The Long Day's Dying

by Alan White

  I arranged the arc of my progress so as to keep only his elbow and arm in sight as he swung slowly around. I drew nearer to the tree. My rubber commando soles made not the slightest sound on the ground, and I walked on my toes, prepared for instant action. Ten feet to go, six feet to go, five, four, three, two, and then I was there. His elbow was only twelve inches from my chest, as he stepped out, and I struck.

  God knows how I did it, but at the very last second, as I realised, I turned the blade of the knife inwards.

  The point pierced the front of his jacket, with the blade sideways, avoiding his body by a skin’s width. The jar as the blade hit the bole of the tree ran up my arm and paralysed, for an instant, the whole of my shoulder and jaw.

  Tom Cooper’s face came round the side of the tree-trunk, level with mine. Mine was pressed into the rough bark, and I was panting in released fear and agony.

  He too put his face to the tree bark, and we stood there until my panting subsided.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ he asked quietly, ‘absent off parade again?’

  ‘You’ll never believe it, but we got lost.’

  ‘Where did you dump the German?’ He knew I hadn’t killed him.

  ‘He’s sitting at the edge of the wood, waiting for me to go back to get him. Where’s Cliff?’

  ‘Behind you!’

  He was, too. He’d come up silently while we had been talking, and he punched me on the arm.

  ‘Where were you,’ Tom Cooper asked him, ‘when this bugger tried to shave my cobblers?’

  ‘When?’ Cliff asked, uncomprehendingly.

  I looked at Tom Cooper entreatingly. He said nothing further. I told them I had recognised the wood, and drew their attention to the tree at its edge. They both remembered it, and we were able to place our position exactly. It still didn’t alter the fact that we didn’t know the password, but somehow there was reassurance in knowing where the first challenge was likely to come.

  Cliff lost his temper when I suggested we go back for Helmut. ‘Leave him,’ he argued, ‘and we can send someone out to get him.’ But a lot can happen even on the first eight hundred yards of a fighting patrol, and I didn’t want it on my conscience that I had left Helmut there all night. I didn’t believe he could stay alive all night, and said so.

  ‘So what?’ Cliff asked.

  There was no answer I could give him that would make any sense at all, and I was beyond arguing. Cliff would have gone through any brand of hell, and had done so, for me, Tom Cooper, or any troop of ‘our’ men. But he had a monumental indifference to ‘the others’, no matter how arbitrary was his choice of us and them. He and Tom Cooper, Robin Farquhar and I had been sent one time to bring a man out of a prisoner-of-war camp, secretly. We did so, and we got him to our lines under the noses of an SS troop. When we brought him into the light, Cliff said – ‘But he’s Irish.’ He never forgot that we had risked our lives to save an Irishman. He never went to bed without a prayer for his own mean Baptist soul, and he never forgave himself for saving an Irish Catholic!

  I couldn’t stand another argument, another vote, another appeal to Tom Cooper. I turned on my heels and went down the path looking for Helmut. Cliff knew the path was mined – but the bastard never said a word. Tom Cooper came after me.

  ‘Watch it,’ he said. ‘I daren’t come with you or he’ll go blundering off on his own and the first thing we know he’ll be playing football with a mine.’

  I had never realised, until that moment, how protective we had always been towards Cliff – how we had looked after him, and guarded him, ox of a man that he was. I don’t want to imply that he was the sort of ox to inspire the love in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men – the ox that must be protected both from himself and society – I suppose we had the feeling that Cliff was, and could be, acceptable to society in other situations, at other times, but that he lacked our ability to cope with the set of circumstances into which we had all been thrust. I jumped from a twenty-five foot roof, once, when I saw him tangle his parachute lines and dangle near a power cable. Dammit, I jumped off a twenty-five foot roof for that man, and grabbed his swinging legs, and steadied him, despite what felt at the time to be a broken ankle. I didn’t know at the time that the power cable had been cut and carried no danger.

  This, and similar base thoughts of ingratitude, took me down the path to where Helmut was sitting. I untied him. He had not, to my surprise, passed out, and seemed to be expecting me.

  ‘You found them?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘They managed to stay alive, then?’

  I was cutting the wire. I needn’t have jerked it quite so brutally. He knew it, of course, and knew he had got under my skin.

  ‘They’ll stay alive a damn sight longer than you will!’

  His mocking smile said, ‘I would take bets on that!’

  I cut all the wire and salvaged what I could of it. He stood as erect as he could, flexing his stiffened muscles, his glittering eye fixed on me. I was truculently unable to meet his gaze. Dammit, what was there about this bastard that could so quickly discomfit me? Didn’t he know he was a prisoner? Didn’t he realise he was sinking into the trough of grey-clad prisoner-of-war anonymity? That he was no longer a Herrenvolk, an Aryan superman, a leader of men?

  He straightened his body and dusted himself. Meticulous bastard. I was in a lousy temper.

  He saw it, but other than raising that one eyebrow, he made no comment. I could have laughed at the sight of him – with one eye covered by the dirty bandage, and the other raised in an inquisitorial gesture, his face had a curious chaplinesque quality to invoke laughter. The mirth tried to get through, but I was too soured. Frequently, I have been forced by circumstances to defend a belief I did not hold. It was always happening to me in argument, that the proposition I could support was expressed in such bigoted terms that I was revolted by it. Then, perverse sod that I am, I would defend the opposing proposition with all the vehemence and skill I could muster, without the belief that adds cogency.

  I knew damn well we’d be better off to kill Helmut, to have done with him. But I could bring myself to agree neither with the expedient viewpoint of Tom Cooper, which seemed to lack the courage of resolution and therefore be evasive, nor the irrational violent solution of Cliff, which seemed too instinctive and animal. Between the three of us, we ought to be able to work out exactly what to do with Helmut. I knew that, if we could do that logically, we would decide to kill him.

  ‘I’ve taken out all the mines along the path, so you can get a move on!’ I felt coarse and brutal – and certainly would have swayed from side to side in the best anthropoid, paperbacked-novel gangster tradition, had not my rucksack and body pains made the movement impossible.

  We got back to the others standing silent by the side of the path in semi-concealment. They came onto the path. Tom Cooper took a position behind Helmut. I did not pause, but stepped past Helmut, on ahead. Looking back over my shoulder, I saw Helmut, then Cliff, then Tom Cooper bringing up the rear, in Indian file, each one separated from the one ahead by a safe thirty feet. I found two more booby-traps in the wood, and dealt with both with angry speed.

  The light was disappearing fast, and I wanted to be out of that wood as soon as possible. The temperature had dropped to below the dew point, and I was wet through again. The grass and the trees were dripping with the dew, and the whole wood had the potency of tiny notes in an immense swelling of an infinite number of infinitely small sounds, waiting to react to any noise, to be amplified and echoed and bounced from trunk to trunk in a rolling reverberation. With each step we trod in leaf mould, for the path had long been disused. It exuded a sweat, a natural richness like the smell of a healthy athlete after triumphant strain. It reminded me of all the cross-country runs and the buns and Tizer that followed in the steaming changing rooms, when I had listened glumly to the boasts of the winners.

  Once we had left the wood, Tom Cooper came up in front, and I dropped behind Helmut. We kn
ew there were no obstacles in the field that lay before us, for our own men would need to be able to cross that field in a hurry when the occasion presented itself, as it would do, without warning. We made our way in spread formation across to the hedge bottom. We turned to the right, northward, and started to go along…

  It was Tom Cooper who first heard it, and shouted, ‘look out!’

  We crashed to the ground, hugging the hedge-bottom.

  The mortar shell landed about twenty feet behind us, and I heard the fragmented bits of steel whistle overhead. We all half ran in a stumbling crouched position, forward. The next mortar bomb landed even further away, but the steel fragments still hummed overhead. The third and fourth and fifth mortar bombs came with calculated regularity. They found a target in the corner of the field behind us, each of the three bombs falling within fifteen feet of the edge of the wood. We were just out of range, and watched each one fall with a trembling fascination. There was a long silence after the fifth bomb. We sat crouching, waiting, holding our breath for the next ear-pounding burst, which didn’t come. Finally, I let the breath out of my lungs, held my nose hard and blew to clear the pressure in my ears. I signalled to Helmut to do tne same.

  ‘What was that?’ I asked Tom Cooper.

  ‘I haven’t the faintest idea,’ he said. ‘They couldn’t have seen us in this light!’

  He was right. The edge of the day had gone, and we were in the muzziness of early evening twilight, when distant objects lose their definition.

  How many were the mysteries of war. How many times a bomb dropped and killed the one man who didn’t want to die, leaving unscathed the man to whom death would have been the solution to a life of problems. How many times did a perfectly-maintained rifle jam at the wrong moment, a parachute fail to open, a leg break in a perfectly normal landing.

  ‘Those were yours,’ Helmut said, quietly.

  ‘Of course they’re ours.’

  Some bloody fool on our own side was putting those bombs into that mortar barrel. I had sat under too many German mortars not to know the popping sound of them. I had heard too many of our own mortar bombs go sailing over my head not to know the whistling note of them.

  I looked at Cliff. He was wild-eyed, but with anger, not terror. By tacit understanding, we moved out of the hedge bottom, across the open field, and then stopped about forty yards from the north-western corner. We sat on the grass, in a circle of diameter about ten yards, waiting for the mortars to end. Desperate men spread out under fire – tired, shocked, frightened men huddle close together. It’s all, or nothing, but if you go, at least you don’t go alone.

  Mortar crews are notoriously jumpy. It must be the explosion of the propellant inside the barrel, the knowledge that if anything goes wrong in the bottom to prevent the bomb flying out, the barrel will become an instant twisting snaking nest of lashing steel fragments that can slice the belly out of a man with surgical precision.

  A mortar crew had an emplacement somewhere only a thousand yards in front of us. The thousand yards I could count from measuring the time interval between the crack and the thump, a calculation we all did instinctively whenever anyone fired anything at us.

  Doubtless Helmut was reading it off in metres, but the distance was the same in any measure.

  We were sitting, as I have said, in circle of diameter about ten yards. The sixth mortar bomb landed in the centre of that circle. I felt a thousand tiny hands press my face, shoulders, chest and throat as I bent backwards under the force of the push from in front of me. The rucksack strap ground into the pit of my back as it hit the ground and I felt myself lifted up and over it, and lost consciousness.

  Chapter Eight

  When I came to, I was lying with my feet towards the crater the bomb had caused, and on my back. I must have done an instinctive double roll. It did not take more than a second for me to know where I was, and I had none of those hallucinations of being dead. The whole of my face pained from the force of the blow I had received.

  The first sound to penetrate my recovering awareness was the steady rhythmic thump of bombs falling into the corner of the field near to the wood. Pause, fire. Pause, fire. Pause, fire. I had seen the mortar crews doing it time and again – had felt the sharp crack as each bomb flew after its fellows. Mortar crews took a pride in maintaining a rhythm, as much pride as in the accuracy they could achieve. The mortar is an imprecise weapon, relying more on density of coverage than an accuracy of aim, and density is best achieved by rhythm.

  We had been hit, I imagined, by a bomb improperly made – nothing more than slight imperfection in the finning to pervert its flight a few hundreds of yards short of its planned objective. Damn the anonymous factory hand who stopped work on the first wail of the lunch siren, damn the inspector who had neither the courage nor the interest to stamp our bomb ‘unfit for service’, and damn damn damn the nervous ear that fed the hand that switched to ‘fire’ on a deserted target. It was a long chain of damns, each without purpose, but it brought me back to full awareness.

  I rolled over onto my side. Tom Cooper was alive, so was Helmut. What was left of Cliff would never stir again. It wasn’t even worth crawling over to where the largest piece of him lay.

  Sorrow comes later – its immediate manifestations are anger, regret, apathy, stunned shocked silence and the inability to care.

  Some superior instinct of survival had rolled Helmut into a tight ball – he uncurled and I saw where the blast and bomb fragments had ripped through his trouser legs. Tom Cooper’s face was lightly dashed with blood flecks – his beret had gone, and with it all the hair at the top front of his scalp, from which the skin had neatly been sliced. He looked horrible – his face, elongated by the recession of his hairline, wore a frightening grimace, half smile, half leer. Tears were running down his cheeks between the blood flecks. He was obviously in intense and continuous pain. When you remember the pain of pulling out just a few hairs – it is not difficult to imagine the searing torture of ripping away three square inches of scalp.

  I started to crawl across to him, and then noticed the pain in my own knee. Helmut must have seen me wince – and he crawled across to Tom Cooper.

  ‘In my shirt breast pocket,’ Tom Cooper said. Helmut opened his jacket and drew out the metal tube of morphia. From it he shook a pill. Tom Cooper shook his head. ‘Two,’ he whispered. Helmut shook out another, and put them on Tom Cooper’s tongue. He unstrapped his water bottle and gave him a sip from it, but Tom Cooper gulped greedily, the faster to wash down and dissolve the pills.

  Helmut then got out the packet of sulphanilamide powder that had been used on him, and dusted it liberally over Tom Cooper’s forehead. With all the death that lingered in rotting carcases over this countryside, tetanus was always our first fear, gangrene the second.

  Then Helmut crawled over to me and with my knife, cut the trouser from my knee. A piece the size of a shilling had been sliced from my knee-cap. It looked a worse wound than it actually was – though I guessed I would never play football again. My immediate concern was to know if I could walk. Together we cleaned the wound, and he dusted powder into it and we strapped on a field dressing. There was not a lot of bleeding, and I made certain we made a clean job of patching it. Then Helmut put his hand under my foot, and I tried the effect of pressing my weight against it. After the initial excruciating twinge, the immediate pain was replaced by a monstrous ache that throbbed all the way up to my thigh.

  ‘You’ll be able to walk on that,’ Helmut said.

  ‘When the time comes.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Tom Cooper appeared to have passed out. We both crawled over to where he lay, me shuffling along on my backside without lifting my body more than twelve inches from the ground. If they had a mortar that could fire into this field, we had no way of knowing they wouldn’t also have a Bren-gun. Though the range was distant for a Bren, that was not to say they wouldn’t try it.

  Tom Cooper’s eyes were open, and by the
time we got to him, what was left of his brow was no longer furrowed, and he seemed in repose.

  ‘You all right?’ I asked him.

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Move your arms and your legs.’

  He did so, flexing each of his fingers in turn, and drawing his hand backwards and forwards. All his limbs appeared capable of movement.

  ‘Nothing broken?’

  ‘It would seem not.’

  ‘How do you feel in yourself?’

  ‘Bloody awful.’

  ‘Got any pain?’

  I knew he couldn’t have pain – two of those issue pills would stop any feeling for at least four hours.

  Helmut had been examining him. He then looked at his watch, and at the field which lay beyond the hedge before us.

  ‘Have you any idea how far we have to go?’ he asked me.

  ‘Six to seven hundred yards. If they are still there!’

  ‘How long did it take you to come?’

  ‘I don’t remember. We were held up by two patrols.’ I could see the contempt in his eye. He was the sort of man to keep locked inside himself the precise memory of each isolated incident of his entire life.

  It had not seemed relevant to me at the time, to keep a record of each yard we travelled. I could not have known we were going to what was to become a seemingly endless isolation. I had no idea of the sergeant’s purpose in putting us so far on the flank without even a radio to keep us in contact. I had not known, of course, that we were not going merely into the next field.

  ‘I think we’ve got a half mile to go,’ I said, with as much confidence as I could muster.

  I didn’t fool him, not for one second. He had already closed his mind to whatever my answer might be, had already dismissed it as an irrelevancy.

  ‘How strong are those tablets?’