The Pacific and Other Stories (15 page)

He was clearheaded enough to calculate that he could reduce his effort by half were he to cut the lines from the harness, which lay at his feet, attach the rifle, and let it fall, pulling the parachute up toward him as the line played through his hands. This he did, and when the rifle went flat in the brush, he pulled in the billowing panels of the parachute and its tangle of cord, and stuffed them between himself and the parapet, for a cushion.

Undoubtedly he could be seen from the valley, but there the enemy would have reason to look only west. The tanks on the ridge were out of sight, and would not see him. Nonetheless, he moved as fast as he could, pulling the rifle until it rose to a forty-five degree angle and pivoted on its butt plate.

With a few minor maneuvers, he moved this heavy marionette until it closed on the pack. Then he let it settle. The muzzle projected into the air and the rifle lay trigger guard up, as if a soldier had taken a break during a march and arrayed his things just so. After a moment of rest, it was easy to lift the rifle into action again, lower it, and in three or four swings hook the pack straps with the muzzle.

Immediately he began to haul the lines. They went smoothly over the parachute silk at the top of the parapet, but still there was friction. The distress
of hauling eighty pounds surpassed even the magic of morphine. He could feel the action of his body surrendering to destruction—like beams shearing, roofs collapsing, or cables snapping.

The pack came even with the top of the wall. He pulled it over and fell back to where he had been, still breathing the ethereal breath of morphine, there to lie until the next things he saw were stars in air that had grown cold.

T
HE DRUG HAD LARGELY WORN OFF
, making him queasy and his pain more treacherous. The morphine side of the equation, in which he had floated in awe, was an illusion with a price. As the night breeze came from the west, carrying with it the smell of burning brush in aromatic clouds of smoke that enveloped the city on account of fields that had been set on fire by stray munitions and the phosphorous of battle, he took from within his pack a canteen of water, some cheese, crackers, and a bar of chocolate. After eating a day’s rations all at once, he felt much better. He pulled out the submachine gun, and removed the radio from its wrapping of blankets and a sweater. Once it was switched on, it had only one button to press and release. The monitoring station was in the trees across the river, not even two miles away. He had found his route back to the world, and he prayed that it would still be working.

“Furious to Glorious,” he said. “This is Furious, calling Glorious. Come in Glorious.”

Though the radio itself seemed to be in order, at first there was nothing. Perhaps they had stopped listening. He had been out of contact for a long time, although he was unable to remember exactly how long. He hated not being able to connect.

“Glorious, this is Furious calling. Glorious, come in, please.”

Clicking to receive, he listened to a sea of static, until over the static a voice was carried. “Furious, we haven’t heard from you in how long?” They were testing him.

He didn’t know exactly, so he said, “Since you made me a munition.”

“What’s the first password?”

“Just a minute.” He himself had made up the passwords, but they did not come to him immediately.

“Password,” they said again.

And then he remembered: “I’m the man who broke the bank in Basutoland.”

“Isle of Skye,” was the response, so each knew that the other was real. “Have you had tea?”

“Yes. And I can tell you next time about the birthday parties of everyone in the company, in every platoon.” This meant that he was so situated that he could call in strikes against targets in any cell on the map, each one of which was marked by a date, from nineteen hundred to the present, picked at random to fill the two-thousand-cell grid.

“When?”

“When the trucks come with the new barrels.” This meant at next light.

“Very good, Furious. Stay well. Glorious out.”

“Furious out.”

Alone, as soon as the static disappeared from the earpiece, he felt a surge of contentment. He moved his watch so close to his face that it seemed like a wall. It was two in the morning: he had four hours to go before he could acquire a target. He would make a list, call it in, and fine-tune each salvo. The four night hours would be morphineless, as he would need the morphine for getting up and to stay standing.

It was cold, but wrapped in blankets he was fairly warm. He tried to sleep by following the streamerlike remnants of the morphine into the dark, but he couldn’t, because even though he was injured he was well rested and alert. This led him to believe that perhaps he would heal. At least when he was still he could entertain such a thought. Any movement brought so much pain that he was forced to reassess. He may have been bleeding internally, with a dangerous infection in a dangerous place. The allies would have to take the city within a day or two, he thought, or, like so many Englishmen before him, he would be buried in Italy.

Stars pulsed and meteors flared now and then across the sky. The scent of fields afire carried on the air, and echoing off the west parapet, as if in a Brighton seashell, came the sound of waves. No matter what would happen
to him, to those he knew, to England, or to the cause for which he fought, the stars would remain untouchable and active, the colors of light constant, the laws of nature immutable. Had the universe been still, he would have had no comfort, but the universe moved as if it were alive. The sun sailed perpetually and the earth forged ahead through space in a never ceasing silken glide. Comets tore through the settled systems in surprise, intruders and dissenters whose broader orbits made those of the planets seem tame. The asteroids jingled like ice, and far away the gorgeous mass of galaxies and distant stars blazed in a rhythm that had begun at the beginning of time.

He was content on his rooftop in the midst of battle while the stars burned like phosphorous flares. One death would not shake this eternity of motion. And if he could hang on until morning and force himself to rise, he would bring upon the enemy a fire of such magnitude, precision, and vigor that the Germans, who had asked for Götterdämmerung, would get it.

A
ND THEN AS IF BY MAGIC
his concentration upon distant light was cut short by a soft, muted shine when an electric light was switched on beneath the lanterned skylight closest to him. Probably no more than thirty or forty watts, it glowed from within, flickering occasionally with the uneven current, the only light to shine from within the building.

Just underneath him, someone had returned to his flat during a lull in the shelling, and turned on a light. The soldier on the roof found its glow enormously touching, so weak was it, so tea-colored, blooming unexpectedly in the dark, and hidden from everyone except him. He wanted to imagine who it was: a civilian, or perhaps even a soldier quartered there, but a soldier who had put down his weapon and taken off his heavy belts and ammunition. In other times, he would have let his imagination complete the scene, but suspecting that he might not live another day, he refused to imagine anything. What he had at the moment seemed more than enough, even overwhelming.

He had the lantern, glowing, and beyond it, over the parapet and out of sight, encampments with fires flickering dangerously despite the tendency of artillery to home in on light. He wanted to speak to whoever was within. The language spoken was not important; whether it was a man or a woman
was unimportant. There, close to him, was someone yet living, perhaps the last imperceptible touch he would have with another life. He was already hovering above this person, unseen, like an angel.

Then the water came on. Through the vents in the lantern came its sparkling but languid sound, rising in the pipes, issuing forth, floating in air, tangling down, splashing at the foot, and running away with almost the sound of bells. The slight hiss of falling water was a cousin to the sea, the stars, and the static on the radio. Without any sense whatsoever, it all made sense, as if it had been orchestrated, but he wondered if these sounds would have seemed so carefully arranged and perfectly in harmony if he had been on a bus in Camden Town, worrying about small things. Suddenly, everything was benevolent.

Billows of steam began to float from the vents, coming quickly into the sharp night air. Soon they smelled sweet, and the water was held, and then dropped, in quantities that were remarkable. How had the water been suspended but in a woman’s thick hair, in long coils carefully lifted from the nape of her neck to catch the flow?

He had no idea, of course, who she was. Nor did she know that he was above, and she probably never would. He managed with great difficulty to move off his blood-soaked square of the roof and travel, before too long, to a point close enough to the lantern to hear every drop of water, to see the steam on the opaque plate of glass, to inhale the sweet moist air, and to touch his fingertips against the vents as if in doing this he were embracing a woman that he would love for the rest of his life.

W
HEN THE INHABITANTS
of even the busiest cities are rising, the soldier about to do battle has long been up. In the absence of hot water or heat, he pulls as much life and warmth into his body as he can by moving, if he can. And he is able to feel action before its impact, as if the coming battle were a train speeding toward him in a tunnel, pushing a breeze miles ahead of its arrival.

As dawn struck the German encampments east of the river, soldiers moved about and circled the fires. Their bodies bent and dipped as they folded blankets. They stepped into the sun, and looked around. They shouldered
their weapons. Messengers drove from one strongpoint to another, on motorcycles or in trucks. Officers stared through binoculars at the clearly illuminated allied lines.

The river was hidden beneath a low wall of mist that the sun soon made airborne and broke into shards through which shone the tops of the Apennines in pale reds and gold. Smoke that had risen in dark columns from a hundred fires was bleached into transparency by the sun, and even the waves rolling in from the open Adriatic seemed pushed down by flat trajectories of light fired from the semifinished crags of the Balkans.

When the sun was high enough the allied gunners began their volleys. These, for want of the kind of information he could give them—other spotters were in other places, but none had his comprehensive view—were poorly directed. Two observation planes had been shot down the day before he was parachuted in. Though many guns had exacted a toll, they needed, above all, guidance.

For the second time on the roof he awoke in heat and glare, and when he heard the shelling pick up he stirred, eager to get about his work now that he could. He was sick, and wanted to stay still. The slightest movement was painful and nauseating. Though his fever had partially abated, even in the absence of the morphine he was not quite himself. He knew that it was best not to move, that he had to let things settle, and the prospect of reopening his wounds by strain contradicted every natural impulse.

But upon going into battle—at the instant he volunteered, in the moment he accepted his orders, when the plane had left the ground, and when he had stepped from it into explosions and flak—he had already written himself off in the quiet way that allows soldiers to do their duty even unto extinction. The more he presumed he would not last, the better he was able to take satisfaction from doing what was required. The delight of honor unknown to anyone but himself would have to substitute for a life that no longer lay ahead.

Injecting morphine, raising himself, finally standing, and taking his telescope, radio, and maps to the parapet was for him as meaningful as the coronation of a king, for like a king who has taken a solemn oath, he had abandoned his private self.

After bulking up the parachute silk again to soften his contact with the parapet, he began to observe. So many targets were gathered before him that he chose what looked like the most influential ten, and called them in with great care. In a perfect world he would have called in many more and let the command choose what to hit and in what order, but, then again, in a perfect world he would still be in All Souls Library. As imperfection ruled, he did what he could: three concentrations of tanks, waiting to sheer off the first allied columns to penetrate in depth; four hidden strongpoints filled with infantry; an ammunition dump; a group of a dozen howitzers and 88s; and the tanks on the ridge. He would start with these, wait for redeployments, attend to them, and then, assuming that he still could, call in targets during the crossing and the battle.

First, he brought in a target with his telescope, in which what he saw was compressed, clear, and laden with intense color. When he had determined that the target deserved bombardment, he looked for landmarks, and then, after difficult deliberation, assigned it to a cell on the map, to which he added a red-penciled number. The cell
20 Dec. 04
, for example, became number one. He then determined where in the box the center of the target rested, and marked it with a red dot. Each cell was divided further into four quadrants and a bull’s-eye where they met.

In an hour, he had marked his targets and called them in, reading clearly as fast as he could, so as to stay on air for as little time as possible. Anyone hearing a list of any sort broadcast prior to a battle would know it was a spotter no matter how ingeniously the transmission was embedded in ordinary radio traffic. The weak signal did not come from German radios, and yet it came from within the German lines. They would home in on it if they could.

The first call, delivered crisply despite the morphine, was surprisingly short: “One: twenty December, nineteen four. Q two, toward center. Two: four February, nineteen thirty-six. Q four, corner. Three: eighteen April, nineteen twenty-one. Q two, center. Four: thirty June, nineteen ten. Q one, top …” until he signed off, “Furious, out.”

Monitoring this, if they had, the enemy would not rush to move every unit and reform every concentration. Had they been so willing, it would have been easy to scramble them. They would sit unknowing and uneasy,
until the barrage came through, and even then they would do nothing but seek shelter. Only when the pattern of incoming fire appeared to tighten would they scatter. He had seen it before. He had caused it.