The Green Gauntlet (30 page)

And yet his mind persisted in making comparisons. Both wars, from his point of view, had been fought as an amateur, but this time he was an amateur with professional equipment at his disposal. Even the Bren gun he held was capable, in the hands of a trained man, of killing half-a-dozen men with a couple of bursts whereas, in Spain, he had counted himself lucky to carry a 1914 Lebel rifle with a stiff bolt action. The men beside him were amateurs, now as then. Tonight they were fresh-faced youngsters, keyed-up to a terrific pitch and probably terrified by the hazards of their assignment and yet, like himself, fortified by the certainty of ultimate victory, and this was half-way to survival. In Spain it had not been that way at all. Always they were staring over their shoulder at defeat, a mob of peasants fighting Italian armour and German dive-bombers in a contest from which the Democracies had stood aside, calling their cowardice non-intervention.

Well, here after so long was the beginning of the end, an invasion mounted on a massive scale and surprisingly he was part of it. And that in spite of having passed his fortieth birthday.

He heard the long, final swish of the glider and felt the grinding, bumping slither of its impact. Then training took over and his thoughts went tumbling back to the lumber room as men spilled out of the door and down through the shattered nosecap, shouting and leaping, whooping, prancing and firing haphazardly into the snake-belts of mist that hung above river and canal. Expecting to lead some thirty of them he was, instead, caught up in their tumult, and in the flash of exploding grenades images registered on his brain at the speed of a runaway film. He saw Lance-Corporal Gilson fire from the hip at the embrasure of a pillbox. He saw another man hurl grenades into a gun-pit. He saw a tall German soldier standing on the bridge itself, his mouth wide open but no sound issuing from it as a Bren burst folded him like a sack. And then there were his own tiny triumphs as he shot a man in the act of firing a Verey pistol and seconds later, two more pounding back across the bridge. From the direction of the canal came the continuous wink of flashes and the roar of grenades and after that, from all around, a long, unaccountable silence. It was done, apparently, and so quickly that it was hard to believe. It had been like a noisier edition of one of the briefings, where every object seen here was a scale model glued in a frame. The only real difference was the dead, the man still holding a Verey pistol, the two fugitives at the far end of the bridge, and on the lip of the gun-pit his own sergeant, camouflage smock still smouldering from a phosphorous grenade.

Time passed and they pottered about in the gloom. ‘Consolidating’ it was called but how did one consolidate fixed objects in the dark? Overhead he heard the throb of engines and glanced automatically at his watch. It was 3.20 a.m. and the noise would come from the Dakotas carrying parachutists to hold the heights north-east of Caen against a panzer counter-attack. Later he heard them rallying to the toot of an English hunting-horn. The sound had never stirred him as it seemed to stir other men, for he had forsworn foxhunting as a child. All the same it was odd to hear it away in the mist and he made a mental note to write and tell his father who, despite having been a Master of Foxhounds, had never learned to produce anything better than a despairing wail on the instrument.

Messages, most of them encouraging, came in from one source or another. The canal bridge was secure. The parachutists were assembling in the west. Casualties had been relatively light. Miraculously it was seen that their own glider had landed within fifty yards of the bridge. As it began to grow light, and they had to contend with nothing but a few snipers, abstract thoughts began to creep out again but they took no hold and skirted carefully on the edge of triviality. The hedge tear in his smock. The thick crust of dirt under his thumbnail. The foolishly upturned heels of the two dead men on the bridge. From the shelter of the gun-pit he could count eight German bodies. The British dead had been carried into the pillbox.

When it was quite light he could see the profile of the German with the Verey pistol and it was contemplating him that he came to terms with the curiously final reaction to the night that was gone and already receding into history, like the battles in Spain and the débâcle at Calais. For him, in a sense, it was over. There was no hate for the man spreadeagled on the bridge, or the inert grey forms of the others. All this time he had been sustained by a hatred that had driven him blindly along the years, and although it had moderated after his marriage to Evie there had still been enough to push him as far as this. But now it was altogether spent. Tomorrow or the day after they would roll on, he supposed, over the Seine, over the First War battlefields of Flanders, and ultimately over the Rhine, but it would be a campaign, not a crusade. The transition pleased him. In a way he felt purged and free.

The man at his elbow said, fighting a yawn ‘They haven’t shown up yet, sir. Taking their time.’ He meant Lovat’s Commandos, scheduled to relieve them and already an hour-and-a-half overdue. ‘They’ll be along,’ Simon said and as he said it they heard, from down the road, the faint but unmistakable skirl of pipes so that Simon smiled, not from relief but at the juvenile enthusiasms the British injected into the sorry business of war. There had been that story about footballs punted across No-Man’s-Land on the first day of the Somme offensive. There was the early morning toot of the hunting horn heard in the Normandy mists. And always, in every war, there was the moan of bagpipes.

He stood up and watched the men scrambling out of cover and moving across open country. Some of them were waving and cheering but most of them just stared. The green berets marched in with conscious panache, as if they were relieving another Lucknow. Their piper was playing ‘Blue Bonnets over the Border’, a tune Simon had heard often during his long spell in the Highlands. Soon red and green berets intermingled and he overheard Lord Lovat apologise for being late, as though he and the Major had agreed to lunch together. ‘I must remember to tell the Gov’nor that too,’ he thought. ‘Amateurs, the whole bloody lot of us. But we look like beating the hell out of the pros and that’s a damned sight more than we deserve, considering the way we went about it until a couple of years ago.

III

W
ar, Claire was discovering, was an unreliable catalyst. She remembered the generalisations of 1914, when war had been proclaimed ‘ennobling’ by poets, politicians and journalists, and she remembered how, not long afterwards, these same people had piously denounced war as ‘the final debasement of human currency’. She was not, however, a diligent reader of leading articles, preferring to base her opinions on observation and instinct, and it seemed to her, now that the war was entering its sixth winter, its stresses were responsible for some dramatic changes in the characters of people around her.

Paul had changed very little but then Paul was Paul, the captive of a single idea and basically more conservative than any of the Tories he had campaigned against in the Liberal heyday. It was otherwise with his sons. If Margaret was to be believed Stevie had developed a new personality when he had switched from fighter-pilot to bomber-pilot whereas his twin, Andy, had changed so dramatically that even casual acquaintances noticed it. He had gone to war a loud, cheerful extrovert and had returned, some three years later, a morose, truculent, glowering young man, quick to fly off the handle, silent and brooding when left alone. She didn’t know what to make of him these days and neither, it seemed, did poor Margaret, who was having a very difficult time with him.

Andy, Margaret told her, had not been soured by her involvement with Stevie. This was something that he had shrugged off and seemed to regard as no more than tiresome, and only then because it involved them and governed their approach to him. He did not resent Vanessa either, in fact, in his lighter moments he appeared to be growing very fond of her. He had never, Margaret admitted under pressure, taxed her with disloyalty and when Claire, unable to believe this, had taken the risk of raising the subject with him, she found that Margaret was speaking the truth. ‘Stevie bought it, the old clot, so naturally I’ll stand by the kid,’ he said, briefly. ‘As for Margy—we all make bloody fools of ourselves now and again and I’m no angel. Never pretended to be one.’

And that was about as far as she got and sometimes she wondered whether the reconciliation she had achieved had been worth her cab fare from York to Criccieth. But then, she told herself, Andy’s indifference was not all that surprising, for the younger generation had long since discarded the old values and invented for themselves an entirely different code of behaviour. What was more to the point was Andy’s moodiness and Claire assumed this stemmed from his disfigurement and the limitations imposed upon him by his injuries. Margaret thought otherwise, saying that he would never perk up until he could reabsorb himself in the strike-it-rich brigade. In that way he hasn’t changed at all,’ she told Claire, in one of her confiding moments—‘Stevie would never have gone back to scrap, or anything that meant keeping the kind of company we kept, or living in the places we lived in before the war. He would have gone for the open-air life, even farming maybe.’

‘Isn’t it at all possible to steer Andy in that direction?’ Claire asked. ‘Paul would probably set him up in one of the Coombe farms—my father’s old farm for instance, as soon as these arty-crafty people move out and they will the moment the war finishes.’

Margaret was not encouraging. ‘That isn’t for Andy,’ she said, dolefully, ‘he’s still interested in money for its own sake. He’s already financed that one-legged speculator Shawcrosse he met in hospital and set him up next door for the duration. They hobnob most of the day when they aren’t on the phone and are forming a company I believe.’

‘What kind of company exactly?’

‘How would I know? He doesn’t confide in me. All I know is that it’s something to do with houses and land. Once upon a time he would have told me anything I asked but not anymore, and I can’t honestly blame him in that respect. He remembers. Before the war, when all four of us were living it up, I was never interested where the money came from, so long as it arrived in large, juicy dollops.’

Claire sympathised with her. She lived in a vacuum between past and present. Her loyalty, perhaps her guilt, bound her to Andy, but she had seen through the sham of their pre-war marriage and its tawdriness, viewed in retrospect, dismayed her. Claire, who had always recognised its fairground glitter, understood this very well, but Andy was Margaret’s problem and she could only wait for matters to resolve themselves.

They seemed to be doing this very satisfactorily as far as Simon was concerned. Claire had developed an easy undemanding relationship with Evie, who told her that Simon had also undergone a subtle change since his participation in the D-Day assault. To prove it she produced a letter she had received from him after the Allies had broken out from their beachhead and made their bid to win the war by Christmas.

‘It will tell you a lot more than I can second-hand,’ she said, ‘and I daresay you’ll read more into it than me because you knew his first wife and were around when he was involved in all those lame-dog campaigns. Anyway, read it, and tell me if I’m right about readjustment. I’ve only known him twelve months and I’m not all that bright, but it does seem to me that he’s—well, mellowed a lot.’

Claire laughed and said it was probably the prospect of having a wife to come home to, but when she read the letter she saw that the girl’s instinct had served her well, and that Simon had indeed mellowed, so much so that there was hardly a trace of the smouldering young man Claire remembered in the period of political upheaval between the wars. She had always sympathised with his quarrel with the established order far more so than Paul, who regarded him as a bit of a fanatic, but she had never understood the masochistic pleasure he and that humourless girl Rachel seemed to derive from sharing the burdens (and sometimes the living quarters!) of what her father would have described as The Great Unwashed. All that, it seemed, was now in the past, and for the first time she detected tolerance and maturity in his outlook. ‘
I
don’t see this as a Left-versus-Right contest anymore,’
he wrote,
‘but as a kind of Sanitary Squad exercise! I’ve always lived for politics, and they’ve always presented a straight choice for me, as they did for Rachel, but since I got back here I’ve had
to shift my sights for a variety of reasons. The prisoners we took after the break-through to the Seine aren’t the Germans I remember, those arrogant, indoctrinated bullies, who bombed Guernica and threw us out of France, in 1940. Mostly they remind me of the kind of ferry one met in Remarque’s
“All Quiet …”
The French too are not all “gallant resisters “, who have been running around with secret codes and homemade explosives ever since Dunkirk. Many did, of course, but others just sat and waited, and there were some who made a packet of money out of the Occupation. It isn’t a matter of politics anymore, but expediency. There are plenty of cruel bastards on the Left, as well as on the Right. I had to threaten to shoot two of them yesterday, after they had shaved a seventeen-year-old girl because somebody pointed her out as someone who had once slept with a German. I’ve seen a lot of that since June and it isn‘t the kind of Democracy I’ve been fighting for ever since Spain.
’
Then came what was, to Claire, a frank admission of self-doubt and reappraisal. ‘
I’d more or less made up my mind to have a crack at getting into Parliament at the first post-war election but I’ve had second thoughts about that. I’m more interested in people than politics, so I shall look about for something where I can co-operate rather than legislate. Don’t ask me what, for I don’t know. We’ll talk about it when I get home, and as the Daddy of the Company I’m at least sure of one thing—I’m right at the head of the demob-queue.’

Claire was so interested in his heresy that she took it upon herself to show part of the letter to Paul. She did not show him the final page that she ought not to have read but did, for she was always very curious to learn about other women’s relationships with their husbands. What she read here encouraged her to think that dear old Simon, bless his air-conditioned heart, had at last found someone with enough cosiness and commonsense to make a grab at the bonuses of marriage in the way she had done from the outset of life with Paul and she was touched by the boyish endearments in the final paragraph. Evie must have realised she had read them but perhaps, in a way, she was glad for there had never been any secret between them that what Simon needed as much as a wife was an amiable mistress.