Strong Man

by H. R. F. Keating

  What had I told them to do next? I cudgelled my tired brain to remember. Ah, yes. ‘Use the first shelter you find out of the firing zone.’ Where would they go? Poor devils, they looked battered and soaked enough. Should I have tried to make sure they had somewhere definite to rest? No, there was nothing I could have done to find a place anywhere. It was up to their commander—if they still had a commander—to make his own arrangements.

  And as I stood in the shelter of our now heavily sagging tarpaulin watching, the commander, whoever he was, did indeed use his initiative. I heard a distant rain-muted shout and then saw the men wearily heave themselves over the wall and make their way across the next gently rising field. A minute or two later vigorous moos of protest came from the cow-shelter in the far field: a take-over had been made. And the next time I had a moment to look about me I saw the whole group sitting on the rails of the shelter with their boots off and their oddly lily-white feet clearly visible in the rainy gloom right across two fields. Soon the smoke from a cooking-fire went drifting up towards the low grey sky. For some men at least, I thought, the pressure is off for a little. For their sakes I wished the whole business might be over and done before, looking down at a list, I had to select a number and send them back to face the bullets again.

  Yet in the paper battle I was helping to conduct, the struggle taking place between thick pencil marks on the heavy dampened sheets of our maps, before long it began to look very much as if I would indeed have to consult my lists, select various numbers and wait for the messages that would indicate that various groups having rested a few hours had gone back to the front again. Because, as the first hours of darkness went by, more and more it looked as if a position of stalemate had been arrived at. We had done better during the day than we had thought we might, and certainly we had gained an enormous advantage in having got as close as we had done to the heart of Mylchraine’s shrunken territory by penetrating into the northern suburbs of Lesneven, now marked for us at the water-tower by the sullen glow of burning buildings. But, having gained this advantage, reserves which Mylchraine had thrown in were now holding up our every effort to advance further.

  The orders kept going out from Keig, the flat words that were sending men to their deaths. ‘Push forward,’ ‘You must get beyond such-and-such a point,’ ‘Send out strong patrols’ and the replies kept coming in ‘Attack failed,’ ‘All but two men wounded,’ ‘Ground ahead under heavy machine-gun fire.’

  From the cow-shelter in the next field, indicated in the rainy dark by the small glint of the men’s bivouac fire, there came in snatches the sound of a mouth-organ playing a song, whiny and thin but cheerful. That cheerfulness was bound soon, I feared, to be abruptly cut off with the receipt of an order I myself might give sending them back into the battle.

  I had come to feel in my dog-tired state, that those distant yet close men were somehow key figures. I did not want them to go back over there to the fighting in that dark glow of burning buildings punctuated by the occasional sharp flashes of gun-fire and the following rumbles of heavy sound. I did not want those few human beings who mysteriously linked me to the battle to have to die. I longed to ask Keig what hope he thought they had. And I knew I must not. To nag at him now with irrelevant worries would be selfish beyond words: he had his solitary burden to bear, heavier far than any of ours.

  So the second night wore on, much like the first in its externals. The messages came in about as frequently as they had come in the night before. The orders went out. I handed Keig new maps from time to time as I had done twenty-four hours earlier. I made notes, kept referring to my watch, went over to Francis Crowe and the telephone-men—they at least had been relieved—mechanically ate every now and again a somewhat stale sandwich and swallowed at intervals some scarcely warm tea. But the excitement had gone out of the messages we received, the zest of urgency from the orders we sent out. A slogging grimness extended over everything, as pervasive as the still incessantly dripping rain.

  At 3.34 a.m.—I noted the time as carefully, as mechanically as all the other times I had noted—a message came in which did send a tremor through us, every one. Francis pushed himself up from his padded groundsheet on the trampled muddy earth and came over to deliver it personally instead of calling it across as he had been doing with other messages for hours past.

  He stooped closely down to Keig as if he was anxious for what he had to say not to be heard by anyone other than Keig himself. But I was too near them to miss a word.

  ‘From Mr Corrowane, Mr Keig, with the battery at Lesneven South. No further ammunition. Over and out.’

  Little tubby Francis’s face, with its stubble of pale hair, was stretched and strained. He knew as well as Keig that it was no supply failure that had deprived that battery of its ammunition. If it had none it was because there was none to supply it with. And if there was none for this battery, quite soon there would be none for any of the others.

  Keig turned to me.

  ‘Get a message to all the batteries except Lesneven North,’ he said. ‘Stop shooting. Send any unused shells back to the Central Dump. Tell Central to send to Lesneven North and nowhere else.’

  ‘Right.’

  I pushed myself off my uncomfortable ammunition-box seat and went over to the field-telephones to pass on the orders. From the distant front in the darkness I could see the quick flashes of the howitzers on Mylchraine’s side. Their rain-dampened crumping notes followed a few instants later. No shortage of ammunition there.

  And before long the advantage Mylchraine had acquired began to tell. The messages that came in started complaining of the impossibility of advancing, or even of holding ground already gained, without artillery support. And there was nothing by way of reassurance we could send in reply.

  Just at dawn we got a sharper warning than any before of the grimness of the situation.

  We were all at our various tasks. I had noted that daylight had almost fully come but I had decided that the storm-lanterns could be left burning for a little while yet. To have had to peer at things in the heavy rain-filled light would have been just one more imposition on our already ground-down existence. I knew that I had had a steadily thudding headache for an hour or more, and I had no doubt that the others were suffering in similar ways.

  Then, quite suddenly, a figure swung round one of the tower walls and presented itself in our midst. Only then did I recall that I had heard a sentry challenging and, stupid with tiredness, had thrust the intrusion out of my mind the moment I had realized what it was.

  The man who had so abruptly come in on us seemed familiar. I got up and, blinking my tired eyes, looked at him more closely.

  ‘Cannell,’ I said.

  It was the young mountain shepherd who years before had taken sides briefly with Jack Ascough in the short mutiny against Keig’s leadership that had followed the fiasco of our raid on Colonel Aleyn’s house in our first hours on the island. But he looked like a young man no more, though he could scarcely have been much over twenty-two. I remembered he was a full-blown commander now, with as many as a hundred men under him. That responsibility can have been no light task. He stood in front of us with the weight of prolonged fatigue stamping his face into haggardness. His beard, I saw, was matted with mud, and what looked like blood as well.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  Slowly he raised his right arm and made with it a vague gesture towards the distant front. It looked as if even making such a slight movement was more than he could force himself to do.

  I remembered that I had a mug half full of tea, by now no doubt quite cold. I looked round for it, spotted it, stooped and picked it up. And then, sitting the Iad down on my ammunition-box, I held the mug to his lips. He took a swallow and seemed grateful. I held the mug up again.

  ‘No.’

  With an almost directionless lunge from his shoulder he sent the mug tumbling out of my hand.

  ‘No,’ he repeated. ‘Not.’

  There was an agoniz
ingly long pause. I realized that everybody under the tarpaulin was looking at us now.

  ‘Not when they—they are still there,’ young Cannell managed to bring out.

  Suddenly I was aware that Keig was at my side. His broad-shouldered frame towered over the hunched shepherd.

  ‘What’s that you’re saying?’ he barked out. ‘You’re telling us you won’t take that tea because there are men still fighting out there?’

  Cannell looked up. I saw that his eyes were blazing, deep sunk in their sockets.

  ‘No,’ he shouted. ‘No. They must come back now. It’s gone on too long.’

  ‘Cannell,’ Keig answered. ‘It’s gone on too long when I say it has.’

  Cannell swayed to his feet.

  ‘You murderer. You bloody murderer. Get up there yourself. Feel what it’s like. I came back to tell you myself: my men can’t go on with it any longer. I’m going back to them now. And I’m taking the order to pull out. It’s at an end. At an end, do you hear me?’

  ‘Quine,’ Keig said, jerking round to me. ‘Take him away and get him tied up where he can do no harm. Then find me someone to put in charge of his men.’

  I took hold of Cannell’s arm. But there was no need for the tough measures I would have had little heart to take. As my fingers closed round his elbow his whole body suddenly sagged and he fell at my feet.

  I shook my head to clear it and called to the sentry down in the sunken lane behind us. A moment or two later he thrust his head round the side wall, looking anxious in case he had done wrong by letting Cannell come up to us. I told him to carry the Iad off and see that he got attention. Then I fumbled through my lists to find someone we could signal to take charge of Cannell’s men.

  I found a name at last and submitted it to Keig.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I know him, he’ll do.’

  I was about to go away and see that the message was sent off when Keig laid a hand on my arm.

  I turned back.

  ‘He was right, you know,’ Keig said. ‘His men ought not to be made to go on with this any more.’

  So this was going to be it, I thought. A quiet ending.

  5

  Keig looked up at me, his deep eyes glowing more intensely than I had ever before seen them.

  ‘Yet in spite of it all the fighting’s got to go on,’ he said. ‘The men out there have to go past the time they ought to be let stop. They have to be made to go on. I have to make them.’

  For a moment his eyes held mine and I felt that he had the power to do just what he had spoken of: to radiate energy, it almost seemed, all the way over to those battling, frightened, rain-soaked, wounded, sleepless men caught up in the turmoil round Mylchraine’s ring of iron.

  ‘Now go and send that name off,’ Keig added abruptly. ‘And come back to me as soon as you have.’

  I went in a daze of admiration for him, with at that moment not the slightest inward reservations about what such personal power could do, and sent the name we had agreed on off to that distant point in the fighting zone where Cannell’s leaderless men waited his return.

  And when I went back to Keig he had ready in his mind a whole series of new orders, the actual and visible means of imposing his will on that far-off struggle. If sheer strength of mind can win battles, I thought—and I believed at that moment it could—then Keig can win this battle.

  And it was in a reply to that new batch of orders that the first sign of the breakthrough came. A simple message, ‘Have occupied Old Watch-point.’ But the Old Watch-point, in Lesneven, that picturesque semi-ruin, was, as we well knew, perched on the highest piece of ground in the whole northern part of the city. If we really held it, and could continue to hold it for a few hours, it should give us the capital.

  Orders flowed now from Keig like a gush of spring water breaking from the ground. He moved men in to support the newly gained position, relentlessly he withdrew other forces to back the vital thrust, and he sent glowing words of encouragement to the men at the key point itself.

  And just an hour before dusk, when the messages back began reporting new signs of success, he suddenly lurched to his feet.

  ‘Go and get the car started,’ he said to me. ‘I’m going to see it for myself.’

  I ran, I positively ran, down to the car. I had a hell of a time getting the engine to turn over—the plugs must have got thoroughly wet in all those hours exposed to the pouring rain and I had to take them out and wipe them in the end—but I was not in the least put out. I knew now that triumph was going to be ours. If Keig could leave his central command post then he must be sure of it. And I shared that sureness to the full.

  We drove gloriously through the sodden countryside as the light began to fail. We came to a screeching halt in an area where thirty-six hours earlier the Keepers had lounged in comfort. We hurried forward at a half-run on and on till we came to the outer edges of Lesneven itself. And finally we were in time, just, to witness that extraordinary moment when the resistance in front of our men suddenly simply melted away and they were able to advance in a joyous, laughing, helter-skelter charge across ground disputed in blood not a few minutes before.

  That night we spent in the shell-scarred offices of the Oceana Messenger.

  Part Six

  1

  But Mylchraine got away.

  What had happened soon became plain. The moment that the Keepers’ resistance had collapsed in front of us—that moment which Keig and I had actually witnessed, crouching at one instant beside the wild-eyed commander of the men who had captured the Old Watch-point with bullets whining over us in the gloom of the rainy day’s end, and the next realizing that no more shots were being fired ahead of us and listening to a sound which could only be that of running feet fading into the distance—that moment had been the one at which Mylchraine had set out from the town quay for the Kernel in a launch crammed with his personal bodyguard, and someone left behind had realized that their leader had deserted them and had passed the word for everyone remaining to save themselves.

  Keig did everything he could. All next day while in the streets our men, able for the first time in months to walk upright without fear of coming under fire, wandered joyfully about, he busied himself with dark and settled purpose in finding out every single thing possible about his flown-bird arch-enemy. And I, of course, was required to accompany him on this quest, to take notes, pick up the pieces, smooth the way.

  Only once did he break off from his relentless inquiries about what arms had gone over to the Kernel and the number of men and the nature of their equipment. And this was to order the burning of the town’s principal whiskey warehouse, the one that Mylchraine himself had purchased as one of the first steps in his climb to absolute power.

  It was an awesome sight indeed when the flames eventually took full hold. They brought to nothingness the other fires the town had suffered during the fighting. Where those had been ordinary affairs with the flames seldom more than half as high again as the buildings they sprang from, this was quite extraordinary, feeding as it was on pure spirit. The flames, brilliant and clear, leapt up in a single high tongue to the whole height again of the big warehouse and higher. Casks exploded inside with the sharp reverberation of firing guns and at each explosion new jets of pure flame spurted high to add to the substance of the central pyramid. The dazzling white light lit the whole town, it seemed, in a glare of unearthly purity.

  Yet, returning to our headquarters in the Messenger building, my old anxiety over Keig was quick to bare its teeth momentarily once more. Wasn’t this a pretty high-handed act of his when you came to look at it? Of course the people of the island had been corrupted by generous supplies of artificially cheapened whiskey. We had proved it. But all the same the actual spirit flaring up so dramatically in front of our eyes now must belong to someone. It was some individual’s property, perhaps ultimately Mylchraine’s but yet bought with money from, no doubt, all sorts of people’s pockets. And here was Keig with a flick of his f
ingers ordering it to be sent up in flames. Just because he himself hated it, and probably hated it all the more because of the accidental factor of his own head being too weak to tolerate the stuff, he had commanded it to be destroyed. Just what had been his exact motives in giving the order for this startling blaze to be lit?

  It was while we were busy in the editor’s office beginning to co-ordinate our findings about Mylchraine’s resources on the Kernel—with that varying, bright, eerie light from the blazing warehouse still illuminating my scribbled notes—that the sentry on the stairs called up to us.

  ‘Mr Keig.’

  ‘Yes?’ I answered for him.

  ‘Mr Cormode is here.’

  I glanced at Keig questioningly.

  He thought for an instant.

  ‘We’ll give him a few minutes,’ he said.

  I called to the guard to show Cormode up.

  He came striding in, still wearing one of his dark out-of-place pin-striped suits—perhaps it was his only one—and went straight up to where Keig sat behind the editor’s desk with his hand out-thrust and pale face glowing.

  ‘We’ve done it,’ he said. ‘Magnificent. I give you the fullest credit.’

  Keig looked at that extended hand for a moment and only then took it and gave it the briefest of shakes.

  ‘We haven’t done it all the same,’ he said.

  Cormode was quick. A glint of sharp apprehension appeared in his eyes.

  ‘You mean Mr Mylchraine?’ he said. ‘It’s certainly a pity he managed to get out ahead of you. But I don’t think you can in the least blame yourself. And we’ll flush him out easily enough.’

  ‘How?’

  Just that.

  Cormode blinked.

  ‘My dear fellow,’ he replied, ‘naturally I leave the details to you. You’re the one who has shown military genius, real military genius. But I wouldn’t have thought that Mr Mylchraine could present any very great difficulties.’