by Alan Judd
That done, he went over to the Mess but it was too early for dinner and, as chance would have it, he found himself alone with the CO, who was warming his backside against the fire. ‘Have a whisky,’ said the CO. It was not an invitation that could be refused. The CO looked tired and drawn and Charles, feeling guilty for what he had just done, as though he had betrayed the CO in some personal way, made a show of enthusiasm. ‘Pity about today,’ continued the CO. ‘Would have done the battalion a power of good to have found something. Good for morale. Nothing worse than trudging round fields all day and not finding anything. I know, I’ve done it myself. And of course if one person finds something it makes everyone else look that much harder. Still, there you are, can’t be helped. Stuff had probably been moved before we got there.’
‘What was it, sir?’
‘Four hundred pounds of home-made explosives in animal feed sacks. I think we were fairly thorough, don’t you? Don’t think we could’ve missed it.’
‘I think we were as thorough as possible under the circumstances.’
‘Yes, that’s what I thought. You can’t really tell when you’re hovering up in the air like a bloody kestrel. Easy to get the wrong impression.’
Charles sat next to Chatsworth during dinner and heard how his contribution to the search had been to shoot a rat in a ditch with his rifle. This probably accounted for the shot that had been reported by the RUC. Whilst looking for what was left of the rat – he wanted to see what the bullet had done – Chatsworth had sunk up to his knees in slime and, judging by the stench of his trousers, socks and boots afterwards, had concluded that the ditch was formed by the overflow from a cesspit. He had attempted to exchange trousers, socks and boots for new pairs by claiming that there were no cleaning facilities that could cope with the contamination, but had been rudely rebuffed by the misanthropic quartermaster.
‘They’re all the same, QMs,’ Chatsworth complained in a low, bitter voice. ‘They all see their job as to prevent you from getting kit rather than to provide you with it. You’d think they had to pay for the stuff themselves. I reckon if our QM ever had to issue the whole battalion with new boots he’d go into a decline and not eat for a week. Except that, knowing him, he’d eat even more and dock it from our rations. I’ll get the stuff clean eventually but it means our room’s going to stink for a bit.’
‘Can’t you keep it outside?’ asked Charles.
‘Not without someone pinching it.’
‘Who’d want it in that state?’
‘The QM for one. He’d take anything if he could get it without exchanging. People would pinch it out of spite.’
‘And what about the bullet?’
‘What bullet?’
‘The one you shot the rat with. You’ll have to account for it. You’ll be one round short.’
‘That’ll be all right. We’re bound to get through a few dozen rounds in Belfast. At least, I hope we are. I hope it’s not going to be as dull as this place. Anyway, I’ve got some of my own from home. I always carry a few with me.’
After dinner the Mess cleared unusually rapidly. Tramping around all day seemed to have tired people. Charles had reached that stage of sleeplessness when he was prepared to delay going to bed, the better to savour the prospect of sleeping soundly no matter what noise was made by A company going up and down the tunnel outside their room, and no matter what stench Chatsworth had introduced within it. He lingered over a whisky.
Chatsworth sat back in his armchair and languidly crossed his legs, as though he were about to conduct a tutorial. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever killed anyone?’ he asked offhandedly.
‘No, I haven’t.’
‘Do you want to?’
‘Not particularly, though I don’t object to the idea. It depends on who and why.’ It struck Charles that the conversation was beginning to sound very like conversations with Henry Sandy about sex. His replies were disturbingly similar. At the back of his mind there was a suspicion that he might quite like to kill someone just to see what it felt like, though it would never do to admit that to Chatsworth. ‘Why, have you killed anyone?’ he asked.
Chatsworth looked shifty. ‘Well, not really. Sort of but not properly.’
‘D’you mean they recovered?’
‘No, no. No question of that. It’s just that it wasn’t deliberate.’
Chatsworth looked embarrassed, as though he regretted having raised the subject. However, discomfiture of Chatsworth was too rare an experience for Charles to be able to resist exploring it. ‘Come on, what do you mean? What happened? Was it today?’
‘No, no. No. It was – you won’t tell anyone, will you? I won’t like it to get out, you see. It was an old woman in Bogota. I ran her over at night. Pure accident. Didn’t matter very much because they just leave the bodies on the streets out there. I don’t know who she was. But as I didn’t mean it I can’t really claim it as a kill.’
‘Perhaps you’ll be able to make up for it here,’ said Charles.
Chatsworth raised his glass. ‘Let’s hope so.’
Charles had meant it as a joke but seeing Chatsworth take his remark seriously caused him to doubt his own intentions. It was quite likely that someone was going to kill or be killed during the next few months.
Before he left the Mess that night Charles received a telephone call from Janet. She had got the number from military enquiries. In a conversation made awkward by enforced normality, she said that she was going to a wedding in Dublin the following month and suggested he came down for the night. He explained that he wasn’t allowed south of the border and asked whether she could get up to Belfast – where he would be by then – for the night. She thought it might be possible. It then occurred to him that he didn’t know whether he would be allowed to take a night off. She asked whether he was sure he wanted to see her. He said he was. She said that she didn’t want to be in the way. He tried to reassure her, but was rather reticent because he was acutely aware of Chatsworth listening to every word. In the end they agreed that he should ring her nearer the time. She asked, with a slightly nervous jokiness, whether he had killed anyone yet. She daily expected to hear that he had slaughtered dozens, and added that she presumed that that was what he was there for. They bade each other a formal goodbye.
‘Is she very attractive?’ asked Chatsworth, immediately Charles had replaced the receiver.
‘Yes, she is, quite.’
‘I wouldn’t mind meeting her when she comes over. You know, if you’re on duty or anything.’
‘That’s very kind of you.’
Chatsworth nodded his acknowledgment. ‘Let me know when she’s coming.’
During the final week in Killagh, just before the relieving unit arrived, there was an event which made national and international headlines. Charles was involved by default of Chatsworth, a part of whose platoon had crossed the border by mistake and had been arrested by the Irish Army. The meanderings of the border were such as to make accidental crossings all too easy, but fortunately encounters with the Irish Army were usually amicable. Names and details of the soldiers and their weapons were taken, and they were then escorted back to Northern Ireland. Because Chatsworth was involved, however, there was the suspicion that the crossing might have been less accidental than most. Edward was upset because the CO was angry.
The result was that Charles’s platoon had to patrol the key points, such as electrical installations, gas and water works. They divided the work between sections and Charles was in the leading Land-Rover of two on the way to inspect an electricity transformer when they heard an explosion. Though loud, it was difficult to tell from which direction it came but it felt large. They all seemed to feel it in the pits of their stomachs a split second before they heard it. They turned off the lane and drove up the rough track that led to the transformer. At the top of a short hill they rounded a corner and saw that something had happened to the track about halfway between them and the transformer. There was a large crater, the grass arou
nd was smoking and was littered with bits of yellow material. Charles stopped his Land-Rover and sat for a few moments looking. It was soon clear that the yellow bits had been an Electricity Board van. There were other, darker bits scattered about.
Charles ordered his men out of their vehicles and sent them all, except his own radio operator, to take up tactical positions on the crest of the hill. He warned them to watch for booby-traps. He feared an ambush and so dreaded having to account to the CO for dead men that he found himself shouting ‘Hard targets!’ as they doubled across the fields. He called up the rest of his platoon over the radio and then went forward to look at the mess. The crater was several feet deep, the engine of the van was about fifty yards up the track and one of the seats was smoking in the grass. A part of a body, wearing a jacket, lay nearby. When he reported to battalion headquarters he was told to do nothing but to wait for the CO and Henry Sandy. Edward was apparently still involved with Chatsworth and his troubles. It crossed Charles’s mind that Chatsworth would be very jealous of his having witnessed the carnage.
When the CO arrived he made no comment on the scene, and his face was expressionless. ‘Keep half your men as they are,’ he said, ‘and get the other half to help the medics with the bodies. You supervise them. They need an officer at a time like this.’ He pointed to the plastic bags which the medical orderlies were unfolding and laying on the grass. ‘Put the bits on the death sheets there. You don’t know how many bodies there are, do you?’
‘At least two, I think.’
The CO nodded, his lips pressed tightly together. He looked at the pieces of bodies on the grass, and then hard at Charles as though to see what he was thinking. ‘Don’t touch any bit of the vehicle until ATO’s been and had a look at it,’ he said. ‘It’s all good evidence for him. And keep a grip on your men. They’re very young. This might upset some of them. It’s their first time.’
They gathered the charred and reddened bits, enough to indicate three bodies but not enough to complete them, and put them in the back of Henry’s ambulance Land-Rover. Charles’s soldiers were pale and serious.
The device turned out to have been a mine activated by a trip-wire across the track. It had been intended for the Army’s daily visit to the transformer but had instead caught three maintenance engineers. There was considerable press interest and Philip Lamb, to his delight, was made PRO. The CO was interviewed on television and described the incident as ‘an appalling and mindless act of bestiality’. Nigel Beale thought that the brewery explosion had been a trial run for the real thing in order to test reactions, and Chatsworth felt slighted because nobody would describe the scene to him in the detail he wanted. Charles was a little surprised at himself for feeling nothing at all. When it came to it, there seemed to be nothing to feel or say.
4
It was cold when they left Killagh and there was snow on the ground. This made night ambushes seem a bitter cruelty, though the days were bright, sunny and exhilarating. They were relieved by a regiment of gunners, a polite and rather formal people who often wore civilian clothes and soon slowed down the pace of operations to what seemed to them acceptable. There was talk of a fixture with the rugby club.
Cursed though he was, and absurd though he seemed, the CO’s tactics of day and night patrolling on foot combined with ambushes and hides were ideally suited to the kind of warfare that was to develop in the border area, though it had not then. In the briefing for Belfast he stressed that they would maintain the same level of activity there but would have to discipline themselves to the notion of ‘minimum force’. The eyes of the world – the press – would be upon them, and any force used – and they would have to use a good deal of it – would not only have to be the minimum necessary but would have to be seen to be so. Every rubber bullet fired had to be accounted for and treated with the same seriousness as the firing of a real one, to which it was the only alternative. They would not use gas for riot control since it was not sufficiently specific, affecting villains and innocents alike. He would have no cowboys blasting off at every lout on a street corner; on the other hand he was not prepared to stand back and see his soldiers murdered on British streets, no matter what the politicians might think. If the IRA, or any other bunch of thugs that tried to call themselves an army, gave him trouble he would hit them; if they gave more trouble he would hit them hard; if they continued to give trouble he would kill them. Otherwise, he would leave them alone and he expected every soldier in the battalion to do likewise.
The part of Belfast they were going to was one of the most notorious in the city. It was in the south-west and had a population that was eighty per cent Catholic and twenty per cent Protestant. The Catholics lived in IRA-dominated ghettos and the Protestants in a tight little enclave in one corner of the battalion area. The two communities were divided by the Peace Line – a tortuous, tangled line of wire, corrugated iron, concrete and sentry-boxes that had to be manned day and night. During the 1969 riots the Protestants had burned down a score of Catholic houses. There had been attempts by the residents to build new ones, mostly without planning permission and sometimes without planning. The Catholic part of the area had been prominent during the recent riots. According to Nigel there were two IRA ‘battalions’ in the area and both had been ordered to step up their activities during the next few weeks. This could provoke a Protestant reaction. The CO, however, took it as a compliment to the battalion to be given such a welcome by the enemy and he was sure that the harder it was the more his soldiers would like it.
Battalion HQ was to be in a police station, while the companies occupied schools, factories, houses and a disused bus garage. C company was the largest and had what the CO considered the most interesting area. It included a part of the Peace Line, a few Prot streets and a large Catholic estate of ill-repute where several soldiers had already died that year. Company HQ was a bottling factory. Charles did not need to see it to know that it was a move for the worse. The barracks in Killagh were almost academic cloisters by comparison. The Factory was a nineteenth-century building of six storeys set in the midst of a maze of narrow, mean streets and enclosed by a high wall. The iron gate was kept closed and there were two knife-rests in the street outside, which forced traffic to weave past slowly, at walking-pace. Inside and outside the wall the ground was littered with glass and rubble. The outgoing unit’s Land-Rovers were battered, dented and holed.
Charles was greeted on arrival by the CSM, a popular, gravel-voiced Liverpudlian whose face was almost as battered as the Land-Rovers. ‘’Tain’t much, sir, but it’s ’ome. Only four more months. Won’t be so bad when we’ve cleaned it up a bit. Soon as this bloody lot clear off we can get started. Live like pigs, don’t they? Must’ve caught it from the people round ’ere, by what I’ve seen of ’em.’ He laid his hand confidentially on Charles’s arm and indicated the broken bricks, bits of piping, paving stone and glass that lay scattered about the parked vehicles. ‘See all this shit, sir? D’you know ’ow it got here? Kids threw it, little kids last night. ’Undreds of ’em in the street outside, lobbing it over the wall. I come down with the advance party, see, just in time to cop the lot of it. Like a bleedin’ avalanche, it was. And the same thing happens every time one of their Land-Rovers pokes its nose out the gate, which is why they’re all in shit order. So I says to the guard commander, like, well, what you going to do about it, ain’t you going to stop ’em? Oh no, ’e says, it ’appens every night, it’s nothing serious, we just let ’em get on with it. Containment, he called it. Containment, I ask you! Standing there letting a mob of kids chuck bricks at you. I says to ’im, I says, well, this is the last night they do it, you can tell ’em that from me, ’cos when we take over tomorrow night containment stops and ear-boxing starts. I’ll give ’em bloody containment.’
Charles struggled with his unnecessary quantity of kit up the stone stairs into the Factory. There was a continuous sound of activated machinery, punctuated every few seconds by a crash that shook the building.
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‘The bottling,’ said the CSM. ‘That’s what that is. They still use the first two floors, you see. Six in the morning till ten at night. They’re all Prot workers but we still ’ave to escort ’em in and out in case of bombs and we have to do bomb searches when they’re not ’ere. We live on the other four floors. The machinery’s been ripped out but there ain’t no separate rooms, not properly speaking, just a lot of cardboard partitions with a corridor down the middle. It’s a bit noisy ’cos the cardboard’s a bit thin and don’t reach the ceiling anywhere. An’ it’s crowded. You an’ the other officers, ’cept Major Lumley, sleep on the third floor in a kind of cubicle next to the ops room, so you’re nice and handy like if anything ’appens. But it’s even noisier for you.’
The Factory soon became known as the worst of the company locations. Defaulters were sometimes threatened with transfer to C company, as though to some particularly gruesome region of hell. It was never silent. Apart from the crash and thump of the machinery below there were televisions, a juke box in the NAAFI partition, countless transistor radios and all the zoo noises that soldiers make. From their partition next to the ops room Charles, Chatsworth and Tim were able to listen to radio talk and mush for twenty-four hours a day. The partition was furnished with three sleeping-bags, three lockers and one table. There was just room to move between them. Chatsworth and Tim had already claimed the two sleeping-bags farthest from the door, which was a piece of sacking nailed to the woodwork. Chatsworth’s kit was strewn all over his sleeping-bag, but he was nowhere to be seen. Tim was lying down writing a letter, his kit neatly stowed away. Charles had often wondered whether Tim was oblivious to his surroundings or simply contented with anything. He wasn’t sure which was worse.
