Monte Cassino (25 page)

As usual, the Legionnaire had his Moorish knife between his teeth. He winked at me. He knew I was afraid.

Only five seconds now. How slowly the hand moved. Three seconds. Two seconds. A hand descended on my shoulder and I leaped forward, found the wire cutters where Porta and Tiny had put them and cut away. The revolting barbs tore my skin to ribbons. I scraped on my back under the dangerous stuff. Then threw the cutters back.

I lay for a moment getting my breath after the tremendous effort. Dear God, let me be wounded now, while those in the trench still have time to set me back. I could be in hospital in a lovely clean bed in just a few hours. The nurses would coddle me. Hospital was a thing you dreamed of, when you lay out in No-man's land. But I wasn't wounded. I had to go on. After Porta. One never is wounded, when one wants to be. In a moment or two the Legionnaire came. I looked at my watch. Two minutes had gone already. Now he was crouched there ready to spring, a panther in human guise. It was good to have him with us. It gave me a sense of security.

I rolled over and began crawling towards the American positions. Then I reached the bush where I was to hide till the afternoon. My hand slipped on something slimy, and a nauseating sickly smell filled my nostrils. I had crawled into a blown-up corpse. I vomited. I put my field glasses in front of me, camouflaged them with leaves and grass. As long as it was dark, glasses weren't dangerous, but when day came, if the sun's rays struck them for an instant, they might give me away and that would be that. Then the enemy would know that there was something brewing in No-man's land, something there that shouldn't be there.

But I had to have them. I had to study the man I was to kill. The years had changed us strangely. We no longer attached any importance to killing a fellow human. Not even in close combat. Tiny and the Legionnaire had lost count even of those they had killed with their bare hands. It had become almost a habit to thrust your knife into a man's midriff. I shall never forget the first time I saw a person die. And that was not even my doing. It was an infantry feldwebel sitting on the tailboard of a troop-transport. A stray Polish bullet hit him in the head and I only just had time to pull the tank up. It was one of those two-men tanks, a Krupp-Sport. We both jumped out to move the body out of the way and were sworn at by a leutnant for halting the column.

That was the first man we had seen killed and it suddenly brought home to us the gravity of war. It was not nearly so nice as we had had it painted to us.

Someone was crawling along close to me. I drew my knife, I pulled out my pistol.

"Boo!" I heard behind me and almost screamed with fright. Then in the moonlight I caught sight of a light grey bowler and a row of strong horsey teeth glinting in a broad grin. It was Tiny, the great idiot.

"Did you shit your pants?" he asked in a whisper. "I could see you miles away, you limp prick." Then he disappeared over a hummock and was swallowed up by the darkness.

I began digging myself in with my short-handled trenching tool. A job for a mole. I daren't make too much noise.

The guns in the north had stopped firing, and all that broke the threatening silence of the night was an occasional rifle shot or a short yap from a machine gun. Using my glasses I tried to make out my surroundings, but there was nothing but darkness. I was glad it was just ordinary infantry we had facing us. We would deal with the infantry quickly enough. They did not know all the devilish tricks the marines were expert at, and of course we almost felt that we and the marines were related because of Mike.

A star shell went hissing up into the sky and slowly sank to earth in a flare of dazzling light. A machine cannon bayed evilly. In the distance, tracer was like a string of beads against the black sky of night. It was nearly three. They would change over soon.

There they were. A clink of steel. Someone laughed. A faint glow of light. The ghastly idiots! Smoking in an advanced position! My fingers itched to get at them and I knew that all the others would be feeling the same. Death is the only punishment for that sort of madness. They couldn't be tried troops. They wouldn't do a thing like that. This must be their first time up at the front. Recruits! It would be child's play for us.

A couple of crickets were fiddling away just in front of me Then one of them hopped up onto my back. Another couple joined in. They thought I was a corpse, as well they might, I was lying so still. That was perhaps the worst part of this sort of enterprise having to sham death. Perhaps at that moment someone was scrutinising me through glasses.

I shall never forget the first of these long distance patrols I was on. It was in Finland. The patrol was led by a Finnish ensign, a Lapp. He was called Guvi but whether that was his surname or Christian name no one knew. Every other word he said was 'Satan and hell'. It was said that he owned a large herd of reindeer with which he lived, when not in the army. Just before we set out to destroy a railway line far behind the Russian lines, Guvi came to me and brandishing his long Finnish dagger under my nose, said:

"Satan and hell, you bloody German, just you listen to me. This is the first visit you're paying to our neighbour. Satan and hell, fancy being burdened with you! You Germans ought to stay at home and leave these jobs to us Finns. You can only fight with guns and tanks. Satan and hell, that's not proper fighting. We Finns are the only ones that really fight. I know how to deal with our neighbour. I am responsible for twenty-four men. Satan and hell, I can't stand having to cart you along, you ghastly German. If anyone's nerves goes, when we get in among our neighbours, I know it won't be any of my lot. If you lose your head, we shall be compelled to kill you. If you are wounded, don't use your pistol to put an end to yourself and stop yourself falling into enemy hands. Use your knife. Drive it in a hand's breadth and a half down from your left shoulder, slanting upwards and you'll cut right through your German old woman's heart. Satan and hell, that's an order. No one is to fall alive into the neighbour's hands and talk."

But it wasn't me he had to kill on that trip, but one of his own lot, a corporal. A stupid athlete with all sorts of prizes to his credit. I saw Guvi do it. The athlete lost his head while we were lying among some trees waiting for a column we were to liquidate. Suddenly, the athlete got up on to his knees, his machine pistol at the ready. In the silent frosty polar night the noise when he undid the safety catch was like a pistol shot. Like lightning Guvi was there, and plunged his knife down by his collar bone. One of the others sat on his head, so that his rattles and gurgles were smothered in the snow.

The same thing would happen to anyone who lost control of his nerves out there in No-man's land. He would be killed instantly. We would be forced to do it. I wondered what had happened to that Finnish ensign, the Lapp Guvi? I wondered if he was lying, a frozen corpse, somewhere by the Murmansk railway? Or had he lived to become a captain as he so dearly wished? His great dream was to be able to wear silver stripes on his trousers instead of green. And his reindeer? Had he ever seen them again? How he could drink, that Lapp! And there wasn't a Lotta for miles around he had not been in bed with. When he came out of the sauna with birch twigs in his hands and rolled himself in the snow, he always said of the girl he had just had in there:

"Just reindeer cunt!"

And when we set off in an aged Ford to paint the nearest town red in one of our brief rests between patrols behind the Russian lines, Guvi always managed to start a fight with someone. I was his interpreter, where the Germans were concerned. He understood German, but talked only Swedish. Wonderful old Guvi! None of us who knew you will ever forget you! You were the typical Finnish soldier, feared like the devil and loved like God.

The eastern sky was beginning to grow red,--changing shade every minute. The world's arsehole, that filthy mountain Cassino, looked almost lovely in the early morning. The sun hung above the monastery as a great round glowing bowl. It was God's morning.

The morning mist came off the river and hid us for a while, until the wind got up and blew it all away.

It was just before eight. Another change-over. Helmets glinted. I pressed the glasses to my eyes, got them adjusted. There they were. The one coming now was the one I would have to kill. He would be relieved at ten o'clock and come back at twelve. He had two medal ribbons on his chest, and his eyes were of a strange blue like that of a hussar's uniform. He began picking his teeth with a close-combat knife. The man he was relieving showed him something. They both laughed. It was dirty postcards they had. He was called Robert, I heard: Bob like myself. Strange coincidence, here was a Bob lying waiting to kill another Bob.

Carefree, he leaned against his machine gun. Blue tobacco smoke rose up above him. He had shoved his helmet onto the back of his head, where its chin strap bumped against his cheeks.

But what was this? My blood froze in my veins, as I saw him take his field glasses hanging on his chest and point them at me. I did not breathe. A fly settled on my eyelid. I let it sit there. A man with a fly on his eyelid must be dead.

A bird flew down right in front of me. It had red tips to its wings. Right in the middle of No-man's land. Don't you know, little bird, that life in No-man's land means death? It hopped round me, even perched on the barrel of my machine pistol. A dangerous branch to perch on.

The sun was burning the back of my neck and the insects were almost driving me mad. Now he was being relieved again. Unless his platoon commander had something special for him to do during the next two hours, he would come back for his last watch. I wondered if he had a girl at home in the States. What his father was. What the place where he lived was like. A terrace house, where the paper boy chucked the paper over the gate every morning? Or back premises somewhere with teenagers copulating in the basement? Had he come straight from college, exchanging schoolbooks for rifle? Or was he a west-side boy, who once in a while held up a homo or knocked out a policeman?

If only they would start an attack of their own, so that our whole patrol came to nothing. Why the devil did it have to be us? Who had to get that staff officer for them? I was half out of my mind. I would soon be compelled to move. I had been lying stock still for ten hours. I bet there were fakirs who would find it quite difficult to do as much.

There I could see some helmets. The final relief. But what was this? There were many more of them. Bob was there too. I recognised him easily. What was the meaning of the great migration? Then I understood. Platoon leader's inspection. He picked the barrel from the machine gun, shouted, giving the section commander a blowing up. A parade ground lion. I knew the kind. They wouldn't let up even in the front line.

Wait, you little turd, I thought. You haven't a chance. You have exactly one hour and fifty seven minutes to live. Tiny and Heide are going to deal with your dug-out. They are personal friends of the man with the scythe. You won't escape them.

Now, God help me, he was going to put his men, who only had a few minutes to live, on charge. He did not know that of course. But even so, he was the kind whose greatest ambition was to become First Sergeant. He wanted six stripes and a star, whatever it meant in the way of death and prison for his men.

Bob stood at attention and let the filth run off him. A horsefly was buzzing round my head. Then it settled on my hand. I wondered if I could remain still, if it stung me? I had always been afraid of horseflies and bees. It stung. I watched it as it bored its sting into my hand. A searing pain swept up into my arm.

I watched the man through my glasses, US Private First Class, he was just lighting his last Camel. Enjoy it, chum! You've only seven minutes left. I hope they'll send your mother the Congress medal. She deserves it. Send your boy to Italy to be slaughtered. At twenty. Just when life is beginning. And to end like that. Just a soldier.

Just a soldier. I had heard that often enough. Said a little disparagingly. But it's we who have to give our lives for your factories, your industry. It's over our dead bodies you get your new and better contracts. And when it's over and you're sitting in your elegant offices, exchanging contracts and giving orders to Krupp, Armstrong and Schneider; we soldiers can beg on railway platforms or rot in a POW camp. Last year's leaves are soon forgotten.

He sang softly.

Again he pointed his glasses at me.

God, don't let him discover me in the last two minutes. He put the glasses down and began to sing again.

There was a roar behind me. The heavens opened and spewed fire. The rocket-projectors. They plunged down in front of the American positions. It was an experience that could have inspired Liszt to another rhapsody. I moved the muscles of my feet in my boots. The blood began to circulate. If my leg went to sleep it would be a catastrophe. I drew my left leg under me. It had the most strength in it for the start. The rockets would stop in five seconds.

US-Bob did not know the rules of the game. He had curled up in the bottom of his trench, afraid of the whizzing shells.

I squinted to the side. There was Porta, the long idiot. His yellow hat glowing like a buttercup in a green field. I drew my knife, the knife I had taken from a Siberian guardsman long ago.

Now!
I leaped forward. Bullets were whizzing past me like angry wasps, but I was not afraid of them. They were our own infantry's covering fire. US-Bob's helmet and face appeared over the parapet. The impetus of my leap knocked him over. He shouted savagely, tried to kick me in the crutch. Two pistol bullets went singing past my head. I buried my knife in his neck. He contorted himself and blood gushed foaming from his mouth. I kicked the machine gun over, cast a last look at US-Bob. He had bored his fingers into the wall of the trench.

He had flung his head back and was staring at me, eyes wide open. I felt I wanted to fling myself down beside him and comfort him, but I did not have the time or the right. I was only a soldier. I gave his helmet a kick.