The Soldier's Return

by Melvyn Bragg

  Sam had been undecided about the Reunion but as the bus crawled into Carlisle, he knew that it was right to come. He had thought that he had had enough of the war. Now, as the bus stopped opposite the museum in Castle Street, he realised that in peaceful ways he wanted it to continue.

  He walked up towards the castle almost adopting a brisk march. Carlisle Castle had a picture-book aspect, set on a hill as it had been since Roman times, facing north over the River Eden to confront the barbarous Picts, the Scots, the enemy. Roman captains had fought there and legions from all over Europe had cursed the weather, marooned on this key fortress on the Great Wall, the northernmost limit of the Roman Empire. When Rome fell, Dark Age chieftains, Arthur perhaps among them, used the remains and ruins for their own wars. Later, William the Conqueror’s son rebuilt the castle, which became a focus of bloody warfare between the English and the Scots for more than five hundred years. Part of the training had been regimental history and castle history and Sam could still remember it, six years on.

  Kings of Scotland had been crowned there and legendary warriors executed there, the ballads recording their bravery and recklessness still sung in Burma. Richard the Lionheart used those Northern Marshes as his training ground and for Wallace and Robert the Bruce and last of all Bonnie Prince Charlie, Carlisle Castle was the first great prize of England. In those wasting wars, the character of the Border warrior had created his own myth and history, one of thieving and torching, of vendetta and treachery but also of loyalty and a terrible harshness. For Border men, fighting was the only life available for centuries. Sam was proud still that Carlisle Castle had sent out regiments all over the Empire trained to engage in battle without cowardice, men and boys, and win or die in the very thick of it as they had, as was testified by banner after tattered banner in the medieval cathedral built partly out of stones from the Roman fortress.

  There were others moving towards the castle, but for a few moments Sam kept to himself. He picked up the march coming from the regimental band inside the walls and time went on hold. He knew, and years in the army had ground it into him, that warfare was boredom and waiting for weeks for a spasm of fear and desperate action. He knew that soldiering was tedious, knew homesickness and resentment at stupid decisions and foul conditions and that mindless nit-picking disciplines were endemic. He knew the weary load of war. But in that moment, on the way from the bus to the castle, with the regimental band sounding crisp in the damp air, he saw how much it had given him and how much he had so willingly given back. The bonding beyond friendship with men whom you might not even like very much but for whose life you would risk your life, knowing it would be done in return. The knowing without words that when split seconds mattered, utter reliance could be placed on the man beside you and should you fall he would stay with you. That loving, if he could use such a word, of those who had survived with you the slaughter of an encounter which you had survived only because of them. The being a unit, eight, nine or ten men intent on one object with a ferocity of purpose which could only come when sudden death was the imminent alternative.

  And beyond that unit, other units, companies, battalions, the army, a mass of mankind, each man different yet sacrificing that difference to a greater purpose and, Sam thought, as he stretched his stride and remembered the deaths and remembered the evil, a fine purpose. He had been part of that. Grown, enlarged, crowned in that. No forgotten army here. A life which in some essential way it would be hard to measure up to outside. And there had been a liberty also. However unlikely and contradictory it seemed, he had at times felt a full free man for the first time in his life.

  ‘You old bugger!’

  ‘Doug!’

  ‘You were off with the fairies.’

  ‘I was.’

  The Reunion was under way.

  The men had been asked to turn up at ten a.m. and the air was chill inside the solid sandstone walls. The band was playing non-stop as if music would warm the place up. Sam arrived some minutes ahead of time. He felt odd, in that place, out of uniform. Some men had brought their bush hats but, Sam noticed, one or two took them off and held them. Maybe later.

  A sergeant major announced that breakfast was served and they trooped into the dining hall where the first treat met them. The meal was what they had eaten in Burma – bacon, beans, porridge, bread and unlimited tea. When the men saw this they cheered. After they had sat down at the trestle tables, each one was presented, by new recruits, with a plate on which was placed, like a delicacy, the timeless staple item of British fighting men – hard tack, a small, square half-biscuit, half-oatcake. On each square was a cube of bully beef. Scarcely one of the men had not vowed never to eat hard tack again, but scarcely one now resisted it. With hard tack the Reunion really began.

  The Hindustani words which they had made their own were emphasised and over-employed. Who had any mallum these days? And how many bints had Dacre had – he had sworn he’d have a dozen before Christmas. That chota wallah over there had made the best char west of Rangoon but even char could not beat chaggle water, brackish, life-saving chaggle water. They ate their bait and took a dekko at the connor, lamented the pani and laughed at goolie stories and klifty stories and tik hai, they said, all right, good, tik hai. Words from halfway across the world latticed them together.

  The day was, of course, organised to a Y, which most of the men took nostalgic enjoyment in. It was also made perfectly clear by those in charge that no one had to join in the activities, even though they were bullied into them in a friendly way. Tug-of-war teams were announced without consultation and a five-a-side football competition was set up – for this they were allowed to pick their own teams -and there were other games, but Sam drifted down to the shooting range, drawn by an urgent desire to get his hands on a Lee Enfield once again. Sam had been classified as a first class shot (the top-notch was one up – the marksman). He had loved his Lee Enfield. Ten rounds. Experienced men could fire at such speed that it was like automatic fire and yet every single shot was aimed and the extreme range was a mile. A few brave new recruits were throwing the plates into the air.

  As Sam waited patiently for his turn, he felt released. It was topsy-turvy: in the civilian world, free to come and go as he pleased or could afford, endowed with all the opportunities Blighty had seemed so full of when viewed from beyond the Indian Ocean, he felt trapped; here, in the quasi-regimentation, he acknowledged that service had given him a certain freedom. His duty, his work, his goal – all these had been decided for him. There had been no options. Yet this straitjacket had liberated energies inside his mind. With the Lee Enfield snuggled into his shoulder and the intrepid young lads hurling plates into the air, he was brushed again by that inexplicable sense of freedom.

  Sam’s best show had been three out of five at a distance of two hundred yards. Three out of five. Still not a marksman.

  ‘You won’t recognise me.’

  It was said almost with bravado.

  Sam, invited to stare, stared. What he saw was a severely emaciated man, cheekbones threatening the skin, his clothes so loose they were, painfully, like the oversized suit of a clown.

  ‘There’s others put it on. It doesn’t seem to take with me. Doctor says time will cure all’

  He grinned and the skull seemed to dissolve the skin.

  ‘It’s Harry,’ said Sam.

  ‘Of course it’s Harry.’

  ‘I heard you’d been captured.’

  ‘Surrendered. Not my decision.’ Harry grinned again. Sam wished that he did not find it so disconcerting.

  ‘We were—’

  ‘Solo whist. I won a packet.’

  ‘Fifteen quid?’

  ‘Nearer seventeen.’ Harry’s saucer eyes rolled in their deep sockets. ‘Never had a pay-day like it.’

  ‘Early on, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Before Imphala. I was sorry to miss that. I’d liked to have laid it on the Japs. Invincible! Inhuman, Sam, sub-human you ask me, animals. I could tell you. I was
four stone. Still only five and a half. And I was one of the lucky ones, Sam. I’ve seen things done.’ He shook his head. ‘You and me were pals.’

  The statement was so forlorn that Sam had no idea how to reply. He looked at the suffering man before him and he could feel the residue of fear and humiliation and the injustice. To have held on for years in the brutality of a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp and to survive: to cross half the world and survive: and still, months on, to be this gaunt ghost of times best forgotten, a spectral reminder, marked out as the man who had been starved almost to death by the cruel thwarted soldiers of the Empire of the Rising Sun.

  ‘I hope we still are pals.’

  ‘Wigton’s too far from Whitehaven,’ Harry said. ‘I kept meaning to come through. There’s three of you out that way. But it seems to take such a lot to gather myself together.’

  ‘TIFFIN!’ called out the sergeant major.

  ‘I eat,’ said Harry. ‘I can eat.’

  They went in together. It was bully beef, biscuits and tinned fruit, but the bully beef was supplemented by potatoes and carrots and gravy and the biscuits, donated by a local firm, included creams, the tinned fruit came with condensed milk and there was beer and two packets of twenty Players’ cigarettes neatly stacked by each plate.

  The more Harry ate and talked, the less Sam could eat or talk. It was not only Harry’s condition, not even his obsessive references to his condition and the cause of it, but there had been an aspect, perhaps a single movement of his skull, which had transferred Sam to the cinema in Meeting House Lane where, some weeks before, he had seen footage of the concentration camps. The sight had simply numbed and drowned his senses. That this had been done. He had heard something about it but they were so far away deep in their own battle, their own atrocities, and the Germans from the First World War had seemed not too terrible, clean deep trenches, singing carols, ordinary men like British ordinary men. But then they did this. Systematically. On that scale. He and Ellen had come out into the Lane as if into an unreal world because what they had seen was so real. How did you deal with that fact and that knowledge and with those who had with foreknowledge been party to that fact?

  Harry had hooked on to Sam and monopolised him.

  ‘You can have my beer,’ said Harry. ‘I can’t get the taste for it back.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  The word came out as through cotton wool.

  Sam drank for the two of them. The cadets serving the beer had been ordered to be generous.

  Harry’s talk was stopped when Colonel Oliphant – MC and Bar, twice wounded, much liked — rapped the table and said that he did not want to spoil their fun and there was more laid on including the tug-of-war and Housey-Housey, but he would just like to say a few words.

  First, though, he was sure that before anything was said they would all want to observe a minute’s silence for their comrades and friends who had been killed, who had not come back from Burma. The Kohima epitaph said it all:

  ‘When you go home, tell them of us and say

  ‘For your tomorrow we gave our today.’

  The men stood. The instant massed silence was a sound of its own. Most bent their heads. Memories rose up like prayer. Time slowed, all but stopped.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, and allowed the men to sit down and settle and the mood to ease. Then he began.

  Important to keep in touch. Essential to look with pride on what we did together. Forgotten Army? Let history take care of that. They knew what they had done. Churchill’s Hellespont. Attlee on Slim. (All cheered.) ‘Slim was the chap … he made do with the scrapings of the barrel.’ (More cheers.) Some scrapings – ask Jap! (Cheers and banging on tables.) Fourteenth Army had stopped in its tracks the great Japanese army which had swept through China and Malaya and Burma and was a whisker away from India, which it would have devoured. They were part of that. Others too. Many nationalities. Fair play. But this great county regiment from a remote island off the European mainland had taken the battle to the enemy on the mainland of Asia and won. Never forget that. Won. I salute you, he concluded.

  And Colonel Oliphant together with the other officers who had quietly fallen in behind him, drew themselves to attention and saluted their men.

  There was a pause, it was almost a shock, and then the men clapped and then stood and then someone called for three cheers and they cheered. Many thousands of miles away from the battlefields where so many of their comrades lay buried, they cheered what had passed and sang Tor he’s a jolly good fellow’.

  The beer began to flow.

  Harry latched on to someone else and Sam quelled his guilt at being relieved and, fortified by the beer, went to seek out Metcalfe.

  Alex (for Alexander) Metcalfe was the son of a schoolteacher, who had himself just begun as a primary schoolteacher when war broke out. He was Sam’s exact contemporary in Wigton, but he moved in a different circle, although they had met at the cycling club. Alex had failed to become an officer and dropped all ambition for authority. He was, Sam thought, the best-educated private east of Bombay. Although Alex was scrupulous in taking his orders from Sam and never let past familiarity muddy the military relationship, Sam could still find it a bit difficult, especially when things were slack, to give him commands. This was compounded by Alex’s willingness to talk and to listen to what Sam felt were his uneducated, under-informed opinions and to reinterpret them and return them as new lamps for old.

  Sam had spotted him at the Reunion early on but had been too diffident to seek him out. He had heard that Alex had taken up a post in a village school four miles out of Wigton but he had not come across him since his return. When he saw him, Sam realised how much he wanted to speak to him. It was almost like a yearning. Yet he felt diffident. He had always believed that Alex gave him much more than he had ever been able to give Alex in return. And their friendship – it could be called that – had been underpinned by necessity: that was now in the past.

  ‘So what do you make of it all, Sam?’

  Sam smiled. Typical. A question. Still the slim face, fair thin hair that looked rather foppish even though short, a beaky or, at a pinch, an aquiline nose and the cigarette held rather daintily.

  What was the correct answer?

  ‘I thought I wouldn’t much care for it.’

  ‘But you do?’

  Sam nodded.

  ‘Make you want to join up again?’

  For a few moments back there, Sam had indeed entertained that idea. He shook his head.

  ‘It did cross my mind. But – no. You?’

  ‘Not for all the tea in China, old boy. Let’s cut games and enjoy the view.’

  He led, reversal of roles, and Sam followed, up one of the sets of steps which steeped up to the ramparts. The moist day was warm and a light haze veiled any long views but it was pleasant on the ramparts, it felt airy and commanding.

  ‘What did you think of Oliphant’s speech?’

  ‘I liked it.’ Sam knew that he sounded over-emphatic.

  ‘So did I. Oliphant’s one of the good eggs. Do you remember when he sang that dirty song at the concert? I like an officer who’s prepared to make a fool of himself. It’s important that those set in authority over us make fools of themselves. At one time, kings and noblemen would set aside a day when they were the servants and the servants their masters. We have a lot to learn.’

  ‘Fag?’

  Alex took a cigarette and the men cupped their hands to light up.

  ‘I’m thinking of pushing off,’ he said.

  ‘It’s a bit early.’

  ‘From England. From Blighty. From here.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Dunno. What I’d like to do is just swan around the world but that needs more pounds, shillings and pence than I can muster.’

  ‘What’s brought this on?’

  ‘A severe case of the browned-off, but by what it’s hard to say. A case for Professor Freud, I presume. Nothing specific; is anything ever specific? Count
ry might be going in the right direction. Job’s fine; kids half-civilised and parents pleasingly impressed by the little knowledge of a local schoolteacher. Love life a bit of a dud, but I suspect that’s my fate, if we can use such a mighty word. Dunno. How have you settled back?’

  ‘Not bad.’

  Something in Sam’s mind acted like a portcullis and slammed down instantly against the mass of disquiet which threatened to spill out. He had grown used to answering Alex’s questions honestly.

  ‘You’re married of course. And Joe. The family bond. Can’t beat it. Don’t know you’re born.’

  ‘Sometimes, Metcalfe, I have my doubts about you.’

  Alex smiled. His teeth were nicotine-stained, but the smile was infectious.

  ‘Remember meeting those Australian lads?’

  ‘Yes. There was one had come from round here.’

  ‘Dixon. From Aikhead. Frank Dixon. I’ve been thinking about them.’

  Sam conjured them up immediately. He had liked their similarity to the Border lads and yet their unmistakable difference. They were tough. They were humorous. They were every bit as cynical as the Cumbrian lot. But something else.

  ‘There was something of the sun about them,’ said Alex. ‘Just as there is something of the cloud about us. Climate and character: could be connected. Did you talk to them much?’

  ‘Not a lot.’

  ‘I talked to a couple of them. I’ve been trying to put my finger on it. Everybody was “mate”. Everybody with us was “marra”. But we meant something personal. Only personal. They meant something political or social, I can’t put my finger on it. Something much bigger. Don’t you feel hemmed in here, Sam? I’m not talking about your family, excuse that, but just hemmed in? Despite the changes which we’re told are going on, it’s the same old grey weight pressing down on us and keeping us in our place and keeping us away from exercising any real influence. Oh, this is rot! Probably it’s just the weather. Give me sun and sea and the devil take the hindmost.’