THE NIGHT WAS STILL, warm, brilliantly moonlit.
Sergeant Ferrissey, commanding the Fifth Battalion’s last guard on British soil, moved quietly on his rounds. The moonlight cast shimmering tracks across the dark sea below and bathed the fields in white radiance; but Sergeant Ferrissey had no eyes for the loveliness of the night.
He was burning, aching inside his uniform for the company of a woman. Not for years had Sergeant Ferrissey gone so many days unconsoled; he looked down from the heights towards the town that lay in the shadows around the bay, asleep and silent except for the hum of the nightshift that came ceaselessly from the distant aircraft factory; he thought of the women down there in the darkness, moving softly about in curtained rooms, lying warm and lonely in their beds, smiling insolently across the throbbing machines in the factory; and he raged.
He closed his eyes and stood for a while listening to the distant, hypnotic hum from the factory. He let his fancy carry him away, swooping down through the warm night, to the empty, moonlit streets below. He could see himself running with giant, floating strides through the town, his boots thundering on the pavement; and all along the streets, the doors swinging slowly open and the women stretching out their warm and supple arms in invitation. He opened his eyes, the dream broken, and breathed deeply.
Someone would suffer for this. His strength was leaping and struggling within him. God help the first German I meet, he thought, and the muscles at the back of his hands tightened under the skin.
He continued on his rounds among the silent tents. The sentry on Number One Post was leaning dreamily over the wire fence, his rifle slung at his shoulder, looking down at the sea. The night cook was dozing in a chair by the warmth of his boiler. Outside one of the tents two men were sitting on the ground, talking quietly. Sergeant Ferrissey paused on his way.
‘Get to bed, lads.’
‘O.K. Sergeant. Good night,’ said Charlie Venable.
‘Good night.’
Lying in the stifling darkness inside the bell tent, Charlie Venable had been awakened by the sound of whimpering on the other side of the tent pole.
He lay for a moment listening, then raised himself on one elbow. Alfie Bradley was sitting up, his blanket heaped at his feet. His head was bowed, his shoulders were shaking.
Charlie whispered, ‘What’s up, mate?’
Alfie looked up, then began to sob again.
‘Dear, oh dear,’ said Charlie, ‘this won’t do. You’ll wake the others up in a minute. Get your head down, boy, an’ try to sleep. You’ll be all right.’
Alfie whispered weakly, ‘I’ve wet my blanket.’
‘Nothing to cry about, boy. Done worse than that in my time.’
Alfie shivered, ‘I could die, Charlie. I could die of shame, doing that.’
‘Come on outside,’ said Charlie, ‘get a breath o’ fresh air.’
They crept from the tent. Charlie reached back for the blanket and flung it over the wire fence to dry.
‘What’s frettin’ you, Alfie lad? Miss your Floss?’
Alfie shrugged his shoulders.
‘Come on, lad, tell your Uncle Charlie. Won’t do you no good keepin’ it shut up inside you. Talk cures all ills, my ma says. What hurts, Alfie?’
‘You don’t know what happened that last night before we came here. Me an’ Floss. Over the common.’
Charlie pushed Alfie back by the shoulders.
‘Did you, boy?’ he said delightedly. ‘Honest?’
Alfie nodded.
Charlie slapped his thigh. ‘Lord love me,’ he chuckled, ‘our little Alfie. An’ you think the end of the world’s come because you’ve ’ad a bit orf your girl. Is that what was worrying you?’
Alfie said, ‘She might have a baby.’
‘She might not,’ said Charlie. ‘Anyway, you ’aven’t done a murder, boy. They been doin’ that all over the world for years an’ years. Old Adam was the bloke that started it. Didn’t no one ever tell you?’
‘I want to marry her,’ said Alfie. ‘I was going into town last Monday to ask her mum; then we went and moved out of camp in the morning and here we are. What’s she thinking of me now?’
‘She’ll ’ave guessed what’s happened. If she ’asn’t, she’ll know soon enough.’
Alfie answered bitterly: ‘That’ll cheer her up, I bet. What they want to go and do this to us for? Why can’t I live my own life? I don’t want to go an’ invade somebody else’s country.’
‘No more do I, boy.’
‘Well, what did you come back to the battalion for?’
‘Look at it this way,’ said Charlie. ‘You’ve ’ad to stop living your own life for a while. Right? You want to get married, an’ you can’t. Right? Well, you’re not the only one, boy. In every tent in this camp there’s geezers in the same boat, an’ all along the coast tonight there’s millions more like them. Geezers who want to get married. Geezers waiting for their wives to ’ave a nipper. Geezers with their ma, or their missus, or their kiddie ill. Geezers with big ideas and ambitions. Geezers with businesses they ought to be keeping an eye on. And all of a sudden, bang, they’ve ’ad to turn their backs on these things.’
He chewed at a blade of grass for a moment.
‘Nothing wrong with that,’ he went on. ‘It’s like this. You’re sitting at home by the fire reading the paper. Your ma calls down the stairs, “Alfie, go up the corner for a tin loaf.” Nothing else for it. You put the paper down an’ you go up the road for the loaf. Then you sit down by the fire again and carry on reading the paper. Same with this now. Just like goin’ up the road for a loaf. It’s got to be done, Alfie boy, before we can live right again. What’s the use of marrying your Floss, an’ buying a home, an’ raising nippers if this lot’s gonna go on for ever? Wouldn’ like that, would you?’
‘No.’
‘Well, then, that’s what we’re goin’ over there for, to finish it all off an’ pay out the ones that started it. You’re doin’ it for Floss. I’m doin’ it for the old lady. All of them others I spoke about are doin’ it for someone.’
‘Won’t be much use to Floss if I don’t come back,’ said Alfie.
‘If,’ jeered Charlie, ‘if ifs an’ ands was pots an’ pans… You’re not a bad boy, Alfie. All them millions of others, you don’t mind taking your chance with them, do you?’
‘I’m not frightened,’ said Alfie, ‘if that’s what you mean. It was just thinking about Floss, an’ worrying, an’ doing that in my blanket. I felt so ashamed, Charlie. I see it different now, though.’
‘That’s the boy. Lord love me, worryin’ about that. You won’ ’arf laugh about that one day, you an’ Floss, after you been wed.’
A voice interrupted them from the other side of the wire fence. ‘Get to bed, lads.’ It was the guard commander on his rounds.
‘O.K. Sergeant,’ said Charlie Venable, ‘good night.’
‘Good night.’ The sergeant went on his way.
‘That git,’ said Charlie, ‘he oughter a known what you was worryin’ about. He’d a killed hisself laughing. Come on, boy, into kip.’
Alfie looked doubtfully at the blanket on the fence.
‘That’s all right, cocker,’ said Charlie, ‘you oughter know me by now. Charlie Venable the wide boy from Bow. Never wants for nothing, an’ no more do ’is friends. Got three blankets in there, I ’ave, an’ just for tonight I’m gonna be Santa Claus an’ tuck you up in two of ’em. In you go.’
He settled down on his palliasse and lay for a while, until he was satisfied that Alfie was asleep. As he slid down at last under his own blanket, a voice came softly from the darkness.
‘Charlie.’ It was Lance-Corporal Feather.
‘You awake, Corp?’
‘Been awake all the time, Charlie. Charlie, you know what you are? You’re a gentleman.’
‘Dear, oh dear,’ sighed Charlie, ‘I do get called some names. Good night, Corp.’
‘Good night, Charlie.’
Lieutenant Paterson was a sturdy young man with fair hair that lay gleaming like a golden cap across his brow, and smooth, ruddy cheeks. He was twenty-two years old but did not look more than nineteen; when he was alone with his mother he still called her ‘Mummy’.
At four o’clock in the morning Lieutenant Paterson had still not yet gone to bed. He had lived a long time for this night, and it seemed stupid and pointless to sleep through it. Instead, he strolled slowly round the camp perimeter, chewing the stem of his unlit pipe and trying to summon up thoughts appropriate to the occasion.
He had thought of all the poems he knew, dreamed a dozen battle scenes in which he had won a dozen decorations, drifted into a sentimental vision of his mother hearing the news of his death, written in imagination his first letter home from the front, conjured up a picture of himself lying bandaged in a hospital bed with his family tiptoeing respectfully to his side; and it was still not yet dawn. The night had become terribly long and terribly quiet; to Paterson the distant hum of the factory had already become a torment.
Towards the morning the moon was obscured by cloud and the sea grew dark; the air became chill. Lieutenant Paterson, as he breathed, felt the air in his throat and his lungs like ice. It was hard for him to breathe, harder still to dream. He was beset by thoughts more dismal than he had yet known; thoughts of himself being delivered home to his mother like a helpless package, handless or armless or legless; thoughts of his mother weeping over his smashed and frightful face; thoughts of himself sprawling dead, face downwards by the roadside, with the battalion plodding by as if he had never existed and his mother waiting in anguish far away for news of him.
It had not been difficult to soldier these last three years, at OCTU, at battle school, with the battalion; there were leaves, and weekend visits, letters from Mummy and parcels from Mummy. Mummy sent his laundry to him every week, wrapped daintily in sheets of tissue paper and sprinkled with lavender which reminded him of her each time he opened the parcel.
He could see his Mummy now, tall and slender, with hair more golden than his own, sitting at table in the white-frilled blouse with the cameo brooch at her throat, smiling at him across the spotless tablecloth and the glittering cutlery and the gleaming cut glass and the flowers.
For the first time it seeped into his understanding that he was going now far beyond her reach, where it would not be in her power to help or comfort him.
In Lieutenant Paterson’s mind there was no place for fear; but for the first time he discovered the strange terror that afflicts the soldier’s body regardless of his will, a twitching in his calves, a fluttering of the muscles in his cheeks, the breath like a block of expanding ice in his lungs, his stomach contracting, the sickness rising in his throat.
Far below him the sea was shrouded in the last darkness before the sunrise. He began to plod down the slopes towards the sea, to drive the weakness from his legs, to rout the palsy from his body. From the horde of memories which assailed him he seized on one, of himself as a small boy at the seaside, in a little family hotel, lying all night in the darkness of his room consumed with impatience for the morning; and in the morning, dressing, and kissing Mummy, and scrambling down the steps and down the street towards the sea, and on to the promenade, to make sure that the sea was still there; and every morning it was still there, whispering and serene.
And he was suddenly a little boy again, running down to the sea through the long grass, heedless of the brambles and of the dew that soaked his trousers, vaulting over fences and squirming through barbed-wire barriers in his haste, with the warmth of movement bringing eagerness and confidence flowing back into his body. Through the dark woods now that barred his line of vision; and here he was, leaning against the rail at the sea’s edge, with the salt breeze playing in his hair.
The sea lay before him in the chill dawn light, grey and smooth and silent, the orderly rows of ships at anchor as peacefully as if they were waiting for the start of a regatta.
The longing for his mother melted into pride and exultation. The little boy was going to show his mother how brave he was; there was a fine, new game for him to play.
Lieutenant Paterson turned from the sea and ran joyously up the hill towards the camp. He wanted to laugh aloud, to shout up at the pale sky. He was ready for the fine, new game.
He checked himself as he came into the camp; the guard commander was standing by the fence, looking at him curiously.
‘Good morning, Sergeant,’ he said self-consciously. ‘Grand morning, isn’t it?’
‘Mornin’, sir. Goin’ to be a lovely day.’
Sergeant Ferrissey looked at his watch and stretched his body. Ten minutes to reveille. He turned out his off-duty men to awaken the battalion.
He stood watching as they went from tent to tent, stumbling over the guy-lines, drumming with their fists at the taut canvas, shouting, ‘Wakey, wakey.’
He heard the first sounds of movement inside the tents, the muffled voices; the first dishevelled men appeared, stumbling across to the ablution benches. As the white light crept across the sky the camp came to life with noise and movement. The Fifth Battalion was awake.
At eight o’clock in the morning, while the holiday-makers in the town below were crawling from their beds and looking gratefully out of their windows at the radiant sunshine and blue sky of a perfect summer’s day, the men of the Fifth Battalion marched quietly down to the sea and went aboard ship.