by Tom Remiger
‘In English?’ asked Breen.
‘In English.’
‘I’ll creep down. Gibsy’s up thataway with Tiger. It’s not far now. Moohan’ll show you the way.’ Breen looked hard at Moohan as he said this. One man could move far more quietly than two.
Then he thought. ‘Give me your rifle,’ he said. Parkinson unslung it.
‘I’m fair tired,’ said Parkinson. ‘Good luck, sir. Bring her back—she’s a beaut of a rifle.’
Breen kept going, trying to move silently. The clouds were rushing away in the wind, and he cursed the improved light. When he looked up, it seemed as if he were moving at a thousand miles an hour while the sky stayed still. It was like what the fairies said about flying. Twenty thousand feet up in a fighter plane, you can see forever. Everything blends into one. You catch streams of air and go so fast you don’t know that you’re moving. You can see so much of the earth alight with blues and greens and greys and browns, all blurring.
He walked on. At first he thought that he was imagining it, but the second or third time he was sure. A voice was repeatedly, monotonously, calling out ‘Help.’ Occasionally the voice said, ‘Please.’
Soon Breen hit the barbed wire. Beyond that was the enemy. Clark was a murderer; his greed had killed a man. Still, Breen parted the wire. The barbs scratched at his exposed hands as he wriggled through the gap they had left for occasions like this. It tore at the skin on the back of his neck so that he felt blood running into his collar.
There were two figures moving in the dimming light, a long way down the slope. His heart leapt within him. They spoke in low voices, crouched down beside one another. It was too far to hear. One put a hand on the other’s arm, a gesture of affection and trust. They were Germans but wore shorts and jerseys just as his men did.
And there, between them and him, when he followed the monotonous cries, meaningless as seagulls: it was Clark, lying in the open. He felt a sense of kinship with the two Germans. They were trying to make the same decision he was; would they go to help the man?
He unslung his rifle. They would be easy targets when they made a move. He could pull Clark back. Moohan would come down if he heard a shot. There might still be mules; they could carry Clark out on one of them.
And then something in him revolted. He couldn’t think of those two as enemies. They were better men than Clark, ready to risk their lives for a stranger who just before had tried to kill them. And Clark was a killer of one of his own men. No. He could not justify saving someone like that from a prison camp by shooting better men. It was what Clark deserved.
He watched and waited. Finally one of the Germans came on, slinking from shadow to shadow. His mate waited behind. When the shadowy figure crouched down beside Clark, Breen slipped back. It was a victory of a kind; he had restored some sort of justice to the world.
He cut his hands coming through the wire. He found Parkinson and gave his gun back to him.
19
‘No go,’ he told Tiger. ‘I saw a couple of Jerries, but no trace of him. He stopped calling while I was on my way down. They must have carted him off.’
‘Probably shot him,’ said Tiger. ‘Bloody Jerries.’
They waited for the full dark to retreat, dozing for half an hour in a pile of close-packed bodies while a section from each platoon waited for an attack which never came.
On the right of their line, the Germans were outflanking them, filtering around.
Waking, Breen remembered an incident from months before. He had found himself with Bluey and Tiger, talking in a lazy sort of way about what the country would do after the war was won. Nothing would be the same ever again, of course. The subject of Spain had followed, naturally: what it meant.
‘I knew someone who went to fight,’ said Breen. ‘A wild sort of Canadian. He riled up the whole university—his words—and then he went off and died there.’
‘I knew a pair of them,’ said Bluey, ‘from up Waikato way. A fellow with bad teeth and his cousin.’
‘It felt pretty useless to be sitting at home,’ said Breen. ‘But it wasn’t as if there was much we could do.’
‘If you were a bit of a red,’ said Bluey. ‘I don’t see much harm in it. Not that it’s for me, of course. But I’m a Labour man.’
‘Schoolteachers always are,’ said Tiger.
‘And bankers are capitalist scum,’ Bluey replied equably. ‘Especially the clerks. It’s rugby what made me. All together for a common cause, you and the boys.’
‘I didn’t like what they did to the nuns over there,’ said Tiger.
At church parades Tiger gave the impression of someone who goes to church every Sunday only to please his mother. ‘He’d read a book the whole bloody time if he could get away with it,’ Sinclair had said.
‘That’s what made me give the whole lark up,’ said Breen.
‘The nuns?’
‘No, I mean the church. Giving it up. The way they behaved about it all.’
‘You’re not still a Bolshie?’
‘The army wears that away. Imagine a bloody soviet of soldiers demanding more beer and less marching.’ He now felt a little ashamed at how easily he found himself embracing hierarchy and order. Whatever faint sparks of belief remained were easily hidden; it was for the best, if he wanted any sort of promotion.
‘You know your place here,’ said Bluey. ‘It’s good. You do what you’re told and you don’t have to wonder what’s right.’
The men began to peel away, stumbling over the river bed towards where they had been building the half-finished road. Small stones rattled underneath their feet.
Such a path as there was along the creek had mostly been washed out, and they splashed heavily through the water and from stone to stone. And onwards, half in and half out of the water, no path, only feet sliding over rocks. Everyone was somehow unconsciously speeding up.
Breen stayed in the middle of his platoon, looking around at the unknown forest, his soaked legs bracing him against any threats. Once he slipped and plunged down, the water coming up to his waist. He scrambled out shaking with shock and anger, walked on. Everyone felt the menace of the forest. They knew they should slow down, prepare themselves for the climb, but they could not. The night was full of bodies moving and cursing. Men stood sentinel at the crossings and the places where the path might be lost.
Improbably, Breen thought of Anzac Day—the people flowing to the dawn service through the darkened streets, the veterans standing silent, waiting for the sun, people standing straight-backed in remembrance of warm bodies.
We’re the Anzacs now, he said to himself. The thought was somehow comforting. Clark would be safe, stuffed with morphine and bandaged up on a German stretcher somewhere.
At the base of the new road, they dumped their heavy gear. The trucks were running with no oil in the sump, and men were sitting in them revving them to pieces. They pushed the colonel’s car and the wireless truck over a cliff. They scattered flour and sugar into puddles and drove bayonets into the cans. It was an orgy of destruction, a release of emotion.
They began trudging, heavily laden, through the ankle-deep mud. Their balance was fraught and sometimes they toppled over. When they fell, they stayed down for a few seconds before struggling up again. Men would lie in the mud, panting. The battalion became a tangle of different platoons.
Breen and Sinclair brought up the rear of their company. The first time they came upon someone hunched and exhausted by the side of the track, Breen spoke gently. ‘You need to keep going.’
‘I can’t.’
‘The Germans will be coming just behind us. They’re alpine troops, Austrians, who are used to this sort of thing. If we wait, they’ll catch us and take us prisoner.’
‘I can’t.’
‘You have to. Come on, give me your hand.’
But they kept finding more, and they couldn’t afford to wait and convince each one. With each delay, Breen grew angrier.
The first time someone refused
outright they left him. The second time Breen didn’t bother talking. He kicked him and hissed, ‘Get up, you bastard. Do you want to rot away behind some bloody wire?’ Then he kicked him again until the man stumbled up.
From then on, every few hundred yards they would find someone fallen out like a sheep on its back, and Breen would kick and curse at him until he got up and kept going. Some went through this two or three times, or they crawled off the track where they would not be seen and lay there waiting to be taken prisoner. The road was churned up by all those who had trudged before them, and in the dark sometimes they held hands and edged along the gaps where the earth plunged away into gullies and cliffs.
Breen had been given a flask of brandy by Gibson, and he doled it out judiciously to the foundered men. Soon he began to drink some himself, passing it over to the captain after each swig and then maybe five minutes later reaching out for it again.
Sinclair remembered taking his fiancée out of the dance hall. He had led her by the hand out of the hall, and he could feel the drink in her overcoming her reluctance at his plangent hand. The feel of a beating heart in his fingers. The thump of it against his skin. The blood like ink in the wrist.
‘God,’ he said once. Most of the time it was easier not to talk.
Behind them was the sound, three times in that long night, of explosions as the sappers tried to blow the road behind them.
It happened when they thought they were about halfway through. They were barely a quarter of the way.
Bent under their valises, Breen and the captain rounded the corner, past a collapse of trees. In the dark a figure loomed at them. Unlike most of those who had given up, he was standing like a war-memorial statue, head bowed. There was no sign of his valise, his rifle, or the spade or pick that they had also to carry. There was a sense of empty space to their right, a greater darkness that meant another cliff plunging down.
‘Move on,’ said Breen, ‘keep going.’
The man leapt. He pushed Breen aside. The stars turned into streaks and Breen was lying on rocks and roots at the side of the track. He was conscious of a dead feeling in his arm. The alcohol dulled any pain.
The man now grappled with the captain, trying to wrestle him over the edge. It was too dark to see more than that he was big. There was a sound of heavy breathing. The captain collapsed into the mud. ‘Enough!’ he called. Breen got to his feet, and the man must have seen that he could not push the captain over before Breen reached him. He broke and staggered off, too fast for Breen, who could only hobble after him. His hip and his shoulder were making a sombre complaint. He gave it up almost at once, and turned back to the captain.
‘I don’t blame him,’ said Sinclair. ‘You just want it to be over.’
‘What was that,’ said Breen. Everything felt like a dream. He couldn’t think. They staggered on, always upwards.
They walked all night, and in the early morning, about an hour after they started to move downhill, they came to a mass of slumped bodies. Baird was trying to sort them, keeping one company in the defensive positions that had been made there and sending the rest of the battalion on. ‘Just a little further, mate,’ he would say over and over again with a rough kindness.
Twenty minutes down the track they found a village and huddled in empty rooms, breathing raggedly, the night folding in on itself in circles to the diameter of a breath.
It was maybe seven o’clock when they heard the sound of machine-gun fire that meant the enemy were attacking the rearguard. Most of the men slumped there, uncaring. Tiger and Christie pulled together ten or fifteen volunteers and went to find the battle. Breen stayed with his head on the captain’s thigh and slept again.
He woke once to someone stumbling in: Newman, his face and uniform covered in mud.
‘Bet you didn’t think you’d ever see me again,’ he said, smiling broadly. ‘Anyone got a drink?’
‘Look in my pack,’ said Breen, and went back to sleep, dimly aware of Newman starting to snore beside him.
He woke up again to the sound of Tiger’s corporal Brennan crying loudly and relentlessly. He could sense that others around him were awake, but no one wanted to acknowledge the tears.
‘What’s the matter?’ said Breen, feeling like a sleepwalker and too tired to give an impression of sympathy.
‘I didn’t think it would feel like this to kill someone,’ said Brennan. ‘I was coming back from A Company’s lines with Tiger and we just walked up to two krauts setting up a machine gun because we thought they were ours and so I gave them a shout and then they saw us and they started fumbling for the gun so I shot them and no one told me that it would be like this.’
‘It’s all right,’ said Breen. ‘It’s all right.’ He wanted to distract him, keep him talking. ‘Tell me about where you come from,’ he said to Brennan, ‘and what you’ll do first when you go back.’ While Brennan talked, Breen half-listened. Beer was the answer; he came from one of those little places you always picture as being in the rain, just a straggle of houses along the road and a closed store. Everything was divided in half by a railway line with weeds growing up among the gravel, and there was a pub on one side of the railway and he would go there and have a beer.
So, he thought. He had suspected Charlie Brennan of killing Cousins before he decided that it had to be Clark. Brennan wasn’t the killer, that much was clear, not if he responded to killing like this. But who had tackled the captain on the path, and why? Maybe he was a straggler sick of being kicked, revolting against the demands of officers and armies. But he had seemed to be trying viciously to push the captain towards a broken leg, probably worse.
He’s still out there, Breen said to himself. And he was after doing it again. But who? Not Brennan. Brennan was too small; he was tall but slouching, thin as a bent nail. He barely spoke, and normally if you made him wait you could see him trying to think of things to say. He made a pair with Corporal Hamilton, who was heavy and short, with loose friendly hair. ‘Homely,’ Tiger once said of him. ‘Not in that sense, just—you feel safe and content around him, don’t you? Like you’re at home.’
Breen realised who the killer was.
There wasn’t much time to think of it in the long retreat. They didn’t see Germans again for a good while. They took the trucks down those terrible Greek roads, once they reached them, in a mess of tangled traffic, with ratted trucks left on the side of the road. In some were bodies. Overhead were those blazing Grecian stars, the constellations still not quite familiar. The belongings of refugees were strewn all over the road and they would drive over packs of clothing and scattered photographs.
The one town they passed through, buildings scattered like dice along a river, didn’t have many buildings, only rubble with slow malignant fires burning underneath. The smoke was black and yellow. There were bodies of Greeks and Australians pulled to the side of the road.
They looted the ration dumps along the way, eating greedily from tins. In one place there was beer, and they drank it and threw the empties over the side of the truck. One man filled his pockets with sugar and licked it from his hands whenever he wanted.
At another place, astonishingly, there was mail, thirty tonnes of it being burned piece by piece. The battalion was given their mail to save it from the fire, and from the burning supply dump they were given bivvy sheets and new two-man tents, still clean from the factory.
Breen had a letter from Cousins’ brother.
Dear Sir,
I write to apologise for my earlier letter. I can see with some months’ distance that my reaction was disproportionate, and perhaps foolish. I hope that you have not been put to any trouble by me.
I hope also that you need never undergo the experience of losing a brother, especially one far away. The imagination runs riot. But if such an experience is ever to occur to you, I hope, sir, that you will understand how I came to this.
Trusting that this finds you well,
I am,
Yours sincerely,
Tom Cousins
‘Bit bloody late for that,’ said Breen aloud.
In that last town, just after they arrived, a Greek girl came up to him. She was maybe six or seven, and must have come from one of the houses still occupied. Her dress was silk. He stood to meet her, putting down the tin of M and V that had been warmed for him on the truck’s exhaust manifold.
‘Thank you, English,’ she said gravely, ‘thank you so much—goodbye, English.’ Her hand pressed against his, and she disappeared.
20
They reached the new line of defence being set up at Thermopylae. They had gone from Olympus to Thermopylae. It was like when Breen saw Oxford for the first time: a place imagined so often turned out to be real, after all. It was late at night on the twentieth of April 1941; the Australians were waiting where the Spartans once did. On the Australian flank, the battalion pressed up against a river. The sea was to their right and to their left were the hills.
The bridge was blown just after they arrived, and then more damage was done to it at 2 a.m., the sappers cursing in the cold water while men held torches for them. They watched them run out the wires, and then they went back to their tents and huddled together in the cold, and waited for the sound of another explosion.
Breen took the chance to lie in Sinclair’s tent, huddling with him supposedly for warmth. He took solace in the feel of a body breathing placidly beside him; he astonished himself with the affection he felt, watching him sleep.
When the captain woke up, Breen said, ‘I should talk to you about Cousins.’
‘Not now, you single-mind.’ He reached to kiss him instead; Breen submitted, only half his mind on the moving lips.
They had set up what they could of positions to fight in, but they had almost no wire and the ground down by the river was featureless swamp. The water seeped in when you tried to dig. Baird and Christie persuaded the colonel to let them have new positions a little back from the river. They would send out patrols into the swamp instead.