Soldiers

by Tom Remiger

  ‘It was all right while I was shooting,’ Newman began to say, but Breen was no longer listening. He had mistaken panic for enthusiasm. It was no good blaming the man.

  He felt more excited than afraid, but fear was mixed in. The closest parallel was a long way back, when he was little more than a toddler. Young Patrick had a game then, one of his solitary games, where he stood in the ocean and let the waves come roaring in to pick him up, throwing himself into the white water and letting it carry him spinning and weightless to brush against sand and air. If he timed it right, he could ride on the surface of the waves, but most of the time he would be picked up and dumped behind the wave. The excitement, uncertainty, and lurking fear offered by every new wave was replicated now.

  As the parachutists fell from each plane it did not depart, but remained over the island. The effect was bewildering. One forgot which still had men ready to drop and which did not.

  And now a pair of feet appeared in an olive tree just up from the gully. A new detachment of parachutists were falling almost on top of the battalion. Everyone seemed to recall themselves at the same moment. Breen gave no order, but the gunfire burst out like kelp on a fire, crackling. The parachutists fell quickly, but while they fell they were helpless. Their legs moved as if they were trying to run, and when the bullets hit them their knees jerked upwards into their chests then dropped back.

  Moohan came at a hunched run up the gully, shaving cream spattering off his face. There were red flecks in it. ‘Sir.’

  ‘You took your bloody time about it.’

  ‘Sorry, sir.’

  ‘Too late now. If there’s some poor fucker out there—’ said Breen.

  ‘He’s fucked.’

  As the parachutists dropped, the fighters ceased their murderous dives.

  ‘They go down easy,’ said Gibson.

  ‘Ducks.’

  A new calm was descending with the parachutes. For these few minutes there was a sort of peace, an aiming and a firing as soothing as combing wool.

  In the sky above a hundred men were dying.

  A few more of the parachutists had landed, and now there were odd shots cracking about. There was a wet sound when the bullets hit the earth, and a dry resonant sound when they hit one of the olives.

  Often their parachutes caught in the olives, and they died there, or they were too slow to get their harnesses off, and they died pulling at them.

  Baird had risen from his desk. He aimed and shot with the rest of them, and came sliding down the wet sides of the gully to a point near Breen. ‘Talk about bloody concealment!’ he said, with an exultant face. ‘They’re dropping right on top of us. What a beautiful battle we’re going to have, Breen. What a bloody beautiful battle.’

  ‘All right,’ said the colonel, coming up to him with the same strange smile. Granny was in tow. It was time to react. ‘When they stop dropping here, we’ll need to clean them up. Along either side of the road, I reckon. And in the high ground.’

  He did not pause, transformed into decisiveness by action, before he laid out a plan. ‘If it’s all like this, we won’t be needed at the airfield. We’ll need your company, Breen. Where’s Sinclair?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Send him to me if he turns up. His company—your company—can have the east, Granny, but don’t go too far.’

  He kept talking, planning aloud, but there was no time to listen.

  Granny took over. ‘Right.’ He was still smiling. ‘We’ll send the lot of you out to clear the front between us and the others. Then you keep your platoon with us; no, actually, there’ll be bugger all of them left. Just you, and whoever Sinclair can drag up, and we’ll send Tiger into the high ground, stop the bastards from harassing the Aucklanders. Bluey can go southeast’—there was now much more fire coming from that direction—‘and you can get a runner out to the other companies and we’ll send them in the other direction up the canal.’

  ‘Goodo,’ said Breen.

  ‘I’ll run up to Lookout Hill. We’ll check how the intelligence platoon are doing and what they can tell us of the bloody northerners. No, wait. There’s not a Buckley’s the wires aren’t cut, but if they aren’t I’ll see what the gen is from the airfield.’

  ‘Good man,’ he said to the approaching Tiger. ‘Breen’ll sort you out.’

  Sinclair reappeared from some burrow in the gully he had been trapped in; headquarters platoon and Breen’s platoon rolled up the front beautifully, coming in from the right, except that Tavistock lost his nerve and lay quivering in one of the holes dug into the bank for the stretcher bearers, and there was nothing to be done about it.

  Breen killed only one person for sure. The man was lying very still pressed into the long grass. Breen walked over to him, not knowing if he was dead or playing dead. He watched for any movement. The fine hairs on the back of the man’s head shifted in the strengthening breeze, and a line of white skin showed above his collar and below his sunburnt neck.

  Breen drove a bayonet into him, turning his head away as it went in. He didn’t want to look. The man had been alive and the blood bubbled up. God have mercy on him, thought Breen.

  The German was an officer. Breen took his Luger, reaching under the body to get at the holster, and a pair of Zeiss field glasses. They were much better than the British ones.

  Later Breen found a body lying next to the tea bucket, still in harness and with a hole shot through the eye of the unworn gas mask. He found a packet of cigarettes, Papastratos, and liberated them. It had been a week since the last issue of tobacco. The body was young and blond and good-looking. He was glad he wasn’t the one who had shot him.

  There were bodies every hundred yards or so, and almost all of them were paratroopers.

  When Breen returned to the gully, Granny had been shot through the head by a sniper on his way back from Lookout Hill. Bluey’s platoon had dealt with the sniper.

  Breen wanted to see what the new glasses were like, so he looked out at Tiger’s platoon coming back in an easy line. There didn’t seem to be many of them missing, maybe only one or two. They all seemed to have new binoculars as well. They had two prisoners.

  ‘Look,’ he said to Sinclair. ‘You’ll have a better need of these than I do.’ He gave him the new binoculars and their stiff black unbuttoned case.

  They kept on with the mopping up well into the afternoon as more paratroopers came in trying to get at their cannisters of weapons. Each time two sections would go from a platoon, one with a Tommy gun (or, as the day went on, a Schmeisser taken from the dead) and one with a Bren.

  The Bren would flatten the paratroopers down into cover and hold them pinned in place while the men with the Tommy gun worked their way around behind and shot them.

  The planes were still not bothering them much, and that alone made the day much better. There was none of the maddening noise.

  There had still been no word from the airfield, and the intelligence section on the hill had not seen any Very signals. They could watch more paratroopers persistently landing around it.

  Morrie went out to try to contact the defenders. ‘And whenever we got bloody near the fuckers,’ he said to Breen, ‘they tried to blast us into next Tuesday. And we stuck our tin hats on the bloody rifles, and they did it all the more.’

  Apart from that, everything was going well. The brigade major came through to report that all was well with the other units, and the brigadier said that they would not be called on to counterattack unless the position was very serious. It looked like they were about to have the first victory of the war.

  There was a corpse hanging from a parachute tangled in high branches. His feet could almost touch the ground, as if he had been the victim of strange torture. But they had not quite touched the ground, and now he hung suspended, his body moving slightly in the wind and his arms as loose as a puppet.

  He had looked for a while as if he might have been alive, so that everyone who passed him for the first time, hanging in his green
shadow with the leaves about his face, had taken a shot at him. You couldn’t exactly make that mistake any longer.

  There was a bird that looked a bit like a magpie—a hooded crow, said McKelvey, the quiet boy who liked to look at birds and would die the next morning when his trench was caved in by a bomb and suffocated him, or so everyone thought, but there wasn’t really a chance to dig him out and be sure. The bird was sitting on the ground and looking speculatively at the hanging man. Perhaps the movement was confusing it.

  ‘That’s fucking disgusting,’ said Parkinson. ‘Shoot it, someone.’

  ‘Hold off on that,’ said Breen. ‘Just let it be for a second.’

  You could watch the bird’s frustrated speculation in the way it turned its head to look. It was like a chicken at home, one of those fussy old hens who would come up to you in the garden and complain in soft clucks about what had happened, what people had said, the unfairness of it all, until you gave her a piece of spinach or silverbeet and she wandered away.

  ‘Now you can shoot it,’ he said.

  Somehow the shot missed, but the bird did not fly away even at the roar of it. Perhaps it was used to the sound of rifles.

  ‘Leave the bugger, then.’

  The corpse rocked in the breeze, the mouth hanging open to show yellowed teeth.

  25

  By the evening, they felt almost secure.

  ‘Just one thing,’ said the colonel after he called Sinclair to a huddled conference. ‘There’s still no news from the airfield.’ Watching through glasses it had been apparent that there was still fighting going on, but the clouds of dust from the bombing obscured all else.

  ‘We’re to take the company up to the airfield and reinforce them,’ Sinclair explained to the subalterns afterwards. They still had no second-in-command. It was something to worry about later. ‘Maybe the Maoris will send something as well. Apparently, they’ve had an easy day of it.’

  They had an hour of waiting before it was dark enough to remove any threat from what Breen’s platoon had begun to call ‘the bastard planes’.

  One of them had been buzzing about while a section waited to force three paratroopers down from a terrace of vines. They were held in place by it for fifteen minutes, while the paratroopers, who had insouciantly sent up a flare as a recognition signal, climbed unhurriedly away to safety over the ridge. Newman had rolled onto his back and called out, ‘Fuck off away, you bloody carrion hawk! You’re spoiling the whole fucking game,’ then pumped one two three shots at the plane, each shattering the world.

  The three lieutenants retreated to the firing pit of a wrecked gun to talk themselves into the night’s work.

  ‘Look here,’ said Tiger, in confidence. ‘If the captain gets it, who’s in command now?’ They had all got their commission on the same day.

  ‘It’d best be you,’ said Breen wearily. He might have wanted it for himself, but if things got that bad he knew that he’d rather have Tiger leading him out.

  ‘The captain should have sorted that out himself,’ said Bluey. ‘But you’ll do.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Tiger. It was the first time Breen had seen him blush. The laconic compliment seemed to fire something within him. ‘We’ll beat the fucking world,’ he said.

  ‘What time do you make it?’

  ‘We’d best synchronise.’

  There was a fiddling with watches.

  ‘She’s a beaut feeling,’ said Tiger.

  ‘When one of us gets it,’ said Breen, without thinking what he was saying, ‘we’re all happy with our sergeants getting the platoon?’ The question was almost pointless.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’d love a cup of tea,’ said Breen.

  ‘If you check the bastards’ pockets,’ said Tiger, ‘they’ve got these wee pills. I reckon they’re dope.’

  ‘I’ll give it a miss.’

  ‘They’ve got things like barley sugars as well. And Baxter,’ said Tiger, ‘he had one of the pills. And he’s still standing. Reckoned he didn’t feel any different, though.’

  ‘Let’s have a smoke,’ said Bluey.

  Breen passed his newly acquired cigarettes around. They stood in silence, the smoke billowing in the evening light.

  Breen was drawing in fast and shallow, but it was Tiger who threw down his cigarette first. He stamped on it. ‘Here’s to us,’ he said.

  When Bluey had gone, he asked Breen how to make an act of perfect contrition. Breen said that he couldn’t remember.

  It was dusk when they left, moving with a quiet confidence. They marched in their platoons, an officer at the head of each and a sergeant behind, up the steep cobblestone track, past the wireless station, and through the silent village. As they went past the Aucklanders, voices called out to them from behind the lines of wire as if they were off to play a game of rugby.

  ‘Go on, my sons!’

  ‘Give them hell!’

  Their loose accoutrements jingled softly. By the time they were in the village they could see only the well and the square outlines of the houses against the darkening sky.

  They passed through like ghosts and dropped down the ridge onto the road. They heard a frightened voice calling in the dark, and they moved silently to surround and capture two parachutists who dropped their weapons with a clatter when they saw them.

  They sent them back with the oldest man, because he had children, and they went on. They had expected to meet the defenders by now. They passed through where the headquarters were supposed to be and walked on until they almost stumbled upon a sentry, who challenged them with a voice that rang out bravely.

  He pulled aside the wire when they gave the password, and pointed them up the ridge; his eyes shone white in a dirty face.

  They reached the headquarters by ten o’clock. The captain went forward to find their colonel.

  ‘They’re not happy,’ he reported on his return. ‘They’ve been having a hell of a time of it and sent up the flares for us to come in this afternoon. Then the bugger of a brigadier sent a message on their radio—it’s dead, by the way—that made them think we’d be here hours ago. So they’ve been going to pieces.’

  ‘What’s the loss?’ asked Bluey.

  ‘They don’t know.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘They’ve all been cut off from one another and bombed to pieces. The paras keep forming up to the west. And I haven’t seen the bloody colonel. His second and his adjutant were there. They think that a whole company is gone. The man is having an hour’s sleep while he can.’

  ‘And the other companies?’

  ‘B and A are more or less alive. We’ll be in the positions A had. They don’t know about the others. They haven’t heard from D since midday. They reckon there’s probably still something going on with C, but the runners don’t come back. The last they heard there were still about a third of them. That was about five o’clock. They tried a counterattack and got cut to pieces.’

  ‘It looks like we’ll have a grand old time of it in the morning,’ said Bluey.

  ‘Look here. We’d better get the sergeants in for this conference,’ said the captain.

  ‘Yes,’ said Breen. ‘What do you mean, the positions A Company had?’

  ‘She’s a bloody mess. He’s pulled them back, all of them, to a shorter line on the ridge. So we’ll take Point 107. The hill in front and above them.’

  ‘And the airfield?’

  ‘I don’t know what he’s planning.’

  ‘They’ll run a fucking express service flying them in if we don’t hold it,’ said Tiger. He didn’t normally swear.

  ‘We’ll hold it,’ said the captain. ‘We’ll hold it.’

  A guide for them came down from A Company, a lieutenant who had grumbled about Sinclair when Bluey was reprimanded for leaving his porthole open.

  He took them up the ridge, going west. He was almost silent, and very curt in answering questions. Bluey’s platoon was peeled off first: he place
d the men in a defensive position while the others watched from above. The darkness below them, where the ground sloped away towards the river, was almost absolute.

  He came back up and started walking further. They were moving to the north now. This was Tiger’s platoon’s turn.

  ‘Down a bit,’ the lieutenant said. ‘You wait here; I’ll take them into place.’

  He led the line of men off into the darkness.

  The rest of the company waited as patient as draught horses. By force of habit they stayed slightly below the line of the ridge to avoid silhouetting themselves, but there was no light to show them up.

  There was a sound like balloons popping loudly and a lone voice in pain.

  They waited a little while longer, trying to look into the soft darkness, and a scrambling noise came towards them. It was Baxter. Perhaps he saluted; there was a sort of movement in the darkness. It was hard to be sure.

  ‘The platoon’s in place, sir,’ he said, ‘but there’s three wounded and the guide’s dead. The lieutenant says they’re quite comfortable where they are and looking forward to what’s coming and you’re not to weaken yourselves by carrying the wounded away. They’ll be all right for now but if you can get a runner down to the ridge, getting some more stretcher bearers sent up might be a plan.’

  The message had the unmistakable stamp of Tiger. Its unpunctuated run sounded like he had asked for it to be repeated back to him for accuracy before he sent Baxter off.

  The captain led Breen away a little further. ‘We’re going to need a new guide.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘What do you think Tiger meant by what’s coming?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘He thinks there’s going to be a night attack, doesn’t he?’

  ‘I don’t know. Nothing we can do about it if there is.’

  ‘You’ll have to take over here.’

  ‘We—that is Bluey and Tiger and me—we’d sort of agreed—’

  ‘There’s no time for that now. I need someone I can trust.’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘I’m going to go back and get another guide, and get some more stretcher bearers up.’