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Solitude was precious, because rare. Most of the time, we men of the Forgotten Army crowded together. Life was gregarious for safety reasons. Those of us on ‘S’ Relief grew to know each other very well. Despite our uncertain movements, our routine was fixed. It went in three-day cycles: first day, afternoon shift from 1 p.m. till 6; second day, morning shift from 8 a.m. till 1 p.m., and night shift from 6 p.m. till 8 the next morning; third day, off duty after 8 a.m. to sleep, probably with guard or similar duties in the afternoon or evening. This routine, or something like it, was to be mine for almost three years, in action or out of it. In Burma, night duty generally meant no sleep at all, with signals being passed all the time. Sometimes, it was possible to doze for half-an-hour, head on your arm at the table; more rarely, you could curl up under a blanket in a corner of the office for an hour.
During the Mandalay campaign, my job was to work that prehistoric line instrument, the Fullerphone. About the size of a shoe-box, and black, the Fullerphone scarcely resembled a weapon with which to defeat the ferocious Jap Army. It held none of the glamour of a wireless set. Being solely a line instrument, it had to be connected with forward units or rear units – brigade or Division HQ – which entailed, in a mobile war, the perpetual laying of cable.
The Fullerphone gave off a misanthropic buzz. But it did send and receive Morse. We worked at up to eighty letters a minute. We held the various units of the advance together. We kept everyone in touch. We were good.
When coming off the all-night shift, after perhaps twelve hours of intensive work by dim lights, we did not expect comfort. Sometimes, we had an hour in which to pack up everything, take down the signal office, and start another move. At the best of times, we could get breakfast and then sleep.
The cooks were compelled to wait for us until we came off duty. This did not please them, since sometimes, inevitably, we were late. The food – probably a fried egg and a soya link and a mug of tea – would be cooling or cold. Washing our mess tins was a particularly dismaying business. Two dixies filled with what had been hot water stood at the entrance to the mess area (we sat on the ground or on logs to eat); one dixie was for washing mess tins and ‘eating irons’, the other for a post-wash rinse. By the time we got to them, the liquid in the dixies resembled a particularly rich vomit. Water was scarce. We had to use what was there. Since we had nothing on which to dry tins and cutlery, we used our mosquito nets; by the end of the campaign, the nets had developed a ripe aroma.
Sleep after a busy night was not always easy. Our bivouacs were pitched over slit trenches, and so stood out away from shade, since no one attempts to dig slit trenches, an unrewarding occupation at the best of times, near the roots of trees. Temperatures under the canvas rose as rapidly as the sun. Inside our fragrant mosquito nets, necessary to keep off flies, the heat was suffocating. We fricasséed as we slept.
And there was a local defiler of sleep. Central Burma is the habitat of the Morse Code bird. The Morse Code bird sits in the leaves of the palm tree outside signalmen’s tents and utters random bursts of Morse Code. Dit dit-dit-dit dit-dah-dit-dit dit-dah dah dit … Endlessly, meaninglessly, while the weary brain of the operator who has been passing Morse all night perforce tries to transcribe the bird’s nonsense. Full grown men have been known to run naked, screaming, from their trenches, trying to drive the offender away. No raven of Edgar Allan Poe’s was ever more ill-omened than the Morse Code bird.
Few animals were to be seen; the birds were mainly those of the kind that earned their living by eating the dead. We passed through a copse outside Myingyang where Japanese troops lay scattered in death. Turkey-like vultures with creamy feathers ran among them, guts so swollen with food that they could scarcely hop into the lowest branches of the trees to escape us. The Japanese, British and Indians had between them made of Burma a terrible waste; ordinary life was suspended while the evil dream of war went by, first in a tide one way, then in a tide the other.
Our portion of tide moved forward about once a week. At one period, we pitched camp near Yeu. The four or five bivouacs of ‘S’ Relief were clustered near two large palms tethered to the ground by cordons of vines and creepers. Before us was open land, looking towards a canal; behind was a thicket, very noisy at night with the sound of things scuttling through the dead undergrowth. We were nervous in that camp, not knowing exactly where the enemy was. As the sun was setting on our first evening there, we heard noises in the topknots of the palms. Looking up, we saw black snakes dangling far above us. We came to realize that the snakes were the tails of some kind of big cat. The Cockneys among us became particularly nervous; war was one thing, tangling with wild life quite another.
The night was moonlit, the heartbreaking moonlight of a still Burma night, when the Moon hangs like a sacred gong in the next field but one, ancient with wisdom, gold with desire. I lay awake under my mosquito net, my rifle by my side. After a while, crashing noises sounded from the nearest tree. A shadow fell outside the bivouac. One of the cats was standing there.
Because we had camped so near to the tree for purposes of concealment, and because we had arrived in the dark the previous night, we had not dug slit trenches as usual. Our slender cover was propped up on poles in order to make it easier to enter and leave the tent. The big cat strolled in. I lay there, resting on one elbow, afraid to move. The cat came closer. It looked in at me. Only the net separated our faces. Neither of us spoke. Then it walked out the rear of the tent and was gone.
What communication could I have had with it?
That camp remains in memory my favourite. It was one of the few sites where there were Burmese nearby. They had not fled at our approach. They had harvested the crop on the field by whose perimeter we stayed and were busy threshing grain while we were there. We watched the operation with interest, talked to them, called to the women, and offered them cigarettes. Beyond the field of stubble was a grain field, the crop very much broken down, and beyond that lay a canal, with low-growing blossom trees on its banks and nine inches of water flowing in it. The whole neighbourhood was attractive, with small white pagodas here and there like silver pepper-pots set randomly on a lawn.
But it was water that was the attraction. Water we had not seen for six weeks at that time. Sweat and dust alone had kept our bodies clean. It was possible to lie in the canal and be almost totally submerged in water. All the relief went for a bathe that first day. Thereafter, they considered that nine inches of water was too tame, and so I went alone, accompanied only by Sid Feather’s rhesus monkey, Minnie. Minnie ran beside me on her long lead like a dog. In the water, she would enjoy a swim and then come and perch on my shoulder to dry herself. I lay there prone, watching a busy kingfisher which fished in the water from one of the low trees. The sun burned overhead, war was miles away. I communed with nature.
The trouble with communing with nature is that she does not commune back. One day, when returning through the flattened cereal crop from the canal, I almost stepped on a great snake, straw coloured, basking in the sun. It reared up to strike. Minnie immediately scaled the nearest tree, which happened to be me, and stood on the top of my head, screaming furiously and throwing handfuls of my hair at the snake.
Perhaps Minnie saved the day. The snake did not strike. It suddenly made off, shaking out its long coils. I watched it thrash its way through the burnished stalks. It was six or more feet long. It made its way rapidly across the field. Shaken, I walked back to camp. Minnie remained clinging to my ears until we were in safer surroundings.
The fear of snakes always haunted us. Army training in India taught us that the first thing we did on waking was lean out of bed and tip our boots upside down, in order to eject any nasties which might have lodged there during the night. It was a habit which took years to break, even in relatively scorpion-free England.
Although I never became fond of the army, I found a developing passion for the natural world, that great green system which encompassed us. It could bring my heart up from my boots. Burma is a varied country, by no means all jungle as some imagine. Its variety was beautiful and the Burmese appeared to have lived in harmony with its variety, embellishing it with their pagodas, and not overwhelming it – as India was overwhelmed – with humankind. But the Burmese had by and large vanished, taking cover like rabbits under the wing of war. We entered their buildings, moodily looking for souvenirs and poking about, rifles in hand, in the manner of invading soldiery. Some of the wooden houses were enchanting. I remember one in particular, with a verandah contained behind an ornamental rail. Of the four stilts on which it stood, only three remained. Inside, all was as it had been. Although chairs remained in place, everything listed to starboard, like a sinking ship.
In this surreal landscape, the British were surreal objects. The ethos of the Forgotten Army was to look as wild as possible. We wore trousers with puttees and boots, to keep out insects, and bush hats. Our torsoes were mahogany brown, our backsides alabaster white. It was the custom to tie bits of the coloured signal scarves dropped with our airborne rations round our hats to serve as puggarees, and to grow our hair long. ‘In the depths of the Burmese jungle lived a strange white race …’ For me, this costume remained a kind of dressing up; for the older members of the army, it had become second nature. Many of them described themselves as puggle. It was the sun, the heat, the awful food, they’d tell you.
The maddest in ‘S’ Relief was Steve Dutt. It was rumoured that his father was a general; Steve was just a private and an orderly. A sweet-natured man, he was never heard to raise his voice in conversation. He would sit about, listening to our talk, smiling, stroking his moustache. His recreation was to drill himself as if he were a platoon. On these occasions, he put on a sergeant-major’s voice.
‘Steve Dutt, Steve Dutt, harten-shun. As you were. Wait for it. Steve Dutt, harten-SHUN. Saloope arms. By the right, quick – wait for the order, Dutt. Quick – MARCH. Ep, ep, ep, right, ep. Let’s see you swing that arm. Plenty of bullshit. Keep in line.
‘Steve Dutt, Ri-ight TURN. Chin up. Look to your front, man. Harbout TURN. Ep, ep, ep, right, ep.’
And so on. True, we all on occasions drilled ourselves, but it was Steve Dutt who drilled himself continually, for a half-hour at a time, up and down in whatever clear ground there was. We would hear him at night, outside the bivouacs. No one thought anything of it.
‘By the right, number. One, two, three, four, five – six. As you were. Wake up, Dutt, you know what comes after five, don’t you? Dutt, by the right, number. One, two, three, four, five, SIX, seven, eight, nine, ten. Pick up your dressing. Squad, diss – I want to see you smartly away. Diss-MISS.’
Then he would come in. ‘Sergeant put me through it today,’ he’d say cheerfully, lighting up a cigarette.
A few of us in ‘S’ Relief had small lanterns. We would sit and chat in the entrance of someone’s bivvy after dark. We spoke our own lingo of English and fractured Urdu. The conversation would often turn to London. There were frequent arguments about which number bus ran through Cockfosters, or where it went after it left the High Street.
My mates were homesick, and would talk about ‘our mum’ doing this or that, or ‘my old woman’ doing this or that, or how they went down to see the Spurs play every Saturday. Their small home worlds were continually resurrected. Homesickness was something I never felt. The present was too vivid.
Another favourite topic was how forgotten we were in this unearthly part of the world, and how we never featured in the news. It was the rule to find nothing good about overseas. To declare that one felt passionately about Burma would have been to invite ostracism, or else the scornful, ‘Wait till you’ve got a bit of service in.’
The man I was most fond of in ‘S’ Relief, after Bert Lyons, was Ron Grade. Ron was a slow-spoken farmer from Pinner way. One of his eyes was beyond his control and would wander about in the course of conversation. Ron was the only man with a camera; perhaps it was a sign of the interest he took in the world for which the others cared little.
Ron never ran out of film. He seemed to photograph everything, dead Japs, distant landscapes, ‘S’ Relief in transit. It must have been his roving eye. The few snaps I have of those times come from Ron’s camera. He photographed us when at last we reached the Mu river. So delighted was ‘S’ Relief by the charm of running water that Sid Feather drove us to bathe every time we were off duty.
Since the spirit of Romanticism is connected with ruin and destruction, the Mu site must be one of the most romantic places to choose for a swim. Two railway bridges had once crossed the river at this point, a low wooden bridge and a grander one, metal on sturdy brick piers. Both bridges had been blown up by the British in their retreat from Mandalay. Both had been blown up with engines and rolling stock on them, so that the invading Jap should have no use of them.
The wooden bridge had disappeared – swept downstream or eaten by ants. What remained to mark the spot was a small tank engine, only half-submerged by the river in its shrunken dry season state.
The greater bridge had left greater remains. Two stout double piers had not fallen in the doubtless hasty explosions, so that between it and the eastern, Mandalay-bound shore, a totally unworkable span of line had stayed in place, slightly buckled and laden with two locomotives and a selection of carriages and trucks which straggled back to the land. Vegetation was already devouring the rearmost trucks.
The next span, the one which, in the wet season, would cover the mid-point of the Mu, had fallen down. Left balanced on its pier were a locomotive and tender. The tender stood with its tail in the air on top of the pier; the engine, to which it remained attached, hung down, buffers clear of the water by some feet. There it dangled, in that precarious position, for three years of war. The metals were too hot to touch – that we knew from the sunken tank engine, on which we could climb only after splashing it with cooling water.
We went every day to the surviving narrow, green, fast-running channel of the Mu, rushing deeply entrenched in its bed of sand; and every day the engineering ruin presided over our relaxation.
In her book, The Pleasure of Ruins, Rose Macaulay remarks, ‘The ascendancy over men’s minds of the ruins of the stupendous past, the past of history, legend and myth, at once factual and fantastic, stretching back and back into ages that can but be surmised, is half-mystical in basis. The intoxication, at once so heady and so devout, is not the romantic melancholy engendered by broken towers and mouldered stones; it is the soaring of the imagination into the high empyrean where huge episodes are tangled with myths and dreams; it is the stunning impact of world history on its amazed heirs.’
Our three-year-old ruin was also part of world history; it had already become a symbol of the end of a myth, the myth of white supremacy. We did not know it then, but never again would the British ride from Mandalay to Dimapur in their first class carriages, relegating the Wog to the third, as if the land belonged to them. The Forgotten Army might – indeed, would – drive the Jap from Burma; but it was beyond even our powers to restore the country to the British crown. The tide of history had turned and, whatever his later victories, the white man had been defeated – in many cases with remarkable ease, in Hong Kong, the N.E.I., Singapore, and Burma. The British, not the most pragmatic of races, recognized their defeat in victory, and left their former colonies and dependencies with comparative good grace, so that some measure of good will attached to their memory. Not so the Dutch and French. The latter, in particular, clinging to Indo-China – a struggle in which the Americans soon rashly involved themselves – would bring further chaos to the regions of S.E. Asia, with the battle of Dien Bien Phu breaking out not ten years after the time we bathed below the broken bridge over the Mu.
I still have a faded photograph of the bridge, with ‘S’ Relief naked below it. Ron took the photograph.
Ron was not just a keen photographer. He was a pleasant man to be with – one of those people who, by some inner quality, make us feel slightly better than we are.
Ron never showed irritation or swore like the rest of us. ‘S’ Relief benefited from his presence when the battle for the Chindwin was on.
The Japs held the east bank of the Chindwin, the British the west. The fighting continued for several nights and days. Our signal office kept moving, sometimes only half a mile at a time. The firing could clearly be heard. In that period, the section had to be split up, and the detachment I was on worked six nights out of nine, passing messages all the while. In the day we had guard duty. It was a time of maximum exhaustion, and the Morse Code birds were at their most punitive. The constant hammer of shellfire, like a maniac pounding his sleepless pillow, was rendered more unreal by the brilliant sunlight; recalling my uncle’s experiences of World War I, I had believed warfare was conducted to the accompaniment of rain, or at least the famous North European drizzle.
During this crisis period, Ron and I were sent on detachment to run a radio link on our own. This was the only time we encountered live Japs; on other occasions, we had seen them, reassuringly, trotting along with the naked point of a bayonet at their backs, prisoners.
There was no ‘front’ in the accepted sense. For forward momentum to be sustained, the tanks had to drive onward as fast as possible, giving the enemy no chance to rest or recoup. Any odd contingents of Japs left behind, separated by freak of war from the main body, could be mopped up later. So there was no way of telling when Japs might not pop up and surrender or, more likely, attack. Ron and I were dumped under three large trees with empty expanses on one side and a chaung on the other. We had some rations and water and the wireless set, and were told that a truck would collect us ‘within twenty-four hours’. Till then, the set was to be continually manned and, for our own safety, we were not to show a light, except for the one on the 22 set.
The night was moonlit and still. We had dug ourselves a trench in the sandy soil and were crouching over the set together. Ron had the headphones on and was receiving when I became certain I heard a low voice from the direction of the chaung. I took up a firing position with my rifle, and nudged Ron. Coolly, he went on scribbling down the message with his right hand, while taking up his rifle in his left.
When the message finished, he signed off and took up position beside me, still wearing headphones. We were in moonlight, dappled by the filtering branches of the trees. I felt that this made us highly visible; in fact, it was probably a help in dimming out the tiny downward-directed light on the set. We crouched together, aiming into the dark.
Bushes grew round the banks of the chaung. Night birds scuttled in the dry undergrowth. We began to think our nerves were playing us up, and that the slight breeze accounted for the supposed voices. Certainly the bushes were swaying slightly. I stared fixedly at them – to become suddenly aware that three figures stood behind their uncertain shapes, head and shoulders showing.
I squeezed the trigger and fired at once. Ron fired at the same moment.
The rifle kicked against my shoulder. The world seemed full of noise. Above that noise I heard a shrill cry. I ceased fire.
A long silence fell. Gradually the noises of the furtive birds in the undergrowth returned. Neither Ron nor I dared to get up.
Another message was offered over the wireless. Ron gave the wait signal, and then we rose and went forward together, rifles raised.
The Japs had run off, all but one. He lay face downwards in the sand of the chaung. Next morning, we examined him in a squeamish way. A bullet had gone through his chest. He was a poor thin diseased specimen.
Then I was glad it was Ron with me. We argued a bit about which one of us had shot him, but did not pursue the matter too far. Ron said laughingly, ‘You must have shot him. With my wandering eye, I’m not much of a marksman.’ Neither of us wanted full responsibility.
Not until several years later, when I was back in England, did the nightmares come. Then I woke screaming. The Japs were after me again. And again it would be moonlight. But those nightmares, like so many other things, gradually worked their way through the system and were dissipated into thin air.
Ron and I ate our frugal breakfasts a few paces away from the dead Jap. About midday, the linesmen showed up in their truck and took us back to Signal HQ. We reported the Jap, and were briefly regarded as heroes by the rest of ‘S’ Section. But there was a war to be going on with, and the incident was soon forgotten – except in the fertile beds of Ron’s and my memory.
Japanese resistance broke. The Chindwin was crossed, and bridged by long Bailey bridges. We were now on the famous Road to Mandalay, still a good cobbled road, its miles marked by two waves of war, burning villages from which Japs had just retreated, and the rusty carcasses of old cars, abandoned during the retreat towards India, three years earlier. In contrast to this thrilling chaos, the trees with which the sides of the road were planted looked suburban, painted as their trunks were with whitewash up to a height of four feet.
This was the habitat of death. The victorious Japs were victorious no longer. Their units were in retreat, their soldiers often starving and diseased. Very little mercy was shown them; their reputations were too ghastly for that; for too long, the British had looked on them as both superhuman and subhuman. ‘Though kings they were, as men they died.’
We drove among the paraphernalia of defeat: burnt-out Japanese trucks by the roadside, overturned 8-wheelers, scattered ammunition, dead bodies, vehicles and buildings burning quietly to themselves in the middle of nowhere. We drove. The infantrymen slogged it all on foot, every mile. We were now about 400 miles from the old base, Dimapur.
Even when in grimly victorious mood, the Fourteenth Army remained bitter. Newsreels were shown with the odd film show, so that we were accustomed to seeing coverage of triumphal Allied advances in Italy, France and Belgium. Entry into towns was always marked by pretty girls rushing out to present the soldiers with wine or flowers or, even better, kisses. These were the traditional rewards of liberators. The miserable ‘towns’ we liberated, sometimes little more than names on Ordnance Survey maps, were utterly deserted. No pretty girls came running to us. The fruits of victory had a bitter taste.
Since time immemorial, the prizes for soldiers after a battle have been loot, drink, and women. In that respect, ours was a remarkably chaste war.
Three Indian soldiers were caught raping a Burmese woman. She was very irate about the whole business and said, ‘Just when I was getting interested, they gave up.’ We took this story for truth at the time.
At this stage in the great upheaval of nations, the division I was to join in the future, 26 Indian Division, was in action in one of the worst areas of Burma, the dreaded Arakan, mopping up the Japs on Ramree Island. Such names as Arakan and Ramree acquired a special and dread significance.
The object of 2 Div’s immediate attention was Mandalay. The Japs were now withdrawing from round the city, where they could muster eight divisions against our five. Commander Bill Slim’s plan was to switch IV Corps, to which we belonged, from the north to the south to attack Meiktila while XXXIII Corps attacked from the north. Meiktila was a focus for road, rail, and air communications south of Mandalay; Mandalay was of relatively little strategic but of immense symbolic importance, its name known all over the world – a poor man’s inland Singapore.
Mandalay fell towards the end of March after an intense struggle. In Meiktila, even Japanese hospital patients were ordered to fight to the death. The Japs fought in strong-points, alleys, and cellars. They were all exterminated by bullet, bayonet, or flame-thrower.
When I rolled into Mandalay in our signal truck, I was all but prostrate from dysentery, though still working. The city had once been a seat of Buddhist learning, and its hill was covered with white icing pagodas, many of them damaged in the fighting. The thick walls of Fort Dufferin were also much damaged. But Slim had given orders that Mandalay should not be bombed.
It was an empty city, doomed and desolate. The smell of corruption hung over it, while birds sat on trees overhead, waiting. Stray dogs wandered about the streets, many of them suspiciously fat, but disconsolate. Perhaps they, like us, felt a sense of anti-climax.
Before we left Burma, there was one more adventure. 2 Div had completed its task with the defeat of the Japanese in the plains and the retaking of Mandalay. It was the task of other units to drive the Japs south towards Rangoon and, if possible, eliminate them entirely. We were to be flown out – an unusual operation in those days on that front.
I was one of the rear detail. Four of us manned a skeleton signal office in a small tent. After we had passed the last traffic, we closed down for good. There was now no one to answer our signals.
The radio and line apparatus we loaded into a Dodge truck, which set off into the wilderness. We returned to pick up our kit. We had camped under a large tree with generously spreading branches. For the flight back to a base in Bengal, we were allowed only 40 lbs. of personal kit; the rest had to be dumped – pegdoed, in our corruption of Urdu. A lot of pegdoing went on in India and Burma. So we got our packs on our backs and our kitbags on our shoulders with our bivouacs and mosquito nets, and started to walk to the airfield. Behind us, a wind whipped up dust, fluttering the pages of the books, so lovingly accumulated, which I had been forced to pegdo. Stapledon’s Last and First Men was left behind. The wind grew stronger, whipping about our legs, reminding us that the monsoons were on the way to revivify the torn land. Out of their hiding places among tossing bushes came dark figures, rushing forward and seizing the abandoned loot. Partridge raised his rifle, half in fun. Before the tree was out of sight, the Burmese had borne all our pegdoed possessions away.
The airstrip was marked only by a small windsock, rippling in the new winds. The strip consisted of a runway of knee-high grass perhaps two hundred yards wide and a mile or more long. Perhaps it had once been designed as a fire-break. Nothing was to be seen but grass and trees, stretching across the plain. No one else was about, not a shack, not a truck, no personnel in sight. We had water and rations but no means of communication with the world.
The four of us settled in the shade of the trees and waited, smoking, chatting. Idle chat. I had found no way of communicating my inward feelings to my friends, sensing that anything I said on an emotional level would be laughed at. Nor did I impart my feelings to my parents; my few letters home were miracles of superficiality. Now, under the trees, I found myself alone in having some regrets at leaving Burma. With a great victory behind us and the unknown ahead, here was surely an hour of communing. We continued to talk in trivialities, all perhaps afraid to reveal our true selves.
One thing we vowed, sprawling in the shade, was that when we got back to the Blight we would tell everyone what we had been through. We would – as the expression had it – ‘grip them ragged’. The Ancient Mariner would have nothing on us. It can be seen that this process of telling all would have had great therapeutic value. I was with three men who were about to be sent home after long service abroad; for myself, I had still a lot of time to serve out. So I never knew if the requisite grips were applied. But for me, returning to Blighty when the war had been over some while, and put out of mind, I found that no one wished to hear. The jungle experience was too alien.
Why did no novelists or poets spring up to celebrate the experience of Burma from the common soldier’s point of view? It was an undemocratic war. Only officers spoke about it later – heroes like Bernard Fergusson and ‘Mad’ Mike Calvert, and of course Slim’s own fine book on the campaigns, Defeat into Victory. They all stuck to autobiography or fact. Hardly a poet spoke up. There was Alun Lewis, but he shot himself before going into action.
One of Lewis’s poems tells how:
But leisurely my fellow soldiers stroll among the trees.
The cheapest dance-song utters all they feel.
It’s a lie, an officer’s snotty lie; Lewis did not know what he was talking about. Delightful irony reposed in singing those ‘dance-songs’. Their superficiality, like our chatter, served to cover momentous upheavals of feeling. ‘Paper Doll’ and ‘Moonlight Cocktail’ had marvellous surreal effect in our jungle hideouts.
We woke the next morning under the great trees, eating a hunk of bread and marmalade for breakfast without washing. The place was as waterless as a desert – and as deserted. No sign of our plane, and the monsoon-bearing wind blew stronger. The smell of smoke came to us.
Hour succeeded hour. We strolled about in the sun, hats off – it was our pride that we never got sunstroke or wore topis, as an earlier generation of regular soldiers had done. The smoke could be seen. It thickened until gradually it shrouded the blue sky. A forest fire was approaching. We could hear its roar and crackle. It was as if a stampede of animals was coming our way.
What were we to do? There was no escaping from our position. The fire was approaching at brisk walking pace, burning up the trees in huge brands on either side of the airstrip, triumphant and furious. Rapidly it came, and still no rescuing plane.
We moved into the centre of the grass strip. Jungle blouses went on, to protect our skins from flying sparks. The sky was black, the whole forest on either side blazing red. We crouched to the ground. The heat seemed to swell about us.
The fires on either side moved parallel with each other like friendly rival expresses. Linking them across the open space ran a wave of flame, consuming the grass, turning what was green black, leaving behind it cindered ground. It dashed towards us like a rip tide.
Standing, we heaved our kit on to our backs. As the wave reached us, we jumped. That is how you evade a forest fire. You jump over it.
‘So much for fucking Burma,’ said Bert Lyons.
There we stood, in a land of black ash. The great fire swept majestically on, about its own purposes, leaving smouldering destruction on either flank. We looked at each other and laughed. Then we lit up cigarettes.
‘Where’s that bloody plane?’ we asked.
We spent another night out in the open, on the burnt earth. Next morning, an aged Dakota with the American star on its wings landed on the black airstrip; we climbed readily enough into its hold, and soon were flying westward, over the Chin Hills towards India and a quieter life.
History is what happens to contemporary events when they have receded enough for us to draw a moral from them. What is the moral of the Burma campaign?
That change is all. Three years after the victory of the Forgotten Army, Burma was granted independence. Although the Japanese had packed their bags and left, Britain was unable to regain the confidence of the Burmese people, who had twice seen their fair country reduced to a battlefield – Burma, that most religious of countries. Nor could the brave Indian Army be relied on to hold down Burma by force. India was being returned to the Indians. That was the British will: while behind that will was American pressure; righteous to a fault about British and Dutch Far East possessions, the United States nevertheless let itself be led into another war that has been seen since to have caused more damage and destruction in Vietnam, Cambodia, and surrounding regions than even the Japanese dreamed of.
Nineteen thousand men of British and Commonwealth origin – the greatest number being Indian other ranks – died in the Irrawaddy crossings by Mandalay and Meiktila. In the earlier battle of Kohima, over two thousand men of British 2 Div, for which I was a pale-skinned reinforcement, died. All told, in Burma, there were seventy-one thousand British and Commonwealth casualties. Japanese casualties have been numbered at 185,000.
A memorial was erected to the British dead at Kohima. On the memorial is carved a free translation of a Greek epitaph, which reads:
When you go home
Tell them of us and say
For your tomorrow
We gave our today.
Sadly, it was no one’s tomorrow, despite the brave words. The British got out. The Burmese then sank under a repressive regime. Various kinds of struggle still divide it. Visitors from outside are scarcely welcome.
The bamboo grows beside the rivers where once we so bravely, so fruitlessly, drove from Milestone 81, through Kohima and Imphal, down the Tiddim Road, across Chindwin and Irrawaddy, to a ruined Mandalay. A lot of tomorrows lie buried along the route.
4
Clement sat over his brother’s old exercise book for a while, engaged in unconstructive musings. Then, sighing, he made a few phone calls. As he was setting the phone down, the intercom buzzed. It was Michelin.
‘Your supper’s all ready, Clem. And I’m just off out.’
‘Got another party?’
