The Long Day's Dying

by Alan White

  I went back into the corridor. Two staircases led upstairs – one at the front of the farmhouse, and one at the back. Each had a half landing, and on each half landing was a large window. Good! Whoever came down either of those two staircases would be blinded momentarily by the light from the half landing window. I went to the bottom of each staircase in turn, but could hear nothing above. There was no sound of footsteps. One on guard, the rest asleep or reading?

  I chose to go up the left-hand staircase. That would put me on the landing with my knife hand leading and make for an easier throw. In my left hand I held a grenade, with the pin out. I went up the inside edge of the staircase, step by step, testing each one by slowly lowering my weight onto it. No creaking. Those farmhouses, like farmhouses everywhere, were built to last by a race of responsible craftsmen. When I got to the landing, I crossed to the other side of the step, and brought my head up slowly in the actual corner by the wall. The top corridor was the counterpart of the bottom corridor, and equally deserted. The room in which I knew the parachutist on guard with the rifle to be was the first on the right. The door was open. I walked slowly along the corridor, and looked into the room through the partly opened door.

  He was standing in the window, looking out. His rifle was rested against the window sill and I saw he would not be able to turn it quickly. To the left, along the corridor, a room looking the other way. No one on guard here; two figures huddled on the floor, asleep. Down the corridor, each room was empty. The silence in the house was oppressive, the air heavy and stagnant, smelling of sweating boots and the unwashed bodies of dirty men.

  I went back down the corridor until I was outside the room in which the man on guard was still standing. He hadn’t moved. I went along the corridor again, and looked down the staircase into the ground floor. No one else was about. I shielded my eyes against the direct light which streamed in through the window. By now I was certain there were only the three men inside the farmhouse. Back down the corridor, rehearse my movements, take a deep breath, and then knife in the left hand, dash across the room so quickly he hasn’t time to move!

  I jammed my knife left handed up under his shoulder blade and into his heart from the back. With my right hand on his right shoulder I pushed and he went straight through the open window. Without waiting to watch him land I released the handle on two grenades with the grenades held against my chest. The ‘crump’ was deadened but still sounded like a miniature cannon boom. I ran across the room, one, two, up the corridor, three, pause four, five, roll the grenades in, six dash down the corridor, seven and I was halfway down the stairwell when they exploded.

  The door banged and rattled, but it stayed on its hinges. I heard the bell-like jangle as glass was shattered from the inside and fell on the paved courtyard below. I waited in the stairwell until the reverberations had ended, and then fired three shots, fast, through the window to let Tom Cooper know to come in. By the time I got there, he was inside the kitchen, up against the outside wall. Cliff was in there with him, but behind the inner door, also flat against the wall.

  ‘Two of ’em asleep – one on guard in the window.’ I was panting with suppressed excitement, but the act of success no longer had any meaning for me. I knew now what a soldier feels like. Up to this day, I had been a full-grown Boy Scout, winning badges for proficiency, for daring, for stamina, for the automatic courage that comes with training. Now I was a hardened war criminal, with a built-in absolution. Now I was sufficiently proficient to forget about the lesson and the method. Suddenly all my training, all my peak condition, all the things I could do with my hand and my arm and my legs and my eye, all became forgettable, not worthy of mention.

  Cliff was already on his way upstairs, looking for the Luger. Tom Cooper went outside, to examine the man I’d pushed through the window. I cleared a corner of the kitchen table and sat down and took out my cigarette tin. I still had fifteen cigarettes in there, and about a half an ounce of cigarette tobacco, and a half packet of Rizla papers. I rolled a cigarette in the palm of my hand, licked the cigarette paper edge, tore off the trailing tobacco ends, lit up, and began a slow, luxurious smoke.

  They both shouted simultaneously, Cliff and Tom Cooper. I didn’t know whether to go upstairs to Cliff or outside to Tom Cooper. They both came pounding into the kitchen. Tom Cooper was shocked – Cliff derisive.

  ‘He was dead!’ Tom Cooper said.

  I eyed him, uncomprehendingly.

  ‘So were those two buggers upstairs,’ Cliff said, contemptuously, ‘and for a damned long time to judge by the smell.’

  I didn’t understand.

  I went racing out of the kitchen to where the man at the window lay in a crumpled heap on the courtyard paving stones. I turned his shoulder. He had been dead for at least two or three days. There was a fly in his mouth. His face was putty grey. There was a stain of dried blood on the front of his tunic. He’d been killed by bombing, several days ago. Like the stick, he’d been propped into position to slow the advance of our troops. I dashed to the cow barn, flung open the door. The end of the baling string finished aimlessly in a pile of maize, with no signs of a booby-trap. The edges of the stick had been chamfered deliberately, to make whoever happened across it to think it was the start of a lethal weapon.

  From inside the farmhouse I heard Cliff’s raucous laugh. I went back inside.

  ‘And what’s more,’ he said, ‘not a sign of a bloody Luger anywhere.’

  We searched the farmhouse room by room, then the barns. There was no fresh food anywhere, no clothing, no drink. In one of the bedrooms were signs of occupation by a young girl – a photograph lying face down on the dresser top showing a young girl, a fat farmer figure in a Tyrolean hat, a fat farmer’s wife wearing a flowered dress, all taken standing against the wall at the back of the farmhouse. In the corner of the young girl’s room a cross had been hanging against the wall, and the paper was unbleached beneath what had been its outline. There were several small pots on the marble slab on the table beneath, and candle wax down the side of one of them. Along a painted panel behind the pots was a devotional tableau, with a Madonna and Child in the centre. The paint and gilt on the panel had been chipped, but an attempt had been made to touch them in with what looked like water paint. There was a runner along the tabletop, embroidered at each end, with words worked into the embroidery. It was in German script and I could only read the words ‘Gott’ and ‘Uns’. On the wall beside where the cross had been was a framed picture containing a painted scroll and the words ‘Vater unser’, followed by more writing I could not decipher. The picture was only about four inches by three inches. I took it from the wall and smashed the glass on the foot of the bed. I shook out the glass fragments, pulled out the paper, and put it in my breast pocket. It wasn’t a Luger, but it would do! Downstairs, Cliff and Tom Cooper were still in the kitchen, Cliff standing beside the table.

  ‘Dirty pigs,’ he said, and indicated with his arm the mess on the tabletop. His hand was clenched.

  He shook it as if it contained dice, and then flicked it over the clean part of the table.

  ‘How’s that?’ he said.

  On the tabletop lay three gold nuggets.

  ‘What are they?’ I asked, with quickening interest.

  ‘Gold teeth,’ he said. ‘One of those two upstairs.’

  ‘You filthy, lousy, stinking sod,’ I said, and went into him. I was blind with disgust and rage. The butt of his hand caught me across the chin, beneath my mouth, and I went backwards, banging the wall with my back. It felt as if my skull had been knocked off the top of my spine. I couldn’t hear anything, nor could I see for the sudden tears in my eyes. I shook my head to clear them, and then went in again.

  This time I crabbed in forwards and sideways so that he couldn’t do it again. He swung his weight slightly forwards and I knew he was going to kick when I was within reach. I brought up my hands level with my neck, thumbs pointing to the rear, the heel of the hand hard and straight. It was my intenti
on to kill him. I think he knew it. I saw the mockery go out of his eyes as he realised, and saw the fear that replaced it. He took his weight backwards off the balls of his feet. He knew he could chop one hand aside, but not the other, not both of them. I knew it too, and I didn’t care, I was past caring. Because of him and his lust for a Luger we had come into that farmhouse, and I had been prepared to risk my life, though I was not to know there was no danger within. I had killed three men already dead, killed them again, brought back their cadavers from beyond the death and knifed and bombed them over again. All he could do was carry lust into the base pit of animal acquisitiveness.

  He feinted forward, and to the left, to draw me that way, then started to turn around to trap one of my arms and try in desperation to throw me over his shoulder. It was a desperate measure, but it didn’t stand a chance of working. I had resisted that one so many times! I would simply shift my weight to the right, and bend my knees and then chop at the base of his skull where it goes into the spine top and possibly break his neck.

  But before I had had time to start the sequence, Tom Cooper, standing behind me, hit me on the neck and the back of the knee simultaneously and I felt myself falling over backwards into unconsciousness. When I awoke, they had carried me out of the farmhouse, and up the side of the field. The first thing I noticed was the plume of smoke coming more strongly from the chimney stack above the farmhouse, and Cliff pouring his brandy from his glint flask into my mouth. I came to. He watched me warily. Tom Cooper was watching me closely, too.

  ‘Try that again,’ he said, ‘and I’ll break one of your fingers.’ He would, too!

  When I was in good order again, we got to our feet and climbed up the field to where we had left Helmut.

  He had been waiting for our return, though afraid we would not make it. He had tried to unfasten the piano wire, and to free himself from the base of the bush to which Cliff had tied him. The bush had been torn half out of the ground and his wrists were raw where the wire had cut into them under the strain. He would have released himself in a few hours, but that bush would have gone with him wherever he went. We clipped him free.

  ‘What did you find in there?’ he started to ask.

  ‘Shut up,’ Tom Cooper said.

  Helmut looked at me, and at Cliff, and then started to speak again.

  ‘Shut… up’, Tom Cooper said. There was no mistaking the lethal tone of his voice.

  We climbed in Indian file up the field, until we were just below the crest of the hill. Then we walked slowly along to the left, and through a small copse of beech-like trees. In the copse we found the remains of bombing, a machine gun emplacement, and a fresh grave. On the grave was a German soldier’s helmet. Sprigs of some flowering bush had been stuck into the grass to make a cross for the grave, though the flowers had begun to shrivel.

  At least this man had a friend when he died, had one particular individual who cared enough to bury him, and tend his grave, and lay out his helmet in respect. I stood looking at it. Cliff drew level with the grave, saw what I saw, and punched me lightly on the shoulder. ‘You’d do the same for me, you bastard,’ he said. He was right.

  Outside the copse, we turned right, and walked slowly along the hedge bottom towards the small hillock which formed the shoulder of the valley. At the crest of the hillock, just before we would have appeared head and shoulders on the skyline, Tom Cooper dropped to the ground. We followed him, and then we crawled, each one taking a position behind and equally to the left of the one before him, to extend the target area and minimise the risk of being hit by a bullet aimed into the centre of the group.

  I was about eight feet behind and to the left of Helmut. I watched the way he crawled totally snakelike through the grass, with an economy of movement I had never been able to achieve. I guessed that most of the work was being done by his chest muscles, his style of progress being not dissimilar to the slowed-down movements of the swimming crawl. It was most effective, and I could see that often, without even rippling the grass, he had to pause presumably to keep his distance behind Cliff. I could not see either Tom Cooper, or Cliff, in the ten-inch high grass, without lifting my head dangerously. After a while, I stopped lifting it and relied on Helmut keeping his distance from Cliff, and me keeping my distance from Helmut.

  We made quick progress, but it still took a half-hour to cross that field. When, finally, we reached the hedge, and each one got his knees under the cover of the hedgerow, I noticed that Helmut had allowed the distance between himself and Cliff to grow to at least twenty feet.

  I crawled to him, and rose beside him, sitting back on my haunches. He reached into his pocket and drew out four sweets, of the boiled barley sugar type. He gave one to each of us. Despite ourselves, each of us watched him pop his into his mouth before starting to eat ours. The one I had tasted strongly of lemon essence, the artificial flavouring of fizzy powder rather than the tangy taste of the real fruit. But the saliva it caused to flow was welcome and refreshing.

  ‘You ought not to get so far behind the one in front,’ I chided him, ‘I’ve seen men lost like that!’

  ‘Sorry,’ Helmut said. ‘We work on a distance of ten metres.’

  Looking through the hedgerow, it became apparent we had mistaken the nature of the ground, and were still hidden behind a fold running about a hundred and fifty yards in front of us, from left to right.

  I could also see, from the expression on Cliff’s face, that he had had time to reconsider the question of Helmut’s presence, and was troubled by it. The look he gave him no longer had the air of acceptance, however reluctant – rather was he asking again, ‘What’s wrong with us, that we let ourselves be taken in by this man?’

  I glanced at Helmut. He too had noticed the change in the atmosphere.

  Tom Cooper was looking out over the field. He turned round quickly. ‘Wait here,’ he said, and in a half run he went as far as he could, then dropped to the ground and squirmed forward, until he could see over the top of the fold before us. He lay there quite still.

  Cliff watched him go, then came and sat beside me.

  ‘You know, we could be making a rich old mistake with this sod,’ he said, indicating Helmut.

  ‘What sort of a mistake?’ Helmut, of course, knew what we were saying, though Cliff’s whisper could not have been audible to him.

  ‘You know, we only have your guess, and then his word, that he wants to give himself up. And then, he never said anything about it until you’d said something about it, did he? And you’re only guessing, aren’t you? You don’t really know what he’s got on his mind at all! It could be part of a plan to let us show him exactly where our lads are. How do we know there isn’t a whole tribe of his lot following us at a safe distance? It’s been done before, hasn’t it? Once we’ve got him safely inside, who’s to know he won’t escape and get back to ’em, and then you can stand by for the rapid mortar fire, and no mistake. I mean, how do we know, eh?’

  These were all rhetorical questions, stemming from unnamed fears. How do you defeat fear caused by lack of intelligent understanding, how do you do it? How did they conquer mumbo-jumbo, which often, it seems, is nothing more sinister than a lack of the necessary intelligence to make mental progressions. Cliff had it, whatever it was, an unreasoning fear of the unknown. How could I reason with him? But then, how did I know that what he was saying was not accurate? After all, if I gave in and believed him, I had nothing to lose but the burden of Helmut.

  Looking at Helmut, wrapped in his improvised bandage, his strength leaving him as fast as the blood had left his punctured cheek, I could not consider him a potential danger. Rather did I know that, if we didn’t get him back to our medical orderlies quickly, he’d become a liability, and as such a potential danger. But there was, there could be, no aggressive intent left in him. How could I explain that to Cliff, if he couldn’t see it for himself?

  He didn’t wait for me to try.

  He took up the half-stooped stance Tom Cooper had used, a
nd ran, then crawled, across the field. Tom Cooper turned round in surprise as Cliff drew near, and they began to talk earnestly. I could see they were discussing Helmut, and it appeared to me that there was no disagreement in Tom Cooper for whatever Cliff proposed.

  Helmut, too, was aware of what was going on. He looked at me, on the edges, or so it seemed, of entreaty.

  Quickly, I signalled him to his feet, and we too went scampering up the field, to drop down and crawl to where Tom Cooper and Cliff were talking. As we drew near, they stopped.

  ‘What the bloody hell are you playing at?’ Tom Cooper asked, with justifiable anger.

  ‘We felt lonely back there,’ I answered, as flippantly as I could manage, ‘knowing all the important talking was going on up here.’

  He knew I would have nothing to do with any Star Chamber justice… and was counting on his sense of fairness. The struggle went on in him for perhaps a half a minute, for though we both had an equally low opinion of Cliff’s reasoning ability, he, at least, was one of us.

  ‘No, Cliff, we put it to the vote, and that’s that!’ he said. I was by no means certain enough of myself and Helmut to feel a sense of victory, but at least we had avoided taking a step backwards.

  Tom Cooper beckoned to us, and we started our advance again, in the same pattern, Tom Cooper crawling first, Cliff after him eight yards to the rear and to the left, then Helmut to the rear and to Cliff’s right, then me to Helmut’s left rear.

  We had gone over the crest of the hill, over the fold, and about a hundred yards down the slope of the field, when we came to a crevice in the ground. We stayed in formation, for the crevice’s edge was washed free of vegetation. Tom Cooper went down the crevice and across the other side, then Cliff went down it. Helmut went to the crevice’s edge, and then there was a sudden crack.