by Tom Remiger
About The Book
Someone was pulling at the flagpole, making the flag shiver and dance, warning the rest of the platoon to keep their heads down. Breen could see blood on the trousers of Tiger’s battledress.
After Corporal Daniel Cousins dies during routine training in England, a young officer, Lieutenant Patrick Breen, becomes obsessed. Was it an accident, or was Cousins murdered by one of his own?
Breen’s investigation, as well as his unanticipated love affair with a superior officer, threatens the unity of his comrades in the New Zealand Division as they wait for the suffering to come in the Battle for Crete—one of the defining conflicts of the Second World War.
Soldiers is about what happens to men who go to war: about the psychological as well as the physical toll. Tom Remiger’s compelling first novel tells a story of intense feeling and unforeseen experience in a strange and distant world.
Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
England
1
2
3
4
5
6
Travelling
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
Greece
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
Crete
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright Page
England
1
‘What’s going on with you and her?’ asked Lieutenant Patrick Breen, as he and Tiger Jackson walked away from the farmhouse and passed a figure—un-uniformed! female!—wobbling down the road on a bicycle. Captain Sinclair was trudging the same way, a little behind; a conference with the colonel, he had said.
In a snaking line C Company was moving towards the farm, where it was billeted. That afternoon the men were, in one of those English bargains, picking fruit for its owners. There was nothing much to do; but Lieutenant Jackson had arranged for them to meet Bluey, the other lieutenant, on the hill above the orchard with a couple of bottles of beer. It wouldn’t be diplomatic for them to notice too much of the fruit disappearing. But it was an idea to be nearby. Just in case.
‘A man can have a bit of fun,’ said Tiger. ‘She’s only a fallback, you know. There’s Elaine—’
Breen couldn’t be bothered hearing all of the sordid details. ‘We’ll be moving along soon enough,’ he said.
‘You reckon? We can always write one another letters.’
‘You’re serious?’
‘She’s quality,’ said Tiger.
‘It’s your funeral.’
‘No call for that, Paddy. Just because you don’t go chasing after the girls.’
Breen didn’t say anything.
‘She doesn’t think she’s too good for us,’ said Tiger, defensively.
‘I didn’t say that.’ They all do, though, Breen was thinking, the bloody Poms. And I’ll bet he hasn’t told her he’s a doolan, either.
‘There is one thing,’ said Tiger. ‘Somehow she’s got the idea into her head that I’m a lawyer, back home. So if she says anything sort of strange-sounding…’ This sort of bullshit was typical of Tiger, but you couldn’t really resent it. If you asked him, he’d be able to explain that he had picked up a fair bit of legal knowledge in his position, that he was really more of a lawyer for his bank than anything else, if it weren’t for—or something like his uncle had been a lawyer, and he’d worked in his office and could be called to the bar any day now if he wanted, only his prospects were already so good that he was a bit reluctant. There’d be a story, anyhow. There always was.
‘Jesus,’ said Breen, ‘you do make it interesting for yourself. How’d she come to think that?’
‘Something the colonel said about me, apparently.’
‘All right, my learned friend,’ said Breen. ‘I’ll play along. But good luck explaining things to her someday.’
‘Someday’s a hell of a long way away,’ said Tiger. He lived in a world that he liked, that was pleasantly aware of his uniform, where he gave orders rather than took them.
Breen sometimes thought sourly that Tiger Jackson would have made a good fascist. He told unreliable stories, he liked power and admiration, and he had all three military virtues: self-belief, luck, and an eye for the main chance. Despite all this, Breen liked him. Somehow it was impossible not to. His vanity was a kind of virtue: he thought he was the best, so he was determined to be the best. And he thought that he was the kind of hero who placed others before himself; and so, in a curious way, he did.
He was, in short, the sort of person you wanted—like an Australian division—on your flank when it came down to it, even if they weren’t exactly what you’d want on your lines of communication. (Three years later, when most of them were dead or back home sharded with shrapnel, Christie, the battalion’s intelligence officer, would burst out on an Italian hill: ‘What I’d give for some of those Aussie thieves!’)
But now, in 1940, the flashes of light from the windscreens of the planes were like heliographic messages. There was a pleasing contrast between lounging about in the grass with a cigarette in hand, the morning’s duties done, and these panicked signals from a distant place. It was like watching fish from over the side of a boat, it was all happening so far away: a running fight over the Isle of Sheppey. The day before, Bluey’s batman had compared the bombers coming in to a run of whitebait.
Remembering that now, on top of the hill, Breen said, ‘It’s like kahawai in a boil-up.’ No one answered at first. The planes darted and weaved, schooled and flashed the sunlight. Bluey reached for another cigarette, and instead crumpled an empty packet into the grass. His real name was Louis; despite his thick black hair, he had inevitably become Bluey Louie, then just Bluey. The rhyme had its own appeal, but you could also blame his fondness for a drink and a bit of a blue. It was the fond belief of the entire brigade that a rugby player like him could only be stuck in a fighting battalion if he was dodging a court summons somewhere.
‘The Canadians get a thousand a month, you know,’ Tiger said. It hadn’t looked like he was watching.
‘Durries?’ That was Breen. He used to speak in that vernacular way, trying to fit in. The words always sounded odd in his mouth. He had actually trained as a lawyer and, although he still thought of himself as newly graduated from the grey university in Dunedin he had last seen more than a year ago, the war had interfered with the smooth progression of his imagined career.
‘They get the best of everything,’ said Bluey.
‘Try the fairies for that,’ said Tiger. ‘Steak for breakfast in the air force.’
‘Still rather be here than up there.’
The engines were becoming louder. Some days they sounded exactly like a beehive just before the smoke got to it.
‘They’re on their own, eh.’
One of theirs came towards them, losing height in a dive. It was being chased. The pursuer was not so clear. They accelerated together, losing height and gaining speed.
‘Christ,’ said Tiger. ‘They can put on some speed when they want to.’ His brother was in the air force, in Singapore.
Neither of the other two replied. They were looking at the plane as if only their eyes were holding it up.
The engine was a panicked scream. Over-revved. When Breen had learned to drive his grandfather talked about kangaroo petrol, and told him to give it more revs. The chasing plane pulled up. There
had been no sound of guns, but the pursued plane—a Hurricane, it looked like—continued along the same acute angle, rushing towards a ground that was much closer now.
‘Do you reckon he’s dead?’ asked Breen, keeping it casual.
The plane began to level up, under control and flattening its dive on a trajectory away from any houses. Breen imagined a crash to be inevitable now. He admired the coolness that let the pilot think of those below him. There was smoke coming from the plane.
‘He’ll be opening the canopy now,’ said Tiger. ‘He’ll have to bail out.’
There was a pause, a long one. Breen wanted to say ‘running out of time’. Instead he watched a soldier bicycling into the orchard below, where the men were picking. He wondered who it was, and what excuse he would offer.
The plane was close and flames were visible now. The pilot appeared suddenly, plunging out. He fell in a straight and soundless line. His parachute flung itself open at about the level of the trees, and there were two distinct sounds as first he hit the ground and then the plane rushed into the hills.
‘Jesus,’ said Bluey. He breathed out the word, lengthening it.
‘Well, that’s another one gone,’ said Tiger. ‘Bloody noisy about it, too.’ His face was pale.
‘If that’s what it takes to get the girls,’ said Bluey, ‘maybe I’ll become one of you jokers’ monks.’ Tiger and Breen, Catholic where Bluey was Presbyterian, had already heard in some detail about the airman, the fairy, who cut Bluey out the night before in the Brown Jug. The girls were starting to shy away from the New Zealanders, even if the old women still liked them.
‘You couldn’t,’ said Breen. Imagining Bluey as a monk was like trying to picture the colonel as a private, the way he had begun the last war.
‘Maybe not,’ said Bluey, ‘but what’s a man to know he can do unless he tries?’
‘They’re silly beggars,’ said Tiger, looking down the hill.
The men picking fruit had come running out of the orchard in fitful order, some with rifles and some without, in lines like ants.
They couldn’t have seen anything, only heard a crash like the sky falling down and come out for a look. There might be work to do, a chance to take a prisoner. And when everyone else was running it was hard to resist the impulse.
‘Why don’t they bloody well listen?’ asked Breen. ‘One Tommy gun.’ He meant that their staggered line was, as the manuals put it, exceedingly vulnerable to automatic fire: a man firing from where they sat could have cut through those running figures.
‘Don’t worry, Bosky,’ said Bluey. ‘They’d be acting differently if they thought it was the real thing. They’ve got the enthusiasm. We’ll manage the rest.’
No one seemed willing to talk about what they had just seen. Tiger stood up. He waved a calming hand. The leaders slowed, and he began to stroll towards them, hands in pockets and head high, perhaps out of a desire to show himself in control. There was no reason to chase after him. Breen took a letter from his pocket and began to read, storing up silence. Bluey rolled back and looked at the emptying sky. He lit another cigarette.
‘She’ll come around,’ he said. His meaning was unclear. He shut his eyes and appeared to sleep.
The airman was the first death Breen saw in the war, if you didn’t count the captain in supply who died of some sort of stomach trouble in Cape Town. They found out later who the airman was: Toronto-born, seconded from the Fleet Air Arm, young. They hoped to go to his funeral but something came up. And perhaps it would not have been appropriate, anyway. One still didn’t know how these things worked. Everyone kept saying that there would be funerals enough, anyway, when Der Tag came.
‘Right so,’ said Tiger, and assigned duties to a couple of his corporals. ‘Brennan, if you’ll take three men and put a guard around the plane. A volunteer to run down to the village to ring for an ambulance and a fire engine, though I don’t doubt all the old ladies are doing that already. Rest of your section should have a bit of a look for the poor beggar. Just in case. Cousins, can you run off for Captain Sinclair? You’ll find him up at the big house; he’ll know who in the air force we should be giving a bell. And I reckon there’s nothing to stop the rest of you getting back to work, is there now?’
Tiger looked back up at the hill, shading his eyes from the sun. Bluey and Breen lay sprawled like air-raid victims. ‘Lazy beggars,’ he said under his breath.
Bluey looked at Breen through half-closed eyes, wondering about the boy. Bluey was the oldest of the company’s three platoon commanders, a teacher from a country school. There had been a few wild years first; and now he sometimes felt a sense of responsibility.
‘Training,’ he said, without opening his eyes. ‘Always training. If in doubt. Let’s borrow the course the Maoris have set up. Do the machine-gun crawl again. If you’re really worried about them not getting it, that’ll help teach them respect for it.’
‘Do you want to talk to Captain Sinclair about it?’
‘He’s only got bloody route marches planned. Night exercises on Thursday.’
‘That’ll do, then,’ said Breen. ‘We can fit it in somewhere.’
The summation of their training back at Burnham—it felt a long time ago now—had been a crawl under barbed wire while machine guns fired live ammunition on fixed lines above them. It was the best way anyone could think of to re-create the experience and the fear of being under fire. The old soldiers said it wasn’t the same at all, but it still felt like nothing else in the world.
‘They might still be a bit worried about the ammunition situation, that’s all.’
‘It’s not happening,’ said Breen with a confidence he didn’t feel. ‘The buses are going back next week. We’d still have them with us if they really believed the invasion was coming this year. And the general’s buggering off to Egypt.’
‘So?’
‘So we’ll be moving on too, if we give it time. And before that there’ll be scads of ammunition to get rid of.’
‘I’ll talk to the captain,’ said Bluey. ‘There’s all the blanks with the wooden tips to get through, and they’re only any good in a Vickers or a Bren anyhow.’
It was surprisingly easy to arrange. They passed the word on when Captain Sinclair came down to investigate the crash.
‘Let’s make it the real thing,’ said Sinclair. ‘Use live ammunition, I mean. We’ve got to get rid of it somehow; though you didn’t hear that from me.’
Sinclair was tall and sometimes, like now, worried-looking.
He always added things like that when he was talking to Bluey. He couldn’t help but feel that Bluey’s competence might go a bit far, that he might assume everyone saw the world in such practical terms.
Things were different with Breen.
‘The moment I saw his file,’ the colonel had once said to Sinclair, ‘I knew all right. Tough as old boots. Not that I’d agree with him on much, but he’s got the wildness in him.’
Had Breen heard this judgement, he would have doubted its accuracy. Captain Sinclair, though he had his own motives, saw no reason to query it aloud. He pulled together a respectful face. To read the smudged print of the files the colonel wore large black glasses like those his mother had once worn to do the books. Above his small moustache, they gave an impression of an inept disguise.
‘You want a bit of wildness in a junior officer,’ the captain said.
‘We were going through the files,’ the colonel said, ‘back in God’s own, Vollman and me’—Vollman was the battalion’s old adjutant, left behind as too good to waste and now disappeared into an impotent office block somewhere in Wellington—‘and looking at them, you know the sort, the territorials, the varsity men, the doctors’ and the clergymen’s sons, and then down to the clerks and the stock agents; and Vollman, he says to me, I don’t know about this one, Dan, I think my brother said he’d been a bit wild at the university. And I says to him, wildness is what we want in a junior officer.’
He leaned back
in his chair with satisfaction. Sinclair had heard this anecdote before, although the subject sometimes changed. On enquiry, he had found that Breen was one of those who read about Spain at Otago University, and, finding in it a special horror, spoke at public meetings and raised money for bandages. Then something in his cautious mind clicked and he began to back away from his advocacy, but a little too late.
The colonel tapped at the photograph attached to Breen’s file. It was an old one. Breen looked out of it with criminal assurance, as though he awaited an unjust trial somewhere south of the Rio Grande. He had a fleshy nose and ears, and his eyes were well sunk back, so that he should have been ugly. Instead, the big ugly face under his rumpled hat and the uniform hanging off him somehow combined to create an impression of daring, like the handsome hero of an old ballad.
Most of the time, you were reminded of an uncle or cousin gone a bit wild after the first war, the sort whom you ran into in pubs or at the sales. You’d find time for a quick drink before you went about your business, and then you’d think, I must see him more often. But you knew you wouldn’t. You’d remember his blue eyes. And the stories might have been good, but the character was a bit dark.
Sinclair had decided none of this was true. Breen was very mild. And yet God knew what Tiger was capable of, even though the man looked like an overgrown kid in someone else’s uniform.
2
A couple of days later, Breen was early to Granny’s forty-fourth birthday party, held at the pub in the village. Granny’s name was really Russell but only Major Faulding called him that, and only Granny called the major Bob. Granny was an old soldier, a retread who had gone to the first war as a corporal.
Morrie was at a table with someone else, holding a bottle of wine by the neck, propping it up in his lap like a child. He looked at Breen, then gestured him over. Morris was the battalion’s quartermaster, in charge of supplies. The world called him Morrie, and Breen tried to do so as well. He had a moustache and a grin and a perpetual cigarette, and made you want to believe whatever he said. He was some sort of glorified salesman, spruiking oil and petrol in bulk to commercial customers.