by Brian Mooney
He stood up and stared ahead. He was quite sightless. He looked quite magnificent standing there and straddling the edge of the cliff, bare of chest, his stance lofty, his face calm, composed and unclouded, full of noble indifference.
I was at his side in an instant.
A thin trickle of blood was making its way over his chin from a corner of his mouth and two others, as black as treacle, were oozing from his nose.
In every other respect, he appeared uninjured. Yet there was something in his aspect which filled me with foreboding.
The whole thing – our meeting, recognition, and my rushing to his assistance – took place in a split second. Dal Bahadur had not had time to say anything, but his eyes were wild.
I looked down into them. They were already clouding, as I thought, with the mists of incomprehension and death. He seemed to be fighting to retain his consciousness.
He let out a hysterical shriek.
‘Murgaya! Murgaya! Murgaya! I’ve been hit. I’m dying, sahib. I’m dying!’
As if beseeching me to give him back his strength, which was ebbing with every exclamation, he flung himself on me. I also was bare-chested. Our naked flesh met – touched – trembled – melted – fused.
But in that instant of physical impact another thing happened. There was a hideous bubbling noise, and I was drenched with a warm, sticky liquid, and my boots began to fill with fluid.
I held him away from me, and saw his wound. It was his blood, mixed with a sort of runny yellow mucus from the pleura, which was saturating my chest. A piece of shrapnel had torn a hole through his rib-cage. The bubbling noise was the air which was escaping every time he breathed, from a rent in his lung.
Although the urge to panic and despair was almost overwhelming, I made a supreme effort to pull myself together.
‘Try to lie down,’ I said; but I could not disengage myself from his embrace.
‘Let me carry you. Relax. Release me, there’s a good boy! Please do!’
For a moment he relented. I tried to pick him up but he proved too heavy for me. We collapsed to the ground. Suddenly, in response to some inner muscular spasm, his wound opened further and spouted a fountain of blood. It hit me full in the face.
‘Lie still,’ I begged him, my mouth close to his ear. ‘I’m going to get
help.’
‘Don’t leave me,’ he whispered; and then much louder, ‘Don’t leave me! I’ll soon be dead!’
His eyes were full of pleading. I became aware of his scent-glands. He smelt musky as milk.
I surrendered to his importunity helplessly.
Winkling out Bhim Bahadur and his section from their fox-holes and putting them to carrying out Dal Bahadur proved more difficult than I had anticipated. The shells were still bursting all round us, and not unnaturally the men were unwilling to leave shelter. It was one of those occasions which demanded – quite literally – putting in the boot.
With Dal Bahadur lying near death at the edge of the precipice, I could not afford to be scrupulous, and, after a few kicks and cuffs, they followed me.
He hadn’t moved, but in the few minutes I had been absent his condition had deteriorated. The effects of shock were asserting themselves. His eyes were open, but fixed and staring, and they were plainly devoid of vision. His frame was rigid. He appeared to have relapsed into some sort of catalepsy.
Just before we lifted him, he regained consciousness for a moment, saw and recognized me, and repeated ‘murgaya, murgaya,’ – but weakly and hesitantly. It was obvious that he was slipping away.
‘Quickly,’ I urged, impatiently. ‘Quickly!’
The urgency of my words merely stimulated the men who were trying to lift him – his weight seemed to have double or trebled – into being clumsy. Fumbling about with their great ungainly hands and awkward fingers, they caused his wound to re-open. A great hot blast of moist spume and bloody bubbles flew straight at me. It was like being subjected to an attack.
I gazed with horror. The lung was collapsed and hissing like a cat. Quite accidentally, I put my fingers on his pulse. That, at any rate, was throbbing steadily. The heart was strong and true.
Unable to bear the torture of being in his company a moment longer, and with the bearers stumbling joltingly through the mud, I dashed ahead to find the doctor. As the stretcher party emerged from the rocks, the shelling miraculously stopped.
Doc Whyte came at once.
We met on the edge of the clearing, near Jack Masters’s command post. They had laid Dal Bahadur down in the middle of the path, amongst the mud and the blood and the mule-droppings.
‘Can you help?’ I begged Doc Whyte, with joined palms.
He seemed miraculously calm beside my state of near-frenzy.
‘Of course. But first of all, what’s the matter with you?’
He looked at me intently.
‘Why, nothing! Absolutely nothing!’
‘All that blood!’
‘It’s his.’ I wailed hysterically, pointing at Dal Bahadur and trying to prevent myself sobbing. ‘It’s his. I tried to carry him.’
During this exchange Doc Whyte was preparing his medical haversack. Now he took out a great roll of adhesive dressing, tore of a strip with a noise like the ripping of silk, cut it with some scissors and slapped it right over the rent in Dal Bahadur’s chest. The procedure was performed with magical skill. The bubbling and hissing of the air through the aperture ceased at once, and Dal Bahadur began to breathe normally.
‘Are you going to put him out? Will you put him out?’
‘Certainly,’ he nodded. ‘Just give me a chance.’
He prepared a syringe.
‘Is that it? Will it do the trick?’
‘It will do the trick.’
He jabbed with the needle, then slid it in subcutaneously. ‘Will it knock him out?’
‘It will knock him out.’
I felt a tremendous surge of relief. I couldn’t bear that Dal Bahadur should suffer needlessly.
We both watched while he slid painlessly into unconsciousness. After a respectful interval, I asked ‘Is he dead?’ ‘Of course not. What a suggestion!’ ‘Not yet? It’s been quite some time.’ ‘What are you talking about?’
‘You said you were going to knock him out. Wasn’t it lethal?’ Mercy killing was sometimes practised on the fatally wounded. Doc Whyte looked at me incredulously.
‘You’re in a state of shock,’ was all he said. ‘Dal Bahadur’s going to recover. Come down to my basha and I’ll give you something that’ll buck you up.’
He saw my anxious expression.
‘Don’t worry. I’ll look after him.’
They carried Dal Bahadur away.
Everyone was looking at me warily. They obviously wondered how I was going to react. I felt that it was essential to return to some routine activity, so I went in search of Thaman Bahadur. Together we went round the positions, getting the men back to their duties and establishing a sense of normality. Finally we arrived at Tej Bahadur.
Nobody had touched him. He still lay there on his back. Thaman Bahadur bent down and removed his hat. The boy’s face was calm and un-disfigured. ‘Shall I detail a burial party?’
‘Yes, you’d better. Just a minute though! Let’s find out where he was hit. Tell them to examine the body before they bury it.’
‘Very well, sahib.’
I withdrew a little apart. The intensity of the firing was increasing on the upper slopes of Point 2171 and it looked as though a ferocious battle might develop. Some mules came up into the clearing from the rear, were loaded with spare ammunition which we had saved from the supply drop, and went trotting off towards our forwards elements. The medical orderlies started rounding up the lunatics.
I observed the scene of carnage dispassionately. Everything had returned so swiftly to normal that it was difficult to realize that anything had happened. Then quite spontaneously, I looked up. The sky was undergoing a drastic reorganisation. The cloud-layer which h
ad borne down so heavily was dissolving. The superimposed strata were withdrawing themselves like shutters. A shaft of sunlight shot into the clearing as solidly as a streak of paint. The clouds continued to roll away.
I caught a glimpse of blue sky. The revelation only lasted a few minutes, but in that interval God was present. Despite the deceptive appearance of things, I was assured that everything was divine.
I glanced about me. At my feet, the mud was dark and bloodstained. At a little distance my men were examining the corpse of Tej Bahadur. Further away, Dal Bahadur lay wounded. Yet the message was unmistakable. God was tangibly present. God was present, not as an abstraction or a concept, not as a philosophical statement, not as a metaphysical speculation, not as an old man in a white sheet sitting on a cloud, God was present in everything around me – in the howling Gurkhas, some of whom the medics had succeeded in collecting and who were now neighing like horses; in the peripatetic mule-teams plodding patiently towards the front; in Thaman Bahadur, who was coming towards me.
‘What is it?’
‘We’ve examined Tej Bahadur, sahib. Shall we bury him?’
‘Yes – but what’s the verdict? What did he die of?’
‘Sahib – he was untouched. There wasn’t a mark on him.’
I turned away despondently. My revelation of the divine seemed to fall about me in ruins. I was going to walk off when Thaman Bahadur stopped me.
‘Sahib, look at your clothes. Look at your trousers. Look at the back!’ ‘What about them!’
I glanced down and behind. To my amazement, the seat and legs of my trousers were in shreds. They had been torn in tatters by shell splinters. Yet I was unscathed.
Doc Whyte emerged into the clearing from somewhere back down the slope, wearing a preoccupied expression. He told me in simple, unmedical language that Dal Bahadur’s prospects were bleak. He did not now expect Dal Bahadur to live. In addition to the desperate nature of his chest wound, which was itself sufficient to cause death, several ribs were shattered, and he had sustained a broken ankle and a smashed wrist.
Just at this moment there flared up a revival of activity from the hill. Jack Masters came out of his command post, where he had been in communication with Alex Harper, and told Doc Whyte that Jim Blaker had arrived in position, and was about to go for the top.
Blaker was a young officer, a Company Commander of Alex Harper’s 3/9 Gurkhas and thus comparatively unknown to me. He had been selected earlier in the day to lead a detour round the Japanese flank. It was the last of such assaults which we should have the resources to mount. It was, as a consequence, critical to our survival.
All of a sudden there was an outburst of bombing and mortaring from high on the slope. The machine-guns of both sides opened up with burst and counter-burst and it became impossible to distinguish anything further.
Only Masters – still in communication by walkie-talkie with one of the forward commanders – knew what was happening. I saw him blanch and shudder.
Blaker, while leading a charge against a Jap machine-gun post which had been holding up our advances, had been hit.
The walkie-talkie brayed out the news relentlessly.
‘His men are struggling to get him back – they are going to evacuate him. He’s still conscious. Yes – there he is – I can see him – he’s propped against a log. He is crouched in the mud. Someone’s giving him a drink.’
‘What is it? What’s the nature of the wound?’ Doc Whyte kept asking. ‘For God’s sake tell me – maybe I can send some instructions – maybe I can
help.’
‘I don’t know – I can’t make out,’ Masters answered, and handed him the walkie-talkie. ‘You take it. You talk to them.’
‘No, no,’ said Doc Whyte, recoiling. ‘They have their column doctor up there. I’ll mind my own business and not interfere.’
All at once the walkie-talkie began speaking as if it possessed an independent identity and had come under the influence of one of a mediumistic spirit: ‘I can’t see very clearly – it’s started to rain. It looks as if they’re having a conference. I can see the subedar expostulating – he seems to expostulating about something with Jim, but Jim won’t have it. They’re breaking up – they’ve decided something – yes, it looks as if they’re preparing for something – I can see some of them unpinning their grenades – they’re going in. Jim’s wounded in the stomach. He copped a burst in the gut. He’s dying – his guts in the mud. He’s encouraging them forward – he’s still conscious – he’s encouraging ’em on – they’re going – they’ve left him – they’re going for the summit – they’ve gone. I can hear the firing, I can see the bomb-burst – they’re going in with the kukri – they’ve got it – they’ve got to the crest – they’ve got to it – the crest is ours – I say, can you hear me? – Jim is dead.’
Masters yelled at the instrument, ‘Identify yourself – who the hell are you?’ But it also had ceased to function.
Jim Blaker was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross for his role in this engagement.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Holding On
Darkness descended that evening rather earlier than usual. The afternoon too had been dull and leaden. The break in the clouds which had provoked my sudden burst of spiritual illumination had been quickly dispelled, its promise dissipated. Soon it was pouring with rain as relentlessly as ever.
There is always much to do after a serious engagement. Casualties have to be attended to and evacuated; the dead have to be disposed of. If the action had resulted in ground gained or a technical victory, the advance had to be exploited and its advantages consolidated. Barbed wire must be strung out and defensive positions dug as quickly as possible and the place converted into a strong-point in order to resist the counter-attacks which will inevitably follow – and Japanese counter-attacks could always be relied upon to be extremely well co-ordinated and heavy.
Men also must clean their guns and their weapons, as well as themselves. In more ways than one, fighting is a dirty business. With his attention distracted by battle, it is astonishing what an accumulation of muck can be accommodated on one man – mud and earth thrown up by bombs and the mortars, as well as an immense assortment of body dirts like sweat, blood, shit and piss, even spunk (men have been known to ejaculate under the stimulus of the excitement).
Most of the men, in relays, chose to go down to the bed of the chaung to wash, where there were one or two turgid pools, now filthily churned up into foetid swamps by so much traffic. I preferred to let Dal Bahadur’s blood solidify on me until it could be chipped off. It came away like nail varnish, in tarnished flakes. As for my torn trousers, I threw them away and adopted a torn strip of parachute cloth for a lungyi.
Long lines of mules trailed up to the top of the hill with coils of barbed wire – one coil to each side – only to return after half an hour with a wounded Gurkha in the saddle. Jim Blaker and the other dead, in spite of being heroes, were treated less ceremoniously. They were bundled over the edge of the precipice, because everyone was too tired, or too busy, to bury them. Tej Bahadur, on the other hand, lay in a decent and proper – if rather shallow – grave. I insisted on according him that much respect.
I managed, round about five o’clock, to snatch some spare time to pay a visit to Dal Bahadur. He was as comfortable as it was possible to make him, but was still unconscious. Was he sinking or was it morphia? As I returned up the slope – along that same path I had traversed a hundred times that day in various stages of dementia or hysteria – Doc Whyte waylaid me. He lured me into his basha and presented me with half a bottle of medical brandy. This was the ‘something’ he had promised me when I was begging him to ‘knock Dal Bahadur out’, which would put me right.
Soon afterwards I received a message that Jack Masters wanted to see me.
He looked a bit put out; or perhaps it was just the characteristic embarrassment of the typical Englishman who needs to say something emotional. What followed, however, was some
thing I would never have predicted from someone so reserved. It no doubt cost him considerable effort and as a consequence I was – and still am – extraordinarily grateful to him. I think the incident reveals him at his most sympathetic aspect. It reflects him, moreover, in a light which I have not, in these pages, sufficiently emphasized.
‘Um – er,’ he began, after a short pause, at the same time doing something nervously with his hands. ‘I sent for you – yes! I sent for you.’
He took a deep breath, and then the words rushed out.
‘I sent for you because I want you to know – about Dal Bahadur – I’m not unsympathetic. Believe me,’ he continued gently, giving me a cool and level look of appraisal which penetrated straight to my heart so that I remember it to this day. ‘Believe me – I know what this means to you. I understand.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘How is he?’
I told him what Doc Whyte had said, adding that he did not think he would recover. He nodded, and then he in his turn produced half a bottle of rum which he handed to me.
I stumbled out from his presence, more muddled-headed than ever. When compassion takes over from military harshness – as when liberalism replaces repression in the mechanics of government – is always a moment of danger. The effect of Masters’s kindness was singularly unhelpful. It merely served to augment my physical weakness and lack of moral fibre to the point where they became visible to everybody.
At the beginning of my narrative I had occasion to recount a similar circumstance involving Joe Lentaigne. I did so, moreover, with a certain lack of sympathy. At that juncture I observed that there would be further examples, during the course of the campaign, of a comparable nature. I certainly wasn’t thinking of myself.
At about six o’clock that evening we were submitted to our first experience of heavy shelling from medium artillery. It consisted of an hour’s bombardment from the plain by big calibre howitzers. Daylight was filtering away, leaving the landscape dull and undistinguished, when suddenly, from way down in the valley, there was a distant boom. Within seconds all ranks were diving for cover. The muted explosion was followed by an infernal howling noise, and then by an explosion and a concussion which shook the hillside to its core.