Quartered Safe Out Here

Forster was a fly man who never had a cigarette to his name. “W’ee’s smeukin’?”,4 in an aggressive wheedle, was his watch-word, generally responded to with “Iveryone but thee”. He was crafty, foul-mouthed, ignorant, and dishonest; sufficient to say that in a battalion of expert scroungers, Forster was gifted beyond the ordinary; there are Burmese villages which must be wondering still where their pigs and chickens went to in ’45.

Steele was a Carlisle boy, tough and combative and noisy, but something of a mate of mine, even if he did use the word “Scotch” to me with occasional undue emphasis; once he added “bastard” to it (there was no race relations legislation in those happy days), and I responded with a fist; we battered each other furiously until Corporal Little, who was half our size, flew at us with a savagery that took us aback; he knocked me down and half-strangled Steele before dragging us face to face. “Noo shek ’ands! Shek ’ands! By Christ, ye will! Barmy boogers, ye’ll ’ev enoof fightin’ wid Jap, nivver mind each other! Ga on – shek ’ands!” Confronted by that raging lightweight, we shook hands, with a fairly ill grace, which was not lost on him. Then, being a skilled man manager, he put us on guard, together.

Stanley was large and fair and quiet, and had the unusual ability of sleeping on his feet, which was a genuine torment to him when he had to stand stag.5 He had been a cinema projectionist, and for sheer cold courage I never saw his like, as I shall tell later. He might have had a decoration, but his heroism manifested itself in a lonely place, by night, and no one in authority ever knew about it.

Wedge was a Midlander, and said “Ace, king, quine,” among other vocal peculiarities, like “waiter” for “water”. Being used to carry saggars6 in the Potteries, he would bear his big pack and other impedimenta on his head when necessary, leaving his hands free for other burdens. When we were cut off in Meiktila he developed an obsession about the 5th Division, who were to be the “hammer” to our “anvil”. “Wheer’s 5th Div, then?” was his stock question at the section O-group (the little conference which took place each evening, when the corporal passed on news and orders from the platoon commander). No one could tell him, and he would lapse into gloomy silence. He was deeply religious, and eager for education because, he told me, “Ah want to improve meself. Ah want a trade efter t’war, not carryin’ bloody saggars. A reet trade, Jock – Ah dunno what, though; Ah’ll ’ave to see.” Once, I remember, when we were on stag together, he told me how much he had enjoyed the pirate movie, The Black Swan, and I told him something of Morgan’s buccaneers and their exploits; from that moment he seemed to regard me as a latter-day Macaulay and pestered me for historical information, and since I am God’s own history bore, he got plenty, and his gratitude was touching. I doubt if it helped him to get a trade, but you never know.

The Duke, whose surname I have forgotten, if I ever knew it, was so called from his refined public school accent. He was tall and lethargic and swarthy as a gypsy, with a slow smile and a manner which grew more supercilious in proportion to the rank of whomever he was addressing; he was almost humble to Corporal Little, but I have heard him talk – with studied courtesy, mind you – to a brigadier as though the man were the veriest trash. He got away with it, too. The rumour ran that he was related to the royal family, but informed opinion was against this: Grandarse had seen him in the shower at Ranchi and had detected no sign of a birthmark.

Parker I have left to the last because he was easily the most interesting, a dapper, barrel-chested Cockney who was that rare bird, a professional soldier of fortune. He was in his forties, and had been in one uniform or another since boyhood, having just got into the tail of the First World War before serving as a mercenary in China in the ’twenties, in what capacity I never discovered, and thereafter in South America, the Spanish Civil War (from a pungent comment on the International Brigade I deduced that he had been with the Nationalists), and China again in the late ’thirties. He re-enlisted in 1939, came out at Dunkirk, and had been with Eighth Army before being posted east. He was a brisk and leathery old soldier, as brash and opinionated as only a Londoner can be, but only rarely did you see the unusual man behind the Cockney banter.

I first noticed him on the dusty long haul by troop-train across India, when the rest of us slept on the floor or the cramped wooden seats, while Parker improvised himself a hammock with his groundsheet and lengths of signal cable. But I didn’t speak to him until the end of a marathon game of nine-card brag in which I had amassed the astonishing sum of 800 rupees (about £60, which was money then). I’m no card-player, let alone a gambler, but the priles7 kept coming for once, and I was just wondering how to quit in the face of the chagrined opposition, which included various blue chins and hairy chests of Australian, American, and mixed origin, when Parker, who had been watching but not playing, leaned over, picked up my winnings, and stuck them inside his shirt.

“That’s yer lot, gents,” he said cheerfully. “E’s out.”

There were menacing growls, and a large individual with a face like Ayers Rock rose and demanded who said so.

“I bleedin’ do,” said Parker. “I’m ’is uncle, an’ you’ve ’ad a fair shot, so you can brag yer bollocks off all the way to Cal8 – by yerselves. E’s out, see?” To me he simply said: “Better let me look arter it.” Which he did, all the way to Ranchi, where he escorted me to the paymaster to see it deposited. I won’t say I didn’t watch him with some anxiety during the last days of the journey, but I never even thought of asking for my money: some people are fit to look after a small fortune east of Suez, and some aren’t.

One result of his mother hen behaviour was that I learned something of his background. He was an orphan, and the proceeds of twenty years’ free lancing had put his younger brother through medicine; this emerged when I offered him a cut of my winnings for his good offices as banker; he didn’t need it, he said, and out came the photographs of his kid brother in his M.B. gown, and in hospital groups; Parker’s pride was something to see. “E’ll go in the R.A.M.C. shortly, I ’spect; ’e’ll be an officer then. An’ arterwards, ’e can put up his brass plate an’ settle dahn, get married ’an ’ave kids, make me a real uncle. ’E’s done bloody well for a Millwall sparrow, ’as Arthur. Mind you, he allus was bright, top o’ the class, not like me; I lef’ school when I was nine an’ never looked back. Yerss, I’m prahd of ’im, orlright.” He must have realised that he was running on, for he grinned sheepishly and put the photos away, remarking jauntily that a medico in the family allus came ’andy, didn’t it, case you got a dose o’ clap.

I said my parents had wanted me to be a doctor, and he gave me a hard stare.

“You didn’t make it? Why not?”

“Not clever enough, I suppose. Didn’t get into university.”

“Too bloody lazy, more like. Idle little sod.”

“Well, I didn’t want to be a doctor! I wanted to get into the Army, try for a commission.”

“Did you, now? Stupid git. Well, ’ave you applied?”

“Yep. Selection board turned me down. I’ve been busted from lance-jack a couple of times, too.”

“Christ, some mothers don’t ’alf ’ave ’em! An educated sod like you – I seen you doin’ bleedin’ crosswords.” He cackled and shook his head. “Well, I shall just ’ave to kick you up the arse, young Jock, I can see that. Ne’ mind – with my permish you’ll get a commish!” He liked the sound of that, and it became a private slogan whenever the going got uncomfortable: if I was sodden through, or was marching on my chinstrap, as the saying was, or bone-tired after digging or standing to all night, and even when we went in under the guns at Pyawbwe, Parker’s raucous cry would be heard: “Bash on, Jock – wiv my permish you’ll get a commish!” It was as regular as Nick’s “You’ll all get killed!” and just about as encouraging.

That was the section, and if they sound like a typical cast for a Gainsborough war movie, and I am suspected of having used clichés of character, I cannot help it. Every word about them is as true as I can make it. War is like that, full of clichés, and of many incidents and speeches that you couldn’t get away with in fiction. Later I shall describe how a comrade of mine, on being shot in the leg, rolled on the ground shouting: “They got me! The dirty rats, they got me!” I would not use it in a screenplay – and I know what the director and actor would say if I did. But it happened, word for word, nature imitating art.

I have said that was the section, but obviously it changed. We took casualties, and new men came in, and some of them became casualties, and reorganisations took place, often in haste during an action – I suppose as many as twenty men, perhaps even more, served in the section in six months, but the nine I have described are the ones I remember best. Eventually I left the section, and found myself in the last stages of the war among unfamiliar faces. But up to Meiktila we were all together, and whatever I learned I learned from them.

Because I dislike books which bewilder me by taking for granted technical details which I don’t know, and also for the record, I shall say how we were dressed and armed. Burma was a barebones war; in many ways we were like soldiers of the last century in that our arms and equipment were of the simplest; it was so because it was largely a close-contact, hand-to-hand war in which, while tanks and aircraft and artillery played an important part, it was first and foremost an infantryman’s business, and actions tended to be on a small scale compared with the battles in Europe. By today’s standards we were sparsely equipped. Thank God.

The uniform was all dark green; even underpants, vests, and socks had gone into the big dye vat at Ranchi; watch-straps had to be green or khaki. You had two shirts, two pairs of trousers, puttees (a better protection than anklets against leeches and other crawlies), and boots – British-made, if you were lucky, rather than the clumsier Indian pattern; later we sometimes wore captured Jap jungle boots, with their thick crepe soles. A few – Parker, for one – dispensed with socks and filled their boots with tallow, claiming that it prevented blisters. It was also messy, and stank. I tried it – once.

Fourteenth Army’s distinguishing feature was the bush-hat, that magnificent Australian headgear with the rakish broad brim which shielded against rain and sun and was ideal for scooping water out of wells. In some ways it was a freak, in the steel-helmeted twentieth century, and it may have cost some lives under shell-fire, but we wouldn’t have swapped it. It looked good, it felt good; if you’d been able to boil water in it you wouldn’t have needed a hotel. Everyone carried a razor-blade tucked into the band, in case you were captured, in which event you might, presumably, cut your bonds, or decapitate your jailer by stages, or if the worst came to the worst and you were interrogated by Marshal Tojo in person, present a smart and soldierly appearance.

Equipment consisted of the standard web belt; cross-braces; pouches worn brassière fashion; small pack containing two mess-tins, pialla (enamelled mug), knife, fork, and spoon, housewife with needle and thread, water purification pills, mepacrin (to ward off malaria, which it didn’t), and any personal effects you felt like carrying, plus your rations; a pint water-bottle; entrenching tool, a steel mattock head with a detachable handle; and a log-line, a five-yard coil of thin rope. The last three items hung from the belt behind. A small trouser pocket contained a field dressing, but everyone scrounged a spare one because the gauze made a splendid sweat-rag-cum-neckerchief.

Weaponry was equally simple. There were a few tommy guns (but none of the hated Stens, the plumber’s nightmare) in the company, but the standard arm was the most beautiful firearm ever invented, the famous short Lee Enfield, either of the old pattern with the flat backsight and long sword bayonet, or the Mark IV with the pig-sticker, a nine-inch spike with no cutting edge. The old pattern, which I carried, was the great rifle of the First World War, which the Old Contemptibles used with such speed and skill that the enemy often believed they were facing automatic weapons, and one German general told of how his division had been “shot flat” by its disciplined fire. It held ten rounds with its magazine charged, and another up the spout, had an extreme range of close to a mile, and in capable hands was deadly accurate up to four hundred yards. I’m no Davy Crockett, but I could hit three falling plates (about ten inches square) out of five at two hundred, and I was graded only a first-class shot, not a marksman. The Lee Enfield, cased in wood from butt to muzzle, could stand up to any rough treatment, and it never jammed. “She’s your wife,” as the musketry instructors used to say. “Treat her right and she’ll give you full satisfaction.” And she did, thirty years old as she was; treating her right consisted of keeping her “clean, bright, and slightly oiled” with the pullthrough and oil bottle in her butt trap, and boiling her out after heavy firing. She’s a museum piece now, but I see her still on T.V. newsreels, in the hands of hairy, outlandish men like the Mujahedeen of Afghanistan and capable-looking gentry in North Africa, and I have a feeling that she will be loosing off her ten rounds rapid when the Kalashnikovs and Armalites are forgotten. That’s the old reactionary talking: no doubt Agincourt die-hards said the same of the long bow.

Nowadays the automatic rifle, and concentrated firepower, are the thing, spraying rounds all over the place – which must give rise to hideous supply problems, I imagine. We had it drummed into us that each round cost threepence; “one bullet, one Jap” was proverbial, if obviously impractical. I know I sound like a dinosaur, but I doubt if the standard of marksmanship is what it was – it can’t be, except at short range – and I wonder what happens if, say, a bridge has to be blown from a distance, because there’s no fuse, and someone has to hit a gun-cotton primer the size of a 10p piece at two hundred yards? (A Sapper lieutenant did that in Burma, with a Lee Enfield, one shot.) Possibly such problems don’t arise in modern high-tech war, or perhaps they just plaster the bloody thing with automatic fire, and hope. But I digress. We carried fifty round apiece, in a canvas bandolier draped over the buttocks.

Apart from the bayonet, the other essential sidearm was the kukri, the curved short sword of the Gurkha, slung behind the right hip. Mine cost me ten rupees, and some swine pinched it near Rangoon. The alternative was the dah, a long, broad-bladed machete.

In one pouch you carried two armed 36 grenades (Mills bombs), and these posed a problem. A grenade has a split pin holding in place an arm which, when the pin is withdrawn, releases a plunger which causes havoc with a fulminate of mercury detonator; depending on the internal fuse, you then have five or seven seconds to get rid of the thing, or good night, sweet prince. The cast iron casing is split into segments like a chocolate bar, and on explosion these segments (plus the base plug) will take care of anything within five yards, give or take. The question is, do you when given grenades to carry render them safe by hammering the split ends of the pin apart, or, bearing in mind that an angry Jap is not going to stand around while you un-hammer them, do you leave the pins so that they can slip out easily? The thought that Grandarse, who would make a bullock look security-conscious, is snoring beside you with his pins loose, is no inducement to untroubled sleep. In practice you just left them extractable with a sharp tug – and if Victor McLaglen, who is to be seen in old movies yanking the pins out with his teeth, ever tried it during his own army service, his incisors must still be in Mesopotamia. You do it with your finger or thumb.

There was another type of grenade, the plastic 77, which was a smoke bomb. It also sprayed phosphorus about, and was used in clearing bunkers.

In the other pouch were two Bren gun magazines, holding between 25 and 30 rounds, for the section’s light machine-gun; rifle and Bren ammunition being identical. The Bren gunner normally fired from a lying position with his number two alongside to change magazines if required and turn the “immediate action” plug when the gun jammed, as it could when over-heated. It was a good gun, but needed intelligent handling, for when held firm it was accurate enough to punch a hole in a brick wall with a single magazine, and to get a good spread the gunner had to fan it about judiciously. It could also be fired from the hip, given a firm stance, for without one it would put you on your back.

Any other weapons were a matter of personal choice. Most of the section carried long-bladed flick-knives, bought in Indian bazaars; my own knife was something like a Commando dirk, worn with the butt protruding from the small pack, behind the right shoulder. The only other personal items were the rubberised ground-sheet, folded inside the top of the small pack (later we were issued with waterproof monsoon capes), a blanket, and a canvas water chaggle, carried only if you were marching some distance – and only those who have been really dry know that there is no drink like chaggle water, brackish, chlorinated, with a fine earthy silt at the bottom, pure Gunga Din juice. We hated it and would have sold our souls for it. And I should mention the pale green masks, with eye-slits à la Dick Turpin, worn only if you were travelling by truck through dusty country; they were not for concealment. Camouflage paint was unknown, nor did we ever black up, presumably because sun and dirt made it unnecessary.

We were not bearded; that was a Chindit1 fashion. I grew a beard at the end of the campaign, when I was away from the battalion, but that was sheer laziness (and swank), and I got rid of it after a few weeks.

So there we were, nine or ten men with a thousand rounds of .303 and twenty grenades among us, and if my list has been a long one it still describes one of the most lightly armed and least encumbered foot soldiers since the introduction of firearms in war. It was gear designed for fast, easy movement by the lightest of light infantry – and I wonder why it has gone out of fashion.

The question is prompted by what I see on television of the Army today. To my eye the loose camouflage blouse is ugly, clumsy, and ill-fitting compared to our tight shirt and trousers; it might have been designed to catch on snags and hinder its wearer, and as if that wasn’t enough, the poor infantryman is festooned with more kit than would start a Q.M. store. I’m sure it’s all necessary; I just can’t think what for. I don’t like the helmet, and suspect it cramps head movement. Very well, I’m old-fashioned and ignorant, but I hold that a streamlined soldier is better off than one who looks as though he has been loosely tied in the middle, and I’d hate to try to crawl through a hedge or swim a river in that lot. Perhaps if those who design the Army’s equipment had to do either of those things, they’d come up with something better.

I suppose our war was different. A military historian has written that Fourteenth Army was stripped to the belt, and certainly it took makeshift and improvisation for granted, and relied, when it had to, on what it could carry and what was dropped to it from the air. While you were with your trucks, you were part of a mechanised force, transport, tanks, artillery and all; there was a company cookhouse (dispensing bully stew and boiled eggs, mostly) and a regular water truck, and an M.O. and padre, the regimental police and familiar Army organisation, and perhaps even a Church of Scotland or Salvation Army mobile canteen – I can see it now, a jungle clearing and two smiling douce old ladies from Fife, with their battered tea-urn and tray of currant scones. “Mai guidness, Ennie, we’re running out of sangwidges! Did I not say we needed anither tin of spem? Dearie me! More tea, boys?” And afterwards they would rattle off in their truck (“Furst gear, Ennie – and don’t rev the motor, woman! Oh, mai, take a hemmer to it! Bay-bay, boys!”) beaming and waving and adjusting their hair-pins, with Jap just up the road. There are heroines; I’ve seen them.

That was with the battalion, but there was no doubt that those long desperate months in the khuds and jungle (before my time) had bred in Nine Section an aptitude for something closer to guerrilla warfare. When the trucks had been left behind, and the battalion had faded into the distance, things were different: the long patrol, the independent operation at platoon or section level, the scout to an outlying village or just to a map reference, the lying-up perhaps in a ruined temple at what seemed the back of beyond, the feeling of being part of a reiver foray – the section seemed somehow easier, if not happier, at that kind of work; you felt that if the Army had vanished, and they had been left alone in that wild country halfway to China, they would have damned the government, had a smoke, and carried on regardless, picking up this and that on their way back to India.

I must emphasise that the platoon, much less the section, didn’t operate independently very often, and only in the later stage of the campaign when the nature of the war had changed from a pursuit in divisional strength to a more confused and piecemeal operation whose object was the final demolition of the beaten Japanese armies. By then they were scattered and disorganised, often into quite small parties, so it was no longer a question of a general advance by Fourteenth Army with set-piece battles, but of road-blocks and ambushes and patrolling on a smaller scale. Those were the conditions in which the section might find itself briefly on its own, and the occasions (mercifully few) which are large in my memory are those on which, having attained the dizzy height of lance-corporal, I had nervous charge of seven or eight old sweats watching with interest to see what the young idiot would do next. To me, each decision was momentous, whether it was to kip down in a village for the night, or turn for home, or to ford a milk-white river with snake-like shapes writhing in its depths, or to allow the section to accept rice-cakes from an evil-looking headman who was so greasily friendly I was convinced he was a Jap collaborator – he wasn’t, as it turned out, nor did his rice-cakes contain ground-glass. Small stuff, I know, but it seemed very big stuff then.

I might have found decisions easier if the others hadn’t kept reminding me, with gloating obscenity, that I wasn’t old enough to vote at the forthcoming General Election. It was a reminder that I had not been trained for authority in eccentric warfare. The young soldiers’ battalion had given excellent military instruction, but no guidance on what to do if, on a long patrol, we found a group of obvious Indians in their underwear holed up in a chaung2 (they were “Jifs” – deserters to the Japanese “Indian National Army”); or if the section lunatic decided to shoot a vulture in open paddy, thereby alerting any Japs who might be within earshot; or how to cope with a seasoned veteran who, in a lonely basha at night, swore that there were Japanese outside, hundreds of them but only eighteen inches tall, and led by his Member of Parliament, Sir Walter Womersley, Minister of Pensions. He was the only case (the veteran, not Womersley) that I ever encountered of what is now called, I believe, post-battle trauma; I’m sure it would need psychiatric reports and counselling by social workers nowadays, but the section simply advised him to take his kukri to them – which he did, cleaving the air and crying: “Pensions, you old bastard!” before going back to sleep. He was entirely normal for the rest of the campaign.

What I had been trained for was to be an obedient cog in the great highly-disciplined machine that was launched into Europe on D-Day. That would at least have been in civilised countryside, among familiar faces and recognisable environment, close to home and the main war effort, in a campaign whose essentials had been foreseen by my instructors. The perils and discomforts would have been no less, probably, but they would not have been unexpected. It is disconcerting to find yourself soldiering in an exotic Oriental country which is medieval in outlook, against a barbarian enemy given to burying prisoners up to the neck or hanging them by the heels for bayonet practice, among a friendly population who would rather turn dacoit than not, where you could get your dinner off a tree, be eaten alive by mosquitos and leeches, buy hand-made cheroots from the most beautiful girls in the world (with granny watching, puffing her bidi3 and rolling the tobacco leaf on her scrawny thigh), wake in the morning to find your carelessly neglected mess-tin occupied by a spider the size of a soup-plate, watch your skin go white and puffy in ceaseless rain the like of which no Westerner can imagine for sheer noise and volume, gape in wonder at huge gilded pagodas silent in the wilderness, and find yourself taken aback at the sight of a domestic water-tap, because you haven’t seen such a thing for months.