Quartered Safe Out Here (15 page)

This was something new. In my previous contacts with the enemy, everything had been split-second in crisis, with nothing to do but react at speed, snapshooting, grabbing for a grenade, throwing it, shooting again. There had been no time to think; it had been scramble and shoot and hope, trying to keep cool and yet move and act like lightning—in a way like a goal-mouth scramble or a rally at the net in tennis or a loose scrum near the line when the ball is like soap and there are bodies flying everywhere.

But in that railway wagon it was more like the
moment when you're clear with the ball and know you have a few yards to move in and a few seconds to think about it. There wasn't much time, but enough: to pick a target, hang for an instant on the aim to make sure, take the first pressure according to the manual—and then the second.

It was exciting; no other word for it, and no explanation needed, for honest folk. We all have kindly impulses, fostered by two thousand years of Christian teaching, gentle Jesus, and love thy neighbour, but we have the killer instinct, too, the murderous impulse of the hunter…but one must not say so. The young men going out to the Gulf felt obliged to tell the cameras that they felt nothing personal against the Iraqis, and wished them no harm—but I know, for I have felt it, that when an Iraqi came in their sights, the blood-lust would take them hot and strong. Never mind the excuse that this is what a soldier is trained for, that it is his duty, that like 007 he is licensed to kill; the truth is that he gets a kick out of it—which may be one reason why, when he is asked later: “Did you ever kill a Jap (or a German or an Iraqi)?” he will often dodge the question. Other reasons include a decent reticence, an understandable wish not to dwell on unpleasant memories, a reluctance to be thought a line-shooter or a psychopath, and a sense that the question is in doubtful taste. (The best answer, incidentally, is “Why do you want to know?” That makes them think.)

Such considerations don't arise when the human target appears in the V of the backsight. You're just
thankful for the chance and concentrate on keeping the aim steady—which is not easy when you're excited, and fearful that they'll get away. First pressure and second pressure is all very well for the first five shots, but by the time I was at the bottom of my magazine I must have been snatching at the trigger, and Nick was pausing between shots to observe: “Ye're firin' low an' left, Jock—that's it!” And then suddenly pointing, as he reloaded, to a fallen figure and shouting: “Git that booger—he's nobbut wounded!”

There are many grey areas around the Geneva convention, I suppose: I know a sergeant from another platoon at one stage yelled: “Ower theer! They're gittin' the wounded away!” and directed a Bren gun accordingly. A moment later he stumbled into the wagon beside us, shaking his head violently and striking his ears. “Ah's gone deef! Ah can't ’ear a bloody thing!” And he couldn't; even a rifle fired within a few feet of him was inaudible. (It turned out to be a medical curiosity: a shell had burst close to him on the advance, but his hearing had been fine until he was directing fire up the slope, and had gone stone deaf in an instant. A few hours later his hearing came back equally suddenly.)

Then it must have been all over, for the firing stopped and the section was reassembling among the ruins by the railway line, no one missing, no one wounded, everyone with that dazed, weary look that men wear after battle. We must have reached our objective for the day, for that was where we dug in, not far from
the railway track—the derailed wagon which Nick and I had occupied became the section H.Q. I brewed up, and it was evening, and patrols were moving across the gentle slope to our front, sweeping the ground. We were hacking out our slit-trenches in the stony earth and boiling out our rifles when Corporal Peel came back from Company H.Q. and told me to take a couple of men and have a look at a small square building away on our left front, just to make sure it was unoccupied.

The last thing I needed just then was a half-mile hike over broken ground. For some days I'd been suffering from that military curse, foot-rot; it had been getting worse all day, and my feet felt like fiery sponges. But there it was; I took Morton, who had a tommy-gun, and Wedge, and we set off for the building, scanning right and left for wounded Japs. There weren't any; indeed, on this flank there was only an occasional body sprawled on the rocky earth with the flies buzzing in the dying sunlight. The patrols had swept the area, but not as far as the little square building which stood about three hundred yards away on level ground where the slope petered out.

It looked deserted enough, four broken walls and no roof, and while it was just the spot for a sniper, with a good field of fire on our forward positions, I doubted if Jap was in residence. I was in that resentful, foot-sore state where I could convince myself that this was a ridiculous, unnecessary chore; it wasn't reasonable, after we'd had our ration of war for the day, that
there should be any more to come. That is how stupid you can be when you're tired. Away to our right there was the occasional sound of a shot, and once a rattle of Bren fire, but I approached that house knowing it would be empty, with no more precaution than signing to Wedge and Morton to watch the sides while I went in through the ruined doorway.

He was there, though, and if he hadn't been wounded he'd have had me. I had taken a cautious step over the broken door-frame, and was glancing left when I heard the clatter to my right and he was rearing up from behind a pile of rubble, grabbing for his rifle, and I fired and he gave the kind of “ouch!” that you make when you stub your toe and fell face down on the tangle of broken masonry. I whipped another round up the spout, jumping back to get my shoulders against the wall, but there was no one else in the little ruined room. His body was settling, twitching a little, then he was still. Strange, I can't remember his face at all, but I can still see his head as he lay prone, with the grey stubble on his skull, and beside it was a small wooden plaque which I have in a drawer somewhere: it's about the size of a visiting card, with what looks like a sacred figure among sunrays stamped on it, and a little hole which suggests it was worn on a string. One of his puttees was off, and there was a bloody rag wrapped round his wounded leg.

The shot brought the other two at the double, Morton crying: “Is ’e dead?” I said he was, and Morton stepped forward and put a single shot into his back. I
witnessed a similar incident, later, when a “dead” Jap came to life after a
burst
from a Thompson hit him, but this one did no more than jerk with the shot. We turned him over to see if he was carrying anything, but he seemed to be just a private soldier.

I had to take a moment to draw breath, feeling shaken at the unexpectness of the thing and my own folly (never think he
can't
be there, that's when the bastard's sure to be there), and then we took a brief scout about fifty yards beyond the building—going the second mile, if you like. But that was far enough; shock followed by relief doesn't cure burning feet, and I was tired enough to weep. How tired I didn't realise until we were retracing our steps past the ruined building, and from far behind us there was a shot which passed overhead—the kind of distant speculative effort I'd heard when I was first fired on, years ago, at Meiktila. I'd been quite impressed, then; now, with my soles hot and raging, and having had the fright of my life from the wounded Jap, and being bloody weary and hungry and thirsty and sick to death of everything, I just pulled up and looked back and gave vent to my feelings with a great roar of: “Oh, bugger off!” Two more shots came, passing harmlessly above us, and I noticed that Wedge and Morton didn't even duck. It wasn't coolness under fire; it's just that sometimes you're so brassed off that you couldn't care less, and he was so far away he couldn't have hit a barn door with the knocker.

Two hours later everything was fine. It had been a long, dirty day, but it ended well, in a drowsy feeling
of contentment. I reported finding the Jap to Peel, and I seem to remember that an o.p. was being set up in the little building, and I know we had no stags to stand because all through the night our patrols were busy in the no man's land in front of our positions. Peel thought that we were almost alone in having reached our objective, and that the attacks on the other sides of the town hadn't gone so well, but tomorrow would see the finish of it.

I remember standing in a group round the fire, sipping hot tea and smoking happily, having bathed my feet and smothered them in the M.O.'s foot-powder, listening to the ribaldries, and all the shelling and the shooting on the slope and my plunge down that blasted well (oh, God, why did You give me such a talent for the ridiculous?), and the horrid moment when I heard the clatter in that little room and fired by pure reflex action, and the distant sniper—they all seemed a long time ago, and I was too dozzened to care about them.

We walked slowly back to the rusted railway wagon where we would sleep head to toe along its length, and some were already settling into their blankets while others stood in the warm gloom chatting; Wattie and Wedge were arguing about the North Star, and Grandarse was yawning that he was aboot tired, and Parker was telling us about Shanghai before the war, and Peel was saying he didn't think we would be going in again tomorrow. As on the night after the temple wood duffy, there was no talk of the battle, but neither was there the silence that had been cast then by the
deaths of Gale and Little. We sensed that it had been a good day;
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we had got there and killed a lot of Japanese for only ten wounded in the company; Long John had played a stormer, and the company was pleased with its commander and with itself. It was bedtime, and all well; the fight was done, and the drought and rage of extreme toil, the breathlessness and the faintness, had been soothed by supper, tea, and tobacco, and the happy warriors were settling down.

“’Ey, Dook,” said Forster, “git thee arse off the pillow!”

“My arse isn't on your pillow, Foshie,” said the Duke. “It's my feet.”

“Weel, they stink bloody rotten! They want boilin' oot!”

“I suppose you think your feet smell like Madame Dubarry's tits!” said the Duke, mildly incensed, and there was a long pause. Then:

“W'ee's tits did ye say?” asked Grandarse.

“Madame Dubarry's.”

“W'ee th' ’ell's she?” asked Wattie.

“A French king's tart,” said Peel. “Didn't you see the picture?”

“Mistress of one of the Louie's, if you must know,”
said the Duke, yawning. “Which one, Jock—fourteenth, fifteenth?”

“Dunno. Think of a number.”

“Shurroop, ye eddicated gits! W'at picter, Tommo?”

“Dubarry was a Lady. Lucille Ball was in it, and that Red Skelton feller.”

“By God!” rasped Forster. “Loo-seel Ball! Ah could dae wi' that alangside us. Ah'd give ’er soom stick!”

“Lucky Miss Ball, to be in California,” murmured the Duke.

“She's awreet. Ah fancy Susanna Foster meself,” said Wedge, with dreamy reverence. “By, she's a loovly lass, that! Sings, an' a'—she can't ’alf twilt
^*
it!”

“I remember her,” said the Duke. “Blonde, sort of ice maiden. C above Top C, very hard, clear voice. Nice legs.”

“Nivver mind bloody legs!” cried Grandarse, keeping to the essentials. “Warraboot this French bint's tits, Dook? Waddid they smell like?”

“How the hell should I know? I was merely making a comparison with Foshie's revolting feet. Go to sleep!”

“An' dream of great tits of ’istory,” chuckled Parker. “They reckon Susanna Foster's legs is better'n Marlene Dietrich's or Betty Grable's,” said Wedge. “See ’er in
Phantom o' th' Opera
—”

“Ah seen that fillum, an' nivver saw ’er bloody
legs!” objected Wattie. “She was wearin' lang goons a' the time!”

“Well, aye, man! It was a ’istorical picter, in th' old days, in Paris—”

“Famous for various Louies, Madame Dubarry, and tits,” groaned the Duke. “Why don't I keep my mouth shut?”

“That was the film abaht the feller in the sewer, with a mask on ’is face, ’cos ’e'd been given the acid—”

“Claude Rains,” said Wedge.

“Claude Rains?” cried Grandarse, on a new tack. “That minds us! ’Ey, Jock—did ye ivver read that book, The Cat's Revenge, by Claude Balls?”

“I know,” I said, “and The Nail in the Banisters, by R. Stornoway.”

Forster, naturally, knew many more titles, too obscene to mention, and that started them on limericks, each one concluded by the singing, in unison, of “That was a cute little rhyme, sing us another one, just like the other one, sing us another one, do-o-oo!” It must have lulled me to sleep, for when I was awakened by Grandarse's snoring and had elbowed him into silence, the rest of the wagon was in heavy-breathing repose, except for Wedge, who was muttering that Susanna Foster could have been a great opera singer but she made more money in Hollywood, and any roads she was better-looking than Lucille Ball or Madame Doo-whatsit…