Soldiers

by Tom Remiger

  ‘You should call him sergeant,’ said Breen.

  The refugee party looked prosperous. Their town shoes were coated with mud. Breen guessed that they had abandoned a car somewhere nearby. ‘America?’ he asked. ‘Anyone been to America?’

  There were blank looks.

  ‘Français?’

  Nothing.

  ‘Deutsch?’

  ‘Ja, ich kann Deutsch sprechen.’ The fellow had the grace to look bashful about it.

  ‘Ich kann auch, ein bisschen. Es tut mir sehr leid, aber sie können nicht hier bleiben.’ Breen was trying to say that he was sorry but they had to keep moving.

  ‘Warum müssen wir verlassen?’

  Breen searched for the words. He only had enough German for a few simple phrases; from his accent, so did the Greek. Why must they go? Because if they stayed they would be exploded. But damned if he could remember the word for an explosion.

  He tried to mime it out instead. He pointed to where the guns were tucked behind the ridge line. He spun his arm in a great arc to point at the houses behind the refugees; then he made the sound of an explosion.

  ‘Ich verstehe,’ said their leader. ‘Ich will mal nicht so sein, aber wir sind sehr müde.’ He mimed sleeping. ‘Wir müssen schlafen. Die Deutsche soldaten kommen nicht heute, oder morgen. Was ist denn das Problem? Warum können wir nicht heute Nacht hier schlafen?’ The Germans would not come today or tomorrow; why could they not sleep here tonight?

  ‘Blitzkrieg,’ said Breen. ‘Sie können sehr schnell. So glaub mir doch, müssen wir auf alles gefasst sein.’

  ‘Hier müssen wir schlafen. Sie können nicht uns evakuieren.’ Irrelevantly he added, ‘Ich bin ein Rechtsanwalt.’ A lawyer.

  ‘Gehen sie!’ said Breen. ‘Ich kann nicht sie helfen. Wenn sie bleiben will, sind sie selber schuld.’

  ‘Wir bleiben.’

  Behind the refugee someone who might have been his daughter said something in Greek. ‘Gebe Gott, dass alles gut ausgeht,’ he said.

  Breen swore and turned away. He had no time to waste.

  ‘They’re not leaving? Tell them not to come near our lines,’ said Moohan. ‘They’ll be target practice, like as not. Everyone’s jumpy.’

  ‘Komm die Soldaten nicht zu nähe,’ said Breen, ‘oder sie werden…’ He couldn’t remember the verb ‘to shoot’, and instead slapped his hand down on his holstered pistol and half-drew it. ‘Ich kann nicht sie helfen.’

  That afternoon those who had binoculars would sometimes pause to watch the enemy transport. ‘It’s been a long road,’ said Gibson, ‘a hell of a long road to get here.’

  They heard the explosions as the bridges were demolished.

  The next day the artillery opened up on a German column they could not see. The refugees stayed grimly camped in the village. They demanded to be let through the company’s lines but Breen could not allow that.

  Orders came through to abandon the position. They destroyed all that they could not carry, and then they were told to wait just a little longer, until tomorrow night. A line of mules began to carry out what they could. The mortars would be left until last.

  Breen burned the orders in the cookhouse fire. He stirred the ashes with a piece of wood until the delicate fragments of words dissolved, as if the watcher’s eyes blurred with the wind off the hills, the firmament streaming black banners.

  They could see enemy aircraft above the plains but the mist kept them away from Breen’s positions. He could see the smoke from cooking fires in the evening when the rain cleared for a little while.

  Watching them, the captain remembered how at home he would see smoke coming out of the bush. His mother used to say that these were the fires of lost explorers who were still out there. They shot wood pigeons to survive on, and one day the government would arrange an expedition to find them. They were waiting for that and they didn’t want to go any further in case they got more lost, wandering into the wilderness.

  The soldiers stood waiting all night with the rain coming down. Breen moved from post to post alone in the dark, trying to keep silent. When he came near to one he would stamp his feet on the hollow-sounding earth, stiffened by frost, so that the men there would hear him.

  A challenge would be given. He said ‘Kapai’, the password, and came in. The men would look at him like cows over a fence, asking if anything had happened.

  ‘Nothing yet,’ he would say. ‘Nothing yet.’

  17

  They had disembarked a few days before in Piraeus and marched through its cheering streets. The people gave them flowers and held bottles of wine out to them as they marched through the port and through Athens. Their gesture to wave goodbye looked like they were calling the soldiers back again.

  Then they slept in a transit camp on the outskirts of Athens, before boarding a train—‘fucking cattle trucks’, said Moohan—and rolling endlessly through Greece on a twenty-four-hour journey. The night was jolting and uncomfortable, but they were crammed together, and the bottles of koniak and mavrodaphne went in a ceaseless round until they could sleep.

  Breen talked to Morrie in a whisper. Both were a little drunk. ‘Did you know Cousins?’ he asked.

  No, said Morrie, but he knew his brother. Breen asked how; the truth came out ruefully. Morrie made him promise not to tell anyone. ‘It isn’t a huge secret,’ he said, ‘but I like to be able to keep my secrets. Like you; like Sinclair.’

  The morning revealed trees, hills, mountains, a landscape spreading out before them through the slots in the sides of the trucks. They posed for photographs at the railhead and there was a great fuss about taking the Bren guns off their carriages.

  Breen seized the opportunity to speak to Clark. ‘Come with me,’ he said, and led him away to look at the view. ‘How much money did you owe Cousins?’ he asked.

  ‘Too bloody much.’ Clark seemed surprised by the abruptness of the question, and answered honestly.

  ‘You gambled with him, yes?’

  By now, Clark was committed. ‘Yes, I did. It started on the voyage over.’ It was innocent at first, he said, and he would pay up like a lamb. But then he got to owing a little bit, and then a bit more. And he was hooked. Cousins never held the debt against him, but it changed the way he treated him. ‘I let things slide, you know?’

  ‘Well, why didn’t you bloody well tell someone?’

  ‘He made me sign a piece of paper saying that it was legal that I owed him, and he said there was no way I could get out of it and I’d go back to the ranks if I said anything. I could complain, he said, or I could keep playing and see what happened. He said you’d drawn up the contract for him, actually. He told me everyone knew but was keeping it quiet for my sake. I thought you all knew.’

  ‘You’re an idiot, Clark.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Did you kill him?’

  ‘Jesus, sir!’ Clark was a good actor, Breen thought. He flushed and went boggle-eyed, like a man just come out of a pub. ‘It was a blessing to me, though I shouldn’t say so, but I wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘I might get you to talk to the captain about this.’

  ‘If you say so, sir.’

  ‘And what happened to that money?’

  ‘We played poker for it, the boys who liked a flutter. Split it all up even and played it out. He didn’t need it; he didn’t have any dependents. And it was our money at the start. Though we noticed that he had lots of money, more than what we’d all lost to him at one time or another. You might want to look into that. He might have been playing the black market.’

  Breen relished the prospect of private meetings with the captain, of having a legitimate excuse. He could bring news and talk without offending his sense of duty.

  ‘Oh,’ said the captain when Breen told him about Clark. ‘I mean, it’s plausible, but I don’t like to think of it. Not that I have any pity for a blackmailer. Run me through it again.’

  Breen explained.

  ‘He’s not a monster,’ said the captain. ‘I
t’s a bit off. No one kills for bloody money, do they?’

  ‘Oh yes they do,’ said Breen. ‘Look, anyone’s capable of anything. I didn’t realise, but now I know. I’m much worse than I ever thought, and can enjoy things I would have said I was disgusted by. And that means there’s wickedness everywhere in the world. Look at us. We take decent ordinary fellows and we train them to kill other decent ordinary fellows, for what’s nothing more than abstractions. Money’s just another abstraction, same as killing for king and country.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Daisy. You’re a fussy old hen sometimes. Look, about Clark, I don’t see how you could prove it without a confession. And you can hardly go about demanding one right now.’

  Breen pressed him; he wanted a commitment to an investigation, to action. The captain was vague. Now wasn’t the time, he said. They would worry about it soon enough. They had to turn their thoughts to action, they had to be clear-minded.

  By then, Breen was convinced: Clark had done it. He didn’t know how, not exactly—Cousins must have been suspicious of any order coming from him, but maybe Clark had played on his sense of resentment. Or maybe it was the old theory of a jab with the bayonet: let him know they were blanks, give him a jab, wait for him to rise up in angry protest, watch the bullets going in.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Tiger. ‘He’s not that type. Give it a rest. You’ll need more than that to convince anyone. I’m going to forget you told me, all right?’

  Moohan seemed worried about something. He would hover around Breen, asking if there was anything he could do to help.

  ‘Bugger off,’ Breen told him. ‘Give me some time of my own. No, sorry. Just not now, all right?’

  18

  The enemy came early in the morning, when the soldiers were slowed by the long night of waiting. The first reports came from Tiger’s platoon. They saw three men and they fired at them and the men dropped down invisible into the scrub, on their bellies, and Tiger and his men hoped they had hit them but it didn’t seem likely.

  Then it was waiting. Every so often, someone saw movement or thought he saw movement and there would be a gunshot. The enemy seemed to be moving from left to right, seeking out the points where the defence was weakest as they planned an attack.

  There was something dreamlike about it. Occasionally there were voices in the mist. The rain kept falling.

  ‘D’you know,’ said Moohan, ‘you come along and you imagine being killed, all right, when you’re daydreaming about it, same as you imagine being a hero. But you never imagine dying in the rain. It’s always in the sunshine.’

  ‘No one’s going to be killed,’ said Breen. ‘Only they are.’

  He, Moohan and Gibson were sharing a slit trench.

  When finally something came towards them, it was not what they expected. A dog emerged from the mist, running openly up the valley. It stopped when it saw the men in their trenches looking at it, and came forward wagging its tail slightly. It stopped maybe twenty yards away and looked towards them as if in anticipation.

  Moohan’s pup was sleeping in the bottom of the trench. Something came over Breen and he lifted him up. He was small enough that Breen could do it with one hand. Zebediah’s paws found the crumbling edge of the trench. He gave a bark, squirmed out of Breen’s hand, and ran forward.

  ‘Jesus, sir,’ said Moohan reproachfully.

  The dog stayed still, its tail still moving slightly. Then it bowed down in an invitation to play.

  The pup rushed towards it. At the last moment the dog jumped up, and they chased one another joyfully in the cleared ground between the trench and the first tangle of wire.

  There was the sound of a shot, and another one. The dog crumpled with a brief sad noise. Gibson lined up again and took another shot. The dog’s body jerked, and then it lay still. Zebediah was running for the tree line, into the mist.

  ‘You bastard,’ said Moohan. ‘You unutterable bastard.’ There was moisture in his eyes. Breen hoped it was only the rain.

  ‘Use your loaf,’ said Gibson. ‘Someone lifted that dog over the wire. It was a bloody spy.’

  ‘A dog can’t be a spy,’ said Moohan. ‘You’re a bastard, you know that?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Gibson. He didn’t look it.

  ‘I’ll never see Zebby again,’ said Moohan.

  ‘Not now,’ said Breen.

  There was a shout from somewhere down the hill. Two figures appeared and Gibson took a shot at them. Nothing more happened for a long while.

  When the mists cleared again, out beyond their range, past the wire on the edges of the village, they could see German soldiers massing around their officer.

  ‘Give us a count, sergeant,’ said Breen. ‘Moohan, I’ll have you run back to the field observer and get him to call in the guns to stonker this. Just the mortars should do, but let the arty have a lash if they’re getting bored. Just to the right of the village, maybe five hundred yards from us.’ He was thrilled to find that he wasn’t afraid at all, and that he knew what to do.

  ‘More than thirty of them,’ said Gibson.

  Perhaps the enemy realised that they were visible, and knew what was coming. They were beginning to scatter as Moohan began a crouching run uphill. It reminded Breen of cows turning away from a fence if you gave a shout, udders swinging, the thud of their hooves on the earth as first one and then the others broke.

  Then came the two-part sound of the mortars as the mist closed in again.

  ‘Poor fuckers,’ said Gibson.

  ‘Gibsy, that isn’t like you.’

  ‘I meant the refugees who wouldn’t leave. Not saying they didn’t yet deserve it, but still.’

  Breen hadn’t even thought of them. He didn’t yet have the luxury of feeling guilty.

  After about half an hour, when they heard sustained bursts of shooting coming from the direction of Bluey’s platoon, Gibson relaxed. ‘They’ve moved on for now.’

  ‘It’ll be a killing field,’ said Breen. ‘Bluey’ll have them caught on the wire.’

  Already the shooting was quieting down. There was a long silence.

  The fighting kept moving to the right all day, and they saw nothing more until it was twilight and they began abandoning the outlying positions. The rain had stopped. They were meeting with Tiger’s platoon and preparing to withdraw. It seemed a shame. It had been good country to fight in.

  Breen and Tiger were sitting on their packs when someone came rushing through. Schofield carried nothing but his rifle, and he crashed into the middle of them with high excitement.

  He spoke to Breen first, since he came from his platoon. ‘Parky sent me back,’ he said. ‘Newman is cut off; he and the boys are sort of stuck.’

  ‘It was too good to last,’ said Tiger.

  ‘Righto,’ said Breen. ‘We’ll send down some help.’

  ‘I’ll go,’ said Clark. ‘It eats away at you not doing anything.’

  There didn’t seem any reason not to send Clark if he wanted to go. He took a section with him. Breen and Tiger settled down to wait.

  ‘Is Clark a good man to have about?’ asked Breen.

  ‘He’s getting better,’ said Tiger.

  Their men were still moving out. In contrast to Clark’s disciplined group, they disappeared into the night in a loose line.

  ‘I can’t see how they’ll be able to do anything about Newman.’

  ‘He volunteered, didn’t he?’ Tiger’s face was lit by his cigarette. ‘You’re keeping things pretty calm.’

  ‘There’s no sense in losing your head.’

  ‘How did it feel for you, to shoot at a man?’

  ‘Pretty normal. A different-sized rabbit, you know.’

  They sat in silence. They could hear a Tommy gun somewhere. Breen kept listening for more but there was no more.

  ‘I don’t think there’s anything there. With Clark, I mean. Sorry,’ said Tiger.

  ‘You want to pull at the loose ends, see if you can get anywhere.’

  ‘M
um used to hate me doing that. I’d wreck all my jerseys.’

  ‘It’s bloody quiet,’ said Breen. ‘I might go and have me a look. You’d best stay.’

  ‘Don’t be too rash,’ said Tiger. ‘It sounds harsh, but it’s easier to replace a couple of privates than a good officer.’

  ‘Parkinson’s bloody good,’ said Breen.

  ‘She’ll be right,’ said Tiger.

  Breen hoped that Tiger might stand to shake his hand, but he just sat there with his cigarette under the clouded sky. Breen walked alone down the track. He heard a crashing sound behind him. When he turned Moohan was there.

  ‘I can’t let you go alone,’ he said.

  ‘Come on, then. We’ll see what we find.’

  ‘Half the German army, knowing my luck.’

  Breen had keyed himself up for heroism. It was almost a disappointment to find Parkinson’s section coming up the slope. Clark’s men were mingled with them. He eyed the faces. Two missing. No sign of Newman, as well. And Clark wasn’t there either.

  They began to speak in high and excited voices. He waved them down and sought out Parkinson. ‘So?’ he said.

  ‘Newman is gone. We heard him shooting a couple of bursts and then nothing. That was hours ago.’

  ‘Monty?’

  ‘He’s dead. Owens went out after him but he’ll be a prisoner by now. I told him not to go. Silly young bugger.’

  ‘Where’s Clark?’

  ‘He and his lot went right past us. We picked up the end of them but he was gone off in front.’

  ‘And you just left him? No, that’s not fair. You did right to bring them out.’

  ‘There was shooting,’ said Parkinson. ‘He pushed way too far looking for us. He must have gone through the wire.’ He paused. He didn’t look guilty. ‘I’m not sure, but I think I heard shooting. Maybe someone calling out for help.’

  Parkinson had neither false humility nor false pride about ignoring that voice. Breen understood his attitude. There were certain things he could say or do, and in return for confining himself to these he knew that he had the right to be treated in a certain way. He could not be condemned for doing his duty.