It was a day that started just as any other day.
Getting up early is an insidious habit that gets right inside you – you act like a civilian for just so long, luxuriating between the blankets after waking each morning, and then suddenly, to be awake and not to be up and about seems wasteful. Bed becomes a setting for only one thing – for rest-giving sleep. The sybaritic side of resting horizontal in the warmth, with only a bird’s eye aspect of the realities of the day, becomes a weakening civilian habit. In bed you’re vulnerable, you’re a bad soldier – sergeants come upon you and bellow in your ear, grown men twitch the blankets from you and jeer at the hands you have tucked for comfort into your crotch.
As first light stole into the barn, I awoke, and immediately jumped out of the ‘bed’ in the hay bale. The straw had worked its way into my shirt and my trousers, and the dust it carried covered my body with an itching prickling powder.
I took off all my clothing, shook it, and laid it out in the sunlight to air. Then I took out the clothing I had worn the previous day, and had folded neatly into my rucksack. It didn’t smell unpleasantly yet, but I could quickly identify it as my own. It had my sweet-sour odour I had once been told was most attractive, but which I knew could quickly go stale. I put on underpants, trousers, socks, boots, gaiters, and with my braces hanging, took a bucket of water behind the hedge behind the orchard on the far side of the barn.
Behind us, or so we were told, was the entire British Army. With them, so rumour had it, was the entire American Army.
Beneath us, south on the maps, was a unit of Frenchmen. At least, Frenchmen had marched the night before the previous one through what the military historians would call ‘our positions’, and I supposed they still had to be down there somewhere. Up above us, the reconstituted Dutch Army, leftovers from the Dutch Underground, or so I’d been told by Tom Cooper. He seemed to know everything that went on, though we had no contact with the world outside for three days, other than a daily visit from the sergeant whose name I cannot remember.
In front of us, somewhere, the German Army. The finest bunch of soldiers ever fashioned by the cunning of men. That’s what we had been told by each of our bloodletting training officers at Catterick Camp – this message had been used by every single sergeant and officer who held sway, for however brief an episode, over our lives and destinies. I couldn’t carry accurate testimony to the fineness of the German Army. I had never seen a German fire a shot in anger, had never fired a shot at one in anger, and had begun to think the whole war was a foolishly conceived exercise in futility.
Trained as taut as a fiddle string by the most brutal methods the Army could devise, I had been flung into mortal combat again and again. I had been dropped by parachute into localities in France, Belgium, Holland, known only to me by a code name.
Operation Thunder. We had blown up a bridge across a river rumoured to be the Loire. Four of us had done that job. Our training had been such that we were in and out of Thunder in three hours flat. We’d been received by a rain-drenched Frenchman who came no nearer to us than twenty yards, and then seemed afraid of the explosives we carried. We had landed in the rain. There had been an exciting moment when a German lorry, or so we guessed, went down a road half a mile away. We moved across the ground already made familiar to us by models studied at leisure in the ground floor front of a boarding-house in Hurstpierpoint. We had no need of the Frenchman.
My part in the proceedings had been to lash my share or the explosive round the base of the second plinth of the bridge. I had dumped at least a half a hundredweight of grease-proof-paper wrapped packets into a hole I was told I would find there. It had been there all right. Half full of rain. I remember thinking, ‘Good job they wrapped this lot in grease-proof paper.’ Then I retired by a planned route, to the corner of a field. I waited there about ten minutes, and my three companions came back one by one. There was no talking. Five minutes later a plane landed, and we hopped on board. Only when we were in the air with the thin ribbon of the river stretching below us did we relax. By then, we were feeling the delayed action of the tension we had lived under since our first briefing.
I never found out if that bridge was ever blown. No one told me if that grease-proof paper had kept out the rain. We landed in that plane in an unnamed aerodrome, from which we were driven one by one, separately. We had not talked in the plane. There had been nothing to talk about. ‘What mob you with, then?’
‘Fifth Special Group. What mob you with?’
‘Fourth Special Group.’
‘Know a guy called Chalky?’
‘Chalky what?’
‘Dunno – we always called him Chalky. I did a power station with him up in Belgium somewhere.’ Long pause.
‘You ever done a power station?’
‘Never.’
‘They’re all right.’
‘I’d be scared of getting a shock!’
‘Yes, you’ve got to watch it.’
Conversations such as this one don’t go on for ever. I never saw any of the four again. I was driven in a small army truck and deposited in an assembly centre in a hotel somewhere along the Marylebone Road. After two days I was sent up to Wrexham, then to Achnacarry in Scotland to learn how to make a fire with the oil in the oil bottle in the butt of a rifle.
I was washing. In a bucket. Behind the hedge behind the orchard beside the barn. I’d made a bit of a fire with pellets of smokeless fuel, and had stuck the bucket on them to try to get the water warm enough for a shave. I’ve never forgotten that story about Somerset Maugham wearing a dinner jacket in the jungle in Burma, and saving The Times to open it fresh each morning.
The sun was up, and it was warm. It was a pruning morning. I was daydreaming again – the orchards of Kent. Blossom time – Schubert-song blossom time, Ivor Novello’s ‘We’ll Gather Lilacs’ time. I remember thinking that neither Schubert nor Ivor Novello can ever have pruned an orchard, to smell the spring, when the bark of the trees gives off a sweet odour as pungent as the sweat on the skin of a desirous woman.
Which led me into another rich vein of daydreams.
Cliff and Tom Cooper came out of the barn and started to walk across the beaten earth yard to where I was washing by the hedge. Both were stripped to the waist. Tom Cooper was carrying what had once been a lilac-coloured towel over his shoulder. We’d pulled his leg about that towel for the two weeks he’d had it. My towel had gone long ago, too soiled even to wash. Oddly enough, it was his only possession apart from his rifle that no one would ever borrow from him. I suppose that was one of the things that set Tom Cooper apart from the rest of us, even from Cliff and me and Robin Farquhar. That towel. We always called Robin Robin, Cliff Cliff, but we never called Tom Cooper Tom.
I was cleaning my teeth with the last of the salt and the end of my index finger. I would infinitely prefer to stink of sweat than bad breath.
Suddenly, I suppose – though the action that followed can still cross my night dreams in slow motion – the whole wall that jutted out from the side of that barn just took off, into the air, and came crashing to the ground, brick upon brick upon brick, between Cliff, Tom Cooper and me. The bucket of water was pushed upwards and crushed almost flat against my belly by the sudden pressure. A little of the water in it shot up past my face, and then the rumble began, the rumble of rubble and the clatter of tiles and the whiplash of the branches of trees. Tom Cooper was flung sideways into a trough of pigmeal long since rancid, but Cliff just crumpled and fell, boneless, to the ground. Then the post-explosive suction began, and bricks, timber, tiles, dust, rubble, came rushing helter skelter into the swirling maelstrom all about us.
That was the first bomb.
Other bombs fell at one- or two-minute intervals, during the next ten or so minutes. For ten or so minutes the bombs came, each one a whirling, swirling, bone-bruising, belly-blasting belch obscuring the sun.
I stood there, too rigid even to drop to the ground. When the bombing stopped there was a tangible silence, the silence that Goethe must have heard when his birds shut up in the trees.
The official historians, the bibliographers, the biographers, men of leisure and records, would be able to tell you what those bombs were, and who was responsible for them.
To me, they were a vast anonymous turbulence, that came from nowhere, went nowhere, had only one direction and that inwards to a twisting centre evil as the eye of a hurricane. They had no identity, no curses could be unleashed by them, no anger-releasing blasphemies. They were yet another manifestation of the fatuity, the enormous life-wasting, peanut-cracking, sledge-hammering devastating idiocy of war.
The barn itself, constructed only of thin timber hung tile fashion on slender wooden posts, appeared untouched by it all, save that several tiles had been stripped from the overhanging shingle roof above the doorway.
When the bombing stopped and the quiet came, I felt each separate muscle of my body relax and begin to ache. My chest heaved – I had been holding my breath for some time. There was an intense pain in my appendix. I walked to where Cliff lay, and straightened his limbs as best I could. He was covered in blood, actually covered by it, with some in his eyes.
But he was alive, and conscious. He tried to turn his face away as I straightened out his neck on his shoulders – he tried to push me from him with hands and arms from which all strength and mobility had been blasted. I bent over him, and waited for him to speak. He chewed at a mouthful of blood and dust, then spat it out.
‘Go away,’ he said, his voice perfectly normal, and quite capable. ‘Go away, I’ve pissed myself.’
I left him and went to Tom Cooper. He was dusting the dried rancid pigmeal powder from himself, banging both his hands rhythmically on his thighs, and cursing.
He appeared to be quite dry. I looked down. I, too, had pissed myself.
It was about half-past ten by the time the sergeant got to us, crawling down the gully at the side of the hedge, past a gap through which one could look west to where we had been told were Germans. Not that we’d ever seen any Germans across there, mark you. Not that we’d ever taken the risk of looking for them.
Apparently a number of the men we’d travelled with through France and Belgium and Holland had been killed, so the sergeant said. He himself was all right, except he had broken a finger, and had made a temporary splint of plaster of Paris held in position by a French letter – one of the ones we used to keep water out of the end of the rifle barrel when we waded across rivers.
Cliff had recovered by the time the sergeant arrived, and had washed the blood from his face and out of his eyes. ‘Everything all right, Cooper?’ the sergeant asked. Cooper was the senior soldier – his number seven less than mine. Cooper didn’t reply. He nodded.
The sergeant looked at the yard, the sideless gaping barn, the shattered trees, the debris that littered the clearing.
‘I see you had ’em here, then?’
It wasn’t a question you wanted to answer.
‘You’re not the only ones – we had ’em over there you know,’ he said, on the defensive.
‘We know,’ I said, to comfort him. We didn’t know, of course. How could we. We didn’t even know what day it was, or even where was ‘over there’!
‘Anybody hurt?’ he asked.
‘No, sergeant,’ Tom Cooper said.
‘Anybody hurt over by you?’ I asked, more to make conversation than anything else.
‘Yes,’ he said, and told us of the lads who’d been killed, or wounded and sent back to the casualty clearing station. ‘Well, you can call it that,’ he said, ‘two queer orderlies and a refugee from a knacker’s yard.’
By this time Cliff had brewed a pot of tea in a metal pot we’d found in the barn when we first arrived.
We sat down and drank it, slowly at first, and then gulping as it became apparent the sergeant was going to get regimental.
Tom Cooper forestalled him.
‘What’s the order of the day, sergeant?’ he asked, quiet and crisp and competent as all good senior soldiers are thought to be.
‘Keep your eyes on the top of that hill,’ he said, pointing about a half a mile to the south-west. ‘Anything comes over it,’ he said, ‘and you’re to make a planned withdrawal back to the camp.’
We looked at the hill, suddenly invested with the awesome aspect of a potential trouble spot, like some street of ill repute in a provincial town. If countryside can look innocent – it looked innocent enough. Well covered with growths of one kind and another, holding a pleasing aspect of sunlight and shade – almost a painter’s hill, a bit of Constable. But, when the sunlight was dimmed by a scudding cloud, and the shadows darkened, it suddenly took upon itself a look of Piper, a gaunt exterior with the bones of evil too close to the surface.
‘Right,’ Tom Cooper said. ‘We’ll watch it, sergeant.’
‘One on watch, two resting. Make out a two-hour rota.’
I believe he imagined Tom Cooper would produce from somewhere a sheet of quarto paper and a typewriter, and would compose three carbon copies of a list of names to be filed in the orderly room. He appeared for a moment to be waiting for this manifestation of discipline, but when nothing formal was forthcoming, he looked briskly about him. He took my rifle, opened the breech and extracted the bolt. It was clean. My rifle always was clean. I stuck my thumbnail in the breech at a suitable angle, and he looked down the barrel. It too was clean, that I knew. I removed my thumb, and he handed the bolt back to me. I slid it into the rifle without effort, without fumbling, looking all the while into his eyes. From this distance, I could have sworn he was cross-eyed!
‘All right for ammo?’ he said.
We had a whole box of ammo, three rifles, and unaccountably the barrel alone of a bren-gun. We also had a pillowcase full of primed grenades, primed against regulations of course, and Tom Cooper had a Verey pistol and a pocket full of cartridges.
We’d been crossing a low range of hills, one time, and suddenly a group of civilians had appeared over the crest. At the same time, bombing had started from we knew not where. The civilians had not flinched under the bombing but had continued to approach us in that deadly purposeful shuffle. In the confusion, an officer with us, not from our mob but loosely attached for some particular purpose we never discovered, had pulled out his pistol and had started to fire in the direction of the civilians. The firing range of a pistol is limited – at one hundred yards you might just as well fire a pop-gun. The officer had panicked. Tom Cooper, standing half a pace behind him, felled him with one mutton chop blow behind the ear. As he went down, Tom Cooper reached into the officer’s second holster and withdrew his Verey pistol. He loaded a cartridge into it, and aiming at the advancing group of civilians, he fired a Verey light slap into the middle of them. It was a white star light – the shock of it exploding harmless but brilliant and dazzling in their midst brought them to a halt. It didn’t take long to discover they were a group of Ukrainian forced labour camp escapees.
Our own captain saw the entire incident, and knew how the sight of an officer losing his head and firing a pistol at an impossible target could affect a troop of men impetuously poised on the trigger edge of fear and action.
The officer left us within the half-hour, never to be seen again, and somehow Tom retained the Verey pistol. The cartridges proved very useful for starting a quick fire.
‘All right for grub,’ the sergeant asked. It was not a question – he was going through the motions of being a good commander.
‘Yes, we’re all right for grub,’ I told him.
We had enough meat and vegetable stew to build a small wall of tins between us and hunger. We had corned beef, Christmas pudding, tea, sugar and powdered milk, rock-hard high-protein biscuits, and a carton of bacon, eggs and K rations acquired from an American unit complete with Lucky Strike cigarettes, chewing gums, boiled barley sugar sweets, three paperbacked novels with lurid covers and painted edges, and a packet of contraceptives and anti-VD treatments. On the packing slip enclosed with the latter was a handwritten phone number in Detroit, Michigan, and the improbable name Ellie beneath it. We could think of no better inducement to continue to use them, and ‘I’m keeping myself clean for Ellie’ became something of a slogan with us.
‘Yes, we’re all right for food,’ I said.
Three dead chickens were hanging at the back of the barn. We found them roaming, fat, jocular and we hoped succulent. We found a mound of potatoes, and swedes and beetroots, and there were pounds of onions hanging in long strings. We had been dreaming all night of chicken stew with onions, and Ellie, clean in a new-made bed.
The sergeant dug into a side pack. From it he produced, like a father rewarding his well-behaved children, the Naafi issue of seven cigarettes and a tin of plain nutritious protein-enriched concentrated chocolate slab that we knew full well was going to be good for us.
He gave our ration issue to us, opened his top pocket and drew out a field notebook and appeared to consult it, as if to verify that we had not drawn beyond our entitlement.
Satisfied, apparently, he stood for a couple of minutes, while we stood before him in anticipation. Then, without saying the expected benediction, he strapped on his pack, fell to the ground, and crawled across the hard-packed earth of the clearing, and into the hedge.