by Alan White
Helmut showed none of his former sneering superiority – he did not seem surprised by Cliff’s devotions. He had instinctively become one of us, and I for my part was glad to accept him as such. There was no risk of being caught off guard by him. I knew that however close we might become, I would still be prepared for combat, with him or anyone else, should the need arise. This I could do because it involved no need to adopt a placatory approach, and thus no weakening of my intent. I was prepared to accept him, but not to woo him by the surrender of any of those rampant principles of kill-or-be-killed, the quick-or-the-dead, with which we had constantly been stimulated since our first acceptance of the military mind and purpose. Rather did I now perceive that total war need not be the total constant preoccupation of each individual. Trained, equipped, and prepared as ever to destroy my enemies by any of a dozen effective methods, I could accept that, for the present time, the ebb and flow of combat had washed by us, and that we could float for a while in the quiet shallows of some turbulent sea whose waves, crashing at a distance, would be spent before they could reach us. In these circumstances, any personal antagonism would seem purposeless. Any antagonism would have stemmed from personal relationships I was anxious to avoid, from the recognition of conjoint humanity, from his acceptance by me as a human being. This I was not prepared to do. I dare not do, if truth be told.
The meal ended as it had begun, in silence. I took all the mess tins to a vat of water near the door, a rain butt we would have called it in England though its shape was more vat than butt, and scoured each one clean with rough dust from the beaten earth of the barn floor.
Helmut offered to help me, but Tom Cooper made him sit down and attended to his bandage. He redusted the wound with sulphanilamide powder, and changed the field dressing, washing the wound carefully with boiled water. Helmut seemed in good spirits, though he flinched when Tom Cooper was compelled to tear the last bit of lint from the congealed blood on his face.
Cliff was busy striking camp, packing our rucksacks and preparing our equipment for the night trek.
When I had finished washing the pots, I ran my hand over my bristling chin and decided to shave. The water in the vat was cold, but soft enough to give an instant lather when I rubbed my chin with a speck of soap I had managed to preserve. It was that same block of sweet-smelling transparent brown soap – had been given to me as a parting gift by a young girl who lived a wartime life of generous but lonely sin in a block of flats near Regent’s Park. The blade pulled, but I was used to that. I remember hoping, as I slipped it into my razor, that using it for shaving wouldn’t blunt its weapon edge.
We finished our self-appointed tasks simultaneously, strapped our rucksacks onto our backs, Helmut wearing his odd-looking goatskin pannier with the hair facing outward, and Tom Cooper led the way out of the barn. I was last out, Helmut walking before me, and behind Cliff. We walked across the corner of the field in the path taken each morning by the sergeant, and then turned the hedge as he had done, and went over the crest of yet another field. A whole valley lay revealed to us, a long, gently sloping field, a scrub wood, another field, a proper wood, then the other bank of the valley rising away to the near horizon. There were no signs of activity in the valley, though I had not expected to find any. I seemed to remember, on the night we had been brought from our position, that we had walked along the edge of a valley, just beneath one of the lips, before we had turned right to come to the field in which was the barn.
We turned left, along the top of the hedgerow, and across the edge of what had, oddly enough, at one time been a ploughed field. There appeared to be little arable farming in these parts, though I would have thought the ground rich enough to support a crop. Rather was the land devoted to stock-rearing – each field had the well-manured and cropped look of constant grazing. There was no sign of stock now, however. I imagined that any animals had been taken to the regional abattoirs as shortages of meat became – as had been reported – more and more acute. The three chickens we had eaten that day must have been part of someone’s private hoard, though there had been no sign of their owner.
The farmhouse was round the corner of the hedge. Tom Cooper saw it first, and motioned each one of us to get down and remain still. I remembered seeing a farmhouse on our way there, but couldn’t have said exactly where it was. I crawled along to the end of the hedge, and looked round. The farmhouse was no more than a quarter mile away, set in an open ring of one-storey farm buildings, with a stockyard in front of it, and a pond. Behind it a small wood gave protection from the winds. At the first glance I saw the rifle sticking out of the upstairs window, pointing more or less in our direction.
Other than the rifle, and a thin wisp of smoke coming from the chimney, there were no signs of activity. Tom Cooper beckoned Helmut forward. There was no need to caution him, his movement imperceptible to any but us.
‘What kind of rifle is that?’ Tom Cooper asked. It had a shorter barrel than any I had seen.
Not that I had even seen a rifle held in German hands before, other than the three I had seen that day.
Helmut took back his glasses from Tom Cooper and, shielding the front with his hands to avoid reflections, used them to scan that open window.
‘Parachutists,’ he said. ‘Parachutists.’
Men after our own style. Daredevils, with their own ideas of discipline, tough, longshanked bastards, each one of them.
‘That’s the short rifle only they have.’
Why couldn’t the men in there be detachments of inefficient Pioneer Corps ditch-diggers…
That’s it, I thought, and started to look for some way of circumnavigating the field without exposing ourselves to sight and fire from that upstairs window.
I had plotted a route in my mind, and was starting to outline it to Tom Cooper, when I saw the look on Cliff’s face, and stopped.
‘There might be a Luger in there,’ he said.
Cliff was obsessed with the thoughts of that Luger – the one souvenir he wanted.
‘Well, go in and get it,’ I said.
For the first time it occurred to him that perhaps we were not going to go into the farmhouse. He turned to Tom Cooper, looking incredulous.
‘We’re going in there, aren’t we?’ he asked. There was a boyish note of pleading in his voice – a boy who had been brought all the way to the fun fair and then told he couldn’t go on the Big Dipper, and didn’t believe it when he was told ‘No’.
‘I don’t know,’ Tom Cooper said.
‘Well, I know,’ I interjected. ‘What’s the point of going in there? There’s nothing in the farmhouse we want, is there? Dammit, the sergeant’s been this way twice a day for the past two days, and if he wanted to go into there, he could have whistled up the boys and they could have gone in there, couldn’t they?’
‘We don’t know the sergeant has been this way,’ Cliff said, with simple truth. We didn’t, of course. Certainly, if he had, I couldn’t imagine he would leave the farmhouse, held by paratroopers, without doing something about it. I looked across the field behind me. If the sergeant had stayed to the top side of the field, he would not have seen that farmhouse. The small plume of smoke coming from the chimney dispersed about ten feet above it, and certainly would not have been visible from the top side of the field.
‘Well, when we get back, we’ll tell him,’ I said, ‘and he can send a fighting patrol out to have a look at it.’
‘That’s a load of nonsense,’ Cliff argued. ‘Here we are right on top of it. We might just as well have a look inside. If we go all that way back, and then report it, ten to one the sergeant will tell us to lead the patrol back here, and then we’ll have gone all that way for nothing!’ Simple as ever, one plus one equals eleven.
Tom Cooper and Helmut listened to this exchange, their heads swinging backwards and forwards as if they were watching a ping-pong match.
‘We ought not to leave it,’ Tom Cooper said.
‘To tell you the honest truth,’ I sa
id, ‘I’m beyond caring what we ought or ought not to do. We have no briefing to start Errol Flynning our way over the countryside. Here’s a farmhouse – we don’t know how many of them are in it, we don’t know if it’s on our line of advance, we don’t know anything about the bloody place, and yet, just because it’s there, you want to have a crack at it. What the hell’s the matter with you two, anyway. They’re not dishing out Military Medals today, you know…’ That was a sore point with us. The number of medals our lads had received could be counted on one hand. There was never anyone about when they were earning them. So far we’d been lucky in avoiding the death or glory, the amateur mentality. We were all blasé professionals, if the truth was known. Tell one of our lads to blow a safe and he’d blow it, without even opening it when he’d blown the lock out of it, because he knew that what was in it didn’t concern him. Mind you, they had been opening safe doors since the time one of them had walked away, incuriously, from a cache of gold sovereigns and diamond brooches that had been nicked by an infantry man who’d followed them the easy way inside an armoured scout car. ‘The next thing,’ I argued – quite inconsistently, as I fully realised – ‘you’ll be wanting to go dashing back and over that hill to take the lot of them on, just for the sake of a filthy Luger or two.’
I had overdone it. I could see that by the hardening of the expression on Tom Cooper’s face, and the look of distress on Helmut’s. He didn’t want to mess about in there any more than I did, and his reasons were every bit as selfish as mine. He wanted to get back to the quiet of his limbo in a prisoner-of-war camp. More than anything else, I wanted to get back to the reassuring world of sergeants and decisive orders and radios that chirped out contacts with the great world of war behind us. I wanted to watch my chances for a fiddled trip to Brussels for some leave in the Orbin Hotel, where the prostitutes were graceful, and lined the bars each evening, and had a room booked upstairs, and for an all-inclusive fee would spend three days and nights being a lover, mother, companion and nurse to you. I wanted to get back to Naafi issue, and ‘I wonder where the next job will be’, and the chance that perhaps this time we were going to be pulled out of the line for home leave, that magically enticing phrase that was engraved on the heart of us all. I wanted a long wash, and a bath, and a sit-down shit, and bread – oh, how I longed for a slice of bread to replace the hard tack. I longed for the peace of lying back in some rest area, with all the many catnaps between meals and briefings and debriefings and new weapon instruction and watching the makeshift company notice board and waiting for the postman to bring me – a joke on someone’s part, but one I now awaited avidly for the totally disinterested preoccupation with the mundane lives of others it gave me – my monthly copy of the latest issue of the Muckshifter’s Gazette.
But from the look on Tom Cooper’s face I was not going to see the Gazette while there remained German soldiers in that farmhouse, and a menacing rifle barrel peeping out of an upstairs window.
‘How do I get in?’ I asked.
I had already worked out the route. It was going to be messy, because it would mean crawling through the corner of that blasted pond, and I could see the slime from where we sat. But the corner of the pond was hidden from that upstairs window – and we could move along the back of the outhouses, down behind a wall which became the overhanging lip of the pond, without too much danger. In more peaceful times, water must have cascaded over that lip, and the sight of it must have been a feature of the entire farm. Dammit, it would have made a change from belching and stuffing yourself with sausage and sauerkraut, and dancing improbably athletic pink fat-kneed, bulging belly-bouncing versions of ‘Knees Up Mother Brown’ to the sound of the flugelhorn and glockenspiel. The thought of these bucolic pleasures restored my humour, and I set off back along the hedge. There was an almost inaudible thud behind me – when I turned round, Cliff was wiring Helmut up again, and had stuffed a rag into his mouth. Helmut, of course, was quite unconscious from one of those devastating butt-of-the-hand jabs.
The water of the pond was slimy, and it stank. Luckily I was able to keep my face out of it, but my nostrils could have been only four inches above it. The bottom was slimy, and several times my feet slid. Each time I slipped my knee would thud down into the ooze with just sufficient force to bang the puddled bottom. I was carrying my pack and my clothing in one hand, my rifle in the other. At the far side of the pond, under the shelter of a long low wall, I dressed again, but I left my pack off. From the side pockets i took four grenades, and made certain my ammunition pouches were filled. I had borrowed Helmut’s automatic rifle, and slung a bandolier of his ammunition (0.300 for the technically-minded) across my shoulders.
Cliff, of course, was livid that I was going first, but there was no question who could get in there with the least chance of being spotted. He made me promise he could have any Luger. Along the side of the wall, slowly, listening for the slightest sound of activity on the other side. I had arranged with Cliff and Tom Cooper, waiting on the far side of a fence of intertwined hazel branches, that at the first sign of me being pinned down, I would run forward, Cliff would shoot rapid and high, Tom Cooper would aim low and always before me. God grant I didn’t run too fast. Slowly along the wall, two steps and listen. Nothing. Not a sound. Two steps and listen. Not a murmur. Obviously well-disciplined troops though their reputation had gone before them and I wouldn’t expect them to fool about in there if they were manning an outpost.
Two steps and listen. Nothing. Now I was within five feet of the end of the wall, and the first barn door. I waited, every sense prickling. Not a sound from within the barn. This was a long, low cowshed, not like the barn in which we had spent the last few days, high and wide for hay and farm equipment. This was long and low, with a wide double door. The top part of the door was open, the bottom part closed, but not latched. It was held open just an inch by a stick that leaned innocently forward from the edge of the doorpost, jammed into the wood of the door at an angle of thirty degrees to the vertical. The end of the stick was newly-pointed – at the other end a piece of baling string, loosely attached, or so it seemed. The baling string went under the door, and vanished inside the cow barn. It was not stretched taut. The hinges of the barn had been greased not too long ago. The marks on the upright showed where the door had swung, and where the latch had rubbed the wood for many a year. Many farmyard doors are hung this way, off centre, to ensure the door will shut by its own weight after the beasts have gone in. But here was one beast who was not going in. Not for a king’s ransom. The point of that stick was jammed not against the door, but into it. You wouldn’t spot it at first, but the butt of the stick was not quite touching the ground. I broke off a blade of grass growing beside the corner of the door, and I could pass that blade of grass under the bottom of that stick. So that’s the way they want to play, is it? Open that door and the stick would go with it, the baling string would pull, and Phoof – away I go to a far better life stoking a furnace. Not on your nellie. I ran my fingers lightly along the stick to the top end, to where it had been stuck into the door, and gently pulled it back, making quite certain not to move the butt end or the baling string while doing so. Whoever had set it in had been, in a previous existence, a carpenter. The stick had been mortised into the door with as clean a joint as I had seen. If it hadn’t been for the carpenter’s neatness in chamfering the edges of the stick, I would never have guessed its purpose. Slowly I drew the stick out of its hole, and eased the door with my shoulder. The stick came out, neatly. I laid it down on the ground, inside the doorpost, away from Cliff’s clumsy feet. Then I propped the door open by the same amount using a piece of stone. I ran swiftly along hugging the wall, until I was level with the kitchen door.
This was another half door, but there were no signs on the outside of its having been prepared for visitors. I stood erect, with my back to the wall, and beckoned to Tom Cooper to keep a watch on the outhouses along which I had come. No one inside the building could have seen me, unless
he came to an actual window and looked out. Cliff, I knew, would be watching the windows for the first sign of his Luger.
The German in the upper window was about twelve feet above my head. From where I was standing, I could have lobbed a grenade in through that window. It was unlikely, however, that all the men would be on this one side of the building, and the first explosion of a grenade would alert them all.
There is no way of getting into a house other than the cinematic, dramatic way of pushing open the door and going through it. The trick is to open the door fast, go through the opening fast, and stand at the side of the door, looking in. Whoever is inside the room will automatically look at the door as it bangs open and will be blinded momentarily by the sudden inrush of light. That moment belongs to you – and it’s all you have. Speed, however, is a better protection than all the armour plate. It’s not generally understood that it is virtually impossible to hit a man with a bullet who is running in a zigzag path across your line of flight. Many animals run in a pattern unconsciously derived from this – the bounding of an eland is a natural form of self-protection.
I went into that room with a knife. I avoided slamming the door too far back, to cause it to bang against the wall. I needed the time only speed and silence could give me. There was no one in the room. I went across it quickly, after shutting the door. It led to a corridor. There was no one in the corridor; the door of each room was open and I went into and out of each one in mounting speed. Finally I had been through all the rooms and was back again in the first room.
There was no one downstairs.
The stove was warm in the kitchen, and on it was the remains of a makeshift meal of maize and sauerkraut. Junk littered the tabletops in the room – whoever was in the house lived like a pig. I knew that would be Cliff’s immediate reaction. I opened the front of the stove. The sudden rush of air into it fanned the ashes into a small flame, though the fire appeared to have been banked down for quite a time. The maize and sauerkraut were hard in the pan.