The problem with the castle was that while Jerry couldn’t break out, we couldn’t get in. It was built like the proverbial brick shithouse, and sunk onto old granite bedrock. All the conventional ammunition that had been fired at it had bounced off: that included the huge 155mm shells lobbed into it from miles away. A few days earlier a section of fighter-bombers had tackled it with AP rockets, and left one of their mates flame-grilled in a field nearby. That really pissed them off: they came back later that day with a couple of five-hundred-pound bombs each. Those bombs, striking virtually horizontally, dropped clouds of pulverized brick dust into the moat with no effect on the stone inner. They might as well have used spears, or bows and arrows on it. A company of Scots from the Lowland Division had had a go twice, like medieval siege troops. It took a full day’s truce to allow the Jocks to collect their bodies from the moat and surrounding meadows.
So now it had settled down to a regular siege, only nobody knew how much food they had in there, nor ammo, nor how long it would go on for . . . nor how many of the bastards there really were, come to that. The problem the damned place posed, apart from turning Uncle Sam’s favourite R & R camp into a General Hospital, was that just beyond it, the main advance on the Rhine had ground to a halt. The Generals didn’t want to race ahead with a pocket of nasty Germans in their rear, waiting to dash out and roger them from behind.
I asked about bombing the bloody place into submission, and was told that that was an option in two weeks’ time. It was down to the USAAF, who were still running the daylight stuff, and that was the earliest they could put a significant number of birds over the castle.
Later they walked me down to the woods in the lower fields, from where I could see the action. There were soldiers in shallow scrapes spread at the edge of meadows which sloped down to an improbably wide moat, and a castle that looked just the way you don’t want a castle to look; if you are on the outside. It was grey, massive, a bit battered, but unbloodied. I fell out of love with it at first sight. From time to time a mortar round from the castle would drop among besiegers, causing niggling casualties. There were two carried out in the period of time I watched. The Americans shrugged. One of them said, ‘I don’t like to watch good men wasted, but, what the hell; they ain’t ours.’
That was exactly how I felt about the Kraut.
I left the guys there, rubbernecking, and taking souvenir photographs for their friends back home. You might not think that my interest was professional, but truly it was: all the time the Army wasn’t moving, neither were we. Grace could be moving further into Germany; by the hour for all I knew.
Back in the bar I limited myself to a single E & T, and asked the barman who was really in charge of the war around here. He directed me to a big Leyland command lorry in a field about a mile away. It was so perfectly camouflaged that you couldn’t mistake it for anything other than perhaps another Leyland command lorry. I hoofed it.
There was a Lowland Division Colonel drinking scented tea at a portable map table, under a canvas awning stretched out from the lorry. He was the first soldierly Brit I had seen all day; he was in full khakis, which had been neatly patched in places, indicating that the Colonel had been around a bit. I paused on the periphery, then threw him a decent salute as soon as he noticed me. An overweight ADC looked as if he was on an intercept course, but the Colonel waved him back, and beckoned me forward. I gave him the Good afternoon, sir, and my name, service and service number. He said, ‘Whatever you want, Pilot Officer Bassett, my first instinct is to have you arrested. You look bloody horrible, even for the RAF. Where did you get that bloody jacket from?’
‘A Yank gave it to me, sir, after another Yank had stolen mine. It suits what I’m doing.’
‘And that is?’
‘Driving around Europe looking for an important lost someone, sir.’
‘Under orders, I take it?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Whose?’
Time to use my weight.
‘Ultimately, the Prime Minister’s, sir.’
‘Oh,’ he said moodily. ‘Another one of those. There’s bloody hundreds like you around at the moment. I’ll be glad to get the war over with, and get back to proper soldiering.’ There was something the matter with that somewhere, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. He waved the fat ADC over, and asked me, ‘So what can we do for you?’ The ADC had a pad and a pen, like a secretary. I shut off the image of him sitting on his Colonel’s knee.
‘Nothing, sir, at present. Thank you.’
‘Oh. I see. Courtesy call. Good of you. Carry on . . . with whatever you’ve got to do.’
When I didn’t move he gave me an eye lock, with a quizzical expression fixed to his face. I decided to talk before the muscles locked up.
‘I rather thought of offering something to you, sir. How would you like to lose that fucking great castle in the valley, sir?’ Interest. He waved the fat man away again: he walked backwards away from us, slightly bowing, like a courtier in the presence of royalty.
The Colonel said, ‘Interesting. Go on, please.’
‘I thought a couple of Lancasters with a couple of cookies and eight one-thousand-pounders apiece would crack the place open for you. It will be a pity if you have to wait a fortnight for the Yanks to do it, sir. Then there’s the problem of American bombing.’
‘What problem?’
‘They’ll clobber your target OK, but they’ll do it with at least a squadron, from a very high altitude. They will drop more than a hundred bombs, and some of those will fall as far as five miles away. It’s the way they do things these days: they call it overkill. You’ll have to pull back every living thing around five or six miles from the target to guarantee no casualties.’
‘. . . and you think we can do better than that?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I have asked the RAF, of course, but they say No: it’s an American job. Have you any reason to imagine they might change their minds?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Why?’
‘I’ll ask them, this time, sir. Sorry, sir.’
‘. . . and that will make a difference? I realize that you’re in the same club, of course, but . . .’
‘You have nothing to lose, if I try, sir.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I suppose not.’
He had to give it the pretence of some thought, so as not to lose face. Then he said, ‘OK. I’ve got one of those special RAF listening stations in a radio van parked round the back. See if you can use them to connect through to whoever you need to speak to.’
I’d heard of those types, and rather approved of them. They were RAF corporals and sergeants who connected into a special intelligence source somewhere, and told generals to piss off now and again. They were the best source of battlefield information the Army had, so it had to put up with them. This quartet of sergeants wasn’t terribly impressed with me, but couldn’t find a decent enough excuse to refuse to let me use their gear to speak to England. I gave them Cliff’s name. I gave them the telephone number for the Guard Room at Tempsford, and another fall-back number Cliff had given me. I think that they would have kicked me out, but that fall-back number clinched it. The senior Sergeant recognized it. His mouth got all twisted, as if his tongue had turned to worm-wood, and had started to lick itself. They told me to hang around, and that they would call me.
I walked back to the command vehicle. It was the fat ADC at the table now, smoking a curved pipe. He motioned me to a chair across from him. I produced my straight billiard, and accepted a fill of dark tobacco. The sun had broken clear again. There was a travelling chess set on the table.
When he finally came on the line Cliff sounded tetchy, but his voice in the heavy black handset was as clear as if he was in a room with me,
‘What do you want?’
‘Hi, Cliff. Nice to hear you too. I’ve missed our little chats.’
‘Fuck off, Charlie. What do you want?’
‘I want a couple of Lancs, with a cookie and eight one-thousand-pounders in each. I want them to crack open a castle full of Jerry Paras on the Holland and Germany border; tomorrow at the latest.’
‘Why should I help?’
‘It’s holding up the brown jobs’ advance, and I think that Grace might already be on the other side. Heading off into Germany with a band of mad sods.’
‘Nazis?’
‘What’s the difference?’
‘The point is, Cliff, I am moving behind the advance with James and Les, and the advance has stopped. If Grace is already on the other side then she’s getting away from me. Do you understand?’
‘Yes. Let me think about it for a minute.’
He thought a minute; then he said, ‘I’ll call you back.’
‘That’s what I thought, Cliff. If Winston can’t whistle us up a couple of Lancs what’s the point of him being Prime Minister?’
I heard him give his little coughing laugh, and momentarily remembered the Cliff I had liked when I first met him.
He said, ‘Don’t get too good at this lark, Charlie. I might have to keep you on.’
I was called back to the little Austin radio van half an hour later. Cliff asked me, ‘Can you give me the coordinates for this place you are responsible for killing?’
I liked the you are responsible bit. I said, ‘I’ll hand you over to someone who can, as soon as we’ve finished.’
‘OK. It’s ordered for 10.20 your time tomorrow morning, and just to make sure you take requests like this seriously, I’ve asked your old squadron to do it. It’s going to be your mates up there being shot at, and there’s bugger-all on paper. They’re going to love you when they find out it won’t even count as a trip for them.’
‘Thanks, Cliff. What do I need to do now?’
‘Nothing. Make sure that the brown job leader has pulled all his people more than a mile back from the target, and has a company ready to go in and mop up as soon as the RAF’s finished. Anything else?’
‘I should confess that I didn’t tell you that the RAF had already been asked, and had turned the job over to the Americans, who were going to do it in a fortnight’s time. There might be some political knee trembling.’
‘Thanks for confessing that. I should confess that I already know.’
‘We’ll both need a priest at this rate.’
‘I’ve already got one, haven’t I?’ He gave that odd little laugh again. ‘What about those coordinates?’
‘Wait one,’ I told him, and handed the handset to the RAF Sergeant alongside me, telling him, ‘Give this officer the coordinates of that bloody castle. The RAF’s going to lose it for us.’
The Sergeant surprised me. He said, ‘Yes, sir,’ before he took it from me.
By mid-evening the bar was nearly empty. I asked McKechnie. He said, ‘Steak night. In peacetime this always used to be steak night in the officers’ mess. So they kept the tradition going for the R & R areas.’
‘You mean there’s steaks on the menu?’
‘Hell no, buddy. Just some grey and pink stuff the Scotties serve up. What are you drinking?’
‘Ethanol,’ I told him. ‘I could get used to this stuff.’
‘Don’t. Stick to beer. It will leave you a few brain cells.’
‘Bad as that?’
‘Worse. Where are you kipping tonight?’
‘Hadn’t given it a thought yet; and I don’t know where the guys I came in with have got to.’
‘Can you remember the number seven?’
‘Sure. That’s my birthday.’
‘That’s the number of the tent I’m billeted in. Sleeps fifty. There’s at least twenty empty cots right now. That’s where you go if nothing else has been arranged.’
I waited until James, Jamie, Albie and Les were half cut before telling them that I had laid on an air display for the following morning. The word spread like gonorrhoea in a monastery.
The LD Colonel sat alongside me on the boardwalk in front of the Quonset, and his ADC stood behind us. The Colonel had a pocket watch he kept consulting. The ADC sniffed a lot. He had a radio operator with a field set by him. It was an interesting piece of kit, but far too big and heavy to lug around for long. We paid a dollar each for our chairs, and the first E & T. As much coffee as we liked came for free. I needed the damned stuff to un-fur my tongue. I had slept in old tent number seven, but had little idea how I got there. The water I had washed in was cold, and had a petroleum rainbow floating in it.
The weather over the target couldn’t have been better for day bombing: it was clear, and a lazy grey. Ten miles north of us a bank of thin cloud hung like a sheet in the air: our aircraft would fly out of it. If the guys in the castle hadn’t got radar, or weren’t talking to someone who did, they wouldn’t know what was about to hit them. The castle was about three miles away in a low natural amphitheatre. I could see it above the line of trees I had skulked in the day before. McKechnie was about four chairs along from me: he had his boots and socks off and was passing the time trimming his toenails with an enormous fighting knife, and crooning. It was a Benny Goodman number: ‘Sing’. I could smell him from where I was sitting. Someone would have to speak with him about that. My dad was a few seats after that, making friendly conversation with the girl I had first seen him dancing with. Uncle Tommy sat the other side of her looking glum. That was good: at least he was back to normal. Right at the end of the second row to my right was a little guy with slicked back dark hair wearing faded RAF blues. I was sure that I had seen him somewhere before, but couldn’t be sure where because his back was to me all of the time.
I kept my fingers crossed because I was still thinking that Cliff might let me down. I think that that was why the LD Colonel and his retinue were seated around me: if the RAF didn’t show I’d probably be on jankers before lunch. I jumped when the Adj tapped me on my shoulder, but it was only to offer me a fill of pipe tobacco to settle me down.
‘Thanks, I will. I’ve always hated waiting for something to happen.’
‘Don’t see why, old boy. In my experience the RAF is late for just about everything it does.’
‘Thanks again. I’ll remind you about that when we’ve lost your castle for you.’
‘Do. I shall be properly contrite. The Colonel will offer you a medal, won’t you, sir?’
The pipe tobacco was heavy and sweet: I drew deeply on it, and filled my mouth with cool smoke.
The Colonel said, ‘Command wouldn’t wear it, but I’ll ask the French. They have the next sector, and they’ll put you up for anything. Very good at medals, the French.’
Les was hiding behind James England. I heard him grunt, ‘Fuck-all good for anything else.’
‘Hark,’ the Colonel’s Adj said, ‘. . . the herald angels sing . . . and lot’s more than two of them, Mr Bassett. Look out for the black crosses on their wings everyone, and get ready to duck.’
Nobody took him seriously because the first planes through the veil of cloud were six Spitfires, flying at no more than two hundred feet. They echeloned into line astern, and took turns at hosing the castle with cannon fire. Lights twinkled along their grey and green wings, and puffs of grey dust appeared about the old masonry. The radio operator had two pairs of bins: he handed me the smaller. They had been made by Zeiss.
The Spitfires hadn’t intended to do any damage with their cannons, it was just a wake-up call to the poor sods inside. A statement of intent. Overture and beginners, my old skipper would have called it. The Lancasters came through the veil a bit higher. Say two or three thousand feet. That’s still not very high. If you fuck up at that height you can hit the ground in less time than it takes to fart. Which is probably exactly what you’re doing as you hit the ground. They had more Spitfires with them: they had to weave from side to side to get their speed down to that the Lancs were trundling in at.
There were three Lancs, not two: thank you, Cliff. Two of them climbed into a circle at about another thou – say four thousand feet. The leader flew a wider loop, and came straight back onto a bomb run. It was odd for me: I’d spent my operational tour flying Lancs by night – mainly over Germany – but I’d never seen one actually dropping bombs in daylight; not observed it from the outside, that is. I was surprised how steady it looked: my experience had been that of having been bounced about a lot on the bomb run. There was no opposing fire from the castle; perhaps that was something to do with it. It dropped two bombs: big cylinders with flat ends – no tail fins. It was curious; they rocked gently, and weaved slightly as they tumbled – like children being rocked to sleep by a parent.
The Colonel asked, ‘What are they?’
I answered without taking my lenses from them: tersely, probably, ‘Cookies: four-thousand-pounders. Eight thousand pounds of high explosive.’
‘Poor sods,’ James murmured just before the bombs disappeared into the castle. Bang on, both of them; but then you don’t miss much from that height – like a chicken laying eggs. What appeared to happen was this. The bombs disappeared. After a pause of maybe a couple of seconds the castle walls seemed to expand briefly, and then fall back into their original shape and configuration. Now the castle looked more or less the same, but was fatally damaged. It was skewed. A pall of fine brown dust and thin smoke, hundreds of yards high, hung in the thin air above it in a squat column. Then the sound of the two almost simultaneous detonations reached us like a double thunderclap. The audience clapped too, and cheered. I had a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach. I hadn’t really thought much about what my bombs had been doing when they reached the ground during those long months over Germany. All of a sudden I didn’t want to.
The two circling Lancs gave a couple of turns to let the pall begin to clear, and then one of them pulled away for a run. It was like watching a cobra gear up for a strike. Again, it was a finely executed run in – the bombing standard on the squadron had improved since my day. I counted the bombs away. There were twelve of them. Shark-shaped, with fins to steady them into their dive. Before anyone asked me I said, ‘Thousand-pounders.’
James didn’t say anything this time, but I heard him grunt.
Three of the bombs fell outside the walls of the place: two in open fields, and one in the moat. The one in the moat threw up a great curtain of water hundreds of feet high, which hid from us what the nine that hit inside were doing. I saw their great flashes of red and orange and yellow behind the veil of mist, and could see the shimmering ripples of blast in the rainbow-laden air above it. The blast effect intrigued me. It was like invisible rings visible, and spreading outwards and upwards. As the shit cleared I could see that the castle was altered even more. It was still more or less the castle shape and size, but the whole of its profile had spread out.
The radio behind us burst into life. The communicant appeared to be shouting in a very highly pitched voice. The W/Op answered in rapid, fluent German, then he told the Colonel, ‘The enemy requests permission to surrender, sir.’
‘I like that,’ the Colonel told us. ‘Very Germanic. Asking permission to surrender: we would have just thrown our hands up, and got on with it.’
‘Sir?’ the W/Op prompted him.
‘Tell them By all means, and to stay put until I’ve worked out what to do with them.’
The third Lancaster had pulled out of the circle. The Colonel told his ADC, ‘Give them the gun, Harry.’ Then, ‘Pity they dragged their bombs here all for nothing.’
The ADC fired off a Very Pistol too close to my right ear for comfort, and dropped a huge blue light in the sky. The pilot of the Lanc was a comedian. He did the run as if he’d not been given the scrub signal, and at the last minute, instead of dropping his eggs, waggled his wings and went off low across country. Two Spits followed him, weaving from side to side. The Colonel turned and looked at me.
He said, ‘Very good, RAF. That medal: which one had you in mind?’
I was prevented from answering by the Negro pianist. He had a white batboy’s jacket on, and had come to stand behind us. He was counting aloud. He got to sixteen.
The Colonel asked, ‘Sixteen, George?’
‘Yes, Colonel. Sixteen souls climbing up to heaven through the smoke.’
‘If they had about a hundred or so Krauts in there,’ the Colonel told me, ‘that’s maybe fifteen or sixteen per cent of their establishment. We’ve gone rather easy on them really.’
I decided that I didn’t like the cold-blooded bastard, but it was all a bit late for regrets, wasn’t it? He who laughs last, and all that.
The Colonel sent his ADC down later in the morning to take the surrender. We had had to wait until the Press Corps arrived. A company of hard Hun Paratroopers opting out of the war was bound to make all the front pages. There were a hundred and fifty of the Allies’ finest down there to meet them. Probably twice as many Press people as military. And a load of guys rubbernecking. That included me: I’d just won my first land engagement, after all, and still had To the victor the spoils on my itinerary. When the heavy wooden gates of the castle pulled back the first thing that came out was a trickle of smoke. Then a white handkerchief tied to the muzzle of an old Mauser rifle. When nobody shot at that, a head in a grey ski cap bobbed out and back a few times. Then a scrawny Captain in dirty greys stepped out, and onto the causeway over the moat. He did a dozen paces on his own before the LD ADC stepped up to meet him. The first thing they did was shake hands, reminding me of sketches I had seen of Livingstone meeting Stanley. Or was that the other way round? The German gave the ADC his rifle with the white flag. (That explained the unfortunate front-page photographs the next day, giving the impression that we were surrendering to them.) Then the Kraut turned back to face the door, and waved his men out.
By that time I’d moved in close myself, and could hear what was going on. I counted the Krauts out onto the causeway. I’ll swear none of them was over nineteen years old. Spotty teenagers mostly, hungry and tired in Para smocks too big for them. Their mixture of weapons looked as if they’d come from a museum. Including the middle-aged Hauptmann sixteen of them surrendered. George had got the number right, but the wrong way round – there were only sixteen of them left.
The ADC shook hands with the Captain again, and said something that sounded diabolically like, ‘Sprachenzee Anglische? Do you speak English?’
The Hauptmann looked pained; as if he’d failed an exam. He smiled apologetically and said, ‘A little. Only a little.’
‘You have many wounded?’ That was Harry again.
The small German looked mystified,
‘Nein: no, only these.’ He indicated his rag, tag and bobtail street gang, who were carefully laying their weapons on the causeway. They had an inordinate number of potato masher grenades for so small an army; I remember that. The mortar that had caused the casualties I had seen the day before looked like a home-made job: it had started life as a drainpipe. Harry tried again.
‘You have many dead, then? Many kaput?’
The Captain looked even more mystified, if that was possible: I didn’t know if it was the question, or the hotchpotch of lingo it was posed in. He shook his head.
‘No. Only these.’
I don’t know when it began to dawn on us that the little Kraut was walking out with precisely the number of men he went in with. One of the Press Corps guys scrambled up onto the causeway. He gave the Kraut officer a cigarette, and asked him, ‘You are Paras? Fallschirmjägers?’
‘Never heard of it, matey.’
‘People’s Army. You call it the Land Defence Volunteers in your country, I think.’
‘Fucking hell.’ That was Les. He’d crept up on us. ‘It’s the Home Guard.’
That was what we struggled to come to terms with as we moved away from the embarrassment as quickly as we could. This motley crew of a man, and a few boys in pieces of uniform too big for them, had held up the Allied advance for almost two weeks, and killed dozens doing it. And we’d had to throw a dozen Spitfires and three Lancs at them before they gave up.
‘It’s just occurred to me . . .’ I said to Les.
‘. . . Yes, I think I know what you’re going to say, sir. It’s not going to be as easy to get to Berlin as Winston thinks, is it? Don’t you think that someone should tell him?’
‘Tell the Major,’ I said. ‘He can do it. Perhaps, for once, they won’t shoot the messenger. Anyway, he’s had it far too easy for the last week or two.’
‘Don’t be too hard on him. He never asked to go soldiering . . .’
‘. . . and this isn’t soldiering, Les, and what’s more, you bloody know it.’
‘It’s not my fault, either, sir.’
‘I didn’t say it was.’
We climbed the rest of the way to the Quonset bar in a sort of baffled, humpy silence. The Colonel was standing at the bar with a couple of senior medical types. I tried to ignore him, but he spotted me, and turned to say, ‘All fixed up, Padre. You’ll get a Croix for this lot.’
‘Hardly worth it, sir, for smoking out one man and Jerry’s Home Guard.’
‘It’s definitely medal material, Padre. Sixteen Jerry Paras walked out alive after a gallant defence. There must be hundreds dead over there. I’ll get you to pray over the rubble before you move on.’
‘There aren’t any bodies, sir. There’s no one there.’
‘Atomized, dear boy, by pin-prick . . . sorry, I meant pinpoint . . . bombing. Your old squadron, I understand.’
He’d obviously been talking to someone, and had then had a few.
I said, ‘Sir, it is my opinion that sixteen men went into that castle, and sixteen marched out. I can’t in all conscience accept a medal for bombing the shit out of a Home Guard patrol, and missing them.’
‘That’s where my military experience comes in, old boy, so listen carefully. I’m the Colonel . . . and you’re apparently a Padre, savvy?’
‘Sir.’
‘I agree it appears as if a patrol of Jerry’s Home Guard has stood us off for a fortnight, and killed a good many good men. But that, the military mind tells me, is plainly impossible. So far?’
‘So far, sir.’
‘So there must have been another hundred or so Paras in there as well.’
‘I see, sir.’
‘Everyone knows that Paras fight to the death: so that is what this lot did, almost to the man. So far?’
‘So far, sir.’
‘. . . and if there ain’t any bodies and body parts, it must be because they were blown to smithereens by our RAF friends. Atomized by devastating bombing. A great success for the RAF. I’m sure that you understand.’
‘I do, sir.’
‘. . . and that if you accept the Frenchy’s little medal with dignity and grace, it will bring honour and credit to you and your squadron, and everyone will know that it must all be true, because the Froggie is very parsimonious with his awards.’
‘I thought that you said he gave them out to anybody for anything?’ I mislaid the sir; I suspected that he was already too pickled to notice.
‘That,’ he said, ‘was when I was being unkind. Now that you have opened up my castle, I am benevolence personified.’ He grinned a bleary grin. ‘. . . and just a wee bit squiffy. Run along now, and save a few more souls.’
I was getting damned tired of this religious lark.
I had to bloody go through with it. It must have amused James, because he sided with the LD Colonel, and ended up bloody ordering me to attend an investiture. Les summed it up with, ‘A Brylcreem boy dressed in the clothes of all the other Services, and at least two nations, and disguised as a bleeding priest, getting a French medal for killing a hundred Jerries who never existed: this is a good war!’
They sent a retired French General of my father’s vintage to present the medal the next morning. He was even smaller than me, and wore a uniform straight out of the Crimea – red pants, a blue jacket and a flat-topped peaked cap that looked suspiciously German. He needed to stand on tiptoe to kiss my cheeks and his breath smelled of Parma violet. Normally I’m not bad at picking up languages, and at least my French was fairly fluent, but his staccato machine-gun delivery, punctuated by the occasional mon brave, kept beating me down the leg side.
The Colonel had lined a few of his brown jobs up with anyone else who wanted to gawk in an open square, with me in the middle. James stood alongside me, ramrod-straight in a cleaned uniform. Out of the corner of my eye I could see my dad – he looked really chuffed. There were one or two nurses, including the one who had held the GI’s plasma drip. She had long rolling waves of chestnut hair like someone else I had known. McKechnie wasn’t there: he was cutting a Kraut who’d owned up to a shrapnel wound. With James alongside me, like a best man at a wedding, I felt a bit of a drip. I felt like a bit of a fraud too, but in my head I rehearsed what we eventually learned to call the Nuremberg Defence – I was only obeying orders.
I hadn’t expected Lee, although she seemed to turn up in my life every now and again, so I wasn’t surprised to look up and see her smiling at me. She was with her pal Dave Scherman, and a naval officer wearing a grunt’s winter parka. Lee had her arm through his, and looked happy. She gave me a discreet waist-level wave when she saw I’d spotted her. The hand she waved with had a small camera in it. George, the coloured pianist and barman from the Quonset, was there in a full infantry Lieutenant’s colours, and James Oliver had forsaken his white battle bowler for a smart fore-and-aft forage cap, and had polished his shoes.
After suffering a few more kisses and hugs I let the silly old sod pin the medal on to my battledress blouse. Just over one of the neatly mended bullet holes which had done for my predecessor. A small firing party fired three volleys over our heads, almost as if they were burying me. Then it was back into the bar for a spam sandwich and E & T reception that they’d put on for us. The mud clung to my boots; I remember that. I had a shiny cross on my chest, and its small leather-worked case in my pocket just to prove it. I waited for everyone to file into the drinks emporium in front of me, and I went in with the last man. Lee gave me a brief kiss as she moved past me; plumb on my lips. I was trembling and it wasn’t with emotion – not that kind of emotion, anyway. It was the sort of emotion I now recognize as fear.
You see, I’ve seen dead men walking, before. I’ve told you that. I want you to get that straight. I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’ve seen men wandering about long after they were dead: that American patrol in Brond was an example. OK, so when I’m face to face with something I don’t believe is there, I tremble. Got it? And when I saw a dead man in that small open square that morning I got a little jittery. OK?
It was the little guy in the faded RAF blues I’d noticed the day before. Not being a man to put off the inevitable, I waited for him at the door and, feeling a bit dumb, the first thing I said was, ‘Hi, Pete. You’re dead.’