With the Zeros constantly buzzing overhead on patrol and to protect the Jap convoys using the road, the USAAF were called in to get rid of them. Which they did swiftly and efficiently before destroying a huge store of rice which intelligence had spotted several miles away hidden in a deserted Burmese village.

Jim and his platoon had dug in on the rugged slopes of a hill where kanyin trees overshadowed the teaks. They cleared the lesser growth to form clean lines which gave them a good view of the road beneath them, then took it in turns to sleep and eat. Jim had been dreaming about Peggy and Beach View when he woke for no apparent reason and automatically reached for the carbine resting between his knees.

He was instantly alert, listening for any sound that might have been the cause of his waking so abruptly, but there was no bird call, enemy rustle or animal snuffling – not even the snores and breathing of the men around him. He could see the bulk of Big Bert on watch at his machine gun, and the huddled figures of the Gurkhas lying in wait with their Brens while the other men slept in a rough circle behind them. Looking down the hill he could see the deeper shadows of massed men, mules and horses at rest within the hollows and defiles of the terrain and the long, empty road running through the valley.

Jim realised it was the silence that had woken him – a silence which was like nothing he’d experienced before coming to Burma, and seemed to hold a special quality. He relaxed and looked up through the kanyin trees which stood two hundred feet high, their vast upper branches forming broad, leafy canopies that were smothered in red and white flowers.

It was like being in nature’s cathedral, he thought, with the long, straight trunks forming the walls and aisles, the canopies the roof, above which sailed a full, orange moon. He lay there watching the way the leaves and blossoms of the kanyin trees formed beautiful patterns against the moon, and how a pale mist was rising from the valley to drift up the slope and silently fill the aisles between the trees and entwine its way along the trunks. It was at moments like this he could forget his reason for being here, and just revel in the wonder of nature’s mysterious beauty.

Dawn came and cast a pearly light over everything, chasing away the mist and bringing with it the distinctive tenor bell call of the Sambhur stag, one of the red deer which roamed wild through Burma and India.

When Jim and the others had first heard it, they’d taken it to be the Japs conducting their usual ploy of using bird calls to signal to one another, but one of the officers had put them straight, even going so far as to quote a poem by Kipling about the deer.