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picking for food (HW, 226). The Cambodian soldiers are relaxing in the shade of the coconut
grove, cheerful, smiling and laughing in their ‘fantastic, almost festive’ uniforms, the
checkered Cambodian peasant scarf/turban, and the ‘sacred Buddha amulets hung in pouches
around their necks’ (HW, 227).
The hut’s inhabitants are not to be seen, ‘except for a single small boy in black shorts,
seated on a buffalo at the roadside: he chewed a blade of grass, and watched proceedings’
(HW, 226). The presence of the buffalo boy, the second piece of the puzzle, would be
unremarkable except for his association with the soldiers, also just boys, whom he foreshadows
and symbolises:
Many of them were no older than ten, and their old French rifles looked bigger
than they were. They wore floppy olive fatigues and green berets, and all their
large dark eyes shone with bright expectancy, like those of a team of little boys
waiting for the start of a football game. Some were playing, climbing palm
trees, shouting and throwing down coconuts. (HW, 227)
The boy soldiers, who have an obvious affection for their fatherly sergeant, assemble
behind the lines of older soldiers when the troops begin to advance on the Khmer Rouge in the
trees. One of them, however, ‘who appeared to be about twelve, was standing at the head of all
the troops, holding the Cambodian flag’. The flag, whose ‘device was the towers of Angkor
Wat’, symbolises ‘Cambodia’s days of ancient glory’, and bearing it is a very special honour:
The boy’s beret was at a jaunty angle, and his face had a cocky expression:
teacher’s pet, chosen for the most privileged of all duties. Another order was
shouted, and the troops marched directly up the road behind the boy with the
flag. (HW, 229)
This is one of the moments where Koch describes his favourite theme of the movement
from this world into the ‘Otherworld’, the theme covered in chapter 12. According to Hindu
philosophy, ‘the invisible is reached through the visible’ (Preston, 61); the buffalo boy has
symbolic value which must be substantiated by the flag boy in the same way that in many
Hindu ceremonies the celebrated god or goddess will be represented by a clay or plaster figure.
As they are battling the Khmer Rouge, who represent the adharmic forces of evil, the
Cambodian Army is marching through a looking-glass into a dream world:
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