Finally, the pain in my back eased. I dropped my pack, sank to the ground and leaned against a tree. I stretched out my legs and closed my eyes, and for about a minute, maybe two, I forgot where I was and dreamed of home. My mother, sitting on a low stool in the kitchen, her feet on two metal rods steadying the iron pot on the fire. Her fat arms rippled, sweat dripping down her face, as she stirred the banku with a long wooden spatula.  ‘Abla, the bowls!’  she would call out. ‘Sitso, the table!’ She was a woman of few words. 

Johnson Maclean, headmaster of the Labadi School for Young Boys, brought me here, and for that, even if I die today, I know I would never forgive him. When he ordered me to join the war, I should have run. The jungles of Burma are no place for a schoolteacher. 

A distant roar of a plane’s engines brought me back. I opened my eyes and looked up. Other men in my regiment did the same. We couldn’t tell if the plane was friend or foe — the impenetrable canopy of thick foliage made sure of that — and we did not know whether to laugh or cry, for we were running low on food.  

Thunder rumbled in the sky.  

That night it poured. 

The wind gripped and pulled at our tents with fierce claws. That the tents held seemed to increase the wind’s fury. It lashed and raged. Water streamed about our legs. Samuel Kamara sat beside me on a log — a tall, thin boy with bushy eyebrows and a head so big we marvelled his thin neck could support it at all. Sometimes we called him B.H., meaning Big Head. When we called him that, he would respond, ‘Big head, big brains.’ 

For the first time since we met at the training camp in India, he was silent. That was quite something because, I swear, if talking could win the war, that boy was the only weapon the Allies needed. His constant chatter usually irritated me. One day, we were cutting our way through the thick underbrush, insects buzzing in our ears and our clothes sticking to our skin. I was wishing I could rip my shirt off, when of all things, he started talking about his father’s shop in Freetown. 

‘It is the only place, where you can get almost everything — bread, tomatoes, rice.’ He paused to clear a particularly tricky branch from his path before he continued. ‘Even bicycle tyres, you can get some there.’ He laughed. ‘The women, they like coming because they say when they come there, they don’t have to go anywhere again. But I think they come really because of Papa. You see, Papa is a fine man, even at his age.’ 

The storm clearly made him uncomfortable.  

He cracked the knuckles on his right hand from the smallest finger to the thumb; then he cracked the fingers on his left hand. Then he said, in a voice so low it was as if he was talking to himself, ‘Mama would place her hands on my head and pray for me every day, before I went anywhere.’ He cracked his knuckles again. ‘You see, I didn’t tell her I was joining the army, so she couldn’t pray for me.’  

Unable to stand any longer whatever demons were eating him up inside, he ruffled through his pack and took out a bamboo flute. For a minute, his teeth glowed white in the darkness before he placed the flute to his lips. Ooooh, God of Mercy!  The most hauntingly melodious tune I had ever heard came from the flute. We were about twenty ragged men in the tent. In that moment, all movement ceased, and time stopped. The tune he played was unfamiliar, but accompanied by the winds and the rain, it seemed to make the storm disappear. That night, I glimpsed heaven. Any irritation I had ever felt with the boy vanished, and the nickname, Flute Player, replaced B. H. 

For three days and nights, the rain did not ease. I cornered Kamara a few times in the tent. ‘Charley’, I said. ‘About the flute, who taught you to play like that?’ He opened his canteen, took a swig and pretended he hadn’t heard. Later he would tell me it was his older brother who had taught him to play. When he was younger, his brother would play his flute for him whenever he was scared. Then all the fear would go away, and he would feel better. The brother was dead now, and Kamara did not like to talk much about it, but the flute he played had been his brother’s. 

On the third night, a 12-foot-long beast slithered into our tent. We attacked it with our machetes and bayonets, nearly bringing the tent down. Finally, victorious, we stripped the skin off the snake and chopped it to bits. The sticks, leaves and branches were all soaked; with no way to light a fire, no spices to marinate the meat and no salt to add for taste, we ate with relish, for our daily ration of crackers and corned beef could no longer fill our bellies. 

The fourth day brought respite from the rains. We resumed our march, and the mosquitoes that seemed to have gone to sleep with the onset of rain returned with fervour. We squished and squelched our way through the mud and flooded undergrowth. With each step, the wet, spongy ground sucked at our boots, threatening to pull them off.  

Most of the stone bridges across rivers swollen by the rains had been blown up by the enemy. Sometimes we could walk many miles away from our course, looking for less turbulent sections of the river to cross. I had never learned to swim, and many times, I felt my heart race as we approached the swollen rivers. Sometimes, the water even rose as high as my neck. Kamara, a descendant of seafaring men, seemed to sense my dread and stayed close. He held tight to my hands, and when he felt the beginnings of a panic in the water, he would squeeze hard as if to reassure me he wouldn’t let go. Sometimes we got lucky and found a rickety wooden bridge or two that had existed long before the war. The enemy had either not noticed them or had simply not considered them worth their dynamite.  

There was no sun to dry our clothes. My shoes stank, and sores grew between my toes. I kept an envelope of dried neem leaves in a rubber sachet, chewing and swallowing them to ward off malaria. The first day I gave some to Kamara, he spat them out, unable to stand the bitterness, and wasted half the water in his canteen trying to wash away the foul taste.  

When Kamara came crawling to me one night, mumbling incoherent words, his forehead on fire, I suspected malaria.  Some had the dysentery, others typhoid, and the sick had to be carried on stretchers of cloth tied between two long sticks until we could get help. Crude graves lined our route, marked with rudely crafted crosses of two sticks bound with twine. That night, I drenched a towel with water and bathed his head to cool the fever, before crushing some neem leaves into a paste in my palm and feeding it to him. This time, he had no energy to reject it. Kamara fought any weakness that came from the sickness, refusing to be carried and marching on like the rest of us; I kept close. By some miracle, he survived.  

We came face to face with the enemy on a small hill overlooking a small town, Kohima. We dug trenches, and from the trenches, the battle raged.  I was with Kamara and a hundred other men. Some were on their bellies, feeding machine guns with endless rounds of bullets. Ratatatatat— 

In all my twenty-five years, I had never taken the life of a chicken, a mouse or a cockroach, but out there on that hill in Kohima, I shoved shells into mortars, watched them blow and saw men fall. There was no room for pause. After every explosion, the screams of the wounded and the dying multiplied. We were outnumbered, but until reinforcements came we had to keep going. 

Men fell like trees pulled from their roots, and the stench of blood, gunpowder and urine mingled as one. We urinated in the very trenches we stood in, and even though the insides of my stomach had not seen food or water in many days, twice I vomited.  There were no days, and there were no nights. All that existed was smoke and dust.  

Boys cried for their mothers and men for their wives or lovers. My eyes burned, and my throat felt like it was lined with sandpaper, and I cursed Johnson Maclean. I dared not leave the trench for water, even though a stream ran not five feet from where I was.  

I was still loading shells into mortars, even though my arms and legs felt like lead, ready to collapse, and my eardrums threatened to explode, when the straining notes of a flute drifted from the trench. There, I spied Kamara, sitting with his back against the wall, eyes closed, flute at his lips: 

Home again! 

Home again! 

When shall I see my home? 

When shall I see my native land? 

I shall never forget my home.  

There were no words, just the tune. You might think it inappropriate for a soldier to pick up a flute when men were falling and more hands were needed to replace the dead and the injured at the guns, the bazookas and the mortars. It should have been inappropriate, but it wasn’t. The tune may not have been familiar to everyone, but even those who did not know it felt pumped with renewed vigour. It was a call, reminding us that we still had a place to go to, that this was not our home and this did not have to be the end. We forgot our rumbling bellies; we forgot our parched throats, and the injured forgot their injuries and got up to fight again. 

Reinforcements arrived. By the thirteenth day, the enemy had been defeated. Victory brought no joy, only the surprise that I was not among the dead. The stench of death was strong, and the ground was soaked with blood. We searched for survivors, and I sought Kamara, for he was not in the trench.  

I sensed him before I saw him, lying on the ground beside the stream, one hand clutching a bloody chest, his other hand clenched around his flute.  

He struggled to sit up, and I went to help him, urging him, even as I did, to keep still on the ground.  ‘Divi’, he said, for that was what he called me, blood trickling from the corner of his lips. 

‘Shhh’, I said, placing a finger on his lips. ‘Don’t talk.’  

‘Please — pray for me.’ 

I hadn’t been to church in 10 years, even though my mother kept telling me to go, and I never prayed.  

Kamara’s eyes were half-closed, and his chest was heaving. I had forgotten how to pray, but I couldn’t deny a dying man his last wish, so I helped him back to the ground, placed my hands on his head, like I imagined his mother would have done, and said the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Our Father, who art in heaven’ — that was the only prayer I knew.  

When I opened my eyes again, he was smiling.   

We dug graves to bury our dead. Before we covered Kamara’s body with a mound of dirt, I placed his brother’s flute beside him. One of the men said a short prayer for the fallen soldiers, and I was given the honour of placing the cross on Kamara’s grave. 

I don’t know if Kamara ever shot a gun in the war, but I do know this: his flute saved some of us. 

2025 Commonwealth Short Story Prize Shortlist