A Soldier Erect: or Further Adventures of the Hand-Reared Boy. Brian Aldiss

       Epigraph

      As she turned around, I saw part of her backside, leaned over and laid my face on it, crying about my broken drum; the evening sunshine made it all bright – how strange I should recollect that so clearly, but I have always recollected sunshine.

      My Secret Life, by ‘Walter’

      ‘Cavaliers, and strong men, this cavalier is the friend of a friend of mine. Es mucho hombre. There is none like him in Spain. He speaks the crabbed Gitano though he is an Inglesite.

      ‘We do not believe it,’ replied several grave voices. ‘It is not possible.’

      The Bible in Spain, by George Borrow

       Introduction

      Whilst writing The Hand-Reared Boy, I began to consider a further book, where we might meet with my Stubbs when adult. Taking the time scale into consideration, it seemed likely that young Stubbs would join the army. A Soldier Erect is wholehearted in its awfulness. Here is Horatio Stubbs again, fresh from his adventures in the first novel of the trilogy.

      We find him now complaining about a party, which was planned to celebrate his departure overseas with the Mendip Regiment to fight the Japanese Imperial Army in Burma. (Burma until this date had been part of the British Empire.) Stubbs begins his account in the grumbling mode – a mode which endures, with the volume being turned up throughout the book. Complaint about war is hardly surprising, but the entire novel has implications beyond this, confronting us with passages full of filth, fear and frustrated fornications; passages engendered in large part by the horrors and hungers of global disruption.

      Stubbs and his young mates, ill-informed as they are, have a hatred for the lower orders of Indian society with which they are forced to mingle. One might wonder what the Indians of today would make of these violent episodes and impressions, launched upon us with demonic energy.

      A short extract might tell us what we are in for. Here are the words written on a card a beggar hands round on a dreary train journey. It reeks of human misery – yet I believe it to be a humorous triumph.

      ‘Sir,

       This unfortunate idiot is a lunatic from the malayli states. He has not escaped. He asks you to be excused. This is not his fault. The bearer was always dumb. He cannot speak since after birth. The foolish fellow and his brothers are also speechless and without voice. He lost his parent. They early departed their sense. His younger sister is also blind and demented.

       These three depend on this one. He laboured by the railway. Their mother was never known. His auntie died in the prime. His father was serving longwhile in South Indian Railway Co. Ltd., so Railway Officers have excused this imbecile and so kindly pay him charity and God help you.

      Signed: A.R.M. Shoramanor Madras Dorosani Cristian.

       Mrs Pandambai, B.A. (Oxen) Principal Theosophical Ladies’ College, Lucknow.

       Please to Re-Turn This Notice After The Execution.’

      Once we arrive in Burma with Stubbs we find things a little better. The Commander gives the order:

      ‘During this operation, we have two objectives: to kill as many Nips as we can, and to relieve the Kohima Garrison.’

      There follows a record of hard and dangerous times, and though accounts of the war in Burma have drifted into several of my other books, here lies, I think, the most comprehensive account of a struggle staged so far from help and home.

      Still moving, the novel is summarised by the resigned despondency of the sentences with which it concludes:

      ‘The early monsoon rain began to fall over our positions. Down the road, the guns were pounding away at Viswema.’

      Brian Aldiss,

      Oxford 2012