The long story of how Samad went from the pinnacle of military achievement in the Bengal corps to the Buggered Battalion was told and retold to Archie, in different versions and with elaborations upon it, once a day for another two weeks, whether he listened or not. Tedious as it was, it was a highlight next to the other tales of failure that filled those long nights, and kept the men of the Buggered Battalion in their preferred state of demotivation and despair. Amongst the well-worn canon was the Tragic Death of Roy’s Fiancée, a hairdresser who slipped on a set of rollers and broke her neck on the sink; Archie’s Failure to Go to Grammar School because his mother couldn’t afford to buy the uniform; Dickinson-Smith’s many murdered relatives; as for Will Johnson, he did not speak in the day but whimpered as he slept, and his face spoke eloquently of more miserable miseries than anyone dare inquire into. The Buggered Battalion continued like this for some time, a travelling circus of discontents roaming aimlessly through Eastern Europe; freaks and fools with no audience but each other. Who performed and stared in turns. Until finally the tank rolled into a day that History has not remembered. That Memory has made no effort to retain. A sudden stone submerged. False teeth floating silently to the bottom of a glass. 6 May 1945.
At about 18.00 hours on the 6th of May 1945 something in the tank blew up. It wasn’t a bomb noise but an engineering disaster noise, and the tank slowly ground to a halt. They were in a tiny Bulgarian village bordering Greece and Turkey, which the war had got bored with and left, returning the people to almost normal routine.
‘Right,’ said Roy, having had a look at the problem. ‘The engine’s buggered and one of the tracks has broken. We’re gonna have to radio for help, and then sit tight till it arrives. Nothing we can do.’
‘We’re going to make no effort at all to repair it?’ asked Samad.
‘No,’ said Dickinson-Smith. ‘Private Mackintosh is right. There’s no way we could deal with this kind of damage with the equipment we have at hand. We’ll just have to wait here until help arrives.’
‘How long will this be?’
‘A day,’ piped up Johnson. ‘We’re way off from the rest.’
‘Are we required, Captain Smith, to remain in the vehicle for these twenty-four hours?’ asked Samad, who despaired of Roy’s personal hygiene and was loath to spend a stationary, sultry evening with him.
‘Bloody right we are – what d’ya think this is, a day off?’ growled Roy.
‘No, no… I don’t see why you shouldn’t wander a bit – there’s no point in us all being holed up here. You and Jones go, report back, and then Privates Mackintosh, Johnson and I will go when you come back.’
So Samad and Archie went into the village and spent three hours drinking Sambucca and listening to the café owner tell of the miniature invasion of two Nazis who turned up in the town, ate all his supplies, had sex with two loose village girls and shot a man in the head for failing to give them directions to the next town swiftly enough.
‘In everything they were impatient,’ said the old man, shaking his head. Samad settled the bill.
Walking back, Archie said, ‘Cor, they don’t need many of ’em to conquer and pillage,’ in an attempt to make conversation.
‘One strong man and one weak is a colony, Sapper Jones,’ said Samad.
When Archie and Samad reached the tank, they found Privates Mackintosh and Johnson and Captain Thomas Dickinson-Smith dead. Johnson strangled with cheese wire, Roy shot in the back. Roy’s jaw had been forced open, his silver fillings removed; a pair of pliers now sat in his mouth like an iron tongue. It appeared that Thomas Dickinson-Smith had, as his attacker moved towards him, turned from his allotted fate and shot himself in the face. The only Dickinson-Smith to die by English hands.
While Archie and Samad assessed this situation as best they could, Colonel-General Jodl sat in a small red schoolhouse in Reims and shook his fountain pen. Once. Twice. Then led the ink a solemn dance along the dotted line and wrote history in his name. The end of war in Europe. As the paper was whisked away by a man at his shoulder, Jodl hung his head, struck by the full realization of the deed. But it would be a full two weeks before either Archie or Samad were to hear about it.
These were strange times, strange enough for an Iqbal and a Jones to strike up a friendship. That day, while the rest of Europe celebrated, Samad and Archie stood on a Bulgarian roadside, Samad clutching a handful of wires, chipboard and metal casing in his good fist.
‘This radio is stripped to buggery,’ said Samad. ‘We’ll need to begin from the beginning. This is a very bad business, Jones. Very bad. We have lost our means of communication, transport and defence. Worst: we have lost our command. A man of war without a commander is a very bad business indeed.’
Archie turned from Samad and threw up violently in a bush. Private Mackintosh, for all his big talk, had shat himself at St Peter’s Gate, and the smell had forced itself into Archie’s lungs and dragged up his nerves, his fear and his breakfast.
As far as fixing the radio went, Samad knew how, he knew the theory, but Archie had the hands, and a certain knack when it came to wires and nails and glue. And it was a funny kind of struggle between knowledge and practical ability which went on between them as they pieced together the tiny metal strips that might save them both.
‘Pass me the three-ohm resistor, will you?’
Archie went very red, unsure which item Samad was referring to. His hand wavered across the box of wires and bits and bobs. Samad discreetly coughed as Archie’s little finger strayed towards the correct item. It was awkward, an Indian telling an Englishman what to do – but somehow the quietness of it, the manliness of it, got them over it. It was during this time that Archie learnt the true power of do-it-yourself, how it uses a hammer and nails to replace nouns and adjectives, how it allows men to communicate. A lesson he kept with him all his life.
‘Good man,’ said Samad, as Archie passed him the electrode, but then, finding one hand not enough to manipulate the wires or to pin them to the radio board, he passed the item back to Archie and signalled where it was to be put.
‘We’ll get this done in no time,’ said Archie cheerfully.
‘Bubblegum! Please, mister!’
By the fourth day, a gang of village children had begun to gather round the tank, attracted by the grisly murders, Samad’s green-eyed glamour, and Archie’s American bubblegum.
‘Mr Soldier,’ said one chestnut-hued sparrow-weight boy in careful English, ‘bubblegum please thankyou.’
Archie reached into his pocket and pulled out five thin pink strips. The boy distributed them snootily amongst his friends. They began chewing wildly, eyes bursting from their heads with the effort. Then, as the flavour subsided, they stood in silent, awed contemplation of their benefactor. After a few minutes the same scrawny boy was sent up as the People’s Representative once more.
‘Mr Soldier.’ He held out his hand. ‘Bubblegum please thankyou.’
‘No more,’ said Archie, going through an elaborate sign language. ‘I’ve got no more.’
‘Please, thankyou. Please?’ repeated the boy urgently.
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ snapped Samad. ‘We have to fix the radio and get this thing moving. Let’s get on with it, OK?’
‘Bubblegum, mister, Mr Soldier, bubblegum.’ It became a chant, almost; the children mixing up the few words they had learnt, placing them in any order.
‘Please?’ The boy stretched out his arm in such a strenuous manner that it pushed him on to the very tips of his toes.