Charlie's War

by David Fiddimore

  ‘What happened to your fingers?’

  ‘The small one was shot off: didn’t feel a thing. Broke the middle one. Just lashed the others on either side as a splint. Been meaning to get it fixed up for days.’

  The nurse was sitting alongside him. Up close you could see how tired she was. She reminded me of Les when he got his pills out of sync: the lights were on, but there was no one in. She wore no lipstick, and for some reason that touched me – I wanted to look after her. I asked her about his fingers. She took a long time to reply. Then she sighed and said, ‘He’ll get gangrene. We’ve told him that. I don’t think he cares.’ She spoke as if Albie wasn’t there.

  Albie asked her, ‘How long before you’re back on duty, hon?’

  She made a production of checking a small watch which hung drunkenly on her collar. It all happened in slow-mo.

  ‘. . .’bout three hours. Back shift.’

  ‘If you’ll give me a quarter hour to talk to my friends here, I’ll walk you back to your tent, and after that I’ll walk you on duty, and you can fix my finger.’

  ‘You just want to fuck me.’

  ‘That, too.’

  ‘OK,’ she said.

  Albie asked me, ‘Are you following Grace about?’

  ‘Yes. Do you know where she is?’

  ‘She won’t like that.’

  ‘I promised her.’

  ‘She still won’t like it.’

  Dad was coming back from the bar with the waitress. They each had a tray of beers.

  I told Albie, ‘You’re right. I know it. But I haven’t any choice. The RAF sent me.’

  ‘What the fuck’s it got to do with the RAF?’

  ‘You didn’t use to swear.’

  ‘That’s before the Kraut shot things off me, and killed my pals. I’m serious – what the fuck has it got to do with the RAF?’

  ‘Actually, very little. That’s the way their world seems to work. My boss tells me to go and do something. In reality he’s repaying a favour to someone he owes, who’s repaying a favour to someone he owes, who’s repaying a favour to someone he owes. These are all personal favours: nothing to do with King or Country. It’s person to person inside their business. Am I making sense?’

  ‘What are you trying to say, Charlie?’

  ‘That I could be working for the Jerries, and never know it. It depends who wants the favour done in the first place.’ I said it again: probably the first time I faced facts. ‘It’s the way their sort of world seems to work.’ If it sounded sort of lame, it was because it was.

  ‘Whose world?’

  ‘Spies,’ I told him. ‘I think.’

  ‘Fuck . . . off, Charlie!’ That was Albie.

  ‘Charlie boy, what sort of a mess have you got yourself into?’ That was my old man. They really helped, didn’t they? I felt about ten years old again, exposed and foolish.

  Albie told me, ‘You missed her by about a fortnight. She crossed with us, ditched us in France, and then caught us here, after we were shot up again. She was here before those bloody Krauts came back through us.’

  ‘She was OK, though?’

  ‘Yeah. She had an orphan child with her. Wet-nursing it: I heard my folks talk about women wet-nursing other people’s children when I was a kid. Never saw it until now. Still has nice little tits.’

  ‘Do you know where she went?’

  ‘No. She hung around us for a few days, but I didn’t get to talk to her a real lot.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it. Talking a lot isn’t what Grace does.’

  ‘She took a fancy to one of the guys in the squadron. She might have told him more than she told the rest of us. All I know is that she was looking out for some mob of mad Frogs who believe that everyone has the right to medical care, regardless what side they’re on. They say that medicine is like a religion: it has no boundaries. Apparently the Top Brass don’t like them too much.’

  ‘Will he talk to me, this guy? Grace’s friend?’

  ‘Who wants to find her, as well as you?’

  ‘I thought I told you: her parents. They’re VIPs. That means that the Prime Minister wants her found as well because he’s a friend of the family . . . and I sort of got the short straw. Short guys do.’

  Albie grinned.

  ‘OK. I’ll talk to him.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘See you back here tonight or tomorrow.’

  He hooked his good hand into the nurse’s armpit, and helped her to her feet. In the course of that his own chair fell over backwards. She smiled. It was a self-indulgent smile that said she had a secret. Either that or she was pissed to the eyeballs.

  I asked, ‘What do I do till then?’

  ‘If you don’t need a Doctor yet, grab a little R & R. It’s what this place is for.’

  I didn’t like the word yet.

  I went round and picked the chair up. Dad was helping a waitress clear the table back to the bar, so I gave up resisting and sat down with strangers. I’ll have to revise that. There was a mixture of olive drabs and white coats. One black-face white coat studied my face, and said, ‘Hi, Charlie Bassett.’

  I said, ‘Mr McKechnie,’ as his name came back to me. ‘Simmer, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Well done, Charlie, you have a memory for names. You should have been a policeman.’

  ‘I thought that you were a policeman. Kilduff is looking for you.’

  ‘He’ll never find me. This is too obvious a place to look. The best place to hide a doctor is in a hospital.’

  ‘The last time I met you you weren’t quite a doctor.’

  ‘Am now. Out of the shitehouse and into the shite.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘When I saw that you and your people could fuck the system, I decided to blow. I left the Lieutenant an anatomically accurate description of what he could do with my job, and just came out where they needed a doctor most – they don’t care where I come from here, as long as I can cut. They like my style. They call me the Cutter. There’s a cutter in every unit. The last one here was minced by a mortar round the week before I turned up.’

  ‘I’m still looking for that girl.’

  ‘Miss Emily, or your Grace what’s her name?’

  ‘Grace. I leapfrogged over Emily. Your Captain Grayling saw Grace more recently than Emily did.’

  ‘That’s good, because Miss Emily was here, then she got a few days’ leave. I think that she’s gone back over to England.’

  ‘Did she know that I was looking for her?’

  ‘ ’course not. Why would anyone tell her that, Charlie? You still a pretending Padre?’

  Fuck them, I could manage without help. I reached across the table with my glass of beer. He met me halfway. I said, ‘Cheerio. I won’t tell on you either.’ We clinked.

  ‘Cheers, Charlie . . . and I note that. You going liberal? Growing up on me?’

  ‘That’s what Dad said this morning.’

  The devil of whom I had spoken was back in a chair alongside me, arguing the toss with the thin Sergeant. He twitched round when I tugged his sleeve.

  ‘This is my dad,’ I told McKechnie, and, ‘This is my friend Dr McKechnie, Dad. He helped me in Paris.’ OK: so that was stretching it a bit.

  ‘. . . he’s gonna give me a hand when I find Grace.’

  I might have imagined it, but I sensed McKechnie’s fine brown face becoming a couple of shades paler.

  Five minutes later a wet SBA banged in at the door and shouted, ‘Cutter here?’ across the echoing hall.

  McKechnie snapped alert, and responded with a, ‘Yo. I’m here,’ and threw his hand up.

  ‘You got a bad arm up in Number Three, sir.’

  He said, ‘OK, brother,’ and moved up and out.

  I murmured, ‘Good luck,’ not meaning him to hear me, but he turned, and flashed me a brilliant smile before scampering out into the rain. I forgot to tell you; it had begun to rain. Eastern Holland should twin with Cambridgeshire: they have that in common. The roo
f of the Quonset was thin boards and tarred cloth. The noise of the rain was like being inside a side drum during a Gene Krupa solo. The SBA who’d come for the Cutter stepped over to the bar and had a quick one. It started as half a glass of something clear, but the barman stirred a spoonful of HP sauce, a spoonful of honey, and some salt into it.

  The old man saw me watching. He said, ‘Bourbon. They can do a good dark rum as well: a touch heavier with the HP, brown sugar and a dash of bitters.’

  I saw the SBA swallow it in a oner, and shudder, before making for the door. I got a glance of rain bouncing off puddles outside as he left.

  I asked, ‘What is it?’

  ‘Medical-grade alcohol. Ethanol: good with tonic water, and lemon, or lime. They call it an E & T. Lemons are not too easy to get, but we had a couple of lorryloads of limes last week. God knows where from. Anyway, the babes love an E & T. They dance on the tables.’

  ‘Babes?’

  ‘Sorry, son. The women. Everyone talks American over here.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because they’re paying for the war now, didn’t anyone tell you?’

  It must have been McKechnie’s use of the word shitehouse that did it. Not long after he left to go to work my lower bowel performed a serious ritual of summoning. The barman gave me directions, which were outside and on to the boardwalk, turn left, walk the length of the Quonset until I reached the canvas field latrine. He’d have an E & T on the bar for me to try when I returned. I didn’t walk; I ran. It was a large latrine: wind and water proof, if a trifle draughty. The usual thing – a long, narrow pit with a smooth pole along it lengthwise. You hung your jacksie over the pole and watched for splinters. In front of you was a heap of dirt, and an entrenching tool – so you could cover your spoil afterwards. There was an entrance at each end; for men and for women. They were labelled Cats and Dudes. I went for Dudes. The only thing was that they led to the same space. While I sat there balanced on the pole a woman SBA in fatigues came in, and squatted the woodwork about ten feet to my right. She smiled as she dropped her kecks, and opened a Forces newspaper.

  She said, ‘Oh, hi, Father,’ when she noticed me, and turned back to it. She had a nice smile and a fine, white backside, but that was it for me. The romance was gone. The paper squares were cut from newspapers, just the same as in the UK . . . and the same bastard had got there before me, and stolen the cartoons. I slipped into role when I was covering my turds. As I sprinkled the earth on the rich faecal stench reaching up for me, I noticed the resemblance to a burial.

  ‘Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust . . .’

  I’d learned that from a Kid Ory number – I think that it was ‘Oh Didn’t He Ramble!’ I must have spoken aloud, because the girl laughed. When I looked her way she was looking back, and said, ‘Practising, Father?’ then went back to her newspaper.

  I could never have fancied her anyway.

  Back in the bar I dropped the E & T straight into my stomach to get the latrine taste away from the back of my throat. Then I went over to where Les and the Major were building a glass mountain at the table between them. I’m not quite sure what happened to the rest of the morning. At lunchtime a great crowd of folk drifted through on the way to the mess tents. Some of them stuck. I lost James and Les and my dad, and eventually found myself at a table with a couple of GI captains called Harry and Salvatore, who wanted to tell me how they first met. When we ran out of conversation they told me about the Krauts holed up in Blijenhoek Castle: which is what I had stayed to hear.

  Fifteen

  The problem with the castle was that while Jerry couldn’t break out, we couldn’t get in. It was built like the proverbial brick shithouse, and sunk onto old granite bedrock. All the conventional ammunition that had been fired at it had bounced off: that included the huge 155mm shells lobbed into it from miles away. A few days earlier a section of fighter-bombers had tackled it with AP rockets, and left one of their mates flame-grilled in a field nearby. That really pissed them off: they came back later that day with a couple of five-hundred-pound bombs each. Those bombs, striking virtually horizontally, dropped clouds of pulverized brick dust into the moat with no effect on the stone inner. They might as well have used spears, or bows and arrows on it. A company of Scots from the Lowland Division had had a go twice, like medieval siege troops. It took a full day’s truce to allow the Jocks to collect their bodies from the moat and surrounding meadows.

  So now it had settled down to a regular siege, only nobody knew how much food they had in there, nor ammo, nor how long it would go on for . . . nor how many of the bastards there really were, come to that. The problem the damned place posed, apart from turning Uncle Sam’s favourite R & R camp into a General Hospital, was that just beyond it, the main advance on the Rhine had ground to a halt. The Generals didn’t want to race ahead with a pocket of nasty Germans in their rear, waiting to dash out and roger them from behind.

  I asked about bombing the bloody place into submission, and was told that that was an option in two weeks’ time. It was down to the USAAF, who were still running the daylight stuff, and that was the earliest they could put a significant number of birds over the castle.

  Later they walked me down to the woods in the lower fields, from where I could see the action. There were soldiers in shallow scrapes spread at the edge of meadows which sloped down to an improbably wide moat, and a castle that looked just the way you don’t want a castle to look; if you are on the outside. It was grey, massive, a bit battered, but unbloodied. I fell out of love with it at first sight. From time to time a mortar round from the castle would drop among besiegers, causing niggling casualties. There were two carried out in the period of time I watched. The Americans shrugged. One of them said, ‘I don’t like to watch good men wasted, but, what the hell; they ain’t ours.’

  That was exactly how I felt about the Kraut.

  I left the guys there, rubbernecking, and taking souvenir photographs for their friends back home. You might not think that my interest was professional, but truly it was: all the time the Army wasn’t moving, neither were we. Grace could be moving further into Germany; by the hour for all I knew.

  Back in the bar I limited myself to a single E & T, and asked the barman who was really in charge of the war around here. He directed me to a big Leyland command lorry in a field about a mile away. It was so perfectly camouflaged that you couldn’t mistake it for anything other than perhaps another Leyland command lorry. I hoofed it.

  There was a Lowland Division Colonel drinking scented tea at a portable map table, under a canvas awning stretched out from the lorry. He was the first soldierly Brit I had seen all day; he was in full khakis, which had been neatly patched in places, indicating that the Colonel had been around a bit. I paused on the periphery, then threw him a decent salute as soon as he noticed me. An overweight ADC looked as if he was on an intercept course, but the Colonel waved him back, and beckoned me forward. I gave him the Good afternoon, sir, and my name, service and service number. He said, ‘Whatever you want, Pilot Officer Bassett, my first instinct is to have you arrested. You look bloody horrible, even for the RAF. Where did you get that bloody jacket from?’

  ‘A Yank gave it to me, sir, after another Yank had stolen mine. It suits what I’m doing.’

  ‘And that is?’

  ‘Driving around Europe looking for an important lost someone, sir.’

  ‘Under orders, I take it?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Whose?’

  Time to use my weight.

  ‘Ultimately, the Prime Minister’s, sir.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said moodily. ‘Another one of those. There’s bloody hundreds like you around at the moment. I’ll be glad to get the war over with, and get back to proper soldiering.’ There was something the matter with that somewhere, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. He waved the fat ADC over, and asked me, ‘So what can we do for you?’ The ADC had a pad and a pen, like a secretary. I shut off the image of him sitting on hi
s Colonel’s knee.

  ‘Nothing, sir, at present. Thank you.’

  ‘Oh. I see. Courtesy call. Good of you. Carry on . . . with whatever you’ve got to do.’

  When I didn’t move he gave me an eye lock, with a quizzical expression fixed to his face. I decided to talk before the muscles locked up.

  ‘I rather thought of offering something to you, sir. How would you like to lose that fucking great castle in the valley, sir?’ Interest. He waved the fat man away again: he walked backwards away from us, slightly bowing, like a courtier in the presence of royalty.

  The Colonel said, ‘Interesting. Go on, please.’

  ‘I thought a couple of Lancasters with a couple of cookies and eight one-thousand-pounders apiece would crack the place open for you. It will be a pity if you have to wait a fortnight for the Yanks to do it, sir. Then there’s the problem of American bombing.’

  ‘What problem?’

  ‘They’ll clobber your target OK, but they’ll do it with at least a squadron, from a very high altitude. They will drop more than a hundred bombs, and some of those will fall as far as five miles away. It’s the way they do things these days: they call it overkill. You’ll have to pull back every living thing around five or six miles from the target to guarantee no casualties.’

  ‘. . . and you think we can do better than that?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I have asked the RAF, of course, but they say No: it’s an American job. Have you any reason to imagine they might change their minds?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ll ask them, this time, sir. Sorry, sir.’

  ‘. . . and that will make a difference? I realize that you’re in the same club, of course, but . . .’

  ‘You have nothing to lose, if I try, sir.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I suppose not.’

  He had to give it the pretence of some thought, so as not to lose face. Then he said, ‘OK. I’ve got one of those special RAF listening stations in a radio van parked round the back. See if you can use them to connect through to whoever you need to speak to.’

  I’d heard of those types, and rather approved of them. They were RAF corporals and sergeants who connected into a special intelligence source somewhere, and told generals to piss off now and again. They were the best source of battlefield information the Army had, so it had to put up with them. This quartet of sergeants wasn’t terribly impressed with me, but couldn’t find a decent enough excuse to refuse to let me use their gear to speak to England. I gave them Cliff’s name. I gave them the telephone number for the Guard Room at Tempsford, and another fall-back number Cliff had given me. I think that they would have kicked me out, but that fall-back number clinched it. The senior Sergeant recognized it. His mouth got all twisted, as if his tongue had turned to worm-wood, and had started to lick itself. They told me to hang around, and that they would call me.