When I came to, I was lying with my feet towards the crater the bomb had caused, and on my back. I must have done an instinctive double roll. It did not take more than a second for me to know where I was, and I had none of those hallucinations of being dead. The whole of my face pained from the force of the blow I had received.
The first sound to penetrate my recovering awareness was the steady rhythmic thump of bombs falling into the corner of the field near to the wood. Pause, fire. Pause, fire. Pause, fire. I had seen the mortar crews doing it time and again – had felt the sharp crack as each bomb flew after its fellows. Mortar crews took a pride in maintaining a rhythm, as much pride as in the accuracy they could achieve. The mortar is an imprecise weapon, relying more on density of coverage than an accuracy of aim, and density is best achieved by rhythm.
We had been hit, I imagined, by a bomb improperly made – nothing more than slight imperfection in the finning to pervert its flight a few hundreds of yards short of its planned objective. Damn the anonymous factory hand who stopped work on the first wail of the lunch siren, damn the inspector who had neither the courage nor the interest to stamp our bomb ‘unfit for service’, and damn damn damn the nervous ear that fed the hand that switched to ‘fire’ on a deserted target. It was a long chain of damns, each without purpose, but it brought me back to full awareness.
I rolled over onto my side. Tom Cooper was alive, so was Helmut. What was left of Cliff would never stir again. It wasn’t even worth crawling over to where the largest piece of him lay.
Sorrow comes later – its immediate manifestations are anger, regret, apathy, stunned shocked silence and the inability to care.
Some superior instinct of survival had rolled Helmut into a tight ball – he uncurled and I saw where the blast and bomb fragments had ripped through his trouser legs. Tom Cooper’s face was lightly dashed with blood flecks – his beret had gone, and with it all the hair at the top front of his scalp, from which the skin had neatly been sliced. He looked horrible – his face, elongated by the recession of his hairline, wore a frightening grimace, half smile, half leer. Tears were running down his cheeks between the blood flecks. He was obviously in intense and continuous pain. When you remember the pain of pulling out just a few hairs – it is not difficult to imagine the searing torture of ripping away three square inches of scalp.
I started to crawl across to him, and then noticed the pain in my own knee. Helmut must have seen me wince – and he crawled across to Tom Cooper.
‘In my shirt breast pocket,’ Tom Cooper said. Helmut opened his jacket and drew out the metal tube of morphia. From it he shook a pill. Tom Cooper shook his head. ‘Two,’ he whispered. Helmut shook out another, and put them on Tom Cooper’s tongue. He unstrapped his water bottle and gave him a sip from it, but Tom Cooper gulped greedily, the faster to wash down and dissolve the pills.
Helmut then got out the packet of sulphanilamide powder that had been used on him, and dusted it liberally over Tom Cooper’s forehead. With all the death that lingered in rotting carcases over this countryside, tetanus was always our first fear, gangrene the second.
Then Helmut crawled over to me and with my knife, cut the trouser from my knee. A piece the size of a shilling had been sliced from my knee-cap. It looked a worse wound than it actually was – though I guessed I would never play football again. My immediate concern was to know if I could walk. Together we cleaned the wound, and he dusted powder into it and we strapped on a field dressing. There was not a lot of bleeding, and I made certain we made a clean job of patching it. Then Helmut put his hand under my foot, and I tried the effect of pressing my weight against it. After the initial excruciating twinge, the immediate pain was replaced by a monstrous ache that throbbed all the way up to my thigh.
‘You’ll be able to walk on that,’ Helmut said.
‘When the time comes.’
‘That’s right.’
Tom Cooper appeared to have passed out. We both crawled over to where he lay, me shuffling along on my backside without lifting my body more than twelve inches from the ground. If they had a mortar that could fire into this field, we had no way of knowing they wouldn’t also have a Bren-gun. Though the range was distant for a Bren, that was not to say they wouldn’t try it.
Tom Cooper’s eyes were open, and by the time we got to him, what was left of his brow was no longer furrowed, and he seemed in repose.
‘You all right?’ I asked him.
‘I think so.’
‘Move your arms and your legs.’
He did so, flexing each of his fingers in turn, and drawing his hand backwards and forwards. All his limbs appeared capable of movement.
‘Nothing broken?’
‘It would seem not.’
‘How do you feel in yourself?’
‘Bloody awful.’
‘Got any pain?’
I knew he couldn’t have pain – two of those issue pills would stop any feeling for at least four hours.
Helmut had been examining him. He then looked at his watch, and at the field which lay beyond the hedge before us.
‘Have you any idea how far we have to go?’ he asked me.
‘Six to seven hundred yards. If they are still there!’
‘How long did it take you to come?’
‘I don’t remember. We were held up by two patrols.’ I could see the contempt in his eye. He was the sort of man to keep locked inside himself the precise memory of each isolated incident of his entire life.
It had not seemed relevant to me at the time, to keep a record of each yard we travelled. I could not have known we were going to what was to become a seemingly endless isolation. I had no idea of the sergeant’s purpose in putting us so far on the flank without even a radio to keep us in contact. I had not known, of course, that we were not going merely into the next field.
‘I think we’ve got a half mile to go,’ I said, with as much confidence as I could muster.
I didn’t fool him, not for one second. He had already closed his mind to whatever my answer might be, had already dismissed it as an irrelevancy.
‘How strong are those tablets?’
‘How the hell do I know – I’m not a bloody pharmacist.’
He took the metal phial, and tried to decipher the wording on it – but there was nothing to give even a clue as to the contents or dosage.
‘How often are you supposed to take them?’
‘Every four hours.’
He looked again at the field on the other side of the hedge, obviously calculating our chances of survival, our route. It didn’t bother me, temporarily, that he had seized the initiative.
‘We can’t go straight ahead,’ he said, thinking aloud, ‘there’s a mortar up there with a nervous crew. Your mortar companies come in threes, but what we don’t know is if this one is the flank crew, or the centre crew. If they are the flank crew, which flank are they on, the left or the right?’
Not one of us mentioned Cliff. Tom Cooper must have seen what was left of him – Helmut certainly had, for he had crawled within five feet.
‘Can you move?’ he said to Tom Cooper.
‘I’ll try.’
‘All right, then, come on,’ and with Helmut leading, we slowly crossed the field to the hedgerow straight in front, to the north. For me it was a journey I measured in inches, every inch a mountain of effort. It became apparent that I had been rent by splinters, and blood ran beneath my vest. Finally, my punished body gave up the struggle and I ceased to feel anything at all, except a throbbing core of pain that filled my entire body. When it became strong enough, some portion of my mind was switched off by it, and I was able completely to ignore it. Tom Cooper was making heavy going. From time to time he would stop, and his head would sink into the grass. Then he would jerk himself up again into a crouching position, and make a few forward moves. Helmut forged straight ahead and was sitting up in the hedgerow when we arrived. I would not have been surprised to see him with a stein of lager in one hand, a liverwurst sandwich in the other, and a Baedeker map of the tourist attractions spread out before him.
It was plain to see he despised us both, with the arrogant contempt of the triumph of mind over matter, the blind unfeeling disregard of the capable for the incapacitated.
We both struggled into a semi-upright position beside him, and he unwrapped and gave each of us a barley sugar sweet. I would have refused it or spat it out, had I not craved the energy it contained.
When he saw the mess Tom Cooper had made of his forehead, he got out a field dressing, and tied it on the wound. He had great difficulty getting it to stay in position, and then suddenly he crawled back across the field over which we had come. He returned minutes later with a green beret – Cliff’s green beret which he had always worn at such a ridiculous sergeant-torturing angle – and clamped it on Tom Cooper’s head. It held the bandage in position. He also had Cliff’s knife, which he used on the bandage with great dexterity.
‘How many British Army songs do you know?’ he asked me.
Nothing could have surprised me.
‘All of them.’ I did, too. We’d had more than enough marching in our time, and there’s nothing like a march to teach you to sing, to conquer the weary loneliness and pain and body-building futility of slogging endlessly along.
‘This is what we do,’ he said. ‘We will make no attempt to conceal ourselves. We will get up and walk into them. But you will sing army songs. And you will sing them loudly. It will be dark in about ten minutes, too dark for them to see us, but we will make certain they hear us, and recognise you.’
It might work. It might just work! Certainly I was in no condition, nor was Tom Cooper in any condition, to crawl the best part of five hundred yards. Even tottering, erect, balanced however precariously on our two feet, we might just make it. Certainly, when those two morphia pills wore off, Tom Cooper was going to be in no condition to do anything but scream. It was essential we get back before that could happen.
We sat for five more minutes, watching the light gradually disappear, watching the trees at the far side of the defile fade into an obscured nothingness. When we could no longer see the other edge of the field, Helmut signalled us to get up, and we both tried to get to our feet. Neither one of us could make it alone. He jerked us erect. Finally, I was balanced, holding the branch of a bush in the hedge. I took my hand away from the bush and found I could stand unaided. I kept the weight of my body off the bad leg, and then tried to take a step forward. Though I was past feeling actual pain, my eyes misted over with the effort. I cleared them angrily with a shake of my head, and then started forward, one step after the other. I didn’t look around but felt Tom Cooper’s long, drawn-out gasp as he too ventured the first steps forward. Then I started to sing. ‘Ten green bottles.’ I knew this would last a long time. We made no attempt at concealment, but kept out in the centre of the field. After two hundred precious yards, I felt Helmut draw beside me. By then I was singing, ‘We’re going to hang out our washing on the Siegfried Line’, and there were tears in my voice. I was crying, real tears of misery, real tears of horror. Tears for Cliff, and tears for the two anonymous Germans I had killed that day. Tears for my pain and woe, tears for my dirty stinking wetness, tears for my inferiority, tears too for fear of the zipping bullets I expected to come at me with each moment, with each word, with each tear-laden verse.
‘Don’t stop singing,’ he said. ‘How far ahead of your mortars do you usually put down your Brens?’
‘Usually about two hundred yards.’
This appeared to mystify him. He hadn’t realised we were not an infantry-style unit, that we didn’t have fixed ground procedures and patterns, that usually we hit and run without the time or the need for defensive positions to be outlined. Usually we were never in the same spot for more than eight hours at a stretch. I didn’t know what in God’s name had gone wrong this time, but I knew damn well why that mortar crew was jittery. They were crazed by routine, crazed by an equivalent of out-of-doors claustrophobia. There would not be a single man in the whole unit wouldn’t have been aching for three days to get the hell out.
That’s when the tracer started. It wasn’t ours, we never used tracer bullets. They must have brought up an infantry regiment, and that meant our lads had moved out. This tracer was being fired from a Bren-gun, one round every five, on a tripod with a mechanical arrangement for keeping the shots at one height. It started across at the eastern side of the field, and was coming towards us. The point of firing was only three hundred or so yards in front of us. We dropped to the ground, scrabbling into the grass and the soil beneath it, flattening ourselves as much as was humanly possible. Within seconds the tracers were over us, and I felt the blow as one of the bullets hit and pierced my rucksack. It jerked the straps into my shoulders, yanking back the blades of my shoulders with a fierce wrench that opened up the scattered wounds on my chest.
When the gun had traversed to the far side of the field, it started again on the reverse arc. We watched it come back our way, fascinated by the red whipping streaks of fire. When it got to within feet of us, in the air just above our heads, it stopped again. Magazine change, I predicted.
‘Keep down,’ I croaked. ‘It’s a magazine change.’
Tom Cooper didn’t reply.
I waited a moment for Helmut, hope the unspeakable thought, but he replied.
The Bren started again, and continued its slow traverse.
I got to my feet, despite the effort. ‘Come on,’ I said, ‘for Christ’s sake come on.’ I was not going to lie there with that lot passing over the back of my spine every fifteen seconds. My mind was working again, and I had timed the interval between left and right. I lumbered eleven steps, and then croaked, ‘Down.’ We had barely flopped to the ground when the line of fire was across our backs again. We let it flip by and then got up and stumbled forward again. Eleven agonising steps and then down. This time we had to wait seven seconds before the line got to us again. I took a tremendous pride in calculating that they were not sitting in the centre of the hedgerow before us.
We were actually moving forward when the other Bren, to the north-east of us, began to cover the lines of the first one, from a different angle. We managed to get down in time, but were now beneath two cross arcs, beneath the aim of two gunners composing their lines of death contrapuntally, with the time interval too small for us to make the slightest move forward or backwards, to the left or the right. I had noticed however, and continued to watch to verify it, that each gunner had his lock-off position on the edge of his arc, opposing edges. Thus, when the guns ceased to fire we would have a few seconds warning when they began again. I crawled across to where Helmut was lying.
‘Wait till they stop,’ I said, ‘and then we can go forward.’
He knew nothing of lock-off positions – I took a childish pride in airing my own bit of superiority, explained it to him as I would to a child. By the time I had finished, they had stopped firing. Tom Cooper was lying about eight feet to one side of us, immobile. I crawled over to him. A bullet had entered the top of his head, leaving a neat hole in Cliff’s beret. He must have been holding his head high, possibly to prevent his forehead making contact with the ground, for the bullet had come out again at the base of the back of his neck. His face was now buried in the grass. His hands were stretched before him in the push-off position, half bent. I straightened them across the top of his head, then reached into his top pocket and took out the letter he had written that morning.
I am still not certain of the emotions I experienced as I crawled back across the dampened grass to where Helmut lay. He knew Tom Cooper had died.
‘There’s just you and me now,’ he said.