Strong Man

by H. R. F. Keating

We made our way quietly through a peaceful countryside sleeping undisturbed by wars and rumours of wars, with the first frosts beginning to bite at the soft petals of the bushy dahlias in the cottage gardens that we stole past. There was no sign here of any of the upheavals of the north. Everybody was obviously going about their quiet lives in their usual way. Even the signposts, always rooted up in the north, were in place here pointing with age-honoured fingers the way they had always pointed.

  It was as if they were showing us where to go. With their aid, instead of having to spend a whole dangerous day finding the exact place we had been told Mylchraine kept the planes, as we had expected to do, we walked to it almost directly in two hours.

  Nor did we have any Particular difficulties when we arrived. Standing up against the night sky, we spotted at once a tall spinney of elms, their leaves half gone. We made our way towards it up a little rounded hillock and found it deserted. In half an hour we had buried ourselves comfortably in fallen leaves and were lying where we knew that with the coming of day we would have a view over the whole stretch of flat land some part of which Mylchraine used as a landing strip. The night sped by.

  And then the sun began to come up at last and we saw below us a shallow blanket of mist clinging to the flat wide-spreading ground. But already looming out above this mist only some quarter of a mile away we could see the stark black shape of a big barn.

  ‘Bet that’s their hangar,’ Fred Quiddie murmured. ‘These old Molotovs’ll do a lovely job in there when we creep near enough.’

  He patted affectionately the knapsack beside him with its clinking oil-filled bottles.

  ‘Think of the napalm,’ I said. ‘When we set that alight it’ll send up a column of smoke they’ll see half way to Lesneven.’

  We felt a little breeze stir in our faces, and, like wrappings being gently removed from some precious object, the thin layer of mist began to stream away. And that was when we saw them: first the pill-boxes and then the coils of barbed wire.

  There were four pill-boxes, made out of sandbags, low and hugging the ground, each about a hundred yards clear of the hangar, and the wire ran in fat rolls all round in front of them. As the light improved we were able to see that inside each pill-box there was mounted a light machine-gun, which, to judge by the way their glinting blue-steel barrels prowled constantly over the landscape in front of them, were manned by men ready at any instant to deal with trouble. And, as a last twist of irony, when the mist had fully blown away we saw stacked beside the big hangar, the final confirmation that we had found our target, a stack of the long black canisters of napalm.

  All day Keig watched the pill-boxes, scarcely speaking a word.

  There was a stir below about ten in the morning when one of the planes was wheeled out of the hangar and through a crude gate in the barbed wire. Its engine was already going and soon it was loaded with its supply of napalm and taxied down one leg of a giant cross of close-mown grass in the big field by the barn.

  ‘Blast it,’ muttered Fred, as it took to the air. There goes trouble for someone.’

  ‘There’s two hundred yards of mown grass between where it runs and the nearest cover,’ Keig said flatly.

  And then he fell back into silence.

  He said nothing when about two hours later the plane returned and was got into the guarded hangar as invulnerably as it had been got out. And he made no other comment when in the afternoon the same procedure was repeated.

  But an hour before dusk he summoned us nearer him with a crook of his finger.

  Stiff, hungry, worried, we crept on our bellies to within whisper range.

  ‘With only the four of us and the weapons we’ve got,’ Keig said, ‘those planes are as safe as houses. We’re going back tonight.’

  I felt a sharp thump of disappointment. Though I had not been able to see for the life of me how we were to do it, it had never at all occurred to me that we would not leave those canisters of napalm burning fiercely before we had done.

  Pat Boddaugh, burly and hasty, felt a good deal more.

  ‘That’s bloody ridiculous,’ he burst out, hardly bothering to keep his voice down. ‘We can’t just let those planes of his sit there. Not after all we’ve been through.’

  He glared over at the distant hangar and the dark yellowy sandbagged posts. His mouth was set, his eyes were blazing. He looked as if at any instant he would be up and thundering down towards the target.

  ‘We’ll be off in three hours from now,’ Keig said. ‘We’ll have to let the farm dogs quieten first.’

  He said nothing more. And he never did offer any explanation of this willingness, totally unprepared for by anything I had seen of him yet, to back right out.

  It was only long afterwards, long after we had made the hellish journey back to our familiar glen hideout, that the explanation that he had not felt obliged to offer floated already formed into my mind.

  Keig, as I saw then, though more sheerly determined than any man I had ever met—or have met yet—coupled this willpower with as strong a strain of practicality. With the single exception perhaps of his sudden attachment to young Alan Duckan, the son he might have had, he was never any sort of romantic. Certainly he was never one of those who seek to bring about the impossible by a magical act of will and die in the attempt as often as not. He had seen Mylchraine as needing to be toppled, he had looked at what would have to be done to bring this about and it had not seemed to him beyond human powers. So he had soberly set about the task. Faced, however, with a set of facts that really could not be dealt with, as here, he had quietly and calmly accepted their logic. It was his greatest strength.

  The snow came two days after we had got back, sick and sore, to the glen. The wind shifted to the north and at once there came hard drumming showers of tiny sharp flakes which nevertheless lay from the start on the already hard-frosted ground. Before that night was over the whole mountainside was transformed under a solid layer of it, and soon we realized that it would bring worse problems than merely warding off a colder chill in our shallow cave sleeping-places. It made the business of getting food ten times more difficult. No longer were the rabbits easy to snare and other game retreated into Parts of the mountains even more inaccessible than our hide-out. And, wherever we went now, we left clear tracks. So expeditions down to friendly shepherds’ houses and to the hamlets on the edge of the wolds below where we bought provisions became infinitely more dangerous than they had been.

  Within days we were on minimal rations and had begun to be gnawed at by hunger. It was an odd sensation at first. I suppose I had never really been prolongedly hungry before in my life, but now I went about all day with a little nagging feeling in the pit of my stomach as if I was soon going to be ill. For months it never left me, and, unlike the pain of a crooked knee or a touch of rheumatism, this did not seem to be something one could get to tolerate and even in a way like.

  We had to limit ourselves to occasional expeditions only to the wolds bringing back each time as many supplies as we could and going to tedious lengths especially as we neared the glen to make all our tracks in places where they could not be followed and, above all, could not be seen from the air. Because as often as the weather allowed—and the frequent snowstorms of that early winter were both a blessing and a curse—Mylchraine’s three aircraft prowled above the mountains and never hesitated when they saw something suspicious to run steadily in and slowly tip out one of those clumsy black fire-spewing canisters. Here and there all over the mountains for miles around us their scars showed as ugly patches of burnt-out gorse or heather until the snow mercifully blotted them out again.

  So we spent hours, literally, tramping the long way round to avoid putting a telltale line of footprints across a virgin expanse of snow, and the fires that we longed for had to be kept as small as possible and used only for cooking, with a sack of earth always ready beside them to put them out instantly if the lookouts at the head of the glen heard the faintest drone of one of Mylchraine’s ai
rcraft. On days that were at all still the whole time a fire was lit someone sat next to it and kept wafting away the smoke as it formed, since nothing would have given away our location more quickly than a long rising column of smoke and the safety of the glen was the only ace we had left.

  Needless to say, such constant watchfulness over irksome details of this sort when we were already miserable enough produced its backlash of grumbling. We did what Keig ordered, because none of us for a moment considered the possibility of disobeying, but we disliked what we had to do.

  And then one day one of us failed to obey. The first we knew about it was when just after it had got fully daylight one of the sentries called down from the top of the glen ‘Aeroplane.’ At once we all crowded to the entrances of our sleeping caves and looked to see whether any telltale objects had been left out of cover. But there was nothing that was not safely under the snow-covered frameworks we had built and we had had no fire since the evening before. So we sat where we were and listened to the tiny pricking drone of the aircraft drilling its way across the sky.

  It grew louder, and someone murmured half-interestedly ‘He’s coming close today.’

  Then we heard the plane banking and a moment later the drone became full-throated. For all the chill air around me I felt a sudden sweat break out over my whole body as I remembered Jack Ascough: the aircraft’s engine-noise was coming at us in just the way it had done the day he had been burnt like a torch.

  And then it happened. We had one long glimpse of the machine, flying directly down the length of the glen though high above us. We saw the hatch open on its underside and two black canisters roll out in quick succession. I suppose we jerked ourselves back a little deeper into the caves: there was nothing more we could do in the time. And then, one, two, the canisters landed right in the glen and smoky dollops of flame were flung in all directions.

  No one was harmed, thanks to the protection of the caves. But it was obvious that somehow our hiding place had been spotted. We crouched there waiting for the plane to bank, turn and run in again while the thick greasy flames took hold of the fir-branches of our daytime shelters. But the aircraft engine-note tailed rapidly away and soon was lost.

  At once Keig ordered us to collect up every scrap of our possessions that we could get at through the fires.

  ‘Quine and Quiddie, the transmitter, Boddaugh, take the generator. You, Alan, lad, I want you to take my papers. Look after ’em. We’re away in ten minutes.’

  And in ten minutes—pockets hastily stuffed, bundles of bedding quickly caught up, guns shouldered, we were off, loping along at intervals of a couple of yards or so, heading away from our pinpointed hiding-place before a force of Keepers came to follow up the air strike.

  It was when we had stumbled only some two hundred yards from the head of the glen and had just come out on to the open hillside that we saw how it had been that the pilot had known where to drop those canisters. On a wide open slope of snow below us a single track of footprints ran, pointing like a line drawn on a map to the very heart of our hiding-place.

  We stood in the cover of a scatter of scree and straggly gorse-bushes and looked at it.

  Keig’s face was expressive now, expressive as I had never quite thought to see it. And paradoxically what it expressed was lack of expression, a positive stony lack of expression. The mouth was being kept a little too straight, the eyes were held in a hardness that was fractionally more than their accustomed set look in repose.

  We all knew why.

  Only one of us had been away from the glen the night before. Young Alan, sent specially by Keig to a near-by sympathizer with a message that I for one would have liked to have seen entrusted to a fully-grown man.

  Keig crunched now past me along the scatter of scree towards the boy.

  ‘It was you, lad, wasn’t it?’ he said.

  The boy looked down at his feet. I, too, could not bring myself to look up any longer and let my gaze fall to regard the ground where the lad stood at the far end of the line of us. I noticed with a sudden Particularizing vision that the boy’s boots—those ‘good boots’ of his that he had been so eager to put on in anticipation of Keig recruiting him that day back in the spring under the blossoming chestnut-tree beneath whose shade he had grown up—were broken and battered now and tied round with grease-smeared rags. They must have been misery to walk in.

  ‘Well?’ Keig demanded, his voice harsh and dry.

  ‘I was so tired coming back last night, Mr Keig,’ Alan muttered, with tears not far below the surface. ‘I thought it was bound to snow again before morning. And it didn’t.’

  ‘Give me that bag of papers,’ Keig said.

  I watched the boy duck his head a little and slip out of the strap of the leather satchel in which Keig kept our handful of headquarters ‘documentation’. He held the satchel out to Keig, who took it without a word.

  For a moment afterwards the two of them stood looking at each other. Then Keig spoke again.

  ‘Make your way home,’ he said. ‘Travel by day and keep well away from the Keepers.’

  I could almost feel him stopping himself adding a single word more.

  ‘Yes, Mr Keig,’ Alan whispered.

  He stood where he was for a few seconds, as if he thought there must be something else to do. But there was nothing. He half-turned and set off along the slippery line of scree passing—there was no other way round—right in front of us all.

  And it was when he had got almost to the end of the line just by where Fred Quiddie and I were standing shouldering the heavy transmitter on its long pole that Keig called out something more.

  ‘Lad.’

  Alan turned. He succeeded in keeping his face unmoving, but there had been too much alacrity in the way he had swung round.

  ‘That cap, lad,’ Keig said. ‘Take it off. There’s too many Keepers know we wear ’em now.’

  Slowly the boy reached up and pulled off his orangey-red cap, the cap that was an exact replica of the one Keig always wore, the one knitted for him long ago by pale-faced, ill, devoted Margaret in Dublin. Alan looked now at the bundle of orangey wool in his hand, wondering what to do with it. For a second he seemed half-determined to throw it defiantly to the ground. But he had already left one clue too many to our whereabouts.

  An almost hunted expression appeared on his broad open face. And then he leant swiftly across, thrust the bundle of wool into my hand and was off at a run down the mountainside in and out of the straggly gorse bushes.

  We never saw him again.

  In a way it seemed in the weeks that followed that Keig was paying more than the simple rational consequences of his act of sentiment over the boy. We never rested in all that time, hurrying from one group to another of the remaining men we had recruited in the high summer of the wolds and who now lay at various points in the mountains in this bitter winter. It was seldom that we made our headquarters anywhere for three whole nights together and sometimes, when we learnt the Keepers were on our trail, we stayed put for a couple of hours only.

  Yet in spite of everything Keig contrived to resume his old policy of striking back whenever the Keepers hit at us. Gone however were the days when we fought them on anything like level terms. The most we could do now was to take advantage of any spell of clouded days and, safe from indiscriminate napalm attack, inflict some damage somewhere.

  If this did nothing else, it stopped the cautious country-folk turning informer. And, indeed, every time we shot at a pair of motor-cycling Keepers—they never went singly nowadays—or planted a Molotov cocktail on, or nearly on, a scout-car an almost perceptible corresponding improvement would take place in our supply of information. Our wild scramble for the mountains when Mylchraine’s planes had first appeared had seriously disrupted our courier system, but now, despite the snow and the increased freedom which the Keepers had to roam about, we steadily rebuilt the system to something like its former efficiency.

  Yet whatever small successes we scored from
time to time we still never went other than hungry. On good days we had one solid meal, generally a sort of all-in stew—what a triumph when we caught a white-furred winter hare—a breakfast of dry biscuits and water and a supper of the same, except that we usually managed to brew up a sort of tea with it made by steeping rowan berries in hot water. On bad days we fared worse.

  Christmas Day was a bad one. It came just when we had had to shift our headquarters yet again, and this time we had had to go further than usual before finding another safe place, so most of the day we spent on the move and we had no time to light a fire that night.

  It was the next morning that Keig addressed us on the subject of not speaking about food.

  ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘There’s to be no more talk about eating. Not another word from any one of you. I heard a couple of you last night. You were driving yourselves silly making up Christmas dinners you’d have liked to have had. It’s got to stop.’

  The order was religiously obeyed: Keig had established such an ascendancy over those of us who were nearest him that that went without saying. But he did allow himself a series of jokes on the subject thereafter. We would get such specimens of humour creaky as a wooden toy as: ‘The thing I said that wasn’t to be mentioned’ or ‘a little of you-know-what’. And, damn it, I laughed every time.

  A subject I found much less laughable and one which Keig did not ban, because he never knew it ran rife among our headquarters group, was sex. I suppose it was an inevitable topic of conversation with a small party of us often cooped up in hiding for days at a stretch waiting for a spate of activity from the Keepers to die down. But I found it galling to say the least.

  It was Fred Quiddie, naturally enough, who started it. He would begin by going sotto voce through his whole repertoire of dirty songs—it was immense—and then when this legitimate method of whiling away the hours was exhausted he would start retailing, to the open admiration of the less sophisticated like big Pat Boddaugh, dozens of his sexual experiences. An unwilling listener often to his endlessly detailed accounts of the same basic set of facts, I never doubted that, for all his unromantically tubby appearance, he was describing real events. But his stories made me darkly furious. They roused memories I should have preferred to let lie dormant.