by Alan White
‘Watch the hill,’ Tom Cooper said to him, and turned around.
He was sweating, but then so was I.
‘How did it go?’ he asked me. Funny thing about Tom Cooper. He was a cold bastard, an unemotional person to have around, you might suppose. But I knew him, had grown accustomed to the silent signs that revealed his inner emotions. Like the time we were on the harbour wall in Amsterdam when they dropped a bomb and I kicked him in the buttocks into an open shop doorway. The blast had come down that street like a wall of dam water, stripping even the doorknobs from the doors as it scraped by. Him in one shop door, me in the other, looking through the shattered glass at each other. He’d known about the kick, known I’d saved his life.
‘Fancy yourself as a bloody footballer, do you,’ he said. From that moment war without him would have been inconceivable.
‘How did it go?’ he asked. He’d lived every moment of that straw-plaiting and pin-lifting episode, focused on my fumbling fingers, there in the hedge bottom.
‘Piece of cake,’ I said.
‘I hope there are no rabbits about,’ Cliff said, without turning his head.
I looked past and beyond him. The tree was still. The entire valley was still.
Until about twelve o’clock we worked our way across that shelf of field and hedgerow, until it would have been impossible for even a rabbit to crawl through that grass to reach us without setting off the devastating alarm of a grenade or, when we started to run short of grenades, one-pound slabs of gun-cotton we used for cutting railway lines. We took it in turns to lay them, and as we worked, we built up a sketch-plan of the area, one planting, one watching, and one keeping the planter covered.
Nearly a quarter past twelve by Cliff’s watch we smelled the burning chickens. The bucket had boiled dry. Tom Cooper gave a yelp, crawled madly backwards and disappeared into the barn. Just about that time, Cliff got back from planting the last one.
‘You’ve got to do something about that smell,’ he said, ‘I caught a whiff of it right across the other side of the field. It’s a dead giveaway.’
He was right, of course. I hadn’t considered the odour, that wonderfully reassuring odour of boiling chicken. For anyone approaching us by stealth it would be as good as a homing beacon. How often, in a strange northern town, had I located the nearest fish and chip shop by following the smell. I remember a self-made circus owner I once knew who used to be driven around by a chauffeur in the days before the war, a cockney man with a heart of gold who never accustomed himself to the plush-lined interior of such a vehicle. When he tired of sightseeing, he would pick up the speaking tube and say, ‘Right, Charlie, follow your nose.’ And within twenty minutes, Charlie would guarantee to have the Rolls parked outside a fish and chip shop.
Tom Cooper came scampering back. ‘We’ve got to do something…’
‘…about that smell,’ we echoed.
‘But what?’ I added.
I knew, and he knew, and Cliff knew.
Had our sergeant been there, he would have made some pointless joke about ‘Who’s musical – well you can volunteer to shift the piano.’ But we had no sergeant, and a smell of burning chicken that pointed to our exact position from all points of the compass down wind.
Cliff had just returned from planting the last grenade, and the sweat was not yet dry on his upper lip. Tom Cooper’s army number was seven fewer than mine, and that gave him all the rights and privileges of an older soldier. So off I went. I found what I looked for, at the back of the barn, a pile of it, over eight feet high. It had been there since the spring, I reckoned, when the grass was green and lush, the animals well fed after a winter in the barns, well fed, contented, and to judge by the smell a little obese. Shovelful by shovelful, I spread it over the yard, a pungent, deadening blanket of humus that would have masked the sweet odours of heaven itself.
When I returned to the eyrie, Tom Cooper and Cliff shrank from me in exaggerated horror. After a short while we all grew accustomed to the cloying stench of it, and forgot it.
Cliff went back into the barn to salvage what he could from the bucket. Tom Cooper took over the watch, and I took my official time off. What should I do? Take a walk, go for a bus ride? Cinema, dance, or stay at home and listen to Much Binding?
I went for another wash. The stench hadn’t quite gone, though I had learned to ignore it. I took the bucket round to the back of the barn again, and started the water warming again. It was the same water I had washed in that morning, but there wasn’t all that much water in the rainwater butt that I could afford to waste it.
Why do we do it? How do we manage? What reserves exist in the human spirit that can be drawn upon, as it seems, at will? Once we ran from Achnacarry to Fort William, and back via Spean Bridge. We ran all the way, just for the hell of it. We were in full battle kit, carrying weapons. I started with a rifle, finished with six rifles slung on one shoulder, and a heavy Piat on the other. Not a word of command was spoken, and no one dropped out. Twenty-five men, all running through the mountains, up road and down road, over bridge under bridge. One of us was a parish priest who d resolved that there was only sense in war if he could truly believe that ‘Whither thou goest, I will go.’ He meant it. He also wanted to ensure that when he arrived he would have the breath left in him to comfort the weary and the sick, to say the Lord’s Prayer. He’d never run more than a hundred yards since leaving prep school – his living had permitted none of those gastronomic luxuries that give energy to the ribcage – he was lean, and hungry, but determined. Many of the men running with him had been released from gaol to volunteer to join us – they had been blackguards, now were heroes in the making. Four men half-carried that priest through the last eleven miles, on the barrels of their rifles, two in front, two behind, with the rifles clamped under his armpits. He was not conscious of them, just as not one of us was conscious of the road we trod, the burst bleeding blisters, the pain-numbed ankle, leg, thigh and back muscles, the salt from the dried sweat that found every crack in our chapped faces. They who carried him before were released thieves, those behind him were safe-blowers, and thus thieves. He had the best of precedents for his journey, but the cross he carried was locked somewhere inside his head. I remember seeing him run up the beach when first we landed in France to begin the second front. It was my fourth visit, but running up that beach I felt like a tourist. He was carrying a telephone exchange on his back, and I got to the hummock on the crest of the beach before him. I was cursing him as he trundled slowly behind me, his hands clasped to his stomach. When he got to the hummock, he gasped, ‘I’ve been hit’ and, unable to stop, he blundered into the hummock and tripped and fell. I rolled him over and started to attach the ends of the spools of assault cable as our men brought them from other units. We had been told to establish a telephone network and then get out of there quickly. The priest didn’t move and I had to prise the switchboard off his back to permit me to get at the connectors. The whole of his stomach had been sliced out by a plate-like piece of shrapnel. He must have been dead long before he got to the hummock, yet he had been able to speak. I’ve heard of fowl running about the farmyard after their heads have been cut off – this was my first, but not my last, experience of it in a human being.
How and why do we do it? What is this immense power that mind seeks to have over matter? Is it simply the glorification of the ego, the need to feel that there is nothing that cannot be done, no wall too high, no drop too deep?
After the war I spent six months on fruitless weekly visits to a professor of psychiatry at a provincial university. It was an entertainment, nothing more. I revelled in everything I ever told him, and telling it doubled the effect, if not the value, of it. One of our men didn’t have the opportunity to talk to a professor of psychiatry. He came back from a heavy water-plant job in Norway after a harrowing experience during which he had been held prisoner and tortured. The fools who received him when he got back sent him home to recover. On his first night at home, his lov
ely young wife woke beside him. Dawn had not yet broken, but tenderly she bent over in the half-light and kissed his forehead where the scars of the cigarette burns still showed. Without waking from his sleep, he reached over and stuck his knife up to the hilt in her heart. He’d gone finally to sleep, clutching it. They sent him to Broadmoor. It was in all the papers. We had four men desert to Southern Ireland when they read about it, and one of our sergeants dropped a live grenade down a toilet and then sat on the seat. Another of our sergeants, a physical training instructor over six feet tall, who must have weighed sixteen stones, every one of them a muscle, taught us all unarmed combat so fiercely he broke two legs a week. Tom Cooper was the only man in the unit who’d ever chopped him to the ground. The Gorilla, we used to call him. He was given a year’s imprisonment, and sent back to the Pioneer Corps, for buggery in Wrexham, North Wales. How do you do it, sergeant? How do you do it? When Cliff heard about it, all he could say was, ‘the sergeant thought too much of his privates’. It had made me laugh when I first heard it – it made me laugh again sitting there behind the barn with the slop in which I was going to wash bubbling merrily away. The washing took all of five minutes. The water was too hot, but I was determined not to waste it. The sweet-scented, transparent soap made me think again of the Millais painting, but it shifted the stench of dung and that was all I asked.
As I had supposed he would, Cliff had dressed it all up in best Somerset Maugham style. The chicken had not all been burned, though the liquor was amber. He had cleared a box-top, laid on it a bleached flax sack, and had ‘set’ a paper twist of salt and pepper, a pot of steaming tea, and his own knife and fork, burnished bright, daintily placed beside my mess tin. Hard tack biscuits he had placed on a paper doily, torn from toilet paper into a delicate pattern, and pièce de resistance – a flower.
The flower was a beauty, flush-fleshed, richly-coloured. I didn’t know the name of the species, but the sight of it was reassuringly incongruous. ‘You’ll make someone a good wife,’ I said.
He was pleased.
What a pointless thing it is to draw an arbitrary line between the sexes, to claim certain abilities as male or female, to put men and women into separate compartments, as opposed as plus and minus, nuts and bolts, top and bottom. What a false dichotomy we have created between those with their parts outside, and those with their parts inside. I had been with Cliff on roaring, fall-down drunks. We had shared park benches with acquiescent sisters – on one occasion Tom Cooper and Cliff and I took three friends in a field overlooking the town, and all the way through the act the three girls held hands. Cliff jumped into women; he jumped out of aeroplanes with a pre-packed parachute between him and the Roman Candle fast-fall to earth, and never even gave it a thought.
But lovingly he’d take a piece of toilet paper and laboriously fold it, with thick grimed fingers, and tear a paper doily and spread it on the table. This was a man whose military speciality, in the coarse world of barrack-room values, was that he could belch at will loudly enough to split an oak panel at fifty feet.
The chicken was delicious. Soft and tender as Ellie herself must have been about that time. Of course, it was burned to old Nick, but that didn’t detract from the flavour.
As soon as he saw I had started, he fetched Tom Cooper’s kit and laid the other side of the table. The flower he moved to the centre, then he went and took Tom Cooper’s place on watch.
When Tom Cooper came in he gave a soft whistle, sat down, and tucked in. I finished first, of course, and left the table with the remains of my mug of tea and lit a fag. Tom Cooper finished his grub, and came over and sat beside me. He lit the cigarette I offered, and let his head drop back onto a corn sack behind him.
‘I’m a bit worried by that tree,’ he said.
‘So am I.’
We both thought a while, and then spoke together.
‘If it was somebody…’
I let him finish it.
‘If it was somebody, they’ll be here about half-past two.’
I had already worked it out for about that time.
‘What do we do when they come?’
‘Well, you heard the sergeant – he said, we make an orderly retreat. The trouble is, I don’t know where to make an orderly retreat to…’
So it was out. He too was lost. We were all lost until ten o’clock the next morning. Provided we were still there at ten o’clock.
‘Of course,’ I said, tentatively. ‘We could start right now if you wanted. Surely we’d find somebody somewhere back there.’
‘And when we find somebody, what do we say to them? “Don’t shoot, it’s us, and the password for three days ago was MARTIN.”’
I had even forgotten that the last password we knew was MARTIN.
‘We could take a chance?’
An officer and seven men had taken a chance a month ago, and one burst from their own Bren got the lot.
‘No,’ said Tom Cooper, with complete finality. ‘We’ll stay here!’
There are many kinds of soldiers and many reasons for fighting a war. We were three army commandos, each a volunteer. What was I doing as a volunteer commando? I was and still am a pacifist. Not a mealy-mouther, not a brotherhood-of-men man – you can keep all that crap for me.
But I have been able to believe that the sole object of life is to try to enhance the calibre of the human soul – call it spirit if you will – and have never had anything but contempt for the human animal. War, for me, is the triumph of the animal. I can forgive the destruction, but not the debasement, the festering unwashed sore on the body of mankind.
Realising the inevitability of my fighting the war, for I lacked the courage of pacifism, I could only descend to the animal level in my own way, as a volunteer for an undisciplined unit, subjected by no official dogma, by no protocol of military academy observances. How many men insist on going to hell in their own way. Tom Cooper was one, so was Cliff. For Tom Cooper this was a spiritual as well as a physical revolt. First and foremost, he was a moral man, with an inalienable sense of correctitude. And though he could pin a girl to the earth for a fast forgotten moment, he could neither walk nor crawl from the scene in which we had been placed without his own personal justification.
‘I’d better be getting back,’ he said, ‘and you’d better get some kip. We’ll be up all night, for certain!’
He stubbed out his cigarette and left the barn.
I settled myself on the corn sacks, and didn’t move again even when I heard Cliff come in and start to wash up.
I was still asleep when the first grenade exploded.
Nervous twitch flung me across the barn with my rifle cocked, one up the spout, the safety catch off. I stood just inside the door, accustoming my eyes to the sudden glare, looking in a continuous sweeping arc across the entire line of vision. A puff of smoke was rising in the sky on the other side of the hedge. There seemed to be no action, not any movement at all. I saw with relief that Tom Cooper and Cliff were still there, both looking along their rifle barrels at the mid-distance.
I crawled to where they lay.
The smoke was rising above the hedge bottom where I had planted the first grenade. About five yards in from the hedge, a tall German soldier was standing, swaying, his hands clasping his head. His hat had been blown off. His rifle was hanging by its strap from the crook of his arm, banging against his puttees and trailing in the grass. On his back he had a slim pack, the kind made of an animal skin with the fur outwards. His water bottle hung from his side, dangling as he swayed. He was trying to walk forward, impelled by I know not what devil of instinctive obedience, but his feet refused to keep time with the upper part of his body and he pitched forward. He grunted as he fell, and as he lay there, we heard him grunt again. He tried to get back onto his knees. Then he pitched finally forward, flat on the earth and lay still. By now, the smoke plume had begun to disperse. Then the German started again to groan, and grunt as if to stop his own moaning. Then there was silence.
&nb
sp; Total silence.
It had been my grenade.
Oh, I’d planted hundreds before. Hundreds. Over most of France and Belgium and Holland and parts of Germany were grenades I had planted.
I had never watched anyone who’d been hit by one before.
I had never realised that they could be lethal.
‘Sure,’ you’ll say, ‘this is an excuse, the frightened whimperings of a stupefied child who says, “I didn’t know it could hurt.”’ Like the time a boy took a dart and threw it while I was picking other darts from the face of the dartboard, and the dart went right through the fleshy part of my hand near the thumb, and the boy said to me, ‘I never knew they could hurt you.’
Well, the dart could and did hurt me.
And planted grenades, that game we had played, first in battle school in the wilds of Wales and Scotland, as a game, and then as a sport in the fields of France and Belgium, and then as a habit of self-protection in Holland and Germany, this game and sport and habit suddenly became a lethal weapon you hold tightly, knowing damn well your skill will prevent it exploding in your face. The man lying out there, still holding his head, perhaps in death, didn’t know it was there, and I had carried skill beyond the point of sport and self-protection, into aggression.
Where were the Germans, anyway, and where were our own troops and the Americans and the French and the Poles and the Dutch and the Belgians? Where were they? They ought to be here, all around us, and the Germans ought to be on the top of that hill, far away where the tiffies could come and get them and where, with our sights extended to the limit, we could fire anonymous shots in their general direction. I can fire a rifle, but why couldn’t it be at the end of a rifle’s range. Why did it have to be just there, an arm’s throw away, across a green, stinking, damned-awful field of grass that needed cutting anyway and was full of bloody quitch.
At these moments, the official historians tell us, the proud men of the one hundred and twenty-seventh lancers, extended in V formation after the style of Clausewitz, bent their heads, and some of them vomited. Come on, lads, sick it up. Get rid of it. Wipe your mouths, lift your heads, smile palely and soldier on in hup two three time.
