Gunner Kelly

“He’s coming with me,” Audley smiled at Benedikt. “Okay, Benedikt?”

That was taking acceptance for granted— alliance for granted—

without leaving the ally any real choice.

He smiled back at both of them. “Okay, David,” he said.

There was at last another German foederatus in Duntisbury Chase.

But this one, at least, would be on his guard, he decided.

VII

All military establishments were somehow alike, decided Benedikt critically, but one had to allow for national peculiarities.

The alikeness here—the true alikeness, apart from the unnaturally tidy ugliness—was its aura of impermanence. It wasn’t that the buildings weren’t substantial. . . the brick-built barracks and married quarters which he had glimpsed were if anything more solid than some of the ancient Dorset villages through which they had passed . . . But those little thatched cottages and small corner shops were part of the landscape, where God and man both dummy1

intended them to be, while this place had merely been drawn on a map by some far-off bureaucrat to serve a finite need, and when that need evaporated it would decay quickly.

Yet at this moment, as Audley slowed the car to turn across the traffic, the British peculiarities were more obvious: not only was this camp bisected by a public road, without any visible sign of security, but there were children climbing on that tank—and wasn’t that an ice-cream van—

The last of the oncoming vehicles passed by, and his view was no longer partially obstructed.

It was an ice-cream van. And there were several tanks, and they were all festooned with children, the nearest of whom machine-gunned them noisily with his pointing fingers as they came within his range.

And there were more tanks—and a pale grey howitzer of ancient aspect—it was all antediluvian equipment in a graveyard of armoured elephants: he craned his neck to the left as the car halted, towards a harassed mother shepherding her ice-cream-licking offspring from the van to the nearest monster; and then to the right, where on the roadside forecourt in front of a hangar-sized shed, he caught sight of the distinctive rhomboid of the sire of all these beasts, squatting on an angled concrete plinth facing the road, which until now he had seen only in old photographs, but which had once crawled out of the smoke and mud against Grandpapa.

“These are the ones they don’t care about,” said Benje disdainfully from behind him. “The proper ones are inside.”

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“These are just for kids to climb on,” supplemented Darren. “You can’t climb on the ones inside.”

Benedikt looked questioningly from one to theother. “Inside?”

“Inside the museum.” Benje raised an eyebrow. “Didn’t you know where we were going?”

“The museum?” The progression of questions was beginning to make him feel a trifle foolish, but Audley was too busy finding a space in an already well-filled car park to rescue him.

“The tank museum,” said Darren.

“Museum machinationum,” said Benje, seizing this unlikely opportunity to demonstrate his Latin vocabulary further. “Or it could be plain machinarum— lacuum doesn’t sound right . . . But David says why not testudinum, from the way the Romans used to lock their shields together into a testudo—what do you think?”

“Yes.” What he thought was that Benje’s obsession with all things Roman, unleashed on the mistaken assumption that Herr Wiesehofer was a fellow enthusiast, was as exhausting as it was surprising. But Papa would never forgive him for discouraging a young classicist, so he must consider the problem seriously.

“Testudo—a tortoise ... I suspect, if there had been armoured vehicles in the Roman Army they would have had a proper name, as we have in my country—whatever the Latin for Panzerkampfwagen may be ... or perhaps Schuetzenpanzerwagen might be closer to what they might have had. But for a nickname I think testudo does very well—unless the Roman who invented that objected to such an infringement of his copyright.” He frowned at dummy1

Benje. “Was there a Roman copyright law?”

Benje returned the frown. “I don’t know. I hadn’t thought of that.

They had a lot of laws . . . What do you think, David?”

Audley had finally found a space and was nosing into it. “I think testudo—there is actually an appalling monster in there called ‘The Tortoise’ ... 78 tons and quite useless—we started building it in ‘42

and finally got it to move in ’46, to no possible purpose that I can imagine, unless they wanted to play snooker inside it under fire.”

He applied the handbrake fiercely. “But I think also that I do owe you an apology for failing to tell you where we were going, Herr Wiesehofer. Actually, I thought I had—but it’s young Benjamin’s fault for monopolising you with his theories on Boadicea—”

“Boudicca,” the boy corrected Audley sharply. “Everyone gets it wrong, Mr Burton says. ‘Boadicea’ is a spelling error—

‘Boudicca’ means ‘Victoria’, and she was Queen Victoria I, not to be confused with Victoria II, 1837 to 1901.”

Darren shook his head at Benedikt. “He just talks all the time, that’s his trouble.”

“It’s not me. It’s what Mr Burton says,” snapped Benje.