Forgotten Life

Anyhow, I’m now a member of ‘S’ Signal Section – their sole new recruit. The other reinforcements are spread throughout the division. I’ve not been through ‘S’ section’s harrowing experiences, about which they constantly tell me. Am I welcome? Certainly not. I’m a representative of ‘The Blight’ (Blighty), the country thousands of miles distant which has ignored them and their exploits for so long. Thank God for Bert Lyons. ‘Don’t worry, we’re all puggle,’ he says – puggle being our word for le cafard…

Such mighty things happening. Conversation so trivial – apart from those terrible experiences – some of which I now know by heart. God, what these poor so-and-sos have been through. And more to come.

I’m off on duty now. Love to all.

Milestone 81. Assam

13th Oct. 1944

Dear Ellen,

Hope to hear from you some day. Letter from Mum, which I’ll answer soon. Perhaps you could show her this one to be going on with. The chaps here have mainly given up writing home.

We’re still waiting to move forward. I’ll then have to be careful what I say. Of course our letters are censored by one of the officers for safety’s sake.

I’ll tell you what our billet is like. Very picturesque, I assure you.

I’m lodged in a tent consisting of a spread of brown tarpaulin over a patch of steep hillside. Lodged is the word. When I got here from Dimapur, five men already occupied the tent. If you can call it a tent. They made room for me, and so I found lodgement on the outer side, just about.

My bed or charpoy is home-made. I can’t say I’m proud of my handiwork, but it’ll do. A bit Robinson Crusoe! It consists of a ground sheet stretched across four bamboo poles which are lashed together with old signal wire. This masterpiece is balanced on empty jerry cans, stacked so that the bed is roughly level on the uneven ground. My mosquito net is secured to ropes overhead, so low that the net is uncomfortably close to my face. Never mind – I can see the stars at night.

Apparently we are 4,300 feet above sea level. It’s as if we were perched on the top of Ben Nevis. From my charpoy, I can see a hill whose peak is a thousand feet higher than we are. It towers above us, jungle-clad all the way. Not long ago, it swarmed with Japs. By propping myself up on one elbow, I can see the great road, winding and winding on for miles, always carrying its slow crawl of convoys. What a window on the world! Behind me, on the slope where we are perched, is an untidy waste land, only partly cleared. It was also Jap-infested until recently. In it still remain all the vantage points, fire bays, and tunnels the Japs dug. They were killed by grenades and flame-throwers, and their bodies walled-in where they lay. No wonder the hillside has a thriving rat population …

I was asleep last night when a rat jumped on to my charpoy and ran across the net over my face. I struck out violently at it – and dislodged my charpoy from its pile of cans. Consequently I was pitched right out of the tent, where I rolled some way down the slope, naked as the day I was born. The other blokes just laughed or swore because I had woken them. I had to laugh myself.

Mum asks if we have any entertainment. Three nights ago, the Army Cinema rolled up and showed us Margaret Lockwood in The Wicked Lady, which I now know nearly by heart. The men just sat about on the hillside, watching. You should – or shouldn’t – have heard what they said they’d do to Margaret Lockwood. Out here, a white woman is almost a mythological creature.

Can’t be bothered to write more. I like this place – it’s so weird, though everyone takes it for granted. We haven’t even got a NAAFI, where you might linger over a beer or a coffee.

One entertainment is to watch the agile Naga women climb up and down the steep hillsides to harvest tea in the distant valley. They don’t look as good as Margaret Lockwood. They scale the slopes with huge wicker baskets secured to their backs by wide leather straps running round the forehead. It’s a tough life, and they can’t let the war get in their way. Do they consider their surroundings beautiful, I wonder?

Love to all.

Milestone 81. Assam (Nagaland)

18th Nov. 1944

Dear Ellen,

Still in the same spot. This outdoor life must be depraving: what do you think? Yesterday I stole something …

My orders were to report to the MO for various injections – TAB and so on. The MO – how typical of an officer – had appropriated for himself what passes out here for a ‘cushy billet’, a bungalow belonging to a tea planter who is now probably sitting out his life in New Delhi (unless the Japs got him). It felt quite odd to be ‘indoors’. The waiting room in which I was made to kick my heels for a good half-hour actually boasted a couple of cane armchairs and a crammed bookcase. What an anachronism! Books! On one shelf was a paperback with a title that immediately attracted me. I started reading it there and then.

Right after the first page, I knew that that book had to become part of the booty of war. ‘Loot what you can’ is an ancient warrior’s slogan. Even a 1/3d Pelican. By the time the doctor summoned me, it was safe inside my bush shirt. The book is Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, and tells of the rise and fall of poor suffering humanity over the next few billion years. (Are we rising or falling just now?)

Stapledon is an even better companion than Bert Lyons. He’ll come into action with me (we’re due to go forward soon). He provides an antidote to the triviality of daily conversation (which is in contrast to the majesty of our surroundings), which centres largely round the subjects of Kohima, sex, and the possibilities of getting home. Only Stapledon and his preoccupations seem a match for these stirring times. A cure for transience.

End of true confession. Sorry to write in pencil.

Love to all.

Milestone 81. Nagaland

30 Nov. 1944

Dear Ellen,

Many thanks for the letter with all the sordid details of your birthday. Or at least some of them. You’re really getting a big girl – and who is this fellow Mark who is taking such an interest in you? Full details please. The mouth organ sounds like a great attraction.

Sorry I wasn’t with you to have a slice of that cake. Rations or no rations, Mum obviously did well. Our rations here are awful. I won’t go into details, but I’m always hungry. Everything we eat has to come down that winding road from Dimapur which I described to you earlier. Sometimes the ration wagon rolls over the cliffside. Then we go short. The chaps in my tent talk about cooking up rats, and swear that rats and canned Indian peas taste good – but that’s just to impress the newcomer in their midst, I hope.

Forgive this awful colour ink – all I could find.

Rumours abound. We are at last about to move forward into action. So they tell us.

‘I heard the Captain say

We’re going to move today.

I only hope the blinking sergeant-major knows the way …’

This camp, now so familiar, is temporary. Everything is temporary along the Dimapur road. Maybe one day they will let it all revert to jungle. The air’s so fresh and good here and I’m secretly so excited.

It’s not only the air that’s fresh. So’s the water. Washing is quite an adventure. I wish I could draw. Facilities are just about nil at Milestone 81. Our only place to wash is at the mouth of a huge cast-iron pipe which snakes down the hillside and terminates here at a concrete base. The pipe vibrates with power and water gushes forth, splashing everywhere. In order to wash, you have to strip off entirely and then fling yourself into the stream. It’s like jumping in front of a cannon! It’s easiest to take the full force of the water smack in the chest – difficult to do because slippery green algae grow on the ever-wet concrete.

The water’s freezing cold. It’s come down from five thousand feet in a great hurry. Soaping is mighty difficult. However, my hardened campaigner friends tell me that it could be the last running water we’ll see for months. (They’re ever optimistic.)

We’ve just been issued with new chemical stuff called DDT. We’ve had to dip our shirts in it and run the liquid along the seams of our trousers. This will prevent lice and other nasty things at a time when it looks as if we shall be unable to wash clothes for months at a stretch.

You see what a funny life your brother leads. It’s better than school. And to toughen us up, we’ve been made to climb down into the valley and back, with kit. I tried to get a piggy-back off one of the Naga women, but no luck. We can’t climb the mountain above us, because that’s where the Nagas live and they must not be disturbed.

Yours till the cows come home.

Manipur, I think

20th Dec. 1944

My dear Ellen,

Guess what? It’s Christmas Day! Yes, 20th December.

The world has done one of its marvellous changes. Everything is different. I’m different. I’m rolling forward into ACTION. Imagine! This green and dusty world is slipping towards jungle warfare …

We knew something was up on the fifteenth and sixteenth. Our unit on that day had its collective haircut. Weren’t knights of old shriven before battle? Shriven and shorn? Well, at least we’ve been shorn.

Ahead of us lie danger and a desperate land full of terrors and destitute of barbers …

The very next day – we packed up everything and started rolling forward. A whole division, 2 Div, moving to our forward positions before the actual assault.

At the last minute, the CO addressed us, gave us a briefing. ‘You will all be proud to fight for king and country …’ He doesn’t know his men. But he concluded by quoting Shakespeare:

And gentlemen in England now abed

Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,

And hold their manhoods cheap while any speaks

That fought with us upon St Crispin’s Day.

Among the common soldiery was many a moist eye. Amazing to see us all respond to poetry. Or maybe it was funk.

I have to scribble these lines just to tell you about the journey, hoping not to anger the censor. Because it really was legendary – legendary! Not to be measured in miles or the time on a clockface. A move across a great division, like the division between life and death—

—Into a land without civilians. Without civilization. Not a place for ordinary human life. You couldn’t buy a ticket to get here.

A mysterious mountain country – without living inhabitants, without real roads, without towns, without flags or currencies. The writhing, thunderous, plenitudinous route to war. A newly invented route, patched together out of lanes, jungle tracks, chaungs (a chaung being a sandy stream bed reliably dry in the dry season). On this gallant road we embarked at a dim and secret hour of night, with even our voices muffled, for every sound carries in the thin air. We’re travelling from Milestone 81 – home! – to a rendezvous in the country I can’t name, called Yzagio. This rather imaginary highway we travel is christened the Tiddim Road. Six months ago, it was all dense jungle and raging rivers. And in Japanese territory.

If you will have nothing of this legend, then I have to admit that this way of the conquerors lasts only about two hundred miles. On it, my girl, we left the old mundane world behind.

After we had passed the blackened remains of Kohima – like all you ever imagined of the Great War – we went from Nagaland into the old state of Manipur. Ragged and brutalized Imphal went by, possessed solely by pigs and vultures. The mountains became more gigantic, the way more unlikely, like something in a dream. All our vehicles proceed at a crawl, in bottom gear most of the time. Headlights are muffled. We ourselves wear a secret, anonymous air. Dispatch riders patrol up and down the convoy, seeing to it that the trucks keep even distance, neither too far from nor too close to the next vehicle. All this in a great fog of dust, the very material of secrecy.

I’m travelling in a three-tonner with some of ‘S’ Section and its stores. The stores include immense rolls of barbed wire. So excited was I last night that I climbed over the barbed wire as we moved, until most of me was out on the cab roof, from where I got a fine view of the shrouded nomansland all round us. In that awkward position I fell asleep.

Shouting and noise. Daylight. I awoke. I was hanging far over the side of the vehicle, between cab and body, my legs trapped in a roll of barbed wire, upside-down. In my sleep I had slipped right off the smooth cab. But for the embrace of the wire, I would certainly have fallen to the ground and been run over in the dark.

That was this morning. I live to tell the tale. God knows where we are in place or time – because today we were served our Christmas dinner. Imagine, 20th December! Very surrealist.

We ate in an empty grain store, all built of bamboo and dry leaves. Being a greedy little thing, you’ll like to know what we got for this monster feast. Well, it was probably better than you will do on the 25th. We started with chicken noodle soup, followed by canned chicken, canned mutton, sausage stuffing, beans, potatoes and gravy, all washed down by two cans of beer, and followed by Christmas duff with sauce and canned pears. Then coffee. A marvellous blow-out!

By way of presents, each man got a handful of sweets and biscuits and half a bar of Cadbury’s chocolate. The CO then made a brief speech and offered us this toast: ‘To our wives and sweethearts!’ (The old meanie didn’t say anything about sisters…)

This meal has marked not only the putting away of the old order but the imposition of half-rations. Fancy – the food was bad enough at Milestone 81. But from now on all food has to be supplied by air, so half-rations it is.

Soon it will be dark. That’s the end of Christmas Day and then we’ll be on the wonderful road again. I tell you these things. Try to understand. Something really extraordinary is happening to your old brother.

God knows when this’ll be posted but – Happy Christmas!

Somewhere

31st Dec. 1944

Dear Ellen,

How are things at home? How is the mouth organ player? You all seem very far away. There are great psychological barriers in communicating rather than in just firing off letters for their own sweet sakes. To be honest, I’m not sure if the outer world exists any more.

And I’ve got other problems … For instance, I was hauled up before an officer I had better not name (he will probably read this letter before you do) in the Censorship office. Apparently I have been giving too much away in my letters and endangering security. (You might be a Jap agent in England, sending all my letters on to High Command in Tokyo, or something similarly daft.) There I stood, rigid at attention in my soiled jungle greens; there he sat immaculate in khaki, putting me right. On such situations the British Empire is founded.

In future any references to place names or troop movements will be deleted from my letters. There is to be no further attempt to convey a picture of what is happening in these possibly most exciting days of my life. I made a protest, but it’s like butting your blinking head against an advancing tank. Any attempts to evade regulations will be punished.

It was hard enough in the first place, trying to describe life here to you. Now I’m forbidden to try to convey a picture! So here’s what may prove to be my last try.

I mean the picture is like one of those marvellous Brueghels (in this culturally deprived area I have even forgotten how you spell that weird Flemish name …). Is there one called The Conversion of St Paul? Where there are thousands of people on horseback and on foot in the tall mountains and, although St Paul is having his moment right in the middle of the picture, no one is taking a blind bit of notice. We’re doing this incredible thing and no one’s taking a blind bit of notice – just grumbling about where their next packet of fags is coming from …

Later. Oh, burps. Now the first day of 1945. No celebrations last night, bringing more complaints. Fancy wanting to celebrate. I was collared to shift heavy stores. Too exhausted then to do anything more than sleep.

We’re at a place called – but I named it once and daren’t do so again or they’ll keelhaul me under the nearest 3-tonner. Great amassment of vehicles. People all strolling round, brown as berries, smoking among the branchless trees. (Hope that doesn’t give our positions away.) Half-rations. God in his heaven, CO in his mobile home. Only the Japs missing from the picture. (You could perhaps get Dad to send me some ciggies if he’s feeling generous.)

Oh, I can’t concentrate. Something comes between us, and you know who he is.

Well, I’ll just tell you how we got here. I think it was the night after I last wrote that we got on the road again, the whole division, all very orderly. (I don’t tell you which division, so it’s safe …) I was more careful about how I travelled, not wanting to meet my end yet – dying for your country should not entail being run over by your own 3-tonner! Yet the sight of endless trucks trundling like elephants in convoy is irresistible. Are they off to the Elephants’ Graveyard or a solemn heavyweight orgy? Some stops, some starts, yet on the whole a steady funeral pace. Huge chunks of landscape phantasmal in the dusty dark.

Sleep, huddled in a silly position on a crate. Waking next morning very early to behold a wondrous sight.

Is dawn a secret shy and cold,

Anadyomene, silver-gold?

Are we still on terra firma

Or merely moving into – another land?

Answers in the affirmative c/o The Censor, please. The convoy was winding about the endless mountains, intruding into a Chinese landscape. Mountains filled our view, heaps of them. Beyond each mountain, more mountains, thickly afforested. Clouds floated below us, lit by the early sun. Clouds and smaller clouds of dust. For wherever the mountains went, there too went the road, coiling tirelessly – and, for all its inexhaustible miles, covered with X Div vehicles. What an astonishing sight! My first experience of travelling mountainous country. We could see the road winding above and behind us; it was the way we had come. And there it all was to be seen and enjoyed. We were outdoors, and not sitting inside at desks, over boring lesson books.

Green, blue, gold, were the colours of the distance. Closer at hand, only the sandy grey of dust and vehicles. The trucks in their passage threw up dust over all the trees lining the way. Everything without wheels stood absolutely motionless, as if breeze had never been invented, as if the dust had killed off the jungle.

So we made our advance over that marvellous ____Road, across the mountains of Manipur and those of the ____Range, until we reached the more level ground on which our present site (no names, no pack-drill) stands. We are parked in a scraggy and ant-infested forest, while the division sorts itself out in order of battle and puts in maintenance on all vehicles.

Later. Sorry to go on in pencil, but I’m now in the signal office. On duty but little traffic coming over the wires, so I’ll continue for a while.

It’s hot. I’m sweating.

The signal office is a 3-ton lorry, its flap at the rear raised horizontally to extend the floor-space. You climb into the lorry by a rusty ladder with three widely spaced wooden rungs. Inside, at the end nearest the cab, sits the Signal Master in all his glory. He’s an officer (of course). He has a table with a field phone. Before him are piles of paper, code names, references, maps, diagrams, documents.

To one side of the lorry are two long narrow tables on which stand four Fullerphones. These chesty, unhappy little instruments play an important role in keeping the division in touch with itself and with other nearby units. On the floor are four piles of Fullerphone boxes, and on these the Fullerphone operators have to sit. They are translating the buzzings in their earphones into words on paper – as I’m doing between scribbling to you.

A tarpaulin is attached to the outside of the lorry and extended so as to provide shade for the Counter Clerk. He’s an important man. At the moment it’s our Corporal Pine. The Corp shuffles and sorts and distributes the endless stream of messages which pass through our hands, dealing them out to us operators or to various other lowly degrees of messenger.

With him sits the Superintendent, crooning times and cyphers into the ear of his phone. Here too sits our orderly, patiently waiting – at present it’s Steve. This morning it was old Gaskin. Steve smokes stylishly, cradling one elbow in the palm of his hand, relaxed until the counter clerk calls on him to take a message on foot to one of the local gods hiding nearby behind acronyms, ADMS, ARQS, CLAD, DELS, and the like.

A camouflage net covers this lazy yet busy scene. Flies buzz everywhere.

Oh, yes. Nearby is another tent, upon which snakelike lines of cables converge. It’s our telephone exchange, a place of urgency, stuffed with winking lights and brass plugs. This is the tent whose ropes you trip over, swearing, in the dark.

Dispatch riders and cable-layers lurk nearby, somnolent as lizards. Only lizards don’t smoke.

Bert’s my relief. He’s working another Fullerphone. By now, I am pretty well accepted by the rest of ‘S’ Section. They respect the fact that I nearly fell off the truck one night, and that I was hauled up before the Censor (they mostly gave up writing home long ago – part of the myth of the Forgotten Army). They are no longer astonished that I can send and transmit Morse almost as rapidly, as stylishly, as they. What they can’t get over is the fact that I appear to be enjoying myself. Nor can I.

Love to all.

3

Clement folded Ellen’s letters carefully back into their envelopes and took them over to the window sill, to tuck them in Box File No. 2, in which he kept anything of his brother’s relating to the war period.

‘Good letters,’ Sheila said. She had sat immobile, as was her way, to read them through. ‘Joe’s excitement comes through. He seems to have had no qualms about going to war.’

‘That’s true.’ Glancing out of the window, he saw Alice Farrer in her front garden next door. Holding her green watering-can, she was sprinkling the roots of her pseudoacacia. It was her excuse to have a good look at what was happening in the street. The fact that very little ever happened did not deter her. She used her nose as a tracking device to follow two girl students who walked slowly along the pavement, talking, completely unaware of her.

‘He had made up his mind by then there were worse things than going to war.’ He spoke as he turned back into the room. He was fascinated by Alice Farrer only to the extent that he could say honestly that nothing she did would ever interest him.

‘Such as what, exactly? His unhappy childhood?’

‘That, too, I suppose. But I was thinking of an incident he once told me about. Maybe he told me twice. It was about something which had made a great impression on him. It took place outside Calcutta, and so it would have happened just before the first of these letters to Ellen. In any case, the incident was too horrific for him to wish to report it to a little sister.

‘The group he was in was led by the Sergeant Sutton he mentions in one of Ellen’s letters. After travelling across India from Bombay, they reached a transit camp somewhere on the outskirts of Calcutta. Joe gave me a vivid account of the squalor, and of seeing a water buffalo dying in the railway marshalling yards – shunting yards, we used to call them – surrounded by vultures, who set about tearing it to shreds while it still had life.

‘Owing to some confusion in the rail timetables, not uncommon in those days of crisis, with the Japanese army at the gates of India, Joe’s detachment had to leave their train and go to this camp somewhere nearby. It was just a collection of ragged tents beside a railway embankment, no signs of discipline or cleanliness anywhere. Full of flies and filth.

‘Joe and Sutton went to the office to apply for money to continue their journey to Burma. I suppose at that time the movement of troops would be towards the east only, across India to the war zone. He said it was like a peristaltic movement. Everyone was drawn into it. But he and Sutton found that this camp was full of deserters, who had got that far and then jumped off trains at Calcutta, rather than face the Japanese. Deserters ran the camp. There was nowhere they could go – they certainly couldn’t make it back to England. So they stayed put, waiting for the war to finish. If the camp was inspected, the deserters simply melted into Calcutta, where no one could find them. They lived by making false returns to various legitimate units nearby. The money was spent on food, booze, and whores. The whores came into the camp – quite against army regulations, of course.’