Farthest Field by Karnad Raghu

Author:Karnad, Raghu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2015-06-04T04:00:00+00:00

14

No Heroes

Madras, May–June 1943

After the deserts of Libya and Iraq, and lately a week on the Arabian Sea, the men of 2nd Field Company had seen enough mirages to doubt the bright, blocky crust accreting on the horizon. In hours, though, the channel grew busy with ships, and then there was no doubting the stench of fish and civilisation. Men crowded the bows of the Nevasa as she slipped past the Elysium of Bombay, the Gateway of India and the Hotel Taj Mahal, and returned to the dock from which the company had departed nearly a thousand days before.

As the ship berthed a brass band struck up behind the crimson carousel of coolies’ dhotis. Its tooting and bumping were drowned out by the clamour of the troops as they rushed up from below and frothed on the deck. For more than an hour they lay tied up without orders to disembark. Hindi in the dialects of Rajputana and Urdu in the brogue of Wales mingled over softer conferences in Tamil and Garhwali. In content, however, the talk was all the same: the cause of the hold-up before their summer furlough.

At last four jeeps drove onto the quayside, and a hush descended as some very heavy gold braid stepped out. Then the ship erupted in whoops and whistles, not for the Major-General Commandant of Bombay, or the commander of the 5th Division, but for the third man to emerge: the handsome slab of chin and the trim blond moustache that were unmistakably General Claude Auchinleck.

The Auk looked a little diminished from his photographs of 1941, when he had commanded the entire Middle Eastern theatre. After being relieved in Cairo he had spent a year unassigned, the punishment for his many contretemps with Churchill. His chest had sunk, and he clasped his hands behind his back. His great chin rested nearly on his sternum, but a smile played above it, sending wrinkles to his small enquiring eyes. Perhaps he knew that he would soon be re-appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Army in India, the force to which he had always been most devoted. But his present news was even greater. It was exchanged on the quayside with the brigade staff, and ran like a sparking fuse up the gangway to explode on the deck where Bobby stood. Tunis had fallen, the Afrika Korps was defeated. The 4th Indian Division had accepted the surrender of General von Arnim, Rommel’s successor and the supreme commander of Axis forces in Africa.1 The news was bittersweet, for both Auchinleck and the 5th Division. Neither had seen the campaign through to its end: the general had been fired from his command just before the final turn, and the division had been sent east after paying for the victory with the lives of thousands.

A few days later, there were more pipes and drums at the platform of Roorkee station, as 2nd Field was paraded through the town, representing all the Bengal Sappers still overseas. Europeans, loyalists, cantonment staff and children came out to cheer for them, the victors of North Africa; pi-dogs yapped and scampered.

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