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was hardly a pause in the rain. Then one night, high overhead, one heard a squawking of invisible
birds. The snipe were flying southward from Central Asia. The rains tailed off, ending in October.
The fields dried up, the paddy ripened, the Burmese children played hopscotch with gonyin seeds and
flew kites in the cool winds. It was the beginning of the short winter, when Upper Burma seemed
haunted by the ghost of England. Wild flowers sprang into bloom everywhere, not quite the same as
the English ones, but very like them–honeysuckle in thick bushes, field roses smelling of peardrops,
even violets in dark places of the forest. The sun circled low in the sky, and the nights and early
mornings were bitterly cold, with white mists that poured through the valleys like the steam of
enormous kettles. One went shooting after duck and snipe. There were snipe in countless myriads, and
wild geese in flocks that rose from the jeel with a roar like a goods train crossing an iron bridge. The
ripening paddy, breast-high and yellow, looked like wheat. The Burmans went to their work with
muffled heads and their arms clasped across their breasts, their faces yellow and pinched with the
cold. In the morning one marched through misty, incongruous wildernesses, clearings of drenched,
almost English grass and naked trees where monkeys squatted in the upper branches, waiting for the
sun. At night, coming back to camp through the cold lanes, one met herds of buffaloes which the boys
were driving home, with their huge horns looming through the mist like crescents. One had three
blankets on one’s bed, and game pies instead of the eternal chicken. After dinner one sat on a log by
the vast camp-fire, drinking beer and talking about shooting. The flames danced like red holly, casting
a circle of light at the edge of which servants and coolies squatted, too shy to intrude on the white
men and yet edging up to the fire like dogs. As one lay in bed one could hear the dew dripping from
the trees like large but gentle rain. It was a good life while one was young and need not think about
the future or the past.
Flory was twenty-four, and due for home leave, when the War broke out. He had dodged military
service, which was easy to do and seemed natural at the time. The civilians in Burma had a
comforting theory that ‘sticking by one’s job’ (wonderful language, English! ‘Sticking by’–how
different from ‘sticking to’) was the truest patriotism; there was even a covert hostility towards the
men who threw up their jobs in order to join the Army. In reality, Flory had dodged the War because
the East had already corrupted him, and he did not want to exchange his whisky, his servants and his
Burmese girls for the boredom of the parade ground and the strain of cruel marches. The War rolled
on, like a storm beyond the horizon. The hot, blowsy country, remote from danger, had a lonely,
forgotten feeling. Flory took to reading voraciously, and learned to live in books when life was
tiresome. He was growing adult, tiring of boyish pleasures, learning to think for himself, almost
willy-nilly.
He celebrated his twenty-seventh birthday in hospital, covered from head to foot with hideous
sores which were called mud-sores, but were probably caused by whisky and bad food. They left
little pits in his skin which did not disappear for two years. Quite suddenly he had begun to look and
feel very much older. His youth was finished. Eight years of Eastern life, fever, loneliness and
intermittent drinking, had set their mark on him.
Since then, each year had been lonelier and more bitter than the last. What was at the centre of all
his thoughts now, and what poisoned everything, was the ever bitterer hatred of the atmosphere of