Slapton Sands (14 page)

‘Hiram Maxim was a genius,' he said to his son. And then he winked at Johnny and he died.

When Germany invaded Poland, Johnny Compton was a sergeant among the ranks of an American professional army numbering something under 200,000 men. Most of the infantry were armed with single-cartridge bolt-action Springfield rifles manufactured for the First World War. The cavalry boasted fewer than twenty tanks, and the senior officers were by and large West Pointers allocated field commands on the basis of age rather than any aptitude for strategy. It wasn't their fault. America hadn't fought a war for more than twenty years. The only experience of combat the army had was spates of sporadic strikebreaking prior to the Depression.

By the time Johnny Compton was shipped to England, America had sixteen million men under arms, two-thirds of them conscripted. The army had gone from being a refuge for criminals, chronic alcoholics and the dispossessed to a machine equipped for waging war on the world stage. Army pay had doubled. Overseas bases were provided with recreation officers. Rations were so generous that each man received a pound of meat a day. They were awash with
coffee, with fruit and vegetables, with chewing gum and chocolate and cigarettes.

Compton didn't dislike all the new men. Some of the new brass were an improvement. He'd been sent to give the benefit of his technical expertise when George Patton established his vast training camp in the Californian desert in the summer of 1942. There he'd been impressed by Patton's single-minded thoroughness, by the ruthless way in which he schooled the best of the new recruits and discarded those who didn't come up to scratch. War was principally about killing as many of the enemy as you could in the most efficient way possible, and Patton had seemed, to Johnny Compton, to have a good grasp of that. He'd even been invited to dine with the general. There'd been only twenty officers in the tent, and he couldn't afterwards recall having ever heard a speaker funnier or more profane.

It was the draft that bothered Compton. The volunteers were one thing, you could forgive them their inexperience for their commitment to the cause. But the draftees did not deserve to be getting what they were. It wasn't just the pay they drew and the rations they ate. Equipment, weaponry, transportation – everything had improved beyond measure since the outbreak of the war. Compton had been proud to wear the uniform when the pay had been piss poor and the chances of glory non-existent. Now he was forced to attend lectures on how to maintain the morale of men who might grow bored of drills and succumb to homesickness. He found himself marking men out for petty acts of retribution
for slights he knew in his injured heart were largely imagined. He harboured a particular grudge against New Yorkers. He didn't object to the Negro soldier. He never had. But New Yorkers, with their wheedling and their wisecracks and their sense of city-boy superiority, he was growing more and more to detest. He'd look at them, seated before him in their half-circle on the sand of an English beach, submitting to the illusion of cross-legged obedience, and he'd see the smirks spread with the speed of an epidemic among them when he opened his mouth and they heard him lecture them on Hiram Maxim's killing machine in an unschooled voice of the South. It was a good enough voice for George Patton's high table, he'd thought more than once. But it fostered a sort of furtive mockery among those dragged overseas to fight for their country from Queens, from Little Italy, with their peacetime professions and their paper qualifications from the public education system. The number men. The citizen soldiers. He sensed their civilian distaste for saluting, fatigues, kitchen patrol and kit inspection. Chickenshit was the term the draftees used for the everyday stuff of army life. ‘In the army but not of it' was the phrase frequently used to justify their sneering distaste for men like himself.

England, however, he liked. He'd come over on the
Queen Mary
, embarked from New York after a two-day furlough featuring one hooker, countless beers, a bottle of Wild Turkey bourbon and three fights if he didn't count the fight involving the hooker. He'd won his three fights, so far
as he'd been able to recollect. But the third, the one involving a saloon bar bouncer, had been tough. He'd embarked for Europe nursing bruised ribs and a jaw too sore for the doughnuts that were supposed to provide sustenance on the five-day voyage.

It was standing room only on the boat. He'd found himself in possession of greater space when what seemed like the majority of his comrades in arms embraced portholes and lavatory bowls and ship's rails to void their stomachs of doughnuts when the sea turned choppy a few miles out into the Atlantic. Johnny Compton, by contrast, discovered to his surprise that he was a natural sailor. Perhaps he should have joined the navy, he mused. He sipped coffee and dozed on his feet and hoped that what they had said about the ship being too fast for U-boats was true. The voyage gave him the opportunity to sober up. His jaw stopped hurting, and the bruises on his ribs purpled and yellowed in a pattern he admired in the steel mirror reflecting them when he eased off his shirt in the can. A lesser man might have resolved at that moment to avoid future confrontations with the doormen guarding the speakeasies of the Lower East Side. Johnny Compton had never seen himself as a lesser man. He reckoned his accent gave him a split-second edge. Opponents heard it and couldn't help but think of cornball pipes and slow days on hick porches squinting at the sun. Johnny was slow like a mongoose was slow confronting a cobra.

He kept himself to himself on the ship, easy enough
among reluctant sailors too busy fighting nausea to engage in conversation. Then they docked at some port in Ireland but were not allowed off the boat. A day later he climbed up on to the deck and saw the coast of England, the city of Liverpool bleak and smudged above a river dull with silt and shallow enough for the great Blue Riband liner he'd travelled aboard to need six tugs and a pilot boat to nurse it into harbour. England is in black and white, like a newsreel, like a lesser sort of movie, was his first impression. The city was soot-stained, cobbled, bomb-battered, grim.

He stopped in Liverpool only long enough to relish his status as a weapons expert called to the fray individually for what he knew and the value of what he could impart to others. It meant he didn't travel any longer with the herd. War had given him a freedom and a status that were still novelties. In the cocktail bar of the Adelphi Hotel, he admired his reflection, his new uniform, his officer's cap in the mirror behind the bar. He tipped slightly too lavishly and studied the English women. Like buds they were, he thought, with their pale faces and their puckered, painted-over lips. He thought them pale blooms after two or three Tom Collinses, these women, ripe enough for the picking.

He caught a ramshackle train to a big railway junction called Crewe and then a train full of narrow carriages to what a polite ticket inspector confirmed would be his final destination. The seats were cramped and greasy and there were blackout drapes over the windows as the train clanked
and he rocked and dozed through a series of fitful little stops.

When Johnny Compton awoke, it was light and he looked out of the window. The land was lush and green. It was another movie. Another country. He found himself sitting opposite two boys. They could have been ten or eleven, he supposed. They wore gas mask cases on canvas straps across pale-blue school blazers edged with a violet trim. The trim looked hand sewn and clumsy. Maybe their mother had done it. The boys offered him lemonade from a bottle stoppered with a plug of paper. Parched, he took a swig. The boys tried to engage him in conversation. Eventually they gave up. People always did, Johnny found, if you gave them enough encouragement.

His destination was the Assault Training Centre set up between the villages of Woolacombe and Appledore on a stretch of coastline in the north of an English county called Devon. Here, he was supposed to school assault troops in the strengths and weaknesses, the capabilities and tactical limitations of the machine gun. He didn't feel the machine gun as a defensive weapon had too many characteristics on the deficit side.

He'd misheard his dying father's parting aphorism. He'd thought the old man had said something like: ‘Hire a maxim. Be a genius.' He knew that ‘maxim' was a fancy word for a slogan or a motto, and he puzzled over it. But the puzzle remained unsolved. His daddy had been cold the better part of a year when Johnny Compton read on the
trivia page of a magazine in a Mississippi barber's chair that Hiram Maxim was the name of the Kike inventor responsible for the machine gun. He whistled, which made his Adam's apple bob under a freshly stropped blade. He wasn't cut. But he'd have taken a nick as the price of the posthumous wisdom his father finally imparted.

The ATC occupied an area of coastal land Compton thought shockingly cramped. He'd known that England was a small country. He'd seen it on a map. But he had done his own tactical training in the American South, in the old Confederate forts of Benning and Bragg, 100,000 acres-plus military fiefdoms allowing full-scale rehearsals for war. Patton's piece of Californian desert had been similarly sized. Here in England they could hardly organize a live fire exercise for fear of hitting postmen and parsons cycling by on lanes they lacked the jurisdiction to close. Marching men got into arguments with farmers about rights of way. Transport columns got into traffic jams, obstructed by chugging tractors on narrow roads bound by high hedges that made navigation by sight impossible.

The on-duty circumstances were a matter of almost constant exasperation. Then when you got your twenty-four-hour or forty-eight-hour leave pass, it was worse. Social opportunities off base were limited to two hick towns called Bideford and Barnstaple. Compton didn't fully appreciate the GI joke about putting the piss back in the horse until he tried his first pint of English beer one evening at a Bideford pub. A fifteen-mile training march had given him
a thirst, marching being one of the few martial pursuits they could practise without enraging local people. Or putting the natives' lives at risk with stray ordnance. But even fifteen hard miles under a full pack over sandy country left the beverage sadly wanting. He tried cider, a concoction that smelled of vomit and tasted so sour it made him wince, but at least brought the benefit of feeling like a drink when it had crept into your blood.

The womanhood of Bideford and Barnstaple were sadly lacking too. They did not appear to possess what Johnny Compton believed to be a woman's principal charm. They could not be bought. In his lieutenant's uniform, at the wheel of his jeep, he attracted the initial interest of no end of friendly and inquisitive English females. But sex to him occurred ideally as a cash transaction. He had neither the inclination, nor more particularly the skills, for socializing with women. The lack of the one had precluded the other all his adult life.

Misreading the signs one night in Barnstaple, he managed to insult a pretty girl in a pretty dress in the railway hotel bar by suggesting a pleasurable way in which she could earn herself a five-dollar bill. She left so incensed that when she returned it was predictably with her angry beau in tow. Johnny Compton took a measured sip of his cider and waited for his dick to detumesce as he weighed the fellow up. He was country ruddy, the boyfriend, strong-backed he supposed from digging and baling, hands hammerheads of meat and bone on the ends of vein-trestled
arms. Denied a fuck, Compton would ordinarily have welcomed a compensatory fight. But you had to be careful on foreign ground, in well-lit public places, bristling as they tended to be with the eyes and ears of potential witnesses. Past misdemeanours involving ATC personnel and locals meant that the twin towns were thick now with stick-happy MPs to whom rank meant little. Little anyway once they discovered the fighting knife concealed down one of Compton's spats. So he smiled and fulsomely apologized as he memorized the fellow's indignant features for future reference. Forgetting such a slight would have been contrary to his nature. He was a man who always paid out on debts.

London, of course, was much more to his inclination. Length of service alone had earned him his grudging commission. But the army didn't discriminate in the allocating of leave between vets like himself and the smart young men made lieutenant as soon as their basic training was completed. In the time he had been in England, he had enjoyed two spells of leave in the blacked-out capital. Once there, he had taken full advantage of the peculiar and liberating circumstances. His departure on the most recent visit, from a basement flat in Paddington just after four in the morning, had been necessarily swift. But he hadn't had far to walk in the groping blackness to the railway terminus. And he'd had sufficient time to clean up in a lavatory on the concourse prior to catching his return train.

As a child, with his mother dead and his father mostly
away, Johnny Compton had been obliged to learn to feed himself or starve. He'd learned to hunt game with snares and nooses at night. He soon discovered that the best prey lived in burrows on private land. Too many poor scavenged on the common scrub for the pickings to be anything but thin. To get at the most tender morsels of meat, young Johnny was forced to trespass. His fingers still remembered the thump of a rabbit's heart, the swift, panicky pulse under feathers of a game bird caught. He'd got the same exhilarated thrill from doing this that he rediscovered during his night exploits in London. He'd never have thought to feel nostalgic for the clandestine pursuits of his hungry Southern boyhood. But somehow that was how London at night in the war made him feel.

He first heard the rumour in late September 1943, after six months and a lifetime of drills and marches and small arms practice in their little pocket of belligerent rehearsal for the fight some of the men had begun to complain openly was never actually going to come. He heard it in the canteen from a major from Kentucky whose information almost always contained a hard core of fact. The bad news was that it was still going to be Devon. The good news was that it was an area much larger than the one they currently shared with its indigenous civilians. The brass were pressing to implement DF 51, the Defence Regulation that could clear land entirely for military use. They'd tried to apply it to areas of Dartmoor and Salisbury Plain, but had been blocked by the British military. The word was that this time
they were going to succeed. The area under discussion was, by British standards, huge. It would need to be. They would be preparing there for the seaborne assault on occupied Europe.