That was the last of the battle Jonathan had written up in the diary. The rest was memory. Fifty years later he remembered every sound and the scent of the Tunisian fields and hills; he could remember every word that was said. As long as he lived, he could never forget. There would be no exorcism.
* * *
Soon after dawn on the next day the main attack had begun, when the guns had begun pounding the enemy position on the ridge across the valley. Clouds of dust and rock splinters rose into the sky, followed by a rolling cloud of smoke as the battalion rose from the crest and in extended order began the descent down the rocky forward slope into the valley. By his fireside, Jonathan stirred again. The diary lay on his lap, the pages blank.
Into the valley of death they had gone, he had thought at the time. In the first rays of sunlight they could see, ahead and below, the heads of the corn in the plain swaying in the faint breeze, yellow-gold, spotted with crimson – the poppies, like those in the fields over which Beau and his friends had fought more than twenty-five years before. There could be no shelter until they reached a cluster of olive groves on the far side of the valley, from which gullies led up the steep, rocky face of the hill held by the Hermann Goering Division.
By the time they’d gone a little way the sun was up and in contrast to the cold of the night, it became warm. Jonathan marched with Colonel Philip, their orderlies and signallers around them, slightly to the rear of the leading infantry companies. Ahead, he had seen the tall figure of David Trelawney prominent with his lead platoon. They marched steadily down the forward slope—as if they had been on the Horseguards in Whitehall. But long before they had reached the cornfield men began to fall as the enemy opened up with spandaus and six-barrelled mortars. To avoid the wounded being crushed by the tanks that would follow them into the valley, Colonel Philip had ordered that when a man fell his rifle should be stuck, bayonet down, into the earth and his helmet placed on the butt. Soon the cornfield became crowded with a forest of reversed rifles.
One of the first to fall was the commanding officer’s orderly. For a moment Jonathan had hesitated. Then he thrust the man’s rifle into the ground. ‘Come along, Jonathan,’ he heard Colonel Philip say quietly. ‘Keep up, but not too close. Keep going.’
Jonathan never knew how they managed to reach the cornfield, or how they crossed it; all he remembered was the noise and the cries. They paused only to leave the forlorn markers as they brushed through the waist-high corn until, at last, they reached the temporary safety of the olive grove at the base of the hill they had still to attack. The forward infantry companies had regrouped here, but by the time Battalion HQ reached the grove they were already out of sight above them, clambering up the ridge in the face of the withering fire poured from above.
In the olive grove Colonel Philip tried to contact the forward infantry company commanders on his command W/T set. After a minute he pulled off his earphones. ‘Jonathan,’ he had said, and Jonathan could hear his voice now although he had not heard it since they said goodbye in the Base Hospital before Jonathan had left for home and Colonel Philip for his death on the plains of Sicily. ‘I can’t reach any of the company commanders. Take one of the signallers and go up and find out how far they’ve got. They should be approaching the summit by now. Try and let me know the position before I launch the reserve company. The carriers won’t be able to make it up the hill, but I’ll send up the Carrier Platoon dismounted, as reinforcements. If we’ve got the crest, it’s to be held until tomorrow. Off with you.’
Jonathan scrambled up over the rocks, the signaller with his heavy W/T set on his back beside him. Through the storm of bullets and hand grenades they clambered, stumbling over the dead and wounded. Twenty-five yards below the summit Jonathan heard a cry and, turning, saw the signaller roll over and fall down the hill, his set smashing and splintering as the body bounced from crag to crag. Jonathan climbed on. In twenty minutes he was on the summit.
‘Who’s in command?’ he shouted.
‘Keep down, you bloody fool,’ a voice yelled. It was Rory Connor. ‘Who is that?’
‘Jonathan,’ he shouted back.
‘David’s in command of what’s left of us. He’s along the crest, to your right.’
There was a lull in the fighting and Jonathan made his way along the reverse slope just below the crest until he came to a complex of trenches from which the German defenders had been driven. He walked along a trench until he came to a corporal sitting on the ground, his hand bandaged with an emergency dressing.
‘Where’s Major Trelawney?’ he asked. The corporal pointed to a tarpaulin sheet and Jonathan pushed it aside. The cave, its earth walls lined with the wood of ration boxes and the floor with straw, was lit by a solitary oil-lamp. Squatting on the ground, filling his tommy-gun with a fresh magazine, was David.
‘Reinforcements, by God,’ David said. ‘Welcome to the recently vacated HQ of the Hermann Goering division.’ He patted the straw beside him and Jonathan sat. ‘It’s good to see a friendly face,’ David said. He looked at Jonathan. Then he added, ‘Or rather a fresh face. Why have you come?’
Jonathan gave him Colonel Philip’s message and reported the loss of the signaller and the W/T set. David took his flask from his breast pocket. ‘There’s only one other officer left, that’s Rory, and about thirty men.’ He handed the flask to Jonathan. Jonathan shook his head and David shrugged his shoulders. ‘Suit yourself,’ he said. ‘I’ve learned never to be without it.’
He took a pull and then added, ‘I’ve no W/T, so I’ve sent a runner down, telling them where we are. God knows whether he’s made it.’
Corporal Lawson pushed his head through the tarpaulin. ‘Message from Captain Connor, sir. Boche patrols are working their way around us. They’re now on the slope Captain Playfair just came up.’
‘Thanks, Lawson. Wait in the trench for me.’
Lawson’s head disappeared. ‘Now you’ll have to stay, Jonathan. They’ll be counter-attacking soon. Go to the north and take command of what’s left of Number Three Company. Lawson’ll show you where.’
‘Brigade wants us to hold on for twenty-four hours,’ Jonathan said.
‘They’ll be lucky if we hold out for half a dozen.’
There were about twenty men left of No. 3 Company, mostly in pairs in the German slit-trenches. Jonathan selected a fox-hole for himself which he manned alone, retrieving a bren gun from a dead gunner. A lance-sergeant was in the slit-trench furthest from him. Then the mortaring began in earnest, and a little later the first attack. Wave after wave came struggling up the hill to retake the position while the defenders blazed away at them. By noon, Jonathan learned by calling to the men in the fox-holes around him, there were only a dozen of them left. Still the attackers came on. From time to time, to his left, he had seen David standing, careless of the danger, flinging grenades, firing a bren from his hip, then leading a few in a counter-attack to drive any surviving attackers from the rocks they had managed to reach.
By mid-afternoon they were down to eight effective and unwounded, strung out along the north edge of the summit. In the intervals between the attacks Jonathan drank from his water-bottle, crouching at the bottom of the hole, his head in his hands, only standing to get back to his bren when he heard the shouting that announced another attack was coming in.
All that long hot day they clung on, until at last the darkness came. And with it the cold. A great lassitude and exhaustion had come over him but he knew that he must get out of his slit-trench and encourage the survivors. So he summoned up the energy and crawled from fox-hole to fox-hole, doing what he could to chat up the few who survived, arranging for look-outs, doling out morphine to the wounded, telling them that soon help would be coming. Then he crawled back and lay huddled at the bottom of his foxhole, hugging himself to get some warmth. Suddenly, silhouetted against the night sky above him, he saw a tall figure. It was David.
‘Jonathan,’ he whispered. ‘I’m concentrating everyone in the centr
e, around the cave. Come along.’
Jonathan hauled himself up and, with the few who had survived, he followed David along the summit, walking upright because David was. When David had posted the men in their new positions he took Jonathan along the trench to the cave. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
Jonathan nodded. David again handed him his flask, and this time Jonathan drank.
‘The Boche are all around us. When Number Two Company tried to come up they were driven back to the olive grove. So we’re on our own for the rest of the night. But some of your old platoon, the carriers, got up during the day.’
‘How many?’
‘Sergeant Willis and eight others, and they brought ammunition. But we’ve no food or water. Only our iron rations and what’s left in our water-bottles. Sergeant Willis gave me a message from Colonel Philip. He says we’re to hold on until dawn when the rest of the brigade will attack.’ He got out his map. ‘The Boche are regrouping. It’ll be harder for us in the dark. Rory’s out now, having a scout around to see where they are concentrating. I want you to go to the south end of the ridge and see him in. Take charge there and send Rory to me when he’s back.’
David put his head out of the cave, pushing aside the tarpaulin. ‘Lawson, take Captain Playfair along to what’s left of Number One Company to the south.’ He turned to Jonathan and put his hand on Jonathan’s arm and smiled. ‘It’s been a long time, Jonathan.’
Jonathan said nothing and David dropped his hand. ‘Good luck, if I don’t see you again.’
Jonathan took his bren and some fresh magazines and followed Lawson out of the cave and along the crest to the most southerly group of fox-holes.
‘There’s your place, sir. Captain Connor should come back about here. He’s been gone twenty minutes. Sergeant Willis is over there, just behind you.’ Then Lawson left.
Jonathan crawled to Sergeant Willis’s slit-trench. ‘Where are the rest of the Carriers?’
‘The major’s scattered them around. I’m here on my own.’
‘I’m to see Captain Connor in. I’ll be in the slit-trench just ahead.’
Jonathan crawled back and dropped into his fox-hole.
He heard Rory’s cry before he saw him. Then an enemy flare lit up the sky and he saw the crumpled figure twenty yards from him down the hill. He climbed out of the slit-trench and on his belly worked his way down to where Rory lay. ‘It’s me, Jonathan,’ he said, and grabbed at Rory, trying to pull him up the hill.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Rory had screamed. ‘My legs, my bloody legs.’
The spandaus opened up again from below and when they ceased he tried again. But Rory cursed and swore at him and again the spandaus opened up. ‘Get back,’ Rory had said. ‘The buggers’ll be coming any moment. They’re forming up now, right below us. Piss off, Jonathan. Get back to the trench and your bren. They’re coming again.’ So he had given Rory the last of his morphine and crawled back to the fox-hole above where Rory lay. For a time quiet had fallen on the hill, and it was then that Rory’s songs had begun – the songs which had ended with the prayer: ‘Pater nostris, qui est in coelum…’
Afterwards, long afterwards, when it was all over and he dreamed about that night or when he was remembering as he was now in front of the fire, Jonathan always told himself that it was Rory’s singing that had done it. The songs Rory had sung as he lay there, dying, unable to move. The songs of Ireland, about the Wild Geese, and all the heroes the English had killed. How strange the Germans would have thought it if they could have understood! But it was those songs, Jonathan believed, that had caused him to do what he did. Not the mortar bombs, not the night attacks, not his wound, not the hunger nor the thirst and exhaustion. It had been the songs. He was as certain of that now as he had always been during the past fifty years.
* * *
The silence that had followed Rory’s prayer had not lasted. It was only minutes before Jonathan saw the first of the dark shapes coming up the slope. Behind him a flare soared up into the sky and his and Willis’s bren opened up. He heard the screams of the enemy as their leading files fell like ninepins. More flares lit the sky, this time from further in the rear by the cave, and he saw the figures turn and hurry down into the darkness. He had laid his revolver on the parapet beside him so that he should be ready for them when they got close, and he reloaded the bren with his last magazine. Then they came again, and once again the brens stopped them. When they had disappeared down the hill into the darkness the mortars opened up, not the single mortars but the six-barrelled mortars whose bombs whined and howled through the night air before they fell and burst with an ear-splitting crash in the rocky ground. At first the bombs fell short, then long. But soon they found the range. Two, one after the other, landed almost on the parapet as he crouched at the bottom of his pit. They were followed by a third, and then another and another, crumbling the earth, flinging up slivers of metal and splinters of rock. The blast of one swept over his head, and a splinter gashed his helmet, knocking it from his head. Blood poured down his face into his eyes and involuntarily he stood up. Another splinter hit his left arm, wrecking the bren, flinging him across the rock of the fox-hole, face down. Yet another landed within feet of where he lay. Then it happened. Sitting in his chair, remembering, he did what he always did when in his memories he came to this part. He put both hands to his face and rocked slowly back and forth, back and forth.
For when that last bomb had landed on the rim of his fox-hole, with a cry he grabbed his revolver with his right hand and hoisted himself out of the slit-trench. Stumbling and running, his right hand holding the revolver, pressing it against the wound in his left arm which lay limp by his side, he began to run. Falling, rising again, stumbling on, he careered back along the crest of the hill with the bombs falling around him. On he ran, past the other fox-holes, until he reached the trenches by David’s cave. By then he could hardly see from the blood running from his brow as he threw himself into the trench, and crawled the last few yards to where the tarpaulin covered the entrance to the cave. He pushed it aside. The cave was empty, lit now not by the lamp but by a single candle guttering in the neck of a bottle. He flung himself face down on the straw on the rock floor.
He heard a voice behind him, calling his name – ‘Jonathan. Jonathan. What are you doing here?’ – and he thought of his mother calling him when he had run from the accident after the tractor had fallen from the field. He lifted his head and looked over his shoulder. The blood was running down from his forehead but he could see that it was David kneeling beside him. David pulled at him, trying to turn him on to his back, tugging at his shattered arm. He screamed, and David let him go. He still had his revolver in his right, uninjured hand. Then Jonathan heard another voice and he rolled over on to his back so that he was staring at the entrance, wiping the blood from his eyes with the back of his uninjured arm with his pistol still in his hand. David, kneeling beside him, had also turned and shone his torch on the entrance to the cave. The tarpaulin was pulled aside and a head appeared. The tarpaulin opened further and the figure of a man was framed in the entrance. He had one hand on the tarpaulin, in the other a bren gun. It was Sergeant Willis.
‘He ran,’ Willis shouted. ‘The buggar ran!’
Jonathan, now half-sitting, could see in the beam of David’s torch Willis’s mouth as he shouted the words. ‘The buggar ran,’ Willis shouted again. ‘He ran, he ran.’
A salvo of mortar bombs landed on the trench outside the cave, but not before the cave had reverberated with the sound of a single shot from within it, and Sergeant Willis fell forward. The tarpaulin split into shreds as he fell, and then the blast from yet another salvo of bombs swept into the cave. The last thing Jonathan saw before all the light was quenched was the strip of tarpaulin clutched in the hand of the dead man who lay within a foot of Jonathan with a neat, round hole from the bullet of a revolver in the centre of his forehead.
* * *
The diary had fallen from Jonathan’s lap and l
ay half-open on the rug at his feet. His head had sunk on his breast. Then he raised his head, bent and picked it up. For a moment he held it in his hand. Then he tossed it on to the fire.
The pages burnt quickly; the flames licked at the black imitation leather of the cover. Then that too, or most of it, had gone.
He sat watching the small, black, crinkled pile of ash on the topmost log, until it fell in a small shower on to the bright red base of the fire.
21
THE room was in almost total darkness when Mason knocked for the first time. It was only when he knocked a second time and, getting no reply, opened the door, that light from the hall flooded into the room. From where he stood he could see, above the rim of the armchair, the back of Jonathan’s head, resting on his right hand.
‘Mr Benson is here, sir.’
Jonathan made no reply and did not stir. ‘Mr Benson is here,’ Mason repeated. ‘He is very anxious to see you. He’s in the cloakroom at the moment.’
Still there was no reply, and Mason crossed the room. ‘Are you all right, sir?,’ he asked, bending over the chair. Jonathan lowered his hand from his head. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I was dozing.’
‘The fire’s got very low, sir. Shall I make it up?’
‘Please do.’
Mason knelt. He could see from the mound of ash that Sir Jonathan had been burning paper. Taking the poker he stirred the ash from the embers and threw on some kindling twigs, which caught and burnt brightly; then he added fresh logs.
Indictment for Murder Page 26
