Making It Up (15 page)

Afterward, he had no idea what had sustained him through the attack, how he had been able to go on, to stumble up that hill, to fire a rifle, and fire again, swept up it seemed in some unstoppable, unquestionable progress. Once, he had fallen, hitting his knee against a rock, and the pain had kept him momentarily slumped there, his heart banging, a brief instant that raised the possibility of simply staying like that, of not getting up, not going on. And that instant had fused at once with the next; he was on his feet again, forging ahead, going on up that hillside, from foothold to foothold, rock to rock, toward the flashing summit from which came bullets and grenades.

The assault line ahead of him was within range of the enemy positions now: the men were firing continuously. And the Chinese were screaming, up there invisible beyond the thick curtain of scrub below the brow of the hill—a thin, chilling noise that was presumably intended to do just that—curdle the blood. It was at this point that everything seemed to compact, so that later he could remember only that at one moment they were going on and up, and then suddenly men were running back toward them, shouting at them to pull back. He remembered an intensified barrage of fire from the summit, he saw other leaping figures beyond their own men, mustard-colored uniforms snaking through the bushes, waves of them, it seemed. A mortar bomb fell so near that the blast made him stagger. An officer was coming down the slope above, waving and shouting. He realized that the assault had failed, and then he was sliding and stumbling his way back down the hillside they had just climbed, and there were bullets whistling past.

They regrouped half a mile or so farther back, on high ground, near to the positions taken up by X and Y Companies. The rest of the day was spent digging in, a relentless task battering at the hard stony soil with picks and shovels. His direction of a group of men was interrupted by the platoon commander: “We'll have to do without you for a bit. Pick a carrying party and get going—there's a mortar and ammunition to be brought up from HQ.”

He was shown the map, given further instructions. Brigade HQ lay a few miles back. He should lead his group off the hill and join up with the road: “Report to Major Harrison. Watch it, though—you could run into an enemy assault party.”

They made their way down the hillside, the men relieved to be released from digging in, but jumpy as they wove their way through trees and scrub. One of them grabbed his arm as they approached an outcrop of rock: “Sir! Something moved behind there . . .” It was a man from his own platoon back home, a stunted, anxious lad from Ashington, as ill at ease in the army as he was himself. He told the men to get down, and left them lying there as he crept round through bushes until he could see beyond the outcrop, his heart racing. He found nothing, and turned to wave the men on. The road was now clearly visible, with its confusion of activity. They would be safe down there.

There were jeeps, armored cars, carts, lorries, the occasional tank. A lorryload of wounded passed them, ashen-faced men clinging grimly to the sides, shaken and jolted as the vehicle navigated the ruts and potholes. At one point he halted his men to check with a sergeant who was bent over a stalled motorbike as to how far there was still to go. As they spoke, the sky was ripped by two U.S. fighters; they circled and then came hurtling down toward the rise beyond the road. The sergeant stared up at them: “The enemy's got a mortar position somewhere in there—that's what those boys are after.” White smoke plumed up from the hillside; the fighters disappeared.

Once on the road, they could make quicker progress, and he was relieved to see the tents, vehicles and bustle that identified HQ, through which he had passed only a few days ago, on his way to the line. A time of innocence, that now seemed.

Major Harrison was a small, gingery man, preoccupied and brisk. “You're who? Okay—I know, we're expecting you, there was a signal. I've got another job for you. There's some replacements for your company coming through at any moment, and you can take them up to the line. Send your men on ahead with the mortar. What's wrong?”

His expression must have betrayed him. He found himself dismayed at the idea of leaving the men on their own. “The lance corporal can take over,” said the major impatiently—that clipped Sandhurst diction that he now knew so well but that still seemed to come from another planet. “Collect the equipment and get them going. You'd better go to the mess tent and hang on there till these chaps turn up.”

He was given tea and a meal. He sat about, feeling displaced, uncomfortable, surprised by some unsuspected need that made him want to be not here but with his men, with the unit. An hour passed, and another. After a further thirty minutes he sought out the major, who was conferring with another officer and looked up impatiently. “What's the problem? Oh, didn't they tell you? There's been a transport hitch—those men won't show up till later. You'd better get back to the line on your own, pronto.”

It was now late afternoon. There should be no difficulty about reaching the unit before darkness fell, but he resolved to try to get a lift if at all possible. In the event, every jeep or truck that passed him on the road was crammed; he resigned himself to the walk, suddenly grateful for this spell of solitude, the release from the monotonous swearing and repartee of the men, the sense of a fragile independence. Ahead, he could see the smoke of explosions, he could hear bursts of gunfire, fighters swept across the sky; he was going back into all that, and there was no alternative, but he was able to savor this brief respite. He felt concerned about his carrying party. Would they have made it back all right? Would they have identified the right hillside, and the route up to the company position? He felt guilt at having had to abandon them—pointlessly as it turned out.

These fears were compounded as he reached the line of hills and himself had some difficulty in identifying the right crest. He left the road and set off up the hillside, panicking at points when he thought he might be losing his way. This landscape was confusingly repetitive: it rose and fell, and each incline offered you a false crest, beyond which was a dip and then a farther slope. He had tried to fix his direction on the way down by noting features like a prominent rock or tree (again, walking in the Lake District came achingly to mind), and it was when he paused to consider a particular rock that a Chinese soldier stepped out from behind it, looking directly at him.

He reached for his pistol at the same moment as the Chinese drew back his arm, flung a grenade, and then vanished.

The grenade fell short, into a clump of bushes, and he was on the ground before it exploded, his face buried in the grass. Dirt and twigs and stones spattered down onto him. There was a belt of small trees to his left, and he began to edge toward the cover of these, watching the rock, expecting another grenade, another of those sudden figures, so instantly perceived as hostile, alien.

But nothing happened. This slice of hillside was apparently empty again. Presumably he had been judged not worth further investigation. Or did they think him the forerunner of an attack and were biding their time? He waited for a while, then moved forward cautiously under cover of the trees. The rock terrified him, and he swung round to keep it parallel, but when he could see behind it there was nothing there, and beyond he recognized with relief a gully that lay immediately below their own position.

He reported the encounter when at last he got back. The officer said laconically that he had been a bit lucky: “The chap was out having a look-see, probably. Thought there might be more of you. Anyway, you shooed him off. The new mortar's in position. I gather they roped you in for another job.”

All day, they watched and waited. From time to time, news and information flew through the lines, arriving on the field telephones, passed from trench to trench: the Gloucesters were getting it badly, the enemy had bypassed the road, were moving behind their own positions. The word came more than once: “There are bloody thousands of them.”

Night came. Another stretch of that treacherous darkness. They had gone twenty-four hours already without sleep, and those who were not on watch lay in the bottom of the trenches, clobbered with exhaustion. He did so himself, when his turn came, and fell at once into some pit of semiconsciousness that was laced with gunfire, bugles, and screams. He surfaced to find the sergeant shaking him, and shot up wildly, reaching for his pistol. But the sergeant was only telling him that he was due on watch again. The nightmare of his brief sleep gave way to the awful truth of that night: the noisy flashing darkness, the grim uncertainty. Nobody seemed to know what was going on, where the enemy were, how they were moving, whether their own positions were holding on.

All around him, there were Tyneside voices. They brought an incongruous homeliness to this benighted place. They evoked his city, and the Tyne Valley, and Morpeth and Accrington and all the places that he knew. He could tell where a man came from by subtle inflections, by the way he used a word, by the words that he used. He could place others, too: the officers' voices with their identifying vowel sounds, their overtones of the BBC, of masters at school, of his family doctor—the tones of authority. It seemed extraordinary that this entire elaborate social system could have crossed the world intact and asserted itself here among these Korean hills, amid this mayhem.

At daylight, orders came. They were to withdraw once more to a position half a mile farther back from the river, joining up with X and Y Companies. It was likely that the enemy would harass the withdrawal.

He anticipated attack at every step. Each line of rocks was a threat, each stand of trees. He was jolted out of his weariness by tension, waiting for the screams, the bugles, the grenades, as the company moved slowly across the hillsides. They were all on edge; he saw the sergeant scanning each rise ahead, silent and intent. He saw officers stop and turn their binoculars on the skyline, on the next ridge; he did the same himself. The place seemed to team with men, conspicuous and vulnerable—brown-clad figures moving through the scrub. His platoon was toward the front of the withdrawal; at one point they were within sight of the road, and saw trucks and lorries, a couple of tanks. From the hill beyond, there came mortar fire. And then, once more, U.S. planes came hurtling in, sweeping across that distant hill and the mortar flashes. In their wake there arose a line of dark red flame, a fiery snake against the green, and then great plumes of black smoke.

“That's napalm,” said the sergeant. “Filthy stuff. Fries them, poor buggers.”

Somehow, they arrived at the new position without attention from the enemy. All the noise was coming now from the range of hills beyond the road and nearer to the river, where the Gloucesters' positions were, and as the day went on, this intensified. They dug in, and lay there listening and watching. In their vicinity, there was little going on, just the occasional burst of fire from one of their own trenches as someone spotted movement. There was the sense that the enemy could be all around, waiting their moment.

Weary men brewed endless tea. Every hour or so, it seemed, he was handed a steaming mug, and drank automatically, grateful for a momentary alleviation of that nervous vigil. There were rumors now—word-of-mouth reports that hopped from trench to trench: the Gloucesters were surrounded, the entire brigade was going to pull out. He was so tired that he seemed to be beyond sensation, numbed into apathy, but with the talk of withdrawal he felt a rush of optimism. Never mind that after this there was heaven knew what else to come. Just to get away from these infested hills.

As darkness fell, the rumors were confirmed. There was to be a general withdrawal, by way of the road, the next day.

That night was quieter. They lay waiting—waiting for attack, waiting for dawn, for the prospect of getting out of this. There was speculation about their chances. He listened to the sergeant, who was acid about the order to use the road—“Bloody crazy. We'll be sitting ducks. We should keep to the high ground.”—and thought that he was probably right. But most of the men were apathetic, worn out, and demoralized by their situation. News was filtering through now about the level of their own casualties in the counterattack on the hill—as high as 50 percent it was said. Several of his own men had been killed, his companions on the voyage out from England, including a man who lived round the corner from his home, with whom he had played street games when they were children. He thought of the mother, who would not yet know what had happened, going innocently about her business, perhaps chatting to his own mother at the butcher's or the greengrocer, in a world of routine and normality.

When dawn came, there was a thick mist. They were all anxious to move, and the mist seemed like useful cover, but the order to get going did not come until midmorning, by which time the sun had broken through. There were U.S. planes swooping down frequently now, gunning for the Chinese mortar positions that threatened the road, and their own artillery trying to pick off machine-gun posts on the enemy-held hillsides.

They began to make their way down toward the road, following orders to report at designated checkpoints. He was surprised and impressed by the calculation of it all, the careful counting through of men, the determined imposition of some kind of order upon this anarchy. They wound their way over this now-familiar terrain—the grassy ridges, the stands of stumpy trees, the scrub and the sudden slopes covered with slippery shale—and he became aware of his blistered feet. He had taken his boots off at some point during the night, and had been startled to find his feet raw and bleeding. On the scale of things, this seemed a triviality; from the next trench he could hear the moans of a man who had taken a bullet through his thigh. He had put his socks and boots back on again, feeling vaguely ashamed. But now his feet felt as though he were walking on fireballs.