Even so, it’s marvellous how at times my thoughts are as clean as stars on a dark night. Maybe when I get back to England, where there’s clarifying frost and snow, I’ll be able to see things intelligent and stark, read a lot and learn to use big words and know what they mean so that Pauline will say: “Hark at him! Swallowed a dictionary!” whenever I come out with one.
A matter of fifty yards and they swung into the jungle, brushing aside creepers in an initial burst of exuberance at being on the move. It was marvellous, marvellous, and a jolly efficient show, the CO would be saying, yet the time was midday and they had been shaken to life at five, which was seven hours ago. So how little energy can you have when it takes a day’s work to get started? The idea stabbed his resistance at the beginning: they were to shin-up with all speed to the crest or ridge, descend by different routes, lunge up again at another angle until someone caught sight of the plane or any shot-out component of it, making crazy red-pencilled zigzags on the map like wounded flies.
Stumbling over trees in a well-spaced single-file, chopping at creepers that could not be booted down, Brian was already exhausted. Little was visible through the dim shadows of giant trees, and constantly freeing his rifle from some stray creeper, he climbed automatically, peering ahead and to left and right in the hope that some part of the plane would show itself. Blisters began at his heels, sore spots that grew fat on the aqua vitae of his life, that soon from the movement and constriction of his boots burst into the covering of woollen sock, stuck there until he pulled them loose during a pause. Which was unwise, he discovered on setting out again, for the soreness took on a new lease of torment against him — that nevertheless had to be lived with.
At two in the afternoon Odgeson signalled a rest, and they collapsed against trees, to rip open tins of meat, snap at biscuits and bars of chocolate. “What I’d like to know,” Brian called to the others, “is who’s coming up to rescue us?” After a ten-minute smoke they went on, and in another ten minutes it seemed as if they hadn’t rested at all.
If I stopped and lay down, I wouldn’t get up again. Even the thought of those poor wounded bastards can’t make me go quicker. All I want to do is sleep. Why didn’t they crash in swamp or sea? They’d have been back safe now without this godless grind. Maybe we’ll find them soon and zoom off to camp. Christ, though what if we couldn’t even hope for that, if we were flying from the Japs in war with no place to go, or if we were Communists running before the Grenadier Guards? In that case we’d soon be out of it, one way or another. He pulled off his boots: one blister had turned white, puffed out like a growth of dirty flour over his skin, and hurt more now, as if the air were infectious and gathered it more quickly than the wool. A heavy inappropriate plane roared along the level of the hill, then lifted and flew back at a less dangerous height.
They climbed through bushes and between threatening trees, drying up one dark patch of sweat only to have another painted there as if with a wet brush while they weren’t looking. It seemed to Brian after a while that, should he for some reason stop climbing, his legs would go on making the same pedalling ache of ascent, out of control like a puppet with St. Vitus’s Dance. By six they were on the crest, marked on the map as three thousand feet. “We’ve done wonders,” Odgeson said.
“We ought to get the VC for this,” Cheshire grinned.
“They could stuff it,” said Baker.
“Let’s find them bastards,” Brian said, “and get out of it.”
They began the descent, slithering on an altered compassbearing. Since Gunong Barat, they had developed an instinctive feeling for the shape of the earth under its great wadding of ponderous trees, sensed like ants in the gloom of thistle-strewn hillocks the easy climbs or pitfalls of a quick descent long before they were seen or felt by the feet. To Brian the smell, humidity, quality of travail, the intense silence of desperation felt whenever they paused to rest, seemed now like home and second-nature, an acknowledged fight on the earth connected to a lesser-known and felt contest in the jungle deep within himself, a matching that in spite of his exhaustion made the trip seem necessary and even preordained.
At dusk, his eyes lost their sharp vision — as if he needed glasses to make leaves and the hats of the others clear again. They watched the sun setting over Pulau Timur, the length of the distant island settling into the sea like a silent deserted raft. Clouds above were spearheads pointing down the sea, so vividly red that it looked as if, while they stared, a tremendous sausage of blood had just burst over the island’s black hills and rolled a lava of sunset into its concealed valleys.
By seven it was too dark to go on searching, and Baker worked on the radio to make contact with Knotman’s party (the others sitting around as if, in the dark forest, he were trying to get through to some listening God for instructions), until Knotman answered: “That you, Baker? As if I didn’t know. We haven’t seen anything yet, so we’ll bed down for the night. Went up to the north ridge and looked into the next valley. So now we’re halfway to the bottom again. Did you see the sunset over Pulau Timur? It looked like the end of the world from this side. We contacted the army an hour ago, and they’ll stay with us tonight, moving in your direction in the morning. I think we’re about a mile away, but you can’t tell in this.”
Brian spread his ground-sheet and blanket in the undergrowth and drifted along tunnels of weird dreams, emerged into the dazzling half-light and half-dark of a snowstorm, heavy white flakes falling thickly around and chilling him to the bone as he fought against it. When the storm stopped, the fields were white over, the sky a milk blue, low and still threatening. But the snow-covered fields, in spite of his shivering, felt good to be in.
He opened his eyes to wonder where he was, and the warm smell of the jungle told him. Someone else was awake, sitting with hands clasped around his knees nearby. Hoping it was almost dawn, Brian looked at his watch: four-thirty, its luminous hand glowed. He felt for his rifle, and cursed to realize it was the first thing he thought of. I should throw it away. “How long do you guess this search’ll go on?”
“It depends on our luck,” Odgeson said. “We could be kept knocking around for a fortnight.”
Brian lit a cigarette, and threw one over: “It’s a long time to be slogging around in this.”
“We’ll be relieved in a few days,” Odgeson guessed. “Somebody else will take over.”
“Not that I couldn’t go on for weeks. It’s funny the way I feel in two minds about it.” Like everything, he added to himself.
“I suppose we all do,” Odgeson said. Their cigarettes glowed in the darkness, red flies helicoptering on the warm buoyancy of their thoughts. Odgeson fell asleep but Brian smoked half a tin of cigarettes before it got light.
At six Knotman came through on the radio: the two parties would descend and make contact with the jeeps in a couple of hours. Another jungle-rescue unit had been flown up from Singapore and would join the search. Odgeson acknowledged and they set off.
After a sweet breakfast of canned milk, and the sun’s warm penetration to his rheumatic bones, Brian felt renewed. Yet in the first hour he was plunged to the senile age of ninety. He felt weak and nondescript, was already fed up with the zigzag futility of the trip. Scabs were forming in his armpits, sore from the sweat of continual movement, and now the same mechanical ascendency over the chafing pain had to be won as over the blisters on his feet the previous day. The six days on Gunong Barat seemed by comparison an easygoing romp in which he had held out fine against the rigours of jungle travel, even though he’d lugged twice the weight on his donkey-back. “I can’t see why they didn’t hold us in the village until the planes had spotted something,” he called out at the first rest, as if to make it a subject of general discussion.