Singapore Grip - J. G. Farrell [221]
Though the sky was at last beginning to grow pale it was still very dark on the road. Sinclair, in his anxiety to find out how A and D Companies were faring in the rubber on the other side of the trunk road, borrowed a motor-cycle and set off on it rather unsteadily down the estate road from Brigade Head-quarters. As he came careering out of the rubber trees, going rather faster than he intended and meaning to cross the trunk road and follow the estate road which continued among the trees on the far side, a vast shape suddenly loomed out of the darkness. A Japanese tank! Swerving violently he crashed into it, almost head on … but luckily for Sinclair he was thrown clear. As the tank advanced, one of its tracks ran over the motor-cycle, flattened, it, chewed it up and dropped it on the roadway behind. Sinclair dusted himself off shakily as the tank disappeared on down the road into the darkness. ‘Suh … suh … suh … suh … wine!’ he shouted after it. ‘You weren’t carrying any bloody luh … luh … luh … headlights!’ But all he could see, as he stood cursing beside his flattened motorcycle, was the rapidly diminishing flicker of the tank’s exhaust. And then he thought: ‘But my God! A Jap tank isn’t supposed to be here at all!’ And although he knew that by now it was almost certainly too late to warn anybody he began to run as fast as he could back the way he had come.
But if the tank had already passed through the long neck and out into the bottle itself, this meant that the Japanese had not only broken through the Punjabis position but that the first of the Argylls’ obstacles where the trunk road left the jungle and entered the rubber had also failed to stop it. What had happened was that the Japanese tanks, which had been successfully stopped by the Punjabis on the trunk road, had found a way round them: for it so happened that the line which the trunk road now followed was not the original one. The original road had snaked through the defile with a number of sharp bends. When the road, in the process of being improved, had been straightened out, the disused loops of the original road had been left and no anti-tank defences had been provided for them. Thus it was that Nakamura’s tank had discovered one of the disused loops and used it to circle around the British position, emerging in the rear. The Punjabis’ resistance now at last collapsed. Charlie collected those men of his own contingent who were still able to walk and retreated with them into the jungle, hoping that they might be able to make their way back to the Slim River Bridge and the British lines. It was just beginning to grow light as Charlie and his men were swallowed up by the great dark-green wall of jungle. Subsequently nothing more would be seen or heard of them.
Now the tanks of Major Toda and Lieutenant Nakamura with two more medium tanks behind them (the very last of which had just flattened a motor-cycle) and a single lorry-load of infantry which included a dismayed Kikuchi and the reckless Matsushita, had brushed aside one pitiful road-block where the road left the jungle and surged on down the road. This was already a victory for they had broken through the defile and could now operate in the greater freedom of the rubber estate if it suited them. But Nakamura had his eye on an even greater feat of arms … to capture the two bridges before they could be blown up!
In no time the leading tanks had reached the second road-block which the Argylls had set up a hundred yards in front of the bridge at Trolak. This second obstacle, prepared in haste, was scarcely more impressive than the first, but it was covered by the two