I don’t know whether it was the manner in which he said it, or the look that glittered from that one uncovered inky eye. All my pains and aches drained from me. I felt them go, as a man feels everything within him go during the brief moment of a complete orgasm. Perhaps I even had an orgasm, I don’t know, for they burned all my clothing, or so they told me.
I seemed to have been feeling so much pain during the past few hours, that I was no longer capable of opening my mind to the rational processes that still lay within, however concealed by unthinkable thoughts. I seemed, therefore, to become clairvoyant, to grasp knowledge and powers that rationally I would have dismissed.
That grenade hadn’t dropped from Cliff’s pocket. I saw the scene again, and my mind went to a vision of what had happened. Helmut had had that grenade the whole time! Poised on the edge of that crevice, he had seen Cliff stumble and fall. In that flash of a second the opportunity offered itself, and was accepted, of getting rid for once and for always of the one danger man, the one man against whom he could not triumph, the one man likely to kill him out of hand. Calmly he had taken out the pin of that grenade and had rolled it down the bank into the crevice, onto a momentarily disabled Cliff.
He wasn’t to know how swift I could be when retrieving grenades, how I had practised by throwing live grenades up in the air with the pin out, catching them, and then lobbing them into the grenade testing pit. He wasn’t to know that I was a faster man than he suspected.
I was incapable of asking myself if what I intended to do was right or wrong. I was incapable of saying, ‘judge not lest ye be judged’. I imagine I was temporarily of unsound mind. Many men were driven insane during the war by pain and suffering.
The actions and the abilities of the insane, however temporary that insanity may be, often seem to stem from stimuli of outstanding precision and clarity. I crawled beside Helmut.
‘It was you rolled that grenade?’
‘Yes – it was him or me!’
I wanted him to lie, to deny it, to defend himself actively, to attack me even, to cause me to be angry, to give me an excuse of hot blood. The cold look of contempt came to him again, and I could clearly distinguish the tightening of the corners of his mouth, the wrinkle of distaste at the man who would be so careless as to let a prisoner steal a primed hand-grenade. I was holding my right hand by my side, not twenty inches from him. Once again I unsheathed my knife, and then, with one twisting movement, I stuck it, up to its hilt, under his ribs and into his black heart. He died instantly, but not before a look of human fear had wiped all arrogance from his face.
I pulled out the knife, and wiped it crudely on the grass and then on his trouser leg. In that one death was washed away all my clairvoyance, all my inner clarity, my privileged knowledge of Tom Cooper and Cliff and Robin Farquhar, and the other two Germans I had killed. I got to my feet and started to stumble forward. When the Brens began again I watched them approach me, from each side. The nearest bullet came within twenty inches, as I walked through the fire.
Soon I could see the emplacements, one behind a knoll to the left, and one in front of a tree to the right.
From the grass before me came the voice of a Scotsman.
‘Halt! Who goes there?’
I could think of nothing to say but, ‘It’s me, you bloody fool,’ before starting a long, slow collapse into a heap at his feet.
‘What’s your name, then?’ he asked, as I went down.
‘Well, I can tell you, it’s not Winston bloody S. Churchill!’