‘Last month,’ he told me. ‘The Major has this thing about battlefields. He prefers the old ones to the new ones.’
‘I’m not going to complain, Les. Bloody sight less dangerous.’
‘Not always, Charlie. Look at this place. A good place to fight is always a good place to fight: different weapons, that’s all.’
James had wandered off a bit, towards one of the Brit tanks. It had a great blackened hole where something nasty had gone in between the drive wheels. The track on that side had been thrown. All of its hatches were open, so unless it had been robbed in the last couple of days, some of the crew had got out. James abruptly lost interest.
‘Let’s go down there. That’s where most of the fighting took place.’
There was the valley floor. It wasn’t as deep as the valley from which we’d climbed, and followed a meandering stream fringed by bare trees. They were coming into bud and leaf. The earth seemed disturbed in a narrow line parallel to them; as if it had been ploughed. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to find out why. The knocked-out tanks all seemed to be facing down towards it, as if they had come along the rim that we had walked over, and then turned down in open formation. James set off down through the ankle-high grass. Les hadn’t the heart to let him go alone, and I hadn’t the courage to leave them to it. James turned once on the short descent, to grin back at us. He was animated. Like a child.
And that’s what they were like: like children.
The disturbed earth was a hastily dug trench. My dad would have done a better job than that. There were fifteen or sixteen dead children chucked around in it. It wasn’t deep because they had tried to sink it too close to the line of scrubby trees, and had got into the roots. Don’t worry, I won’t go all soft on you. Tommo told me long ago: bad things happen: that’s what wars are for – fade scene. They were soldiers, anyway. Little soldiers. Kids in their mid-teens away for their first and last adventure. They were dressed in bits and pieces of soldier suits, just like me and Les. Not only that, but the empty cartridge cases scattered around, and the fucked-up tanks on the hillside, seemed to indicate that they’d put up a hell of a fight before the tank squadrons had overrun them. I could see the crushed and churned areas of the makeshift trench, and the gaps in the trees where the tanks had crossed them. Some of the bodies were smashed. I thought that they looked like dolls tossed aside by a bored playmate.
James’s voice was a thousand miles away. No one had ever sounded less like a Major. He said, ‘Stupid, but I suddenly feel sick.’
It was too true, and too trite to be worth a response. We walked along the scarred earth, slowly, like visitors to a museum studying mildly novel exhibits. At the far end of the trench it fell back into the tree line. A boy who might have been fourteen, one of the youngest fighters there, was lying back out of the trench, as if he had been caught as he stood up. A grubby white handkerchief fluttered in a branch close to him. You never know. One of his arms was thrown back above his head as if grasping for the skittering cloth. His other hand, his left one, rested on his chest. His stomach cavity was as open as his dull eyes. So was his mouth. What had his last sound been like? There were flies. There are always flies, even when temperatures are too low to give them more than a day’s life.
A boy of no more than five sat beside the corpse, his dirty little hand resting in the hand the corpse had placed on its chest. His little legs dangled in the trench. His head was bowed, chin resting on his chest, his back to us. He had a camel-coloured coat – I remember that coat – with a dark brown soft collar. He was as motionless as all of the others, and because he didn’t move as the flies crawled on him, we knew what we were going to see but could not help ourselves. One of those nightmares you can’t switch off.
The reality was worse than that.
I was closest to him. As I came up to him, and steeled myself to look, he moved. That was more shocking than anything else. He turned his head to look at me. His brown eyes were huge, in a small face as round as the moon. That was when Les said, ‘Fuck it.’
None of us attempted to free him from the corpse he held on to. We sat on the grass in front of him, and spoke as if he wasn’t there. James started it.
‘Poor little sod. What do you think?’
‘He won’t make it on his own. He’ll starve out here.’ That was Les, replying. I wished that he hadn’t. Then nothing; as if they had nothing to say. Then Les, as if there hadn’t been a gap in the conversation.
‘We can’t bury them. It will take all bloody day.’
‘I’ll get some Pioneers up here. Don’t worry, they’ll be here in a couple of days.’ James again.
I asked them, ‘What about the kid?’
Then nothing again. What the bloody hell was the matter with them all of a sudden? Then Les, ‘It would be kinder if this didn’t go on for him, Charlie. Look at him. He can’t even find his own food.’
‘You mean, kill him, don’t you?’
James wouldn’t meet my eye. Les said, ‘Look on it as being kinder.’ He had almost repeated himself. Then, ‘He wouldn’t be here if he had anyone else.’ The odd thing is that his voice sounded almost tender.
James coughed. I think that
