“Do you always carry all that?” inquired Francois politely, in his precise English.
“Only when I’m traveling light. You ought to see me drop in by parachute,” said the American, dumping his burdens one by one and spraying water over the bunks as he flung open his raincoat to approach the stove. Jack stretched out a hand to save one of his socks from falling onto the top of the stove. The other had been spattered with the rain that the American was shaking from his oddly cut dark hair. His head was shaved, except for a wide strip that ran proudly from front to back.
“Captain James Tecumseh McPhee, U.S. Rangers, at your service, gentlemen. Don’t ask about the Tecumseh, I get touchy. And I’m so hungry and so wet that I’m touchy enough. Just let me hug this stove and get some warmth into these godforsaken bones, and if one of you guys wants to look inside that big haversack he’ll find a bottle of Johnnie Walker’s finest, which my ancestors invented specially in order to survive this fucking climate.” He put his hands within a millimeter of the glowing stove lid and sighed deeply. Suddenly he broke into French. “We all need one drink, and I need three, and I’m sorry about knocking down the sock.”
“They stopped serving dinner about two hours ago, I’m afraid,” said Jack. “But I’m sure the cookhouse can do you a SPAM sandwich.”
“SPAM,” grunted the American. “As my great-grandfather’s old commander once said, war is hell.” He turned from the stove to the haversack, pulled out a bottle of scotch, a large can of ham, three oranges, a bottle of Martell brandy, and a smaller can that he tossed at the recumbent Frenchman.
“Foie gras,” said Francois, in tones of worship. “I have not seen foie gras since 1940.”
“It’s my last can. The reason I volunteered for this crazy assignment was that I reckoned it was about the only chance I’d get to find some more.” He pulled out another can of ham, and then took a complicated knife from his pocket, prized out a can opener, carved his way efficiently around the rim, and brought out some oatmeal biscuits. He tossed the can opener to Francois and opened the scotch.
“When my great-grandfather heard General Sherman make his celebrated remark, he thought to himself that war could be made pretty tolerable so long as one kept lots of good friends in the commissariat, a pearl of wisdom that he passed down through the family. I have made bosom buddies of the modern equivalent, the ferry pilots who bring the B-17s over here. A doting mother, a moderately considerate father who was too bad at making money in the twenties to lose any in the Wall Street crash, combines with regular transatlantic flights and a decent scotch ration to permit me to test great-grandpa’s theories to the limit. And once we get to France, I guess we live off the land for as long as our livers can take it. Gentlemen, here’s to war,” and he passed around the scotch.
“You wouldn’t happen to have a Sherman tank hidden in that magnificent haversack, old boy?” inquired Jack as he took the bottle. The American’s eyebrows lifted, and he smiled sunnily, waiting for Jack to continue. “If we’re going to live off the land, as you say, we might find one comes in rather useful.”
“The land,” intoned Francois, inhaling the scent of the foie gras on his biscuit, “is not what it was, since the Boches have been at it. But we shall conduct ourselves in the spirit of your admirable great-grandfather, and no doubt we shall get by. And if starvation threatens, we can always count on our intrepid English colleague to catch himself another sheep. After our last exercise, I can tell you that he is very good at hunting sheep.”
“Better than foxes, I guess,” said the big American around a mouthful-of canned ham. “At least you can eat them.”
In the three weeks remaining of their fieldcraft training at Arisaig and Loch Ailort, the American showed that he had little to learn. Fit and fast, and fresh from parachute training and Rangers school in the States, he won grudging praise from the instructors and the affection and respect of the English cavalryman. Francois, who had already accepted Manners as a comrade of the desert war, was more guarded with the American. It began when McPhee said casually that he had read Francois’s book about the war in Spain, and asked if he had ever some across a college friend who had volunteered for the Lincoln Brigade. Manners had no idea what they were talking about, and had never heard of the book. Nor had he known that Francois had written one.
“You didn’t know our little partner here was a glittering light of the French intelligentsia? College girls back home would buy his book and moon over that sexy photo in the frontispiece even if they couldn’t understand a word of it,” he explained. “Francois is the European civilization we’re all fighting for, Jack. We’re just the rude mechanics, you and me.”
“Your Lincoln Brigade were all Communists,” said Francois. “They did what Moscow wanted, not much for Spain.”
“Well, I guess some of them probably were,” McPhee said lazily. “But the guy I knew, he just wanted to stop fascism. He got back, too. He’s in the Marines now, in the Pacific theater. But a lot of British guys went to that International Brigade, Jack. Maybe even some guys you knew.”
“Barely knew there was a war on, old boy. I was in Palestine at the time, putting down an Arab rising, and then India, playing polo at Quetta.” Jack laughed. “Great training for tank warfare, polo. The old regiment hung on to the horses as long as they could, then they put us into armored cars. Never could understand why the wretched things didn’t go when I tried to feed them oats. The only chap who seemed happy with the conversion was the farrier. He said there wasn’t much difference between horseshoes and tank treads.”
“You have just been introduced to the subtlety of English humor,” Francois explained. “Jack here fought his way back and forth across Africa two-or was it three? — times. Against the Italians, all the way to Benghazi until Rommel’s panzers pushed them back to Egypt. And then back again to Benghazi until Rommel pushed them back to Egypt again.”
“See, I told you.” Jack laughed again. “Just like polo. We called it the Benghazi handicap.”
“A simple soul, our Jack,” said Francois. “No politics in the desert. Just war as a kind of cricket.”
“Why aren’t you flying, Francois?” the American wanted to know. “You flew in Spain, shot down a few fascists as I recall.”
“The Allies are not short of pilots in this war,” Francois replied. “But there are not enough Frenchmen ready to go back and work with the Resistance. The war in the air is simple. The war on the ground in France will be complicated, at least for me if not for you two. You are just fighting a war. Like all Frenchmen, I have the peace to think about.”
When they were posted south to Stevenage for the demolition course, just as the Allies took Sicily and the Italians pulled out of the war, McPhee had the more to learn. He seemed confused between the use of plastic explosives in cutting charges to take out pylons and railway lines, and the ammonal for the lifting charges to destroy bridges. Manners came up with the memory trick that seemed to help him. P for plastic and for precision; A for ammonal and to annihilate. But when they moved on to Huntingford for the course in industrial demolition, the American seemed to get confused again.
“Not too good on destroying things, fellas,” as the doctored lubricant grease with the grit that would grind away at industrial bearings smeared itself onto his clothes and face. “I guess it goes against the grain.”
They lived in one another’s pockets, always training together, given weekend leave passes at the same time. Once, they went back to the Manners family home in Wiltshire, a small country house with one wing that had been rebuilt after the Parliamentarians had destroyed it in the English Civil War. “You would always be a Royalist, Jack,” Francois had laughed, as McPhee shook his head in disbelief at the age of the place and the deferential pleasure of an elderly serving man and the even older cook at the return of the young master. His father, the general, was somewhere in India. His mother appeared for meals, but was otherwise in her garden.
“I guess we know what you’re fighting for, Jack.” McPhee grinned as they took the train back to London, ready to start the black propaganda course at Watford. “For the King-Emperor and the old landed estate.”
“Did you not know, McPhee?” Francois interrupted. “This was a farewell visit. The house has been requisitioned to become a brigade HQ for American troops. Her ladyship will be moving out into the lodge, from which redoubt she will try to protect her garden against your gallant countrymen.”
“I didn’t know Mummy had told you about that,” said Jack. “But it won’t be for long. We get the old place back, once the invasion goes in and the war is over.”
“I sure hope the guys take care of it,” said McPhee, embarrassed. “Maybe I’ll know somebody in the brigade, tell them to look after it.”
“A pity you do not know somebody among the Germans who have been occupying my house since 1940,” said Francois.
In the silence that followed, as Francois smoked and McPhee stared out of the train window, Jack realized
