Farthest Field

by Karnad, Raghu

  Bobby’s faith in British order was recoiling in his face. In Bengal, the oldest dominion of British India, the devastation seemed no different from what they heard of the territories now ruled by the Japanese. Bobby felt himself being pulled by a chilly undertow away from the West-facing war and its modern means, its plain purposes and moral clarity, its flat and sunlit field, into a deadly murk in the East in which very little was clear.

  The confusion was telling on the men, as well. They were garrulous with fatigue, and were agitating each other with dismal thoughts. The new recruits included men from the United Provinces and Bihar, who were distraught at the idea of the famine reaching their villages. As it was, food was costly. Then they were called up just before the planting. Softer talk concerned Subhas Chandra Bose. On 15 August, over Radio Syonon, he had offered 100,000 tons of rice to save Bengal. The British sarkar had declined to even acknowledge it. Bose was a traitor, but at least it could be said of him that he thought Indians were good for more than dying.

  In the spring of that year, in Königsbrück, Bose had bid farewell to his two battalions of Legion Freies Indien, both now regular formations in the Wehrmacht. He departed Germany and reappeared in Japanese-held Singapore, still waving the banner of a Free Indian Army.8 ‘To lean on the Japanese to get rid of British power,’ Gandhi had written the previous year, was ‘a remedy worse than the disease’.9 But Bose was ready to take steps that the lily-livered Congress would not contemplate. After Stalingrad and El Alamein, he realised that no liberating army would ever reach India from the West. Instead he saw his chance, and his country’s, on the jungled frontier with Burma.

  In Singapore, he took command of the idle Indian renegades who called themselves the ‘Indian National Army’. To Bobby and the other officers, they were the ‘Indian Traitor Army’, but by official order they were referred to as ‘JIFs’ – Japanese-Inspired Fifth Columnists. Though it had not yet been in battle, the INA was putting on a good show. It was the force Bose needed and he was the leader, the Netaji, it had been waiting for. For recruits, it drew from the deep pools of Indians languishing since the flight of the British – first the prisoners of war, then the Tamil plantation workers, who feared being press-ganged into work on the Thai-Burmese Railroad. Some troops joined from a captured garrison on the Andaman Islands. Eventually Bose would have 40,000 troops, among them a brigade of women called the Rani Lakshmibai Brigade, to honour a heroine of the uprising of 1857. It was led by another Lakshmi: Lakshmi Swaminathan from Madras, who had been made a captain. If Bobby met her now, he might be expected to salute her – were it not for the fact that he would have to shoot her.

  Unlike his predecessor, a captain self-promoted to general, Bose took no rank. Yet he was plainly the most esteemed Indian officer anywhere in the world. He began to make appearances only in uniform, and he crisscrossed the Japanese imperium, leaving a trail of adulation among the Indians, the most vulnerable of the population in every place. On the radio he was hypnotic, but his live rallies drew tens of thousands, crowds that surged forward to fling jewellery at his feet to fund his crusade.

  On 21 October, Bose announced the formation of the Arzi-Hukumat-e-Azad Hind, the Provisional Government of Free India.10 The Japanese ceded the Andaman and Nicobar Islands to its symbolic rule, and Bose visited the islands briefly to raise the tricolour flag of the INA, not noticing the terror in which the real administration held the islands’ population. If Azad Hind could be taken seriously, then Kobad’s Maplah convicts – exiled here since the ’20s – had the fruit of their rebellion, slow-ripening and probably bitter. They had become the first free Indians.

  Azad Hind declared war on Britain, and Bose explained, ‘When I say war I mean WAR – war to the finish, a war that can only end in the freedom of India.’ He had led his crowds in shouting ‘Dilli Chalo!’ – Onward to Delhi!, and now they were coming, marching with the enemy. In November their first units moved west to the front, and 2nd Field Company moved east to meet them.

  16

  The Jungle Book

  Arakan, December 1943–March 1944

  At last Bobby was building his road. It was not, in its design or location, anything he might have foreseen; not a concrete highway cut through shoulders of sheer rock, or a track of diamond-mesh netting pegged over desert sand. Instead it was a light sheet of bitumen sprayed onto gravel, providing a casual passage across a bright green pastoral that was almost the Malabar.

  The broad tar cambered to the grassy edge of the bund, then dropped into paddy pits, which were clay-cracked or held warm, shallow pools in this dry season. Bamboo thickets grew in narrow footholds, and plantain leaves twitched like elephants’ ears in the breeze. On the far side of the paddy, scrubby forest massed and scattered. Burmese villagers crossed the fields wearing longyis, knotting and tucking in abstracted motions, just as the men did at home.

  This picturesque plain was only a narrow belt, four miles wide, between the Bay of Bengal and the sudden, sheer rise of the Mayu hills. With the equally narrow plain on the far side of the hills, it formed the Arakan peninsula, the last fingernail of coastal Burma over which the British still asserted control. Smaller hills herring-boned off the central range, and tidal creeks, or chaungs, whiskered the coastal strip. Bobby’s road skipped and darted around them, connecting the base at Chittagong to the forward operations of the Allied Fourteenth Army, which now included the 5th Indian Division.

  The 5th had been reorganised as a ‘Combined Animal and Motorised Transport’ division, and they were accompanied by new comrades: tough and ill-tempered, champing like betel-chewers. Mules would be integral to their mobility in Burma. They were becoming so essential at the front line that the army had experimented with dropping mules by self-deployed parachute (alas for the mules involved). Any slope that an armed soldier could climb, a laden mule could too, leaving trucks and jeeps to catch up as they could. On operations, a jawan carried his rifle, his grenade and provisions for a day, but he watched anxiously over his shoulder for the mule that brought his blanket, bandages and sugar, stove and tea. The men of the division became devoted to them at once. They had been trained in their handling, loading and care, and when the time came, they kneeled on the mules’ anaesthetised heads while doctors did bloody surgery to take out the animals’ vocal chords. Debrayed and unable to speak their protest, the mules were ready for battle.

  Day and night, a pastoral theatre played out on the Arakan Road. Motor vehicles hurried by, blaring horns, and exited. An occasional elephant ambled through, then returned the stage to its main actors, the mules. They came in trains of plodding hooves and nodding muzzles, flanks buried under heaped stores or pieces of broken-down artillery. It was the dry season and their feet raised the dust on the road, and villagers had to be hired to keep it tamped down. Fine-built men and women in bright longyis spread out beneath the bund, using cigarette tins to fling water out of the paddy puddles onto the tarmac. Each sapper platoon worked about twelve miles of road, and for much of the day, Bobby had his orderly drive him back and forth, watching the leaping walls of spritz as they caught rainbows and distressed the clouds of yellow butterflies in the air. After dark, clouds of fireflies took their place, and the sappers rolled tar by the light of blazing petrol-tin lamps.1

  Up the road, John Wright found his villagers less than motivated, and on a morning when his jeep refused to start, he fancied he could already see the rising dust cloud, an invitation to an aerial strafing. He puzzled over how to find some transport, and it struck him that the 2nd Derajat Mountain Battery still kept horses, and stabled their remounts somewhere nearby. It was his lucky day after all. The gunner commander was obliging, and they led out a superb charger bearing full army kit: a rolled-up blanket behind the saddle, spare shoes jangling at the cantle, and a real cavalry sabre hanging in its sheath. Trotting down the road, Wright looked forward to busting the Burmese labour corps from this high position on his new mount.

  It occurred to him, though, that if they saw
him coming his truant wards might hop up and pretend to have been working all along. Suddenly inspired, he turned his steed off the road, across the dry fields, and into the trees on the far side. Crossing over the forested hillock, he could cut a shorter route to his road section. Shortly he could observe, from behind a screen of foliage, the row of villagers seated on their haunches and chatting in the bund’s shade.

  Wright sank his heels into the horse and burst, triumphant, from the foliage. The Burmese had not noticed. His spirit rose, and he spurred the horse again till they were cantering over the clay. The Burmese paid no attention. Now man and mount were galloping at their victims, and Wright reached for the hilt of the sabre and drew it in a motion, and then he was swirling it above his head, hollering like a Hussar, and at last the Burmese were rising nervously to their feet.

  His cry tapered off quite suddenly, and his sword hand froze as he noticed the pennanted jeep that had come around the corner while he charged over the field. Wright paused by the side of the road to squirm the sabre into its sheath, then trotted over to the jeep.

  Beside an impassive driver was Brigadier Mansergh, chief of regimental artillery. ‘Good morning, lieutenant,’ the brigadier said. ‘And is this the accepted practice in the Royal Corps of Engineers for road labour inspection?’

  The driver smiled behind his glove, but the brigadier kept a straight face until his jeep was back in motion. By the time John Wright dismounted and turned, arcs of spray were rising all down the Arakan Road.

  The company tended their road till the end of the year, when they reached Zenganbyin and a military policeman’s sign with a crude sketch beneath it. ‘STOP,’ said the sign. ‘If you drive your vehicle past this point, you probably won’t come back.’ They camped there while the brigade assembled, on the first of a spur of hillocks where their good road ended and the war began.

  The retreat of 1942, over a thousand miles, had already turned Burma into Britain’s largest land campaign in the world war. It was on its way to becoming the longest lasting. After the failure of the first Arakan campaign, in early 1943, and the passing of the monsoon that year, the pressure had resumed on the Fourteenth Army to provide a visible victory for the Empire, or at least to draw off more enemy divisions from the fighting in China and the Pacific Islands. Slim had planned an amphibious assault down the coast, but the mysterious recall of all landing craft to Europe had scuttled that proposal, and left his options unchanged.

  In the new year, then, his army would reprise the strategy of 1943: an offensive down the Arakan peninsula, aided by a Chinese advance in northern Burma and a second Chindit infiltration in the centre. For 161st Indian Infantry Brigade the specified objective was a series of railway tunnels that traversed the Mayu Range, connecting the port town of Maungdaw to the inland river town of Buthidaung. The larger aim was as quixotic as ever: Tokyo was never going to fall to an offensive that began in Chittagong. Slim’s modest campaign had only the modest hope, he wrote, of being ‘the first step to building a tradition of success’2 against the Japanese.

  At Zenganbyin, from their mild elevation, Bobby could see a fallen pillar of floating dust, his road leading back north to Cox’s Bazaar and Chittagong. In the west, the winter sun lit up a filament of the Naf estuary where it met the sea at Maungdaw. To the south, it glimmered on the winding Hathipauk Chaung, beyond which the ground rose into crisscrossing chains of hillocks. What mattered was what lay there: on each hump, concealed by the coarse undergrowth, were Japanese trenches, wire and machine guns. The highest hilltop was Razabil, an earthen fortress fenced in with spiked bamboo, and in its shadow, the tunnels crossing the mountain.

  More than a year after his commission, Bobby had found the war. It hadn’t reached him by surprise, but seeped into his life as rainwater fills a trench, inch by inch, less exhilarating and more chilling with each drop. Now he had to wade out into it. The first offensive was set for the night of 30 December, according to the three clocks of moon, tide and paperwork. Earlier in the day, the 4th Battalion, Queen’s Own Royal West Kents and the 1/1st Punjab had marched off in opposite directions, each with a ‘bunker-busting’ sapper detachment. They would circle behind the first chain of hillocks to cut off Japanese retreat or reinforcement. At dawn, the 4/7th Rajputs would put in a frontal charge and sweep through, destroying the enemy from the Hathipauk Chaung to the cut-off positions in the rear. Their hundred mules would follow at noon.

  The operation was codenamed ‘Jericho’, after the biblical city vanquished by the Israelites, whose voices and trumpets were enough to flatten its walls. The divisional commander seemed confident of an equally deft victory: ‘There will be little resistance to a surprise attack on my objective, except possibly by isolated posts,’ he wrote to the brigade. It would be over in a single day.

  The moon set. The tide fell. Down below, the sappers had raised a timber bridge over the chaung, and the Rajputs streamed over it and disappeared in the dark. Their war cry was audible at first light, answered by a red flare from the nearest hilltop, and then the chatter of machine guns like an insect swarm rising with the sun.

  By nine o’clock the battle was fully joined. Bobby retired from the banks of the chaung to a vehicle park further back and up, where the cooks were doling out a morning langar. There was a partial view of the facing ridge, and everyone looked south, watching for the yellow triangular pennant that would signal the first objective being taken. The miniature figures of the Rajputs were periodically visible as they moved through the cover of Frate’s rhododendron, or mustered a charge through black puffs of grenade smoke. If they were Hindus, Bobby knew, they would be crying out, ‘Jai Bajrang Bali!’, or if Muslims, ‘Nara-i-Haidri Ya Ali!’ But under the hellish din of machine guns and mortars, which rolled directly over him here, he heard only a high, thin note like children singing. It seemed the Rajputs’ battle cries had not the power of the Israelites’. The attack was not going as planned. Only once he saw a few of them reach the top trench, where other small figures rose to meet them with bayonets.

  It was his first glimpse of the enemy, dug into burrows on an anonymous knoll in the Arakan. Their war was a crusade, Bobby thought ruefully; a duty to an emperor who was no less than a deity, and to an imperial destiny they held equally sacred. They fought under these orders from their army commander, General Mutaguchi: ‘If your hands are broken, fight with your feet. If your hands and feet are broken, fight with your teeth. If there is not breath left in your body, fight with your ghost.’ Bobby wished his own army fought for more than wage and pension – or that he had any conviction about why he was there himself.

  By afternoon the chance was lost, the leading platoon virtually destroyed. But each day a new Rajput attack was thrown at some innocent-looking rise. Each time, the defenders shot a flare and vanished deep in their trenches, while surrounding positions brought down maximum fire on their own men and the exposed Rajputs. Every evening the dead and the wounded came back dangling in their mule saddles, and a gridlock of shouting stretcher-bearers built up at the chaung crossing.

  The new year came, bringing rain, which washed the bloodied hillface in sleets of chilly water. The creek banks were churned to froth by hooves and tyres, and Bobby and the sappers laboured to ramp down the sand, lay new matting, and keep in place the guide ropes and pickets that kept the grisly traffic going. Snipers perched in trees drove them from the banks, but they returned to work under fire. On the sixth day, the Rajputs and the West Kents stormed a final feature, and found it had been abandoned during the previous night’s rain. A pencilled note in the Rajputs’ diary shares the secret of their eventual victory: ‘Strangulation, starving, attrition.’

  The brigade pushed on south over the hills toward Razabil, now with tanks alongside, firing solid steel shot over the heads of the infantry. Howitzers were dragged up the slopes and sent shells arcing from hill to hill, lifting geysers of shredded vegetation, soil and life. Vultee Vengeance bombers fell like spear thrusts from the sky, making eighty
-degree dives and only twisting out instants before their payloads scalped the hills. Further north, one of these bombers was being flown by Manek’s little brother Edul, a pilot with No. 7 Squadron IAF, wreaking vengeance in more than name. Sometimes the Allied echelons bombed their own side. By the end of the month, the Rajputs alone had 247 dead and wounded, and still they struggled to prise the deep-lodged enemy out of the soft ground.

  As the Razabil assault ground on, the war broke the dykes of the front line and poured in all around them. The 5th Division, descending the western coastal strip, was mirrored across the Mayu by the 7th Indian Division, which advanced on the eastern end of the tunnels – and into a trap. In February, an enemy division made a cunning sweep around them, encircling the 7th, and cutting them off from the steep passes through which they were supplied.

  Its infantry, dispersed in readiness for an attack, dug into their positions and refused to fall back. They inadvertently left the forward headquarters at Sinzweya – the divisional stores, signals centre, medical stations, all gathered in a natural amphitheatre in the eastern foothills – barely defended. Shells began crashing into the ‘Admin Box’, spreading fire in the vehicle park and letting loose a chain explosion in the ammunition dump. Cooks, clerks and signalmen, muleteers and quartermasters were handed rifles, and charged with helping to hold off thousands of Japanese.