Making It Up (14 page)

 

He stared out over the edge of the trench into the darkness. It was three o'clock in the morning. Oh, he had done this kind of thing before—maneuvers on Salisbury Plain. But that was then and this was now—an insane, incredible now that should not be. And the darkness of Salisbury Plain was an amiable, homely darkness, whereas this darkness was malign; at any moment it might hurl machine-gun bullets or a grenade at you. The darkness of Salisbury Plain was a great calm circle, but this darkness was broken by the jagged shapes of hills, it was lit every now and then with flares or a shower of green or red tracer, it emptied into the whine of shells.

He thought: This is not happening. This could not be for real—this place on the other side of the world to which he had been shipped and flown, a piece of human freight. He was not here. Really, he was in his room in a small house on a council estate in Newcastle-upon-Tyne; he was back in the time of reason, two years ago, his books spread out on the table—R. H. Tawney and G. D. H. Cole and the Hammonds. There was a cup of Nescafé with wrinkled skin on it at his elbow, the lino was chilly under his feet, downstairs his mother had
Housewives' Choice
on the wireless. That was where he was really, not here.

They were on stand-to. Somewhere out there in the darkness, on the other side of the river, the Chinese were moving. Many Chinese. The enemy. The map that they had been shown had this looping river, the Imjin; north of it lay the menacing territory out of which would come the enemy attack, to the south were their positions, Twenty-ninth Brigade—the Gloucesters to the left, the Belgian battalion to the right, themselves in the center, the Ulsters behind, in reserve. He had craned to see this map, spread out in front of them by an impatient officer who had more pressing things to do than brief a bunch of newly arrived national servicemen. He was struck by the bleak number references accorded to the hills—the height in meters, 257 and 194 and 398 and so on—and it occurred to him, even in the trauma of his hideous arrival, that they must have names. The people here would call them something. He had remembered the Lake District, where he had walked—Cat Bells and Langdale Pike, Skiddaw and Saddleback.

He thought he saw the darkness move. His stomach churned; his fingers tightened on his pistol. And then the movement defined itself: the shifting branch of a bush. A little gust of wind.

In his kit bag there was the War Office pamphlet: “Notes on Korea, August 1950.” He had read this several times on the voyage out, sitting on deck amid the wastes of the Indian Ocean, or lying in his bunk in the cramped cabin shared with three others. Officers' quarters, relative comfort; elsewhere were the teeming fetid tiers below decks.

 

Why indeed? But he knew why. It was because that is what history does to people. It picks them up by the scruff of the neck and puts them where they do not want to be. It scuppers them; it condemns them to national service and then throws them this, as an extra treat. He was interested in history; at school, he had sat at the feet of a charismatic history master; he had won the sixth-form history prize. At this moment, he would prefer to stand aside from history.

A sound. Scurrying. Someone coming. He tensed again. Then the reassurance of a hoarse whisper—a Geordie whisper, a Fusilier whisper, one of them, an NCO going from trench to trench: they could stand down for an hour, brew up. The men alongside him shuffled with relief, slumped in the trench, lit cigarettes.

 

Ah. So that was what they were there for. For noble, enlightened reasons. Never mind that the goalposts had now been subtly shifted and it was the Chinese that they must fight, and what had
they
been told, one asked? And a fat lot of consolation was all this high-mindedness out in the middle of the Indian Ocean, or in a transit camp in Japan, and least of all here, now, in a trench on a freezing hillside with people who intended to kill you somewhere out there in the darkness.

He was twenty-one. He was interested in social justice, the music of Mahler, Newcastle United, girls, books, and argument. He had been reading his way through Newcastle Central Library since he was fourteen. He played rugby, cricket, and the violin. He was a member of the Labour Party, the Youth Hostel Association, and the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society.

He owned a bicycle, a violin, a gramophone, three Beethoven symphonies and two of Mahler's, the
Concise Oxford Dictionary
, the complete works of Evelyn Waugh and eighty-nine other books, a compass, a map of the Lake District, and not much else.

Someone handed him a mug of tea. He must have dozed off for an instant, leaning up against the wall of the trench, and was jolted back to consciousness by a thud and then an explosion that he recognized as mortar, quite near. Gunfire too, closer than before. The platoon commander was telling them to get back on watch. He stared out into the darkness, which was leeched with light, a proposal of dawn, and was hectic now with flashes, flares, tracer, the sound of firing, of explosions. Intensified, continuous rather than spasmodic—something going on out there, down there, over toward the other company positions, three miles away, nearer to the river.

“That's Z Company getting it. And the Gloucesters.” His own former platoon sergeant was next to him in the trench, the familiar voice somehow reassuring, known from Catterick, from Salisbury Plain, from that other life a world away. Most of the men around him here were strangers, regulars and reservists, their Northumbrian accents the only unity. The officer commanding this platoon to which he had been attached as observer and second in command was a regular soldier, the men a mix of veterans and the raw, newly arrived national servicemen.

Daylight came. Now you could see the lumpy green hills again, this queer artificial terrain that had seemed alien as soon as he set eyes on it—no landscape he had ever seen was like this, with the row upon row of jagged peaks, seemingly endless, receding into the distance. W Company was stuck up on the side of one of these, looking down on the road that ran to the river, which was shallow and easily forded, no obstacle to the enemy—the briefing officer had told them that. They could see a bend of the road, with armored cars and lorries and sometimes one of the Eighth Hussars' Centurion tanks, and a stream of the carts on which Korean porters brought up supplies. The river was invisible, beyond the next peaks, on one of which Z Company was dug in. And that was ablaze, it seemed—smoke, flying tracer, a barrage of noise.

The sergeant was looking at him: “You've lost your rose, sir.” It seemed like a reproach.

They had been issued yesterday with red and white roses for St. George's Day, flown in specially from Japan, and many men still wore them, tucked into their battledress or their beret—limp, incongruous tokens.

Sir. The sergeant was older than he was. That “sir” always gave him a twinge of embarrassment. Army hierarchy offended his deepest instincts. The army trawled its catch and selected those who had higher educational qualifications or were apparently more intelligent—categories not always mutually compatible—and set them in authority. He was an officer because he was a grammar school boy and, yes, he was clever. And, yes, an army has to have a command structure. None of this made him feel easy with the sergeant's “sir.” He and the sergeant shared a background—they spoke the same language, recognized the same codes; the crude dictation of the army had thrust him with public school boys whose attitudes and assumptions he despised, and who in their turn patronized grammar school types.

He knew that if the officer in command were killed or wounded he would have to lead this platoon, and a role that he had found possible at the barracks or on Salisbury Plain, if unnatural and occasionally alarming, became out here a nightmare. He thought of the time he had got lost on an exercise, with thirty men, and brought them back to base ten hours late. Here, a mistake could cost men's lives. His training had all been in anticipation of this moment; a hypothetical event, back then, but now an incredible reality amid these foreign hills. Others depended on him; somehow, the sobriety of this knowledge helped to steady him.

The sun came up; a bright, clear, spring day. There were new green leaves on the stunted, windswept trees, and shrubs that had purple flowers. And every now and then the ground shook, the hills were exploding, sending up bushes of white smoke, and the whole place was frenzied, manic, treacherous. He found that he was superficially calm, could do what he had to do, function correctly. But there was cold fear within. The thing was to keep it there—tamped down, in check. The routines of trench existence were a kind of solace; he was constantly busy—supervising the rotation of guards, checking signals procedures, overseeing the storage of greatcoats and surplus kit now that night was gone.

They had another brew up; they ate. He was surprised that he was able to do so, was even hungry. The ration packs were American and their contents seemed exotic—pork, beans, and pineapple slices, which were a luxury at home, a tin of them opened up for Christmas, or for Sunday supper. He sat eating, and the taste brought back his home, and the time before the army staked its claim.

He hated national service. In the initial weeks he had bitterly resented the way in which every minute of his time was allocated. He hated the bull, he hated having to change his clothes several times a day, he hated uniforms and weapons and sleeping every night on a thin hard bed, the blankets of which had to be folded in precise alignment every single morning. He hated the hours spent blacking boots and cleaning equipment. As an officer, he was spared the daily grind of basic chores, but his life was still commandeered. He had survived by counting the months, the weeks, the days. He was a rational being; he knew that this experience was finite. And then it had landed him with this.

The day inched on. There was intense activity down on the road, and several times mortar bombs fell close by. The action was still at some distance, and another sound was to be heard now. Bugles. A haunting sound that rose and fell, insistent against the crackle of rifle fire, the rattle of machine guns, the explosions. Chinese bugles—their system of command and communication.

He was straining his ears to evaluate this eerie, uncomfortable music when the officer came running from trench to trench: they were to prepare to advance. Z Company had been forced to retreat from the key hill position beyond them, which commanded the road junction. Both Z and Y Companies had withdrawn and were regrouping farther south. Their own company was to attempt an assault on the Chinese positions on the crucial hill: “Get cracking. We move in fifteen minutes.”

It was then that time went haywire. Before, he had been aware of the passage of hours and minutes, of the turning of the world. Now, all was one continuous moment, a helter-skelter process of kitting up, scrambling through undergrowth, sliding on slopes covered with loose shale, following the man ahead, listening for orders, plunging this way and that through the trackless landscape. And all the while the gunfire getting nearer, a whole tree flying apart once, hit by a mortar bomb, an aircraft roaring overhead, an American fighter, spawning silver sticks that fell and whined.