SHE WAS STOOPING OVER HIM, murmuring with love, as he lay still half-involved with nightmare. He had been fighting in the darkness of jungle, tearing men’s faces open with his hands, sinking back in defeat and rising again on cataclysmic waves of sickness that burst disintegrating in thunderous pain. The pain was still there, but little more than a distant rhythm; he seemed to have withdrawn from it, or at most to lie very light on it as a fakir on his bed of nails. And her green hair moved caressing on his brow as she stooped over him; beyond her green hair was a glint of sky, of a heaven of a pure, cool duck-egg blue and somewhere near amongst her voice the purring ripple of water.
But then he knew that her hair was not green, yet still for a moment managed to hold his waking mind back from the real world. She had not deserted him; she had not written because instead she had at once set out to come to him. She was here, her hand moving over him, mapping his body and plotting his reality.
He could hold his dream no longer. The hand now moved, feverishly scrabbling. A long groan of despair rose from his stomach. His own hand roved hopelessly about, seeking its mate. The pain ran kicking back into his blood, as his left hand found his right hand and clutched it vainly; it was as inert and detached as the hand of a stranger’s corpse. The appalling thought that his right arm had been amputated woke him fully. Now he saw Sundar Singh’s face, anxious but relieved, brown above through a trailing frond of green leaves that touched Alan’s forehead. He found himself propped against a little pile of branches, packs and equipment; he was all in one piece, only he had no sensation in his right hand. Across his right shoulder the shirt had been ripped open; under the armpit and over and across his body were swathes of crude bandage made of Sundar’s turban, and the rest of Alan’s shirt and the right-hand side of his shorts was stiff and sticky with blood. With great caution he stirred all down his body; he found he could move. Looking down at the watch on his wrist, he saw, with a faint shock, that it too was still going. He realised that the hands pointed to six o’clock. As he grasped that this meant six o’clock in the morning, the urgency of his interrupted mission rushed his body; it sat up with a jerk and he almost fainted for pain. But he steadied, balancing, still sitting up. Sundar was fussing about him with little whispering exclamations of fearful excitement, but Alan could not for the moment move farther, and looked at him bleakly, without hope.
‘You should have gone,’ he said. ‘You should have gone.’
Sundar’s cheeks drooped with bewildered dismay, and then clenched with anger. Of course he had not gone. There had been a great battle in the night, over there – he pointed in the direction of Holl’s position, downstream – so he had half-dragged, half-carried the sahib into hiding in the jungle at the river’s edge, had washed his wound, and dressed it. Such a lot of blood, such a lot of bandages needed, his poor turban – for a moment Sundar was hysterically almost merry – but only a very small hole through the shoulder. Sundar held up his thumb and forefinger very close together, indicating the size of the hole. Nothing broken. So they had stayed all night. The sahib had been very sick. But now, if the sahib could move, it was only a very short way to the boats; they could slip across and make their way back to the English troops.
Alan gazed at him stonily. Without the turban, the round face had lost the adult composure that he had seen in it the night before; it looked boyish and stupid. He tried to find out whether Sundar had any idea what had happened during the night, but Sundar had none, apart from the certainty that there had been a great battle with great noise. For all Alan knew, Holl might still be there; there was no sound of action anywhere near, only the rumble far away to the south. His thought stopped at Holl as a terminus. There he had to go.
With careful deliberation he got to his feet on Sundar’s arm. He found that, with a crude sling made from the last remnants of Sundar’s turban for his right arm, he could move. The pain seemed to be mainly in the head, and from the giddy assaults of nausea in his stomach as he stood, swaying, he thought that he probably had some kind of concussion. But he could walk, though the ground rose through each step, jarring on the roof of his brain. He could not put on his webbing, so Sundar arrayed himself in two sets, his rifle slung over them across his back, the tommy-gun at the ready in his hands. Alan’s revolver had disappeared; it seemed of little importance as he knew he was a hopeless shot left-handed. But Sundar had a few hand grenades, and one of these Alan put in the left-hand pocket of his shorts.
So equipped, he climbed painfully, slowly, back towards the track.
‘Now,’ said Alan. ‘You go to the boats, cross the river, and report to the English troops. They will take care of you. I go the other way.’
At first Sundar did not understand. When he did, his eyes filled with tears. He stood for a little staring at Alan, then half-turned as if to obey, only to swing back fiercely. His mouth was trembling.
‘No. Where the sahib goes, I have to go too.’
‘It is an order.’
Sundar dropped his eyes, but stood firm. Alan felt his temper slipping; he swore savagely at Sundar, willing him away with all his strength until his head started to swim and he nearly fell. He staggered, and Sundar caught him with one hand. He looked into Sundar’s face with weak hatred, but could not speak. When he was able, he turned away, spurning Sundar, and started to walk. At a distance of about five yards, Sundar followed; when Alan looked around, he stopped, but followed on directly Alan started again.
They moved thus for some way until they reached a fork in the path that Alan could not remember; he stopped, trying to work out which was the right way back to the coffin factory. Sundar came close up behind him and stopped in his turn, and at that moment they both heard the patter of men moving fairly fast on soft earth. Sundar caught Alan’s good arm, and almost lifted him some ten yards down the left-hand path and into the shelter of a great trunk that had fallen along its edge. Crouching behind this, they heard the swift steps come up to the fork on the other path, and there stop. They heard voices, a swift muttered interchange, not Indian nor British, nor Malay. After a sickening pause the running footsteps of the Japanese started off again, down the track towards the boats.
Alan’s face was running with a cold sweat. He looked at Sundar, too shocked to be able to make any decision, and Sundar’s face twitched with something that was almost a smile and he jerked a thumb down the fork that they were already on. There was no other reasonable choice. They went on, together now.
They walked carefully, painfully, in agonising slowness, for about two hours. The track appeared to be swinging them round south and west through the jungle, though it was difficult to be certain of any direction; the path wound like a dark green tunnel and the sun was hardly ever visible. As Alan settled to a motion, almost crabwise, that was easiest for his bruised body, a faint hope began to revive in his mind. They should, he thought, come out somewhere south and west of the position Holl had been in, perhaps even into Holl’s progress. But when at last they reached the jungle’s edge it might have been anywhere: the same burned-out wasteland, and beyond that the high ordered ranks of rubber trees. There was no sign of life.
They crossed over into the rubber, Sundar almost doubled up over his tommy-gun, and went up a long rise through the rubber that seemed to Alan’s tiring legs endless. But they went up it fast, driven by the relative openness of the rubber wood and by some urgency, a breath of instinctive hope driving them like a freshening wind in a boat’s sails; Alan’s head thudded as if it must crack open at each beat of his heart. Then they came to the crest of the rise, and both stopped so suddenly that their attendant swarm of mosquitoes brushed for a second against the backs of their knees. Sundar gasped, and flung out a trembling hand, pointing.
Forward from their feet the ground went down sharply, and at the bottom not more than a hundred and fifty yards away was a road, a tidy, metalled road. They looked down through an aisle of the rubber trees on to the road, and across the road, in a little sunlit clearing, were squatting, motionless and silent, some forty Indian troops of their own battalion.
Alan’s head reeled. At his side Sundar was whispering excitedly that they were saved, it had all come right. ‘There is Havildar Ali Khan. There is Naik Narayan Singh, my cousin, Narayan Singh.’ His face rippled and shone, and he turned to Alan with a wild loose gesture of uncontrollable happiness; then, before Alan had begun to realise what was happening, Sundar had set off down the slope at a run, bounding and leaping, waving his tommy-gun, his twin sets of webbing flapping grotesquely about his hurtling body.
With his mouth open, Alan watched. He knew something was dreadfully wrong, but could not make out what. Then he saw, beyond Sundar, the Indians squatting there turn their heads to Sundar’s approach; they had seen him, but apart from turning their heads they made no move, no sound, and suddenly he realised that they had no firearms. They were prisoners waiting under guard.
Alan froze. His heart missed a beat; his legs jack-knifed at the knees and he sat with a jolt. His mouth shut, but he could not swallow; it opened to scream and no sound came. Sundar had emerged from the rubber into sunlight, and on the edge of the road he stopped dead. He looked bewildered, his head moving stupidly from side to side. Then slowly, slowly, he started to bring up his tommy-gun, as if it were of tremendous weight, and as he did so, from each flank of the squatting Indians, two short khaki-clad figures stepped out of the shadow of the trees, and two long bursts of automatic fire tore open the silence.
Sundar Singh jerked; his gun skipped in his hands and clattered on the road. His knees splayed open and he sank down. A new burst hit him in the stomach, and he folded sharply forward; the little black pigtail at the back of his shaven head flicked up and down. Then he was a twitching jumble on the road.
A wail, a keening, moaning sob, shook the Indian prisoners beyond. But the bullets that had annihilated Sundar Singh seemed each one to have hammered into Alan’s heart, striking in jagged lightning succession till it rent as a tree splits in the storm, and he fell back, unconscious.
When he came to again, he was on his feet, and moving, in a wavering course from one tree to another. He could not have been going long, for the road was still below him, and the clearing where the Indians had sat was still visible though from a different angle. But the Indians were no longer there; there was no sign of Sundar. No one was there. Dazed, not knowing what he was doing, he made his way down towards the road; he moved in a hallucination – he was not really there, it was his ghost visiting. His body had no connection with his light mind, which accompanied it as at a distance above, watching. There were no Indians; perhaps there never had been – but then he saw a wet smear on the road surface, and a moment later his foot stumbled on something soft in the ditch by the roadside. He found that one of his feet was resting on Sundar’s body. He stood there stupidly in the sunlight in the attitude of a big game hunter awaiting the arrival of the photographer. After a little, tears ran down his face, and watching, he noted this, until presently he switched them off. Clumsily, he made his way back up into the rubber.
He wandered thus for some time, as in a maze. Sometimes he would knock his head with violence against a tree, but it meant nothing. His course meandered vaguely parallel with the road, and once he stopped as a considerable number of Japanese troops, squat, sturdy men, joking and laughing, moving in irregular formation, some on foot and some with bicycles, went down the road. It was a very spruce little stretch of road, edged with short vivid green grass, and it was as though he were in England, and these happy people with green leaves stuck in their helmets, their laughing and their bicycles, were villagers en fête. But their faces were not English, nor their hurrying shuffling walk. For a second his mind stood still and open; across it went the pattering rush of rubber-shod feet, hurrying and urgent as shellfire overhead, and through it an empire fell like a cliff into the sea, but too far away to hear.
He was clutching a tree as they went past below, murmuring to himself that they were all over the place. He watched them go, and when they had gone, and the road was empty as Sunday again, he shook his head, puzzled, and went on his own wavering route.
After a while he began to walk straighter, with some determination. He had remembered again; his job was to find Holl. He walked on and on through the trees to find Holl.
It must have been about four o’clock in the afternoon that he found him. He had lost sight of the road for a little and swinging back towards where he thought it ought to be, he found himself suddenly almost on it, fifteen yards away from a roadblock. He was looking up at it almost from under it; it was made mainly of charred tree trunks, and it had been partially cleared, enough to allow a single line of motor vehicles through. But riding high up on the heap of trees, as though cresting a breaker, was a burned-out bren carrier. He could not see how many men had been in it, but one man was still visible. He sat upright, brittle as a charred stubble-stalk, the flesh shrivelled black on the sharp cage of his ribs, his head thrust up and back, the mask withered from it in a snarl where shone a gleam of gold; on top, the flaxen hair, untouched by fire, still flared bright as harvest. Its right arm was flung up, as if scorched across the sky, in that imperious order onwards that Alan had seen so often.
Alan’s paralysed mind accepted this apparition without question. It was certainly Holl. He stared at it, and could not take his eyes away; yet to begin with it was as meaningless as a prehistoric menhir in an empty landscape. But then his hair began to lift on his scalp, and he backed away from it, at first growling, and then, suddenly, snarling and jeering, loading it with the filth that Holl had flung at him the day before. Gradually he quietened, as at last something of the ultimate stillness, the terrible authority of the outflung withered arm, began to impose on his mind, began to impose an extraordinary order. His dispersed faculties came home like rooks at dusk. Settling, he stared at Holl, as the world too settled to its place and he awakened in it. He was aware now of the sunlit space in which the extinct hulk of the carrier hung with its freight, and aware of the dark brooding shadow of the trees that the upraised arm seemed to have struck in triumph to silence. Beyond that, he was aware too, at the rim of the world, of the rumble of battle continuing. He was alive; he breathed a stench of burnt flesh, softened already by the sweetness of corruption, and from his own body, battered and aching, shot with pain, rose too the odour of blood and filth, of sweat and vomit; but his body was alive. His mind turned on, sudden as a lamp; he saw that Holl’s arm was pointing east, and that to the east there was still that sharp thudding that Jennings had sworn was the sound of 25-pounders. It might be that he could make that path again, even in his rickety condition; if he were lucky enough not to run into a Japanese patrol, and the British were still there, he might make it in a day’s march; the river would be difficult but not impossible if the Japanese had not found the boats. Urged by a sudden vehement desire, his hope projected back through the dark tortuous jungle tracks to the warm, rough sound of English voices, to a vision of ambulances, hospital ships, cool clean white sheets. His vision brightened like a window from a convalescent’s bed; the visitors thronged – his parents, his old friends – and Lettice, sun-warm and fragrant and various as a summer English garden, flooded him with her presence so that he gasped for the wonder of it, and his good hand groped for his breast pocket where was the link, her love written in her letters.
But his pocket was empty. The vision flared, and vanished in a crash of pain. She had never answered his proposal. The letters were in his webbing that lay twisted about Sundar Singh’s body and drenched with his blood. Alan’s hand ran questing now over his body as if it were a stranger’s, as it had done that morning when he first woke. His eyes went back to the black and wizened body on the carrier. They had all died; everyone was dead. He himself was an anachronism of no importance, of no value. His own body had failed him as he had failed Sundar Singh and all his men. It had failed him as he had failed Holl, as Holl had failed him. He stood up; he nodded coolly and almost casually to Holl, and wandered off up into the rubber again, with no purpose, veering like a rotten leaf in the wind, brittle and crumbling.
Towards the end of the afternoon he was still going, faster now, almost in panic, in flight from the sweet stench that seemed to have infested his clothes, even the pores of his skin. His slung arm flapped and jerked. He was almost running when he was halted by the sound of voices, and suddenly he became cunning and sly. He was still in rubber, and approaching a little crest in the ground; he worked forward cautiously and found himself soon on the edge of a clearing. About twenty-five yards away was a bungalow; Japanese troops were looting it, gay and fierce and destructive as children. Sounds of smashing from inside the house came across the still air; on the veranda a soldier was playfully ripping open a mattress with his bayonet. They all seemed so busy and carefree breaking the place up that they had clearly not even posted their sentries properly. Only, almost between Alan and the bungalow, not more than ten yards from him, there was one man not engaged in looting. But he was not a sentry; he sat at a rather elegant walnut table, dressed almost smartly in tall shining brown boots, breeches and a uniform jacket with a white open-necked shirt. He was no doubt an officer. His glistening shaven pate, bent forward, was all that Alan could see, for he was writing on the table, where in front of him a naked sword lay brilliant in the slanting sun.
Alan stared blinking at the sword. He had no idea what to do. It was only after a few moments watching the sword and the movement of the officer’s hand across the paper that he remembered the grenade in his pocket. Carefully, he eased it out. He looked at it. It seemed oddly old-fashioned, corrugated, dark brown; it was very heavy but surely much too small; it did not look as if it could do any damage at all. It was, however, something to do.
He considered how he would throw it. It would have to be lefthanded. A lob. Something in the long shadows reaching over the lush grass, in the clarity of the noises that came from the bungalow, released a memory in him. He was twelve years old, captaining the second cricket eleven at his preparatory school. It was his day of triumph; in the closing over he put himself on to bowl, and with underhand lobs had disposed of the last two wickets for as many runs, and for victory.
The cold metal was at his mouth. With his teeth he released the pin, counted a few seconds and slid forward out of the shelter of the trees. Nobody seemed to take any notice. Then suddenly the officer looked up. Alan noted the mingled expression of alarm, fury and bewilderment in the officer’s face, and swung his left arm back to throw.
As his arm jerked, a sudden and numbing pain stabbed from his right shoulder; he staggered. The grenade rolled a few yards along the ground.
Stupidly, Alan looked at it. A scornful voice rang out of his past, the voice of the defeated captain of the opposing team – ‘Well, of course, with dolly drops…’ But it was also Holl’s voice.
Grunting, groaning, Alan was half-running now towards the grenade, to recover it and throw it again. ‘Coward!’ he said amidst sobs. ‘Ah, you murderer. Oh no, no, you fool!’
The officer was shouting somewhere, but Alan was stooping over the grenade. It lay there in the grass like the sinister dropping of some prehistoric mammal; it seemed to throb in his eyes, and his hand was reaching for it.
The explosion spent itself in the soft arch of his body, and did no further damage.