The old couple were the last out of the Land Rover. They stood to one side for a few moments, talking quietly to each other, then walked slowly towards the memorial. There was only a stiff breeze blowing by Falklands standards, but she clung to his arm as if she was fighting her way against a gale.
They stopped three quarters of the way along the wall. They stared at one of the names of the Welsh Guards for several minutes and I saw the woman reach out and touch the letters cut into the cold stone.
She turned and saw me watching them, and I felt like an intruder. She held out a camera. ‘Would you take a picture for us, please?’ she said. ‘It’s for our son, his broth—’ Her voice cracked.
I took it from her and they stood to either side of the column of names. The old man was at parade-ground attention, staring straight past me, out towards the sea. His wife stood in profile, her eyes brimming with tears, still fixed on her dead son’s name.
We got back into the Land Rover in silence. Jack drove us down Ross Road, through the town and out along the peninsula at the easternmost tip of the mainland. Drawn up around the shores of the inner and outer harbours or languishing in the shallows were the mouldering hulks of another score of ancient ships.
‘Stanley was one of the busiest ship repair yards in the world at one time,’ Jack said. ‘Every vessel that took a battering rounding Cape Horn – and there were plenty of them – would put into Stanley for repairs. If the damage was more than the owners could afford, or more than the value of the ship, it would be abandoned here, either scuttled, dragged up onto the beach or simply left to rot at anchor. One or two of them have been rescued since then, like Brunel’s ship, the Great Britain, which was towed back to the UK and restored, but most of them are still here.
‘Falklanders don’t like to see such waste, though. The Falklands Islands Company put a tin roof on one hulk, the Egeria, and has been using it as a store for over a hundred years. The SAS used another one in the middle of the harbour as an observation post during the war. A patrol stayed on it for nearly two months, right under the Argentinians’ noses.’
He turned in through the gates of the old Stanley airfield, where a Bristow’s helicopter was waiting. We clambered aboard and flew due west, low over the mountainous central ridge, while Jack kept up a running commentary. We passed over each of the famous battle sites – Wireless Ridge, Mount Longdon, Tumbledown, Mount Kent, Two Sisters, Mount Challenger – and the pilot flew even lower, circling the peaks as Jack related a brief outline of the battle.
‘I’m telling the story of the war back to front,’ he said, ‘because the British Task Force marched on Stanley from west to east, but from previous experience on these tours, I’m expecting that most of you will be flying back without me, while I lead a party of one or two up Black Mountain.’
We flew down to San Carlos and landed to visit the cemetery and the memorial cairn on the beach. Then we flew back over the Sussex Mountains towards Darwin and Goose Green, retracing the route I had walked a few days before.
The helicopter landed again near Burnside House at the neck of the isthmus. Jack led us forward on foot through the battlefield, stopping repeatedly to talk us through the battle, stage by stage.
Only the old couple and I stayed with him every step of the way. The biting wind, the cold and damp, soon cooled the enthusiasm of the others. They huddled in whatever shelter they could find – the lea of a tumbledown building, a sheep pen or a bank of gorse – and emerged with increasing reluctance after each halt.
Eventually we reached Goose Green, a settlement and a number of huge shearing sheds, clustered around a jetty jutting out into the head of Choiseul Sound. On the other side of the isthmus, the shorter, narrower Grantham Sound curled away north, its narrow opening into Falkland Sound hidden by a shoulder of land.
‘This is the objective we were fighting to reach,’ Jack said. ‘Any textbook of military strategy will tell you that five hundred men advancing across open ground to attack an equally strong force of well-equipped troops in prepared defensive positions is a recipe for disaster. Only the finest assault troops – and in my biased opinion, the Paras are the finest in the world – could have succeeded in such an attack. A lot of men died – on both sides. Many of them are buried here.’
The two graveyards stood in the open, away from the settlement. They were separated from each other by a strip of grass, a no man’s land between the opposing forces. Both were surrounded by white picket fences and laid out in geometric lines, with paths of white gravel separating the neat rows of graves.
A large white cross dominated the Argentine cemetery. In its shadow stood scores of smaller crosses. Some bore names, others were simply inscribed, ‘An Argentine Soldier’. Fading, wind-battered bunches of carnations and chrysanthemums lay on the graves. Many of the crosses – even the unmarked ones – were hung with rosaries and family photographs, as if, unable to bear not knowing where their sons lay buried, grieving parents had simply adopted one of the unknown soldiers as their own.
Fewer crosses surrounded the memorial to the dead of the Parachute Regiment, a cairn of rough quartz boulders with an inset brass plaque. ‘Don’t be fooled by the number of graves,’ Jack said. ‘There’s another Para cemetery on Black Mountain, but all the next of kin were also given the option of repatriating the bodies of their loved ones. Most people wanted them back in the UK, but a few chose to bury them here.’
He pointed to another monument a few yards away. It was a more traditional memorial, a stone obelisk on a heavy plinth, but at its side a grave was roughly marked with more small white quartz stones. It stood close to the water’s edge, at the foot of a long, low hill.
Jack pointed up the hill. ‘The officer buried here led a frontal assault over open ground against an Argentine machine-gun position on the top of that hill. It was an act of enormous bravery, even self-sacrifice, for which he paid with his life.’
The American cleared his throat. ‘I read that it was also unnecessary.’
Jack’s face flushed and I started forward, fearing for a moment that he might hit the man, but when he spoke, his voice was even, though his eyes never left the American’s face. ‘Then you’ll probably also have read that the whole attack on Darwin and Goose Green was unnecessary, a sideshow to the advance on Stanley, undertaken only because of the political need in the UK for a victory to distract attention from the ships and men being lost in San Carlos Water.
‘Those opinions may be correct, but soldiers in combat do not have the benefit of hindsight, nor the luxury of questioning their orders. We are told to attack an enemy position or take a piece of ground, and we do so. Some men freeze under enemy fire, others find reserves of courage or are driven, for whatever reason, to acts that may afterwards be called either rash or heroic. Good soldiers assess the risks before each action, and take steps to eliminate as many as possible, but whatever the risks, the bottom line is that when the man says “Go,” you go.
‘There’s not much profit in analysing what went on afterwards, except to learn from the mistakes made. Goose Green may have been a sideshow, but taking it had a huge impact on Task Force morale and a correspondingly damaging effect on the Argentinians.’ He paused and fixed the American with an even more unblinking stare. ‘And whether the officer was right or wrong to make that frontal attack no longer matters. He gave his life. I’m not about to start chipping away at a dead man’s reputation to make debating points.’
He took a deep breath. ‘Now, that’s the end of the tour of Goose Green.’ He spoke into a radio and almost immediately I saw the helicopter, still waiting near Burnside House, begin to rise into the air.
Jack turned back to us. ‘As I said at the start of the tour, the last stage up Black Mountain is hard walking over rough ground. You’ll get something of the feeling of what it was like for the ground troops advancing over it, but it is tough going and I recommend it only for those who are in good physical condition.’
The old couple deba
ted between themselves before reluctantly shaking their heads, the others could barely conceal their relief as there was a clatter of rotors in the sky and the red and white helicopter landed in a whirlwind of dust and dirt. They were climbing inside almost before the rotors had stopped turning, eager for the return flight to Stanley for china penguins and hot coffee. The American hung back and tried to press a £20 note into Jack’s hand. ‘I appreciate your time; hope I didn’t annoy you with my questions. I’m a former soldier myself, I served in Korea.’
Jack shook his head. ‘No offence taken – or given – I hope, but I’ve already been paid. There’s a British Legion collection box by the jetty in Stanley. It’ll do a lot more good there.’
The American hesitated, then shook Jack’s hand and climbed into the helicopter.
The old couple were the last to board. I caught the woman’s eye. ‘Has it helped?’
She gave a sad smile. ‘A little. Not as much as I’d hoped.’
Jack leaned into the cab of the helicopter, shouting to make himself heard above the din of the rotors, then stepped clear, crouching as he moved away. He raised a hand as the engine note rose, the rotors blurred and it lifted clear of the ground. It passed overhead and thundered away over the plain, the noise fading until there was only the keening of the wind.
The two of us began to stride away from Goose Green. The ground rose slowly at first, and looking ahead I could see the dark peak above us, but as we neared the edge of the plain, banks of cloud rolled in from the west, hiding the summit from view.
The lower slopes were thickly clad with fern and diddle-dee. It looked like a cross between the heather and bilberry that clothed the hills back home, and proved even harder to walk through. It was waist deep in places and the tough, twisted roots and branches tugged at my ankles.
I stumbled my way on up the hillside. On the higher slopes the diddle-dee gave way to vast, cloying peat bogs that sucked at my boots. The wind was keener here and moisture filled the air, a slow but insistent drizzle that soaked us to the skin. Jack was a good dozen years older than me, but he set a relentless pace, his long rhythmic stride eating up the ground. I kept pace with him, but my panting punctuated the conversation.
‘What kept you in the Falklands, Jack? You’re not a native – I mean a Falklander – are you?’
‘No. I went home at the end of the war, served another seven years and then bought myself out. I mooched around Civvy Street for a while doing security work mainly, but something about this place kept pulling me back. I came back on the tenth anniversary of the landings, intending just to stay a few weeks, but then I kept sticking around a while longer. I got a job for a few months, labouring on the facilities site for the oil exploration companies, and rented a house in Stanley.
‘I found I liked the people, and the place itself gets under your skin after a while. In the end I re-enlisted and volunteered for permanent duty here.’ He gave a rueful smile. ‘One of the very few. There wasn’t much for me in the UK any more. I’m divorced, my children are both grown up and live abroad, and after so many years soldiering, I didn’t have too many friends in the UK.’ He glanced behind him towards the cemetery at Goose Green. ‘Partly because I left a lot of them here.’
We walked in silence for a few minutes. ‘Anyway, it’s been six years now since I came back. I live in Stanley and I’ve remarried, to a Falklander.’ He shot a sidelong glance at me. ‘But we’re not here to talk about me, are we, son?’
‘Were you with him? Did you – did you see him die?’
He gave a slow nod. ‘I’ll show you the place.’
‘Can you talk me through the battle? I know a little, but there are so many gaps, so many questions I can’t answer.’
He paused and turned to look at me, scrutinising my face. ‘It’s not something I often do. Those who were there don’t need to be reminded of it; many of them prefer to forget. Those who weren’t there haven’t earned the right to question what went on.’ He fixed me with a stare, his eyes almost black in the shadow of the hood of his combat jacket. ‘But I’ll tell you what I can.’
It was a curiously enigmatic answer, but he was already turning away, heading up the hillside once more. A hundred yards above us, a ridgeline interrupted the slope, just below the lowering cloud ceiling.
As we clambered over it, we found ourselves on a narrow plateau. Erosion had stripped away much of the peat, leaving a bare rockscape of sand and gravel, punctuated by quartz boulders that had tumbled down the screes from the upper slopes.
A stream meandered across the plateau and the brown water dropped over the edge of the cliff in a waterfall that bounced from rock to rock before losing itself among the peat and diddle-dee on the lower slopes. The wind caught some of the water as it fell and whipped it upwards again in a fine spray, mingling with the pall of cloud.
Jack pointed towards the stream. ‘That was the start line. We crossed it an hour after last light.’
He took a bearing with his compass and then we splashed through the stream and began to climb into the mist, the hillside stretching away ahead of us.
‘The night was eerily quiet,’ he said. ‘The wind that had blown every moment since we landed had died away. The silence was total and the cold intense; I could see my breath fogging in the night air. We’d waded a river to reach the start line. My boots were soaked and my feet numb with cold.’
He walked more slowly now. His voice was low but urgent, and I could sense the intensity of emotion behind his words. As he talked, I peered into the mist ahead of us. There was nothing for my eyes to focus on and I began to have the uneasy feeling that dark figures were moving just beyond the limit of my vision.
The quiet, insistent voice continued, and I began to see that long-ago night through his eyes. I felt the cold, the tension that hurried every breath, and the fear that was always lurking just beyond the threshold of consciousness. I shared his certain knowledge that many of the men advancing up the hillside alongside him would not live to see another dawn.
I could see the heavy-laden platoon making their slow, silent way up the hillside, slipping from cover to cover, some watching as the others moved, then advancing as the others in turn gave them cover. They struggled upwards, stumbling over clumps of tussac grass, and slipping and sliding as they searched for purchase in the glutinous peat.
Jack’s eyes remained fixed on their first objective, an outcrop of rock glowing a faint grey in the darkness. They were a hundred yards short of it when a corporal stood on a mine. There was a single thunderous concussion and Jack threw himself flat. Shrapnel shrieked overhead and then there was a patter like rain as smaller, softer fragments fell to earth around him.
There was a pause, a stunned silence, and then the darkness erupted into an inferno of noise and light. Flares burst overhead, bathing the hillside with fierce white light. Soaring lines of tracer – red, white and yellow liquid fire – sliced across the hillside.
There was the crash and whistle of incoming artillery shells and the dull, echoing thud of mortars. They worried him less than the machine-gun fire. The roar of the detonating shells was terrifying but they buried themselves deep in the soft ground, minimising the spread of shrapnel. The rattle of machine-gun fire was far more deadly. A group of soldiers advancing to his left were caught exposed in open ground and cut apart. The remainder regrouped and advanced again, only to be cut down in their turn.
The plans evolved in the calm of the Field Headquarters all but disintegrated in the bedlam of the battlefield. The need to achieve tactical advantages and strategic objectives faded before the individual struggle to fight and to survive. The men moved on, driven only by some primal impulse to climb higher, silence the guns, kill or be killed.
As he wormed his way forwards, up the hillside, Jack had no sense of time passing. There was just an endless barrage of noise and waves of fear and panic that he struggled to keep at bay.
Almost without realising it, he reached the relative safety of th
e rocks and lay flat behind a boulder, his chest heaving and a roaring in his ears. He looked back down the hillside and urged on the stragglers. One by one, the surviving members of the platoon, some wounded, all wide-eyed with fear, followed him into the shelter of the rocks, a boulder field, a sterile, alien landscape of rock and grit. It was impossible to move across it at more than snail’s pace.
They paused and regrouped, then began to move forward under relentless enemy fire, struggling over the rocks and boulders. They cleared the boulders one by one as gunfire whined and ricocheted around them. Rock fragments splintered and flew and he felt blood trickling down his face.
They paused again, one hundred yards below the ridge. An overhang of peat, roughly halfway to the top, offered some cover, otherwise the slope above and below it was studded only with a few small rocks.
He fought down his own fear once more, then looked at the faces around him, barely recognisable behind the smears of camouflage paint and the splinter cuts. There were perhaps a dozen of them huddled in the shelter of the outcrop, including a young lieutenant. He knew there were other groups to either flank, but they were as good as alone; their only hope lay in their own actions, not those of others.
The lieutenant tried to rally them, his voice cracking with tension. ‘We have to do this,’ he said. ‘Fire and movement. Either we get those machine guns or we’ll all be wiped out.’
As Jack described him, I could see my brother, as clearly as if he had just walked out of the mist in front of me. The stress and fear had etched furrows into his brow but his gaze was steady, his deep blue eyes fixed on the hilltop above him.
He paused, staring at each man in turn. No amount of training could ever prove who could be counted on when under hostile fire for the first time. The biggest and hardest men might literally piss themselves with fright, while others grew in stature, finding a calm in the eye of the storm.
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