The people were slender and brown-skinned, the men mostly bare-chested with a wide length of brightly coloured cloth wrapped around their waist to fall to their ankles. The women were elegant in their sarongs – or longyi – daintily modest in small white tops as they moved to some slow inner rhythm which made them almost glide along as they carried baskets of produce on their heads in the heat of the day. It all looked so peaceful, but Jim knew the Japs often hid out in those villages, bringing death, destruction, and often slavery to these gentle people who’d been caught up in a war that was not of their making.

The mountain range Jim and the rest of the long column had just negotiated led to a broad valley which ran for approximately forty miles north towards another precipitous mountain. This valley was almost entirely smothered in jungle except for a few scattered Burmese villages and the cultivated areas around them.

Morale was high amongst the men, for the time for games of hide and seek with the enemy was over, and the Chindits had been ordered to engage and drive out the Japanese in a series of ambushes, and make it impossible for them to use the area by destroying their communications, arms dumps and vehicles. It was what they’d trained for and why they’d borne the privations and effort to get here, so each man was ready and eager to get to work, bring the fight to the enemy and rout him once and for all.

The idea was to let the enemy know they were there in force, heavily armed and ready to fight, so they set off at a deliberately fast and noisy pace to intimidate the already disorganised and fleeing Japs. It would take three days to reach the end of the valley, where they would set up operations at the foot of the towering mountain.

As the long column of men, mules and horses progressed boldly along the single road that had been carved through the valley, Jim could see the villagers working knee-deep in the water of the paddy fields, bent at the waist beneath large conical hats woven from strips of bamboo as they planted the green shoots of rice. At the sound of their approach the villagers stopped and stared at them – first in fear, and then in awe, some of the dainty and very pretty girls shyly waving and smiling before they returned to their work, their babies secure in slings on their backs.