Another discovery was that the size and importance of an action is no yardstick of its personal unpleasantness. A big operation which commands headlines may be a dawdle for some of those involved, while the little forgotten patrol is a real horror. The capture of Meiktila means that gallon tin to me, while other episodes which can still enliven my nightmares receive only a passing mention in regimental accounts, if that. Mention Meiktila to any surviving pensioner of my old section and he will sip his pint, nod reflectively, and say “Aye”; but drop the name of a little unheard-of pagoda that doesn’t even get into the index of the big official history and he will let out an oath, sink the pint in one gulp, and start talking.
(It’s an illustration of the fortunes of war, a phrase that always reminds me of a night later on, when I shared a cigarette with three men from another platoon, and we talked vaguely of having a pint in the Apple Tree on Lowther Street when we got home. Before dawn one of them was dead, another had killed a Jap and been wounded, and the third had slept through it – and he hadn’t just been keeping his head down, either; he wasn’t like that. My own contribution to the night’s activities had been to come within an ace of killing a comrade, a recollection that still makes me sweat.)
But we knew that Jap had died hard in and around Meiktila; the rumour ran that in one hospital more than a hundred wounded had committed suicide rather than be taken; this proved to be true. It seemed incredible, after the hammering he’d had at Imphal; from listening to the older heads I gathered that they’d been hoping to hear of cases of surrender at this stage in the war, but apparently there had been none.
From the official map I see that we came into Meiktila on foot from the west, but all I recall is volumes of smoke rising from the cluster of low white buildings between the lakes, and the distant sound of firing and explosions. It isn’t much of a place; in the six weeks we were there I never visited what was left of the town proper, but I spent three days at the airstrip on the way out after VJ Day, living on tinned salmon sandwiches and attending a camp concert which featured a bald, bespectacled, desperately dirty comedian who told the story of Flossie the Frog. (I’m sorry, I can’t help my eccentric memory.) When we marched in we knew only that it was a vital link in Jap’s communications, and that he would want it back.
Our platoon position was on the perimeter, on the crest of a gentle slope running up from one of the lakes and looking out across a hundred yards of flat ground to undergrowth which you wouldn’t dignify with the name of jungle, with a fairly thick wood to our right front. The perimeter was a deep sloping horizontal apron of barbed wire (a better protection against infantry than any upright fence or coils of Dannet), and a few yards inside this we dug our two-man rifle pits with the usual dog-leg pit for the Bren. Behind us was platoon headquarters, consisting of the pits of Lieutenant Gale, Sergeant Hutton, and Gale’s batman and runner; behind that was company H.Q., which in my memory consists of the camp stool belonging to the company commander, Long John. There were two brigades of us inside the wire1 which enclosed the two lakes in a box perhaps four miles by three, and when the third brigade came in by air that was the whole of the Black Cat Division within the “anvil”, eighty miles inside Jap territory, “surrounded”, says the history, “by numerically superior forces”, and waiting for the “hammer” of 5th Div – and, in the meantime, Jap.
“’E’ll be at us like a rat up a fookin’ drainpipe,” said Sergeant Hutton, and the section gave pessimistic growls, and spoke with deep feeling of our prospects. Fortunately I’d been brought up in Cumberland, and knew that the natives would rather moan than eat; the British soldier is famous for complaint, but for sheer sour prolonged bitching in adversity commend me to the English West March. It comes out in a disgusted guttural growl rising to a full-tongued roar of discontent, and subsides into normal conversation:
“In the shit again! Ah’ve ’ad it, me.”
“We’ll all git killed.”
“Fook this!”
“Whee’s smeukin’, then?”
“Booger off, Forster, scrounge soomw’eers else.”
“Ahh, ye miserable, mingy Egremont twat!”
“Whee’s gonna brew up, then? Eh, Wattie, you’ve got the tin.”
“Brew up yer bloody sel’. Ah’ve carried the bloody thing a’ day!”
“Aw, wrap up, ye miserable sods! Eh, Jock, git the fire lit, there’s a lad.”
“All right, you get the bloody sticks.” (Evil associations corrupt good manners, you see.)
“Idle Scotch git! Ye want us to strike the fookin’ matches, an a’?”
An outsider wouldn’t have realised it, but they were in good spirits, and I should remark here that they were not foul-mouthed, as soldiers go. Many never swore at all, and those who did swore as birds sing, so naturally that you hardly noticed. You must imagine the above conversation punctuated by the Cumbrian’s dirty, snarling chuckle; they are the only people I know who can moan and laugh together; they took pleasure in reviling each other, and I remember those section brew-ups as some of the friendliest gatherings of my life. Little, the corporal, listening, not saying much; Nixon with his pipe under the drooping moustache, spitting into the fire; Steele noisy and assertive, the lean young face eager in the firelight; Wedge working methodically at his rifle, one moment laughing, the next worrying about whether 5th Div could get through before …; Grandarse sprawled contented like a captain at an inn, his pialla in an enormous paw, red face beaming; Parker with his sharp Max Miller banter, never stuck for an answer; the Duke yawning and making occasional remarks which invariably attracted mimicry, at which he would smile tolerantly; Stanley off in a reverie of his own, replying quietly when spoken to, then lapsing into contemplation again; Forster’s twisted grin as he needled and sneered – “Ah could piss better chah than thoo brews, Jock” … “Reet, noo … whee’s got the fags?”
If the knowledge that they were surrounded and outnumbered by the most cruel and valiant foe on earth worried them, it didn’t show, ever. Times have changed now, and it is common to hear front-line troops, subjected to the disgusting inquisition of war reporters, confess to being scared. Of course they’re scared; everybody’s scared. But it was not customary to confess it, then, or even hint at it. It was simply not done, partly out of pride, but far more from the certainty that nothing could be better calculated to sap confidence, in one’s self, in one’s comrades, and among those at home. If I’d heard Corporal Little voice the kind of anxiety that television so loves to ferret out and harp on nowadays, I’d have wondered if he was the man for the job – and felt even more nervous myself. I was a worried man in Burma, but I hope it didn’t show. Nothing put more heart into me, young and unsure as I was – most of all, fearful of being seen to be fearful – than the fact that, being a Scot, it was half expected of me that I would be a wild man, a head case. This age-old belief among the English, that their northern neighbours are desperate fellows, hangs on, and whether it’s true or not it’s one hell of an encouragement when you’re nineteen and wondering how you’ll be when the whistle blows and you take a deep breath and push your safety catch forward.
Talk about morale: Nine Section was morale, they and the barking Sergeant Hutton, and tall Long John, the courteous, soft-spoken company commander whose modest demeanour concealed a Berserker, and the tough, black-browed colonel to whom I never spoke until he warned me for a late tackle in a bloodbath of a Cumberland Rugby Cup match (Carlisle v. Aspatria) after the war, and all the rest of that lean and hungry battalion. To say nothing of the Gurkhas along the wire, grinning and chirruping, and the fearsome Baluchi hillmen looking like the Forty Thieves. And the green and gold dragon flag of the regiment planted down by the lake, and the black cat insignia of the oldest division in the Army. You felt you were in good company; Jap wasn’t going to stop this lot. (The only remaining question was: was he going to stop me? Well, we’d just have to see; there was no sense worrying about it.)
But the biggest boost to morale was the burly man who came to talk to the assembled battalion by the lake shore – I’m not