Chindit Affair

by Brian Mooney

  When he saw me, he made an inadequate attempt to struggle free from his surroundings. It was not a success. He fell back, feigning exhaustion and weakness. All this was simply what I had led myself to expect. There was only one circumstance which caused me surprise. This was that his face had unmistakably become illuminated with hope and expectation as soon as he saw me. It ought not to have done if he was, as I surmised, swinging the lead. It was this fact alone which made me wonder whether he was indeed malingering. Otherwise he looked, I thought, extremely well.

  ‘Well, havildar-ji,’ I said with forced courtesy – it sounded as painful and unconvincing as it was insincere. ‘What is it?’

  He launched into a detailed description of his symptoms. I could make nothing of them. His manner betrayed a sort of superstitious confidence in me which, however, I was afraid I was going to disappoint. I recalled to mind that Tulbir had been encouraged by this same Ganga Bahadur’s connivance and support to convert himself into an intriguer. Now Tulbir was disgraced, and I did not feel disposed to extend my clemency towards his coadjutor.

  ‘Is it a cold?’

  ‘No, huzoor,’ answered several voices, eager to get into the act. ‘It’s a chew – sheu – cheou.’

  My medical vocabulary was not up to these terms. I imagined his malady to be one of those absurd oriental superstitions like the supposed weakening effects of nocturnal emissions. Hindus make such a fuss about them. If I refused to be impressed, then Ganga Bahadur would come to his senses and get better. I should then forgive him, and he would return to his allegiance.

  ‘Get up!’ I said brutally. ‘And get on with your job of helping me to run this platoon. That is where your duty lies and I will thank you to do it. Be on your feet tomorrow and no more will be said.’

  At my harsh words, his features underwent an extraordinary change of expression – from confident to disfigured.

  ‘Won’t you even send for a doctor?’ he whimpered despondently, all his bounce and bluster gone.

  I had been about to go. Now I turned back.

  ‘My dear Ganga Bahadur,’ I enunciated patronisingly and unctuously. ‘The nearest doctor is twenty-five miles away. It will take a messenger one day to get down to Indawgyi and the doctor another day to get back. I am certainly not going to send for him on the slender supposition of your illness. Quite frankly, I don’t believe in it. There must be persons among the men who have experience of Ayurvedic medicine. Well, use them! By all means try herbs and simples. All I am asking you is not to rely on me.’

  He had managed to raise himself on one elbow while I was saying all this and to incline himself hungrily forward. Now he threw himself back.

  ‘Then I am finished. I had some hope. You have taken it from me. I resign myself to die.’ His face became quite composed under this impact of this realisation – his posture almost dignified.

  ‘Stuff and nonsense,’ I declared, still quite convinced he was bluffing.

  ‘It’s a chew – sheu – scheou,’ he muttered.

  ‘It’s a chew. If only his excellency could understand.’ Suddenly he screamed at the top of his voice in torment of anguish, ‘ Chew – sheu – scheou!’

  But I left. The next morning Dal Bahadur said to me, quite chattily, ‘Ganga Bahadur is dead!’

  Correctly interpreting my terrible look of consternation, he continued, ‘You couldn’t have helped him. You see, he’d eaten this! Chew – sheu – scheou!’ He held up a small specimen of amanita muscaria. Ganga Bahadur had eaten a poisonous mushroom.

  As is the way with Gurkhas, nobody seemed to take Ganga Bahadur’s death very much to heart except me. He passed from this world and was buried in an anonymous grave, rolled up in his groundsheet, without a sigh of regret. I, on the contrary, was very much troubled by it. It was the first time in my life that I had perpetrated such a disreputable act. I had not even felt his pulse. It was genuine deed of wickedness.

  I returned deeply upset from viewing the corpse and certifying the death. Try as I might, I found myself incapable of escaping liability for it. Ganga Bahadur fastened himself like a leech on the tender stuff of my susceptibilities and proved far more tormenting dead than alive.

  I sat on top of the pine-clad tumulus where Thaman Bahadur had established the headquarters section, and gazed out over Indawgyi Lake. The clouds, momentarily, had lifted, but the dazzling landscape for once afforded me no sense of spiritual refreshment. It was dimmed by my personal shadows.

  It rained and rained. Huddled in our sopping slit-trenches or under the leaking grass roofs of our diminutive bashas, the defence platoons and I no longer put up any pretence other than of clinging desperately to survival. Crushed into close and constrictive confinement in an effort to escape the pitiless rain, dry our soaking clothes, or warm our icy limbs (for the temperature between rain storms fluctuated wildly), we were all unavoidably forced either into wallowing contact or wallowing conflict.

  The feculent, foetid smells exhaling from our sweaty bodies luckily failed to repel us. They exerted an exactly contrary effect. A veritable furnace of sensuality seemed to take possession of us. Nor were Dal Bahadur and myself exempt. With torn and tattered clothes whose rents sometimes appeared to me to have been contrived deliberately, the Gurkhas seemed to be under the influence of a permanent excitation.

  The rain continued to pour down.

  Suddenly this private domain, cut off entirely from communication with the rest of the world and inhabited exclusively by lustfulness and secret indulgence in forbidden pleasures, became once more a centre of activity. The West African Brigade’s 6th Battalion of the Nigeria Regiment arrived – huge, black, intensely grinning negroes. I have never to this day been able to discover which direction they came from. They simply appeared, their officers bringing with them all sorts of terrible rumours: 111 Brigade had been defeated – Jack Masters was dead, kicked by a mule, shot by a bullet or exploded by a shell – or he had simply vanished into the terminal shadows – there were hundreds of casualties – 111 Brigade had ceased to exist – we were disbanded, finished, kaput!

  They descended to the plain, scarcely bothering to conceal their satisfaction. It was evidently their intention to take over.

  They were closely followed by 30 Column Gurkhas from Mokso Sakan. In the van was Mike MacGillicuddy in charge of all the mules. Jack Masters had wisely sent the animals transport back to Mokso Sakan from Blackpool, consequently all the brigade mules were now available for evacuating the wounded. It was these mules, together with 30 Columns’s own transport, that MacGillicuddy was hastening to take down to the block.

  I wasn’t able to have many words with him nor did he know very much, merely having received a brief signal, but he confirmed my worst suspicions.

  ‘Is Jack Masters all right?’

  ‘Yes, he’s OK. Unwounded. I don’t know who else is gone. Oh, yes. M (he mentioned a mutual acquaintance) is dead.’

  ‘Anybody else?’ I was thinking of young Lawrence.

  He shook his head. ‘Tommy Thompson (the Colonel of the King’s Own) is wounded. He got his in his neck. I don’t know anything else at the moment. Look here, I’ve got to go. The rear of the column is bunching up.’

  ‘Do you want me to come?’

  ‘No, we’ve already got the West Africans. Anyway, the path is too narrow. There’s no room to manoeuvre.’ With this depressing information

  he left.

  My worst forebodings were fulfilled two days later. One of my sentries came running to me and announced, ‘The Brigadier is coming.’

  I hastened, therefore, along the path across the taung-ya cultivation, now become a perfect quagmire, and down the opposite hill. Parties of wounded men, in twos and threes, were struggling up it, their eyes glazed with exhaustion, while the leaden hue of their faces, dull like some lustreless metal and as blue as cobalt, betokened many hours of wakeful nights. They exemplified the frightful effects which a decisive defeat can have on an army, for these stricken wretches, reelin
g from fatigue, shock and humiliation, belonged to no recognisable unit and owed allegiance – temporarily – to nobody. They were intent solely upon saving themselves and their mates, and if any attempt had been made to rally them with the familiar slogans, they would have turned on the individual attempting it and torn him to shreds.

  They did not even look at me as they passed, but avoided my glance. They knew me for an officer and feared I might give them an order which they would refuse to obey. Eyes riveted to the ground, they chattered incessantly to themselves like very old, or mad, people who are completely cut off from their fellows by their obsession with their private sorrows.

  But this was merely the advance party – a faintly adumbrated foreshadowing of what was to follow. There were simply the walking wounded, those who could fend for themselves. Some of them had uniforms hanging in tatters, ripped from their backs by shell-splinters and exposing ghastly, shrapnel-shredded wounds. Others, except for the parachute-cloth or segment of torn blanket which covered their genitals, were naked. Their unresilient flesh was mercilessly exposed to the teeming rain.

  I was overwhelmed with compassion and longed desperately to help. For the moment, however, they were beyond contact. I felt myself, on account of my association with (at however far a removal) those who had submitted them to this ordeal, rejected without benefit of appeal. I belonged, you see, to the military establishment, and on that account was not to be trusted.

  A little further down the path I came upon my friend Sergeant Barker. He was always a loner and, even under these circumstances, except for the comrade he bore on his back, was unaccompanied.

  ‘My God, but I’m glad to see you,’ he said unashamedly. ‘I never thought I’d make it.’

  ‘Are you all right? Are you wounded?’

  ‘I’m all right. It’s me mate! I can’t turn me ’ead. What’s ’e look like? Is ’e dead? I can’t bear to have carried ’im all this way an’ ’e be a gonner!’

  The man, indeed, looked moribund. His survival, I suspected, must be very much in doubt. I did not, however, like to say so. His eyes were closed, his head was lolling and he was quite obviously unconscious.

  As if aware of what I was thinking, Sergeant Barker interpolated in extenuation, ‘Of course, ’e’s full of morphia. It makes ’em ever so dopey!’

  Every so often, however, the man opened his mouth quite automatically and let forth a gobbet of blood. It stained his teeth with a hideously macabre effect as if he had been chewing pan (a confection of areca nut and betel leaf used as a masticatory by the inhabitants of South East Asia, which causes a flow of brilliant, brick-red saliva); but his face remained studiously passive. I did not think there was the slightest hope for him.

  ‘It’s only quarter of a mile to the summit,’ I assured Sergeant Barker, encouragingly. ‘Do you want me to take over?’

  ‘No thank you, sir. I can manage.’

  ‘Before you go – er – have you seen my friend, Mr Lawrence?’ ‘No sir, He’ll be further back. I’m almost certain he’s with the Brigadier’s party.’

  ‘Yes, that would make sense. Good luck with your friend, and thank you.’

  Next came a party of mules. They had managed to get some of the more seriously wounded men astride them bareback, and to support them there with some success. The men walked, one either side, to prop them up. At just the place on the path, however, where I had encountered them, some jutting rocks and a sharp, precipitous ascent made a successful negotiation very problematical. The leading mule gathered her legs together for a jump, thought better of it, stumbled, and in striving to regain her balance, struck her rump against a rock. She lurched drunkenly off the path and, in recovering herself, threw the man off her back. He fell in the mud with a sickening thump. The expressions on the faces of people who are old, sick or injured, and on account of their disability are subjected to galling indignities, are often strikingly pathetic. I remember particularly the expression on this man’s face of outraged innocence. He looked like a very old baby who has been rudely precipitated from his pram. We all rushed to pick him up, but it was plain that he was dead.

  I did not want to witness the look of baffled fury, mortification and perplexity which invaded the face of his friend – who had been supporting him – but I could not avoid it. He simply sat down on the edge of the path and surrendered helplessly to a fit of sobbing and to a wringing of his hands.

  I moved on down the hill into the thick of it – where the hundred and fifty or so casualties the doctors had managed to evacuate were being borne on improvised stretchers by the West Africans.

  Here, the sheer carnage caused by intensive shelling was painfully apparent. It was particularly evident, too, how the fog of war had confused the combatants. Whenever I came on anyone I knew, I persisted in enquiring after young Lawrence. All I got were contradictions.

  ‘Oh, yes. He’s up at the front. I saw him an hour ago. He gave me a drink from his water-bottle.’

  ‘Oh, no. He’s with the rear guard. I passed by him this morning.’

  But despite the horror of the situation, the withdrawal was in fact an astonishing success.

  Here a tiny Gurkha trudges through the wet, on his face that perennial look of surprise which never seems to leave a Gurkha, no matter under what circumstances. He leads his devoted mule, head nodding, ears bobbing, and also wearing a persistently perplexed expression. Man and mule are further indistinguishable by being covered in mud. On the mule’s back there rides a battered soldier of the King’s Own, rocking backwards and forwards at every lurch of his mount. His head is swathed in bandages because he has been blinded by a shell. He is covered in mud too, and is in addition entirely naked. He looks like an earthen image.

  He is closely followed by a file of earth-grey soldiers, each with his carefully preserved personal weapon intact. The last group in the file staggers under the weight of a three-inch mortar-barrel and base-plate while every other man in the platoon is loaded down with a ten-pound mortar bomb in addition to his own equipment. They plod past methodically, eyes blazing out of mud-plastered faces and their breaths inhaling and exhaling in short, stertorous gasps.

  Now comes a group of West African sipahis volunteering as stretcher bearers. They tower over the rest of us like picturesque Nubians taking part in Cleopatra’s procession. They are so strong that, if need be, two of them can raise above their heads at full arm’s length a stretcher with a wounded man on it. On the stretchers the wounded lie, lulled by morphia, like flat little piles of old clothes – quite unidentifiable as human beings. Everyone’s uniform – if you can so dignify the rags which hang from their backs – is black with wet or sweat.

  Suddenly I rounded a bend and came on the Brigade Headquarters command party led by Jack Masters. I don’t know what I expected, but I was surprised that they all looked the same. After so many gruesome sights, I was half-afraid that I would be unable to recognize them: Geoffrey Birt; Doc Whyte; Briggo, looking supercilious as ever; Smithy, black as a boot. John Hedley, I knew, was not there for he had been wounded and flown out. But where – my eyes scanned the group and penetrated into it deeply – was young Lawrence!

  Masters was devouring a hot, cooked chicken! His orderly was standing nearby with the savoury, grease-glistening carcase in his hands and tearing pieces off it. At the moment I came upon them he was in the act of passing Masters a leg. The scene was such a domestic contrast to the frenzy of battle that I halted self-consciously. I feared to rush in and spoil their interlude.

  Masters glared at me over the top of the drumstick he was gnawing and greeted me with an unemotional ‘hello’. Then he wiped some grease from his mouth. Although I felt I ought to be profoundly grateful that he had been spared to us, I was unable not to feel envious of him on account of what he was eating. This must have taken a certain amount of sincerity out of my greeting. However, I said ‘How are you, sir?’ with as much solicitousness as I could manage.

  ‘Seething with rage and frustration, he
responded without an instant’s hesitation. He said it with such venom, and so ferociously, that I felt ashamed.

  ‘Why?’

  He followed up the remark with so many reasons for rage and frustration that I realized his emotion was deeply felt: because he had been defeated; because he had been driven out of his position; because he was tormented with hunger, fatigue and sleeplessness; because he yearned – and here he expressed himself self-deprecatingly – for some nameless good which he could only guess at. For these reasons he seethed with rage and frustration, and his gaze challenged me so directly to deny their validity that I averted my eyes. I feared lest inadvertently I should trespass upon his privacy and deface it. I withdrew. In the presence of such noble despair I felt unworthy and humble.

  I buttonholed Doc Whyte instead. ‘Where’s young Lawrence?’

  I asked this so accusingly that Doc Whyte must have felt I thought him personally responsible. Of course, by this time I had guessed the truth. Doc Whyte betrayed it by allowing his eyelids to flicker.

  ‘Well?’

  Doc Whyte cleared his throat. I raised my eyes and saw that he was looking at me helplessly. ‘How did it happen?’

  Doc Whyte’s voice was so hoarse and throaty that I hardly recognized it. ‘He was killed by a shell.’

  ***

  Leaving another platoon from 30 Column to relieve me and hold the top of the pass in my place, I withdrew with the rest of the Brigade to Mokso Sakan. Here I was able to relax on the shores of Indawgyi Lake, where everybody enjoyed a respite of blissful recuperation.