Introduction to Trial
by Battle
War literature is often associated with the First World War,
with an explosion of the genre in the late 1920s. Erich Maria Remarque’s All
Quiet on the Western Front was a bestseller and later made into a Hollywood
film, while generations of schoolchildren have grown up on a diet of the poetry
of Wilfred Owen and the words of Siegfried Sassoon.
Yet the novels of the Second World War – or certainly those
written by individuals who had first-hand experience of that war – are often
forgotten. First published in 1959 under the pseudonym Peter Towry, Trial by
Battle very much deserves to be remembered, and to be part of the literary
canon as a ‘wartime classic’. Its author David Piper was an officer educated at
Cambridge who went on to become a distinguished art historian and the director
of several national museums. The novel tells the story of Alan Mart, from his
training in India to the intensive jungle fighting in the Malayan campaign. The
critic Frank Kermode described it as ‘probably the best English novel to come
out of the Second World War’, while V.S. Naipaul found the writing superb, and
the novel to be ‘one of the most absorbing and painful books about jungle
warfare that I have read’. The jungle was an alien environment for all the
British, Indian and Australian soldiers fighting in Malaya. Very few novelists
of the Second World War come close to Piper in evoking the claustrophobia, heat
and intensity of this theatre. This very welcome reprint will bring this
forgotten war novel to a new readership.
At the opening of the novel, the protagonist Alan Mart has
just arrived in India, where Sam Holl is put in charge of Mart to show him ‘how
an infantry battalion in the Indian Army should be run.’ On the outbreak of the
Second World War India was still the ‘jewel in the crown’ of the British
Empire. The Indian Army was a part of the army based in India (alongside the
British Army); this army was the main instrument of control for both internal
security and defence of the borders, particularly the North West Frontier. Up
until the Second World War, the Indian Army was largely officered by British
officers in charge of Indian troops.
The huge expansion of the Indian Army at the beginning of
the war meant that there was a desperate need for trained officers – hence
Mart’s posting to this unfamiliar location. In 1939 there were just under
200,000 soldiers in the Indian Army, with only 1,912 British officers and 344
Indian officers. (In contrast, by the end of the war there were over two
million in the army with c. 36,438 British officers and 15,747 Indian officers.
It had become the largest volunteer army in the world.) In 1940 three officer training schools were
set up in India to accommodate the expansion of the officer corps (Alan Mart
attends one of these, after leaving university). Following their training,
newly commissioned officers elected to join their regiments in the Indian Army.
David Piper, for example, attended Bangalore Officer Training School and then
joined the 4th Battalion, 9th Jat Regiment. Then, just like Alan Mart, he
underwent the signals course at Poona, becoming the signals officer in the
battalion. The novel is very much based on his own experience.
The opening line of the novel introduces Mart to Holl, and
theirs is the central relationship throughout the book. The contrast between
the hard-drinking regular Indian Army officer, Holl, and the inexperienced
wartime officer, Mart, is very apparent from the word go. In the first half of
the novel, this manifests itself Alan’s rather bizarre decision to turn down a
relatively easy and safe posting, teaching German to fellow officers in Simla.
After a confrontation with Holl – and perhaps out of a desire to see action
himself – Alan rather baffles his adjutant by rejecting the position (‘Did you
say you did not want to go to Simla?’) Mart’s actions seem nonsensical, even to
him. Later on in the novel, as Alan’s experiences leave him desensitised to
army life, he develops a grudging, new found respect for Holl, the experienced
soldier. He has adapted to cope with the fighting life both through the army,
but also under Holl’s guidance. In the closing chapters, in the most desperate
of situations, it is Holl who Alan seeks:
He tried to find out whether Sundar had any idea what had
happened during the night, but Sundar had none, apart from the certainty that
there had been a great battle with great noise. For all Alan knew, Holl might
still be there; there was no sound of action anywhere near, only the rumble far
away to the south. His thought stopped at Holl as a terminus. There he had to
go.
If we see Alan’s shock at Holl’s behaviour earlier in the
novel, what the reader also witnesses is the intensity of army life, and more
specifically the culture shock of being in a different country, so far from the
familiar. This is revealed on numerous occasions, particularly Mart’s rather
uncomfortable relationship with the men he commands. He struggles with his
relationship with his orderly Sundar Singh – ‘Orderly? You mean he’s a soldier?
But he’s a child. Can’t be a day more than fourteen’ – and finds effective
communication with the men he commands extremely difficult:
He tried to talk to them and they answered ‘Yes, sahib,’ or
‘No sahib,’ in the gaps of his stumbling Urdu. They seem unknowable: they
seemed to wish to know, at least to understand what he wished, as much as he
did; there were foggy smiles, gestures left incomplete in the air, but there
was no contact. He got to feel very little more at home with them yet; he
certainly did not feel for one moment in command of them.
All of this combines to build a rather chaotic picture of
ill-preparedness, and indeed the alienation experienced by Alan in such
unfamiliar surroundings.
Indeed if the officer training is insufficient, the six
weeks spent with the training battalion for the Indian soldiers does not bode
well for the fighting ahead. In effect the Viceroy Commissioned Officers (a
level of officers between non-commissioned officers and the British
commissioned officers) are the link between the men and the British officers.
Holl tells Mart: ‘They’ll be very kind to you. Once the Hindu VCOs have drunk
you under the table on tumblers of desi whisky and you’ve overeaten of goat
curry with the Mosel ones, they’ll love you like a son.’ The paternalistic relationship
of the British officers and the Indian soldiers is very evident in the book,
sometimes bordering on racism, and problems with communication abound.
Evocative as these opening chapters of the novel are – where
we see Mart’s youth and inexperience, his uneasy relationship with Holl, the
confused and chaotic nature of some of the preparations – the book’s supreme
strength lies in its depictions of jungle warfare once the men arrive in
Malaya. The evocation of the claustrophobia, the heat, the fear and the tension
can only be drawn from direct experience. Notable is Alan’s realisation early
on that his equipment simply will not work in the jungle – a terrain almost
depicted as an enemy itself:
‘Drums, sir’ said Alan fiercely, ‘We might be able to work
something out with native drums.’
The glaring eyes popped, and blinked rapidly. Then they
glazed with a wary caution. Alan saw Scrapings’ gaze wander and tangle in angry
lost bewilderment amongst the endless trees, and recognizing the feeling, his
own anger vanished as he suddenly he felt the full weight of responsibility on
those elderly thin shoulders.
‘We’ll think of something, sir,’ he said gently but
confidently.
Later that day that day, a message reached him from the C.O.
[Commanding Officer] he was to proceed at once into Malacca again, and corner
all native drums that might be available.
Scenes of this nature are an accurate reflection of the
reality of Piper’s true experience, as noted in the regimental history. From
December 1941 to May 1942 the British Empire suffered the most humiliating
series of defeats in its history, as Hong Kong, Malaya, Borneo, Singapore and
Burma fell in rapid succession to the Imperial Japanese Army. The Fall of
Singapore in February 1942 was considered by the British Prime Minister,
Winston Churchill, ‘the worst and largest capitulation in history’. The
Japanese had overrun the numerically superior Commonwealth forces in Malaya in
just over two months resulting in more than 130,000 troops entering captivity.
As a lieutenant comments in Trial by Battle: ‘Never have so many run so fast
and so far from so few’. As with the ‘native’ drums scene, on numerous
occasions we see how the men are not prepared for the theatre into which they
have been sent – ‘I’m afraid our desert training will be somewhat
supernumerary’, is the dry comment from the Commanding Officer.
Once in the jungle itself, the text becomes fraught with
tension and a sense of isolation, ‘he looked up from the map at the solid bare
trunks that dwindled away from them but nevertheless closed their sight at a
radius of a hundred yards or so. They seemed like prison bars arrayed wilfully
as a maze. It seemed to him that one could not hope within reason to hold
country like this without much less than a man per tree, and he looked to Holl
to say so, but swallowed the remark’. When Alan first sees action – having
earlier heard the swirling rumours that ‘the Japanese take no prisoners’ – the
text vividly describes his scramble for survival when his jeep is hit and he and
Holl must try to make their way back to their own troops. As the situation
becomes more desperate, the light-heartedness that tinges some of the novel’s
opening chapters dissipates. Alan, and the reader, are far from the heady days
of training at Poona. Particularly visceral and moving is the scene in which
Mart feels he has no choice but to leave his wounded with the Australian padre,
knowing what their fate will be.
The throb and racket of the final Japanese attack had begun
a mile or so away. Arcs of fire, red, yellow, orange, streamed across the sky;
flares splashed glaring whiter and brighter than the moon, and sank slow as
thistledown. The display raged in brilliant and beautiful violence, seeming to
come from fore and aft of the position they had just abandoned, for perhaps
twenty minutes, half an hour – then, over the deep clamour of explosives, there
came the howl, thinned by distance but piercing eardrums like a glacier wind,
of the Japanese infantry going in for the kill.
Alan’s eyes closed, and he rocked where he stood. The
triumphant maddened howl was edged now by a scream that reached into the bowels
of the little group who stood there listening, dragging every nerve in their
bodies out searing through the skin. When Alan’s eyes opened again, the tears
were flowing down his face, blurring the southern sky that now was lit by the
pulsing leaping flame from trucks on fire.
David Piper served with the 4th/9th Jats in the Malayan
campaign. They arrived in theatre in early January 1942, and fought alongside
the Australians at Muar. Piper was the signals platoon commander in the
battalion. He along with Major White (second-in-command) went missing on 18
January when their car was ambushed on the way to brigade headquarters and
their driver killed. They spent the night by the side of the road, and
attempted to return to the battalion the following day. Faced by Japanese
tanks, they returned through the jungle – exactly as Alan Mart does in the
novel. On 19 January 1942, the battalion was ordered to join up with the
Australians. However they were heavily attacked, in the confusion there were
many casualties. Piper, having got lost, managed to the make his way back to
the 2/29th Australian Battalion but later became a prisoner of war. Mart’s
experience in Trial by Battle is thus almost an exact replica of Piper’s own
time in the jungle.
After the surrender at Singapore Piper was a prisoner of war
in Changi and then Taiwan (years later he wrote a very moving memoir and diary
of his time in Shirakawa camp in Taiwan I Am Well, Who are You?). In 1944, in
what was considered a major turning point for the war in South East Asia, the
Japanese Army suffered defeat at the hands of the British and Commonwealth 14th
Army at the Battles of Kohima and Imphal, and the later battles for Burma
(modern day Myanmar). The transformation in the fortunes of the Commonwealth
troops, in particular the Indian Army, was in a large part due to the
development of jungle warfare doctrine and the resulting improvements in
training, tactics and equipment. Unfortunately for many men such as Piper,
these developments had come too late.
After the war, Piper returned to Britain and married (he had
his own ‘Lettice’ in real life). He published a number of books on art history
and five novels under the pseudonym Peter Towry – Trial by Battle was the
first, published in 1959. One of the possible reasons for the pseudonym was
that some of the men in his battalion were still alive (Towry was his middle
name and he had been known as Pete by his old friends). In the foreword to I Am
Well, Who Are You?, a fellow prisoner of war wrote of Piper: ‘I was amused by
the ironic detachment with which he coped with the circumstances of being a POW
and the extreme modesty with which he regarded his achievements in the post war
world. Those of us who had the opportunity to make something of our lives after
the war were lucky. Many were not.’
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