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1. Razmak

The Mahsuds, with their light skins and ruddy cheeks,
stride along, each slung with a rifle,
dagger at belt.

Here it’s Hadrian’s Wall.
Our troops peer across the stone battlements
or out of towers, like legionaries.

Saturday in the club is the click
of snooker balls, Indian beer, then
Sunday hangover and a curried morning.

The nearest woman’s cantonments away.
Captain Scott’s ‘Tiger’ is too manky to fondle.
Nightly we stand on the verandah and spray the lawn.

2.Second-lieutenant Pettit

Pettit’s fatal move that first
lunchtime in the sixth-battalion mess

was asking half-shy, half-sly, for a whisky
when we asked for sherry.

Posted two weeks later, he’s Colonel Hewson’s oblation
to the God of Worry for his hard-drinking mess.

3. Out of the Body

Scampering and skittering up stony slopes
we bag our coigns of vantage on the hills
and sit in this thin heady oxygen.

Scampering and skittering down,
I find I’m racing for a rock,
bullets bouncing round my boots,

and I’m in the air, watching,
aware of life, aware of death:
equally possible, both waiting quietly.

I watch what seems like
a former self racing for a rock,
which he reaches,

and then I’m one with his crouch —
grinning at two grinning havildars —
while mortars whump.

Tubby Sen’s binoculars
study the sniper’s ridge
from a steel car. A mule is dead.

Later Tubby, glum as a pike,
studies me without binoculars,
as Fet cackles

and I know I’m accepted and can die young.

4. Intoxication

After dark, within our temporary drystone walls,
I sink to the bottom of my slit
and feel my steel-framed campbed
bouncier than a bed with springs.

Up there the stars are drinking oxygen
and burning brighter. My lungs are ecstatic.
From the bottom of my little room
Everything’s extending for ever like an expanding attic.

5. Nights in the Sixth Battalion Mess

There’s a shortage of good whores in Mobile...
Oh the Ball, the Ball, the lovely Ball, the Ball of Kerriemuir...

The songs are new to these nine KCO’s
in our stone camp surrounded by barbed wire.

We get pickled on Gibsons:
little white onions in the gin.

Major McFetridge is egg-bald like the chaps,
though without the pigtail: a white egg.

Short, always chirpy, balding,
he was glad to complete the job

and be like them. He sighs, though,
gives rueful glances, as if fending off

endemic melancholy or clinical world-pessimism,
grins, bird-shrugs, and caws his version of

Drinking rum and coca-cola...
Working for the Yankee doll-a-a-a-ar.'

6. In the Sick Bay

We’re the only patients this weekend,
this captain from another camp and I.

We’re bored. The orderlies must be skiving.
I sneak to the bazaar, get Gordon’s and a rye.

Drunk, he tells me about a barmaid’s kiss.
You break a glass, it seems,

and dab the jagged points in someone’s face.
And now I see he’s trying to break a glass.

I look at his narrow head, the clean white parting,
the killer moustache, the ironic yellow pupils,

and go. I lock his door, circle, and
lock the other that’s down the corridor to my room.

I can hear him breaking furniture, being sick.
At dawn I vomit and expect the high jump.

It never comes. Are they covering up
for their skiving? Or hasn’t he snitched?

Anyway, the climate’s curing my ringworm.

7. Dum-dam

Here in our high rank at the high table,
after thirteen starters and tumblers of white rum,
I face a vast brass tray of goat and rice.

My Urdu’s doing well, with family smalltalk,
when drum and harmonium bring on the dancing girls.
They sidle round a curtain and peep from sari-folds.

Their bums and fingers dance and gesture expertly,
and now that all this rum’s gone down so well,
it’s impracticable not to barter ogles and grimaces,

though I know they’re epicene sepoys with pretty faces.

8. Dashera

In the Autumn, black cross-eyed Kali
with her skull beads, long red tongue,
girdle of snakes and ten arms

is worshipped for nine days,
and then, on the tenth,
cast into the water of the Dasahara.

We sit at a raised trestle-table
with thirty nervous goats bleating below.
Havildars stand with sharpened kukris.

They grab a horn, whack the blade down,
and the heads roll clean.
The whole battalion watches religiously.

The goats panic, skittering
on slippery blood, the kukris go blunt,
and bad-luck second-whacks are raining down.

Tubby is hunched. He rolls
an anguished frog’s eye at me,
bloodshot as a frightened horse’s.

The goats are hung to drain in a smoky room.
We eat them raw, but luckily I don't
get eyeball in my rice.

Major Havildar Singh lost caste
by eating with Europeans. At home
his mother makes him take his meal outside.

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