by Alan White
I neither vomited, nor, I believe, showed any outward sign of what had happened. But without disturbing the outer skin of my being, the whole of my inside shook and shuddered.
‘One of yours,’ Tom Cooper said.
‘Yes, one of mine. My first,’ I replied.
‘We’d better have an all-round watch,’ he said.
Cliff turned around and lay facing the rear. I watched the foreground, Tom Cooper watched the hill and the ground between. We lay that way for at least thirty minutes without moving or speaking. The German soldier neither moved nor spoke during that time. Finally, Tom Cooper turned to face me.
‘Watch the hill as well,’ he said. ‘I’m going to make certain he’s dead.’
‘No you’re bloody well not.’ The vehemence surprised me, but appeared not to shock him. ‘I’ll go myself.’
‘I thought you would,’ he added, the vestige of a smile on the corners of his mouth.
I crawled out of that hedge and across and down the side without, I swear, causing even a ripple of a blade of grass, though I’ve never travelled so far so fast on all fours.
At the hedge corner, I cautiously lifted my head to look around. There was no other sign of activity. I took my knife out of the special guard we had down the seam of the right leg, and poked it into the inside of my right gaiter, for quick action. I took the piano wire garotte we always carried, and wound it round one wrist, holding the short steel handle in the palm of my hand. The other handle on the choking end I tucked up my sleeve. Then I started to crawl across the field, the eight or nine feet to where the German soldier lay inert.
At every pace I lay still and looked about me as far as I could see through the grass. At every pace I lay with my ear close to the ground listening for reverberations. I heard nothing.
Finally, as I drew my right knee level with my left knee, my head across my folded left arm, I was staring straight into the German’s face from two feet away. His eyes were open, and he was not dead. The left top of his head had been sheared away. Though he was not dead, death was not far from him. I lay beside him, and tried to turn him over onto his back. His arm was caught beneath him and I had to pull it free before he could turn. Then I rolled him over. He had been carrying what appeared to be an automatic rifle. I pulled his arm through the strap, and drew the rifle away to the side. I tried to get off his pack but it was not possible until the straps had been cut and it could then be drawn from beneath his body. I put this to one side, near the rifle, then emptied his pockets into the large side pocket of my jumping jacket. He had official-looking documentation in the top right-hand pocket, a tin of cigarettes and a lighter in the top left-hand, a grubby handkerchief in the side pocket which I pressed down into the grass, and spare cartridge cases in the other jacket pocket. Getting into his trousers pockets was more difficult and completely fruitless. All six were empty, save for the field dressings in the back pocket. I took one field dressing and tore it apart. It was a burn dressing with a Vaseline lint pad. I put this over his wound, and then closed his eyes. He was still breathing, deeply and rhythmically, though his lips were beginning to drain of colour. I took the remainder of his cartridges from his side-slung pouch and then opened his tunic, drew the back of it from under his shoulders up over the back of his head and down over the front to cover his face completely.
Before covering his face I looked at him. He appeared to be about twenty-six. Not blond, not particularly handsome, though his now pinched lips had been full-fleshed. The dark shadows beneath his eyes had turned purple, but from battle fatigue or impending death I could not tell.
He died, I think, as I covered his face.
I gathered all his belongings and started back into the hedge, dragging him behind me by his feet. When I got him into the hedge bottom I levered his ankles and rolled him over into the undergrowth.
I then went back across the field and obliterated the signs his passage had made through the grass.
No trace of his presence remained, other than his dead body in the bottom of the hedge, half hidden by the overgrowth.
I crawled back to Tom Cooper, carrying my spoils of war. We couldn’t understand the documents, but Cliff, overjoyed by the automatic rifle, insisted on taking it apart at once. He had always had the ambition to loot a Luger for himself, and so I let him have the rifle.
Before Cliff could ask me I said, ‘No, he wasn’t wearing any medals.’
‘Don’t you think we ought to get back with the papers?’ I asked Tom Cooper. ‘Intelligence might be able to make something of them.’
‘I doubt it,’ he said.
I left them there and went back into the barn, sitting in the darkest corner with my rifle across my knees.
Sometimes, you don’t ‘fall asleep’. Suddenly, you become unconscious. You lie down in bed with a book and a last drink beside you. You can even be halfway towards lighting that last cigarette, when suddenly you find the world of the bedroom is spinning about you, and you know if you don’t do something to stop the spin, you will become unconscious. You’ll faint. I don’t think I fell asleep in that barn. My mind refused to accept any more of the dust and the dirt and the turmoil, refused to answer the questions that came crowding in, unformed into words. This has happened to me since that time – when my wife left me I slept all day and all night for three days, waking up each four or five hours and falling back into this faint almost immediately. In the barn was the first time it ever happened to me. I fell asleep, but it was the sleep of the boggled mind. I didn’t dream, but was aware of time passing by like water running silently down a long tube, washing the sides of the tube clean. I woke up the moment Tom Cooper came into the barn.
‘What about a brew?’
Cliff had left a pail of water under a wooden lid to keep out the dust. I took a small handful of smokeless fuel tablets, and in next to no time I had a pint of water on the boil. As it bubbled, I dropped in the chlorinating tablet, and then, contrary to instructions, let it boil for a minute or so to remove much of the taste.
Cliff had found a number of earthenware jars high on a ledge while clearing up after our chicken lunch, and I filled one of them with tea for Tom Cooper. He took it, drank some, pulled a wry face.
‘Shove a barley sugar sweet in it, will you,’ he asked. ‘I’m certain they put less and less sweetening in these mixtures.’
When the barley sugar had melted, and he declared the tea more to his taste, I poured out a second potful, for Cliff.
‘He says he doesn’t want one,’ Tom Cooper said. ‘I think he’s scared of your cooking. You remember that stew you made at Maastricht?’
Maastricht. I remembered. We had been parachuted into Holland in the middle of the waiting period before the second front invasion became a reality – the Dutch Underground led by a wild man from Eindhoven had stolen the signals equipment of an entire German division during a night thieving raid. In farms and barns and fields around Maastricht, Tom Cooper, Cliff, Robin Farquhar and I had held classes in signals procedure and radio repair and maintenance. In the midst of death we were in life. We went back to school, back to a peaceable atmosphere of regular routine and lessons and the eager thirst of youth for knowledge. For three whole weeks we had forgotten the war. I spent much of my youth on a farm equipped only by lanterns, and the darkness of the black-out was reminiscent of those days. I was a night cat by training and by nature – and still am, and the bright lights meant nothing to me as they did to others by their absence.
In Maastricht, too, I fell in love. It must have been love, for I never even tried to put my hand inside her skirt. That too was a part of Maastricht, that for the first time I could remember, I avidly sought the company of a girl, and kept my hands to myself. Our kisses were the sweeter because of it, because they caused no rude stirrings of lust in the loins. To Tom Cooper, or so I guessed, Maastricht meant the resumption of an ordered way of life, a programme, the contentment of knowing what you will do tomorrow, and at half-past four today. It me
ant giving and receiving knowledge, it meant the resumption of father-son relationships. To Cliff, Maastricht was the sudden beneficence of legalised theft, of stealing by permission. He would fondle the radio sets lovingly. ‘Come here, you beauty, you must be every bit of you worth fifty quid.’ But it also meant for him the indulging of his prowess, the protracted, drawn-out, orgiastic sexual experimentation, when the whole becomes greater than all the parts, grateful women lie groaning beneath the renewed onslaught, rising fluidly to never-ending peaks of gushing release, cataclysmic paroxysms of tense insatiable passion. To Robin Farquhar, Maastricht meant a chance to sleep.
We remembered Maastricht. Each in his way, me in mine. Often we recalled it. At moments of strength it gave us caution, in weakness or fatigue it gave us strength. Bless Tom for reminding me of it!
There I made, for the first time under ‘active’ conditions, though we never sighted a German during our entire stay, I made a field kitchen and cooked the smokiest stew I have ever been compelled by pride to eat.
Tom Cooper came and sat down in the corner in front of me. He lit a cigarette, offered me one but I refused.
‘We’re a bit out on a limb here, aren’t we?’ he said.
‘Yes, we are.’
‘Does it bother you?’
‘Does what bother me?’
‘Being out on a limb like this, with me making the decisions.’
With anyone else I would have thought he was seeking justification. But not Tom Cooper.
‘As long as you go on making the right decisions, we’ll not be worried.’
‘What should we do, d’you think?’
‘Do you mean, what should we do right now, or what should we plan to do as and when we can do it?’
‘No – I mean, what should we do right now?’
I must admit this did worry me. Tom Cooper always knew what we should do immediately. Sometimes I’ve been bothered by his apparent inability to plan, to know what he will do after he’s done what he’s going to do next. Like many people, he had a fine sense of balance between what he wanted to do and what he could do, and he could run along the chain of continuous action with the appearance of following a carefully-laid plan. Often, I think I was the only one who realised that he went from action to action with a speed of decision and interchange of ideas that would baffle most men.
‘As I see it,’ I said, ‘what we do right now has more or less been decided for us. We don’t know where anybody is, not even our own lads, and we can’t go stumbling around in the hopes of finding ’em asleep. We don’t know where the Germans are. The sergeant says they’re somewhere over that hill and we’ve got to go on believing him, until at least tomorrow morning when he comes back to tell us he’s changed his mind. On the basis of only one German, and he’s dead, thank God, we can’t go rushing back on to the spikes of our own unit.’
‘But what happens if a whole regiment of ’em come streaming over that hill?’
‘Then we’ll go as far back as we can, and when we can’t go any further without risk of being sprayed by a Bren we’ll stand straight up with our hands above our heads and start shouting – “don’t shoot, it’s us.” But a regiment is a different proposition from one dead man, isn’t it?’
‘There may be a whole regiment, and they may have gone round the side of us,’ he said.
‘In that case, they’ll run across three other lonely buggers on somebody else’s flank, and the decision will be theirs, won’t it.’
‘But what if we’re cut off?’
I thought about this one, and remembered the way I’d been trained, selected, trained again. I remember how good at this game of war had been some of the rejects. Crawl through snow for a whole hour, then take out your rifle, strip it, reassemble it, and fire two shots, one from each shoulder, into a tin plate no bigger than a pocket handkerchief, and at two hundred yards’ distance. Miss one plate and you were back at Spean Bridge waiting for the next troop train back to your parent regiment.
‘If we’re cut off,’ I said, ‘there’ll be Germans behind us, and frankly I’d rather crawl through the Germans with a lighted lamp in my hand than try to get through our own lads.’
We’d both trained with the same troop. We’d both crawled under barbed wire eight inches high stretched in a taut blanket sixty feet long, with live bullets being fired two inches above to make certain you learned to keep your head and backside down. There were many men who’d limped back to Spean Bridge, unable to sit down in the troop train when finally it arrived. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’ll take my chance on getting through the German line.’
‘And if I say different?’
‘Then I’ll do whatever you tell me,’ I said. I meant it too.
‘Aye, you would, an’ all,’ he said, mimicking my northern accent. ‘But then,’ he added, ‘that’s one of your troubles – you’d argue the back leg off a donkey, but when it comes to taking responsibility you can’t be provoked.’
‘As I see it, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, there’s no democracy in what we’re doing. We can’t stop every time we have to make a decision to put it to the vote. There’s sheep and shepherds. We’ve had our election a long time ago, we three, and for better or for worse, you’re the shepherd, and Cliff and I, well we’re the sheep.’
‘It’s a big responsibility, being the shepherd as you call it.’
‘Yes, and it takes a lot of guts to be a sheep.’
This conversation was getting us nowhere fast.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘we’re not three separate individuals, you and Cliff and me. We’re the left flank, the outpost, the patrol, call us whatever you like. But we’re one body. If we’ve got to waste our time putting everything to the vote, one of these times we’ll be caught before we’ve got our hands in the air. Cliff’s the muscles. We never argue about who goes over the wall first – I go over first because I’m the lightest, you go over second because Cliff’s the strongest. And you’re the brains of the outfit…’
‘And what the hell are you?’
That was better. Now I had him on the attack again.
‘I’m the dogsbody,’ I said. ‘The shit shoveller, the grenade planter, the railway line cutter. That’s because there’s nobody to touch me at the clever stuff… the stuff that needs the skill…’
‘You’re the big-headed bugger, too,’ he said, and laughed. ‘Here – grab hold of that!’ He poked his rifle forward into my stomach. It was a manoeuvre we’d practised a thousand times. Instinctively I let my thumb run along the sight until I had metal in the palm of my hand. I dropped my other hand down to the trigger guard to prevent him pulling the trigger, and then, using his momentum and the length of the rifle as a lever, I dropped my knee and hoisted him and his rifle over my shoulder.
At least, that’s what should have happened. It had happened a thousand times before in our unarmed combat training, at which I was acknowledged the troop master. But something went wrong, and I felt the sharp end of the magazine press into my crotch with sufficient force to show that, if he had wanted, he could have demasculated me. As it was, the force was enough to snap my head forward, and to make me grunt with pain. But before I could get the grunt out, he brought the entire length of the rifle up under my chin – luckily for me with his hand over the muzzle to protect my throat – and I went flying backwards into a bale of rancid straw.
‘That’s one you didn’t know,’ he said, smiling. ‘I worked that one out all on my own!’
I don’t know which hurt the most, my balls, my Adam’s apple, or my pride.
But the point was taken – and he now had again the justification for taking the decisions.
The German was standing inside the barn door in a patch of shadow. I had one hand in my crotch and one on my throat. Tom Cooper had hold of his rifle in the reversed position and was at least a half a second away from the trigger. The German was holding a twin to the other automatic rifle, and it was pointing straight at Tom Cooper. The second shot would get
me before I could release the pressure.
Chapter Four
‘Hände hoch,’ the German said, softly. Then, ‘Hände hoch,’ softly again, but piercingly.
‘With pleasure,’ Tom Cooper said.
It was one of our codes. With pleasure – such an innocuous remark to any captor, but to me it meant, ‘When we have counted to three, you step behind me, I’ll move to the right, we both drop to the ground but you throw a knife.’ It stood a chance of working, and we had rehearsed it like steps of the ballet, over and over again. But before I had got to the count of ‘two’, the German, no doubt sensing an anticipatory feeling in the air other than the fear his sudden appearance should have induced – and let me reassure you the fear was there – called brusquely, but understandably, ‘Stand still – no talking!’
There was no doubting the command in the economic movement of his rifle, nor his command, ‘Sit.’ We sat where we had stood. I noted that, true to form, Tom Cooper had placed himself so that my right hand was within fifteen inches of his throwing knife. I put my hands flat on the floor on either side of my legs. Now I was only ten inches from the knife.
The German looked at us closely for a moment, then smiled. The bastard was enjoying himself.
‘Hands and fingers for prayer.’
Neither one of us moved.
‘Come,’ he said, ‘put your hands and fingers together for praying, in the church.’ He started to walk towards us.
We clasped our hands together, lacing the fingers as if in prayer. The Germans must have studied the same manual we used. He saw too that we knew what to do, and smiled again.
‘Now between the knees, and lean forward!’
We lowered our hands between our knees, and leaned forward.
Round One to him.
Sitting down on the ground with your hands clasped between your knees and leaning forward is an impossible position from which to attack anyone – especially if that someone goes behind you, as the German did, and kicks a box into the small of your back to prevent a backwards roll.