The Long Day's Dying

by Alan White

  I had a razor blade tucked into the inside of my gaiter. Not much. Silently I cursed myself. How many times had I said there ought to be a scabbard on the inside seam of the trousers for such an eventuality. I’d even gone so far as to design and experiment with a steel pin and bow and arrow, but had never done anything about it. The man who drew a different pattern on the sole of the infantry boot and saved one stud per boot sole got a title, so they said.

  I felt the muzzle of the rifle on the bone behind my ear.

  ‘How many of you are there, and where are the rest of your men? And where are the officers? Speak in your normal voices, but not too loud. You first!’ And he jabbed the muzzle hard against the bone. It felt as if he had pierced the skin and that blood was starting to run, but that may have been sweat.

  Before I could speak, Tom Cooper had half turned his head. The muzzle was withdrawn from behind my ear, and jammed into the back of Tom Cooper’s neck before he could speak.

  ‘There are only three of us,’ he said – ‘another man is outside and due to be relieved in a few minutes. If we don’t relieve him, he will wonder what is wrong in here.’

  He knew damn well that Cliff, suspecting nothing, would come into the barn half blinded by the change from light to dark, a standing target for the German. And, being Cliff, he would be bound to snap a shot at the German, without even the remotest chance of getting away with it. The resulting turbulence would finish us all, for once the German had given the alarm by firing one shot there was no reason to stop him pumping shots into Tom Cooper and me. Already he was uncertain of us, despite his confident mien.

  But instantly I saw the mistake Tom Cooper had made.

  If we were only three, there was no reason why the German shouldn’t shoot Cliff anyway, and us with him, once he had Cliff inside the barn.

  ‘Well, Tom, if you’re going to spill your guts, I may as well spill mine,’ I said. He would know that I knew, from my use of his Christian name alone, that something was wrong. It was an understood thing that I had never called him Tom. ‘There’s a whole troop of our lads just across that field,’ I said to the German, ‘and they have this whole area covered on fixed lines by three Brens.’

  I could tell without him making a sound that Tom Cooper recognised his mistake. The German bent forward, and with his left hand only he removed my knife, and that of Tom Cooper, and our rifles. I couldn’t see what his right hand held but I could guess. Then he came to stand in front of us, just inside the door. He spoke in a piercing whisper. ‘We will wait for your friend,’ he said, ‘in complete and utter silence.’

  He blended into the shadow beside the door-post, difficult to see clearly even to our gloom-accustomed eyes, certainly impossible for anyone whose pupils were filled with bright sunlight. We watched him without moving – any attempt to shift our weight and the gun swung forward in our direction. I could tell that, despite his outward air of control and calm, the German was preparing himself for the entry of Cliff, steeling himself to wait just as, before he came into the barn, he must have stood outside the barn door, watching us, bolstering his courage. Full marks for his ability to move quickly and unobserved.

  It had taken me about five minutes to move my hand down to the gaiter and to get out the razor blade. Now I was holding it clasped between the two centre fingers, towards the end of the fingers, in such a position that I could flick it. On a dartboard I could score a double-twenty four times out of six at anything up to five feet away. He was standing at least twenty feet from me.

  Tom Cooper carried a spring-loaded dart gun in his gaiter, that would throw a steel needle about fifteen feet, but the best accuracy we had ever been able to achieve was a circle twelve inches in diameter. The human head measures twelve inches in only one direction, and our line of most error had been horizontal. The German had a long and narrow face, with soft-looking, crisply curled hair that came down low on his forehead and at the sides of his temples. He was tall, but slender. I could tell from his uniform that he was of the parachute regiment – six weeks before we’d seen a paper they had captured on a German paratrooper instructing that should they meet ‘the troops with the green hats’ – and that meant us – they should shoot first. We were labelled ‘uncapturable’. Well, we had laughed grimly at the warning and flattery – but here we were, both of us, temporarily captured.

  Not for a single second did our lanky captor take his eyes from us, but I knew that not for a second did he relax his concentration on what was happening out there.

  I was disappointed he hadn’t tried to tie up one of us, for the other one would have got him, somehow. He was too wise for that.

  Cliff came in. He knew the moment he saw us sitting in that position that something was wrong, but by then he was too far into the barn to do anything about it, and by then the German was between him and the light, and had the muzzle of that automatic in Cliff’s kidney.

  ‘Go and sit with them,’ he said, quietly.

  Cliff tried to sit in front of Tom Cooper, but the German banged him in the side with the rifle to keep him out of the central line of fire. As Cliff felt the rifle touch him, he tried to drop his hand onto the barrel to throw the German, but the training on the other side must have been identical with ours, and just as rigorous. The German side-kicked the muscle at the back of Cliff’s knee, and Cliff pitched forward onto his face. As he rolled over I could see from my vantage point behind him that he had contrived to sit on the flat blade of his throwing knife.

  The point could only have been six inches from his hands, clasped between his knees. I pitied the German.

  Without taking his eyes off us, however, he brought over a box and sat in front of us but to my left, at least eight feet from me, eighteen feet from Tom Cooper, and the same distance from, but to the side of, Cliff. Oh yes, he was a wily bird all right.

  I turned my head away from him, to stop myself looking through that door into the bright sunlight, to protect my eyes. I was going to need all the vision I could keep, when the moment came. I was not afraid – there can be no element of fear in facing a situation, a moment to which you have been trained to the peak of perfection. There can only be speculation about the outcome. Inherent in good training is an acceptance of the consequences should you fail, and a calculation of the actual risks involved. I was fairly certain the odds were so great against our German that one of the three of us would get him, and oddly enough I suppose, I was less concerned about what would happen to myself, than confident he would not win. I could see no reason why he should leave this barn alive. I could see no reason why I would leave it alive, either, but this did not seem to matter. It was, for me, one of the essences of comradeship with other men that a certain part of the individual entity ceased to exist, a certain portion of human responsibility is shared and thus can be abdicated by any one individual.

  The German could have killed each one of us, from behind, with a knife. He had my knife and Tom Cooper’s, but had used neither. Killing us was not, therefore, his first intention, and I didn’t therefore fear the objective bullet, fired from a safe distance. This situation could change instantly, and would be changed, by any provocation. Any aggression on our part must therefore be totally successful, for it would immediately stimulate the German into killing. And I had seen enough of his method to realise he would be completely effective against whomever he chose first.

  ‘I’d better have your names,’ he said, surprisingly. ‘I don’t care for anonymity in human beings.’

  Tom Cooper ran through our names, drily, without the slightest trace of emotion. When he had finished, the German introduced himself. He was a lieutenant in a parachute regiment, and his name was Helmut Something. I didn’t catch his surname which had far too many unpronounceable syllables – but it hardly seemed appropriate to ask him to repeat it.

  ‘Would you care to tell me about your regiment and so forth?’ Helmut then enquired, quite politely.

  ‘You know we are not obliged to…’ Tom Cooper sa
id.

  ‘I know you’re not obliged, but I am insatiably curious about people.’ There was no doubt in my mind – he had attended a British school, been taught the same things we had been taught, brought up in the same atmospheres we had been brought up in, had our curiosities.

  ‘We’re from the Ninth Commando Brigade,’ I said. After all, why not? He couldn’t get out of that barn alive, of that I was quite certain. ‘But at the moment we are on loan to the Special Air Services.’

  ‘For what purpose?’

  ‘I wish I knew,’ I said. ‘We were told to get into a plane, and in this plane was an aerial photograph, showing this barn, and we were told to jump and make our way to this barn and then wait for further orders. And here we are.’

  ‘Still waiting for further orders?’

  ‘Still waiting. The sergeant comes over every day, just to pay us a visit and leave our rations – but we’re still waiting for the further orders.’

  ‘Whit time does the sergeant come?’

  ‘Various!’ – that would keep him on edge!

  ‘What is your immediate target?’

  ‘A hill on the other side of the valley,’ Tom Cooper said, with asperity. He knew, as we all did, that we were all talking too much, were all creating an atmosphere in which the necessary killing would become repugnant.

  The German laughed. ‘Do you know what’s behind that hill? Three of you wouldn’t be much use against all that…’

  I don’t know how Cliff did it, but he must have aimed at the sound of the voice. He flicked his knife with only a few inches of movement of his hand. The German managed to fire a couple of rounds but they were wide of any target. By the time the chatter had stopped, I had jumped across and was standing behind him, the razor blade pressed against his pulsating jugular vein. Tom Cooper was standing in front of us. Unaccountably, I looked up at Tom Cooper before slicing the vein, and he quickly shook his head. The knife had gone into the German’s cheek, and was sticking out below his ear, but very little blood escaped. The shock must have knocked him unconscious. Cliff came up to him and looked at the knife.

  ‘Thought I might be just a little bit high,’ he said. Three inches lower and the knife itself would have severed the jugular. Two inches to the right and it would have missed entirely and we would all three be dead!

  Cliff carefully examined the front and back of the wound, and then slowly withdrew the knife. There was copious bleeding from the German’s cheek as the point came out – Tom Cooper dusted it with sulphanilamide powder from his field kit, bending the German forward so that blood would not run down his throat and choke him. He dusted the back of the German’s neck with the sulphanilamide, and bandaged him quite expertly with a double field dressing. He fished inside the German’s mouth with the tip of his finger, exploring the back of the throat, and gave a grunt of satisfaction as he pulled out a piece of a broken tooth.

  ‘He could have died from swallowing that,’ he said.

  We settled the German comfortably on a tarpaulin laid on a bale of straw, keeping him in a sitting position, and then lashed each of his cuffs to his ankles with the short lengths of piano wire we carried for that and other purposes.

  The German came round, slowly, while we watched.

  ‘Well, Helmut,’ Tom Cooper said. ‘You didn’t expect that, did you?’

  Helmut’s eyes glistened, but in rage at himself.

  He washed the spittle around inside his mouth, and spat out the blood on the ground between his legs.

  ‘Do you have any medical knowledge?’ I asked him.

  He nodded his head.

  ‘Would it be all right for me to give you a cup of tea?’

  He nodded, made a frightening effort, and then was able to say, ‘Yes.’

  ‘And morphia?’ I asked him.

  He thought for a while, and then said, again with that immense effort, frightening in its intensity, ‘No morphia.’ He preferred the pain to the loss of total alertness, or the risk of a deliberate overdose. He need not have worried. If I were going to kill him, I wouldn’t waste my precious, pain-relieving morphia.

  Cliff meanwhile had gone to make the tea. We fussed about making the German comfortable, but Tom Cooper’s eyes, I noticed, never left the door and in his hand he held his cocked rifle.

  We both ran to the door when the bombs started.

  We couldn’t see the planes, which must have been flying above the low-lying cumulus, but the flashes and the ear-rending barrage of the bombs exploding on the other side of that hill were as awesome as if they had been dropping in our barnyard.

  When we got back inside, Helmut had managed to untwist one strand of the piano wire, but the knot below it had stopped him. We didn’t ever bother to twist that first strand again – there isn’t a man breathing can get out of piano wire. There were marks on it where he had scraped it – I prised open his hand, and in it was a nail file.

  I looked at his hands. Despite the rigours of his present mode of existence, an attempt had been made to keep them clean. The nail file had been used regularly, and recently. I was ashamed of my own hands and finger-ends, but resisted the sudden urge to go and wash them, the sudden feeling of being once again the one grubby schoolboy in a class of cleaner boys, the one boy to whom all the dirt that misses the others seems to stick.

  I went over to Tom Cooper. ‘What are we going to do with him?’ I asked.

  ‘We’ll have to try to get back with him,’ he said, a thoughtful, even worried, look on his face. ‘He could tell them a lot of what they want to know.’

  ‘If he’ll talk.’

  Cliff had taken the tea, and was feeding it to him from a spoon. The German appeared to feel no resentment of the man who had wounded him. Rather, looking at his exposed eye as he gazed into Cliff’s face, I saw a professional admiration. His foot, meanwhile, was slowly moving into a position from which he could kick Cliff in the groin.

  ‘Plucky bastard,’ I said quietly to myself.

  But you would have to get up early in the morning, as they say, to catch Cliff out, and as the German poised himself for the kick, Cliff dropped his hand onto the German’s ankle. I had suffered that grip, known the steel strength of those fingers. A look of pain crossed the German’s face, but then it was washed away by relief, by the relief of the peace of surrender.

  ‘You wouldn’t have stood the ghost of a chance, you know,’ Cliff said. Helmut nodded. ‘But I don’t blame you for trying, anyway. Now, give it up for a bit, and rest yourself.’ It was the tacit truce we had all waited for, that exterior circumstance alone would break.

  There was an old dovecote set into the top of the barn. I climbed on bales of straw and swung up into the rafters to get to it. About four feet square, it was protected from the fierce glow of daylight, and presumably marauding other birds, by sloping wooden lattices. A man could sit in comfort up there and could see all around the barn, across the fields to the hill, without himself being seen. I called Tom Cooper up – he swung lightly on the beams, walking across one fifteen feet in length as a tightrope-walker will, using his rifle as a balancing rod. It was at least a twenty-foot drop to the ground below, but he didn’t look down and showed no awareness of the height.

  ‘This would be a better spot to watch from, and would have the advantage we could see to the back as well as to the front. I don’t think Helmut came from the front at all, or Cliff would have seen him or he would have set off one of our grenades.’

  Tom Cooper looked around the countryside from the eyrie. The doves had vanished from it long before, to judge from the hard dustiness of the droppings on the eight-inch ledge which ran around the outside. The water trough had long since dried. I couldn’t understand how it filled until I saw the rain guttering on the outside, sufficient to catch enough water to keep the birds happy.

  The dovecote was filled by the paraldehyde smell of the solid fuel Cliff had just used for making the tea, but two of the louvres were moveable – I tilted them very slowly, as inconspi
cuously as possible, to cause a slight breeze through them to dispel the odour.

  Tom Cooper went back down to the floor of the barn, walking the beams fearlessly until he was over a bale of straw onto which he dropped lightly. He found a rope in the corner, behind a hay rake, rolled one end around a stake, and unerringly pitched it to me. He then tied the other end to a box which I hauled up – set on two cross planks it made a seat for whoever was on duty. I knotted the rope onto the side of the dovecote, a convenient climbing ladder and quick escape slide. Tom Cooper came up it, hand over hand, deftly, and inspected the guard post.

  ‘We won’t try to get back until this evening,’ he said, ‘and we’ll send Helmut first, with you right behind him. He’ll protect you, and then you can clear the way for us.’

  It seemed a sensible way of doing things – and I was glad to be the one going in behind a human shield, even though the shield would need watching every inch of the way.

  ‘Do you suppose he was with the other one?’ I asked.

  From where I was sitting on the box I could see the exact spot where the first German lay, in the hedge bottom. I had been gratified to find no trace of dragging him through the grass.

  ‘I imagine they were together,’ Tom Cooper replied, after thought, ‘but Helmut was just far enough behind to stay out of trouble when the first one hit the grenade. Then I imagine he went backwards, circled around, and came down this gully over here.’ He pointed to a gully, the dried bed of a water run, just behind a hedge to the west of the barn.

  ‘I imagine he had his eye on this barn, as a good vantage point. It must have been a helluva shock when he came through that door and saw us there, apparently fighting with each other. He couldn’t resist the opportunity. You’ve got to hand it to the parachute boys. They’re about the best-trained soldiers we’re ever likely to run across.’