brothel at dawn feeling like jumping off a bridge into the river
out of sheer physical disgust with life.'
Robert Baldick, DINNER AT MAGNY'S
'Remember you were of the Fourteenth Army and never say die.'
General Sir William Slim, disbanding the Forgotten Army
3
1
The wild life in Medan was something neither night nor DDT
could stop.
Beyond our steamy windows, the darkness held all the
breathability of a sailor's armpit. A winged and nameless
shitbag came hurtling in from the murk, full of offence and
fury. Its manner was of one intent on shattering Р preferably for
ever Р the world speed record for Tropical Hirsute Insect
Nuisance Flying.
It burst across the room at drunken velocity, maintaining an
altitude of approximately two inches above the heads of the
assembled drinkers. The drinkers were tanking themselves up
for the arrival of a lorry-load of unleashed Dutch girls, and
failed to notice this freak of evolution. Still accelerating, the
shitbag gained height and ploughed its way through a cloud of
assorted mosquitoes, flies, moths, and fluttering uglies which
had appropriated our central light as a zone for combined aerial
combat and propagation of species.
I saw it because I was leaning against the far wall of the
mess, listening with Jock Ferguson to Johnny Mercer on War.
'The generals have done their best, but it's been a bloody
untidy war all along,' he was saying. 'Do you wonder we're
stuck here in such a right old cock-up? You can't say the war is
over, even now.'
'Och, you're exaggerating, man,' said Jock Ferguson,
