Capricorn and Cancer

by Geoffrey Household

  Tarmer and Avory raced back from the disposal of Mussolini to find Robins and the Marine still testing the rope. Resistance was soft and unreliable. The grapnel seemed to be caught in a weak loop of wire which it was pulling out along the top of the fence; it felt as if it could not be trusted to support bodies climbing furiously up the rope against time.

  It stuck firmly on something hard, evidently the top of a post. But a last jerk was indecisive, though nothing appeared to break or yield. Tarmer and Avory added their weight to the rope and had to take a step backwards as it gave. In the darkness it was impossible to see what was happening; there was nothing for it but to keep on pulling in a desperate attempt to recover the grapnel and try again. Another yard or two of rope came in, and its angle was not so steep. The sensation was baffling. They felt as if they were the winning team in an obstinate tug-of-war. Then thirty yards of that formidable outer perimeter fence fell over into the ditch, forming an impenetrable trampoline suspended from the leaning posts at each end of the wreckage.

  There was another terrifying moment of silence, which ended in the almost musical twanging and tearing of wire as the grapnel was worked loose by brute force and recovered.

  The guards on No. 2 Tower turned their attention from the bleating of Beatrice and the monk, and challenged. They then opened fire with rifles on the ditch and the collapsed fence. Since their eyes were still unused to the blank darkness, they found it hard to judge the correct angle of depression. Some of the shots strayed across the protruding angle of the camp and sang past the ears of the defenders of No. 3 Tower.

  ‘I’ve never understood 3 Tower,’ Avory said.

  ‘They swore afterwards that they thought parachutists were trying to rescue us. But I know what happened. They had a light machine-gun which they’d never had a chance to use, and they weren’t going to be left out of whatever excitement there was.’

  3 Tower put down a curtain of fire on the ditch and at least hit the glacis. Ricochets from that smooth stone slope howled across the camp—some of them on a trajectory low enough to tear splinters off the wooden roof of No. 2 Tower.

  On the still peaceful western side of the camp Mussolini behaved as if he had been in on the plan since the beginning. Loyal and single-minded, he charged down to the quietly grazing Tecla and tried to console her loneliness. Tecla at any time was a dignified goat, her expression always making it clear that Mussolini’s were unwelcome attentions to which it was her duty to submit; so now, approached by an importunate lover at, for goats, an unreasonable hour, she fled for her pen under the Bridge Tower.

  The Ditch Patrol, which had been idling its way from No. 4 to the Bridge Tower, clearly decided that the eastern side of the camp was well covered by fire from Nos. 2 and 3, and was also extremely unhealthy. It therefore cautiously continued its round until alerted by the bouncings of Mussolini and his shoe. It didn’t stop to investigate at all. It took such cover as there was and plastered the ditch with automatic fire. Most of it was high. The guards on the Bridge Tower, nervously searching the impenetrable darkness for the unknown enemy which had attacked Nos. 2 and 3 Towers, briskly engaged the Ditch Patrol.

  By now Mussolini was in safety with Tecla under the bridge. But Tecla must have made the most of the difficulties and protested that the pen was not nearly large enough for Mussolini too. Her excuse was acceptable. He was always a free and easy goat who liked plenty of space and publicity. He therefore trotted off beyond the bridge on the scent of Lucia. She had half-heartedly followed her master, the monk, and was now browsing close to No. 1 Tower.

  No. 1, hitherto deprived of an opportunity for heroics, at once opened fire on the mysterious noises. Since the ditch ran straight between No. 1 and the Bridge Tower, without any protruding angle, the gentle slope of the glacis was murderous, and the stuff came off with the accuracy of tennis balls. The terrified Lucia joined Tecla under the bridge. The guards up in the Bridge Tower, attacked from both sides and hearing beneath them the sinister rattlings and scrapings of the final bloody assault, surrendered to Mussolini.

  ‘I suppose it was funny,’ Avory said.

  ‘It was damned dangerous. Nobody felt like laughing till Fantle appeared.’

  Dodging from cover to cover the Senior British Officer had joined the prostrate and fascinated group just as the cross-bows had been dismantled and concealed. He demanded a situation report from his adjutant. Tarmer replied that the goats had got out, that the guards had mistaken them for escaping prisoners and that in the general confusion part of the fence between Nos. 2 and 3 Towers had fallen into the ditch.

  ‘Then what the hell are you still doing here?’

  ‘Personally, sir,’ Avory had said, ‘I am waiting for the lights to go on so that I can finish my book.’

  Hardly fair, perhaps. But the disappointment was bitter. As for a mass break-out in the confusion, it couldn’t be launched into an unseen tangle of wire through which nothing but artillery could blast a path.

  The firing and the distracted cries of Mamma mia! died away. Searchlights and the head lamps of trucks illumined the ditch, revealing not a single corpse, not even of a goat. All was painfully quiet except between Nos. 1 and 2 Towers where the Ditch Patrol, having clothed Fra Giuseppe in a blanket, was fearlessly meeting the challenge of Beatrice.

  When the break in the power line had been repaired, Colonel Colonna at the head of a full company marched into the camp and paraded his innocent charges. To his astonishment not one was missing.

  It was then that resentment should have been shown, that the prisoners should have jeered at their captors and established such a moral ascendancy that a mobile battalion would have to be rushed in to control them. But only four knew what had really happened. The rest were gasping between laughter and bewilderment, and inclined to hope that a revolution had broken out in Italy.

  As soon as the parade had been dismissed and only the senior officers remained, the Commandant observed in a tone of mild distaste rather than rebuke:

  ‘I am informed that some joke was played upon Muss … upon the he-goat.’

  ‘We all sincerely hope he came to no harm, sir,’ Tarmer answered.

  ‘Thank you. Apart from a sprained tail he is unhurt. May I ask you, gentlemen, to accept the apologies of myself and my command for disturbing your evening?’

  ‘Tell him that it was a disgraceful, cowardly episode,’ Fantle stormed, ‘and that we don’t give a damn for his apologies!’

  Tarmer’s conscience stung him a little as he remembered how he had translated that one. But Colonna was no German commandant bristling with suspicion, fury and punishment. In spite of what he must be feeling, he still cultivated a friendly atmosphere full of human acceptance of the tasteless tricks of young officers and the liability of troops to panic in the dark.

  ‘The Senior British Officer assures you, sir,’ Tarmer had said, putting an extra formality into his voice so that the change of tone would not be too obvious, ‘that between gentlemen of good will all apologies are unnecessary.’

  No, he had not been wrong. Unmilitary, perhaps. But if there were anything whatever to be said in favour of war Colonna represented its spirit better than Fantle. He said as much to Avory.

  ‘Just what that damned journalist meant by the casual climate of Italy!’ Avory replied.

  ‘But it cuts both ways. In any German camp the posts would have been set in concrete with decent efficiency. And then all four of us would have got clear away.’

  5

  Immoral Trade

  THE only murderer I ever knew was a personal friend. Yet I had to admit that his sentence was absolutely just, legal and merited. Even the military police were kind to Valdes. They assured him that it did not hurt at all to be executed by a firing squad. Valdes politely agreed with them—not that he cared about pain. He was as used to that as a retired boxer, and looked a little like one, too.

  He wanted to live as eagerly as the rest of us, but he realized that his death, like any other
military ceremony, had to be performed with dignity. He was a soldier all through. He made one understand the character of that handful of men who conquered the Americas. Yet the luck of war had landed him in a non-combatant unit.

  He was an Andalusian, sturdy, of middle height and with the type of face which the Spaniards call chato—looking as if it had been flattened out by a road roller and come up smiling. It must be common in the Peninsula. I had three other toughs with much the same lack of features.

  Valdes had fought right through the Spanish Civil War and been interned in France at the end of it. In 1940 some of those internees were evacuated before the Germans could grab them, and formed into a Spanish commando. A good idea on paper. What they didn’t know about bloodshed wasn’t worth knowing. And yet their commando was unusable—too fierce, too desperate. They hadn’t the flair of the British for discreet, deadly action.

  When the Spanish commando was disbanded, Valdes, with a few of his mates, was posted to the Pioneer Corps. What an outfit that was! We had docile labourers recruited from Africa or obscure islands in the Indian Ocean, and able-bodied poor of every colour in need of work and regular rations, and always some Q men, as they were called—habitual army criminals who had learned by experience and low cunning to anticipate the psychiatrist’s next move and to get themselves registered as psychopathics. My own company was a mixture of Arabs, Q men and vaguely oriental beachcombers. Corporal Valdes and his section of Spaniards formed a solid island of sanity and hard work.

  In 1944 the company was with Eighth Army in Italy, cleaning up close behind the advance. My main trouble was Italian hospitality. The men were not accustomed to red wine in that quantity. Valdes and his Spaniards, who were, acted off duty as nursemaids in the cafés. The amount of rape and murder those fellows prevented was astonishing. They were proud of the reputation of the British Army—yes, proud of it, even in the Pioneer Corps. For them there was no other army in the war at all. Of course, when they joined up, there wasn’t.

  ‘My captain,’ Valdes said to me one night, ‘we cannot all be in the Guards. But we wish to assure you that we know how to die with decency.’

  They were going out beyond the front line with a Field Company of sappers to fill up craters in a mountain track which was going to be badly needed next day. It was late in the evening when they volunteered for the job, and they were all, I suppose, at the third litre; but there was no telling where the generosity of wine ended and Andalusian pride began.

  Pride. Perhaps murder is never very far from it. There didn’t seem room for either when one morning I sent Valdes and his section down to railhead to collect a consignment of picks and shovels. Nothing but picks and shovels—but to Valdes they were Toledo steel. I had seen him use them under shell fire with such nonchalance that even the Qmen didn’t find an excuse to run back to safety.

  That hardware was important to my Spaniards—so important that when a young French sergeant told them to get to hell out of the way and let him load his truck with warlike stores they ignored him. Unfortunately Valdes, after two years of internment, spoke French. Unfortunately, too, he had that unreasonable Spanish contempt for the neighbour across the northern frontier. At last he told the French sergeant to pipe down and wait his turn.

  The sergeant replied that he was not going to wait for any non-combatant bastards who were not fit to shovel—well, you can imagine the number of uses that an angry and imaginative Frenchman could find for a shovel. Valdes did not lose his temper. He rose with dignity to the occasion and developed his favourite creed: that if there were no shovels the luckier men who had fighting to do would never get near enough to the front line to do it. The Frenchman—so much we had in evidence—remarked that all the British Army ever did was shovelling while their allies did the fighting. Corporal Valdes quietly picked up a rifle belonging to the French detachment, and shot the sergeant dead.

  It was astonishing how correct and soldierly Valdes’s movements then were. The only authority handy was the railway transport officer. While the startled Frenchmen were busy with their sergeant, Valdes marched up to the R.T.O., saluted smartly, gave his name and unit, handed over the rifle and reported the incident. The R.T.O. wiped the sweat off his elderly brow—he had been naturally disconcerted by the approach of a murderer with a loaded rifle—and sent for the military police. The section, still an island of proud discipline, returned to camp.

  There was nothing I could do. If it had been a British soldier Valdes had shot, I think I might have got the court-martial sentence reviewed and had him punished by a long term of imprisonment. But he had had shot an ally, and allies were touchy. It was more essential for the war effort that Valdes should die than that the French should suffer a sense of grievance.

  He admitted as much himself. He did not regret the murder at all; he only regretted that it had been unavoidable. He pointed out that he had paid no attention to personal insults, but that an insult to the British Army was not to be borne. For three years, he said, we had treated him as a friend and a gentleman. The least he could do in return was to protect our honour.

  I was determined that Valdes should not be executed. Somehow I, a mere captain, reached the French G.O.C. I speak reasonable French—that and a bit of Arabic and the remains of several tropical diseases were my qualifications for the Pioneer Corps—and I nearly won him over. I insisted that there was no need to prove Valdes mad; to shoot an unknown and gallant Frenchman he must be mad. The general was exquisitely courteous. He knew that these were mere empty words, but they pleased him. Speaking for himself, he said at last, Valdes could be reprieved; but for the sake of the suffering mothers of France and the damned politicians—he dared to couple the two together with the irony of a man who was absolutely sure of himself—he regretted that he could not interfere. I came to a dead end against French obstinacy.

  I tried the corps psychiatrist—with whom, thanks to the curiosities among my Q men, I was on excellent terms. He told me that Valdes had the only faultlessly healthy human mind he had met in years, and that if hard scientific lying could help him, helped he would be. He did his dishonest best, but the big shots above him refused to play. About ten per cent of my company had deserved a firing squad at some time, and Army H.Q. were tired of finding excuses for their behaviour. They refused to distinguish between Q men and emotionally primitive Spaniards.

  I had no military ambition. I was just a grey-haired captain, only fit enough for the Pioneer Corps. So my plans for saving Valdes were quite uninhibited. I seriously considered every trick one reads of in fiction—down to supplying the firing squad with blanks and bribing them to say nothing. But not a single one of my ideas was practicable.

  Valdes’ section was equally desperate. They took it for granted that I was on their side. They had no more logic than women, and were just as right. Their experience of impossible escapes in the chaos of civil war was to the point, but such plans in a more formal army were unworkable. Private Moreno, who was some sort of relation of Valdes from the days when they had possessed homes and wives, wanted to get inside the jail and substitute himself for the condemned man. He couldn’t very well be shot instead, and a court-martial—always merciful when its collective sense of humour was aroused—was unlikely to give him more than a year.

  I thought about it night after night. I even trained Moreno to imitate Valdes’s voice and accent. But he was a good inch too tall; and, though he did have a similar type of squashed and wrinkled features in the same tint of deep tan, common sense insisted that one could never be mistaken for the other unless they were heavily made up or bandaged, and then only in a crowd of Arabs or Englishmen.

  Valdes was in the jug at Bari. I used to drive down and see him whenever I had a spare moment and could invent a reasonable excuse. On what would have to be my last visit, two days before he was due to be executed, I ran into the corps psychiatrist being let out through the formidable gate as I was being let in.

  ‘Another of your beauties,’ he said
to me.

  ‘Who is it this time?’

  ‘Pidgegood. There’s nothing wrong with him whatever except that he knows as much of our routine as I do. You can have him back when he’s served his sentence.’

  Myself, I knew all along that there was not a trace of maladjustment in Pidgegood; he had merely been born without a sense of shame. But it had taken a long time for over-conscientious psychiatrists to realize that jail was the proper place for him. He was a gipsy—or said he was. He had found in peacetime that wild eyes and dirt and a general air of rural eccentricity always intimidated housewives and farmers, and he trusted that the military were just as easy.

  They were. Pidgegood couldn’t read or write, but he had the cunning of the devil to make up for it. By the time he had been dismissed from his battalion as an incorrigible and cowardly rogue, he knew enough psychiatry to fool any solemn doctor. He put on an act just sufficiently unbalanced to make sure that his crimes would land him in a mental ward rather than a cell, but not enough to get him invalided out of the service. He preferred the army—what little he saw of it—to being drafted into a factory.

  Courts-martial had no effect on him; he always came back to me with a careful letter of advice from the psychiatrists. But my chaps found a use for the man. If there were any enquiries about missiong pigs or chickens and no chance of the company’s innocence being believed, they always put the blame on Pidgegood. He was perfectly willing to accept it, even on the rare occasions when he wasn’t guilty, and was rewarded by privileged idleness.

  I was far from fond of him, but he was a part of my company to which we were all accustomed. So I asked to be escorted to his cell. I went there before my visit to Valdes. It was going to be the last time I should see my corporal, and I knew I should want to be alone afterwards.