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By Root 989 0

taken in his welfare, and he gets leave fairly regularly. He does not ask a great deal more.” Few British officers in Indian regiments perceived that the day of the Raj was done, or heeded the alienation of most Indian civilians from Britain’s war. “We took it for granted that Burma and Malaya would remain parts of the British Empire. We never thought India might go,” said Captain Ronnie McAllister of 1/3rd Gurkhas, whose stepfather was a senior officer of the Indian Police. “I remember dinner parties134 at my stepfather’s house where there were police, Indian Civil Service people, Indians. Nobody even mentioned the possibility. We were cocooned against reality, you see, because the Indian Army was so staunch.”

That army’s cultural complexities aroused some bewilderment among newcomers. Pathans in John Cameron-Hayes’s gunner unit not infrequently used their leaves to pursue tribal vendettas at home, before returning to the British war. John Randle, a company commander in the Baluchis at the age of twenty-two, was informed by his colonel of two taboos essential to maintaining respect for sahibs: an officer must never let himself be seen naked before his men, and should ensure that excretion was carried out in privacy on a “thunderbox,” even in action. The officers’ mess sweeper, a little man named Kantu whose broad grin never failed, thus sometimes found himself excusing the colonel’s temporary absence from a battle, saying as he saluted: “Command officer sahib, pot par hai” “The CO’s on the pot.” Randle was so impressed by the spectacle of Kantu crawling out under fire to deposit the hallowed contents of the thunderbox in a latrine pit that he successfully submitted the sweeper’s name for a Mention in Dispatches. Less happily, Randle was informed that a homosexual British officer had been making advances to sepoys. His soldiers, mostly Pathans, were plotting to kill him. Randle saved the man’s life by having him removed for court-martial.

Once, an attached platoon of British troops arrived triumphant in the Baluchis’ lines with the carcass of a wild pig they had trapped. Randle’s subadar-major said firmly: “Sir, that thing is not coming135 into our position to defile us.” The British sergeant said: “Sir, you know what the rations are like—we’re all hungry and browned off to hell with bully and biscuits.” Randle told the sergeant to remove the pig, dismember it and come back with the meat discreetly concealed in the men’s haversacks, for transfer to their own cookhouse. The subadar-major acquiesced. Likewise when tins of mutton were delivered to the 4/1st Gurkhas, bearing labels which showed images of female sheep. The men declined to eat them. The battalion CO instructed his quartermaster to find a crayon and draw testicles on the beasts. The amended mutton was found acceptable.

There was rivalry between British and Indian units, with some disdain on both sides. Derek Horsford of the Gurkhas said: “We thought nothing of the British Army136. They seemed to us terribly inefficient.” War in Burma produced wild incongruities, such as the spectacle of the gunners of 119 Field Regiment singing “Sussex by the Sea” in honour of their native county as they heaved twenty-five-pounders across a jungle clearing. The culture and language of the Raj seeped into the veins of every man who served under Slim. Whether you were a Borderer or a Dragoon, tea was “char,” the washerman a “dhobi-wallah,” a mug a “piyala,” food “khana,” and so on. They smoked Indian “Victory V” cigarettes, packed in brown paper packets for European consumption, green for Indian and African. Soldiers found both “unspeakably vile.”

The foremost tactical reality for both British and Americans fighting the Japanese was that when the enemy moved, he became vulnerable to their firepower, but while dug into his brilliantly concealed and meticulously protected bunkers, he was hard to see and harder still to kill. One of the more ridiculous documents produced by the wartime British Army, marked “Most Secret,” was an August 1944 report from the Directorate of Tactical