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By Root 5567 0

pits had been dug and wire had been strung by Chinese and Indian coolies supervised by engineers sent forward by 11th Division; no sooner had the troops themselves arrived, tired though they were by this latest withdrawal, than they, too, had been obliged to join in the work on the defences. But the only defences that could be found that might, at a pinch, stop tanks were a few concrete blocks and a couple of dozen anti-tank mines, both of which had been disposed in the defile. All well and good. Sinclair knew, however (he was a much keener soldier than he had been a diplomat), that tanks are distinctly solid objects: the only point in stopping them with your concrete blocks, which you won’t do for long, in any case, with these improvised methods, is to allow your anti-tank guns to get in a good shot at them while motionless. Unfortunately, the slender obstacles which the 12th Brigade had been able to erect in the defile were covered by a mere three anti-tank guns manned, into the bargain, by gunners who had, alas, never been trained to cope with tanks at all, even in daylight, let alone tanks most likely firing tracer at close range in pitch darkness. That should be enough to make even a seasoned gunner’s hair stand on end, never mind a raw Indian recruit.

Well then, what else was there to stop the Japs? A railway bridge, forward, had been blown up (the Japanese had tanks with wheels that would run on the rails, it was thought). The Argylls, in common with the rest of the British forces in Malaya, had no tanks of their own, only armoured cars and bren-gun carriers; although these might come in handy on the estate roads to cope with a flanking movement by the Jap infantry into the rubber they were quite useless, of course, against tanks. Most serious of all, the British anti-tank rifles would not penetrate the armour of the Japanese medium tanks. And so what could be done? If the tanks once got through the defile there was only the bridge at Trolak and the Slim River Bridge, both prepared for demolition, which lay between the tanks and the open road to Singapore. And now, into the bargain, it seemed that the Japanese attack would come twenty-four hours sooner than expected.

If the Brigadier received this news of an impending attack from young Sinclair without making a fuss, it was partly because it was his business to be imperturbable, partly because he knew that one can never predict quite how things will turn out: battles cannot be decided on paper by subtracting the armour of one side from the armour of the other and giving the victory to the side which has the surplus. There was a probability, certainly, that the tanks would have the advantage … but so much depends on the quality of the men and on what is going on in their minds. True, the Indian battalions were in very poor shape and the Argylls were not much better. But a quick success or two and who could tell? Thank heaven, anyway, for the few dozen reinforcements who had just arrived from Singapore on this dark, rain-lashed night, under Captain Hamish Ross, for they included some of the best men in the battalion. The few words he had had with Ross had cheered him.

‘We had a wee spot o’ bother, sir, at Tyersall Park,’ Ross had said, eyeing the Brigadier slyly. ‘I suppose ye might call it a mutiny.’

‘A mutiny, man? Ye’ll no expect me to believe that, Hamish Ross!’

And so Captain Ross had explained. When his party of reinforcements had paraded at the Tyersall camp in Singapore a number of Argylls on staff duty whom Malaya Command had specifically ordered him to leave behind had paraded too, demanding to return to the regiment to join in the scrap.

‘Aye, now that’s more like it,’ nodded the Brigadier and, though his expression was no less forbidding, Hamish Ross could tell by the glint in his eye that he was pleased. These new arrivals would help put heart into the other men, given enough time for them to settle in.

Outside, the rain had slackened now. Making his way through the rubber trees back to the road to find out whether anything more had been gleaned