Читать книгу Farthest Field: An Indian Story of the Second World War - Raghu Karnad - Страница 17

Madras, February 1942

The defence of India – or the first visible sign of it in Guindy – was a fence raised by a gang of workers using a batch of defective propeller blades as fence posts. It was at the back of the Guindy campus, against the fields, where the army had built a new R&R centre for troops behind a sign that read ‘Holiday Homes’. British soldiers had already moved in, and soon they were crowding the edge of the college football field, smoking cigarettes and hailing nervous students to come play a game.

The war was headed to India, and not from the direction anybody had anticipated. There was meant to be fighting in Europe, fighting in Africa, and war on and under the sea. Indian divisions were splayed out from the North-West Frontier through Iraq and up to Libya, holding back an enemy in the west. But nobody was prepared for war to reach Madras, and from Japan.

Only when the time came to start cramming did Bobby realise how loud the noises of war had grown. They weren’t the noises he had expected. The suburban soundtrack of a distant hammer knocking became ten hammers sounding all around the students’ heads. Glass panes came out of all the windows and were piled into sea-green slabs as the college handymen boarded the holes over with ply. Air-raid precautions had been ordered, and the campus juddered with construction: a pair of concrete tanks was sunk to store water for fire-fighting; a block of congested rooms was built to house air force mechanics on emergency training. Contractors yelled at men high up on scaffolding. Cement mixers gargled gravel through the night, drowning the murmur of the waves all the way from Elliot’s Beach.

Nobody could study. Nobody tried. It was urgent and necessary to talk all the time, assuring each other that they too could not focus, and acknowledging that their entire class was doomed in its exams. It was their final year, and of course there had never been a class that finished at Guindy without sensing, in that end, the end of all things. The previous year, the college had set an accelerated three-year syllabus to produce more engineers for the Army; the year before that, it had admitted women.1 But arguably, with the advent of a world war, Bobby’s year had the winning hand.

That the new belligerence came from Japan was not in itself a surprise. The nation had spent decades bridling inside a thicket of European colonies and seething over the dilemma of a late-modernising power: for its population and imperial reach to grow, Japan needed food, oil and resources, but to gain those resources, it needed to expand its empire.2 In 1936 the military government had seized some territory from the crumbling state in China. It was instantly condemned by Western countries that had themselves spent a century exploiting China, and the USA began to supply the Chinese resistance with goods and weapons, routed through India and Burma.

It wasn’t until the West fell back into war, however, that Japan saw its destiny unclouded. By late 1941, European powers had spent more than two years at each other’s throats. In the last world war, Japan had protected British shipping from the Germans. Now it was willing to try the reverse. On 8 December, hours before its navy bombed the US fleet in Pearl Harbor, Japan landed an army at Kota Bahru, at the northern end of British Malaya. Two days later, off the Malayan coast, its air force sank HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse, the proudest battleships of the Royal Navy. With appalling suddenness, as the United States was lamed in the Pacific, Britannia ceased to rule the waves in the Indian Ocean. Japan lunged at the colonial sprawl. Its troops crossed from French Indo-China into British Malaya, captured the island of Hong Kong, took the Dutch East Indies and the American-controlled Philippines, and advanced on the fortress of Singapore. If it could hold back the West just long enough to exploit those colonies – of their oil, rubber, timber, grain, minerals and men – it could supply its own defence against the West’s inevitable retaliation. Calling itself the liberator of each new colony, it accumulated, in haste, one of history’s largest empires.

Each advance through Asia was announced with a bombardment, and refugees arrived in India each day to describe it. In Penang, naive crowds had filled the market rows, waving at the Mitsubishis passing high above the town. The formations passed again and again, inscrutable, until they flew low and shredded the crowds with their machine guns. Fire spread in the native town, and European residents received quiet orders to evacuate; at the docks, while they poured into ships for Singapore, armed volunteers held back the terrified Asians. The city was surrendered without any effort at defence.

The bombers reached Burma as early as December 1941. In Rangoon, 150 aircraft appeared all at once in the clear winter sky. Incendiary bombs began to fall in the labour settlements; built from cheap materials, they burned like tinder. It was Indians, most of them Tamils, who made up the labour in the town and the rubber plantations of Burma. They had been the first to migrate and work beneath the scaffold of the British Empire, taking orders from Malayali contractors a few rungs up, who took theirs from the White men at the top. The Japanese army blew through that scaffold like a gale; the British ruling class was the first to abandon it, and the Indian labourers were the most exposed as the structure collapsed. Migrant Chinese, whose anti-Japanese activism had been recorded by spies, were at great risk of reprisals, but their civic organisations supported them through escape or occupation. The Indians scattered and flew, blown like chaff before the brewing storm.

As in Penang, they poured into the streets, and the Mitsubishi Zeros flew in low to maul them. Two thousand were killed in Rangoon the first day, and the homes left standing were festooned with human gristle. Hundreds of thousands prepared to flee from the southern provinces toward Mandalay and the ports on the Bay of Bengal, obstructing (as the Japanese intended) Army traffic and government logistics.

The good news was that Manek’s squadron had been ordered back from the Frontier, scrambled to the defence of the Indian coast. For a few weeks, the Winged Arrows held to their old routine, dropping their bombs at one end of India while they listened for the sound of bombs falling at the other. Manek sat by the radio, rapt, contemplating for the first time an opponent who had aeroplanes too, and more of them, and better.

The aerial defence of south India was tissue-thin. The country still relied on a volunteer reserve to patrol the coast, and the Public Works Department had only just thrown itself into building airfields in the south: sixteen in the Madras Presidency alone. The No. 1 Squadron was already in Rangoon, and now, at last, the No. 2 returned from the Frontier. The groundcrew caught the train at Peshawar: Indian officers swaggering into the first-class carriages, behaving like overgrown schoolboys, the sullen British NCOs in second, and the native NCOs in third. After watching them pull away, each group scowling at the one ahead of it, Manek was glad to sail back in exquisite solitude, high above the human fray.

By the end of February, he was in Secunderabad, in the Madras Presidency, and any time Kosh heard a plane drone past overhead, she ran into the garden waving both her hands and shouting, ‘It’s Manek, come to see me!’ The war, now rising on both sides of them, still seemed a mirage, difficult to believe. But they felt like heroes already.

In Guindy, on another morning, Bobby passed a crew of painters at work in the halls, putting up fat yellow letters on the building’s pink brick – ‘E4, LCE3, E3, LCE2’ – each followed by a dripping yellow arrow. What the cipher meant was clear, but even so his professor began class by reading out from a circular about how, in the event of an aerial attack, students should proceed to the slit trenches being dug around the college grounds. ‘Please commit to memory,’ he droned, ‘ahead of time, the assigned portion of trench according to your course and year.’

He was interrupted by the head of the department, Dr S. Paul, who commanded the engineers’ company of the local University Training Corps, and had been put in charge of Guindy’s air-raid precautions. After glowering at the students for a minute, Dr Paul began once again to inform them that Guindy College would very probably be a bombing target. In the absence of any plausible defences, their lives would depend on their taking ARP seriously.

‘And so,’ he said, ‘if there is going to be an air raid, you are sure to know what to do?’

‘Yes sir,’ the class mumbled, not at all sure.

‘You, Mugaseth – you know what to do?’

‘Yes, sir!’ Bobby sang.

‘So what will you do if they come?’

‘This,’ said Bobby, and he sprang to his feet, moved lightly to the window of the ground-floor classroom, and leapt out of it. He ran out into the campus, shouting ‘Boom!’ at every classmate he passed, and he didn’t stop running till he was back at his room.

‘Boom!’ he yelled at Mukundan, as he burst through the door. ‘Everybody take cover!’

Then he got under the covers and took a long nap.

At lunchtime, Bobby walked onto the grounds to watch the trenches being dug: zigzag gutters, each ten feet long, two wide and three deep. The hard soil thrown up on the sides was already dancing, grain by grain, back down to its bed. A group of radical students stood nearby, under the lone Indian beech that was called the Unity Tree.

They were seething, Bobby could tell, at the pathetic sight: the whole college preparing to crawl into its own shallow grave, to await the blows of an imperialist war that had already set three continents on fire. He heard them arguing, their rage newly stoked. He wondered if they meant to rush the trenches themselves. Perhaps he’d be expected to resist them, here on the orange grounds of Guindy, a new front of the world war; driving the points of their setsquares into each other’s eyes.

One after the other, the great Eastern metropolises filled with fire and emptied of Europeans. Native staff were left to save themselves, and native officials to organise basic services and manage their surrender. In Malaya, soldiers were ordered to enact the ‘policy of denial’, a scorched-earth retreat, which meant demolishing ports, power plants and oil facilities, tearing out railroad and telegraph lines; leaving in ruins every modern installation the Empire had built and held up as the proof of its greatness.

In the jungle the Japanese were like muggers in the water. They scissored through terrain the British had considered impassable, their squadrons moving by bicycle, and patrols on elephant-back. A garrison remained in Malaya to oppose them: British, Australians and Indians. The Indians outnumbered the other two combined, but they belonged to an army still held in the amber of another era, of pack mules and breech-loading rifles. Most had never seen a tank, and now were scattered before Japan’s armoured advance. The Rajputs and Pathans of the 45th Indian Brigade, just trained for desert fighting, were turned mid-passage and unloaded on the jungled peninsula. They were outflanked, outfought, bewildered by the failures of their command and the sheer superiority of the enemy. They began a fighting retreat, over ten miles each day for two months, toward Singapore, the bastion of the eastern defence. The 22nd Indian Brigade – numbering more than 3,000 men – was hewn down to sixty-three fleeing survivors. As they fought their desperate rearguard battles, military lorries rolled south rescuing golf clubs and porch furniture.

A pincer movement half the span of the planet was closing in around India. The grand strategy was laid plain in February by George Orwell, then working for the BBC: ‘The general plan is for the Germans to break through by land so as to reach the Persian Gulf, while the Japanese gain mastery of the Indian Ocean … The Germans and Japanese have evidently staked everything on this manoeuvre, in the confidence that if they can bring it off, it will have won them the war … If Singapore is lost, India becomes for the time being the centre of the war, one might say the centre of the world.’3

Nugs knew someone in Singapore, Lakshmi Swaminathan, a friend from college. The Swaminathans were from Malabar too, where they were thought of as radicals. As a result, the girls never met until Nugs arrived at Queen Mary’s, where Lakshmi was two years ahead. She wasn’t a banshee wearing a homespun sari hitched up above her knees, as Nugs might have expected, just a sort of prettier, communist version of Nugs herself, neither of which was as offensive as Nugs might have expected. A girl had to have both delicacy and grit, Nugs knew, but she had never seen those virtues twinned quite this way. Lakshmi, unimpeachably gentle in college, could go to marches and return all bruised by men’s elbows. She preceded Nugs to medical school, where she married a man from a different caste, with no fuss.4 In 1940, Lakshmi left Madras to start a practice in Singapore.

She was still there on 15 February 1942, when Singapore was lost – and not only lost, but abjectly surrendered. Nugs tried not to wonder if Lakshmi was alive or dead. Hearing the stories of what the Japanese did to women, she didn’t know which was worse. Along with the city, nearly 70,000 Indian troops concentrated there – a third of the entire strength of the pre-war Indian Army – were handed over as prisoners, along with 15,000 British and Australians. One entire division had marched down onto the docks just in time to be made captive. Never in its history had the British Empire surrendered so many troops en masse: troops who were still needed to defend Burma, or if Burma fell, to defend their own homeland.

India had felt numb pains of distant war creeping up its limb, but with the loss of Rangoon, they burst open as a weeping wound. Until 1935, India and Burma had been a single colonial state, and for long Burma was seen as a green field of opportunity for Indians of all classes: Tamil plantation labour, Anglo-Indian railwaymen, Oriya stevedores, Muslim petty traders, Bihari landlords with whole indentured villages in train. In Rangoon, more than half the population was Indian. When the Japanese invasion began, not only was the Empire unable to defend them, it had no plan to help them escape.

The city was invaded first by rats and bombs; then by fire, as the air-raid defences collapsed. Weeks before the Japanese marched in, parts of the city were in anarchy. Looters, even White soldiers, sacked the shops along the boulevards. Officials had recognised the impossibility of defending Rangoon at least a month earlier, but its residents were given only forty-eight hours’ notice, after which, they were told, neither trains nor petrol would be available. The last boats left the docks at Taungyup and Akyab, and those left behind were stripped of any choice but one: to cross the remaining length of the country, and reach India on foot.

The retreating Army crossed over in good order, with few deaths, though stricken with malaria and harassed by Burmese bandits. For them it was merely ‘the Dunkirk of the East’. Behind the Army was a river of pathetic civilians, straggling down the open road. And behind them came the Mitsubishis, some ploughing the column with cannon fire; some filling the air with thousands of fluttering leaflets. These were propaganda cartoons, gaudy and shocking, depicting starving Indians ground under the heels of fat imperialists, or turbaned jawans being kicked out of evacuation lorries by blond-haired Tommies. In Hindustani or in Urdu, they said, ‘The Englishmen are just not bothered about you. You will see this scene wherever you look.’5

The centre of ancient Mandalay became an immense refugee camp, until the bombers reduced it to acres of ash and cinders. The refugees moved on, into northern Burma, where the British roads gave way to hill tracks, and the tracks gave way to long smears of mud, monsoon downpour and human waste. Cholera spread through the camps and contaminated nearby water sources. On the most exposed segment, the 130 miles between Monywa and Palel on the border, the roadside was littered with families too drained to walk. Sometimes a parent or child was still able to move on all fours, to reach a nearby water body and find it, invariably, already fouled.

Six hundred thousand attempted the gruesome march: at the time, the largest human migration in history. Eighty thousand died, in the transit camps and in the undergrowth by the sides of the route. Many left parents or children to die. At Palel and Imphal, there were field hospitals and well-stocked camps, and Army convoys to the railhead. But even there the planes came, above the fluttering Red Cross flags, to draw the harrow over them one last time.

Never before had the Empire, and the men who commanded it, been so disgraced. In the First World War, Indians on the Western Front had first seen the forbidden sight of White men afraid, wailing, soiled, like regular men. But that was on a distant continent. In 1942 the humiliation took place in India’s backyard, and its evidence streamed through Assam and Bengal and all the way to Madras.

At Madras Medical College, where Nugs and Ganny were now house officers, ward after ward filled with refugees. Many had been stretched to their last fibres by starvation, and exposure, malaria, dysentery. Nearly all had cholera. Blue-white faeces gushed out of them. The staff cut holes in the ward bedding, and stitched sleeves of waxed fabric between the holes and buckets on the floor. Nugs and Ganny monitored how much liquid the patients lost every hour, then the ward boys collected the buckets and sloshed the ‘rice water’ into the gutter.

Few survivors carried anything, except for anguished tales of their abandonment by the Raj. Lying in their cholera beds, they told of Anglo-Indian families whose darker-skinned daughters were turned away from camps for Europeans; of columns of Indian refugees held back until Europeans had passed, so the roads would be less begrimed; of elephants struggling up the slopes, hind legs quivering, as they carried mahogany desks out over the bodies of children. The most despised rumour, which travelled well in India, was that the Army enforced separate ‘White’ and ‘Black’ routes: so little did Indian lives count in the end.

Nugs and Ganny heard their stories in the wards, and a different kind of appeal outside. Officers of the Indian Medical Service had besieged the campus, bidding to recruit the senior students. Much of it was familiar, but a new enticement had sent a murmur of amazement through the class: final-year students who signed up to join the Army would receive a monthly stipend of a hundred rupees, starting right away.

Try as he might, Ganny couldn’t get the offer out of his mind. It meant he would start his life with Nugs with some savings, instead of empty pockets, as well as an assured job. Every civil department had suspended hiring at the start of the war, and in their place, graduates were invited to apply for military commissions, and promised priority in civil appointments after the victory. War service would count double for seniority. The Army Medical Corps needed thousands of doctors – one for each new fighting company, and more down the chain of evacuation: in field ambulances, at staging sections, casualty clearing stations, ambulance trains and barges, base hospitals and convalescent depots. The government was doing all it could to make it seem a sound professional decision, rather than professional suicide.

Or actual suicide, which was how Nugs saw it. There was a terrific row. To Nugs, the war was a pathological madness, undoing a thousandfold all the efforts of all the doctors in the world. She knew that Ganny thought the same. They had nationalist friends, like Lakshmi Swaminathan – who they imagined was a captive, at best, of the Japanese – and they had come to agree with them on the lunacy of the war effort. How could Ganny even think about throwing his life into that fire, for the bribe of a commission?

The newspapers said that President Roosevelt had called for a new name for the war which would ‘briefly describe it as a war for the preservation of the smaller people of the democracies of the world’. What he meant was that Europe was in peril of losing the freedom it had long denied to all other races. Churchill gave sermons about a war for freedom, but Orwell provided a sharp retort: ‘The unspoken clause is always: Not counting niggers.’6

Ganny did not argue further, but Nugs could sense his decision hardening. The prospect of a commission was something, more than just the stipend that cooled his anxiety about their future. At the very least it was a plan. If she dared confess it, the relief it gave him helped her too. And there was something else, besides. A bravery had come over him. So she helped prepare the world’s gentlest mercenary to join its greatest war.