Soldier No More

part of tradition, and tradition's very important, to my way of thinking—like doing dummy5

a thing the old way, like it's always been done, which is the way it ought to be done—the proper way . . . And, of course, he said, a dragon's just right for them in their tanks, because it's all covered with scales—like in the window in the church, of St. George and the dragon—and they'd got all these iron plates to keep the bullets and suchlike out, you see.'

'Huh!' murmured Wimpy. 'All except 88-millimetres, and the odd Panzerfaust, anyway . . . and suchlike.'

She frowned to him. 'What's that, sir?'

Nothing, Clarkie, nothing—just a thought, that's all.' Not so much a thought as a memory: they were practically wiped out in the bocage, south of Caumont....

Roche observed the two very different faces, the sharp ferrety features of the schoolmaster and the red- cheeked middle-aged countrywoman, as they watched each other, sharing overlapping recollections of past fears— fears they had shared for very different reasons, the one because he knew the perils lying in wait for young tank commanders, the other because she had seen so many of them march away, never to return.

And there was a third face, the one in the file, to be superimposed on those unrealised fears, hard and young and arrogant, quite unlike either of these—quite unlike the young

'Master David' he might otherwise have imagined from their evident affection, and yet the face which united them nevertheless: a broken-nosed, rugger-playing face.

'Ah. . . well, he did come back, sir, Mr William.'Ada Clarke dummy5

might not know a Panzerfaust from a hole in the road, but she had understood Wimpy's meaning in the end.

'He was invulnerable, certainly.' The schoolmaster's agreement was strangely grudging. 'But it was also a post-war version of him, Clarkie.'

'Well, you wouldn't expect him to be the same, would you, sir?' Ada Clarke chided him sympathetically. 'Growing up in the war. . .just waiting to take part—watching the other boys go before him, like young Mr Selwyn in the RAF, that was killed . . . and then seeing all those terrible things in those camps, that they showed on the films on VE-Day—' she turned to Roche suddenly '—I remember going to the Odeon Cinema in town that day, with Jim's wife Mavis, my sister-in-law ... my Charlie didn't want to go, 'cause that was after he'd been invalided out, and he never wanted to see war films after that, only films with Betty Grable, and it was a war film that was on that day—I can't remember what it was—it was an American one, though . . . but I went with Mavis, anyway.'

She nodded at Roche, as though it was necessary to quote Mavis as corroborative evidence. 'And in the interval the lights went up, and the manager—the cinema manager—

comes on the stage and says 'Will all mothers with young children under the age of fourteen take their children outside

—and all children, and anyone of a nervous disposition please go outside with them—because we're going to show these newsreel films that it's better they shouldn't see. And then they can come back afterwards when it's over.' And so dummy5

Mavis had to go out of course, because she had young Jimmie with her—'

'Young Jimmie who's in the army now, is that?' inquired Wimpy politely, with only the merest hint of irony.

'Not in the army sir—a Royal Marine Commando, he is.'

'That's right—of course! He was the one who went in at Suez last year?'

'Port Said, sir. And that mad he was when he came back—

wouldn't stop talking about it, even though my Charlie didn't like it, and went off and wouldn't listen! But he says to me, young Jimmie does, 'We were winning, Auntie—going through them like a dose of salts—and they wouldn't let us go on!'—that mad he was! You should have heard him, sir!'

Wimpy nodded. 'Yes. Perhaps I should have.'

'Doing very well, he is. A sergeant now, and he's thinking of putting in for a commission and making a career of it.'

'In spite of Suez?' Wimpy caught himself. 'Sorry, Clarkie—

you were in the cinema on VE-Day—?'

'Yes, sir ... Well, of course, young Jimmie was only a nipper then—he was eleven years old, or thereabouts, must have been—so Mavis has to take him out. And she wasn't very pleased, either! 'You tell me what happens, Ada', she says . . .

And . . . then they showed these films of the camps, where all the people were dead, poor souls—with arms and legs like matchsticks, and the bones showing through . . . just skin and bone, they were—I never saw anything like it in my life.

dummy5

Great piles of them, with the legs and arms hanging out—you couldn't hardly credit it, not unless you'd seen it—like scarecrows, poor souls.' Ada Clarke shook her head, still only half-believing the evidence of her own eyes after a dozen years.

'Yes, Clarkie?' Wimpy jogged her gently.

'Yes, sir. Well... I thought—I can still remember what I thought, like it was yesterday—' she looked at Roche. 'I thought 'he hadn't any right to do that, did Hitler'. I mean . . .

killing people, that's bad enough, when they haven't done you any harm—but doing that to them . . . that's not right.'

Roche waited.

'And then I thought—it's funny, but we had this German couple to stay at the house, friends of the Master, Mr