by Tom Remiger
‘Good on you,’ said Bluey, without looking up from his cards.
The door swung sharply behind him. The sky was greyish even in the dark, streaked with clouds. He wondered if there would be more raids; there would be. They hadn’t stopped since the afternoon. ‘Jerusalem, Alexandria, Athens, Vienna, London, unreal,’ he said to himself.
On a stump there was a magpie looking at him. A droning came across the Kentish hills. The magpie’s wedge of a tail pointed in the direction of nothing in particular.
‘You live in the daytime,’ he said to it, but it did not move. The dull light of the city fifty miles away must have been keeping the bird awake. London was burning: the unreal city was burning. The first planes of the night were dropping flares to guide the raiders in. There were searchlights across the sky, fingering the clouds.
His mouth was sour and he closed his eyes. The magpie looked like the sort you got at home, not like an English one. A heavy strong bird with a bone-cracking beak. ‘Away with you.’ It flew off.
Captain Sinclair was walking along the road with a small man Breen didn’t recognise. Somehow Breen was ashamed. He stepped into the trees, hoping that they hadn’t seen him.
‘Mr Breen!’
He turned around reluctantly and walked towards the two figures.
‘How are you, sir? I didn’t quite see you.’
‘I must be getting on,’ said the smaller man. He had an English accent.
‘Good, good,’ said Sinclair. He spoke almost with the benign indifference of a general. ‘Look here,’ he said to Breen, ‘I wanted to talk with you about something.’
‘Yes,’ said Breen. He was afraid of a return to an earlier talk on Oxford or, worse, a discussion of Tiger and the barmaid. Sinclair’s egotism made discussion in one way easy—a man simply had to listen appreciatively—but in another difficult. There was no sense that your own contributions were valued as anything more than an indication that he was listening. At least Sinclair paid more attention to what Breen said than to almost anyone else.
And yet maybe that wasn’t it. The man had no bottle; he leapt from role to role like a child playing, and Breen was sometimes worried about what was there underneath. No one was quite sure how John Sinclair came by his post: hardly exalted but much coveted. It was very recent and only acting; ‘but 3/6 a day is worth the shame,’ he once told Breen. Sinclair might have seemed brave in a stupid way, but he was subtle enough to grasp the many ironies of command. So far as Breen understood it, he came from some farm not quite nowhere, had left New Zealand as a lieutenant, and expected to revert to that rank when the brigade joined the rest of the division in Egypt.
He seemed to like Breen, at least. But he was hard to read. People at home would say that young John was too clever, in the way that the aunts used to say ‘clever’ so that you knew that there was something wrong with it. They would talk in the kitchen, casting over their shoulder to look at him and using the curious phrasing his generation, native-born, shed as soon as they could.
He was betrayed, too, by a reliance upon an open understanding of what it meant to know someone; the easy tolerance of his people was matched by an insatiable desire for talk. Conversation was stories about the family repeated and polished. The captain believed that Breen knew more of him already than he did of Breen, and he had his own motives for wanting to know him better. Perhaps he was of a mind with the lieutenant.
‘How do you find the life of a platoon commander?’
‘She’s not the easiest,’ said Breen, ‘but I feel that I’m making a go of it. I do wonder, though, whether—’
‘Oh, yes. You needn’t worry. I’m not implying that—the fact is, I wonder if you might be better on a slightly different track. It’s really the colonel’s place to put your name up, but I told him I might have a talk with you.’
‘I see.’
‘You must know Christie well.’
‘Intelligence? I’m afraid I don’t, really.’
‘I thought, both being lawyers—’
‘The trouble is, he’s a Christchurch man.’
‘Silly of me. Anyway, you must be able to see that he’s got talent.’
‘He does, at that.’
‘I don’t think he’ll be with us much longer. That course they’ve sent him on—I suspect we’ll be needing a new intelligence officer sooner rather than later.’
‘I think,’ said Breen, ‘that I would be interested. If that’s what you mean.’
‘Good, good,’ said the captain. ‘There’d be nothing for a while yet. Not until we leave this country and join the rest of the division. Everything should shuffle about then, I should say.’
Breen felt a quiet excitement. His careful building up of himself had begun to succeed after all.
‘But,’ said Sinclair. ‘Keep this quiet. It’s important you don’t go talking to him about it. To those who are patient all things will be given. But if you go even hinting at things—you know how he is—he’ll get it into his head that you’re windy, and that’ll be the end of that. No rewarding cowardice in this man’s army.’ The captain sounded honest when he told lies.
‘I’m grateful to you,’ said Breen.
‘Not to worry. You never seem quite happy as you are,’ said the captain.
‘I’m not sure what you mean.’
‘It’s a bit of a performance, isn’t it? We play a part.’
‘I suppose we do.’
‘Personally, I live in fear that what’s underneath will somehow be revealed. In my case.’
‘Surely not.’
‘We have to look brave and we have to look competent. All of us. It’s enough to drive a man to drink.’
Breen was uneasily aware of the alcohol on his own breath. He did not know how to take any of this. Perhaps he was only being shunted sideways.
The captain seemed to anticipate this. ‘Sergeant Gibson’s a steady hand, isn’t he? Perhaps we should put him up for a commission. I need a list of names, by the way. The colonel didn’t like the ones he interviewed the other day.’
‘There’s a fellow,’ said Breen. ‘Newman.’
‘Him?’
‘He’s got the knack of it. You want to believe in him.’
‘He’s only a corporal, isn’t he?’
‘He’s a good one.’
‘I’ll consider it. Think about it. Goodnight, then.’
‘Goodnight, sir.’
‘Come and have a little drink with me in half an hour. My room, not the pub. I’m a little short of cash just right now.’
Sinclair didn’t wait for an answer to this invitation, but walked quickly away, as if he was trying to overtake the long-departed smaller man.
Then he turned back again, and said, ‘We shall have to trust one another, you know. I hope you don’t think I’m saying too much. But we shall have to be able to trust one another.’ He said this gently.
‘I know,’ said Breen. The captain walked on. Breen was by this time desperate. He stepped into the trees and unbuttoned his fly, grunting in relief.
As he turned to go back to the stables, moving out of the trees, a number of things happened at once. The earth seemed to throw him up, something attacked his eardrums, and he was lying on the packed earth at the bottom of a slit trench. He decided it would be sensible to lie there a while. He was conscious of a heavy feeling in his arm but the alcohol dulled any pain. There was a series of loud dull sounds, far away and moving closer. They were bombs, coming down like destiny.
He put his face into the dirt. It smelt soothing, almost like home. Probably a single plane, turned back from London and dropping its bombs before it crossed the Channel. He hoped Sinclair was all right. It would be interesting to talk to him alone. A man never got much of a chance to be alone anymore, nor even just to be part of a pair. There was always someone else as enthusiastic as a puppy and wanting to join in, or giving a knock at the door to present a problem.
In the stables there was a scramble for helmets, bished u
nder the bench. Someone threw open the door. The rush for the trenches was about to begin.
A hand on Moohan’s arm stopped his escape. ‘No one’s trying to kill us tonight. It’s just one of the fuckers running away.’
Moohan tried to move his arm. Newman looked at him, shrugged, read the room. Then he began to sing. His indifferent voice was heavy with irony.
We are the boys from way down under,
Marching to victory.
Shoulder to shoulder we shall stand,
And fight for the right to be free.
Across the sea, we join with you,
At Britain’s side, we mean to see it through.
For we are the boys from way down under,
Anzacs’ sons are we.
From the land of the long white cloud we come,
Sons of the Empire ev’ry one.
In Australia too they heard the call,
‘Britain needs you one and all!’
Helping the motherland as of yore,
as our fathers the Anzacs did before.
As our fathers on Gallipoli,
Will the Aussies and the NZs be.
Breen heard the voice from within his trench, coming out of the door’s quadrilateral of light. He heard nervous laughter as they regained themselves. He pulled himself up and he sat still and straight, out there in the darkened country, tasting ashes on the wind.
‘Isn’t it something?’ he asked the wind. ‘Isn’t it just something?’
And then the next morning Corporal Cousins was dead.
4
The sound of the machine guns, almost obsolete Vickers, was far louder than it had any right to be. These and their operators were borrowed from out of the brigade. Though still New Zealanders, they were only half-familiar. They lounged over the guns, when they were not firing them, with an easy grace. The guns smelt of oil and steam as much as cordite. There were three of them, fixed so that they could be swept horizontally in a limited arc. They had no vertical movement, for safety’s sake.
They were positioned just past a fence separating them from the spectators; the wires had been strung from flimsy battens driven into the ground in the paddock beyond. On the other side of the paddock was a hill, where the spent bullets would fall.
It was cold, and every so often the men watching would stamp at the ground like angry sheep. There weren’t many of them. Too many men in one place might attract a plane.
Lieutenant Breen’s platoon had crawled through already and been sent on their way. The lines of wire that were meant to keep their heads safely down had uncomfortable gaps in them: the same shortage of supplies that made all their training exercises half-imaginary and made Morris the quartermaster’s life hell. Breen had pressed his nose into the yellowish grass and pushed with his thighs, rolling from side to side as he crawled.
Now Breen stood watching with his sergeant Gibson as the red flag went up again, signalling another period of live fire. There wasn’t enough wind for it to furl out properly, so someone had forced a bit of wire along its top edge. It hung stiffly, the wire drooping with the weight of the flag.
‘That’ll tear the old thing to pieces,’ said Gibson, following his gaze.
‘It doesn’t need to last long, Gibsy,’ said Breen. ‘We’ll be out of England soon enough.’
Gibson touched the scar under his eye. ‘In the thick of it.’ He looked at Breen and grinned. ‘We’ve been waiting long enough.’
‘Here we go,’ said Breen.
Tiger’s platoon was ready for its turn. The machine gunners crouched over their weapons. Tiger tossed a wave to Breen, then lay down in the crushed grass, the point of the triangle. Behind him the men were fixing their bayonets. He himself carried no rifle.
They went in groups of three. First came Tiger, beginning to crawl forward. Alongside him was his batman, Baxter, and his platoon sergeant, Clark.
Five yards behind, as the manual said, came the three section commanders of his platoon: Brennan, Cousins, and Hamilton.
The straight lines blurred as they crawled at different speeds, so that Tiger, without a rifle, was quickly in the lead. Clark kept after him, making a kite-like shape. Cousins was taller and stronger; he, too, began to form the head of a triangle.
‘Tiger should really have put himself in the middle and set one of the corporals in front,’ said Gibson. ‘In case he was hit.’ This was a veiled criticism of Breen’s arrangement of his platoon; he had done the same as Tiger.
‘It’s only a game,’ said Breen. ‘Tiger likes to be a leader.’
‘And Clark should be beside him, ready to take over.’
‘He’ll want Clark keeping an eye on the others, checking they’ve not got the wind up. And that’s what we’re here for, isn’t it? See who flinches, and who’s a bit cocky.’ Breen felt a hypocrite saying this, whether because he thought he was one of those who would flinch, or because he thought Tiger was a bit cocky.
But by then Tiger was halfway through and the closest gun was opening up. The gunner grinned as he swept it back and forth to make a cone of fire. It was too noisy to talk anymore.
The Vickers had a perfect and regular rhythm; they were sewing machines made louder, needles darting in and out.
Breen started involuntarily as he watched. ‘Jesus,’ he mouthed. ‘Jesus.’ His hand went out and he grasped Gibson’s arm much more fiercely than he intended. The strange smile on Gibson’s face—the one men got around guns—faded. He hadn’t noticed anything until Breen grabbed his arm, and by the time he turned to look it was already over.
The silence was sudden. The gunners had reacted damn quickly, if still too late. The lieutenant in charge of them had been waving his arms even before the bullets hit.
Out there between the lines of wire, Cousins had raised himself up on his arms, only a few inches or so above the others, and been ripped to pieces. He fell like a bundle of stained old clothes, shapeless and still after a couple of twitches.
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, and there was more flicked across the earth.
In the silence came the sound of the birds singing and the rustle of wind through the grass.
The gunners stepped back, keeping their eyes on what they had done. Their lieutenant pulled down the flag, and only then did Tiger’s platoon begin to move.
Breen felt a brief admiration for how well Tiger had trained them. They all knew not to move, had been told about the flag often enough to obey it without thought, even with a body among them and blood staining the dirt.
He looked at the grass. It was pale, unkempt on the other side of the fence line. He had imagined that there were only hedges and drystone walls in England, but this was just the same as home. Battens and posts. Three slackish wires and barbed wire to make the top strand.
We should’ve ripped that out for more wire, he thought. He felt sick. He didn’t want to look at the body. Someone was vomiting loudly, somewhere to his left.
He shut his eyes. The strength of the sunlight through his eyelids meant that everything he saw was red.
He began to feel that he was about to stumble and fall. His heart flickered like the wings of a trapped bird. Arms held him from behind; there was a smell of hair oil mixed with the blood, the grass, and the pines. It was Sinclair. ‘Not in front of them,’ he whispered. It was too close to Breen’s ear, too intimate.
‘I’m all right,’ Breen said. ‘I’m quite all right.’
‘It’s quite all right,’ said the captain, and released him.
Gibson was looking at him. Breen felt the hopelessness of a child about to cry.
They buried Cousins quickly, but with style, in the village churchyard. A surprising number of the villagers turned out. Some of the women sobbed, and the battalion took pride in the three buglers from the brigade band, the smartness of its honour guard and the
volley of blanks they fired above the grave.
Breen was not sure about the appropriateness of that. He stood in his uncomfortable dress uniform and longed for it to be over.
He stood the same way the next day for the impromptu court of inquiry into Cousins’ death; the battalion wanted to get on with training, in whatever way they pleased, and the inquiry was a necessary and undesired delay.
The court sat over a single afternoon in a school classroom, before a row of three officers. They were crammed behind three small desks shoved together. Their findings were predictable; they were the only conclusions which could be drawn. Cousins, exposed to an experience designed to strain the nerves, had—as the colonel presiding said, in a choice of words which might have been, but probably wasn’t, a joke in bad taste—lost his head.
Breen’s evidence was limited to saying that he had taken his platoon through without much incident.
‘There was,’ the presiding officer asked, ‘no way one could have accidentally raised oneself too high?’ The trees were moving in the windows to each side of him.
Breen coughed before he replied. ‘There were fewer wires than I might have hoped for,’ he said carefully. ‘Physically, it would have been possible to find a gap. I think it would have required extraordinary carelessness to have done it accidentally.’
‘So you think it deliberate?’
‘I think I have to; in the sense that the action was voluntary, rather than that he—Cousins—necessarily understood the consequences.’
In front of him one of the officers lit a cigarette. The match must have scorched his fingers; he dropped it. There was a brief outbreak of laughter, suppressed almost at once. It felt more and more to Breen like he was in a version of a school assembly, being chased for some minor misdemeanour.
‘There is,’ Breen said, ‘one small possibility. A rumour had been going around that we would use blank ammunition, but wouldn’t tell any of the men.’