to draw a general conclusion from them.
The review goes on to say that “what, in time of war, was seen as necessary to uphold the morale of soldier and civilian alike has persisted for almost fifty years as a method of determining what should be accepted as reality”. So far as that has a meaning, it appears to be that misrepresentation of war was necessary at the time, and has continued until now, when presumably some omniscient revisionist has seen through the sham. Well, such a conclusion is false, and insulting. It fails to see that morale, far from being inspired by policy, comes from within, and is nourished by friends, family, and example. Government and media may reflect that – as Churchill did – but they cannot create it. Perhaps no one can understand that who was not alive and aware in Britain during the war, or experienced the Blitz, or was torpedoed, or confronted death and mortal peril at point-blank.
There is, for some reason which I don’t understand, a bitter desire in some to undermine what they call the “myths” of the Second World War. Most of the myths are true, but they don’t want to believe that. It may be a natural reaction to having the war rammed down their throats by my generation; it may have its roots in subconscious envy; it may even spring from a reluctance to recognise that today’s safety and comfort were bought fifty years ago by means which today’s intelligentsia find unacceptable, and from which they wish to distance themselves. I cannot say – but I do know that the review I have quoted is typical in presenting a view which is false. It is also dangerous because it may be taken as true by the uninformed or thoughtless, since it fits fashionable prejudice. And that is how history is distorted. You cannot, you must not, judge the past by the present; you must try to see it in its own terms and values, if you are to have any inkling of it. You may not like what you see, but do not on that account fall into the error of trying to adjust it to suit your own vision of what it ought to have been.
Thirdly, it is now widely held (or at least it has been widely stated) that the dropping of atomic bombs was unnecessary because the Japanese were ready to give in. I shall have something to say of that bombing later – and not entirely, perhaps, what you might think – but for the moment I shall say only that I wish those who hold that view had been present to explain the position to the little bastard who came howling out of a thicket near the Sittang, full of spite and fury, in that first week of August. He was half-starved and near naked, and his only weapon was a bamboo stake, but he was in no mood to surrender.
Finally, if any young soldiers of today should chance to read this book, they may understand that while the face of war may alter, some things have not changed since Joshua stood before Jericho and Xenophon marched to the sea. May they come safe to bedtime, and all well.
The dialects of Cumberland are among the purest and, to the outsider, least comprehensible in the English-speaking world. Rendering them phonetically is difficult, but I have tried because that is the way my comrades talked, and to translate their conversation into normal English would be to change the characters of the speakers out of recognition; they were the way they spoke: tough, strong, forthright, and frequently aggressive. But while I hope I have conveyed their accent, I have to rely on meaning and context to suggest the style in which their speech was delivered. For example, the Cumbrian voice is well suited to derision; everyone knows the common English expression of disbelief, “Get away!” and the equally familiar North Country “Give over!”, meaning “Stop it”, but as rendered by the Cumbrian “Girraweh!” and “Give ower!” have respectively a snarling contempt and a violence which have to be heard. At its heaviest, the accent is a harsh, rasping growl, and it is this as much as the occasionally archaic vocabulary which baffles the foreigner. Just to give one quick example of pure Cumbrian, I give the translation of:
“Have you seen a donkey jump over a gate?” which is
“Est seen a coody loup ower a yett?”
That sentence, in Cumbrian, illustrates one of the most distinctive features of the county’s speech – the occasional use of the second person singular: “Est” or “Esta” is “Hast thou”. I emphasise occasional use; the Cumbrian, especially the countryman, will use “thou” (pronounced “thoo” or “tha”) and “you” or “ye” indiscriminately. “You will” in Carlisle may be spoken as “you’ll” or “ye’ll”, but out on the fellside it is liable to be “tha’lt” (“thou wilt”). Similarly, his assent may be “yes”, “yiss”, or “aye”; he alternates “well” and “weel”; “go” may be “gaw”, “gan”, or “ga”; he may say “how” perfectly normally, but he may also say “’oo”. The list is endless: “don’t” is usually “doan’t” or “dawn’t”, but occasionally it is “divvn’t” – and don’t (or divvn’t) ask me why.
I have said the dialect is pure, because it is both ancient and grammatical; Chaucer might well understand a modern Cumbrian better than he would a modern Londoner. But it has its antique ungrammatical lapses, too – “Ah’s” (“I is”) and “Thoo’s” (“Thou is”) are examples to balance against the purity of “Th’art” (“Thou art”) and “looksta” and “sista” (“lookest thou” and “seest thou”).
All of which may convince the uninitiated that my characters might as well be speaking Turkish; in fact, I don’t think their speech will be too difficult to understand, and where I think it may be I have appended footnote translations. The glossary at the end consists largely of Hindustani words and slang expressions current in the British Army fifty years ago.
G.M.F.
The first time I smelt Jap was in a deep dry-river bed in the Dry Belt, somewhere near Meiktila. I can no more describe the smell than I could describe a colour, but it was heavy and pungent and compounded of stale cooked rice and sweat and human waste and … Jap. Quite unlike the clean acrid wood-smoke of an Indian village or the rather exotic and faintly decayed odour of the bashas1 in which the Burmese lived – and certainly nothing like the cooking smells of the Baluch hillmen and Gurkhas of our brigade, or our own British aromas. It was outside my experience of Oriental stenches – so how did I know it was Jap? Because we were deep inside enemy-held territory, and who else would have dug the three bunkers facing me in the high bank, as I stood, feeling extremely lonely, with a gallon tin of fruit balanced precariously on one shoulder and my rifle at the trail in my other hand?
I had never seen a live Japanese at this time. Dead ones beyond counting, corpses sprawled by the roadside, among the huts and bashas of abandoned villages, in slit-trenches and fox-holes, all the way, it seemed, from Imphal south to the Irrawaddy. They were what was left of the great army that had been set to invade India the previous year, the climax of that apparently irresistible tide that had swept across China, Malaya, and the Pacific Islands; it broke on the twin rocks of Imphal and Kohima, where Fourteenth Army had stopped it and driven it back from the gates of India. (I imagine that every teenager today has heard of Stalingrad and Alamein and D-Day, but I wonder how many know the name of Imphal, that “Flower on Lofty Heights” where Japan suffered the greatest catastrophe in its military history? There’s no reason why they should; it was a long way away.) While I was still a recruit, training in Britain, this battalion had fought in that terrible battle of the boxes,2 and their talk was still of Kennedy Peak and Tiddim and the Silchar track, and “duffys” – the curious name for what the Americans now call fire-fights – in the jungle and on the khuds3 of Assam. There they had fought Jap literally to a standstill, and now we were on the road south, with Burma to be retaken. We had said goodbye to the mules which had been the only possible vehicles in that fearful country; trucks had brought us to the Irrawady and beyond, courtesy of East African
