by Alan Judd
‘I haven’t done it myself,’ continued Chatsworth. ‘I don’t know what it is, but one feels somewhat inhibited in front of one’s own soldiers. I’m not even sure how they do it, which is why I’d like to watch. They must be contortionists, though I s’pose love always finds a way. D’you fancy watching tonight? We could hide in one of the Pigs.’
As it happened, Charles was on duty in the ops room that night and Chatsworth had to take out a patrol. However, when the CO made his nightly appearance in the ops room, accompanied by the signals officer, the RSM, his driver and two bodyguards, it was clear that something was wrong. His lips were pressed firmly together, his expression was set hard and he stared bullishly at Charles. ‘Where’s Edward?’ he asked.
Charles went to Edward’s partition and awoke the dozing man. ‘I was dreaming,’ said Edward. ‘I wish you hadn’t.’
‘The CO wants you. He looks angry.’
‘Oh God.’
They returned to the ops room, Edward still blinking.
‘D’you know what your soldiers have been doing?’ said the CO. ‘They’ve been screwing girls through the main gate.’
Edward’s eyes opened wide. ‘Good Lord, sir. Really? How?’
The CO exploded. ‘How? How d’you think? What a bloody stupid question, Edward. What are you going to do about it, eh? What are you going to do?’
Edward reddened. ‘I’ll punish them, sir, punish them right away.’
‘What with?’
Edward gazed helplessly at Charles, who looked away. Castration was the only answer that came readily to mind.
The CSM came to Edward’s rescue. ‘I suggest Section 69, sir,’ he whispered.
‘69? What do you mean, Sergeant Major? You’re not trying to be funny, are you?’
‘Conduct likely to be to the prejudice of military discipline. We might also throw in not being at a place at which it was their duty to be.’
The CO was slightly mollified, though clearly far from satisfied. It turned out there was only one offender, who had apparently been caught in the act, and he was marched into the ops room with unnecessary violence by the RSM and marched out again to be charged in the company office by the CSM. The CO stared disapprovingly at him but everyone else gazed with frank curiosity.
The CO took Edward aside. ‘I’ve been worried for some time about moral standards in the battalion, Edward, and what I’ve seen tonight has absolutely sickened me. It was a disgrace. I never thought to see the day when Assault Commandos would behave like that. I know they’re young men and have to be allowed a little licence now and again – let off steam and that sort of thing – but to do that in public, in uniform and on duty is going about a hundred miles too far. And as for those girls, I really don’t know what to say. What sort of future do they have, eh? What chance of living a life that’s even halfway decent if this is what they’re like now? Where do they go from here? They’re not even out of school, I bet you a pound to a penny. My heart bleeds for them, you know, it really bleeds.’ The CO’s dark eyes shone with sincerity. Edward stood before him like a schoolboy in trouble, nodding and staring at the table. The CO put his hand on Edward’s shoulder. ‘Not that I’m blaming you entirely, Edward, but I can’t help thinking that they take their example from the top, so look to it. I shall send the padre round to talk to the company tomorrow.’
While dealing with the offender Edward wore his beret and assumed an expression of grave indignation. Afterwards he said to Charles: ‘The CO wanted him to go up on battalion orders and be formally charged but I said I’d clobber him here. I fined him twenty quid for the company fund. You don’t think that was too much, do you?’
‘I don’t know. Is there a precedent?’
‘No. The sergeant major couldn’t remember one so there can’t be. Apparently they get one leg through.’
‘What?’
‘The gate, you know. They get one leg through and sort of twist their hip through the bars. I felt I should’ve been paying him twenty quid prize money instead of fining him. I s’pose he could’ve been shot, though. The CO’s ordered us to put barbed wire on the gate now. Speak to the sergeant major about it when you see him.’
The battalion area was quiet for the first fortnight. Wherever the Assault Commandos went their reputation for aggression preceded them, and the CO’s somewhat brisk policy did what little was needed to confirm it. Regular stoning soon stopped and the children were reduced to sporadic hit-and-run sorties, usually after dark. What might have become a serious spate of petrol bombing was nipped in the bud when Tim’s platoon sergeant, with two men, caught three of the bombers. Mobile, as opposed to foot, patrols were the usual targets for such attacks and the sergeant, anticipating trouble at one particular corner, sent both his vehicles ahead whilst doubling round the back of the houses on foot. The bombers threw their bombs whilst the vehicles were still out of range and were caught as they ran away. They were teenagers and there was little fight in them. Belfast being a small city, and being divided into smaller tribal areas, even insignificant arrests like these had a quietening effect on the area in which they occurred.
Mobile patrols normally consisted of two Land-Rovers or one Pig. Charles disliked them because he felt more vulnerable in a vehicle than on foot, but of the two he felt safer in a Pig, and therefore nearly always found himself in a Land-Rover. One evening he was on a mobile patrol in the new estate when his corporal in the second Land-Rover recognised a car they had been told to look out for. It was parked in a cul-de-sac on the other side of a main road that formed the boundary of the estate. There had been a shooting earlier a few streets beyond that, outside the battalion area, in which a policeman had been wounded in the foot. This was thought to have been the getaway car. They cruised past the cul-de-sac at their usual patrolling speed, slightly faster than walking pace, and radioed back. After a pause they were told to stay with the vehicle as it was wanted for fingerprinting but not to go near in case it was booby-trapped. ATO was called and they were to guard it until he came. At the same time they were to look out for snipers in the area.
The car was a newish Cortina, evidently stolen for the job. Charles had the Land-Rovers parked across the road before and behind it and then dispersed his seven soldiers into the doorways and alleyways of the cul-de-sac. Though separated only by the main road, the people there were quite different to those in the estate. Their houses were well kept and they were friendly. Within ten minutes two had brought out trays of tea for the soldiers.
The first sign of trouble was when four women crossed the road and stood at the bottom of the cul-de-sac singing Republican songs. They were short, hard-faced, fat and ugly, either middle-aged or coarsened before their time, a kind that flourished on the estate. After a while they sat on the kerb, passing a bottle between them and still singing in unnervingly discordant unison. They could just be made out by the orange light of a distant and solitary street-light on the main road, but it was not possible to make out the words of their songs. Soon Charles realised that others were joining them – squat, waddling shapes – and the volume of singing swelled. The songs were now recognisably anti-Brit, as was to be expected, and aggressively obscene, as might have been predicted. Charles, more intent upon observing the situation than in calculating what it might mean, reflected that the image of their kind knitting at the foot of the guillotine was too passive to do them justice.
His attention was focused more sharply upon possible consequences when the original four women left the others – and their bottle – to begin a slow perambulation around the cul-de-sac. They walked arm-in-arm, still singing, peering into the doorways and alleyways. Even so, it was not until they were halfway round that Charles realised they were reconnoitring the number and positions of his soldiers. He wondered what he could do about it. Presumably, they had every right to walk the streets counting soldiers and singing; at least, he was not sure that he had any right to stop them. Nor did he know what they intended to do when they had counted. Th
e people in the cul-de-sac had retreated behind locked doors and put out their lights when the singing first started. The tea-trays were not returned to their owners for fear of identifying them. Their recce completed, the four women joined the by now even larger group at the bottom. The singing stopped.
Of Charles’s seven men, five had rifles, one (his radio operator) a pistol and one a pistol and a rubber-bullet gun. This latter was a converted signals pistol which made a very loud bang and could do a lot of damage at close range if fired directly at someone, which was forbidden. The projectile was meant to be bounced off the ground. Charles had a rifle. The simplest way to protect the three vehicles would have been to form a line across the cul-de-sac, but that would have made an easy target for a gunman and he could imagine only too vividly the subsequent enquiry into how he came to lose a soldier. It did not occur to him that it could have been him that was shot. He therefore kept five of his men dispersed among the alleyways with orders to look out for snipers and placed himself, his wireless operator, and Corporal Stagg, who had the rubber-bullet gun, between the vehicles and the crowd.
This had grown swiftly so that it was now forty or fifty strong and included a number of young children. There were no men. He reported the situation over the radio and was told by Edward that an escort vehicle had gone to meet ATO and that both would be with him as soon as possible. For a few minutes more nothing much happened; the crowd talked amongst themselves, shouted the odd slogan or obscenity and in general seemed quite good humoured. Then a black taxi, one of the many old London cabs that had found their way to Belfast, drew up on the main road behind the crowd and four men got out. The taxi drove away and the crowd immediately became more vociferous. It surged slowly forward towards the vehicles with the harridans shouting at the front and holding their children before them. The four men stayed at the back, urging the others on.
As he watched the crowd advance several scenes from his Oxford life flashed through Charles’s mind, vivid and uncontrollable, and for a few seconds the scenes seemed to get between him and what was happening, as though the two worlds were jostling for reality. The present world won when he realised that the front women were within three feet of him, jumping up and down like wizened and frantic baboons. Though the noise was overwhelming he shouted that there was a bomb in the car. To his surprise, the crowd fell back and there was relative quiet; but still the feeling of unreality. He looked at Corporal Stagg’s white and nervous young face and then glanced behind him at the other soldiers crouching with their rifles in the alleys. He felt that all eyes were upon him. He grabbed the headphones from the wireless operator and called for immediate assistance but before he could get a response the crowd began to rumble forward again, only quieter this time and more sinister. They didn’t seem to believe, any more than he did, that the car was booby-trapped.
Charles was aware that Corporal Stagg at his elbow had raised and cocked the rubber-bullet gun, but he did not give the order to fire. No one in the battalion had yet had to fire a rubber bullet; they were accountable; there had to be definite provocation, an aggressive act. The crowd pressed closer, murmuring, the children held in front and no one so much as raising a hand or even shouting any more.
Charles realised that he was separated from his wireless operator by the Cortina. The operator was shouting that the CO was on the air and wanted a detailed sit-rep. ‘Just tell them to get here!’ shouted Charles. He turned round and bellowed for the other soldiers to join him. Corporal Stagg was still by his side. The front women were now within reach again, and Charles stepped forward and pushed one firmly back. Again, to his surprise, they fell back quickly. The rest of the soldiers arrived and they were able to clear a two-yard space between the crowd and the vehicles, but it was clear that it would not last for long. The crowd had increased again, and the same four men were busy at the back. What most inhibited him now about firing a rubber bullet was that it would be at point-blank range. It would frighten or anger the crowd. If the latter they could well charge before the gun could be reloaded, and the only way to stop them then would be to shoot them with real guns. As the crowd now completely surrounded the soldiers and the vehicles, shooting them would be the only way to protect their own lives and weapons. Technically, according to the Yellow Card they all carried, Charles would be justified in opening fire, but he could imagine the resultant publicity if unarmed women and children were shot dead in the street by ‘heavily armed’ Commandos. There would be an enquiry, if not a court case. Half hoping that they would do something to provoke retaliation, and half frightened that they might, Charles walked slowly up and down between the crowd and the vehicles, his knees trembling and with a great emptiness in his stomach. His soldiers were watching him, and so was the mob. He walked with his hands behind his back, trying to look as though he were deep in thought and entirely at peace. For some minutes nothing happened.
Then, with a kind of slow rush, a few of the crowd pushed past and got to the Cortina. The women started to rub it with their headscarves and cardigan sleeves – to remove fingerprints, Charles realised suddenly. He and Corporal Stagg managed to push them back but one of them threw a burning newspaper through the open window on to the back seat. Charles got inside the car and threw the newspaper out, but whilst he was doing so they surged forward again and pushed the car several feet back down the road into an invalid carriage. They were shouting and excited. Needlessly jamming on the handbrake, Charles tried to get out but found several of the women were pushing on the door. Seriously alarmed, and for the first time angry, he shoved the door open with his feet and jumped out, shouting, ‘Prepare to fire!’ Corporal Stagg, after hitting one of the women on the shoulder with the barrel of his gun, aimed it straight into the face of her neighbour, who screamed and ducked back. The women who had been struggling with the other soldiers also fell back for a moment. Both sides waited, neither sure what to do next. It was clear that the crowd still felt sure that the initiative was with them.
Charles felt his heart pounding. He looked at the excited faces in front of him, ugly with hatred, and still only a couple of yards away. Neither he nor his soldiers would have any choice but to shoot if they were rushed: if they had time for that. He pulled and cocked his pistol. If they were rushed after firing the rubber bullet he would do less damage shooting them with that than if he ordered the soldiers to use their rifles, which would go through three or four at that range. He would aim for the legs. As vividly as he saw the mob before him, he heard again some remark made in Killagh to the effect that a bullet from the nine-millimetre Browning would simply bounce off their bra straps. At such close range, though, it would be another matter. He imagined the carnage with disturbing clarity.
Charles was spared the decision by the arrival of the CO with his two long-wheel-base Land-Rovers and his oversize escort. He was not at first aware that help had arrived, only of a sudden commotion and sounds of pain and distress from the back of the crowd. Then he saw the CO’s tall figure, his face set hard and his beret firmly down on his forehead. The CO, accompanied by the RSM and his escort, walked as though there was no one between himself and Charles, and very soon there wasn’t. The escort drove a wedge two yards wide while the snatch squad, whose sole job was to make arrests, remained by the CO’s Land-Rover, fingering their batons. One of the women who swore was grabbed by the RSM and marched briskly back to the vehicle. A shrill chorus of protest by the rest of her tribe was drowned by the CO’s shouting through a loud-hailer: ‘Right, you’ve had your fun, now you’re going home. Anyone still in this street thirty seconds from now will be arrested and charged with riotous assembly. Good night!’
The snatch squad began to move with slow purpose into the mob, which drained away into the night quickly and quietly. Soon there was only Army left in the street. The adrenalin coursing through Charles’s body did not drain away so rapidly. He was too relieved to feel elated. He told the CO what had happened with what sounded even to himself like schoolboy-ish urgency. H
e had never thought he would be glad to see the CO.
Having heard him out, the CO stared disconcertingly at him for several seconds before saying, ‘I shall fine you twenty pounds, Charles. The alternative is to send you home in disgrace, but you’re young, inexperienced and this is your first mistake. And your last. Two reasons: A, bad reporting – you gave us no idea of the gravity of the situation and your voice procedure was appalling; B, you jeopardised the lives of your soldiers and MOD property – not to mention your own life, which I shan’t – by not taking a firm line before the situation got a chance to develop. You should’ve got a grip early on. You should’ve fired a rubber bullet the moment they started to come at you, after warning them, of course, but even without if you thought it was necessary. You need not have feared the consequences. I would have backed you up to the hilt. Minimum force is all very well as a political policy but in tactical situations I will not have the lives of my soldiers needlessly put at risk. A rubber bullet would have been minimum force but you used less than that. In fact you didn’t use any force at all. In future, act firmly in the early stages and nip it in the bud. Got that? Good. Time you got rid of this airy-fairy university stuff and realised you’re commanding the best soldiers in the British Army.’ He looked at the Cortina, which was resting against the crumpled invalid carriage. ‘Well, there can’t be a bomb in it, anyway. How did that happen?’
‘The mob pushed it there, sir.’
‘Where were you?’
‘I was inside it trying to stop it catching alight.’
‘They should never have got that close. Go and find the owner of the invalid carriage, explain how it happened and write me a full report. Someone’s bound to claim that you did it.’
Charles and his crew drove back to the Factory in the companionable silence of shared fear. The only remark came from the driver, who said, ‘I was a bit worried there, sir.’
