A New Kind of War (28 page)

‘Since last year, sir.’ The ice creaked with that warningly-repeated ‘sir’. ‘Just about this time, it was—August.’

August was Normandy, near enough. ‘In France, that would be—?’

This time Hewitt didn’t reply instantly. ‘Beg pardon, sir—?’

In Normandy, August 1944, Audley would have been how old—nineteen? With maybe two years’ military service, and a qualified tank commander … and maybe never kissed a girl, other than his mother (who wasn’t a girl) and his sister (if he had a sister; but who still didn’t qualify, anyway); and now he was in Germany, Anno Domini 1945 (or AUC whatever-it-was), where girls were to be had from Otto Schild for a bar of soap, and a packet of Players Medium Navy Cut, and a bar of ration-chocolate (all three together? Or individually? He wasn’t sure of the rate-of-exchange yet, anyway)—

‘Fraternization reg’lations don’t apply to
us
, sir.’ Hewitt changed the subject quite out of the blue. ‘Or … not to the orfficers of this unit: they ’ave the right to … to interrogate former enemy persons, oosoever an‘
where-
soever—’ The precision as well as the emphasis of the wording indicated its official source—‘—as may be necessary in the course uv their duties—their duties—’ The little man’s memory betrayed him for a second ‘ —’avin‘ the appropriate orders an’ authority thereto, all signed an‘ sealed, like—’ Hewitt gave up the unequal struggle there, aware that he was obviously extemporizing the incantation now, and that Major Fattorini must know he was, and changed gear and accelerated.

So he wasn’t going to get any more about Audley, Fred understood: even, he had already got more than he had any right to expect. But then …

‘I think I’ll try and get some sleep now—’ He stretched his legs as best he could, knowing that there was too much in the back of the little car to permit any more room; but at least he wasn’t right next to that
whirring
engine! ‘—wake me up when we get to … wherever it is … okay?’

‘Right!’ Hewitt settled back comfortably himself, like the old soldier he was.

Out of the corner of his eye, Fred saw the trees—delicately-leafed birch branches and dark, uncompromising evergreens, rocket-stiff—swim past, against a grey sky.

One last try, perhaps—

‘What’s Major Kenworthy got in the Hippo then, d’you think?’ He tried to sound sleepy and not-very-interested.

Once again, no instant reply. ‘I’m sure I can’t say, sir.’ Pause. ‘Major Kenworthy … ’e likes gadgets, an‘ bits-an’-bobs of machinery—‘eavy stuff.’

Heavy stuff
—

People
were
light stuff
: you didn’t need a Hippo to carry off people.

Although …
that poor devil, last night, when he was dead
…
he’s seemed heavy, even though there was nothing to him really: but then the dead were always heavy
—
heavy and awkward, as though they objected to going, and were set on causing as much trouble as they could to the living, if it was the last thing they did
…
Which of course it was
—

Kenworthy: that was his ten-tonner—his Leyland Hippo Mark 2A, making heavy weather of every dip and undulation, with the weight of its contents …

Kenworthy, Liddell, Ingrams, Carver-Hart, Simpson—
Simpkins?
—
Simpkins … M’Crocodile—
McCorquodale, damn it!
And Then Macallister—
not Macalligator: mustn’t say that!
—
and then Colbourne, de Souza and Audley (that was easy, like learning the dates of the Kings and Queens of England, which mathematicians always had trouble with, by some perverse illogic: 1066-1087—1087-1100—1100-1135 … the Normans were easy, and the Stuarts and Hanoverians too, later … 1714-1727—1727-1760—“
George the Third remarked
with a smile/ There are seventeen-sixty yards in a mile”
—
but the Plantagenets and the Wars-of-the-Roses lot were confusing … not like Colbourne, de Souza and Audley!)

Mustn’t dream again: must just go out like a light and sleep, with no silly nightmares: must remember that the war’s almost over
—
almost over
—
almost over-and-over-and-over
—
over-here, if not out-there
…
and I’m over-here, and not out-there
—
ignoble thought! Ignoble-sensible thought
—
sensible-ignoble thought
—
sensible-sensible thought
—

Huge, amorphous nightmare: yawning great lorry, heavy-loaded with inadequately-secured Bailey bridge components, bouncing up-and-down and shifting, because the silly-bloody driver was exceeding the speed restriction
—
must slow down, get off the road
—
get off the road
—
!

Fred shook himself awake, with his mouth full of foul, leathery tongue and empty-stomach taste, quite absurdly sorry for himself, and yet also ashamed of his over-imagined horrors. Because this wasn’t Italy, the home of all Bailey bridges …
this was Germany, of course
!

And it was doubly Germany, because there were trees everywhere—tall, trees, rising up on every side—and ahead, as they swung round a hairpin corner, with the engine
whirring
at his back—

And no bloody-great lorry, either: as they
whirred
round the bend he saw the open road ahead, rising steeply—just a foul dream—

What
—
?

He sat bolt upright, and hit his head on the roof of the
car
—
ouch!

‘How long have I been asleep—?’ He addressed the driver thickly, only realizing gratefully in the next second it was still Driver Hewitt in broad daylight, and not some grinning stranger whom he’d never met and couldn’t remember.

‘You’ve ’ad a right good sleep—quiet as a baby.‘ Hewitt grinned at him encouragingly. ’Your ‘ead did knock against the side a bit … but it didn’t seem to worry you none—’ They came to the end of the straight stretch and Hewitt spun the wheel again, twisting the little car round another hairpin ‘—so I didn’t think to wake you.’

Fred squinted ahead, at another stretch of trees heavy with summer, and an open road still climbing ahead. And then turned quickly to peer out of the divided rear-window behind them.

They drew away from the corner, and the road behind was as empty as the road in front. ‘Where’s the convoy?’ His voice was still thick with sleep: he could hear it outside himself, beyond the eternal
whirring
of the engine, but without any other sound.

‘Oh, we lost that—about ten miles back, before Detmold,’ replied Hewitt cheerfully. ‘I laid back for a bit, round Paderborn—the proper road’s no good there jus’ now … I think they’re repairin’ a bridge what’s fallen down … An‘ then I went like the clappers, an’ I took the wrong turnin‘ … But you don’t need to worry none.’

‘I—what—?’ Words failed him.

‘They knows the way.’ Hewitt agreed with himself. ‘They drove it enough times, so they oughta know it. An’ we—we’re spot on, like.‘

‘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 …
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—?’ 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—

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 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.’

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 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 more than that—
much more
, thought Fred with a cold inward certainty—he was a damned, bloody-dangerous character, who’d shop his mother without a second thought, and then buy drinks in the mess afterwards to celebrate.

‘I was just thinking, sir—’ Oddly enough, that certainty steadied him. But, then again, not oddly at all: it was uncertainty that was unsteadying. The only thing that was odd was that he hadn’t been more frightened at Osios Konstandinos. But then he had had Kyri with him, of course. And he had only been an innocent bystander, too—

‘That’s what I want you to do—go on!’ What was wrong with the voice was that it had no origins. It wasn’t public school and Sandhurst (as he had a right to expect), or Oxbridge, or BBC, or Home Counties or Scottish or soft Irish (Welsh was not to be expected)—
it was from nowhere, by God
!

‘I didn’t mean that.’ He mustn’t think any more about that voice: it would only unsettle him again. ‘I was thinking about what a friend of mine once said—not so long ago, actually.’ As he smiled at the Brigadier he felt his unwashed, unshaven face crinkle with the effort. ‘He advised me against getting mixed up with units like this one. He said I should stick to bridge-building … and mine-clearance and bomb-disposal. Because that would be healthier for me, he said.’