Farthest Field

by Karnad, Raghu

  Even with the 161st Brigade they were far too few, and their brigadier ‘Daddy’ Warren confessed he was on tenterhooks. Orders from above kept changing. At his headquarters in Comilla, General Slim was locked in argument with both subordinates and superiors about how best to deploy the lone brigade between two towns forty-three miles apart. Dimapur was the real prize the Japanese wanted, but it was already on the plains, too deep into India. A stand at Kohima might halt the onslaught, but if Kohima fell it would doom Dimapur and the country behind it.

  Already the 1/1st Punjabis had been shunted east and back, south and back, like a piece in the hands of a nervous chess player. At Kohima, the sappers needed every precious hour remaining to dig trenches, improve local tracks and sandbag their water points. At dawn, the men swung into confident action. The mountain wind pushed between them as they worked, flipping tarps and exciting the pennants on the tents and jeeps, and it was a glad sight for the local troops, at least till dusk closed in, and with it the Japanese.

  On the second morning the order arrived: return to Dimapur.3 Cursing and spitting, the men pushed their gear back onto the lorries and started the dismal drive down, leaving Kohima to its original, now-panicking, garrison. It was raining, and Bobby knew that their trenches, left half dug and without revetments, must be crumbling and flooding. Kohima would go the same way, with as little resistance. The brigade convoy spread out and the sappers bivouacked on the rain-frothed road, only straggling into Dimapur the next day, the first of April.

  Forty-eight hours later, they were ordered back.

  Second Field’s ‘A’ Platoon, led by John Wright, left Dimapur at daybreak with the West Kents and a battery of gunners. Blaring vehicles hurtled past them on the narrow road, carrying away the sick and non-combatants. Outside Kohima, Wright watched the last of the opposing traffic, a regiment of Nepali state forces, rattle past him and down to Dimapur; they were wide-eyed with fright, officers as well as men. As Wright rounded the final bend, their debussing point came into view a half-mile ahead, crowded with the lorries of the West Kents – one of them in flames. Shells were landing amidst the vehicles: men leapt out, some already hurt and screaming as their feet hit the dirt. The Indian drivers were shouting and reversing to get out of range. The West Kents piled up in a roadside gutter, lying flat on their bellies and then rising, platoon by platoon, to sprint off in the direction of the DC’s bungalow. An inauspicious way to get into town, Wright thought. He ordered his sappers to dismount, and carrying what they could on their backs, they jogged quietly into Kohima.

  A few miles back, with the 1/1st Punjab and the 4/7th Rajputs, Bobby rode in the cab of a truck, alternately fiddling with his Webley, packing and emptying its chambers, and leaning out the window to peer ahead. The road was shrouded in the exhaust of the descending traffic. They were barely creeping forward. To Bobby’s right, the hill-cut extruded the pale roots of the forest; to his left was the windy abyss. Directly in front of him, sappers took turns vomiting over the tailgate of their lorry – sickened by the fumes, the fatigue, the fear and the swerving ascent. Bobby swayed in his seat, urging the convoy to move faster, less for the sake of Kohima than to catch up with Wright. Whatever reckoning lay before them, he had to meet it and not be too late, as he had always been before. The road would not cooperate: already a captain of the Rajput battalion had caught his drivers sabotaging their vehicles, stuffing cigarette papers into the fuel pipes so they could drop out of the column.

  After a point, Bobby was distracted from his silent urging by the numbers of men shuffling past on foot toward Dimapur; anxious groups who only met his gaze sidelong, some of them armed and seeming healthy. As they passed, some of the stragglers began to toss their rifles and ammunition belts into the brigade transport, shedding the signs that they belonged to the army. They were deserting, for reasons that became clear once a few were arrested.

  They were terrified. They moaned and pleaded utter confusion. All was disarray in Kohima, they said: the night after 161st Brigade had abandoned them, enemy soldiers snuck into the Naga village in the north and slaughtered the Gurkhas on guard there. The next day they came from the south, and began to shell the town. Already the Japanese had captured the general hospital and the only water springs, and had forced back the defensive perimeter. Men in the garrison had been put under command of officers they had never seen before – officers who then ordered them to face an enemy at suicidal odds. Voices rose in the night to counter them, calling out in Urdu and Punjabi, ‘Brother! Kill your officers before they get you killed!’ The troops answered with random fire, contagious spasms aimed at ghosts.

  Other soldiers had defected, the men said – gone over to the INA. They themselves had only fled.

  The deserters were released, to be picked up in Dimapur. The convoy pulled off the road for the night and pressed on in the morning, a silent accordion of vehicles and men on foot, rifle-ready. The low drumming of distant guns and their echoes broke suddenly into the close, shrill whistle of falling shells. The first ones hit the tree canopy. Trunks cracked and branches burst loose over the brigade. Somewhere, a gunner adjusted his range. Then a screaming came down at Bobby where he stood.

  Earth bucked. The blast rushed over him. It tumbled him, bodily, into a dark and quiet place he hadn’t seen in a long time – not since the first time he had thought he would die, when he was a spindle-limbed boy swimming off the Calicut pier, and a big wave knocked him under with its hard rubber palm. He’d thought he was drowning before the sunlight pulled him back – as it did now. Bobby rose choking, with a throat full of leaf litter instead of salt. He clung to the earth as he had once clung to the furred leg of the pier. He had never known anything could be so loud. When his ears started working again, he heard someone nearby screaming at the top of their lungs.

  Bobby got to his feet, and seizing the boy’s shirt, pulled him over onto his side. He wasn’t injured, and his scream subsided into a sobbing. Bobby looked up and staggered out across the carpet of dust and shattered bark. There was another body – down, and not moving – a sapper named Jagannath, a new recruit, concussed from the blast. He would survive. A platoon havildar, Keshwa Nand, had wounds from shrapnel but refused to be evacuated until they persuaded him that Jagannath must have an escort. Both were thrown into the last trucks heading downhill.

  At the front of the convoy, the Rajputs had been approaching the forty-two milestone when the Japanese guns found them. Fires now burned greedily down their column, and ignited the mule trucks. While the men recovered, the animals burned, voiceless and unattended in the confusion. After the flames were extinguished, half the mules had to be dragged out of the charred carriage, demented from burns. They were shot through the forehead by ashen-faced jawans, then pushed over the edge of the ravine.

  The Japanese division had seized the Dimapur road behind Wright’s platoon and the West Kents, and it was still advancing. The enemy was a flood and Kohima was an island, five hills and sinking; now the water rose around the brigade in turn. Once Brigadier Warren’s phoneline to Dimapur went dead, they knew they were encircled too. They must get off the road. The brigade struggled up through the dark, moss-dressed forest, towards a Naga hamlet called Jotsoma. It occupied a high spur of Pulebadze, with a clear and parallel view across the two-mile distance to Kohima. Here they held fast, a second island in the storm.

  The five hills of the Kohima Ridge hung like a stage curtain across their western prospect. The slopes of Pulebadze at one end and the Naga village at the other were already crowded with Japanese, and for the next two weeks, Bobby watched the forests of Kohima explode and the line of ash and fire converge on the centre of the picture. They had only two goals in Jotsoma: to endure until relieved from Dimapur, and to protect their artillery, the 24th Mountain Regiment, as it helped Kohima endure. The two guns that had entered Kohima were now at too close quarters to be any use. Instead, with rising desperation, the eight guns at Jotsoma slung their fire into that narrowing gap of pulverised
earth. All in the Jotsoma ‘box’ felt the same rage and urgency as they watched. It was hard to imagine anyone surviving in there.

  Though a very long way from Roorkee, the company OC thought the situation also called for some cantonment drill. ‘Raise-strike, break-rake,’ the naiks sang out. ‘Swing, handle low, throw.’ Digging by numbers, three cubic yards per man per day, even though the soil was mostly rock. The familiar drill kept the sappers focused and calm, even though they were deemed ‘fighting infantry’ now, under command of the Rajputs. With the West Kents inside Kohima, the brigade was a battalion short; one Rajput company soon disappeared into the trees, aiming to slip through the siege and add a last few rifles to the Kohima defence.4 Each day the sappers fanned out further along the perimeter, as the infantry sent new patrols to the intervening slopes, or onto the road itself, trading ambush for ambush. Sometimes sappers went with them, bunker-busting details, to run through smoke toward an enemy momentarily subdued, push a pole-charge into a sodden dugout and blow it into smoking timber.

  Every time they advanced, counterattacks dragged them back to defend Jotsoma. At the wire, Bobby shared a dugout with his orderly, and kept a close eye on the platoon that had lost their havildar. They were especially on edge. The first night in the box, a nervous bout produced an endless fusillade, riddling the vacant dark. In the morning the Rajput CO coolly informed Bobby that he had counted 250 wasted rounds – each of which betrayed the lay of their defence to the jitter party presumably watching to learn just that.

  Days passed under breeze-blown heat. Even with the crush of men in the box, and the enemy swirling around it, what Bobby felt constantly was not fear but loneliness. The scale of the valleys demolished any sense of a lone human’s significance. That was apart from all the lethal metal streaking through them. Out here on the green baize of the Naga Hills, the gods were rolling dice for men’s lives and limbs. Each day the brigade brought in its dead – Jat Sikhs, Hazarawals, Punjabi Mussalmans – to be burned or buried in the wilderness. At any moment, Bobby could fall to the snap of a bullet or the sighing arrival of a mortar shell.

  In the evenings, the wind towed clouds over the ridges, which scraped their bottoms of rain. When the clouds reached Jotsoma, a grey mist charged in like a ghost battalion, leaping overhead and closing up in front of them, and opening fire with needle-sharp drops, flying sideways. Through one such blindfold of rain, Bobby first heard, and then saw, the white bursts spouting from the blue shadow beyond the wire. His mind emptied clean of the thoughts it had been working on the instant before, of the words on his lips. As the roar of voices and gunshots rose around him, his life behind him went dark and only the present showed in flashing fear-vision.

  Bobby sat down hard, and for a minute, or how long he didn’t know, he only sat. Bullets cast the sound of pure and lethal speed wide overhead, and he twisted around to watch the stabbing flames multiply before him. He watched the battle, and then he could see himself watching the battle, and then for a moment he saw someone else, far away and in the future, watching him watch himself, at this moment.

  And then he was back, his will at work again and his eyes swivelling over the scene around him. Mortars fell on both sides, flashing among the darkened trees over there, silhouetting thin men and thin packs. A sapper’s face lit up as a child’s, round-eyed and square-mouthed, exhaling panic. Asanandan Singh was crawling up the trench, bellowing into sappers’ ears, and Bobby rose on legs like tubes of water to do the same.

  He had grasped the words and could say them. But the Bren guns roared to life, hosing the woods with returned fire and turning Bobby into a soundless mime, manhandling boys up against the parapet. The naiks got their Tommy guns going. A few gallants were up behind their rifles, sighting over the edge for a target in the spasming light. Taking courage from them, Bobby fell to his knees with the Webley that had tugged at his hip since Baghdad. Now it was out and seeking its shot, but no new flash issued from the grey tree shadows. The raiders disappeared, leaving Bobby with the blood banging in his ears, acid in his mouth, and a lead-heavy sidearm wavering in his hands.

  18

  The Cremation Ground

  Kohima, April 1944

  The wireless set at Jotsoma was rarely let go by the gunners, who needed to stay in constant touch with their observers inside Kohima. It wasn’t until 13 April, a week after their separation, that the OC of 2nd Field had a moment to check in with John Wright. He returned with an uplifting report, noting in the unit diary: ‘“A” Section in good heart and mainly engaged in blowing up houses containing Japs …’

  As Wright scampered zigzag back to his trench in Kohima, he considered all the details he’d omitted. He hadn’t mentioned, for instance, that he was a hero. He wasn’t dwelling on it, under the circumstances. It had happened on the one good day that anyone in Kohima had had since the siege began.

  After sneaking into the Kohima perimeter without casualties, Wright’s platoon had ‘dug trenches like billyo’, only about a foot deep to start with – enough for them to lie nuzzling the earth. Forty-eight hours later they were dug in on the central feature, Garrison Hill. The Japanese battered in on all points, but their main offensive press was from the south, where the defenders had been driven off two more hillocks. A third, the Detail Hill, was under heavy assault. At sunrise on 7 April, a company of West Kents found a large population of Japanese in their midst – hunkered down in a set of vacant trenches and buildings on Detail Hill. They turned a mortar onto the thatched huts, which burst into flame and drove some Japanese into the open, where the Kentish gunners cut them down. But nearly a hundred infiltrators still sheltered in one large building, a bakery, and were shooting out of its slit windows, tearing up the ground against a counterattack. Japanese snipers on Jail Hill, a hundred yards back, covered the approach as well. The West Kent captain Donald Easten thought it looked like a job for the sappers.

  The captain laid out the situation to Wright and Lance-Naik Abdul Majid: the bakery had a tin roof, one brick wall and three walls of bamboo. In Kohima, this amounted to rock-solid defences. The men inside were also taking cover in the bread ovens, which gave protection against grenade blasts. Could the sappers make a breach in the wall?

  Wright exchanged a few words with Majid, who sprinted away and returned with the platoon’s Bren gunners. Above his head Majid carried a light wooden door frame panelled with hessian, scrounged from the debris of the general hospital. Kneeling together, Wright and Majid pasted slabs of guncotton onto the frame, and plugged them with a detonator and a tail of black safety fuse.

  At a sign, the Bren began to flash and crackle, and the lieutenant and the lance-naik sprang up the slope, carrying the door between them like a battering ram. They reached the bakery wall and slammed the frame up against it, fumbled a light to the fuse and fled back downhill to shelter.

  Once the ammonal blew and the gauzy smoke lifted, it revealed a neat, door-shaped hole in the brick, and bodies sprawled in the shadow within. The West Kents pitched grenades through the doorway, and the Japanese came staggering into the sunlight, some of them on fire, falling to roll on the earth, others running for the safety of Jail Hill. Very few made it. The Bren gun and the infantry rifles knocked them down – like a pheasant shoot, thought Wright. Everyone got a kill, and some West Kent NCOs claimed more than ten. The figure for enemy killed that morning was put at 120, forty-four of them left strewn around the bakery itself. The sappers had saved the hill.

  To avoid further trouble, Captain Easten asked Wright to raze the other building still intact on Detail Hill, a grain godown not far away. Three sappers got to work while Wright stepped away to examine his handiwork at the bakery. They had taken only two prisoners; one a dying lieutenant, with a backpack full of maps. Bodies gouted blood onto the ground. A British private nudged a corpse’s cheek with his rifle, bent over and then laughed. The dead men’s mouths were smeared with a pale, sticky fluid: they had spent the night licking clean tins of condensed milk.

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bsp; At the godown, Wright’s demolition party ran a daisy chain of explosive charges around the sacks of flour. After clearing the vicinity, Wright shoved the detonator home. There was silence. ‘God,’ he remembered thinking, ‘the circuit’s broken, I’m going to have to go and —’: a cyclonic roar sucked his mind bare. An enraged fireball billowed up into the sky. Wright was horrified: he hadn’t counted on the flour combusting as it dispersed. The secondary detonation whirled the air above the hillside as the flour fed the flame. The pillar of burning wheat rose and rose, a finger of fire addressing every eye on the surrounding hills with a portent of what was still to come.

  Detail Hill would not hold. The garrison was too small, surrounded and outnumbered ten to one, and its defence too costly. Japanese artillery pounded the defenders day and night. The men called them the morning and evening ‘hates’. Salvos turned the town buildings to rubble, and shells landing near trenches made the earth lurch with the force of a car crash. When the artillery fell silent, it gave way to the racket of the Japanese assembling to attack. The defenders braced for the moment when the alien chatter turned into a unified scream. Then they came crawling and scrambling up the slope. Bullets stopped hundreds, but hundreds more were massed and waiting. When they reached the perimeter, the fighting was the worst that fighting could be: murder done hand to hand, face to face.

  Trench after trench on Detail Hill was overwhelmed by bayonets and body weight, until the West Kents dug in there begged their captain for permission to withdraw. On 10 April, they fell back to ‘Field Supply Hill’, where Wright’s sappers had fifty yards of perimeter to defend. Spread before them was a shamshaan, as his orderly Raham Ali called it: a cremation ground, earth belching fire, covered with cold bodies. At night the Japanese crisscrossed the hillside, dousing the corpses with petrol and, indifferent to their race, set them burning.