A New Kind of War

‘Spot on?’ He had control of his tongue and his senses at last. ‘Spot on where?’

Driver Hewitt spun the wheel again, with the same maddening nonchalance. ‘Up on top of the Two-toe-burger- void – as they likes to call it: the Two-toe . . .

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burg . . . Woods, is what you-and-I’d say, though – ’

The little man pointed ‘ – see there – ?’

Something had flashed past Hewitt, outside the car just beyond the edge of the road in the trees, as he spoke, diverting Fred’s attention: it was a sculptured bust on a shaft of stone, it looked like. But it was gone before he could be sure.

‘What the hell – ?’ He turned in the direction the little man had indicated, and the question stifled itself. But the trees were in the way. And there was another long tree-lined avenue ahead of them, but this time it wasn’t empty: the rising avenue was blocked at its highest point by an immense monument, pillared and domed, and then surmounted by the gigantic statue of a warrior brandishing his sword far above the tree-tops.

‘Hewitt – ’ The monument rose up higher and higher as they approached it ‘ – what the hell is that?’ It wasn’t actually the question he started to ask, but the thing was so enormous that it crowded out his original intention.

‘Don’t rightly know – dontcha know, then?’ For his part, the little man seemed to be quite unimpressed by the view, some of which was already disappearing above them through the restriction of the windscreen.

Rather, he seemed to be looking for somewhere to park in the wide empty circle round the monument’s base.

‘One of the Colonel’s old Romans, would it be – ?’

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Fred rubbed his eyes as the car came to a stop. He wasn’t still dreaming, but he wished he was. And his mouth tasted of old unwashed socks.

‘Ah! There ’e is!‘ Hewitt relaxed suddenly. Then he turned to Fred. ’Orf you go then – look lively, now!

The Brigadier – ‘e don’t like to be kept waitin’, y‘

know –

2

Brigadier Clinton looked down on him from the top of a flight of steps leading up to a doorway in the monument, as from a great height.

‘You look a bit rough, major,’ he observed, unkindly but accurately.

Fred looked up at the Brigadier. ‘Yes, sir – ’

This, he thought, is where I came in, continued from the Eve of Scobiemas last February, when we last met: nothing much has changed since then, because I was looking pretty rough then — and I didn’t know what the hell was happening then either, come to think of it!

‘As a matter of fact, I feel a bit rough, too.’ He brought down his saluting hand, which had at least done its job more smartly than his legs had performed on the way from the car, one foot having gone to sleep to inflict dummy4

agonizing pins-and-needles on him, while the muscles behind the opposite knee had contracted with some form of partial paralysis during the journey –

Then the thought expanded: Rough I may be – but I never asked to be a rough major in this God-forsaken place! So you must want Major Frederick Fattorini –

must need him – far more than Captain Frederick Fattorini ever wanted or needed (or even expected) to exchange three perfectly-respectable pips for this questionable crown –

He found himself glancing down sideways at his shoulder-strap and rubbing his chin simultaneously. He not only hadn’t had time to have that questionable crown replace those honest pips, but he also hadn’t had time to shave, the rasp of stubble under his hand reminded him.

And, further down, if there had ever been decent creases in this uniform, last night’s rain and today’s journey had obliterated them; and there was a muddy patch on the half-paralysed knee, to remind him of how he had knelt beside a dying man – a man who had died for this man Clinton?

He looked up at the Brigadier again. ‘It was a fairly rough night, actually, sir. One way or another.’

‘Yes. So I gather.’ The pale-blue eyes fixed on his intently. ‘But also a successful one.’

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What was wrong with that voice? Fred now found himself absurdly rethinking the same nagging question which had quite uselessly weakened his concentration six months before, in the ruined monastery of Osios Konstandinos. The man’s setting had changed (although the war had reached this unlikely place: the stone-work above was pitted and pock-marked with bullets or shell-splinters, and the steps were littered with fragments), but that voice was the same – the same and somehow wrong . . . but how–?

Absurd! ‘Yes, sir?’ He heard Jacko Devenish’s far more accurate and embittered formula “If you say so, sir – I’m sure I don’t know!‘ inside his head. But majors couldn’t say that to brigadiers on such short acquaintance, if ever, he decided.

The Brigadier smiled an unsmiling smile at him, which his thin lips were ideally designed to do. ‘You don’t really know what is happening, do you, major?’ He began to descend the steps, his boots crunching noisily on the stone fragments. ‘Or do you?’ He stopped suddenly, still above Fred. ‘What do you think – and how much do you know? Tell me, eh?’

Fred envied Jacko Devenish, whose certain reply to such a dirty question would have been that neither had he joined up to think, nor did his rank entitle him to do so. But those escapes were not open to officers of field rank. ‘Come on, major!’ The Brigadier crunched down dummy4

the last few steps. ‘Don’t disappoint me.’

Close up, he was surprisingly young – at least, for a brigadier: mid-thirties, at a guess, no more. But much