The Road Past Mandalay by John Masters

Author:John Masters [Masters, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: WW II, World War II, Burma Campaign
Publisher: Bamtam
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

We were like a man trying to make a hidden-ball play from end to end of a football field thickly planted with trees. The distant rendezvous was the goal line, the opposing team those Japanese who crossed and recrossed the area on their own occasions, knowing we were somewhere about, but not knowing where we were going and, as yet, no more ready to come and look for us than we were to go and look for them. We were strong enough to force past any single group we might have run into, but then they’d call the rest of their team, and our object was not to get involved in a free-for-all struggle in midfield but simply to reach that goal line.

It was a beautiful stadium … At night, the second night after crossing the Irrawaddy, I awoke about three o’clock, gently pulled up out of sleep, without cause.

I listened first, but there was no sound at all. I could not hear the men around me breathing, nor the mules in the lines, nor any sound of the wild earth. We lay in the rough circle of our harbour high on the slopes of the Gangaw Range, among kanyin trees two hundred feet tall. The boles swept up straight and clear for a full hundred feet to the first branch; then, high above, spread out into giant canopies topped by red or white flowers. Since the kanyins overshadowed and pushed out the teak and most of the lesser trees, I could see a long way down the slope, where the shapeless masses in the deep shadow were men and animals. After a time I knew why I had awoken. It was night in Burma. The quality of the night, of the silence, was different from anything I had known, and it was that which had touched my senses and called me out of sleep. The moon, a little past full, hung a deep orange colour among the high leaf canopies. In the long aisles of our cathedral a pale grey-violet mist seemed to move slowly up the slope, in absolute silence. The edges of the trees round the moon had an unreal quality as though they were not leaves and boughs but the brush-work of a painter, using some technique not yet explored before this, for I was watching the painting grow and change under his hand as the night advanced.

Before dawn we stood to arms as usual. There was no colour now, everything pearled and pale and sheened in the morning. A hand signal passed round, Stand down. I walked forward from the perimeter with Jabgir, my orderly, to eat my breakfast out there, only a few yards beyond the sentries but a world away from the bustle at the centre of the harbour and the shrill, soft, ceaseless cheeping of the radio sets.

The note of a tenor bell rang full and true out of the thinning mist below. I sprang up and ran back to the sentries. They had heard it and waited intently.

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