Farthest Field

by Karnad, Raghu

  It was dusk when they set sail. Men were sick over the side before the ship had even reached the open sea, while flexing weeds and Bombay’s grime were still visible on the surface. Bobby had an officers’ cabin, which was good, though it was a lonely way to begin a war. He’d imagined he would head west with a unit, and all that the word implied: a trusted CO, comrades from Roorkee, the sturdy VCOs and long lines of sappers who had never seen the sea, whose fears would displace his own. Instead it was just him with his kitbag and cases, and unknown regiments thumping around the ship above and below him. He was a reinforcement, travelling alone to Iraq to join the 2nd Field Company of the Bengal Sappers, under the 161st Indian Infantry Brigade and the 5th Indian Division: formations about which he’d heard much but knew nothing.

  He slipped down to the lower decks, where the men of the ranks were stacked like cargo to the roof. It was hot as a circle of hell, and to make things worse, blackout rules required that the portholes stay closed through the night. British, Hindus and Muslims were each bunked in separate decks, and Bobby could tell from just the odorous air which was which. The soldiers retreated to their bunks, homesick or seasick, to drip tears and vomit onto the floor. It mixed and coursed through the vessel, stroking the decks and slipping under the collars of steel joinery. The prow of the ship counted out a white rosary against the black water.

  Dawn brought the convoy to light, the troopships and their cruiser escorts axing through the Arabian Sea. The intense sunlight found a thousand points to strike among their bristling guns and masts and jigsaw hulls before it joined the million glints upon the waves. This was more like it. On deck, VCOs shouted over the haul and clatter of chains, assigning parties to man machine guns at bow and stern – extra fire against enemy aircraft – while men with field glasses kept watch for submarines. Bobby was nearly lifted off his feet with anticipation. They were taking it to the Boche at last! He still had nothing to do, though, so he stood at the rail, looking west for the view that had greeted so many Indians already.

  In 1914, the Indian Army had invaded Basra; in 1941, they did so again.1 That April, after Britain decided to ensure the cooperation of its former protectorate, an Indian division landed and fought Iraq’s army back towards Baghdad, where it met the British units and the Arab Legion fighting from the west. After taking the capital, they secured the oil wells of Mosul and the pumping facility at Kirkuk, reoccupied the fractious border villages of the Kurds, then fanned out to occupy Vichy-ruled Syria, the oil refinery at Abadan, and finally the rest of Iran.

  By the summer of 1942, a territory three times the size of France was held in occupation by the newly created Paiforce – the Persia and Iraq Force,2 the bulk of which was Indian. It was said that you could visit a police station in any corner of Iraq and think you were in Bihar: men sat on charpais, boiling tea, nattering in Hindi. Most were not idle, though. There was a fuel-burning war in Libya to the west, and an earth-scorching war to the north, and Iraq was a hectic logistical backroom for both. The Soviets suffered the greatest ordeal alone, but not unaided: American Lend-Lease materiel kept the Red Army on its feet, and the most viable route to Stalingrad was through the Persian Gulf and overland. Iraq became the final link in a supply chain wrapped halfway around the globe. Americans held one end, valiant Soviets the other, and there in the middle were the Indians.

  In Margil, the port of Basra, the freighters all flew the Stars and Stripes. Bobby came down the gangway beneath huge silhouettes in the air, hanging askew from the harbour cranes. Knobbly battle tanks, angular field guns; tyres strung together like garlands of figs, and barrels of aviation fluid like clustered grapes. Crates enclosing mortar shells, sulpha drugs, tank treads and parachute silk, made in Detroit or Buffalo. More than a million tons of materiel a year was landing at these docks, which sagged under the weight of the task.

  Bobby was put in a lorry going north, through Basra and on, splitting the wishbone of the Tigris and the Euphrates. The road carried a ceaseless column of military traffic. The driver of his lorry looked like a Tamil, and Bobby tried him out, asking where the convoys were headed. The driver smiled at hearing his mother tongue:

  ‘All to Russia, sir.’

  ‘And who’s driving them?’

  ‘We ourselves.’

  Bobby scanned the ground for scars of war, but he could see none. After twenty months of the occupation, most of Iraq had returned to its perennial rhythms. Outside Basra, the road leapt over creeks and canals and then settled into a flat run, striped with eucalyptus shadow, or hedged by state farms thick with fruit trees. New wheat was risen in mankind’s oldest fields, and closer to the river huge panes of sunset covered the ground where the spring floods had swept in between the bunds.

  At Latifiya Camp, south of Baghdad, Bobby found himself in a headquarters tent, too nervous to take a seat while the orderly went to wake the major from his siesta. The tent was pitched by a signals office, beneath its snarl of phone and telegraph wires. Through its window Bobby could only see an incandescent square of the sky, divided by the cables into wedges and trapezoids like countries invented at the Paris Conference. Pied crows perched on the wires, beating their wings against the shocked air and fussing with their feathers, undecided on whether to let the heat singe them black or bleach them white.

  Major A. E. Scott was an old campaigner whose boots had collected the sand of seven countries by the time Bobby met him. He had been a lieutenant with 2nd Field when it embarked for Port Sudan in 1940, and was officer-in-command of the company by the time of the Allies’ stand at El Alamein that past winter. He was as brown as Bobby was green. This respite in Latifiya Camp, a dreary place for certain, was still welcome.3 He explained that the only agenda now was to rest and to train.

  Bobby’s heart sank as the major outlined their duties. After this long period ‘in the blue’, he said, the men’s turnout was slipping. The platoon needed daily vehicle maintenance parades. All equipment must be spotless, including water pumps. ‘And supervise sub-section naiks on stacking bedrolls,’ the major concluded, ‘… And keeping the pots and pans neat.’

  With these rousing words was Bobby Mugaseth inducted to the 2nd Field Company and the giant, restless reserve that maintained the occupation of Persia and Iraq. He met the company officers: the second-in-command, Captain Williams, and Lieutenants Reid and Rayner. Mugaseth was the first Indian name ever written in 2nd Field’s officer rolls. The others were English, and apart from Major Scott, all commissioned during the war. Another lieutenant, John Walker Wright, had been in a road accident, the details of which remained vague until Wright hobbled back to the company and told Bobby about it himself.

  It happened like this. Only a week into their time in Iraq, Wright and Captain Williams had gone on a company errand to Baghdad. The captain had insisted on driving, as he wanted to strike a pose in his new pair of driving gloves. As they raced down a raised bund road past Baghdad airport, Wright’s mind had wandered, watching a plane climbing into the sky. In one moment he was wondering what it would be like to fly, and the next he felt their jeep magically lifted into midair, with the tops of trees passing below it, before it slammed into the earth fifteen feet below the bund. Williams wandered off, presumably to get help, leaving his passenger semi-conscious in the wreckage. Before the captain could return, the locals had stripped Wright of his wallet, documents and most of his clothing. Then they carried him off to hospital themselves.

  Wright was bitter but unsurprised, because the captain was a vicious nincompoop, and the Arabs were thieves – as every soldier here knew. Generations spent under occupation had given the Iraqis stealthy fingers. In Army legend, they could steal the tent you were sleeping in and leave you slumbering beneath the stars.

  Recuperating at Latifiya after two months in hospital, Wright was put in charge of the rookie’s orientation. His camaraderie with Bobby came naturally: Wright disliked the company of the other English officers – particularly Captain Williams – and preferred that of his Ind
ian platoon. Bobby, though an Indian, was at much greater ease talking in English than in the Urdu of the troops. It was an easy match of half-measures, which grew into rapport as they learned more about each other. Like Bobby, Wright had grown up with sisters, in a family full of doctors and without much military tradition, though Wright’s father had been in France in the Great War. Neither had any affection for army discipline and routine, and for both the lure of the world war was more in the first word than the second.

  Prior to boarding HMS Durban Castle for Bombay, John Walker Wright had never been further from England than to go cycling in Brittany. He was reading Classics at Cambridge when he enlisted, in 1940, and was filliped into the almost vicious discipline of a British training battalion. His memories of Aldershot were of running down a country road in full kit, hearing a sergeant shout ‘Gas!’, pulling on a mask that was fogged up, and running smack into a tree. Later, he faced disciplinary action for taking a piss while on guard duty – all because his fellow sentry had left splash marks on the wall.

  After recruit training, Wright was commissioned as an officer-cadet. Finishing at the top of his class at Ripon, the colonial armies were gems in the palm of his hand, glinting for the privilege of his preference. He could see the world, and polish his status and career, anywhere from Jamaica to Hong Kong, though no army commission was more esteemed than India’s. Wright arrived in Roorkee in January of 1942, and found that life there suited him nicely. The air was chilly and crisp. Havildars and khidmatgars and orderlies were constantly at hand, and bearers and sweepers and bhistis under foot, doing things so he didn’t have to. He had his own polo pony. Bobby and Wright reminisced about Roorkee: about the funny old elephant, and the town’s small but essential female population of nurses and ‘grass widows’, wives of officers gone overseas. Last summer, Wright said, he and some others took the ladies on a midnight picnic to the banks of the Ganga. Wright accompanied one particularly pretty grass widow, unaware that the Roorkee commandant was keeping an eye on her personally. That he found out the next day, when he received orders for Egypt.

  Wright had light, winking eyes, a dimpled smile, and a high forehead covered with a fall of lank hair. He spoke in a soft, bantering voice that was great for telling stories, and it eased the process of introducing Bobby to the other personnel. Together they toured the lines and separate kitchens of the three platoons, and met the non-coms, including the hero of 2nd Field, a jemadar named Asanandan Singh. Singh was up for the Indian Order of Merit, Wright said, after they had taken his leave, but deserved even better.

  The company’s other lieutenants seemed bemused at being so far from Blighty for so long. They worried constantly about their onward deployment and when it would point them back toward Europe – which Britain hadn’t touched since 1940 – and home. But Bobby was burning to hear about what he had missed, about the war the sappers had left behind in Africa. On occasional evenings, he and Wright avoided the officers’ mess tent, and introduced themselves quietly to the circle in the jemadars’ area, where the Indian VCOs gathered to smoke hashish at sundown.

  They carried a tin or two of warm beer for themselves, and first, as a gesture of official purpose, Wright would share the news that came down from brigade, about developments in the desert theatre and the rest of the world. The crack of the tab and the hiss of carbonation announced the end of the briefing. The Indians began to talk, slowly at first with a mind to the officers’ presence, and then in frank but mellow voices which slipped inconsiderately into Punjabi and then resumed Urdu again, and their stories came out, beginning with the story of Asanandan Singh.

  10

  The Jemadars’ Story

  Eritrea and Libya, 1940–41

  It was August of 1940, and away at the base of the Himalayas, Asanandan Singh led the recruits’ anti-gas training. It was still hot in the day so they drilled at night, wearing gas masks as they dug trenches, looking like boars rooting up the soil by moonlight. Under the circumstances, Singh welcomed the news that the 2nd Field Company had orders to mobilise, to fight Mussolini.

  Italy had taken the plunge, declaring war on the British Empire, and right away in Africa, its colonial armies invaded neighbouring British possessions. From Libya, they moved east into Egypt. From Abyssinia, they marched north into British Somaliland, and began nosing south into Kenya and north-west into Sudan. This open country was defended only by small garrisons, and the cry went up all over, to call in the Indian Army. Within a week, the company was on board the HT Akbar, preparing to cross the Arabian Sea. On the day of their departure, a German radio broadcast aimed at India recited the exact shipping schedule from Bombay, and concluded: ‘None of them will arrive at their destination of Port Sudan.’ On the tenth day of the voyage, Italian planes smashed up the sea to either side of the Akbar. But on the thirteenth day they did reach Port Sudan, and it was as they had been warned: the advantage in the air was entirely the enemy’s. The platoons came down in good order; they had drilled, on board, to disembark quickly. Still, it was hard on the men to be greeted at a foreign front by the full wail of air-raid sirens.

  Singh was more worried about the trucks, as they’d never had trucks before.1 Their engines had to be primed after two weeks sitting in the hold. For an enemy bomber this would look like three birds in one shot – docks, trucks, men. The vehicles came down in a great sling, one by one, and as soon as each had bumped down onto the dock, he was beside it, bellowing over the siren: ‘Clear sling; quick inspect; connect battery terminal. Fill up! Cranked to fill the carburettor? Drive off, drive off!’

  So the 2nd Field Company entered Sudan, and the African war. At Khartoum, they painted their lorries and staff cars with the sign of their new division, the 5th Indian Infantry Division: a simple red circle on a black field, hastily contrived by the chief of staff, and called ‘the Ball of Fire’.2 They patrolled the banks of the river Atbara while the infantry arrived, and their formation grew to full strength, and was joined by the 4th Indian Division from Egypt. By the time the two divisions could go on the offensive it was the new year of 1941, and the Italians had pulled back across the border, to fight in the highlands of Eritrea. They were concentrating in Asmara, the capital and the key to safe shipping in the Red Sea. The key to Asmara was Keren, high in the mountains, and the sole approach to Keren was the Dongolaas Gorge.

  At the gates of the gorge, Italian sappers had blown down half a hillside. Basalt rocks, the size of three-ton lorries, lolled in the road. The company spent five days cutting, blasting and clearing under fire from the Italian rearguard, and lost seven men. When they entered the gorge, the mountains rose around them like iron plough teeth, sharp and crusted, digging at the sky. Singh’s platoon were Hindus from the hills of Garhwal, not far from Roorkee, a place where the wind came through green valleys carrying the electric smell of snow, to shock their skins and dismay their cattle and bounce the crops in the high terraced beds. But these hills were barren, or covered in camel-thorn bushes that tore skin like barbed wire. Singh stripped down a solid bough to use as a walking stick while they marched.

  Ahead, a more dreadful obstacle awaited: the fortress of Dologorodoc. It was a concrete eyrie commanding the gorge, surrounded by other, higher peaks, all horned with Italian gun positions. The fort was defended by the strongest of the Italian regiments, the Savoy Grenadiers, and it fell to Singh’s brigade3 to capture Dologorodoc itself. The opening attack, 15 March, went badly: a Highland battalion went straight into concealed machine guns, which pinned them down in a streambed for the rest of the day, game for Italian snipers. At nightfall the Marathas went around to the steeper face, and climbed the dizzying incline foot above knee, shouting ‘Shivaji Maharaj ki Jai!’ Singh’s sapper detail was right behind them. Small red grenades poured down on the Marathas, and thrice they were pushed back, but each time they fought on, till they took the first rise toward the summit. The Sikhs passed through them to capture the next rise, and at night men from Yorkshire stormed the low walls of Dol
ogorodoc.

  Then began the greater ordeal, of holding the fort. Across the gorge, the 4th Division had failed to capture the peaks of Sanchil and Brigs Peak, from where the Italian guns hammered steadily on Dologorodoc. The noise alone was an assault. Explosions reverberated in the stone bowl of hills and returned as concussive shockwaves. Before long, sound was joined by smell, of rotting corpses and human waste, which rose from the ravines into which they’d been thrown. On the acre of bald rock at the summit, Singh’s platoon tried to raise sandbag barricades in between the waves of Italian counterattack, pushed back with rifle fire and rifle butts. Officers struggled to keep their men from going berserk. Singh saw one Maratha machine-gunner clinging to his weapon on the fort wall, emptying belt after belt into strewn corpses, until his colonel physically dragged him off it.

  For ten days the counterattacks continued, but while the bodies mounted around the concrete perimeter, Singh was called away to a new task. The Army Commander had decided that progress must be made down the gorge road, to give the 4th Division new routes of attack on Sanchil, and thus to finally relieve Dologorodoc. But the Italian sappers had blocked the way again, with a hundred yards of fallen boulders alternating with craters in the road.

  On 25 March, Singh and his platoon crept down the gorge. It was not yet dawn, and explosions lit the profiles of the peaks above them. This was their third attempt to clear the rockfall. The sappers carried gelignite and ammonal, detonators, primers and fuse, sandbags, picks, shovels, pliers, wire cutters, rifles and two days’ dry rations. What weighed most on Asanandan Singh, however, were the after-images – not yet reduced to memories – of their earlier attempts. Both times they had been spotted from the Sanchil slope, and machine guns chiselled up the rocks around them. The second attempt had cost their infantry escort sixteen lives.