Quartered Safe Out Here. George Fraser MacDonald

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ leadin’ that patrol wadn’t ’ev to git busted – ’e’d bust ’is bloody sel’, man, oot o’ shame! An’ Ah’m nut kiddin’.” He shook his head in admiration. “So we’ll say nowt aboot it – bar to Hutton. Awreet, Jock? Good lad.” He had another chuckle to himself. “Walked reet by us, an’ a’! Nut bad, eh?”

      I sympathised with the Gurkhas, having no doubt that in similar circumstances I could have walked through the whole Japanese Imperial Guards Division without knowing it. “All we had to do was lie still,” I suggested.

      “Aw, aye? Is that reet, Jock? Girraway! Ah’m glad ye told us.” Cumbrian sarcasm is never applied lightly. “Lissen – the Goorkas is the best night scoots in the bloody wurrld! By God, there isn’t many can say the Goorkas nivver spotted their o.p.! Noo, an’ Ah’m tellin’ ye!”

      “Right pair of Mohicans we must be.”

“Aye, laff, ye girt^* Scotch git! Looksta, if they’d bin Japs, an’ we’d fired oor Verey, they’d ha’ bin nailed, ivvery bloody one, on the wire wid their arses oot the winder! Wadn’t they?” He was quite belligerent about it. “Awreet, then! We did oor job, an’ the Goorkas missed us! An’ that’s nut bad! That’s a’ Ah’m saying!”

      Well, he was infinitely better qualified to judge these things than I, and his words prompted a disturbing thought: if I’d been alone in the o.p. I’d certainly have fired the Verey, the Gurkhas would have been caught in the glare, and might well have been wiped out by a nervous Bren gunner making the same mistake as I had done. Nick had identified them by the shape of their legs – and that is something you won’t find in any infantry training manual. But then, he was what the Constable of France would have called a very valiant, expert gentleman. The irony was that it almost cost him his life a few nights later.

* embankment

* little

* I have been reminded that the rule of two men to a night stag was inviolable; nevertheless, I am positive that on this occasion I was on my own. The explanation can only be that the section strength had been so reduced by casualties in recent actions that two-men stags were, for a night or two, impossible.

* Ex-Fourteenth Army men may take issue with me for suggesting that a sentry would ever alert his comrades by shouting. The approved method was to have a log-line or creeper running from the sentry to the nearest sleeper, who could be aroused silently by tugging it, and I remember doing this in jungle country farther south. At Meiktila the ground was open, and I don’t recall ever using log-lines there.

* Get hired = get a job. One of the Cumbrian’s many expressions of derision, referring to the custom whereby an unemployed farm worker would stand with a straw in his mouth at Carlisle Cross during the hiring fair, waiting to be approached with an offer of work.

* Corporal

* Great, big, but like “lal” or “lyle” (little) it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with physical size, being just a familiar adjective.

       Chapter 7

       “‘Ey, Jock, are ye any good at ’rithmetic?”

       “Not much, sarn’t, I’m afraid.”

       “Well, mek’s nae matter. Ah’ll keep thee reet. Noo them – ’oo many fellers is there in’t British Army?”

       “Gosh, I dunno. Five million?”

       “An’ ’oo many o’ them’s in Boorma?”

       “Half a million, maybe?”

       “An’ ’oo many o’ them’s in this battalion?”

       “About a thousand.”

       “An’ ’oo many o’ them’s in Nine Section?”

       “Ten, sarn’t.”

       “So if ye’re in’t Army, w’at’s the odds against bein’ in Nine Section? Tek time, noo.”

       “I haven’t the least idea.”

       “Iggerant booger. Ah’ll tell thee. It’s ’alf a million to one.”

       “If you say so. I’m fascinated.”

       “Ye will be. Ye’re the section scout, aren’t ye?”

       “I am, and I think I begin to see where your elaborate calculation is leading, sarn’t –”

       “Shurroop an’ charge yer magazine. Noo, 17th Div’s ahead o’ Fourteenth Army, an’ this battalion’s leadin’ 17th Div, an’ Nine Section’s oot in froont, foorther sooth than any oother boogers in Sooth-east Asia Command – are ye follerin’ this, Jock?”

       “With interest. Sarn’t Hutton, do you know what a sadist is?”

      “By, Jock, yer a loocky yoong feller! The odds against bein’ the leadin’ man in the whole fookin’ war effort against Japan is five million to one –”

       “And I’m the one. Thank you very bloody much.”

       “So git thasel oot on point, keep yer eyes oppen, an’ think on – me an’ Choorchill’s watchin’ ye!”

       Chapter 8

      The fight to retain Meiktila was to be long and bitter since the Japanese concentrated every unit and formation they could to break Fourteenth Army’s stranglehold … It is a tribute to the Japanese that nobody had any doubt that, rather than break off the fight and withdraw, they would launch a counter-offensive with every unit they could assemble …

      Although 17th Division was surrounded … by numerically superior forces, Cowan’s policy was to retain the initiative by using a very small number of troops for static defence and sending out columns in all directions to strike at Japanese communications and enemy forces which had cut his own land communication …

       Official history

      What I have described so far was the “static defence” of Meiktila, and so far as that was СКАЧАТЬ