chaggles took considerable punishment; by then we were coated so thick with dust that our faces looked as though we were wearing Number Nine make-up, and it was almost a relief to slide down and walk.
There are two great descriptions of marching: Kipling's poem, “Boots” (a remarkable work of art since he can have endured the pain of foot-slogging in the sun only at second-hand) and P. C. Wren's passage in
The Wages of Virtue
. I marched far farther in training in England, and in India, than ever I did in Burma; twenty-two miles in a day is my record, and that was in North Africa after the war. It is painful, too, not so much on the feet as on the back and shoulders, where the equipment chafes—the official wisdom is that you should wear the small pack high up towards the neck, but I noticed that Nine Section let them hang slack. Your feet are either fine or useless; my soles, by the end of the campaign, were white, spongy, and entirely devoid of feeling, but that was the monsoon; not until fifteen years later did they return to normal. At first they just became raw, and by Pyawbwe they were hurting like sin, but not to incapacitate: it is a tribute to my small part of Fourteenth Army, at least, that I never knew a man fall out with hisfeet; some of them were in horrible condition, but they bathed them and patched them and anointed them with strange things from the M.O., and kept going.
I have read, whether it is true or not, that in the Falklands War there were twenty per cent casualties from feet. I find it hard to credit, but if it is true, it was no fault of the soldiers, but of the boots.
Our Burma marches were modest—certainly by the standard of the Retreat or the Imphal Campaign—but even they could be rough if you were fighting along the way, or getting wearier by the day from night actions or stand-to's. My lasting impression is of thirst, and the yearning to reach for the water-bottle bumping on my stern, warm-to-hot though the contents were and highly flavoured of chlorine and rust. You didn't touch your water-bottle until you had to, so I ploughed moodily on, parched and sore, hating Preston Sturges, the film director, because in a copy of a magazine (
Yank
, probably) there was an article about him, describing how in his Hollywood office there was a soft-drink tank, awash with clinking ice-cubes and frosted bottles; it was enough to start you baying at the sun. And it was at such a time that Grandarse, who must have been more educated than he looked, would start to recite:
You may talk o' gin an' beer
When you're quartered safe out here
with coarse modifications to the verse which Kiplingnever thought of, but which I'm sure he would have approved. I don't recall even the North Sahara being hotter or drier than the Dry Belt of Burma; it may be significant that Grandarse, having finished his recitation and stretched himself on the rocky earth with his hat over his lobster-coloured face, should exclaim:
“Wahm? Ah's aboot boogered! By hell, Ah could do wi' some fookin' joongle, Ah tell tha!” And the Duke, sighing and sweating, said thoughtfully that, on the whole, he thought Grandarse was right.
From what I saw farther south, and the jungle I encountered twenty years later in Borneo, I'm not sure I would agree. The Dry Belt might be hard and hot, but at least you could see where you were, and, with luck, the opposition.
I had my first long look at them in numbers when we made our initial probe a few miles down the Rangoon road, two companies of us with tanks of the Deccan Horse. Our own company sweep encountered little, but the other company hit a village where Jap was dug in; the attack went in, 70 Japs were killed, and two guns captured, but by dusk we were outnumbered and cut off from Meiktila, 200 men and a troop of tanks, and had to fade into the dark and make a box. This was the night a tank * brewed up on the road and we lay off in the dark, sweating in the night cold and keeping quiet while
There are two great descriptions of marching: Kipling's poem, “Boots” (a remarkable work of art since he can have endured the pain of foot-slogging in the sun only at second-hand) and P. C. Wren's passage in
The Wages of Virtue
. I marched far farther in training in England, and in India, than ever I did in Burma; twenty-two miles in a day is my record, and that was in North Africa after the war. It is painful, too, not so much on the feet as on the back and shoulders, where the equipment chafes—the official wisdom is that you should wear the small pack high up towards the neck, but I noticed that Nine Section let them hang slack. Your feet are either fine or useless; my soles, by the end of the campaign, were white, spongy, and entirely devoid of feeling, but that was the monsoon; not until fifteen years later did they return to normal. At first they just became raw, and by Pyawbwe they were hurting like sin, but not to incapacitate: it is a tribute to my small part of Fourteenth Army, at least, that I never knew a man fall out with hisfeet; some of them were in horrible condition, but they bathed them and patched them and anointed them with strange things from the M.O., and kept going.
I have read, whether it is true or not, that in the Falklands War there were twenty per cent casualties from feet. I find it hard to credit, but if it is true, it was no fault of the soldiers, but of the boots.
Our Burma marches were modest—certainly by the standard of the Retreat or the Imphal Campaign—but even they could be rough if you were fighting along the way, or getting wearier by the day from night actions or stand-to's. My lasting impression is of thirst, and the yearning to reach for the water-bottle bumping on my stern, warm-to-hot though the contents were and highly flavoured of chlorine and rust. You didn't touch your water-bottle until you had to, so I ploughed moodily on, parched and sore, hating Preston Sturges, the film director, because in a copy of a magazine (
Yank
, probably) there was an article about him, describing how in his Hollywood office there was a soft-drink tank, awash with clinking ice-cubes and frosted bottles; it was enough to start you baying at the sun. And it was at such a time that Grandarse, who must have been more educated than he looked, would start to recite:
You may talk o' gin an' beer
When you're quartered safe out here
with coarse modifications to the verse which Kiplingnever thought of, but which I'm sure he would have approved. I don't recall even the North Sahara being hotter or drier than the Dry Belt of Burma; it may be significant that Grandarse, having finished his recitation and stretched himself on the rocky earth with his hat over his lobster-coloured face, should exclaim:
“Wahm? Ah's aboot boogered! By hell, Ah could do wi' some fookin' joongle, Ah tell tha!” And the Duke, sighing and sweating, said thoughtfully that, on the whole, he thought Grandarse was right.
From what I saw farther south, and the jungle I encountered twenty years later in Borneo, I'm not sure I would agree. The Dry Belt might be hard and hot, but at least you could see where you were, and, with luck, the opposition.
I had my first long look at them in numbers when we made our initial probe a few miles down the Rangoon road, two companies of us with tanks of the Deccan Horse. Our own company sweep encountered little, but the other company hit a village where Jap was dug in; the attack went in, 70 Japs were killed, and two guns captured, but by dusk we were outnumbered and cut off from Meiktila, 200 men and a troop of tanks, and had to fade into the dark and make a box. This was the night a tank * brewed up on the road and we lay off in the dark, sweating in the night cold and keeping quiet while
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