A New Kind of War

The man was trying to say something, but he was gargling and choking as he tried to speak, and he wasn’t even looking at Fred – he was arching his back and looking up into the dark sky, at nobody and nothing, as he died.

‘Fred – Fred?’ He heard Audley’s voice in the distance. ‘What the devil are you playing at – ?’

Audley’s voice was one sound. And he could still hear the slaughter-house-din muted from the wrecked building behind him. And there was the roar of generators powering the false daylight, which blackened the man’s blood as his eyes rolled upwards and the breath rattled finally in his throat.

‘ Christ!’ exclaimed Audley, above him.

That, among the other words of the ancient formula, was what Father de Vere had said over his dying sappers in Italy, Fred remembered. So, with no more time left, it would have to do for this poor unknown, who had just joined them. And, anyway, the exact words didn’t matter, Father de Vere always said.

He straightened up. ‘Come on, David.’

Audley looked at him. ‘What – ’

‘Let’s go.’ For the first time he felt their roles reverse, and age and rank take precedence, together with self- preservation. ‘He’s dead. So he won’t mind.’ That last consideration hardened him: they were both still alive, dummy4

but in the open, where it wasn’t safe. ‘Come on!’

Without waiting for Audley he ran towards the safety of the trees.

PART THREE

A Free Man

In the Teutoburg Forest,

Germany, August 7, 1945

I

As they drove northwards, Fred slept the sleep of exhaustion. But, unmercifully, it was not dreamless: rather, it was full of images – sharp images, but disjointed and unconnected, of things and people . . .

and even words.

Or a word –

Wildschweinrucken —

In Audley’s jeep, at first, he slept almost upright and very uncomfortably, with his chin down on his breast, so that his neck stretched and stretched as his head dummy4

rolled first one side, and then the other, over every pothole. And there were hundreds of potholes –

thousands, millions, billions ... an infinity of potholes, into which Audley deliberately and maliciously drove, out of the last vestiges of night, into a grey, cloud-swept day –

Wildschweinrucken –

There were, at irregular intervals, villages untouched by war. Then there were towns: towns of rubble, with tall chimneys standing in the ruins . . . buildings –

burned, because they were not built to burn . . . but chimneys were built for fire, so they didn’t burn – that was the rule!

And then there were long stretches of flattened open countryside, so often like, and yet unlike, bits of the English countryside he remembered, out of another world, in August – another August, long forgotten –

He had taken the men, one day in that other August long ago, to a farm, where they were harvesting.

And ... it was wheat – stiff, heavy-eared wheat, deep yellow-gold . . . but also with a fine crop of thistles in it, which made the men swear, who had never before taken hold of a wheat-sheaf let alone a handful of dummy4

thistles: they were mostly conscripts, with a leavening of regulars and territorials like himself, but they were also sappers, and proud of it –

Bridges, endless bridges! And the bridge over the Volturno was more than just a bridge: it was the eighth-bloody wonder of the bloody-world! And I saw Leese –

Jolly Polly Leese! – drive on at one end, past irate, gesticulating Military Police, and approach a column of tanks which had lumbered on to the other end – the far distant end –towards him . . . and he was driving himself, too, Jolly Polly! And he’d had to back up all the way, while the MPs were tearing their hair, because the first tank commander wasn’t going to back up for anyone, not even God Almighty himself, let alone the commander of the 8th Army – not for Jolly Polly, not for anyone! But at least he’d still been jolly at the end of it –

Wildschweinrucken! And then a nightmare wild boar’s head poking out of a wall, with its glaring red pig-eyes but its tusks dripping black blood –

Harvesting! How the men had hated stocking! Men who fancied their skills with metal and wood –

anything was grist to a sapper . . . but they couldn’t dummy4

stand up two wheat-sheaves, one against another, in the stubble: while they were turning round to grab another sheaf, the first two had fallen over – to the loud contempt of the farm labourer driving the tractor, and the little gnarled man sitting high up on the binder behind him – ‘ Garn! Can’t yer do it, then? It’s too ’ard for yer, is it? Too much like ‘ard work, like, is it?’

Christ! There were no tractors in the fields of Germany now! And there were no men, either: only women, bent down in the corn – the thin fields of a poor harvest –

among the flattened crop, beaten down by the rain –

And . . . was it the Crocodile or the Alligator who had said that they’d all be starving soon? –