The Long Day's Dying

by Alan White

  I shall, of course, never know what caused him to turn around, but turn he did. I had been carrying my rifle in the ‘sporting gun’ position, loaded, cocked, and with the safety catch off. I had no need to lift it.

  His automatic he was carrying much too slackly, so that as he turned the barrel failed to keep in line with his body. He snapped off a short burst, starting at an angle of thirty degrees to me. I counted four before he came anywhere close, and then fired, one, two, three, cocking the rifle by hand between each shot. The first one took him in the shoulder and spun him part round, the second one must have gone through his thigh, for his leg kicked back and he started to fall, and the third one got him through the neck as he fell. One, two, three – that had always been the way I had shot, and Tom Cooper and Cliff would recognise it. I walked over to where he lay. He was not dead, but was starting to scream in agony. The air line of his windpipe was severed and no actual sound could come out. A stream of bubbles came from his throat, blowing the welling blood into red iridescent bubbles. His mouth was open, so I put the barrel of my rifle in, and fired three more shots to end his agony.

  Then, dazed, I started to walk back to the barn.

  I hadn’t gone five steps when I started to heave, bitter bilious vomit jerking spasmodically from my throat, wrenching its way up my entire body. I staggered and sat in the hedge with my knees open and my head down, and still vomited. Then a great convulsion shook me and it was as if all my orifices opened at once. Tears streamed from my eyes, there was a roaring sound in my ears, and my bowels and bladder opened together. Great heaving sobs racked me, great tortured gasps of horror, hatred, pain, and remorse.

  I sat there, in my own stink, drawing the back of my hand across my lips, wiping the streaming tears from my cheek with the cuff of my jumping jacket, smelling my own stinking sweat.

  When I got back to the barn neither Cliff nor Tom Cooper spoke to me when they saw my condition. I went into the back corner of the barn, away from Helmut, and took off my boots and trousers. Then I washed myself as best I could with a wet cloth, changed my underwear and dressed again.

  All I had to put on in the way of underclothes was a pair of girl’s knickers I had looted in the town of Uchte and had been saving to use as barter on my next leave – silk knickers were better than cigarettes, soap, or chocolate in the Brussels bars for buying a woman. There was a satisfying reassurance in the feel of them about my legs – the seams appeared to give slightly as I pulled them on, but in some incomprehensible way I felt an appropriate castigation in wearing them, a sense of having abdicated the right to clothe myself in the garments of a man. There was a sensual but unmanned animal quality about that silk, with all its connotations of the pretended bestiality of our infrequent and lusting contacts with the only aspect of womanhood we sought, that seemed appropriate to my state of mind.

  Cliff, of course, had made tea, and handed me a pot.

  I drank it, washed my mouth with it, and it stilled the shivers that shook me, despite the warmth of the barn’s interior. Have you ever tried to climb a thirty-foot rope, carrying a pot of tea in one hand? It’s a question of making full use of the calf of each leg, and of knowing how to lock the rope between the underside of one instep and the top side of the other.

  Tom Cooper watched me intermittently during the last two yards. Then as I sat down on the box beside him, his eyes stopped examining the hill and the surrounding countryside.

  ‘You must show me how you do that, one of these days,’ he said. I knew damned well that he could climb a rope without hands.

  ‘How many were there?’

  ‘Only the one.’

  ‘Same lot as Helmut?’

  ‘Yes – judging from the equipment.’

  ‘I thought so when I heard that automatic go off. What was he after?’

  I thought for a brief moment about the number three German, and the way he got up and walked across those fields. I remembered also the look of indescribable sadness that had been visible on his face despite the rack of pain. And suddenly I knew why I had vomited.

  ‘I think he was trying to give himself up. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if all three of ’em weren’t giving themselves up.’

  We sat and thought about that for a while. Certainly, three is an ideal number for a reconnaissance patrol, but usually, unless there is a specific objective, the patrol returns if it can when it is detected, or if it loses one of its members.

  Tom Cooper didn’t agree with me about Helmut – I could see that plainly on his face.

  Certainly, if asked, I would have agreed that Helmut had shown no signs of surrender. But Helmut was a professional soldier, and would have taken steps to ensure he surrendered with the maximum chance of saving his life. It’s one thing to give away your liberty, and another thing to commit suicide. Outposts were notoriously incapable of coping with prisoners and, remote from Geneva Conventions, they tended to shoot without question, to avoid the inconvenience of supervision. And the risk.

  No man in his right mind would walk into that barn, see us sparring for Tom Cooper’s gun, and ask, ‘Forgive me for interrupting you, but do you mind if I give myself up?’ Not on your nellie, as they say. The shock alone of seeing a German in there would have been sufficient to set the average trigger finger twitching. And when you’ve already been given a warning about the savagery of the men with the green berets, and you find two of them fighting among themselves – or so it appears – you’d be a mug to drop yourself into that situation without keeping at the butt end of a rifle, until such time as you could turn that rifle round and hand it over in complete safety. If Helmut had wanted to, he could have gone on from that barn without our ever knowing of his passage. By now he could be in Corps HQ drinking a mug of cocoa, with a bed to sleep in, and the first of many Red Cross parcels in his hands. Alternatively, if he’d been part of a straightforward reconnaissance patrol, he’d be a fool to disclose his presence to us. He could have observed all he wanted and have been back with his own mates by this time. The third possibility was that he might have been the first in a fighting patrol. Well, you just don’t send fighting patrols of three men out. They don’t have any value.

  ‘What makes you think this latest one was trying to give himself up?’ asked Tom Cooper, cutting across my trend of thought.

  ‘Well, it’s easy to be wise after the event – and certainly I didn’t think so at the time or I would not have killed him, would I? But when I think of his manner, of the way in which he came up that valley, I don’t think he was afraid of the demons in front. I think he was more concerned about the bastards he’d left behind, and in some way, I think that’s why he never looked back. You know how, if a man is walking forward without looking back, you never give him a thought, but if all the time he looks back, you think he’s up to some mischief? And he didn’t want anyone behind him to think he was up to any mischief like running away – provided someone was behind him!’

  ‘And was there anyone?’

  ‘No – it’s not that there was any actual person behind him. I’m certain that, other than Helmut, the nearest German to us at this moment is tucked away on the other side of that hill. He was running away from the whole damned German Army – not just his own sergeant.’

  ‘Then why knock him off?’

  ‘Because, like I’ve said, he turned around and shot off half a magazine!’

  ‘But he didn’t hit you, did he? In fact, from what you told me, he didn’t come anywhere near hitting you. If you had wanted, you could have shot that rifle right out of his hand, couldn’t you? Firing at you could have been no more than nerves.’

  His questioning was relentless.

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose it could have been. But at the time I didn’t give a damn what it was. He had an automatic rifle. He was firing at me. I had one up the spout. I let him have it. It was no time for playing daisy chains, I tell you.’

  ‘There’s no need to be defensive about it, you know,’ he said quietly.
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  ‘Well, the way you were going on, it seemed as if you were saying I shouldn’t have fired.’

  ‘What you did out there,’ he said, ‘was your own affair. You volunteered, remember.’

  ‘Well, I’ll be buggered. You can’t slough off responsibility like that, you know,’ I said, aware of my belligerence, but unable to quell it. ‘As I said at the time, this whole bloody affair is a volunteer job. And as such we’re all in it together.’

  ‘That’s right,’ he replied, gravely, ‘and that’s why it’s no good you coming to me like a penitent; I’m no father confessor to give you absolution.’

  ‘Absolution – are you mad? I just messed my pants out there and here you are sitting like a sanctimonious sod, talking to me about bloody absolution. You can take your absolution and stick it as far as you can get it,’ I said. ‘Now, sod off – it’s my turn on watch.’

  Silently he rose, brushing my shoulder unavoidably as he edged round the box. Then he caught the rope between his two feet, wrapping it round his leg in abseil style, and slid down without even touching it with his hands. The bastard, the cocky superior bastard. I sat there and glowered at the hill.

  Not a thing in sight, of course.

  There wouldn’t be. Two of them were lying dead in two hedgerow bottoms because of my efficiency.

  I felt at long last that I could understand what satisfaction mountaineers must get, up there on the summit. Not the feeling of conquest, not the glorious satisfaction of having achieved something unique, but of having risked death itself, and of having triumphed. This was the important thing – the risk and the triumph. The thrill of high-speed motor racing was not winning, though this would have a miasma of satisfactions at the end of it, and the lip services and genuflections of triumph at having beaten other men similarly engaged. But for the driver himself, the solitary challenger, the thrill would come with every bend, with each individual act whose failure could result in a torn-tyre, track-tearing, body-burning death. I knew now why rifle range practices were sterile tests of competence with social challenge the only stimulus. The trumpetings of the range sergeant who rapped your buttocks with a rifle butt for each inner or an outer, who screamed thinly, ‘You’ll be dead out there if you can’t shoot better than that,’ were the contrived ravings of an outrageous impotence, devoid of the triumph over death.

  I no longer felt remorse for the deaths. The two corpses lying out there were no more to me than spiked guns, stingless bees. They had come to kill me, I had killed them. They were dead and gone. I was still there, and alive, by my skill and my ability.

  True, I had been human, for a while, and had suffered the relaxation of certain muscles, but this was a failing to be anticipated. Next time I would remember, at the time I held my breath to keep the rifle barrel rock steady, to hold all the other muscles taut. It could be as simple as that, and I wondered that no one had thought to teach this, back in the training camps where we had learned all the other arts of death.

  I looked down, briefly. Helmut had moved cautiously about six feet across the floor of the barn, and now had his wrists entangled in the knife blades of a mowing-machine. He was trying to push the mowing bar with the base of his spine, to cause the machine blade to sever the piano wire. It just might have worked.

  I whistled to Cliff who, looking up, saw the motion of my head, and crossed quickly to where Helmut lay. He dragged Helmut’s hands from the machine, and then cracked the butt of his hand against Helmut’s temple. Helmut sank to one side, unconscious. Cliff lifted his head to test if he were shamming, then let it fall to the ground.

  Tom Cooper beckoned for me to come, and I slid down the rope, holding with both hands.

  When I was down, he beckoned to Cliff and we all seated ourselves on the bales by the table on which Cliff had served our midday meal.

  He looked at us both for quite some time before he began to speak – though I could see the struggle that had taken place within him.

  I felt foolish about my cursing – he couldn’t help being human any more than I could, and I appreciated that a confession at that time would have stimulated luxurious sentiments neither of us could afford in these surroundings.

  ‘Nothing up there, I suppose?’ he said.

  I shook my head.

  ‘I thought there wouldn’t be.’

  ‘What do you think they’ll do when they miss the patrol?’ Cliff asked.

  ‘What would you do?’ Tom Cooper asked him, half smiling.

  ‘Nothing! You can bet your life on that!’

  ‘That’s what they’ll do! Anyway, they might not have been a patrol.’

  Cliff looked at me.

  ‘What do you think, patrol or not?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Then what were they?’ Cliff asked, a puzzled look on his face.

  ‘I think they were trying to give themselves up.’

  The puzzled look was replaced by one of surprise. He turned to Tom Cooper. Tom Cooper looked at me, and then at Helmut.

  ‘I think I agree,’ Tom Cooper said.

  Cliff was not so easily convinced. He didn’t turn to look at Helmut. He had no need to. I had seen him hit many men like that, with the butt of his hand, and, even without a previous head wound, they had stayed unconscious for at least a half hour.

  ‘You’d hardly call him a willing prisoner,’ he said.

  ‘But that’s the whole point,’ I argued. ‘We don’t know what he’d be like. We haven’t given him a chance to show us what he would be as a prisoner. Let’s face it – he held a gun on us, but wouldn’t you, in similar circumstances? He walked into this barn and there we were, wrestling. He had no way of knowing we were only larking about. So, he put his gun on us. I believe that once he had made certain that he wasn’t likely to be jumped from the back, he would have put his gun down and have surrendered. Before he had chance to do that, however, you let him have it with the knife.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you just have done the same thing?’ Cliff was belligerent. He thought I was criticising him for missing Helmut’s throat.

  ‘Yes, I would have done the same thing, or tried to, and I wouldn’t have succeeded as well as you did. But my whole point is that we don’t know what he was going to do when that happened.’

  Cliff was baffled, and the expression on his face showed it, unmistakably. I could almost hear his mental processes as he churned out the thought that possibly he might have thrown that knife unnecessarily. A more trenchant thought, however, was the risk we had run had that knife missed its target, and Helmut had been caused to kill us in unnecessary retaliation.

  ‘He’s tried to escape twice,’ Tom Cooper reminded me quietly.

  Cliff thought of that one. ‘We’re not stopping him telling us he wants to give himself up,’ he said. For Cliff it was simply a question of saying out loud what you wanted. If you didn’t say it, you didn’t want it.

  I once saw him eat a whole chocolate bar in front of a Belgian kid, and the kid watched every single mouthful.

  ‘Why didn’t you give him a bite?’ I asked.

  ‘He’d have asked for one if he’d wanted one,’ Cliff said.

  I knew Cliff to be essentially kind, but without the ability to project himself into the thoughts of anyone else. Cliff’s golden maxim was, ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,’ and he was perfectly capable of asking for anything he wanted. I tried, several times, to explain to him the fallacy of imposing your own standards of conduct on other people – had even written out his slogan again, ‘Do unto others as you believe they would have you do unto them,’ but he had not been able to grasp any difference.

  For him it was unthinkable that Helmut would sit there and not say something if he intended to offer himself as a prisoner.

  ‘You know, being taken a prisoner implies that the fighting is over,’ I reasoned, ‘and Helmut knows damn well that even if he surrenders to us, the fighting is not over for him. He knows the fighting is not over for us. He kno
ws we’re caught out here on a limb, and if he’s going to come out on that limb with us, he wants it to be on the best possible terms. I don’t think he has yet decided he can trust us to give him the best terms – even if we were capable of giving him any terms at all.’

  I knew I wasn’t getting through to them. Cliff laughed, coarsely. Tom Cooper laughed too, but his was the timid laugh, the nervous giggle almost of uncertainty.

  ‘Put yourself in Helmut’s shoes,’ I urged. ‘Wouldn’t you feel, if you were going to give yourself up, that you’d like to choose the person you surrender to? You’d like to be able to find someone who wouldn’t panic at the sight of you, and start pooping off his rifle at you. Someone who’d lead you back to sanity without hysterically firing a shot into the base of your spine the first time you put your hand into your pocket to get out a handkerchief? Would you give yourself up to a bunch of nervous nitwits, who’d rip you apart at the sound of the first bomb that fell?’

  ‘When you give yourself up, you give yourself up and you take your chance,’ Cliff said stubbornly. Cliff always dealt the cards from the top of the pack. If you got an Ace, you got an Ace, and that was that. Cliff himself, of course, was flexible enough to be able to play an Ace any way the game demanded it, a high card or a low card. I felt Helmut had that ability, too, but could understand that he might want to cut the cards his way before allowing them to be dealt.

  Tom Cooper didn’t answer immediately. We both looked at him. There was one of those long pauses.

  ‘I think there’s a lot in what both of you say,’ he said, finally. ‘Remember the story the sergeant was telling us, about that German officer who caught three men from the Essex Regiment out on a patrol…’