Forgotten Life

He glanced out of the window again. ‘The old bitch next door is watering her tree once more. Anyhow, Joe and Co had to stay in the deserters’ camp that night. The camp was run by a renegade RSM, a Glasgow man, an alcoholic. He approached Sergeant Sutton, inviting him to stay there, since he wanted a sergeant under his command. Joe thought there was some talk of a drug racket, I don’t know what.

‘They had a crisis in the camp. I’ve never told you this, have I? The RSM had an NCO with him who was severely ill from amoebic dysentery and complications. He died the night Joe was in the camp. The RSM sent a detail of four men out at midnight with storm lanterns to bury the body under a railway bridge, where it wouldn’t be discovered. They hadn’t got a padre for any kind of service, because all padres were officers, and an officer would have had them rounded up and shot.

‘Sergeant Sutton said to Joe and the others, while the burial was going on, “Do you want to stay here or go on to Burma?” All the detachment, fresh out from England, were profoundly shocked by what was happening. Of course, the idea of Burma was also not to be taken lightly. So Joe said to Sergeant Sutton, “What do you think, sarge?”

‘And the sergeant said, “I’d sooner be killed in battle than stay in this fucking sink of iniquity another night.” Next morning, they marched back to the Calcutta station – Howrah, I think it was called. They swore to the RSM that they would say nothing about the illegal camp, and of course they kept their word.

‘Joe derived a profound moral from that episode. I’ve always thought of him as very courageous – not heroic, I don’t mean, but courageous – and he probably saw the war itself as somehow cleaner or more honest than the fear which was the reason for the camp’s existence. He saw how easily men could deteriorate.’

Sheila had moved over to the window and was gazing out at the sunlit street.

‘It makes a good story. Terrifying. It would make a play. Did the RSM threaten them before letting them leave? With a gun, I mean?’

‘I don’t know about that.’

‘I think he’d have to. Burying the body at dead of night is a nice touch, but they could have left the body out for the vultures. Would that be a quicker way of disposing of the body?’

‘Sheila, this really happened.’

‘Yes, I know.’

When she had gone downstairs to get on with her own work, and he heard her typewriter tapping in the room below his, he thought of how her mind was at work on the story. It would probably surface, with added drama, in a future Kerinth novel. He merely wanted to strengthen the story, not add to it. He wanted it clear and as it had been, over forty years ago. Yet even he, telling it to Sheila, had added something. The bit about the whores coming into the camp seemed all too likely; but that had not been anything Joseph had told him. He remembered now that Joseph had said, in passing, that the deserters got fearfully drunk on palm wine every night, in order to escape from their miserable circumstances. Had he said palm wine? It was difficult to remember.

Precision was not the only function of memory.

All the untidy clutter of papers in his room came from Joseph’s flat in Acton. He had to get clear in his own mind his brother’s early years. Then he could make decisions on how to deploy the material.

He picked up from his desk a photograph he had taken a year before Joseph’s death, showing Joseph and Sheila walking together on Port Meadow. In the background was Joseph’s girl friend – his final girl friend – Lucy Traill.

Joseph was laughing, his mouth open, his face creased with humour. His tall, spare figure was leaning slightly forward. He liked to walk briskly. His hair, as always too long, was a streaky white and grey.

It was his wife’s features that Clement mainly studied. Because of the aspect of stillness in Sheila’s nature, she photographed well. Her broad face and well-defined nose and mouth were in evidence as she smiled at whatever the joke was. He thought, ‘No photograph can ever do her justice. Nor for that matter does my memory. I fail to set up a moving picture of her in my mind. That’s why I’m always eager to see her again, even if she has been out of the room for less than an hour. How I love that face! I couldn’t explain to anyone what it means to me, to see it every day.

‘I must be over-dependent on her. Why aren’t I more detached, as I am with others – with Arthur Stranks, for instance? Sheila would probably be shocked if she knew with what intensity I love her face and the woman. What a weakling I am! And she went to bed with that wretched little Hernandez …’

He was wasting time. To celebrate the publication of War Lord of Kerinth, he was arranging a party for Sheila in nine days’ time, on the Thursday of the following week. He made a few phone calls to local friends, inviting them to come. Then he returned to the question of his brother.

In Box File No. 2 lay a battered exercise book, in which Joseph had sought to retain some of his memories of the war years, in particular his time in Burma. The letters to his sister explained why Joseph had scarcely written home at all during the Burmese campaign. The censorship would not permit him to give a truthful account. And the censor already had an eye on Joseph. Joseph perhaps recalled Frederick the Great’s epigram that the common soldier had to fear his officer more than the enemy.

The battered exercise book was of Indian origin, bound in a coarsely woven cover. The narrative it contained was undated. The handwriting, in miscellaneous inks, some now badly faded, varied sufficiently for Clement to infer that the greater part of the account had been composed shortly after Joseph’s division had returned from Burma to India for rest and recuperation.

This was his brother’s first attempt at anything like an historical narrative, his first step towards the historian he was later to become. To lend the original narrative a clearer perspective, Joseph had inserted a few passages later, generally of a reflective nature. For an instance, the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 was mentioned.

First came the title. Joseph had made it deliberately grandiose.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CAMPAIGN OF

2ND BRITISH DIVISION

UNDER GEN. NICHOLSON

AGAINST THE JAP ARMY AND

THE RECONQUEST OF MANDALAY

1944–1945

By Signalman Joseph Winter

Nights were filled with gunfire when the various units of 2 Div crossed the River Chindwin, against stiff opposition from the Japs situated on the eastern bank. Those nights were climatologically beautiful. The Burmese moon is like no other moon. It woke unvoiceable yearnings in the men involved in the great struggle.

Of all those beautiful dangerous nights, one in particular stands out.

I had had to be away from my unit, and a driver was sent in a Jeep to collect me and catch up with the advance. He was in no mood to hurry; I could not make him hurry; and darkness overtook us before we had done much more than start on our way forward. The sun plunged down into the earth and the stars immediately shone forth overhead, streaming along in the grip of the galactic current.

We were two insignificant creatures in a machine on a plain that ran clear to the Irrawaddy. The driver had no intention of driving by night. We ate K-rations and slept one on either side of the Jeep rolled in blankets, with the marvellous sky unfettered overhead. Far from being dwarfed by it, I felt that it filled me and made me vast; I was indivisible from it. A war was passing over the starlit land with its ‘bright and battering sandal’, and I was part of its great process.

Burma was beautiful, a country worth fighting for. Nothing else was asked – at the time. I was eighteen years of age.

We woke at dawn with a bird calling. We were chilly in our thin uniforms before the sun came up. We brewed up mugs of tea, ate a hunk of bread, and moved on. ‘Bloody cold,’ we said.

Nothing was to be seen all round us but plain and, distantly, tops of trees. I found no way in which we could share the magnificent experience of the night; perhaps such exciting experiences are always enjoyed alone – unless one has a girl there. In any case the driver was a man of few words.

The track across the plain led us to the River Chindwin, where a Bailey bridge had been built. It was strongly guarded. Men lounged about, brown-naked to the waist, smoking, rifles on their shoulders, sweat-rags tied round their necks. We called out cheery greetings as we crossed that splendid river, its name honoured in the East. Fine dust hung in the air, sun shone on the water as it ran dark and flat between its sandy banks. It was as peaceful a scene as you could wish. Only two nights earlier, men had died at that spot.

Myingyang, the town on the far side of the river, had been almost completely destroyed in the fighting. Smoke still drifted among the ruined trees. Everything – remains of houses and bungalows – took on tones of black; smoke issued from their gaping black mouths. Tree stumps still burned quietly.

Black also were the piles of corpses gathered up neatly here and there and now left to ripen like grapes in the sun. They were swollen as if about to burst, and stank with the powerful smell of death. So much for the remains of the Japanese Army.

The Jeep driver stopped at one of the biggest piles. He went over to it and helped himself to a pair of boots from one of the dead. I cannot say how this offended me. A fat porker was feeding among the corpses, scarcely able to waddle. The driver, kicking the animal out of the way, beckoned me over. I would not leave the Jeep. He selected the pair of boots he wanted, dragging them off the corpse, kneeling in the sunlight to do so. He fitted the boots on to his own feet before coming back to the vehicle. I could not look the man in the eye.

To everything that happened at that period in time, an extra weight of significance was added. It was as though I travelled back through time to witness the traits of man and nature at their most basic, as though our movement through trees was also a movement through centuries. My understanding of the world, which had hitherto been rather childish, or child-based, advanced greatly, so that everything that happened, down to the movement of my own muscles, was surrounded by a nimbus of truth, in which the ugly was perceived as being as sacred as the beautiful. The blessed sunlight contributed to this revelatory mood.

I was a little mad in the nights, as in the days. The world turned – I heard its axis rotate. One night early in the campaign we were bivouacked by the improvised road which, in the wet season, served as a river bed. A Burmese moon shone through the trees – the moon seeming always to be at the full, when Chinese Buddhist thought has it that the Yin (female) influence is at its most strong. I could not sleep, pent in my little bivouac, for an overwhelming feeling of excitement, so was forced to get up and walk among the dust-saturated trees and shadows. Muffled trucks and guns rumbled out of the silver darkness and into the opaque distance. I stood by the road, unable to leave it, letting the dust settle on me. The behemoths, with dim orange headlights for eyes, were the sole occupants of this world.

Of course what I longed for then – there and then – in my hot little heart, was love or, less abstractly, a woman to love.

Greater than the Chindwin is the river into which it flows, the unmeasurable, immemorial Irrawaddy. The waters of the Irrawaddy are fed both by tributaries rising nearby and distant tributaries which rise in regions of rock and ice up in the Himalayas, so that, like life itself, the river consists of alternating currents of warm and cold streams; and no swimmer can tell which he will encounter next, the warm or the cold. Just to stand looking at the Irrawaddy after the weeks and miles of drought we had put behind us was to drink deep, and to feel its flow as something profound – a main artery in the life of the planet.

For a brief period after rejoining my unit I was able to swim alone in the great river, flinging myself in from the sandy bank, for once unmindful of Japs, snakes, and signal offices. The river immediately took hold of one with its dark effortless power. A river-steamer had been sunk in mid-stream, and lay at an angle on the river-bed with all its superstructure in the sunlight. Long tresses of weed, anchored to its bows, pointed tremulously downstream. It was possible to reach the boat after prolonged battles with the currents, and the water, green as lizard skin, suddenly gave way to scaly hull. With a heave, I was there, over the railings and lying fish-naked on the slant of deck. Ferns and small trees grew on the deck house, giant bees toasted themselves on the sere planking. There it was possible to squat, dangling one hand in the race, a part of that stationary voyage upstream, Captain of the Wreck.

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.’