Chindit Affair

by Brian Mooney

  Joe Lentaigne was seated at the centre of the table like Christ presiding over the Last Supper. On either side of him were two of the fluffiest of the floozies, leaning all over him in a variety of abandoned attitudes – in fact, one was practically reclining on his bosom. They were both clutching huge sheaths of gladioli. Lentaigne had had these flown in by light plane from New Delhi specially for the occasion.

  The other three females sat at a little distance, fingering their flowers murderously, as if they would willingly ram them down their rivals’ gullets. What was astonishing about the scene, however, was that all the girls were exhibiting a dazzling display of décolleté that could only have been intended for the General’s benefit.

  Everybody was downing double-brandies with their breakfast coffee and in addition Lentaigne was plotting confusion to his superiors by offering his two leading ladies certain hints with regard to deportment – which amounted to nothing less than an invitation to seduce the innocent General during the interval allowed for lunch. Being actresses, they were responding enthusiastically to his encouragement.

  Most of those present seemed half-drunk already, and, since the day had started early and it was obviously going to be a corker, I hastened to join them and began downing double-brandies myself. Within a very short time I was as exhilarated as the rest of the company and perfectly indistinguishable from them in my behaviour.

  ‘Is a General really important?’ Desiree was lisping in that impromptu baby-blue voice, putting on a beautiful imitation of an ineffectual dumb blonde being dizzy.

  ‘Very,’ Lentaigne replied, revelling in all the attention he was getting. ‘He carries us all in the palm of his hand – all our destinies!’

  ‘Ooooo,’ said the one called Antoinette, applying the automatic self-hug to her middle and making her breasts pop out of her bodice until they practically showed the nipples.

  ‘I hope you’re duly impressed,’ said Lentaigne, spraying them with spit as if they had been infected with aphids.

  ‘Ooooo, certainly! Of course I am. But do you think he’ll like me?’

  ‘Love you,’ suddenly interjected young Lawrence with a gush, going scarlet with embarrassment in the process. He shot out the remark like a bullet, opening his mouth too wide in the first instance, then snapping it shut as if it were a Venus fly-trap.

  Such a daring observation from our youngest member was greeted with a gasp of admiration by we others.

  ‘Who said that?’ demanded Lentaigne, veering round as if on a pivot. ‘Whoever it was, I heartily endorse it!’

  ‘You mustn’t be inhibited by his rank,’ Briggo interpolated, also blushing furiously like a schoolboy.

  ‘He’s said to be rather a puritan,’ I put in priggishly. ‘And to be easily deterred by the sight of a lady’s bosom. He’ll probably want to exorcise it with bell, book and holy water!’

  ‘Oh dear! Do you think I ought to cover it up?’

  I was about to say ‘Well, just a bit,’ when Lentaigne jumped into the breach.

  ‘Not at all,’ he said imperiously, glancing down with admiration at the dusky protuberances, which gleamed back at him indecorously. ‘Keep yourself just as you are, m’dear. You are going to help us through an appallingly difficult situation, and if you hadn’t arrived out of the blue we should’ve had to send for you. You are going to act as the perfect catalyst.’

  I don’t think Heloise, or whatever she was called, had the slightest idea what he meant. I could not help wondering, all the same, how Wingate was going to react. It was a pretty testing experience to submit him to – to place him at lunch between two such outrageously bold hussies.

  After breakfast, Lentaigne decided he would like us to put in an appearance at the church parades. I chose the Catholic mass, celebrated among the Cameronians. I knew the sight of all those young soldiers kneeling bareheaded in the dust like so many Sir Galahads would appeal to me irresistibly.

  It was an impressive service, but there was one odd circumstance. Padre Galt terminated the proceedings with a blessing. As the nature of the celebrations was essentially bellicose – something like blessing the men and their weapons in order that they should be successful in shedding blood – I was considerably taken aback to hear Padre Galt then suggest to his communicants that they ought to ‘be fruitful and multiply’. I had expected us all to be expelled from his presence with the injunction to ‘go forth and kill’. It was somewhat of a disappointment to discover that our tribal religion had degenerated so far into squeamishness

  By the time all the church parades were over and we had reassembled in the mess, it was eleven o’clock. The hour of the General’s arrival was drawing relentlessly nearer. Brigade Headquarters began frantically fortifying themselves against it with noggins of gin.

  It was obvious that unless something was done to relieve the tension, there would be an explosion.

  ‘Who’s for a joy ride?” asked Lentaigne. ‘We’ve still got time, before we get down to the airstrip!’

  ‘I am, sir!’

  ‘I am!’

  ‘To the airstrip, then!’ rollicked Lentaigne, in a tone of voice appropriate to a shore-leave matelot setting course for a licensed brothel.

  Young Lawrence and I flung ourselves into the jeep and a lot of others tumbled on top of us. At a touch of his foot on the starter, the engine juddered into life. The tormented cogs of the gears engaged, the tyres bit into the tingling dirt, dust flew from under her tortured wheels – and the jeep shot across the open ground in front of the mess to the smell of scorching rubber.

  She had screamed, on first starting, like an anguished log in a saw mill. Now the motor seemed to adjust to Lentaigne’s mood, which was essentially rhapsodic, and to settle instead for a full-throated throb.

  ‘Do a little trip!’ yelled Lentaigne into my ear, confidentially. I was sitting up in front.

  ‘Yes, sir!’ The vehicle trembled ecstatically.

  ‘Do a tour of the camp!’

  ‘Certainly, sir!’ It squirmed responsively like a voluptuous courtesan.

  ‘Eh?’ he barked, looking at me questioningly for some sort of confirmation, as if I had failed to answer.

  ‘We’re right behind you!’ I shouted at the top of my voice.

  Taking advantage of Lentaigne’s invitation, about eight of us had clambered in. An additional two were accommodated on the bonnet. They managed to maintain themselves by clinging to the windscreen – which was down – like shipwrecked mariners to the bottom of an upturned boat.

  I found myself crammed into one of the front seats between an unfamiliarly elevated Rhodes James on the one hand, and the gear-lever on the other. It was such an awkward position that every time Joe tried a racing change he put his hand on my genitals.

  We zoomed to the top of the dam, turned right, and flew along a road that led into the depopulated countryside. Groups of soldiers were promenading along it in a sedate and respectable manner. Their well-scrubbed faces and immaculately clean uniforms recalled childhood memories of chapel-going Sundays in Cornwall along the roads leading to Zion and Bethel meeting-houses.

  The sight of this jeep-load of drunken officers driven by their demented Brigadier screaming along the roads and kicking up clouds of dust must have awakened in them other, latent, possibilities. They were fully to redeem them before the day was over. For the moment, however, they simply saluted us.

  But since Lentaigne persisted in turning the jeep at the end of the lane and zooming back over the same course, it began to dawn on the soldiers that this was a game – and that maybe they were even expected to participate in it.

  They started cheering him every time he made a personal appearance. And we in the jeep, of course, cheered back. I don’t know whether the whole thing was a pre-planned operation, or whether it simply occurred to Lentaigne spontaneously. Suddenly he stopped. The soldiers clustered round curiously. He stood up. Someone said, ‘Good old Joe!’, without much conviction.

  Lentaigne launched in
to the classic declamation of a General addressing his soldiers.

  ‘Men!’

  There was a startled pause. One can only assume that everyone was composing his face into a suitably reverent expression.

  As a rule, Lentaigne was not much given to haranguing the troops – not even on the eve of the battle. In this instance, however, some overriding necessity for mobilising public opinion or a buried instinct for community relations must have prompted him. He repeated the same manoeuvre, and the same speech, in various parts of the camp.

  ‘The General arrives in a few minutes. He’s coming to spend Christmas among you. Get down to the strip. Don’t fail to give him a rousing reception!’

  ‘Very subtle move, if I may venture to say so,’ I hazarded approvingly, as we stormed back.

  ‘Do you really think so?’ he replied. He sounded gratified.

  ‘Certainly. The General cannot fail to be impressed. It will be like one of those spontaneous demonstrations so dear to the heart of Supremo!’ I was referring to Lord Mountbatten, the Supreme Allied Commander in South-East Asia.

  ‘Look here, Baines, that’s really too much. You’d better shut up! Keep your sarcasms for the General’s lunch!’

  One more perilous swoop down the slope of the dam, and we sped off in the direction of the airstrip. Lentaigne could not but be pleased to see that it was tightly packed. His appreciation of the circumstances had been magnificent. As our jeep shuddered to a halt, the soldiers came surging forward to see who was in it. They were like the crowd outside a Leicester Square cinema for the premiere of some notorious film. They would not neglect even the most nondescript arrivals, let alone Lentaigne’s red-banded hat. To his credit, he resisted indulging in histrionics.

  His sole concession to the gallery, as he descended from the jeep, was to say, ‘The General will be here any minute. Give him a cheer, boys, as he gets down from his aircraft.’

  It was enough. It perfectly exemplified the image of a strong, silent commander. A huge air of expectation prevailed, almost of exaltation. I personally felt breathless with excitement. The tremendous quantities of drink I had drunk, the perfect sunlight, the crisp blue sky, this auspicious day (it was still Christmas, however much we might have lost sight of the fact), the impending visit – all conspired to produce an impression of occasion that was hard to resist.

  In addition, Lentaigne’s final words about the General getting down from his aircraft had conjured up an imaginative picture. I was unconsciously led to expect something charismatic. Completely ignoring the nature of the air strip (which was only 100 yards long) I assumed that the General would be travelling in something with four engines. If I had been aware that there were aircraft in existence with more, I would probably have insisted on six. An engine being a sort of status symbol in my mythology, I naturally expected the General’s plane to have at least as many of them as the Old Cunarders had dummy funnels.

  With this concept in mind, I began scanning the sky, searching for that streak of silver which would be carrying the General from Gwalior.

  Several minutes before, a tiresome buzzing noise had become apparent. It preceded form an impertinent little plane – obviously a spotter of some description – which had been reconnoitring round and round taking propaganda photographs, doubtless for publication in the SEAC newspaper.

  Now it was preparing to land, right in the flight-path of the splendid sky-bird which might at any moment appear overhead like the gigantic phoenix from an Arabian Nights fairy-tale. It touched down, shot into the air, bounced, came again to ground clumsily and finally taxied towards us. The performance was so unprofessional yet at the same time casual and painless, that I mistook it for something entirely non-official.

  All the soldiers, with Lentaigne at their head, started forward. I, on account of my obtuseness, got left at the back. By standing on my toes, however, I was just able to see the smallish figure who descended and now stood at the centre of the throng with a disdainful as well as apprehensive expression on his face while Lentaigne greeted him. He looked totally unlike his photographs, and indeed quite different from what legend had led us to expect. Yet there could be no doubt about it – this was General Wingate! The impression he created was both considerably less than, and at the same time more – infinitely more – than his myth.

  Initially, I felt inclined to give way to disillusionment. The wildest stories about his looks and his deportment were current. Consequently I felt cheated when he appeared clean-shaven without his missionary topee, and with no visible sign of the razor-slash across his throat as proof of the assertion that he was an attempted suicide. He was, moreover, conventionally, even neatly, dressed in a beige-coloured khaki-drill officer’s uniform of impeccable cut.

  I then looked more closely. Wingate was short in stature, but possessed of a massive Imperial Roman head. His face was rather flat, but his features were broadly, even boldly sculpted. They recalled one of those cadet-college sand-tables in imitation of an undulating landscape suitable for tanks. His was the sort of face, however, which in spite of having been much fought over, had not yet surrendered to the scars of battle. It was deathly pale – almost disfigured. As a matter of fact, he had been desperately ill and was only just risen from a sick-bed, but I did not know this. His pallor made him look as if he had been indefinably cannibalised.

  His expression was of a deliberately assumed sternness and implacability which did not ring quite true. Though it, however, two trapped eyes, like holes burnt in a piece of snow, peered with the beseeching intensity of a tortured animal. They were seeking sympathy and requesting compassion, and failing to find it.

  How in God’s name, I thought, did such a noble individual manage to get itself incorporated on earth? The face was the face of an archangel, although fallen and indefinably besmirched. It retained however, all the traces of its sublime origin in that it was obstinately and loftily handsome.

  Surrounded by the encircling soldiers, his eyes cast diffidently to the ground lest one uncontrolled glance form them should light upon somebody and frazzle them to a cinder, General Wingate listened modestly to Lentaigne’s welcome.

  Young Lawrence and I walked soberly back to camp. Once you have been granted a flash of insight like this, it is bound to be rather thought-provoking. We were accompanied on every side by groups of soldiers, others also reflecting on their first impressions.

  Young Lawrence himself kept repeating, ‘What did you think – what did you make of it?’

  In reply I could only grunt. What on earth was it, I wondered, that made the man so conspicuously arresting? Glimpsed for a moment in the midst of the crowd, he had towered above all of us without the aid of a single expansive gesture. Powerful people like Joe Lentaigne and Jack Masters paled beside him, while lesser men faded into complete insignificance.

  Whatever it was – this unquantifiable – it put a completely different complexion on the quality of the forthcoming operations. They became, suddenly, much less like a routine manoeuvre of military logistics performed by mercenaries, to which crude level the exigencies of warfare so often reduce a crusade, and they became, instead, inspiring. It was possible to imagine them in all their unveiled glory spilling from the fount of God, in which virgin form Wingate must undoubtedly have conceived them.

  But judging from the way the troops spent that Christmas, you would never have thought so. Our own little luncheon party at Brigade Headquarters, of course, went splendidly. The General turned out to be a considerate guest. However, that was the only place in camp where such urbanity flourished. All around us the lofty tone of the morning degenerated into one final alcoholic orgy before we departed for the war zone.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Into the War Zone

  On 11 January we took a train to Assam.

  The Brigade’s disappearance form the Jhansi area was supposed to be accomplished with the strictest secrecy. Of course, the secret leaked out. The occasion even sparked off quite a demonstration.
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  During our stay near Jhansi, which is a big, teeming, almost entirely Indian town and the centre of the Administrative District, we had formed a wide variety of relationships. In particular, there had developed a close rapport between the British ‘other ranks’ and some of the locals.

  It was to deceive these people, and deny them the opportunity of gossiping about us, that security precautions had been instituted.

  ‘You’re to say goodbye to nobody!’ Jack Masters had ordered us. ‘So get out of your heads that you’re going to indulge in affectionate little farewells on the eve of battle.’

  Everyone was, as a consequence, tight-lipped for several days before our departure.

  Biting back the lump in my throat and reining in a certain amount of manly emotion, I finally managed to assemble the defence platoons into two transport trucks and get them down to the station all in one piece. The time of our departure was fixed for that evening at six. Brigade Headquarters was joining the same train as one of the Gurkha columns and one column of the King’s Own.

  Our enlisted Brahmin cooks and camp-followers had left us. We took with us, however, a week’s supply of provisions, together with our cooking-pots. They were to serve us on the train during our five days journey across India. I detailed Havildar Ganga Bahadur, also a Brahim, to cook for the platoon at our various track-side halts, and directed him, immediately on our arrival at Jhansi station, to set up the men’s langra (cook-house) on a plot of ground adjoining the station yard. I wanted the defence platoons to have a good meal before we departed.

  It was the occasion of rather an unpleasant incident which was to have a sombre termination in days to come. I had always prided myself on my sensitivity to Hindu prejudices. Particularly was this so with regard to their eating habits which are hedged about with many restrictions. I had always scrupulously observed every obligation and interdiction. I cannot therefore account for my relaxing my precautions in this respect with regard to the Gurkhas. Perhaps it had something to do with Dal Bahadur, in that I had unconsciously come to consider the Gurkhas as my friends.