Chapter Five

When you examine a field, a series of fields, a landscape, with trees and bushes and hedgerows, for the presence of other human beings, your eyes automatically seek out all the places you would go yourself if you had to cross a landscape unobserved. Your eye examines the bottom of each hedgerow, each fold in the ground, each bush, tree, all the likely spots. This German was crawling, almost imperceptibly, across the centre of a field, with nothing but his own skill, no depression of ground to enfold and hide him.

Curiously, he was crawling away from us, about two fields beyond the area of our grenades.

He was going so slowly as to be indistinguishable from the surrounding grasses, a mere change of tint exposing his position. I would not have seen him had there not been a tiny reflection of light from something polished on him, possibly a metal trouser button, or a rubbed buckle, or the accidentally-polished top of a metal water bottle.

He was at least seven hundred yards from the barn, completely out of rifle range. It took at least two minutes to identify him to Tom Cooper, so well did he blend with the grass of the field.

Tom Cooper only spotted him finally when the telltale flash came again, an infinitesimal pinprick of revealing reflected light.

Tom Cooper slid rapidly down the rope, came up again almost immediately without even puffing from the straight climb. He was carrying the field-glasses Helmut had had slung about his chest. Through them, we could make out the German quite distinctly. He too was wearing one of those animal-skin packs with the fur outermost, and the reflection came from a square metal plate on the bottom of it that had been rubbed by constant friction against his tunic. I looked at the buckles through which my back strap passed. They too were polished bright and I swore. It could have been me out there, but crawling into and not out of the range of someone’s rifle.

‘Go and ask Helmut how many of them there are,’ he said. ‘I’ll stay up here and watch, but warn Cliff to get ready for a fast pull-out.’

As I went to slide down the rope, he started a systematic, meticulous examination, through those glasses, of every foot of ground between us and the crawling German.

Helmut watched me as I slid down the rope and crossed the barn to where he was sitting. The life and colour had come back into the right-hand side of his face, though his brow seemed flushed. His eye was hard focused on me, expectantly, and in his expression a hint of defiance.

He must have known we had seen the other man – that much Tom Cooper had told him by taking his glasses. He knew also he had knowledge I wanted, and quickly.

Nobody has ever been able to lie to me, successfully.

‘How many of you are there?’ I asked him.

He didn’t reply. This was a well-trained one. The only lie that can ever hope to be effective is a silent one. But you need many other controls to go with control of your tongue.

I sat before him, on my haunches, and my eyes never stopped looking at him as I talked.

‘Of course, I don’t believe the German Army is in such a bad state that they would send out only one of you’ – that truth was confirmed by a twitch of instantly-suppressed wry humour at the corners of his mouth. I could guess that this man preferred to work on his own, had a fierce independent efficiency that working with others would inevitably reduce. ‘And then again, I know there were at least two of you, because I got the first one to try to cross that field.’ This too was confirmed by a twist in the corner of the mouth that again was instantly removed as he gained control, but in that brief second he had given me his opinion of a man who was damn fool enough to crawl across a grenade trap.

This was a man I would like to pit myself against. Only after I had beaten this man, fair and square, in open fight with all restrictions removed, would I have a confirmation of the success, the final state of preparedness, of my training.

‘And then, there’s the fact that you’re a lieutenant.’ There was a tightening of the nostrils when I said this, the self-condemnation. He knew now the mistake he had made. ‘Unless you’re some very ordinary kind of lieutenant, I can’t see you coming out on your own with one other man, because you must know how uneconomic a unit is two men.’ Confirmed again by a twist at the corner of the mouth, that would have said in our language ‘any bloody fool knows that’.

Still he forbore to speak. Of course, he could guess that we had seen a third man, but, if there were other men, he could not guess we had not also seen them.

‘If you don’t tell me what I want to know, I may be compelled against my better wishes to torture you. Now, get this quite clearly, I’m not a sadistic bastard who hurts for the pleasure of it – but I’m determined to get back home if at all possible – and I’ve made enough mistakes for one day already. It would be a mistake to let my feelings prevent me getting the truth out of you, wouldn’t it?’ He could agree with this, it was within the realm of speculation, of generalisation, two men, all differences apart, discussing the theories of war and human behaviour. I saw him relax, saw the tiny muscle under his ear – well, I don’t think it’s a muscle – I think it’s the jawbone which thrusts outward when the teeth are clenched. Anyway, whatever it is, I saw it relax. Of course, I knew I still wouldn’t make him speak, but his face was doing all the talking I wanted.

‘You’re a highly-skilled officer. You’re fully-trained – possibly even a little overtrained, or you wouldn’t have forgotten to take that knife off Cliff—’ That went home, and silently I could see him beginning to curse himself. ‘You also made the mistake of sitting where you couldn’t see his hands—’ that went home too ‘—but despite your mistakes, I can’t see you agreeing to a probing patrol with too many men. After all, you must realise that the chances of getting away with a reconnaissance depend on the number of mistakes your men are likely to make, and that depends on the number of men you take with you, and somehow I can’t see you taking a lot of chances, or a lot of men—’ that went right home, it was as if I could hear him saying, ‘not if they’re all like the fool who threw himself on that grenade’ ‘—and therefore I reckon there only were the three of you.’

And there it was – a mixture of respect for the accuracy of my prediction, shame for the mistakes he and his men had committed, and, I think, the instinctive knowledge we had him beaten.

The reaction was on the corner of his mouth, in his eyes, and in the general relaxing of his muscles. The game was over. I had guessed, and there no longer was any reason to conceal the answer. I knew he wouldn’t speak it, but I didn’t require him to.

Cliff had come up behind me whilst I had been ‘interrogating’ the prisoner.

‘You’re a right bastard you are,’ he whispered. ‘Why the hell don’t we kill the bugger and get out of here.’

I didn’t reply, went shinning up the rope, but without immediate haste. When last seen, the third German had been crawling away from us.

Without our being aware of it, the day had begun to run out on us, and lengthening shadows changed the face of the landscape. I knew Tom Cooper would not now carry out his intention of taking the prisoner Helmut back into our lines – not at least until he could find out more about the one we had seen crawling away.

‘There were only three,’ I told him.

‘Good.’ He didn’t doubt the fact, didn’t ask how I knew or if Helmut had told me, but such was his trust in me and mine in him that there was no need for verification of what I had said.

‘Either he’s on his way back to where he came from – or he’s trying to find the route Helmut used,’ he said. ‘We’ll know within a couple of hours if he has gone back, when they start mortaring.’

Mortar fire is the most insidious form of bombing – there is something acceptable about the longer range stuff – you feel that, coming from so far, there is a much greater possibility of error. Though the blast of each bomb is larger, the fear of accuracy is missing. But with mortar fire, directed from close at hand, each bomb blast is a personal attack, each bomb aimed at you as a person without the possibility of error. A mortar shell is a quieter shell, with a more insidious note to it, a note, however, with more aural pain.

Cliff could never stand being mortared – but seemed to have little objection to being shelled from the greater distance. In his direct way, he despised the method of throwing trouble at him from a distance – and had always unfairly denigrated long-range artillery men.

The evening shadows had begun and, as clouds chased across the line of the sun, the shadows danced and moved as if they belonged to a thousand men. One of them, by a tree, had the profile of a man with a rifle to his shoulder – another looked like two men crouched over a mortar. They were a thousand shivers, a thousand fears, for anyone prepared to be deceived by them.

‘Do you think it would be a good idea for me to go look for him?’ I asked Tom Cooper.

I guessed he had been about to suggest it. A long fold of ground stretched to our rear, curved down towards the rill at the bottom of the wood by the hill we were watching. Any number of men could come up that fold unseen.

‘I think that’s a volunteer job,’ he said quietly, not looking at me.

‘This whole ruddy mess is a volunteer job,’ I reminded him, ‘and we’d all be a sight better off on Blackpool pier!’

I lost no time in leaving the barn – my only preparation to ensure my hands and face had not become too clean by the civilised double wash and living under cover, and that none of my pack-strap buckles could reflect the light. Quickly across the yard, in a cautious walk, but once around the corner it was hands and knees, and then down onto my stomach to the centre of the field. I’d show our number three German he wasn’t the only man who knew to keep out of hedge-bottoms. Then I skirted the field to my left to make certain the sun was actually behind me. Spotters get lazy when they’re looking directly into the sun, and I didn’t intend to be spotted. Before starting across the field, I spent five minutes plaiting grass into my beret, and the epaulettes of my jumping jacket. I also broke the line of my legs and my boots with it, so that I presented no clear outline from any aspect.

It took only fifteen minutes to reach the summit of the field, using a knees and elbows technique developed from official training, casting the knee wider to avoid lifting the buttock too high with each heave forward. From the top of the rising field I could look down into the start of the defile. Nothing was there.

Looking for a man under those conditions isn’t a matter for eyes alone – it taxes all the senses. I knew there was no one there, just as I could have known someone was there even had he been hidden from sight, or sound, or smell. This knowledge comes only out of doors, in the open, for the sounds and movements of trees and bushes have a natural rhythmic order which no human can emulate. Inside buildings there are random sounds, creaks, air movements, flurries of hidden rodents, and the inner ear tends to shut. This, of course, was why we had not detected Helmut. My ‘inner’ ear was wide open now, focused down that defile with all the intensity of a black light probe. I crossed to the borders of the field, then through the hedge, permitting myself half to rise inside the vegetation, against the bole of an evergreen bush whose tint was similar to the tint of the grass I wore.

From this position I could look down the defile to the first edge of the dried-up rill. It was about ninety yards across, on the top edges, and its sloping sides were broken by rocks and vegetation. A pale blue flower grew among the grass, and many yellow spiky flower heads dotted the tips of the bushes. Where the earth had been exposed by rain wear near the rock formations, it took the colours of burnt sienna, flaking to an umber powder.

Again, not a bird, not a single, solitary bird, nor discernible bee, nor fly, nor even, surprisingly, swarm of midges. No suggestion of field-mice, nor rabbits.

It was a rich, verdant defile, full of the growth of nature, but without any of the movement that makes such landscape live. Along the bottom of the defile was the dried-out course of what must, in any other season, have been a musical stream. From the stones in the water bed, one could envisage an endless succession of small dams, each with cascading water giving constant background of cheerful sound.

But the bed of the rill was as silent now as was the rest of the defile, a long menacing source of hidden dangers.

Recently Helmut had passed through it, and I set myself to uncover traces of his passing. It wasn’t long before I found the first – a tree branch he must have snapped to provide leaf foliage for camouflage. The sore end of the thin branch had a long sliver of whiteness where bark had been stripped from the wood. Not far from that tree was a crushed patch of grass where he must have lain flat in a moment of relaxation. After that, his track passed from sight, but significantly it told me he had chosen the far side of the defile. From where I was sitting in the hedge, I would have chosen this near side, but you cannot be certain when you look at the lie of the land from, so to speak, the opposite vantage point. Then I started to comb the defile systematically with my eyes, looking for oddities. I have always checked a location such as this by drawing my sight slowly along a fixed arc, taking a starting point in a tree or a portion of hedge, and ending at a similar landmark. Then I cause my eye to return quickly to the start point, move up about two yards and start again across the same direction of arc. In this way, you see everything twice from the same angle, and you can more easily detect movement.

Other people prefer the square method. They take a particular object, and regard it as being at the centre of a square. They then examine the entire square up and down and across. Then they move to the next square and then to the next. Several of our men who habitually used the square method had been killed by snipers back in Holland.

By the arc method, you fix a whole series of pictures in your mind during the sweep of your eyes. Your eye then comes back to the start point and you start again just a short distance away. The pictures you have seen on your first traverse will now come up again in the bottom of your span of vision, and somewhere, if there has been movement, a warning voice will say, it wasn’t like this last time. The visual element is, I suppose, the most acute part of memory, and certainly the most precise and persistent. I found the German when, between two traverses, he thrust a foot out from the side of the rock. I did not see the movement of the foot. At first sight I wouldn’t have known it was a foot, but on the first traverse of that particular arc there had been nothing at the side of that rock, on the second traverse there was a brownish article that had not been there before. Only after I had examined it for some minutes did I realise that it was a boot at the end of a human leg.

That was the third German sitting behind a rock, with his feet sticking out, not three hundred yards directly in front of me, but on the slope at the other side of the decline.

Slowly I sank back to the ground, and crawled along the hedge to the overgrown base of a tree. Once there, I added beech foliage to the grass woven into my clothing, and bound a well-leafed twig of it along the barrel of my rifle. Then I plaited the undergrowth more securely into a screen before and behind me, and settled on my hunkers to wait for him. He stayed behind the rock for at least ten minutes, then his foot was withdrawn, and he came crawling out. If I had not seen that boot move, I wouldn’t have seen him leave the rock, so sinuously did he move, and so effective was his camouflage. He kept a straight course midway up the bank of the slope, going round rocks and bushes with a barely perceptible movement of his arms and legs. Then, when he reached a hedge that started at the top of the slope and went down to the dried-out watercourse in the bottom, I lost him for a moment. There was a slight disturbance as he came through the hedge somewhat lower than the spot at which I had lost him, and then, to my surprise, he rose to his feet and started to walk cautiously forward. Good! He didn’t know I was there. He was now only two hundred yards from me – if he continued to walk in the same direction he would pass within fifty yards of my hiding-place.

He carried on straight forward, looking constantly to the left and the right, never behind him, until finally he came to the hedge and went through it. I turned round. He kept going. I left the hedge, and, thirty yards behind him, followed in his wake.

His regular pace was easy to emulate, timing my footfall to coincide exactly with his.

I felt none of the tension such a moment should give. The man was obviously a fool. The first rule of the animal kingdom, the kingdom we had all made our own, is to know at all times what goes on around you. Have you ever seen the way a dog, even a coursing dog, will always look behind, even though it may be running full speed. The only animal to break this habit is that abomination, the socially in-bred greyhound.

He was breaking the natural law of the animal kingdom, and frankly I felt damned silly. It was one of those moments when two of you sidestep the same way on a busy street, and one of you embarrassedly says, ‘shall we dance’. Over the field he went, into the hedgerow. Along the hedgerow, into the big field on the other side of the slope to our barn, across the field, then a slight bend to the left to get into the hedgerow on the other side at the crossing point I myself had used on my way out. The crawl that had taken me forty minutes, we had walked back in just under ten. He dropped to the ground, I dropped to the ground. He got up to walk, I got up to walk. In another five minutes he would arrive at the corner from which he would be visible to Tom Cooper or Cliff, whoever was in the eyrie at the top of the barn.

I shall, of course, never know what caused him to turn around, but turn he did. I had been carrying my rifle in the ‘sporting gun’ position, loaded, cocked, and with the safety catch off. I had no need to lift it.

His automatic he was carrying much too slackly, so that as he turned the barrel failed to keep in line with his body. He snapped off a short burst, starting at an angle of thirty degrees to me. I counted four before he came anywhere close, and then fired, one, two, three, cocking the rifle by hand between each shot. The first one took him in the shoulder and spun him part round, the second one must have gone through his thigh, for his leg kicked back and he started to fall, and the third one got him through the neck as he fell. One, two, three – that had always been the way I had shot, and Tom Cooper and Cliff would recognise it. I walked over to where he lay. He was not dead, but was starting to scream in agony. The air line of his windpipe was severed and no actual sound could come out. A stream of bubbles came from his throat, blowing the welling blood into red iridescent bubbles. His mouth was open, so I put the barrel of my rifle in, and fired three more shots to end his agony.

Then, dazed, I started to walk back to the barn.

I hadn’t gone five steps when I started to heave, bitter bilious vomit jerking spasmodically from my throat, wrenching its way up my entire body. I staggered and sat in the hedge with my knees open and my head down, and still vomited. Then a great convulsion shook me and it was as if all my orifices opened at once. Tears streamed from my eyes, there was a roaring sound in my ears, and my bowels and bladder opened together. Great heaving sobs racked me, great tortured gasps of horror, hatred, pain, and remorse.

I sat there, in my own stink, drawing the back of my hand across my lips, wiping the streaming tears from my cheek with the cuff of my jumping jacket, smelling my own stinking sweat.

When I got back to the barn neither Cliff nor Tom Cooper spoke to me when they saw my condition. I went into the back corner of the barn, away from Helmut, and took off my boots and trousers. Then I washed myself as best I could with a wet cloth, changed my underwear and dressed again.

All I had to put on in the way of underclothes was a pair of girl’s knickers I had looted in the town of Uchte and had been saving to use as barter on my next leave – silk knickers were better than cigarettes, soap, or chocolate in the Brussels bars for buying a woman. There was a satisfying reassurance in the feel of them about my legs – the seams appeared to give slightly as I pulled them on, but in some incomprehensible way I felt an appropriate castigation in wearing them, a sense of having abdicated the right to clothe myself in the garments of a man. There was a sensual but unmanned animal quality about that silk, with all its connotations of the pretended bestiality of our infrequent and lusting contacts with the only aspect of womanhood we sought, that seemed appropriate to my state of mind.

Cliff, of course, had made tea, and handed me a pot.

I drank it, washed my mouth with it, and it stilled the shivers that shook me, despite the warmth of the barn’s interior. Have you ever tried to climb a thirty-foot rope, carrying a pot of tea in one hand? It’s a question of making full use of the calf of each leg, and of knowing how to lock the rope between the underside of one instep and the top side of the other.

Tom Cooper watched me intermittently during the last two yards. Then as I sat down on the box beside him, his eyes stopped examining the hill and the surrounding countryside.

‘You must show me how you do that, one of these days,’ he said. I knew damned well that he could climb a rope without hands.

‘How many were there?’

‘Only the one.’

‘Same lot as Helmut?’

‘Yes – judging from the equipment.’

‘I thought so when I heard that automatic go off. What was he after?’

I thought for a brief moment about the number three German, and the way he got up and walked across those fields. I remembered also the look of indescribable sadness that had been visible on his face despite the rack of pain. And suddenly I knew why I had vomited.

‘I think he was trying to give himself up. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if all three of ’em weren’t giving themselves up.’

We sat and thought about that for a while. Certainly, three is an ideal number for a reconnaissance patrol, but usually, unless there is a specific objective, the patrol returns if it can when it is detected, or if it loses one of its members.

Tom Cooper didn’t agree with me about Helmut – I could see that plainly on his face.

Certainly, if asked, I would have agreed that Helmut had shown no signs of surrender. But Helmut was a professional soldier, and would have taken steps to ensure he surrendered with the maximum chance of saving his life. It’s one thing to give away your liberty, and another thing to commit suicide. Outposts were notoriously incapable of coping with prisoners and, remote from Geneva Conventions, they tended to shoot without question, to avoid the inconvenience of supervision. And the risk.

No man in his right mind would walk into that barn, see us sparring for Tom Cooper’s gun, and ask, ‘Forgive me for interrupting you, but do you mind if I give myself up?’ Not on your nellie, as they say. The shock alone of seeing a German in there would have been sufficient to set the average trigger finger twitching. And when you’ve already been given a warning about the savagery of the men with the green berets, and you find two of them fighting among themselves – or so it appears – you’d be a mug to drop yourself into that situation without keeping at the butt end of a rifle, until such time as you could turn that rifle round and hand it over in complete safety. If Helmut had wanted to, he could have gone on from that barn without our ever knowing of his passage. By now he could be in Corps HQ drinking a mug of cocoa, with a bed to sleep in, and the first of many Red Cross parcels in his hands. Alternatively, if he’d been part of a straightforward reconnaissance patrol, he’d be a fool to disclose his presence to us. He could have observed all he wanted and have been back with his own mates by this time. The third possibility was that he might have been the first in a fighting patrol. Well, you just don’t send fighting patrols of three men out. They don’t have any value.

‘What makes you think this latest one was trying to give himself up?’ asked Tom Cooper, cutting across my trend of thought.

‘Well, it’s easy to be wise after the event – and certainly I didn’t think so at the time or I would not have killed him, would I? But when I think of his manner, of the way in which he came up that valley, I don’t think he was afraid of the demons in front. I think he was more concerned about the bastards he’d left behind, and in some way, I think that’s why he never looked back. You know how, if a man is walking forward without looking back, you never give him a thought, but if all the time he looks back, you think he’s up to some mischief? And he didn’t want anyone behind him to think he was up to any mischief like running away – provided someone was behind him!’

‘And was there anyone?’

‘No – it’s not that there was any actual person behind him. I’m certain that, other than Helmut, the nearest German to us at this moment is tucked away on the other side of that hill. He was running away from the whole damned German Army – not just his own sergeant.’

‘Then why knock him off?’

‘Because, like I’ve said, he turned around and shot off half a magazine!’

‘But he didn’t hit you, did he? In fact, from what you told me, he didn’t come anywhere near hitting you. If you had wanted, you could have shot that rifle right out of his hand, couldn’t you? Firing at you could have been no more than nerves.’

His questioning was relentless.

‘Well, yes, I suppose it could have been. But at the time I didn’t give a damn what it was. He had an automatic rifle. He was firing at me. I had one up the spout. I let him have it. It was no time for playing daisy chains, I tell you.’

‘There’s no need to be defensive about it, you know,’ he said quietly.

‘Well, the way you were going on, it seemed as if you were saying I shouldn’t have fired.’

‘What you did out there,’ he said, ‘was your own affair. You volunteered, remember.’

‘Well, I’ll be buggered. You can’t slough off responsibility like that, you know,’ I said, aware of my belligerence, but unable to quell it. ‘As I said at the time, this whole bloody affair is a volunteer job. And as such we’re all in it together.’

‘That’s right,’ he replied, gravely, ‘and that’s why it’s no good you coming to me like a penitent; I’m no father confessor to give you absolution.’

‘Absolution – are you mad? I just messed my pants out there and here you are sitting like a sanctimonious sod, talking to me about bloody absolution. You can take your absolution and stick it as far as you can get it,’ I said. ‘Now, sod off – it’s my turn on watch.’

Silently he rose, brushing my shoulder unavoidably as he edged round the box. Then he caught the rope between his two feet, wrapping it round his leg in abseil style, and slid down without even touching it with his hands. The bastard, the cocky superior bastard. I sat there and glowered at the hill.

Not a thing in sight, of course.

There wouldn’t be. Two of them were lying dead in two hedgerow bottoms because of my efficiency.

I felt at long last that I could understand what satisfaction mountaineers must get, up there on the summit. Not the feeling of conquest, not the glorious satisfaction of having achieved something unique, but of having risked death itself, and of having triumphed. This was the important thing – the risk and the triumph. The thrill of high-speed motor racing was not winning, though this would have a miasma of satisfactions at the end of it, and the lip services and genuflections of triumph at having beaten other men similarly engaged. But for the driver himself, the solitary challenger, the thrill would come with every bend, with each individual act whose failure could result in a torn-tyre, track-tearing, body-burning death. I knew now why rifle range practices were sterile tests of competence with social challenge the only stimulus. The trumpetings of the range sergeant who rapped your buttocks with a rifle butt for each inner or an outer, who screamed thinly, ‘You’ll be dead out there if you can’t shoot better than that,’ were the contrived ravings of an outrageous impotence, devoid of the triumph over death.

I no longer felt remorse for the deaths. The two corpses lying out there were no more to me than spiked guns, stingless bees. They had come to kill me, I had killed them. They were dead and gone. I was still there, and alive, by my skill and my ability.

True, I had been human, for a while, and had suffered the relaxation of certain muscles, but this was a failing to be anticipated. Next time I would remember, at the time I held my breath to keep the rifle barrel rock steady, to hold all the other muscles taut. It could be as simple as that, and I wondered that no one had thought to teach this, back in the training camps where we had learned all the other arts of death.

I looked down, briefly. Helmut had moved cautiously about six feet across the floor of the barn, and now had his wrists entangled in the knife blades of a mowing-machine. He was trying to push the mowing bar with the base of his spine, to cause the machine blade to sever the piano wire. It just might have worked.

I whistled to Cliff who, looking up, saw the motion of my head, and crossed quickly to where Helmut lay. He dragged Helmut’s hands from the machine, and then cracked the butt of his hand against Helmut’s temple. Helmut sank to one side, unconscious. Cliff lifted his head to test if he were shamming, then let it fall to the ground.

Tom Cooper beckoned for me to come, and I slid down the rope, holding with both hands.

When I was down, he beckoned to Cliff and we all seated ourselves on the bales by the table on which Cliff had served our midday meal.

He looked at us both for quite some time before he began to speak – though I could see the struggle that had taken place within him.

I felt foolish about my cursing – he couldn’t help being human any more than I could, and I appreciated that a confession at that time would have stimulated luxurious sentiments neither of us could afford in these surroundings.

‘Nothing up there, I suppose?’ he said.

I shook my head.

‘I thought there wouldn’t be.’

‘What do you think they’ll do when they miss the patrol?’ Cliff asked.

‘What would you do?’ Tom Cooper asked him, half smiling.

‘Nothing! You can bet your life on that!’

‘That’s what they’ll do! Anyway, they might not have been a patrol.’

Cliff looked at me.

‘What do you think, patrol or not?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Then what were they?’ Cliff asked, a puzzled look on his face.

‘I think they were trying to give themselves up.’

The puzzled look was replaced by one of surprise. He turned to Tom Cooper. Tom Cooper looked at me, and then at Helmut.

‘I think I agree,’ Tom Cooper said.

Cliff was not so easily convinced. He didn’t turn to look at Helmut. He had no need to. I had seen him hit many men like that, with the butt of his hand, and, even without a previous head wound, they had stayed unconscious for at least a half hour.

‘You’d hardly call him a willing prisoner,’ he said.

‘But that’s the whole point,’ I argued. ‘We don’t know what he’d be like. We haven’t given him a chance to show us what he would be as a prisoner. Let’s face it – he held a gun on us, but wouldn’t you, in similar circumstances? He walked into this barn and there we were, wrestling. He had no way of knowing we were only larking about. So, he put his gun on us. I believe that once he had made certain that he wasn’t likely to be jumped from the back, he would have put his gun down and have surrendered. Before he had chance to do that, however, you let him have it with the knife.’

‘Wouldn’t you just have done the same thing?’ Cliff was belligerent. He thought I was criticising him for missing Helmut’s throat.

‘Yes, I would have done the same thing, or tried to, and I wouldn’t have succeeded as well as you did. But my whole point is that we don’t know what he was going to do when that happened.’

Cliff was baffled, and the expression on his face showed it, unmistakably. I could almost hear his mental processes as he churned out the thought that possibly he might have thrown that knife unnecessarily. A more trenchant thought, however, was the risk we had run had that knife missed its target, and Helmut had been caused to kill us in unnecessary retaliation.

‘He’s tried to escape twice,’ Tom Cooper reminded me quietly.

Cliff thought of that one. ‘We’re not stopping him telling us he wants to give himself up,’ he said. For Cliff it was simply a question of saying out loud what you wanted. If you didn’t say it, you didn’t want it.

I once saw him eat a whole chocolate bar in front of a Belgian kid, and the kid watched every single mouthful.

‘Why didn’t you give him a bite?’ I asked.

‘He’d have asked for one if he’d wanted one,’ Cliff said.

I knew Cliff to be essentially kind, but without the ability to project himself into the thoughts of anyone else. Cliff’s golden maxim was, ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,’ and he was perfectly capable of asking for anything he wanted. I tried, several times, to explain to him the fallacy of imposing your own standards of conduct on other people – had even written out his slogan again, ‘Do unto others as you believe they would have you do unto them,’ but he had not been able to grasp any difference.

For him it was unthinkable that Helmut would sit there and not say something if he intended to offer himself as a prisoner.

‘You know, being taken a prisoner implies that the fighting is over,’ I reasoned, ‘and Helmut knows damn well that even if he surrenders to us, the fighting is not over for him. He knows the fighting is not over for us. He knows we’re caught out here on a limb, and if he’s going to come out on that limb with us, he wants it to be on the best possible terms. I don’t think he has yet decided he can trust us to give him the best terms – even if we were capable of giving him any terms at all.’

I knew I wasn’t getting through to them. Cliff laughed, coarsely. Tom Cooper laughed too, but his was the timid laugh, the nervous giggle almost of uncertainty.

‘Put yourself in Helmut’s shoes,’ I urged. ‘Wouldn’t you feel, if you were going to give yourself up, that you’d like to choose the person you surrender to? You’d like to be able to find someone who wouldn’t panic at the sight of you, and start pooping off his rifle at you. Someone who’d lead you back to sanity without hysterically firing a shot into the base of your spine the first time you put your hand into your pocket to get out a handkerchief? Would you give yourself up to a bunch of nervous nitwits, who’d rip you apart at the sound of the first bomb that fell?’

‘When you give yourself up, you give yourself up and you take your chance,’ Cliff said stubbornly. Cliff always dealt the cards from the top of the pack. If you got an Ace, you got an Ace, and that was that. Cliff himself, of course, was flexible enough to be able to play an Ace any way the game demanded it, a high card or a low card. I felt Helmut had that ability, too, but could understand that he might want to cut the cards his way before allowing them to be dealt.

Tom Cooper didn’t answer immediately. We both looked at him. There was one of those long pauses.

‘I think there’s a lot in what both of you say,’ he said, finally. ‘Remember the story the sergeant was telling us, about that German officer who caught three men from the Essex Regiment out on a patrol…’

‘Yes, and what did he do? He had them at the point of a gun and made them turn round and lead them into their own lines. I think that’s an exact parallel with what’s going on here. I think that, if Helmut had the chance, he’d have marched us back to…’

‘It’s all “think” with you,’ Cliff burst out. ‘You don’t know, do you? You’re only guessing, aren’t you? The man who has the rifle has the power, and I for one don’t want to take any more chances than we have to. You can’t trust these Germans. Show me one single one you can trust, and I’ll show you a dead ’un. Now, let’s stop all this bloody arguing, and get on with what we have to do.’

‘We’ll put it to the vote,’ Tom Cooper said.

‘Oh damn it,’ Cliff shouted, as angry as he could be, ‘why do we have to put it to the vote?’

‘We’ll do whatever you say,’ I assured him, more quietly.

Cliff agreed with me, and said so, but Tom Cooper was determined this was one time he wasn’t going to lead.

When we saw he was adamant, Cliff gave in. ‘All right, what are we voting about?’ he said disgustedly.

I think if we’d been voting for the return of the chastity belt he would have said ‘yes’ without hesitation.

‘There are two simple alternatives – we either go back, or we stay here.’

‘No, there aren’t,’ I interposed quickly. ‘There are four alternatives. We three either stay here or we go back, or we four stay here or we go back.’

‘I was afraid you’d say that,’ Tom Cooper said.

His decision was already made, on all four counts.

Cliff didn’t care what happened.

Tom Cooper took off his beret, and picked three straws from the floor.

‘First of all,’ he said, in a voice of infinite weariness, ‘we’ll vote for if the four of us stay here, or the four of us go back.’

He gave us each a straw, and we each put the straw in the palm of our hands, out of sight.

‘Broken straw we stay, unbroken straw we go,’ I said.

‘Right.’

Each of us put his hand into the beret, one by one, and he opened it slowly out. Two unbroken – one broken.

‘That’s settled. We go,’ he said.

My straw had been unbroken. I wanted to get the hell out of there, just as fast as I could. One of them wanted to stay, Cliff, or Tom Cooper?

Cliff wouldn’t give a damn whether we went or stayed. If Tom Cooper wanted us to go, I reasoned, he would have said so right out in the open. He wouldn’t have needed any straws.

‘Now we’ll settle the other matter,’ he said.

Again, he picked three straws from the floor, and again he gave one to each of us.

Helmut’s voice reached us as clearly and as crisply as the first words we had heard him utter in the barn.

‘I think I have the right to vote on this one,’ he said.

We all turned round. He was sitting almost erect, straining his weight awkwardly on his out-thrust elbow.

‘I think I have a right to vote whether you kill me or take me with you,’ he said.

He jerked himself into an upright sitting position and then, kicking forward with his feet against the tension of the piano wire, he hobbled on his buttocks across the floor of the barn to where we were sitting.

He looked horrible, but we offered him no assistance.

The blood had drained from his face, leaving his skin a pale greenish-yellow. His eyes were sunken into the cavities of his skull, his lips stretched back from his teeth exposing his upper gum. Blood had run from beneath the bandage across his lower lip. Now it dripped down his chin, like a red pointed beard. When he opened his eye fully, the iris was revealed bloodshot, and his wide-open pupil gave him the crazed look of a fanatic.

‘I think I have a right to vote on whether I should live or die, wouldn’t you think?’ he said. ‘Or I have the right to present evidence of why I should live, at least.’ There was no trace of pleading, no sign of supplication.

Oddly enough, it was Cliff answered him.

‘You gave away that right,’ he said, ‘when you volunteered to leave civvie street for this lot. You gave away that right every time you lifted a rifle against one of our lads. You gave away that right,’ he went on remorselessly, ‘every time you obeyed or issued an order, every time you so much as looked in our direction.’

He was staring at Helmut. ‘Don’t let us ever forget,’ he said, ‘that for every minute of every hour of every day while you are you and I am me, we are enemies.’

Helmut smiled, thinly.

The smile seemed to infuriate Cliff, who made a move to strike him again. I blocked the move, but Helmut did not flinch.

‘Let him hit me,’ he said, ‘violence can strengthen the weak!’

I wasn’t going to give the bastard the satisfaction of making two of us watch the needless violence of one of our own kind.

‘Stuff it, Cliff,’ I said, as a command, ‘he’s trying to provoke you, and you’re falling for it.’

He relaxed, and sat glowering at Tom Cooper.

‘Why did you come here?’ Tom Cooper asked him.

It was too late, of course, to know we’d get the truth out of him, or to be certain of anything he said.

‘I don’t have to reply to that,’ he answered mockingly. ‘Wasn’t it you who quoted the Geneva Convention?’

Cliff made a move again to hit him, but again I blocked it.

‘We’re trying to determine if you came here to give yourself up to us, to kill us, or to try to take us prisoner!’

I looked at him. I hoped he knew he could talk to me on level terms without the fear of rampant animalism. I thought he knew that if I killed him it would be on his terms, one challenger to another. Tom Cooper would kill him from expediency, from the need to do so as a part of his plans for our self preservation. Cliff could kill him in anger. I think he realised that, but he was too conscious of his key role, too arrogant in it, to wish to abdicate its powers and pleasures so soon or so lightly.

‘Which of the three have you selected?’ he asked me. He didn’t mock, that would have been debasing. He had no need to mock.

‘We have come to no conclusion yet,’ I replied.

Tom Cooper could see the path our debate was taking, and felt uncomfortable with it. The German had me where he wanted me, but Tom Cooper couldn’t realise how much I would be willing to concede to get the right answer.

‘I don’t think that’s important,’ Tom Cooper said, coldly, as coldly as the certain smile on Helmut’s face. ‘When the time comes, we will either kill you, or hand you over to one of our field hospitals – but you can rest assured, the course of our lives will not be affected either way. If it amuses you to vote whether you should live or die, then vote by all means, but when you vote, realise that each one of us is voting from his own knowledge and experience and his estimate of the value or inconvenience you will be to us. If we feel you have value – you’ll live. If we decide you will be an inconvenience, you’ll die. And just so that you completely understand me, let’s not make it passive – I will kill you.’

The German was surprised. I too was surprised. I had cast myself in the role of executioner.

In a curious way, I wanted the role.

I knew I was the only one of us to whom killing had ceased to mean anything, the only one whose brutalisation was complete.

Mockingly, Tom Cooper took the wire cutters we always carried for barbed wire, the smail pocket cutters, and snipped through the bands at the German’s ankles. He looked into Helmut’s face, and then cut the bonds between his wrists.