The Magic Army Page 4

  Conrad Sissons gave a truncated snort. ‘You’ll have to lock the bottles up then,’ he said. ‘And lock her up – somewhere else. Not that she’s a lot of good to you. You had a hole in your sock Christmas morning, you know, looking out like a blasted eye from under your cassock. Half the congregation saw it.’

  ‘I know,’ said Sissons. ‘Mrs Hannaford came back with a pair of socks for me. A Christmas present and a hint combined.’

  ‘You ought to get rid of her,’ decided the old man. ‘Cecily, not Mrs Hannaford.’ He remained at the window but turned to face into the room as if he expected the suggestion to be properly considered.

  His son had closed his eyes. ‘How? How does a vicar get rid of someone?’

  ‘Throw her in the sea or something,’ suggested his father. ‘Make your life a lot easier.’

  Sissons nodded as though it were something he had already considered. ‘Cecily says the same about you, more or less,’ he muttered.

  His father returned his gaze to the window. ‘I’ll probably be going anyway this year,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a feeling in my water. If I thought I’d be able to collect the winnings I’d go so far as to bet on it.’ He brightened. ‘Perhaps they let you claim things like winning bets in the Hereafter?’

  ‘Providing there is one,’ said Sissons gently.

  ‘God, that’s a fine thing coming from you.’

  ‘I find it difficult to give guarantees about something I’m far from convinced about myself,’ admitted his son. ‘Would you be very disappointed if it turned out there wasn’t a Hereafter?’

  A half-laugh blew across the room. ‘Ha! I don’t think I’d be in a position to be.’

  Sissons grinned at his father’s back. ‘I mean now. If you knew for sure there wasn’t. How would you feel now? Very let down?’

  Conrad Sissons turned again, with rising belligerence. ‘Bloody let down,’ he said. ‘Listen, there’d better be something afterwards. I’m not going to be satisfied with just death.’ He shook his head as if ridding himself of the thought. ‘All that praying on your knees, and those terrible psalms, and that freezing bloody church, not to mention the quids I’ve put in the plate over the years. I hope it hasn’t all been some kind of fraud.’ He returned to the window.

  Sissons shrugged. ‘Well, if it is a fraud, it’s been a necessary fraud. What would people do, otherwise?’

  ‘There’s lights,’ his father said suddenly and quietly. ‘Lights along the beach road. Dozens, all following each other. I haven’t seen lights like that for years. Look, car lights … shining straight out.’

  Sissons stood up and took his wife’s glass from her dumb hand. He set it next to the mocking bottle and walked to the window. The lights, two by two, were moving along the straight mile run of road that cut between the beach and the leys, the freshwater lakes, immediately inland.

  ‘Just like the lights of Torquay front before the war,’ said Conrad Sissons, suddenly content. ‘You remember, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I remember,’ said Sissons absently. ‘Wonderful, wasn’t it.’

  ‘Torquay? Yes, wonderful. I’ll say.’

  ‘These are Americans,’ said Sissons nodding down at the convoy. ‘That’s why they’re ignoring the black out. They’re going to have a big operation in these parts, I’ve been told.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say?’ The old man straightened and smiled. ‘Ha, that ought to wake things up a bit,’ he said. ‘Americans.’

  ‘It probably will.’

  ‘Americans,’ said Conrad with a happy grimace. ‘Soldiers.’ He half turned and shouted towards his sleeping daughter-in-law. ‘Wake up, Cecily. Come and look. The soldiers are coming!’

  Colonel Schorner slept for only three hours. It was partly discomfort, for his army cot had been set up in a corner of a nissen hut that had not been occupied for eighteen months. The tin seams were parting like lips and the bleak night air whistled through. By the time his advanced unit had located the camp and established themselves, even for that night, it was beyond three o’clock. Vehicles had to be parked, arms and supplies checked and sentries posted before he could retire. Since all the men were weary he ordered that the sentries should be changed every hour. They were young, inexperienced, boys, most never out of their home towns in the far spaces of the United States. Some did not even know where they were. Before going to sleep Schorner had made a round of the camp. One of the sentries at the vehicle park was so jittery that Schorner had to bellow at him to drop the muzzle of his rifle. He saw the young man was trembling. His eyes were points of light in the darkness.

  ‘What’s the trouble, son?’ asked Schorner.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, I just didn’t know it was you. This place sure is creepy. I never saw such a lot of dark.’

  ‘Take it easy. What’s your name?’ Normally Schorner would have known the name and home town of every man in his company, but these soldiers were strangers, assembled on the troopship and put under his command only when they disembarked at Avonmouth twelve hours before.

  ‘Wall, sir. Benny Wall.’

  ‘Where you from, Benny?’

  ‘Cincinnati, sir,’ he said, calling it ‘Cincinnata’. ‘Ohio.’

  ‘Don’t you get darkness in Ohio?’

  ‘Not like this. This is black dark.’ The boy hesitated. Then bluntly, he asked: ‘How far away are the Germans?’

  Schorner was not surprised. ‘Across the sea,’ he said, nodding south.

  ‘How far across?’

  ‘A good distance. They won’t be over tonight.’

  ‘Maybe they’ll come over to bomb,’ insisted the youth. ‘They do, sir. They’ve been bombing this place like crazy. All the time. I saw it on the movies back home.’

  The memory of the movies back home caused his expression to sag even more. Schorner nodded but did not laugh. ‘I don’t figure we’ll get any air attacks, not tonight,’ he said as if he had planned a whole strategy around it. ‘There’s not a whole lot for the Germans to bomb around this area. Only fields.’

  ‘There’s us,’ persisted the sentry. ‘Maybe they already know we’re here, sir. There’s spies all over. Maybe they know we’re sitting right in the middle of this shit field.’

  Schorner raised his eyebrows. The fear had not gone from the soldier’s face. The colonel rubbed his jaw tiredly. ‘If you catch anybody spying, shoot them,’ he said, trying to make it sound simple. Then, thinking again, ‘No. Arrest them and bring them to me. Okay?’ His voice dropped to seriousness. ‘Don’t, I repeat, Wall, don’t shoot them. And in case of air attack – well, I guess you’d better duck.’

  ‘I already thought I’d do that, sir.’

  ‘Sure, get the hell under that vehicle.’ He pointed.

  ‘Not that one, I ain’t, sir. That’s the ammunition truck.’

  ‘See, now you’re thinking like a soldier. Goodnight, Wall, you’ll be fine.’

  He walked back towards the main camp. After a few yards only, he turned and saw the sentry standing transfixed in silhouette, his face lifted, fearfully searching the sky, rifle at the ready, Schorner shook his head. What would they be like when they got on the beaches of France?

  January

  The colonel lay in his cot, wanting to get up but realizing that there was no point in wandering about in the dark, especially if the other sentries were as jumpy as Wall had been. He might well become the first casualty of the invasion that was still five months away.

  Lying there against the rough pillow, waiting, still in his uniform, waiting for the winter dawn, he began to think of his farm in the Shenandoah Valley, of West Virginia, his wife, Sarah, and his children Thomas and Cliff. He shut off the thought; nostalgia was too much of an indulgence. He checked the blue hands of his watch. Six-forty. He closed his eyes and dozed and then, inevitably, slept. He was awakened in early daylight by the crowing of roosters and the thin warbling of the camp bugle. He smiled with the small satisfaction. He had not been aware that they had brought a bugler with t
hem. A moment later his driver, Pfc Albie Primrose, his nose red in the raw morning, brought him an enamel mug of coffee.

  ‘There’s some guys, some Limey guys, hanging over the gate and laughing,’ complained Albie in a hurt way. ‘They look pretty ugly. They’re laughing at our boys.’

  ‘Oh, that’s too bad. Laughing? Well, I guess I’d better take a look.’ He glanced at Albie who, he could see, needed the reassurance. ‘We didn’t come here to be laughed at,’ he added firmly. ‘Not even by the English. But I guess I’d better shave first.’

  Albie brought him a kettle of hot water and a field basin and he washed and shaved. He left the skeletal nissen hut. The air was only a little colder outside than within. A smokey dawn smudged the sky, the indistinct landscape lay like a dead fire. Schorner put a cigar in his mouth, took it out and then with a short curse thrust it back again. He could see a group of figures hanging over the farm gate at the entrance to the camp. He walked steadily towards them across the soaked grass.

  There were six men, agricultural workers he could see, and a churlish-looking woman holding a thin boy by the hand. ‘Good morning,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Is there anything I can do for you people?’

  At once they seemed nonplussed by his attitude. Eventually a man in his twenties, with a heavy coat around his unshaven chin, sleep still sticky in his eyes and string around his trousers at the knees, answered: ‘I don’ reckon there’s anything.’ His fellows, all older although it was difficult to tell, looked towards the speaker with rustic admiration, not lost on him. He grinned insolently with rotten teeth. ‘What you lot doin’ ’ere, then?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that, I’m afraid,’ answered Schorner evenly.

  ‘Why not? It be our field. Well, it be Luscombe’s field.’

  ‘The farmer,’ added another man.

  Schorner shrugged. ‘It’s a field belonging to the British Air Department … Ministry,’ he said with more confidence than he felt. ‘We will be using it for some time to come.’

  ‘Call them soldiers?’ the second man suddenly said, thrusting an earth-dirty hand towards the field. ‘Look at they! Just like Boy bluddy Scouts.’

  Looking at him quietly, Schorner said: ‘We arrived at one o’clock this morning. I guess we’ll soon be straight.’ He moved along the gate towards the speaker. ‘I’d say you were about military age, sir.’ He looked across to the first man who had taunted him. ‘And you, sir. I thought all you Englishmen were in the army.’

  They looked at each other. No one had ever called either ‘sir’ before. The younger man began to say something, then gave up in favour of the older man. He said: ‘We be agricultural workers. ’Tis an essential occupation. Growin’ crops, see.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Schorner. ‘I get it. I guess we hear things wrong in the States. I had the picture of the men all in the army and the women working the land.’ The women at the end of the gate laughed coarsely at her compatriots. ‘Army wouldn’t ’ave them,’ she taunted. She said to Schorner, ‘Mr Luscombe, the farmer, says you’ll be wanting eggs and milk. Fair prices, ’ee says.’ She winked. ‘’Ee might even get you a pig if you can keep a bit quiet about it.’

  The men watched while she made the offer. They looked around at each other. Then the elder man said hurriedly: ‘I got a spare pig too, zur.’

  Schorner walked back towards the camp area. The field draped a slope which began some miles inland at the roots of Dartmoor. He had digested that much from the maps he had been given aboard the troopship. At least, he had noted at the time, it meant that once drainage ditches were cleared, or dug (if the former occupants, the British Air Force, had not excavated them) the endemic rain of the English winter and spring would run off more easily.

  Schorner knew that in the tradition of advance parties, no matter what the war or the army, his was ill-prepared. Although he had known five days before disembarking at Avonmouth that he was to command this first small contingent of engineers, his other officers and the enlisted men were put together piecemeal only hours before they came ashore into this strange, chilly country. Even as he walked towards the camp he knew that the tents which were sprouting up between the bones of the old RAF nissen huts were only suitable for summer use, and American summer use at that. His men, wearing the pre-war doughboys gaiters, erecting the tents, did in truth have a touch of the Boy Scouts about them. Some of them, he recalled sadly, had no idea where England was. On the ship one boy had asked if England were part of France, or an island off the coast of France, which, in a way, he supposed it was. There had been others, particularly those with Irish ancestry, whose forebears had left the British Isles with only a hatred that, far from diminishing, had been nurtured by fable and tradition over the years.

  Private Albie Primrose came towards him with a mug of coffee steaming volcanically in the thin air. He took it gratefully. ‘You repelled the enemy, colonel,’ said Albie, nodding with satisfaction towards the gate. Only the small boy was left now, gazing through the lower bars like a calf at market.

  Schorner smiled. The familiarity between commissioned officers, no matter what the rank, and the private soldier was a hallmark of his army. ‘Albie,’ he answered, ‘if that’s the worst battle we have to fight it will be just fine by me.’ He drank the coffee and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He handed the mug back to the soldier. ‘I think it’s time I took a look around,’ he said. ‘Just pass the word, I want all officers and sergeants in my hut in half an hour. And that guy who brought us here, the conducting officer, whatever his name is …’

  ‘Hulton, sir,’ supplied Primrose. ‘Captain Hulton.’

  ‘That’s the guy. Ask Captain Hulton to come and see me before he leaves, will you. Right, that’s all.’

  Albie flapped up the languid salute of the US Army and sloped off across the cold, damp hill. He sang, loudly, defiantly, tonelessly, as he went. ‘My momma done tol’ me, when I was in knee pants, a woman’ll sweet talk …’ Crows flapped from the bare-boned trees at the sound of the strange song.

  Schorner smiled and then, his farmer’s instinct moving him as much as military practice, he walked to the highest point of the long climbing field. It rose briskly over its last fifty yards or so, forming a grass platform, a gallery from which he could look down on the camp and over the countryside beyond it – a land of red, curving earth interset with meadows like bright green banners. There were houses, farms and other buildings sunk into the sharp deep valleys. Beyond the valleys was the long vision of the sea. In the foreground, almost at his feet, more drab tents were going up between the camouflaged nissen huts. Men were moving about and smoke was fingering from the cookhouse. It reminded him of an encampment of the old pioneers on the trails west in his own country, the tents, the long rounded forms of the nissen huts like the backs of the covered wagons. He noticed that the vehicles had been parked badly in the dark, but at least they were in one area. A new sentry stood at the spot where the previous night he had encountered the nervous Private Wall from Cincinnati. Even at that distance the man looked sloppy and listless. Schorner’s reaction was to look towards the gate. The little boy remained, still watching, and had now been joined by four more children, sitting astride the top bar and shouting towards the sentry who waved back. Children always liked soldiers, and soldiers children. Perhaps soldiers were children. As the sentry waved a second time he saw a grey puff rise from his upraised hand as if he had performed some conjuring trick. ‘Jesus Christ,’ muttered Schorner to himself. ‘The son-of-a-bitch is smoking.’

  ‘Soldier!’ he bellowed from his shoulder of hill. ‘You – soldier!’

  The voice sounded over the whole area. Every soldier in the camp stopped what he was doing and looked up to the broad man standing in silhouette against the pale morning sky. ‘That man!’ bawled Schorner again. ‘The sentry!’

  The GI on guard was the last to turn around. He looked up at the figure of his commanding officer. Schorner was too far away to see the puzzlement on his face. ‘Yes,
sir?’ he called. ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes, you. You’re smoking! Put that cigarette out!’

  ‘It’s a cigar,’ complained the man quietly to himself. He dropped the butt into the earth and screwed his foot over it. Then he waved amiably towards his colonel and continued on his short duty walk.

  Schorner clamped his mouth fiercely. He was tempted to run down the slope towards the sentry but he resisted the idea. Instead he carefully measured his paces down the incline until he arrived at the area where the tents were erected. The men stared as he walked. Mostly they were strangers, to each other and to him. He went towards the smoke of the cookhouse. Twenty men were lining up with mess-tins for breakfast. He picked up a tin plate and stood in the line with them. Nobody moved aside. Three cooks were moving in a businesslike way behind the field kitchen. He watched with admiration. Cooks were always the first to settle anywhere.

  ‘How ya’ doing, colonel?’ said one of the men up to his armpits in steam.

  ‘Just fine,’ said Schorner. ‘Everything okay?’

  The sergeant cook sniffed derisively over his shoulder at a black stove against the wall of the hut. ‘We got ourselves fixed okay now, sir,’ he said. ‘But that junk back there. The stuff the Limeys left. Jesus Christ, no wonder they look half-starved. All you could cook in that is mud and rocks.’

  ‘Good thing you had the field kitchen,’ nodded Schorner. Three fried eggs, four sausages, a handful of bread and butter and plum jam were put, unasked, on to his plate. A mug of coffee, trailing steam like a railway train, travelled along the table towards him. The sergeant patted the hot stove as if it were a pet. ‘Made in the good old USA,’ he grinned. ‘The best. I guess we’re going to have to depend on a whole lot of things made back home in the USA. Yes, sir. They don’t look like they got nothin’ in this asshole country.’