George Fraser - Quartered Safe Out Here

*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.

“‘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!”

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 concerned Nine Section had it cushy – doing stag, mounting the occasional o.p., keeping our weapons clean, and waiting to be sent out Jap-hunting in force with the Sherman tanks of Probyn’s Horse. Jap attacked the wire elsewhere, I believe, but never in our sector, and while we were inside the perimeter life was tranquil. Snapshots of memory:

Playing in one game of football on the bare space behind our rifle pits, and being impressed by the brilliance of a young centre-half from Workington who came close to an England cap a few years later, and the speedy reflexes of an officer from another platoon; he was a Cameron Highlander, and I had occasion to note his speed later on. Also the bone-shattering violence of the man marking me, the Regimental Sergeant-Major, no less, who was completely bald (what Parker called “a lovely head o’ skin”) and who gave me the only wound I received in the war, a neat little scar on my left knee.

Watching someone do Number Two Field Punishment . Number One, which consisted of being tied to a gun-wheel, had gone out by that time, but Number Two looked decidedly unpleasant: having to run in circles, wearing full equipment, which included the big pack, pouches, rifle, etc., in the boiling sun under the supervision of a blue-chinned member of the Provost staff. I don’t know what the accused had done, but he came off in a state of near-collapse. It did him no permanent damage, for only last year, as a sprightly pensioner, he was singing his head off at our reunion in Carlisle Cathedral. (If that kind of punishment seems barbaric, it should be noted that in the Chindits there was at least one case of flogging

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