‘That’s right. Bunny Warren.’ He was twice the bulk of Blackie.
‘There’s a bed next to mine, mucker,’ said Blackie.
‘No taking the mickey about they did to Oi in school with my trucks.’
Blackie shook his head and opened his kitbag on the stiff mattress. ‘There’s some empty old ’uts,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Wood walls.’
‘Chop them up,’ said Gordon.
‘Soon as it gets dark.’
They took three of the twenty-five-pounder guns up to the firing range at Larkhill the next morning, trucks hauling them over the long, austere hills and making trails into the frosty valleys. Blackie enjoyed the guns, it was the best part of the army; the echoing orders, the shattering discharge, the swift recoil, the sharp stench, the earth exploding a mile away. Once, after firing for an hour, they discovered they had killed a rabbit. ‘Died of fright,’ said Sergeant Harris.
When they had gained the higher ground of the plain, where the landscape seemed to press against the sulky sky, they could see other troops moving across the scene: a whole battalion of American infantry in lines, as though pushing forward to confront an enemy. There were Canadians skidding about with light armoured cars. A squadron of tanks, big Shermans, sidled down the longest incline towards the main road south to Salisbury. The sound of small-arms fire drifted from the ruined village of Imber. All training for the day, the day of the invasion.
On the return from Larkhill Harris called a halt on the humped side of the chalky path. As soon as they had secured the guns and taken out their mess tins to drink what was left of the day’s tea, a group of American soldiers appeared over the rise at the opposite side of the track and sat down, studying them in silence as a pack of animals might survey another unknown pack.
The British troops returned the scrutiny. Not a word came from either side; the firing had died away, the whine of the upland wind was sharp. The American troops were all white men and on their legs they wore the long puttees that gave them the look of infantrymen from the First War. ‘Hey,’ one eventually called. ‘What you guys figuring on doing with that peashooter?’ He pointed his rifle at one of the twenty-five-pounders.
‘It’s to cover your arses when you run away,’ Blackie called back at once.
Sergeant Harris stood quickly. ‘He’s joking,’ he called across the divide. ‘He’s the regimental comic’ Blackie scowled but prudently and politely waved.
A flock of sheep appeared, following their daily path, well worn by successive years, and ambled along the narrow track between the two slopes and the two sets of soldiers. The Americans and the British watched the scraggy animals pushing forward between them, complaining and jostling. An elderly shepherd came behind, stumbling with a stave, his dog worrying around the flanks of the flock.
The shepherd did nothing to acknowledge the soldiers on either bank but, eyes down, moved on. On the timeless track his sheep knew where to change direction. When they had reached the place, the shepherd lifted his old head and shouted like an ancient drill sergeant. The flock turned.
‘God-dam, did you see that?’ exclaimed the American at the front.
‘Bloody clever, our sheep,’ Blackie called back.
A single-track railway used by miniature engines crossed the military miles of the plain, connecting the fixed garrisons to the main line of the Great Western Railway. There were stations at the military bases, Tidworth, Bulford, Larkhill and others. The British garrison towns were spotless: white painted stones bordering gravelled roads between the barrack blocks, the clean outlines of churches, the tended graves, the marked sports fields and the parade-grounds where generations of home and Empire troops had drilled, ceremonial volleys had been fired, flags had flown and bands had played.
There were three cinemas in the scattered barracks showing Hollywood musicals with beautiful actresses in technicolour, and less luxurious black-and-white patriotic films like Mrs Miniver with Greer Garson and In Which We Serve, starring the stiff-lipped Noel Coward.
‘Now, I’d like to be takin’ that Greer Garson into my bed on a cold Highland night,’ said Jock Gordon. ‘If only to keep the lass warm.’
‘You’d’ve more chance with that Coward bloke,’ said Treadwell. ‘They reckons he’s one of them nancy boys.’
‘And there’s him in these heroic fillums,’ muttered Gannick, taking his pipe from his mouth. ‘Where’s the justice?’
‘B’aint justice for the likes of you and me,’ said Warren. ‘We’re just good for war or the Labour Exchange.’
Blackie, bent double with an armful of planks, crashed through the door and its blackout curtain followed by Brown and Hinchcliffe, similarly loaded.
‘It’s going out,’ said Warren. He took a plank from Blackie and began to break it up with his thick hands. The others stamped on the wood, dropped it into the iron stove and stood back, grinning, as it started to crackle. The door opened with its customary bleak blast and Harris came in around the curtain. ‘Now I wonder where you came across that,’ he said.
‘Lying around, sarge,’ said Blackie.
‘The remains of Noah’s Ark,’ said Gordon.
The sergeant sat on the iron end of Blackie’s bed near the fire, putting his hands out to warm.
‘It had better be a big ark,’ he said. ‘The coke’s been delayed again. The railways are too busy with the war.’
‘I’m going to write to the War Office about it,’ said Treadwell. ‘Complain.’
‘There’ll be no one to fight their war if we die of pneumonia,’ said Blackie. He glanced at the sergeant. ‘There’s not much wood left.’
From outside in the night came a noise. ‘Ghosts,’ said Gannick. ‘Dead soldiers.’
‘Bollocks,’ said Blackie.
He pulled on his greatcoat and went to the door. Harris got up and unhurriedly followed him, then some of the others. From there they could see the dark outline of the nearest hut they had been cannibalising for wood. There were loose sheets of corrugated iron, held up only by a few flimsy metal supports, rattling and groaning in the dark wind. ‘You’ve made your own ghosts,’ said Harris.
As though it were another spectre, a clanking figure advanced towards the hut door. Warren said: ‘Gunfire. Good old Cloony.’
The soldier was humping a heavy bucket, banging its side with a metal mug. ‘That bog Irish bugger was in the cookhouse,’ said Cloony. ‘I told him us Paddies have got to stick together, for a Free Ireland, so I got the tea.’ He saw Harris. ‘Want a cup, sarge?’
He put the bucket on the billet floor and handed the sergeant the mug. ‘Why do they call it gunfire, sarge?’ asked Peters who was eighteen.
‘Because when the Tommies were in the trenches in France that’s what woke them up in the morning, tea and gunfire.’
The stove was heating up now and with odd domesticity they sat on the beds around it. ‘Ever been in the trenches, sarge?’ asked Blackie.
Harris shook his head. ‘This is my only posting, Salisbury Plain. In three years I’ve never shifted.’
Warren said: ‘Will you be along with us when we … go to France?’
‘I hope so. I’m fed up with pretending war.’ He surveyed their army faces, softly lit by the dim lamps. ‘You’ve been in action, haven’t you, Gordon?’
‘Norway, sarge, 1940,’ replied the Scot. ‘It was no’ so much action as inaction. They landed us on this wee island, hardly room to stand up. Then they left us there for a week, then shoved us aboard another ship and off we went home. Niver even saw the nose of a German. But some of the others had a terriba’ time. The equipment didna’ work, the guns froze.’
‘Same as Dunkirk,’ said Blackie. ‘Oi must have walked forty miles in the blazing ’eat, and the French closed their doors in your bloody face. Wouldn’t give you a cup of water.’ He glanced about. ‘Now we got to go and rescue ’em.’
Harris said: ‘The only time I’ve seen action, real action, was right here on the plain.’
It had been a spring morning, three years before, green and lucid, the curved back of the plain in its colours of the early year like a pale rainbow against a pale sky. A squad of twenty-five recruits, fresh from the training depot at Woolwich Arsenal had been taken for their introduction to the gunnery range, and were climbing aboard the truck to go back. It was the middle of a normal day. The landscape was patterned with soldiers. Some pre-war Bren gun carriers went like beetles along a track and smoke grenades were exploding with puffs of white. Harris was observing a well-spaced line of infantry strung along the skyline, slowly moving and clearly outlined. Abruptly the figures vanished and a moment later he saw the Messerschmitt 110 fighter-bomber, low and daring, dive into the bower of the valley. The unaware squad in the truck and the others grouped around it pointed at the moving shape with excitement but no alarm. ‘Oh, Christ!’ Harris had time to say to himself. He was two hundred yards from the truck, rigid, rooted, as the German plane streaked towards the squad, picking them out, its machine-guns sparking, the bullets throwing up the earth. Then as it began to roll away, its black crosses revealed, it released a lone lucky bomb.
It hit the truck. Harris was knocked backwards, down a slope, his mouth full of dirt. Gasping, he got to his knees and clawed his way up the bank. The truck had disintegrated and was burning in a strangely sedate way. The bodies lay where they had been flung. One man was trying to crawl away on his hands and knees.
Two others, clear of the truck, were sitting on the bank below him, holding on to each other like terrified children. Shouting to them to take cover, he stumbled down. There was no need for his warning; the solitary plane had gone. The two soldiers seemed welded together, weeping and trembling. He pulled them apart and, one at a time, to their feet. All around was uproar. Men were running towards the flaming remains of the truck and there were shouts for the medics. A stretcher was being dragged up a slope. A lot of good that would do. ‘I’m deaf,’ shouted one of the two recruits at Harris. ‘I can’t hear anything.’
The other sank down again, weakly shaking, on to the grass. ‘We thought it was part of the practice,’ he sobbed. Harris saw that he was bleeding from a shoulder wound. He tore the boy’s shirt away and clumsily tried to apply his field dressing. ‘Keep still!’ he ordered. ‘Keep still.’ The recruit’s eyes were wild, uncomprehending. ‘Nobody told us,’ he babbled. ‘They didn’t say.’
Nineteen young men died.
Harris walked through mud and darkness towards the sergeants’ mess. The place was almost deserted; it was NCOs’ night at the garrison cinema. A solitary sergeant crouched like a shadow in a corner listening to the wireless, Tommy Handley in ITMA, shaking his head and laughing soundlessly.
The duty steward got Harris an egg sandwich and a cup of tea. There was a Sunday Express on one of the worn armchairs. Allied forces were still bogged down by winter mud and German resistance as they tried to advance up the limb of Italy. There had been more bomber raids on the industrial Ruhr and there was a picture of the handful of survivors from the sunken battleship Scharnhorst. There was also a quarter column advertisement for Bisto. He turned to the final page of four. There had been racing at Doncaster and there was a half-page of football reports and results.
He called: ‘Good-night,’ to the sergeant still silently guffawing in the corner and the man waved an arm and replied: ‘Ta-ta for now.’ In the lobby there was a letter-board. Harris did not get many letters but today there were two. One was from Southampton library warning him that a book was overdue by six months and the fines were mounting. He had asked Enid to take it back. The second letter was from a spiteful neighbour who wrote that Enid was sleeping with another man.
Grimly he went to his billet and thought it over in his comfortless bunk. He slept fitfully, the wind still moaning as though bereft through the bones of the neighbouring hut which his squad had stripped of wood.
In the bleak morning he went through his soldier’s routine, going to the latrines where there was ice in the lavatory pans, to the wash-house where the water was also frigid. He shaved in a mug of tea; then to breakfast and the early parade. The men went to the gunnery range, joining others who were marching that way. Harris sharply turned from the barrack square and slowly, uncertainly walked towards the adjutant’s office.
He had always thought of Captain Moon as a bit of a fool. Now he found him feeding his spaniel behind his desk. ‘Oh, oh, sergeant,’ he said, straightening. He had gingery hair and pale eyes. He was hoping to be replaced, transferred somewhere remote but safe, before the invasion.
Harris saluted. ‘I would like twenty-four hours’ compassionate leave, sir, if it can be managed.’
‘What is it, sergeant? Missus trouble?’
‘Might be, sir.’
‘They’re absolute swines, aren’t they, wives. Is it a Yank?’
‘No, sir. A merchant seaman, I’m told.’
‘Ho, a sailor. Be a job to catch up with him, won’t it? I know – mine was having the best of three falls with a commercial traveller once, sold boot polish. First wife, that is. Took a long time to catch up with him, I can tell you. He was here, there and everywhere. Cardiff, Bolton. Not that I cared that much in the end.’
He seemed to be talking to himself and appeared surprised when he looked up and saw Harris still there.
‘Right you are, sergeant,’ he said. He reached for a pad and scribbled on it. ‘The orderly room will see to it. You know the drill.’ He handed the note to Harris. ‘Hope you catch the jolly sailor,’ he said. ‘Good luck.’
Harris went out into the ashen morning and skirted the wet parade-ground. Even the lowest hills were opaque, misty. ‘I can’t see that prat leading us up the beach,’ he muttered.
He intended to get the narrow garrison train to Salisbury where the main line travelled down to Southampton, but a fifteen-hundredweight stopped and he threw his greatcoat, pack and steel helmet in the back and climbed in beside the driver of the truck.
‘Bleedin’ Yanks,’ complained the lance-corporal. ‘They’re like dirt-track riders, you know, showin’ off.’ He was a small, rat-like soldier and he peered close to the rim of the steering-wheel as though fearing an ambush at every bend.
‘Round the corners,’ nodded Harris. ‘I’ve seen them.’
‘That’s just them jeeps. The motor bikes don’t even know about corners. They just goes over the top, over the banks. I wonder if they’ll be so keen when they get to France?’
They were coming down from the plain, down to the main Salisbury-to-Bath road. Under the low sky the land looked baleful, closed in, clumps of cloud gathered in its crevices. There were soldiers gathered on an incline, sitting listening to an instructor, hunched together, reluctantly accepting their fate.
‘Have you seen Bulford, sarge?’
‘Haven’t been down there since the Americans took it over,’ said Harris. ‘They probably wouldn’t let me in.’
‘You’d ’ave been shocked. Mud everywhere, churned up. When you think how all reggie it used to be, everything just so, shining, neat. It’s a cryin’ bloody shame.’
‘Maybe they’re training for a muddy war,’ suggested Harris. He was thinking about Enid and the man, whoever he was. What would he find when he got home? What would she say? She was ten years younger than him and he had known what she was like when they married. Enid was not a woman who could be left on her own.
‘’Ow long do you reckon it’ll be, sarge?’ asked the lance-corporal. ‘Before we go in.’ They were joining the main road. Harris was sure the driver had suspect eyesight because he leaned both ways as far as he could and squeezed his eyes together. A convoy of a dozen military ambulances went by. In the other direction, going west, two wedge-shaped landing-craft were being transported, on long low-loaders, white American stars on their hulls.
‘How long?’ said Harris. ‘Nobody tells me anything.’
‘Not yet, I don’t reckon,’ said the driver. ‘Wait for the nice weather. When the water’s not so chilly
.’
They drove into grey, grave Salisbury, its cathedral spire encased in mist. There was little civilian traffic. Three tanks were parked in the market square, their crews talking to some girls. A horse-drawn dray delivered barrels outside a public house and an old man washed down the pavement. ‘Got a twenty-four-hour pass?’ asked the driver. It was Monday. Not many passes were issued on a Monday.
‘Right,’ said Harris.
‘Trouble?’ said the man.
‘Something like that.’ He wanted to tell the man to shut up but instead he joked: ‘I’m going to see Montgomery. I’ve got a few ideas for him. But keep it under your hat.’ The driver laughed and said: ‘I should cocoa, sarge.’ They were at the station now and Harris was relieved.
Calling out his thanks, he put his overcoat over one shoulder and the small pack and steel helmet over the other, and went towards the station entrance.
The driver sniffed: ‘Monty, be buggered.’
Harris showed his rail warrant. There was a wait of ten minutes for the train which was running forty minutes late. On the platform were some mothers and children, going to Southampton to see the pantomime, revived this year. There was a notice-board. Pinned to it were leaflets, almost rubbed out by time and weather, warnings about Air Raids, Careless Talk and Venereal Disease.
There was to be a concert by the pipe band of a Canadian regiment, a Red Cross bring-and-buy sale and an All-Services Dance at the Corn Exchange with a Royal Army Dental Corps swing quartet called the Gnashers.
A woman wearing a headscarf came on to the platform with two children. The boy said to Harris: ‘We’re off to see Jack and the Beanstalk.’
‘I’ve seen it,’ said Harris. ‘Very good.’
‘You must be a good father,’ said the woman. ‘Do you miss your kids?’
‘Yes,’ he said with a sort of truth, although he did not have any.
The train arrived, its steam spouting up among the rusting iron and grimy glass of the station roof. Children jumped with excitement. He wondered if the little boy would ever have to be a soldier, one with a wandering wife.
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