Farthest Field

by Karnad, Raghu

  By April, the noon sky hissed, a frying pan left on the flame with nothing in it. Even the flies, stunned by the temperature, ceased their singing from the arsenic traps around the camp’s perimeter. Men sloshed water on their mattresses and hid in their tents, which filled with tangerine glare. At midday not a soul went outside.2

  Death did not cease his usual rounds. A machine gun left in the sun with a round in the breech, heated up until it spat a bullet and killed a sapper. At Latifiya, a coolie lit his beedi and flicked the match into a dugout full of petrol cans. The conflagration would have made the Luftwaffe proud, and it erased every trace of the coolie.

  John Wright’s injuries had healed, but he was still smarting from the insult that followed the accident on the bund road. Before long, he and Bobby had a chance for revenge against quick-fingered Arabs. The desert around Latifiya was veined with ancient, decrepit aqueducts, raised some feet above the ground. Near the camp they were draped with drying clothes, and further out they stretched into the desert like distended camel bones. One of these barged right through the company area, running under the wire fence at the camp perimeter.

  Inevitably, a rifle disappeared from the company’s arsenal and the major, who viewed the canal with a tactician’s hostility, asked his two young officers to deal with it. It was a textbook booby-trap: they laid a tripwire inside, linked it to an igniter two feet back, and buried a slab of guncotton under the grit and trash on the floor of the duct.

  A week later, at the end of another pattern-copied day in Latifiya, the officers met in their mess tent to empty a bottle. It was near midnight and the radio was off, and the silence hummed in their ears until replaced all of a sudden by a hard blast, the patter of debris, mixed yelling, and the snap of small-arms rounds – the forgotten sounds of battle. For Bobby, it was the first time hearing such noises outside a battle inoculation ground. He rose in a fright, not grasping that it was his own handiwork that had caused the excitement.

  The officers ran out through the tent flaps, grabbing revolvers and torches and calling on the guards to cease fire. The cones of torchlight parted the swirling dust, found the concertina wire still intact and bobbing, and then located the very tiny, motionless body in the trench. For a moment Bobby thought he had killed a child. Under added beams of light, the figure resolved into the torso of a grown man, voiding black blood in the direction of his legs, which lay separate, a metre back. He had pushed the tripwire with his head, setting off the charge right beneath him and blowing himself in two: half inside, half out.

  A delegation led by the local sheikh arrived the next morning to take the body away. The sheikh, undoubtedly the very person who had ordered the thief in, affected great cheer and congratulated them for their brave action. The irony cut Bobby deeper than any reproach.

  The ordeal of the desert summer was partly alleviated when a common suspicion crystallised as credible news. The Indian Army was being prepared to invade Italy, to strike at what Churchill called ‘the soft underbelly’ of the fascist crocodile, while the Soviets forced back its jaws. This lifted everybody’s mood. The division had been in a general sulk about being dumped in reserve while the Eighth Army regained Libya. After five months in Iraq, their minds sprang ahead to the round hills and pointed peaks of Italy, deliriously transmuted into a vista of buttocks and brassieres. For the first time since Madras, Bobby heard La Traviata strike up in his head: De’ miei bollenti spiriti, Il giovanile ardore, ella temprò col placido … soriso, dell’amore, dell’amore?

  Divisional staff shared stories from Eritrea where, a signals officer remembered, ‘You could always tell we were following the Italians … Wherever they had stopped for breath, there was an absolute trail of Chianti bottles and French letters.’3 In Libya, the captured Italian forts had yielded huge swags of Pellegrino, champagne and cured meats stocked for officers. At Giarabub, the Gurkhas found rooms full of Milanese prostitutes, rumoured to have techniques of fellatio as diverse as (and named after) shapes of pasta.

  The sappers were equally cheered by the prospect, particularly the Hindu sappers from the hills. In the summer heat it only took an irrigation canal, slimy with larvae and bilharzia, to bring them close to breaking ranks and jumping in. Italy would mean thymy mountains and fast and freezing streams. The boot-shaped country was laced with rivers, falling east and west from the central spine of the Apennine Range. In place of the nervous drudgery of handling mines, they would build bridges, a real sapper’s job.

  Late April found 2nd Field at Habbaniya,4 practising bridging on the lazy yellow waters of the Euphrates. They were to build a pontoon bridge for a simulated infantry clash between the Sherwood Foresters and Assyrian Levies. It was less taxing than a timber bridge, and after three hours of road work, beachhead defence, hollering and hauling, the pontoons were in place and bound up, flossing the current through their rubber hides.

  Bobby, exultant, pushed away the pile of schematic paperwork and regarded his company. The NCOs were gathered on the bank, shivering in their soaked-black uniforms, laughing over something Bobby couldn’t catch. It was about their first camp in the Sudan, on the bank of the Atbara. Its lazy flow was filled with nubs of water-polished rock, innocent until they shot a plume of spray five feet into the air. Then black hulks emerged – mean pontoons of blubber and ivory, surfacing to breathe. At night the hippopotami climbed the banks and roamed about the camp, issuing loud rubbery challenges.

  The infantry demonstration began. About ninety senior officers from GHQ Paiforce had assembled to watch it, milling around their parked jeeps on a raised embankment. The Sherwood Foresters swarmed up to the bridgehead, and Vickers Valencia biplanes droned in over the far bank, dropping ‘enemy’ paratroopers to assault the bridge. The pale silk bulbs popped open in the sky. As Bobby watched, a solitary pilot flying over the water dipped down toward the crowd on the embankment. He was about to ‘buzz’ the assembled brass for fun. The officers tensed, crouched, and then leapt off the edge. The pilot had misjudged his height. His wheels smashed into the hood of a jeep. As the officers rolled and slid down to the level ground, the plane bounced off the jeep top, yanking its hood up behind it like a banner. The Valencia strained, revolved and crumped hideously, nose first, into the earth.

  It was the most awful spectacle Bobby had ever seen. He turned, aghast, to find the NCOs on their knees with laughter. When they could speak again, they assured him that they’d seen far worse. Even at the very beginning, from their camp by the Atbara, they’d had a grandstand view when Italian bombers obliterated the entire RAF fleet at the Gedaref aerodrome. At Mersa Matruh, during the scrambled retreat from Gazala,5 a two-engined bomber actually crashed into the sappers’ camp.

  That was war, sahib. All this was still nothing.

  PART THREE

  East

  13

  Enter the Hurricane

  Imphal, May 1943

  The Hurricane bounced in the air and Manek’s gut lurched, though he knew in the same instant what it was. Earlier that month he had felt, for the first time, the leaping black rage of anti-aircraft fire aimed at his machine and at blowing him into gravity’s clutches. This wasn’t it. He looked over just in time to make eye contact with his wingman, who had nudged Manek’s wing tip with his own and was still sliding out. Flying Officer Sarna passed his hand over the ‘O’ of his mouth in mock apology, then gave Manek a winking salute. Manek tapped his forehead in return, once with index and middle fingers together, and a second time with just the middle.

  Manek deserved the nudge, anyway. He had been caught napping, and on missions over northern Burma that could end your life. Sarna’s job on these operations was to ‘weave’ around Manek, covering blind spots and scanning the sky for Japanese bandits. Manek’s was to watch the ground like a hawk. Only on a good day, a flare might leap through the treetops and pinpoint their quarry. Other days, the risk of detection was too great for signals, and the pilots spent hours combing the canopy of teak, magnolia and ironwood, waiting
for a glimpse of a camp in a clearing.

  Nobody at Eastern Command knew the exact locations of the camps, so nobody knew the exact location of Manek and his weaver, apart from themselves – and that barely. They were over the thickly wooded region between Mandalay and Myitkyina, east of the Chindwin and far behind enemy lines. They were even further from their airfield at Imphal, and much further from the rest of their squadron in southern India. They were also barely yards above the blurring treetops.

  Manek’s journey out here began in September of 1942, when the Winged Arrows, still in Arakkonam, received the welcome news that they were to switch to Hawker Hurricanes, modern warplanes at last. Hurricanes had been the avenging angels in the dark nights of the Battle of Britain, when Spitfires could not fly because their exhausts glowed too visibly. These were the machines flown by ‘the Few’ to whom, in Churchill’s stirring phrase, so much was owed by so many.

  Manek was part of a small detachment sent to train in the new aircraft. The planes were a surprise gift, and he arrived in Bhopal intrigued about the occasion. There on the tarmac were the Hurricanes, noses in the air, sleek and sufficiently glamorous to make the squadron’s old Audaxes seem like coconut contraptions of an island castaway. The fuselage of the Hurricane was built on a frame of steel tubes, and once in the air it drew its undercarriage into the body to jet through the sky at nearly 300 miles an hour. Its silhouette from below was as modern as anyone could imagine, and if you looked for it, there it was (omitting the length of tail): a convincing outline of Farohar.

  This new pair of wings came with a closed cockpit and pipes streaming oxygen, but for reasons yet unknown, they engaged exclusively in risky, low-level exercises. There was no official word, but Manek gleaned that this was training for Burma, where Japanese Zeros patrolled the air, faster than the Hurricane, but unable to manoeuvre so close to the ground. So he passed the winter trimming treetops, while two of the others, Gajinder Singh and Keki Motishaw, crashed into them and died of injuries. At the end of March, the rest flew their seven Hurricanes east to Imphal in the North-Eastern Frontier. On a map in his mind, Manek traced the path of his service, from the North-West Frontier down into the peninsula and then back up to the north-east: a giant V for Victory, the size and shape of his country – and concluding on the brink of the Japanese empire.

  It had been a year since the Japanese army had swept over Burma. That year had brought victories in Africa and relief in the Middle East and established the British as the winners of the Desert War. In paddy and jungle, however, Britons and Indians had done nothing but lose. More was at stake than troop morale or even strategic advantage. The USA were in every theatre of the war now, but above all they led the fight in Asia: propping up China, leading the air operations over Burma, and driving the Japanese back up the Pacific Rim, island by bloody island. Implicitly, President Roosevelt was setting terms for the post-war world, one of which was freedom for the colonies. America was not going to snuff out Japan’s young empire simply to revive Europe’s decrepit ones.

  Churchill was equally adamant that he ‘had not become the King’s first minister in order to oversee the end of the British Empire’. He knew that Britain’s right to reclaim its Asian colonies must be proved, at least by regaining Burma, if not Malaya as well. Yet its troops on that border were a dismal sight, even a year after their rout from Burma. They lived in a hell of neglect, beneath dripping tarpaulin, eating mean and erratic rations and burning with malaria. For every single casualty from enemy action, 120 men were hospitalised with preventable disease. The Japanese leaflets continued to fall, instigating the Gurkha and Indian troops:

  Lion-hearted Indian warriors! The British Government exploited you to the core. They first made you enslave your motherland; then they took you out of India like hired mules to fight other Asiatic nations. They used you to rob other nations of their independence. The British deceived you into becoming traitors; they made the whole world hate you.

  Are you not ashamed of your plight? Would you be Britain’s tools of slavery? Or, would you be India’s warriors of freedom?

  FIGHT FOR INDIA, YOUR OWN MOTHERLAND! INQUILAB ZINDABAD!1

  Morale sank and the Army reports were a litany of Hindus deserting, of Sikhs defecting to the other side, and of Muslims harassing the indigenous Burmese in revenge for what had been done to Muslim refugees escaping Burma the year before.

  Since the nineteenth century, when it was tamed, the North-East Frontier had been India’s overgrown and neglected backyard. Beyond Assam, the tea gardens ran wild into forested hills where local levies controlled the tribes, some of whom still fought with spear and shield and collected each other’s severed heads. Suddenly those silent hills had become the front line of an industrial war. Two armies were pressed together there, though still back to back: the Japanese faced east, to where the American marines crawled into Guadalcanal, and India west, to the war in North Africa and the impending invasion of Italy.

  It was sappers who worked hardest there, clearing the hill tracks of their litter of refugee bones and laying real roads up to Imphal and down to the Chindwin. In the spring of 1943, Britain’s attempted offensive along the coast south-east of Bengal was defeated again. Amid the cliffs and streams of the Arakan peninsula, the Japanese proved immovable defenders and nimble assailants. British commanders had looked up at the tree-tangled ridges of the Mayu Range and judged them impassable, but Japanese soldiers proved otherwise, clambering over to ambush and rout the British and Indians.

  In an attempt to raise morale about jungle warfare, Allied command turned to Orde Wingate, a brigadier with a messianic vision of Japanese forces in Burma being torn apart from the inside by guerrilla infiltrators. Wingate proposed to split up the 77th Indian Infantry Brigade into Long Range Penetration Groups, which would be called the ‘Chindits’, after the Burmese guardian spirits – half-lion, half-dragon – the men would wear on their badge.

  Wingate’s flamboyant plan appealed to Churchill far more than the costly, fastidious arrangements to strengthen and nourish regular Indian formations. In February 1943, the first Chindits slipped across the Chindwin river. Taking supplies on mule and elephant back, they infiltrated deep into northern Burma where they set about ambushing enemy patrols and severing railway lines. Their real target, however, was the myth of the Imperial Japanese Army’s invincibility. Intrepid jungle attacks made for spectacular propaganda. The needle of British and Indian morale swayed forward just as the Japanese reared up and brought their full weight down on the guerrillas.

  By April, when Manek arrived in Imphal, the brigade had been reduced to scattered and hunted bands. Many units were famished, begging or bartering for rice with Chin tribals, and cooking it along with the tips of edible ferns. The wounded were left behind in friendly villages, and the rest attempted only to survive and make it back across the Chindwin to India. They could be helped, to the extent that they could be located. British and American squadrons tackled the enemy air presence, and made air drops of food and medical aid to the brigade’s survivors. It fell to No. 2 Squadron, Indian Air Force, to find them.

  Like two deranged eyeballs, Manek and his weaver pilot rolled out over the Burmese forest, glaring round at the earth, the sky, the sun, the towering cumulonimbus, at each other, and their own instruments. Equipped with long-range fuel tanks, their Hurricanes could fly two hundred miles beyond the front line, searching for Chindits who had broken north for China. By the Chinese border enemy guns spat black flak. More terrifying were the weird convectional currents exhaled by the forest itself, which made the aircraft bob and bounce, as if it hung by its wingtips from two elastic clothes lines; they were known to get strong enough to tip a plane straight into the grabbing branches. The flying was ruinous on pilots’ nerves, and halfway through each sortie, Manek’s uniform was sodden with sweat.

  Once they had located their object – the haggard faces in their hasty camps – Manek could turn back, and spy on the secret tableaux of life behind ene
my lines as he went. Curls of blue smoke rose from cooling fires; bamboo fish traps threshed hidden creeks; Japanese soldiers sat cross-legged under oak trees, re-reading letters from home. There were traces of their own work in the canopy, where it was streaked with parachute silk, or sheared by the aluminium blade of a fallen wing. When they spotted ‘targets of opportunity’, such as a camouflaged sampan on the Irrawaddy, or a line of elephants under burlap burdens, they were authorised to wheel around and strafe to their heart’s delight.

  Coming to a halt on the mushy airfield was the best part of Manek’s routine, because the camp itself was rough living. As the day cooled into dusk, rain came chopping down on the cadjan huts. It usually caught Manek bent over an empty kerosene tin, washing his own clothes. The officers’ mess was an enclosure with walls of mud and bamboo and a roof of elephant grass. Inside it, though, was a warm knot of real chairs and tables and a small dynamo that powered a single electric bulb and a radio set.2 After a day of searching with his eyes, Manek closed them and scoured the ether with his ears for songs to remind him of home and Kosh.

  The real toll here was not the discomfort, but the unvoiced apprehension of death. Manek had seen too many go already: Gajinder and Keki downed in Bhopal, their squadron leader ‘Bulbul’ Khan killed at the end of their first fortnight of operations; others disappeared – presumed, at best, captives of the Japanese. Every morning, before Manek returned to the water-pearled sky, he slipped the picture of Kosh – lovely, haughty – into his tunic pocket. He tried to make sure to carry it every time he flew, so that if he failed to return they might tell her something consoling: that he had carried her photo to the end.