by Alan White
‘All right for ammo?’ he said.
We had a whole box of ammo, three rifles, and unaccountably the barrel alone of a bren-gun. We also had a pillowcase full of primed grenades, primed against regulations of course, and Tom Cooper had a Verey pistol and a pocket full of cartridges.
We’d been crossing a low range of hills, one time, and suddenly a group of civilians had appeared over the crest. At the same time, bombing had started from we knew not where. The civilians had not flinched under the bombing but had continued to approach us in that deadly purposeful shuffle. In the confusion, an officer with us, not from our mob but loosely attached for some particular purpose we never discovered, had pulled out his pistol and had started to fire in the direction of the civilians. The firing range of a pistol is limited – at one hundred yards you might just as well fire a pop-gun. The officer had panicked. Tom Cooper, standing half a pace behind him, felled him with one mutton chop blow behind the ear. As he went down, Tom Cooper reached into the officer’s second holster and withdrew his Verey pistol. He loaded a cartridge into it, and aiming at the advancing group of civilians, he fired a Verey light slap into the middle of them. It was a white star light – the shock of it exploding harmless but brilliant and dazzling in their midst brought them to a halt. It didn’t take long to discover they were a group of Ukrainian forced labour camp escapees.
Our own captain saw the entire incident, and knew how the sight of an officer losing his head and firing a pistol at an impossible target could affect a troop of men impetuously poised on the trigger edge of fear and action.
The officer left us within the half-hour, never to be seen again, and somehow Tom retained the Verey pistol. The cartridges proved very useful for starting a quick fire.
‘All right for grub,’ the sergeant asked. It was not a question – he was going through the motions of being a good commander.
‘Yes, we’re all right for grub,’ I told him.
We had enough meat and vegetable stew to build a small wall of tins between us and hunger. We had corned beef, Christmas pudding, tea, sugar and powdered milk, rock-hard high-protein biscuits, and a carton of bacon, eggs and K rations acquired from an American unit complete with Lucky Strike cigarettes, chewing gums, boiled barley sugar sweets, three paperbacked novels with lurid covers and painted edges, and a packet of contraceptives and anti-VD treatments. On the packing slip enclosed with the latter was a handwritten phone number in Detroit, Michigan, and the improbable name Ellie beneath it. We could think of no better inducement to continue to use them, and ‘I’m keeping myself clean for Ellie’ became something of a slogan with us.
‘Yes, we’re all right for food,’ I said.
Three dead chickens were hanging at the back of the barn. We found them roaming, fat, jocular and we hoped succulent. We found a mound of potatoes, and swedes and beetroots, and there were pounds of onions hanging in long strings. We had been dreaming all night of chicken stew with onions, and Ellie, clean in a new-made bed.
The sergeant dug into a side pack. From it he produced, like a father rewarding his well-behaved children, the Naafi issue of seven cigarettes and a tin of plain nutritious protein-enriched concentrated chocolate slab that we knew full well was going to be good for us.
He gave our ration issue to us, opened his top pocket and drew out a field notebook and appeared to consult it, as if to verify that we had not drawn beyond our entitlement.
Satisfied, apparently, he stood for a couple of minutes, while we stood before him in anticipation. Then, without saying the expected benediction, he strapped on his pack, fell to the ground, and crawled across the hard-packed earth of the clearing, and into the hedge.
Chapter Three
We watched him go, then Tom Cooper looked at the hill, then around the yard, and picked out a spot almost under the hedge, but screened at about two feet, where a man could half sit, half lie, in complete comfort, while watching ‘the hill’.
‘You take it first,’ he said to me, ‘I want to write a letter home to let them know I’m all right.’ The illogic of his remark didn’t strike me until they had retired into the barn, and I was left on my own.
‘He could have written it this afternoon,’ I said, to no one in particular.
It was a well-shaped hill, standing proud from the countryside like the top of a head. The hair, however, was grass, not bush or trees. ‘Now why the devil would anybody bother to come over the top of that hill?’ I thought. But then I saw the trees around the base, and guessed at the swift-flowing stream that would be in a cleft wide enough, as we had many times discovered to our cost, to stop a man, a half-track, a jeep.
It was a morning of complete peace. Nothing human or animal could be seen anywhere on the surrounding countryside, no evidence of any kind that this valley had human habitation. The sounds I could hear were all next valley sounds. Thumps and crumps, and the occasional quiet rat-a-tat-tat of a hand-held machine gun. One or two planes flew across from north to south high overhead, and then a small plane came up to the horizon of the hills but turned back before it drew level with our valley and our hill.
There was a complete absence of birds. It wasn’t something you noticed immediately, but after about ten minutes I became aware of something being missing, some unique emptiness in that valley, so lush with natural growth, so uniformly correct with its hedgerows, its trees, its grasses, its occasional patches of colour and changes of tint. All of nature invariably seems to me to be a background, a setting for the dramas of the movement of animals and birds and humans. Here was the effect without the drama of action or movement. An expectant quietness.
Tom Cooper had finished his letter. He came out of the barn, dropped to the ground and crawled along the hedge until he could sit beside me. He tucked the letter, after licking it, into his top pocket.
‘Anything happening?’
‘Not a thing.’
‘Seen anything?’
‘Nothing.’
He looked across the valley for quite some time. I could smell the tobacco on him, the bittersweet smell of someone else smoking. I had a sudden sense of deprivation.
‘How’s Cliff getting on with the dinner?’
‘It’s going to be all right. First square meal we’ve had for a week.’
The thought of those succulent chickens in the bucket back in the barn, bubbling quietly with mangel-wurzel and potato, salt and pepper, stilled my craving for tobacco. For a while.
‘What’s going on out there?’ I said to him.
‘How should I know?’
‘What’s happening on the other side of the hill?’
‘How should I know?’
‘I expect they’re getting ready for a big push?’
‘Couldn’t be. If they were, they’d be dropping bombs, wouldn’t they?’ He pointed with a thumb over his shoulder.
‘Who?’
‘Bloody Eighth Army or somebody. Probably send over a couple of tiffies with the rockets, or something. You ever seen them tiffies?’ Typhoon bombers, flying fast and low, with a cargo of rocket projectiles.
‘Quite a sight that is,’ Tom Cooper said.
The smell of chicken floated across the yard. I wasn’t interested in a long and technical account of tiffies and the way in which they could drop bombs, but I was interested in the chickens. All my life I’ve been sensitive to smells. Sensitive on a Sunday morning when I walked back from the bell-ringing, to the smell of bacon being fried late – bacon to me has always been a Sunday smell. The smell of chicken was comforting, rich, redolent of all the odours of well-being.
‘Who’s going to relieve me for dinner, you or Cliff?’
‘I’ll take over,’ Tom Cooper said, absent-mindedly.
He was looking out across the field, towards the hill. He had that wistful far-away look on him – the look of the narrator in the Millais picture of the North-West Passage – infinite experience, and wisdom, but no yearning.
‘That tree,’ he said, quietly, ‘that tre
e over by that light brown patch just below that row of trees that goes into the belly of that wood, over there, just under that second fold in the ground.’ I knew at a moment which tree he meant. To tell the truth, though not to pretend to be wise after the event, I had been considering that tree myself for about ten minutes before his arrival.
By rights, he should have told me about it in correct army style, for though we were commandos and had a certain liberty from correct army procedures, that was not to say that we shouldn’t keep up the best of the Army’s tried and tested methods.
The tree in question was a thick-topped chestnut, I’d say.
The day was completely without wind, no turbulence whatever in the scene before us. The tints of the grasses lay cool, still and unchanging across the valley, the trees silent and still, baking under the early sun, but motionless. With not a sound to be heard, any motion would have been a welcome distraction for the eyes.
Ten minutes ago, I’d seen the top branches of that tree begin to wave. Now Tom Cooper saw them wave, and looking at them again, I thought I saw them wave again too.
We both sat silent and watched that tree, but beyond that initial flicker of the branches, there was nothing else to show. All was still.
‘See anything?’ Tom Cooper asked. His voice was the voice of interrogation – to reassure himself with my conviction.
‘I saw the treetop wave, just a fraction.’
‘Which tree?’
‘The one you pointed out, five hundred yards, left of arc, five o’clock.’
‘What do you think it was?’
‘A squirrel? A chipmunk?’
Each time he shook his head.
‘A cat, possibly?’
He shook his head again. I knew damn well it was no cat.
We both sat and looked intently at that tree. For how long I don’t know. The odour of chicken, briefly forgotten, returned again, but this time without the pleasure of absolute anticipation. Silently I cursed. I cursed the tree.
‘Can you take over for a minute?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’
I crawled back and without looking behind me into the barn, took a half-smoked cigarette from my field-dressing pocket, and quickly lit it. I could hear Cliff messing about in the back of the barn, whistling silently and tunelessly as he went about some all-absorbing but futile task, such as laying a corn sack for a lunch-time tablecloth. Two gulps of smoke, and I crawled back out again, into the bright sunlight, across the yard, into the hedge, along the hedge, to where Tom Cooper was still looking at the tree.
I think it was at that moment that I realised we were completely lost. The journey from the other men in our unit had been made at night, following the instructions of the sergeant who led us along hedgerows and across fields to our present position.
We knew the route our own sergeant took each of the three days we had been there, but truth to tell, I had not the faintest idea which way he would turn when he left our sight at the hedgerow’s end. With absolute conviction I realised that neither Tom Cooper nor Cliff knew.
Until ten o’clock tomorrow, unless a bomb blew us all to kingdom come, we were completely and utterly lost.
‘That’s better.’
‘Yes – had your smoke?’
‘Yes. You seen anything?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Do you suppose it was somebody?’
‘I don’t know. But it wasn’t the wind. At least, there’s no wind over here. But that’s not to say there couldn’t be a sudden burst of wind over there, is it? Of course, with the sun over our shoulders, we’d have seen the glint if anyone there had been using glasses, wouldn’t we? And thinking about it from their side, the tip of that tree must make the best position for viewing this valley. If you look from their side, you could see the entire valley from that tree, and you’d have a natural run up to the tree from down inside that wood. Of course, you couldn’t use the wood itself because none of the trees on this edge of the wood is high enough to look over that sort of scrubby growth at the edge of the wood. And then, from that tree you could come forward down the side of that hedge, and along the bottom of that field we can’t see. Up the side of that fold just under that patch of yellow mustard or whatever it is, and along this side here, round this corner and you’d be staring us straight in the face.’
He was right. There was no reason why a man couldn’t get from the one side of this valley to our present position with no risk that we would see him. Hidden all the way by hedges, ditches, folds in the ground.
We looked again at the terrain, considering each fold from the enemy point of view.
‘Get Cliff,’ he said.
‘What about the stew?’
‘Bugger the stew.’
When I came back with Cliff he was still sitting there, his pose the pose of a man riding comfortably in a sedan chair, his feet propped against the bank in front of him, his body inclined slightly to the rear for even greater comfort. By his left side, the box of ammo, by his right the pillowcase full of primed grenades. He reached into the pillowcase, and handed six grenades to me, four to Cliff, with the air of dishing out Christmas presents. ‘Instantaneous fuses,’ he said, briskly.
It was an old trick we had done many times before. We fix a slender rope of grass across the path a man might crawl. The grass is indistinguishable from the ordinary growing grass, except to the expert eye of, say, a poacher. We had several of them in our unit, and had tried the trick out on them several times and could now fool even them. The end of the grass we plait and make a thin rope, just strong enough to hold the ring of a piece of baling wire jammed against the grenade. If anything disturbs the grass rope, the ring shifts, the handle flies, the grenade explodes.
The only trouble with it, as far as we were concerned, was that you had to remove the seven-second fuse normally used for grenades, and replace it with an instantaneous fuse, and you had to take out the safety pin. And that meant that, if you were foolish enough to make a mistake, the grenade would explode without the normal grace period of seven seconds during which a nimble man could run fifty yards.
Cliff went back into the barn, with whistling and the chicken stew forgotten for the moment. He came out with the box of instantaneous fuses, sweating profusely along his forehead hairline, though his hands were perfectly dry.
‘I think by the edge of that hedge-line would be the best place,’ Tom Cooper said, ‘and then we shall get a look at him. Leave your rifle and I’ll cover you.’
He knew I was the best stalker of the three of us. It was a trick I learned early in life, stealing apples, and I prided myself that no one could go in and out of an orchard like I could. I plotted my route along the contours of the ground, and then crawled forward out of the hole through which we had been watching, turning straight left under the hedge to avoid leaving tracks for any spotter aircraft. To the corner of the field, breathing easy all the way, then across an open bit, on my toes, knees, elbows and fingertips to avoid leaving a visible trail of compressed grass. It took twenty minutes to get to the tip of the hedge where I intended to lay the booby-trap, but I reckoned that, best going, it would take anyone forty minutes to get there from the tip of the tree. The grenade I hung against the trunk of a small hedge bush resembling hawthorn. I laid the straw under the lowest and luckily sturdiest branch, and then plaited it through the grasses, intertwining an occasional blade of grass through the straw fronds here and there to make it quite invisible to the eye. Then I put a bent twig runner, inverted V shape, in the bottom of the hedge to hold the grass taut, and secured the far end some five feet from the hedge with a twig, wedged at an angle into the soil to a depth of six inches. Even from on top of it, knowing where it was, I was unable to see the straw strip. Back into the hedge to sit on my hunkers and take up the strain by twisting the slack of the straw round a twig. The whip of the twig, I estimated, was enough to take the strain of the pin ring and hold the straw taut. Just so long as no one would crawl over the straw!
There comes a moment when you’re involved in a stunt like that, when your mind ceases to function, your instinct takes over. The straw plait was right; hadn’t I done this thing many times before? I yanked the pin out. I yanked it out and there it was, a lethal greeting card set for the first man to cross the plait.
I turned away and crawled down the hedge bottom to a safe fifty feet from it. Only then did I notice I had been holding my breath from the moment of pulling the pin, and that, unwittingly, I had clenched the pin between my teeth. Fear has always made me put things into my mouth, from the time when, as a frightened kid, I used to suck my thumb. I lay there in the hedge bottom, breathing and quivering like a runner, until I quietened down, stopped trembling. I put the pin in my field-dressing pocket, spat out the greasy taste in my mouth, and crawled back to where Cliff and Tom Cooper were waiting. Tom Cooper, the bastard, was not looking out for me. Dead regimental, he had eyes only for the hill. Cliff, however, had the rifle in his hands, his own rifle, with the safety catch forward, and the sights set at a useful three hundred yards, the exact distance to the edge of the copse from which I could have been watched, setting the trap. He was still scanning that copse, didn’t relax his eyes to look at me until I had reached his side of the hedge.