Books: Face of War: Glory

THE ROAD PAST MANDALAY (341 pp.) —John Masters—Harper ($5).

The shelves sag with books about World War II turned out by professional writers who served as amateur soldiers, and by professional soldiers who became amateur writers. The two groups often seem to be writing about different wars. Into the no-man’s land between the two camps moves John Masters, who from 1934 to 1947 was a professional soldier of a particularly proud breed—an officer in the Indian army. Since then, he has become a professional writer with seven novels about India to his credit (Bhowani Junction, Nightrunners of Bengal, The Venus of Konpara). In his autobiographical The Road Past Mandalay, Masters uses his novelist’s insight and his soldier’s knowledge to write an absorbing, sharply distinctive story of World War II as fought in the East.

The Road Past Mandalay is a sequel to Bugles and a Tiger, published in 1956, in which Masters told how a schoolboy became a soldier. The new book tells how the soldier became a man. After eight years in the army, the 28-year-old Masters was assigned in 1943 to the Long Range Penetration force commanded by the famed and fanatical Orde Wingate. “You’re going to die,” Wingate rasped at one of the men, and the prediction seemed likely. Supplied entirely by air, the brigade was to go150 miles behind the Japanese lines in Burma and stage the daring attacks and ambushes that made Wingate a legend.

Blood & Mud. Major Masters led his disciplined Gurkhas of the 111th Indian Infantry Brigade on slashing raids against the Japanese and on harrowing night marches. Then he learned what war was really like: he was ordered to make a stand at a point code-named Blackpool. Outnumbered and outgunned. Masters’ men were slowly driven back. “I wanted to cry,” he writes, “but dared not, could only mutter ‘Well done, well done.’ ” The brutality of battle numbed both armies. “A Cameronian lieutenant fell head-first into a weapon pit and two Japanese soldiers five yards away leaned weakly on their rifles and laughed, slowly, while the officer struggled to his feet, slowly, and trudged up the slope. The shells fell slowly and burst with long, slow detonations, and the men collapsed slowly to the ground, blood flowing in gentle gouts into the mud.”

Later, as he ordered the retreat from Blackpool, Masters was faced with the decision of what to do with 19 hopelessly wounded stretcher cases—”the first man was quite naked and a shell had removed the entire contents of his stomach . . . another seemed to have been torn in pieces by a mad giant.” To avoid holding up the retreat. Masters ordered the men shot. “One by one, carbine shots exploded curtly behind me. I put my hands over my ears, but nothing could shut out the sound … I muttered, ‘I’m sorry,’ and ‘Forgive me,’ and hurried on.”

Hardened by such defeats, John Masters was a tough, battlewise lieutenant colonel during the final, crushing campaign against the Japanese. For six hours one day he got the chance to command the crack 19th Indian Infantry Division in combat—”the summit and culmination of my military life . . . The experience itself made me understand even more fully Lee’s saying that it is fortunate war is so terrible, otherwise men would love it too much.”

Foxhounds & Champagne. There is more than the blood of battle in The Road Past Mandalay. Masters deftly relates the bizarre incidents of war—the middle-aged Japanese officer who drove unharmed through the startled brigade in a chugging Chevy, staring straight ahead and looking as though he had just committed “a grave social faux pas.” Masters tells of monocled British officers who went off to war with a pack of foxhounds and 40 dozen cases of champagne, and who could turn a man to jelly just by peering with wonder at his clothes. And Masters writes frankly of his affair with a married woman, who proudly bore him an illegitimate daughter before they could be married.

Masters writes emotionally, sometimes overemotionally. But his style in these reminiscences is several cuts above the more self-conscious manner of his fiction. Masters is at his best writing about the peculiar, intense, masculine love a professional soldier has for the men he leads into battle. There came the day in 1945 when the Indian army—British, Sikhs, Gurkhas, Madrassis, Pathans—swept to the attack for the last time in its 87-year history. Masters, whose family had lived in India for more than 150 years, watched them go with a sudden surge of choking pride: “All these men knew their commanders, and as the vehicles crashed past, most of the soldiers were on their feet, cheering and yelling. The Gurkhas, of course, went by sitting stiffly to attention, whole truckloads bouncing four feet in the air without change of expression. The romance of war—but only a fool would begrudge us the excitement and the sense of glory, for no one on that plain had wanted war, and all of us had known enough terror to last several lifetimes.”