knees to stop their trembling.
The American came over to us, his face smiling. ‘Gentlemen, we are safe.’ And because we remained unmoving and silent, he said again in Russian, very slowly, ‘Gentlemen, we are safe.’
Zaro shouted and the sound startled me. He threw down his stick and yelled, his arms above his head and fingers extended. He threw his arms about the American and Smith had to hold him tight to prevent his running over to the patrol and kissing each man individually.
‘Come away, Eugene,’ he shouted. ‘Come away from them, I have told them we are filthy with lice.’
Zaro started to laugh and jig inside the restraining arms. Then he had the American going round with him in a crazy, hopping polka, and they were both laughing and crying at the same time. I do not remember starting to dance but there we were, the four of us, stamping round, kicking up the dust, hugging one another, laughing hysterically through the blur of tears, until we collapsed one by one on the ground.
Kolemenos lay sprawled out repeating softly to himself the American’s words. ‘We are safe… we are safe…’
The American said, ‘We shall be able to live again.’
I thought a little about that. It sounded a wonderful thing to say. All that misery, all that sorrow, the hardship of a whole year afoot, so that we might live again.
We learned from Mister Smith that this was a patrol on exercise which would take us, if we were not too weak to march, a few miles to the nearest rough road where they had a rendezvous with a military truck from their main unit. He had told them that we had come so far a few more miles would not kill us. With the main unit there would be real food.
The patrol produced groundsheets from their packs and rigged up a shelter from the sun. We lay beneath it resting for about an hour. My head throbbed and I felt a little sick. We were handed a packet of cigarettes and some matches. Even more than food just then I wanted to smoke. To handle so ordinary a civilized commodity as a box of matches gave me a warm thrill. The smoke itself was bliss. From somewhere came a big tin of peaches, ready opened, and we dug our fingers in, stuffed them in our mouths and crushed the exquisite juice and pulp from them. We drank water from Army water-bottles and were ready to go.
It seemed to me that none of us could have recalled details of that cross-country trek. The patrol adjusted its pace to our weary shamble and it must have taken about five hours to cover ten miles. Zaro marched with me and we buoyed ourselves up with the pretence that we were getting along at a swinging military pace.
‘The heroes’ return,’ Zaro grinned. ‘All we need now is a band to lead us.’
The altogether delightful quality of everything that happened to us at the end of the march was that it required no resolution or decision from us. There was a bumping ride by lorry at that breakneck speed which is the hallmark of Army driving anywhere in the world. We were as thrilled as schoolboys with the trip — our first on wheels since we left the Russian train at Irkutsk eighteen months ago. We were in process of being gathered up and looked after, told what to do, tended, and later, even cosseted. The British took over completely.
I never found out exactly where we were. At that time I did not care. Any guess I might make from perusal of maps could be hundreds of miles out. Smith must have found out, but if he ever told me, the information did not register. I hugged to myself only the great revelation that this was India.
The young British Lieutenant who watched us ease ourselves down over the lorry tailboard was amazingly clean, spruce and well-shaven. I observed him as the American told him our story. His expression as he stood listening in the shade of the trees at the small roadside encampment was incredulous. His eyes kept wandering from Smith to us. He was trying to understand. He put several questions, nodding his head slowly at each answer. I thought how young he looked. Yet, he was about my own age.
The American told us, ‘He believes me now. He says he will make arrangements for us to be deloused and cleaned up here because he can’t take us back to base in this condition. He says he will have to isolate us from his troops until this is done but that we will be well fed and cared for. He says we need not worry.’
That night we were given a hot meal that ended with stewed fruit and steamed pudding. I had my first experience of hot, strong, tinned-milk Army tea, lavishly sweetened. We were given cigarettes. We were given first-aid treatment for our torn and bruised feet. And that night we slept secure, wrapped in Army blankets, in a tent.
The novelty, the bustle and the excitement of it all kept me going. There was no time for me to stand still and discover how near to collapse I was. Breakfast the next day absorbed my attention — more tea, corned beef, Australian cheese and butter from tins, unbelievably white bread, tinned bacon rashers and marmalade.
The delousing was a thorough affair. We stripped off all our clothes — the sheepskin surcoats,
Kolemenos said, ‘I hope those bloody lice die hard. They have had a good time at my expense.’
I turned to him and he to me. Then we were all exchanging looks and the laughter bubbling out of us. We had realized we were seeing one another for the first time — really seeing for the very first time the lines, the set of the mouth, the angle of the chin and the character of the faces of men who for twelve months and four thousand miles had shared the wretched struggle for survival. It seemed the most comical thing that had ever happened to us. I had never thought of what might lie beneath the matted hair, and neither, I suppose, had they. It was like the midnight revelation from some fantastically-prolonged masked ball.
‘Why, Zaro,’ I said, ‘you are a good-looking man.’
‘You look all right yourself,’ Zaro answered.
And Mister Smith was not as old as I had thought him, now that he was shorn of his greying hair. And Kolemenos, in spite of the ravages that marked us all, was as handsome as a big, fine-bodied man could be. We sat there laughing and joking in our nakedness while the fire roared.
Scrubbed clean, our cuts, sores and scratchings anointed, we were made ready for our re-entry into a civilized community. We received white, crisp new underwear, bush shirts, stockings and canvas shoes, and, to top the lot, dashing Australian-type light felt hats. Smith dressed in a leisurely, careful way, but the other three of us hurried through the operation in an enthusiastic race to be first ready. We looked one another over and liked what we saw. We joked about the stark whiteness of our knees.
They drove us away westward. I had a curiously detached feeling about it, like an exhausted swimmer allowing himself to be carried along in a tide race. We came to a small military town, but I had no chance to look at it. We were immediately lodged in sick quarters.
The Army doctor had been waiting for us. He examined us gravely, eyes narrowed behind thin tortoiseshell spectacles. He nodded his head, thinning on top, in acknowledgment of Smith’s answers to terse questions. He was aged about forty, quick-moving, sympathetic behind the professional facade of impersonal efficiency. We needed a lot of care, he told Smith. We needed to take things easy. Recovery might take a long time.
For a few days they kept us there. The doctor dosed us with medicines and pills. We lounged and lay about. We ate most magnificently and were plied with fresh fruit. Kolemenos amused the small staff with his huge appetite. We were allowed to smoke as often as we pleased.
Here it was that we temporarily parted from Smith. He said be was being taken away to see the American authorities. ‘You three will be taken to Calcutta. Whatever happens I shall see you there.’
We shook him by the hand. There didn’t seem to be anything we could say.
‘Just keep your spirits up,’ he said. ‘The doctor tells me we are all going to be very sick before we recover from our trip. But he says that with the proper attention we shall get in a big hospital we should pull through.’
I thought we were not as ill as that and said so. I did not appreciate then that I was feeling a quite spurious sense of well-being, that I was a little drunk with the excitement of these wonderful last few days, that the reckoning was yet to come.
He went away from us like a figure slipping out of a dream. Zaro said, ‘We shall be seeing him in Calcutta,’ as though India were a small place and Calcutta was just around the corner. It was the way we felt. Everything was taken care of. We were spent forces, content to be carried along. All the hammering urgency and the iron- hard resolution of the last bitter year had drained from us. We were more sick than we knew.
I have small recollection of the journey to Calcutta, except that it was long and tiresome and I was shrouded in black depression. We smoked incessantly.
