A New Kind of War dda-17

by Anthony Price

  The bloody man was so bloody-sure of himself that Fred was tempted for a fraction of a second to put him to the test. But then he remembered that his pen was dry, and he’d lost his indelible pencil. And it would be no joke to face Amos de Souza, who possessed the same document, even as a joke, anyway – any more than he could face Uncle Luke if it hadn’t been, damn him – damn him, and damn them all!

  He transferred the envelope to his good left hand and began to fumble with his own top button, forcing his clumsy promoted second finger to do its new work in default of its useless superior.

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  ‘So – ’ It pleased him absurdly that his bad hand obeyed him faultlessly with the Brigadier watching it ‘

  – what are my first orders then . . . Freddie?’

  The Brigadier stopped watching his hand and met his eyes. But now, at least, he was truly ready for that steel to rasp down his own. Which was wonderfully more exciting than anything which had happened to him for a very long time –

  ‘Good.’ Clinton seemed to take his victory for granted, without pleasure. ‘But they’re not simple ones. You may not like them.’

  Fred felt the weight of the envelope inside his blouse, against his heart. ‘That doesn’t surprise me one bit.’

  All he had to do was think of that weight as freedom –

  then he could accept it. Because freedom ought to be heavier than servitude. ‘Who are you hunting now?’

  Clinton’s stare became blank. ‘What makes you think I’m hunting anyone?’

  Fred knew he was right. ‘Kyri – Colonel Michaelides ... he said you were a man-hunter. Isn’t that what TRR-2 has been doing: hunting Germans?’

  ‘Yes.’ Clinton paused. ‘But I am not hunting a German now, major. It’s an Englishman I want now, I’m sorry to say.’

  PART FOUR

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  The Price of Freedom

  In the Teutoburg Forest,

  Germany, August 8, 1945

  1

  Down in the castle courtyard below, someone started singing in a high, sweet voice, quite destroying Fred’s concentration in an instant.

  ‘Als die Romer frech geworden,

  Zogen sie nach Deutschlands Norden,

  Vorne beim Trompetenschwall

  Ritt der Generalfeldmarschall,

  Herr Quinctilius Varus – ’

  For a moment the very sweetness of the sound, rendered crystal-clear in the morning air by some acoustic accident even within his bedroom, deceived him. Then the meaning of the words registered.

  ‘Doch in Teutoburger Walde

  Hu, wie pfiff der Wind so kalte;

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  Raben flogen durch die Luft,

  Und es war ein Morderuft

  Wie von Blut und Leichen!’

  That was quite enough, thought Fred vengefully, throwing back the sheet and starting towards the window across the bare boards.

  ‘Plotzlich aus des Waldes Duster

  Brachen krampfhaft die Cherusker

  Mit Gott fur Furst und Vaterland – ’

  Far below him, foreshortened by the angle of sight, there was a German soldier – or, anyway, a man in field-grey overalls and German steel helmet – washing the Brigadier’s Humber Snipe as he sang. But as Fred opened his own mouth there was a sharp knock on the door behind him.

  ‘Come in!’ He turned from the window quickly.

  ‘Mornin’, sir.‘ The soldier who had swept away all his clothes and equipment the night before appeared in the doorway. Trooper Leighton – char up, sir. An’ your bath’ll be ready in ten minutes – I ‘ave to bring the ’ot water up, ‘cause the pipes broke on this floor, so I’m your bheesti, sir –’

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  ‘Weh! das war ein grosses Morden!

  Sie erschlugen die Kohorten – ’

  ‘I’ll take the major’s tea, Lucy.’ David Audley appeared from behind the man, fully-dressed and with a cup of tea already in one hand. ‘You go and fill his bath.’ He grinned at Fred. ‘Bloodthirsty, isn’t it! “Woe!

  There was a great killing!” Morning, Fred.’

  Although he very carefully hadn’t drunk too much the night before there was a small knot of pain just above Fred’s left eye. ‘Where’s my uniform? Where are my clothes?’ he snapped at the trooper.

  ‘Get the major’s things first, Lucy.’ Audley supplemented the question unnecessarily as he lifted the steaming mug out of the man’s hand. ‘ Juldi.’ He grinned again as the man scuttled away. ‘Lucy started his army service as a band boy in India, so he prefers to be addressed in Urdu. But you don’t need to worry about your stuff – it’ll be superb. Caesar Augustus insists on nothing less: he says that a Guards turnout impresses the Germans – or “the Cherusci” – “die Cherusker” – as he calls them. One of Hermann’s tribes, that is ... And the Redcaps too, when they catch us “fraternizing”. Saves trouble, he says.’

  Fred frowned. The almost-falsetto song was even now recounting the massacre of the Roman Army by the dummy4

  Cherusci in grisly and ill-omened detail, and somehow Audley’s early morning cheerfulness made it worse.

  ‘You’re not late, don’t worry. It’s just that I’m an early bird.’ Audley misread his expression as he handed over the cup. ‘I’ve only dropped in to apologize if I disturbed you in the night.’

  ‘Disturbed me?’ He took a gulp of the scalding tea, and it instantly started to perform its daily miracle. ‘You didn’t disturb me, David.’

  ‘Oh good!’ Audley blinked. ‘It’s just . . . I’m next door . . . and I shout in my sleep, so I’m told. I have these nightmares about a tank I once briefly occupied which was absolutely full of flies – big, fat greeny-black ones. But I don’t have ’em so often now. They’re going away –like my stutter. It’s the th-therapeutic effect of the soft life we now lead, the MO says. But I think it’s the absence of tanks from my life. I never liked them, you know – ‘ He took two long steps past Fred and leaned out of the window ’ – SHUT UP, OTTO! “FLUCH AUF DICH” TO YOU, TOO – YOU

  BLOODY CHERUSKER! SHUT UP!‘ He turned back, grinning widely again. ’He always sings his Teutoburger song when he’s washing the cars, and it really gets on my nerves. I think he only does it to remind us that victorious armies can come unstuck in Germany if they don’t watch out, too – he’s a caution, is our Otto! A man of many parts.‘

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  Fred looked down into the courtyard, where the silenced Otto had moved on to Major McCorquodale’s French limousine. ‘He sings as though he’s lost two of them.’

  ‘Lost two of them?’ Audley followed his glance. ‘Oh, I see! Yes – the Crocodile did say something about

  “castrati” singing when he first heard him. But the way old Otto gets on with the local girls suggests quite the opposite, if Hughie is to be believed.’

  ‘Yes? And where did we get him from – did you tell me?’ The golden elixir of British Army life had quite dissolved the pain over his eye, and he felt suddenly benevolent towards the young dragoon. Besides which, of course, there was the boy’s pristine innocence.

  ‘Do you know, I’m not quite sure.’ Audley sounded a little surprised with himself. ‘I think he just turned up one day, and made himself useful. Maybe he brought one of his wild boars with him – that would certainly have been a passport to acceptance in this mess!’ He thought for a moment. ‘But you’ll have to ask Amos –

  or Hughie. One of ’em’s sure to know, if the other doesn’t.‘

  Amos de Souza, thought Fred with a pang of doubt verging so closely on disbelief that it was painful: if he had to stake his life on one officer in this unit he would have hazarded it cheerfully on Major de Souza. But, in spite of his instinct – and in spite of the night before dummy4

  last, which would have added circumstantial proof to that instinct until Brigadier Clinton had reinterpreted those events for him ... in spite of all that, Major de Souza’s name was on the Brigadier’s list, and high up, too –second only to th
at of Colonel ‘Caesar Augustus’

  Colbourne himself.

  Damn and damn and damn and damn! he thought, remembering his own troubled sleep. This was going to be bad, one way or another, if Clinton was right and if Otto Schild had sung a true song –

  Yet, in the Teutoberg Forest

  Cold blew the wind,

  And the ravens flew above.

  There was an air of doom,

  As of blood and corpses . ...

  ‘You’ll catch cold if you stand there in the window.

  This isn’t Greece, you know.’ Audley swung his arms.

  ‘God knows what it’ll be like in winter! Always supposing the Crocodile hasn’t got me posted to a tank landing-craft for the invasion of Malaya!’

  Fred realized that he had shivered. ‘Oh, I don’t think there’s much chance of that, David.’ He forced a reassuring grin. Audley was a loyal young man as well as a clever one, if Clinton’s judgement could be relied on; and it was an irony that he was the only unfree man dummy4

  among them. But . . . (and brave too, Clinton had said:

  ‘foolishly and suicidally brave, according to his CO’; but that was no more than had been expected of very young officers, wasn’t it?) . . . but it was no real consolation, among all these other veteran officers, to have to rely on the least-veteran, and most callow and awkward, if push came to shove today.

  ‘You don’t?’ After searching his grin for a long moment Audley seized on his reassurance eagerly. But then the look became calculating. ‘And you are a friend of the Brigadier’s, aren’t you! And a bloody dark horse, therefore ... at least, according to Hughie, anyway!’

  Poor boy! ‘I wouldn’t put too much store on that . . .’ A dull thump at the door stopped him from continuing to qualify his statement. ‘Come in!’

  There was a scuffling noise outside before the door opened, to reveal Trooper Leighton piled high with Fred’s belongings.

  ‘Put it all down, Lucy – put it all down!’ Audley started to unload the man quickly of his variously well-pressed or well-blancoed and well-polished cargo. ‘Put it all down –and get out, man-juldi, juldi!’

  Trooper Leighton gave Fred an agonized glance. ‘Your bath, sir – Major M’Crocodile’s servant took all the ’ot water while my back was turned – ‘

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  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Fred was grateful for having been saved from contradicting the rumour Clinton wanted spreading. ‘I prefer to wash in cold water. Just bring me enough hot for shaving.’

  ‘Thank you, sir – ’

  ‘No?’ Audley closed the door on the man. ‘Why not?’

  The battle-dress was as immaculate as Audley had promised, Fred saw with relief. And, for good measure, his major’s crowns were there on the straps, too.

  ‘What?’ This was hardly the time to tell Audley that, according to Hughie, Captain Audley himself was a good friend of the Brigadier’s. Because Audley would know that that was a distorted version of the truth.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Ah!’ The boy’s downcast expression vanished suddenly. ‘It’s that bomb, of course!’ He grinned hugely. ‘Saved by a bomb – that’s me!’

  ‘Yes.’ Half the conversation over dinner had been about the amazing new bomb which had been dropped on Japan the previous day – or, at least that part of the evening which had not been devoted to a long and acrimonious argument about the origin of the recipe for the delicately-spiced meat balls which had formed the meal’s pièce-de-résistance . . . which the Crocodile had maintained was Berlin, while the Alligator had originated them in Hamburg; and which, in Otto Schild’s unexpected absence, had never finally been dummy4

  resolved. ‘Yes – I think you can rely on the atomic bomb, David.’

  Audley nodded happily. ‘That’s what old Kenworthy said. Bloody marvellous!’

  ‘Kenworthy?’ Fred’s memory of the little bespectacled major was of sullen silence and heavy drinking. ‘But he didn’t say anything – ?’

  ‘It was after you left.’ Audley nodded again. ‘He perked up then for a bit, before he was sick – before Lucy and Hughie carried him away and tucked him up.’ Nod. ‘But he said the Japs would be waving the white flag within a week. Or, if they didn’t, it didn’t matter. Because then there wouldn’t be any Japs left, so it came to the same thing. And that we’d all be going home.’ This time Audley shrugged his immense shoulders. ‘But that was just before he threw up –

  which was just after he said he was going home tomorrow. Which is today of course . . . But I don’t think he will.’

  Fred looked across the room to his valise, and to the zip-fastened pocket in it with the lock, the key to which hung round his neck with his identity discs. Because his own envelope was there, with his wallet and all the things he had taken out of his pockets last night. ‘Why not?’

  ‘He was very drunk . . . drunker than I’ve ever seen dummy4

  him. So I don’t think he’ll be able to walk,’ explained Audley innocently. ‘But he certainly talked last night . . . before he returned to his Hamburger or Berliner meat balls ... to us, coram populo. Which was all the more spectacular because that isn’t like him either . . . Besides which he’s not due for release until next year, by my calculations.’

  ‘What did he say?’ It was unfortunate that Audley was the one officer he couldn’t ask about the efficacy of the long brown envelope in practice, and whether it had ever been opened and given a date before.

  ‘Oh ... he said this bomb was the real thing . . . not just like the Tallboys our gallant boys in blue dropped on the Bielefeld viaduct just down the road, which brought it down even though they missed it by miles . . .’ The boy’s eyes widened as he exaggerated the RAF’s incompetence ‘... he said it almost certainly isn’t very big . . . But that doesn’t matter, because it doesn’t work like an ordinary bomb . . . it’s quite different from all the stuff we’ve dropped on Germany.

  In fact, he says that there’s no limit to its destructive power, and that the Jap scientists would know that themselves. So the one the Yanks dropped on wherever it was is probably just a little demonstration job. Some demo!’

  It was plain that Audley wasn’t a scientist. But then, of course, he wasn’t: he was a historian potentially, and dummy4

  an unwilling ex-tank commander and temporary captain actually, at this moment. ‘What does Major Kenworthy do ... refresh my memory, David? He collects machinery . . . ? But what was he ... before the war?’

  ‘What he really does . . . don’t ask me! He never talks to me ... or anyone else, much. But he is damn good with his machinery, certainly.’ The boy was still so entranced with the end of the war that the words tumbled out of him. ‘What he was ... I think was a physics lecturer at Manchester, or Birmingham, or somewhere. But he kept talking about his friends in the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge last night ... is there a Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge? It’s all Greek to me, I tell you!’

  ‘Yes.’ It was almost Greek to Fred, too. But there was a hint of Teutoburger Blut und Leichen about it also, with his mathematician’s war-weakened recollections of the bright boys of the Cavendish in mind, as well as what Clinton had said yesterday.

  ‘Well, whatever it is, it’s got my vote if it’ll end the war before the Crocodile sets his teeth into me!’

  Audley peered out of the window again. ‘Ah! Good old Otto’s finally got round to my little car. So you won’t have to be ashamed of it if we use it today – ’ He came back to Fred ‘ – you know you’re with me today?

  Everyone else can pursue their private interests, or do dummy4

  their paperwork . . . or scratch their balls, and contemplate their navels, and generally recover from yesterday’s journey and last night’s excesses. But Jacko Devenish, and Hughie, and I – and you, Fred ...

  for our sins, we four have to report to Amos bright and early, directly after brekker.’ He returned his attention suddenly to the scene below. ‘PUT YOUR BACK

  INTO IT, MAN!
GET THAT MUD OUT FROM

  UNDER THOSE MUDGUARDS! Yes ... but then, of course, you’ll know all about that already . . . won’t you, Fred!’

  Driver Hewitt had done his work well – and quickly, too. Because even before Clinton had arrived in the mess to contribute his own brief but masterly performance, which had only hinted at an old and special relationship between them, his fellow officers had eyed him differently. So now it was not to be wondered that this young man was fishing: that, and not his self-revealing apology, was the reason for this visit, of course.

  ‘THAT’S BETTER!’ The boy’s pretended lack of interest in Fred’s advance knowledge of the day’s operations was not badly done for one of such tender years.

  ‘Why should I know that?’ What made the lie easier was the certainty that Audley wouldn’t like the truth any more than he himself had done, when the time dummy4

  came for it – if the time came for it.

  ‘Oh, come on! Aren’t you Our Freddie’s long-lost brother? Don’t disappoint me – ’ Audley stopped as he registered Fred’s frown, and his own expression changed from youthful falsely-innocent ugliness to an honest ugliness older than his years. ‘No, of course –

  that’s not how the game is played, is it?’ He sighed.

  ‘And to think that I’ve been blaming myself for taking you away from your Greek fleshpots, because of my glowing references to the Fattorini family that day in the monastery! When in fact you were old acquaintances – ’ He stopped again, and all expression blanked from his face, reminding Fred oddly of Clinton himself. ‘In fact, now I come to think of that particular day in all its beauty . . . that Greek bandit you were with – he certainly wasn’t there by accident, was he!’

  A hint of belated satisfaction re-animated the boy’s face. ‘So, of course, you weren’t, either – were you? So I’ve been slow – slow as usual!’

  It was exactly as the Brigadier had said: there was always a danger in making pictures from inadequate evidence and misinterpreted facts. So this boy, although he was no fool, was doing that now. But there was nothing he could do about it yet.