Road of Bones: The Siege of Kohima 1944 – The Epic Story of the Last Great Stand of Empire. Fergal Keane

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СКАЧАТЬ who had already surrendered. I wondered how he would have felt if the roles had been reversed.’

      A new commanding officer arrived at the battalion that autumn. Lieutenant Colonel H. W. Lambert was a pious man with a fascination for the holy places of the Middle East. He was liked by the men. Lambert began his command with inspections ‘in detail’ of all the battalion companies; drill routines, bathing procedures, battle training and leave procedures were all examined rigorously. Company commanders referred men they did not regard as physically or mentally fit to the medical officers for regrading. Lambert was restoring morale in the most sensible way possible, by ensuring that normal battalion life was resumed.

      In December 1942 the 4th West Kents became part of 161 Brigade, 5th Indian Division, with which they would serve until the end of the war. As part of 161 Indian Brigade they would fight alongside two Indian battalions, the 1/1 Punjab and 4/7 Rajput. The practice of brigading two Indian battalions with one British battalion dated back to the fear-filled aftermath of the Indian Mutiny of 1857.

      The West Kents were to be sent to Iraq to counter the possibility of a German thrust from the Caucasus against the Iraqi oilfields. Lieutenant Hogg found himself leading the column and navigating by the sun. ‘I was supplied with a jeep with a sun-compass on the bonnet and by keeping a careful watch on the sun’s relative movement we were able to arrive within sight of the bridge superstructure at Fallujah, after 700 miles of desert-driving, which was not bad!’ The journey was punctuated by numerous stops ordered by the devout Colonel Lambert. Captain Donald Easten remembered, ‘We had to stop and get the soldiers out of their vehicles to listen to the CO talk about the holy places. I remember hearing the sergeant major telling the lads to get out of the trucks: “Out ye get lads, more Jesus stuff.”’ Ivan Daunt and his comrades would mutter and dutifully dismount for another wholesome lecture.

      Wintering in Baghdad, Captain Harry Smith remembered the sullenness of the locals, the dust storms that whipped grit into the most well-covered orifices, and the endless waiting for a German thrust which every man of them sensed would never come. Smith was a schoolmaster and had married on the eve of the war. The school magazine printed the usual congratulations, but with a poignant coda: ‘Congratulations to Mr. H. Crispin Smith on his marriage on 13th November to Miss Iris Reaves … Though we miss him greatly, we know he is giving another kind of service, and we hope that later, in a war-free world, he will resume his normal work with us.’ He had been wounded at the battle of El Alamein and spent most nights in Baghdad in a state of semi-wakefulness. Shortly after arriving he awoke to find a pack of wild dogs, the snarling and mange-ridden brutes that haunted Baghdad’s alleys, rooting through his belongings. He froze and feigned sleep until the pack moved on. Not only were there dogs and jackals for the men to fear at night, but also the rifle snatchers, some of the best and most ruthless thieves in all of Iraq, ‘who wouldn’t think twice about using a knife if they were cornered’.

      The battalion made route marches of more than twenty miles and conducted repeated mock attacks. But any danger of a German attack from the Caucasus vanished with the defeat of von Paulus’s German 6th Army at Stalingrad in early February 1943. Soon afterwards a new commanding officer arrived to replace Lieutenant Colonel Lambert. The devout and steady leader was replaced by Lieutenant Colonel F. S. Saville, a man of genial nature but with no experience of battle. At the end of May the 4th West Kents were given fresh orders. They were to sail for India where a new army was being readied for war with the Japanese. For Captain John Winstanley it was exciting news, for he had strong family connections with the East. His parents had lived in the Burmese jungle, where his father had worked as an officer for the Burma Forest Service. When his mother became pregnant with John it was decided that she should return to England for the birth. Her husband stayed behind to join the Burma Sappers and Miners, and was eventually posted to the North-West Frontier. He died there of typhoid in 1919. The telegram announcing his death reached Winstanley’s mother just as she prepared to rejoin her husband. She would never see India or Burma again.

      The new CO, Lieutenant Colonel Saville, regaled his officers with the joys awaiting them in India. Donald Easten recalled, ‘When he heard we were going to India he said, “You will all have three or four servants and you will have to play polo. The problem for some of you will be that you will only be able to afford one pony, but the rest of you should be able to afford two or three.” We were all saying to one another, “Perhaps we ought to tell him we’re at war!”’ Before long his enthusiastic word pictures of life on the subcontinent earned the unfortunate lieutenant colonel the nickname ‘Playboy of India’. Saville had not been with the battalion in the crucible of the Western Desert and it would have taken a personality of considerable force to impress the battle-hardened troops. Lieutenant Colonel Saville was not that man.

      Camp was struck swiftly in Baghdad and the men boarded trucks for the start of their journey south to the port of Basra, passing on the way the walls of Kut al Amara, where thousands of British and Indian troops, among them men of the Royal West Kents, had been killed or else died in Turkish captivity in April 1916. From Basra they steamed slowly down the palm-lined fringes of the Shatt al-Arab, passing the dhows of fishermen and little inlets where women washed clothes and children swam and splashed in the muddy water. The landscape beyond the waterway was an immense plateau of reeds, braided through with little canals along which the fishermen constructed their huts of dried reeds. The children waved to the men on deck as the ship glided down towards the open sea.

      Approaching Bombay on the morning of 20 June 1943, the battalion heard the sound of a brass band as they came into the harbour. The triumphal reception was being granted because of their part in the victory at El Alamein. It was, no doubt, also intended as a reminder to the more mutinous subjects of the Raj that British fortunes were improving. One officer recorded that ‘there was a faint hint of comic opera about our arrival. Bombay greeted us with a brass band and grave warnings to the effect that irresponsible talk about Japanese fighting ability was liable to have a bad effect on the morale of British troops.’ He also noted, almost as an afterthought, that Burma was to be their destination.

      Bombay occupied a special place in the history of the Indian national liberation movement, for it was there that the Congress Party had been founded nearly sixty years before, and there that Mohandas K. Gandhi had launched the Quit India movement. By the time the 4th West Kents arrived, Gandhi, Nehru and the other main leaders of the Congress were in prison. The troops knew little of this state of affairs. What information they had came from a handful of old soldiers who had served in Bombay before the war, when the Raj had guaranteed that the humblest of white men could feel themselves among the earth’s chosen. The old soldiers painted a glorious picture of life in the army camp for Private Ivan Daunt and his comrades as they crowded on the gangways to disembark. There were servants to take care of every need. Best of all, Daunt was told, were the punkah-wallahs, who fanned the soldiers while they took their nap during the hot afternoons, operating the overhead fans with their toes until they too, invariably, nodded off. Daunt was advised to keep a boot ready to throw at any punkah-wallah sleeping on duty.

Of all the cities of the eastern empire, Bombay was the most self-consciously striking in the first impressions it gave: a jumble of architectural styles which could have appeared as a grandiloquent folly but invariably inspired the admiration of visitors arriving by sea. Its buildings were not only a fusion of the impulses that drove the dream of empire but a tribute to the enduring power of its institutions, from the government secretariat to the law courts to the university, all facing towards the great bay on the Arabian Sea. Waiting at the docks to greet the West Kents, dressed in distinctive red dhotis, was an army of coolies, the carriers and bearers of the Raj, kept in order by supervisors swirling their long lathis.^*

      Wartime disembarkation in Bombay could be a lengthy and frustrating process. Men, weapons, vehicles and supplies had to be unloaded on to the quayside. Robert Kay, a gunner with the Royal Artillery, remembered being woken at 4.30 in the morning to start the process: ‘The whole operation took place in the cramped spaces of a troopship, with on-board temperatures СКАЧАТЬ