Right of Reply

by John Harris

  Clark considered. ‘Well, yes,’ he agreed finally. ‘I suppose it is. All the same, don’t start talking like that when O’Mara’s around. And don’t go on at me.’

  ‘Haven’t you the guts to stand up for a principle?’ Connell had forgotten by this time that he had been accused of almost the same thing by Ginger Bowen.

  ‘I’ve got the guts to stand up all right,’ Clark said slowly. ‘But I’d like to think there were a few other people standing up with me.’

  Connell stared at him. ‘Perhaps there would be,’ he retorted. ‘Perhaps there would be, if you only knew.’

  Six

  The Sergeants’ Mess of the 17th/105th that Sergeant Frensham had to use was situated among the cotton trees, so that during the day it was in shade and after dark was made more welcoming by the background of heavy foliage.

  Before Malala had become independent, Frensham had once been stationed at Pepul, though it wasn’t quite the same now as it had been then. The huts had about them now the sour smell that Frensham always associated with Africans, though in actual fact it came not from human beings but from the smoke of the charcoal that everyone used for cooking, which permeated the clothes, skin, hair, furniture, houses, even, it seemed, the foliage outside. In addition, some of the buildings had a neglected look about them and the lawns and flower beds which had once been so carefully tended were now overgrown.

  Trust the bastards not to bother, Frensham thought with disgust.

  He had no great love for Malalans, though he had served with great pleasure and pride with a Nigerian regiment for a while. The Nigerians were different from this lot, though, he thought. Although they enjoyed bullying the civilians, Frensham still had grave doubts about Malalan troops against disciplined soldiers. For all their tommy guns and automatic pistols, there was still something about them which, to an experienced soldier like Frensham, seemed a bit too theatrical.

  He lit a cigarette and downed the remnants of his beer. It was a bloody funny world, he thought, that saw the Guards and the Marines allied to a lot of fifth-rate African troops against another lot of fifth-rate African troops. He was old enough to remember a time when one regiment of British soldiers could have wiped up the whole lot – both lots, in fact – in no time.

  He paused and ordered another beer before he began to be borne down by the depression that everyone over the rank of corporal felt from time to time in Pepul. He’d managed to make something of his own men, though, he thought, with fierce satisfaction. Untouched by the ferocious heat, he had driven his teams hard, using all the language he had been able to muster in twenty years of Army life to emphasise what he thought, and his invective and sarcasm had been a fine spur to flagging spirits.

  ‘Bloody politicians,’ he said bitterly, and only half to himself. ‘Pay cuts!’

  He tried not to think of the grievances that troubled the troops, and set his mind to working out a new programme for the next day. Fire and movement techniques were something his men hadn’t yet heard of and it would do ’em good to crawl round in the dust on their bellies. A bite of side-street work, too, because when it came, and if it came, Frensham knew as well as anyone that most of the work they’d be doing would be in and out of the battered houses of King Boffa Port. Although no one knew anything and security was so severe that everyone above the rank of lieutenant refused to regard the operation as anything else but an exercise, Frensham knew exactly why he was in Malala. Twenty years in the Army gave a man a built-in antenna that recorded every single move from above. Things added up.

  They’d better also walk an infantry attack, he thought, and learn the layout of an assault battalion in action. It might be a good idea to get a bit of noise laid on, too. Most of the National Servicemen had minds that boggled at the idea of advancing through shot and shell, and it might be wise to teach them that, although it was noisy, it wasn’t necessarily impossible if it were done properly.

  He put down his glass, pleased with himself, and saw that Sergeant O’Mara was alongside him, placing his order. He nodded welcomingly, because although Frensham had a normal soldier’s built-in dislike for military policemen, things were different when he had three stripes on his arm.

  ‘I’ll pay,’ he said.

  O’Mara nodded his thanks, took a gulp of beer, and leaned with his back to the counter.

  ‘Needed that,’ he pointed out.

  ‘Don’t tell me you’ve been sweating in the sun,’ Frensham said.

  It was an old joke that all a service policeman had to do was stand in the shade of the guardroom door, flexing his muscles and looking important. O’Mara managed a wry smile. He knew the joke as well as Frensham.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve been talking. That’s all.’

  ‘Talking? I do that all the time.’

  ‘Not this kind of talking,’ O’Mara said angrily. ‘Some bastard’s been getting at my lads.’

  ‘Getting at ’em?’ Frensham gestured. ‘What do you mean? – getting at ’em.’

  O’Mara frowned. ‘I mean just what I said,’ he insisted belligerently. ‘Getting at ’em. Preaching sedition. Stirring up trouble.’

  ‘Who the hell wants to do that?’

  O’Mara waved his beer. ‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘Politicians, if you ask me. It sounds like politicians’ talk.’

  ‘Black politicians?’

  ‘No. The bastards back home. This speech on the radio the other night if you want to know. They’re all going round quoting it at me.’

  Frensham took a swallow at his beer and O’Mara went on in disgust. ‘They’re going round saying this business here’s just a lot of gunboat diplomacy,’ he said. ‘They’re saying that, with half the world and the biggest part of the country back home objecting to it, they can’t see any reason why they should be involved without being allowed to register a protest, too. Right of reply, they keep saying. The right to put their point of view.’

  Frensham frowned, his blue eyes hard as he recalled certain disgruntled comments he’d heard from the men of ACT5 when they’d considered he’d been driving them too hard. He hadn’t regarded them as serious, because the men of ACT5 were making too much progress to be dissatisfied, but he’d heard them nevertheless.

  ‘Right of reply,’ he said slowly. ‘I’ve heard that. It’s going the rounds in our lot, too.’

  That afternoon the weather grew noticeably hotter and Pepul became increasingly stifling as the advancing clouds of the coming rains marched over the mountains and hung on the tops of the cotton trees. Towards dark came the first of the electrical storms of the season, violent forks of purple lightning that slashed across the sky, and sudden squalls of wind that set the palm tops thrashing. The clouds of dust that were whipped up filled the nostrils and ears and grated against the teeth, and most of the men in Pepul camp decided to stay in camp and take a chance with the cinema.

  Halfway through, however, with the film half-shown, the projector broke down, as service cinema projectors have a habit of doing all over the world, and as the canteen had unaccountably run out of beer and it was by that time too late to go into Pepul, most of the men were in their billets, hot, dry-throated and frustrated at the lack of entertainment and refreshment, and sufficiently annoyed at missing the dénouement of the film for all the complaints that had started up like a lot of hares at Ginger Bowen’s first whine of protest to be set in motion again.

  Ginger had not been the only man in Hodgeforce suddenly to notice the possibilities inherent in the Leader of the Opposition’s speech, but, while other people in the base at Pepul gave a lot of thought to it privately, Ginger was the first to state publicly his views on the matter. And, since it was already in the minds of others, Ginger’s words were rather like a match that set a fuse alight. Smouldering dissatisfaction existed already and the possibilities laid bare in Carey’s words and given tongue to for the first time by Ginger leapt out at everyone.

  Here, it seemed – laid on the line by a politician of note, a man who could o
ne day be Prime Minister – was the one thing that could clear up all their problems, and it ran through the force like a bushfire. Other objections were already undermining confidence – the certainty that Stabledoor was unjust and unrealistic; the knowledge that the rest of the world was against them; the worries of Reservists who had been called up weeks before and, because the Government in London were waiting on events instead of leading them by the nose, had been allowed to idle their time away, thinking of their jobs, their homes and their wives – all these had sapped at confidence. But the one thing, the major thing, that was in the minds of practically every man below the rank of sergeant was the question of pay.

  And it was among these men – the young, the hot-headed and the easily influenced, the very types who back in England were already vigorously protesting in Whitehall and Trafalgar Square about what the Prime Minister was proposing to do – it was among these men that Ginger’s idea, offered originally merely as an excuse to get him off the hook, spread through the camp like the gospel of some desert prophet.

  His talk with Connell had started a train of thought that had spread from the police to the men of the guard and from the men of the guard back to their billets. Startled by Corporal Connell’s words, Lance-Corporal Clark had discussed it with his older brother who was a corporal in the RAF Regiment and was billeted in a hut at the opposite side of the dusty parade ground. Ginger had been merely chancing his arm to get out of an onerous chore, but by the time it reached Corporal Clark, of the RAF Regiment, it had become something quite different.

  Being a talkative man of an argumentative disposition, Corporal Clark had discussed it with his friends and, before anyone in authority had become aware of it, it had got round the RAF, the 4th/74th, the 71st/86th, the 19th/43rd and the 20th/62nd. An attempt to pass the idea round the Guards companies and the Marines and the Parachutists had run up against a blank wall; but, because the Guards, the Marines and the Parachutists had a habit of regarding the county regiments with their complicated chemical-formula numberings as hybrid organisations unlikely ever to be of much use to them or to anybody else in support, no one had bothered to report what was going on to anyone in authority. And, as Corporal Clark passed it on finally to an old school friend of his, the wheel turned full circle because this friend, Private Leach, served in the 17th/105th, and lived in the same hut as Ginger Bowen.

  Private Leach was an ardent believer in Internationalism and the Brotherhood of Man, and in particular in the class struggle, whether it were against the company directors whom, until his call-up, he had consistently opposed as a shop steward; the Government, which had put him into uniform; or merely his superior officers and NCOs. Private Leach, his sense of grievance honed fine during his years as a member of the Communist Party, had seen in Corporal Clark’s words an opportunity to stir up trouble, and in its passage round the camp Ginger’s moan became a firm protest, and Private Leach was beginning to make a great deal of the preferential treatment handed out to Regulars.

  Indeed, Private Leach so persuaded Corporal Clark, who was hot-headed and not very clever, that he had a bitter grievance that he was actually prompted to refuse a duty. His sergeant, not knowing what was behind his refusal and thinking for a moment that he had gone off his head, instead of clapping him on a charge as he should have done, covered up for him and, being a weak man interested in Clark’s sister back in England, even did the duty himself and said no more about it.

  It was a stupid thing to do and prevented the sergeant’s officer from discovering what was going on; and, what was worse, encouraged Clark and his friends to believe that not only was right on their side but also might; and other small refusals of duty had followed about the base. None of them was serious in itself, but, because section NCOs did not wish it to be thought that they couldn’t control their men, no reports were passed on to superior officers.

  In the meantime, Private Leach and his friends were not idle. Like him, the biggest part of the men in the camp were National Servicemen who had no desire to be killed in an operation which was not only dividing the country at home but was setting the whole civilised world against them, and what had started as a mere flutter of complaint in Ginger Bowen’s mind now came back to him so startlingly different he quite failed to recognise it as his offspring.

  He looked up from the banana he was peeling as Leach thumped the table to emphasise the opinion he was offering.

  ‘The British and Malalan governments,’ he was saying, ‘have already been labelled as potential aggressors, ready to go to war for outworn colonialism and jingoistic imperialism.’

  Ginger paused with the banana near his mouth. The other men in the billet, their attention not so much caught as collared by Leach’s oratory, stopped what they were doing to see what was coming next. Privates Snaith, Griffiths and McKechnie, busy over letters home, put down their pens; Privates Welch and Bolam, deep in the sports page of a fortnight-old newspaper, lowered the sheets to look over the top; Acting Lance-Corporal Malaki, his black skin gleaming in the glow of the light, put down the boot he was cleaning and picked up the other one, his expression unchanged; Privates Wedderburn and Spragg, playing fives-and-threes with a set of miniature dominoes which persistently refused to lie flat on the blanket they had spread on the bed, stopped their argument about the rules and turned round slowly with Private Michlam, who’d been an interested spectator.

  ‘A lot of Old Etonians living in a Kipling’s world.’ Leach was a great one for clichés. ‘That’s what it is, and with their bloody sabre-rattling they’ll do for the lot of us.’

  Ginger swallowed the last of his banana and reached for another. The fact that they belonged to Acting Lance-Corporal Malaki didn’t deter him very much. Malaki was an easy-going man and seemed to be able to get plenty by virtue of the fact that the native camp workers thought he was one of them.

  ‘Nice thought,’ Ginger said unenthusiastically.

  ‘A few bloody roses,’ McKechnie added. ‘RIP Here lies Private Ginger Bowen. He died to preserve imperialism.’

  ‘That’s it,’ Leach said excitedly, feeling he’d made a conversion. ‘You’ve got it, mate!’

  Private Snaith put down his letter. He was a sturdy optimistic young man from a home that was by no means short of money but had managed to adapt himself to the change of conditions better than most. ‘It’ll never come to that,’ he said firmly. ‘They’re already sorting it out at United Nations. There’s a demand for police action.’

  ‘They’ll never get it going,’ Leach said.

  ‘Not in time.’ Private Welch knew his facts. ‘They’ve sent an ultimatum already. Look here.’ He held up the newspaper he’d been reading, which contained one of the Prime Minister’s pronouncements.

  ‘“The first and urgent task,”’ he said, his eye racing over the heavy type, ‘“is to remove these aggressors from what is an international harbour. If the United Nations were then willing to take over the physical task of guaranteeing stability in the area, no one would be better pleased than we should. But police action is necessary and we have accepted that we must carry it out…”’

  The paper rattled as he pushed Private Bolam aside and struggled with the sheets. ‘They’ll use bombs,’ he said with heavy foreboding. ‘And they don’t drop bombs on cities unless they’re going to take ’em over. They’ll follow ’em up with infantry.’

  ‘Us,’ Ginger pointed out. He looked round at the others, enjoying the excitement in the air and the threat to law and order that was implicit in every word that was spoken. ‘Us, mates.’

  ‘That’s a fortnight old,’ Snaith sneered. ‘Things have changed since then.’

  ‘It says it here!’ Bolam snatched the paper from Welch and jammed it to within an inch of Snaith’s nose, and there was a struggle as Snaith tried to grab it. Holding him off with one hand as he struggled, however, Bolam managed to read on.

  ‘Look at this,’ he said loudly. ‘The Prime Minister of Ghana confesses to sadness – even d
istress, he says – at not being able to agree with the position taken up by two countries whose ties with his own are close and intimate.’ He grinned. ‘What you think of that, eh? Intimate. And listen to this: “I cannot ever agree with the action of a nation which, with her awareness of her own moral position in the world, can have sunk so low as to contemplate an attack on a nation that is merely asserting rights which, if not hers by treaty, are hers by racial instincts…”’

  The reading came to an abrupt end as the newspaper was snatched away at last and Snaith and Bolam rolled on the floor, fighting for possession of it. Everyone craned to watch but the noise stopped abruptly as Griffiths looked at his watch and switched on the radio, and Snaith and Bolam sat up at once as the voice of the American Forces announcer in Germany – curiously always preferred by British troops to the BBC variety – crashed into the room in the middle of the news.

  ‘…Rioting has broken out in Khanzi,’ he was saying. ‘In the disputed area of King Boffa Port and in Sarges, the capital. British and Malalan nationals have been assaulted and several Malalans have been killed. In addition, British and Malalan-owned business premises have been set on fire by mobs of students. It is suspected that Communist agitators are behind the rioting, though a Khanzian spokesman claims that in Sarges Malalans are responsible…’

  There followed a formidable array of quotes from foreign sources on the situation, which reflected a grave sense of disquiet that it might lead to a move by British and Malalan forces.

  As the news gave way to music, Griffiths switched the radio off and the silence in the hut was heavy with the thoughts of the listeners.

  ‘That’s it then,’ Leach said harshly. ‘Isn’t it? That’ll start it, if nothing else does.’

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ Snaith said slowly.

  Leach rounded on him, jeering. ‘You’re naive, mate,’ he said. ‘Naive. You don’t want to believe it. You think they’re going to let a lot of Africans go around punching Englishmen up the nostrils without doing something? Not bloody likely. This is the trigger, mate, and it’s been pulled. It’ll escalate, this will, into something big.’