Quartered Safe Out Here

I’m sure that out of my total active service I spent only an infinitesimal time operating in the Burmese night, but in retrospect it seems longer.

The defensive scheme for 17th Div entailed incessant patrolling, both by night and day. You might think that in our situation, cut off by superior numbers, the obvious thing would have been to sit tight and let Jap come at us; having seen my share of Westerns I envisaged waves of them charging the wire while we blazed away at them. Wiser heads than mine knew that it was vital to break up his attacks before they could even be launched, hence the expeditions, sometimes in battalion strength, to fall on his concentration points, the patrols, of varying size, to spy out his movements, and the observation posts, outside the perimeter, to give warning of night attacks. And on the wire itself, the night stag, two guards per section dusk to dawn, unless an alarm necessitated a 50 or 100 per cent stand-to (half or all of the section awake and in their rifle pits).

A stag was a two-hour watch of two men, armed with rifles and bandoliers, normally standing in one pit, but at Meiktila there was an old bunker half-under the wire, and it was usual to lie on the inner slope of this, looking out across the empty ground to the scrub and wood. I don’t remember it ever being pitch black; there always seemed to be half-light, and sometimes the moon turning the scene to silver and casting shadows across the landscape. It was eerie, but placid enough; you got used to the night-sounds and to the odd tricks that your eyesight can play you, causing bushes to stir when they’re perfectly still, or detecting movement from the corner of your eye which isn’t there when you look at it directly. You learned not to concentrate your thoughts, too, for that can take you halfway to sleep – not that this was a problem at Meiktila, where we got adequate rest. Later on it was to be different; when you’re weary to the point of utter exhaustion, keeping awake on stag can be a real ordeal, for you mustn’t move too much or the enemy out yonder will have you marked; you find yourself swaying and realise you were half away, and snap out of it, and a few seconds later your legs buckle and you collapse in your pit – how my knee-caps held out in Southern Burma I’ll never know. You must get up at once, pinch yourself hard, and stare for all you’re worth, or you’ll start to sway again. And so on.

The chief irritant on stag was the “up-you bird” (I give the bowdlerised form of the name) familiar to all who have soldiered in the Far East. In fact, it is a large lizard, said to have a vicious bite, which inhabits drains in the civilised areas; where it lived in the Dry Belt, God knows. It starts up at night and drives strong men mad, for its call is a harsh whirring sound culminating in a melodious “Up you! Up you! Up you!” Half an hour of this, and you become convinced that there is a human being out there, chanting obscenely at you; it is a rare night when some blanket-wrapped form doesn’t come bolt upright with a raging retort of “And up you, too!”

Apart from listening for the enemy, you had to keep an eye and ear open for night patrols returning; it’s a good patrol that can arrive back exactly at its starting-point, and occasionally dark forms would emerge unexpectedly from the gloom, hissing the password. There was a gap in the wire opposite the platoon on our left, manned by a picquet with a Bren, and that was where they would re-enter.

There was a formula for the password, which always consisted of a seven-letter word – “Victory”, for example. In theory, the patrol, when challenged, would identify itself, the sentry would whisper “Victory”, and the patrol would prove its bona fides by responding with whichever letter of “Victory” corresponded with the day of the week, using the Morse alphabet. Thus, if it was Sunday, the correct reply was the first letter of “Victory”, which is “Victor”, if Monday, Ink, if Tuesday, Charlie, and so on. Who thought this up I don’t know, but if he could have heard Grandarse, who seldom knew what day it was at the best of times, and couldn’t spell anything longer than “pint”, trying to persuade Forster that he was not a Japanese White Tiger, he would have thought of something less sophisticated. You may imagine the exchange:

Grandarse (hoarsely from the dark): Is that thoo, marra? It’s me!

Forster (being awkward): Victory.

Grandarse: Ye w’at? Aw, shit, aye … Victory. Haud on, noo. (to a fellow-patroller) ’Ey, Wattie, w’at day is’t? Thoorsdeh – awreddy? Girraway! Aye, weel, let’s see … Moondeh, Choosdeh, Wensdeh, Thoorsdeh – v … i … c … aye, t, that’ll be reet! Tock! ’Ey, thoo on stag, Ah’m sayin’ Tock! Are ye theer?

Forster (knowing it was Thursday when the patrol left, but that midnight has passed): Booger off, yer a fifth columnist!

Grandarse: Bloody ’ell! Whee th’ell’s that? Thoo, Forster, ye git! W’at ye playin’ at? It’s me, sayin’ Tock!

Forster (relenting): It’s Friday, ye daft sod!

Grandarse: Ah, the hell! W’at is’t, then? Orange?

Forster: Awreet, bollock-brain. Coom in if yer feet’s clean.

Fortunately this happened on a night exercise at Ranchi, not in the field, where the system worked well enough, although I sometimes wondered what would happen if a Gurkha or Baluch patrol hit the wire when Grandarse was on guard.

My own stags were marred by only one alarm. It was after a two-day duffy to the south, when we had bumped Jap in numbers, and there had been enemy activity elsewhere on the perimeter for some days previously, so I was more on edge than usual. It was the cold watch, four to six, and I was shivering as I lay alone* on the bunker-side, scanning the shadowy open ground and envying the section in their blankets ten yards to my rear. Once or twice I’d thought I’d heard something apart from the usual night-sounds; there was a little wind playing across the earth, rustling the fronds in the distant wood, just the thing to mask stealthy movement. I peered across the bunker’s top, wishing there was a moon; the sky hadn’t begun to lighten, and ten yards away the landscape was just a blur; a Jap fighting patrol could get to within a stone’s throw undetected, if they were quiet enough … was there something out there, beyond the shadows, or was it just my imagination? The dark seemed thicker in that direction … and then I froze at a sudden faint noise, as though a boot had been dragged across the ground, the sound cut off almost as soon as it had started.

There was a dull thumping, too – but that was me, pressed against the bunker, with my heart moving into fourth. I eased my safety-catch forward and laid a sweating finger along the trigger guard. There had been a sound … there it was again … a soft, irregular scrape, as though someone were moving an inch at a time. It was closer now, not more than a couple of yards away … now it had stopped, to be replaced by something that brought the hairs upright on my skull – the sound of breathing. That put it beyond doubt: someone – and it could only be a Jap – was in the little area of dead ground which I couldn’t see beyond the bunker.

At least it wasn’t hard to do the right thing – lie dead still, and with extreme care ease my rifle forward just a little, finger on the trigger, eyes fixed on the dark curve of the bunker top … but, dammit, that was useless! If he wanted to get inside the perimeter, and why the hell else should he have crawled so close? – he’d come round one side of the bunker … or the other. Which way? I must ease myself down from the bunker-side, and back until I could cover either side – but movement meant noise … should I shout the alarm? I hadn’t seen anything … but he was there, and if I yelled, the section would be on their feet, and he’d get somebody for certain … but if I lay doggo, waiting for him to move – and without warning a hideous white face shot into view over the bunker top, glared into mine from not a yard away, and vanished!

For an instant I was paralysed, thank God, or I’d have fired from pure reflex action – and that would have been deplorable, and threepence wasted. For before I could move, let alone shout, a large pale-coloured pi-dog trotted out from beyond the bunker, snuffled at the wire apron, took a discontented look at me, and mooched off into the gloom. The false alarm can never be as bad as the real thing, but it can set the adrenalin pumping just as fast. Watching the brute disappear I reflected that to the fatal perils of enemy rifles, bayonets, artillery, grenades, mortars, punjis, malaria, dysentery, and poisoned wells, I would have to add another – heart failure.*

This was an ever-present risk on that other form of stag, the o.p., or observation post, which consisted of two men well outside the wire, lying up in any convenient concealment with a Verey pistol. The procedure was simple: you lay doggo from some time after dusk until dawn to give early warning of any enemy fighting patrol advancing to the perimeter, which was done by letting them go past and then firing the Verey. After which it was advisable to leave the o.p. at speed, since the firing of the flare was a certain giveaway of your position; what happened next depended on the circumstances, as Sergeant Hutton explained:

“Git back in the perimeter if ye can, but if Jap’s at the wire keep clear, or ye’ll git thassel shot be soom booger or other. If ye lie off somewheres ye might git a Jap on ’is way yam, but don’t git thassel killed. Yer oot theer to watch; that’s yer furst job. Dee w’at Nick does an’ ye’ll not be far wrang.”

After which Nixon and I slipped out in the dark and made our way cautiously to a fold in the ground about a hundred yards out which Hutton had marked the previous day. The grove which lay on the section’s right front was now behind us, invisible until the moon came up, and even then only a vague blur, for it was a murky night. We lay in silence, listening to the “up-you” birds giving their midnight chorus, shifting only a little now and then to avoid cramp; my chief worry, since we were lying prone, was that I would drop off to sleep, so I kept a piece of stick upright beneath my chin so that it would prick me if I nodded. I needn’t have troubled; knowing what we were there for, and that there was an outside chance that Jap would turn up, was quite enough to keep me wide awake.

I have said that sitting tight in the dark was my unfavourite occupation, and that is partly because, aside from straining your eyes into blackness and listening, there is nothing to do but think. No doubt it was our exposed position and my morbid imagination that turned my mind to the possibility of being taken prisoner, on which we had been lectured by a lean and rather wild-looking Highland officer at Ranchi. He spoke with authority, having escaped from the Japs himself, and discussed his subject with an enthusiasm that prompted Forster to observe, sotto voce, that this ’un was jungle-happy. I doubted it; he talked too much sense, with a flippancy deliberately calculated not to create alarm and despondency. Having shown us escape kit (with which we, at least, were never issued) like tiny flexible files sewn into seams of clothing, and the magnetic fly-button which, detached and balanced on a point, indicated north (“An’ Ah can joost see mesel’, wid Japanni wallahs efter us, pullin’ me bloody fly-buttons off an’ balancin’ them on me knob,” muttered Grandarse), he went on to remind us of survival and path-finding techniques, but what stayed in the mind was his advice on dealing with captors:

“You can expect ’em to be pretty rough. They’re evil little sods, and couldn’t care less about the Geneva Convention, so there’s a chance they’ll beat you up – not just for information, but for spite. You know the drill: give ’em rank, name, and number, nothing more. Don’t lie to them. Keep your head up and look ’em in the eye. If it’s an officer or someone who speaks English, tell ’em they’re losing face by ill-treating a prisoner; it’s been known to work. But first and foremost – escape! Don’t be daft about it; wait for an even chance, and go! And keep going! You know how to look after yourselves. Don’t trust the Burmese unless you must; they’re mostly friendly, but they’re scared stiff of Jap, so watch it.” The last thing he’d said was: “Whether you escape or not, don’t give up. Remember they’re a shower of sub-human apes, and you’re better men than they’ll ever be.”

He was describing, absolutely accurately, an enemy well outside civilisation, but nothing we hadn’t know since the fall of Hong Kong and Singapore. Like everyone else, I suppose, I wondered how I would be if they got hold of me, which isn’t a happy thought in an o.p. at four in the morning … and Nick stirred beside me and asked in a whisper what time it was.

I had only to glance at the luminous dial of my watch to send my thoughts off at another tangent: breakfast at home, with my parents presenting the watch on my eighteenth birthday: there was the old, stiffly-laundered tablecloth bearing in its centre the faint embossed legend “Chicago Athletic Club” – not pinched by an itinerant relative, I may say, but a flawed item bought by my thrifty grandmother from the Paisley mill – and the triangles of toast in the rack, the monthly jar of marmalade with the golliwog label, the damp strong smell of the tea-cosy when my mother lifted it from the pot, the curious wartime breakfast of scrambled powdered egg and “Ulster fry” (one of Spam’s poor relations), my father glancing through his Glasgow Herald before checking his battered leather prescription book and hurrying off to his round of visits and morning surgery, the little electric fire making its occasional sparks … and in the darkness a few yards away a shadow was moving, and it wasn’t a pi-dog this time; it was small and stunted but definitely human, standing in a slight crouch, a rifle held across the body, then moving slowly forward.

I had only to slide my hand a few cautious inches to touch Nick, and his head turned; I didn’t have to point. I can see his sharp face with the heavy moustache, and the movement of his lips, pursed as though to shush me – which wasn’t necessary, really. We lay holding our breaths, heads close together, willing our bodies into the ground as we watched the figure advance, a slow step at a time, the dark blur of the head turning from side to side. If he held his course he would pass about five yards to our right; in that light he would have to be a bloody lynx to make out two figures on that broken ground – unless we moved. The temptation to get my hand on the stock of my rifle was strong, but I resisted it; by good chance the muzzle was pointed almost straight at him, and if he did spot us I would have to be damned slow not to get my shot in first … He was level with us now, treading delicately with barely a sound; he paused to look back and gestured, and other figures, equally small and ungainly, emerged from the gloom in single file – Jesus! there were eight of them, moving like misshapen little ghosts. It took them an eternity to pass our position, while I let my breath out with painful slowness and inhaled again; once I felt rather than heard Nick give a tiny gasp, and as the last figure faded into the dark behind us I turned my head to look at him. To my amazement he was grinning; he gave that little patting motion of the hand that says, settle down, take it easy, and when I stirred a finger towards the Verey pistol, lying between us, he shook his head. Still grinning, he put his lips to my ear and whispered:

“Goorkas! Ey, and they nivver even smelt us!”

Sure enough, a few minutes later, came the faint sound of voices far behind us; they were at the wire, making their presence known.

Another anti-climax – and another lesson, which I learned when it grew light, and silence was no longer necessary.

“How the hell did you know they were Gurkhas? They looked bloody like Japs to me!”

“They did to me, an’ a’ – at foorst. They’re a’ shortarsed boogers, sitha, but there’s one way ye can always tell Johnnie Goorka fra’ Johnnie Jap – Ah mean, w’en it’s dark-like, an’ ye can’t mek oot their fesses, joost their shapes. Ah didn’t spot it till they was near on past us. Always look at their ankles, Jock! The Goorkas, see, wear short puttees, like oors, so their troosers is baggy reet the way doon till their ankles. Noo, Jap wears lang puttees, nigh on up till ’is knee, so ’is legs look thin, ez if ’e ’ad stockin’s on!” Nick chuckled, well pleased. “An’ they walked reet by us! Heh-hee! The boogers!”

“Shouldn’t we have let on?” I realised the answer to the damfool question even before I’d finished asking it.

“Git hired,* Jock! Ye’ve bin on night patrol – if soom booger challenges from underfoot, ye’re liable to do ’im! Ah want to die me own fookin’ way, not wid a kukri up me gunga!” This seemed to prompt another thought. “Ayup, tho’. Look, we’ll ’ev to tell Tut Hutton that we saw ’em, but we’ll not let on till anybuddy bar ’im. Mind, noo, Jock – doan’t tell nobuddy else.”

“If you say so – but why not?”

“Ah, they’re grand lal lads, the Goorkas – but, man, they’re proud! An’ they tek their sojerin’ seriously, an’ a’.” He wagged a finger. “Ah tell ye, if they foond oot they’d coom near treadin’ on us in’t dark, an’ ’edn’t spotted us, they’d ga fookin’ crackers! They wad, tho’! The naik* leadin’ that patrol wadn’t ’ev to git busted – ’e’d bust ’is bloody sel’, man, oot o’ shame! An’ Ah’m nut kiddin’.” He shook his head in admiration. “So we’ll say nowt aboot it – bar to Hutton. Awreet, Jock? Good lad.” He had another chuckle to himself. “Walked reet by us, an’ a’! Nut bad, eh?”

I sympathised with the Gurkhas, having no doubt that in similar circumstances I could have walked through the whole Japanese Imperial Guards Division without knowing it. “All we had to do was lie still,” I suggested.

“Aw, aye? Is that reet, Jock? Girraway! Ah’m glad ye told us.” Cumbrian sarcasm is never applied lightly. “Lissen – the Goorkas is the best night scoots in the bloody wurrld! By God, there isn’t many can say the Goorkas nivver spotted their o.p.! Noo, an’ Ah’m tellin’ ye!”

“Right pair of Mohicans we must be.”

“Aye, laff, ye girt* Scotch git! Looksta, if they’d bin Japs, an’ we’d fired oor Verey, they’d ha’ bin nailed, ivvery bloody one, on the wire wid their arses oot the winder! Wadn’t they?” He was quite belligerent about it. “Awreet, then! We did oor job, an’ the Goorkas missed us! An’ that’s nut bad! That’s a’ Ah’m saying!”

Well, he was infinitely better qualified to judge these things than I, and his words prompted a disturbing thought: if I’d been alone in the o.p. I’d certainly have fired the Verey, the Gurkhas would have been caught in the glare, and might well have been wiped out by a nervous Bren gunner making the same mistake as I had done. Nick had identified them by the shape of their legs – and that is something you won’t find in any infantry training manual. But then, he was what the Constable of France would have called a very valiant, expert gentleman. The irony was that it almost cost him his life a few nights later.

* embankment

* little

* I have been reminded that the rule of two men to a night stag was inviolable; nevertheless, I am positive that on this occasion I was on my own. The explanation can only be that the section strength had been so reduced by casualties in recent actions that two-men stags were, for a night or two, impossible.

* Ex-Fourteenth Army men may take issue with me for suggesting that a sentry would ever alert his comrades by shouting. The approved method was to have a log-line or creeper running from the sentry to the nearest sleeper, who could be aroused silently by tugging it, and I remember doing this in jungle country farther south. At Meiktila the ground was open, and I don’t recall ever using log-lines there.

* Get hired = get a job. One of the Cumbrian’s many expressions of derision, referring to the custom whereby an unemployed farm worker would stand with a straw in his mouth at Carlisle Cross during the hiring fair, waiting to be approached with an offer of work.

* Corporal

* Great, big, but like “lal” or “lyle” (little) it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with physical size, being just a familiar adjective.

Chapter 7

“‘Ey, Jock, are ye any good at ’rithmetic?”

“Not much, sarn’t, I’m afraid.”

“Well, mek’s nae matter. Ah’ll keep thee reet. Noo them – ’oo many fellers is there in’t British Army?”

“Gosh, I dunno. Five million?”

“An’ ’oo many o’ them’s in Boorma?”

“Half a million, maybe?”

“An’ ’oo many o’ them’s in this battalion?”

“About a thousand.”

“An’ ’oo many o’ them’s in Nine Section?”

“Ten, sarn’t.”

“So if ye’re in’t Army, w’at’s the odds against bein’ in Nine Section? Tek time, noo.”

“I haven’t the least idea.”

“Iggerant booger. Ah’ll tell thee. It’s ’alf a million to one.”

“If you say so. I’m fascinated.”

“Ye will be. Ye’re the section scout, aren’t ye?”

“I am, and I think I begin to see where your elaborate calculation is leading, sarn’t –”

“Shurroop an’ charge yer magazine. Noo, 17th Div’s ahead o’ Fourteenth Army, an’ this battalion’s leadin’ 17th Div, an’ Nine Section’s oot in froont, foorther sooth than any oother boogers in Sooth-east Asia Command – are ye follerin’ this, Jock?”

“With interest. Sarn’t Hutton, do you know what a sadist is?”

“By, Jock, yer a loocky yoong feller! The odds against bein’ the leadin’ man in the whole fookin’ war effort against Japan is five million to one –”

“And I’m the one. Thank you very bloody much.”

“So git thasel oot on point, keep yer eyes oppen, an’ think on – me an’ Choorchill’s watchin’ ye!”

Chapter 8

The fight to retain Meiktila was to be long and bitter since the Japanese concentrated every unit and formation they could to break Fourteenth Army’s stranglehold … It is a tribute to the Japanese that nobody had any doubt that, rather than break off the fight and withdraw, they would launch a counter-offensive with every unit they could assemble …

Although 17th Division was surrounded … by numerically superior forces, Cowan’s policy was to retain the initiative by using a very small number of troops for static defence and sending out columns in all directions to strike at Japanese communications and enemy forces which had cut his own land communication …

Official history

What I have described so far was the “static defence” of Meiktila, and so far as that was concerned Nine Section had it cushy – doing stag, mounting the occasional o.p., keeping our weapons clean, and waiting to be sent out Jap-hunting in force with the Sherman tanks of Probyn’s Horse. Jap attacked the wire elsewhere, I believe, but never in our sector, and while we were inside the perimeter life was tranquil. Snapshots of memory:

Playing in one game of football on the bare space behind our rifle pits, and being impressed by the brilliance of a young centre-half from Workington who came close to an England cap a few years later, and the speedy reflexes of an officer from another platoon; he was a Cameron Highlander, and I had occasion to note his speed later on. Also the bone-shattering violence of the man marking me, the Regimental Sergeant-Major, no less, who was completely bald (what Parker called “a lovely head o’ skin”) and who gave me the only wound I received in the war, a neat little scar on my left knee.

Watching someone do Number Two Field Punishment. Number One, which consisted of being tied to a gun-wheel, had gone out by that time, but Number Two looked decidedly unpleasant: having to run in circles, wearing full equipment, which included the big pack, pouches, rifle, etc., in the boiling sun under the supervision of a blue-chinned member of the Provost staff. I don’t know what the accused had done, but he came off in a state of near-collapse. It did him no permanent damage, for only last year, as a sprightly pensioner, he was singing his head off at our reunion in Carlisle Cathedral. (If that kind of punishment seems barbaric, it should be noted that in the Chindits there was at least one case of flogging