The Ice Soldier

by Paul Watkins

  Sugden called again.

  “I’m here!” I croaked.

  Wind moaned around the angles of the roof. The sound was like voices whispering all around me.

  “Forbes is hurt!” shouted Sugden. “I can’t find the medical kit!” His voice was shrill with panic.

  I ran towards the sound of his voice, shining the torch in front of me.

  Sugden was down in the trench, hunched over Forbes.

  I jumped down beside them.

  “I can’t see enough to know where he is hit,” Sugden shouted.

  It was only now that I realized the trench was lined with concrete. It appeared to be some kind of drainage ditch for channeling runoff water from the lake past the customs house and down the steep slope on the other side.

  “Let me take a look,” I said.

  When Sugden moved aside, the first thing I saw were Forbes’s open eyes. The pupils were not dilated, but he continued to breathe in heavy and uneven gasps.

  Moving the torch beam down the length of his body, I realized he has been shot in the stomach, as well as in the hip.

  Past where he lay were two dead Germans, their bodies twisted against the side of the drainage ditch.

  We cut open Forbes’s clothing and discovered that both wounds had been caused by the same bullet, which had gone into his hip and exited out of his stomach.

  Even with my limited medical training I knew he was not going to make it. I didn’t say this to Sugden, but instead climbed out of the trench and ran back to find my pack, in which I’d stored the kit. Beyond the wire, I could make out the marks our crawling bodies had made when we’d come in.

  When I got back, the medical kit clutched in my hand, I found Sugden slapping Forbes over and over on the cheek. “Wake up, wake up,” he chanted under his breath.

  Setting the green metal box on the ground, I opened it and looked at the neat little bundles of bandages, the white tape, and the sulfa powder. Then I set aside the angled scissors and the little morphine syrettes.

  Looking at Forbes’s wounds, I found myself already thinking past his death. The fact was that the mission had failed. Sugden and I could not carry all the components for the beacon by ourselves. It would take two trips up the mountain, possibly three, and if that officer’s radio was working, it would not be long before reinforcements arrived from down in the valley. We had to destroy the equipment and get out of here while we still could. The only question in my mind was whether to bring Forbes with us, on the slim chance that he might survive the journey, or to leave him here, hoping that the Germans might be able to save him, or to overdose him with morphine and put an end to his suffering as quickly as possible.

  I was stunned by the coldness of my calculations. In the past, I’d been proud of my ability to think clearly, even in the most difficult situations we had faced together in the mountains. But this time, even though I knew it was more important than ever to think and act quickly, inside I felt as lifeless as the bodies of the dead men sprawled beside me in this trench.

  Sugden sat back and put his face in his hands. “We should have turned back,” he sobbed.

  “You listen to me,” I said, but my voice was so roughened by smoke that I barely recognized it. “If we had gone back down into the valley, the only thing we’d have run into would be half the bloody German army. Even if we’d given up trying to climb the mountain and pushed on to Switzerland, we’d still have had to come through here. That’s why they chose this place to wait for us.”

  “But why were they here at all?” he moaned.

  “I don’t know. What we have to think about now is getting out of here, before another patrol comes up from the valley.” I took Sugden by the arm and shook him. “Are you listening to me?”

  I still didn’t know if I was getting through to him.

  “We’ll take Forbes with us to Switzerland,” I told him, making my decision. “That’s the best we can do for him. Our job now is to get back alive.”

  Sugden lowered his hands to his knees. Dirt was smeared across his face. He nodded. My last words had brought him to his senses.

  While Sugden did his best to dress the wound in Forbes’s stomach, I went back into the customs house to find a stretcher. But there wasn’t one. Instead, propped up against the side of the house, I found a wooden sled with a harness attached to it.

  We gave Forbes a syrette of morphine, then loaded him onto the sled and wrapped him in gray blankets which we’d found on the beds in the customs house.

  Behind the house we discovered a portable radio antenna, about six feet tall, standing on a collapsible tripod. The wires snaked back through a small hole drilled into the wall of the building. Only a few paces behind the customs house, the ground fell away steeply, patched with snow and boulders. A stone rolled off this place probably wouldn’t have stopped until it reached the valley far below.

  I unwrapped the pieces of the beacon and threw some of them as far out as I could into the lake. The rest I pitched off the steep slope. They clattered away down the mountain, shedding screws and wires and ringing against the rocks until they had vanished from sight

  With two hours to go before dawn, we could hear the sound of trucks moving down in the valley. More soldiers had arrived, and we knew they would not wait for daylight before heading up the mountain.

  As quickly as we could, Sugden and I headed out. Sugden carried a pack containing food and a tent, and I hauled the sled.

  It was cold. Wind rumbled in the caverns of the glacier. Ice glowed blue in the light of the pale yellow moon.

  “ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?” It was Stanley. He stood in front of me, a cigarette smoldering in his fingers.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You were talking to yourself.”

  I shivered. I had no idea how much time had passed or what I had said. “This place,” I muttered. I did not need to say more.

  “I thought as much,” he said, “with all these bullet cases lying around.”

  I got up from where I had been sitting on the coffin and walked out into the road.

  “William,” said Stanley.

  I turned. “Yes?”

  “I think it’s time you told me everything, whether I want to hear it or not.”

  There was something in the way he spoke, a kind of absoluteness in his voice, which made clear that this chance would never come again. Stanley was the only one who could share this burden with me, and if I did not share it now, I would carry it alone and for the rest of my life. I had carried the weight of it already longer than I could stand, and I could not bear it anymore.

  I told him all that I could remember, from the first days of training at Achnacarry, from the first gunshots, which had killed Armstrong and Whistler, to the memory of Sugden and me, after the customs house disaster, hauling the sled towards Switzerland.

  I went on to tell him how Sugden did not speak on that long walk along the ruined road that led towards the border. It was noon of the following day before we realized that Forbes was dead. As I sat beside him, seeing the life gone out of his eyes, I could not summon any grief. That emotion, and others like it, had been swallowed in the darkness inside me. Instead, all I could think about was that despite all the time we had spent together, I had never really known him. We buried Forbes under a cairn of stones almost within sight of the Swiss frontier, too tired to speak or to feel anything more than exhaustion. Then Sugden and I sat on his grave and ate our emergency rations in silence. From there, we could just make out the summit of Carton’s Rock, rising from the distant plain of ice.

  Reaching the border at sunset, we found the Swiss customs house boarded up and empty. We were just beginning to wonder where our contacts might be when two men wearing civilian clothes appeared from a grove of birch trees, where they had been observing us. They turned out to be the SOE agents. They said they had not been certain who we were, since they had been told to expect five men.

  They had brought civilian clothing, which we exchanged fo
r our military gear. Our weapons were dismantled and the pieces buried. The rest of our stuff was hidden in a cave.

  Three days later, bearing forged diplomatic passports, we were flown to Lisbon and from there, the following day, back to England.

  We had been gone exactly one week.

  Sugden and I were debriefed in a room at the Aldershot barracks. It was here that we learned why German soldiers had been in position at the customs house when the place was supposed to have been empty. It turned out that Zimanski, our parachute instructor at Achnacarry, had been passing information to the Germans with a short-wave radio he had hidden in a false-bottomed kit bag in his room. The debriefing officer told us that the only reason anyone from our group was still alive was because Zimanski had gotten the date wrong by one week. The Germans we ran into were an advance guard. If we had arrived a few days later, a whole company of mountain troops would have been in position and we would have been slaughtered.

  “Where is Zimanski now?” Sugden asked.

  The debriefing officer looked at us over the rim of his glasses, which were perched on the end of his nose. “He had an accident,” replied the man.

  By the time we parted company, things had gone completely to hell between me and Sugden.

  I reported back to Achnacarry, and remained there until the end of the war.

  Lindsay, the kilted officer in charge, filled me in on what had happened to Zimanski. “We only found out about him by accident. We went into his room after he had passed out from drinking his spiritus. We wanted to dismantle his brewing equipment rather than see him drink himself to death. We were trying to find all the various pieces when we turned up the hidden radio instead. After Zimanski was persuaded to tell us what he’d been up to, we took him up in the practice-jump plane. Got up to a few thousand feet and told him that when we landed we were going to hand him over to some of his old friends in the Free Polish Brigade. Zimanski asked us, rather emphatically, if there was any way he could avoid that. So we opened up the door and let him jump out. Without a parachute, of course. You know that thing he used to say about breaking every bone in your body? Apparently, it’s absolutely true.”

  A replacement had not been found for Zimanski, since no recruits were coming through in those final months of the war. The mountaineering program had been shut down entirely. Piece by piece, the camp was dismantled. The staff members were reassigned to different corners of the earth. Barracks which had once held a hundred men were now only empty shells, home to nothing but mice and pigeons. The doors were blown open by the wind and remained that way. Windows broke and were not repaired. The twenty-foot-high assault-course jump fell down and was not rebuilt. In this forgotten place, Lindsay and I were also forgotten.

  Lindsay could easily have moved his quarters to his manor house, located a mile up the road and equipped with luxuries it was difficult even to dream of in the ramshackle huts of the base. But I doubted if the thought of moving ever occurred to him. He had been given orders to man the barracks, and that was what he did. The lack of creature comforts did not trouble him in the least.

  Even if I could not understand how his mind worked, I was grateful for his company. We spent a great deal of time sitting by the fire in his Quonset hut and reading old issues of Yank magazine left behind by the Americans who had trained here, while outside the never-ending Scottish rain came down. Sometimes, when even the rain became more appealing than another day of sitting inside, Lindsay and I would swathe ourselves in oilcloth jackets and stride out into the dreary countryside.

  I was still at Achnacarry when news of the board of inquiry’s recommendation came through. I hadn’t even known there was going to be an inquiry, but later I learned that Sugden had demanded one. The medal, a Military Cross with its distinctive purple-and-white ribbon, followed quickly.

  By then, Lindsay and I had lost all military bearing and were living more or less like hermits in the Scottish countryside.

  In the end, Lindsay’s Quonset hut was about the only thing left standing at Achnacarry. We had begun using pieces of wood from the old barracks to heat our fireplace, and the supply truck showed up rarely if at all.

  When our demobilization orders at last came through, Lindsay returned to his estate and I went home to Painswick. But I was restless there and often woke from nightmares in the blackness of the English winter night.

  “Was that when you decided to give up mountaineering for good?” asked Stanley, who until that moment had been listening without a sound.

  I nodded. “Everything that climbing meant to me got turned upside down. All that I used to love about it, I hated from that moment on.”

  “But here we are again,” said Stanley, gesturing across the lake towards the glacier we’d be climbing the next day. “And in spite of everything, there is no place I would rather be.”

  At first, I did not know what he meant. But then it dawned on me that there were things in both our lives, not only the climbing but people as well, whom we loved despite all reasoning. Stanley was right. At this moment in time, there was no place for us but here.

  I felt the burden I had carried on my own begin to lift. It would never disappear completely, but I knew that I could bear it from now on.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “No, Auntie.” Stanley shook his head. “I am the one who should be thanking you.”

  I WOKE THE NEXT MORNING, back stiff from lying on the ground, and looked out into a mist was so thick I couldn’t see the lake, even though it lay just across the road. My sleeping bag and the Kulmbacher mountain jacket I had rolled up as a pillow were beaded with the dew. The wind had died away and there was almost no sound, not even the lapping of water on the shore.

  Over a breakfast of porridge and raisins, the scrape of metal spoons in our mess tins seemed unnaturally loud. Afterwards, we barely spoke as we washed our tins in the lake, flecks of oatmeal drifting down into the cold and glassy water. The fog, swirling all around, compelled us to be silent.

  We set off, dragging the coffin around the edge of the lake.

  By the time we reached the glacier, the mist had started to burn off. Even before we saw the sun, the ice began to glow a haunting greenish-blue. Its sides were not white but grayish brown, insanely ridged, and seemingly in motion, like a torrent of lava bearing down into the valleys.

  After a thorough search, we at last found a slope that we could navigate. Then we strapped on our crampons and began to climb. With these daggers on our feet, our steps became slower but more certain, clinging to patches of ice like the claws of giant cats.

  After an hour of hauling the coffin over sharp ridges, sliding down one side and climbing up another, I fetched the winch from its wine crate and carried it forward, leaving the coffin behind and paying out cable as I went.

  When I reached the end of the cable’s length, I wedged the winch behind a hump of ice and began to reel the coffin in like a huge fish, with Stanley pushing it from behind.

  We kept this up for the rest of the day, stripped down to our bare backs in the sun.

  I cranked the winch until my mind shut down, registering only degrees of pain. Now and then I would look up and see the coffin riding the ridges like a ship over an ocean turned to glass. Stanley would appear behind it, his pale skin reddened by the sun and his goggled eyes wide and emotionless. Then he and the coffin would tumble down behind the next ridge, only to reappear a moment later.

  The ridges grew smaller but steeper as we neared the plateau of the glacier.

  I had not spoken to Stanley in hours, except to yell directions or to let him know when my muscles had cramped and I needed to take a break.

  He had responded only with waves or shouts whose words were lost among the crevices of ice.

  At last, just when a part of my mind had become resolved to cranking this winch for the rest of my life, we emerged onto the smooth surface of the glacier’s cap.

  We collapsed on the ground, trying to catch our breath, eyes filled w
ith the tea-brown light which filtered through the lenses of our goggles. Sitting up again, I looked down the side of the glacier to the lake. It seemed absurdly small, and the customs house nothing more than a speck at its edge. Even the road was reduced to a scribble of chalk, wandering dizzily around the mountainside. Of Palladino there was nothing. The town was hidden in the folds of the valley, which itself had vanished among other folds, blurring into the vastness of the ice-capped horizon.

  We had climbed into the rafters of the world.

  As I struggled to my feet, clumsy in my daggered boots, I remembered what Carton had said the first time I had gone to hear him speak. He had talked about how none of the things which allowed people to feel important—the money and the titles and the social connections and the ritzy tailored clothes—none of them counted for anything when you reached this place. And whereas down below your failures might be measured in scandal or gossip or lawsuits brought against you, up here your failures were measured in the crack of breaking bones, in cerebral edema, pleurisy, pneumonia, in pulmonary emboli, frostbite, and death. Words like these either drew you to them or sent you reeling in the opposite direction. Carton spoke as if this was a sorting of our species, each side looking uncomprehendingly at the other from the safety of the worlds which they called home.

  The more I thought of Carton’s last request, the less strange it seemed to me. Looking out across the blinding sea of white, with Carton’s Rock still hidden out there somewhere in the blur of sun on snow, I understood that this place had been his home since the day he’d first set foot upon the glacier. Not the home of his body but the home of his soul, if such a thing existed. This was his sacred ground, and to be buried anywhere else, I realized, would only dishonor the body which had brought him here.

  Stanley and I roped ourselves together and set off across the glacier, maintaining a twenty-foot distance between each other and the coffin. This way, if the ground opened up beneath us, we would be able to arrest our fall into anything except the largest hidden crevasse. We carried our ice axes at the ready, prepared to throw ourselves forward, digging the spike into the snow and bracing for the massive jolt which would accompany the other’s fall.