5 The Root Canals of Alfred Archibald Jones and Samad Miah Iqbal -1

Apropos it's all very well, this instruction of Alsana's to look at the thing close up; to look at it

dead-straight between the eyes; an unflinching and honest stare, a meticulous inspection that would

go beyond the heart of the matter to its marrow, beyond the marrow to the root but the question is

how far back do you want? How far will do? The old American question: what do you want blood?

Most probably more than blood is required: whispered asides; lost conversations; medals and

photographs; lists and certificates, yellowing paper bearing the faint imprint of brown dates. Back,

back, back. Well, all right, then. Back to Archie spit-clean, pink-faced and polished, looking just

old enough at seventeen to fool the men from the medical board with their pencils and their

measuring tape. Back to Samad, two years older and the warm colour of baked bread. Back to the

day when they were first assigned to each other, Samad Miah Iqbal (row 2, Over here now, soldier!)

and Alfred Archibald Jones (Move it, move it, move it), the day Archie involuntarily forgot that

most fundamental principle of English manners. He stared. They were standing side by side on a

stretch of black dirt-track Russian ground, dressed identically in little triangular caps perched on

their heads like paper sailing-boats, wearing the same itchy standard uniform, their ice-pinched toes

resting in the same black boots scattered with the same dust. But Archie couldn't help but stare. And

Samad put up with it, waited and waited for it to pass, until after a week of being cramped in their

tank, hot and suffocated by the airless machine and subjected to Archie's relentless gaze, he had

putted-up-with as much as his hot-head ever could put up with anything.

"You what?" said Archie, flustered, for he was not one to have private conversations on army

time. "Nobody, I mean, nothing I mean, well, what do you mean?"

They both spoke under their breath, for the conversation was not private in the other sense,

there being two other privates and a captain in their five-man Churchill rolling through Athens on

its way to Thessaloniki. It was i April 1945. Archie Jones was the driver of the tank, Samad was the

wireless operator, Roy Mackintosh was the co-driver, Will Johnson was crunched on a bin as the

gunner, and Thomas Dickinson-Smith was sitting on the slightly elevated chair, which, even though

it squashed his head against the ceiling, his newly granted captaincy would not permit his pride to

relinquish. None of them had seen anyone else but each other for three weeks.

"I mean merely that it is likely we have another two years stuck in this thing."

A voice crackled through the wireless, and Samad, not wishing to be seen neglecting his duties,

answered it speedily and efficiently.

"And?" asked Archie, after Samad had given their coordinates.

"And there is only so much of that eyeballing that a man can countenance. Is it that you are

doing some research into wireless operators or are you just in a passion over my arse?"

Their captain, Dickinson-Smith, who was in a passion over Samad's arse (but not only that; also

his mind; also two slender muscular arms that could only make sense wrapped around a lover; also

those luscious light green brown eyes) silenced the conversation immediately.

"Ick-Ball! Jones! Get on with it. Do you see anyone else here chewing the fat?"

"I was just making an objection, sir. It is hard, sir, for a man to concentrate on his Foxtrot F's

and his Zebra Z's and then his

assume such eyes belonged to a man filled with '

"Shut it, Sultan, you poof said Roy, who hated Samad and his ponceyradiooperator-ways.

"Mackintosh," said Dickinson-Smith, 'come now, let's not stop the Sultan. Continue, Sultan."

To avoid the possible suggestion that he was partial to Samad, Captain Dickinson-Smith made a

practice of picking on him and encouraging his hateful Sultan nickname, but he never did it in the

right way; it was always too soft, too similar to Samad's own luxurious language and only resulted

in Roy and the other eighty Roys under his direct command hating Dickinson-Smith, ridiculing him,

openly displaying their disrespect; by April 1945 they were utterly filled with contempt for him and

sickened by his poncey-commander-queer-boy-ways. Archie, new to the First Assault Regiment R.

E." was just learning this.

"I just told him to shut it, and he'll shut it if he knows what's good for him, the Indian Sultan

bastard. No disrespect to you, sir, 'course," added Roy, as a polite gesture.

Dickinson-Smith knew in other regiments, in other tanks, it simply was not the case that people

spoke back to their superiors or even spoke at all. Even Roy's Polite Gesture was a sign of

Dickinson-Smith's failure. In those other tanks, in the Shermans, Churchills and Matildas dotted

over the waste of Europe like resilient cockroaches, there was no question of respect or disrespect.

Only Obey, Disobey, Punish.

"Sultan .. . Sultan.. ." Samad mused. "Do you know, I wouldn't mind the epithet, Mr.

Mackintosh, if it were at least accurate. It's not historically accurate, you know. It is not, even

geographically speaking, accurate. I am sure I have explained to you that I am from Bengal. The

word "Sultan" refers to certain men of the Arab lands many hundreds of miles west of Bengal. To

call me Sultan is about as accurate, in terms of the mileage,

you understand, as if I referred to you as a Jerry-Hun fat bastard."

"I called you Sultan and I'm calling you it again, all right?"

"Oh, Mr. Mackintosh. Is it so complex, is it so impossible, that you and I, stuck in this British

machine, could find it in ourselves to fight together as British subjects?"

Will Johnson, who was a bit simple, took off his cap as he always did when someone said

"British'.

"What's the poof on about?" asked Mackintosh, adjusting his beer-gut.

"Nothing," said Samad. "I'm afraid I was not "on" about anything; I was just talking, talking,

just trying the shooting of the breeze as they say, and trying to get Sapper Jones here to stop his

staring business, his goggly eyes, just this and only this .. . and I have failed on both counts, it

seems."

He seemed genuinely wounded, and Archie felt the sudden un soldier-like desire to remove pain.

But it was not the place and not the time.

"All right. Enough, all of you. Jones, check the map," said Dickinson-Smith.

Archie checked the map.

Their journey was a long tiresome one, rarely punctuated by any action. Archie's tank was a

bridge-builder, one of the specialist divisions not tied to English county allegiances or to a type of

weaponry, but providing service across the army and from country to country, recovering damaged

equipment, laying bridges, creating passages for battle, creating routes where routes had been

destroyed. Their job was not so much to fight the war as to make sure it ran smoothly. By the time

Archie joined the conflict, it was clear that the cruel, bloody decisions would be made by air, not in

the 3o-centimetre difference between the width of a German armour piercing shell and an English

one. The real war, the one where cities were brought to their knees, the war with the deathly

calculations of size, detonation,

The Root Canals of Alfred Archibald Jones and Samad Miah Iqbal

population, went on many miles above Archie's head. Meanwhile, on the ground, their heavy,

armour-plated scout-tank had a simpler task: to avoid the civil war in the mountains a war within a

war between the EARN and the EL AS; to pick their way through the glazed eyes of dead statistics

and the 'wasted youth'; to make sure the roads of communication stretching from one end of hell to

the other were fully communicable.

"The bombed ammunition factory is twenty miles southwest, sir. We are to collect what we can,

sir. Private Ick-Ball has passed to me at 16.47 hours a radio message that informs me that the area,

as far as can be seen from the air, sir, is unoccupied, sir," said Archie.

"This is not war," Samad had said quietly.

Two weeks later, as Archie checked their route to Sofia, to no one in particular Samad said, "I

should not be here."

As usual he was ignored; most fiercely and resolutely by Archie, who wanted somehow to

listen.

"I mean, I am educated. I am trained. I should be soaring with the Royal Airborne Force,

shelling from on high! I am an officer! Not some mullah, some sepoy, wearing out my chap pals in

hard service. My great-grandfather Mangal Pande' he looked around for the recognition the name

deserved but, being met only with blank pancake English faces, he continued 'was the great hero of

the Indian Mutiny!"

Silence.

"Of 1857! It was he who shot the first hateful pig fat-smeared bullet and sent it spinning off into

oblivion!"

A longer, denser silence.

"If it wasn't for this buggery hand' - Samad, inwardly cursing the English goldfish-memory for

history, lifted five dead, tightly curled fingers from their usual resting place on his chest 'this shitty

hand that the useless Indian army gave me for my troubles, I would have matched his achievements.

And why am I crippled? Because the Indian army knows more about the kissing of arses

than it does about the heat and sweat of battle! Never go to India, Sapper Jones, my dear friend,

it is a place for fools and worse than fools. Fools, Hindus, Sikhs and Punjabis. And now there is all

this murmuring about independence give Bengal independence, Archie, is what I say leave India in

bed with the British, if that's what she likes."

His arm crashed to his side with the dead weight and rested itself like an old man after an angry

fit. Samad always addressed Archie as if they were in league together against the rest of the tank.

No matter how much Archie shunned him, those four days of eyeballing had created a kind of

silk-thread bond between the two men that Samad tugged whenever he got the opportunity.

"You see, Jones," said Samad, 'the real mistake the viceroy made was to give the Sikhs any

position of power, you see? Just because they have some limited success with the kaffir in Africa,

he says Yes, Mr. Man, with your sweaty fat face and your silly fake English moustache and your

pagri balanced like a large shit on the top of your head, you can be an officer, we will Indianize the

army; go, go and fight in Italy, Rissaldar Major Pugri, Daffadar Pugri, with my grand old English

troops! Mistake! And then they take me, hero of the 9th North Bengal Mounted Rifles, hero of the

Bengal flying corps, and say, "Samad Miah Iqbal, Samad, we are going to confer on you a great

honour. You will fight in mainland Europe not starve and drink your own piss in Egypt or Malaya,

no you will fight the Hun where you find him." On his very doorstep, Sapper Jones, on his very

doorstep. So! I went. Italy, I thought, well, this is where I will show the English army that the

Muslim men of Bengal can fight like any Sikh. Better! Stronger! And are the best educated and are

those with the good blood, we who are truly of Officer Material."

"Indian officers? That'll be the bloody day," said Roy.

"On my first day there," continued Samad, "I destroyed a Nazi hide-out from the air. Like a

swooping eagle."

"Bollocks," said Roy.

"On my second day, I shot from the air the enemy as he approached the Gothic Line, breaking

the Argenta Gap and pushing the Allies through to the Po Valley. Lord Mounthatten himself was to

have congratulated me himself in his own person. He would have shaken this hand. But this was all

prevented. Do you know what occurred on my third day, Sapper Jones? Do you know how I was

crippled? A young man in his prime?"

"No," said Archie quietly.

"A bastard Sikh, Sapper Jones, a bastard fool. As we stood in a trench, his gun went off and shot

me through the wrist. But I wouldn't have it amputated. Every bit of my body comes from Allah.

Every bit will return to him."

So Samad had ended up in the un feted bridge-laying division of His Majesty's Army with the

rest of the losers; with men like Archie, with men like Dickinson-Smith (whose government file

included the phrase "Risk: Homosexual'), with frontal lobotomy cases like Mackintosh and Johnson.

The rejects of war. As Roy affectionately called it: the Buggered Battalion. Much of the problem

with the outfit lay with the captain of the First Assault Regiment: Dickinson-Smith was no soldier.

And certainly no commander, though commanding was in his genes. Against his will he had been

dragged out of his father's college, shaken free of his father's gown, and made to Fight A War, as his

father had. And his father before him, and his father before him, ad infinitum. Young Thomas had

resigned himself to his fate and was engaged in a concerted and prolonged effort (four years now)

to get his name on the ever extending list of Dickinson-Smiths carved on a long slab of death-stone

in the village of Little Marlow, to be buried on top of them all in the family's sardine-can tomb that

proudly dominated the historicchurchyard.

Killed by the Hun, the Wogs, the Chinks, the Kaffirs, the Frogs, the Scots, the Spies, the Zulus,

the Indians (South, East and Red), and accidentallymistaken for a darting okapi by a

Swede on a big-game hunt in Nairobi, traditionally the Dickinson Smiths were insatiable in

their desire to see Dickinson-Smith blood spilled on foreign soil. And on the occasions when there

wasn't a war the Dickinson-Smiths busied themselves with the Irish Situation, a kind of

Dickinson-Smith holiday resort of death, which had been going since 1600 and showed no sign of

letting up. But dying's no easy trick. And though the chance to hurl themselves in front of any sort

of lethal weaponry had held a magneticattraction for the family throughout the ages, this

Dickinson-Smith couldn't seem to manage it. Poor Thomas had a different kind of lust for exotic

ground. He wanted to know it, to nurture it, to learn from it, to love it. He was a simple non-starter

at the war game.

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 de motivation and despair. Amongst the

well-worn canon was the Tragic Death of Roy's Fiancee, 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 cafe owner tell of the miniatureinvasion 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, chip board 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.