Soldier No More

additional assignments from time to time, naturally . . .' He left the implication of secret heroism unspoken between them.

'Such as?'

Roche thought of his latest report, on French perceptions of the extent of direct Soviet involvement in the supply of arms dummy5

to the FLN. But the answer to that, as supplied by Jean-Paul and cleared by the Russian military attache as being suitable for transmission to the British, was that French intelligence correctly perceived direct Soviet involvement as negligible.

But that wouldn't quite do. 'I'm currently working on sources of arms for the Algerian rebels, sir.'

God nodded. 'An assignment not without risk, that would be?'

Another modest shrug would do there. If he'd been set to look into the private arms sources, which was worth doing, it might well have been dangerous. But with Jean-Paul and the attache to help him, the Soviet inquiry had been less hazardous than crossing the road.

'And they're working you hard, of course?'

Roche's two highly efficient squadron sergeant-majors handled nine-tenths of the communications work, and the only difficulty in the French Perceptions report had been in finding respectable sources to account for what Jean-Paul and Ivanov had told him, with his former French contacts mostly hostile to him since Suez.

'The French are a bit awkward these days, sir.' He advanced the only truth he could think of with proper diffidence.

'Very true.' God smiled understandingly. 'And that's half the trouble with you people just at the moment. It's a matter of stress, and it happens to all of you .... You have to understand that you're only ordinary men, but you have to do dummy5

extraordinary things from time to time . . . and that exacts a correspondingly extraordinary price. That's what battle fatigue was: the overdrawing on men's emotional current accounts. You, Captain Roche . . . you are probably well-adjusted for normal withdrawals, but not for the contempt in which your French colleagues now hold the British, since the Suez business. In some people it manifests itself as boils—

one of the embassy secretaries has a splendid one on his bottom at this very moment. The poor fellow can hardly sit down to eat his dinner—'

The only Frenchman who frightened Roche was Jean-Paul, and he wasn't at all sure that Jean-Paul was actually French; and he still got most of what he needed from dear old Philippe Roux, anyway. It was the Comrades who sickened him.

'—but with you it's PUO, Captain. But I'm not going to pack you back to England, that would only scar you permanently.

If you run away now, you'll run away again.' God picked up his fountain pen and wrote on his piece of paper. 'Now. . .

I'm going to give you a month's leave—go and find the sun in the south somewhere, and laze in it—' he looked up again quickly '—I see you're not married . . .but have you got a girl-friend? If so, take her. . . if not—get one. Right?'

Roche was speechless.

'I'll give you a tonic—and take that too. But go easy on the alcohol—I want you mended, not drugged. Do you understand?'

dummy5

'Yes, sir.' Roche needed a drink badly now.

'But stay in France. Your French is fluent, I take it?'

'Yes, sir.' His fluent French, thought Roche, was probably why he was still here. 'Why France?'

'Because most of your problem is here, and you've got to come to terms with it. Take the girl-friend—take the tonic . . .

and take a month.' God passed a month across the desk to him. 'And come back and see me in five weeks —'

Five minutes later Roche had the shakes again, right on the street outside God's house and worse than before. And five minutes after that he was fortifying himself in the cafe-bar at the corner, in preparation before phoning in to Major Ballance. He stared into the drink, trying not to drink it because he already needed another one.

A genuine illness, if not an actual disease, might have been enough to put Jean-Paul off. But what he'd got was the shakes, and a month to get rid of them, which was worse, because in a month they'd be worse too. And then, or very soon, Jean-Paul would see them; and then it wouldn't be a tonic and a month's leave, because it would be a matter of Jean-Paul's preservation.

He had drunk the drink, and the waiter, who knew his man, filled his glass without being asked.

God had been right about one thing: it was a sort of disease, even if it wasn't some bloody pyrexia of unknown origin—it dummy5

was a pyrexia of known origin . . . pyrexia, whatever it was, sounded like the sort of disease a careless young soldier might have picked up out east, and that was really what it had been, he saw now. A disease.

He had caught it on a beach in Japan, and it had been feeding on him for six years without his knowing about it, and then without his understanding the symptoms he had experienced—not until the first authentic reports had come out of Hungary had he begun to add the facts to those symptoms. Or was that really it?

But causes hardly mattered now. All that mattered now was the progression of the shakes from his hands to his face, because when that happened Jean-Paul was bound to recognise the tell-tale signs, which he must be trained to spot.