by Martin Booth
‘I see it!’
Not him. It. Bob was not looking at a man through his field glasses but at an object that was hiding behind the collapsed end of a balcony where the tiling of the roof had caved in. It was wearing a soft cloth field cap with a matching peak and a brown leather strap. On the front of the cap above the peak was a small yellow star, which looked almost colourless in the dark shadows where its wearer lurked. As Bob watched, it raised a pair of binoculars to its eyes and started to scan the buildings above where their post was situated.
‘It’s a Nip officer. Infantry. He’s spying out the land. Keep still, even in here.’
They all stood quite still as Bob kept his watch up. After some minutes, the ‘it’ disappeared into the depths of its own building. As it went, the ray-skin hilt of a Japanese officer’s sword shone briefly.
‘Stand easy. It’s gone.’
‘Reckon we can guess they’ll move up now.’
‘He’ll have to get back and report, first. They’re not going to march blindly up the street and chance it to luck.’
Sandingham rubbed his hand over his eyes. They ached with the tension of watching. He was certain that if there were a cockroach out there waving its antennae he’d spot it.
‘Keep an eye open, Vale,’ Bob ordered the taller Canadian, adding, ‘Got a little surprise for you all.’
He tugged the cognac bottle clear of his clothing.
‘Jee-zus Chris’!’ exclaimed the tea boy. ‘Milk’s one thin’, but real brandy’s somethin’ else! Where in hell’s name you get tha’?’
‘Ask not how you come thereby, but when you share in the bounties of the battlefield.’
Bob poured a tot into each man’s mug. They drank as if it were the Blessed Sacrament. Vale sipped his without taking his eyes off the street.
‘It’s re-al gen’rous you sharin’ it with us, sir,’ he said as he rested his mug inside a battered crate by the side of his rifle.
‘Another tot each sees it finished,’ said Bob. ‘Let’s have your glasses, gents.’
He refilled their mugs.
‘A toast,’ he suggested.
‘What we got t’ drink to?’ asked Vale.
‘Christmas,’ replied Bob. ‘Christmas 1941.’
They raised their mugs, saying, ‘Christmas 1941’ in a quiet chorus.
‘You know,’ said Sandingham. ‘I had forgotten it was Christmas Eve.’
They all fell silent then, drained their mugs and returned to the business of watching for ‘its’.
Nothing was moving. The Japanese infantry officer did not reappear on the balcony and no cat recrossed the street.
Sandingham let his eyes scan the buildings but his mind was elsewhere. Keeping watch in this way was like driving a car while talking with a passenger – one could change gear, slow down or speed up, judge corners and junctions automatically while at the same time carrying out an involved conversation. The body was alert at its level, the brain engaged all the while on something completely different.
Christmas Eve. He cast his mind back to that same day in 1940, in 1939, 1938, ’37 …
A year ago had seen him in officer-training school following the disaster of Dunkirk. The previous year, the war had been young and he had only been getting round to thinking of offering his services to it. His call-up papers hadn’t come through: the army was large enough to rebuff the German advances. In 1938, he had been at the Great Missenden home of Charles Warrinder and his parents. They had had a twenty-foot-high tree set up in the main hallway of their house and it was decorated with fairy lights, cotton-wool snow and shiny glass baubles. Between the lights, at the outer reaches of the branches, candles in holders shed a soft light upon the Persian carpets and the paper chains hanging from the banisters and the minstrel-gallery rail. Their butler, Golding, was to die in the Blitz, serving with the ARP. That year – 1938 – was the year Sandingham had had his twenty-first birthday party and been thrown into the fountain in his grandfather’s garden: his back had borne mauve bruises for days where he had hit and gone through the ice. The chill he caught had lasted three weeks.
The year before that had been 1937, the year of the sad Christmas. His mother had died at the end of September, in an earlier-than-usual autumn, and three months on he was still missing her more than he was prepared to admit even to himself, even now perhaps.
Now was Christmas 1941: a good moment to take stock of the past, prepare for what was to come. In a week’s time, the new year would open. He would be twenty-five in 1942. If he saw the year out.
The goodwill, the warmth and the love, the joie de vivre that the season implied vanished. He felt nothing for those around him – except Bob. He looked across at the man he loved so deeply: Bob was standing with his hands thrust into his pockets, leaning his stomach on the rim of a wooden counter and looking down Percival Street. As Sandingham watched him, Bob took a hand out and scratched the two-day stubble on his chin. In the silence of their gun position, he could hear Bob’s fingers rasping on his skin.
If, he thought, the two of them were to walk out of the shop now, stand in the middle of Yee Wo Street and shout, ‘All right! We’ve all had enough. Let’s stop now before this thing gets out of hand. Before we all start to regret it,’ what would happen? Would the war stop? Would sanity prevail at last? Would a Japanese signals captain come out from the ruined pharmacy and say, ‘Okay. You Blitish sodjyer woight. We stop now. We go home. You go home. Happy Chlistmas’? Thinking this, the accent in his head more Gilbert and Sullivan Mikado than Tokyo pidgin, he realised he had never heard a Japanese speak in his own language, let alone in English, with the exception of the Jap who broadcast propaganda to them daily from a loudspeaker mounted by the railway station clock tower on Kowloon. And he spoke English without an accent. Or the loudspeaker distorted it too much for the telling.
Sandingham knew that if he did go out there and shout, little would happen or change. His voice would echo briefly. The officer in charge of the Vickers machine-gun section covering the western section of Hennessy Road might ask, ‘What’s that stupid blighter doing, Corporal?’ ‘Shouting out we ought to stop the war, sir.’ ‘Bloody ridiculous! Must’ve gone off his rocker.’ Or else a hail of bullets would converge on him and he would die before the echoes did.
Soon he was going to have to poke the barrel of the utilitarian Sten through the crack in front of him and pull the trigger, emptying the oblong magazine into a man whom he had never heard speak, or sing, or laugh – indeed, whom he had never set eyes on before. And that man would die or live according to his luck. He might be someone skilled at painting portraits, or telling rude jokes, or mending broken toys. He might have a wife, children – a lover, even. His home might be a farmhouse surrounded by paddyfields. He might wake every day of his normal life to hear the quacks of his ducks and the bark of his dog; perhaps the sounds of his wife getting ready for her day’s chores. Or he might get up to the sound of city traffic and go off to repair cars in a garage or count out money from behind a teller’s window.
He would never know. Just moving his index finger a quarter of an inch towards his thumb would cause all that to come to a halt, irreversibly. With one tiny action, like a beckoning, Sandingham could erase for ever the farm, the loved ones, even the sky from one man’s consciousness. Simultaneously he could make that mind itself instantly cease to be.
It seemed such a waste, so totally illogical, so utterly pointless; yet this was what he was supposed to do. On Christmas Eve.
‘Phst!’
The Bren gun clicked from safe to automatic. Mack snuggled the wood of the butt into his shoulder. Without knowing how it came to be there, Sandingham found his Sten in his grip. His right hand was evenly pulling the cocking lever back, the T-shaped butt of his own weapon jabbing into his hip-bone.
‘Back on the verandah! The Nip officer!’ Bob was studying the enemy through his binoculars. ‘Can’t see quite what he’s at … standing up. Out of sight – no, he’s there. Th
e shadow’s deep.’ He fidgetted with the knurled focusing wheel. ‘He’s looking this way. Now up the road. Got his glasses out of the case. Damn! He’s ducked out of sight again.’
Sandingham followed this running commentary through the chink in their defences. He could only see the vague shifting of a darker piece of shade.
The other two Canadians were preparing to fight. One was checking his rifle while the other, Vale, was relieving himself behind the door, in a rear room now roofless and open to the sky. The stench of his urine wafted into their gun post, making Sandingham want to follow suit. When Vale re-entered the shop, Sandingham went out.
He returned, trying not to stumble on the rubble. Any sound they made now would echo alarmingly in the buildings.
The world appeared so silent, almost in awe of itself, as if waiting for something it accepted unequivocally and inevitably. He knew that if he were so much as to crack his knuckles it would make an eruption of terrifying proportions. There was no definable noise except their whisperings.
As Sandingham stepped on to the carpet, Bob was talking quietly again, his voice so low that it had not managed to pass through the doorway as the smell had done. Sandingham had missed a development in the action of the Japanese officer.
‘He’s definitely got someone with him. Can’t make out – yes, it’s an NCO. I can see his red collar patch. And his steel hat. Very fancy knot under his chin … he’s got down now. They both have.’
‘Do we open fire, sir?’
‘No. Let them start it. We have the advantage so far as we’re quiet. I’m sure they don’t know we’re here.’
The next few minutes confirmed this, for the Japanese officer was busy giving instructions in the setting up of a Type 11 machine-gun and was not too careful in keeping himself concealed. Sandingham could see the heavily ribbed barrel that reminded him so much of the Hotchkiss on which the Japanese weapon was mimicked. He thought at first they were positioning the gun in order to cover an advance down Hennessy Road but it became apparent that this was not so, for their arc of fire was too limited. They were preparing for a stand at this point, consolidating a front-line hold on the area, readying for an offensive by their enemies to the west. A machine-gun so placed could mow men down as they came around the corner in the road and it would be difficult to bring a field piece to bear on the verandah.
Sandingham suddenly understood, tossing up the odds for their choice of position, that he was an enemy to them as they were to him. The realisation shook him.
‘What now?’
‘We wait,’ said Bob.
Sandingham looked at his watch: it was ten minutes to four.
No one spoke. The minutes were passing like hours. They just watched the Japanese in the shadows. Keeping cavey on one spot started to give Sandingham the stares. He had to keep shifting his eyes to look at other things, nearer or farther away and, while doing this, he saw it.
‘Behind the tram!’
Bob turned his field glasses on the wrecked vehicle.
‘To the left. Just above that projecting bit of the –’
‘I see him!’ cried Bob.
Mack wriggled his body a few inches to the right bringing the Bren to bear on the left-hand side of the tram.
‘I sure can see th’ bastard, sir,’ he drawled. ‘Jus’ th’ top o’ his head.’
Not long, thought Sandingham. Twenty minutes, maybe. In twenty minutes he would be dead. He looked at his watch again, careful not to let go of the tubular barrel of the Sten gun. It was three minutes past four now, and the light was beginning to fade in the cover of the buildings.
Suddenly a loudhailer sounded from behind the tram, the words bouncing off the sides of the empty buildings.
‘This officah in Cowonel Shoji Regimen’,’ said the voice, with a clipped officiousness. ‘We know you in buiwding. You come ou’, hand up, we no shooting. You no come ou’, we shooting.’
Sandingham said, quietly, ‘Need we hold our fire any longer, Bob? They know we’re here.’
‘Not necessarily, Jay. It may be just a come-on, to winkle us out. They know we’re tired.’ He paused to see if he could spy the loudhailer then added, resignedly, ‘But what the hell. We’ll have a go. It’s only a matter of time. Orders said to fire at will –’
His words were interrupted by an outbreak of rifle fire in the direction of the harbour wall.
‘Right, Mack? Ready everyone? Good luck, and may your god be with you this day.’
Sandingham had never heard Bob say anything like that. So deep, so religious. He looked at him. He was not smiling. It was not a flippancy. Before Bob turned away, however, he caught Sandingham’s eye and grinned, the grin of a boy about to scrump apples, or flick an ink pellet.
‘I and you’ll…’ he said, and left the sentence hanging in air.
Mack had pressed the trigger. The rattle of the Bren was amplified tenfold in the shop. He emptied the twenty-round magazine into the tram in under three seconds. The noise made Sandingham’s ears ring and his head throbbed as if the sound were echoing within it.
Two arms were thrown up into the air behind the tram. Then silence. There was no fire returned, not even from the machine-gun on the verandah.
Judging his aim by looking through the simple sight and along the barrel of the Sten, Sandingham fired at the verandah shadows. He used half a magazine. The flickerings of flame from the mouth of the barrel tickled his retina – the poorly designed flash hider was ineffective in the darkening shop – but he could see plaster and concrete flaking off the stonework. It was as he was assessing the impact of his efforts that the Japanese machine-gun opened up.
‘Down!’
They were all on the floor now, but the Japanese gunner was under the misapprehension that they were on the first-storey level, as he was himself, and he was riddling the rooms above them. Sandingham could hear the spent bullets bouncing around overhead.
Two squat figures ran, bent double, into the cover of the tram. One of the Canadians lifted his .303 through a hole in the barricade and pulled the bolt backwards, forwards and down.
‘One up th’ spout to shove up his ass!’ he muttered.
A single bullet, followed by the crack of its report, slapped into the timber of the butcher’s table. Another followed it, striking off the rubble.
‘They know about us now,’ said Bob with a matter-of-factness that momentarily scared Sandingham.
The .303 banged. He could see its owner’s shoulder shake as it absorbed the recoil.
‘Got him, the sod!’
A Japanese standard issue rifle slipped over the roof of the tram to clatter on to the road. They could hear it quite distinctly.
There was a shattering explosion on the street twenty feet in front of them. The front of their barricade was showered with debris and shards of stone; road surface and concrete spattered through their lookout holes. Black smoke billowed towards them and began to rise in a disintegrating pall.
Bob lifted his Sten and fired two magazines towards the verandah just as the machine-gun was opening up on them once more. They could see the flashes from its barrel: that meant they should be able to see the gunner. And then hit him. A bullet from the second magazine struck the Japanese officer in his chest. They watched as his body spun half round and he toppled sideways, to hang limply over the remains of the verandah wall.
With the officer dead, the Japanese mortar crew, who were hiding in Kai Chiu Road, had no one to spot for them. The next few bombs passed well over their intended target and into the remains of houses in Lockhart Road. It was not long, however, before the crew obtained another observer, and their aim grew increasingly more accurate.
In the meantime, the five behind the barricade kept up a steady fire and no one was injured until an enemy infantryman in the cover behind the tram lobbed a grenade at them. It exploded on the top of the wall and blew in a large slab of loose masonry which caught Mack in the small of his spine as he lay at the Bren.
He scr
eamed once, a short, high-pitched curdle that Sandingham almost did not hear in the general din of gunfire. He looked down, as if by chance: Mack was already dead, his belly forced to the carpet and his arms flexing and tensing with all that was left of his life.
The magazine on the Sten was empty. Sandingham’s finger depressed the trigger still, but nothing was happening. He turned to look at what was left of Mack: the hair, the flesh, the bones … He wondered if, by closing his eyes, he could not only end the war but return Mack to life, as if by shutting out the scene the slab of stonework would lift back to its position, the grenade fold back through the air and return, unprimed, to its thrower and the wrecked tram right itself and fill with passengers.
He thought this, yet he also knew it was impossible. What was done was done. The dark angel was around, had made this be. Just as the chaplain had warned.
‘Dark angel!’ he howled. ‘Oh, God! Fuck the dark angel!’
Bob spun about at Sandingham’s shouting. His face was taut.
‘For Chrissake, Jay!’ He glanced at Mack’s prone body, then pointed with the barrel of his own weapon to what was left of the soldier, at the same instance inserting another magazine. ‘Get him aside and use the bloody Bren. Use it!’
With the assistance of one of the others Sandingham shifted the stone block and together they dragged Mack to the rear of the shop. His body was pliable, fluid as if filled with water. The sickle-shaped magazines for the Bren were empty and he sat on a box and thumbed shells into them. He did not think as he did this, just loaded the curved steel boxes with ammunition and, when they were refilled, carried them the ten feet to the gun and rammed one into the square hole on the top of the breach. Having reloaded, he lay down on the carpeting and put his cheek to the wooden stock. It was still warm from Mack’s face.
‘The tram! Get the tram!’
Bob was watching the verandah, waiting for a chance.
With an ease that surprised him, for he had not used a Bren for any length of time except on the ranges at Aldershot, Sandingham found he was able to shoot quite accurately. With the Sten one sprayed the target but with this heavier weapon, with its front bipod to keep it level, it was possible to be far more exacting. The bipod did buck up but it was still a better piece.