Road of Bones. Fergal Keane

area. In early September 1943 he received a message from a village reporting a suspicious-looking man claiming to be local but believed to be Japanese or Chinese. A fortnight later Pawsey was reporting to his deputy that ‘Japanese in great numbers had entered the hills … three villages have been bombed and burned for disobeying their orders and five people killed’. There were worrying reports, too, about some village chiefs offering their services as guides to the Japanese in return for gifts of salt. The Naga Hills were tense and expectant.

      Perhaps because of wartime tension, the sense of the prevailing order being threatened, the hills experienced a brief revival of headhunting in late 1943. The Governor’s Fortnightly Report for the first half of December recorded that two villages had joined with a Burmese village in a major raid across the border. A second report to the Governor evoked the tense nature of affairs: ‘In the Naga Hills Tribal Area the powerful Konyak village of Sangnyu is reported to be threatening to interfere with the carriage of supplies for us by Zangkam who are their hereditary enemies.’

      There were less threatening annoyances. Ursula Graham Bower was disturbed one morning by the arrival of an officer with a large retinue of porters. He had made his way to her post by claiming that he was a V Force officer. The lieutenant was in fact attached to an engineering unit and had been sent to look at the wreckage of a crashed American aircraft. Graham Bower was suspicious of the empty litter being carried by his men. When questioned, he told her it was for a sick subordinate. But the Nagas discovered that it had been used to carry the lieutenant through the hills, ‘making him the laughing stock of several villages in the process’. He told the Naga headman that because he was over forty he could not walk the difficult terrain. The headman was himself over sixty. It was an image of simpering weakness that could undermine the image of V Force among the local tribes. Remembering poor old Rawdon Wright and his brave progress across the hills, Graham Bower was furious and decided to teach the newcomer a lesson. ‘We had not been so bitter or angry for years,’ she wrote. Having learned that the lieutenant was also terrified of the ghosts that were reputed to stalk the hills, she arranged for two Nagas to terrorise him with fearful noises throughout the night. He left the following morning, whey-faced with exhaustion and fear.

      Both Ursula Graham Bower and Charles Pawsey decided to stay on the wild frontier and take whatever the war might bring. Although as different in personality as it was possible to be – she the feisty extrovert, he the eternal reticent – they were driven by something more than duty to the empire. One could describe what they came to feel for the Nagas as loyalty, except that it was more intimate than that. By different paths they had come to love the Naga people and would stand or fall with them when the hurricane struck. It was a love that would be reciprocated at Kohima in courage and blood.

* Set up in 1942, the plan was for V Force to operate in six areas along the 800 mile frontier between India and Burma, with headquarters at Cinnamara in Assam. Its existence was predicated on the assumption that the Japanese would eventually attack. In the event, V Force was to remain behind and carry out hit-and-run operations. Several other clandestine groups, including Z Force and Force 136, as well as the Special Operations Executive, also operated in the frontier area.

† The Tochi Scouts were made up of around twenty white officers and 2,000 native troops. The Canadian correspondent Gordon Sinclair wrote in his book Khyber Caravan (reissued by Long Riders’ Guild Press, 2001) that they were ‘the only branch of the service who did, and do, wheel into action on their own responsibility without the okay of politicians’.

FIVE

       Kentish Men

      In old age it could still fill them with pride and reduce them to an agonising grief. Only in the company of those who had been with them could they hope for true understanding. That would be the nature of Kohima for the survivors of 4th battalion, Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment. Yet at the time they joined up not one among them could have imagined fighting a war in the jungles of north-eastern India. Germany and Italy were the only enemies then and the war was just a few miles away on the other side of the Channel.

      Citizen soldiers. It is an overused phrase, but it is hard to think of another that could properly describe the men of 4th battalion, a Territorial Army formation made up of men who had joined up before the war, and others who had been transferred from local militia after limited conscription was introduced in April 1939. The formation of which they were a part traced its roots to the eighteenth century, when it was raised as a regiment of foot during the Seven Years War. In time, and with the depredations of war, the battalion would absorb fresh drafts of men from all over Britain, but at the outset it was overwhelmingly Kentish in character, and most of its officers and men amateur soldiers.

      The coastline of their county, with its long sandy beaches, towering cliffs and sheltered coves, had witnessed the landing of the Roman conquerors and now beckoned to Hitler’s armies a few hours’ sail away in France. The officers and men of the 4th West Kents shared an attachment to this landscape, a county still dominated by green fields and hop farms with the conical towers of brewers’ oast houses. According to tradition, men from the west of the county were called Kentish Men, while those from the east were Men of Kent. The division between them followed the contours of the River Medway, which bisects the county on its way to the sea. As the county boundary blurred with that of Greater London, growing numbers of city dwellers gravitated towards the ranks of the Royal West Kents. The regimental history, written in the stolid prose of a different age, describes the qualities of the West Kent soldier: ‘The stubborn alertness of the Londoner is thus merged with the slower solidity of the worker in the Garden of England.’ In more prosaic terms, they might have been described as an intimidating concoction of hardy yokels and urban wide-boys.

      They formed their first bonds in the small drill halls of rural Kent. The shared sense of place provided essential glue in the 4th West Kents until the normal regimental allegiances could be forged through training and combat. As one recruit put it, ‘the Drill Hall proved to be a great social club for the young men of the town, and I remembered how good it felt to have left the Church Choir and Boy Scouts … to become one of the men!’

      Private Ivan Daunt, from Chatham, where the naval dockyards were accelerating production to meet the German threat, was one of the battalion’s notable characters. Conceived when his father was on leave from the First World War, he was one of nine children and was blessed from an early age with a gift for getting into trouble. Constantly playing truant, he eventually left school aged thirteen and became an apprentice carpenter. On the day his apprenticeship finished Daunt was called up. He resented the blow this represented to his earnings: ‘I was getting one shilling sixpence ha’penny an hour as a carpenter which was good money and I was doing quite well. And then I go into the army on one shilling and sixpence per day! And then they took sixpence of that for barrack damages.’ But Daunt surprised himself and took well to the army life, helped by the fact that most of his comrades were of the same age and from the same part of Kent. The private’s mood was further improved on discovering that his wages would go up to two shillings on the outbreak of war.

      The officers were the sons of lawyers, stockbrokers, wealthy farmers and teachers. The men of the ranks came from the same great pool that had filled the ranks of the British army for hundreds of years: factory workers, farm labourers, apprentice tradesmen, but also, now, the sons of an aspirant working class, boys who looked to white-collar jobs or even to go on to university.

      John Winstanley was beginning his studies as a trainee doctor at St Thomas’s Hospital in London when war broke out, ‘and I was happy because I thought I’d much rather be with my army chums than studying for medical school … and I had another two and half years before I could qualify’. He took well to military life. ‘I loved the Territorial Army, and the whole way of life; we were in the outdoors and I loved the marching and the comradeship.’ The First World War had been a brooding presence