With a Kiss and a Prayer by Ellie Dean

Author:Ellie Dean
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House

13

Burma

There had been skirmishes and ambushes from the moment they’d scaled that riverside cliff. The fighting had been fierce on both sides, and although they’d wiped out several rats’ nests of Japanese, some of their number had been killed or wounded.

However, despite this, Jim was getting a real sense of this strange and beautiful country into which he’d been thrust. Blue-hazed mountains soared above lush, jungle-clad valleys where hidden villages of bamboo huts lay by crystal-clear rushing rivers that fed into neat paddy fields. Unfamiliar bird calls were accompanied by the tinkling of tiny bells in ornate little pagodas bedecked in frangipani and smelling of burning incense, while saffron-robed Buddhist monks walked barefoot from village to village, and long-horned cattle cropped contentedly as white egrets hitched a lift on their backs to feast on the ticks and flies they found there.

The people were slender and brown-skinned, the men mostly bare-chested with a wide length of brightly coloured cloth wrapped around their waist to fall to their ankles. The women were elegant in their sarongs – or longyi – daintily modest in small white tops as they moved to some slow inner rhythm which made them almost glide along as they carried baskets of produce on their heads in the heat of the day. It all looked so peaceful, but Jim knew the Japs often hid out in those villages, bringing death, destruction, and often slavery to these gentle people who’d been caught up in a war that was not of their making.

The mountain range Jim and the rest of the long column had just negotiated led to a broad valley which ran for approximately forty miles north towards another precipitous mountain. This valley was almost entirely smothered in jungle except for a few scattered Burmese villages and the cultivated areas around them.

Morale was high amongst the men, for the time for games of hide and seek with the enemy was over, and the Chindits had been ordered to engage and drive out the Japanese in a series of ambushes, and make it impossible for them to use the area by destroying their communications, arms dumps and vehicles. It was what they’d trained for and why they’d borne the privations and effort to get here, so each man was ready and eager to get to work, bring the fight to the enemy and rout him once and for all.

The idea was to let the enemy know they were there in force, heavily armed and ready to fight, so they set off at a deliberately fast and noisy pace to intimidate the already disorganised and fleeing Japs. It would take three days to reach the end of the valley, where they would set up operations at the foot of the towering mountain.

As the long column of men, mules and horses progressed boldly along the single road that had been carved through the valley, Jim could see the villagers working knee-deep in the water of the paddy fields, bent at the waist beneath large conical hats woven from strips of bamboo as they planted the green shoots of rice.

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