We were four. Tom Cooper, Cliff, Robin Farquhar and me. We belonged, somewhat loosely, to Number Nine Commando Brigade, a group of bank clerks and bank robbers, strong men and weak, heroes and cowards, burglars, fire-raisers, bombers, poachers and just plain vagabonds. Our commanding officer, a noble Scot at birth, who’d inherited a title and a distillery together, should have been a pirate. He started the war a whisky tycoon; ended it a corpse of no intrinsic value.
Our Robin Farquhar was killed, too, crossing a river.
Our own unit consisted of seventy-four men when we landed in France shortly before the start of the second front. That first week they counted our dead in tens.
We were known as a Special Group, one of several, used by all and sundry to winkle out trouble wherever it might be encountered. We worked mostly by night, often behind the enemy lines when we could distinguish them. We were often cold, always lonely, usually hungry, and for the whole of the summer, autumn and winter of 1944 I used a bed only for hasty, unsatisfying and totally immoral purposes.
Now I tell my youngest daughter stories that always have to start ‘One day…’ This one I will never tell her.
One day we were taken by a sergeant, and we walked and crawled to where a barn was half concealed by a fold of the ground. The sergeant said, ‘Watch it,’ and crawled away and left us.
He came back the following morning about ten o’clock, and then again the morning after that.
One day…
I’ve read in the official histories of the last war, and in the official and unofficial novels, that armies were locked in combat, that an entire wing of the RAF flew overhead, tanks dotted the plains, hid in the woods, and forged across streams to look for hull-down firing positions. A couple of regiments of artillery, they say, came as close as was feasible, and a couple of thousand tons of bombs were fired or dropped during that one day. For me, it was the day, one of the days, Tom Cooper, Cliff and I spent in the barn. I don’t remember the name of the village nearest to the barn, and I never knew why we spent our days in it.
Generals and field marshals met in headquarters, and films of plays or books have been made, showing them looking gravely at Ordnance Survey maps, listening to them debate the fate of their mortal souls and careers should they decide to take again that ultimate decision, to send another stick of men forward into the holocaust of battle. That’s a mean load of responsibility, a mean way to have to send another man to his death, from across the top of an Ordnance Survey map of ground you’ll never see. Or so the films, my own research sources, have told me.
It wasn’t like that, you know. At least, not for Tom Cooper, for Cliff, nor for me. We fought a little war against boredom, tiredness and the unquenchable desire to be somewhere else, with someone else, doing something else. Lacking the knowledge of what the hell was going on, our chief fight was to preserve the essential seriousness of it all, the sense of being a small but vital part of the grander scheme of things.
Our chief difficulty was to accept, always, that a ‘grander scheme of things’ even existed. I had always been a simple man, not over-bright, this much I knew quite clearly. I had always lived under my father, had worked for an identifiable boss, had prayed to a superior Being I called (and thought of as) God. But significantly, I believed the portraits of Jesus Christ and of God that I had grown up with in my Bible, and all other drawings and portraits of him, were sacrilegious to me.
I had also seen photographs of war leaders, and could usually accept them as they were, but I needed a more positive outcome for their efforts than the mere movement over ground they called conquest.
And so, I think I’ll tell the story of that day the three of us had, out there on what I imagine is still marked on an official death kit Ordnance Survey map, locked away in a dusty cupboard in a labyrinthine office of the War Department, as being the left flank.