A New Kind of War

‘David! Isn’t that Sergeant Devenish?’

‘ – and the rain pissing down!’ Audley caught himself at last. ‘So it is – yes – ’ Click-click-click! ‘ – so we’d better be going. But . . .’

But he still wasn’t going. ‘But what?’

‘Illusion and reality – that’s what, old boy – ’ Audley touched his arm, out of the darkness, pushing him in the desired direction ‘ – illusion and reality . . . also like now, I very much fear!’

‘What – ?’ Fred let himself be steered, but then slowed down.

‘Oh . . . we’re not about to be massacred, like Varus –

don’t worry!’ Audley’s hand dropped away as he moved. ‘But if I pick up Amos’s signals a-right, then we just may be more into illusion than reality just now, is what I mean –’

That was worrying – and worrying because Audley wasn’t passing on his juvenile ideas now: he was parroting Major de Souza’s fears, which would be well-matured by knowledge and experience and judgement –

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‘Captain Audley – ?’ For some unfathomable reason de Souza’s whisper out of the dark reassured Fred that things couldn’t be as bad as he had just feared. ‘David?

Freddie?’

‘Sir!’ Audley.

‘David – ’ With that calm voice there were people in the half-dark, and there was subdued activity all around them suddenly ‘ – this is Major Hunter, of the United States Army, with me.’

‘Hullo there, Captain Audley!’ Deep familiar American whisper, oddly comforting.

‘Oh!’ For an instant Audley was taken aback by the presence of the United States Army. But then he rallied. ‘Hi there, major!’

‘And Major Fattorini, Royal Engineers, major.’ De Souza’s voice became very British, almost parodying itself. ‘Major Fattorini has just joined us from the Middle East, major.’

‘Major.’ Fred wondered what the collective noun for

“majors” might be. “Majors” were the army’s alpha and omega: the last and highest rank for some (including all “hostilities only” officers like himself), but the “field rank” beginning of promotion to higher command, and fame and fortune, for the generals of the next generation. ‘Major.’ Major Hunter couldn’t see dummy4

Major Fattorini, so neither of them knew what sort of major he was up against.

‘Slight change of orders, David. But nothing to worry about.’ Wisely, Amos did not introduce Sergeant Devenish. ‘Major Hunter will be accompanying us. But I shall be looking after him. So you just watch out for Krausnick – eh?’

‘Right-oh, Amos,’ Audley answered lightly. ‘G-g-gettin’ to be quite a crowd of us. But the more, the merrier!‘

‘Now, major ... as I was saying ... we are going to the back entrance, which is in the angle of the wall, partly concealed by some bushes, so far as we can make out from the photograph – ’ De Souza’s words faded as he turned away to address the American, against the continuous background drone of the planes.

‘Shit!’ Audley whispered. ‘Nothing to worry about!’

‘No?’ As the young man put his head close, Fred picked up the familiar winter’s night smells of front-line Italy: wet uniform, sweat and alcohol, to which –

less familiarly, amongst the British anyway – this evening’s dinner had added an unBritish whiff of garlic.

‘The Yanks suspect we’re up to something ... or, rather, they don’t suspect – they know!’ The grip tightened.

‘Surprise, surprise!’

‘But I thought you already expected that, David?’

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Jollying-along depressed young engineer subalterns was another Italian memory: it came quite naturally to him to do the same for Audley. ‘Isn’t all this – ’ he almost said ‘ nonsense’ – ‘ – all this elaborate business a sort of smokescreen?’

‘Oh sure! But there’s so much bloody smoke about now that I can’t see either. Not that I ever can see much.’ The boy’s tone was bitter. ‘The trouble with the bloody army is that you never really know what you’re doing – I haven’t known for years ... or since last year, anyway.’ He sighed. ‘I thought I was liberating Europe and winning the war. But I wasn’t doing that at all, you know.’

It’s just he talks too much! So much the better! ‘Then what were you doing?’

‘Jesus Christ! You may well ask! God only knows!

Or . . . He probably doesn’t – only Brigadier Frederick J. Clinton knows – ’ Audley bit his tongue. ‘Do you really know what you are doing, Major Frederick Fattorini? I’ll bloody-bet you don’t, by God!’

Audley’s voice had been rising as he spoke. But it didn’t matter, because the engine-noise had been rising at the same time, from that steady drone to a drumming which Fred recognized for the first time: there was a pair of good old Dakotas out there, circling one behind the other in the darkness, separated by the diameter of their circles; and he had already survived one Dakota-dummy4

crash, outside the Bari, in which the pilot had ploughed neatly through two lines of poplars and an olive-grove, losing more and more of the aircraft at each obstacle –

wing-tips, wings and engines, and at the last even tail-planes –until only the fuselage had remained when it came to a halt, with its human cargo bruised and bloody, but unbowed. Good old Dakota!