‘I was in that one where that fellow Arnold was sticking up the medical crew with a .45, remember?’
‘No. I didn’t know that. He wasn’t one of mine. You comin’?’
I saw another side of the black bastard as he moved from cot to cot. His words were firm, and his hands were gentle. He said some of the guys were dying. I sat and held the hand of one. He was an older man about thirty-five: a Scot from Peterhead who had got his bullet pointlessly assaulting that bloody castle. He asked me, ‘Will you hear my confession, Father?’
‘I’m not a Catholic. I wouldn’t properly know how to. I don’t think that the Pope would pay that much attention to me.’
‘That’s OK. Will you say something?’
‘If it helps.’
‘Do you know the Pilgrim’s Hymn then? You should know it; it’s a good Proddy hymn.’
‘I think so.’
For once my blessed memory worked. I murmured the old, cracked words to him. He held on tight to my hand. Then he turned his head away from me and said, ‘I confess that I’m feeling unco wearied tonight, Father.’ Then he said very distinctly, ‘Goodnight Jenny.’ Then he died, and as he exhaled it seemed as if his soul went out of him with the breath. Just like that.
I hadn’t been aware of McKechnie standing over me. He put his hand on my shoulder. He had spoken two sentences, which were, ‘Nicely done, Charlie.’ And, ‘Thank you.’
So you can see that I was a bit choked as I walked away from that small graveyard in that small town in Germany and our boots slipped on the cobbles. Same words, and James shouldn’t have said them. It may have been Goch, or it may have been Cleve. I never did find out what the name of the town was. Never asked James the name of it later, and I never did go back to look. I hated the fucking place.
That was something to do with the way we left.
I told you that the gun I bought in Laon was a Jerry Luger? It had a long butt. That made it easy to go to sleep hanging on to, without pulling the trigger and shooting your foot off: make no mistake about it, that 9mm ammo was serious stuff. When I awoke there was a hand between my hand and the gun butt, and another over my mouth. Neither was mine. I could see a face close to me. Unsurprisingly it wasn’t mine either. Kilduff.
He whispered, ‘C’mon Charlie: time to go.’
Downstairs, by the light of a small kerosene pressure lamp on the table, I met the Bürgermeister, who looked worried, and James, who looked tied up. His wrists were tied together with bootlaces. Les’s feet stuck out behind the settle he had been kipping on. James said, ‘He’s not dead. I don’t know what the bastards did to him, but he’s not dead.’
The big soldier we’d met before, also called Bassett, cuffed James around the ear hard enough to move him a foot sideways. I guess that that meant Shut up until someone asks you to speak, but Kilduff hadn’t liked it. He shook his head. He told me, ‘It was the Princeton squeeze. You just put a bit of pressure on the carotid and they go down like busted horses.’
‘Do they wake up?’
‘Most times. Usually with a headache afterwards.’ I could have told them that leaving Les lying about and about to wake up with a headache wasn’t their best option. But I didn’t. They could make their own fucking mistakes. Kilduff added, ‘And before you ask me anything else I gotta tell you again: it’s time we were going.’ He had an automatic pistol in his hand. I couldn’t think of a good counter-argument to that.
The Bürgermeister still looked worried, but he managed to slip me a little smile that the others didn’t see. I saw Les’s foot twitch. No one else did: I steeled myself not to react, and didn’t. The two Yanks pushed us outside, and carried the kero lamp with them. There was another on the bonnet of one of those ugly little 4x4 trucks the Yanks ran around in, in ’45, and another American leaning against the truck. He had one of those light machine pistols around his neck on a webbing strap. He was smoking a fag which stuck to his lower lip. Between James and me and Kilduff’s truck was a heap of rubble in the road. It had once been a weaver’s cottage. Now it was just a low pyramid of seventeenth-century stone rubble. It didn’t obscure our view. I just wanted to give you the picture the way we saw it.
Kilduff and big Bassett were behind us; prodding. It was slow going because we had to avoid the bricks and tiles, which were strewn around the slippery, cobbled road as if a child had just scattered his play set in anger. The idea for Lego probably came from things we did to houses in the 1940s.
I think that we were still about forty feet away when Kilduff’s driver suddenly straightened up, and grunted. From the light on the truck’s bonnet I could see that he had an odd expression on his face. Something between surprise and a bad attack of heartburn. Then he collapsed to his knees, and his chin came to rest on his chest. He explosively spat his cigarette away: it dropped onto the road, and winked out. It was all very
