that a good many have forgotten those few scanty lessons on Burma which they had in the geography class am of their youth. Though, probably, there are not many like certain friend of mine, who—when I told him that I was leaving my London parish to go to Burma—said: "I suppose that's short for Birmingham!"
Burma is the country which lies to the East of the Bay of Bengal, and is, therefore, the most eastern province of our Indian Empire, and it touches Assam, China, and Siam. You get to its chief port, Rangoon, where the rice comes from, by a month's sea voyage from England unless you happen to have a fast non-stopping private aeroplane, in which case, you could do it by a straight flight in about thirty-six hours.
When you get there, you find a tropical climate—with an average temperature thirty degrees higher than the average of England—which gives you five months of rain and then seven months of no rain. If you ask, as so many do: "Can an Englishman really enjoy being out there?" I should say If you're out there in the wartime spirit to "do your bit" it is all delight and romance; if you're out there in the poet-war spirit to "get your piece" (I see that my typewriter insists on spelling that word with an "ie" instead of an "ea") it is an alternate boiling and baking which soon makes you feel a good bit over-done.
Now, of the Burmese people—the first thing that strikes you is their language. It is Mongolian—that, is, akin to Chinese—and, therefore, quite foreign to the Western ear. It's not quite the "out-grabe " of the "mone raths" in "Alice in Wonderland," being rather a series of spits and clicks.
Speaking of the difficulties of the language reminds me of an incident which occurred in my first week out there. I was playing with some children, when one of them put a small object into my hand with a remark. I didn't understand much of the remark, but caught the verb "to eat" and, responding immediately to the suggestion, put the thing into my mouth and crunched it up. I then learnt that it was a monkey-nut with the shell on.
A few minutes after-wards, another boy put another object into my hand with another remark. Again I caught only the verb "to eat." and was about to respond to the suggestion when I thought are that it felt rather hard, and, examining it more closely, to see whether it required shelling, I found it moved, and identified it as a large black beetle!
My work in Burma is mainly routine work at head-quarters, under fairly stable and ordinary conditions of town life in a suburb of Rangoon. But even that is by no means monotonous. Frequent burglaries of the premises, not infrequent murders in the neighbourhood, a street or two of wooden houses burnt every now and then, an occasional wild-cat hunt or cobra chase, strikings by lightning, an annual earthquake, periodic visitations of plague and cholera—these things offer variety to life.
Although we can never call the town-life of head-quarters "humdrum," it is touring in the jungle which furnishes the real emotional thrills. I have covered between 30,000 and 40,000 miles in the province of Burma, in all kinds of transport and all kinds of company; but it is only possible to enumerate briefly some of the situations that arise. I think the most uncomfortable journey that I can recall was an eight-hour night journey on the uncovered seat of a third-class railway carriage—during the first five hours we were literally unable to change position by reason of the crush around and on top.
The most discouraging moment I can remember was once when we came to the last stage of a journey into a wild district. The first man I interviewed as to how to get on to our goal assured me that no visitors to that district ever survived the virulence of the local fever; the second refused to accompany me because a man-eating tiger had been making havoc on the road fur the past few nights; the third consented to take us in his cart, provided that there was sufficient company to insure safety against the highwaymen. We did the journey all right, and had confirmation of all the opinions!
One incident serves often to remind me of the necessity for discretion. I was going along a slippery mud track behind my guide when he suddenly told me emphatically to keep close to the left. Investigating carefully for myself, I discovered that we were crossing the face of a small precipice, on a ledge about eighteen inches wide, and that on the left was a sheer drop of about twenty feet into a swamp of goodness knows how much depth of mud.