Back to the Classics #17

I read this book for the 2019 Back to the Classics Reading Challenge.

Classic from Africa, Asia, or Oceania. The book reviewed here covers WWII when the author fought in Syria, Iraq and Iran. In Burma, he commanded a Chindit (i.e. special ops) brigade and fought with the 19th Indian Division at Mandalay. I feel a travel book or a translation of a novel by an African or Asian would be more appropriate to the category but the book below has been on the shelf for years so it fits my self-imposed imperative for this summer “Read books you got.”

The Road Past Mandalay: A Personal Narrative - John Masters

Born to British parents in India in a family dedicated to military service, John Masters was educated at Sandhurst, an important UK military academy. His return to India in 1934 as an officer in the 4th Prince of Wales’ Own Gurkha Rifles is told in the excellent autobiography  Bugles and A Tiger.  In early 1942, he attended the Indian Army's Staff College at Quetta. He was dinged informally for not being careful enough in his dress, not attending closely enough to using correct acronyms in orders, and not being deferential enough in expressing his opinions to superiors. He had the right stuff for an officer: a strong, forceful personality and concern for his men.

This war memoir works on all levels because Masters is a good story teller and not just of war stories. For example, he and his later wife Barbara were hiking high in the Himalayas when they met some shepherds:

…Marmots whistled at us from every stone, and we came upon two shepherds, with their flock, living in a stone shelter which they willingly shared with our porters. Their dogs were Tibetan sheep dogs, huge beasts of the chow family, their coats so thick and matted that even a leopard would have a hard time sinking his fangs through them; and they wore collars made of solid steel, with triple rows of spikes, hand-beaten and sharpened, six inches long.

The shepherds told us that these two dogs had killed a leopard down the valley only a month earlier. The dogs eyed us coldly, slow growls rumbling in their deep chests, as ready to kill us as any leopard, if we had come to harm the sheep. When we patted them they looked very puzzled. One tried to wag his tail but he really didn’t really know how to, and almost threw himself over. Affection was something they had never known, or had forgotten. They were guardians. But they came back for more, and I pulled the thick coats and pushed the heavy heads this way and that in a flood of sympathy. I had something to tell them about our common lot, if only I could speak to be understood….

“Our common lot” indeed. It’s not outlandish to wonder if this is an allusion to Zeno's metaphor about the dog leashed to the cart. If the dog has no choice in the matter, then it is better for her to trot along with the cart than be dragged and strangled by it. Same with soldiers, same with adults: making the best of a situation that can’t be helped is better than yapping and yipping about it the whole bloody way.

In another instance of making the best of a bad situation, Masters tells of the Chindit brigade's withdrawal from an over-run redoubt and the last request of a dying member of the Scottish Rifles is a light machine gun:

Men trudged on in a thickening stream down the muddy, slippery path past my command post. Shells and mortar bombs continued to burst all around…. A Cameronian lay near the ridge top, near death from many wounds. “Gi' me a Bren”, he whispered to his lieutenant. “Leave me. I'll take a dozen wi' me.”

The reader wonders where the infantry finds such courage, endurance, and self-sacrifice. Masters the professional shares observations of his superior Field Marshall “Bill” Slim:

In the end every important battle develops to a point where there is no real control by senior commanders. Each soldier feels himself to be alone. Discipline may have got him to the place where he is, and discipline may hold him there—for a time. Co-operation with other men in the same situation can help him to move forward. Self-preservation will make him defend himself to the death, if there is no other way. But what makes him go on, alone, determined to break the will of the enemy opposite him, is morale. Pride in himself as an independent thinking man, who knows why he’s there, and what he’s doing. Absolute confidence that the best has been done for him, and that his fate is now in his own hands. The dominant feeling of the battlefield is loneliness, gentlemen, and morale, only morale, individual morale as a foundation under training and discipline will bring victory.  

As a writer, Masters sets his goal for accuracy and realism. He underlines the savage fighting and the destruction of historical places, cultural treasures, and the environment.

A gruesome campaign of extermination began, among the temples of one of the most sacred places of the Buddhist faith. Sikh machine-gunners sat all day on the flat roofs. Their guns aimed down the hill on either side of the covered stairway. Every now and then a Japanese put out his head and fired a quick upward shot. A Sikh got a bullet through the brain five yards from me. Our engineers brought up beehive charges, blew holes through the concrete, poured in petrol, and fired a Verey light down the holes. Sullen explosions rocked the buildings and Japanese rolled out into the open, on fire, but firing. Our machine-gunners pressed their thumb-pieces. The Japanese fell, burning. We blew in huge steel doors with PIATs (bazookas), rolled in kegs of petrol or oil, and set them on fire with tracer bullets. Our infantry fought into the tunnels behind a hail of grenades, and licking sheets of fire from the flame-throwers. Grimly, under the stench of burning bodies and the growing pall of decay, past the equally repellent Buddhist statuary (showing famine, pestilence, men eaten alive by vultures) the battalions fought their way down the ridge to the southern foot - to face the moat and thirty-foot-thick walls of Fort Dufferin.

Basically, this book goes on the shelf with the other classic war memoirs Memoirs of An Infantry Officer by Siegfried Sassoon; Eastern Approaches by Fitzroy Maclean; Goodbye to All That  by Robert Graves and With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa by Eugene B. Sledge.