Authors: John Sweeney
He ate. The cooked fish was good, the first proper meal, not out of a tin, that he’d had in ages. He was more hungry than he’d realised, and when he’d eaten, he slumped into his hammock, cursing their luck. All this way, but no way out.
In the morning: ice-grime.
A coating of frost covered their bedding, their faces, their feet where they protruded out of their blankets. The Burmese had never seen anything like it, tiny crystals of coldness, which burnt the tongue. Sam told them about snow, so deep it could bury a man, and they looked at him as if he had turned idiot.
They shivered violently as they rolled up their hammocks and prepared for the day’s work. Sam divided up the party into five groups of two, and set off to explore the rockface. The fittest, youngest ones were sent off to the furthest extremities, north and south, while Sam and Po Toke had given themselves the task of examining the rock immediately in front of them. To the north for two miles, nothing. They retraced their steps and found, almost
immediately in front of the camp, a landslip tumbling down towards them, strewn with boulders and overgrown with lianas and bamboo.
He doubted whether he could get up the fifty feet of the landslip, let alone an elephant. Po Toke, who knew what elephants could do, better than any man alive, shook his head. But still, they had no choice but to explore it.
They spent two long hours hacking through the undergrowth to climb forty feet or so. The last ten feet were almost perpendicular, Sam having to jump from one stony outcrop to another, but eventually he hauled himself up onto a goat track, invisible from below, which slowly ascended, running to the south-west around the side of the rockface. Gingerly, Sam and Po Toke followed the path upwards. Much of the time, it was ten feet wide, maybe more, but they came to a narrow point, just twelve inches wide, curving around a bend in the rock, the path out of view, as if ending in the sky itself. Sam made himself go first, edging his way along, facing the wall of rock, eyes on the path ahead, not daring to look down to the drop below.
Four feet along and the path narrowed an inch or two. A spasm of fear gripped him. Going back now would be more dreadful. His legs froze, his arms extended, fingers scrabbling and flailing to gain some traction on the smooth-as-soap surface. Despite himself, he looked down the sheer wall beneath his feet to the jungle far below, as green as a bottle, welcoming, seductive, deadly.
They had no hope. The path was barely wide enough to allow one man, impossibly narrow for an elephant, let alone fifty-three. The smallest calf would be knocked off the goat-track by the fatness of his belly.
To the north, a mass of clouds piled up, punctured by the sun. The wind, cold and fresh from Thibet, soughed over the rocks. Hard – no, impossible – to judge the distances
made by sounds. Was that the soft crump-crump of the big guns? And, not so far off, the fire-crackers of small-arms fire? Or thunder and lightning from fifty miles away?
Out loud, Sam heard himself say: ‘Get a grip, old man,’ and he straightened his back and started moving, imagining that he was about to plunge into the sea off Cornwall. Five, six, seven steps, a bend – and the path widened to a large space, covered by an overhang of rock, shading him from the sun, almost dark, as spacious and restful as a hay barn. Giddy with suppressed fear, he made for the ground furthest from the drop and pressed his back against the rock, luxuriating in its solidity.
Forcing himself back to the cliff edge, waiting for Po Toke, he tried to affect an air of nonchalance, but in his heart he had to deal with facts.
There was no way out.
They had lost. He’d have to shoot the elephants.
They trekked on and on, slow, sluggishly, looking over their shoulders at the impassive wall of green behind them, half-wanting the Japanese to be there to put an end to the relentless anxiety. The trudge through jungle came to a halt as they watched Henry VIII toboggan on his haunches down a muddy bank into a dried-up riverbed. The rest followed, finding themselves in a sandy gulley with both banks above them steep walls of rock. At the start, the dried-up bed was much, much easier-going than the jungle and they made good progress on sand and cracked mud, picking their way through boulders as big as houses and side-stepping deep pools of water.
They walked on, locked inside the funnel of rock, the banks getting steeper and more forbidding as the riverbed twisted and turned. Halfway through the afternoon, a long, drawn-out rumble sounded from the north.
Thunder.
To Eddie Gregory’s ears practised, from his days with the gunners, it made a bigger noise than artillery, easily distinguished. The rain came, even harder than before, a relentless curtain of water falling, connecting up the deep pools by a thread, then a tracery, soon a blanket of water, until you’d take a step and plunge in down to your waist and struggle to hold upright. Thank God he’d parked all his kit, apart from his knife, in the big elephant’s basket.
Whoever the bright spark was who’d thought of taking a short cut along the dried-up riverbed hadn’t worked out what might happen if it started to rain, big-time. Because pretty soon the river wasn’t dried up at all, but running freely, the water level rising and rising fast.
One inch, two inches. A trickle turned into a sluggish flow. Five inches, six inches. The flow started to move little stones, bits of dead wood began to be carried away by the current.
The rain thrummed down through the trees that arced overhead, the job of sloshing uphill against the current becoming harder, with every step.
Sick of plunging out of his depth, Gregory studied the great elephant’s progress. The animal never put a foot wrong. It must be something in the pads of the creature’s feet. When unsure of himself, the animal had a way of testing a step, to make sure it would carry the burden of his great weight, before he would move. But the elephant was even smarter than that. For much of the time the beast ploughed on up the stream, making quite good going, keeping an eye out for signs that the bed of the stream was sound. He could work out, Gregory realised, when he could walk steadily and when he had to slow down and take soundings. The oozies knew this, and never pushed the tusker when he suddenly stopped, and started dipping his toe into the water and testing his weight rather than plodding robotically on. If he ever got out of here, and sorted out that bitch of a schoolmarm, then he would have some tales to tell about his time with the elephants.
How long would they stay in the riverbed? Gregory raised his eyes and studied the slabs towering above them. Sheer rock, sprouting a bit of jungle here and there, a good thirty feet on one side, maybe a hundred on the other. If the river kept on rising at the current rate – and the stream was being fed from the hills and mountains to the north, where the thunder was coming from – then pretty soon it would be a forceful torrent, down which dead trees would come, smashing everything in their wake, and then they’d have to look out.
Reading the faces of the oozies, he could tell that they didn’t like it one bit. There was no panic, not yet, but a growing jitteriness amongst the Burmese. To prove the point, a biggish tree trunk idled past them, and then locked still for some seconds, a branch snagging on the bottom, before it spun free. As it passed Gregory, a high branch brushed against his
face. He jerked his head away fast, but not fast enough, and the left side of his face bore a nasty tracery of scratches.
That set him thinking. The oozies by him were leading the most powerful elephant of the whole pack, walking with the fittest men, and they looked worried. Further down the march, the schoolgirls and the baby elephants, would be in trouble.
An opportunity, maybe, to settle things with the schoolmarm? No harm in taking a look, was there? Gregory made a thing of asking the lead oozie on the big one, using sign language, for his permission so that he could go back down the stream to see how the others were coping, whether they needed to quit the riverbed now. That was a bit academic, like, because they were trapped in the funnel of rock until it opened out. The oozie, high up on the tusker’s neck, grasped Gregory’s meaning, nodded, and the sergeant turned on his heel and began to saunter downstream. It was easy-going compared to slogging uphill, but every now and then something caught his feet underwater and he would stumble and stagger, working hard to keep upright. His boots filled with water but he didn’t dare risk taking them off lest he tread on something sharp. Remembering where the elephant had hesitated, he managed to avoid the deep sumps of water, and came to a bend in the riverbed. Far to the side was a kind of cave, a shelter made by a misshapen roof of rock and a spread of thick waxy ferns. Underneath the ferns the ground, standing proud of the stream, was dry-ish and quite comfortable to sit down on. He could rest, hidden behind the greenery, and people and elephants could pass him a few feet away and have no idea that he was watching them.
Smart. And so he sat down and waited to see who would pass by.
The Havildar came first, almost running, scowling, looking anxious, followed by a troop of pack elephants, moving faster than normal. Not running exactly, but kind of trotting, if elephants could be said to trot, calves skipping after mothers, little trunks flapping this way and that. Nearly all of the children were being carried in panniers, which was against Sam’s
rules. By foot came a group of the older girls, Emily passing only a few feet from him, chatting to another girl, beak-nosed and lippy, a Jewess, and finally, there she was, the princess schoolmarm, rain plastering her blonde hair wet over her shoulders, her frock – once cream - a muddy brown and, to the delight of the secret watcher, all but see-through.
And what was bloody marvellous, she was alone.
Gregory checked upstream: all clear. The older girls had rounded a bend and had disappeared, out of sight.
Thirty feet away from him, blissfully unaware, she was walking towards him.
Now?
Hold the knife to her long, lovely throat, drag her under the ferns, make sure everybody had passed – it would not take that long, because they were all hurrying up the riverbed – wait until the last of them had gone. He’d wait five minutes, maybe ten, just to be sure.
Then he’d tie her up with a liana, her hands behind her back, cut away that old dress with his knife. Have her, nice and slow.
And then…
With a bit of luck, if the rain kept on pouring and the river level rising, her body would be flushed downstream so fast no one would ever find it. He’d have to do a bit of explaining about why he was so late, so far behind – he’d fallen down a sump, knocked his head, the old concussion. Strange no one had spotted him lying by the side of the bank, but that was hardly his fault, was it? They’d missed him in their panic to get out of the river before it became a torrent. Sam and the Havildar might suspect some funny business but, with no body, they wouldn’t be able to pin anything on him. No evidence, see?
Better wait until she had passed him.
A few more steps.
So close to him he could reach out and stroke her hair, could see her shoulderblades sculpted through the sodden fabric of her frock.
In the dull green light, the blade of his knife not shining…
There was something awesome about the force of the melt-water powering down from the Himalayas, surging like great Atlantic breakers crashing against boulders as big as a house; something awesome about the finality of what it meant to the raggle-taggle army of last-ditchers.
The end of hope.
The men slumped against mossy-green rocks, enjoying the relief of the spray, cooling after the heat of the forced march. They had clattered down from the plateau above and were now at the very bottom of the ravine. The waters were hellishly strong.
‘Cross that?’ The sergeant-major gestured with the slightest twitch of his head. ‘Fat chance.’
One man, tall, gaunt, paddled into the shallows, squinted across to the west bank, fuzzy in the cloud of mist.
‘We’ve got to move.’ Desperation in his voice.
‘The lads need a break, sir. You’re killing them at this pace. Besides, there’s not a man among us who could cross that and live. That goes for you too. We can’t swim that. We’re fooked this time, sir.’
It was not much more than 100 yards to the far bank. In the old days, at school, he could have run that distance handsomely in a twinkling of an eye. Now, the force of the water would knock him flying in the first five feet and he would certainly drown– and he was probably the fittest, or, rather, the least poorly man, out of the nine of them. Some of the chaps could barely hobble.
He was angered by the sergeant-major’s realism. They had been following the river downstream for hours and they had not seen a single place where they could get across. They had been moving fast, every one of them knowing that the Japanese had time on their side. If they could not ford the torrent, they were trapped and they knew that sooner or later, the Japs would hunt them down. Only nine of them were left, haggard, pitifully thin, all of them beyond exhaustion. Only the officer’s mad insistence that they must catch up with the others, must at all costs reach them, drove them on. Had it not been for Peach, they would have dawdled to a halt hours ago.
‘Sergeant-major, may I remind you that I am the officer in charge,’ said Peach.
The sergeant-major was a good eighteen inches shorter than Peach, but his eyes flashed with contempt.
‘Aye, and it’s my job to tell you that the lads cannot keep this pace up. They fooking want to kill you, which would be a black spot on your career, wouldn’t it, Lieutenant? Being dead and all?’
‘Are you threatening me?’ The two men stared at each other.
‘No, sir, I’m not threatening you. I’m telling you that killing your men on some wild-goose chase to rescue some silly totty is conduct unbecoming of an officer. Sit down, lads – we’re having a break.’
Peach almost hit him. His frustration, and fear, that Gregory was a real danger to Grace, was boiling up inside him. After a moment, he stormed off, running downstream a further two hundred yards, wading up to an islet in the torrent, thick with bamboo. The water was running fast even here, and he had to fight the current to find what he was looking for. On the west corner of the islet, impossible to see from the bank, was a sandy bluff, standing proud of the water. The bamboo – higher than a lamppost – shielded observation from the
south, too. It was the perfect hiding place. He hurried back to the men, resting against the mossy rocks.
‘We’re moving, and that’s an order.’
The sergeant-major stayed where he was; the others took their cue from him.
‘This is a bad place to stop, Eric,’ Peach said. ‘The Japs will be able to see us from miles off. I’ve found a better resting place a few yards downstream. We’ve got to move. It’s not far.’
The waters thundered on; the spray from the wet mist soaking everything.
‘Fook off, you love-sick bastard.’
‘Eric!’ Peach was appalled.
‘Only joking, sir. Attention!’ The sergeant-major pulled himself up and motioned with his head for the men to move. With infinite weariness, five stood up and pulled up their packs onto their backs. But two men, furthest from the sergeant and the officer, refused to stir. Barr walked towards them. He kicked one in the leg, and bent over the other and whispered into his ear. Both men struggled up and began to walk.
Peach led the way, downstream, and stood in the water, waist–deep, ensuring that none of them lost their footing as they fought through the current to the safety of the islet.
With all of them safe and out of sight of the Japanese above, Peach allowed himself to collapse flat on his back on the sand.
‘What did you say to him?’
‘I threatened to stick a cricket bat up his arse, sir. He’s a Methodist and doesn’t like that sort of talk.’
‘Very good, Sergeant-major.’
‘I’m sorry…’
‘No, don’t. I’m sorry, too. I know the men are exhausted.’ Peach shook his head.
They had grown so used to each other’s thinking that speaking out loud was almost unnecessary.
‘Shall we call it a day, Sergeant-major?’
‘Surrender, sir?’
‘What do you think?’
‘Japs don’t take prisoners, sir. They’ll just kill us, and they’ll take their time about doing it.’
‘Yes. That’s my thinking, too. And it seems a shame, having come all this way, just to give in when we’re almost there.’
‘Right.’ Barr glanced uphill, towards the unseen enemy. ‘They can’t see us from up there. As awficers go, you’re not all bad.’
‘Eric?’
‘Sir?’
‘Why did you call me a love-sick bastard?’
‘Oh, come on, sir.’
‘What makes you say that, Sergeant-major?’
‘It’s bleedin’ obvious, sir. Making out them orphans to be the bloody aristocracy. Not blowing up that bridge when you were ordered.’
‘One word from you, and I would have blown the bridge then and there.’
‘So it was all my fault, then, sir?’
‘Yes, Sergeant-major, it was.’
‘Fook off, sir.’
‘If you carry on like that, Sergeant-major, I’ll put you on a charge.’
Barr started to laugh, a high-pitched giggle, almost girlish.
‘There is…’ continued Peach.
‘Sir?’
‘There is one way, we might get across.’
‘What’s that, sir?’
‘On an elephant.’
‘We haven’t got an elephant, sir.’
‘Yes, I know that, Sergeant-major. I’m suggesting that we borrow one.’
‘From who, sir?’
‘Emperor Hirohito, Sergeant-major.’
‘He might not like that, sir.’
‘But what if we ask him nicely, Sergeant-major?’
‘That should make all the difference, sir.’
‘There’s slightly more to my plan than that, Sergeant-major.’
‘I’m all ears, sir.’
‘I once met a man in a bar, Sergeant-major. He told me all about the training of an elephant, how they pair up a calf elephant with a teenage boy, of around fourteen or so, and with a bit of luck the two of them make a team for life. So not anyone can ride an elephant. Each animal must have its own dedicated oozie, a man he trusts. So, clever as the Japanese are, they’re not that clever. The elephants we’ve seen them with, they must be ridden by Burmese oozies.’
‘So?’
‘Our best shot is that we try and meet one of the oozies working for the Japs at dead of night, and we offer them a fair passage to India, and gold at the other end of the rainbow, if they will run away from the Japs and give us a lift across this river. What about it, Sergeant-major?’
‘You’re the officer. You give the order and we do what you tell us to.’
‘You know damn well it doesn’t work like that, Eric. What do you really think?’
‘You’ve gone crackers, sir.’
Another pause.
‘Ever gone bonkers, sir? Lost your marbles, sir?’
‘No, Sergeant-major. Or, at least, not yet. That time when I was a magistrate and I jailed an officer for crashing into those two Burmese women – that was difficult… War had just broken out and I had applied for a commission. I got a letter back, declining my offer, and someone had scrawled on the envelope, LMF.’
‘Lacking Moral Fibre.’
‘I was pretty cut up by it, back then. Grace was the first European woman to break the spell. She had no idea that I had been boycotted. She didn’t like me very much, but she didn’t like me because of who I was, which is fair enough, not because of what I had done to stand up for the rule of law.’
‘Well, you’re in the army, now, sir.’
‘Very funny, Sergeant-major.’ But Peach was aware that he might have been sounding rather pompous. ‘She ran away from me once. We’d gone to the cinema, to see some damnfool show, Bob Hope and Bill Crosby. One of their road movies. At the end of the show, I tried to kiss her and she started hurdling over the cinema seats. I tried to chase after her but I fell over. I felt absolutely frustrated at the time. Everybody was laughing me. Humiliating. Looking back at it now, damn funny.’
‘What did she look like, jumping across the seats?’
‘Bit like Tipperary Tim winning the Grand National, Sergeant-major. She took those cinema seats like old Tim leaping Becher’s Brook.’
‘You’re in love, sir.’
‘I prefer it when you’re saying that I’m bonkers.’
‘I went bonkers, once.’
This, from the man he trusted most in the world, came as a shock.
‘Raving, I was. Doo-lally.’
‘Why?’
‘Family stuff.’
‘You’ve got a wife and kids.’
‘Aye. I came out here in thirty-eight. Two kids and the missus, safe at home in Leeds. Then along comes the youngest. Born in 1940. Three kids. But I was out here.’
‘Oh,’ said Peach.
‘Aye. When I calmed down, I wrote to her saying: “When I get back to Yorkshire, I’m going to throttle you with my own bare hands”.’
‘I see. Will you?’
‘No, not now. Seen too many dead. It’s only a bit of slap’n’tickle that went wrong. That’s what she says. Any road, there’s nowt I can do about it out here. He’s a lad, and all. Name of Jake. I’ve only had the daughters before. Nowt wrong with girls, but…’
‘Yes.’
‘Thing is, sir…’
‘Call me Bertie’
‘Silly fooking name, Bertie. I’m calling you sir. Thing is…’ Barr struggled to get the words out. ‘If I fooking die out here, she’ll think I died bitter an’ all, and I’m not. I’m not fooking proud of her, but you can’t go through a bloody war and not learn a thing or two about human weakness and all, so if I get killed…’
‘Which you are absolutely not going to do.’
‘If I do get killed, then will you go and see her, and tell her from me, that she’s a silly whore, but I still love her with all my heart, and I love little Jakey too, and I’m sorry I wrote mean things to her. You’ll do that, won’t you, sir?’
‘You’re not going to die.’
‘But?’
‘Of course. What’s her name?’
‘Agnes.’
‘Do the same for me, Sergeant-major. Tell Grace I forgive her for making me look like a complete idiot.’
‘Aye, I will and all.’
They sat in silence, listening to the river’s roar. After a while it was Peach who broke the spell.
‘But if I have gone bonkers,’ he said, ‘then it’s your duty to relieve me of my command. So if I really am mad, then you’re in charge, Sergeant-major. What shall we do?’
‘Fook that for a game of soldiers.’
‘Well?’
‘Fook it.’ He turned away and raised his voice. ‘Lads, pay attention. The officer says we’re going to borrow an elephant.’
No moon that night. They’d left the rest of the men on the islet. On their return, the password would be ‘Sheffield Wednesday’, making a change from the usual ‘Leeds United’.
In pitch dark, Peach and Barr waded across the shallows to the eastern bank, faces blackened with stinking river mud. Each man carried two grenades and one jungle knife. Their rifles would not be much use in the dark and they had precious little ammunition left
between all of them. The whole point of this exercise was to ‘borrow’ an elephant or two without disturbing the Japanese.
The officer and the sergeant-major had had one of their semi-silent discussions about risking both their lives on this foolishness. If the Japanese caught them, the remaining seven last-ditchers would be leaderless. But the soldiers were pretty far gone. If this plan didn’t work, well, that was pretty much it for all of them.
The two men were well accustomed to the sounds of the jungle at night by now: the sudden, unexplained mechanical bangs and crashes, subtle creaks and inhuman gibbering. But some new sound gripped Peach’s attention. What was that…?
He sensed the sergeant-major freeze beside him and he flattened his stomach against the ground as best he could. Ear down, he could just make out a patter of soft footfalls, then silence. The silhouette of the sergeant-major remained immobile. Fighting in the jungle – or just staying alive – was as much a matter of patience as anything else.
The footfalls started again, diminishing with each step. They crawled forward on their bellies, as lightly as they could, until they found what they had been looking for: seven, eight, nine, ten elephants, standing, obelisk-still in a circle, and beyond them they could make out hammocks stretching between trees, a deeper black against the blackness of the night. One of the elephants stirred, shuffling his hobbled legs, uneasy. The beast chirruped, a strange high-pitched sound for such a big animal. Had they been smelt out?
Peach stiffened as he felt the light brush of a blade of grass against the back of his neck. No, he was wrong about that. This blade was made of steel.