Sultan. Continue, Sultan.’
To avoid the possible suggestion that he was partial to Samad, Captain Dickinson-Smith made a practice of picking on him and encouraging his hateful Sultan nickname, but he never did it in the right way; it was always too soft, too similar to Samad’s own luxurious language and only resulted in Roy and the other eighty Roys under his direct command hating Dickinson-Smith, ridiculing him, openly displaying their disrespect; by April 1945 they were utterly filled with contempt for him and sickened by his poncey-commander-queer-boy-ways. Archie, new to the First Assault Regiment R. E., was just learning this.
‘I just told him to shut it, and he’ll shut it if he knows what’s good for him, the Indian Sultan bastard. No disrespect to you, sir, ’course,’ added Roy, as a polite gesture.
Dickinson-Smith knew in other regiments, in other tanks, it simply was not the case that people spoke back to their superiors or even spoke at all. Even Roy’s Polite Gesture was a sign of Dickinson- Smith’s failure. In those other tanks, in the Shermans, Churchills and Matildas dotted over the waste of Europe like resilient cockroaches, there was no question of respect or disrespect. Only Obey, Disobey, Punish.
‘Sultan… Sultan…’ Samad mused. ‘Do you know, I wouldn’t mind the epithet, Mr Mackintosh, if it were at least
‘I called you Sultan and I’m calling you it again, all right?’
‘Oh, Mr
Will Johnson, who was a bit simple, took off his cap as he always did when someone said ‘British’.
‘What’s the poof on about?’ asked Mackintosh, adjusting his beer-gut.
‘Nothing,’ said Samad. ‘I’m afraid I was not “on” about anything; I was just talking, talking, just trying the shooting of the breeze as they say, and trying to get Sapper Jones here to stop his staring business, his goggly eyes, just this and only this… and I have failed on both counts, it seems.’
He seemed genuinely wounded, and Archie felt the sudden unsoldier-like desire to remove pain. But it was not the place and not the time.
‘All right. Enough, all of you. Jones, check the map,’ said Dickinson-Smith.
Archie checked the map.
Their journey was a long tiresome one, rarely punctuated by any action. Archie’s tank was a bridge-builder, one of the specialist divisions not tied to English county allegiances or to a type of weaponry, but providing service across the army and from country to country, recovering damaged equipment, laying bridges, creating passages for battle, creating routes where routes had been destroyed. Their job was not so much to fight the war as to make sure it ran smoothly. By the time Archie joined the conflict, it was clear that the cruel, bloody decisions would be made by air, not in the 30-centimetre difference between the width of a German armour piercing shell and an English one. The real war, the one where cities were brought to their knees, the war with the deathly calculations of size, detonation, population, went on many miles above Archie’s head. Meanwhile, on the ground, their heavy, armour-plated scout-tank had a simpler task: to avoid the civil war in the mountains – a war within a war – between the EAM and the ELAS; to pick their way through the glazed eyes of dead statistics and the ‘wasted youth’; to make sure the roads of communication stretching from one end of hell to the other were fully communicable.
‘The bombed ammunition factory is twenty miles south-west, sir. We are to collect what we can, sir. Private Ick-Ball has passed to me at 16.47 hours a radio message that informs me that the area, as far as can be seen from the air, sir, is unoccupied, sir,’ said Archie.
‘This is not war,’ Samad had said quietly.
Two weeks later, as Archie checked their route to Sofia, to no one in particular Samad said, ‘I should not be here.’
As usual he was ignored; most fiercely and resolutely by Archie, who wanted somehow to listen.
‘I mean, I am educated. I am trained. I should be soaring with the Royal Airborne Force, shelling from on high! I am an officer! Not some mullah, some sepoy, wearing out my chappals in hard service. My great-grandfather Mangal Pande’ – he looked around for the recognition the name deserved but, being met only with blank pancake English faces, he continued – ‘was the great hero of the Indian Mutiny!’
Silence.
‘Of 1857! It was he who shot the first hateful pigfat-smeared bullet and sent it spinning off into oblivion!’
A longer, denser silence.
‘If it wasn’t for this buggery hand’ – Samad, inwardly cursing the English goldfish-memory for history, lifted five dead, tightly curled fingers from their usual resting place on his chest – ‘this shitty hand that the useless Indian army gave me for my troubles, I would have matched his achievements. And why am I crippled? Because the Indian army knows more about the kissing of arses than it does about the heat and sweat of battle! Never go to India, Sapper Jones, my dear friend, it is a place for fools and worse than fools. Fools, Hindus, Sikhs and Punjabis. And now there is all this murmuring about independence – give
His arm crashed to his side with the dead weight and rested itself like an old man after an angry fit. Samad always addressed Archie as if they were in league together against the rest of the tank. No matter how much Archie shunned him, those four days of eyeballing had created a kind of silk-thread bond between the two men that Samad tugged whenever he got the opportunity.
‘You see, Jones,’ said Samad, ‘the real mistake the viceroy made was to give the Sikhs any position of power, you see? Just because they have some limited success with the kaffir in Africa, he says Yes, Mr Man, with your sweaty fat face and your silly fake English moustache and your pagri balanced like a large shit on the top of your head, you can be an officer, we will Indianize the army; go, go and fight in Italy, Rissaldar Major Pugri, Daffadar Pugri, with my grand old English troops! Mistake! And then they take me, hero of the 9th North Bengal Mounted Rifles, hero of the Bengal flying corps, and say, “Samad Miah Iqbal, Samad, we are going to confer on you a great honour. You will fight in mainland Europe – not starve and drink your own piss in Egypt or Malaya, no – you will fight the Hun where you find him.” On his very doorstep, Sapper Jones, on his very doorstep. So! I went. Italy, I thought, well, this is where I will show the English army that the Muslim men of Bengal can fight like any Sikh. Better! Stronger! And are the best educated and are those with the good blood, we who are truly of Officer Material.’
‘Indian officers? That’ll be the bloody day,’ said Roy.
‘On my first day there,’ continued Samad, ‘I destroyed a Nazi hide-out from the air. Like a swooping eagle.’
‘Bollocks,’ said Roy.
‘On my second day, I shot from the air the enemy as he approached the Gothic Line, breaking the Argenta Gap and pushing the Allies through to the Po Valley. Lord Mountbatten himself was to have congratulated me himself in his own person. He would have shaken this hand. But this was all prevented. Do you know what occurred on my third day, Sapper Jones? Do you know how I was crippled? A young man in his prime?’
‘No,’ said Archie quietly.
‘A bastard Sikh, Sapper Jones, a bastard fool. As we stood in a trench, his gun went off and shot me through the wrist. But I wouldn’t have it amputated. Every bit of my body comes from Allah. Every bit will return to him.’
So Samad had ended up in the unfeted bridge-laying division of His Majesty’s Army with the rest of the losers; with men like Archie, with men like Dickinson-Smith (whose government file included the phrase
