J. E. MacDonnell - 028 Page 5

  We walked into the bar of the ornate Taj Mahal Hotel, just opposite the harbour wall and the Gateway to India. Here, in this world-famed watering place, I found my man.

  "Have a gin," he invited automatically, "how's the writing going?"

  "Fair enough. But I'd like to send back something on India."

  "Great Scott, man, it's been done to death!"

  "All of it?" He looked at me shrewdly for a moment. Then he drained his glass.

  "The paper's been put to bed, I'm free. All right, then-if your stomach can stand it."

  In a minute or so we were driving in his car along a picturesque sea road, on one side the blue distance of the Arabian Sea, on the other ultra-modern blocks of concrete flats. They were let to wealthy Parsees, Hindus and Brahmins.

  We came to a European quarter inhabited mostly by British officialdom and visitors, and the car slowed, I saw a ragged native squatting near the sea wall. He appeared to be doing something to his left leg.

  The journalist stopped the car and led us over. The Hindu looked up as we approached, and leered horribly from a pock-marked face.

  "Alms, sahibs, alms for the love of Krishna," he whined, thrusting out his leg.

  I looked down. The ankle was swollen to twice normal size, and round it hung a filthy black piece of rag. Above this, the skin edges putrefying, was an ulcer two inches wide. I know now what he had been doing to his leg-he had been stirring the ulcer with a dirty stick.

  "Why in hell do you do that?" I asked him, disgusted. "Don't you want it to get better?"

  "Ah, sahib, then the white man would give me no money. But if it is kept red... Alms, sahib, alms for the love..."

  Nutty threw him a rupee.

  Soon we were out of the better-class suburbs, and, still travelling along the curve of the bay, entered an area of dirty brick houses, the street swarming with polyglot India, so that the car crawled along. Even this was new to us, for all native quarters were out of bounds to Servicemen.

  There were thin-legged Hindus with the caste mark in red on their foreheads, pantaloon'd Mohammedans, tall, grave Mahrattas, Pathans, and Sikhs from the hill country, bearded and turbaned. And everywhere, in doorways, climbing on to the car, scampering through pedestrians, cows and bullock-carts, hundreds of yelling half-naked children.

  Then the car was climbing a hill, one side of which dropped steeply to the water. The other side was densely wooded with green, cool-looking trees. Nutty pointed to a cluster of trees close together and to the right. Above those trees circled a flock of what appeared from this distance to be large black crows.

  "What birds are they?" Nutty asked.

  "You'll see," was all the answer he got.

  The good journalist, keeping the tag-line last...

  Our guide took us to the top of a hill, and there below us lay the whole city spread out, modern flats, public buildings, Hindus and Mohammedan temples, hovels and tents, all bounded by the blue, blue sea. Bombay, of course, being on an island.

  We could still see the grove of trees, and the birds hovering above, but now we were close enough to ascertain that they were not crows. They were vultures.

  As we watched, something, some movement, disturbed them. The grisly flock flapped suddenly into the air. But not for long. In a moment the lot of them swept downwards, out of sight behind the trees.

  "Now would be the time," my friend remarked cryptically.

  He read the question in our eyes. We drove towards the grove of trees and he explained, with professional aptness, the reason for the vultures.

  In India the Parsees are a wealthy sect, and they have a peculiar method of disposing of their dead. Among the trees we were approaching was a circular brick tower with its top open, entrance to which was strictly guarded. Inside were half a dozen slabs, or tables, of hewn stone. On these were laid the bodies of the dead.

  After due ceremony the mourners and relatives retired from the place. And in three or four days it was flooded, and the bones washed out to sea. Nutty and I looked at each other. Now we knew why the vultures had swooped down, why they had been disturbed. The place was called the Tower of Silence.

  We drove up to the main gate. It was not large, more like a slab of concrete. In the lower portion was a square hole with a wooden door-about the size of a coffin.

  At the gate we were stopped by a Parsee official, who pointed to a notice. It read:

  "Parsees only allowed in this compound.

  Visitors must produce permits before admittance."

  My friend explained that it was practically impossible to obtain a pass. He added that he would get us in if we really wanted to. Nutty looked dubious, but I had committed myself back in the Taj Mahal bar. So off we drove round the hill for a mile or so, then stopped before an iron grille in the brick wall.

  This was a priests' entrance, and we had to be quick. Through the gate we walked up a gravel path under the trees towards the Tower of Silence, on the opposite side to the guard. Now and again a vulture would rise, flapping heavily, above the trees, and settle down again.

  The phrase "where no white man has trod before" is hardly applicable anywhere these days. But I think the number of European eyes that have seen what we saw that afternoon are few.

  The inside of the circular wall was quite plain, no ornaments of any kind, just the half a dozen stone slabs and a mark round the wall where the flooding water rose. The vultures were busy round a table directly below us. But we were very quiet. The birds were not disturbed.

  I've seen a few nasty sights in five years of war, but to the end of my days I know I shall regret having intruded into the Tower of Silence.

  We regained the car, and I for one was quite ready for the India I should see in the lounge of the Taj Mahal. My friend, however, possibly because he was a newspaperman, had to continue the story. Maybe he thought our appetites had been merely whetted.

  Sticking to the macabre, he took us next to the burning ghats. The car slid to a stop outside a high brick wall, over the top of which hung a faintly aromatic haze of wood smoke. Just inside the gate was discernible a huge pile of logs.

  The Englishman spoke fluent Hindustani, and he argued and pleaded with the gatekeeper for five minutes, with the thing ending as we knew it would-with the production of his wallet. Even then the permission of the mourners had to be obtained-another ten rupee note. We were in.

  It was not until then that the significance of the mourners struck me. I didn't mind seeing the place, but... not in use. "Look here!" I said, "we can't go in there now. I mean to say..."

  "Oh, you won't see much," he grinned slightly. "Unless you've got a vivid imagination..."

  With mixed feelings I approached the square where the smoke was drifting lazily up. We passed through an archway, and automatically removed our caps. Our Hindu guide told us that that was not necessary, as the business was merely routine, and anyway, this was the seventh today! But we kept them off.

  The mourners numbered about 20. They sat in the shade of a sloping roof supported by the brick wall, a sort of lean-to, squatting and talking and watching the square. There seemed to be no tears. They seemed to be simply waiting.

  In the centre of the square were four iron stakes, about ten feet high, placed one at each corner of a rectangle ten by four feet. Their purpose was to support the logs of wood laid lengthwise between them. The wood was piled up for six feet. Then there came something white, limp. Then, on top of that, another three or four big logs.

  The bottom logs were burning steadily. The smoke rose slowly upward to the remote blue sky. And on the sixth log up the something white lay still, waiting. The guide told us the usual time was four hours.

  The mourners talked and squatted and chewed betel-nut. And waited. The smoke thickened and the flames licked higher.

  We did not wait four hours.

  There were other things we saw that afternoon; cruel, stomach-turning, unprintable.

  By now, day was fading. My friend said that he wanted to drive to the top of the Tower hill again-to show us a sight "to wash the taste away."

  Even before we made the top of the hill I was in a maze of wonder at the transformation in the sky.

  From a central point of indescribable brilliance low down in the west a flood of variegated light radiated to every point of the heavens, diffusing in its furthest parts to a soft, pink glow on the undersides of the fleecy clouds.

  The colours ranged from deep blood red to scarlet and pink, from yellow to brown and black, with here and there, dispersed like relieving banks, strips of the deepest blue. The water shone with a brassy glare, and the brown hills of the mainland beyond were bathed in a lambent fire.

  For a long time we gazed, silent, watching this extravaganza of fiery colour. It was resplendent. It was garish. It was cruel.

  It was sunset over India.

  CHAPTER FOUR FLEET AND FLOTILLA MANOEUVRES

  ADMIRAL OF THE FLEET, Lord Chatfield, once wrote:

  "Destroyers have in the past forty-five years grown in size, in speed, in guns and torpedo power and cost; they have become invaluable for many other purposes than those for which they were originally designed; but their old function remains: to guard the Fleet against attack by the torpedo." We were getting stronger now, almost each week bringing with it a new addition to our force. And as each ship came out of the horizon to anchor in the strongly-defended harbour of Trincomalee prepared to receive it, the importance of the destroyer flotilla assumed new significance. There were more big ships to protect, and the more there were the greater became their attraction for Japanese submarines.

  So that almost constantly the growing Fleet was at sea on exercises, which were in reality offensive sweeps, to ensure that efficient understanding and cooperation existed throughout; and, of course, with the big fellows putting to sea, so went we.

  We would invariably go out first, perhaps an hour ahead, not only to sweep a path for submarines, but to indulge ourselves in destroyers' own highly-skilled and dangerous little game, flotilla manoeuvres.

  Destroyers at exercise never fail to stir the old pulse, no matter how often you've witnessed the game. Not only the sight of those lean grey ships creasing through at speed, but the knowledge of what superb seamanship goes into the execution of the seemingly effortless manoeuvres. And that knowledge raises a feeling of absolute confidence in the captains who will take you into action. Perhaps that is one of the intended objects...

  Destroyers drill and form in much the same way as a squad of soldiers ashore. They move in line ahead, single file, turn into line abreast like a platoon, form fours, or sub-divisions, advance and retire at the flicker of a light.

  But these ships, two thousand tons of driving steel, manoeuvring only two hundreds yards apart, often less, are crashing through sometimes heeling seas at twenty-five knots, thirty miles per hour.

  The slightest error of judgment, the least moment of indecision, can mean a shearing, buckling collision, and Service oblivion for the commanding-officer.

  The masts of destroyers in line, with their signal halliards draped neatly down to the deck, tucked in at the waist, as it were, and the switchy sway of the mast's tapered length, remind me of a slender girl on a dance floor.

  We were in line-ahead for the beginning of the manoeuvres, eight of us, the sea as flat as a river, the land a low-lying blur over to port.

  A hundred yards ahead the leader, or guide ship, sank her stern in the water and spawned a smother of white foam from her tail. We were so close that the acrid fumes from her funnel caught our throats. Astern, a bow-wave creaming from her sharp forefoot, followed the next in line. Shortly the first signal hauled up the leader's mast: "Alter course together ninety degrees to starb'd." As one the eight grey bows swung off. They leaned over to port, and in a moment the flotilla was speeding at right angles to its former course, now in line abreast, side by side. Now and then a bow would surge forward a little, having a peep, then under reduced revolutions sink back into line.

  We split up into subdivisions then, our division comprising four ships, steaming in line ahead. Away to port, distance half a mile, cruised the other four. There was now to be performed a manoeuvre calling for the highest standard of individual skill.

  Those four ships were to head straight in at us, turn, and take up position in the line as before, one ship between two others, our line travelling all the time at twenty-five knots. Imagine, in a motorcar, coming down a side street into a main artery, and squeezing your machine in between two cars of a line travelling at right-angles to you, distance between cars two car lengths, speed of the lot thirty miles per hour.

  The signal was down, and in they came.

  But the Navy usually tries things the hard way, in case you have to. When they were almost in position, assuming that he was dodging a falling enemy salvo, our leader altered the course of the whole line.

  Then was provided for us watchers an exhibition of seamanship the like of which I defy any other Navy to equal. The destroyer whose station was ahead of us was almost on us, due to the sudden alteration of course. Her captain stood abaft the binnacle, in khaki shorts and sun helmet, leaning casually forward of his outstretched hands.

  I saw him bend to the voice-pipe. She started to swing. A cloud of foam was opening before her, her knife of a bow just inside the circle of our wake. Closer she came, skidding in sideways like a crab. Then, under the inertia of the turn, still slipping sideways, she slid neatly in under our bow, straightened up, and steered by the ship ahead.

  My trainer said something unprintable, an ejaculation of pure admiration. And added:

  "After that lot the flamin' skipper's entitled to his ruddy great cabin!"

  Perhaps that was one of the intended objects...

  For two hours the pack sped and twisted and slid over the sea, exercising every manoeuvre in the commodore's repertoire. Then the line formed up and headed at a sedate and steady twenty-five knots back to the Battle Fleet poking its armoured nose outside the harbour.

  It is doubtful if any machine of warfare at sea has been designed which equals in complicated ingenuity a destroyer's most lethal weapon-the twenty-one-inch torpedo.

  We were to carry out a dummy attack on the Battle Fleet this day, firing fish set to run beneath their bellies. Astern, the seven remaining destroyers of the flotilla followed our gyrations through the mine-swept channel like beads on a string. Ahead, like a block of flats on Bondi's skyline, waited the battleships.

  But first a brief insight into the tight mass of delicate machinery packed inside these long, steel shapes; machinery which, when bared, looks like the medical charts one sees of human viscera, coils and coils of intestinal copper and steel pipes all jumbled together in a seemingly chaotic mass. Yet out of it comes a range of more than a dozen miles, a speed of forty knots, and a punch packing the blast of a cruiser's full broadside.

  The modern twenty-one-inch torpedo, as fired from Fleet destroyers, contains six compartments of varying size.

  In the nose, or rather constituting it, the warhead. This rounded steel body is packed tight with high-explosive. The violent composition can be exploded only by direct contact with a bare flame, so in the very nose of the warhead is screwed a primer.

  Into this again small detonators of fulminate of mercury, one of the most sensitive explosives known, are fitted. To render this highly-dangerous concoction relatively harmless until the time arrives for it to do its work, a four-bladed propeller, called a pistol, is fitted over the detonators, on the very nose of the torpedo.

  Due to the forward motion through the water these vanes revolve, screwing the detonators hard up against the primers. Not difficult to imagine, then, what the slightest bump does to that little lot!

  Before we positioned ourselves, the battlers, perhaps to show what we dreadnoughts could expect were they fair dinkum, opened up with their main armament in a long-range throw-off shoot.

  They were hull-down on the horizon, the massive structures and funnels jutting up across close on fourteen miles of tumbling sea. Fourteen miles-and they had to try to lob their man-high shells in line with a leaping, heeling target forty feet wide. Some of those battleships, we remembered, had been lobbing their shells on the beach at Salerno a few months before.

  Through glasses you could see a black square at each distant masthead; the gunnery flag. It meant:

  "I am about to open fire."

  Looked like a concentration shoot, then.

  Closed-up at B-gun we waited. We knew-we'd done it scores of times ourselves-that those monstrous fifteen-inch barrels would have been thrown-off ten degrees ahead of us, the targets. The director would be aimed straight at us, and the turret layers and trainers would be following their director pointers, to gain the utmost from the exercise. But the turrets, and the guns, would have been thrown-off. Wouldn't they...?