Book Three

God’s Own Country

GOD’S own country was the ironical Fourteenth Army name for Burma. Perhaps it was so named because of the difficulty of getting there. The distance from Calcutta to Kohima in Assam – maintaining the celestial topography, Assam was God’s Frontier Post – had to be measured in more than miles. The rear detail of the First Battalion travelled northwards by train, on a railway taken over and run by US Railway Troops. From the train, we transferred to a ferry, and the ferry took us slowly across the wide Bramaputra. On that river’s eastern shores, we stood in Assam and the effects of the Japanese blight were already apparent. The chaos and splendour of India, the cheerful and hazardous trafficking of its people, all shrank away into the unnatural quiet of an invasion area. Such inhabitants as there were moved the way people do in war-zones – keeping close to the fence. We were far from home.

We climbed on to another train – this time of a narrower gauge than the first, as if the sinister Japanese spell had caused even the railway to contract with fear. This train started with more than Indian promptness and brought us to Dimapur.

Every change of transport meant delays. It also meant the unloading of stores – McGuffie might have lost a military bogie full of our stores, but there were plenty of other stores to be humped. This chain of supply, over different gauges, rivers, and mountains, was the only route to the central front in Burma, bar the air!

The country grew more tremendous as we advanced, as if it too was heading for some kind of crisis. Each change of transport entailed spending a night in a transit camp; each morning, we woke to chill air and, although the sun quickly became as blazingly hot as ever, we knew we were heading towards higher mountains. I don’t know how it was with the others, but for me those were days of excitement. I could have travelled on for ever.

On this journey, the foreign names stood out like names of an incantation: in particular, Dimapur, Kohima, and Imphal! Imphal, the most distant, was capital of the tiny state of Manipur – a capital yet a village – Kohima was just a village in the Naga Hills of Assam, some fifty miles beyond Dimapur. In the ranks, we made little distinction between Manipur and Assam and Burma – all tropical trouble-centres.

As we rolled into Dimapur, everyone stood at the windows of the train staring out in amazement.

‘Hey, I reckon the fucking Japs have taken over here already!’ Tertis said.

The pitiful little town was packed with soldiery and refugees and thousands of coolies. This was the bottle-neck between India and Burma and, for every man going forward, eastwards, there were ten trying to get back, westward. As the valley opened out, the panorama resembled an historical frieze more than reality. Dust roads stretched in all directions. Along them roared camouflaged lorries, one behind the other almost bumper to bumper, travelling at reckless speeds. There were long static lines of coolies, too, often engulfed in dust. In the valley and on the hillside, impromptu camps were being flung up. Digging was going on everywhere. The whole impression this great staging area gave was of chaos. An invasion had taken place, as Jackie Tertis implied.

In the centre of town stood a signpost with three fingers, each pointing in a different direction and reading, ‘NEW YORK 11,000 miles, TOKYO 5,300 miles, LONDON 8,300 miles’. As the pecking order of cities indicated, Americans were in town. As usual, the American troops looked more relaxed, more democratic, bigger, and decidedly better fed than our troops; they differed as much from us in those respects as we did from the Indian sepoys.

The mixture of races was staggering. It was as if all these thousands of strange men had suddenly arrived to build a new Tower of Babel in this unknown spot. We saw Chinese troops, who were reserved, and Gurkhas, who waved cheerily (‘Yon’s the best fucking fighting man in the world, after your Glaswegian,’ McGuffie said), and a contingent of West Africans – not to mention a baffling miscellany of Indian and Assamese troops. Everyone was on the move.

For all the over-crowding, our little party moved into a neat and almost empty staging camp. It had been set up for 2 Div. We were almost the first of the division to arrive at the scene of action. The rest were straggling, train-load by train-load, across India, towards this narrow and dangerous valley which pointed towards Kohima and the advancing Japanese.

Our party grabbed some food and then went to see a film show: Tom Conway in ‘The Falcon in Danger’. The film was projected on to canvas, so that the audience could sit on the ground on both sides of the screen. Who cared on which side of his head Conway parted his hair?

Chatting with other squaddies, we gained a basic picture of what was happening in the so-called real world about us. Japanese units were moving forward again, threatening Kohima and encroaching on the Dimapur-Kohima and Kohima-Imphal roads. Nobody knew precisely where they were. The Dimapur-Kohima road was overlooked by mountains, every mountain covered by jungle right up to its crest; some of the chaps had seen Japs moving about on the crests. 33 Corps was supposed to be guarding this vital length of road – ‘and they’re a bloody shower,’ someone lugubriously remarked.

‘The Mendips’ll sort them fucking Japs out!’ Carter the Farter said. He laughed.

We walked down the valley road, smoking and chatting, to a canteen in a tent where they were serving chicken buttis and beer. Over the Naga Hills, a half-moon sailed. London 8,300 miles. In the tent, a group of Cockneys were arguing drunkenly about the exact route a Number 15 bus took.

I stood outside drinking my pint and smoking. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. All the expectations of yesterday had been swept away. It was enough to stand in this magnificent valley.

My mates had told me their news: how they had been transferred to Barrackpore as soon as I had left for the Field Ambulance Unit, how Gore-Blakeley had been going spare about the missing equipment, and how everything had suddenly become irrelevant because the Japs were on the move and every able-bodied man in India was being pushed up to meet them. Whatever schemes McGuffie or Gore-Blakeley or anyone else had nourished – all were blown away. The lists had arrived, the orders went through, we did as we were told.

There was a remote outburst of firing, echoing down among the hills.

‘Probably Jap mortars – they’re bastards with their mortar-fire,’ Ernie said.

‘Some poor bastard’s getting it,’ Aylmer said. He and I walked back to our basha, leaving the others. It was the first firing – the first real firing – we had heard. Here and there, groups of men were singing in the darkness. Convoys were moving in both directions. Sepoys were on guard all along the road, at the stage of night with friends to keep them company smoking beadis, the pungent scents of which followed us down the road.

‘At least we should be going in with Yankee Lee-Grant tanks,’ Aylmer said reflectively. ‘The old Valentines they used in the Arakan were no use – should have been pegdoed long ago – obsolete. They’ve been handed over to the Chinese now, so I hear.’

I laughed. ‘They’ll do for the fucking Chinese!’

‘The Chinese are fine fighting men. The old Yanks won’t have a scrap without electric-razor sockets in their landing craft, but your Chink is brought up to fight on a handful of rice a day. A Chink’ll go for days on just a handful of rice. They’re like the Japs, given the chance I wouldn’t mind if they were going in with us.’

It was the second time he had used that expression ‘going in’. He seemed to savour it.

‘Christ, it’s a fucking lovely night!’ I said.

We heard firing again, followed by the plummy sound of mortars.

Next day was a waiting day for rear detail. Most of them were pressed into digging slit-trenches; McGuffie and I went off with Captain Gore-Blakeley, Jock driving his Jeep, I lugging my wireless set and passing an occasional message to or from White Knight, which was someone at Corps HQ. Gore-Blakeley had with him a Major Bedford, a Division Officer, in charge of supply dispersal or something. They seemed to enjoy themselves, driving about everywhere, walking miles. Jock was often able to sit tight in the Jeep while I tagged after them on foot, sweating beneath the set-harness, half-listening to their conversation.

They were both very cool and detached about the prospects for the battle, as though discussing the chances for a season’s football fixtures. Bedford was the senior prefect.

‘The sooner 8 Brigade moves in the better,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a very mixed bag defending Kohima, although they hold good defensive positions. The Japs are much thicker on the ground than we realized at first. Mutaguchi and Sato are first-class commanders and, if they overrun Kohima, Dimapur would be impossible to defend. I needn’t stress how disastrous it would be for India and the UK if they took Dimapur.’

‘Supposing they by-pass Kohima, as they have Imphal?’

‘We shall have to do the best we can.’

‘Naturally.’ Perhaps Gor-Blimey felt at a disadvantage. He said quickly, ‘2 Div is moving into its concentration areas as fast as possible. As you know, units have to assemble from as far afield as Chittagong and Ahmednagar.’

‘It’s that damned line of communication back to India! Fortunately, the Japs’ lines are even more extended.’

‘The monsoons will make everything impossible. I hate to think of the water that pours off these hillsides in the wet season.’

Bedford had a way of wiping his moustache with an open hand as if it kept filling with sweat and needed to be frequently squeezed dry. He wiped it now with some perseverance. ‘We’re learning to fight over any terrain, under any conditions.’

‘Agreed entirely. But it would clearly be better if we could drive Sato back into the central Burmese plains before the wet season. The British soldier is more accustomed to fighting in open country.’

Lowering his voice in the hope that I, trudging along in the rear, would not hear, Bedford said, ‘Most of the units in this area are unaccustomed to any mode of fighting – with notable exceptions, they’ve never fired a rifle in anger in their lives.’

‘8 Brigade are as highly trained as any unit in this theatre of war.’

‘Thank God for that but – without wishing to cast a damper in any way – your chaps have been trained in combined ops. They may find the mountain jungles ahead a different kettle of fish entirely.’

‘You should be pleasantly surprised within the next few days.’

‘Of course I expect to be. It’s a matter of first urgency to get the brigade up the road to its concentration area at Zubza, and out of this bloody shambles.’

Bedford indicated the muddle of rifle pits and barbed wire through which we were walking. Hundreds of spare bods stood about or sat on piles of kit. Coolies wandered aimlessly everywhere. You could go a long way – we did go a long way – before seeing anyone with a rifle. Only in the reinforcement camps was there order and a military scheme of things. We toured the defences in an alternating state of anger and expectation, eventually arriving at an airstrip, where Bedford and Gore-Blakeley disappeared into an officers’ mess and Jock and I scrounged a fried egg, a couple of bully sandwiches, a can of plums, and char from an aircraftsman’s cookhouse. This feast we ate on the edge of the airstrip, watching the planes – mainly RAF Vengeances – land or take off in the dust and daylight.

‘If we could think of a way of getting on to one of they wee planes, we could be back in Calcutta and pissed before fucking sunset,’ Jock said wistfully. ‘I’ll maybe go and chat up some of them pilots. Bet you there’s a Glasgey lad there somewhere! Come on!’

‘I’ll stay by the Jeep. Have a bash, Jock!’

‘Okay, you unsociable bugger – just don’t flog the vehicle to anybody.’

He nodded and marched off, with that parody of a march he reserved for his public performances. I noted that for once he was making a tactical error. The parade-ground stomp was out in Dimapur, where it raised too much dust; the fashion was for a sort of brisk stroll, a gun-fighter’s walk.

The guns were hammering away in the hills when my two officers reappeared.

‘Sounds as if we’re bashing the Japs again, sir,’ I said to Gor-Blimey.

‘Do you fancy a bash at them yourself, Private Stubbs?’ Bedford asked. Testing morale, no doubt.

I nodded my head and smiled in idiot Tommy Atkins fashion. ‘Me, sir? Signaller Stubbs, sir. Not ’arf, sir!’

He smiled back, attempting once more to wipe the moustache off his face. ‘Well, the sooner you get your chance the better. If the Japs get this far, India could be theirs. It’s a pretty rugged prospect. You should be moving up to engage before very long.’

‘We’ll give ’em what for, sir!’

‘I’m sure you will.’

Three Hurribombers went snarling past overhead, speeding up the valley towards Kohima.

To Bedford, Gor-Blimey said, ‘Someone’s going to “give ’em what for”, by the looks of things.’

‘Just as well. We’ve got precious little strike-power on the ground in Kohima at present – the Assam Regiment, almost untried, plus the Assam Rifles, who are just local police, a few odds and sods of the Burma Regiment, and our friends and allies of the Nepalese Army! Hardly the most solid defence against a crack Japanese division like the 31st.’

‘A hybrid mixture.’ The officers lit cigarettes. Gor-Blimey leaned against the Jeep and looked up at the hills with the nonchalant eye of a grouse-shooter.

‘Damned hybrid mixture!’ Bedford said. ‘That’s part of the charm of the Fourteenth Army. A signals captain at Ranking’s last committee meeting was likening us to the armies of Austria-Hungary at the beginning of the Great War. I shut him up! I thought the parallel was one that hardly needed stressing.’

‘Hardly! The British have always used native contingents – because of our small population, I suppose. I hear the Japanese are using Koreans.’ He turned abruptly to me. ‘We should be moving. Stubbs, where is McGuffie?’

‘He’s just nipped off to the latrines, sir. Here he comes now!’

We watched McGuffie swinging his arms as he marched across the dusty plain towards us, looking every inch an unsung hero.

‘Just went to collect some fags, sir!’ he said, saluting smartly.

We were called at five next morning, before dawn had broken. The world was silent and fantasmal, embalmed in a chill air. It felt like the middle of the night. We had a cold wash, dressed, packed our things, and lugged them over to the mess, where surly cooks were dishing out the first bergoo of the day. Other soldiers were there at the mess tables, a despatch rider in leather coat all covered in dust, three Aussies who did not speak, various wild-looking characters. Jam stood on the trestle tables in great cans. As always, I was ravenous.

‘Where we going, Corp?’

‘Join the rest of “A” Company, of course.’

We moved over to a dispersal point and were checked out, and Corporal Dutt marched us to a supply dump, where an RASC Corporal set us to loading rations into a five-tonner. It was just getting light.

Beginning to feel more like a fighting troop, I asked the corporal-in-charge why we were set to loading rations.

‘You lot got to get up that road, thik-hai? These rations is due for Kohima, malum? You’re lucky to be travelling up with ’em, in comfort. If I had my way, you lot would march up the bloody road, and then we’d have more room in the transport for rations, but the road’s choked up enough already without you terrible hairy 8 Brigade wallahs stragglin’ over it.’

‘Pity they didn’t build a wider road then,’ I suggested.

He stood stock still and glared at me. ‘What ignorance!’ His contempt almost overwhelmed him. ‘You’re a base-wallah, mate, aren’t you? Just come in from Firpo’s with the ice cream still wet round your bloody mouth! You want to take a fucking good shufti at that road as you goes over it this morning, and remember when you do that every inch of the way was built on human sacrifice, just as in days of old!’

There was reason to recall what he said, and he was with us to remind us. When the lorry was loaded, we piled in, and it moved to form up on a feed road with the next convoy to go through. Day was fully on us now. We could see the scar of the road, yellow and brown, against the mountainside – and then realized that that was only another feed: the proper road lay high above it, in the low clouds.

What a drive that was, once we got started! We had Indian drivers who, despite the odds placed against their doing so, kept us on the road. It must have been a challenge to any man. The marvellous road curled continuously round the mountainsides with the dexterity of a contour-line on a map. It rarely ran straight for more than a few yards.

The RASC corporal gave us a commentary, pointing excitedly as the early morning sunshine swung first in the back then in the front of our gharri.

‘Watch this bit now! A gharri went over the khud here a couple of days ago and started a minor avalanche. They’re still patching up the damage.’

Gangs of native workmen, muffled in old sweaters or tunics, worked with baskets by the road where he indicated and there were others just over the edge of the bank, clinging to what looked like a sheer drop.

‘They’re the blokes as built this magnificent engineering enterprise – gangs of Indians and Assamese and Nagas and the bleeding lot, what you wouldn’t look twice at normally – built it all on their tod, with a bit of help from our sappers and suchlike. Don’t it make you weep to see it? Now you know why the British Empire’s great!’

‘You mean we exploit all the good road-builders!’ Carter the Farter said.

‘I’ll throw you over the khud, mate, if you talk like that! Look out there! Just take a shufti! What ennerprise! I come up here most days and never get sick of the sight!’

Sitting on the piles of bully-cans, we stared out with him. It certainly was a marvellous road. Down in the valley, several hundred feet below, we saw an occasional burnt-out lorry, where an unlucky driver had not been quick enough with brake or wheel. The scenery was wild and magnificent. All of us, from time to time, glanced furtively up at the crests of hills, looking for Japs.

Some way beyond the Nichugard Pass, we had a long halt for more than an hour. An advance Jap patrol several miles ahead, had blown a bridge during the night. We waited without complaint until traffic could move again, standing on the road with the sun scorching our arms and foreheads. Lorries could be seen far ahead, moving round their shoulders of the road, long before it was our turn to jump aboard and go ahead.

The sense that the die was cast was strong on us. Calcutta had sunk far below the plimsoll line. We could only guess at what lay ahead. Even McGuffie was silent this morning, beyond an occasional curse at the driver to take the curves easy. His attempt to sneak an air-lift back to Calcutta the day before had come to nothing – the pilots had all been Canadian – and he was content to listen to the oratory of the RASC corporal.

We arrived at Milestone 35, where Battalion HQ was still being established. A crude roadside sign pointed up a side track to our concentration area.

‘All change!’ yelled the RASC corporal. ‘This is Zubza. No cinemas or cushy air-conditioned restaurants here!’

Without wasting time, we threw our kit down on to the dusty verge. The corporal stared at me as I climbed over the tail-board.

‘Well, Firpo, p’raps you learnt sommink this morning!’

‘It’s quite a road, I give you that.’

‘Quite a road! Sod me! I’ll say it is! It’s the Eighth Wonder of the World, after Stonehenge and Edison’s Lighthouse!’ He banged his open palm against the side of the truck as a signal to the driver. ‘Jhaldi jao! Kohima!’

He gave us a thumbs-up sign as the lorry disappeared in the swashbuckling dust.

The heat of day was intense as we reported in and moved uphill to our new positions.

‘Here comes the old monkey god himself!’ There was Wally, with the rest of our mates, whom we had not seen since Kanchapur. He came up and smote me affectionately on my biceps. ‘How’s Vishnu and the rest of your fucking pin-ups then, Stubby?’

‘In my big pack, you old sod, along with Micheal Meatyard. How’re you doing, cobber?’

Wally, Dusty Miller, Di Jones, Enoch, and the others looked wilder than they had done in Kanchapur, tougher, and browner. We stood about for a while, joking and laughing, until RSM Payne came and moved us on.

‘It’s great here, cocker,’ Wally said, walking along with me. ‘Not like fucking Kanchapur or Vadikhasundi. We’ve only been here a couple of days – had a scare just as we were digging in. The picket exchanged a few rounds with a party of wandering Japs. The hills are lousy with ’em.’

‘Bet you shit yourself, Page!’ Carter laughed. ‘Churchill won’t help you here, you fucking old Tory!’

‘I don’t see Joe Stalin tagging along with you neither,’ Wally said, good-humouredly.

‘How’s Geordie Wilkinson?’ I asked.

Wally lifted his bush hat and mopped his forehead. ‘He needs his mum!’

The novelty of being half-way up a mountain was infectious. We were jumpy and excited. When Charley Meadows came along to show Carter the Farter and me where to dig our slit trench, he clearly shared the general excitement. Only Geordie, when he showed up, seemed less enthusiastic.

‘You won’t find any knocking-shops up here, like, mate, I’m afraid. No football, either.’

‘Seen any Japs, yet, Geordie?’

Geordie’s Adam’s apple started to bob. He made obscure gestures to me, trying to get me to one side so that Carter, a well-known mocker, did not hear what he had to say. I moved over to oblige him.

‘We only got here like a couple of days ago – at least it seems longer, but that’s all it is, just a couple of days. And the Japs opened fire on us as soon as we got here.’

‘I heard the picket had loosed off a few rounds at someone.’

‘Look, mate …’ He grabbed my arm. ‘The fucking bullets, I mean. I swear they were aiming at me – well, not aimed at me, like, but I was on that fucking picket, and Christ … Honest, mate, I nearly got wiped out, like, as soon as I got here. I mean, perhaps I’m unlucky or something. A sort of Jonas, you know what I mean? The bloke that got swallowed up by the what’s-it, the whale …’

‘For Christ sake, Geordie, fuck off, man! We’re all going to get fired at, aren’t we? That’s what we’re here for, isn’t it?!’

He went sulky. ‘It’s all right for you, mate, you don’t care. You’re as bad as Wally, you never fucking care, but some bloke in the factory told me I was a Jonas once.’

‘You mean a Jesus. A Weeping Jesus!’

‘How about lending a hand with this bastarding trench, Stubbs?’ Carter the Farter called. ‘It’s like hacking your way through fucking millstones.’

‘Get on with it, Carter! Stop moaning! I thought you were a Communist and believed in working for the general good!’ I turned to Geordie. ‘Pull yourself together, Geordie, for Christ’s sake! You’re okay. The Japs missed you, didn’t they?’

‘You can say that … It’s cushy for you – I suppose that Monkey God thing brings you luck, like, or summat … You were down in Chowringhee with Carter and fucking McGuffie when they were firing at me. You know that McGuffie’s a real bastard, don’t you? I bet you were having a poke down there in Cal, weren’t you?’

‘You were there yourself. Didn’t you have a poke? I bet old Wally did!’

‘Oh, yes, old Wally did …’

‘Right – well, you’d be feeling a fucking lot better now if you’d had a poke right alongside him.’

‘There’s no survival value in fucking …’

‘Oh, Jesus, fuck off, Geordie, will you, do you mind!’

‘That’s all you care, like! Fine mucker you turned out to be!’ He moved off and I went to help Carter. Some of our natural excitement had begun to wear off by the time Carter the Farter and I had dug ourselves a slit-trench. The ground was tough and stoney and needed a lot of work. We pitched our two-man bivouac over it and breathed deep, while sweat poured off us.

‘This is a right way to start our holidays in Assam,’ I said.

Carter patted the tent affectionately. ‘What the hell, it’s home!’ We began to sing together:

It’s only a shanty in old shanty town …

We were still singing when Sergeant Chota Morris, my old buddy in No. I Platoon, came up the trail. He too looked wilder and browner than in Kanchapur.

‘How does it feel to know that there are twenty thousand murdering little sods of Japs out there, creeping towards you, Horry?’

‘Christ, they don’t know I’m here yet, do they?’

‘’Course they do, boy – the news is back in Tokyo by now!’

‘When do we actually have a go at them?’

‘No good asking me. Nobody seems to know exactly where the Japs are, or how many divisions they’ve got in the area. They’re attacking Imphal in strength – that’s sixty-five road miles south of Kohima, but they may have a couple more divisions between here and Imphal.’

‘And how far’s Kohima from here? Only about ten miles, isn’t it?’

‘That’s not the point. We’ve got to hang on till the whole Div gets here, and then we can’t just move up the road, not just like that.’

‘Why the fuck not?’

‘Because it would be too easy for this bloody army!’ Carter interposed.

Chota said, ‘Anything moving along that road is liable to be picked off from the hills. It’s a perfect target! You can’t hold the road without holding the hills, can you? So my bet is that we’ll soon get cracking into these ridges behind us – and we won’t get cracking until all the gash bods in the area are sent back to base.’

We stood contemplating the savage planes of jungle all round us.

‘Makes a change from Kanchapur!’

‘We’ll knock the shit out of the Japs. It’s going to come out in bucketsful. They’ve had their own way out here too long. Once we stop them here, we can bowl them back into Burma and out the other side.’

He made it sound like a village cricket match played with turds for balls.

‘Why should we bloody bother about what happens to Burma?’ Carter the Farter asked. ‘I’d never heard of the bloody dump till I come out to India.’

‘It’s not Burma so much, we’ve got to hold on to India, haven’t we?’

‘Why?’

‘Don’t be fucking daft, man, because it’s ours, isn’t it?’

‘Carter’s a Communist,’ I said. ‘You don’t want to take any notice of what he says! He thinks the king and queen should move out of Buckingham Palace and live in a council flat.’

Chota Morris laughed. ‘I suppose you think we’re oppressing the Indians, do you? They’d be a fucking sight worse off without us looking after them.’

Carter always rose to such bait. ‘Balls! Arseholes! The British ruling classes are oppressing the Indians just as they oppress the British working man. If we stood back and let the Japs have India, we’d all be freer.’

‘You’d be working on the fucking Death Railway for one!’

‘Besides, what about the rights of the Japanese working man?’ I asked.

‘I’ll shoot the bastard when I see him,’ Carter said, and we all burst out laughing.

I stood under a low tree to cool off and look about at the superb landscape through which the Japanese working man might even now be crawling. A leaf fell off a twig and spiralled down to the ground. It lay there in the sun, green at my feet. I had a fag. My mind wandered. I just felt fucking lucky to be there, to be among my mates again, to be standing in the middle of that marvellous country. I was fitter and tougher than I had ever been, wanking twice a day without noticing it, burning off surplus energy. The air was like armour – it blazed and it had advanced from the Himalayas, not so far away. You could suck it down your throat like beer.

In twenty minutes, the leaf by my boots had turned brown. In half-an-hour, it was shrivelled and dead, lost, forgotten among the debris underfoot.

That night, the garrison at Kohima was heavily attacked; the concentration of Japs in the area was growing. Two nights later, the siege was on in earnest. We lay awake in our slit-tenches, listening to the firing.

The tremendous task of moving in our division, with all its guns and equipment, through that crazy line of supply from India, went on. Behind our defences above Zubza, we passed our days as picturesquely as outlaws. Our handkerchiefs and sweat-rags and any white articles of clothing we possessed were dyed jungle-green in a vat made from an oil drum, cut in two and placed over an open fire. We were issued with an amazing new American chemical called DDT, which we rubbed along the seams of our clothes to keep bugs out, since we were unlikely to be washing clothes for a while. We ate mepacrine and vitamin tablets. We cleaned rifles, and I was issued with a sten gun instead of a rifle. I worked the wireless set, and found how baffling it was to establish communication by short wave in a mountainous area.

We were also addressed by the CO of the Battalion, Willie Swinton. He told us that we were about to fight and win one of the great victories of the war, that our fame was assured, and that never again would we be called the Forgotten Army.

‘While we’re winning victories, we aren’t doing anything worse,’ Bamber said, parodying himself.

We patrolled. We picketed. We watched. We waited. It was all rather exciting. We were playing soldiers.

Only a few days before, I had been in Calcutta, surrounded by all sorts of petty worries. They had gone, they were obsolete. We were in action now. We had nothing, or nothing that we couldn’t carry with us. We were hunters.

I felt myself stripped to the bone. For once, I understood everything that was going on around me, because everything had been reduced to its most primitive. We had to crawl round our allotted hillsides, keeping in touch with neighbouring units, watching for the enemy. Although I had never considered myself cut out for that sort of thing, ancient instincts woke and growled in pleasure.

That Assamese landscape had a lot to do with it. How back-breakingly tremendous it was! Sometimes we had to move up to the top of a ridge, two thousand feet above the road and another thousand above the valley. Clouds drifted below us. We scrambled over burning rock or moved in single file up sandy chaungs, which would be raging streams when the monsoons came. But the monsoons were weeks away yet. Perfect summer reigned and the pure air could burn by day and freeze by night with hardly a dusty bush stirring in its sleep.

The mountainside was covered with trails. The first time that we were near enough to any Japs to shoot them, we had to hold our fire. A column of them passed, and we were only a section patrol. They were moving along one of the trails, only a few yards above us. When they had gone, Charley Meadows passed the word back over my set to HQ, reporting strength and direction of the column.

As I crouched over the wireless, I looked round at the faces of my mates. A memory returned of how I had at first priggishly thought those faces grotesque with ugliness and stupidity. Now that they had grown familiar, I saw only how brave they were – ready for anything. We were the stuff heroes were made of.

The mountain trails belonged to the Naga hill-tribes. They were the people we admired most. Prejudices against anything foreign disappeared before the sight of those extraordinary brown-limbed men and women who insisted on carrying on life in the midst of a potential battlefield. Their villages, poor simple places, stood on the crest of the mountain ridges. Their fields of rice and maize were two or three thousand feet sheer down in the valley below. The women climbed down to work and back again with their chickos strapped to their backs. The kids, wearing no more than a ragged waistcoat, never made a sound.

On one occasion when we were resting, during a recce, a party of Naga women overtook us and gestured that they wanted food for their children. I gave one of the women a cigarette. She gestured for the child to have one too, took it, and stuck it in her black hair. She was fairly young, lean, wearing a long skirt, barefoot.

‘Speak English?’ I asked.

She looked at me, a long troubling look, and said something incomprehensible. Would she have consented to have a spot of intercourse in the nearest chaung, buttocks sinking into the soft sand? Of course I did not make a move towards her. That night, when the moon floated above the mountains, I thought of her again and burned her out of my skull with rough fantasy.

Along the wild trails came news and rumours. The rest of 2 Div was delayed. Extra units were being flown in from the Arakan. Imphal had fallen. Imphal was holding out. The Japs were outflanking us. Kohima was surrounded. The Chindits, operating with Gurkhas and Kachins, were trying to join up with Vinegar Joe Stilwell in Northern Burma. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek was assassinated. Our water ration was going up soon.

Water was one of our troubles. It arrived at Brigade HQ in a water-truck, having come from the Jiri River, several miles away. It always stank of chlorine; even the char stank of chlorine. When you watered the rum ration with it, the rum stank of chlorine. Water was always short. We shaved and washed in one mug-full each morning – or you could shave in the dregs of your char, which was the only way to get warm water. Apart from that, we never washed or took our clothes off. We kept our boots and ankle-puttees on all day, to guard against typhus.

It was all a big fucking lark at first.

Belgaum had been much rougher than this. We had here, too, the interest of learning about the situation – of acquiring, for instance, the names of the Jap generals, Mutaguchi attacking Imphal, and Sato attacking Kohima, which seemed to give us an extraordinary and paradoxical intimacy with them. It was difficult to think of them in human terms; they were much more like H. G. Wells’s invading Martians.

The area was now stiff with Sato’s men, although our forces were building up. The Worcesters moved in next to us along the road though the rest of 2 Div was still assembling in Dimapur. We slowly gained a clearer picture of the situation. Four or five miles nearer Kohima than our positions, a defensive box was built at Jotsoma, where artillery could lay down fire on Kohima Ridge, on which the Japs had established themselves at several points – notably the Naga village. When Japs cut the road between Zubza and Jotsoma, the artillery carried on as usual.

It was on Easter Sunday that we were ordered to move down to the road behind the Japs and make contact with a detachment of the Assam Battalion which was withdrawing after holding off the Japs near Imphal. On that same day, the Mendips suffered their first casualties.

Jock McGuffie had been into the village of Zubza and reported it as a mankey, stinking hole.

‘The only bloody attraction Zubza’s got is a pontoon school,’ Jock said. ‘They’re playing for fucking mepacrine tablets – let’s go and show them how one evening, you and me, Stubby?’ But, when the chips were down, I was infantry and Jock was not, and our paths did not cross again for several rugged weeks.

Whatever its shortcomings, Zubza was usefully situated as regards the trails, and a small outdoor church service was held there on the morning of Easter Sunday. Our blokes were strolling about openly after the service, when a Jap 75mm. opened up from Merema Ridge. A sapper officer called Lodge and two BORs were killed. From then on, we began treating the whole business as less of a game.

The foray down to the road was also no fun. We were getting some bully beef hash inside our pullovers when Major Inskipp came over with Lieutenant Boyer and addressed us. Inskipp was Company CO, a smiling old boy with a wide face and a gaze that could go through you like a bullet when necessary. He told us that the new campaign was about to begin and that the Mendips were about to add a new name to their list of battle honours. Tonight we were simply concerned with helping the Assam Battalion to safety. Tomorrow, we should probably be allowed to kill as many Japs as we wanted – there was a good supply in the neighbourhood. The usual sort of stuff. With something touching in the way he finished with ‘Good luck, boys!’, as if we really were his boys.

We began to move in column file before night came down. Occasional vistas through tree-cover showed darkness rising out of the valleys, while the upper world was serene and in mellow light. It all looked so peaceful, you could hardly credit that the place was swarming with Japs. Over Mount Japvo way, black cloud was piling up. Easter fucking Sunday!

Scouts came back, we halted, spread out along a gully, squinting down through the bushes. An Indian file moved through us, heading up towards Zubza. Members of both parties gave a whispered ‘Thik-hai!’ to each other in passing as if it was a code-name. The Indians left behind them the individual smell of Indian troops, sweetly rancid with a touch of wood smoke and damp.

It took us two hours to get into position near the road. By then, night was absolute and the black clouds had closed overhead.

We waited. I was stuck behind a tree trunk with the radio set, and could not even see the road, but it was somewhere just below and ahead. There was a blown bridge nearby, round a curve of the road, although it was too dark to see the curve either. Messages came through saying the Assam Regiment was on its way.

In the Assamese night, silence was never complete. Cicadas chirped, night birds called, an occasional wild dog yelped, and countless little things scuttled through the undergrowth. Something moved all the time. There was silence as well, felt like an echo in a shell, rolling down off the hilltops. Totally different from India, where you had but to kick a sacred cow and villages woke all round you. Here, the place was deserted except for the poor buggers who had to fight in it.

There was another noise. Tension all round, rifle butts gripped more firmly. A password called across the road. Men slipping across to our side. The Assamese!

Then the firing broke out. We had heard a lot of shooting from Jotsoma an hour earlier – the Japs were going in there, by the sound of it. Now came rifle and automatic fire, punctuated by shell fire, from a greater distance. That would be Kohima getting it again! It sounded like a real pitched battle.

But the Assam Battalion kept coming across the road, Kukis, Karsis, and all the other tribesmen. What was more, they formed up behind us, in proper order.

It began to rain, a dull steady downpour. But the stragglers still arrived. They had walked over the hills from Imphal, and moved without hurry or apparent fatigue.

One of them was saying something in a low excited voice, down on the road. I could hardly hear anything for the drum of rain on my monsoon cape, which was protecting the set. A minute later, Lieutenant Boyer fired a Verey pistol. As bright light broke over the scene, he gave the order to fire. The chaps lining the ditch by the road opened fire. Dusty Miller opened up on the Bren.

There were yells from the thickets opposite, and some answering fire. The Japs were there all right, and must have been on the heels of the Assamese, but they did not venture to cross the road.

Our shooting stopped, the rain petered out. The racket up at Jotsoma and Kohima was still going strong. Poor bastards! We waited for the order to move out, now that the job was done. Word came only when the survivors of the Assam Battalion were clear. We started moving up the track again. Dawn was just filtering in. Our first modest bit of action was over.

By now, Kohima had been six days under siege.

Only when you stood in that landscape, with your boots firm on the ground, could you understand why advances by either side were so slow. Whatever the country looked like from the air, from the ground it was baffling. To the confusion of whatever prehistoric calamity had thrown up this maze of small mountains and valleys, nature had added entangling forest. Every hill, valley, re-entrant, and salient was covered with vegetation which, although from a distance it looked little more than knee-high scrub – so large were the Assamese perspectives – on closer acquaintance proved to be a riot of thorn, bamboo, and towering trees. Every minor feature, nothing on a map, proved capable in actuality of swallowing a battalion. Every hillside mopped up men as a sponge mops up beer.

Every now and then, pressure on the sponge caused a trickle of combatants to emerge. Often they were walking wounded, from one of the sites within the Kohima perimeter, from Garrison Hill, the GPT Ridge, or even the disputed area by the District Commissioner’s bungalow – then the most famous building in the world. They passed through our lines, V Force men, Burmese Regiment, Mahrattas, Gurkhas, Nepalese, Indian Infantry, Royal West Kents, and disappeared again into the consuming jungle, led by Naga warriors. Dimapur was far away, somewhere in the blue distance near Calcutta.

Our attention hinged on Kohima, always Kohima, and what was happening there. The Japs never gave up. Their forces and ours were practically intermingled, and often fought for days on end within a few yards of each other. Behind the DC bungalow, centre of the dispute, the opposing sides lobbed grenades, volley after volley, across the tennis court. The RAF and the Americans were making air-drops of food, water, and ammunition to our beleaguered forces but, inevitably, some of these fell into Jap hands. It was hard to see how either side could survive for long.

There were plenty of other factors we did not understand. Why didn’t Sato simply by-pass Kohima – there was nothing there anyone could possibly want, except the command of the Dimapur-Imphal road – and make for Dimapur, the gateway to India and impossible to defend? And why could we not make better progress in relieving Kohima?

The Japs had command of the road at several strategic places. To try to advance down it was to invite ambush and withering fire. It was equally impossible to move along the valley, for similar reasons: that broad valley was constantly under observation. Equally, you could not move along the ridges of the hills – they were too broken, too directionless. We were forced into the undergrowth. And the undergrowth provided the Japs with unlimited cover. They had perfected a system of interdependent bunkers which protected each other with cross-fire; if you charged one, you came under attack from two more. 2 Div was well mechanized, but mechanization counted for little here. Many of us were practising guerilla warfare before we ever heard of the term.

We were joined at Zubza by a detachment of Pathan muleteers, tall men with monstrous black animals in their charge, over a hundred strong. These cantankerous animals set off wild-eyed into the bush, bearing supplies. Our perimeter had to be extended so that we could give them protection, which caused a certain amount of ticking and grumbling. The culinary habits of the Pathans, the aroma and blood-sucking flies of their charges, made them unpopular. Besides, mules were so primitive. They had gone out with the Great War!

Swinton dealt with that sort of attitude when he addressed us one morning, two days after we had gone down to the road to help the Assam Battalion.

‘You’ll all be glad to know that 2 Div is finally moving into action. We are going to relieve Kohima. The rest of the brigade is already in the vicinity, and 5 Brigade is taking up temporary positions nearby. The First Battalion will be moving into action tonight, at midnight. The cooks are laying on an extra issue of char, and then we go forward.

‘Naturally, we aren’t too keen for the Japs to know about this. They will have their heads down by then, although we are prepared to disturb their sleep if we have to.’ We laughed at his assumed consideration.

‘We shall all be glad of the chance to do something positive. And we need a little exercise. We have been sitting on our arses for too long. We shall proceed to Kohima along the Merema Ridge.’ He indicated it with a sweep of his arm. ‘We shall move along the Ridge, clearing it of enemy as we go, and we shall deliver a hefty punch at Sato from his left, where he will be least able to deal with it, and where it will hurt him most. He may be well dug in, but we shall dig him out – even if only to give him a decent burial!

‘On this operation, we have two objectives: to kill as many Nips as we can, and to relieve the Kohima garrison. I know you approve of both objectives.’ We cheered to show we did. ‘Good. After Kohima, things will be easier. The road will be opened to Imphal and the Chindwin, and life should be simple. This is the decisive point in the war in the Far East – so we all understand, don’t we, why the Powers-That-Be had to call in the Mendips for the job!’ More cheers.

‘Let me just remind you about the question of supplies. They are vital, as you know. We are going to want to eat up on Merema. We may get some air-drops, but cargoes are limited. It goes without saying that the Fourteenth Army is short of planes! We are lucky to have the Pathans and their mules with us, to bring up rations and ammunition. They are absolutely marvellous chaps and we shall depend upon them absolutely. They come from mountainous regions of Pakistan and are a warrior people; they must be given every respect, for our stomachs if not our lives are in their hands.

‘Good! This is not a picnic we are embarking on. You are all aware of that. We have a worthy foe, and we shall vanquish him worthily. I will remind you of the words of Shakespeare, which he gives to Henry V to speak before another great battle, the Battle of Agincourt.

‘“And gentlemen in England now abed

Shall hold themselves accursed they were not here,

And hold their manhoods cheap while any speaks

That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s Day!”

‘The going before us will not be easy – we never expected it would be easy – but the victory, I promise you, will be something nobody will ever forget. We shall never forget it, and it will never be forgotten in the annals of our beloved country.’

As Swinton stood down, we cheered, and looked covertly round at one another. How many men there had tears gleaming in their eyes, as I had in mine – and have now, writing of it, all these years after! Those words from Shakespeare seemed to open up something inside us. If I ever come across them now, I can still weep, entirely without knowing why, for they bring back the emotions we felt in those shabby Assamese glades.

‘Bloody good speech,’ I said to old Bamber, as we dispersed.

‘Old Willie’s got the gift of the gab all right!’

‘Fuck off, it was a bloody good speech.’

‘I didn’t say as it wasn’t!’

‘Well, don’t let your enthusiasm run off with you. “As long as you’re listening to speeches, you’re doing nothing worse”, I suppose!’

He looked at me. ‘You’re young, Stubby, you’re a good lad. But life isn’t all speeches. It isn’t what you says as counts, it’s what you do.’

To accompany his talk, Swinton had brought a blackboard, on which his ADC sketched a map of the battle situation. The disputed section of the Dimapur Road formed the outline of the top half of a duck afloat. Kohima was tucked into the duck’s head and beak. Above the head lay Naga Village, now in Jap hands. Down below its chest and off the drawing lay Imphal and the road to Burma. Zubza lay somewhere at the highpoint of the duck’s tail. Stretching in an arc from tail to Naga Village was the Merema Ridge, overlooking the road for much of its length. That was our route!

Its lower crests were above our camp, its slopes clothed in jungle, its crest hidden by false crests. Everyone looked at it and drew his own conclusions. And at midnight, as ordered, we began moving in single file up the jungle trails, heading for those false crests.

We began to learn the lesson many an army has learnt. Mountainsides eat armies. The true scale of any country can only be appreciated by walking over it. From a distance, the prospect of Merema looked straightforward. Climbing its hillsides seemed to call simply for patience and a little endurance. Yet, once we were under its tree cover, we found how every hillside was broken into dips and depressions and pimples and gulleys. Every miniature plateau offered its miniature ravines and cliffs. And, of course, Merema Ridge was just one comparatively minor feature of the area.

In daylight, thick vegetation cut visibility badly – you could walk into the Japs before you saw them. You might get a glimpse through the thickets of the crest, cloud drifting over it, and think, Thank fuck, we’re there at last! You’d reach it, and it would prove to be just another false crest, and more thicket and another crest looming above you. Those bastard and everlasting hills! We didn’t know what we were at – it wasn’t exactly jungle warfare and it wasn’t mountain warfare either. If this was Assam, roll on fucking Burma!

It was a matter of keeping going. We moved ahead for fifty minutes, had a ten minute rest, went on again. It rained hard for two hours. We wore our monsoon capes. You couldn’t see where you were going and the trail grew very slippery. We could hear firing and the eternal Jap mortars, but nothing too near.

By first light, we were still stuck on the limitless hillside. Looking back through the trees, you could get glimpses of the rest of the world. It was all jungle. You could not believe that there were two brigades near you. A whole invasion force could have lost itself on Merema Ridge alone.

We dug ourselves in soon after dawn. I helped Tertis dig Gor-Blimey’s foxhole while Gor-Blimey did his rounds. We ate a breakfast of eggs and soya-link and char. Pickets were set out, everyone else got their heads down. We were having trouble with the bloody wireless set, and it was hell to get a message back to HQ, though we picked up 5 Brigade loud and clear.

We had patrols out during the day. There was one brush with the Japs, and two of them were killed. Aircraft were flying most of the day, Dakotas and RAF planes, dropping supplies to the garrison at Kohima. And sporadic firing. Only at tiffin-time was there a sort of truce. Thank God the Japs ate lunch at the same time we did.

With dusk, we moved forward again. Forward and upward. The eternal climbing, slipping back, the possibility of losing your footing and falling on to the man behind, or the man in front falling on to you. It was like madness, your leg muscles threatening to seize up, your heart threatening to burst. Although cool came with the dark, the air was suffocating in the jungle, and we were attacked by sodding great mosquitoes that whined and hummed round your face. To begin with, you’d try to smack them out of the way, but it soon became not worth while – easier to let them feed. By morning, our faces were a mass of blotches.

But before morning we had our own bit of excitement. It was a hell of a night everywhere. Kohima was getting a plastering again. The noise came down the valley and you couldn’t be sure of its direction: the great hillsides distorted everything. There was also shooting down on the road, and behind us, and above us, and to one flank. It seemed as if everyone was blazing away bar us.

We got word over the radio that a company of Japs was attacking our former position down at Zubza. There were tanks at Zubza now, which had fired their seventy-five millimetre guns into the Japs at almost pointblank range. The surviving Japs were now climbing towards us, and a reception committee was quickly arranged.

It was a relief travelling downhill for a change. We moved to the rear, No. 2 Platoon, through our own troops. Our rearguard was already dug in on one of the false crests. There was a spur here, and Charlie Cox and Dusty set up our Bren on it, with good vision into the jungle just below.

We waited for two hours before anyone turned up.

The Japs came up the trail, moving fast. Their scouts were bayonetted without a word, and the rest allowed to gather on the ridge before our lads opened fire. From the spur, we could pick the rest off as they tried to rush up and join battle, and we could cover the trail for some way back. Although the poor little bastards yelled and blazed away, they didn’t have a hope. We killed thirty-one of them, with no more than a flesh wound among our own men.

To celebrate, we had a quick brew-up and then made our way back to our proper positions. Before we got there, messages came through from the Worcesters on our left flank that their advance patrols had encountered a cluster of Jap bunkers right on the crest of the Ridge, which was now at last not far above us. Our platoon got our heads down while arrangements were being made for an attack the next day. I slept like a corpse, forehead down on pack.

By all accounts, the next day’s attack was deadly. By this time, some 2nd Manchesters were up with us – they were machine-gunners, and useful lads to have along, but on this occasion they could not bring their fire to bear properly to keep the Japs’ heads down while the troops went in, since the Japs were dug in slightly above our positions. We had some help from the brigade mortars, or such as had been assembled at this height.

The lads went in after the mortars had been pumping away for twenty minutes, with the Worcesters supporting on the left flank.

One of our casualties was ‘Dolly’ Lazenby. Sergeant Lazenby of ‘C’ Company was a tough old nut who had survived all that the Krauts could throw at Dunkirk; he led his platoon in with a bag of grenades round his neck. He was shot in the leg almost at once, but managed to fling himself right under the slits of one of the Jap bunkers. He lobbed a grenade through the slit. A crafty Jap grabbed it and flung it back again at once, so that it burst among our men.

Lazenby pulled the pin out of another grenade, counted to four, and then lobbed it in. Even then, all the Japs were not killed – two had to be bayonetted before the bunker was ours. By this time, Lazenby was dead, killed by cross-fire.

The mortars had no effect at all on the Jap bunkers. After two charges, our attack was called off and we had to give up the one bunker we had gained. The Mendips had lost three men and the Worcesters, who had come up against the main complex of bunkers, six – with nothing gained. We had not even got on to the heights of the Ridge yet.

We were held up where we were all that day, in rain and shine. Now that the Japs knew our positions, they kept pounding away with their mortars; we had to keep our heads down. Part of the trouble was that we were bunched just below the escarpment, making it difficult for reinforcements to come up from below. During the afternoon, we spread out round the hillside – not without minor skirmishes, for the Japs had a nasty habit of digging foxholes in the jungle. When you stumbled over them, the bunkers above immediately gave covering fire. Those bunkers, dug well in, with roofs covered by tree-trunks and earth, were almost impregnable and almost did for us.

At nightfall, we had another try at the main Jap position. Sappers had come up with pole charges, which gave us a handy new weapon if we could get close enough to use it. These were mines on the end of a long bamboo, designed for poking into bunkers, which were proving successful at Kohima.

Before we went in, we had the benefit of RA support from guns at Jotsoma, a couple of miles over on the other side of the road. Once they were registered, their shells clumped home above us in heartening fashion. You lay there listening, imagining the Jap bunkers crumpling. Radio contact was good across the valley, although the RA could observe what they were doing better than we could. After a softening up period, another attack was launched. Our attack!

This time, No. 2 Platoon was having first bash, under Gor-Blimey. We were all there on our bellies, Geordie, Wally, ‘Honey Pears’ Ford, Chalkie White, Feather – the lot. Waiting for the word. We all looked really tough and dirty bastards.

The MMGs were supporting better now, since they had been dug into shallow pits in the rock. Using tracer one-in-five, they directed their fire right into the Jap bunkers, making the little bastards inside keep their scabby skulls down.

The signal came, the machine-gun fire stopped, Charley Meadows yelled at us, and we got on our hind legs and lunged forward, shouting as we went. Geordie was next to me, not showing a sign of his earlier jitters.

All that shelling, mortaring and machine-gunning hadn’t put a single bunker out of action, though it had spread the jungle about the place. A few trees had come down – one on our right flank was burning into the night like a torch, and I saw Harding leap over its roots. All the bunkers began spitting out deadly fire.

At least there were shell-holes in which we could fling ourselves for cover. From them, we were able to worm our way forward and get right under the bunkers. This wasn’t easy – the bunkers were built with their weapon-slits close to the ground. Inside the bunkers, any number of Japs could produce a deadly volley of grenades, machine-gun, and small arms fire with little danger to themselves. This was what they were now doing.

But we knew the lie of the land and we had the hang of things. This was going to be our fucking ridge! We were beginning as we meant to go on. We used every inch of cover, worming our way forward, firing as we went. The pole-charges, too, did their stuff. We covered the sappers as they bunged their grenades home. An explosion, fire and smoke pouring out, screams, and we’d be in there!

One by one, we disinfected the Jap bunkers, bayonetted or shot all the surviving Japs inside, and then moved on to the next. The only real hitch was when a bunker we had cleared opened fire on us again. These were well established defences, and the Japs had had a chance to establish communicating trenches between the bunkers. Once we got the idea, we killed several Japs in trenches. With every bunker that fell, the next was correspondingly easier.

The noise all the time was colossal, though you didn’t realize that properly till afterwards. The Worcesters were having a tough time too, somewhere to our left flank. You hardly knew what was going on, yet all sorts of sixth senses saw to it that you worked as one of the team and avoided the flying shit. None of the Japs surrendered, scarcely a one of them fled. They stayed at their posts, where they could do most damage, until the last. It was weird to jump into the bunkers after we had blasted them open and find the enemy tumbled over the floor, his flesh and guts spattered over the walls.

Orders came that we were to hold the positions we had gained. We pitched the dead Japs over the khud, took over their defences, and dug new ones to the rear. We made our own latrines. After first light, our reliefs trooped in and we moved back for food and kip, shagged to the bloody wide, dead of emotion.

After four hours’ sleep, I was roused and went to relieve Wally in the signal trench.

‘You’ve been bleeding, mate,’ he said. ‘You want to stand further from the razor next time.’

I was so covered with crap from head to foot that I didn’t know what was happening. And I was still half-asleep. Almost automatically, I took Wally’s place at the wireless set, where Gor-Blimey was taking reports and orders. He looked almost as scruffy as I felt.

‘Haven’t you had any sleep yet, sir?’ I asked between messages.

‘I’m going off in a minute, Stubbs. Is your ear hurting you?’

‘I don’t think so, sir.’

‘Get it dressed afterwards.’

One of the orderlies brought up pialas of hot char while the R/T messages went on. I just slumped there, doing what I was told. From the situation reports, it sounded as if every bloody hillside in Assam was loaded with Japs. The garrison at Kohima had had another bad night; the DIS box had fallen to the Japs, who were now firing into the West Kents’ perimeter. But we had wiped out almost a whole company of Japs, and it looked as if the Ridge might be clear for most of the rest of the way to Naga Village.

The regimental aid station to which I went to have my ear dressed was some way below our position. I got there after tiffin. It seemed a blessed refuge of peace. The badly wounded had been sent back from here to Zubza, and thence somehow they would have to make their way to distant Dimapur. Serious cases would then have a further journey: back to the railhead at Gauhati, across the Bramaputra, and the long exhausting journey to the hospitals in Barrackpore and Comilla, if they lived that long. India! – Unimaginably far in time and space!

My ear had been nicked by a flying wood splinter. Feeling an absolute malingerer, I had it patched, and then made my way to a rest tent, where a party was being made up for returning to our forward positions.

‘Hey, Horry, some Burmese bibi bite your ear, then?’ There sat old Di Jones, among half-a-dozen other bods, smiling at me, nodding his head, making little clicking noises under his breath.

‘If there was any kyfer on this mountain, you’d smell it out first, Di, wouldn’t you?’

Although he wore boots and puttees, his right trouser-leg had been cut away below the knee and a bandage applied round his calf.

‘Just a flesh wound from a bit of grenade,’ he said. ‘Not enough to get me back to India.’

‘You don’t want to miss the excitement, do you, Di?’

He lowered his voice and said apologetically, ‘This sort of business, this fighting, it’s really for youngsters. I’m a bit too old. I wouldn’t mind going home.’

I offered him one of my de Reskes and sat down beside him. We lit up and sat looking at the tired green foliage outside the tent. There was much I wanted to say to him.

‘It’ll be a better world after the war, Di, once we get the Germans and Japs out of the way.’

‘Hope you’re right.’

‘Of course it will be!’

He said nothing.

‘You’re a miserable old sod, Di!’

‘Let’s just say I’ve seen more of the world than what you have, Horry.’

‘I thought you’d never left the Valley till you joined the Mendips!’

‘You don’t have to leave the Valley to find out life’s pretty tough, boy, believe you me!’

‘It’ll all be changed after the war. You ask Enoch Ford. It’ll be a place with better opportunities and everything.’

‘I hope you’re right. Myself, I don’t believe that, any more than I believe in Communism. See the way the gov’ment have taken control of everything, rations and coal and clothing and the lot, all since war broke out. Well, you watch if they don’t keep things the same way after the war, same as they kept on passports after the last war!’

I laughed. ‘There wouldn’t be much point in fighting if things weren’t going to be better afterwards, would there?’

One of the other bods there, also with a patched leg, had been listening to us and smoking silently. His name was Coles. He was one of the hard cases in Dolly Lazenby’s platoon. He said, ‘You want to read your history, mate! Wars never improve nothing for the likes of us, do they, Di-boy?’

‘No, I don’t think they do. Not so’s you’d notice. My old man served three years in the last war and got a bayonet through the guts on Gallipoli. He came back home to ten years’ unemployment. That killed him off in the end as sure as the bayonet wound …’

We all sat looking out at the tired green foliage outside, smoking our cigarettes in silence, until they came to collect us.

The whole battalion was moving into the previously held Jap positions, and extending them to the east. The panorama was staggering from the top of the ridge, where I found myself doing look-out duty towards sunset. We could see where the Manipur Road ran, from Zubza on. To the eastern end of the valley, Kohima Ridge was plainly visible, curving like the walls of a great dam. Its sides were a deep turbulent blue. Rain was falling there, moving to envelop us. The sun caught it, and a great rainbow came into being, rising from the hillsides of Jotsoma and Two Tree Hill, bright against black raincloud. Behind it, serene in sun, appeared Pulebadze, a fearful and indestructible wedge of. mountain. The sight could have been no more striking if heavy organ music had rolled out of the hills.

There were now two miles to cover over pretty dicey terrain to the village of Merema itself, and then rather less down to the outlying areas of Naga Village. Once through that, we were almost at Kohima. How easy it is to set it down – indeed, how easy it appeared in that day of our first success, although we had had a taste of the territory and the Jap resistance.

We felt optimistic then – in Assam, our spirits were up and down pretty regularly. The Pathans and their mules were bringing the supplies up and a cookhouse was dug in against shelling and mortaring. There was no water to spare for washing.

Everyone got some rest during that day. The plan was to move again after dark, and keep on progress as fast as possible.

It took us three days to reach Merema. Even on top of the ridge, the going was virtually impossible. We kept hitting dense patches of bamboo and thorn. The monsoons were gathering, and rain hampered everything. In Assam, the rain falls in a solid lump. There were Japs about too, but no more fortified positions. Patrols we could deal with – Japs above ground were as vulnerable as anyone else: more vulnerable, because they did not have our initiative. That old Forgotten Army spectre of the Invincible Yellow Man was broken for ever. (After the war, when the British, French, Dutch, and other European nations tried to re-establish their rule over their old territories, they found that the older myth of the Invincible White Man had also been shattered for ever.)

We wanted to have a go at Merema, where a seventy-five-millimetre gun gave us a lot of trouble, but it was heavily defended and the plan was to by-pass it and press ahead towards Naga Village and Kohima beyond. This meant coming off the ridge and down into the nullah again.

Unfortunately, as we started to descend in pouring rain, we were ambushed by a Jap patrol. Our chaps were badly shot up and most of the Jap patrol escaped behind thickets of thorn. In no time, we got a hell of a pasting from the seventy-five-millimetre gun and from mortars. The Jap mortarmen were always deadly. A mortar exploded among some Pathans, killing two of them and sending a mule stampeding madly among the trees. It fell headlong down over the khud taking a consignment of rifle oil and four-b’-two flannelette with it.

We spread out and got our heads down. In doing this, our right flank walked slap into a concealed advance bunker which had been keeping quiet until then. It opened fire with all it had got and several Mendips were killed, including old Chalkie White, who had owed Ali the char-wallah five rupees for eight years. So we were involved in a nasty two-cornered fight, in neither comer of which we had an advantage. A storm banged and clattered overhead, rain came down with renewed violence. I could not get anything but atmospherics out of the set. Eventually, a runner was sent back down the trail to ask for smoke, under which we could advance. The runner was killed a mile back along the trail.

We had to settle in where we were. The Japs weren’t coming in to us and we could not get at them. A lousy situation. It was impossible to retreat. We had to work away with entrenching tools and dig in as best we could. There was no proper defensive position at all.

Hot soup came up as we rested. I was off the set, manning a rifle pit with Carter the Farter, when Geordie crawled over, mess-tin full of soup in his hand, and climbed in with us.

‘How did you manage to do that without spilling your fucking soup?’ Carter asked.

‘Oh … I was sort of lucky … I don’t know …’

‘You see, you aren’t such a Jonah, Geordie!’

‘I’ll tell you something for nothing, my fucking feet ache, like.’

Carter began singing ‘Tell me the old, old story …’

‘Here, Stubby, mate, I killed a Jap.’ His Adam’s apple started bobbing again. ‘I shot the poor bastard smack in the chest!’

‘Shoot as many as you can. That’s what we’re up here for. Don’t fuck about.’

Carter said, ‘If you don’t shoot them, Geordie, they’ll fucking shoot us. That’s what it’s all about. If you haven’t got that through your tiny Newcastle skull by now, you’d better get to Inskipp jhaldi and ask to go fucking home, because you’re no fucking use to us.’

He looked really vicious, showing his teeth and glaring ahead over his gun barrel. Geordie stared at him and said, half in a whisper, ‘You’re scared too, Carter, aren’t you?’

‘Of course I’m fucking scared,’ Carter said, still looking ahead.

Geordie drank up his soup and then crawled back to where he had come from.

By now, we had several wounded. Some of them were lying in the open and it was impossible to reach them. The Japs were firing at anything that stirred. We could only lie there and wait for dark. The set still yielded nothing but static. Word had finally got back, and some supplies were coming up, but it was still almost impossible to move. Part of the trouble was that we were hampered on our right flank by a sheer drop of cliff face.

Towards dusk, during a lull in the downpour, a levy of Nagas appeared over this cliff face. Dug in though we were, word quickly got round. These heroic fellows had come to take the wounded away down one of their trails, inaccessible to us. With the aid of some of our own stretcher-bearers, the wounded were slowly collected.

One of our staff-sergeants, Badger Collins was supervising this movement with Charley Meadows when they conceived an alternative plan of attack. Crawling on his belly, Charley dragged himself in the hole where I was on duty on the set next to Gor-Blimey.

‘If we stay here all night, sir, the Japs are going to pound us with that seventy-five from Merema. It’s just this bunker that’s holding us up. If we could get two or three men on top of it, we could lob grenades inside and put it out of action, and the others would be a push-over. We’ve just got to get round the cliff-face. The Nagas will lead us.’

‘It’s a sheer drop into the valley!’

‘The Nagas are managing, sir. It’s not too bad – I’ve had a dekko. But we’ll have to move at once, before it’s too dark to see.’

Maybe I’d grown tired of calling ‘Report my signals!’ into the microphone.

‘You might as well throw this set down the khud-side, sir! I’ll volunteer to go, if that’s okay with Sergeant Meadows.’

Gor-Blimey gave me one brief glance. ‘All right. You stay here, Sergeant, and I’ll take Stubbs.’

‘No, sir, you hang on with the set. Stubbs and I’ll go. It just needs the two of us.’

Charley passed me some grenades. We looked at each other; his normally soft face was rigidly set. We worked our way out of the trench on our bellies. I kept his boots in sight. The skin of my back crawled, preparing itself for Jap bullets. We hauled ourselves over the edge of the cliff almost face first – I took care not to look down into the distance.

The lip of the cliff had fallen away. There was a ledge of sorts, and roots to hang on to. You couldn’t help seeing the dangers of the situation. Once we were over the edge, we were out of the line of fire but, my God, the view was frightening! Far below, the injured were being lowered gently into the jungle. The valley bottom lay at least a thousand feet below. Across the way, Kohima Ridge stood out like a stranded ship, and the beleaguered position of Kohima was also visible. Dakotas were circling it. Two of the Nagas had stayed behind and were waiting for us. One shuffled behind, one in front of us.

‘Thik-hai, Stubby?’

‘Thik-hai, Sarge.’

The Nagas led us immediately over a cross-path, where the footing was very slippery. We moved with our hands against the rock, sideways, a nasty drop below our heels. This side of the Jap defences was so sheer that they had not fortified it. With luck, we could get on top of the advance bunker and lob grenades in without being spotted from other bunkers.

I unglued my eyes from the muddy cliff-face and looked at the Naga beside me. He smiled encouragement – young, a soft face, pretty, almost girlish. The girlishness was emphasized by strings of beads round his neck and an orchid in his hair. Christ, it was a girl! – A fucking Naga pusher, climbing about as cool as you like! I nearly fell into the khud in sheer surprise!

Her throat, the line of tit under her tunic – for that sort of thing we were staying alive.

She motioned me on and after what seemed like an hour we went scrambling up a bank and into thick bamboo, Charley and I on our own. Two yards from the cliff and you wouldn’t have known the drop existed. As we crawled among the foliage I could feel ants scampering on to my neck. I could not see what lay ahead for the sergeant’s arse in my way. He moved slowly, although the platoon was now putting down covering fire, so that it was unlikely anyone would hear us. Then we were climbing on to the top of the bunker, well camouflaged by earth and growing things – which would have instantly seized hold even if they had not been planted there.

‘Get over a firing-slit – pin off, lever away, count three, throw in fast, get down!’ Charley said. We looked at each other with a quick glance, then worked forward. We lay ready, Charley raised his hand, and in a moment our covering fire ceased. I leaned forward, pulled the pin, flung the grenade through the aperture below. Charley yelled as he bunged his in. As I flung my grenade, I heard the little sods below me shout out and presumably make a dive for the pineapple. It exploded, Charley’s exploded, the logs beneath us heaved and jarred our bodies. We hung on, thinking our last moment had come.

Yelling, our lads made a great charge forward, while Charley and I lay where we were.

So the bunker was ours in the last quarter-hour of daylight. By the look of its late inhabitants, we saw they had been diving for the grenades – their faces were cut to paste. Charley and I gazed at each other and nodded curtly. I put a couple of bullets into one little sod who was trying to bring his rifle up, despite half a hand missing.

The Japs had been manning a Taisho, a light machine-gun which had caused us a lot of discomfort. Our grenades had done no more than buckle its stand. We turned this light machine-gun on the nearest support bunker. Although we could not do much damage, we could make the marksmen keep their heads down. Our sections advanced and stuck pole-charges into the bunker – we watched them do it, and saw one of the sappers shot down from concealed firing-lines.

Although the situation had now greatly improved, we were still stuck on the lousy hillside. With all the Japs in the jungle alerted to us, there was no question of moving on till we had mopped this bit of trouble up, so we just stayed where we were and waited. The two Nagas who had guided us – perhaps it was a man and his daughter – picked up a few Jap souvenirs from the advance bunker and departed, smiling and making the thumbs-up sign.

‘They were head-hunters a couple of generations ago!’ Gor-Blimey said reverently.

There were picks and shovels in the advance bunker, as well as a litter of filth. Badger Collins got a party of us to dismantling part of the front of the bunker. It seemed almost impossible at first, but once we had one timber out, we were able to break open a crude doorway. We fortified the rear and could use the bunker as stronghold and HQ. Under cover of dark, communicating trenches were dug. Now our position was more secure.

Everyone was shagged out. As many men as could be spared got their heads down. It was a question of sleeping under monsoon capes where you lay. I found sleep came as soon as I shut my eyes. Even in sleep, you went on endlessly fighting – I must have climbed on to that bunker fifty times.

Our patrols reported more Japs moving in from Merema as reinforcements. Just past midnight, I was roused and went back to the wireless set, which was now in the bunker. We were receiving a Strength Five signal from Brigade. Orders came over that we were to move on immediately and remember our real objective, Kohima. Our officers swore; officers at the rear never understood the problems of the men under fire. Brigadier Grey ought to come and have a shufti at this little lot for himself. The whole shagging mob of Base Wallahs in New Delhi ought to be dragged from their chota pegs and dropped into Assam.

There was nothing for it – we were going to have to go round and not through this collection of Japs. Orders were orders.

The trick was to disappear without letting the enemy know your next intentions – not too difficult in thick jungle at night. Everyone was roused. Leaving a rear detail to fire on till the last, we slipped into the bush more craftily than Sato himself. The rain had cleared, the night was fine. Over the way, Kohima was still taking punishment.

As we were withdrawing, a horrible voice woke over the jungle.

‘Hello, Johnny! Hello, Johnny! Give up the battle, go away from this country. Go back to the UK or you get kill! Go back to London, Johnny!’

They had a loudspeaker in operation. We learned that members of the INA, the so-called ‘Indian National Army’, were working with the Japs. They were allowed to use loud-hailers, even if the Japs would not trust them with rifles.

Later, the voice broke into crazy singing. ‘It’s a long long way to Tipperary, It’s a long long way ago, It’s a long long long to Tipperary To Tipperary ago …’ The temptation to blast away in the general direction of the voice was almost irresistible. At least it helped cover our withdrawal.

To this foul music, we moved off into the night, down a precipitous trail – led again by the Nagas.

By mid-day, after some kip, we were feeling in good shape again. This was 18th April, a memorable day. ‘A’ Company had dug itself in on a saddle of ground overlooking the nulah towards Kohima itself and protected from higher ground above us by a false crest. Patrols were posted, of course, but those off duty got a chance to rest up a bit, clean rifles, and get themselves bandaged if necessary. We could dry out our blankets, for it was a spectacular and hot morning, the sun blazing down and not a cloud in sight.

I woke feeling ghastly and dragged myself off to have a shit in the latrine trench, which had been built behind a ruined basha. There was a certain pleasure, generally, in squatting and smelling the raw meat stink of one’s own turds, but I had a touch of dysentery now, and that was hardly enjoyable at all. When I dragged my pants down, the sight almost made me sick. I had ripped the skin of my right leg off from knee to ankle on a rock. My trousers were scarcely torn. Blood was caked everywhere, and the leeches were at me, little grey bastards that fattened up to a dull purple like a plum until you burnt them off. I applied the hot end of a cigarette and saw them fall away. I squidged them underfoot. If you rashly pulled them off, their heads stayed embedded in your flesh and an ulcer formed which could eat away your muscle and bone – the ‘Naga Sore’ it was called.

While I was getting myself patched at the first-aid post, the mules came up with the supplies: water, food, mail, ammo, and the rest. The old Pathans did a wonderful job. They brought big cans of fags too. Ernie Dutt issued me with two packets.

‘What, de Reskes again, Ernie? Can’t you do better than that?’

‘These are special, boy – present from the base-wallahs at Delhi.’

‘What sacrifices they are making on our behalf!’

‘Yes. They’ve been saving this issue for us ever since the Great War.’

He could have been right. The paper on the de Reskes was a pale brown, the tobacco a pale green. But we sat back and smoked them and enjoyed them. We had acquitted ourselves well, had not been too badly mauled, and Kohima was very near. Its relief was not far off, after almost a fortnight of siege.

‘By Christ!’ Dusty Miller said, ‘We deserve more medals than fucking Sato’s had NAAFI suppers!’

One of our look-out posts was picturesquely sited behind a spur of rock, festooned with creeper, which stood on the edge of an escarpment. I was put on the noon-till-two watch with Feather, and we had a good view across to Kohima through the thick afternoon heat. We could see some action round Garrison Hill and the DC’s bungalow, at the centre of the redoubt. It looked a complete shambles because, under constant bombardment, the area had been denuded of cover. The trees were mere stumps, some of them smouldering like spent matches. On some of the stumps, gay fabrics hung. These were parachutes used in the air-drops, and they lent an inappropriate air of festivity to the scene, as if the Japs had caught the DC holding a fete in his back garden.

‘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.

The sodding soggy hillside was pitted with ravines. We went down into one, then had to climb again. We never appeared to advance. Birds ran through the undergrowth like rats. Of course we were lugging our ammo, machine-guns, mortars, and the whole subcheeze with us. That day cured me of mountaineering for good.

Towards evening, the rain laid off, the sun appeared, the clouds scudded away to the Bramaputra to draw up fresh loads for the next day. This was not the true monsoon, merely what the Wogs called the chota barsat, or ‘little rains’. Everyone realized that the Japs had to be cleared out before the monsoons finally broke.

Steaming slightly, we dug ourselves into a defensive box for the night. Anything was a relief from climbing. We brewed up char on our Tommy cookers and ate bully beef and biscuits from our personal rations. Then we got our heads down, and again came that peculiarly stunned sleep, where the body lay in something approaching rigor mortis and the mind stumbled along just below consciousness, always alert for danger, imagining horrors and terrible things coming up out of the mud. I never dreamed of home or sex. There was not even that escape from the present.

Sex was in abeyance. During the night, I was hauled out for my spell on guard. My guts were twisting and writhing with the dysentery and I wondered if perhaps a wank might cheer things up. I felt my prick in the dark. It and my balls had shrunk to almost nothing. My ballbag was a little hard wrinkled thing, pathetically trying to turn itself into armour-plating against mortar-fire. I cudgelled my brain for fantasies, for pictures of brothels stuffed with gleaming fannies, but everything had been scoured dry. There was nothing left of me but the soldier.

Next day, the trail went winding ever upwards, the bloody jungle kept growing. I got a Strength Two chirp out of the Royal Welsh, who were also climbing the shitheap to the top; they were uncertain of their whereabouts. Major Inskipp came and spoke to us, cheering us and saying that it was not far to the top of the Spur, and that the Pathans were bringing Lifebuoy flame-throwers up to help us burn the Japs out of their bunkers. Inskipp was as filthy as the rest of us. We looked every inch a forgotten army.

This was another back-breaking day. The sodding rain came down again and never stopped. You just wanted to lie down and die. Afterwards – even long afterwards – you couldn’t tell anyone what it was like.

‘Where were you in the war?’

‘I was in Burma.’ Adding to yourself. ‘Fuck my bloody luck!’

About noon, the khud-side was at its steepest. Nobody could move forward; it was just impossible. We were shagged out. We had to stop. Stopping was a matter of getting your crutch round the base of a tree, so that you didn’t fall back on to the next bloke. All the time, there was the dread that Japs would materialize out of the foliage to one side or other, and shoot us all up. Heads down to protect our fags from the rain, we sucked at de Reskes and stayed within the defensive perimeters of our own skulls, saying nothing. There was fuck all left to say.

Firing broke out somewhere above us – how far, it was impossible to tell, and if you looked you could see nothing, just the water falling at you in great shards from the leaves above. The firing was nothing to do with us.

We’d have been there still if a scout had not come slithering back down the trail to tell us that they had at last found the top of the ridge. The firing was coming from somewhere up there. Presumably we were so late that the other units had gone in without us.

‘Come on the Mendips! Let’s get up this bloody hill!’ Inskipp shouted. He pressed ahead himself and we followed.

The rain redoubled its efforts too. The crest remained miles ahead. The firing was lost in the drumming of water and the squelch of boots.

The jungle thinned. A miniature cliff loomed, water pouring off it in yellow streams. Orchids grew among the trees like weeds. Our forward patrol had fixed a rope to a tree, and we pulled ourselves up by it, fanning out as we got to the top, running, falling into position with weapons at the ready.

More wilderness confronted us. You could not tell where we were. Still nothing could be seen more than seventy yards ahead, although the jungle had thinned. The Japs might be lying in wait, about to open up on us with all they’d got. A plane roared overhead. How we envied the bastard snug up there in his cabin, heading for a cosy mess, way back at Jorhat or Dimapur. Remember Dimapur? Dimapur had charpoys and showers and beautiful canteens.

No one opened fire on us. We advanced again, in line now, Inskipp leading. The jungle closed in. We were forced back into single file. The track No. 2 platoon was following started winding away to the left, separating us from the others, and we had to retrace our steps, fucking and blinding as we went. The other platoons had their own troubles. We had to reform, rest, go ahead, again in single line. After two hours and four rests, we found the ground beginning to rise again. We still weren’t at the top of Aradura!

The wireless was yielding nothing, however much I fiddled with the bloody thing during rest periods. I could cheerfully have thrown it over the khud-side. I knew the blokes were willing me to get in touch with someone, one of our other companies, Brigade, anyone. Gore-Blakeley sat by me in the slit-trench staring grimly into the jungle. Occasionally, he would say, without turning his head, ‘Keep trying!’ But we could not raise anyone. We were just plain fucking lost on Aradura.

We kept moving during the afternoon. The rain kept coming down, firing was maintained sporadically in the distance. Night fell, and the next day we moved on again, at once stiff and limp. Rations were getting low. We were running out of fags and water. We had the feeling that everyone had forgotten about us. Ominously, the firing had ceased, except for an odd round now and again.

The weather improved towards mid-morning. The jungle still dripped even when the rain stopped. We halted in a sort of clearing for a bite of tiffin. A new awfulness crawled inside my blouse. I pulled the blouse off, and a stubby centipede in twelve grey segments fell to the mud. I plonked my boot down and ground it into mush. My chest was covered with dull red blisters.

‘That’s all you needed, mate – the fucking pox!’ Ernie said.

I let my blouse dry off on a bush while we had another shot at raising someone. This time, we managed to pick up a section of the Welch Fusiliers, Strength Three. Gore-Blakeley got a report through, gave them our position as far as it could be established, and asked for the message to be relayed back to Battalion. The Welch had nothing good to report: they had reached the top of the Spur, only to encounter the Japs in strength. They had gone in more than once, but against well sited bunkers it was hopeless, and they had suffered heavy casualties. Yes, there was artillery support, but nothing had any bloody effect against those fornicating Jap bunkers.

The mere fact of being in touch with the outside world was something. We heaved ourselves to our feet and moved on once more.

It was on the next day that we finally reached the highest ground. We were no more than half-a-mile off course. Our forward patrol made contact with the Japs, who cut loose with withering MG fire. Even that had the effect of raising our spirits – better to fight the bastarding Japs than the jungle. Against the jungle you could never win.

But could you win against the Japs? We had our doubts. You could not see the sods, so well were they dug in, and so torrential the rain.

We had climbed three-thousand feet of muddy mountain. Now we were fucking well expected to fight.

Being above the great hillside, we found R/T reception was better. The link opened up properly and we learned that the rest of the battalion was close at hand. Within minutes, we had contacted them. What a bloody relief! All parties had suffered the same total aggs we had, and ‘C’ Company had taken a hell of a mauling from a platoon of Japs, encountered on a ridge. Good news was that rations were coming up to us.

But the rain came down worse than ever. You couldn’t do a thing. You could hardly breathe. The air was water. Every man had prickly heat, which the rain stung and soothed by turns. I could feel my toes rotting off in my boots. It was so impossible that the attack was postponed for the day.

Inskipp came along to break the news to us. ‘I’m sorry to tell you all that the ENSA show due to be held up here tonight has also had to be postponed.’ That got a laugh.

Dusty Miller called out ‘While you’re watching ENSA you’re doing nothing worse.’

We made the best of things, digging in, making drainage trenches, spreading our monsoon capes over the foxholes.

Early next morning, we went in.

Our objective was Peter, a pimple on Cuckoo Spur, which was an outcrop of Aradura and commanded the road. While the artillery from the valley was pounding Peter, we had soup and rum. Somehow we found the strength to fight.

It was bloody murder. I had shed the set, and went in firing the sten from the hip, shouting like fuck, with Feather on one side, bayonet fixed, yelling too, and Ernie the other side, heaving grenades to make the bastards keep their heads down. But they just plastered us with fire, safe in their bunkers. We were charging uphill, perfect targets.

Dave Feather went down almost immediately. Dutt and I just charged on, but it was madness, screams coming everywhere. We were within a few yards of the bunkers when Ernie staggered over. I could see the bunker-slits, see the tongues of fire, coming right at me. I fell by Ernie.

He had been wounded in the leg, through the thigh, and was sobbing incoherently. I grabbed up his grenades and started to throw them hard as I could at the firing-slits in the bunker ahead. There was cross-fire from another bunker. Our charge withered away. It felt as if all the Japs in creation were firing at us. At me.

They hit poor old Ernie again as he lay. I felt the bullets rip into him. He never made another sound. He had always been a quiet man.

I was just possessed. Nothing meant anything. Ernie’s body gave me some shelter. I went on flinging grenades. By luck, I got one through a firing-slit. I was near enough to hear their shouts. There was an explosion, screams. Then their fucking Taishio opened up again. Perhaps one of the little sods had deliberately fallen on the grenade and saved his buddies’ lives.

So much for our attack! Fuck Aradura, fuck its very name, and fuck every scab-devouring sod who suggested we should climb the cunting thing! I stayed where I was, scooping a shallow trench for myself behind Ernie’s body. What had happened to the rest, I hardly knew. After a bit, I heard Gor-Blimey’s whistle, then his voice calling, ‘Stay put and you’ll be okay! Keep your heads down!’

He must have been fucking puggle to believe I was capable of lifting my head one bastarding inch! I was not the only one stuck in no-man’s land, and a second attack would be coming soon. I stayed where I was, as ordered, clinging to the gudge. The firing had died, except for regular bursts from either side intended to keep heads down. This is what reports call ‘a lull in the fighting’.

‘B’ Company, operating along a mula to one side of us, had been having mixed fortune. They found themselves facing new trenches, in which the Japs had set up one of our captured twenty-five pounders. ‘B’ Company charged and managed to overcome this position, gaining possession of the gun. A Jap counter-attack had been fended off, and one section dragged the gun away while the rest fought off another counter-attack. Heavy mortar-fire was brought to bear by the Japs, and many of our men were wiped out, including Captain Morgan, but the rest had been able to manoeuvre the gun and some shells round to our section of the line. Under Inskipp’s command, they manhandled the gun into place. It now began blasting away at those sodding Jap bunkers at almost point blank range.

Before it registered, shells appeared to be falling all round me. I retreated under Ernie Dutt’s body in terror. At that moment, I almost did my nut, like the time I found the teeth in the shit at Kohima, but a tremendous explosion jerked me back to what then passed for my senses. The same bunker into which I had thrown the grenade was going up in flames. The Japs must have had a store of petrol in it. My bowels were emptying into my trousers. A little crap more or less would make no difference.

Our brave old lads were getting set for another charge. The MGs were concentrating on one set of bunkers, the twenty-five-pounder on another. The range was maybe forty yards. Surely to Christ, the fucking Japs couldn’t stand too much of that!

But directly we were up and running, that impossible deadly stream of fire came at us again. We ran on. You had to run on. There was fuck all for it but to run on. Fire and fucking run on!

I wasn’t aware of myself getting up and plunging forward. It just happened. I saw – it all registered afterwards – Jackie Tertis’s baby face contorted in a yell of fury and, beyond him, Geordie Wilkinson, mouth shut, charging on. Even as I caught sight of Geordie, he was gone, spinning round, falling. It meant nothing. I charged on with the others.

A second bunker had been blasted open and was half-collapsed. Some genius got a Mills bomb into it, and suddenly it was erupting Japs. They came pouring out of the earth itself, black and smoking. I heard myself yelling – fuck knows what, ‘Kill!’ probably!

They were big buggers, not the little bow-legged guys of legend.

They were – shag me, the cheeky cunts were putting their fucking hands up, sticking their hands up, fucking surrendering, the bastards! Surrendering! We shot them down as they appeared. As I made it to the bunker with Enoch close beside me, a Jap officer popped his head up, sword in hand. Maybe he was going to surrender it. He was quite spick and span, with a trim little moustache.

‘Get the bastard!’ Enoch yelled. We dived together.

The three of us went sprawling across the earth. The Jap half-rose, we grabbed him, and with our combined weights fell back into the ruined bunker. Partly smothered in mud, I saw he was fighting to draw his revolver. But Enoch had him by the throat and was choking the life out of him. I grabbed his wrist, wrenching his arm backwards until something cracked.

Gor-Blimey came up, panting like a dog.

‘I’m knackered,’ he said. Blood was streaming down his face from a cut on his temple. He swayed on his feet. After a moment, he recovered. With eyes half-shut he said, ‘Secure this officer and see he does not escape. He must not be ill-treated. The other bunkers …’

He slipped down against the bank. We saw there was blood all over his tunic.

‘Hang on to this bastard,’ Enoch said.

As I sat on the Jap officer, Enoch ran down to Gor-Blimey and dragged him in to our position of relative safety. We could see then a ragged wound in Gor-Blimey’s chest. He opened his eyes, looked at us, and belched up blood. His hands fluttered and he lay still.

‘Oh Christ!’ I heard myself say. ‘They’ve killed dear old Gor-Blimey!’

‘Well, we’ll settle this fucker’s fucking hash for him!’ Enoch said. He jumped up and thrust his bayonet into the Jap officer, right up to the hilt, until it squelched.

The firing was still going on, the twenty-five pounder blasting away whenever it had a line-of-fire, although Jap mortars further back were now responding. All told, we took care of twenty more bunkers, main ones and auxiliaries. Some time during the melée, the long awaited Lifebuoys came up, and we burned the bunkers out. It was a massacre. After a while, we began to take prisoners.

By the end of the long bloody afternoon, Peter was ours. We had a string of thirty prisoners, tied in a line, hands behind backs, with their own signal wire. The rumours had been true. The Japs were in a far worse state than we were, filthy, starved, diseased. Many of them had a fever and looked at death’s door; but as long as they had been able to stand, they had been able to lean to and fire out of their bunkers. Brave bastards, brave to the last! – And fucking stupid too.

Jackie Tertis and I were rounding them up into some sort of shit-order. Tertis was staggering about almost as much as the Japs, and looked almost as black and ragged.

‘How’re you doing, Jackie, mate?’

He grinned at me, and was no longer baby-faced. With a would-be playful gesture, he swung the rifle to point at my guts. ‘I’m doing all fucking right. What did you expect? I can look after my fucking self. And I’ll tell you something for nothing – if one of these fucking slant-eyed pricks here makes a wrong move, I’ll shoot the cunt in two!’

Our pathetic prisoners stood before us with drooping shoulders, plainly expecting to be blown to hell at any moment. None of them made a move.

‘Get stuffed, Tertis! This lot’s fucking had it.’

‘Just let them try it on, that’s all, and I’ll shoot the cunts in two.’

‘This bunch of heroes can hardly stand, never mind run.’

‘I’ll shoot the cunts in two!’

He swung his rifle up as if to do what he said. The Japanese bent their heads and swayed slightly, as if facing a stiff breeze.

We’d hoped for a good night’s rest, but mortars were pounding our positions. For a while, it looked as if we might even have to withdraw. But ‘B’ Company somehow managed a sortie by moonlight, thinned though its ranks were, and clobbered one mortar position. We slept, and in the morning had a go at one last group of three bunkers that had somehow escaped detection. The Japs put up little resistance and we bagged some more prisoners. They were meek and respectful, standing about with bowed heads. The shit had been knocked out of them. They cowered before Tertis.

Our doctors attended everyone. Stretcher parties were busy loading casualties on to the backs of the mules for the hellish journey down to the road. Even there, their troubles would be only just starting; the hospitals of Comilla and Barrackpore were a dismaying journey off.

Freed from the wireless set for a couple of hours, I should have got my head down, but for once weariness had gone too far for sleep. I wandered over to the mules, exchanging grins with the Pathans, and there was Geordie Wilkinson, painfully lashed over one of the largest, blackest brutes.

‘Geordie, old mate!’

He looked ghastly. His face was dead white, its tan washed away. His entire uniform was dark with blood. The bandage round his stomach was soaked with blood. Another bandage round his upper leg was cleaner, although there too the blood was beginning to show.

He opened his eyes. I stood by him, trying to smile at him. ‘Do you want a fag, mate? How about a Blighty Players?’

He moved his head. His eyes closed again and he said, quite distinctly, ‘They got me in the guts, mucker … I reckon I’m a sort of goner, like.’

I took his hand. ‘You’ll be okay, Geordie. They’ll patch you up. We’ll all see you down on the road. The Japs are packing it in, did you know that? They’ve had their fucking chips.’

‘I saw my own fucking guts hanging out, mucker.’

A medical orderly came up, as weary, filthy, and unshaven as the rest of us, moving down the column of mules. He pushed me out of the way to examine Geordie’s securing straps.

‘Is he—?’ I asked.

‘We’re moving this batch of wounded off straightaway. This bloke’s had a jab of morphine, so he’s not suffering pain. Is he a mucker of yours?’

I bit my bottom lip. ‘One of the best,’ I said, and for some reason the words started me crying.

In my ammo pouch, against the sten magazines, I had stuffed the picture of Hanuman. I pulled it out, creased, stained, and folded, and tucked it into Geordie’s shirt, against his clammy chest.

‘It’s the old Monkey God, Geordie, remember? The Monkey God … Look after him for me!’

‘The Monkey God …’

Geordie was the only bastard in the squad who hadn’t kidded me about Hanuman, Vishnu, and the rest. As I stared down at his pallid ugly face, my tears came again, and I turned my head away so that the Pathans would not notice.

When I looked again, the line of mules was already moving away through the nearest trees. Geordie would be lucky if he made it back to base-hospital. Hanuman wasn’t going to be much help.

With victory – with the minor victory of Aradura, our mood changed. We had survived, and Aradura was one jungle-mountain we would never have to climb again! For a while there was not even the need to keep our heads down.

As the patrols were bringing in their shit-stained prisoners, the RAF finished making an air-drop of ammo, water, fags, and rations on Aradura. ‘A’ Company was getting its share under the watchful eyes of RSM Payne and Inskipp. Inskipp had a shoulder wound and his left arm was out of action, but he refused to be evacuated.

I sat in one of the bunkers, talking to Wally as he operated our wireless set under Boyer’s supervision. Casualty reports coming in suggested that the Mendips had suffered less badly than we feared.

‘We didn’t live in vain, Wally,’ I said.

He clapped me on the back, right across my prickly heat. ‘That’s God’s truth, me smelly old mate! I bet you was praying to your fucking old monkey god this time yesterday, weren’t you?!’

‘Who were you praying to, Churchill?’

‘Come orf it, Stubby, I been keeping myself morally pure lately – that’s what did it!’

‘You haven’t got much fucking choice in this neck of the woods, have you? You know old Geordie got a packet didn’t you?’

‘Yeah. Poor old Geordie! I reckon he’s had his fucking chips. Right in the fucking guts …’ Wally screwed his face up as if thinking. ‘Nice old lad, Geordie – his trouble was, he didn’t believe in anything.’

Without arguing with Wally – always a useless occupation – I was unconvinced by this implied reason for Geordie’s packet. After all, I had survived so far, and what did I believe in?

‘Oh, fuck!’ I said. ‘What a fucking fornicating shower it all is!’

Aylmer came over, bringing us two packets of cigarettes and a half-piyala of rum-and-water each. While Wally got on with Boyer’s messages, Aylmer and I sat on one side, smoking and sipping our drink.

‘This rum should help my dysentery!’

‘Yes, it’ll clear it up like one o’clock! In the old days, surgeons used to give their patients rum before they sawed their legs off. Without it, nobody would have survived the ordeal.’

We watched the Japs being marshalled into bundles by Harding and Charley Cox. When Harding and Charley got their cigarette issue, they lit up and then, rather sheepishly, offered one to the nearest Japs.

‘That’s the way to kill the little bleeders off!’ Wally remarked, looking round from the set. ‘Give ’em a de Reske!’

Bamber, who was near Charley, called out angrily, ‘Hey, Charley, don’t give those bastards a drag! They’d kill you if they had the chance – they were shooting our fucking mates yesterday!’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll shoot ’em if they try anything, but they’re human same as we are,’ Charley said cheerfully.

‘Not in my fucking book, they aren’t,’ Bamber said, and he turned away.

We had secured Peter, a lonely pimple on a big ridge. But the sitreps coming over the air were startlingly bad. Nobody else had any joy on ill-fated Aradura. The Royal Welch had been forced back, owing to impossible fighting country as much as anything, and the rest of the battalion had had to move back for lack of support. We were alone on Aradura, and the situation looked grave. We were ordered to dig in.

‘A’ and ‘B’ Companies were now all within one perimeter, and familiar faces were missing. My old pal Chota Morris had been killed by grenades while leading No. 1 Platoon forward. Handsome Hansom and Ginger Gascadden were dead. It turned into a bad day, despite the charge that had come from our success; everyone was very quiet.

Only late in the afternoon was there cause for cheer. The high ground of Peter allowed us a view of the road. It wound below us, down the glittering hillside. Our artillery was pounding Garage Spur, on the other side of the valley. We could see paddy fields, with Nagas working in them as if nothing was happening. And one of our mobile columns was moving down the road from Kohima! It could not be too long before reinforcements moved up the khud to join us, if only we could hang on where we were.

Reaction set in then. The lull in the fighting gave time for thought. That was the afternoon I really got the jitters. By next morning, stuck on that fucking hill in the middle of miles of wilderness, we might all be dead. And I thought of old Geordie, suffering total aggs.

Nothing ever happened out in Assam as you expected it to. We had plenty of defensive patrols out during the night. They came back with nothing to report. There was no firing. No Japs were contacted. The rain fell. It was still falling at first light, when Sergeant Gowland came in with a patrol and reported that the Japs seemed to have disappeared from the ridge. That was the last day of May.

It was two days before we could confirm that Aradura was clear, and confirmatory reports came in from elsewhere. For the first time, the Japs were in retreat. Sato had had enough; he had given the order to withdraw! His battered forces were in retreat south, towards Imphal and the distant Chindwin!

We came down the mountain again, taking our prisoners with us.

The road below us was open and the polyglot Fourteenth Army rolling through. At last we said good-bye to Aradura and stood on the road! Inskipp marched us to a point where a mess and a bath unit had been set up in a broken and deserted hamlet. The mess was a basha without a roof; the benches and tables looked like the height of civilization. There stood our fat cooks in their greasy green vests, cocky as ever, Ron Rusk and George Locke.

‘How’re you doing, Stubby, boy? How’s your belly off for spots?’ Rusk had abandoned his old cry, ‘Get in, pigs, it’s all swill!’

‘Still burning the bergoo, Ruskie? I didn’t think they’d let you admis this near the firing line!’

‘You want to watch what you’re saying to him,’ Locke said, digging his mate in his ribs and nodding at me. ‘Ron killed a Jap single-handed yesterday – coshed him over the bonce with a ladle, didn’t you, Rusky Boy?’

‘The little bastard walked into the cookhouse and I coshed him one!’

This heroic deed of Rusk’s became legendary. It was useless to point out that the Jap in question had probably been on his last legs anyway; Rusk had made a kill, and thereafter it was hopeless complaining about the food or we would be warned that we should get what the Jap got – a cosh over the bonce with a ladle.

At that meal there were no complaints. We sat at the benches and ate real meat, which someone suggested was our old friend the elephant from Merema Ridge. There was beer with the meat and vegetables, Yankee Beer from Milwaukee, with peaches and condensed milk to follow, and a piyala full of char.

It was a very quiet meal. No one spoke, no one looked at anyone else, until Charley Cox said, producing the fruit of long consideration, ‘They’re fucking brave bastards, the Japs, all the same.’

‘Bravest bastards in the world, after the Fourteenth Army,’ Wally agreed.

Silence again, until Charley went on. ‘You know all the balls-ups our Higher-Ups made? I mean, like about withdrawing amphibious support and everything? It was lucky the Jap Higher-Ups made balls-ups too, wasn’t it? What I mean to say, if they’d gone straight for Dimapur before we got to Zubza, instead of waiting to mop up Kohima … well, there wouldn’t have been anything to stop ’em, would there?’

‘They’d be in Calcutta, eating in Firpo’s by now,’ Dusty Miller said.

‘That’s what I mean – their Higher-Ups made a balls-up same as ours.’

‘The biggest balls-up was starting the war in the first place,’ old Bamber said. ‘Where’s it get you?’

‘To fucking Milestone 61,’ Wally said.

Silence fell again as we tackled the peaches.

Afterwards, we gathered in the clearing. Inskipp stood up on his jeep and addressed us, thanking us for incredible bravery under adverse conditions. He read out an order of the day from General Grover, Divisional Commander, congratulating all ranks and stating that the enemy was in full retreat. It was our duty now to get after him and not let a man escape. Then Inskipp went off to have his arm attended to.

After the meal and speech, baths. The baths were built out of big oil-drums, cut in half lengthways, and were full of wonderful hot water. Easing off our foetid boots, shedding our shitty uniforms, we climbed in.

What luxury! Our aches and pains were forgotten as we soaked. Things might be bad again, but they could never be as bad as they had been.

Slumped back in the water, we began to sing sentimental things, There’s A Long Long Trail A-Winding, I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Side by Side, Underneath The Arches.

We could see lorries rolling by along the road, loaded with troops heading towards Imphal, still beleaguered.

‘Get some fucking service in!’ we bellowed. Full of fun, the Mendips were, given half a chance!

While we were still wallowing – the orderlies could not get us out – a Dodge truck bumped up and stopped beside us.

‘Any of you ginks want your backs scrubbed?’ It was McGuffie, turning up with the quarter-master-sergeant and a stack of new jungle-green uniforms.

I bellowed to him, ‘Jock, you skiving old base-wallah, come over here!’

‘You can wash your own mankey fucking back, Stubbs – I know where it’s been!’

Cries from all sides – ‘Where’ve you been hiding, you sly old sod?’

Jock shook his head. ‘While you lazy fuckers have been up in the hills screwing Naga women, I’ve been working my fucking arse off at Kohima.’

‘You never worked in your life, Jock.’

‘Och away with ye, man, I’ve been weaving a new net for the DC’s tennis court! And I’ve brought you all new uniforms.’

‘Get dried and I’ll kit you out, lads,’ the QMS said. ‘Form a line as you’re ready.’

It was while we were trying out blouses and trousers and boots that he told us the news. The Second Front had opened in Europe that morning. A bridgehead had been established on the Normandy beaches and the British and Americans were pouring in.

‘They must be using our fucking landing-craft!’ Wally said, and we all fell about laughing. It was 6th June, 1944. We had forgotten date and season.

It took a time to remember Kohima, so long had we spent on Aradura. When Jock was asked, he said, ‘It’s all clear of Japs now. They pulled out there, same as here – couldn’t stand the smell of the Mendips. The battle lasted seventy days. They’re holding film shows at Assam Barracks now – I saw Margaret Lockwood last night, wobbling her titties at James Mason. You boys want to get around a bit!’

‘Margaret Lockwood! Ooorgh!’ There was a general statement of what we could and couldn’t do to Margaret Lockwood. The arts of peace were already struggling to reassert themselves.

‘What’s that round your pughri, Jock?’ I asked.

Jock removed his smart bush hat and polished it with the ginger hairs of his left arm, while gazing admiringly at the bright orange fabric tied round the crown. ‘Margaret Lockwood would go for me in this outfit, don’t ye think? It’s a bit of one of the parachutes as dumps the rations. I was in charge of collecting them yesterday – bloody nigh got killed with them damn great crates falling nichi! You young lads don’t know what danger is until you’ve been up the airstrip.’

Bamber came along frowning and towelling his hairy crutch. ‘You want to chibber ao and shut your gob, McFuckingGuffie, you do! You don’t know what the word danger means until you been up against the Japs on Aradura. I lost some of me best mates up there, so you shit in it!’

‘I know how you feel, Bamber,’ Jock said, sympathetically. ‘You’ll be away to see Margaret Lockwood tonight and then you’ll feel better.’

‘No, I won’t. I don’t want to see Margaret Fucking Lockwood.’

‘Suit yourself, mate.’

I looked at them both, thinking I understood how both felt.

Even this fearful time of battle was precious to me, just because it wasn’t going to last. The jungles, like the cities, came and went.

Suddenly it struck me – I had an infinite capacity for happiness! I was really a hell of a feller!

My elevated mood endured for the rest of the day. Wearing our new kit, we marched a mile down the road – the Manipur Road! – to a temporary camp, where we boiled rifles and stens through with hot water and fresh four-b’-two in our pull-throughs.

There was no chance of getting up to the flicks in Kohima that night – in the morning, we would be moving forward again. But McGuffie drove down in his truck and brought some rum along. We sat on the tailboard chatting, and he told a long tedious story about how he had nearly come to blows with an Irish cook in the DLI.

I heard Aylmer limping along, still singing his pathetic fragment of song, ‘Could I but see thee stand before me …’

‘D’ye want a piyala of rum, mate?’ Jock asked him.

‘Where did you get it from?’ Aylmer asked. ‘Did you lift it?’

‘My guts has no’ been too gude – fucking krab, in fact. I needed something for them, and this stuff settles them fine. Stubby’s got the same complaint and he’s feeling better already, aren’t you, Stubby?’

‘Did you lift it?’

‘Bollucks to that for a question! This fucking rum was meant to come up to you bastards up on Aradura, if you must know, but we couldne get it there, so I took charge of it. You wouldn’t want the mules to drink it, would you? I’m offering it to you now.’

‘You can keep it, Jock,’ Aylmer said mildly, and marched off.

Jock laughed. ‘You lot are fucking shell-shocked or puggle or something!’

‘We’re just proud, Jock, that’s all.’

‘Proud you didn’t bloody get killed?! Och, I wasne killed myself, was I?’

‘Away and piss up your kilt, Jock! We won the fucking battle, didn’t we?’

‘This fucking Burma campaign has only just started, do you malum that? We’ll probably all be dead in another six months. How many years do you think it’s going to take to chase the Japs out of all these great mankey hills?’

He swung his hand up and pointed into the darkness, where the hillsides stood.

I could not say anything to him. Suddenly I was shagged out. He had not been with us and could not understand.

More gently, he said, ‘How many fucking years is it going to take to chase the fucking Japs out of this bloody place? I’m asking you, man, only asking. You’re the fucking soldier!’

No good arguing that. ‘Jock, I know I’ve asked you before, but what were you in Civvy Street?’

‘Och, man, I was a waiter in the Gleneagles Hotel. I thought I’d told you.’

It struck me as funny at the time. ‘I’m sorry to laugh, Jock – I’m shagged to the wide. I must go and get my head down.’

‘You learn a lot, being a waiter, ye ken. I was serving at table while you was going to school with cake in your hand.’

‘Sure, Jock, I know. I wasn’t really laughing, honest! You know my mate Geordie got badly shot up, up on Aradura?’

He patted my shoulder, and he was not a man who ever touched people. ‘Don’t greet over it! He was a poor wee turd of a man, and you know it – asking to get fucking shot!’

‘He’s probably bloody dead by now.’

‘So’s a whole lot of other fuckers, including a lot of brave Jocks, but you’ve got to soldier on, haven’t you? I learnt that fucking lesson waiting at table. At least, they nailed old Spunk Bucket, so there’s some justice in the world! Now for Christ’s sake come and sup some stolen rum and talk of something cheery!’

When I could, I left him. There would be time for Jock later – perhaps a lot later. I was going to get my head down early and give myself a bloody good going over to celebrate survival. My sense of personal freedom was still with me. I had survived. It could never be expressed in words, all of which belonged to systems; but it was going to be expressed in an outburst of hand-fucking, with the pukka thing to follow just as soon as possible.

You’ve got to soldier on …

A troop of armoured cars, followed by infantry in carriers, rolled along the road, heading towards Phesama. Fighting was going on there; as Jock said, there was still trouble to come.

I noticed there were several Mendips standing solitary, like myself, watching by the side of the road; the sight of them became terribly moving. They were smoking, watching the transport, thinking. We had all been together; now we had come apart again. Suddenly, it occurred to me that perhaps they too saw themselves as just pretending to be Mendips!

But that was all balls, really. Tomorrow, we would be moving into action again at Viswema, where forward elements of 8 Brigade were already engaged – when, again, there would be no room for anything but action and the pressure for survival.

A heavy drop of rain landed on my cheek. The clouds rose over the valley, mounting high above the dark shoulders of Pulebadze. As I headed towards my charpoy, I reformed the image of the Naga girl whose body had momentarily been close to mine on Merema Ridge. She had orchids in her sleek hair. She raised her skirt suggestively. She smiled and gave me the old come-hither.

Before I reached my blankets, I was gratified to feel a stirring in my trousers. Probably every man-jack in the Mendips had his hand on his knob that night, giving thanks for survival.

The early monsoon rain began to fall over our positions. Down the road, the guns were pounding away at Viswema.