Soldiers

by Tom Remiger

  ‘As you loved me,’ said the captain, ‘as you loved me, stay.’

  ‘I have a job to do,’ said Breen. ‘There’s nothing I can do for you. There never was.’

  ‘Please,’ said the captain.

  ‘You can’t go forward,’ said Breen, ‘and you can’t go back. What am I supposed to do?’

  ‘Shoot me,’ said the captain.

  ‘You don’t deserve that,’ said Breen. ‘It’s not your fault. Anyone can be afraid. It’s like a sickness, and not a contagious one. All I can do is offer sympathy. If you go back, you’ll be safe. But I have to do something for the ones who are not afraid.’

  ‘If I go back,’ said the captain, ‘I’ll never be safe.’

  Breen was looking where the sounds of battle were coming from. ‘If I stay any longer,’ he said, ‘people will think I’m shying away from it.’

  ‘Shoot me,’ said the captain. ‘I don’t mean kill me. Just the arm or something. Give me an excuse. Please.’

  Breen let go his rifle and felt for his German revolver. ‘You deserve it,’ he said.

  For a moment, the gun seemed to be pointed at Sinclair’s head. It wavered and dropped towards his hips, then up again.

  Breen walked a few steps closer to be sure of his aim. The captain lowered his rifle on the ground and stood as straight as if he were on parade. Then he spread his arms down and out from his shoulders at an angle.

  The gun sounded, louder than hope. Sinclair fell backwards. There was no pain. It felt exactly like being kicked by a horse. He watched the bright red blood bubbling through the fingers of his right arm. It was clasping his shattered left forearm.

  Breen turned away, buttoning his pistol into its holster. He began to walk back to his rifle.

  There was the sound of feet drumming. Sinclair felt down for his revolver and could not reach it. His fingers went into his pouch and found a grenade. There was another shot.

  Breen dropped instinctively to the ground. He wriggled about, turning to face the captain, who could not see what was going on behind him.

  There was a snarling and a foot crashed down on to Sinclair’s shoulder so that he cried out. A figure in uniform ran past him, towards Breen. Breen was starting to kneel, beginning to get up. He was fumbling for his pistol.

  He’s going to bayonet him, thought the captain. All his thoughts were coming very slowly, but he still seemed to be lucid. He realised that he was shivering. Then he’ll come back for me.

  He saw Breen’s blue eyes, cold as the waterfall had been, wide as a lover’s. He heard the thud of the bayonet going in and the sucking sound of it coming out, and the enemy soldier and Breen crying out in the same voice. The soldier was readying his bayonet for another thrust, his broad back to the captain. They were close enough to hear that. Too close. But his fingers were pressed on the handle and the pin was out. One, two, three, four.

  He was on his knees with a gasping pain and the world was swaying laterally and the grenade, thrown underarm, was arcing to a point just beyond Breen, and the explosion sent shards of pain through his chest and there was a feeling of great heat in his forehead and he fainted.

  When he came to, Breen and the German were mangled. There was still blood flowing out of Breen, pumping out. The captain had not thought there could be so much blood.

  There was blood over his forehead, hot and sticky, and he could only see out of one eye. He thought it must be gone, but when he raised two fingers to it he found it was only clotted with blood. The German’s body had protected him.

  The captain crawled over to the bodies and then tried to turn in the direction the attack had come from, but he must have passed out again.

  Two men from Morrie’s platoon found him, and he next remembered being carried back on a door torn from a house.

  Baird was in the same dressing station, splinters from a bomb sharding his arm and most of his left ear missing. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said to the captain. ‘I misjudged you terribly. Forgive me. It’s funny who turns out to have it. In the end, I was so afraid.’

  Breen was not there. He was dead. Tiger and Bluey were there. Tiger had a great hole in his thigh, and Bluey a wounded foot.

  Bluey was in some sort of shock and he kept telling the captain the same story. It went something like this: ‘We were the best I’ve ever bloody seen. The boys…Baxter. I got this bloody hole in my foot and the boys make me comfortable and they keep rushing on and the pain’s getting worse and I’m lying there thinking about things. Then Baxter comes back tearing past me like the furies are after him, and I say, “Hold it, you bastard!” and I tell him, “No fucking deserting on my watch,” and he says, “I’m running a message back for old Morrie,” and we get into a bit of a scrap until he shows me the blood on his bayonet and says he’ll bloody well use it again if he has to—he’s got a job to do. Then he comes back a wee bit later in the other direction, back to the fight, and he says, “Some fucking deserter, eh, sir?” but the beauty, he’s brought me morphine back with him.’ The first time Bluey told it, he added, ‘I could have kissed him—sorry, sir.’

  Men were lying about them with the curious quiet of the badly wounded. The smell of blood was everywhere. Time went by, hours and hours of nothing. The captain dozed and dreamed and lay quiet, until a voice above him was saying, ‘Stand up if you can walk,’ and he stood up with difficulty. The dressing station was being evacuated.

  Bluey and Tiger watched him from the floor. Their eyes were turned towards him, large with pain. He wanted to say something, but he couldn’t think of anything.

  ‘Good luck, sir,’ said Tiger. ‘Give the bastards hell for us.’ He turned away so that the captain could not see his face, and his shoulders moved slightly.

  ‘I’ll see you in Berlin,’ said the captain.

  ‘Have a beer for me in Cairo,’ said Bluey.

  ‘There’s no prison camp in the world’ll be able to hold you,’ said the captain.

  ‘We’ll see about that. You’d best be going.’

  Because he was wounded, the captain even had priority for the evacuation ships. He waltzed right past the guards on the cliff above the beach with their bayonets fixed, and past the mob of men a few yards back from them who had lost their units or run away from them or just got cut off when they went down the wrong gully. They knew they weren’t getting a ship out.

  They were all looking at the beach guard and the favoured ones, and their eyes were blazing. Bluey and Tiger were out there waiting and hoping the bloody Germans would turn up soon with more bandages and morphine, and their eyes were blazing. And the captain’s eyes were shining, and Breen’s eyes on the cobbled streets were glazed and open.

  It had been good, thought Sinclair on the ship the next morning, to be somewhere where the light was like home.

  28

  A couple of months later, Bluey wrote Father Emmet a letter from somewhere in Bulgaria. Emmet replied, ‘To the best of my knowledge, Tiger Jackson confessed nothing to me about the death of Dan Cousins. I regret that I cannot be of more help in this matter.’

  Tiger was sent to a prisoner-of-war camp on the mainland, where there were more doctors about. He escaped by bribing one of them, a Greek, to declare him dead and lay him out in a coffin. He began the long walk down to Turkey, blood and pus oozing at the purple edges of what had been the hole in his leg, making little mews of pain with each unguarded step.

  There were six months before the battalion went back into action. By then it was late 1941. There weren’t many left from the old company; they had been crossing down a hillside in the evacuation of Crete, the thirty or so who were left, and a Messerschmitt got them with a single burst, swinging up the gully. Some were killed, and the rest were taken prisoner.

  Bluey died of tuberculosis in London in ’forty-six, just after he was released from a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany.

  Tiger had a good war, one of the best, after he made it to Turkey and then rejoined the battalion in Syria. He was there in Trieste at t
he end, dancing with a pretty girl at the ball hosted by the collaborators to appease the new conquerors.

  The captain had got himself a good reputation on Crete. He was even awarded a medal. He felt bad about that at first, but then back in Egypt he shared a hospital room with a man named Upham.

  In all the chaos of the retreat, Upham told him, he’d been sent to stop an attack coming up towards headquarters. With four men, he captured twenty Germans, but then he had to shoot them all. He said that it was pathetic polishing them off, but you couldn’t trust them: they hid bombs and then they’d use them just when you thought you were safe.

  You heard such things, but Upham got awarded a Victoria Cross for his courage. Sinclair felt that it made his own medal seem not so bad. He’d done his best, after all. You couldn’t ask for more than that; you just couldn’t.

  The captain did well for himself in hospital and then in jobs safely arranged in Egypt. By mid-1942 he found himself in command of the battalion as they prepared for the big attack that would drive the enemy out of Libya.

  He tried, he really did; but he just couldn’t do it. They were going in for a night attack, the whole battalion, a few weeks after he took command, and he ordered his driver to turn his jeep around and came bumping back in the moonlight.

  Everyone was kind about it, but it really couldn’t go on. There was a sense that maybe they should leave him alone in a little room, but no one dared to say so, not explicitly. So they said, ‘We’ll have to send you back to New Zealand. We’ll make the orders out once the offensive’s over.’

  It was a little later that Sinclair was captured. Because everyone was kind, no one mentioned it when he came home.

  He went back to his family’s farm just in time for the shearing. He avoided seeing people, avoided places where he could be recognised and talked about. He had been wounded quite badly when he was taken prisoner.

  Everyone came out of the war with some small secret shame or other; the brave were the dead. There weren’t so many like him, but there were plenty who found their way into the pay corps or the army post office. And the men who knew for sure had a pride in the old battalion; there was no reason to sully its name. He couldn’t hope to have a public life, and he couldn’t go seeking any trouble, but that was all right.

  Sometimes when he went out into the garden it felt as if there was a melancholy ghost just behind him; as if it walked softly and exactly behind him with sad eyes, stepping carefully through the lifeless spaces underneath the walnuts and through the flowerbeds and the rhubarb and down to the woodpile through the wandering jew, green and shining.

  He didn’t dream very often, and he burned his scraps of diaries. No matter how far you think you’ve come, you’ve got to go back to where you left them behind. You can’t quite make it on your own; you can’t come back out of the desert, not on your own.

  Every six months or so, another came from the old battalion to see him. Talking about England in the blitz, the way they stood on Olympus, the dark green flowers of parachutists over Crete, and the day in the ravine when the Bren gun jammed.

  ‘That was when Newman got it right through the head. He was a good bloke; he knew what he was about. That was a bad business. And young Moohan got it in the guts, but he was a silly young bugger anyway.’

  His wife wondered how his visitors could not see the harm in these reminiscences. She wondered, too, how they could think that he and she could not see the dutifulness in the appearances, the hint of reserve in the way they treated him. It was, she thought, the shame of the prison camp and the wounds hanging miasmic about him. He had commanded the whole battalion once, and then they put him in a cage.

  The men who had once saluted him would come and stand awkwardly in his darkened bedroom, or by his old armchair. They shuffled their feet uneasily across the uncarpeted floors with the air of schoolboys who had nothing to say when called to the front of the class. She would watch from a distance while they stood about uneasily for the length of time it took to be decent, and no longer, and then turned to go in a rush, all at once, as if wounds and unhappiness were contagious.

  It was unpleasant. Their nervous fumblings for a pipe or cigarette, and her glaring eye. Their forcing her to play the monster’s part. Or, if she wasn’t there, they would pour whisky down his throat and tell incomprehensible stories about the war.

  That night, he would call out, a man whose dreams were more vivid than his life, and she would cross the hall to him, hold him as if they were young again.

  It took her years to realise: first one secret, unspoken but acknowledged; and then, finally, the other. And then another. There comes a time when it’s too late for harm or pity. You make a go of things. You carry on. He had confessed.

  One day some friend of her husband, from his old battalion—she thought from the company he first had—came around. Her niece was staying. She was a girl from town seeing the land, about five or six. He downed his trousers to show her a deep pit in his thigh. ‘Put your finger in,’ he said. ‘Whaddaya reckon?’

  He had started clearing the bush just on the other side of Jack’s Ridge after he came home. The stumps provided shelter in spring storms. He spent months going up there, sawing away in silence. At night that year the ashy remains of the fires he made of them would still be visible, and her washing would smell of smoke.

  So we go on. Sometimes she watched the ones who would be next to go. If something else were to happen in a far country, they were the ones up for it: these half-wild children going into the gorse with their fathers’ binoculars.

  She saw them chopping wood and each piece split was the butt of a rifle coming down on a skull. The heavy thud of it. And then they got a little older and they were given a gun and a handful of cartridges. They went out to train their eye on rabbits, but they were imagining men.

  That’s the world, she thought. I have no son to give to a war, anyway; I’ve never even had the hope of a son. So whatever comes shan’t be mine to suffer. I’ll wait out the remains of a life until some neighbour finds me dead on the kitchen floor with a black fly crawling over my face, and they’ll bury me with a view of the sea and a headstone that says Beloved Wife Of.

  When the shearers came, sweating in their vests, she would make scones and take them up to the yards. She did this because it was what her mother did; and we must observe certain proprieties. We cannot simply do what we will, and so we are left to do what we can.

  The nuns at school used to say that to her: do what you can and leave the rest to God. She considered becoming a Josephite, before she married. She knew that you were supposed to know that you have a vocation, but maybe she did. It was one option.

  And when she went up with the scones, a tea towel over them and the wind singing at an untucked edge so that it moved like a flag—well, then, sometimes she would stay and watch. The sheep would struggle as they were held down by glistening arms. She would watch them kick and stumble away and down the chute, and every time she felt plucking at her, somehow unexpected, the same quality of compassion.

  He just went off to the war, and then he came back calling her Daisy.

  Acknowledgments

  I tried to ground this novel in real experience. As such, it would doubtless be possible for a motivated reader to identify the battalion and even the company (or rather the two companies combined for narrative purposes) whose experiences are represented here. This would not be ideal. Soldiers is a work of fiction; I did not hesitate to invent character, plot, and action.

  That said, many episodes were, for authenticity’s sake, derived from archival sources or soldiers’ narratives.

  The description of a plane being shot down in England was expanded from a line in the diaries of Dan Davin, as was the story of Bluey in the Egyptian brothel, and the murderer of a taxi driver being traced by his cigarette butt. Certain phrases of dialogue he recorded were also too good not to use: ‘as innocent as a child and as cunning as a Maori dog’, ‘The Greeks are ratting’, and
‘He was a good bloke… he was a silly young bugger anyway.’ From his letters and papers came the story of a psychologist following a chaplain about, and various small details.

  From the letters of Brian Bassett came the stories of a man shooting himself in the leg and being surprised that it was sharp, creeping down to the wire in Greece to listen for a missing man, and the Greek girl who appears on a beach to say ‘Thank you, English.’ So did certain period details.

  I owe a debt both to a history by Angus Ross and to the archive of papers collected by him in its preparation; from these came a number of episodes in the novel. Ross collected descriptions of the action at Galatas—from these came ‘They’ll run like hell’, the soldier asking how long to count before throwing a grenade, and the wounded officer who threatens a runner he believes to be deserting.

  The accidental shooting of a Cretan woman is recorded in the papers of Geoffrey Cox. The description of parachutists as like balloons in a Hollywood film was suggested by a comparison in a report on Crete by Carl Watson. And the taking of pills believed to be dope (in fact, antimalarials) comes from an article by Len Diamond.

  A full list of sources would be impossible, but I must acknowledge the series of official histories produced after the war, as well as Haddon Donald’s In Peace and War: A Civilian Soldier’s Story; Tony Simpson’s Operation Mercury: The Battle for Crete, 1941; Keith A. Forsman’s unpublished ‘E. A. Forsman: Priest, Padre and Poet, 1909–1976’; and Howard Kippenberger’s Infantry Brigadier. I am similarly indebted to Paul Jackson’s One of the Boys: Homosexuality in the Military during World War II (on Canada) and Yorick Smaal’s Sex, Soldiers and the South Pacific, 1939–45: Queer Identities in Australia in the Second World War.

  I would also like to acknowledge the careful and sensitive editing of both Michael Heyward and David Winter, as well as others who commented on the manuscript.