by Paul Watkins
Our progress was slow. The weight of our packs and the added burden of the beacon parts soon had us all soaked in sweat. It was a beautiful day, however, and we found it almost impossible to believe that away to the south, whole armies were clashing together. The first reminder we had of the war was a series of contrails in the sky, great chalky cat scratches, at the tips of which we could just make out the planes themselves. From where we stood, the planes were a luminous white. They looked like chips of ice up in the blue. Separate streams of condensation from the engines on each wing merged to form one trail behind every plane. There seemed to be hundreds of these trails, but it was impossible to count since some planes were flying directly above others, so that when the planes were directly above us, the lines blurred together into one huge path across the vault of the sky. Only after they had passed could we hear the rumble of their engines.
We watched and listened for a while, trying to imagine the men up in those planes, swathed in sheepskin, the pilots trying to stay in formation, the gunners watching the frost build up on the barrels of their .50-calibers, the navigators squinting down upon the brightness of sun off snow and seeing the world below as we had seen it on the map at Achnacarry—a smooth, clean maze of ice and stone, the height of mountains measured only by the shadows they cast across the surrounding glaciers.
Turning back to the crumbling path, I thought how for the next few days we would measure this world not with maps and the blink of an eye but in sweat and the shuffling of our boots.
The road jackknifed twice more before it leveled out, by which time we were well above the tree line. Here, the ground was covered with stunted grass and lichen. Snow clung to the hollows. Icicles dripped from the lips of stones. Some of these were huge and had been propped at precarious angles by the glaciers which had left them behind.
Our original schedule, as devised by Carton, had allowed us two hours to reach this place. But either because he had misjudged it or because the breaks in the road and the weight of the gear had slowed us down so much, we did not get to the level ground until midafternoon and still had several kilometers to go before we reached the customs house.
The schedule didn’t seem to matter much, however. We were on our own now, and appeared to have the entire range to ourselves. Scrabbling up the mountainside on that beautiful autumn day, there were times when I almost managed to forget that we were carrying weapons, and that we had been ordered to kill anyone we came across between here and the Swiss border.
Shortly afterwards, we stopped to rest and brew up tea.
Then, shouldering our packs, we continued along the gravel road. It was bordered on both sides by ditches, along which a shallow but steady stream of water splashed over the stony ground.
My body swung once more into the rhythm of the march. My vision narrowed in on the heels of Whistler walking before me and the tidily rolled ends of his canvas pack straps.
It was only a moment later that I heard the strange, dry, popping crack which I at first failed to understand was the sound of a gun.
Whistler tripped, or so it seemed to me. He fell down hard on his face and the heavy Bergen pack slipped over his head.
I stumbled to avoid tripping over him. Once I had regained my balance, I reached down to help him up, still wondering what that sound could have been and thinking that it must have been the ice cracking out in the glacier.
Then I saw Sugden and Forbes scrabbling down into the ditch on the other side of the road. Armstrong jumped for cover, landing with a splash in the ditch nearest to me. Then he turned and shouted to me. His face was white.
I looked from Armstrong to Whistler, and then out towards the glacier and the lake. My gaze swept over the boulder-strewn ground. Only now did I fully grasp that we had come under fire
“Come on!” shouted Armstrong.
I stumbled towards him.
His hand reached out to me, fingernails dirty with gun oil.
I dropped into the ditch beside him.
Hurriedly I took out my binoculars. With Armstrong ready to shoot, I scanned the ground between us and the lake, from where the shot appeared to have come.
After finally locating the sniper, I ducked down and indicated the spot to Armstrong. Slowly, the way people sometimes move in dreams, he raised his rifle and took aim.
I crouched beside him, breathing hard. My head rested against the side of the ditch. The binoculars were still clutched in my hand.
Then I heard a sound right by my face, like someone biting into an unripe apple. Armstrong’s face became a blur. His legs gave way and he fell in a heap at the bottom of the trench.
Armstrong lay on his back with his legs twisted under him. His hands were thrown out to the sides and his fingers curled gently over his open palms. His head looked lopsided, squashed like a stepped-on loaf of bread. It seemed to be pressed into the wall of the ditch, but then I realized that the left side of his face was missing. A bullet had gone through his right ear and come out somewhere around his left cheekbone. His mouth was open and his shattered teeth were stained red.
Immediately after came another gunshot, which made me flinch and close my eyes. When I opened them again, I saw Sugden running across the road. He tumbled in beside me, breathing hard. The rim of his helmet, its surface roughened by sand sprinkled over the paint when it was wet, cut a sharp line across his brow. “I got the sniper when he came out from behind the rock,” he said. As his eyes met mine, a look of horror spread across his face. Immediately, he began tearing at his pocket, trying to pull out one of the field-dressing bandages we all carried.
“It’s no good,” I told Sugden. “Armstrong’s dead.”
“This isn’t for him,” replied Sugden, his breathing shallow and fast. “It’s for you.”
“But I’m not hurt,” I told him. Then I touched a hand to my face and saw blood on my fingers. “It’s not mine,” I said, pointing a red-smeared finger at Armstrong.
Sugden paused, the half-unraveled bandage clutched in his hands. Almond-colored eyes glowed in his sunburned face. “Oh, Christ,” he whispered.
Now Forbes left cover and made his way across the road. He stopped in the middle, grabbed Whistler by his pack straps, and dragged him to the edge of the ditch before jumping down beside us.
We could see for certain that Whistler was dead. His eyes remained open. The bullet had gone in through the right side of his chest. It must have hit him in the heart and killed him instantly.
Armstrong’s blood tinted the water sluicing past my feet.
I glanced at Sugden and Forbes. Each of their faces bore the same pale mask, which blurred their features into the same hollowed-out expression of fear.
“There couldn’t just be one man up here by himself,” said Forbes, his voice trembling. “He must be part of a patrol.”
“Then why was only one man shooting at us?” asked Sugden.
We squinted at one another in the bright light, sweat dried powdery and white in the corners of our eyes.
“He might have been a sentry,” I said hopefully.
“Guarding what?” demanded Sugden, but before anyone had time to answer, he had figured out the answer for himself. “They’re in the customs house,” he said.
But if this was true, then how many were there? We did not even know if the customs house existed anymore.
Forbes took off his glasses and rubbed his reddened eyes. “What are we going to do?” he whispered, more to himself than to us.
“We must turn back,” answered Sugden. His breathing was shallow and fast.
I stared at him. It was the first time I had ever heard him speak of turning back from anything.
“There’s no point going back,” I told them both. “Switzerland is that way.” I pointed up the road in the direction we had been going.
“Then let’s just forget about the beacon and move on into Switzerland,” Sugden protested. “We can’t do the job. Not now. Not with two men gone.” He scratched at the side of his face
, leaving red lines through the dirt that pasted his skin.
Then I remembered what Carton had told me back at Achnacarry—that the beacon was the most important thing. More important than me. More important than my friends. I had not believed for an instant that it would ever come to this, but now I knew what choice I had to make. “We will still make the climb,” I told them.
The two men stared at me in silence, as if they could not believe what I’d just said.
I met their gaze and held it. “The rules are different now,” I whispered.
Sugden turned away and spat. “What do you say, Forbes?” he asked.
“Sugden,” I said as firmly as I could, “it’s my decision.”
He turned on me. “I don’t care about your decision! I want to know what Forbes thinks.” Bringing his dirty face close to Forbes, he whispered, “What’s it going to be?”
Forbes blinked Sugden’s breath out of his eyes. He cleared his throat. “I don’t want to be here any more than you do,” he said.
I gritted my teeth. With two of them against me, there would be no hope of completing the task.
“Then it’s settled!” Sugden hissed. “We head back down the valley. We’ll hide out until things quiet down, then make it through to Allied lines.”
“No,” said Forbes.
“What do you mean?” Sugden’s face was twisted with disbelief.
Forbes aimed one black-rimmed fingernail at Sugden. “If we pack it in now, Armstrong and Whistler will have died for nothing. No matter how badly I want to get out of this, I say we push on and get the job done.”
Sugden’s eyes darted from Forbes to me and back again. His hands curled into fists, the knuckles turning white as he squeezed the blood out of them. “Fine,” he spat. “Then let’s get on with it. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
We prepared to move out. Pushing into some backwater of our minds the wretchedness of going through the pockets and the packs of our two dead friends, we shared among ourselves the pieces of the beacon they had been carrying. After we had redistributed the equipment, we took the food from the dead men’s packs, then filled our pockets with additional ammunition. Lastly, we took their dog tags.
“We’d better go and get that other man out of sight,” I said. I could see him lying out there in the open, beside the rock where he had taken cover.
With Sugden and Forbes standing by, I ran to where he lay.
The soldier was on his back. Sugden’s bullet had hit him in the throat, exposing his torn windpipe and the milk-white tendons of his neck. The features of his face were sharp, his lips thin and pale. The way that death had pinched his skin, I could not tell how old he was.
He wore a greenish-gray tunic made of shabby wool, held together with gray pebbled buttons and a black leather belt. On the belt were two sets of leather ammunition pouches. One of them was open, and bullets had spilled out over the ground. Also on the belt was a green canvas bag on which he had clipped a wool-covered canteen. His helmet lay upturned beside him. The fact that he wasn’t carrying a pack confirmed that he must have been using the customs house for a base.
I took his paybook from the top right pocket of his tunic and was getting ready to go through his other pockets when Sugden called for me to hurry. I grabbed hold of the man’s heavy mountain boots and dragged him behind the rock, where he would not be seen from the road.
There was no time to bury Whistler and Armstrong, so we dragged their bodies behind the flat rock and laid them beside the German who had killed them. Then we spread a ground sheet over the three men and pinned it down with stones.
When Sugden, Forbes, and I moved out, we walked in the ditch, stumbling over uneven ground and splashing through the shallow stream.
Water seeped into my boots. The weight of the extra equipment hung across my shoulders, and the muscles of my thighs strained to handle the burden of my pack. The way sloped gently upwards until we reached the crest of the rise. From here, nestled under a great overhang of rock, we at last spotted the customs house about five hundred yards away. It was a wooden log-cabin type of structure, built up against the rock itself. Flat stones of various colors, some green, some brown, some smoky blue, overlapped unevenly to form its roof. On the opposite side of the road stood a small guardhouse and the supports for a wooden boom for raising and lowering across the road. Now only the supports remained in place. The boom itself lay in the water at the edge of the lake, just beside the guardhouse. In place of the boom, the road was blocked by barbed wire. It had been strung onto several X-shaped frames which were staggered across the road.
We crawled forward, so as not to silhouette ourselves against the skyline. I took out the binoculars again and looked for signs of life. Sunlight reflected off the barbed wire, showing that it had recently been placed there. The area outside the front door was protected by a chest-high crescent of sandbags. I could also see that, just to the side of the customs house, there was some kind of stairway leading belowground.
I saw no people, however, nor any sign of vehicles or radio antennas. For a moment, I allowed myself to feel some relief that the place might have been occupied only by a couple of men. And perhaps, at the sound of the gunfire, these men had fled.
A short distance beyond the customs house, the lake curved around towards the glacier. That was the route we’d have to take to get out on the ice and begin our march towards Carton’s Rock. We could not circle down below the customs house, as the mountain face formed a sheer drop to the valley floor. The site for the building had been well chosen. Anyone who wanted to travel this way had to get by under the shadow of that rock, right past the front door of the house.
The approach was entirely out in the open. There was no way we could sneak by in daylight. If anyone saw us, we would be gunned down before we’d gone more than a few hundred yards.
We decided to wait and then try to slip past in the dark. With no sign of a radio antenna, we assumed that whomever was there had no radio contact with any units standing by down in the valley. We would have to get by them, but they would have to get by us as well. They would have to cross the same open ground.
We removed our packs and took cover in the ditch. The sun was going down. In the distance we could hear the wind out on the glacier. It blew across the ice and ruffled the surface of the lake, then raked against our faces with a bone-hollowing chill.
As sunset bronzed the air, we heard the noises of engines and saw one, then two, then three planes flying overhead in loose formation. They must have been part of the squadrons we had seen earlier in the day, now returning from their mission. They were much lower than before, and I could see the white-star insignia and distinctive turned-up noses of B-24 Liberators.
I realized how little chance these planes would have stood if they had been flying through clouds on their return journey. Luck alone would bring them through these jagged hills. But soon, perhaps, they would have more than luck, and it seemed amazing to me that this small beacon might save the lives of so many men. Thinking about this allowed me to balance out what had happened to Whistler and Armstrong. The knowledge of their deaths was sinking in, past the fact of it, past the grief of it, to the cold acceptance of their bodies left behind.
Sugden, Forbes, and I took turns keeping an eye on the customs house as well as on the road behind us, in case someone approached from that direction. The third person tried to get some rest. When it was my turn, I lay with my scarf across my eyes. Sun winked through the crossed threads of the wool, which smelled of sweat and old tobacco smoke. For a while I drifted back and forth across the veil of consciousness.
As soon as the sun disappeared behind the customs house, the air became very cold. We waited through the long twilight, until a fingernail of moon rose above the glacier. Stars riddled the darkness in the east, but in the west, the sky was clouding over.
We smeared our faces and hands with mud, not only to camouflage ourselves but also to distinguish between friend and enemy once we got
to the customs house. There, if we ran into anyone, it would be too dark and confusing to differentiate between German and British uniforms. Anyone with a pale face would be killed.
We moved slowly down towards the customs house, carrying all our gear. The plan was to stop a hundred yards from the barbed wire, then creep forward and see if we could shift the entanglements by hand.
The three of us spread out about ten paces apart, navigating the uneven terrain while keeping an eye on the customs house, which by now was completely hidden in shadow.
I had become convinced that the place was empty. There were no lights, no smell of smoke or food. Slithering across the crumbling earth, I was soon sweating again under the weight of my pack. The stones over which I crawled were as sharp as coral. I could feel their edges gouging my knees and the blood cooling as it trickled from these wounds. In places, the dry earth gave way to patches of damp ground, in which water black as tar welled up from the moss and leeched into my clothes. If I tried to raise myself, my arms only sank deeper into the wet earth. Whenever I stopped to catch my breath, I could hear the faint sound of the others crawling beside me. By now, the clouds had blown in from the west, and a soft rain began to fall.
We reached the bottom of the rise and were now level with the customs house. The building remained dark and silent. The wire bunched like a haze at the horizon of my little world. Wind off the glacier whistled around the roof of the guard shack. I could feel my heartbeat thumping in my neck.
We were only a hundred yards from the wire.
As agreed, we undid the straps of our rucksacks and left them lying on the ground with the rope, the climbing axes, and the equipment belts we had been issued. Sweat which had pooled against my back under the rucksack quickly chilled now that the pack was off. As soon as we had secured the customs house, we would go back for our gear, then carry on around the edge of the lake to the departure point for our glacier crossing.
