Memories of Kohima

UNVEILING OF THE ROYAL WELCH FUSILIERS MEMORIAL 1944

The Battle in Retrospect

One veteran returned to the battlefield 10 years later and recorded his feelings.

Memories of Kohima

MAJOR GORDON GRAHAM MC & BAR
of the Cameron Highlanders who returned to the battlefield in 1954

The trees are all young on Garrison Hill, and in Naga Village children are playing. The wet earth and sprouting shrubs have the same spring-fresh smell. And there is no stench. Grass-filled fox-holes still mark forgotten remains and some rusty ration tins and leather straps have escaped, as too worthless to pick up, a decade of scavengers.

Beneath the Hill the graves. One thousand three hundred and eighty-seven of them, in orderly, impersonal, endless rows. In this geometrical panorama there is no heartbreak, no rebuke, no regret. It is a design of peace, the pious peace that follows war, the revulsive peace of ‘Never Again’. It is the mute attempt to express the inexpressible by those who, helpless, are left behind. It has the same conscious inadequacy as the ‘Remarks’ column in the Visitors’ Book, where a sudden embarrassment catches the pen which has written smoothly the name and address and then stumbles on to an anti-climactic ‘Very impressive’ or ‘A fitting resting-place for heroes’. But one ex-soldier had written in a flash of perceptiveness, ‘I wish my name were here’.

Yet the heartbreak is there. On this bronze plate or that is written the parting message of those who loved. Some are inspired; some are simple and heartfelt; some are superstitious; some, like the blank spaces in the Visitors’ Book, are stilled to silence by the despair of incomprehension. But, mute or vocal, all concern those who speak, and we are left wondering what may be the response of those who are gone before. Do they know too much to keep their treasures in the crumbling storehouses of memory? Or do they go unforgetful, yet untrammelled by past happiness? Killed in Action. April 18 1944. Aged 27. ‘Good-night, Daddy.’ Killed in Action. April 21 1944. Aged 29. ‘A very parfit gentle Knight.’ Killed in Action. May 5 1944. Aged 35. ‘Beatae memoriae quis nos separabit?’ Killed in Action. May 6 1944. Aged 23. ‘Our only beloved son, who died that freedom might live.’

Statistics can be comforting. Fifty thousand rupees; 200 saplings; 36 tons of cement; 1387 graves; and 10 years. Like the poignant milestones, past which the country bus had driven in as many minutes as the advancing troops had moved in days, these figures measure the thinker, not the thought. To some they are mere computation; to others they are the sight, smell, and touch of a forgotten battlefield. Just as, at the summit crossroads where the bus groans to a standstill, the level space above is to some that which was once a tennis court and is now a war cemetery; to others it was a point of dominating destiny. Behind lies the tortuous mounting road. Before lie the jumbled blue forests and hills of Nagaland and Burma. Above the cross-roads is the memorial, its message unread by those who pass, but commanding and holding the gaze of those who arrive: ‘When you go home, tell them of us and say, for your tomorrow, we gave our today.’

Kohima War Cemetery – Cross of Sacrifice

Round the memorial are written the names. Brigadiers and privates; tankdrivers and stretcherbearers; signalmen and riflemen; names from every corner of England, Scotland and Wales. For our tomorrow, they gave their today. One of tomorrow’s children guided me to the memorial on the Naga Village height. With proud knowledge he explained the bullet-riddled sheets of corrugated iron. The track which the bull dozers drove up the hillside is now a leafy lane; and houses identical with those which the battle obliterated have hidden the pattern of war till it can no more be traced. Red blanketed Nagas, cheerful rebels now as then, stared in unbelief as I panted upward behind the nimble barefoot urchin to the place which I should have known better than he and which I knew before he was born. The Highlanders’ memorial is in a houseyard, a confusion of fencing, pigs and hens. McCassey, Mackay, Mackinnon, Macmillar, MacNaught, in bronze alphabetical permanence. Here 83 were killed and eight were missing. Beneath the names is the title of the Cameron lament, ‘Lochaber No More’.

The wail of the bagpipes from the Assam Rifles’ barracks on the ridge below was almost too timely a background to reverie. So, too was the bugle sounding reveille when stumbling through the thickets in the mist of a rainy dawn, I looked for ghosts and found none. We are the ghosts called forth by our own memories, investing each impersonal inch of soil with our own personal meanings; these meanings our self-conjured mists in which wraithlike, we startle only ourselves.

But as the mists are swept clear of the heights above by the rushing winds of an oncoming monsoon, there where we stare uncomprehendingly at the sudden call for vision – still too sudden too fleeting but unutterably certain – is the great meaning we seek. For the trees are all young on Garrison Hill, and in Naga Village children are playing.

Kohima Today »

Last Updated: 15 Jun 04