Forgotten Life. Brian Aldiss
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Our unit on that day had its collective haircut. Weren’t knights of old shriven before battle? Shriven and shorn? Well, at least we’ve been shorn.
Ahead of us lie danger and a desperate land full of terrors and destitute of barbers …
The very next day – we packed up everything and started rolling forward. A whole division, 2 Div, moving to our forward positions before the actual assault.
At the last minute, the CO addressed us, gave us a briefing. ‘You will all be proud to fight for king and country …’ He doesn’t know his men. But he concluded by quoting Shakespeare:
And gentlemen in England now abed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap while any speaks
That fought with us upon St Crispin’s Day.
Among the common soldiery was many a moist eye. Amazing to see us all respond to poetry. Or maybe it was funk.
I have to scribble these lines just to tell you about the journey, hoping not to anger the censor. Because it really was legendary – legendary! Not to be measured in miles or the time on a clockface. A move across a great division, like the division between life and death—
—Into a land without civilians. Without civilization. Not a place for ordinary human life. You couldn’t buy a ticket to get here.
A mysterious mountain country – without living inhabitants, without real roads, without towns, without flags or currencies. The writhing, thunderous, plenitudinous route to war. A newly invented route, patched together out of lanes, jungle tracks, chaungs (a chaung being a sandy stream bed reliably dry in the dry season). On this gallant road we embarked at a dim and secret hour of night, with even our voices muffled, for every sound carries in the thin air. We’re travelling from Milestone 81 – home! – to a rendezvous in the country I can’t name, called Yzagio. This rather imaginary highway we travel is christened the Tiddim Road. Six months ago, it was all dense jungle and raging rivers. And in Japanese territory.
If you will have nothing of this legend, then I have to admit that this way of the conquerors lasts only about two hundred miles. On it, my girl, we left the old mundane world behind.
After we had passed the blackened remains of Kohima – like all you ever imagined of the Great War – we went from Nagaland into the old state of Manipur. Ragged and brutalized Imphal went by, possessed solely by pigs and vultures. The mountains became more gigantic, the way more unlikely, like something in a dream. All our vehicles proceed at a crawl, in bottom gear most of the time. Headlights are muffled. We ourselves wear a secret, anonymous air. Dispatch riders patrol up and down the convoy, seeing to it that the trucks keep even distance, neither too far from nor too close to the next vehicle. All this in a great fog of dust, the very material of secrecy.
I’m travelling in a three-tonner with some of ‘S’ Section and its stores. The stores include immense rolls of barbed wire. So excited was I last night that I climbed over the barbed wire as we moved, until most of me was out on the cab roof, from where I got a fine view of the shrouded nomansland all round us. In that awkward position I fell asleep.
Shouting and noise. Daylight. I awoke. I was hanging far over the side of the vehicle, between cab and body, my legs trapped in a roll of barbed wire, upside-down. In my sleep I had slipped right off the smooth cab. But for the embrace of the wire, I would certainly have fallen to the ground and been run over in the dark.
That was this morning. I live to tell the tale. God knows where we are in place or time – because today we were served our Christmas dinner. Imagine, 20th December! Very surrealist.
We ate in an empty grain store, all built of bamboo and dry leaves. Being a greedy little thing, you’ll like to know what we got for this monster feast. Well, it was probably better than you will do on the 25th. We started with chicken noodle soup, followed by canned chicken, canned mutton, sausage stuffing, beans, potatoes and gravy, all washed down by two cans of beer, and followed by Christmas duff with sauce and canned pears. Then coffee. A marvellous blow-out!
By way of presents, each man got a handful of sweets and biscuits and half a bar of Cadbury’s chocolate. The CO then made a brief speech and offered us this toast: ‘To our wives and sweethearts!’ (The old meanie didn’t say anything about sisters…)
This meal has marked not only the putting away of the old order but the imposition of half-rations. Fancy – the food was bad enough at Milestone 81. But from now on all food has to be supplied by air, so half-rations it is.
Soon it will be dark. That’s the end of Christmas Day and then we’ll be on the wonderful road again. I tell you these things. Try to understand. Something really extraordinary is happening to your old brother.
God knows when this’ll be posted but – Happy Christmas!
Somewhere
31st Dec. 1944
Dear Ellen,
How are things at home? How is the mouth organ player? You all seem very far away. There are great psychological barriers in communicating rather than in just firing off letters for their own sweet sakes. To be honest, I’m not sure if the outer world exists any more.
And I’ve got other problems … For instance, I was hauled up before an officer I had better not name (he will probably read this letter before you do) in the Censorship office. Apparently I have been giving too much away in my letters and endangering security. (You might be a Jap agent in England, sending all my letters on to High Command in Tokyo, or something similarly daft.) There I stood, rigid at attention in my soiled jungle greens; there he sat immaculate in khaki, putting me right. On such situations the British Empire is founded.
In future any references to place names or troop movements will be deleted from my letters. There is to be no further attempt to convey a picture of what is happening in these possibly most exciting days of my life. I made a protest, but it’s like butting your blinking head against an advancing tank. Any attempts to evade regulations will be punished.
It was hard enough in the first place, trying to describe life here to you. Now I’m forbidden to try to convey a picture! So here’s what may prove to be my last try.
I mean the picture is like one of those marvellous Brueghels (in this culturally deprived area I have even forgotten how you spell that weird Flemish name …). Is there one called The Conversion of St Paul? Where there are thousands of people on horseback and on foot in the tall mountains and, although St Paul is having his moment right in the middle of the picture, no one is taking a blind bit of notice. We’re doing this incredible thing and no one’s taking a blind bit of notice – just grumbling about where their next packet of fags is coming from …
Later. Oh, burps. Now the first day of 1945. No celebrations last night, bringing more complaints. Fancy wanting to celebrate. I was collared to shift heavy stores. Too exhausted then to do anything more than sleep.
We’re at a place called – but I named it once and daren’t do so again or they’ll keelhaul me under the nearest 3-tonner. Great amassment of vehicles. People all strolling round, brown as berries, smoking among the branchless trees. (Hope that doesn’t give our positions away.) Half-rations. God in his heaven, CO in his mobile home. Only the Japs missing from the picture. (You could perhaps get Dad to send me some ciggies if he’s feeling generous.)
Oh, I can’t concentrate. Something comes between us, and you know who he is.
Well, I’ll just tell you how we got here. I think it was the night after I last wrote that we got on the road again, the whole division, all very orderly. (I don’t tell you which division, so it’s safe …) I was more careful about how I travelled, not wanting to meet my end yet – dying for your country should not entail being run over by your own 3-tonner! Yet the sight of endless trucks trundling like elephants in convoy is irresistible. Are they off to the Elephants’ Graveyard or a solemn heavyweight orgy? Some stops, some starts, yet on the whole a steady funeral pace. Huge chunks of landscape phantasmal in the dusty dark.