“Heath?” said Lieutenant Colonel Hamilton.
“My apologies, sir—I was miles away.”
“I’ll bet you wish you were.”
Alistair grinned. “Sir.”
“Brief the men, will you? A pep talk would be nice. Otherwise any kind of talk they will listen to. Soliloquy, philippic . . .” He waved his hand as if it was all too wearisome. Alistair saluted and left the old man to his paperwork.
Ten Regiment, Royal Artillery was mustered at easy readiness among the ramparts of Fort St. Elmo. The men relaxed in the twilight and lounged against the stone walls, while below them Grand Harbour shone under a fulvous moon. The men had the news already: the carrier Illustrious had been badly smashed up and was on its way in to port. Now the whole spite of the enemy would be directed against the island, to finish the great ship off. It was up to Alistair to tell the men, officially, that they were in for it.
He swallowed his nerves, blew his tin whistle, and stood firm while two hundred men came to their feet with the grudging compliance they might have afforded to a football referee who could just as usefully have let play continue. The men got themselves into their three batteries, each battery subdivided into two troops of four guns apiece, each gun accounting for a sergeant and seven gunners.
They lined up facing Alistair while the senior officers assembled at his side—his five fellow captains and the three majors. As captain, Alistair commanded a four-gun troop. Even when one added in his subalterns and his warrant officer, only thirty-five of the men arranged before him were his own. It was nerve-wracking, which was why Hamilton did it—made his juniors take turns to address the whole of 10 Regiment.
The men fell quiet, waiting for Alistair to be a genius. They watched him with the world-class loyalty and affection that only the British Army could disguise as open sarcasm.
At his side, Simonson whispered, “Your fly is undone, old man.”
With effort, Alistair stopped himself from checking.
Simonson whispered, “Oh, and your mother telephoned.”
Alistair ignored him.
“I’m to let you know that your father’s cock tastes of your dog’s arse.”
To stop himself laughing Alistair had to bite his cheek.
He took a step forward. “Well, men, as you all know, our loved ones are taking a beating back home and they are holding up superbly, and now it is our turn. The Admiralty tells us that one of their tubs, Illustrious, has undergone some unplanned modifications at sea. She’s on her way in now, and we can be certain that the enemy will spare no effort to sink her in port.”
“Or brandy,” whispered Simonson.
“Perhaps we cannot do much against high-altitude bombing, but as you know we have a very effective anti-aircraft weapon in the 3.7-inch gun, and we intend by coordinated firing to establish a box within which the enemy’s dive-bombers cannot operate.”
“A lunch box,” whispered Simonson. “A cricket box.”
“Gunners, your sergeants will be issued with the angular sectors and elevations for each gun. There will be a coordinated firing sequence in order to achieve the maximum coverage of shell splinters for the minimum expenditure of ordnance. The details will be—”
As Alistair spoke, he had noticed a growing agitation among the men. Now they were looking past him, over the ramparts. Alistair stopped talking and turned to see what they were watching.
Looming huge over the breakwaters, Illustrious was limping into Grand Harbour under cover of dark. Alistair had never seen a carrier and he was awed at the size of her. She wore no lights and the harbor was blacked out, but they could see her silhouette against the moonlight. She darkened half the sky. Her huge turbines throbbed as she ghosted in. The sea breeze brought the awful smell of her: scorched metal and flesh, burned aviation spirit, leaking oil. No one spoke. A dozen officers and two hundred men watched for two full minutes in silence. When the smell got too much, Alistair turned back to the men.
“All right,” he told them, abandoning the speech he had planned. “As you can see she will be hard to miss, even for the Italians. We had better all get to our guns.”
Back with his own troop, Alistair felt all right. He busied himself with making each man as comfortable as he could. Since it would be a cold night he had blankets and bedding brought up from below, and thermoses filled with cocoa. He sent his subaltern to the medical officer to secure a stock of eyedrops and Benzedrine for the men, knowing from his experience in France that it would be two or three more days at full alert before the stuff was needed, but that by the time it was, it would be gone. He split each gun crew into two watches of two hours, and he spent the long night walking the quarter-mile beat of his guns.
No attacks came.
Finally, with the hum of fatigue in his ears as the day dawned in gray cloud, he took himself down to the rocks below the fort. He looked at the sea and thought about Tom. The waves broke themselves on the rocks, each retreating with its wounded hiss to succumb to the surge of the next. They came from the horizon to do it. Alistair watched the incoming queue of them. Not one wave jumped its order or renounced its destination. Death, finally, was British; life chaotic and foreign.
The cloud clung to the island all morning, and at noon the lieutenant colonel had them stand the gun crews down. A long lull began. The cloud stayed so low that nothing could fly, and with so much of the Royal Navy still in the approaches, the enemy would risk nothing from the sea. All eyes peered upward. At any perceived darkening of the gray, the men would remark that it was turning out nice again. Any slight break in the cloud brought anxious silence. In short order the men became authorities on gray, able to distinguish between the nuances of ash, dusk and silver; granite, slate and mouse. Their upturned faces took on the lifesaving pallor.
Leave was canceled, officers and men confined to the fort. There were no more afternoons sailing or swimming. On the first day fresh barrels were fitted to the guns. Shells were brought out and inventoried and restocked into the underground magazines. When there was nothing more that could usefully be made ready, the men were given a hundred things to polish. The rubble-painted gun carriages, the brass oil lines, the optics of the predictor gear. When all the artillery pieces gleamed, the men moved on to cutlery, flagpoles, boots. By the end of the second day of the lull, the fort and all its contents were burnished to a furious sheen under the unflattering sky.
When there was nothing left to shine, there were walls of sandbags to be moved. It was discovered by the officers of the regiment, with their three batteries in eight-hour rotation, that if the men of the first battery moved a sandbag wall from A to B, the second from B to A and the third from A to B again, then the first battery would come back on duty satisfied that their work was still as they had left it.
By the third day of the lull even the most imaginative officers could no longer busy their men. Now the gray of the sky began to bleed into the soldiers’ unguarded hearts. Men stared at the featureless clouds and saw enemy planes where there were none. There were false alarms and loud panics. Memory was blinded, and none could remember a time when they had not stood guard on the timeless ramparts under the colorless sky. On their mean rations an ancient hunger slowed their minds. The ghosts in the old stone haunted them. Officers brooded and traced their fingers over the scratched graffiti of past garrisons. Men off duty woke screaming in the night, babbling that the Turks had breached the walls. A bloodied ax was found on the ground in the central courtyard, with tufts of blond hair clinging to the blade. Some supposed the hair to be human, others thought it was goat. When a roll call was taken, one of each was found to be missing.
On the fourth day, all was quiet. The missing man was found in a village inland, injured only by drink.
Alistair tried to remember Tom’s face. Already he could hardly remember it differently from Duggan’s. He couldn’t catch a glimpse of their old life to
gether through the low gray ceiling of memory. Instead he saw Mary—her copper hair, her insubordinate grin—and he was sick at himself.
He lay in his cot, staring at his gray metal table with its lit candle. Its small flame shivered beside the jar of Tom’s blackberry jam. It reflected onto the gray writing paper with a bloody glow.
At dawn on the fifth day he went up to take the report of the off-going watch. He smoked his pipe while he looked out over the sea. The breeze was fresh on his face. He watched the red sun edge up into a vast pink sky, but it was a long time before he understood that the cloud was gone. He creased his eyes against the light. Already the horizon was starting to blue. It was a perfect bomber’s sky. He tapped out his pipe on the stone, ran his fingers through his hair, and felt the familiar battle lurch in his stomach.
It was six, and the fresh watch was coming up from the fort. He hurried to get them installed but they were not even halfway ready before the fort’s electric bells started up. A minute later, as men rushed to their stations and the fort erupted into action, the sirens began to wail across Valletta and all around the harbor.
The Germans attacked, so much harder than the Italians. The Germans were inflexible in their fury, deploying it in a prearranged configuration. For the next week there was not one hour when an attack did not come from their dive-bombers or their high-altitude rigs. When it finally ended, on the eighth night, the men who had not been pierced by shrapnel or mutilated by their own guns’ recoil were so deafened by a million bangs that their ears bled through the yellow dust that clogged them. They were so washed through with amphetamines and smoke that they saw visions as they collapsed—officers and men alike—into piles around their guns. Like children kept awake beyond endurance they slept where they fell, mouths agape, faces as still as death. All night the fine yellow dust, which had risen a mile high in the bombing, drifted down on the men in a shroud.
—
When Alistair woke, the only sound was the keening of seagulls. He rubbed dust out of his eyes until he could see. Under a sky that was finally gray again, the harbor was black with oil and foul with sewage. Every pipe in the port must have cracked. The air could have stripped paint from the inside of a man’s chest.
He stumbled up the stone stairs to the signals room, but when he picked up the field telephone, the line was dead. After eight days and nights of dive-bombing, nothing was connected to anything anymore. The garrison was a join-the-dots puzzle, and Alistair was not sure he wanted to know what it looked like when it was completed.
He was the only soul awake. He roused his subaltern—if he’d had to shake him any harder, Alistair would have been doing the enemy’s work. He held the man by the shoulders, gave him a stern look and said, “Coffee.”
Briggs looked back at him from a distance measured in miles.
“Coffee,” said Alistair again. “Koh. Fee.”
“Yes. Please.”
“No, Briggs. You make coffee. For officers.”
His subaltern gave a clumsy salute and stumbled off to bang pots. Alistair went along the guns until he found Simonson. He shook him awake.
“What is it, you contemptible man?”
“I came to see if you were alive.”
“Well I’m not, so clear off.’
Alistair said, “I thought you might want to know that the war is over.”
Simonson sat up in the dust and blinked twice. “God. Jesus. Really?”
“Yes,” said Alistair. “Telegram just in from London. Immediate cessation of hostilities. Troopships home for us within the week.”
Simonson closed his eyes and gave an ecstatic sigh. “Oh, thank Christ.”
Alistair gave him twenty seconds and then said, “No, not really.”
Simonson opened one bloodshot eye. “You vile, vile bastard.”
“Returning the favor for your help with my speech last week. Coffee?”
“I hope it poisons you.”
“My man Briggs is brewing some. Come over to my room. And then we must rouse the men and get ourselves operational again.”
Simonson eyed the clouds. “The Germans won’t come today.”
“They won’t need to, if we let this rot set in. Everyone’s still snoring.”
Simonson pulled his jacket over his head. “It worked for the French.”
Alistair laughed. “I thought you wanted to make major.”
“Yes, so oiks like you can do the drudgery.”
“Did I mention,” said Alistair, “that our friendship means the world to me?”
Simonson only groaned.
“But it does, you know. I’m mildly glad every time you’re not killed.”
Simonson opened half an eye and leered at him. ‘At last. Meet me in the showers at midnight, and for god’s sake not a word to Matron.”
For the rest of the day the two captains saw to the men of their battery. There were the injured to be evacuated to the hospitals farther inland, the badly battle-frayed to be rotated out for R&R, and the battery’s eight guns to be consolidated down to six fully manned units. Everything needed repairing, cleaning and oiling. Each of the 3.7s needed releveling on its jacks, every sight needed recalibrating, and every signal line had to be taken up, checked for breaks and relaid.
Inside, in the labyrinthine fort, everything had been shaken from its shelf, or taken to the wrong place in the chaos, or stolen or eaten or sublimated. It was a mercy that every unit of the British Army came so fully documented that it could be reassembled from its constituent parts by men who had hardly slept. Alistair and Simonson worked their battery back up to readiness using the technical manuals and the quartermaster’s equipment list. If they had happened to pick up the wrong instructions at the beginning of the day, it seemed to Alistair that they might just as easily have ended up with a bus company, or a small dairy farm.
At nightfall there was still so much fuel oil in the sea that Alistair half expected the setting sun to ignite it. He was too tired to think straight. He stumbled up the stone staircase to his room and sat down on his cot. Airmail had come during the day—a Wellington had slipped in through the lull in the enemy’s air cover—and a letter was waiting for him on his desk. He slit the envelope open, not recognizing the hand.
Alistair,
I hope you shan’t mind if I write. You must feel as rotten as I do without Tom. I was going through his things when I found a letter you wrote to him, asking forgiveness for the night you and I met. I do not know whether he managed to reply.
I thought it might do you good to know that Tom often spoke of you. He looked up to you. He was never reconciled to staying in London while you put your neck on the line. So if Tom seemed distant in his letters toward the end, you mustn’t think that he meant to be. Some days he could seem a thousand miles from me, even though we would be sitting at the same table.
Everyone is tired here, after so many months of bombing. There is a distance between all of us now. I do not mean to be maudlin, only to tell you how it is in London. After the war of course it will be like the start of spring, which is always so brilliantly sudden. The leaves will burst back onto the trees and close the gaps between the branches and we shall be startled—shan’t we?—as we are startled at the end of every winter. We shall think: oh, I had quite forgotten there were three livable seasons.
Tom wouldn’t want us to be sad. The crocuses are out now in Regent’s Park, and I picked some this morning and took them to his grave. I arranged them as best I could, and then I came home. On the way home the train was crowded. I was hungry. There was a man in my compartment with an irritating laugh. One does not rise above the everyday simply because one ought to. In the end I suppose we lay flowers on graves because we cannot lay ourselves on them.
Hilda and I have applied to work on the ambulances. It might be exciting to drive an ambulance—although to listen to my father, my drivin
g would be certain to cause further casualties. In any case, they will not let me teach. It is too bad, but perhaps they are right. It is my constant regret that my class would still be alive if I had not insisted on carrying on once the air raids began. We live, you see, and even a mule like me must learn. I was brought up to believe that everyone brave is forgiven, but in wartime courage is cheap and clemency out of season.
Unless you tell me otherwise, I shall keep up the rent on the garret. I thought you might like it to be there when you geot back. In your wardrobe you have three viable ties, four shirts of which two are almost serviceable, and a lounge suit in a style that I can only describe as conventional. Forgive me if you feel that “dull” is a better word. I have applied mothballs, though I was tempted to use something more flammable. You must let me know what you want to do about arrangements.
Sincerely,
Mary North
Alistair put down the letter and stood up. For a few minutes he looked out over the devastated port and the black harbor still sickly with oil. Then he sat back at his metal table and took up a stub of pencil and an airmail sheet.
Dear Mary,
Thank you for your kind letter. You must surrender the garret and let me know what you have paid in rent so I can reimburse you. As for my poor old clothes, surely there is some yokel in your father’s constituency who can hang them on a scarecrow. Furthermore
He hesitated. What had she meant by You must let me know what you want to do about arrangements? He read her letter through again, finding it impenetrable. If it was a simple request for instructions, perhaps there were too many crocuses in it. If it was something more, then perhaps there were not enough roses. He screwed up his page and began again.
Mary,
If you really do not mind, I hope you will keep the garret on, at least until I have a chance to come and say goodbye to the old dump. I would like a place to remember Tom by. Of course it is your place now, yours and his, so you must do what you feel is