A Breed of Heroes (2 page)

‘And the second point, the second point is yourself. How would you – I hope you never have to, but the day may come – how would you bury one of your friends who had had his
face blown away, without God’s help? Could you do it?’

‘I hope I could.’

The CO slammed the bayonet on to the desk. ‘You could not. Without belief you could not do it. Could you stand at your friend’s graveside, with your soldiers around you, and lower
your friend minus face into his grave and conduct a burial service – without a faith to fall back on? Do you seriously think you could do that and look your soldiers in the eye again? Do
you?’

‘As far as I can tell –’

‘As far as I can tell you don’t know what you’re talking about. You would crack up, I can assure you. The Russian soldier has his faith and, fortunately, all the soldiers in
this battalion have theirs. They’re all good Christians. Think about it, Charles. I don’t want to interfere with your beliefs, I just want you to think about it. It’s all very
well being long-haired, left-wing and atheistic, but when it comes to the crunch up at the sharp end it’s not enough. It won’t do. Now, anything you want to ask me?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Settled in the Mess all right?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Good. Well, if you have any problems you know you can come and see me at any time. This door is always open. Or the padre. Go and talk it over with him. You’ll find he’s very
sympathetic and down to earth, a good man. Used to be a private soldier in the Regiment in National Service days.’

Charles stood up to go.

‘One other thing.’

‘Sir?’

‘Hair.’

Charles repeated the word to himself. His hair had been cut the day before and washed that morning. Nevertheless, it seemed likely that the CO had in mind that it needed one or both again. He
gave the response that seemed least likely to displease the CO. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Today.’

‘Yes, sir.’

It was worse than anything Charles had expected. He could not conceive how he was going to survive the remaining two and a half or so years that were expected of him. He would need a faith of
some sort for that. He heard again the voice of his tutor, Manningtree, with its lisp and affected weariness: ‘The only excuse I can think of for your joining the Army is that you are
experimenting with yourself in a particularly unnecessary, unpleasant and narcissistic way. I hope you fail.’ Manningtree was in no sense a military man and neither, Charles had to admit to
himself, was he. He had known that all along, of course, but to have admitted to Manningtree that he might have been even slightly right about him would have offended Charles’s particular
brand of undergraduate honour. To have been ‘got right’ by the remote and listless Manningtree was almost a condemnation, and not to be borne. As he left the CO’s office Charles
reflected that Manningtree was probably at that moment supine in his leather armchair listening to somebody’s predictable essay and sipping sherry that was almost as dry as his own comments.
The faltering student did not know his luck.

Sometime later Charles had related to the padre what the CO had said to him. The padre was a short, square Yorkshireman who smoked a stubby pipe and was universally popular, having boxed for the
Army. ‘Silly bugger,’ he had said.

Charles was jolted out of his musings by a particularly vicious bit of continuous welded rail. He realised that the noise of the train and Edward’s voice had merged into
an indistinguishable background, each as unvarying as the other. He tried to pay attention. ‘We shouldn’t be in Ireland at all, of course,’ Edward was saying. ‘It’s
all political, not our job. Let the bloody politicians fight it out if they must fight over it. I’d rather have a good clean battle any day. I don’t like all this
now-you-shoot-them-now-you-don’t stuff. Bad for the Ackies.’ Everyone knew that Edward had never been in a battle, but no one doubted his sincerity.

John, the third platoon commander, was a serious-minded young man. ‘You can’t avoid the political dimension when armies are involved in anything,’ he said. ‘Especially
internal security situations. An army is then one among a number of political factors instead of being the decisive one, as in a war. In a place like Northern Ireland everything is political and
everything has to be taken account of.’

Edward unfolded and then re-folded his arms, his chubby face perplexed. ‘I daresay you’re right. All you young chaps are so damn clever these days. Too much education, if you ask me.
I hope you know what to do with it when we get there.’ The train jolted and lurched suddenly, throwing the four men against each other. Edward’s kit fell off the seat and got mixed up
with Charles’s. Edward trod on Tim’s beret, leaving a dirty bootmark on the clean black. ‘When do we get there?’ he asked.

‘0700,’ said John, who always knew times.

‘Christ. It’s not that far, is it? Have we got to put up with this all night?’

‘That’s to Belfast. We’ll be in Liverpool in a couple of hours.’

‘Thank God for that. I was going to say, all night’s a bit long, even for British Snail.’

The door of their compartment was opened abruptly by the Intelligence Section colour sergeant, a well-known criminal named Fox. He grinned at Edward. ‘O Group, sir. Orders Group.
CO’s carriage. Ten minutes ago.’

Edward’s mouth dropped open. ‘What for? What’s he want to hold an O Group now for?’

‘Search me, sir. Probably going to brief you on what to do if the boat’s torpedoed. Russian subs in the Irish Sea. Could be nasty.’ Colour Sergeant Fox slid the door to with a
crash.

Edward started up and nearly fell in the swaying carriage. Mention of the CO never failed to arouse a degree of panic in him. ‘O Groups even on the bloody train – would you believe
it? God only knows what it’s going to be like when we get there. Where’s my file? Has anyone seen my clip file?’ He cast about desperately, his face red, as it always was in a
crisis. Crises arose frequently in Edward’s life. His file was found for him. ‘Gas mask,’ he said. ‘Respirator, I mean. Must take it with me. You know what the CO’s
like. He’ll probably let off the CS canister to test us.’

‘You’re not serious,’ said Charles.

‘’Course I’m serious. Standing Operational Procedures, paragraph 4b – “In vehicles respirators are to be available at all times.” A train is a vehicle.’
He found his respirator. ‘I’d advise you all to find yours.’

‘But we’re not going to the O Group. And we’re still in England.’

‘For Christ’s sake, Thoroughgood, stop being irrelevant. Just find your respirator and have it available.’ Edward straightened his beret in the mirror and clambered over their
kit to the door. ‘Which way’s the CO’s carriage?’ he asked.

‘Left,’ said Tim.

‘Was it left?’ asked John, when Edward had gone.

‘Haven’t a clue.’

The three of them rummaged slowly through their kit for their respirators. Charles couldn’t find his. He had never learned to travel lightly and seemed to have as much kit as the other two
together. He gave up and tried to read. The night before he had said goodbye to Janet, his girlfriend, and memories of the uncomfortable evening kept coming back in snippets. There had been nothing
positively unpleasant. It was just that he could not think of it without a sense of hopelessness, in much the same way as he felt about the ensuing four months in Northern Ireland. This was due not
to any pessimistic appreciation of the situation there, nor to any dislike for the place, which he had never seen, any more than the previous night’s hopelessness had been anything
specifically to do with Janet. It was a more general malaise in which he was the only common factor, though he was inclined to blame the CO.

‘Don’t get killed, please,’ Janet had said. They were in a restaurant in Fulham, and she had said it whilst sipping her mock-turtle soup, peering earnestly at him over the
spoon.

‘No, of course not,’ he said, feeling absurdly British.

She lowered her spoon. ‘Really, Charles, I’m very worried.’

‘So am I.’

‘It’s worse in a way, staying behind.’

‘I’m sure it isn’t.’

‘Don’t be so selfish.’ She looked down, apparently occupied in making patterns in the soup. With her forehead bent towards him and her gaze averted she always seemed at her
most vulnerable, and Charles felt inclined to be tender. But it was a distant sort of tenderness and it could not survive in conversation. She looked up again. ‘I still don’t understand
why you joined the Army.’

This had been a bone of contention for some months now. He suspected that what exasperated her most was not the weakness of any explanations he might have given but the fact that he had never
really given any. He didn’t know why for certain, though he was dimly aware of various promptings – a feeling he ought to do something different, uncharacteristic, a desire to shock his
friends, a not-to-be-acknowledged desire to please his father, an insufficiency of cowboys and Indians during childhood, a surfeit of his subject, history, and the simple feeling that he ought to
do something. Janet had become an enthusiastic social worker for Wandsworth Council. He knew that his obvious lack of concern for the difference between her profession – caring – and
his – killing – annoyed her. She thought that he thought lightly of hers.

‘You will write, won’t you?’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘It must be awful, all that killing and suffering. I couldn’t bear it. I’d have to do something.’

‘It’s the living conditions that worry me.’

‘I know. All those dreadful slums.’

‘Ours, I mean. There’s no possibility of privacy. We have to sleep in school boiler rooms, factories, police stations and warehouses.’

‘But you get paid extra for it, don’t you? Hard lying money or something. And lots of people have done it before, so it won’t seem so bad.’

‘It will.’

‘It’s your own fault for joining.’

‘I know.’

‘Well, don’t be unreasonable on our last night.’

They went back to her flat, and thence to bed. Their love-making lacked both affection and passion. The thought that this was probably their last time for four months added nothing to the
occasion. Charles had wondered whether he would be subjected to an oblique and tentative interrogation of his feelings for her afterwards, but she fell asleep immediately. He left in darkness early
the following morning. If nothing else, the hour and the cold precluded any attempt at an emotional farewell, and they parted silently with a tasteless kiss. He wondered vaguely whether she would
sleep with anyone else whilst he was away. There was very little chance that he would.

The journey back to Aldershot on the early train was one of the most depressing experiences he knew. The bleak suburbs slid past like a bad dream repeated. They seemed to emphasise the unreality
of his life in the Army, which he had at first mistaken for an unpleasant form of reality. But the Yorkshire exercise had convinced him that his world was not a real one. Seven days and seven
nights on the moors, digging trenches, then living in them, then filling them in, then digging more and living in them, and so on. Seven days and nights of rain, during which they had the first
recorded case of trench-foot in the British Army for years. This was a condition, well known during the First World War, in which a kind of crust formed on the foot after it had been deprived of
air and immersed in soggy socks and boots for days and nights on end. In very bad cases toes were lost. The envied victim, a private in A company, was sent to hospital. The CO urged everyone to
think how much worse it would have been on the Somme.

During the first few hours of the exercise, kit became waterlogged and never thereafter had the chance to dry. The imaginary but ubiquitous enemy – to Charles, an obvious personification
of the CO’s paranoia – was more troublesome than a real one could ever be. After the first two days everyone was too depressed and wet to speak except to pass on orders and their
subsequent amendments and contradictions. During the middle of one day – recognisably so because of a barely-perceptible lightening at the base of the clouds – Charles and his platoon
came to a stone bridge over a swollen stream. The downpour continued. They were about to cross the bridge when Charles was aware of a surging in the water and the CO and his wireless operator
emerged from beneath the bridge. They had been standing up to the tops of their thighs in the stream.

‘You have been mortared,’ the CO said to Charles. ‘Your platoon is decimated and you are dead.’

For one wild moment Charles thought he might be sent home in disgrace.

‘What do you intend to do about it?’ continued the CO.

The rain hissed in the stream. The CO and his wireless operator were still standing in it. Charles’s platoon gazed at them without curiosity. ‘We had to make a detour via the bridge,
sir,’ said Charles, ‘because there’s a cross-country motor-cycle event upstream.’

‘You could have forded it. Why didn’t you do that?’

‘We were told that the stream was the Rhine, sir.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘With respect, sir, you did.’

The CO waded ashore and scrambled up the bank, followed, at the second or third attempt, by his heavily-burdened wireless operator. The rain ran in streaks through the mud on his face and tiny
droplets clung to his heavy eyebrows. His dark eyes looked for a few moments as though he were considering whether to have Charles shot or drowned. He then looked at the stream, as though he had
decided the business was not worth a bullet, and then as far up the hill as the clouds permitted. ‘You should have used your initiative. Anyway, how did you know this bridge was still
standing?’

‘Well, sir, I could see it.’

‘Not this bridge, nincompoop, not this physical bridge. The one over the Rhine that you were attempting to cross. How did you know that was still standing, eh?’

‘I suppose I didn’t, sir.’

‘I suppose you didn’t too. Any more than you knew it was covered by heavy mortars, which you should’ve. D’you understand me?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Good.’ The rain streamed down their faces. ‘Now, what’s all this about a motor-cycling event?’