The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy (48 page)

‘Look at it all!' Feather said. ‘It doesn't seem real! How
the hell are we going to settle down in Civvy Street again after seeing this lot?'

‘You'll forget all about it once you're back on the farm again.' He had a little fruit farm in Kent.

Feather shook his head. ‘After all this, I don't know how I'll settle down again with my old woman, I'm sure.'

‘I shouldn't start worrying about that until you get home!'

He shook his head again.

The 2 Div guns opened up on the Japanese positions on the other side of Kohima so suddenly that we both jumped. You would wonder how anyone survived unless you had seen the bunkers.

RAF fighter-bombers were having a duffy too.

After a while, there was activity down on the road, of which we could glimpse one short stretch. We saw jeeps go by. Perhaps the road was open all the way at last. We saw dust rising, and in a minute tanks were visible. On the ridge opposite us there was movement, where columns of infantry – the Punjabis, we found later – were fanning out on to higher ground. Behind the tanks was a transport column, our transport! Old Jock McGuffie would be there somewhere, if he had not managed to bum his way back to Calcutta.

Feather nudged me and indicated something to his side of the rock. I peered over his shoulder. On one of the trails that ran below our position, several hundred yards away, a column of Japs was moving, taking no trouble to conceal themselves and chatting to each other as they went along. But what amazed us was what was with them. They had an elephant at the rear of the column. Feather slithered back to get the guard corporal, Warry Warren. Warry fetched Lieutenant Boyer. Word spread. Soon everyone who was spare was lining the edge of our escarpment, staring down at the elephant, toy-like in the distance. It was plodding along steadily, a ten-pounder gun on its back, with little Japs leading it.

‘It may have come from one of the Burmese logging camps as part of the spoils of war,' Boyer said.

As we watched, two or three of the Japs threw up their hands and collapsed. The rest immediately fell to the ground. Only then did the sound of a long burst of Bren-fire reach us. Someone had the trail dead in range, and had perhaps been waiting for the Jap party to reach the best
firing point: 5 Brigade, the Dorsets, very likely. The elephant raised its trunk to trumpet. Now the soldiers were on their feet again and running. One went plunging over the
khud.
The elephant toppled to its knees. It waved its trunk about, opening its mouth wide. Then it too fell over the edge and was lost to view. The firing stopped. Nobody was to be seen, unless you counted one dead body.

‘Rotten fucking bastards, killing an innocent animal!' Jackie Tertis said.

‘It wasn't innocent – it was an enemy elephant!' Bamber said.

We fell back roaring with laughter. Everyone just stood, looking at their muckers and bellowing with laughter. Modern warfare, airlifts and everything, and fucking Sato was using elephants! The contrast was too much for us!

What a scene that was! What a group we were! Others had been killed or wounded – we survived and we had complete trust in each other. We worked as a machine – hadn't we proved that? All the training, all the ritualization of speech, had prepared us for this amazing, marvellous unity. Every fucker there loved every other fucker. The hierarchical structure of the British Army had triumphed over the class structure of the British; the difference between them came like illumination: class divides, is meant to divide; hierarchy unites, is meant to unite. Officers, NCOs, men, from the old Brig downwards, we were all comrades-in-arms.

So I have to put it in clumsy words now, a quarter of a century and more since we came down from those barbaric hillsides, and so I think it was. At the time it came to me like a revelation out of the clear air, without words. It was the mystique of battle. Once you have experienced it, you never forget it.

That evening, after a gruelling slog up and down the jungle-covered hillsides, after crossing the Manipur Road, the Mendips moved over the IGH Spur and took up defensive positions alongside the Punjabis. We were in Kohima!

What should have been an hour of triumph was a time of utter disgust.

One of the constant disappointments of the campaign was the way in which magical names turned out to be illusion. Later, there were Palel, Tamu, Sittaung, Tiddim, Kalewa,
and Schwebo – syllables which proved themselves capable of rolling thrillingly right down a lifetime – and one by one these places, like Kohima, turned out to be little more than ruined bungalows, a few burnt-out
bashas
, a tin shack, and a temple. Our positions at Kohima were scarcely as much as that: just a few pimples of hills overlooked by enemy positions and the District Commissioner's bungalow in its pockmarked grounds!

A fortnight of siege, of attack and counter-attack, had turned Kohima into a minor Somme. As ‘A' Company worked its way through the shattered trees, the slanting sunlight appeared to shift and tremble. The flies were there. This was their campaign! They feasted where human beings starved. And so many varieties of fly, little dun flies that no amount of gluttony could make fat, big flies that crawled everywhere like legged grapes, scintillating flies, flies that flicked their wings as they sipped, flies that would not go away, that returned twenty times to the very same spot on your face if you struck at it twenty times, perverted flies, drunk flies, dying flies, sportive flies. They made a patina over every single thing, and could dim the daylight when they rose in their swarms.

What they fed and bred on were the pieces of human being that rotted in the churned mud. The whole site was mud, gouged by shells and trenches and running boots; bits of men, whole limbs, had been blasted all about the area. The dead bodies, fat and blackened in the heat, had at last been dragged away; but the bits that had fallen-off, or had been blown off or shot off or chopped off, still lay about, and poisoned the air with their stomach-curdling sweet stench of carrion. Some of the chaps were spewing their rings up as we dug ourselves in. Fortunately, the Jap sniping intensified, which kept our minds off the butcher's compost all round.

There were all sorts of other shit lying around, as well as shit itself – boxes, boots, shattered rifles, fragments of parachute, keys, a typewriter, bottles, bandage, kit-bags – you name it. Tertis found a little brass Buddha which he rubbed up on some flannelette and kept. A couple of days later, standing watching in a trench during a torrential downpour, I spotted a curious object in the mud just ahead of me. It looked like part of an ivory bracelet. I reached forward and tried to pick it up. It was a crescent of teeth, sticking out of a bit of lower jaw.

I nearly went spare. Somehow, it was just too much. My mind flipped, and I was falling through the cracks of existence into a world where tiny yellow dentists swarmed underground like worms, extracting people's jawbones through their gaping mouths. I was with them, another gaping mouth. Years later, that ghastly moment returned to me in nightmares over and over again.

At the time, I did not recognize Chota Morris and the other blokes who piled on to me to stop me screaming and running wildly about. I didn't recognize anything but panic. Mercifully, Chota Morris clipped me on the jaw and almost laid me out. When I came round properly, I was sitting propped against a tree, with several anxious faces staring down at me, Chota's included.

‘Thik-hai
, Stubby?'

‘Achibar
, mucker. Roll on the boat that takes me home!'

‘You had us fucking worried there for a moment, mate! We thought you'd gone proper
puggle.
Geordie's off to get you a mug of
char.'

It was hell on that bastarding hill. The garrison had been relieved, the position, so vital to the road from Dimapur to Imphal – where 4 Corps were still fighting on – was held. But all round it lay dozens of natural fortresses where Sato and his fiendish soldiery could hold out for years. Thank God we did not know then that we were to be stuck in that frightful place for all of five weeks. The siege of Kohima was off; the battle for Kohima was still on.

The Japs never gave an inch. Although they were no longer the superhuman devils of the jungle they had been to the bods in the Arakhan, their courage and tenacity had something supernatural about it. They did not know when they were beaten. They launched bayonet charge after bayonet charge, running to certain death. They shouted and shrieked at us after dark. They never took prisoners, they never surrendered. We longed to blow their faces off their skulls, and at the same time we were proud that they were ten times more terrible than anything the Wehrmacht had to offer.

Their snipers and mortar-men kept our heads down all the time. When you moved anywhere, you moved at the double, in fear for your life. Nights were hell – night or day, for all those five weeks, none of us ever notched up more than four consecutive hours of sleep. Of course you did learn to sleep
whenever there was a spare minute. Not that it felt much like sleep; it was full of things moving, and you woke feeling as if whiskers were growing on the inside of your skull.

And what were we battling for? Most of the time, we were battling for possession of the DC's tennis court. Or were we battling for Burma – a country that no one in their right minds had heard of before or since!?

Perhaps you could now construct a symbol out of that tennis court and make it stand as a monument to the futility of the Forties. Where the tea-planters of Assam, in the mellow Thirties afternoons, had lobbed tennis balls over the net, we now lobbed grenades. But, at the time it was deadly imperative for us to take that innocuous patch of ground, to blast out of existence the bunkers that lay on the other side of it, and thus to open up the road below the beak of Swinton's imagined duck and clear the way south to Imphal and victory.

Somehow we lived through it all, somehow we survived on a pint of water a day and an occasional tot of rum and meagre rations, somehow we kept back fear, somehow we survived the slow loss of our muckers. Carter the Farter came back from Field Ambulance with his arm bandaged, looking all fresh and smart, kidding us about our beards and how we smelt, and that very day fell beside me with his head askew and the life-blood pouring out of his throat.

April passed, May came. More of our lads got killed – steady old Di Jones, who had already had a wound on Merema, never to see his Welsh valley again, and his mucker, Taffy Evans, and too many other good men who stood at their posts to the last. Still we were stuck there.

One bit of the perimeter would give. We would get it back. Then another would go. The tanks came up, but could not decide the issue. Desperate fighting went on in Naga Village. Our gunners back at Zubza and Jotsoma kept plastering the heights from which the Japs plastered us. The fighter-bombers came blasting up the valley day after day. Still nothing changed. The grape-vine said that the Japs were all starving at their posts and dying of every imaginable disease, especially the yaws, scurvy, starvation and syphilis. We had killed thousands of the bastards. But their bunkers still spewed out flying steel as unremittingly as ever.

Our days up on Merema Ridge now seemed a bygone dream, a boy scout's lark. You didn't dare think how many
engagements like this there would be before the Nips were pushed back into Burma, let alone out of Burma and into the oceans beyond. Nobody thought of the future, or remembered the past.

The bags of mail from home arrived regularly. All the family wrote to me in turn, sending me as lavish a ration of news and love as possible. But the world had turned inside out. Their words came from a place we could not reach to a setting they could not visualize. Amid our dirty-arsed standtos, home and its people faded to myths; the Japs were a hell of a fucking sight more real.

In May, with the rains settling in heavily, things began to give a bit. By the 13th, though the tennis court still held, some of the obstacles to the south fell into our hands. For the first time, we were treated to the sight of Japs running away. We cheered then, jumped out of our trenches against orders, and fired at the bastards as they went. Their figures flopped like puppets among the dismasted palms.

The rumours were proving true. The Japs were becoming demoralized, were starving, although they were never to run out of their own savage version of courage. Sato could not hold out for ever. On 1st June, his men began to pull away from their beautifully-placed positions. Before that, we had had to undergo another spasm of fighting.

The tennis court was left to the Dorsets, and welcome they were to it. On 24th May, our battalion moved south of the Kohima defences, and was set to climb Aradura Spur as a final test of stamina. This we did through thickest jungle, in pissing rain. Assam gets about twenty times as much rain as Britain, collecting most of it in three months. Most of it hit us. I was shitting six different kinds of dysentery at the time, and everyone else was practically
puggle
with weariness, illness, or jungle sores.

‘A' Company was Tac. We were labouring upwards through the dripping undergrowth, while the path we followed was turning into a considerable stream. All the flies and ants of Aradura were clinging to us for safety, when some wag up the front called out a variant of our old catchphrase: ‘While you're climbing up Aradura Spur you're doing nothing worse.'

Forty officers and men started pissing themselves with laughter. Progress stopped as we lay there in the gudge, helpless with mirth.

We knew there was fighting to be done when we got to the top – but, Christ, the getting there! We were going up that spur for ever! As Dusty Miller said, the jungle was so thick you couldn't tell your arse from your elbow. You couldn't see ahead or behind or sideways. Massive trees reared overhead. The radio was not operating, so we were cut off from the Royal Berks, who were supposed to be somewhere on our flank. Our whole battalion was advancing in single file, against all the rules of warfare.