We had a factory for making them. We had hospitals for our wounded. And towards the end of August we had opened a rifle workshop.
Complaints, which I take some credit for passing on to Keig, had come in about the difficulties our troops, still armed to about half their strength with shotguns, were experiencing up against the Keepers who now all had rifles or machine-guns. I will admit my solution was to press Cormode to buy more rifles. It was Keig who said we must make our own.
‘They make them on the North-west Frontier,’ he said. ‘Why can’t we?’
‘The North-west Frontier?’
‘Yes. I don’t know just where that is, but there was this general I read about back in Dublin and at the start he was out there and he said the tribesmen had their own rifles. If they could, we can.’
We could. And three weeks after this conversation the first crude hand-made rifle, converted from a shotgun, was ready. Keig examined the new weapon with the minutest care, and at last produced his comment.
‘It’ll do very well. But there’s one thing.’
‘What?’ demanded our gunsmith, an old man we had wheedled from his blacksmith’s forge.
Keig slapped the butt of the new weapon.
‘It needs our mark on it,’ he said. ‘Everybody’s got to know it’s us who can make these things. Burn a “K” on it. Burn one on every rifle we make. A “K”.’
So Keig chose without hesitation as the mark to put on all the products of our rifle factory the letter denoting his own name. Was it a sign of another step along Mylchraine’s path? Once more I reserved judgment. There was nothing else I could do. I was too busy, just as Keig was too busy. Events had us in their grasp.
All too soon there came the time when men first marched through the square outside the Assembly Room at night. Each time I surfaced from sleep I heard faintly through the thick granite walls, but clearly enough, the ring of steel-tipped heels on cobblestones in a rhythm single but steady, then breaking a little, then resuming.
And then Keig fixed the hour of the assault.
He had spent all day seeing brigade commanders who had been summoned from their posts. Each he put through his questioning process—tough, uncompromising, devoid of any politenesses, capable of forcing men to remember things they were unaware of having observed and make deductions they would not have thought themselves capable of.
When late at night the last of them had gone Keig took from his pocket a scrap of paper which he had not up till now allowed me to see. It was a list of days around the end of October and beginning of November. Against each day were jotted notes about its suitability as the time of our great throw. He studied them in silence and then looked at me and jabbed his thick black-nailed finger down.
I craned forward and read.
‘Oct 31. No moon till late. Men in place 2 days. Punky Night.’
‘Punky Night?’ I queried.
‘Aye. If I’m right there’ll be drinking, dancing naked and the rest of it that night in Lesneven. It might help.’
He grunted.
‘They’ll be wanting it in the rest of the island too, I dare say,’ he added. ‘But there’ll be not so much as a smell of anything among my men.’
From outside came the ringing of boots on cobbles once more as a new detachment passed by.
‘That must be one of the last lots to go up,’ I said. ‘By dawn tomorrow every man is due to be in his final position.’
I was only talking. Mouthing a few words to paste over the gaping awe I felt because the die had now been cast. Keig made no reply since no reply was needed.
In the silence of the night the sound of the marching men sang out clearly, made the more ringing by the first of the autumn’s frosts. They still had a moon to march under just now. But in two nights to come, on Punky Night, there would be no moon.
4
The assault lasted for the best part of forty-eight hours, and for almost all that time the outcome was constantly in doubt.
Late in the afternoon of October 31, as dusk was beginning to fall for Punky Night with its openly secret rites and rituals, Keig led those of us who formed his battle staff—though we never had any reverberant title of this sort—off to a point about a mile behind the front south-west of Lesneven where a water-tower, which had been half destroyed by the Keepers when they had acquired our howitzers and were inclined to be sportive, stood up gauntly in a stretch of quiet countryside. Between its two solid granite walls, on which the big tank had been perched, we stretched a large tarpaulin to form a roof, since from shortly before we had set off rain had been falling, as it was to do for all the time of the battle.
Keig ordered us not to light the hurricane lamps we had, so as not to give the slightest opportunity to some unfriendly civilian—and with the stony-eyed woldsmen you never knew—to signal a message to the Keepers. So we sat in the gathering darkness and just waited.
And then, on time to the second, the battle began. Every single gun we possessed started laying down its barrage, pathetic by World War standards but fearsomely extravagant to us. The rain-splotched night was filled through and through with mere noise.
We all jumped up and went outside. The sky all the way along, north and south, was lit by repeated flashes of light. And then, with varying periods of delay, there came the light flashes from in front of us, from inside Mylchraine’s iron ring, the counter-bombardment.
‘You can light the lanterns,’ Keig said with a grunt of heavy-handed humour when the first enemy battery opened up. ‘They know we’ve begun it now.’
I went back inside our tower and one by one lit the four storm-lamps. From a shelter in a field nearby a cow greeted the yellowy light with one long complaining moo, just audible under the continuous crumping of the guns.
Eventually our barrage petered abruptly to its end and we were able to make out, when the wind blew a little more strongly, the tat-tatting of small-arms fire. We knew then that things had begun properly: that men were meeting in combat face-to-face, were running across open spaces in the dark and the rain and being shot at. But the distant rattly sound did not somehow live up to such thoughts. So we sat down again knowing under our tarpaulin that it might be more than another half hour before anyone over there would have anything to tell us.
And then, with a suddenness that almost made me cry out, the first message came. It was on one of the field-telephones. First there was the whirring noise of the distant operator cranking his call-handle, then the man crouching ready beside the instrument at our end snatched up the handset, all sweaty-fingered, and jabbered at it ‘Yes? Yes? Who’s that? What is it?’ Then the intent listening. And finally the operator, looking across at Keig, gulped visibly before speaking.
‘From Mr Dogan, Mr Keig. He hasn’t reached his objective, and it’s twenty minutes past his time. They had a machine-gun we never spotted. Mr Keig, he’s lost twelve men.’
But already Francis Crowe was bending over his walkie-talkie, speaking quietly but very precisely. It was impossible to make out what his distant operator was saying, or even from which of the far sets the message was coming. But in a minute there was the neat ‘Over and out’—Francis had forgotten nothing of his drill—and a new report to Keig.
‘Portharnel South, that was. All objectives reached. Artillery barrage completely effective. Ready for next phase.’
And now our other telephone-man, reporting an unexpected degree of success in the sector right next to our first failure. Keig was already peering at one of the maps he had slipped out of the haversack in which I had carefully folded the various sheets in the way most likely to be of use.
‘That’s Corkan, isn’t it?’ he asked.
‘Yes, Mr Keig.’
‘Then tell him to send twenty men out to his left. Tell him there’s a machine-gun post somewhere there and it’s holding us up.’
‘Yes, Mr Keig.’
And then the message going out in that high careful monotonous voice I was to hear so much of in the n
ext two days. ‘. . . twenty men to your left, repeat left, where a machine-gun post . . .’ And already the message was having to compete in my ears with other messages coming in and going out. And already mistakes were being made and unexpected successes were putting unexpected problems in front of us, and all of us under that taut tarpaulin with the rain steadily drumming down on it were working flat out, trying from all this distance to influence the miles-long struggle we had started.
The night went hurrying by, and, except that I had to note down when certain messages were received with the idea of us getting some general picture later, I was not really conscious at any moment of what time it was.
A sullen dawn crept in at last. Twice at intervals during the night when things had momentarily been quieter I had conscientiously eaten a sandwich and had handed one to Keig feeling it was my duty to ‘keep my strength up’ and his. And it was in another such short respite, shortly after full daylight—such as it was with the dense grey blanket of weeping cloud above us—that I got up from my empty ammunition-box seat, tucked my pad of papers under my arm and one by one extinguished the unnecessary storm lanterns. The small break in the routine attracted Keig’s attention. He stood too, stretching in a wide yawn that even under his thick coat showed all the strength of his enormous shoulders.
‘I want to go over what’s happened along the whole line,’ he said to me. ‘Now the men over there can see what they’re doing things’ll be different.’
I carried my box-seat over nearer to his and side by side we went over the whole extent of the front, noting where our plans had failed to come up to expectations and where perhaps an unexpected success might present a chance of breaking through somewhere where we had not thought we would be able to. On the whole it was a decidedly satisfactory picture that emerged. Almost all our objectives for the night had been reached, and at several places we had done much better than we had hoped. Keig grunted his final approval.
‘They weren’t so ready on Punky Night then,’ he said.
I smiled agreement, stood up and stretched in my turn.
In the gateway at the far end of the field over which we looked I noticed that a small party of men had suddenly appeared. There were, I suppose, about a dozen of them of whom four were wearing the easily-spotted orangey-red caps of the new recruits of our support forces. They were the ones carrying the stretchers. The rest of the party, helmeted but limping and broken, were contriving to make their own way along despite the roughly bandaged wounds that, as they came nearer to us along the field-wall, became easier to see through the still steady downpour.
I glanced at Keig. Distracted by my sudden silence, he too was looking over at the straggling sodden group moving with pathetic slowness along the edge of the field.
‘Now,’ he said sharply, ‘this is what I want to try for today.’
I forced myself to look back at the map spread on the big board across Keig’s knees. And, without the slightest sign of having seen anything out of the way, he began to outline his plans.
They were good plans, I later came to realize. Keig had seized squarely on the new factors that had arisen out of the higgledy-piggledy fighting of the night, and from these had had fashioned a possible way into the heart of Lesneven that we could not have guessed existed before the assault began. It looked, in fact, as if he had hit on a weakness in Mylchraine’s whole defensive system. It seemed that, over-concerned about being cut off from Portharnel, his only source of the flame-throwing tanks that would roll up our forces like a done-with map, he had concentrated his strength in the part of his line between the port and Lesneven. North of the capital, although his defences had appeared to bristle with men, blockhouses and artillery, in fact there was only an outward screen. And our probing attacks of the night had succeeded in penetrating deeply enough to reveal this.
But I was finding it hard to concentrate on what Keig was telling me. The thought of what it was we were doing to so many men, of whom the pathetic group across the field were but a sample, was hammering, almost hysterically, at my tensed-up mind.
But in face of Keig’s relentless pounding out of the details of his new plans it was not possible to let other thoughts than those he wanted me to be thinking have any share in my head for long. And soon I was furiously jotting down notes of the new orders it would be necessary to send.
At last he finished.
He jumped to his feet.
‘Get those messages off,’ he said. ‘I’m going to shave.’
And from the pocket of his coat he produced the new razor he had bought himself after his forced loan had been returned to Colonel Aleyn and stumped off through the steady rain towards a Particularly large puddle some twenty yards away.
Watching him for a moment as he knelt in the mud, dipped the razor into the thick water of the puddle and brought it up to his chin, I felt almost as if I was receiving rays of strength shooting directly out at me from that broad bent back. I turned to look over at the far side of the field: the party of wounded had already gone through the gate into the sunken lane behind us. I hurried across to Francis Crowe, sitting on a neatly folded groundsheet beside his walkie-talkie set, and together we started sending out the new orders.
Within about an hour we were receiving the first reports of the success Keig’s new plans were having. And as the day went by—with never a let-up in that drumming rain—bit by bit our men in the north got nearer and nearer Lesneven itself.
By the afternoon they were on the outskirts, and, standing up to take a short stroll and stretch my cramped muscles, I saw coming through the same distant gateway where I had seen just after dawn that wet and weary group of wounded men a group of a very different sort. Marching heads down in front of a pair of young orangey-capped guards were no fewer than twenty captured Keepers. They looked an odd sight with their bedraggled green uniforms retaining that distinctly countrified touch they had always had but with grim storm-trooper helmets replacing the feather-cockaded hats of the days of their supremacy in the island, and I allowed myself to stand and stare for some minutes as they tramped along the side of the field in the rain. Somehow the sight of them coming away from the distant crackly area of the fighting put into my head the conception of ultimate victory as something more than a far ideal.
As they reached the end of the field, at the gate to the sunken lane behind there appeared one of the many teams of horses and carts that had passed by us all day taking food up to the front. There was a moment of hesitation as the two Parties met at the gateway, the young orange-capped guards with their sullen prisoners and the countrymen up on their carts, shoulders hunched under sacks to protect them from the rain. Then the leading countryman pulled his horse to a halt.
Suddenly from behind me came a roar of sound.
‘No.’
I swung round, considerably startled.
It was Keig. I had thought that watching these first prisoners to come our way might be rather below him and had not done anything to draw his attention to the sight, heartening to me though it was. But evidently he had been looking on too, and now he was, as evidently, pretty angry about something.
He strode through the rain towards the gateway where prisoners, guards and countrymen up on their carts all stared at him in silence. When he was about twenty yards away he stopped.
‘Those carts go through first,’ he shouted at the guards. ‘You keep that lot against the wall till they’re all past. There’s food for men who’re fighting in there.’
He swung round again, marched back to our shelter and planked himself squarely down on his ammunition-box once more. Shamefacedly the two guards—they must have been only about sixteen or seventeen—lined up the captured Keepers against the wall and waited while the carts, the last of them laden with cans of rapidly-cooling tea protected by straw wrappings, slowly creaked and lumbered their way past and on up to the fighting zone.
Traffic of this sort along the grey drystone wall at the far side of the big field in which ou
r ruined water-tower stood was a running thread in the background for the whole of that first day of fighting. It bore, I suppose, in reality little actual relation to the progress of the battle but for me it did seem to form a true link with the terrible events that I had had my share in setting in motion. The messages that came in, on the master walkie-talkie, on the two field-telephones, kept us technically in touch with what was going on. But the news they brought, of a spinney captured, of an enemy howitzer definitely located and ready to be blasted out of existence by the fire of our own guns which I would order, was as far as I was concerned no more than fodder for the much-creased maps in the haversack at Keig’s side. They meant little more than a new mark to be made with difficulty on the dampened paper. They did nothing to bring home the things that were really happening to men crouching beneath the killing fire of a distant machine-gun, stumbling forward among shell-bursts through the ever-falling rain, raising their rifles and endeavouring to hold a hardly visible green-clad figure in the sights. But the passing processions along the field-edge—the groups of bitter prisoners, the small Parties of wounded, the creaking ration carts—were signs I could grasp to share in what was actually happening over there.
It was in this way that I became aware that a new stage had begun in the long struggle. Shortly before it had started to get dark at the end of that short rain-washed November day I saw at the far gateway the first men coming back from the front after being relieved. The men who had taken over from them must, I thought, have gone up by a different route. I had seen nothing of them. And then I realized that, of course, they had used a different way up: I myself had worked out the route they were to take and had given Francis Crowe the order to send to them. And I too had ordered these men, now slowly making their way along the field-wall, to follow this Particular route back.
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