praying at some ruined wayside shrine. The wounded Negro had opened his eyes, shallow breaths breaking through the caked blood on his lips. The young private slept against the plinth of the memorial.
The captain pointed with his wired hands at the men strapping up their packs. Pearson ignored him, and was about to move on. Then something about the American’s posture, and their shared community of fatigue and hopelessness, made him stop.
‘We’re going forward.’
Eyes half-closing, the American stared down at his wrists, as if aware of the effort he had wasted in trying to prevent the abrasions from opening. ‘That’s bad luck. Not my day.’ His face grew stiff and wooden as the blood emptied from his cheeks.
Pearson watched Sergeant Tulloch supervise the stowage of the radio and begin his rounds of the men, waiting with weapons at the ready. ‘Why did you come up the river?’
The captain tapped the memorial stone with his wrists. ‘We wanted to see about moving this. The Kennedy Memorial.’
‘Kennedy…?’ Pearson turned and stared down at the broken lettering on the stone. Vaguely he remembered the memorial built by a previous British government at Runnymede to commemorate the assassinated President. In an amiable, if sentimental, gesture an acre of English ground had been given to the American people overlooking Magna Carta island. The President’s widow had been present at the unveiling.
The American was feeling the broken lettering. He pulled off his cap and dipped it in the pool of oil-stained water beside the plinth. He began to work away at the memorial, scraping off the mud, as Pearson moved down through the trees to the forward post.
When Pearson returned shortly afterwards the American was still working away at the memorial with his wired hands. Below the surface dirt were the residues of earlier defacements, slogans marked in engine grease or cut with bayonets. There was even one, ‘Stop US Atrocities in Vietnam’, almost as old as the monument itself. Pearson remembered that the memorial had been regularly defaced since its unveiling, a favourite target of vandals and agitators.
‘Major, we’re ready to move off, sir.’ Tulloch saluted him smartly, for the first time that day. The American was still scraping at the stone, and had managed to clean at least half of the front surface.
The lead platoon moved down the slope. As the captain dropped his cap and sat down, Pearson signalled to Sergeant Tulloch.
‘Okay, Charlie — off your backside!’ Tulloch had drawn his.45 automatic. The rear platoon was filing past, the men’s eyes fixed on the gaps in the trees, none of them paying any attention to the prisoners.
The American stood up, his eyes almost closed. He joined the two prisoners lying behind the memorial. As he began to sit down again Tulloch stepped behind him and shot him through the head. The American fell on to the sleeping private. Tulloch straddled his body with one leg. Like a farmer expertly shearing a sheep he shot the other two men, holding them as they struggled. They lay together at the base of the memorial, their legs streaming with blood.
Above them, the drying stone was turning a pale grey in the weak sunlight.
It was almost white twenty minutes later when they began their advance across the meadow. Fifty yards from the bank a murderous fire had greeted them from the Americans concealed among the trees along the opposite shore. Pearson saw Tulloch shot down into the waterlogged grass. He shouted to Corporal Benson to take cover. As he lay in a shallow crater the white rectangle of the memorial was visible through the trees behind him, clear now as it would not have been that morning. In his last moments he wondered if the cleaning of the memorial had been a signal, which the watching Americans had rightly interpreted, and if the captain had deliberately taken advantage of him.
Mortar shells fell in the damp grass around him. Pearson stood up, beckoning to the young lieutenant to follow him, and ran forward to the wreck of the personnel carrier. Ten steps later he was shot down into the oil- stained water.
A Place and a Time to Die
Shotguns levelled, the two men waited on the river bank. From the shore facing them, four hundred yards across the bright spring water, the beating of gongs and drums sounded through the empty air, echoing off the metal roofs of the abandoned town. Fire-crackers burst over the trees along the shore, the mushy pink explosions lighting up the gun-barrels of tanks and armoured cars.
All morning the ill-matched couple making this last stand together — Mannock, the retired and now slightly eccentric police chief, and his reluctant deputy, Forbis, a thyroidal used-car salesman — had watched the mounting activity on the opposite shore. Soon after eight o’clock when Mannock drove through the deserted town, the first arrivals had already appeared on the scene. Four scout-cars carrying a platoon of soldiers in padded brown uniforms were parked on the bank. The officer scanned Mannock through his binoculars for a few seconds and then began to inspect the town. An hour later an advance battalion of field engineers took up their position by the dynamited railway bridge. By noon an entire division had arrived. A dusty caravan of self-propelled guns, tanks on trailers, and mobile fieldkitchens in commandeered buses rolled across the farmland and pulled to a halt by the bank. After them came an army of infantry and camp-followers, pulling wooden carts and beating gongs.
Earlier that morning Mannock had climbed the water-tower at his brother’s farm. The landscape below the mountains ten miles away was criss-crossed with dozens of motorized columns. Most of them were moving in an apparently random way, half the time blinded by their own dust. Like an advancing horde of ants, they spilled across the abandoned farmland, completely ignoring an intact town and then homing on an empty grain silo.
By now, though, in the early afternoon, all sections of this huge field army had reached the river. Any hopes Mannock had kept alive that they might turn and disappear towards the horizon finally faded. When exactly they would choose to make their crossing was hard to gauge. As he and Forbis watched, a series of enormous camps was being set up. Lines of collapsible huts marked out barrack squares, squads of soldiers marched up and down in the dust, rival groups of civilians presumably political cadres — drilled and shouted slogans. The smoke from hundreds of mess fires rose into the air, blocking off Mannock’s view of the blue-chipped mountains that had formed the backdrop to the river valley during the twenty years he had spent there. Rows of camouflaged trucks and amphibious vehicles waited along the shore, but there was still no sign of any crossing. Tank-crews wandered about like bored gangs on a boardwalk, letting off fire-crackers and flying paper kites with slogans painted on their tails. Everywhere the beating of gongs and drums went on without pause.
‘There must be a million of them there — for God’s sake, they’ll never get over!’ Almost disappointed, Forbis lowered his shotgun on to the sandbag emplacement.
‘Nothing’s stopped them yet,’ Mannock commented. He pointed to a convoy of trucks dragging a flotilla of wooden landing-craft across a crowded parade ground. ‘Sampans — they look crazy, don’t they?’
While Forbis glared across the river Mannock looked down at him, with difficulty controlling the distaste he felt whenever he realized exactly whom he had chosen as his last companion. A thin, bitter-mouthed man with over-large eyes, Forbis was one of that small group of people Mannock had instinctively disliked throughout his entire life. The past few days in the empty town had confirmed all his prejudices. The previous afternoon, after an hour spent driving around the town and shooting at the stray dogs, Forbis had taken Mannock back to his house. There he had proudly shown off his huge home arsenal. Bored by this display of weapons, Mannock wandered into the dining room, only to find the table laid out like an altar with dozens of far-right magazines, pathological hate- sheets and heaven knew what other nonsense printed on crude home presses.
What had made Forbis stay behind in the deserted town after everyone else had gone? What made him want to defend these few streets where he had never been particularly liked or successful? Some wild gene or strange streak of patriotism — perhaps not all that far removed from his own brand of cantankerousness. Mannock looked across the water as a huge catherine-wheel revolved into the air above a line of tanks parked along the shore, its puffy pink smoke turning the encampment into an enormous carnival. For a moment a surge of hope went through
