The Retreat

As we came into Pegu a heavy fog rolled in. Our platoon was lying behind a low earth wall, with the rest of the battalion behind a taller bund to our rear. Out of the fog came the unmistakable sound of metal being knocked into the ground — a machine-gun being set up, no more than fifteen or twenty yards in front of us and barely visible.

I turned to the corporal senior to me and suggested we would be better off moving back. He agreed, and gave the order to retire from the left, each man warning the next as he passed. It was going well enough until a man came up to alert Tiddles and found him dead, shot in the back of the head. It must have been a stray round from our own bund behind us. During the same action the other corporal remarked what a cheeky devil this Jap was, appearing five or six yards off from behind a haystack; I brought my rifle round and fired, and did not wait to see whether I had hit him.

We fell back behind the bund with the rest, and from there began the long retreat towards Rangoon, which we had been told would be held at all costs. We marched along the railway, and the railway had its hazards, for our own troops had done their best to deny it to the Japanese. At one point we came to a bridge that had been set alight and half destroyed; we had to cross it with many of the sleepers burnt away, and one of the chaps fell from it onto his head and did himself considerable damage. Bandaged up, he marched on with us — one more hazard to be nursed along.

It was now that we learned what it was to be hungry and thirsty. For the thirst we stopped at a bullock wallow, shooed the bullocks aside, and plunged our hats into the water, drinking what trickled through the eyelets, filthy as it was — and very likely paying for it later in dysentery. At a village we were offered food, mostly rice on a banana leaf with a few minnows, eyes and tails still attached, and we turned it down. Plainly we had not yet learned what hunger really was. Later on we would have been glad of it.

Somewhere on the order to march for Rangoon, one of our sergeants was detailed to blow the bridge over the Salween River — the very road the Japanese had to take to get into Burma. Looking across to the far bank as he prepared the charge, he saw his own brother standing there. He blew the bridge all the same, and left his brother to the mercy of the enemy coming up behind. There are things a man is asked to do in war that no peace can ever quite undo.

We were not well served by those set over us. Our officer deserted us, taking with him the maps and the company cash that might have aided our escape; he was court-martialled afterwards, having used that money to hire a boat to India. As for rations, where other troops grumbled about their emergency tins of corned beef, ours were pilchards, and the oil they sat in all but boiled in the sun. They were scarcely fit to eat.