I think that they were the first proper orders I ever gave. A bead of sweat ran down the small of my back. Oliver went with them. I sat on the bed where his leg should have been – it was a bit tactless, but the sooner he got used to it the better. I asked the GI, ‘What’s your name?’
‘Arnold Ripley. I’m from a small place called Houston. You won’t have heard of it.’
‘I won’t forget it now, will I? I had to sit down so that the others wouldn’t see my knees knocking.’
‘Would you have dropped me, Father?’
‘We’ll never know, will we? I’ve never fired the damned thing.’
‘Better learn, if you’re going to go round threatening soldiers.’ He gave a low moan.
I wasn’t going to be dumb enough to ask if it was hurting. I said, ‘I’ll get them to give you a shot when they come back.’ The words were out before I could call them back, but he grinned through the pain.
‘You don’t take any fucking prisoners, do you, Father?’ Then, ‘Yeah; better you don’t do it yourself: you could hurt someone.’
The nurse and the SBA came back with James Oliver. Each of the three was struggling to carry a galvanized iron dustbin. Jamie waved me over. He said, ‘Problem. We got bins full of arms and legs back there. Some of them are a bit smelly. No one knows which one is his.’
This was getting out of control. I felt like a pilot whose control lines had been shot away. I went back to the bed. I said, ‘Houston, we have a problem. They have bins of arms and legs, and they don’t know which one is yours.’
‘What we gonna do, Father?’
‘Like they do in the gangster films, son. Identity parade.’
He laughed between gasps of pain. They got all the legs out, and laid them across the end of his bed for him to see. Eventually he laid claim to a fine left leg. The one he’d lost was the right one, and in any case the leg he identified was clearly black. I said, ‘That’s not your leg, Arnold. It belongs to a Negro. It’s not even the right side.’
‘I know, Father, but I kinda like it. It’s a good leg.’
‘OK. What do you want me to do with it?’
He gave a little gasp again, and said, ‘Just say a little something over it, Father. Put it to rest.’
I gave the leg the Twenty-Third Psalm, stumbling a bit around the bit that says walking through the shadow of the valley of death. The nurse cried a bit, and the SBA grinned as if he was about to lose his mind.
Arnold said, ‘You kin take it away now,’ and, ‘You can shoot me now, Padre.’
The nurse moved away to a trolley mired in the middle of the tent, and came back with a syringe of pink fluid. Whatever it was it put Arnold out of it very quickly.
The SBA asked, ‘You want to pray over all these bins, Padre?’
I told him, ‘Not now, son. Just stack them up out back, and I’ll creep round and say the words over the whole lot tonight.’
‘You’re the strangest bloody priest I’ve met, sir!’
‘It’s the training. They rush us through it these days. You don’t have time to get the rough edges knocked off.’ I was pissed off with having to explain myself all the time.
The nurse fussing around the bed nearest to the door flap as we left was the pretty one in a traditional nurse’s outfit we had seen running away alongside a patient and holding up his plasma drip. She straightened up, backed away from the bed and half turned – almost bundling into us. She blushed, said, ‘Sorry,’ and then looked angry. But not at us.
‘Lieutenant?’ Her voice came all the way from that girls’ school in Cheltenham. Some posh Anglo who was here for the good works that would take pride of place in her war diary one day.
Oliver stopped and said, ‘Yes?’
‘I want to report that man I was with.’
‘What did he do?’
‘He handled me. Handled me standing up in the mud. Up against a post while I held his drip, and kept him alive.’
‘Why didn’t you run away, Miss?’
‘If I’d dropped the drip he would have died.’
‘I expect he had his reasons,’ the policeman told her, and pushed me out through the door flap ahead of him.
Outside he asked me, ‘Is your denomination allowed to drink? I could show you a good bar.’
We waded up to the Quonset hut. It was a lot larger than I had thought: about the same size as a village church hall, but not much more substantial than one of the large tents. It had been wood prefabricated in the USA in four-ply, shipped in pieces and erected on a small bit of America in the Netherlands. Even though it was relatively early morning there was a party going on: maybe fifty people. Thinking about it, it could have been the dregs of last night’s do. A coloured pianist in a white jacket was doing the Casablanca thing, and among the few couples dancing was a nice-looking nurse dancing with an older guy. He was in clean fatigues that bore no identification flashes, and wore highly polished black shoes. I couldn’t see his face. I noticed them because she had a tit out, and she danced with her eyes closed. She looked beat; I think that she was sleeping. If that sort of thing offends your sensibilities these days, I can’t say I care. We had almost reached the end of the world: things were different out there.
A friendly waitress brought a couple of foaming beers to our table – no money changed hands. I asked Oliver about that.
‘It would be immoral to charge for it, Padre. After all, the Army stole it in the first
