by Alan White
The Long Day’s Dying
Cover
Title Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Postscript
Next in Series
About the Author
Also by Alan White
Copyright
Cover
Table of Contents
Start of Content
Chapter One
We were four. Tom Cooper, Cliff, Robin Farquhar and me. We belonged, somewhat loosely, to Number Nine Commando Brigade, a group of bank clerks and bank robbers, strong men and weak, heroes and cowards, burglars, fire-raisers, bombers, poachers and just plain vagabonds. Our commanding officer, a noble Scot at birth, who’d inherited a title and a distillery together, should have been a pirate. He started the war a whisky tycoon; ended it a corpse of no intrinsic value.
Our Robin Farquhar was killed, too, crossing a river.
Our own unit consisted of seventy-four men when we landed in France shortly before the start of the second front. That first week they counted our dead in tens.
We were known as a Special Group, one of several, used by all and sundry to winkle out trouble wherever it might be encountered. We worked mostly by night, often behind the enemy lines when we could distinguish them. We were often cold, always lonely, usually hungry, and for the whole of the summer, autumn and winter of 1944 I used a bed only for hasty, unsatisfying and totally immoral purposes.
Now I tell my youngest daughter stories that always have to start ‘One day…’ This one I will never tell her.
One day we were taken by a sergeant, and we walked and crawled to where a barn was half concealed by a fold of the ground. The sergeant said, ‘Watch it,’ and crawled away and left us.
He came back the following morning about ten o’clock, and then again the morning after that.
One day…
I’ve read in the official histories of the last war, and in the official and unofficial novels, that armies were locked in combat, that an entire wing of the RAF flew overhead, tanks dotted the plains, hid in the woods, and forged across streams to look for hull-down firing positions. A couple of regiments of artillery, they say, came as close as was feasible, and a couple of thousand tons of bombs were fired or dropped during that one day. For me, it was the day, one of the days, Tom Cooper, Cliff and I spent in the barn. I don’t remember the name of the village nearest to the barn, and I never knew why we spent our days in it.
Generals and field marshals met in headquarters, and films of plays or books have been made, showing them looking gravely at Ordnance Survey maps, listening to them debate the fate of their mortal souls and careers should they decide to take again that ultimate decision, to send another stick of men forward into the holocaust of battle. That’s a mean load of responsibility, a mean way to have to send another man to his death, from across the top of an Ordnance Survey map of ground you’ll never see. Or so the films, my own research sources, have told me.
It wasn’t like that, you know. At least, not for Tom Cooper, for Cliff, nor for me. We fought a little war against boredom, tiredness and the unquenchable desire to be somewhere else, with someone else, doing something else. Lacking the knowledge of what the hell was going on, our chief fight was to preserve the essential seriousness of it all, the sense of being a small but vital part of the grander scheme of things.
Our chief difficulty was to accept, always, that a ‘grander scheme of things’ even existed. I had always been a simple man, not over-bright, this much I knew quite clearly. I had always lived under my father, had worked for an identifiable boss, had prayed to a superior Being I called (and thought of as) God. But significantly, I believed the portraits of Jesus Christ and of God that I had grown up with in my Bible, and all other drawings and portraits of him, were sacrilegious to me.
I had also seen photographs of war leaders, and could usually accept them as they were, but I needed a more positive outcome for their efforts than the mere movement over ground they called conquest.
And so, I think I’ll tell the story of that day the three of us had, out there on what I imagine is still marked on an official death kit Ordnance Survey map, locked away in a dusty cupboard in a labyrinthine office of the War Department, as being the left flank.
Chapter Two
It was a day that started just as any other day.
Getting up early is an insidious habit that gets right inside you – you act like a civilian for just so long, luxuriating between the blankets after waking each morning, and then suddenly, to be awake and not to be up and about seems wasteful. Bed becomes a setting for only one thing – for rest-giving sleep. The sybaritic side of resting horizontal in the warmth, with only a bird’s eye aspect of the realities of the day, becomes a weakening civilian habit. In bed you’re vulnerable, you’re a bad soldier – sergeants come upon you and bellow in your ear, grown men twitch the blankets from you and jeer at the hands you have tucked for comfort into your crotch.
As first light stole into the barn, I awoke, and immediately jumped out of the ‘bed’ in the hay bale. The straw had worked its way into my shirt and my trousers, and the dust it carried covered my body with an itching prickling powder.
I took off all my clothing, shook it, and laid it out in the sunlight to air. Then I took out the clothing I had worn the previous day, and had folded neatly into my rucksack. It didn’t smell unpleasantly yet, but I could quickly identify it as my own. It had my sweet-sour odour I had once been told was most attractive, but which I knew could quickly go stale. I put on underpants, trousers, socks, boots, gaiters, and with my braces hanging, took a bucket of water behind the hedge behind the orchard on the far side of the barn.
Behind us, or so we were told, was the entire British Army. With them, so rumour had it, was the entire American Army.
Beneath us, south on the maps, was a unit of Frenchmen. At least, Frenchmen had marched the night before the previous one through what the military historians would call ‘our positions’, and I supposed they still had to be down there somewhere. Up above us, the reconstituted Dutch Army, leftovers from the Dutch Underground, or so I’d been told by Tom Cooper. He seemed to know everything that went on, though we had no contact with the world outside for three days, other than a daily visit from the sergeant whose name I cannot remember.
In front of us, somewhere, the German Army. The finest bunch of soldiers ever fashioned by the cunning of men. That’s what we had been told by each of our bloodletting training officers at Catterick Camp – this message had been used by every single sergeant and officer who held sway, for however brief an episode, over our lives and destinies. I couldn’t carry accurate testimony to the fineness of the German Army. I had never seen a German fire a shot in anger, had never fired a shot at one in anger, and had begun to think the whole war was a foolishly conceived exercise in futility.
Trained as taut as a fiddle string by the most brutal methods the Army could devise, I had been flung into mortal combat again and again. I had been dropped by parachute into localities in France, Belgium, Holland, known only to me by a code name.
Operation Thunder. We had blown up a bridge across a river rumoured to be the Loire. Four of us had done that job. Our training had been such that we were in and out of Thunder in three hours flat. We’d been received by a rain-drenched Frenchman who came no nearer to us than twenty yards, and then seemed afraid of the explosives we carried. We had landed in the rain. There had been an exciting moment when a German lorry, or so we guessed, went down a road half a mile awa
y. We moved across the ground already made familiar to us by models studied at leisure in the ground floor front of a boarding-house in Hurstpierpoint. We had no need of the Frenchman.
My part in the proceedings had been to lash my share or the explosive round the base of the second plinth of the bridge. I had dumped at least a half a hundredweight of grease-proof-paper wrapped packets into a hole I was told I would find there. It had been there all right. Half full of rain. I remember thinking, ‘Good job they wrapped this lot in grease-proof paper.’ Then I retired by a planned route, to the corner of a field. I waited there about ten minutes, and my three companions came back one by one. There was no talking. Five minutes later a plane landed, and we hopped on board. Only when we were in the air with the thin ribbon of the river stretching below us did we relax. By then, we were feeling the delayed action of the tension we had lived under since our first briefing.
I never found out if that bridge was ever blown. No one told me if that grease-proof paper had kept out the rain. We landed in that plane in an unnamed aerodrome, from which we were driven one by one, separately. We had not talked in the plane. There had been nothing to talk about. ‘What mob you with, then?’
‘Fifth Special Group. What mob you with?’
‘Fourth Special Group.’
‘Know a guy called Chalky?’
‘Chalky what?’
‘Dunno – we always called him Chalky. I did a power station with him up in Belgium somewhere.’ Long pause.
‘You ever done a power station?’
‘Never.’
‘They’re all right.’
‘I’d be scared of getting a shock!’
‘Yes, you’ve got to watch it.’
Conversations such as this one don’t go on for ever. I never saw any of the four again. I was driven in a small army truck and deposited in an assembly centre in a hotel somewhere along the Marylebone Road. After two days I was sent up to Wrexham, then to Achnacarry in Scotland to learn how to make a fire with the oil in the oil bottle in the butt of a rifle.
I was washing. In a bucket. Behind the hedge behind the orchard beside the barn. I’d made a bit of a fire with pellets of smokeless fuel, and had stuck the bucket on them to try to get the water warm enough for a shave. I’ve never forgotten that story about Somerset Maugham wearing a dinner jacket in the jungle in Burma, and saving The Times to open it fresh each morning.
The sun was up, and it was warm. It was a pruning morning. I was daydreaming again – the orchards of Kent. Blossom time – Schubert-song blossom time, Ivor Novello’s ‘We’ll Gather Lilacs’ time. I remember thinking that neither Schubert nor Ivor Novello can ever have pruned an orchard, to smell the spring, when the bark of the trees gives off a sweet odour as pungent as the sweat on the skin of a desirous woman.
Which led me into another rich vein of daydreams.
Cliff and Tom Cooper came out of the barn and started to walk across the beaten earth yard to where I was washing by the hedge. Both were stripped to the waist. Tom Cooper was carrying what had once been a lilac-coloured towel over his shoulder. We’d pulled his leg about that towel for the two weeks he’d had it. My towel had gone long ago, too soiled even to wash. Oddly enough, it was his only possession apart from his rifle that no one would ever borrow from him. I suppose that was one of the things that set Tom Cooper apart from the rest of us, even from Cliff and me and Robin Farquhar. That towel. We always called Robin Robin, Cliff Cliff, but we never called Tom Cooper Tom.
I was cleaning my teeth with the last of the salt and the end of my index finger. I would infinitely prefer to stink of sweat than bad breath.
Suddenly, I suppose – though the action that followed can still cross my night dreams in slow motion – the whole wall that jutted out from the side of that barn just took off, into the air, and came crashing to the ground, brick upon brick upon brick, between Cliff, Tom Cooper and me. The bucket of water was pushed upwards and crushed almost flat against my belly by the sudden pressure. A little of the water in it shot up past my face, and then the rumble began, the rumble of rubble and the clatter of tiles and the whiplash of the branches of trees. Tom Cooper was flung sideways into a trough of pigmeal long since rancid, but Cliff just crumpled and fell, boneless, to the ground. Then the post-explosive suction began, and bricks, timber, tiles, dust, rubble, came rushing helter skelter into the swirling maelstrom all about us.
That was the first bomb.
Other bombs fell at one- or two-minute intervals, during the next ten or so minutes. For ten or so minutes the bombs came, each one a whirling, swirling, bone-bruising, belly-blasting belch obscuring the sun.
I stood there, too rigid even to drop to the ground. When the bombing stopped there was a tangible silence, the silence that Goethe must have heard when his birds shut up in the trees.
The official historians, the bibliographers, the biographers, men of leisure and records, would be able to tell you what those bombs were, and who was responsible for them.
To me, they were a vast anonymous turbulence, that came from nowhere, went nowhere, had only one direction and that inwards to a twisting centre evil as the eye of a hurricane. They had no identity, no curses could be unleashed by them, no anger-releasing blasphemies. They were yet another manifestation of the fatuity, the enormous life-wasting, peanut-cracking, sledge-hammering devastating idiocy of war.
The barn itself, constructed only of thin timber hung tile fashion on slender wooden posts, appeared untouched by it all, save that several tiles had been stripped from the overhanging shingle roof above the doorway.
When the bombing stopped and the quiet came, I felt each separate muscle of my body relax and begin to ache. My chest heaved – I had been holding my breath for some time. There was an intense pain in my appendix. I walked to where Cliff lay, and straightened his limbs as best I could. He was covered in blood, actually covered by it, with some in his eyes.
But he was alive, and conscious. He tried to turn his face away as I straightened out his neck on his shoulders – he tried to push me from him with hands and arms from which all strength and mobility had been blasted. I bent over him, and waited for him to speak. He chewed at a mouthful of blood and dust, then spat it out.
‘Go away,’ he said, his voice perfectly normal, and quite capable. ‘Go away, I’ve pissed myself.’
I left him and went to Tom Cooper. He was dusting the dried rancid pigmeal powder from himself, banging both his hands rhythmically on his thighs, and cursing.
He appeared to be quite dry. I looked down. I, too, had pissed myself.
It was about half-past ten by the time the sergeant got to us, crawling down the gully at the side of the hedge, past a gap through which one could look west to where we had been told were Germans. Not that we’d ever seen any Germans across there, mark you. Not that we’d ever taken the risk of looking for them.
Apparently a number of the men we’d travelled with through France and Belgium and Holland had been killed, so the sergeant said. He himself was all right, except he had broken a finger, and had made a temporary splint of plaster of Paris held in position by a French letter – one of the ones we used to keep water out of the end of the rifle barrel when we waded across rivers.
Cliff had recovered by the time the sergeant arrived, and had washed the blood from his face and out of his eyes. ‘Everything all right, Cooper?’ the sergeant asked. Cooper was the senior soldier – his number seven less than mine. Cooper didn’t reply. He nodded.
The sergeant looked at the yard, the sideless gaping barn, the shattered trees, the debris that littered the clearing.
‘I see you had ’em here, then?’
It wasn’t a question you wanted to answer.
‘You’re not the only ones – we had ’em over there you know,’ he said, on the defensive.
‘We know,’ I said, to comfort him. We didn’t know, of course. How could we. We didn’t even know what day it was, or even where was ‘over there’!
‘Anybody hurt?’ he asked.
‘No, sergeant,’ Tom Cooper said.
‘Anybody hurt over by you?’ I asked, more to make conversation than anything else.
‘Yes,’ he said, and told us of the lads who’d been killed, or wounded and sent back to the casualty clearing station. ‘Well, you can call it that,’ he said, ‘two queer orderlies and a refugee from a knacker’s yard.’
By this time Cliff had brewed a pot of tea in a metal pot we’d found in the barn when we first arrived.
We sat down and drank it, slowly at first, and then gulping as it became apparent the sergeant was going to get regimental.
Tom Cooper forestalled him.
‘What’s the order of the day, sergeant?’ he asked, quiet and crisp and competent as all good senior soldiers are thought to be.
‘Keep your eyes on the top of that hill,’ he said, pointing about a half a mile to the south-west. ‘Anything comes over it,’ he said, ‘and you’re to make a planned withdrawal back to the camp.’
We looked at the hill, suddenly invested with the awesome aspect of a potential trouble spot, like some street of ill repute in a provincial town. If countryside can look innocent – it looked innocent enough. Well covered with growths of one kind and another, holding a pleasing aspect of sunlight and shade – almost a painter’s hill, a bit of Constable. But, when the sunlight was dimmed by a scudding cloud, and the shadows darkened, it suddenly took upon itself a look of Piper, a gaunt exterior with the bones of evil too close to the surface.
‘Right,’ Tom Cooper said. ‘We’ll watch it, sergeant.’
‘One on watch, two resting. Make out a two-hour rota.’
I believe he imagined Tom Cooper would produce from somewhere a sheet of quarto paper and a typewriter, and would compose three carbon copies of a list of names to be filed in the orderly room. He appeared for a moment to be waiting for this manifestation of discipline, but when nothing formal was forthcoming, he looked briskly about him. He took my rifle, opened the breech and extracted the bolt. It was clean. My rifle always was clean. I stuck my thumbnail in the breech at a suitable angle, and he looked down the barrel. It too was clean, that I knew. I removed my thumb, and he handed the bolt back to me. I slid it into the rifle without effort, without fumbling, looking all the while into his eyes. From this distance, I could have sworn he was cross-eyed!
