Wall had been looking over the side of the ship at the misty sea; his eyes tightened each time he imagined he saw or heard something. He was damp with nervousness. Albie said to him: ‘What’s with you all the time? You, getting up and looking over. There ain’t a thing to see out there, Wall.’
‘I’m scared,’ admitted Wall. ‘I’m so scared I feel like jumping into the ocean.’
Ballimach laughed, a strange sound that rattled in the fog. Some men trying to sleep on the metal deck nearby rolled over and complained. ‘There’s no future in it, son,’ he said. ‘There’s not a whole lot of future in what we’re doing right now, but there’s even less in jumping over the side.’
Wall sat down miserably. ‘There’s some guys got seats,’ he complained. ‘Those special guys who were in camp. That outfit we couldn’t figure out.’
‘They got seats?’ asked Albie. ‘How come they got seats?’
‘Don’t ask me, buddy. But they’re right up that front end of this tin can, sitting on seats. What’s so special about those guys? They keep them separate from the rest of us and now they got seats.’
Albie said: ‘Go and ask them, Wall. Go right over and ask them. Ask them why they got seats, why they’re so special.’ He knew Wall would not. ‘I’ll take a walk and see for myself,’ decided Albie. He rose and stretched his short legs. He could have slept in the seat of the colonel’s jeep, but he preferred to remain on the deck. ‘Ballimach would only bellyache,’ he explained. ‘And there’s a whole lot of belly to ache.’
He moved towards the front of the LST, stepping over and between the huddled soldiers. When he was a child his father had taken him to see the National Guard parade on Washington’s Birthday and now, quite suddenly, after the years, he remembered it. It was strange how then he had thought of soldiers as upright and shining. Now look at them.
He saw the men of the mysterious unit sitting in a small encampment beyond the nose of the amphibious tank that was to be first on the beach at the assault. There were ten men and they not only had portable seats but a table with coffee and the remains of a meal on it. Albie studied them. They looked no different from other soldiers, maybe a little more studious, for they sat in attitudes of thought.
‘Hi,’ he said cheerfully, approaching them. Some of the men were dozing but the two sitting nearest looked up. He was not certain in the difficult light but he thought they were glad to see him.
‘Hi, soldier,’ said the nearest. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I’m just in the war,’ shrugged Albie. The man offered him some coffee.
‘Thanks,’ said Albie genuinely. The issue coffee had been bitter and cold by the time it reached his corner. He poured a cup and stood against the snout of the amphibian to drink it.
‘Here, kid,’ said one of the men kindly, ‘take a seat. It’s better to drink sitting down.’
Albie sat, still wondering at their mystery. Were they older than other soldiers? They seemed of no particular rank or uniform, although it was difficult to see now, everyone looked much the same in battledress and life vests, every man a blot. He took the stranger’s seat and the man stood where he had been standing. Gratefully he drank the coffee. ‘Eighteen before midnight,’ he mentioned conversationally, checking his watch.
‘And all’s well,’ added the soldier sitting next to him.
‘I just hope it goes on that way,’ said Albie, not comfortable. ‘I don’t go a whole lot on this floating around. I like to have the earth under me.’ He thought the remark brought a dry chuckle from someone at the other end of the group. ‘They say we got to look out for E-boats,’ he continued nervously. ‘Me? I wouldn’t know an E-boat from an A- B- or C-boat. Even if I could see it I wouldn’t know.’
The man next to him casually but quite suddenly leaned out of his cape and put his hand to Albie’s throat, causing the small soldier to jump in apprehension. The coffee spilled and the man apologized. His hand remained however and he said: ‘I just wanted to see your dog tags.’
‘Dog tags?’ said Albie. ‘Sure, I got dog tags.’ He fumbled for the identity discs and pulled them free of his shirt and battledress. The man tightened his eyes to the light of a tiny torch he produced and read: ‘Albert G. Primrose. 2288456. That’s a nice name,’ he said. He put the tags back inside Albie’s shirt in a disquietingly professional movement.
‘You guys go around checking that GIs are wearing dog tags,’ decided Albie. ‘Am I right?’
‘You’re right,’ said the man who had given him the coffee and now stood against the tank. ‘We check dog tags all the time.’
It was dawning on Albie. He looked from one to another. The standing man told him anyway. ‘We’re what they call a Grave Registration Company. We get around checking on dead guys and making sure their graves are marked.’
Albie almost bit through the coffee mug. ‘That’s why we got a table and chairs,’ went on the second man conversationally, almost with eagerness. ‘This is our office, see. Once we get ashore we scurry around making sure that every guy who dies is properly registered.’
The small soldier looked at the faces. ‘That,’ he hesitated, ‘is a great service … a very necessary service.’
‘Sure,’ said the seated man. ‘We know that. If you get killed you want to know that your folks know where you are buried, don’t you?’
‘Oh, sure I would. I’d be much happier then.’ He rose. ‘Well, I must get back to my buddies. It’s been real nice meeting guys with … with an … unusual job like you guys have. Thanks for the coffee. It was good.’ He tried not to hurry away too quickly but still he fell over a sleeping man and backed away from a flurry of curses. He picked himself up and waved his fingers at the grave men. Then he hurtled over the prostrate forms and between the vehicles until he reached Ballimach and Wall again.
‘Okay, so you found out,’ said Ballimach.
‘Didn’t they have seats, just like I said?’ demanded Wall.
Clay-faced under his black paint, looking like a boy on Hallowe’en, his eyes dilated behind his glasses, Albie said simply, hoarsely, ‘They’re a Grave Registration Company.’ The mouths dropped like twin traps. ‘They tell you when you’re dead – I mean they tell your folks when you’re dead.’ Albie shook. ‘One of them took out my dog tags!’
‘Jesus,’ muttered Ballimach. ‘Didn’t I just know it? Those guys, when we was back in camp, those guys was always looking sideways at me, kinda measuring me. I knew it. I goddamn knew it.’
‘I said I like to have the earth under me,’ remembered Albie in a whisper. ‘And they all agreed.’
‘That outfit put it about that they were Intelligence,’ said Wall indignantly. ‘Back at Telcoombe. Other guys asked them. They said their outfit was a special Intelligence unit. Gathering information, that’s what they said.’
Ballimach pointed out lugubriously, ‘I guess that’s what they do. They just didn’t mention what kind of information.’
‘Who can blame them?’ asked Albie more reasonably. ‘That’s terrible, lousy work. Checking on corpses.’ A shiver trickled down his small frame. ‘It gets colder,’ he said. ‘I hope I don’t meet up with those guys again.’
Fifteen miles away, to the south-west, a flotilla of German E-boats of the latest class were rendezvousing at sea, having left their base in Cherbourg half an hour earlier.
They lay prone about the base of the Bofors gun, a tableau of men such as had been much represented in memorial stones to the fallen of the First World War, and would later be carved again. They were not asleep, for on the hard, damp deck, with the wind-pushed mist moving around, the grunting of men and of engines, sleep was all but impossible. In addition, they were on the gun platform at the blunt stern of the unstable craft and the rise and fall and pitch were most felt there. Landing ships were meant for facility of landing, not voyaging.
Killer Watts eventually sat up, aching and cold, and leaning back against the metal bulkhead began to grumble. He sat, legs out, head and shou
lders sagging forward, arms hanging limp, like some beggar on an eastern street. ‘I don’t know what I’m doing here, on this fucking thing,’ he moaned. The complaint was quiet enough to have been addressed to himself. It was Catermole who answered, lying flat, a tarpaulin from the gun across him like a shroud. ‘When you find out, Killer,’ he observed, ‘ask for me, will you, mate?’
‘You’re here because your country needs you,’ said Sergeant Spence. It was defiant but strangely shy. ‘I know you lot think I’m some bullshitting old regular, and so I am. But at least I know what’s what. I was there in nineteen-forty when you lot got orange juice in your rations.’
Gilman lay depressed, his eyes and mind stuffed with aches, his mouth full of cold. ‘What is what then, sarge?’ he said. ‘You tell us. Go on.’
‘I mean,’ continued Watts, as if no one else had said anything, ‘I get in the army and they say that I’ve got to be a sparks, so it’s not my trade. We had gas in our house. But I said all right, because that’s all I could say, because you can’t argue, can you?’
‘What was your trade, then?’ asked Spence. He eased himself up now and so did the others, surrendering to the fact that sleep and any kind of comfort were unattainable.
‘Unemployed,’ said Watts casually, not lifting his face. Spence let it go. Watts said: ‘So I have to learn about all this electricity bollocks. And then, after all that, they stick me out here on the sea and tell me I got to fire this bleeding gun. It don’t make sense.’
‘Not a lot does,’ put in Gilman.
‘I reckon the safest way to get to be a cook is to volunteer for the paratroops,’ put in Catermole.
Spence regarded them in the dark. ‘You’re a lot of soft moaners,’ he said. ‘I’ve been in twenty years now.’
None of them had realized. It was like admitting you were mad. Even Watts brought his chin up from his chest. ‘Christ,’ breathed Catermole. ‘Twenty years. It feels like a hundred I’ve been in and it’s only two. What you been doing for twenty years, sarge?’
‘Being a soldier,’ said Spence. He said it with a little arrogance. Gilman realized he meant it. ‘I was one of those who got taken off at Dunkirk and I’m bloody glad we’re going back. I hate those bastards. They’re the enemies of our King and Country.’
It came out so unselfconsciously now that only Catermole could offer a remark. ‘But it’s no sort of bloody life is it, the army?’
‘It’s the best job there is,’ asserted Spence. He looked down at the huddled Watts. ‘A job for life. I’ve been all over, I have. India, Egypt …’
‘They reckon there’s a shortage of crumpet in India and all the crumpet in Egypt is poxed up to the armpits,’ said Catermole predictably. ‘Is that true, sarge?’
Gilman said craftily: ‘You’ll be unemployed soon, sarge … Once all this is over.’
Spence said: ‘There’ll always be war, you can bet on that, son. When this lot’s all done, give it a year or so and the balloon will go up again. With Russia this time. I’ve got a job for life.’
‘Until you get killed,’ put in Gilman.
‘Same thing,’ shrugged Spence. ‘What do you do, Gilman?’
Watts interrupted. ‘My old man reckoned that all the women in France was poxed in the First World War,’ he said. ‘He reckoned you could get it just by dancing with them in those French cabarets. But he got hisself gassed in the end, not like fatal because I wouldn’t be ’ere, would I? But he got hisself gassed which ’as got to be worse than getting pox, and not so much pleasure in it.’
‘My old man was unemployed,’ said Catermole reflectively. ‘Ten-and-a-half years. He was a bloody good footballer, my old man. Through being on the dole that was, see. He ’ad a ’ell of a kick. Sometimes he used to take me with ’im when he was trying to get a job, you know to see the bosses, and he always used to give me a kick to make me cry so that they’d feel sorry for us.’
Gilman said: ‘Did he ever get the jobs, Pussy?’
‘Nah, they didn’t want the poor old bloke. He’d got arthritis in his hands, couldn’t use them some days, so he didn’t get the jobs, or if he got them they soon gave him the shove.’
Spence said again to Gilman: ‘What did you do in civvy street?’
‘In a bank,’ said Gilman. ‘But I’d had enough of that. I’m not going back there.’
‘What are you going to do then after?’
‘I’m trying to get on with writing,’ said Gilman. ‘I’ve been doing a correspondence course. I don’t know what I can do, but if I could get a job on a newspaper or in advertising or something like that …’
Spence sniffed as if testing the Lyme Bay mist. ‘Writers,’ he said scornfully. ‘Cause of half the trouble in the world, writers. Wars, everything.’ He nodded out towards France and then at the crowded troops forward of them. ‘All this,’ he said, then amended, ‘half of this lot is caused by writers. Shouting the odds and the next thing you know there’s a war.’
‘I thought you approved of wars,’ said Gilman. ‘They keep you employed.’
‘I didn’t say any different, son,’ said Spence. ‘I just said that writers caused half of it. The stuff they put in the papers.’
‘What I reckon,’ said Watts doggedly, ‘is, that when you get out of the mob and get married like, it’s no good having a fuck every night with the missus, is it? Walt Walters says you more or less have to. I don’t reckon that at all. Not every night. I was thinking about it yesterday, no, I tell a lie, on Friday. That’s the night I ring the girlfriend. But I couldn’t fancy going home from work and having it every night. Saturdays, yes. Few pints, get home and get on the job. That makes sense, don’t it?’
‘Russia’s definitely next,’ said Spence confidentially and confidently. ‘You can just see it happening can’t you? They hate the Yanks and the Yanks hate their guts, no matter what they make out. And we’re stuck with the Yanks, so it makes sense. I think that when we’ve got the Germans on their arses, all that will happen is the Ruskies will keep advancing one way and us and the Yanks will be going the other, and the balloon will go up again. You see.’
‘Why do they always say about the balloon going up?’ asked Watts curiously. ‘I reckon balloons are bleedin’ good. Like when you’re a kid and you’ve got a balloon.’
Catermole said: ‘You know that bird what you was giving it to?’ Gilman realized he was talking to him. He said nothing. ‘She’s been giving it to the Yanks. There’s always Yanks going to ’er ’ouse.’
‘So what?’ said Gilman. ‘She can do what she likes. She’s nothing to do with me.’
Watts began to light a cigarette but the sergeant moved forward sharply and almost knocked it from his hand. ‘You know the orders, Watts,’ he rasped. ‘That could be seen for miles.’
‘Bloody ’ell, sarge,’ complained Watts. ‘Who’s going to see me having a drag. The fishes?’ Carefully he folded the cigarette and put it in his tunic pocket. He settled back against the bulkhead and began to sing in a soft whine:
‘Kiss me goodnight, sergeant-major,
Tuck me in my little wooden bed …’
Five miles away, just beyond the lip of the night horizon, the formation of E-boats was fanning out.
At fourteen minutes past midnight, already half an hour behind its schedule, the torpid convoy turned off Portland Bill and began to retrace its course across the wide night of Lyme Bay. Wispy moonlight now alternated with fields of fog across the dim sea. At twelve-fifty the ungainly turn-about had been accomplished; eight long and bulky landing craft – crowded with soldiers and machines – and the two escorts were rolling west again. Ten minutes later HMS Florida began to signal.
On the bridge of the LST, Lieutenant Young-husband took the message from the signaller. He sent for Colonel Schorner who was sitting awake, his eyes staring at darkness, in the front seat of his jeep. Bryant and Scarlett were sitting propped against the bulkhead. They stood and followed their senior officer up the steel ladder. Hulton came from bel
ow and saw them on the bridge. He climbed awkwardly after them.
Younghusband said to Schorner: ‘Florida is having to break off, sir. She’s got trouble with her boilers, poor old dear. She’s going into Portland.’
Schorner said: ‘That’s not good news.’
‘It’s not very, is it, sir,’ agreed Younghusband. ‘But she’ll never be able to keep up. Not even at our rate of knots.’
‘That leaves us with only one lame duck to look after us,’ sighed Schorner. ‘Not that it makes a hell of a lot of difference.’
‘It’s crazy when you think about it,’ put in Hulton sulkily. ‘That we have to sail all this way, just to sail back. Right under the noses of the Germans and with inadequate protection. Those intelligence warnings about E-boats certainly didn’t sound like bedtime stories to me.’ He caught Schorner’s critical eye. ‘Sir,’ he added lamely.
‘Soldiers have always been told not to ask too many questions,’ the colonel said. ‘Just do it.’
‘More or less the same goes for the Navy,’ put in Younghusband cheerfully. He looked around the dark horizon. ‘Mind, you are apt to wonder sometimes where everybody else has gone. Ah, there goes Florida now. Cheerio, Florida. She’ll be home and in bed in an hour.’
‘Lucky girl,’ commented Scarlett.
Schorner put in: ‘Are your men okay, Bryant? Awake?’
‘Yes, sir. I’ve checked on them every fifteen minutes. They’re sitting around the gun.’
‘I’ll double look-outs, sir,’ said Younghusband without being asked.
Schorner thanked him and said: ‘Let’s double-check that everyone is wearing life vests.’ He went down to the deck. Scarlett followed him. Bryant went back to the Bofors crew at the stern. Hulton remained on the bridge trying to stare through the night. Only the shadow-shape of the LST directly ahead was visible.
‘What difference look-outs will make I don’t know,’ confessed Younghusband with a shrug. ‘When something is coming at you at forty-plus knots there’s no real advantage in seeing it any sooner.’
The Magic Army Page 50
