Authors: Maggie Ford
Matthew did a nightmare scramble for the carrier again, it seemingly a mile away as he felt rather than saw a line of dust spurts heading his way. In his own panic, he never even heard the explosion of the direct hit on the truck he had been helping to shove.
The attacks continued into the afternoon. In the centre of the road the truck was ablaze, now interlocked with a ten-tonner that had come from nowhere it seemed. From the smoking cab the officer’s body hung amid shreds of burned clothing gently wafting away in the upcurrent of heat from the vehicle. Of Farrell there was no sign. He had legged it to the trees and was gone.
The sun going down saw the waves of planes depart. The bridge was at least still being defended, with the heavy hammering of a Bren-gun which sounded almost dignified against the excited clatter of an enemy machine-gun. Occasionally there came the dull flat detonation of a mortar bomb. At one time he fancied he could hear the hollow cough of a bomb as it left the mortar’s barrel, the enemy too close for comfort if he was right. After a while it ceased, the operators perhaps moving closer to their goal, ignoring the broken vehicles nearby, but his uneasiness lingered. Those passing him in the sudden darkness that descends in the tropics trod warily, bent double, weapon held tense as they tried to probe the shadows either side of the road.
It made the flesh creep, this sensation of being watched, imagination magnifying fear tenfold. But fear had no place here. There was work to do, a way to be made for vehicles laden with wounded and supplies to get through to the bridge. In the darkness lit by lurid flashes, Matthew heaved and sweated helping to clear blockages While all around came the incessant chirruping of insects impervious to the racket of men locked in battle. At least while the sound of fighting continued there was hope of getting through. Should it cease, it would mean the enemy had taken control.
It was with relief that he saw a staff car approaching out of the darkness, followed by a lorry full of Indian troops. The staff car held two obvious junior officers, even though they had ripped off their lapels and thrown away their caps, and a burly senior officer also minus his insignia.
With the road narrowed by the shattered ten-tonner, the car stopped. The burly officer got out. ‘Where’s your officer, corporal?’
Matthew indicated the body hanging from the burned-out truck. The man sighed, surveying the tangled wreckage. ‘Not having much luck here.’
As Matthew explained his lack of men and tools, the lips beneath the dusty moustache gave a small, tight, tired, smile. ‘My men will take over, corporal. Corporal …?’
‘Ward, sir,’ Matthew supplied.
‘I’m Captain Weatherill. You and your men get some rest. You may need it.’ He nodded towards the flashes around the bridge up ahead. ‘By the way, the Japs have cut the road at Mokpalin,’ he added as calmly as if announcing a cricket score.
Mokpalin, only three miles back, meant they were virtually caught in a neat pincer movement. For a moment, a feeling of doom spread through Matthew together with an irrational impulse to run towards the bridge, to race across and keep going until he got home to Susan and safety. It came to him that he might very well never see her again.
‘Dear God,’ prayed the panic within him, ‘please, get me out of this. Let it all be a dream.’
Beside him Bob’s voice came hollow. ‘You mean we’re trapped?’
The sound of that voice returned Matthew’s sanity to him in a rush.
‘We’re going to get out okay,’ he said, more to still his own fears than to reassure Bob. His mouth sour, he lifted a hand to his eyes and with finger and thumb grubbed out the caked dust that had collected at the inner corners. To ease the ache between his shoulder-blades he straightened his back. It was a gesture Weatherill immediately took as determination.
‘Good man,’ he grunted and left them to find a hole by the road to creep into and rest for a while.
Beside him Bob was fast asleep. Other men also were sleeping, but his own rest was fitful. For something to keep his imagination at bay he took a sip of the warm metallic water from his canteen, rinsed it around his mouth and spat it out, thick and evil, then took another sip and swallowed it. In the canteen the water slapped hollowly. How grand to have been able to wash, if only his face. To think of millions of gallons of fresh water flowing by just half a mile away. He listened to the spasmodic firing and wondered how much longer the two sides would continue taking pot shots at each other. He thought of Susan, the child she bore. He thought drowsily that if he were to get up now before it got light and go towards the firing, the river, there might be a chance …
A hand on his shoulder brought him awake, grabbing for his rifle. The grip tightened.
‘Easy, lad.’ Weatherill stood over him. ‘Be light in a few minutes. Get your men together.’
Firing could still be heard from the bridge, a little more energetic in the fast-brightening tropical morning. The driver of the staff car, a cheeky Cockney, was handing out cubes of corned beef, the tin opened with his bayonet. ‘We’re orf, mate,’ he said to Matthew. ‘’Ad a dekko darn the road. It ain’t so bad furver along. A few obstructions but we can all git fru. Once we’re over that bleedin’ bridge we’ll all ’ave a nice cuppa tea at HQ.’
Matthew grinned at his Cockney optimism and was on the point of helping himself to a greasy cube of the corned beef when a terrific triple explosion rocked the already pink dawn.
For a second or two the firing from both sides stopped as though paralysed by the tremendous paroxysm, and in the lull its echoes rumbled away into the distance with slowly diminishing reverberations.
‘Mother of Jesus! What the hell was that?’ one of the junior officers called out, running over.
Weatherill’s answer was one of incredulity. ‘They’ve blown the bridge.’ A pall of smoke was spiralling slowly above the tree-tops.
The other man’s voice shook. ‘Bloody HQ. Couldn’t wait for us. Left us in the lurch, thousands of us. They panicked.’
Weatherill didn’t dispute him. Headquarters had probably had no alternative if the Japanese had been threatening to swarm across. It had been the plan, to delay the enemy’s advance on Rangoon enough to allow Allied reinforcements to arrive.
After the first shock of the explosion, hostilities resumed with even greater ferocity, each man now desperately fighting for his own life, gone all thoughts of saving transport and artillery.
Weatherill lost no time. ‘We’ll try the river further upstream. Thank God this isn’t the monsoon. The river should be low.’
‘What about the wounded?’ Matthew asked. The enemy, it was rumoured, had its own methods with casualties. Weatherill didn’t even look at him.
‘If they can walk and if they can be quiet, they come too.’
His words were met by silence, the men around him knowing there was no other suggestion to be made. He waited a moment or two for any there might be, then turned and without a word moved towards the trees. The others followed mutely, the green world closing in barely thirty feet into the trees, hiding the abandoned wounded quickly from guilt-ridden sight.
Here even any continuing rifle fire was muffled, the canopy a hundred feet or more above them cutting out all sunlight in a tangle of vines and parasitic growth, echoing only to the whirring of insects and the bell-like early-morning calls of forest birds. Grey wreathing mists of morning lay in motionless flat layers, but as the sun rose they turned delicate pink and lifted steadily through the ceiling of miniature jungle above to disappear. Within minutes that ceiling was pressing the heat down on the men, saturating them with sweat, the soft and spongy earth under their feet smelling dank.
Progress remained snail-like. In some areas the great mottled tree-trunks stood like dead-straight pillars of some vast cathedral, lianas draped from one to the other with curtains of green moss hanging from them. Sometimes the forest thinned enough to allow shafts of sunlight through and vegetation to become rampant, scrambling for light with vivid colouring, thick clumps of bamboo around which the men must time after time make diversions. In half an hour they had covered just half a mile, bearing northeast as much as those diversions allowed.
Breathing heavily from the now steamy heat which by midday would reach ninety degrees or more, arms aching from pushing aside the tough, woody creepers, legs aching from negotiating a surprisingly undulating terrain, from somewhere to their left came the gurgle of water.
‘Should see some open space soon,’ Weatherill predicted in a whisper. ‘Paddy fields probably. We could be easily spotted. Keep your heads down.’
After ten more minutes pushing through undergrowth, they came upon a proper path, the forest beginning to thin.
In the sudden brilliant sunlight, Weatherill crouched just off the path, beckoning to his men to follow suit. ‘I think there’s a village ahead. Could be sitting ducks if we blunder in there. We’d best skirt it, find the river and somewhere to swim across. Come on, but quietly.’
He stood up, the rest taking their cue from him. A sudden movement of foliage, the metallic sound of hands on rifles, froze the group. In a strange language, a guttural voice grated out a command.
From nowhere there appeared small men in drab tunics with double belts, short legs bound in puttees to the knee, and split canvas boots that divided the big toes from the rest. Black shoe-button eyes trained on the group from behind levelled rifles with incredibly long bayonets; for all their size each man looked strong, immensely capable and very much a fighting man, utterly at home in this hostile environment.
One by one the surprised men let their rifles fall and lifted their arms in the time-honoured abject signal of surrender as their captors moved closer. There were some twenty-five of them plus their officer – that many moving so silently no one had heard them at all.
With a sickness pounding in his chest, Matthew lifted his arms with the rest, submitted himself to be searched by a soldier reaching only to his shoulder in height. His pockets and ration pack were emptied of all he possessed: silver cigarette case, lighter, a little Burmese money, a photo of Susan. It was the photo that hurt most, seeing it scrutinised then torn into four pieces and flung away. The silver cigarette case and lighter were handed to the Japanese officer who immediately pocketed them with a satisfied smile.
‘We’ll get another letter from him very soon. You really must stop fretting, Susan. It isn’t good for the baby.’
Susan eyed her mother-in-law, just managing to hold back the tears that threatened and which always annoyed the woman. But every time she thought of Matthew’s last letter she couldn’t help them rising to the surface.
The one prior to that had said he had been over the moon about her news of the baby, and she’d been so happy that he was happy. It had said they were leaving Bombay though where for, as usual, hush-hush.
His last letter had come two days ago, a single page written in pencil in such an obvious hurry she could hardly read it, the soiled notepaper in an even more soiled envelope telling her not to worry, he was all right, that in itself worrying her more although she wasn’t sure why. It bore a military Rangoon postmark. Rangoon was in Burma, Mr Ward had told her, and she had heard fear echoing in his tone.
Her geography never good, she’d quickly consulted an atlas, alarmed how near the fighting Matthew had been sent. News from that part of the world had all been of disaster: the sinking of two large Royal Navy ships, the
Prince of Wales
, and the
Repulse
, the fall of Hong Kong on Christmas Day, then Singapore on the fifteenth of February four weeks ago. Now it was March. There was fighting in Burma and Matthew’s last letter, grubby and stained, made her shiver with imaginings she daren’t voice; none of them dared, though the look on their faces said they were thinking the same as she was.
Why was it, Jenny thought, that when she was with Ronald she could talk without a pause about all sorts of things, completely at ease in his company, yet the very anticipation of going to meet him never failed to fill her with strange reluctance, wishing she didn’t have to?
‘Have a quick drink in the pub tonight?’ he’d whisper as they passed in a corridor, if their off-duty hours coincided. ‘Wait for you outside.’
She would nod, smile, aware of a sinking feeling, a wish to be doing anything other than meeting him, even preferring to go home to spend a dull evening with Mumsy. There was none of that excited palpitation a girl in love was supposed to experience – the way she used to feel all those years ago when Matthew Ward came into sight or inadvertently touched her. The touch of Ronald’s hand on hers did nothing, though if he kissed her, her body would stir, responding of its own accord. Then her head would start to send messages that this wasn’t love, but a natural response to the touch of any man halfway handsome. Yet it made no sense to shy away from the knowledge that marriage to Ronald could be the best thing to happen to her; she would become the wife of a general practitioner.
‘It’s still early days,’ she’d hedged. ‘Too many people are rushing into marriage because it seems the right thing to do.’
‘Don’t you want to marry me?’ he had asked only last week, towards the end of February. What could she say?
‘Of course I do.’
But was she lying, to him and herself? They had had their very first row, as far as it was possible to row with Ronald, who was always even-tempered.
‘Then for God’s sake why delay it? It’s not as if I’ve nothing to offer you. My family’s pretty well off. My father’s a GP. Soon I’ll be one as well.’
She knew that. He was taking his finals in a couple of weeks and was more than certain that he’d pass. He had talked often of the day when he too would be a GP expected to go in with his father as a junior partner. Perhaps it was that which made her so reluctant about marriage and the assumption that she would accompany him to Bristol. It meant leaving her mother, who still deemed herself lonely after all this time with Jenny not getting home regularly each night. Her mother was destined to become even more isolated if Jenny went off to live on the other side of the country – the other side of the world as far as she was concerned.