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By Root 5483 0

from Chinese refugees, Sinclair paused, gripped by the sense of unreality which comes from excitement and lack of sleep. In the course of the afternoon he had gone forward with the Brigadier to inspect the progress that the Hyderabads and the Punjabis were making with their defences and there he had met Charlie Tyrrell, Mrs Blackett’s brother. He did not know Charlie very well. In Singapore they had not met more than once or twice at the Blacketts’ house and even then had scarcely exchanged more than a few words. But seeing each other now in these unusual, even desperate circumstances, they had immediately begun to talk as if they were old friends. Charlie had come back with him for an hour to the Argylls’ area in the rubber.

Sinclair had been shocked to see the state that Charlie was in. His handsome face was hollow-cheeked with fatigue, dirty and inflamed with insect bites; even his khaki was in tatters. But it was not so much Charlie’s physical appearance that had given Sinclair a shock, for in the middle of a jungle campaign one does not expect to see a soldier looking as if he has just turned out on parade: it was the feverish look in his eyes and the obsessive, fatalistic way in which he talked … almost as if he were talking to himself, as if Sinclair had not been there at all. Charlie talked incessantly about his men: he had never seen them so apathetic and dejected! They were at the end of their tether, that much was clear! ‘How can you blame them?’ he had demanded without waiting for a reply. ‘Most of them are barely trained recruits.’

Sinclair had nodded sympathetically. Unlike the Argylls down the road the Punjabis did not possess that extra strength for living and fighting in the jungle which comes from training in atrocious conditions, from discipline, from regimental traditions which, combining all together, temper each individual and form what Sinclair thought of as a collective willpower, imperious and inflexible (yet even some of his own Argylls were close to cracking).

He had watched his men for the past two days, Charlie went on, and it was clear that their only thought (though these were the bravest of men!) was to huddle in their slit trenches, the nearest approach to security they could find. But who could blame them? In the course of their long retreat through northern and central Malaya the battalion had lost two hundred and fifty men, of whom many had been killed. From dawn the day before yesterday, there had been a steady stream of Jap bombers and fighters blasting away at the edges of the jungle on both sides of the defile where, though hidden, they knew the British forces to be. These planes had robbed the Punjabis of any chance they might have had of resting before the next attack; they had also caused a further trickle of casualties. And yet, somehow, even that was not the worst of it … It was …

They were standing a little way off the road in the shade. Charlie was leaning his back against the trunk of a rubber tree. As he spoke he kept wearily slapping his sweating face with his hand as if to drive off insects but mechanically, with resignation (besides, Sinclair could see no insects around Charlie’s face) … Abruptly Sinclair was afraid that the Brigadier might come by and see Charlie in this state. He felt that that could not be allowed to happen, he could not quite say why, except that you only had to glance at the way Charlie was leaning against the rubber tree, talking and slapping himself, his gaunt and desperate face dappled by sunlight and shadow filtering through the leaves, to know that he had very nearly reached the point where he simply would not care any longer!

But still Charlie was trying to explain himself to Sinclair, with an almost pathetic determination that he should understand … He was trying to say that, however bad it might be when the Jap Zero was roaring along the road machine-gunning the fringes of the jungle, it was no better when the plane had dipped its wing and swung away over the tree tops. Because within a few seconds an eerie silence had fallen, blanketing