A Breed of Heroes (8 page)

The result was that Charles’s platoon had to patrol the key points, such as electrical installations, gas and water works. They divided the work between sections and Charles was in the
leading Land-Rover of two on the way to inspect an electricity transformer when they heard an explosion. Though loud, it was difficult to tell from which direction it came but it felt large. They
all seemed to feel it in the pits of their stomachs a split second before they heard it. They turned off the lane and drove up the rough track that led to the transformer. At the top of a short
hill they rounded a corner and saw that something had happened to the track about halfway between them and the transformer. There was a large crater, the grass around was smoking and was littered
with bits of yellow material. Charles stopped his Land-Rover and sat for a few moments looking. It was soon clear that the yellow bits had been an Electricity Board van. There were other, darker
bits scattered about.

Charles ordered his men out of their vehicles and sent them all, except his own radio operator, to take up tactical positions on the crest of the hill. He warned them to watch for booby-traps.
He feared an ambush and so dreaded having to account to the CO for dead men that he found himself shouting ‘Hard targets!’ as they doubled across the fields. He called up the rest of
his platoon over the radio and then went forward to look at the mess. The crater was several feet deep, the engine of the van was about fifty yards up the track and one of the seats was smoking in
the grass. A part of a body, wearing a jacket, lay nearby. When he reported to battalion headquarters he was told to do nothing but to wait for the CO and Henry Sandy. Edward was apparently still
involved with Chatsworth and his troubles. It crossed Charles’s mind that Chatsworth would be very jealous of his having witnessed the carnage.

When the CO arrived he made no comment on the scene, and his face was expressionless. ‘Keep half your men as they are,’ he said, ‘and get the other half to help the medics with
the bodies. You supervise them. They need an officer at a time like this.’ He pointed to the plastic bags which the medical orderlies were unfolding and laying on the grass. ‘Put the
bits on the death sheets there. You don’t know how many bodies there are, do you?’

‘At least two, I think.’

The CO nodded, his lips pressed tightly together. He looked at the pieces of bodies on the grass, and then hard at Charles as though to see what he was thinking. ‘Don’t touch any bit
of the vehicle until ATO’s been and had a look at it,’ he said. ‘It’s all good evidence for him. And keep a grip on your men. They’re very young. This might upset some
of them. It’s their first time.’

They gathered the charred and reddened bits, enough to indicate three bodies but not enough to complete them, and put them in the back of Henry’s ambulance Land-Rover. Charles’s
soldiers were pale and serious.

The device turned out to have been a mine activated by a trip-wire across the track. It had been intended for the Army’s daily visit to the transformer but had instead caught three
maintenance engineers. There was considerable press interest and Philip Lamb, to his delight, was made PRO. The CO was interviewed on television and described the incident as ‘an appalling
and mindless act of bestiality’. Nigel Beale thought that the brewery explosion had been a trial run for the real thing in order to test reactions, and Chatsworth felt slighted because nobody
would describe the scene to him in the detail he wanted. Charles was a little surprised at himself for feeling nothing at all. When it came to it, there seemed to be nothing to feel or say.

I
t was cold when they left Killagh and there was snow on the ground. This made night ambushes seem a bitter cruelty, though the days were bright,
sunny and exhilarating. They were relieved by a regiment of gunners, a polite and rather formal people who often wore civilian clothes and soon slowed down the pace of operations to what seemed to
them acceptable. There was talk of a fixture with the rugby club.

Cursed though he was, and absurd though he seemed, the CO’s tactics of day and night patrolling on foot combined with ambushes and hides were ideally suited to the kind of warfare that was
to develop in the border area, though it had not then. In the briefing for Belfast he stressed that they would maintain the same level of activity there but would have to discipline themselves to
the notion of ‘minimum force’. The eyes of the world – the press – would be upon them, and any force used – and they would have to use a good deal of it – would
not only have to be the minimum necessary but would have to be seen to be so. Every rubber bullet fired had to be accounted for and treated with the same seriousness as the firing of a real one, to
which it was the only alternative. They would not use gas for riot control since it was not sufficiently specific, affecting villains and innocents alike. He would have no cowboys blasting off at
every lout on a street corner; on the other hand he was not prepared to stand back and see his soldiers murdered on British streets, no matter what the politicians might think. If the IRA, or any
other bunch of thugs that tried to call themselves an army, gave him trouble he would hit them; if they gave more trouble he would hit them hard; if they continued to give trouble he would kill
them. Otherwise, he would leave them alone and he expected every soldier in the battalion to do likewise.

The part of Belfast they were going to was one of the most notorious in the city. It was in the south-west and had a population that was eighty per cent Catholic and twenty per cent Protestant.
The Catholics lived in IRA-dominated ghettos and the Protestants in a tight little enclave in one corner of the battalion area. The two communities were divided by the Peace Line – a
tortuous, tangled line of wire, corrugated iron, concrete and sentry-boxes that had to be manned day and night. During the 1969 riots the Protestants had burned down a score of Catholic houses.
There had been attempts by the residents to build new ones, mostly without planning permission and sometimes without planning. The Catholic part of the area had been prominent during the recent
riots. According to Nigel there were two IRA ‘battalions’ in the area and both had been ordered to step up their activities during the next few weeks. This could provoke a Protestant
reaction. The CO, however, took it as a compliment to the battalion to be given such a welcome by the enemy and he was sure that the harder it was the more his soldiers would like it.

Battalion HQ was to be in a police station, while the companies occupied schools, factories, houses and a disused bus garage. C company was the largest and had what the CO considered the most
interesting area. It included a part of the Peace Line, a few Prot streets and a large Catholic estate of ill-repute where several soldiers had already died that year. Company HQ was a bottling
factory. Charles did not need to see it to know that it was a move for the worse. The barracks in Killagh were almost academic cloisters by comparison. The Factory was a nineteenth-century building
of six storeys set in the midst of a maze of narrow, mean streets and enclosed by a high wall. The iron gate was kept closed and there were two knife-rests in the street outside, which forced
traffic to weave past slowly, at walking-pace. Inside and outside the wall the ground was littered with glass and rubble. The outgoing unit’s Land-Rovers were battered, dented and holed.

Charles was greeted on arrival by the CSM, a popular, gravel-voiced Liverpudlian whose face was almost as battered as the Land-Rovers. ‘’Tain’t much, sir, but it’s
’ome. Only four more months. Won’t be so bad when we’ve cleaned it up a bit. Soon as this bloody lot clear off we can get started. Live like pigs, don’t they? Must’ve
caught it from the people round ’ere, by what I’ve seen of ’em.’ He laid his hand confidentially on Charles’s arm and indicated the broken bricks, bits of piping,
paving stone and glass that lay scattered about the parked vehicles. ‘See all this shit, sir? D’you know ’ow it got here? Kids threw it, little kids last night. ’Undreds of
’em in the street outside, lobbing it over the wall. I come down with the advance party, see, just in time to cop the lot of it. Like a bleedin’ avalanche, it was. And the same thing
happens every time one of their Land-Rovers pokes its nose out the gate, which is why they’re all in shit order. So I says to the guard commander, like, well, what you going to do about it,
ain’t you going to stop ’em? Oh no, ’e says, it ’appens every night, it’s nothing serious, we just let ’em get on with it. Containment, he called it.
Containment, I ask you! Standing there letting a mob of kids chuck bricks at you. I says to ’im, I says, well, this is the last night they do it, you can tell ’em that from me,
’cos when we take over tomorrow night containment stops and ear-boxing starts. I’ll give ’em bloody containment.’

Charles struggled with his unnecessary quantity of kit up the stone stairs into the Factory. There was a continuous sound of activated machinery, punctuated every few seconds by a crash that
shook the building.

‘The bottling,’ said the CSM. ‘That’s what that is. They still use the first two floors, you see. Six in the morning till ten at night. They’re all Prot workers but
we still ’ave to escort ’em in and out in case of bombs and we have to do bomb searches when they’re not ’ere. We live on the other four floors. The machinery’s been
ripped out but there ain’t no separate rooms, not properly speaking, just a lot of cardboard partitions with a corridor down the middle. It’s a bit noisy ’cos the
cardboard’s a bit thin and don’t reach the ceiling anywhere. An’ it’s crowded. You an’ the other officers, ’cept Major Lumley, sleep on the third floor in a kind
of cubicle next to the ops room, so you’re nice and handy like if anything ’appens. But it’s even noisier for you.’

The Factory soon became known as the worst of the company locations. Defaulters were sometimes threatened with transfer to C company, as though to some particularly gruesome region of hell. It
was never silent. Apart from the crash and thump of the machinery below there were televisions, a juke box in the NAAFI partition, countless transistor radios and all the zoo noises that soldiers
make. From their partition next to the ops room Charles, Chatsworth and Tim were able to listen to radio talk and mush for twenty-four hours a day. The partition was furnished with three
sleeping-bags, three lockers and one table. There was just room to move between them. Chatsworth and Tim had already claimed the two sleeping-bags farthest from the door, which was a piece of
sacking nailed to the woodwork. Chatsworth’s kit was strewn all over his sleeping-bag, but he was nowhere to be seen. Tim was lying down writing a letter, his kit neatly stowed away. Charles
had often wondered whether Tim was oblivious to his surroundings or simply contented with anything. He wasn’t sure which was worse.

‘Edward wants to see you,’ said Tim without looking up from his letter. ‘Turn right and keep on till you reach the end of the corridor.’

Edward had a partition to himself. There was ample room for his camp-bed and locker. He was gazing dolefully at a street map of Belfast. ‘Hallo, old son, come in and spread yourself about
a bit. Better sit on the bed, there’s no room to stand.’ Charles sat rather uncomfortably next to him. Their shoulders touched. Edward looked pensive. ‘Ever thought about leaving
the Army, Charles?’

‘Yes.’ Charles wondered what was coming next. ‘Quite often, actually. Particularly recently.’

‘So have I, old son, so have I. Give anything to be out of here at the moment, quite honestly. Don’t tell anyone, though. Trouble is, who’d want to employ a bugger like me? All
very well being Commando trained and Airborne and being clued up on your infantry tactics and all that, but it’s not much use in ICI, is it? The fact that I’m red-hot with a Carl Gustav
rocket launcher won’t cut much ice there, will it? Or I used to be, at least. Probably can’t even do that now.’

Edward was one of those people who were at their most likeable when not trying to assert themselves. He was at heart a simple, nice man, not particularly suited to any job. Charles felt they had
something in common in the latter respect, though possibly not in the former. ‘You could claim you’ve had management experience,’ he said. The concept of ‘management’
always made him feel uneasy. ‘Good at dealing with people and that sort of thing.’

Edward looked reproachfully at him. ‘D’you really think they’d swallow that?’

‘Not really, no.’

‘Nor do I. What would you do if you left – be an academic or something?’

‘Maybe, if I could. Or journalism, or something like that. Something where other people do it and I talk about it.’

‘Wise man. So long as you tell ’em what they’re doing is a load of cobblers you’ll never be out of a job. Let me know if you ever want an assistant, someone to add insult
to injury, you know.’ Edward seemed suddenly to recollect that he was the company commander. He stubbed his finger on the map. ‘You’ve seen this, haven’t you?’

‘No.’

‘You should have. It’s the map of our area. You’re supposed to have one.’

It was a large-scale street map shaded green and orange to indicate Catholic and Protestant areas, and unshaded to indicate mixed business areas. Charles looked more closely at it, as though to
establish by inspection whether or not he had one. ‘I thought perhaps I should have one.’

‘See the sergeant major.’ Edward held up a list of names and addresses. ‘But you haven’t seen this yet, have you?’

‘Yes.’

Edward looked puzzled. ‘Where?’

‘On Chatsworth’s bed.’

‘How the hell did he get one? It’s supposed to be secret. Company commanders only.’

‘Perhaps it was another list.’

Edward seemed relieved. ‘Yes, perhaps it was.’ He stared gloomily at the list. ‘This is what’s so bloody depressing, you see. Not only do we have a larger area than
anyone else but we’ve got a list of gunmen and villains twice as long as your arm. I mean look at it. You haven’t seen this, remember. It’s secret.’