'Watch this bit now! A gharri went over the khud here a couple of days ago and started a minor avalanche. They're still patching up the damage.'

Gangs of native workmen, m.u.f.fled in old sweaters or tunics, worked with baskets by the road where he indicated and there were others just over the edge of the bank, clinging to what looked like a sheer drop.

They're the blokes as built this magnificent engineering enterprise - gangs of Indians and a.s.samese and Nagas and the bleeding lot, what you wouldn't look twice at normally -built it all on their tod, with a bit of help from our sappers and suchlike. Don't it make you weep to see it? Now you know why the British Empire's great!'

'You mean we exploit all the good road-builders!' Carter the Farter said.

'I'll throw you over the khud, mate, if you talk like that! Look out there! Just take a shufti! What enterprise! I come up here most days and never get sick of the sight!'

Sitting on the piles of bully-cans, we stared out with him. It certainly was a marvellous road. Down in the valley, several hundred feet below, we saw an occasional burnt-out lorry, where an unlucky driver had not been quick enough with brake or wheel. The scenery was wild and magnificent. All of us, from time to time, glanced furtively up at the crests of hills, looking for j.a.ps.

Some way beyond the Nichugard Pa.s.s, we had a long halt for more than an hour. An advance j.a.p patrol several miles ahead, had blown a bridge during the night. We waited without complaint until traffic could move again, standing on the road with the sun scorching our arms and foreheads. Lorries could be seen far ahead, moving round their shoulders of the road, long before it was our turn to jump aboard and go ahead.

The sense that the die was cast was strong on us. Calcutta had sunk far below the plimsoll line. We could only guess at what lay ahead. Even McGuffie was silent this morning, beyond an occasional curse at the driver to take the curves easy. His attempt to sneak an air-lift back to Calcutta the day before had come to nothing - the pilots had all been Canadian - and he was content to listen to the oratory of the RASG corporal.

We arrived at Milestone 35, where Battalion HQ was still being established. A crude roadside sign pointed up a side track to our concentration area.

'All change!' yelled the RASC corporal. 'This is Zubza. No cinemas or cushy air-conditioned restaurants here!'

Without wasting time, we threw our kit down on to the dusty verge. The corporal stared at me as I climbed over the tail-board.

'Well, Firpo, p'raps you learnt sommink this morning!'

'It's quite a road, I give you that.'

'Quite a road! Sod me! I'll say it is! It's the Eighth Wonder of the World, after Stonehenge and Edison's Lighthouse!' He banged his open palm against the side of the truck as a signal to the driver. 'Jhaldi jao!

Kohima!'

He gave us a thumbs-up sign as the lorry disappeared in the swashbuckling dust.

The heat of day was intense as we reported in and moved uphill to our new positions.

'Here comes the old monkey G.o.d himself!' There was Wally, with the rest of our mates, whom we had not seen since Kanchapur. He came up and smote me affectionately on my biceps. 'How's Vishnu and the rest of your f.u.c.king pin-ups then, Stubby?'

'In my big pack, you old sod, along with Micheal Meat yard. How're you doing, cobber?'

Wally, Dusty Miller, Di Jones, Enoch, and the others looked wilder than they had done in Kanchapur, tougher, and browner. We stood about for a while, joking and laughing, until RSM Payne came and moved us on.

'It's great here, c.o.c.ker,' Wally said, walking along with me. 'Not like f.u.c.king Kanchapur or Vadikhasundi. We've only been here a couple of days - had a scare just as we were digging in. The picket exchanged a few rounds with a party of wandering j.a.ps. The hills are lousy with 'em.'

'Bet you s.h.i.t yourself, Page!' Garter laughed. 'Churchill won't help you here, you f.u.c.king old Tory!'

'I don't see Joe Stalin tagging along with you neither,' Wally said, good-humouredly.

'How's Geordie Wilkinson?' I asked.

Wally lifted his bush hat and mopped his forehead. 'He needs his mum!'

The novelty of being half-way up a mountain was infectious. We were jumpy and excited. When Charley Meadows came along to show Carter the Farter and me where to dig our slit trench, he clearly shared the general excitement. Only Geordie, when he showed up, seemed less enthusiastic.

'You won't find any knocking-shops up here, like, mate, I'm afraid. No football, either.'

'Seen any j.a.ps, yet, Geordie ?'

Geordie's Adam's apple started to bob. He made obscure gestures to me, trying to get me to one side so that Carter, a well-known mocker, did not hear what he had to say. I moved over to oblige him.

'We only got here like a couple of days ago - at least it seems longer, but that's all it is, just a couple of days. And the j.a.ps opened fire on us as soon as we got here.'

'I heard the picket had loosed off a few rounds at some one.'

'Look, mate ...' He grabbed my arm. The f.u.c.king bullets, I mean. I swear they were aiming at me - well, not aimed at me, like, but I was on that f.u.c.king picket, and Christ ... Honest, mate, I nearly got wiped out, like, as soon as I got here. I mean, perhaps I'm unlucky or something. A sort of Jonas, you know what I mean? The bloke that got swallowed up by the what's-it, the whale...'

'For Christ sake, Geordie, f.u.c.k off, man! We're all going to get fired at, aren't we? That's what we're here for, isn't it?!'

He went sulky. 'It's all right for you, mate, you don't care. You're as bad as Wally, you never f.u.c.king care, but some bloke in the factory told me I was a Jonas once.'

'You mean a Jesus. A Weeping Jesus!'

'How about lending a hand with this b.a.s.t.a.r.ding trench, Stubbs?' Carter the Farter called. 'It's like hacking your way through f.u.c.king millstones.'

'Get on with it, Carter! Stop moaning! I thought you were a Communist and believed in working for the general good!' I turned to Geordie. 'Pull yourself together, Geordie, for Christ's sake! You're okay. The j.a.ps missed you, didn't they?'

'You can say that ... It's cushy for you - I suppose that Monkey G.o.d thing brings you luck, like, or summat... You were down in Chowringhee with Carter and f.u.c.king McGuffie when they were firing at me. You know that McGuffie's a real b.a.s.t.a.r.d, don't you? I bet you were having a poke down there in Gal, weren't you?'

'You were there yourself. Didn't you have a poke? I bet old Wally did!'

'Oh, yes, old Wally did...'

'Right - well, you'd be feeling a f.u.c.king lot better now if you'd had a poke right alongside him.'

'There's no survival value in f.u.c.king -'

'Oh, Jesus, f.u.c.k off, Geordie, will you, do you mind!'

'That's all you care, like! Fine mucker you turned out to be!' He moved off and I went to help Carter.

Some of our natural excitement had begun to wear off by the time Carter the Farter and I had dug ourselves a slit-trench. The ground was tough and stoney and needed a lot of work. We pitched our two-man bivouac over it and breathed deep, while sweat poured off us.

'This is a right way to start our holidays in a.s.sam,' I said.

Carter patted the tent affectionately. 'What the h.e.l.l, it's home!' We began to sing together: It's only a shanty in old shanty town...

We were still singing when Sergeant Chota Morris, my old buddy in No. 1 Platoon, came up the trail.

He too looked wilder and browner than in Kanchapur.

'How does it feel to know that there are twenty thousand murdering little sods of j.a.ps out there, creeping towards you, Horry?'

'Christ, they don't know I'm here yet, do they?'

' 'Course they do, boy - the news is back in Tokyo by now!'

'When do we actually have a go at them ?'

'No good asking me. n.o.body seems to know exactly where the j.a.ps are, or how many divisions they've got in the area. They're attacking Imphal in strength - that's sixty-five road miles south of Kohima, but they may have a couple more divisions between here and Imphal.'

'And how far's Kohima from here? Only about ten miles, isn't it?'

'That's not the point. We've got to hang on till the whole Div gets here, and then we can't just move up the road, not just like that.'

'Why the f.u.c.k not?'

'Because it would be too easy for this b.l.o.o.d.y army!' Carter interposed.

Chota said, 'Anything moving along that road is liable to be picked off from the hills. It's a perfect target!

You can't hold the road without holding the hills, can you? So my bet is that we'll soon get cracking into these ridges behind us -and we won't get cracking until-all the gash bods in the area are sent back to base.'

We stood contemplating the savage planes of jungle all round us.

'Makes a change from Kanchapur!'

'We'll knock the s.h.i.t out of the j.a.ps. It's going to come out in bucketsful. They've had their own way out here too long. Once we stop them here, we can bowl them back into Burma and out the other side.'

He made it sound like a village cricket match played with t.u.r.ds for b.a.l.l.s.

'Why should we b.l.o.o.d.y bother about what happens to Burma?' Garter the Farter asked. 'I'd never heard of the b.l.o.o.d.y dump till I come out to India.'

'It's not Burma so much, we've got to hold on to India, haven't we?'

'Why?'

'Don't be f.u.c.king daft, man, because it's ours, isn't it?'

'Carter's a Communist,' I said. 'You don't want to take any notice of what he says! He thinks the king and queen should move out of Buckingham Palace and live in a council flat.'

Chota Morris laughed. 'I suppose you think we're oppressing the Indians, do you? They'd be a f.u.c.king sight worse off without us looking after them.'

Carter always rose to such bait. 'b.a.l.l.s! a.r.s.eholes! The British ruling cla.s.ses are oppressing the Indians just as they oppress the British working man. If we stood back and let the j.a.ps have India, we'd all be freer.'

'You'd be working on the f.u.c.king Death Railway for one!'

'Besides, what about the rights of the j.a.panese working man?' I asked.

'I'll shoot the b.a.s.t.a.r.d when I see him,' Carter said, and we all burst out laughing.

I stood under a low tree to cool off and look about at the superb landscape through which the j.a.panese working man might even now be crawling. A leaf fell off a twig and spiralled down to the ground. It lay there in the sun, green at my feet. I had a f.a.g. My mind wandered. I just felt f.u.c.king lucky to be there, to be among my mates again, to be standing in the middle of that marvellous country. I was fitter and tougher than I had ever been, w.a.n.king twice a day without noticing it, burning off surplus energy. The air was like armour - it blazed and it had advanced from the Himalayas, not so far away. You could suck it down your throat like beer.

In twenty minutes, the leaf by my boots had turned brown. In half-an-hour, it was shrivelled and dead, lost, forgotten among the debris underfoot.

That night, the garrison at Kohima was heavily attacked; the concentration of j.a.ps in the area was growing. Two nights later, the siege was on in earnest. We lay awake in our slit-tenches, listening to the firing.

The tremendous task of moving in our division, with all its guns and equipment, through that crazy line of supply from India, went on. Behind our defences above Zubza, we pa.s.sed our days as picturesquely as outlaws. Our handkerchiefs and sweat-rags and any white articles of clothing we possessed were dyed jungle-green in a vat made from an oil drum, cut in two and placed over an open fire. We were issued with an amazing new American chemical called DDT, which we rubbed along the seams of our clothes to keep bugs out, since we were unlikely to be washing clothes for a while. We ate mepacrine and vitamin tablets. We cleaned rifles, and I was issued with a sten gun instead of a rifle. I worked the wireless set, and found how baffling it was to establish communication by short wave in a mountainous area.

We were also addressed by the CO of the Battalion, Willie Swinton. He told us that we were about to fight and win one of the great victories of the war, that our fame was a.s.sured, and that never again would we be called the Forgotten Army, 'While we're winning victories, we aren't doing anything worse,' Bamber said, parodying himself.

We patrolled. We picketed. We watched. We waited. It was all rather exciting. We were playing soldiers.

Only a few days before, I had been in Calcutta, surrounded by all sorts of petty worries. They had gone, they were obsolete. We were in action now. We had nothing, or nothing that we couldn't carry with us.

We were hunters.

I felt myself stripped to the bone. For once, I understood everything that was going on around me, because everything had been reduced to its most primitive. We had to crawl round our allotted hillsides, keeping in touch with neighbouring units, watching for the enemy. Although I had never considered myself cut out for that sort of thing, ancient instincts woke and growled in pleasure.

That a.s.samese landscape had a lot to do with it. How backbreakingly tremendous it was! Sometimes we had to move up to the top of a ridge, two thousand feet above the road and another thousand above the valley. Clouds drifted below us. We scrambled over burning rock or moved in single file up sandy chaungs, which would be raging streams when the monsoons came. But the monsoons were weeks away yet. Perfect summer reigned and the pure air could burn by day and freeze by night with hardly a dusty bush stirring in its sleep.

The mountainside was covered with trails. The first time that we were near enough to any j.a.ps to shoot them, we had to hold our fire. A column of them pa.s.sed, and we were only a section patrol. They were moving along one of the trails, only a few yards above us. When they had gone, Charley Meadows pa.s.sed the word back over my set to HQ, reporting strength and direction of the column.

As I crouched over the wireless, I looked round at the faces of my mates. A memory returned of how I had at first priggishly thought those faces grotesque with ugliness and stupidity. Now that they had grown familiar, I saw only how brave they were - ready for anything. We were the stuff heroes were made of.

The mountain trails belonged to the Naga hill-tribes. They were the people we admired most. Prejudices against anything foreign disappeared before the sight of those extraordinary brown-limbed men and women who insisted on carrying on life in the midst of a potential battlefield. Their villages, poor simple places, stood on the crest of the mountain ridges. Their fields of rice and maize were two or three thousand feet sheer down in the valley below. The women climbed down to work and back again with their chickos strapped to their backs. The kids, wearing no more than a ragged waistcoat, never made a sound.

On one occasion when we were resting, during a recce, a party of Naga women overtook us and gestured that they wanted food for their children. I gave one of the women a cigarette. She gestured for the child to have one too, took it, and stuck it in her black hair. She was fairly young, lean, wearing a long skirt, barefoot.

'Speak English?' I asked.

She looked at me, a long troubling look, and said something incomprehensible. Would she have consented to have a spot of intercourse in the nearest chaung, b.u.t.tocks sinking into the soft sand? Of course I did not make a move towards her. That night, when the moon floated above the mountains, I thought of her again and burned her out of my skull with rough fantasy.

Along the wild trails came news and rumours. The rest of 2 Div was delayed. Extra units were being flown in from the Arakan. Imphal had fallen. Imphal was holding out. The j.a.ps were outflanking us.

Kohima was surrounded. The Chindits, operating with Gurkhas and Kachins, were trying to join up with Vinegar Joe Stilwell in Northern Burma. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek was a.s.sa.s.sinated. Our water ration was going up soon.

Water was one of our troubles. It arrived at Brigade HQ in a water-truck, having come from the Jiri River, several miles away. It always stank of chlorine; even the char stank of chlorine. When you watered the rum ration with it, the rum stank of chlorine. Water was always short. We shaved and washed in one mug-full each morning - or you could shave in the dregs of your char, which was the only way to get warm water. Apart from that, we never washed or took our clothes off. We kept our boots and ankle-puttees on all day, to guard against typhus.

It was all a big f.u.c.king lark at first.

Belgaum had been much rougher than this. We had here, too, the interest of learning about the situation - of acquiring, for instance, the names of the j.a.p generals, Mutaguchi attacking Imphal, and Sato attacking Kohima, which seemed to give us an extraordinary and paradoxical intimacy with them. It was difficult to think of them in human terms; they were much more like H. G. Wells's invading Martians.

The area was now stiff with Sato's men, although our forces were building up. The Worcesters moved in next to us along the road though the rest of 2 Div was still a.s.sembling in Dimapur. We slowly gained a clearer picture of the situation. Four or five miles nearer Kohima than our positions, a defensive box was built at Jotsoma, where artillery could lay down fire on Kohima Ridge, on which the j.a.ps had established themselves at several points - notably the Naga village. When j.a.ps cut the road between Zubza and Jotsoma, the artillery carried on as usual.

It was on Easter Sunday that we were ordered to move down to the road behind the j.a.ps and make contact with a detachment of the a.s.sam Battalion which was withdrawing after holding off the j.a.ps near Imphal. On that same day, the Mendips suffered their first casualties.

Jock McGuffie had been into the village of Zubza and reported it as a mankey, stinking hole.

'The only b.l.o.o.d.y attraction Zubza's got is a pontoon school,' Jock said. They're playing for f.u.c.king mepacrine tablets - let's go and show them how one evening, you and me, Stubby?' But, when the chips were down, I was infantry and Jock was not, and our paths did not cross again for several rugged weeks.

Whatever its shortcomings, Zubza was usefully situated as regards the trails, and a small outdoor church service was held there on the morning of Easter Sunday. Our blokes were strolling about openly after the service, when a Tap 75mm. opened up from Merema Ridge. A sapper officer called Lodge and two BORs were killed. From then on, we began treating the whole business as less of a game.