It was a strong flat valley, and once in it another one of those arrow-straight roads ran from one end to the other. I couldn’t remember who had won the argument about who built the damned things, but they were everywhere. The steep wall of hills to our right was densely clothed with pines. Between them and the road were fields of late winter feeding. That was good defensive country. James said that the northern Jerry fed his livestock on kale. I was partial to the irony taste of kale myself. James said that the first time German POWs were offered kale in England they refused it on the ground that it was animal food, and complained to the Red Cross.
The valley ridge to the west was flatter and closer, and clothed with good grazing grass. I could see a hill, or a further ridge, beyond it: perhaps it hid another valley. We seemed to be heading towards a distant forest of deciduous trees, without an obvious way through, but James and Les seemed to know what they were doing, and they didn’t seem to be in a hurry . . . which pissed me off a bit. James took his eyes from the landscape, or his map from time to time, to scribble in his notebook.
When he said, ‘Stop. Stop here, please,’ in majorly tones, it did occur to me to wonder why. I couldn’t see anything of significance for miles. Bollocks. He was away with the fairies again.
He said, ‘Let’s walk for ten minutes. All of us. It will do the pair of you good, instead of sitting around all day.’
Les muttered something about leaving someone to mind Kate, and volunteering himself for the duty. James said what I had been thinking.
‘Bollocks.’ Then, ‘Who’s in charge?’
I kept my mouth shut for once.
It was just as I had thought. As we moved gingerly on foot up to the west and north we were on dark, fine grass; like the South Downs around Hastings. There was thyme mixed in among it. We walked the walk, of course; James set a powerful pace as if he was in a hurry to get somewhere. Les was about six feet behind him, loping along with his Sten bouncing against his hip, and me a good ten feet behind him. We probably looked odd from a distance, if some Jerry sniper had a bead on us. James was taking a chance on the area being pacified, and I didn’t mind him taking chances, as long as it wasn’t with me. The ridge, which was our valley’s west rim, simply looked into another: a shallower and more serious affair. It was more serious because there were dead tanks all over it – some square Brits, and some American light jobs. The Yanks looked low and fast and racy. They looked just as dead as the British Comets close to them. Les knew their flash, and said, ‘Fife and Forfar Yeomanry. Scotch jobs. They have had a bit of a doing, haven’t they?’
I looked quickly for Albie’s past caring among the Americans. No sign.
James told us, ‘I knew it! There was once a battle here.’
Les gave him the If only you knew how pitiful you are look.
‘Would never have known that, sir.’
I added, ‘No, nor would I.’
‘Arseholes, the pair of you. Products of failed second-rate schools. I mean a real battle – swords against spears. This is where about eighteen hundred Jerries stopped a complete Roman legion dead in its tracks. One of the histories says that a year after, a man looking at this hillside from the tree line down there could be dazzled by the sun reflecting back from a carpet of white skulls. They weren’t Jerries back then, of course, merely barbarians.’
‘You’re sure about this, sir? You ain’t just making it up?’
‘Absolutely sure. I’ve been wanting to visit here for years.’
‘That’s what you said about Agincourt and Waterloo, sir.’ That was Les.
‘When were you there?’ I asked him. I was interested in spite of myself.
‘Last month,’ he told me. ‘The Major has this thing about battlefields. He prefers the old ones to the new ones.’
‘I’m not going to complain, Les. Bloody sight less dangerous.’
‘Not always, Charlie. Look at this place. A good place to fight is always a good place to fight: different weapons, that’s all.’
James had wandered off a bit, towards one of the Brit tanks. It had a great blackened hole where something nasty had gone in between the drive wheels. The track on that side had been thrown. All of its hatches were open, so unless it had been robbed in the last couple of days, some of the crew had got out. James abruptly lost interest.
‘Let’s go down there. That’s where most of the fighting took place.’
There was the valley floor. It wasn’t as deep as the valley from which we’d climbed, and followed a meandering stream fringed by bare trees. They were coming into bud and leaf. The earth seemed disturbed in a narrow line parallel to them; as if it had been ploughed. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to find out why. The knocked-out tanks all seemed to be facing down towards it, as if they had come along the rim that we had walked over, and then turned down in open formation. James set off down through the ankle-high grass. Les hadn’t the heart to let him go alone, and I hadn’t the courage to leave them to it. James turned once on the short descent, to grin back at us. He was animated. Like a child.
And that’s what they were like: like children.
The disturbed earth was a hastily dug trench. My dad would have done a better job than that. There were fifteen or sixteen dead children chucked around in it. It wasn’t deep because they had tried to sink it too close to the line of scrubby trees, and had got into the roots. Don’t worry, I won’t go all soft on you. Tommo told me long ago: bad things happen: that’s what wars are for – fade scene. They were soldiers, anyway. Little soldiers. Kids in their mid-teens away for their first and last adventure. They were dressed in bits and pieces of soldier suits, just like me and Les. Not only that, but the empty cartridge cases scattered around, and the fucked-up tanks on the hillside, seemed to indicate that they’d put up a hell of a fight before the tank squadrons had overrun them. I could see the crushed and churned areas of the makeshift trench, and the gaps in the trees where the tanks had crossed them. Some of the bodies were smashed. I thought that they looked like dolls tossed aside by a bored playmate.
James’s voice was a thousand miles away. No one had ever sounded less like a Major. He said, ‘Stupid, but I suddenly feel sick.’
It was too true, and too trite to be worth a response. We walked along the scarred earth, slowly, like visitors to a museum studying mildly novel exhibits. At the far end of the trench it fell back into the tree line. A boy who might have been fourteen, one of the youngest fighters there, was lying back out of the trench, as if he had been caught as he stood up. A grubby white handkerchief fluttered in a branch close to him. You never know. One of his arms was thrown back above his head as if grasping for the skittering cloth. His other hand, his left one, rested on his chest. His stomach cavity was as open as his dull eyes. So was his mouth. What had his last sound been like? There were flies. There are always flies, even when temperatures are too low to give them more than a day’s life.
A boy of no more than five sat beside the corpse, his dirty little hand resting in the hand the corpse had placed on its chest. His little legs dangled in the trench. His head was bowed, chin resting on his chest, his back to us. He had a camel-coloured coat – I remember that coat – with a dark brown soft collar. He was as motionless as all of the others, and because he didn’t move as the flies crawled on him, we knew what we were going to see but could not help ourselves. One of those nightmares you can’t switch off.
The reality was worse than that.
I was closest to him. As I came up to him, and steeled myself to look, he moved. That was more shocking than anything else. He turned his head to look at me. His brown eyes were huge, in a small face as round as the moon. That was when Les said, ‘Fuck it.’
None of us attempted to free him from the corpse he held on to. We sat on the grass in front of him, and spoke as if he wasn’t there. James started it.
‘Poor little sod. What do you think?’
‘He won’t make it on his own. He’ll starve out here.’ That was Les, replying. I wished that he hadn’t. Then nothing; as if they had nothing to say. Then Les, as if there hadn’t been a gap in the conversation.
‘We can’t bury them. It will take all bloody day.’
‘I’ll get some Pioneers up here. Don’t worry, they’ll be here in a couple of days.’ James again.
I asked them, ‘What about the kid?’
Then nothing again. What the bloody hell was the matter with them all of a sudden? Then Les, ‘It would be kinder if this didn’t go on for him, Charlie. Look at him. He can’t even find his own food.’
‘You mean, kill him, don’t you?’
James wouldn’t meet my eye. Les said, ‘Look on it as being kinder.’ He had almost repeated himself. Then, ‘He wouldn’t be here if he had anyone else.’ The odd thing is that his voice sounded almost tender.
James coughed. I think that that was to hide his embarrassment. He said, ‘Kinder. And pragmatic. You’re right; he has no one to look out for him.’
Germany had bled with that argument for the last twelve years. I couldn’t understand them any more. I said, ‘Yes he has. He has us, for the time being. Us. Me.’
At least Les would look me in the eye. When he spoke he was almost whispering.
‘Charlie, Charlie.’ He was shaking his head, as if I was a stubborn child. I noticed for the first time that he had that horrible black-bladed knife in his hand. ‘Will you fight me over it?’
‘Yes. If you make me.’
Then nothing again. Then James: ‘Why?’
‘I’ve chased halfway across Europe to try to rescue a woman and a baby, haven’t I? Maybe I’m not doing too well at it, but tell me where’s the sense of saving one child, if I murder another one on the way to doing it?’
James said, ‘. . . or look the other way while someone else does the killing?’
‘That too. People have been looking the other way in this country for too sodding long,’ I told him. I saw Les drop his right shoulder, and said, ‘Les, if you make a move towards the kid, I’ll jump you. You’ll have to kill me to get him. I promise you.’ I don’t know what I sounded like, but I felt as if I was going to burst into tears. It was one of those moments. Les was suddenly like a Frog or an Eyetie, because he shrugged as if it didn’t matter.
Nothing again. No one moved. Not a sound: then somewhere a bird was singing, and James sighed, ‘Les is right, Charlie, but I’ll pull rank for you. Just this once. I’ll do that if you promise to dump the kid at the next village we get to.’
‘All right. Fine.’
James asked, ‘Les?’
Les looked away from us. Somewhere into the distance. His hands were empty. ‘Aye,’ he said, and, ‘OK.’ I wish I could say that he sounded relieved, but I’m not so sure.
The kid didn’t speak as I lifted him away from the corpse, and carried him away from whatever he had seen there. He weighed nothing. His coat sleeve was stiff with someone else’s blood. James had some sort of pidgin conversation with him as we climbed away again over grass that shone like dark-green glass. It was something like, ‘Muter?’ The kid shook his head. James thought that he hadn’t understood, and asked him again. The kid shook his head again. James realized that he meant no.
‘Fader?’ The kid shook his head.
‘Bruder?’ The kid squirmed in my arms suddenly. I almost stumbled. He pointed back over my shoulder.
Les spoke for the first time since his grudging OK. He said, ‘Don’t worry kid. We’ll see they look after your brother,’ and he touched the boy’s cheek and hair. Then he walked ahead of me.
*
Back on the low west ridge of our first valley we could see Kate down on the road, and something else behind her. We all crouched. Les swung his Sten forward. He grunted, ‘Company.’ Then, ‘Anyone got any ideas?’
I shook my head. James said, ‘Your speciality, old boy. I’ll leave it to you this time.’
It was another sign that James and I had been at different kinds of school. My lot would have called that a cop-out. Les turned to me, and grinned. I had noticed before that when he bared his teeth they had a feral look about them.
‘Keep the kid’s head down. If it goes wrong and you get hit, try to fall on him.’ I think that Les always had this urge to action. No matter how low he got, anticipation of loosing off a mag or two from his Sten always lifted his spirits.
James asked, ‘What about me?’
Les said, ‘I was thinking of an open-order advance, if that’s all right with you, sir? Give me about twenty yards on the left; then give me ten yards start, and watch where yer step. You move off to their right. If you hear me yell, hit the deck; I’ve better long sight than the pair o’ you.’ And, ‘. . . and you look after your new son,’ he told me. His grin told me something else. It told me that he suddenly found my situation amusing.
He asked the Major, ‘Time to go?’
James nodded, and Les lifted up and took a step to the left. He was correct. I wasn’t as long-sighted as he was. I could see something small up Kate’s derrière, and maybe a dark figure on the road. Maybe the figure waved. I had about five minutes during which to watch them as they worked their way carefully down, moving further apart: they had done this before. It showed. The further they were from where I crouched, the deeper in grass they seemed to sink, until eventually they appeared to be wading waist-deep. All that time I reflected on the decision I had made about the boy who was hugging deep into my neck: if I hadn’t stuck my oar in, there would have been three men moving down to Kate: not two. Anyway, it was sweat for nothing. As Les passed the halfway point he suddenly rose up and waved to the Major, and waved to me. It was clear that he was calling us down. By the time I got down to him with the kid it was clear to me why. I still hate those bloody awful little Volkswagens. It was the maths teacher who’d given Les a speeding ticket, days before. His uniform was still immaculate. The shiny black peak of his Toy Town helmet was still shiny black. I don’t know what had passed between them before I was up to them, but I heard the policeman say, in his clipped English, ‘I do not suppose that you have paid your penalty yet?’
Les told him, ‘I don’t suppose I have. We haven’t been anywhere near a manned Police Office. We were at a place named Korne, but your Panzers chased us out again.’
‘Korne was ever a lawless place. Anyway, the Panzers have gone away – before they ran out of gas. Are you going on to Bremen, sir?’
I don’t know why Les answered him. Force of habit, I suppose.
‘Yes. Eventually.’
‘You will probably find a Police Office there.’
‘I suppose that we will. What about you?’
‘I suppose that I will stay here. At present the people need a policeman; and when they no longer need a policeman, they may need a teacher of arithmetic.’
The Major asked him, ‘Am I allowed to wish you good luck?’
‘Only after you have told me why you are stealing that child.’ He nodded my way.
It was my turn, ‘I’m not. We found him. There are loads more of them over the hill, but they are all dead. How many more fourteen-year-old soldiers do you have left to fight your war for you?’
There was a flash of something behind his eyes. He said, ‘How many do you need?’ Then, ‘I wondered what had happened to them.’
‘They fought our Panzers. It looks as if they did very well.’
‘Some of them were once my students.’
Les sniffed. He said, ‘So maybe they won’t need a maths teacher after all.’
The copper didn’t seem to have much more to say. He came to attention, and gave a terribly smart salute. His vehicle left a trail of thin, blue smoke which was blown away on the breeze.
Les told me, ‘You missed your chance. You could have given him the kid.’
‘He didn’t want him, did he? Otherwise he would have asked. Do you think the kid’ll mind if I put him down? He’s getting a weight.’
I put the child down. He stayed by me, but shuffled from foot to foot, looking very uncomfortable. I tried again: I asked Les, ‘What’s the matter with him? Can’t he stand still?’
Les laughed. He took the kid’s hand, and walked with him to the edge of the road. The first dandelions were beginning to show in the margins. Les unbuttoned himself, and pissed on them. The kid looked on with obvious interest, then pulled up his short trouser leg and did the same. The stream was so long and so strong that I wondered how long he’d been holding himself in. When Les walked him back to me the kid studied me for a couple of minutes. There was no malice in that look, but nevertheless he went back over to Les, and held his hand up. Les had no choice. He asked James, ‘ ’ow far to our next stop, sir?’
‘Don’t quite know, old chap. Twenty miles or more. I seem to have made a bit of a mess of today, haven’t I?’
‘ ’ow far back to Korne, then; for the third time?’
‘Ditto. But about ten miles I’d guess. Why?’
‘That publican and his missus. They seemed like good people: we could leave the kid with them.’
‘Good thinking that man. Your Mr Kipling always said that the NCO was the backbone of the British Army.’
‘I’m not one, Major. I’m a humble private soldier.’
‘I could always promote you.’
Les positively twinkled. He said, ‘And I would turn you down. I can do without extra responsibility.’
Les said, ‘Have you ever had one of them nightmares where you’re stuck in a maze, and can’t get out: every time you reach the way out you’re back where you started?’
I was driving, and the kid was cuddled up asleep on Les’s lap, which would be a problem if he needed to go for his Sten in a hurry. James was in the back working on his lists: occasionally he’d give a snort as if he had discovered something.
‘Yes, Les. I think so.’
‘I think that this is one of them. Every time we head away from Korne we end up coming back. Like bloody yo-yos.’
‘Or boomerangs.’
‘Yeah. Do you think that we died a couple of days ago, and this is some kind of Never Never Land we’ll never never escape from?’
Cliff had used similar words months ago. Never Never Land was always close to your tongue in ’45. It was one of those puns that meant anything. James looked up and grunted. Time for an upper-ranks contribution.
‘I can think of people I’d less like to get stuck there with.’
Les told him, ‘There was something the matter with the grammar of your last sentence, sir. Not up to your usual standard. Try again please.’ Then he said to me, ‘Slow her down, Charlie; Korne’s over the next hump.’
We had climbed up again, out of the valley that time forgot, and for the second time in several days arrived at precisely the point from which we had set off. James hugged the publican, and called him Otto as if they were old friends. Otto’s wife hugged Les, and then hugged the kid and hoisted him over her shoulder, and the kid hugged her back, so all was going more or less to plan. James began to explain to them what was going on. They were speaking Kraut, and too fast and too gutturally for my expanding vocabulary. Occasionally I picked out the word Charlie, and whenever I did they all stopped talking, and looked at me. A couple of times the looks were soft and emotional, and a couple of times they were stern and hard. What the fuck had I done this time?
I asked James, ‘What’s going on?’
He said, ‘Frieda will tell you.’
The woman gave the kid over to Otto as if she was tossing over a small sack of vegetables. Then she came up to me and hugged me. We were more or less the same height, so that was all right. Then she kissed me on both cheeks and on the mouth. Then she stood and gobbled at me like a turkey for five minutes. I couldn’t work out if I was receiving a benediction, or being ticked off. I would describe her as a fluid speaker rather than a fluent one. The fluid was a haze of spittle droplets that seemed to hang in the air between us. Halfway through she suddenly fished down the front of my shirt, and pulled out my worn RAF identity discs, and paused to copy my name and service number onto a small order pad, with a stubby licked pencil. Eventually I got the kisses on the cheeks again, before she curtsied, and stepped back to stand alongside her husband.
‘Didn’t understand a word of it,’ I said to her, and smiled. What else was I supposed to say?
James looked very shifty. He said, ‘Had to come to a compromise, you know?’
‘No I don’t. What have you let me in for?’
‘She’ll take the kid for the time being,’ he said, ‘providing we pay for its upkeep.’
‘That’s OK.’
‘There’s more.’
‘Tell me the worst,’ I asked him.
‘For some reason she thinks the kid’s from somewhere called Brittel. I think that’s about a hundred miles away; further to the east. She says they’ll contact someone they know in Brittel. If they find one of his relations they’ll pass him back.’
‘That sounds OK, too.’
‘They don’t want an extra mouth to feed permanently.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘If they can’t find anybody, they are going to dump him outside the nearest Army base, with a label around his neck bearing the service number and name of one of us. We’ll get him back.’
‘And you said she could have mine?’
‘That seems fair.’ That was Les putting his oar in. ‘It was you that talked us into lifting the little bugger in the first place. No point giving him to me. I’ve plenty of my own.’
‘What about James?’
‘The Major’s a confirmed bachelor. He’d never manage. Nah; if it comes down to it Charlie, he’ll be much better off with you.’
‘He’ll have to find me first.’
‘Isn’t that what your girl Grace said to you? Isn’t that how you ended up here in the first place?’
I said, ‘Fuck the lot of you.’
I broke my golden rule. When we walked back to Kate I couldn’t resist having a quick look over my shoulder. Frieda had the boy again. She raised his arm to make him wave to me. I waved half-heartedly back. I heard her spit out a stream of Kraut, and picked up Papa and Englander. I asked, ‘What was that all about?’
Les said, ‘She told him that you may be his new English father, and come back for him soon.’
I looked again. The little bugger was smiling at me. What else could I do? I grinned back at him. Les told me, ‘He’s got a little dark patch under his nose. That’s where the moustache will grow. Just like Hitler. What will the people down your street think when you get ’ome and bring ’im wiv you?’
I didn’t answer him because there were tears in my eyes. There were tears in my eyes because I had imagined taking him home to my little sister Francie. She would have adored him. So I suppose that I did what Francie would have done anyway. I was almost at Kate’s door when I grunted, ‘Forgot something,’ to them, and, ‘Won’t be a min.’
I hurried back to Otto, Frieda and the kid. I fished out my tags, and pulled off the spare. We always had to wear the two. One was to be tacked on to your grave marker, and the other sent back to your unit. It was nice to find something useful to do with them instead. I put the spare in my jacket pocket – I’d find a string to wear it on later – and hung the other around young Adolf’s neck. I got another slobbery kiss from the woman for the gesture. This time I didn’t look back; that was too difficult. Les put an arm around my shoulder and squeezed, avoiding the tender part. I don’t think that that sort of thing came too easily to him. He said, ‘Proud of you, Charlie. That was nice,’ and, ‘I’ll drive.’
James was already in the back with his notebook open. I don’t think that he even noticed. I reflected on what Les had been willing to do a few hours ago.