The Long Day's Dying

by Alan White

  I could tell that, despite the praise, he was remembering the indignity of being made to sit hands between knees.

  ‘Do you think we’ll get him back all right? Wouldn’t it be better to finish with him?’ I couldn’t bring myself to say ‘to kill him’.

  ‘I think he may be useful to us alive in one way or another – just as long as we don’t get caught again…’

  I had no intention of being caught again, and this was only one of my reasons for wanting to be above Helmut, where I could watch his every move as well as everything that went on outside. The walls of that barn suddenly lost their protective feeling when Helmut walked inside them. They became a mask, a blinker on the dangers of the world about, rather than a protective skin. Helmut had demonstrated how vulnerable we were, how easily our protection could be pierced. No doubt that anger can heighten as well as diminish perception.

  It was then I saw the other German.

  Chapter Five

  When you examine a field, a series of fields, a landscape, with trees and bushes and hedgerows, for the presence of other human beings, your eyes automatically seek out all the places you would go yourself if you had to cross a landscape unobserved. Your eye examines the bottom of each hedgerow, each fold in the ground, each bush, tree, all the likely spots. This German was crawling, almost imperceptibly, across the centre of a field, with nothing but his own skill, no depression of ground to enfold and hide him.

  Curiously, he was crawling away from us, about two fields beyond the area of our grenades.

  He was going so slowly as to be indistinguishable from the surrounding grasses, a mere change of tint exposing his position. I would not have seen him had there not been a tiny reflection of light from something polished on him, possibly a metal trouser button, or a rubbed buckle, or the accidentally-polished top of a metal water bottle.

  He was at least seven hundred yards from the barn, completely out of rifle range. It took at least two minutes to identify him to Tom Cooper, so well did he blend with the grass of the field.

  Tom Cooper only spotted him finally when the telltale flash came again, an infinitesimal pinprick of revealing reflected light.

  Tom Cooper slid rapidly down the rope, came up again almost immediately without even puffing from the straight climb. He was carrying the field-glasses Helmut had had slung about his chest. Through them, we could make out the German quite distinctly. He too was wearing one of those animal-skin packs with the fur outermost, and the reflection came from a square metal plate on the bottom of it that had been rubbed by constant friction against his tunic. I looked at the buckles through which my back strap passed. They too were polished bright and I swore. It could have been me out there, but crawling into and not out of the range of someone’s rifle.

  ‘Go and ask Helmut how many of them there are,’ he said. ‘I’ll stay up here and watch, but warn Cliff to get ready for a fast pull-out.’

  As I went to slide down the rope, he started a systematic, meticulous examination, through those glasses, of every foot of ground between us and the crawling German.

  Helmut watched me as I slid down the rope and crossed the barn to where he was sitting. The life and colour had come back into the right-hand side of his face, though his brow seemed flushed. His eye was hard focused on me, expectantly, and in his expression a hint of defiance.

  He must have known we had seen the other man – that much Tom Cooper had told him by taking his glasses. He knew also he had knowledge I wanted, and quickly.

  Nobody has ever been able to lie to me, successfully.

  ‘How many of you are there?’ I asked him.

  He didn’t reply. This was a well-trained one. The only lie that can ever hope to be effective is a silent one. But you need many other controls to go with control of your tongue.

  I sat before him, on my haunches, and my eyes never stopped looking at him as I talked.

  ‘Of course, I don’t believe the German Army is in such a bad state that they would send out only one of you’ – that truth was confirmed by a twitch of instantly-suppressed wry humour at the corners of his mouth. I could guess that this man preferred to work on his own, had a fierce independent efficiency that working with others would inevitably reduce. ‘And then again, I know there were at least two of you, because I got the first one to try to cross that field.’ This too was confirmed by a twist in the corner of the mouth that again was instantly removed as he gained control, but in that brief second he had given me his opinion of a man who was damn fool enough to crawl across a grenade trap.

  This was a man I would like to pit myself against. Only after I had beaten this man, fair and square, in open fight with all restrictions removed, would I have a confirmation of the success, the final state of preparedness, of my training.

  ‘And then, there’s the fact that you’re a lieutenant.’ There was a tightening of the nostrils when I said this, the self-condemnation. He knew now the mistake he had made. ‘Unless you’re some very ordinary kind of lieutenant, I can’t see you coming out on your own with one other man, because you must know how uneconomic a unit is two men.’ Confirmed again by a twist at the corner of the mouth, that would have said in our language ‘any bloody fool knows that’.

  Still he forbore to speak. Of course, he could guess that we had seen a third man, but, if there were other men, he could not guess we had not also seen them.

  ‘If you don’t tell me what I want to know, I may be compelled against my better wishes to torture you. Now, get this quite clearly, I’m not a sadistic bastard who hurts for the pleasure of it – but I’m determined to get back home if at all possible – and I’ve made enough mistakes for one day already. It would be a mistake to let my feelings prevent me getting the truth out of you, wouldn’t it?’ He could agree with this, it was within the realm of speculation, of generalisation, two men, all differences apart, discussing the theories of war and human behaviour. I saw him relax, saw the tiny muscle under his ear – well, I don’t think it’s a muscle – I think it’s the jawbone which thrusts outward when the teeth are clenched. Anyway, whatever it is, I saw it relax. Of course, I knew I still wouldn’t make him speak, but his face was doing all the talking I wanted.

  ‘You’re a highly-skilled officer. You’re fully-trained – possibly even a little overtrained, or you wouldn’t have forgotten to take that knife off Cliff—’ That went home, and silently I could see him beginning to curse himself. ‘You also made the mistake of sitting where you couldn’t see his hands—’ that went home too ‘—but despite your mistakes, I can’t see you agreeing to a probing patrol with too many men. After all, you must realise that the chances of getting away with a reconnaissance depend on the number of mistakes your men are likely to make, and that depends on the number of men you take with you, and somehow I can’t see you taking a lot of chances, or a lot of men—’ that went right home, it was as if I could hear him saying, ‘not if they’re all like the fool who threw himself on that grenade’ ‘—and therefore I reckon there only were the three of you.’

  And there it was – a mixture of respect for the accuracy of my prediction, shame for the mistakes he and his men had committed, and, I think, the instinctive knowledge we had him beaten.

  The reaction was on the corner of his mouth, in his eyes, and in the general relaxing of his muscles. The game was over. I had guessed, and there no longer was any reason to conceal the answer. I knew he wouldn’t speak it, but I didn’t require him to.

  Cliff had come up behind me whilst I had been ‘interrogating’ the prisoner.

  ‘You’re a right bastard you are,’ he whispered. ‘Why the hell don’t we kill the bugger and get out of here.’

  I didn’t reply, went shinning up the rope, but without immediate haste. When last seen, the third German had been crawling away from us.

  Without our being aware of it, the day had begun to run out on us, and lengthening shadows changed the face of the landscape. I knew Tom Cooper would not now carry out his int
ention of taking the prisoner Helmut back into our lines – not at least until he could find out more about the one we had seen crawling away.

  ‘There were only three,’ I told him.

  ‘Good.’ He didn’t doubt the fact, didn’t ask how I knew or if Helmut had told me, but such was his trust in me and mine in him that there was no need for verification of what I had said.

  ‘Either he’s on his way back to where he came from – or he’s trying to find the route Helmut used,’ he said. ‘We’ll know within a couple of hours if he has gone back, when they start mortaring.’

  Mortar fire is the most insidious form of bombing – there is something acceptable about the longer range stuff – you feel that, coming from so far, there is a much greater possibility of error. Though the blast of each bomb is larger, the fear of accuracy is missing. But with mortar fire, directed from close at hand, each bomb blast is a personal attack, each bomb aimed at you as a person without the possibility of error. A mortar shell is a quieter shell, with a more insidious note to it, a note, however, with more aural pain.

  Cliff could never stand being mortared – but seemed to have little objection to being shelled from the greater distance. In his direct way, he despised the method of throwing trouble at him from a distance – and had always unfairly denigrated long-range artillery men.

  The evening shadows had begun and, as clouds chased across the line of the sun, the shadows danced and moved as if they belonged to a thousand men. One of them, by a tree, had the profile of a man with a rifle to his shoulder – another looked like two men crouched over a mortar. They were a thousand shivers, a thousand fears, for anyone prepared to be deceived by them.

  ‘Do you think it would be a good idea for me to go look for him?’ I asked Tom Cooper.

  I guessed he had been about to suggest it. A long fold of ground stretched to our rear, curved down towards the rill at the bottom of the wood by the hill we were watching. Any number of men could come up that fold unseen.

  ‘I think that’s a volunteer job,’ he said quietly, not looking at me.

  ‘This whole ruddy mess is a volunteer job,’ I reminded him, ‘and we’d all be a sight better off on Blackpool pier!’

  I lost no time in leaving the barn – my only preparation to ensure my hands and face had not become too clean by the civilised double wash and living under cover, and that none of my pack-strap buckles could reflect the light. Quickly across the yard, in a cautious walk, but once around the corner it was hands and knees, and then down onto my stomach to the centre of the field. I’d show our number three German he wasn’t the only man who knew to keep out of hedge-bottoms. Then I skirted the field to my left to make certain the sun was actually behind me. Spotters get lazy when they’re looking directly into the sun, and I didn’t intend to be spotted. Before starting across the field, I spent five minutes plaiting grass into my beret, and the epaulettes of my jumping jacket. I also broke the line of my legs and my boots with it, so that I presented no clear outline from any aspect.

  It took only fifteen minutes to reach the summit of the field, using a knees and elbows technique developed from official training, casting the knee wider to avoid lifting the buttock too high with each heave forward. From the top of the rising field I could look down into the start of the defile. Nothing was there.

  Looking for a man under those conditions isn’t a matter for eyes alone – it taxes all the senses. I knew there was no one there, just as I could have known someone was there even had he been hidden from sight, or sound, or smell. This knowledge comes only out of doors, in the open, for the sounds and movements of trees and bushes have a natural rhythmic order which no human can emulate. Inside buildings there are random sounds, creaks, air movements, flurries of hidden rodents, and the inner ear tends to shut. This, of course, was why we had not detected Helmut. My ‘inner’ ear was wide open now, focused down that defile with all the intensity of a black light probe. I crossed to the borders of the field, then through the hedge, permitting myself half to rise inside the vegetation, against the bole of an evergreen bush whose tint was similar to the tint of the grass I wore.

  From this position I could look down the defile to the first edge of the dried-up rill. It was about ninety yards across, on the top edges, and its sloping sides were broken by rocks and vegetation. A pale blue flower grew among the grass, and many yellow spiky flower heads dotted the tips of the bushes. Where the earth had been exposed by rain wear near the rock formations, it took the colours of burnt sienna, flaking to an umber powder.

  Again, not a bird, not a single, solitary bird, nor discernible bee, nor fly, nor even, surprisingly, swarm of midges. No suggestion of field-mice, nor rabbits.

  It was a rich, verdant defile, full of the growth of nature, but without any of the movement that makes such landscape live. Along the bottom of the defile was the dried-out course of what must, in any other season, have been a musical stream. From the stones in the water bed, one could envisage an endless succession of small dams, each with cascading water giving constant background of cheerful sound.

  But the bed of the rill was as silent now as was the rest of the defile, a long menacing source of hidden dangers.

  Recently Helmut had passed through it, and I set myself to uncover traces of his passing. It wasn’t long before I found the first – a tree branch he must have snapped to provide leaf foliage for camouflage. The sore end of the thin branch had a long sliver of whiteness where bark had been stripped from the wood. Not far from that tree was a crushed patch of grass where he must have lain flat in a moment of relaxation. After that, his track passed from sight, but significantly it told me he had chosen the far side of the defile. From where I was sitting in the hedge, I would have chosen this near side, but you cannot be certain when you look at the lie of the land from, so to speak, the opposite vantage point. Then I started to comb the defile systematically with my eyes, looking for oddities. I have always checked a location such as this by drawing my sight slowly along a fixed arc, taking a starting point in a tree or a portion of hedge, and ending at a similar landmark. Then I cause my eye to return quickly to the start point, move up about two yards and start again across the same direction of arc. In this way, you see everything twice from the same angle, and you can more easily detect movement.

  Other people prefer the square method. They take a particular object, and regard it as being at the centre of a square. They then examine the entire square up and down and across. Then they move to the next square and then to the next. Several of our men who habitually used the square method had been killed by snipers back in Holland.

  By the arc method, you fix a whole series of pictures in your mind during the sweep of your eyes. Your eye then comes back to the start point and you start again just a short distance away. The pictures you have seen on your first traverse will now come up again in the bottom of your span of vision, and somewhere, if there has been movement, a warning voice will say, it wasn’t like this last time. The visual element is, I suppose, the most acute part of memory, and certainly the most precise and persistent. I found the German when, between two traverses, he thrust a foot out from the side of the rock. I did not see the movement of the foot. At first sight I wouldn’t have known it was a foot, but on the first traverse of that particular arc there had been nothing at the side of that rock, on the second traverse there was a brownish article that had not been there before. Only after I had examined it for some minutes did I realise that it was a boot at the end of a human leg.

  That was the third German sitting behind a rock, with his feet sticking out, not three hundred yards directly in front of me, but on the slope at the other side of the decline.

  Slowly I sank back to the ground, and crawled along the hedge to the overgrown base of a tree. Once there, I added beech foliage to the grass woven into my clothing, and bound a well-leafed twig of it along the barrel of my rifle. Then I plaited the undergrowth more securely into a screen before and behind me, and settle
d on my hunkers to wait for him. He stayed behind the rock for at least ten minutes, then his foot was withdrawn, and he came crawling out. If I had not seen that boot move, I wouldn’t have seen him leave the rock, so sinuously did he move, and so effective was his camouflage. He kept a straight course midway up the bank of the slope, going round rocks and bushes with a barely perceptible movement of his arms and legs. Then, when he reached a hedge that started at the top of the slope and went down to the dried-out watercourse in the bottom, I lost him for a moment. There was a slight disturbance as he came through the hedge somewhat lower than the spot at which I had lost him, and then, to my surprise, he rose to his feet and started to walk cautiously forward. Good! He didn’t know I was there. He was now only two hundred yards from me – if he continued to walk in the same direction he would pass within fifty yards of my hiding-place.

  He carried on straight forward, looking constantly to the left and the right, never behind him, until finally he came to the hedge and went through it. I turned round. He kept going. I left the hedge, and, thirty yards behind him, followed in his wake.

  His regular pace was easy to emulate, timing my footfall to coincide exactly with his.

  I felt none of the tension such a moment should give. The man was obviously a fool. The first rule of the animal kingdom, the kingdom we had all made our own, is to know at all times what goes on around you. Have you ever seen the way a dog, even a coursing dog, will always look behind, even though it may be running full speed. The only animal to break this habit is that abomination, the socially in-bred greyhound.

  He was breaking the natural law of the animal kingdom, and frankly I felt damned silly. It was one of those moments when two of you sidestep the same way on a busy street, and one of you embarrassedly says, ‘shall we dance’. Over the field he went, into the hedgerow. Along the hedgerow, into the big field on the other side of the slope to our barn, across the field, then a slight bend to the left to get into the hedgerow on the other side at the crossing point I myself had used on my way out. The crawl that had taken me forty minutes, we had walked back in just under ten. He dropped to the ground, I dropped to the ground. He got up to walk, I got up to walk. In another five minutes he would arrive at the corner from which he would be visible to Tom Cooper or Cliff, whoever was in the eyrie at the top of the barn.