The Night the Argentines Heard the Gurkhas Were Coming

If you were a nineteen-year-old Argentine conscript dug into the cold ground above Stanley in the winter of 1982, there was one piece of news that travelled faster than any artillery barrage. It was not about the Paras. It was not about the Royal Marines. It was three words, passed down the trench line in the dark: the Gurkhas are coming. Most of those young men had never seen a Gurkha. What they had heard was worse than anything they'd seen — stories, half-true and half-legend, about small men from the mountains of Nepal who carried a curved knife and did not take prisoners, who moved at night and were on you before you knew the line had been crossed. By the time the British actually reached their positions, the fear had already done a great deal of the fighting. This is the Falklands War told from the wrong end of the rifle — the story of what it was like to be the people the Gurkhas were sent to find. That is one way to tell the story of the last week of the war. It is the way it has usually been told. The small men, the curved knives, the boys who broke and ran. It is a good story, and like most good stories about that week, it is mostly wrong. So before we go any further, hold two things in your mind at once. The first is the fear. The fear was real. It was documented, it was widespread, and it shaped how the war ended. The second is what actually happened when the men those boys feared finally arrived. Because the gap between those two things — between the dread and the deed — is the whole point of what follows. This is a reconstruction told from the losing side, built out of memoir and testimony, and testimony is always partial. One frightened man's night is not every man's night. We will mark the difference between what we can document and what only the rumour can supply. The line between the two is exactly the thing worth examining. Start with the ground itself, because the ground tells you most of what you need to know. East Falkland in June is the southern winter. Sleet comes sideways off the South Atlantic. The peat holds water like a sponge, so a trench dug at dusk is a trench half-flooded by dawn. There are no trees to break the wind, only low ridges of broken rock and a sky the colour of slate. Into this, in April and May of 1982, Argentina had moved more than ten thousand troops. The great majority of them were conscripts. By the figures the historians have settled on, the average soldier had been under the colours for perhaps six months. Many had expected to be discharged that autumn and to go home. Instead they were on an island most of them could not have found on a map a year before, told it was theirs, and told to hold it. It is worth saying who these conscripts actually were, because the popular picture of them is a caricature, and the caricature does them an injustice that this account is built to undo. They were drawn from every corner of Argentina — from Buenos Aires and the provinces, from the cattle country and the cities, and a great many of them from the warm provinces of the north, where a boy might reach eighteen having never in his life seen snow. Now they were on a treeless island in the far South Atlantic in the dead of the southern winter, dressed and fed for a campaign that the men who sent them had not planned with much care. The historian Martin Middlebrook, the one British writer Argentina allowed to interview its own servicemen at length, found unit after unit in this condition. The 12th Regiment, among the last sent across, arrived to find that much of its heavy equipment, its support gear, its means of communication, had simply never come. Three quarters of the force were conscripts, and their training, in Middlebrook's careful phrase, was deficient. These were not professional soldiers. They were teenagers in uniform, far from anything they knew.