Quartered Safe Out Here by George MacDonald Fraser

Author:George MacDonald Fraser
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2011-01-23T16:00:00+00:00

PYAWBWE FELL NEXT DAY without a shot fired. A patrol from the battalion went into the town centre at dawn, but Jap was dead or gone away. There were more than 1100 of his bodies on the ground, and thirteen guns abandoned; his army had finally, to quote Slim, been torn apart, and while the remnants would fight on desperately in the jungly swamp of southern Burma in the monsoon, they were never a coherent force again. Which makes a private soldier wonder why Tokyo, surveying its battered lines from Burma to the Pacific, didn’t acknowledge that all hope was gone, and call it a day. But governments, of course, never do. They’re not lying with a shattered leg in the wreckage of a little room, too far gone to hear the footsteps outside the door.

It must have been on that following day that we shifted our pits, for I remember a slow sweep across open rubble-strewn ground where the Japs had died in their tracks, and their corpses were lying where they had fallen, in stiff grotesque attitudes. I don’t remember any vultures or kites; our advance may have scared them off. One body had its stomach ripped open, and the swollen intestine protruded like a great balloon; someone pricked it with his bayonet, idly, and there was a most disgusting stench.

“Aw, Jesus – pack it oop!” cried Grandarse, and Nick looked about him and upbraided the dead in withering terms.

“Ye stupid sods! Ye stupid Japanni sods! Look at the fookin’ state of ye! Ye wadn’t listen — an’ yer all fookin’ deid! Tojo’s way! Ye dumb bastards! Ye coulda bin suppin’ chah an’ screwin’ geeshas in yer fookin’ lal paper ’ooses – an’ look at ye! Ah doan’t knaw.” He shook his head. “All the way frae fookin’ Japan!”

If it sounds shocking, it didn’t at the time. Nick had a bitter sense of humour, but I’m sure that on this occasion he was simply saying what he thought. He didn’t pity the Japs; none of us did. If anything, he was angry, not only at the folly that those bodies represented, but because only yesterday they had been alive and trying to kill us, and if he had added: “An’ serve ye right!” I wouldn’t have been surprised – or disagreed.

There is much talk today of guilt as an aftermath of war – guilt over killing the enemy, and even guilt for surviving. Much depends on the circumstances, but I doubt if many of Fourteenth Army lose much sleep over dead Japanese. For one thing, they were a no-surrender enemy and if we hadn’t killed them they would surely have killed us. But there was more to it than that. It may appal a generation who have been dragooned into considering racism the ultimate crime, but I believe there was a feeling (there was in me) that the Jap was farther down the human scale than the European. It is a feeling that I see reflected today in

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.