Pale Shadow of Science. Brian Aldiss

mercy of the RTOs along the route. RTOs were Railways Transport Officers; they sat at various points along the system of routes the British had forged, like spiders in a big metal web. Occasionally, they would call us off the train; occasionally, we could wrest from them either fresh supplies or a meagre travel allowance.

      The RTO at Allahabad, a great steel town, allowed us to sleep on the platform of his magnificent station. Next day at dawn, we were put on a milk train heading East. Every day, Burma – a word synonymous with death – drew nearer.

      We visited Benares and, untutored as we were, had only contempt for the pilgrims washing in the filthy waters of the Ganges. Then the train was carrying us across the infinities of the Ganges plain. Again the labouring figures of people and animals, committed every day to struggle beneath the sun.

      The line ran straight ahead until it faded into sizzling heat. Our train stopped unexpectedly at a wayside halt. On the platform stood a corporal, immaculate in his KD, rigidly to attention. The Indian passengers leaning from the window or hanging on the outside of the coaches took some interest in him. He was bellowing at the top of his voice.

      ‘Reinforcement detachment from Mhow heading for 36 British Division, disembark from train immediately. Bring your kit. At the double. Fall in.’

      ‘Christ, that’s us,’ said Ted Monks. ‘We’re not getting off here, are we? Where the hell’s this? This is nowhere.’

      We de-trained and fell in with our kit and our sack of bread and bully beef. We stood to attention. The train pulled away. It disappeared into the distance, down the straight line, across the great plain.

      Without explanations, we were ‘fell in’ outside the halt in a column of twos. On orders from the corporal, we began to march. A dusty track stretched away from the railway line at right angles to it. We progressed along it, sweating in silence.

      After an hour’s march, we reached a transit camp. It was arbitrarily established, and could just as well have been next to the railway line. There was no shade. We paraded in the sun to be addressed by a sergeant, who told us we were there to get properly washed and dhobied; we would be given a meal and would proceed with our journey in the morning. We were fell out.

      As Monks said, we had arrived at nowhere. Wild dogs and jackals ran through our bashas during the night (I was thrilled – something that did not happen at home). Kite hawks – the hated kite hawks – dived down and scooped food out of the mess tins of anyone unwary enough to cross an open space with his meal. Beyond the perimeters of the camp was flat desolation. The camp was the British world.

      One member of the camp staff was a man I recognized. He had been on the same troopship, the Otranto, which had brought our posting to India. I remembered him from among thousands of other troops aboard because he walked about in a distinctly civilian way (i.e. stoop-shouldered) singing a snatch of song over and over again.

      Take thou this rose,

      This little thing…

      There he was, bathed in Indian sunlight, clutching a piece of paper going about some negligible errand. I got close to him. He was singing to himself. It was the same song. I dubbed him the Take-thou-this-rose-wallah. When we got talking, I learnt that he prided himself on this snip of a posting he had secured, office orderly at the Transit Camp; it meant that he would not have to go to Burma. I was convinced that anywhere was better than that nowhere camp.

      A year or so later, it happened that I saw the Take-thou-this-rose-wallah again. He was alone in a crowd. To my delight, he was still singing the same unfinished lines of song to himself. War had no power to alter whatever was on the Take-thou-this-rose-wallah’s mind.

      We returned to our journey with a sack full of fresh provisions. The train was shunted into a siding at Jamalpore, where monkeys swarmed down, climbed throught the open windows of our carriage and stole two loaves of bread from our sack.

      Furious shouts. I jumped up and out of the window and on to the top of the train in no time. Six large rhesus monkeys regarded me with disapproval, before making off with their loot. I followed, jumping from carriage to carriage. The monkeys carrying the loaves began lagging behind. I had almost caught one when we came to some branches overhanging the line. The six of them leaped up and disappeared gibbering into the crown of a giant tree. We’d lost our bread.

      We were met at Sealdah Station when we arrived in Calcutta. A truck carried us to a transit camp buried somewhere in the greasy outskirts of the city. They say that Calcutta is a memorial to the unquenchable human spirit of survival. One’s first impression is that one has – as one was expecting to do all one’s life – arrived in Hell, that here is human desperation on a gigantic scale, and that the slums and hinterlands of the Infernal Regions are spreading until they encompass all India. A black water buffalo was calving on an iron bridge over a railway line. Her body lay on the pavement, her legs in the road. All the traffic, including our trucks, ran over her hooves. I looked down as we passed. A calf was emerging from among pulped flesh.

      Our camp lay under a railway embankment, surrounded by ferocious slums. Seven Dials in Henry Fielding’s time would have looked the same if you had put it under the grill. The tents which comprised the camp were survivors from the first world war. Everything was indescribably filthy, and flies buzzed everywhere.

      It was a refuge for deserters. East of Calcutta, the war machine drew everyone into Burma and the fighting. You either jumped off here or were drawn on. Deserters had no chance of escaping to England or to any neutral country. Their best bet was to hang about in this filthy camp, for years if need be. Some of the N.C.O.s also had deserted, a fiddle was working whereby everyone still managed to draw army pay on which to venture into town once a week, to whore and booze.

      One of our detachment nervously asked if we would not stand ‘a better chance’ if we joined the ranks of the deserters.

      ‘I’d rather die in the bloody jungle than rot here,’ said Monks, with his usual solid sense.

      After two days, we reported to Howrah station, in order to continue our journey to Dibrugarh and 36 Div. The RTO at Howrah mysteriously took two of our number away, for posting elsewhere. No explanations were given. Nine of us were left, with damaged morale.

      The line from Howrah northwards had come under American administration. American troops were on the train, noisy, casual, well-dressed. They had attached a canteen, which they called the caboose. Every fifty miles or so, the train would stop in the middle of nowhere, and anyone who wanted could collect a mug of coffee from the caboose. We were hospitably invited to do the same. The coffee was excellent. But we simply could not understand the Yanks and their boyish excitement at going to war. One of them, however, presented me with a copy of Astounding Science Fiction, which he had finished reading.

      Our excitement increased as we neared Dibrugarh. What a welcome we would get! The railway ran along the south bank of the wide Bramaputra. After many changes of train and mysterious delays, we reached Tinsukia, the railhead. No one was there to meet us. The RTOs had erred.

      We waited on the station, kit drawn up round us. Dusk thickened on the plain. In the distance, clear, aloof, still in sunlight, stood the majestic range of the Himalayas, with Tibet beyond. Their snow-crowned heights slowly turned pink with sunset.

      A three-tonner rolled up. We climbed aboard and went bumping into the dark. The driver was mad and did his best to run down any dogs which crossed the road. He succeeded twice. All round us was miserable secondary growth, slum jungle.

      We arrived at the Dibrugarh camp at three in the morning. A banner over a wooden sentry post announced that we had made contact at last with the British 36th Division. They were about to go into action north-eastwards, towards the River Salween, to strengthen Vinegar Joe Stilwell’s Burma Road to Chungking, the wartime Chinese capital.

      A corporal was woken. He had no knowledge of us. There was nowhere for us. They did not need reinforcements. We would have to sleep in the mess, on the mess tables, and someone would sort out the balls-up in the morning. No, there was no grub. Not at four in the morning, mate. What did we think they were, a bloody hotel?

      The