The Empire Trilogy (169 page)

… Hanc sententiam dicamus …
Floreat Sand … ha … haa … liaaaaah!

As this weird and chilling incantation came to an end, Matsushita took the sabre and with a swift, clean swipe beheaded one snake after another. Then he swiftly gathered up the writhing bodies by the tails, stood there for a moment with a fistful of lashing bodies spraying blood over his thighs as if deep in thought, and finally went to sit against the bole of a tree, prising them open one after another with two stubby fingers to search out the liver and pop it in his mouth. An enormous leech, Kikuchi could not help noticing, had battened on the Lieutenant's private parts. Kikuchi from a screen of fronds gazed in dismay at his leader, wondering what to do. But what was there to do, except report for duty as if nothing had happened?

However, as Kikuchi approached, Matsushita addressed him quite rationally and even, once the rest of the unit had arrived, delivered a short, invigorating lecture on Japanese National Spirit, enlarging on the virtues that this Spirit would bring to the oppressed races of Eastern Asia once the decadent Europeans had been thrust aside by the Imperial Army. While he spoke the members of his unit stood ‘at ease' in an exhausted row, eyeing the leech which adhered to the Lieutenant's private parts and wondering whether they should bring it to his attention.

The column had again halted. On a whispered order the infantry stumbled out of the lorries and dispersed to the sides of the road. How stiff were Kikuchi's limbs from the hours he had spent sitting on his heels in the back of the lorry! Since that dreadful ordeal in the jungle and the subsequent capture of Kampar fortress he had been obliged to travel fifty miles or more without transport. The Okabe Regiment, which had made the frontal assault on Kampar, had suffered losses and so the Ando Regiment (and Kikuchi) had had to take up the pursuit again. Since the retreating enemy had taken care to demolish the bridges behind them Kikuchi and his comrades had found themselves travelling on bicycles. This had not seemed too unpleasant at first (anything would have seemed better than wading up to your armpits through leech-filled swamps) but in no time Kikuchi was exhausted; whenever they came to a stream or a river it had to be waded and this entailed carrying his bicycle and equipment on his shoulders. Presently too, his tyres had punctured in the heat like those of his comrades: they had been obliged to rattle along on the rims (this sound, like a company of tanks approaching in the distance, sowed alarm among the retreating British). But so rapidly was the 15th Engineer Regiment repairing the bridges behind them that in due course the Ando Regiment had once more been overtaken by the heavy vehicle, artillery and tank units. Now here they all were, ready to attack by moonlight! Kikuchi's bayonet caught a glint of the moon as he waited, his heart pounding, and he thought: ‘How beautiful!'

But he hardly had time to consider this thought before the night erupted into a volcano spitting fire and projectiles. The tank cannons flashed and roared, tracer poured in fiery streams into the darkness and Kikuchi found himself charging forward. A moment earlier it had seemed that he could scarcely hobble, so stiff were his limbs … but now he found himself running like a hare, with mouth open and lips curled back to emit a terrifying scream which, however, he himself could not hear at all, such was the noise of gunfire. Ahead of him galloped Matsushita, sword in one hand, revolver in the other. A grenade flashed in front of him but the Lieutenant had thrown himself into the ditch beside the road which lay in the shadow of the jungle, or fallen into it, more likely. Kikuchi had reached the comparative safety of this ditch a moment earlier and now crept along it towards Matsushita. Ahead, rolls of wire and a few concrete blocks had been set up across the road. Already, as they watched, the leading tank, still raking the British position with tracer, had reached the first of these pitiful obstacles, had crushed and snapped the barbed wire and brushed aside the concrete blocks and earthworks as easily as if they had been matchboxes. But this was Nakamura's tank. Kikuchi heard Matsushita hiss respectfully between his teeth as he watched it.

Though the British had been driven back to the fringes of the jungle a steady drizzle of rifle fire punctuated by grenades still poured out of the darkness. Only a madman would consider showing himself on the road itself under such a fire, but the next moment Matsushita had leapt out of the ditch and was signalling to his men to follow the tank down the channel it had battered into the British defences The column must drive on deep into the British lines and seize the bridges before they could be demolished. Nakamura must not get all the glory for his tank company!

Kikuchi, hastening after the Lieutenant, stumbled over a dead Hyderabadi, and in doing so grazed the palms of his hands on the road surface. Picking up his rifle again he hastened on over the flattened wire. Nakamura's tank had turned aside to blaze away at a fortified position in the jungle from which, in the blackness, a machine-gun was still dribbling fire, striking sparks off the tank's armoured turret. Meanwhile, more tanks had surged past Nakamura's, motors roaring, down the road into the haven of peace and darkness on the other side of the road-block.

At this moment Kikuchi became aware that the infantry lorry had followed him and was gunning its motor at his back as it negotiated the ruined and abandoned British defences. He stood aside and swung himself aboard as it passed. Other members of his platoon, already inside, grabbed him and hauled him in. A few yards further on another figure loomed out of the darkness and sprang aboard like a panther. A mortar bomb exploding behind them lit up the face of this latecomer … it was Matsushita, his lips working, eyes burning, speechless with excitement. Kikuchi sniffed carefully. Even if he had not seen the Lieutenant's face he could have told who it was by the strange odour, unlike anything he had ever smelled before, which came from him. He sniffed again. If electricity had a smell, that was what Matsushita would have smelled like at that moment.

Now the lorry had reached the dark haven which lay between the Hyderabads and the next British position. More tanks were following them, dark shapes on the moonlit road, and soon the sound of gunfire was left far behind. They drove on down the road as rapidly as they dared without lights in the wake of the two tanks which had taken over the lead. Nakamura's tank was now cruising immediately behind them.

On and on they went into the darkness. Kikuchi was in a trance, his mind whirling. He became aware presently that his mouth was open and that he was panting like a dog, his tongue hanging over his lower lip. It must be the heat, he thought. He closed his mouth and tried not to pant, afraid that Matsushita might regard it as a sign of fear. Now the word was passed back that the leading tank was approaching Milestone 61. Air reconnaissance had revealed further road-blocks at this point. The time was 4.30 a.m. It was still pitch dark. Kikuchi experienced a craving to see daylight once more.

Suddenly there was a flash and a violent explosion just ahead of them. The leading tank had struck a mine buried in the road: instantly the quiet night erupted into fire and uproar. Once more Kikuchi found himself tumbling out on to the road with his companions, screaming at the top of his lungs. Streams of tracer poured over his head from Nakamura's tank behind the lorry, so close that it seemed to scorch his cheek with its fiery breath.

In the darkness something hit him a sharp blow on the side of the head: perhaps the tail-gate of the lorry or the butt of someone's rifle. The blow dazed him; he stood still in a pool of darkness. It was like being in a cage of bright dotted lines criss-crossing each other … it was like a firework display: amid the rushing streams of fire from the tracer there bloomed and died magnificent white and orange chrysanthemums. The white lights which flickered and dribbled from pillboxes set back from the road might have been merely the sparklers which children hold in their hands. The air was alive, too, with the hum and whir of insect wings just as when cherry blossom covers the branches with its lovely foam in the spring and all the hives are busy. ‘How beautiful! he thought for the second time. And he continued to stand there while enemy bullets fell so thickly around him that it was just like a sudden hailstorm rattling on the slopes of Mount Fuji. ‘Look at this!' he marvelled, contemplating the way the bullets furrowed the soft tar of the road-surface like thick worms in the moonlight.

Suddenly his arm was roughly taken and he was thrown down again into the ditch at the side of the road. The shock brought him partly to his senses and he thought that perhaps an Englishman was at this moment fumbling with his shirt before slipping a knife between his ribs. But the voice which spoke to him spoke Japanese and belonged to Corporal Hayashi. Another tank had been immobilized near where they crouched, perhaps even that of Major Toda himself: its track, struck by a shot from an anti-tank rifle, had unrolled and lay flat on the road; nevertheless, its guns continued firing into the jungle. A few moments later the leading tank, attempting once again to batter a channel through the defences, touched off another mine and was wrecked. Small, dark shapes rose and fell against a patch of moonlit sky. Grenades! Corporal Hayashi paternally gripped Kikuchi's head and thrust it down into the ditch; Kikuchi felt the ground shake all around him. But the Corporal's grip on his neck had loosened and when Kikuchi raised his head again, the hand fell away. Hayashi had been struck on the temple by a fragment of shrapnel but his spectacles, untouched, continued to glint in a friendly way at Kikuchi.

Meanwhile, other tanks had come up and grouped themselves so close to each other that it seemed as if a battleship, guns blazing, had moored here in the middle of the jungle, pouring a steady, concentrated fire at each side of the road. Time passed. Another tank was knocked out by an anti-tank gun firing from a fortified position. More time passed. Still tracer zipped into the jungle, still the cannon and mortar boomed. The British fire, though, had diminished. The anti-tank guns were silent. Now the tanks had left their solid formation and were nudging into the jungle. Kikuchi could make out other figures huddled not far away in the cover of the ditch; among them Matsushita crouched, giving orders to the men with him. Soon they would make a bayonet charge to put an end to the stubborn resistance of the Punjabis.

Only a few yards from where Kikuchi waited for the fateful moment when he would have to leap up from the shelter of the ditch, Charlie Tyrrell was kneeling behind a buttress of earth in a litter of spent cartridges trying to estimate from the flashes of their guns whether the tanks were making any progress in their efforts to force a way through the defences. If the tanks could be held until daylight there might be some prospect of a counter-attack, either by the Argylls or by the Punjabis of the 28th Brigade who were resting some miles further back. On the other hand, his own battalion had already suffered such heavy losses from the tank barrage that he doubted whether they would be able to hold off a determined assault by the Japanese infantry. Charlie himself had so far escaped unscathed except for a flesh wound in the calf which had soaked one sock with blood causing it to squelch disagreeably when he walked; but this wound, combined with the shattering noise of the guns and his own fundamental weariness, cast him into a dream-like frame of mind in which he found it hard to think constructively. But even if his state of mind had been more normal he would have found it no easier; it was almost impossible in the darkness, with communications within the battalion difficult and those between the battalion and the Brigade H.Q. now severed, to form a clear idea of what was happening.

The Brigadier, meanwhile, was anxiously prowling about his headquarters in the rubber plantation. All the telephone wires had been cut by this time but he knew that, as he had expected, the Japanese had broken through the Hyderabads and had been halted, at least for a while, by the Punjabis. He now summoned a despatch rider and sent him up the road to the Punjabis, ordering them to hold on to their positions by the road even if the Japanese tanks broke through. At the same time he ordered the Argylls to set up road-blocks.

It was the Argylls' habit to take breakfast early in order to fight on a full stomach. So, having breakfasted before dawn they set to work improvising road-blocks in the darkness, one where the trunk road first entered the rubber, the other a hundred yards in front of the bridge at Trolak (that is, the first of the two bridges the Japanese would reach): this road-block was covered by two armoured cars with anti-tank rifles; at the same time volunteers for a Molotov Cocktail party were called for and marshalled in readiness.

Though the sky was at last beginning to grow pale it was still very dark on the road. Sinclair, in his anxiety to find out how A and D Companies were faring in the rubber on the other side of the trunk road, borrowed a motor-cycle and set off on it rather unsteadily down the estate road from Brigade Head-quarters. As he came careering out of the rubber trees, going rather faster than he intended and meaning to cross the trunk road and follow the estate road which continued among the trees on the far side, a vast shape suddenly loomed out of the darkness. A Japanese tank! Swerving violently he crashed into it, almost head on … but luckily for Sinclair he was thrown clear. As the tank advanced, one of its tracks ran over the motor-cycle, flattened, it, chewed it up and dropped it on the roadway behind. Sinclair dusted himself off shakily as the tank disappeared on down the road into the darkness. ‘Suh … suh … suh … suh … wine!' he shouted after it. ‘You weren't carrying any bloody luh … luh … luh … headlights!' But all he could see, as he stood cursing beside his flattened motorcycle, was the rapidly diminishing flicker of the tank's exhaust. And then he thought: ‘But my God! A Jap tank isn't supposed to be
here
at all!' And although he knew that by now it was almost certainly too late to warn anybody he began to run as fast as he could back the way he had come.