by Martin Booth
In the meantime, Sandingham ran in a crouch down the left-hand side of the road, keeping himself in close to the cover. He reached a bend in the road and ducked into the bushes. Ahead of him, out of sight, he could hear someone muttering. It was a sound that the mist blunted, rendered indistinct yet did not silence.
Lance-corporal Glass appeared noiselessly at his side. Sandingham was glad that he had had the presence of mind not to whistle. He was carrying his Lee Enfield .303 rifle.
‘What do you make of it?’ Sandingham whispered.
Glass shrugged, then grimaced. Sandingham ordered him to slip into the trees above the road and work his way down to the top of a small bank from where the sound seemed to be emanating. If he saw anything he wasn’t to shoot but to signal to Sandingham who would come along the road using the wide storm drain. They’d tackle the enemy together, as silently as possible.
Edging along the drain, Sandingham felt as if he were making enough racket to awaken a corpse. Dry twigs, deposited in the bottom of the watercourse, cracked and tweaked under his soles; he could ill afford to look down and check where he was stepping. As it was, he was bent double, with his head up, like a miner working his way through a gallery to the seam. In his hand was his revolver. The safety catch was off and he pointed it ahead.
The noise grew softer as he approached, but it didn’t cease. He took the opportunity of the cover of a big lantana bush to stand up and check the lance-corporal’s progress. The cover was not as thick as he had supposed when looking at it from the road, and he could make out his driver a little ahead of him and thirty yards higher up the hill.
The road began to turn left. As he cleared the lantana bush he heard a distinct, smooth click. It was the sound of a bolt going home into a breach. It was followed by another click as the bolt handle was pushed down. Someone was waiting for him.
His nerves were alive with the currents of fear. Every step counted now. He wondered abstractly if one felt much as a bullet entered the forehead and left by the cranium …
His finger tightened on the trigger of his revolver. He looked down. His knuckles were tense and white. The skin across the back of his hand was stringy: it reminded him of his grandfather’s hand when the old man held a fan of cards. His bidding was so good. If he opened six no trumps, out of the blue, you shut up and he’d maybe make seven with a bit of luck or a slip on the part of his opponents.
His mind strayed to thoughts of summer-time peace, tea parties and bridge evenings in the old man’s garden at Saxmundham. Meanwhile his body acted out the slow mime of war.
‘It’s all right, sir. I can see him. One of our lot. He’s hurt.’ His driver’s voice was quiet but clear.
David Glass came quickly through the trees, ducking and weaving past the lower branches and making no pretence of silence. He kept his rifle at the ready, though, and Sandingham noticed that his bayonet had been fitted to the muzzle.
The wounded man was lying on the opposite side of the road, half his body out of sight down the slope. Only his head and shoulders were in view. He was muttering to himself. In front of him, on the kerbstones, lay his rifle.
‘Stay down, driver,’ Sandingham commanded quietly and then, to the wounded man, he called softly, ‘Can you hear me?’
The muttering stopped and the man raised his head a few inches.
‘Who’s there?’ he said hoarsely, his left hand scrabbling for his rifle. Twice his fingers touched its butt, but they seemed unable to grip it. All the effort he could muster had gone into sliding the bolt home. His second hand lay motionless.
‘Signals officer,’ said Sandingham. He stood, so that the wounded man could see him from the waist up, recognise his uniform and the cap from which Sandingham had unclipped his badge.
‘I’m hurt bad,’ said the man unnecessarily. His voice weakened with each word. ‘Can’t feel me legs. Can’t move me fuckin’ arm.’
He groaned and muttered something again. It could have been a prayer, Sandingham thought.
‘Cover me, Glass.’
The lance-corporal rested his rifle in the notch of a sapling and faced downhill, the direction from which they expected any opposition to come. He adjusted his back sight to one hundred and fifty yards.
‘Ready!’
Sandingham scuttled across the road and slid down beside the wounded man. He fumbled in his pocket for a field dressing.
Nothing happened; no hidden sniper opened fire. The lance-corporal rapidly crossed the road and knelt beside Sandingham, all the time looking up and down the road. Nothing moved except a bird which alighted in the middle of the road, sang a few shrill notes into the mist then took wing, to glide on to a branch overhead where it perched in silence.
The wounded man was a private in the Middlesex. He was wearing a battle-dress uniform with a webbing belt. His steel helmet was twenty feet down the slope. His right arm was without motion and felt clammy and cold. Around his shoulders was a dark patch that was not sweat, although it was warm. Where his left foot should have been was a ragged stump of flesh and bone with surprisingly little blood oozing from it. Stuck to the raw meat of the man’s ankle were small twigs and dried leaves.
Sandingham ignored the soldier’s legs. He undid the man’s tunic and tore at the vest underneath. The shoulder wound did not look too bad. A piece of shrapnel was embedded in the tissue just beneath the collar-bone. He gripped it firmly and gave a sharp tug. The man grunted, muttered incoherently and fell silent. The shrapnel was out and the wound started to bleed again. Sandingham stuck the field dressing over it and lodged it in place with the vest. As he did so, he felt the dressing sink in the middle. The hole was larger than he had realised. He felt a hard lump beneath the dressing wad and tried to guess if it was collar-bone or another fragment of iron.
‘If we’re quick, sir, I can get the car down to this poor bugger. I can back along.’
‘Do it!’
Glass disappeared. Within a minute, Sandingham heard the Humber revving up and then it careered around the bend, reversing dangerously at twenty miles an hour. The brakes locked and the car skidded to a stop. The lance-corporal had the back passenger door open. He left the driver’s seat and helped Sandingham lift the private into the rear of the vehicle. The man collapsed on the seat, falling over sideways, blood from his back smearing the leather upholstery. Sandingham got in the front passenger seat and slammed the door. The lance-corporal moved quickly around the boot of the car to get in the driver’s side. As he pulled the door handle down, three single shots rang out in quick succession. Glass spun about, his arms outstretched like a ballerina’s. He hit the bonnet, his head denting the metal, and fell off. His forearm caught round the headlamp and the opening on his jacket snagged the sidelight on the top of the mudguard.
Sandingham knew he was dead. He had seen men pirouette like that before. He pushed himself into the driving seat and rammed the car into gear. It screeched and jolted foward. He pressed his foot hard on to the accelerator pedal. The Humber surged powerfully ahead.
A light machine weapon opened up. The pane in the rear window shattered and Sandingham felt small splinters of it hit the collar of his jacket.
The lance-corporal’s body was hanging from the headlamp and sidelight. His boots trailed along the road, the metal toecaps sparking off the surface. For a quarter of a mile his body stayed in tow. Sandingham ignored it. Then the clothing tore and the body slumped, fell off and was gone. In the driving mirror Sandingham saw it rolling across the road. Around it, small calibre bullets were kicking up puffs of grit.
The machine-gun nests and pill-boxes at Wong Nai Chung Gap were half-expecting him. As he raced through the fog he kept his hand pressed hard upon the horn and it blared out in the sorrow of the mist. He had forgotten to switch on the lights. Those dug in held their fire as he approached.
He did not stop at the medical aid shelter by the brigade headquarters but kept on going, easing up on the accelerator. Outside the headquarters was a pile of smoulder
ing rubbish: it consisted of all non-essential documents.
As he passed some water treatment filter beds, to his horror, someone opened up on the Humber with a machine-gun. Their fire was inaccurate, but a few stray riccochets hit the nearside passenger door.
‘You stupid bastards!’ he screamed. ‘You dumb, fucking useless, shitting, half-arsed bastards!’
His words gave vital release to the terror that was surging through him, a terror that had wanted to seek escape but which he had not dared let go free.
At the junction with Stubbs Road he passed a number of lorries speeding back the way he had just come. He hoped the gormless sods with the machine-gun would not fire on them as well.
Down at the racecourse in Happy Valley, the RAMC and the staff of a local hospital had established an emergency centre in the Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club building. He headed there and stopped the Humber outside the main entrance. A Chinese orderly ran out carrying a stretcher. A nurse in her mid-twenties followed him. They lifted the private out of the back seat and on to the stretcher. Sandingham helped carry him in.
Looking at the man, he knew the soldier was dead. His eyes were open and they seemed to be peering at the ceiling with an intelligent and studied gaze, but the skin around his jaw had sagged and his uninjured leg twitched like the rump of a cow bothered by flies. Lance-corporal Glass was dead, too. To save one he had lost one, and lost the saved as well. A shoddy bargain.
He picked up a civil telephone and dialled the military number. As luck would have it, Bob answered.
‘It’s Jay,’ Sandingham said matter-of-factly. ‘Can you get a message through to the West Brigade HQ at Wong Nai Chung? Enemy strength is through as far as a point half a mile north of the junction of Repulse Bay Road and Island Road. They are not motorised so far as I can tell but they are through in at least platoon strength.’
‘We know,’ replied Bob. ‘They’ve broken through into that area and are attempting to cut off the approach to Repulse Bay: those holding out in Eucliffe have been overrun.’ His voice was distant down the line. ‘Suggest you might have a go get –’
The line went out.
Sandingham wanted so desperately to say that he loved him. They had a code for that on the telephone. He had only to say, ‘I and you’ll…’, mix up the pronouns, get the grammar wrong and they would both know what it meant.
He left the makeshift hospital. It was crowded beyond its meagre capacity with injured Chinese civilians and Indians from the 5/7th Rajput who had suffered heavy casualties above North Point.
He started the Humber, aware of having no memory of having ever switched off the engine. Perhaps someone had done so for him. He was too tired to give a damn.
* * *
‘They abandoned West Brigade HQ at ten hundred hours, sir. They were more or less surrounded when you came through. About the same time A Company of the Middlesex went up but came under heavy fire. Don’t know what happened after that, sir.’
The soldier sat quietly after imparting the information. For such a large man he was remarkably serene.
It occurred to Sandingham that the machine-gun that had fired upon him had not been doing so in error. It had had a Japanese crew. He felt his neck prickle at the thought.
‘What’s your name, Sergeant-major?’ he asked after a while. He took another bite out of the wedge of cheese. It was hard but delicious.
‘CSM William Stewart, sir.’
‘Bill or Billy?’
‘Willy, sir. It’s ’cause I put them up them, sir.’ He saw the puzzled look on the captain’s face: Sandingham was too exhausted to understand. ‘The willies, sir. I put them up them.’
Looking at the CSM, Sandingham could see in his eyes a sparkle that even extreme tiredness could not extinguish. He was about to make a suitable retort when the door was flung open and a blunt head attached to the shoulders of another rank appeared around the jamb.
‘All set! Let’s go! Hands off cocks, on with socks!’
The hollering stopped abruptly to be followed by a profuse apology. The soldier looked sheepishly from the officer to the senior NCO.
‘That’s all right, Corporal. We’re just on our way.’
It was with heavy limbs that Sandingham stood up and eased his feet back into his black leather boots, tucking his trousers into the webbing anklets. He could smell himself, the rank animal odour permeating his clothing. His mouth tasted sour and his teeth were sandy to the touch of his tongue. He lifted his hand to try and scrape off the smooth yellow film with his fingernail but saw his fingers ingrained with gun oil and dirt and decided against it. His peaked cap lay on the chair and he looked at it with unseeing eyes. He placed the olive-green steel helmet on his head and adjusted the strap tightly under his chin.
The CSM handed him a Sten gun and six hundred rounds of nine-millimetre ammunition packed ready into magazines. These he put in every pocket available, stuffing the last one into his shirt. The cold metal on his belly forced him to suck his breath in sharply. So equipped, Sandingham left Battalion headquarters.
Things had not been going well, to put it mildly. The Japanese had captured Wong Nai Chung Gap, were in command of Jardine’s Lookout and held virtually all the rest of Hong Kong Island to the east. Stanley Peninsula was holding out under the control of the Middlesex and the Royal Rifles of Canada, but they were under increasing pressure and it was doubtful they would last for more than a few days, despite putting on a considerable defensive hold. East Brigade headquarters was long gone and now West had followed it, having been forced to withdraw. What had happened to the Brigadier no one knew and some wondered quietly amongst themselves if anyone cared. A replacement had not been named, and this left a hole in the command structure at a time when it was vital that there was seen to be cohesion in the upper echelons.
‘Here are final orders. Gather round.’
The senior officer, a lieutenant-colonel, was standing in the centre of a group comprising all ranks. Around them, protecting them from being seen from the hillside, were the empty carcasses of tenement buildings. Sandingham joined in towards the front of the small crowd.
‘Orders from Fortress HQ are as follows. We are to re-take Wong Nai Chung Gap. Intelligence has it that the area is now lightly defended and we should not meet with any fierce resistance. D Company – Captain Pinkerton; Captain Slater-Brown – will go straight up the main road towards the Gap and engage the enemy. C Company – Lieutenant Stanier – is to move up the valley to the left of the filter beds. There are paths there through the trees that should give adequate cover. Captain Ford and B Company are to go up to Wan Chai Gap and progress along Black’s Link, through Middle Gap to the west of Mount Nicholson and come in to Wong Nai Chung Gap from the west and above. This will be a three-prong attack, a kind of pincer movement. Once we have secured Wong Nai Chung Gap we leave a holding force there and push on round to Jardine’s Lookout. Any questions?’
‘Do we have any artillery support, sir?’ asked one of the D Company officers, a captain of about Sandingham’s age. They’d never been introduced, but he had seen him at times in the mess. He was known as a good sort, a position of some standing in their confined social world.
‘We have some field artillery promised. It’s on its way now. Anything else?’
Sandingham wanted to ask what their chances were but that was definitely not the sort of question the lieutenant-colonel had in mind. It was not ‘military’ to try to assess one’s chances of survival.
‘All move out, then. B Company has the advantage on time and needs a head start. Good luck!’
Sandingham walked in a daze, his eyes cast at the feet of CSM Stewart who was ahead of him, carrying a Bren gun by its handle in one hand and under his other arm gripping half a dozen Bren magazines. He was so damned tired, so absolutely beaten out. His brain felt as if it had been newly forged and still remembered the smith’s hammer. He was reacting to the events in the Humber, saw himself hanging from a moving car just as Glass had don
e. That was to be his fate, too, perhaps: to die dangling like a puppet from something. Someone invisible pulling the strings. At least, he thought with hurried conviction, it would be quick. Like killing a senile dog.
They reached the first of the Bren-gun carriers.
It never ceased to surprise Sandingham that the Bren-gun carrier (Carrier, Universal, Mark I [Ford] armoured, Bren gun, for the carrying of) was the ugliest vehicle he had ever seen or could imagine. It was squat, about twelve feet long and six wide and the sides came up to his chest. In the front, offset to the left, was a turret projecting forward on the side of which was a single headlamp. It had no roof but was armoured: for its size, the four-ton weight was excessive and made up mostly by the armour plating. A raucous eight-cylinder Ford engine drove it, and it was fully tracked. Not only was it particularly unbeautiful, it was also as noisy as the vents of hell. Driven over earth, it howled, bounced and thudded. Driven over a road, it howled, screeched, screamed, rolled and rattled all at once. The steel tracks were guaranteed to chew up tarmac.
Despite their hideous appearance, Sandingham had always enjoyed riding in these when they had been used in exercises. Sitting in one was the army equivalent of going for a spin in a sports car. They were exhilarating and had a good turn of speed. He found it less enjoyable to be standing beside one in these changed circumstances. They were a long way from the training ground at Chobham.
He climbed into the third of the three carriers lined up. The driver was in his seat and CSM Stewart was installing the Bren gun. Next to it were some magazines and a metal ammunition box, the lid of which was off. Sandingham could see that it was only half full.
‘You’re the jockey, are you?’ he asked the driver. He had heard that term used in the tank corps and hoped it would be appreciated now. It was.
‘Yes, sir,’ replied the driver. He was a Royal Scot and his voice betrayed it. Glaswegian. ‘And this is your mount, sir.’