We watched him go, then Tom Cooper looked at the hill, then around the yard, and picked out a spot almost under the hedge, but screened at about two feet, where a man could half sit, half lie, in complete comfort, while watching ‘the hill’.
‘You take it first,’ he said to me, ‘I want to write a letter home to let them know I’m all right.’ The illogic of his remark didn’t strike me until they had retired into the barn, and I was left on my own.
‘He could have written it this afternoon,’ I said, to no one in particular.
It was a well-shaped hill, standing proud from the countryside like the top of a head. The hair, however, was grass, not bush or trees. ‘Now why the devil would anybody bother to come over the top of that hill?’ I thought. But then I saw the trees around the base, and guessed at the swift-flowing stream that would be in a cleft wide enough, as we had many times discovered to our cost, to stop a man, a half-track, a jeep.
It was a morning of complete peace. Nothing human or animal could be seen anywhere on the surrounding countryside, no evidence of any kind that this valley had human habitation. The sounds I could hear were all next valley sounds. Thumps and crumps, and the occasional quiet rat-a-tat-tat of a hand-held machine gun. One or two planes flew across from north to south high overhead, and then a small plane came up to the horizon of the hills but turned back before it drew level with our valley and our hill.
There was a complete absence of birds. It wasn’t something you noticed immediately, but after about ten minutes I became aware of something being missing, some unique emptiness in that valley, so lush with natural growth, so uniformly correct with its hedgerows, its trees, its grasses, its occasional patches of colour and changes of tint. All of nature invariably seems to me to be a background, a setting for the dramas of the movement of animals and birds and humans. Here was the effect without the drama of action or movement. An expectant quietness.
Tom Cooper had finished his letter. He came out of the barn, dropped to the ground and crawled along the hedge until he could sit beside me. He tucked the letter, after licking it, into his top pocket.
‘Anything happening?’
‘Not a thing.’
‘Seen anything?’
‘Nothing.’
He looked across the valley for quite some time. I could smell the tobacco on him, the bittersweet smell of someone else smoking. I had a sudden sense of deprivation.
‘How’s Cliff getting on with the dinner?’
‘It’s going to be all right. First square meal we’ve had for a week.’
The thought of those succulent chickens in the bucket back in the barn, bubbling quietly with mangel-wurzel and potato, salt and pepper, stilled my craving for tobacco. For a while.
‘What’s going on out there?’ I said to him.
‘How should I know?’
‘What’s happening on the other side of the hill?’
‘How should I know?’
‘I expect they’re getting ready for a big push?’
‘Couldn’t be. If they were, they’d be dropping bombs, wouldn’t they?’ He pointed with a thumb over his shoulder.
‘Who?’
‘Bloody Eighth Army or somebody. Probably send over a couple of tiffies with the rockets, or something. You ever seen them tiffies?’ Typhoon bombers, flying fast and low, with a cargo of rocket projectiles.
‘Quite a sight that is,’ Tom Cooper said.
The smell of chicken floated across the yard. I wasn’t interested in a long and technical account of tiffies and the way in which they could drop bombs, but I was interested in the chickens. All my life I’ve been sensitive to smells. Sensitive on a Sunday morning when I walked back from the bell-ringing, to the smell of bacon being fried late – bacon to me has always been a Sunday smell. The smell of chicken was comforting, rich, redolent of all the odours of well-being.
‘Who’s going to relieve me for dinner, you or Cliff?’
‘I’ll take over,’ Tom Cooper said, absent-mindedly.
He was looking out across the field, towards the hill. He had that wistful far-away look on him – the look of the narrator in the Millais picture of the North-West Passage – infinite experience, and wisdom, but no yearning.
‘That tree,’ he said, quietly, ‘that tree over by that light brown patch just below that row of trees that goes into the belly of that wood, over there, just under that second fold in the ground.’ I knew at a moment which tree he meant. To tell the truth, though not to pretend to be wise after the event, I had been considering that tree myself for about ten minutes before his arrival.
By rights, he should have told me about it in correct army style, for though we were commandos and had a certain liberty from correct army procedures, that was not to say that we shouldn’t keep up the best of the Army’s tried and tested methods.
The tree in question was a thick-topped chestnut, I’d say.
The day was completely without wind, no turbulence whatever in the scene before us. The tints of the grasses lay cool, still and unchanging across the valley, the trees silent and still, baking under the early sun, but motionless. With not a sound to be heard, any motion would have been a welcome distraction for the eyes.
Ten minutes ago, I’d seen the top branches of that tree begin to wave. Now Tom Cooper saw them wave, and looking at them again, I thought I saw them wave again too.
We both sat silent and watched that tree, but beyond that initial flicker of the branches, there was nothing else to show. All was still.
‘See anything?’ Tom Cooper asked. His voice was the voice of interrogation – to reassure himself with my conviction.
‘I saw the treetop wave, just a fraction.’
‘Which tree?’
‘The one you pointed out, five hundred yards, left of arc, five o’clock.’
‘What do you think it was?’
‘A squirrel? A chipmunk?’
Each time he shook his head.
‘A cat, possibly?’
He shook his head again. I knew damn well it was no cat.
We both sat and looked intently at that tree. For how long I don’t know. The odour of chicken, briefly forgotten, returned again, but this time without the pleasure of absolute anticipation. Silently I cursed. I cursed the tree.
‘Can you take over for a minute?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’
I crawled back and without looking behind me into the barn, took a half-smoked cigarette from my field-dressing pocket, and quickly lit it. I could hear Cliff messing about in the back of the barn, whistling silently and tunelessly as he went about some all-absorbing but futile task, such as laying a corn sack for a lunch-time tablecloth. Two gulps of smoke, and I crawled back out again, into the bright sunlight, across the yard, into the hedge, along the hedge, to where Tom Cooper was still looking at the tree.
I think it was at that moment that I realised we were completely lost. The journey from the other men in our unit had been made at night, following the instructions of the sergeant who led us along hedgerows and across fields to our present position.
We knew the route our own sergeant took each of the three days we had been there, but truth to tell, I had not the faintest idea which way he would turn when he left our sight at the hedgerow’s end. With absolute conviction I realised that neither Tom Cooper nor Cliff knew.
Until ten o’clock tomorrow, unless a bomb blew us all to kingdom come, we were completely and utterly lost.
‘That’s better.’
‘Yes – had your smoke?’
‘Yes. You seen anything?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Do you suppose it was somebody?’
‘I don’t know. But it wasn’t the wind. At least, there’s no wind over here. But that’s not to say there couldn’t be a sudden burst of wind over there, is it? Of course, with the sun over our shoulders, we’d have seen the glint if anyone there had been using glasses, wouldn’t we? And thinking about it from their side, the tip of that tree must make the best position for viewing this valley. If you look from their side, you could see the entire valley from that tree, and you’d have a natural run up to the tree from down inside that wood. Of course, you couldn’t use the wood itself because none of the trees on this edge of the wood is high enough to look over that sort of scrubby growth at the edge of the wood. And then, from that tree you could come forward down the side of that hedge, and along the bottom of that field we can’t see. Up the side of that fold just under that patch of yellow mustard or whatever it is, and along this side here, round this corner and you’d be staring us straight in the face.’
He was right. There was no reason why a man couldn’t get from the one side of this valley to our present position with no risk that we would see him. Hidden all the way by hedges, ditches, folds in the ground.
We looked again at the terrain, considering each fold from the enemy point of view.
‘Get Cliff,’ he said.
‘What about the stew?’
‘Bugger the stew.’
When I came back with Cliff he was still sitting there, his pose the pose of a man riding comfortably in a sedan chair, his feet propped against the bank in front of him, his body inclined slightly to the rear for even greater comfort. By his left side, the box of ammo, by his right the pillowcase full of primed grenades. He reached into the pillowcase, and handed six grenades to me, four to Cliff, with the air of dishing out Christmas presents. ‘Instantaneous fuses,’ he said, briskly.
It was an old trick we had done many times before. We fix a slender rope of grass across the path a man might crawl. The grass is indistinguishable from the ordinary growing grass, except to the expert eye of, say, a poacher. We had several of them in our unit, and had tried the trick out on them several times and could now fool even them. The end of the grass we plait and make a thin rope, just strong enough to hold the ring of a piece of baling wire jammed against the grenade. If anything disturbs the grass rope, the ring shifts, the handle flies, the grenade explodes.
The only trouble with it, as far as we were concerned, was that you had to remove the seven-second fuse normally used for grenades, and replace it with an instantaneous fuse, and you had to take out the safety pin. And that meant that, if you were foolish enough to make a mistake, the grenade would explode without the normal grace period of seven seconds during which a nimble man could run fifty yards.
Cliff went back into the barn, with whistling and the chicken stew forgotten for the moment. He came out with the box of instantaneous fuses, sweating profusely along his forehead hairline, though his hands were perfectly dry.
‘I think by the edge of that hedge-line would be the best place,’ Tom Cooper said, ‘and then we shall get a look at him. Leave your rifle and I’ll cover you.’
He knew I was the best stalker of the three of us. It was a trick I learned early in life, stealing apples, and I prided myself that no one could go in and out of an orchard like I could. I plotted my route along the contours of the ground, and then crawled forward out of the hole through which we had been watching, turning straight left under the hedge to avoid leaving tracks for any spotter aircraft. To the corner of the field, breathing easy all the way, then across an open bit, on my toes, knees, elbows and fingertips to avoid leaving a visible trail of compressed grass. It took twenty minutes to get to the tip of the hedge where I intended to lay the booby-trap, but I reckoned that, best going, it would take anyone forty minutes to get there from the tip of the tree. The grenade I hung against the trunk of a small hedge bush resembling hawthorn. I laid the straw under the lowest and luckily sturdiest branch, and then plaited it through the grasses, intertwining an occasional blade of grass through the straw fronds here and there to make it quite invisible to the eye. Then I put a bent twig runner, inverted V shape, in the bottom of the hedge to hold the grass taut, and secured the far end some five feet from the hedge with a twig, wedged at an angle into the soil to a depth of six inches. Even from on top of it, knowing where it was, I was unable to see the straw strip. Back into the hedge to sit on my hunkers and take up the strain by twisting the slack of the straw round a twig. The whip of the twig, I estimated, was enough to take the strain of the pin ring and hold the straw taut. Just so long as no one would crawl over the straw!
The final act was yet to come – the act of pulling out the safety pin to prime the grenade. I checked every inch of the straw plait, tried the tension with my finger. It felt right. I plucked the straw plait gently and felt it quiver with just sufficient tension to throb. Too much tension would release the grenade once I took out the safety pin – too little and the trip ring we had so carefully devised would sag down the body of the grenade. Either way, with an instantaneous fuse, I didn’t stand much of a chance.
There comes a moment when you’re involved in a stunt like that, when your mind ceases to function, your instinct takes over. The straw plait was right; hadn’t I done this thing many times before? I yanked the pin out. I yanked it out and there it was, a lethal greeting card set for the first man to cross the plait.
I turned away and crawled down the hedge bottom to a safe fifty feet from it. Only then did I notice I had been holding my breath from the moment of pulling the pin, and that, unwittingly, I had clenched the pin between my teeth. Fear has always made me put things into my mouth, from the time when, as a frightened kid, I used to suck my thumb. I lay there in the hedge bottom, breathing and quivering like a runner, until I quietened down, stopped trembling. I put the pin in my field-dressing pocket, spat out the greasy taste in my mouth, and crawled back to where Cliff and Tom Cooper were waiting. Tom Cooper, the bastard, was not looking out for me. Dead regimental, he had eyes only for the hill. Cliff, however, had the rifle in his hands, his own rifle, with the safety catch forward, and the sights set at a useful three hundred yards, the exact distance to the edge of the copse from which I could have been watched, setting the trap. He was still scanning that copse, didn’t relax his eyes to look at me until I had reached his side of the hedge.
‘Watch the hill,’ Tom Cooper said to him, and turned around.
He was sweating, but then so was I.
‘How did it go?’ he asked me. Funny thing about Tom Cooper. He was a cold bastard, an unemotional person to have around, you might suppose. But I knew him, had grown accustomed to the silent signs that revealed his inner emotions. Like the time we were on the harbour wall in Amsterdam when they dropped a bomb and I kicked him in the buttocks into an open shop doorway. The blast had come down that street like a wall of dam water, stripping even the doorknobs from the doors as it scraped by. Him in one shop door, me in the other, looking through the shattered glass at each other. He’d known about the kick, known I’d saved his life.
‘Fancy yourself as a bloody footballer, do you,’ he said. From that moment war without him would have been inconceivable.
‘How did it go?’ he asked. He’d lived every moment of that straw-plaiting and pin-lifting episode, focused on my fumbling fingers, there in the hedge bottom.
‘Piece of cake,’ I said.
‘I hope there are no rabbits about,’ Cliff said, without turning his head.
I looked past and beyond him. The tree was still. The entire valley was still.
Until about twelve o’clock we worked our way across that shelf of field and hedgerow, until it would have been impossible for even a rabbit to crawl through that grass to reach us without setting off the devastating alarm of a grenade or, when we started to run short of grenades, one-pound slabs of gun-cotton we used for cutting railway lines. We took it in turns to lay them, and as we worked, we built up a sketch-plan of the area, one planting, one watching, and one keeping the planter covered.
Nearly a quarter past twelve by Cliff’s watch we smelled the burning chickens. The bucket had boiled dry. Tom Cooper gave a yelp, crawled madly backwards and disappeared into the barn. Just about that time, Cliff got back from planting the last one.
‘You’ve got to do something about that smell,’ he said, ‘I caught a whiff of it right across the other side of the field. It’s a dead giveaway.’
He was right, of course. I hadn’t considered the odour, that wonderfully reassuring odour of boiling chicken. For anyone approaching us by stealth it would be as good as a homing beacon. How often, in a strange northern town, had I located the nearest fish and chip shop by following the smell. I remember a self-made circus owner I once knew who used to be driven around by a chauffeur in the days before the war, a cockney man with a heart of gold who never accustomed himself to the plush-lined interior of such a vehicle. When he tired of sightseeing, he would pick up the speaking tube and say, ‘Right, Charlie, follow your nose.’ And within twenty minutes, Charlie would guarantee to have the Rolls parked outside a fish and chip shop.
Tom Cooper came scampering back. ‘We’ve got to do something…’
‘…about that smell,’ we echoed.
‘But what?’ I added.
I knew, and he knew, and Cliff knew.
Had our sergeant been there, he would have made some pointless joke about ‘Who’s musical – well you can volunteer to shift the piano.’ But we had no sergeant, and a smell of burning chicken that pointed to our exact position from all points of the compass down wind.
Cliff had just returned from planting the last grenade, and the sweat was not yet dry on his upper lip. Tom Cooper’s army number was seven fewer than mine, and that gave him all the rights and privileges of an older soldier. So off I went. I found what I looked for, at the back of the barn, a pile of it, over eight feet high. It had been there since the spring, I reckoned, when the grass was green and lush, the animals well fed after a winter in the barns, well fed, contented, and to judge by the smell a little obese. Shovelful by shovelful, I spread it over the yard, a pungent, deadening blanket of humus that would have masked the sweet odours of heaven itself.
When I returned to the eyrie, Tom Cooper and Cliff shrank from me in exaggerated horror. After a short while we all grew accustomed to the cloying stench of it, and forgot it.
Cliff went back into the barn to salvage what he could from the bucket. Tom Cooper took over the watch, and I took my official time off. What should I do? Take a walk, go for a bus ride? Cinema, dance, or stay at home and listen to Much Binding?
I went for another wash. The stench hadn’t quite gone, though I had learned to ignore it. I took the bucket round to the back of the barn again, and started the water warming again. It was the same water I had washed in that morning, but there wasn’t all that much water in the rainwater butt that I could afford to waste it.
Why do we do it? How do we manage? What reserves exist in the human spirit that can be drawn upon, as it seems, at will? Once we ran from Achnacarry to Fort William, and back via Spean Bridge. We ran all the way, just for the hell of it. We were in full battle kit, carrying weapons. I started with a rifle, finished with six rifles slung on one shoulder, and a heavy Piat on the other. Not a word of command was spoken, and no one dropped out. Twenty-five men, all running through the mountains, up road and down road, over bridge under bridge. One of us was a parish priest who d resolved that there was only sense in war if he could truly believe that ‘Whither thou goest, I will go.’ He meant it. He also wanted to ensure that when he arrived he would have the breath left in him to comfort the weary and the sick, to say the Lord’s Prayer. He’d never run more than a hundred yards since leaving prep school – his living had permitted none of those gastronomic luxuries that give energy to the ribcage – he was lean, and hungry, but determined. Many of the men running with him had been released from gaol to volunteer to join us – they had been blackguards, now were heroes in the making. Four men half-carried that priest through the last eleven miles, on the barrels of their rifles, two in front, two behind, with the rifles clamped under his armpits. He was not conscious of them, just as not one of us was conscious of the road we trod, the burst bleeding blisters, the pain-numbed ankle, leg, thigh and back muscles, the salt from the dried sweat that found every crack in our chapped faces. They who carried him before were released thieves, those behind him were safe-blowers, and thus thieves. He had the best of precedents for his journey, but the cross he carried was locked somewhere inside his head. I remember seeing him run up the beach when first we landed in France to begin the second front. It was my fourth visit, but running up that beach I felt like a tourist. He was carrying a telephone exchange on his back, and I got to the hummock on the crest of the beach before him. I was cursing him as he trundled slowly behind me, his hands clasped to his stomach. When he got to the hummock, he gasped, ‘I’ve been hit’ and, unable to stop, he blundered into the hummock and tripped and fell. I rolled him over and started to attach the ends of the spools of assault cable as our men brought them from other units. We had been told to establish a telephone network and then get out of there quickly. The priest didn’t move and I had to prise the switchboard off his back to permit me to get at the connectors. The whole of his stomach had been sliced out by a plate-like piece of shrapnel. He must have been dead long before he got to the hummock, yet he had been able to speak. I’ve heard of fowl running about the farmyard after their heads have been cut off – this was my first, but not my last, experience of it in a human being.
How and why do we do it? What is this immense power that mind seeks to have over matter? Is it simply the glorification of the ego, the need to feel that there is nothing that cannot be done, no wall too high, no drop too deep?
After the war I spent six months on fruitless weekly visits to a professor of psychiatry at a provincial university. It was an entertainment, nothing more. I revelled in everything I ever told him, and telling it doubled the effect, if not the value, of it. One of our men didn’t have the opportunity to talk to a professor of psychiatry. He came back from a heavy water-plant job in Norway after a harrowing experience during which he had been held prisoner and tortured. The fools who received him when he got back sent him home to recover. On his first night at home, his lovely young wife woke beside him. Dawn had not yet broken, but tenderly she bent over in the half-light and kissed his forehead where the scars of the cigarette burns still showed. Without waking from his sleep, he reached over and stuck his knife up to the hilt in her heart. He’d gone finally to sleep, clutching it. They sent him to Broadmoor. It was in all the papers. We had four men desert to Southern Ireland when they read about it, and one of our sergeants dropped a live grenade down a toilet and then sat on the seat. Another of our sergeants, a physical training instructor over six feet tall, who must have weighed sixteen stones, every one of them a muscle, taught us all unarmed combat so fiercely he broke two legs a week. Tom Cooper was the only man in the unit who’d ever chopped him to the ground. The Gorilla, we used to call him. He was given a year’s imprisonment, and sent back to the Pioneer Corps, for buggery in Wrexham, North Wales. How do you do it, sergeant? How do you do it? When Cliff heard about it, all he could say was, ‘the sergeant thought too much of his privates’. It had made me laugh when I first heard it – it made me laugh again sitting there behind the barn with the slop in which I was going to wash bubbling merrily away. The washing took all of five minutes. The water was too hot, but I was determined not to waste it. The sweet-scented, transparent soap made me think again of the Millais painting, but it shifted the stench of dung and that was all I asked.
As I had supposed he would, Cliff had dressed it all up in best Somerset Maugham style. The chicken had not all been burned, though the liquor was amber. He had cleared a box-top, laid on it a bleached flax sack, and had ‘set’ a paper twist of salt and pepper, a pot of steaming tea, and his own knife and fork, burnished bright, daintily placed beside my mess tin. Hard tack biscuits he had placed on a paper doily, torn from toilet paper into a delicate pattern, and pièce de resistance – a flower.
The flower was a beauty, flush-fleshed, richly-coloured. I didn’t know the name of the species, but the sight of it was reassuringly incongruous. ‘You’ll make someone a good wife,’ I said.
He was pleased.
What a pointless thing it is to draw an arbitrary line between the sexes, to claim certain abilities as male or female, to put men and women into separate compartments, as opposed as plus and minus, nuts and bolts, top and bottom. What a false dichotomy we have created between those with their parts outside, and those with their parts inside. I had been with Cliff on roaring, fall-down drunks. We had shared park benches with acquiescent sisters – on one occasion Tom Cooper and Cliff and I took three friends in a field overlooking the town, and all the way through the act the three girls held hands. Cliff jumped into women; he jumped out of aeroplanes with a pre-packed parachute between him and the Roman Candle fast-fall to earth, and never even gave it a thought.
But lovingly he’d take a piece of toilet paper and laboriously fold it, with thick grimed fingers, and tear a paper doily and spread it on the table. This was a man whose military speciality, in the coarse world of barrack-room values, was that he could belch at will loudly enough to split an oak panel at fifty feet.
The chicken was delicious. Soft and tender as Ellie herself must have been about that time. Of course, it was burned to old Nick, but that didn’t detract from the flavour.
As soon as he saw I had started, he fetched Tom Cooper’s kit and laid the other side of the table. The flower he moved to the centre, then he went and took Tom Cooper’s place on watch.
When Tom Cooper came in he gave a soft whistle, sat down, and tucked in. I finished first, of course, and left the table with the remains of my mug of tea and lit a fag. Tom Cooper finished his grub, and came over and sat beside me. He lit the cigarette I offered, and let his head drop back onto a corn sack behind him.
‘I’m a bit worried by that tree,’ he said.
‘So am I.’
We both thought a while, and then spoke together.
‘If it was somebody…’
I let him finish it.
‘If it was somebody, they’ll be here about half-past two.’
I had already worked it out for about that time.
‘What do we do when they come?’
‘Well, you heard the sergeant – he said, we make an orderly retreat. The trouble is, I don’t know where to make an orderly retreat to…’
So it was out. He too was lost. We were all lost until ten o’clock the next morning. Provided we were still there at ten o’clock.
‘Of course,’ I said, tentatively. ‘We could start right now if you wanted. Surely we’d find somebody somewhere back there.’
‘And when we find somebody, what do we say to them? “Don’t shoot, it’s us, and the password for three days ago was MARTIN.”’
I had even forgotten that the last password we knew was MARTIN.
‘We could take a chance?’
An officer and seven men had taken a chance a month ago, and one burst from their own Bren got the lot.
‘No,’ said Tom Cooper, with complete finality. ‘We’ll stay here!’
There are many kinds of soldiers and many reasons for fighting a war. We were three army commandos, each a volunteer. What was I doing as a volunteer commando? I was and still am a pacifist. Not a mealy-mouther, not a brotherhood-of-men man – you can keep all that crap for me.
But I have been able to believe that the sole object of life is to try to enhance the calibre of the human soul – call it spirit if you will – and have never had anything but contempt for the human animal. War, for me, is the triumph of the animal. I can forgive the destruction, but not the debasement, the festering unwashed sore on the body of mankind.
Realising the inevitability of my fighting the war, for I lacked the courage of pacifism, I could only descend to the animal level in my own way, as a volunteer for an undisciplined unit, subjected by no official dogma, by no protocol of military academy observances. How many men insist on going to hell in their own way. Tom Cooper was one, so was Cliff. For Tom Cooper this was a spiritual as well as a physical revolt. First and foremost, he was a moral man, with an inalienable sense of correctitude. And though he could pin a girl to the earth for a fast forgotten moment, he could neither walk nor crawl from the scene in which we had been placed without his own personal justification.
‘I’d better be getting back,’ he said, ‘and you’d better get some kip. We’ll be up all night, for certain!’
He stubbed out his cigarette and left the barn.
I settled myself on the corn sacks, and didn’t move again even when I heard Cliff come in and start to wash up.
I was still asleep when the first grenade exploded.
Nervous twitch flung me across the barn with my rifle cocked, one up the spout, the safety catch off. I stood just inside the door, accustoming my eyes to the sudden glare, looking in a continuous sweeping arc across the entire line of vision. A puff of smoke was rising in the sky on the other side of the hedge. There seemed to be no action, not any movement at all. I saw with relief that Tom Cooper and Cliff were still there, both looking along their rifle barrels at the mid-distance.
I crawled to where they lay.
The smoke was rising above the hedge bottom where I had planted the first grenade. About five yards in from the hedge, a tall German soldier was standing, swaying, his hands clasping his head. His hat had been blown off. His rifle was hanging by its strap from the crook of his arm, banging against his puttees and trailing in the grass. On his back he had a slim pack, the kind made of an animal skin with the fur outwards. His water bottle hung from his side, dangling as he swayed. He was trying to walk forward, impelled by I know not what devil of instinctive obedience, but his feet refused to keep time with the upper part of his body and he pitched forward. He grunted as he fell, and as he lay there, we heard him grunt again. He tried to get back onto his knees. Then he pitched finally forward, flat on the earth and lay still. By now, the smoke plume had begun to disperse. Then the German started again to groan, and grunt as if to stop his own moaning. Then there was silence.
Total silence.
It had been my grenade.
Oh, I’d planted hundreds before. Hundreds. Over most of France and Belgium and Holland and parts of Germany were grenades I had planted.
I had never watched anyone who’d been hit by one before.
I had never realised that they could be lethal.
‘Sure,’ you’ll say, ‘this is an excuse, the frightened whimperings of a stupefied child who says, “I didn’t know it could hurt.”’ Like the time a boy took a dart and threw it while I was picking other darts from the face of the dartboard, and the dart went right through the fleshy part of my hand near the thumb, and the boy said to me, ‘I never knew they could hurt you.’
Well, the dart could and did hurt me.
And planted grenades, that game we had played, first in battle school in the wilds of Wales and Scotland, as a game, and then as a sport in the fields of France and Belgium, and then as a habit of self-protection in Holland and Germany, this game and sport and habit suddenly became a lethal weapon you hold tightly, knowing damn well your skill will prevent it exploding in your face. The man lying out there, still holding his head, perhaps in death, didn’t know it was there, and I had carried skill beyond the point of sport and self-protection, into aggression.
Where were the Germans, anyway, and where were our own troops and the Americans and the French and the Poles and the Dutch and the Belgians? Where were they? They ought to be here, all around us, and the Germans ought to be on the top of that hill, far away where the tiffies could come and get them and where, with our sights extended to the limit, we could fire anonymous shots in their general direction. I can fire a rifle, but why couldn’t it be at the end of a rifle’s range. Why did it have to be just there, an arm’s throw away, across a green, stinking, damned-awful field of grass that needed cutting anyway and was full of bloody quitch.
At these moments, the official historians tell us, the proud men of the one hundred and twenty-seventh lancers, extended in V formation after the style of Clausewitz, bent their heads, and some of them vomited. Come on, lads, sick it up. Get rid of it. Wipe your mouths, lift your heads, smile palely and soldier on in hup two three time.
I neither vomited, nor, I believe, showed any outward sign of what had happened. But without disturbing the outer skin of my being, the whole of my inside shook and shuddered.
‘One of yours,’ Tom Cooper said.
‘Yes, one of mine. My first,’ I replied.
‘We’d better have an all-round watch,’ he said.
Cliff turned around and lay facing the rear. I watched the foreground, Tom Cooper watched the hill and the ground between. We lay that way for at least thirty minutes without moving or speaking. The German soldier neither moved nor spoke during that time. Finally, Tom Cooper turned to face me.
‘Watch the hill as well,’ he said. ‘I’m going to make certain he’s dead.’
‘No you’re bloody well not.’ The vehemence surprised me, but appeared not to shock him. ‘I’ll go myself.’
‘I thought you would,’ he added, the vestige of a smile on the corners of his mouth.
I crawled out of that hedge and across and down the side without, I swear, causing even a ripple of a blade of grass, though I’ve never travelled so far so fast on all fours.
At the hedge corner, I cautiously lifted my head to look around. There was no other sign of activity. I took my knife out of the special guard we had down the seam of the right leg, and poked it into the inside of my right gaiter, for quick action. I took the piano wire garotte we always carried, and wound it round one wrist, holding the short steel handle in the palm of my hand. The other handle on the choking end I tucked up my sleeve. Then I started to crawl across the field, the eight or nine feet to where the German soldier lay inert.
At every pace I lay still and looked about me as far as I could see through the grass. At every pace I lay with my ear close to the ground listening for reverberations. I heard nothing.
Finally, as I drew my right knee level with my left knee, my head across my folded left arm, I was staring straight into the German’s face from two feet away. His eyes were open, and he was not dead. The left top of his head had been sheared away. Though he was not dead, death was not far from him. I lay beside him, and tried to turn him over onto his back. His arm was caught beneath him and I had to pull it free before he could turn. Then I rolled him over. He had been carrying what appeared to be an automatic rifle. I pulled his arm through the strap, and drew the rifle away to the side. I tried to get off his pack but it was not possible until the straps had been cut and it could then be drawn from beneath his body. I put this to one side, near the rifle, then emptied his pockets into the large side pocket of my jumping jacket. He had official-looking documentation in the top right-hand pocket, a tin of cigarettes and a lighter in the top left-hand, a grubby handkerchief in the side pocket which I pressed down into the grass, and spare cartridge cases in the other jacket pocket. Getting into his trousers pockets was more difficult and completely fruitless. All six were empty, save for the field dressings in the back pocket. I took one field dressing and tore it apart. It was a burn dressing with a Vaseline lint pad. I put this over his wound, and then closed his eyes. He was still breathing, deeply and rhythmically, though his lips were beginning to drain of colour. I took the remainder of his cartridges from his side-slung pouch and then opened his tunic, drew the back of it from under his shoulders up over the back of his head and down over the front to cover his face completely.
Before covering his face I looked at him. He appeared to be about twenty-six. Not blond, not particularly handsome, though his now pinched lips had been full-fleshed. The dark shadows beneath his eyes had turned purple, but from battle fatigue or impending death I could not tell.
He died, I think, as I covered his face.
I gathered all his belongings and started back into the hedge, dragging him behind me by his feet. When I got him into the hedge bottom I levered his ankles and rolled him over into the undergrowth.
I then went back across the field and obliterated the signs his passage had made through the grass.
No trace of his presence remained, other than his dead body in the bottom of the hedge, half hidden by the overgrowth.
I crawled back to Tom Cooper, carrying my spoils of war. We couldn’t understand the documents, but Cliff, overjoyed by the automatic rifle, insisted on taking it apart at once. He had always had the ambition to loot a Luger for himself, and so I let him have the rifle.
Before Cliff could ask me I said, ‘No, he wasn’t wearing any medals.’
‘Don’t you think we ought to get back with the papers?’ I asked Tom Cooper. ‘Intelligence might be able to make something of them.’
‘I doubt it,’ he said.
I left them there and went back into the barn, sitting in the darkest corner with my rifle across my knees.
Sometimes, you don’t ‘fall asleep’. Suddenly, you become unconscious. You lie down in bed with a book and a last drink beside you. You can even be halfway towards lighting that last cigarette, when suddenly you find the world of the bedroom is spinning about you, and you know if you don’t do something to stop the spin, you will become unconscious. You’ll faint. I don’t think I fell asleep in that barn. My mind refused to accept any more of the dust and the dirt and the turmoil, refused to answer the questions that came crowding in, unformed into words. This has happened to me since that time – when my wife left me I slept all day and all night for three days, waking up each four or five hours and falling back into this faint almost immediately. In the barn was the first time it ever happened to me. I fell asleep, but it was the sleep of the boggled mind. I didn’t dream, but was aware of time passing by like water running silently down a long tube, washing the sides of the tube clean. I woke up the moment Tom Cooper came into the barn.
‘What about a brew?’
Cliff had left a pail of water under a wooden lid to keep out the dust. I took a small handful of smokeless fuel tablets, and in next to no time I had a pint of water on the boil. As it bubbled, I dropped in the chlorinating tablet, and then, contrary to instructions, let it boil for a minute or so to remove much of the taste.
Cliff had found a number of earthenware jars high on a ledge while clearing up after our chicken lunch, and I filled one of them with tea for Tom Cooper. He took it, drank some, pulled a wry face.
‘Shove a barley sugar sweet in it, will you,’ he asked. ‘I’m certain they put less and less sweetening in these mixtures.’
When the barley sugar had melted, and he declared the tea more to his taste, I poured out a second potful, for Cliff.
‘He says he doesn’t want one,’ Tom Cooper said. ‘I think he’s scared of your cooking. You remember that stew you made at Maastricht?’
Maastricht. I remembered. We had been parachuted into Holland in the middle of the waiting period before the second front invasion became a reality – the Dutch Underground led by a wild man from Eindhoven had stolen the signals equipment of an entire German division during a night thieving raid. In farms and barns and fields around Maastricht, Tom Cooper, Cliff, Robin Farquhar and I had held classes in signals procedure and radio repair and maintenance. In the midst of death we were in life. We went back to school, back to a peaceable atmosphere of regular routine and lessons and the eager thirst of youth for knowledge. For three whole weeks we had forgotten the war. I spent much of my youth on a farm equipped only by lanterns, and the darkness of the black-out was reminiscent of those days. I was a night cat by training and by nature – and still am, and the bright lights meant nothing to me as they did to others by their absence.
In Maastricht, too, I fell in love. It must have been love, for I never even tried to put my hand inside her skirt. That too was a part of Maastricht, that for the first time I could remember, I avidly sought the company of a girl, and kept my hands to myself. Our kisses were the sweeter because of it, because they caused no rude stirrings of lust in the loins. To Tom Cooper, or so I guessed, Maastricht meant the resumption of an ordered way of life, a programme, the contentment of knowing what you will do tomorrow, and at half-past four today. It meant giving and receiving knowledge, it meant the resumption of father-son relationships. To Cliff, Maastricht was the sudden beneficence of legalised theft, of stealing by permission. He would fondle the radio sets lovingly. ‘Come here, you beauty, you must be every bit of you worth fifty quid.’ But it also meant for him the indulging of his prowess, the protracted, drawn-out, orgiastic sexual experimentation, when the whole becomes greater than all the parts, grateful women lie groaning beneath the renewed onslaught, rising fluidly to never-ending peaks of gushing release, cataclysmic paroxysms of tense insatiable passion. To Robin Farquhar, Maastricht meant a chance to sleep.
We remembered Maastricht. Each in his way, me in mine. Often we recalled it. At moments of strength it gave us caution, in weakness or fatigue it gave us strength. Bless Tom for reminding me of it!
There I made, for the first time under ‘active’ conditions, though we never sighted a German during our entire stay, I made a field kitchen and cooked the smokiest stew I have ever been compelled by pride to eat.
Tom Cooper came and sat down in the corner in front of me. He lit a cigarette, offered me one but I refused.
‘We’re a bit out on a limb here, aren’t we?’ he said.
‘Yes, we are.’
‘Does it bother you?’
‘Does what bother me?’
‘Being out on a limb like this, with me making the decisions.’
With anyone else I would have thought he was seeking justification. But not Tom Cooper.
‘As long as you go on making the right decisions, we’ll not be worried.’
‘What should we do, d’you think?’
‘Do you mean, what should we do right now, or what should we plan to do as and when we can do it?’
‘No – I mean, what should we do right now?’
I must admit this did worry me. Tom Cooper always knew what we should do immediately. Sometimes I’ve been bothered by his apparent inability to plan, to know what he will do after he’s done what he’s going to do next. Like many people, he had a fine sense of balance between what he wanted to do and what he could do, and he could run along the chain of continuous action with the appearance of following a carefully-laid plan. Often, I think I was the only one who realised that he went from action to action with a speed of decision and interchange of ideas that would baffle most men.
‘As I see it,’ I said, ‘what we do right now has more or less been decided for us. We don’t know where anybody is, not even our own lads, and we can’t go stumbling around in the hopes of finding ’em asleep. We don’t know where the Germans are. The sergeant says they’re somewhere over that hill and we’ve got to go on believing him, until at least tomorrow morning when he comes back to tell us he’s changed his mind. On the basis of only one German, and he’s dead, thank God, we can’t go rushing back on to the spikes of our own unit.’
‘But what happens if a whole regiment of ’em come streaming over that hill?’
‘Then we’ll go as far back as we can, and when we can’t go any further without risk of being sprayed by a Bren we’ll stand straight up with our hands above our heads and start shouting – “don’t shoot, it’s us.” But a regiment is a different proposition from one dead man, isn’t it?’
‘There may be a whole regiment, and they may have gone round the side of us,’ he said.
‘In that case, they’ll run across three other lonely buggers on somebody else’s flank, and the decision will be theirs, won’t it.’
‘But what if we’re cut off?’
I thought about this one, and remembered the way I’d been trained, selected, trained again. I remember how good at this game of war had been some of the rejects. Crawl through snow for a whole hour, then take out your rifle, strip it, reassemble it, and fire two shots, one from each shoulder, into a tin plate no bigger than a pocket handkerchief, and at two hundred yards’ distance. Miss one plate and you were back at Spean Bridge waiting for the next troop train back to your parent regiment.
‘If we’re cut off,’ I said, ‘there’ll be Germans behind us, and frankly I’d rather crawl through the Germans with a lighted lamp in my hand than try to get through our own lads.’
We’d both trained with the same troop. We’d both crawled under barbed wire eight inches high stretched in a taut blanket sixty feet long, with live bullets being fired two inches above to make certain you learned to keep your head and backside down. There were many men who’d limped back to Spean Bridge, unable to sit down in the troop train when finally it arrived. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’ll take my chance on getting through the German line.’
‘And if I say different?’
‘Then I’ll do whatever you tell me,’ I said. I meant it too.
‘Aye, you would, an’ all,’ he said, mimicking my northern accent. ‘But then,’ he added, ‘that’s one of your troubles – you’d argue the back leg off a donkey, but when it comes to taking responsibility you can’t be provoked.’
‘As I see it, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, there’s no democracy in what we’re doing. We can’t stop every time we have to make a decision to put it to the vote. There’s sheep and shepherds. We’ve had our election a long time ago, we three, and for better or for worse, you’re the shepherd, and Cliff and I, well we’re the sheep.’
‘It’s a big responsibility, being the shepherd as you call it.’
‘Yes, and it takes a lot of guts to be a sheep.’
This conversation was getting us nowhere fast.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘we’re not three separate individuals, you and Cliff and me. We’re the left flank, the outpost, the patrol, call us whatever you like. But we’re one body. If we’ve got to waste our time putting everything to the vote, one of these times we’ll be caught before we’ve got our hands in the air. Cliff’s the muscles. We never argue about who goes over the wall first – I go over first because I’m the lightest, you go over second because Cliff’s the strongest. And you’re the brains of the outfit…’
‘And what the hell are you?’
That was better. Now I had him on the attack again.
‘I’m the dogsbody,’ I said. ‘The shit shoveller, the grenade planter, the railway line cutter. That’s because there’s nobody to touch me at the clever stuff… the stuff that needs the skill…’
‘You’re the big-headed bugger, too,’ he said, and laughed. ‘Here – grab hold of that!’ He poked his rifle forward into my stomach. It was a manoeuvre we’d practised a thousand times. Instinctively I let my thumb run along the sight until I had metal in the palm of my hand. I dropped my other hand down to the trigger guard to prevent him pulling the trigger, and then, using his momentum and the length of the rifle as a lever, I dropped my knee and hoisted him and his rifle over my shoulder.
At least, that’s what should have happened. It had happened a thousand times before in our unarmed combat training, at which I was acknowledged the troop master. But something went wrong, and I felt the sharp end of the magazine press into my crotch with sufficient force to show that, if he had wanted, he could have demasculated me. As it was, the force was enough to snap my head forward, and to make me grunt with pain. But before I could get the grunt out, he brought the entire length of the rifle up under my chin – luckily for me with his hand over the muzzle to protect my throat – and I went flying backwards into a bale of rancid straw.
‘That’s one you didn’t know,’ he said, smiling. ‘I worked that one out all on my own!’
I don’t know which hurt the most, my balls, my Adam’s apple, or my pride.
But the point was taken – and he now had again the justification for taking the decisions.
The German was standing inside the barn door in a patch of shadow. I had one hand in my crotch and one on my throat. Tom Cooper had hold of his rifle in the reversed position and was at least a half a second away from the trigger. The German was holding a twin to the other automatic rifle, and it was pointing straight at Tom Cooper. The second shot would get me before I could release the pressure.