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 and swearing and carrying kit bags and everything else they owned.’ Others would curse the bureaucracy of the Colonel Blimps who charged a West Kents officer two shillings customs duty on his double-barrelled shotgun. Irritation and impatience were mixed with awe. An officer remembered the shock of the exotic when he looked out over the side of the ship to see a giant sea snake, twelve feet long and highly venomous.

      In the streets that day the West Kents saw snake charmers and acrobats, and a man who could put a meat hook through his nose and pull it out through his mouth. They were assailed by the pungency of the great port city, the smell of spices piled high in the small shops and curried food being cooked on the footpaths, the reek of open drains and piled garbage and the constant raucous hymn of supplication: ‘Baksheesh, baksheesh.’ Ivan Daunt remembered that the beggars called him ‘Rajah’ and that he saw two men carrying a pole on which was hung a beggar-man, ‘all mangled and his legs, arms all bent’.

      The rise in nationalist sentiment had not inhibited the famed entrepreneurial spirit of Bombay. Taxis ferrying officers to the Taj Hotel, right next to the Gateway of India, bore the Union flag on their radiators and the drivers made the appropriate patriotic noises. The hotel had been converted into an officers’ club where five- or six-course meals, followed by cabaret and dancing, could be enjoyed. Walking outside at dusk, one group of newly arrived officers saw a profusion of street sleepers. They were ‘staggered to see Indian bodies lying there on the pavement, pedestrian islands and almost anywhere; they all looked quite dead, and the more so as their faces were covered with a shroud’.

The 4th West Kents marched to the railway station and set off on a 1,000 mile train journey across India to the training base at Ranchi, where General Slim’s 14th Army was being readied for war. The men were loaded into third-class carriages with hard wooden seats and the officers dispatched to overcrowded sleeper compartments. Diaries of those wartime journeys recall heat, dust, discomfort, and the excitement of traversing the subcontinent. Captain Arthur Swinson, a staff captain with the British 2nd Division, who would later encounter the West Kents at Kohima, was a budding writer who kept a careful account of the sights of India. ‘Every station brought its new quota of ragged half-starved children demanding “bukshees”, some on their own and some egged on by their equally ragged parents. I hardened my heart against them but “Boggie” (who is to take holy orders after the war) feels he must go about doing good and so gives them annas.^* This causes their wails to increase tenfold. The persistence of the Indian beggar is equalled only by his ingratitude.’

      But for all his irritation with the beggars, Swinson was not immune to the magic of India, the immensity of the visions it offered, temporal and divine, or the ingenuity of its cultures. When the train stopped on the banks of the Ganges he noticed groups of Indians bathing themselves and their water buffalo. A woman among the crowd changed her dirty sari for a clean one, ‘without exposing one square inch of flesh that she shouldn’t’. The troops on board cheered her when she had finished, but ‘she was a lady … and made pretend she didn’t hear a thing’. A friend of Swinson’s, Captain Keith Halnan, recalled that when they stopped for lunch, ‘there would be tables laid out on the platform for the sahibs and we would sit and have lunch and the train waited until we were finished. What a life!’

For the other ranks experiencing India for the first time, the journey was a blend of chronic physical discomfort, appalling tedium and moments of wonder. Ray Street, who would become a battlefield runner for the 4th West Kents, believed he was witnessing scenes from a Bible story when he paused at some of the bigger stations and huge crowds ‘swept towards the train, dressed in their white flowing garments’. A platform guard gave the signal for departure by striking a length of old railway track with a piece of wood and this precipitated a final rush of hopeful travellers, clinging to doors and windows and the roof. Wary of the onrush, the troops stored their rifles under the wooden seats, having been warned that they would fetch a price of £100 on the North-West Frontier. Street remembered seeing a band of dacoits chained together and led along the platform by a policeman at one of the stations.^* They were, he reckoned, the roughest-looking bunch of individuals he had ever seen. His friend, Lance Corporal Dennis Wykes, felt unnerved passing a building where vultures feasted on human corpses. The building had no windows, doors or roof. The bodies were laid out on metal bars and when the bones had been picked bare they would fall through the bars to the ground. ‘It was so strange to me, coming from England like,’ he remembered. What Wykes saw was a Zoroastrian ‘Tower of Silence’, where the body is left to be eaten by vultures so that it does not pollute the earth.

      Later on he would become, if not exactly blasé about seeing corpses, then certainly less inclined to worry about them. The train crossed central India on its journey towards Ranchi, through dry scrub and forest, across great rivers and mountains, a five-day journey moving steadily eastwards towards western Bengal, where the high summer temperatures were rendered more tolerable than in the furnace of the plains by the monsoon rains. The schoolmaster Captain Harry Smith was transfixed by the world unfolding outside his carriage. He would remember the light fading to deep blue on the plains as evening came on, the sound of langur monkeys squabbling in the forest by the track, and the fires of wood and animal dung which produced a sweet acrid smell – ‘for me always the smell of India’ – when the train passed near villages.

      In the cool of dusk the train would stop and cooks would alight to prepare the evening meal, invariably a concoction that involved bully beef or soya-link sausages and whatever else they had been able to scavenge. Tinned food was favoured, not for its flavour but because it reduced the chance of stomach upsets. Dinner was eaten on the ground in the shade of the carriages and washed down with tea made from water drawn from the engine’s boiler. As Harry Smith recalled, ‘it was tea made with lashings of sugar, condensed milk and water that tasted of engine oil. Delicious!’

      Many who took the troop train to Ranchi that June would not come back; others would return without limbs, or brutally disfigured in other ways; some would be wounded in the spirit by the loss of friends or the memories of what they had endured and seen. As the West Kents rattled slowly across India, the generals, British and Japanese, were laying plans to change the face of the Asian war.

* There was a tragic postscript. On the return journey, loaded with over 3,000 people, among them many Italian prisoners of war, the Laconia was torpedoed off the West African coast. Over two thirds of those on board lost their lives.

* A long bamboo rod still used by police to keep public order in India.

* A unit of currency in British-ruled India, roughly equivalent to one sixteenth of a rupee.

* Dacoits are bandits or outlaws frequently operating in large groups.

SIX

       Fighting Back

By the middle of 1943 General Slim knew his enemy well and was certain that the fight to retake Burma would be hard and bloody. Of the Japanese soldier he wrote: ‘He fought and marched till he died. If five hundred Japanese were ordered to hold a position we had to kill four hundred and ninety-five before it was ours – and then the last five killed themselves. It was this combination of obedience and ferocity that made that Japanese Army, whatever its condition, so formidable, and which would make any army formidable.’ The previous November, British and Indian forces had stumbled to disaster in the Burmese province of Arakan in a СКАЧАТЬ