Brian Aldiss - Forgotten Life

Forgive this awful colour ink – all I could find.

Rumours abound. We are at last about to move forward into action. So they tell us.

‘I heard the Captain say

We’re going to move today.

I only hope the blinking sergeant-major knows the way …’

This camp, now so familiar, is temporary. Everything is temporary along the Dimapur road. Maybe one day they will let it all revert to jungle. The air’s so fresh and good here and I’m secretly so excited.

It’s not only the air that’s fresh. So’s the water. Washing is quite an adventure. I wish I could draw. Facilities are just about nil at Milestone 81. Our only place to wash is at the mouth of a huge cast-iron pipe which snakes down the hillside and terminates here at a concrete base. The pipe vibrates with power and water gushes forth, splashing everywhere. In order to wash, you have to strip off entirely and then fling yourself into the stream. It’s like jumping in front of a cannon! It’s easiest to take the full force of the water smack in the chest – difficult to do because slippery green algae grow on the ever-wet concrete.

The water’s freezing cold. It’s come down from five thousand feet in a great hurry. Soaping is mighty difficult. However, my hardened campaigner friends tell me that it could be the last running water we’ll see for months. (They’re ever optimistic.)

We’ve just been issued with new chemical stuff called DDT. We’ve had to dip our shirts in it and run the liquid along the seams of our trousers. This will prevent lice and other nasty things at a time when it looks as if we shall be unable to wash clothes for months at a stretch.

You see what a funny life your brother leads. It’s better than school. And to toughen us up, we’ve been made to climb down into the valley and back, with kit. I tried to get a piggy-back off one of the Naga women, but no luck. We can’t climb the mountain above us, because that’s where the Nagas live and they must not be disturbed.

Yours till the cows come home.

Manipur, I think

20th Dec. 1944

My dear Ellen,

Guess what? It’s Christmas Day! Yes, 20th December.

The world has done one of its marvellous changes. Everything is different. I’m different. I’m rolling forward into ACTION. Imagine! This green and dusty world is slipping towards jungle warfare …

We knew something was up on the fifteenth and sixteenth. 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.