I leaped to my feet and bounded over the lip into the crevice. Cliff was lying stunned on his face at the bottom, his foot tangled in a tree root. About four feet from him was a grenade, with no pin in it. I picked up the grenade and in one sweep of my arm, flung it high and far behind me, out of the crevice. At that moment, Helmut came over the lip and into the crevice with us, there was a pause of one, and the grenade went off. The shrapnel from it whistled over the top of the crevice, whipping and crackling in the air. The grenade had not had time even to land on the ground where I had thrown it.
I bent down and savagely tore the root from Cliff’s foot. He turned over and looked up at me, uncomprehendingly.
At that moment, Tom Cooper came over the lip of the crevice on his side, in a flying leap, and landed six feet beyond us.
‘What the bloody hell…’ he started to say.
The side pocket of Cliff’s jumping jacket was hanging open. Anger was still with me. I seized the flap of the pocket and with an insane jerk that released all the anxiety, all the glandular white heat that had burned me since the ‘crack’, I ripped it savagely from him. ‘What’s the bloody point of having a bloody pocket on your bloody coat if you’re not going to fasten the sodding thing,’ I hissed at him.
‘It was my grenade?’ he asked, stupefied.
‘It was your bloody grenade,’ I said, and slapped him across the face. I went on slapping him with each phrase I uttered – ‘it was your grenade, and it fell out of your pocket, and when I got down here, it was sticking right up your arse.’ Tom Cooper stood by and watched. I got the feeling that if I hadn’t been slapping Cliff, he could have stuck a knife in him. Then I noticed where a piece of the shrapnel of the grenade had slashed a scar across Tom Cooper’s cheek and realised, with awesome clarity, that he had been outside the crevice when I had thrown it.
‘Your grenade, was it?’ he asked, quietly.
Cliff nodded, dumbly.
Then Tom Cooper kicked him. The hard cap of his boot must have pierced Cliff’s anus. Certainly it drove him twelve inches along the ground. He went white, and gave a grunt of pain that started where the kick ended.
For a moment I thought Tom Cooper was going to kick him again, but Cliff could not have stood for that. I held Tom Cooper’s arm. He shook off my retaining hand and started to climb back out of the crevice.
‘Come on,’ he said, ‘we’d better get the hell out of here.’
He led the way again, and we all followed. We stayed half bent to the edge of the field, crossing in a swift semi-trot, and then settled and looked about us. No one appeared, we were just as much alone as ever. Looking back, there was no sign of the crevice, nor evidence of the grenade explosion.
We cut through the hedge, and started again, travelling due west to judge from the late sun. We held to the same formation as before. The going was easier now, and the occasional bush gave plenty of opportunity for resting an arm and raising one’s head to ease the ache at the back of the neck crawling long distances always causes.
It was on one of these neck-easing occasions, when I had lifted my head clear of the ground into a sweet-smelling pine bush, that I noticed we had lost Cliff and Tom Cooper. At least, I could not see them, and if we were still in formation eight yards back and to the side, I would have located them in a moment. I looked at the other side, to where they could conceivably have been, but could find no trace of them. I looked in a slow arc over the ground, but I knew they were not in front of us. Helmut was there, making steady progress – but neither Cliff nor Tom Cooper.
I crawled forward at double speed, and finally caught Helmut after a hundred and fifty yards. He felt my first tap on his ankle, though he must have been aware of my closeness long before that, and he stopped.
He drew his feet together, turned to his side and looked back at me. I crawled level with him, my face not more than two feet from his face. I had my hand on my knife. I could see from his half smile that he knew what had happened.
‘It was you who put the idea into my mind,’ he said, ‘when you told me a man could get lost like that. I waited until they turned, and I went straight on.’
And there it was. We were alone, and together.
‘Where did they turn? Which way?’
‘That would, as I believe you say, be telling, wouldn’t it?’
I brought the knife up beside me, and pressed the point into his throat, below his chin. He paused for a moment, looking me right in the eyes, and then he shrugged his shoulders.
‘It was about five hundred yards back,’ he said in a flat voice, ‘and they turned to the left.’
He had me. I had no way of knowing if I could believe him, and lacked the time, or the ability, to frighten him sufficiently to ensure that what he told me was the truth.
‘Come on,’ I said, ‘five hundred yards.’
We turned round and crawled back, approximately five hundred yards, to where a fold in the ground could have meant a natural turn for Tom Cooper. A tree was standing at the start of this fold. I put him under the tree, and seated myself half to his right side and behind him.
‘Don’t turn your head,’ I said, ‘or I’ll finish what Cliff started.’ I could see the vein pulsing under his neck, and could have slashed it in an instant.
‘You’ll never get back if you rely on them,’ he said. ‘One man who hasn’t got the sense to look after primed grenades, and one man who doesn’t know where he is going, and won’t admit it.’
‘Shut up.’
‘You know it’s true,’ he said.
‘Shut up.’
I was trying desperately hard to think. I knew I must know, somewhere inside me, exactly where our route lay. Dammit, I had travelled it once, though admittedly in the other direction and at night, but I had always been proud of my ability to ‘dead reckon’ as do homing pigeons. The route we had travelled so far had not seemed hopelessly wrong to me. Why couldn’t I do it – why couldn’t I reason which way we should go from here? I looked across the terrain, but found nothing in it to evoke a memory of a landmark. I didn’t expect it to come back to me like the street names around Piccadilly Circus, but at least there should be a sense of fitness about some of it, some of the skyline patterns, some of the folds in the ground. I have always made imaginary profiles in countryside. The skyline, walking home from the farm of my friend in Maastricht, had always made me think of a hay-cart going along, with a short stretch of bushes for the horses, and a hummock with trees for the hay and the driver seated aloft. This habit had always stood me in good stead, had always reassured me of the closeness of somewhere or someone familiar. But there was no reassurance in the regular skyline that extended all about us, the regular patternless unfriendliness of the ring of tops with which we were surrounded, ‘Über allen Gipfeln ist ruh,’ said Goethe reassuringly, but there was no reassurance in any of this.
‘You don’t know which way to turn,’ Helmut said. I bit back an urge to tell him again to shut up. His voice did not comfort me, but at least it was there.
‘You live your life under the shadow of that man, Tom Cooper,’ he said, insidiously. ‘When you’re with him, you become less than half of what you are. That man will lead you into disaster, and you will follow him from a foolish sense of loyalty.’
‘Shut up,’ I asked. It was no command.
‘Left on your own, you’re much stronger than either of them,’ he went on insistently, his voice a mellifluous comforting presence. ‘Left on your own you will be much stronger, much more able to command yourself, to take your opportunity…’
I had them. I had seen a flash of movement, about six hundred yards to the left, at the entrance to a thinly wooded valley. And then I remembered the valley. It was the top bit of a long tee junction, with the leg of the ‘tee’ going straight into enemy territory. This valley was about four hundred yards long, and it came out about eight hundred yards, beyond Bren-gun range, from our positions.
‘Shut up,’ I barked, ‘and let’s go.’
I prodded him to his feet, and we began a jog-trot forward, keeping down below the top line of the fold in the ground by running with bent backs. We could still make good progress, however, and I was hardly panting by the time we got to the edge of the wood, the point at which I had seen Tom Cooper vanishing.
It all came back to me – with the recognition of the pattern on the bark of one particular tree, which grew out of the back, or so it seemed, of a rocky shoulder. We had passed that very shoulder on our way out, and that tree had been illuminated brilliantly by the moonlight. At the edge of the wood we had taken particular care to leave the protection of the trees in the deeper shadow under its base.
I stopped by it, to rest, and to accustom my eyes to the comparative gloom in the wood.
Helmut sat down on the rocky base. The jog-trot had done him no good at all, and for a few moments I thought he was going to pass out.
‘Are you in pain?’ I asked him.
He smiled wanly. ‘You bastard,’ he said, ‘of course I’m in pain.’
‘I meant, have you any internal pain?’
I was thinking more of poisons generated from his wound than the wound itself, which by now should have been completely numb. In fact, if the medical boys who briefed us on emergency action under battle conditions knew what they were talking about, he should by now have such a heightened temperature as to cook all the pain out of himself. He should have been in a state of euphoria in which all things are possible, all effort effortless.
I held his wrist. It was wet with sweat. His pulse seemed to be satisfactory, his forehead too, under the bandage, was wet, and he was running a high temperature.
‘At least you’ve still got some sweat in you.’
‘No thanks to you,’ he said, without rancour.
I didn’t fancy the idea of walking through that wood with him in front of me. I would be vastly surprised if that wood were not bristling with the same sort of booby-trap I had put into the field only that morning. It was near enough to our lines for them to want to get early warnings from it, should anyone attempt to use it as we intended innocently to do, for a concealed approach. Furthermore, I could be certain that, if the wood were booby-trapped, a whole regiment of artillery would have an exact fix on it, and would be prepared at a second’s notice to pour hell-fire and brimstone into it.
No, I could not send him through that wood in front of me, and I dare not risk letting him come behind me.
I unwrapped a coil of piano wire from my arm, and used it to tie him where he was sitting. The last loop passed round the tree and his neck in such a way that if he tried to escape, he would be compelled to strangle himself. I wanted to be certain that if he died, he died inarticulately. Another loop I tied about his shoulders so that, should he faint in the normal course of the next twenty minutes, at least he wouldn’t strangle himself.
Then, I poured a swig of water from my water bottle down his throat, gave him a morphine pill and a barley sugar sweet, and left him.
‘I’ll be back,’ I promised. I don’t think he believed me consciously. He had relapsed into a Panglossian coma while I had been tying him to the tree, and he didn’t even trouble to answer me. His face had gone the colour of putty, the perspiration dry and crystalline on his taut skin.
I went slowly forward down the path, seeking out tell-tale signs of booby-trap activity. This had been a game with us in Scotland, and I had become so good at it no one could ever catch me out. They even wanted to make me an instructor, but I could never teach another man to kill. A bent twig, at an unnatural angle, crushed grass, sticks in hedges going nowhere falsely erect. No one can copy the random symmetry of nature, man inevitably betrays himself when he plans irregularity. There is no such thing as a truly random selection, only selection by random forces we are not sufficiently percipient to acknowledge, nor strong enough to ignore. I believe a scientist once had the theory that if the correct figure ‘one’ could be discovered – the true unit – then all other units would be found to be a multiple of it, and what appear to be random numbers such as ‘pi’ equals 3.1417 etc. would cease to exist except as whole numbers. I remember thinking this as I walked down that path.
The first booby-trap was very simple – a piano wire stretched across two trees just over a crest and part way down a slope. Anyone crossing that crest unaware, and seeing a three-foot drop, would have jumped down the three-foot drop into the sand below. His neck would have hit the piano wire. Maliciously, I traced it to its ends. It was fastened to the tree trunk; quite firmly – but at the other end, it was wound round a pin that had been hammered into another tree only about a half an inch. The impact of a fully-grown man on that wire would have throttled him, and jerked out the pin. For good measure the wire would have pulled a pressure fuse on a mine clamped to the side of the tree. The mine would have cut the tree and the man in two, and, oh cunning, would have fired a Verey cartridge tamped into a ‘clay’ pistol barrel. Red sky at night, gunners delight, and the bombardment would have begun. I too must have been in a state of euphoria – lightheartedly I de-fused the mine, and the Verey cartridge, and removed the piano wire.
‘You can be too clever,’ I said to myself, as I removed the cartridge. It had been the incongruity of a clay ball four and a half feet up a tree that had aroused my suspicion.
The next two were simplicity itself. The first one, a twig across the path, holding the pin of a mine in position about calf high, the second one a mine buried in the centre of the path with its pin uppermost. The grass had been lifted to bury the mine, and the joins on the sod had not been concealed when it was put back into position. It was good enough to catch an unwary German – and certainly good enough for the dark, but, I said as I defused it, not good enough for me…!
It was a new mine, of a type I had not seen before, though similar to one we had played with in Scotland.
The rim of the fuse head wouldn’t turn at first. Something warned me. Something said, ‘something’s wrong’. I squatted on my hunkers at the side of the path, in a screen of bushes, and stared at the mine. I knew of booby-traps, had used them often, which, if you tried to defuse them, would explode in your face. But we used them only on special occasions. Surely, a mine like this one, meant only to cover a potentially dangerous advance line, was designed to be retrieved, and possibly used again. It could not be left there if our infantry was to come through! I glanced up at the tree, and saw high on the trunk the mark the mine-layer had made to show where the mine had been placed. I tried to turn the shoulder of the fusing element. It would not turn at first. This was where mines were booby-trapped – this was the knob that activated the second firing mechanism. But, reason told me, this mine could not be a double switch. I yanked the knob more, taking a stronger grip with finger and thumb, and finally it gave way. It had been stiff from lack of grease. I laid the mine down in the grass, and poked a hole with my finger to bury the fuse, after stripping out the fuse powder. Then I realised what was wrong, what had been wrong for some few minutes.
Someone was standing behind me.
Not immediately behind me, but near enough for me to be able to sense him.
To the front of me, and six yards to the left, was a bole of a tree. Left of it again, a bank. Whoever had booby-trapped this wood had done only the path, of that I was quite certain. This tree and the bank were off the path. In one movement I dived onto the ground from my half sitting position in a forward roll then another forward roll, and finished up behind the tree behind the bank. Only one second pause to get my sense of direction and then left again, down onto the ground through what felt in passing like early brambles, then up beside the base of a tree.
There he was, behind a tree, about thirty-five feet away. I could see only a part of a boot and a leg. He must have been looking round the other side.
I moved across to another tree, walking slowly across in the open, conscious he could not see me as long as he continued to peer round the other side of the tree, but prepared to shoot or drop to the ground should his leg reveal any signs of movement in the body above it.
He could not have the faintest idea where I was! The bank would have covered me adequately for movement in any direction.
I looked about me, but there did not seem to be any others hiding behind any other trees, though of this, of course, I couldn’t be certain. I cursed the remains of the light which filtered quite brightly through the tops of the trees with that clarity that presages dusk.
The wood was absolutely silent, without even a natural small animal murmur. There was no wind to rustle the treetops, no musical chafing of branches.
I imagined I could hear him breathing, though I dismissed the thought as fancy.
His foot and his leg were withdrawn slowly, and he started to glide round the tree, slowly, infinitely cautiously. First his elbow appeared, then the lower part of his arm. I calculated from his speed of movement that I would have sufficient time, and stepped from behind my tree. In this desperate situation I could not afford the slightest noise. Any noise at all emanating from the wood would open up that battery of artillery or mortars, without regard for whoever was in there, and I couldn’t hope to shout – ‘We’re not all Germans’. I stepped from behind my tree, knife in hand, and walked in a slight arc towards the tree behind which he was hiding, and from the shelter of which he would soon appear. If I kept to this arc, and he to that speed, I would get to the bole of that tree as he appeared round it, though I would have the advantage of knowing him to be there.
I arranged the arc of my progress so as to keep only his elbow and arm in sight as he swung slowly around. I drew nearer to the tree. My rubber commando soles made not the slightest sound on the ground, and I walked on my toes, prepared for instant action. Ten feet to go, six feet to go, five, four, three, two, and then I was there. His elbow was only twelve inches from my chest, as he stepped out, and I struck.
God knows how I did it, but at the very last second, as I realised, I turned the blade of the knife inwards.
The point pierced the front of his jacket, with the blade sideways, avoiding his body by a skin’s width. The jar as the blade hit the bole of the tree ran up my arm and paralysed, for an instant, the whole of my shoulder and jaw.
Tom Cooper’s face came round the side of the tree-trunk, level with mine. Mine was pressed into the rough bark, and I was panting in released fear and agony.
He too put his face to the tree bark, and we stood there until my panting subsided.
‘Where’ve you been?’ he asked quietly, ‘absent off parade again?’
‘You’ll never believe it, but we got lost.’
‘Where did you dump the German?’ He knew I hadn’t killed him.
‘He’s sitting at the edge of the wood, waiting for me to go back to get him. Where’s Cliff?’
‘Behind you!’
He was, too. He’d come up silently while we had been talking, and he punched me on the arm.
‘Where were you,’ Tom Cooper asked him, ‘when this bugger tried to shave my cobblers?’
‘When?’ Cliff asked, uncomprehendingly.
I looked at Tom Cooper entreatingly. He said nothing further. I told them I had recognised the wood, and drew their attention to the tree at its edge. They both remembered it, and we were able to place our position exactly. It still didn’t alter the fact that we didn’t know the password, but somehow there was reassurance in knowing where the first challenge was likely to come.
Cliff lost his temper when I suggested we go back for Helmut. ‘Leave him,’ he argued, ‘and we can send someone out to get him.’ But a lot can happen even on the first eight hundred yards of a fighting patrol, and I didn’t want it on my conscience that I had left Helmut there all night. I didn’t believe he could stay alive all night, and said so.
‘So what?’ Cliff asked.
There was no answer I could give him that would make any sense at all, and I was beyond arguing. Cliff would have gone through any brand of hell, and had done so, for me, Tom Cooper, or any troop of ‘our’ men. But he had a monumental indifference to ‘the others’, no matter how arbitrary was his choice of us and them. He and Tom Cooper, Robin Farquhar and I had been sent one time to bring a man out of a prisoner-of-war camp, secretly. We did so, and we got him to our lines under the noses of an SS troop. When we brought him into the light, Cliff said – ‘But he’s Irish.’ He never forgot that we had risked our lives to save an Irishman. He never went to bed without a prayer for his own mean Baptist soul, and he never forgave himself for saving an Irish Catholic!
I couldn’t stand another argument, another vote, another appeal to Tom Cooper. I turned on my heels and went down the path looking for Helmut. Cliff knew the path was mined – but the bastard never said a word. Tom Cooper came after me.
‘Watch it,’ he said. ‘I daren’t come with you or he’ll go blundering off on his own and the first thing we know he’ll be playing football with a mine.’
I had never realised, until that moment, how protective we had always been towards Cliff – how we had looked after him, and guarded him, ox of a man that he was. I don’t want to imply that he was the sort of ox to inspire the love in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men – the ox that must be protected both from himself and society – I suppose we had the feeling that Cliff was, and could be, acceptable to society in other situations, at other times, but that he lacked our ability to cope with the set of circumstances into which we had all been thrust. I jumped from a twenty-five foot roof, once, when I saw him tangle his parachute lines and dangle near a power cable. Dammit, I jumped off a twenty-five foot roof for that man, and grabbed his swinging legs, and steadied him, despite what felt at the time to be a broken ankle. I didn’t know at the time that the power cable had been cut and carried no danger.
This, and similar base thoughts of ingratitude, took me down the path to where Helmut was sitting. I untied him. He had not, to my surprise, passed out, and seemed to be expecting me.
‘You found them?’
‘Of course.’
‘They managed to stay alive, then?’
I was cutting the wire. I needn’t have jerked it quite so brutally. He knew it, of course, and knew he had got under my skin.
‘They’ll stay alive a damn sight longer than you will!’
His mocking smile said, ‘I would take bets on that!’
I cut all the wire and salvaged what I could of it. He stood as erect as he could, flexing his stiffened muscles, his glittering eye fixed on me. I was truculently unable to meet his gaze. Dammit, what was there about this bastard that could so quickly discomfit me? Didn’t he know he was a prisoner? Didn’t he realise he was sinking into the trough of grey-clad prisoner-of-war anonymity? That he was no longer a Herrenvolk, an Aryan superman, a leader of men?
He straightened his body and dusted himself. Meticulous bastard. I was in a lousy temper.
He saw it, but other than raising that one eyebrow, he made no comment. I could have laughed at the sight of him – with one eye covered by the dirty bandage, and the other raised in an inquisitorial gesture, his face had a curious chaplinesque quality to invoke laughter. The mirth tried to get through, but I was too soured. Frequently, I have been forced by circumstances to defend a belief I did not hold. It was always happening to me in argument, that the proposition I could support was expressed in such bigoted terms that I was revolted by it. Then, perverse sod that I am, I would defend the opposing proposition with all the vehemence and skill I could muster, without the belief that adds cogency.
I knew damn well we’d be better off to kill Helmut, to have done with him. But I could bring myself to agree neither with the expedient viewpoint of Tom Cooper, which seemed to lack the courage of resolution and therefore be evasive, nor the irrational violent solution of Cliff, which seemed too instinctive and animal. Between the three of us, we ought to be able to work out exactly what to do with Helmut. I knew that, if we could do that logically, we would decide to kill him.
‘I’ve taken out all the mines along the path, so you can get a move on!’ I felt coarse and brutal – and certainly would have swayed from side to side in the best anthropoid, paperbacked-novel gangster tradition, had not my rucksack and body pains made the movement impossible.
We got back to the others standing silent by the side of the path in semi-concealment. They came onto the path. Tom Cooper took a position behind Helmut. I did not pause, but stepped past Helmut, on ahead. Looking back over my shoulder, I saw Helmut, then Cliff, then Tom Cooper bringing up the rear, in Indian file, each one separated from the one ahead by a safe thirty feet. I found two more booby-traps in the wood, and dealt with both with angry speed.
The light was disappearing fast, and I wanted to be out of that wood as soon as possible. The temperature had dropped to below the dew point, and I was wet through again. The grass and the trees were dripping with the dew, and the whole wood had the potency of tiny notes in an immense swelling of an infinite number of infinitely small sounds, waiting to react to any noise, to be amplified and echoed and bounced from trunk to trunk in a rolling reverberation. With each step we trod in leaf mould, for the path had long been disused. It exuded a sweat, a natural richness like the smell of a healthy athlete after triumphant strain. It reminded me of all the cross-country runs and the buns and Tizer that followed in the steaming changing rooms, when I had listened glumly to the boasts of the winners.
Once we had left the wood, Tom Cooper came up in front, and I dropped behind Helmut. We knew there were no obstacles in the field that lay before us, for our own men would need to be able to cross that field in a hurry when the occasion presented itself, as it would do, without warning. We made our way in spread formation across to the hedge bottom. We turned to the right, northward, and started to go along…
It was Tom Cooper who first heard it, and shouted, ‘look out!’
We crashed to the ground, hugging the hedge-bottom.
The mortar shell landed about twenty feet behind us, and I heard the fragmented bits of steel whistle overhead. We all half ran in a stumbling crouched position, forward. The next mortar bomb landed even further away, but the steel fragments still hummed overhead. The third and fourth and fifth mortar bombs came with calculated regularity. They found a target in the corner of the field behind us, each of the three bombs falling within fifteen feet of the edge of the wood. We were just out of range, and watched each one fall with a trembling fascination. There was a long silence after the fifth bomb. We sat crouching, waiting, holding our breath for the next ear-pounding burst, which didn’t come. Finally, I let the breath out of my lungs, held my nose hard and blew to clear the pressure in my ears. I signalled to Helmut to do tne same.
‘What was that?’ I asked Tom Cooper.
‘I haven’t the faintest idea,’ he said. ‘They couldn’t have seen us in this light!’
He was right. The edge of the day had gone, and we were in the muzziness of early evening twilight, when distant objects lose their definition.
How many were the mysteries of war. How many times a bomb dropped and killed the one man who didn’t want to die, leaving unscathed the man to whom death would have been the solution to a life of problems. How many times did a perfectly-maintained rifle jam at the wrong moment, a parachute fail to open, a leg break in a perfectly normal landing.
‘Those were yours,’ Helmut said, quietly.
‘Of course they’re ours.’
Some bloody fool on our own side was putting those bombs into that mortar barrel. I had sat under too many German mortars not to know the popping sound of them. I had heard too many of our own mortar bombs go sailing over my head not to know the whistling note of them.
I looked at Cliff. He was wild-eyed, but with anger, not terror. By tacit understanding, we moved out of the hedge bottom, across the open field, and then stopped about forty yards from the north-western corner. We sat on the grass, in a circle of diameter about ten yards, waiting for the mortars to end. Desperate men spread out under fire – tired, shocked, frightened men huddle close together. It’s all, or nothing, but if you go, at least you don’t go alone.
Mortar crews are notoriously jumpy. It must be the explosion of the propellant inside the barrel, the knowledge that if anything goes wrong in the bottom to prevent the bomb flying out, the barrel will become an instant twisting snaking nest of lashing steel fragments that can slice the belly out of a man with surgical precision.
A mortar crew had an emplacement somewhere only a thousand yards in front of us. The thousand yards I could count from measuring the time interval between the crack and the thump, a calculation we all did instinctively whenever anyone fired anything at us.
Doubtless Helmut was reading it off in metres, but the distance was the same in any measure.
We were sitting, as I have said, in circle of diameter about ten yards. The sixth mortar bomb landed in the centre of that circle. I felt a thousand tiny hands press my face, shoulders, chest and throat as I bent backwards under the force of the push from in front of me. The rucksack strap ground into the pit of my back as it hit the ground and I felt myself lifted up and over it, and lost consciousness.