by Alan White
‘How the hell do I know – I’m not a bloody pharmacist.’
He took the metal phial, and tried to decipher the wording on it – but there was nothing to give even a clue as to the contents or dosage.
‘How often are you supposed to take them?’
‘Every four hours.’
He looked again at the field on the other side of the hedge, obviously calculating our chances of survival, our route. It didn’t bother me, temporarily, that he had seized the initiative.
‘We can’t go straight ahead,’ he said, thinking aloud, ‘there’s a mortar up there with a nervous crew. Your mortar companies come in threes, but what we don’t know is if this one is the flank crew, or the centre crew. If they are the flank crew, which flank are they on, the left or the right?’
Not one of us mentioned Cliff. Tom Cooper must have seen what was left of him – Helmut certainly had, for he had crawled within five feet.
‘Can you move?’ he said to Tom Cooper.
‘I’ll try.’
‘All right, then, come on,’ and with Helmut leading, we slowly crossed the field to the hedgerow straight in front, to the north. For me it was a journey I measured in inches, every inch a mountain of effort. It became apparent that I had been rent by splinters, and blood ran beneath my vest. Finally, my punished body gave up the struggle and I ceased to feel anything at all, except a throbbing core of pain that filled my entire body. When it became strong enough, some portion of my mind was switched off by it, and I was able completely to ignore it. Tom Cooper was making heavy going. From time to time he would stop, and his head would sink into the grass. Then he would jerk himself up again into a crouching position, and make a few forward moves. Helmut forged straight ahead and was sitting up in the hedgerow when we arrived. I would not have been surprised to see him with a stein of lager in one hand, a liverwurst sandwich in the other, and a Baedeker map of the tourist attractions spread out before him.
It was plain to see he despised us both, with the arrogant contempt of the triumph of mind over matter, the blind unfeeling disregard of the capable for the incapacitated.
We both struggled into a semi-upright position beside him, and he unwrapped and gave each of us a barley sugar sweet. I would have refused it or spat it out, had I not craved the energy it contained.
When he saw the mess Tom Cooper had made of his forehead, he got out a field dressing, and tied it on the wound. He had great difficulty getting it to stay in position, and then suddenly he crawled back across the field over which we had come. He returned minutes later with a green beret – Cliff’s green beret which he had always worn at such a ridiculous sergeant-torturing angle – and clamped it on Tom Cooper’s head. It held the bandage in position. He also had Cliff’s knife, which he used on the bandage with great dexterity.
‘How many British Army songs do you know?’ he asked me.
Nothing could have surprised me.
‘All of them.’ I did, too. We’d had more than enough marching in our time, and there’s nothing like a march to teach you to sing, to conquer the weary loneliness and pain and body-building futility of slogging endlessly along.
‘This is what we do,’ he said. ‘We will make no attempt to conceal ourselves. We will get up and walk into them. But you will sing army songs. And you will sing them loudly. It will be dark in about ten minutes, too dark for them to see us, but we will make certain they hear us, and recognise you.’
It might work. It might just work! Certainly I was in no condition, nor was Tom Cooper in any condition, to crawl the best part of five hundred yards. Even tottering, erect, balanced however precariously on our two feet, we might just make it. Certainly, when those two morphia pills wore off, Tom Cooper was going to be in no condition to do anything but scream. It was essential we get back before that could happen.
We sat for five more minutes, watching the light gradually disappear, watching the trees at the far side of the defile fade into an obscured nothingness. When we could no longer see the other edge of the field, Helmut signalled us to get up, and we both tried to get to our feet. Neither one of us could make it alone. He jerked us erect. Finally, I was balanced, holding the branch of a bush in the hedge. I took my hand away from the bush and found I could stand unaided. I kept the weight of my body off the bad leg, and then tried to take a step forward. Though I was past feeling actual pain, my eyes misted over with the effort. I cleared them angrily with a shake of my head, and then started forward, one step after the other. I didn’t look around but felt Tom Cooper’s long, drawn-out gasp as he too ventured the first steps forward. Then I started to sing. ‘Ten green bottles.’ I knew this would last a long time. We made no attempt at concealment, but kept out in the centre of the field. After two hundred precious yards, I felt Helmut draw beside me. By then I was singing, ‘We’re going to hang out our washing on the Siegfried Line’, and there were tears in my voice. I was crying, real tears of misery, real tears of horror. Tears for Cliff, and tears for the two anonymous Germans I had killed that day. Tears for my pain and woe, tears for my dirty stinking wetness, tears for my inferiority, tears too for fear of the zipping bullets I expected to come at me with each moment, with each word, with each tear-laden verse.
‘Don’t stop singing,’ he said. ‘How far ahead of your mortars do you usually put down your Brens?’
‘Usually about two hundred yards.’
This appeared to mystify him. He hadn’t realised we were not an infantry-style unit, that we didn’t have fixed ground procedures and patterns, that usually we hit and run without the time or the need for defensive positions to be outlined. Usually we were never in the same spot for more than eight hours at a stretch. I didn’t know what in God’s name had gone wrong this time, but I knew damn well why that mortar crew was jittery. They were crazed by routine, crazed by an equivalent of out-of-doors claustrophobia. There would not be a single man in the whole unit wouldn’t have been aching for three days to get the hell out.
That’s when the tracer started. It wasn’t ours, we never used tracer bullets. They must have brought up an infantry regiment, and that meant our lads had moved out. This tracer was being fired from a Bren-gun, one round every five, on a tripod with a mechanical arrangement for keeping the shots at one height. It started across at the eastern side of the field, and was coming towards us. The point of firing was only three hundred or so yards in front of us. We dropped to the ground, scrabbling into the grass and the soil beneath it, flattening ourselves as much as was humanly possible. Within seconds the tracers were over us, and I felt the blow as one of the bullets hit and pierced my rucksack. It jerked the straps into my shoulders, yanking back the blades of my shoulders with a fierce wrench that opened up the scattered wounds on my chest.
When the gun had traversed to the far side of the field, it started again on the reverse arc. We watched it come back our way, fascinated by the red whipping streaks of fire. When it got to within feet of us, in the air just above our heads, it stopped again. Magazine change, I predicted.
‘Keep down,’ I croaked. ‘It’s a magazine change.’
Tom Cooper didn’t reply.
I waited a moment for Helmut, hope the unspeakable thought, but he replied.
The Bren started again, and continued its slow traverse.
I got to my feet, despite the effort. ‘Come on,’ I said, ‘for Christ’s sake come on.’ I was not going to lie there with that lot passing over the back of my spine every fifteen seconds. My mind was working again, and I had timed the interval between left and right. I lumbered eleven steps, and then croaked, ‘Down.’ We had barely flopped to the ground when the line of fire was across our backs again. We let it flip by and then got up and stumbled forward again. Eleven agonising steps and then down. This time we had to wait seven seconds before the line got to us again. I took a tremendous pride in calculating that they were not sitting in the centre of the hedgerow before us.
We were actually moving forward when the other Bre
n, to the north-east of us, began to cover the lines of the first one, from a different angle. We managed to get down in time, but were now beneath two cross arcs, beneath the aim of two gunners composing their lines of death contrapuntally, with the time interval too small for us to make the slightest move forward or backwards, to the left or the right. I had noticed however, and continued to watch to verify it, that each gunner had his lock-off position on the edge of his arc, opposing edges. Thus, when the guns ceased to fire we would have a few seconds warning when they began again. I crawled across to where Helmut was lying.
‘Wait till they stop,’ I said, ‘and then we can go forward.’
He knew nothing of lock-off positions – I took a childish pride in airing my own bit of superiority, explained it to him as I would to a child. By the time I had finished, they had stopped firing. Tom Cooper was lying about eight feet to one side of us, immobile. I crawled over to him. A bullet had entered the top of his head, leaving a neat hole in Cliff’s beret. He must have been holding his head high, possibly to prevent his forehead making contact with the ground, for the bullet had come out again at the base of the back of his neck. His face was now buried in the grass. His hands were stretched before him in the push-off position, half bent. I straightened them across the top of his head, then reached into his top pocket and took out the letter he had written that morning.
I am still not certain of the emotions I experienced as I crawled back across the dampened grass to where Helmut lay. He knew Tom Cooper had died.
‘There’s just you and me now,’ he said.
Chapter Nine
I don’t know whether it was the manner in which he said it, or the look that glittered from that one uncovered inky eye. All my pains and aches drained from me. I felt them go, as a man feels everything within him go during the brief moment of a complete orgasm. Perhaps I even had an orgasm, I don’t know, for they burned all my clothing, or so they told me.
I seemed to have been feeling so much pain during the past few hours, that I was no longer capable of opening my mind to the rational processes that still lay within, however concealed by unthinkable thoughts. I seemed, therefore, to become clairvoyant, to grasp knowledge and powers that rationally I would have dismissed.
That grenade hadn’t dropped from Cliff’s pocket. I saw the scene again, and my mind went to a vision of what had happened. Helmut had had that grenade the whole time! Poised on the edge of that crevice, he had seen Cliff stumble and fall. In that flash of a second the opportunity offered itself, and was accepted, of getting rid for once and for always of the one danger man, the one man against whom he could not triumph, the one man likely to kill him out of hand. Calmly he had taken out the pin of that grenade and had rolled it down the bank into the crevice, onto a momentarily disabled Cliff.
He wasn’t to know how swift I could be when retrieving grenades, how I had practised by throwing live grenades up in the air with the pin out, catching them, and then lobbing them into the grenade testing pit. He wasn’t to know that I was a faster man than he suspected.
I was incapable of asking myself if what I intended to do was right or wrong. I was incapable of saying, ‘judge not lest ye be judged’. I imagine I was temporarily of unsound mind. Many men were driven insane during the war by pain and suffering.
The actions and the abilities of the insane, however temporary that insanity may be, often seem to stem from stimuli of outstanding precision and clarity. I crawled beside Helmut.
‘It was you rolled that grenade?’
‘Yes – it was him or me!’
I wanted him to lie, to deny it, to defend himself actively, to attack me even, to cause me to be angry, to give me an excuse of hot blood. The cold look of contempt came to him again, and I could clearly distinguish the tightening of the corners of his mouth, the wrinkle of distaste at the man who would be so careless as to let a prisoner steal a primed hand-grenade. I was holding my right hand by my side, not twenty inches from him. Once again I unsheathed my knife, and then, with one twisting movement, I stuck it, up to its hilt, under his ribs and into his black heart. He died instantly, but not before a look of human fear had wiped all arrogance from his face.
I pulled out the knife, and wiped it crudely on the grass and then on his trouser leg. In that one death was washed away all my clairvoyance, all my inner clarity, my privileged knowledge of Tom Cooper and Cliff and Robin Farquhar, and the other two Germans I had killed. I got to my feet and started to stumble forward. When the Brens began again I watched them approach me, from each side. The nearest bullet came within twenty inches, as I walked through the fire.
Soon I could see the emplacements, one behind a knoll to the left, and one in front of a tree to the right.
From the grass before me came the voice of a Scotsman.
‘Halt! Who goes there?’
I could think of nothing to say but, ‘It’s me, you bloody fool,’ before starting a long, slow collapse into a heap at his feet.
‘What’s your name, then?’ he asked, as I went down.
‘Well, I can tell you, it’s not Winston bloody S. Churchill!’
Postscript
Anyone reading this book will ask, ‘Is it true, did it happen?’
Yes, it is true; yes, it did really happen. Not in the neat, ordered way in which I hope to have presented it – but it all happened at some time or another, and more.
I dedicate the book to Margaret and John Gervis who forced me, in the best possible way, to write it; to all the men who helped me get through my small part of the period it portrays – though many of them are now dead – and, above all, to Celia, who has been brave enough to risk living with me ever since.
A.W.
Next in The WW2 Commando Missions:
The Long Night’s Walk
From the author of The Long Day’s Dying, a tense, gripping novella about a daring commando mission in Occupied France during WWII.
Find out more
About the Author
Alan White’s brilliant war novels have the authenticity born of personal experience. As leader of a commando unit in World War II, he made more than a dozen operational jumps into Occupied Europe. He also fought in North Africa. After the war he joined the BBC and enjoyed a wide-ranging media career including the role of White House correspondent in the US. He has written over forty novels.
Also by Alan White
The WW2 Commando Missions
The Long Day’s Dying
The Long Night’s Walk
The Long Drop
The Long Watch
The Long Midnight
The Long Fuse
First published in Great Britain in 1965 by Barrie & Jenkins Ltd
This edition published in the United Kingdom in 2021 by Canelo
Canelo Digital Publishing Limited
31 Helen Road
Oxford OX2 0DF
United Kingdom
Copyright © Alan White, 1965
The moral right of Alan White to be identified as the creator of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781800321922
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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