NTR: Nothing to Report - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

"Superbly authentic atmosphere, taut narration. Mr Leasor would have delighted Kipling." - The Observer
"The most clinically accurate description of India and Burma about the time of the Kohima breakthrough I have yet seen." - Daily Telegraph
"Mr. Leasor brings to 'Nothing to Report' a journalist's straightforwardness, and an on-the-spot sureness about how frightened men behave, that are both refreshing and effective." - Spectator

In the spring of 1944, with British fortunes in the East at their lowest ebb, Japanese forces crossed the border into India. The invasion had to be stopped, whatever the cost.

Among those sent to meet it were the men of draft RAKXK. Having travelled halfway around the world, they found themselves defending an obscure corner of the front against an enemy they had never seen, in a place none of them had heard of. There they endured fear, exhaustion, love, loss and the sudden, arbitrary violence of war.

They were ordinary men brought together by extraordinary circumstances. Men who did not hate the enemy because they did not know him, but who knew they must kill quickly or be killed themselves.

Based on James Leasor’s own wartime service in Burma with the 1st Battalion, the Lincolnshire Regiment, NTR: Nothing to Report is a moving, unsentimental and darkly ironic novel about the men whose courage and sacrifice could be reduced to three words in a military communiqué.

NTR. Nothing to report.

“…Before a battle, everyone comports himself in a different way, and one that is curiously symbolic of the man himself. There are those who lay out their kit neatly by the side of their bed roll, and then calmly, so it seems, unroll their mosquito nets and lie down, ready and willing for sleep, no more concerned, at least to the looker-on, than if they were off on a week's holiday next day. There are others who lie, nets up, surrounded by busy mosquitoes, talking with friends in low tones, trying to peer through the dimness of the night and see the future and the day beyond. Still others smoke nervously and constantly, jamming their cigarettes through the hole in the concealing tobacco tin, lonely, yet drawn in on themselves like snails with their feelers beneath their shells. All waiting. All passing the time in the only way they know that would make it seem to go quickly. But for all of them, the time drags slowly, and there is no way of making it hurry. Some lucky ones actually fall asleep unexpectedly, and lie on their backs, fully dressed, snoring. But even for them, two o'clock eventually comes; for some too soon, and for others far too late…”

“…When the dust had cleared there was no-one left among them to grumble at all, not even Mr Brown. Ten men accounted for in an instant by one shell that had been made months before in a munition sweat shop outside Yoshida City by bare-foot, hungry workers; that had been carried a thousand miles in a ship with some hundreds of British civilians who were being transferred to Changi Jail from Hongkong, and then up through Malaya to Bangkok and Rangoon; and then brought lashed on the backs of mules, six shells a side, to Nyaunglebyin, where a gun crew of unknown Japanese lubricated it with urine and slapped it in the breach….”

“…Men who had come from opposite sides of the world to meet so fiercely thus in a place none had heard of a month before. Men who did not hate each other because they did not know each other, but who were intent on killing quickly if they could, for otherwise they might be killed themselves…”

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