‘Hello,’ he said.
‘Hello, Mr Keig,’ Cormode replied, after an instant’s pause in which he evidently adjusted himself to an unexpected situation.
He looked round then and spoke again.
‘Can we get into shelter somewhere?’ he asked. ‘And then perhaps you can start putting me in the picture over such administrative arrangements as you have made for the Reconquered Territories.’
It was a good effort, I had to acknowledge. In face of a Keig a great deal grimmer and sharper than the man he would have remembered, the withdrawn, odd-man-out of Dublin whose long silences could well have been the result of ineradicable shyness, he had managed to speak with a convincing air of doing just what he had expected. And how would Keig answer his assumption that he was to have charge of ‘the Reconquered Territories’?
Keig replied simply by ignoring it.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you’ll want to do what you can, and looking after things behind the fighting line would be what you’re best at, I dare say.’
‘I think I’d manage,’ Cormode answered dryly.
Keig glowered at this trace of levity.
‘There’ll be more to it than you suppose,’ he said. ‘There’s the estate-owners, you know. There’ll be trouble there one day if we don’t look out, and you could deal with people like that. And, the way of it is, I can’t spare time from putting Mylchraine down.’
Cormode let all that this implied pass with a readiness I found suspicious, and I quickly suggested that the newcomers must be tired. Plainly exhausted as they were, they were glad enough to make for their beds in the one little hotel Caloestown possessed.
I wanted urgently to talk to Keig, though I was in two minds about what to say. I had been bemused, I saw, by the speed events had happened at in the last six weeks or so, ever since I had chanced on my discovery that Calo had quit. Only when I had actually seen the Revolutionary Council on Oceanan soil had the full truth of things struck me: Cormode and the rest were not just acknowledging our military predominance, they were nothing else than harbingers of peace.
And peace implies ‘after the war’. What were we going to do after the war? It was a question none of us had asked. We had been too deeply engaged in the day-to-day realities of fighting. Yet now the question was upon us.
And it put me in a terrible dilemma. With one half of me I wanted to see the way Keig did things simply continue for ever. I might get furious over his inability to see when politics intruded—or was this not inability, but a refusal to see, a knowledge from innate commonsense that that way madness lies?—but I knew in my heart that Keig’s way was fundamentally the way of justice. Yet another half of me was in mortal terror that Keig was deParting from that way. This was the part of me that remembered, and refused to remember, Fred Quiddie’s execution, dead Donald Fayrhare’s unceremonious huddling away, the abrupt and forthright ending of the Hoddick villagers’ comparatively innocent ‘orgy’ and other signs of perhaps the growth in Keig of just what he was fighting in Mylchraine. This was the side of me that feared the effect his loved Margaret’s death must have had on a lonely mind.
Prey to such feelings, I was even grateful that Cormode had appeared on the scene. Yet here was the politician, the intriguer, the power-seeker, the man who had done nothing to bring Mylchraine down but wait to see which way it would go. And I had to say something about him to Keig now.
‘Look,’ I ventured when we were alone in the hotel bar-room, ‘I think you should go more carefully with Cormode. The fellow’s ambitious.’
Keig looked up from where he had sat himself on one of the time-polished oak benches.
‘Cormode’ll do that job well enough,’ he said. ‘It’s what he’s good for.’
‘Oh yes. I’ve no doubt he will. He’s one of nature’s administrators. He’ll tackle the island’s troubles for you, and he’ll talk the estate-owners into being sweet, I dare say. But he’ll do it by making himself the boss.’
‘He’s no leader,’ Keig answered. ‘I knew that when I first set eyes on him.’
He did not refer beyond this to that first encounter with Cormode when I had shepherded him, a strange uncouth countryman, into the snug at Caveen’s Bar. But I knew he must have that scene in mind and all of a sudden I decided to grab at what small shoots of nostalgia there must be in this always resolutely forward-looking nature and face him with the question that had only a few minutes earlier presented itself to me.
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘what has it all been for? What about afterwards? What do you mean to do when we’ve beaten Mylchraine?’
But in the deep-set eyes there was not the smallest gleam of sentiment.
‘We haven’t beaten Mylchraine,’ Keig said. ‘There’ll be time enough to think about afterwards when we see him crack.’
And this was all I could get out of him. There was sense in it, I saw. We had by no means beaten Mylchraine. He had retreated, certainly. There was a prospect of victory. But Mylchraine had funds enough, and a deep-water port, to bring in new weapons. From my forgotten history-book days a vague memory of Wellington in Spain came back. Hadn’t he lain up behind the Lines of Torres Something-or-other and emerged to chase the French from the Peninsula? Perhaps old Clausewitz even had commented on this, and Keig had a justified fear that Mylchraine might prove to be a Wellington and ourselves the French.
Through all that winter, in fact, it looked as if there was something in this. It took us all our time to get our motley and half-trained forces into a position where it would be realistic to think of trying to break Mylchraine before he broke us, even though Keig did wonders. On occasion he still actually surprised me, though I thought I knew the full range of his capabilities.
Yet one February morning within a few minutes of dawn when I went to see what he had in mind for the day I found him ready and waiting, orangey cap on head, old never-relinquished axe loosely swinging.
‘We’re going to the line near Portharnel,’ he said. ‘We’ll take a bit of breakfast on the way.’
And three minutes later, just that, I was driving him in that big old Bentley through drizzling rain, in silence, the customary state of affairs when Keig had nothing that needed saying. In less than half an hour we had reached the rear areas. We went forward on foot to meet the commander of the local ‘brigade’—for such was the military term, garnered from heaven knows where, that Keig had given the bigger units into which our forces were now organized.
Keig gave the man, a bustling thirty-year-old with a full fair moustache who had come over to us from the Defence Force, a curt nod of greeting.
‘I want to look at their lines,’ he said.
‘Right you are, Mr Keig. We’d best go up this way. From the top you get a pretty good idea.’
The three of us tramped along a sunken lane, where the remains of the last snowfall lay in white streaks pockmarked by the grey of water-drips, to a point where two men with rifles huddled in a dug-out beside a field gateway.
‘This is as far as it’s safe to go,’ the commander said.
We peered carefully over a drystone wall towards the outermost edge of Mylchraine’s redoubt. An unharvested mass of oats lay all beaten down and black in the field in front of us with on its far side another wall in a pretty poor state of repair. Beyond this a similar field sloped upwards to a line of hazel-bushes, bare of leaf but with their thickly intertwined twigs forming a fairly solid mass. Just behind it could be seen the square shape of a bedded-down scout-car.
Keig turned to the commander.
‘I hear you’re not certain what else they’ve got besides the car,’ he said.
The man fingered his fluffily fair moustache.
‘Hasn’t been what you might call practical to get a close look,’ he answered.
‘Well, I’m going to find out,’ Keig said. ‘You stay here.’
He had spoken to me as well as the discomfited commander, and I was glad enough not to have been ordered nearer the enemy. That scout-car
looked too well placed. I wondered too why Keig had made such a fuss about finding out about the enemy. With only two men with rifles we ourselves were hardly going to stop the Keepers if they chose to make a break-out here.
But I was given little time for such thoughts. Keig, taking one quick glance at that reliable watch he had purchased in distant Dublin, walked upright straight through the gateway into the stretch of sodden oats in front of us.
He’ll be killed, I said to myself. Keig’ll be killed. What shall we do?
I thought of running out and dragging him back. Fear would not have stopped me. But I knew that in simple fact I could not drag Keig as much as one yard if he did not want to come, and plainly he had stepped into that field under the direct gaze of the enemy with every intention of staying there.
He tramped down towards the far drystone wall, squashing the black rotting oat-stems under his heavy boots, kicking away the occasional remains of snow. There came no sound of firing: I imagine the Keepers in that well-protected scout-car were just as astonished as we were.
Keig reached the wall, laid his axe on it and stood slowly appraising the hazel copse a hundred yards away. And then the firing did begin. A short burst from an automatic weapon stuttered out in the misty air. I saw a few birds wheel up from the bushes. I looked back to where Keig stood. He was still leaning forwards over the wall. It was impossible to see where the shots had gone.
Another burst. This time my eyes were not on the car but on Keig and I saw the bullets send chips flying from the wall a yard to his left. Slowly he turned and began squelching back over the ruined oats.
Hurry, hurry, I prayed.
The gun fired again. Its bright sparking and a shower of broken twigs from the hazel-bushes were plainly to be seen. I expected Keig to stagger and fall, but he kept walking steadily on. Another burst drew a sudden black line across a patch of snow he had just tramped over, following exactly the line of his footsteps.
They can’t miss him now, I thought. Oh, why had he done this?
But they did miss. It is extraordinary how many bullets it can take, with a not Particularly skilled marksman at any range beyond point-blank, to hit a moving target. Keig marched on. The gun began firing in more continuous bursts, and then it stopped.
Jammed, I thought. And Keig within twenty yards of us.
Run, I almost shouted. Don’t risk it any more. Run.
Instead he looked at his watch, and, as if he was a little early for an appointment, turned and walked along parallel to our wall. Twenty-five yards, squelch, squelch, through the messy oat-stalks, turn, twenty-five yards back.
He is going to be killed, I told myself. They’ll get that gun going again and he will be killed.
2
But of course Keig was not killed. At the end of the third turn in his walk up and down he consulted his watch again and, in time for his appointment, swung off and walked back in through the gateway. As he did so one of the men in the dug-out brought up his rifle and sent shot after shot out into the field until I had to shake him to make him stop.
And, of course, Keig’s action had the effect I soon realized it had been intended to have. It created for him as leader of the struggle against Mylchraine an extraordinary reputation. It made him a sort of living talisman for every man under his command.
And, remembering his moment of weakness after he had seen poor Pat Boddaugh’s mutilated face and been unable to face Gilhast’s shotgun, I was doubly delighted that his cold courage rapidly had its reward. As little as two days later, driving him on an inspection tour at the very other end of our line, I was asked repeatedly whether the exploit had actually happened, I assured everyone it had, and even embellished the tale.
I hoped I might make a repetition unnecessary, though I did not succeed. At various points in the line that swung round Mylchraine’s forces in a great irregular arc during the rest of the winter and in the spring Keig repeated almost exactly the same performance. And the legend of god-like invulnerability he acquired was very necessary. It offset the sapping of morale that our lengthening list of casualties inevitably brought as with the better weather we pressed harder and harder on the unrolling barbed wire and growing mine-sown patches of the Keepers’ defences.
‘Every day they’re left in peace,’ Keig said, ‘we let them kill one more of us sometime without us being able to kill one more of them.’
So, as with advancing summer our men advanced yard by yard, Keig’s talismanic effect became more and more necessary, though often I feared we might have obtained its benefits at a terrible cost in its hidden effects on Keig himself.
And we did not advance fast enough. In May we heard Mylchraine had bought tanks equipped with flame-throwing devices. First we heard he had a hundred of these monsters. Then a revised account said he had just two. But towards the end of the month a new figure came deviously from Hamburg, where the purchase we said to be being negotiated, saying hat Mylchraine had offered for twelve tanks but that the talks were still uncompleted. Even that was not pleasant hearing. A squadron of twelve tanks, especially armed with this eerie, bestial device, could dominate the whole of Oceana.
Keig’s immediate response was to call Cormode, who still controlled the purse-strings, to his headquarters, now established in the small town of Kermaddack almost directly west of Lesneven, where we occupied the little Assembly Room.
Cormode came alone. When he entered Keig’s cell-like room at the back of the hall Keig was sitting on the only seat, a battered paint-splodged kitchen chair, and I was sitting on the folded blankets from his bed set on top of his haversack. Keig put down the board that had been across his knees, but made no attempt to get up. I rose, slightly put out by what I saw as a display of arrogance.
‘Sit down,’ Keig said to me, ‘I’ll be needing you.’
I lowered myself carefully back.
Cormode stood looking at us, seeming extraordinarily out-of-place with his shiny-elbowed blue suit and his briefcase compared with Keig’s open-necked shirt, heavy mud-encrusted trousers and his long-handled axe resting casually against the side of his battered chair.
‘I want more heavy guns,’ Keig said to him. ‘And I want them quick.’
Cormode turned and began trying to pace up and down the little room.
‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘if you realize how crippling the cost might be.’
‘Mylchraine’s getting flame-throwers,’ Keig replied. ‘Have you ever seen a man burnt alive?’
Well, I thought, we had. We had seen poor argumentative Jack Ascough go.
Cormode came to an abrupt standstill. I guessed he was sensitive about the inactive part he had played in our affairs all along. It was shrewd of Keig to get at him there.
‘Mr Keig,’ he said, ‘I know people have to die when a war is fought.’
Keig gave him a sharp glance.
‘And someone has to order them to risk death,’ he said.
It was an unexpected remark. With Keig’s habitual inscrutability it was difficult to appreciate how much of a toll it took having not simply to order one attack but having to order another next day when the casualty reports were still coming in. Yet here was a glimpse of the strain. It was both reassuring and not so. Any rift in the thickening cloud-veil that hung over Keig was spirit-lifting, but I saw now too that such unremitting weight borne in loneliness could have terrible effects.
But Keig at once shook his head in an almost imperceptible gesture of casting something off and looked gloweringly at Cormode.
‘Just how much have you got in the kitty in Dublin then?’ he asked.
A little pink flush appeared on Cormode’s pallid cheeks.
‘That isn’t the sort of question that can be answered,’ he replied. ‘It’s a matter of accounting.’
‘All right, I know. You’ve got an account at the bank. Money comes in and money goes out and you can’t tell to a penny where you stand. But you must have some notion all the same. I want twenty-two more howitzers. Have you
got the cash?’
‘Twenty-two, but surely that’s—’
‘I said twenty-two,’ Keig interrupted. ‘I’ve gone round those lines of theirs for five months and more, and I know what’ll be wanted to break through them. Twenty-two heavy guns.’
‘Yes,’ Cormode agreed then. ‘We could pay for them.’
‘Right,’ Keig went on, as if there was no more to be said, ‘there’s something else too. Recruiting. There’s nine or ten men being wounded or killed every day now, and I’m not getting others to fight in their place. I must have them. It’s the estate-owners that’s to blame. They’re keeping the men from volunteering. Aren’t they? Well, why are you letting ’em?’
Poor Cormode. I wondered if the reason was that he had been too occupied with his own political plans. When I had chanced to meet Clifford Willine a week or so earlier he had boasted to me Cormode was going to launch ‘a full-scale political party to Participate in any future election’. He himself was going to be its general secretary. Hence, I suppose, his anxiety to imPart information. I had yet to pass all this on to Keig, however. I wanted him to hear it at a time when he might take notice.
But Cormode was putting forward excuses. He stationed himself in the clearest space in the cell-like room and delivered a short lecture, with an occasional stiff gesture even. It was, in fact, a not unimpressive performance. Cormode had not been in Oceana long, a few days over five months, and yet plainly there were very few facts even about the years he had been away that he had not already assimilated. Had he been lecturing actual students they would have left with notebooks plainly stating that owing to present social and political conditions much reinforcement of the troops opposing Mr Mylchraine was an impossibility. But he was lecturing the much less tutored Keig.
And after a while Keig looked up at him.
‘You’ve let the estate-owners best you,’ he said.
And, of course, this was it. Seeing Cormode’s arguments in the brutal flash-bulb dazzle of Keig’s statement, I realized that here indeed was the root of the matter. The estate-owners were hardly at all opposed to Mylchraine. Few had even backed Calo, let alone Keig whom they regarded as some sort of outlaw.
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