A New Kind of War

‘Naow, sir, major – not ’ im – ‘ The little man sounded the car’s mellifluous two-tone horn as they came to an intersection, and then accelerated across it ’ – though ‘e is a good mechanic, I’ll say that for ’im ... an‘ ’e was court-martialled for doin‘ up Jerry cars an’

then floggin‘ ’em back to the Jerries, see . . . But naow – it’s Colonel Colbourne wot’s artful . . . But, then, o‘ course he was a lawyer before the war, gettin’ murderers orf from bein‘ ’anged, wot was guilty, an‘ all that – see?’

‘ Colonel – ’ Fred steadied his voice ‘ – Colbourne?’ Relief blotted out surprise. ‘How far is it to Kaiserburg ... and TRR-2, driver?’

‘The Kaiser’s Burg?’ The little man confirmed the name in correcting it to his own liking. ‘Not far. If it wasn’t pissin’ down dummy4

we could maybe see it from ‘ere, almost.’ He pointed into the murk ahead. ‘Right up on top of the Town-us, it is – ’igh up, in the woods.‘

Taunus, Fred remembered, from the only map he had been able to find in Athens. But there had been no Kaiserburg on the map.

‘Yes?’ But at least they were agreed that that was where they were going! he thought. ‘I couldn’t find it on the map.’

‘No . . . well, you wouldn’t now, would you?’ The little man agreed readily. “Cause it ain’t anywhere – is it? The bleedin‘

Kaiser’s Burg!’

Fred saw an opening. ‘It’s a bad billet, is it?’

The rain slashed across the windscreen, and the car bucked in well-bred protest over another crater – down . . . bump-bump-bump . . .

up – and then ran smoothly again, still flanked by ruins.

‘I’ve known worse.’ Uncharacteristically, the little man looked on the bright side, in the midst of unseasonable summer weather likely to render even adequate billets depressing.

A hideous thought offered itself to Fred. ‘We’re not under canvas?’

He had taken it for granted that the occupying forces would have looked after themselves properly in this desolation. But they were well to the south of the zone earmarked for British military occupation, and the teeming Americans had had plenty of time to move into the best of what had been left standing.

‘Under – ?’ They had reached another crossroads in the ruins, but this time the little man had his nose against the windscreen as he peered up at a signpost festooned with information, most of it in dummy4

Military American, but some pathetically civilian, indicating streets which existed only in memory. ‘What was that, sir – ?’

Fred felt his depression returning, even though ruins were the same the world over, and he knew that he’d seen enough of them to take these for granted (these just here were fire-bombed empty shells, still substantial, but floor-less from the top to their ground-level pile of blackened rubbish within): he had seen Plymouth burn, and taken his men into Bristol the day after its heaviest raid, to aid the civil power; and his brief bomb-disposal service, before Italy, was best-forgotten . . . although, when he thought about it, Italy – and Greece too – had on occasion been even worse, when he’d come upon some out-of-the-way village, as inaccessible as it was inoffensive, yet which had been nonetheless comprehensively flattened, sometimes by design, sometimes quite unnecessarily, by accident. But even though this was Germany, which had started it all ... the truth was, he was sick of ruins.

The little man came to a decision (which was of necessity all his own, since the rain-swept wilderness appeared to be uninhabited), and they were moving again. ‘What was that, sir – ?’

For a moment, Fred didn’t reply. And then the moment lengthened, as they continued to drive through the ruins. And there seemed no end to them, and he realized that he was passing through not

‘ruins’, but the ruin of a once-great city, which might never rise again – or not in his lifetime, anyway.

‘Under canvas?’ His unnaturally prolonged silence animated the little man’s memory. ‘ Naow, major, sir – we’re snug enough – for the time bein’, like – eh?‘

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Fred closed his eyes and sat back in comfort, trying to blot out the dead city. Or ... alive or dead . . . it was finished, here – that was what he must think! Or ... he was tired and hungry . . . and the terrible inadequacy of memory was that, while he could recall the exact picture of a leg of roast pork, with golden crackling on it, he could not recall the smell and the taste – the taste of crackling –

There was a bump, and he opened his eyes again as the big car surged forward. And suddenly, they were in open country –

country soaked and dripping, but mercifully untouched by war, after all they had been through. And that was like a blessing, after the anathema of the city: all the worst that the war could do had its limits, leaving the rest quite untouched, outside Plymouth, and Bristol, and Cassino – leaving places which hadn’t had their names on the bombs untouched, as though there had never been a war.

‘Where are we?’

‘Wot?’ Now that he was free of the responsibility of threading his way through the ruins of the city, and had his right passenger in the back of the car, the little man was free of all responsibility. So it didn’t matter what the original question had been, never mind his answer to it.

‘Where are we going?’ All the more important questions which he wanted to ask — ‘ Who the hell is Colonel Colbourne?’ and ‘ What the hell is “TRR-2 Kaiserburg” ?’ in the unembattled British Army order-of-battle in Occupied Germany – were out of order, first because they were too humiliating to be asked . . . and second because the little man probably couldn’t answer them usefully anyway.

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‘Wot?’ After that stretch of peaceful, umbombed Germany they were passing through a peaceful, utterly