Fighting Talk

I had a tough war and not enough medals to show for it. An ungrateful nation ignored my encounters with more than one deadly enemy: I got nothing for drinking for weeks from a well at the bottom of which we eventually discovered a dead Jap. While hardship and boredom were the lot of many, few were as unprepared as I. You see, where I come from – a nice part of Vienna – very little Urdu was spoken, so you can imagine that when I stood before the court martial as a defending officer of an Urdu-speaking soldier accused of knifing a comrade, I felt I was being tested on a rather specialised field of battle. Let me fill you in. When the Army discovered that I spoke more than just English, they had just received a request for a linguist to be attached to the Indian Army. So they packed me off on a troopship bound for Bombay and straight onto a course to learn how to build landing fields in the jungle. When it was decided that it would be the Burmese jungle, they moved the course from Bombay to Calcutta. Life was expensive in the city and in no time I found myself in debt. The only way for an officer and gentleman to earn a bit extra was to go on another course since officers who passed an interpreters’ exam received an additional allowance. The trouble was that I needed to learn Burmese and the only course available was for Urdu. But my need was great and, as they believe at the War Office, there is English and there is foreign. In record time, I was declared a competent interpreter both of Urdu and of American air-strip laying manuals. Off to Burma next? Don’t you believe it. They wanted me to teach airport construction to officers newly arrived in Ceylon. And would I mind conducting a crack team of other ranks, including jeeps, lorries, food (including live goats), on the journey south? Kindly observe the distance from Calcutta to Madras, our point of embarkation for Colombo. My sergeant appointed himself navigator and contrived a route which took in every village that was home to one of my squad. The hospitality I received at our overnight stops was daunting, as were the logistics of obtaining the extra food and fuel to cover a fortnight’s journey that should have taken half that time. Not that the delay mattered: no one was expecting us at the other end – which was just as well since I arrived with two men fewer than I had signed for. The goats, I knew, we had eaten, but the missing soldiers … ? We arrived late at night, and made for the airport for somewhere to sleep. When the men were fed and watered, 1 decided to take a walk round the perimeter to get my bearings. In the darkness I saw some movement, and then, more clearly, German soldiers crawling on their bellies towards me. Wehrmacht, I thought, but who had tipped them off that I was coming? Their helmets were unmistakable. Halt, I cried with a German accent and shone my torch. The shiny helmets continued to advance slowly, propelled by the tortoises underneath, whose shells looked uncannily like German soldiers’ headgear. Time to turn in. I was made welcome in the RAF officers’ mess. One young pilot attached himself to me straight away. He was a beautiful boy, straight out of H. E. Bates. I could sense that something was wrong because I found him in tears one morning soon after my arrival. The others kept their distance, and I made it my business to piece together his story. He had flown Hurricanes in the Battle of Britain and lived to tell the tale. Then he had had some kind of breakdown and got this posting to Colombo and the job of taking up a two-seater aircraft once a day, taking a weather reading, and bringing it down again. His day’s work took 25 minutes. There was only one snag: he was afraid of flying. Every day, at 10 am, he turned up in the hangar, sweating and shaking, never knowing whether he could manage as much as taxi for take-off. The MO would not give him calming-down pills because he said he could not allow him to fly under the influence, so I pretended to be badly shaken by having seen a cobra in my hut (no point challenging the identity of a Singhalese snake in Urdu) and got hold of some Benzedrine, which I passed to my friend. It did not help much. In spite of all the talking and reassurance, he got worse. Some days I had to yank him out of bed and help him to get dressed. In the end, he asked me whether I would go up with him. It seemed churlish to refuse. So I put on his spare gear, strapped myself in behind him and prayed that he would not have an attack at 5,(XX) feet and ask me to take over. We carried on like this for a while, until one day he was mysteriously gone. I never found out where or why, but I was asked by the station commander to pack up his kit, perhaps because I was Army and saved some RAF face. Or perhaps it was intended as a thank-you when he said that he could wangle it for me to do the daily weather flight. I declined, not having the heart to tell him that I didn’t know how to fly a plane. More Fighting Talk As I was telling you in the May issue, I was knocking about on the Indian subcontinent, a British army lieutenant on attachment to the Indian army in acknowledgement of my linguistic prowess, including a recently acquired knowledge of Urdu. What I lacked was a proper job. I was supposed to supervise the construction of landing strips in the Burmese jungle, but no one seemed to think my contribution was essential to the coming battle. Who was I to try to push myself forward and influence strategy, the more so as my knowledge of languages did not extend to the correct phrases for formal surrender in Japanese (theirs or mine)? ‘Speak Urdu, don’t you,’ the brigadier tackled me out of the blue. ‘Just the man. Court martial.’ ‘I didn’t know learning Urdu was a punishable offence, sir.’ ‘Not your court martial – not yet! They warned me you were a bit of a wag. Where did you say you came from?’ ‘I didn’t say, sir, but I was born in Vienna and live in Hampstead when the army lets me.’ “Not much difference these days, eh? Got a job for you.’ The job was to act as ‘Soldier’s Friend’, a lay defending officer, to a soldier accused of knifing a comrade. A conference with my client revealed that he had been in a drunken brawl about which he remembered little except that he had been attacked and forced to defend himself. ‘With a knife?’ ‘No, sir. With a pen.’ ‘You mean a penknife.’ ‘No, a pen. Ball point.’ He pointed to a row of ball point pens in his breast pocket, their number an indicator of status in the world of the Indian army clerk. Over the next few days I studied the papers in the case and immersed myself in court martial procedures. The evidence had been negligently assembled and poorly documented. There was no reference to a pen or a knife, just ‘a weapon’. The victim’s injuries were described as ‘cuts’, which was not consistent with the use of a f)en. He was not down to be called by the prosecution because he was too ill to attend; his evidence was contained in a sworn statement. So I took myself off to the hospital and found him playing ping pong in the recreation hut. ‘Healing well?’, I asked. ‘Very well, sir. Look.’ He pointed to a small bandage on his arm and a sticking plaster below his left eye. ‘It must have been a jolly big knife.’ ‘Very big,’ he confirmed. ‘It made hole.’ The president of the court was a lieutenant-colonel, a member of the English bar, assisted by two lay assessors, both captains. The prosecuting officer was a tubby Tamil, a lawyer, distinctly unimpressive. I had him down as LI.D. Madras (failed twice). Proceedings were conducted in English, with every word translated into Urdu by the court interpreter. Just to lay down a marker, I pulled him up once when he took a shortcut in translation. Surprise all round. We got off to a bad start when I asked why the weapon was not among the exhibits. ‘It’s all in the papers,’ Tubby said irritably. ‘If you come to court you must read the papers.’ He began to outline his case. Translating every word made it infinitely tedious. When my turn came to speak, I decided to make the most of everybody’s desire to finish before lunch: ‘We are a bit short of substance: no weapon, no chance to cross-examine the alleged victim. The weakness of the prosecution’s case may help us to reach a speedy conclusion.’ At the words ‘speedy conclusion’ everybody perked up. ‘Given my lack of experience, I would like to ask the court’s indulgence in calling just one more witness who is not listed. He is waiting outside.’ There was a bit of whispering on the bench and a shrug of the shoulders from Tubby. ‘Granted,’ said the president, ‘but make it snappy.’ I made the two guards who stood either side of my client take off their caps so that they were bareheaded like the accused. Then I asked them to stand in a row, with the accused next to me and no longer in the middle. ‘What’s going on?’, asked Tubby. ‘This is most irregular.’ ‘I am holding an identity parade. Doing your job for you.’ Then I asked for the alleged victim to be marched in. I had fixed this with the hospital, which was only too happy to let him go. ‘Here we are. Now tell us,’ I said, pointing to the guard in the middle, ‘whether you recognise this man.’ Note that I didn’t ask whether it was the man who stabbed him – I wanted that to come from him. And the answer came back at once. ‘Yes, sir. He is the one who cut me.’ ‘Are you quite sure?’ ‘Quite sure, sir. He had the big knife.’ Tubby tried to save the situation, but it was beyond retrieval. ‘I think a conviction would be unsafe in the circumstances,’ I said. ‘We have wasted a morning,’ said the president. ‘Case dismissed.’ The following day I was collared by my brigadier. ‘You made a fool of the court. Nothing to be proud of.’ ‘On the contrary, sir. I stopped the court from making a fool of itself. The evidence was all over the shop. If there had been a conviction I would have asked for a review, and the Judge Advocate’s Office would have blown a gasket.’ ‘I dare say. Even so, it was all a bit too much Hampstead.’ Three weeks later, miraculously accelerated, I was on active service in Burma.