of a situation that was merely prosaic. It only seemed problematical because we lacked information. But because it seemed problematical all this free emotional rein was given to the business of its solution. Well, there you are. If there are things you don’t know, you call the gap in your knowledge a mystery and fill it in with a wholly emotional answer. That morning it struck me as supremely silly because, do you know, there wasn’t a single sound of warfare anywhere. It was quite still. Sylvan almost – with the sunlight coming through the trees. A phrase came into my mind. The sweet indifference of man’s enviroment to his problems. Pathetic fallacy or no, I really felt it, an indifference to us that amounted to contempt. The Brig had installed himself in an old bungalow, probably a traveller’s resthouse. There was a village near by but the people had fled. The Brigade transport was harboured in a kind of glade – command truck, signals truck. Well, you can probably picture it, just like a Brigade command post on a field exercise. I was never able to get the picture of an exercise out of my mind, even when stuff was flying. There’s something fundamentally childish about the arrangements for armed conflict. And there they were, the General and the Brigadier, both red in the face, and Teddie looking pink and embarrassed. They went over to the command truck. The IO was still with me. I told him that if I could get the General’s permission I’d go and collect that Jiff myself, and see what I could get out of him. The IO was all for it, glad not to be bothered with such a minor detail. I went to the command truck and saw that something had just happened to put the General back in a good temper. The CO of the Indian battalion had been on the radio. They now realized they’d got the Japanese into a pocket and had decided that the Japanese force wasn’t much more than company strength. It meant the Indians could mop the Japs up, complete their advance and make contact with the British battalion. The General asked me if there was anything new on my side, so I told him about the Jiff and that I’d like to go up and try and get him to talk and in any case bring him back. He said, “Yes, you do that, and make sure they understand the operational picture.”’
Again he closed his eyes, and said nothing for a while, as if conjuring the image of that morning. But she knew, instinctively, what was coming. Something Teddie had said that marked the beginning of the fatal occasion.
‘Of course the operational picture was Teddie’s side, not mine, but there was nothing about this picture that a G.3 I. couldn’t tell the battalion commander just as clearly as a G.3 Ops could. But Teddie said, “I’ll do that, sir, I’ll go with him.” And the General was in a good enough mood to agree. If he’d thought about it clearly he would have said no. It was absurd, two divisional staff officers going off to a forward battalion to collect one miserable prisoner and to confirm verbally operational information that the CO would get over the radio anyway. But there we were, doing just that, as a result of the General’s euphoria following the solution to his problem, but chiefly because of Teddie’s obsession, his belief that I was not the man to deal with an Indian soldier who had turned coat. I didn’t understand, I didn’t have the touch or the sense of the traditions that were involved. Teddie thought he did. The Jiff was the only reason Teddie volunteered to go.
‘But before we set off something else happened that gave him a better reason. I suppose we were about five minutes, checking with the Brigade IO, making sure of the location and route. We were about to leave when we were called back. I thought the General had changed his mind, but it wasn’t that. Division had been on. The whole operational picture had changed. The division had been drawn into what amounted in military terms to a blind alley. On the map it was advancing roughly south-west to oppose a threat from that quarter, but the major threat was now seen to be south to south-east. In less difficult country it would just have been a question of swinging round in the hope of cutting the advancing force in two, but it’s difficult to swing across the grain of hills like that. The reserve Brigade was the only one of the three not faced with that problem. But I won’t bore you with tactics. It’s enough for you to know there was a bit of a flap, and that this trip of Teddie’s and mine was suddenly much more important to both the General and the Brigadier. The Brigadier was already on the radio to the CO of the British battalion, telling him to send a company back to support the Indians who were going in to clear this pocket of Japanese, make sure they didn’t break through on to the road, but he wanted definite information about the Jiffs. He wanted to make sure there were no Jiff units waiting their chance to come in and command the road when our own troops swung away from it. He told the CO I was coming along, that the two of us were coming, one to help sort out the Jiff situation and relieve them of the prisoner and the other to put them in the picture as the General now saw it.
‘So off we went, in my jeep, the two of us and the driver. There were only three miles to go. That company of the British battalion must have moved. We met them debussing and scattering into the hill on our left. When we got to the battalion we found the headquarters bivouacked just beyond a village, commanding the junction of the road and a track that led off down into a valley on the right. The junction had been their objective the previous night. They had a company in the jungle between the road and the track and another company in the jungle on the left of the road. The whole thing was terribly brisk and businesslike, that is it was until you realized that there were probably no enemy ahead. The CO was one of those cheery types with a wide moustache and a scarf in his neck – navy blue with white polka dots. We found him sitting on a shooting stick, drinking coffee. He had two spare mugs ready and got his batman filling them when he saw us coming. The complete host. At pains to appear quite unflappable.
‘I let Teddie talk first. When he’d finished the CO just nodded, made one or two marks on his map and said, “Well, I could have told them that. There’s nothing down the road, except perhaps some stray Jiffs and if they’re all like the one we’ve got they’re no problem.” He sent for the IO then and told him to take me to the mule-lines where they had the Jiff under guard. Teddie began to follow but the CO called him back. The IO was a pleasant boy. He spoke French and German and had learned some Japanese, but he admitted his Urdu didn’t extend much beyond what private soldiers who came out to India in the old days used to pick up in the barracks and bazaars. The only thing he’d got out of Mohammed Baksh was his name. He wasn’t even sure whether Baksh had been an Indian prisoner of war or an Indian civilian in Malaya or Burma.
‘But when I saw him I was pretty certain he’d been a soldier. He was squatting on his hunkers, under a tree, guarded by a young soldier on mule-lines picket, and directly he saw us coming he got to his feet and stood at attention, and stared straight ahead in that way old soldiers have, never quite meeting your eye unless you ask a personal question. He hadn’t learned that as a civilian. He was a mess, though. Dirty, unshaven, undernourished. His uniform had nearly had it. I started firing questions at him. Name, age, what village he was born in, what year he had joined, what regiment, whether he had any relatives serving in the army, whether his parents were alive, and what his father was. All very quickly, not waiting for the answers, but asking him nothing about the Jiffs or the Japanese or how he’d been captured. I wanted to start him thinking about his home. He’d probably not seen it for two or three years, and coming back to Indian s
oil could have made him pretty homesick. Then I started asking the questions again, but this time waited for answers. The family questions first, the name of his village, what his father did, was his father still alive? He said he didn’t know about his father and I could see the question had got him. It was then that Teddie appeared and that was the signal for Baksh to shut up like a clam, just when I thought I’d begun to break him.
‘I decided to leave the personal things aside for a bit and started asking questions about the past few days. Teddie’s Urdu wasn’t all that hot. He kept asking me what I’d said, and putting in questions of his own, if Baksh had been in the Indian Army, what regiment, who’d been his old commanding officer. The chap got very confused and nervous, looking at Teddie, but not quite at Teddie, at one part of Teddie. It took me a while to get it. That he couldn’t keep his eyes off Teddie’s regimental flash. And then I realized what was eating him and said, Baksh, you’re an old solider of this officer’s regiment, aren’t you? He stared at me and then sort of collapsed. Teddie rounded on me, wanted to know what I’d said, so I told him. I said Baksh had once been a Muzzy Guide. He said I was making it up, he didn’t believe it. No sepoy of the Muzzy Guides would ever turn coat, he’d rather die. He said there’d been one battalion in Burma and one in Malaya, that he knew every man in the Burma battalion, which had been his own, and all the officers of the one in Malaya. If Baksh was a Muzzy Guide he’d have been in the Malaya battalion. He told me to ask him the name of the Commanding Officer. Well I did so, and Baksh just shook his head and for a moment I thought perhaps Teddie was right, but I kept on asking him and in the end he said, “Hostein Sahib, Hostein Sahib.” I thought well, that proved it, Teddie was right. The Muzzy Guides wouldn’t have an Indian CO. But Teddie said, “Hostein Sahib was what they called Colonel Hastings", and stared at me as if we’d uncovered something terribly sinister, so sinister it was unbelievable. He asked Baksh what happened to Hostein Sahib. The answer was that none of them had seen either Hastings or any of the other officers since the night the battalion, or what was left of it, went into the bag, south of Kuala Lumpur. The Indian soldiers and their British officers had been separated by their Japanese captors. There was a rumour that Hostein Sahib had been shot, then another that he was in a camp up-country, on the Siam border. The Indian officer who came to talk to them later, in Singapore, said Hostein Sahib and the other officers had had plans to get away by themselves to Sumatra and leave the sepoys and NCOs behind, but being captured by the Japanese had stopped it. None of the sepoys believed this, and for weeks they’d refused to listen to men like the Indian officer who came and went in a Japanese staff car and was on friendly terms with the Japanese camp commander.
‘What he was trying to do was get them to join the Indian National Army. Baksh said he was a Sikh called Ranjit Singh. He told them he’d been captured up in Ipoh, that the British officers in his regiment had all tried to save their own skins and left him commanding a rearguard action. He’d been a lieutenant. Now he was a major. He used to visit them two or three times a week and tell them about the free Indian Government that was being formed and which it was the duty of every patriotic Indian soldier to support by joining the new Indian Army that would march to Delhi and drive the British out. He said the Japanese were not India’s enemy, only enemies of the British. Why pine away in the prison camps which British cowardice and inefficiency had driven brave men into? The British had always excused their imperialism by pointing out that their presence in India was a guarantee of freedom from invasion. But they hadn’t kept the Japanese out of Burma and Malaya. The Japanese were freeing all Asia from the white man’s yoke and self-respecting Indians couldn’t just sit by and let another nation do their job for them.
‘Baksh said that after several weeks other officers came, including a couple of Muslims who told them the whole of India was rising against the white imperialists and that men in the army back here were turning against their officers. I expect that would have been around August in forty-two. Some of Baksh’s fellow-prisoners began to believe these tales and after a bit were taken out of camp and came back later in INA uniform, said how well they were treated and helped to recruit the rest. He said, “We were forced, Sahib – one man was tortured by an Indian officer because he refused to take the new oath. We didn’t know what was true and what was not. We saw white sahibs working on the roads, like coolies. The world was turned upside down.”
Merrick paused.
‘That was the kind of information I was after, I mean about the pressures and the officers responsible. There’ll be a day of reckoning I suppose. God knows what will happen to all those chaps. The strength of the INA is three divisions. That’s a lot of officers and a lot of men. A lot of sentences of death. Too many. It won’t happen. I suppose we might hang Subhas Chandra Bose, who’s at the head of the whole thing, but for the rest I expect it’ll be a question of weeding out the hawks from the doves, tracking down those who’ve had their own men tortured. Baksh told me what they did to this chap who tried to stand out against them. It’s too revolting to repeat.’
He closed his eyes, but when he continued his voice was still strong.
‘I asked Baksh to describe what had led to his capture that morning and he told us that two days earlier the Japanese had ordered the officer commanding their unit to establish a listening post to keep watch on the track – the one that led down into the valley, and Baksh and two other men, both ex-Muzzafirabad Guides like himself – had been chosen. Their unit was in a village about three miles south of the junction and the listening post was established in the jungle about a mile ahead of the village in a place where they could look down and get a good view of quite a long stretch of the track. Patrols were to visit the listening post every two hours, but if they saw anything going on one of the three men was to go back and report. Baksh said it was a stupid arrangement, the kind of thing they found themselves doing because the Japanese seldom gave them a proper job. Anyway they spent the whole day watching the track and reporting to the patrols. They thought they’d be ordered back when it got dark, but when the last patrol reached them the leader said he hadn’t had any orders to leave the post unmanned. He’d see about it when he got back and in any case send up a hot meal. They’d been on iron rations all day, with only water to drink. But nothing happened. They didn’t dare desert the post or even have one man go back and see what was up because their officer, Lieutenant Karim, was always on at them about obeying orders to the letter and showing themselves the equal of the Japanese in endurance and discipline. Karim had been a Jemadar in one of the Punjabi regiments. He’d adopted the Japanese method of slapping soldiers when he was angry.
‘So there they were, according to Baksh, stuck all night on the hillside. When it got light they expected the patrol to turn up, but it never did. They had no food left and only very little water. They drew lots for which of them would go back when the sun had been up a couple of hours, and Baksh was the unlucky one. He expected Karim would beat him up.
‘When he got back to the village he found it deserted. The unit had gone. It didn’t surprise him because the Japanese were always ordering them to move at a moment’s notice, usually in the middle of the night. He said it didn’t even surprise him that Lieutenant Karim had packed and gone without thinking of the three men at the listening post, and that the patrol leader who’d promised to send a hot meal had forgotten all about them. He said, “In the jungle our doubts returned, each man was only thinking of himself. There was no good spirit in us.” Well, it sounded plausible, and Teddie believed it. So did the young IO. I wasn’t wholly convinced. I kept an open mind, whether he was telling the truth or trying to cover up the fact that he was a deserter or a spy. He said he scouted around, filled the water bottles from the stream they’d been using, and found some tins of food carelessly left behind, then went back to the post. When they’d eaten they decided to go back to the village thinking by now someone must have noticed their absence and they’d
be sent for. In the village they tried to work out which direction the unit had gone. They were afraid of the Japanese appearing and treating them as deserters, or of some of the villagers returning and taking revenge on them for things the Japanese had done. I asked him then how large the unit was. He said it was about half company strength, and had been detached from an INA battalion for special duties, but he didn’t know what the special duties were because apart from advancing up the road behind a company of Japanese they hadn’t done anything. I wasn’t so sure about that either, but I asked him to go on with his story. He said he and the two others had begun to quarrel. One man wanted to go back to the listening post, another wanted to stay hidden in the village and Baksh wanted to scout back along the road in the direction they’d come from a couple of nights before. So they drew lots again, and Baksh won. They tracked back for a couple of miles, keeping to the jungle along the side of the road, and found nothing. He said it was as if God had waved his hand and caused all the soldiers of their own and the Japanese armies to disappear. They went back to the village and on to the listening post. The two others suggested they should go down into the valley. They were sure their unit must have been sent in that direction. Why else should the track leading down to the valley have been kept a watch on? Baksh said there was no point in sending troops into the valley. There was nothing there except the surrounding hills. The road and the high ground on the other side of it were the only features of military value. They’d advanced along the road towards the village. In his opinion their troops had fanned out into the hills, not into the valley. He said they should cross the road and explore the hills, or stay where they were. In one case they’d at least be showing common sense and initiative, in the other obeying the last order received. If they went down into the valley they’d only be acting foolishly. They had a midday meal at the listening post and because they’d hardly slept at all the night before and were tired and hungry they decided to stay put and take it in turns, two men keeping watch and the other one sleeping. He said, “We had no strength left, Sahib, and no spirit. Through no fault of our own we had become deserters and were thinking and doing like that.” It was agreed that at dusk they’d go back to the village. Baksh was the last to sleep. He said he woke when it was dark and found the others had gone. They had taken the rest of the food. He went to the village but knew they’d gone down into the valley and that they felt as he was feeling, that the end of the road had been reached and there was nothing for it now but capture by British or Indian troops. He slept in one of the deserted huts and woke during the night because of the sound of firing from the direction of the hill on the other side of the road. At least, he thought that was where it came from. It didn’t sound close. When he woke again it was light. The firing had stopped but there were two British soldiers prodding him with their rifles. He was glad it was over. Now, he said, he would be shot, and knew he deserved death for being disloyal to the uniform of his father and fathers before him.’ A pause. ‘He broke down and wept and begged Teddie to shoot him then and there. That young IO was terribly embarrassed. Oddly enough Teddie wasn’t. He held the man’s shoulder and shook him a bit and said, “You’re still a soldier. Act like one. You’ve done very wrong, but I am still your father and mother.” The old formula. But Teddie meant it. He really meant it. In spite of what that man had done he felt it was his duty to do his best for him. And I suppose he felt compassion.’