A Kiss for the Enemy (29 page)

‘She's coming on Tuesday!' Anna had also written –

‘The more I think of Frido the more I long to see him and talk to him. He is so steadfast, his instincts are so good. I would trust him with my soul.'

Kaspar still held Frido's arm firmly. He spoke low. None but Frido could hear.

‘Frido, my son, it is best, whatever you may think or feel, to say nothing of these things. These are difficult times. They are not – safe times. It is necessary to be very, very prudent.' His voice was unsteady and only just audible. His son looked at him with love and, for the first time in his life, with
compassion. Then Kaspar released his grip on Frido's arm and spoke to the girls with his usual agreeable courtesy.

‘Excellent news, indeed, little Lise! Anna loves the summer here. I have told her that she should always plan to bring her little son to Arzfeld for every July. But it is good that she should come, too, in the spring. We cannot have her here too often.'

It was December, 1942, and their fourth day on the hill. B Company had arrived in darkness, astonished and relieved to be told they had reached what they had understood was going to be a strongly defended objective – reached it without difficulty. Some shells had fallen among the rear companies as the battalion moved forward silently through the night, but these had, by good luck, done no harm. In front there had been nothing – no enemy machine gun fire, no mines, no reaction: nothing. The word had been muttered, ‘Dig in,' and on stony and inhospitable ground they had done their best, scratching holes, enlarging them. Fear of the enemy's fire, so uncannily silent, struggled against exhaustion. ‘Dig in.' In some places solid rock ordained that the erection of stone-piled breastworks had to replace the excavation of trenches.

‘They look like grouse butts,' Anthony thought, as dawn began to reveal the battalion to itself.

Dawn did not come as a friend. Anthony was now a Captain, second-in-command of B Company. He and his brother officers, the day before their attack, had had the opportunity to look at the landscape from a neighbouring hill, to study the objective. They had seen, as if looking at a stage from far back in the dress circle of a theatre, the large, bare hill they were to assault that night. The hills of Tunisia were dark in colour. From a distance they looked grey and forbidding, with the rough, ridged texture of an elephant's hide. The lower ground was brown, with much scrub. Here and there were fields – patches of earth where there appeared to have been attempts at cultivation, to European eyes haphazard and unsystematic. Yet Arabs tilled this ground, and presumably owned it. As Anthony looked through his binoculars at the objective B Company was to attack in a few hours' time, two Arabs rode out on donkeys into the low, intervening plain: they
dismounted and began to work, scratching the resistant surface of the ground, pausing often in their labours, desultory, seemingly undeterred by the occasional sights and sounds of battle. Guns sounded in the distance. There was a sort of absurdity in the scene. Yet, for a little, these Arabs engaged in their primitive agriculture seemed more real in their struggle for survival than did the contenders for that dark, silent hill where a battalion of strongly entrenched German troops would try to kill the attacking British as they climbed up and along the elephant's hide, and must, therefore, themselves be efficiently killed. It was not the Arabs' quarrel.

And then, in darkness, there had been silence, anti-climax. No opposition. Arrival, by every calculation, at the correct point, unopposed. An hour later dawn had come, and as the early morning mist cleared every man could see that the crest they had reached was a false one. Ahead, and overlooking them, was a further crest. It was significantly higher. It had been invisible from their original observation point. And there was soon no doubt, no doubt whatsoever, that it was held by the Germans. Shells began to fall. Almost as bad was the fact that their supply route, the way they had taken forward, was, like most of their own positions, also overlooked by the enemy on the next crest.

It was the battalion's first battle. A few, like Anthony, had joined from another battalion after experience of that other battle, in France. To most men, of whatever rank, it was their baptism of fire. The first lessons learned were not new, but they were viciously taught. Anthony looked at the dark, menacing ridge in front of them, topped by black rain clouds, as dawn gave way to morning and shelling intensified.

‘If I ever have anything to do with it, which is unlikely,' he thought, ‘I'll never,
never
again sit down in front of an enemy who's occupying higher ground than me!'

The ridge beyond them was, in truth, only a little higher, but to the men of B Company it felt as if the Germans could peer into every British slit trench, could engage in observed target practice at their leisure. They felt naked and impotent.

Their spirits, nevertheless, were extraordinarily high. Every small fold in the ground was used to produce some sort of cover. Men worked with frantic energy to improve trenches,
to find ground where digging was possible, to construct the bleak, sodden habitations of the battlefield and to carve some kind of protected way between them. In these circumstances the journey to or from a particular platoon's position was an adventure, the laughter and companionship found there something different from other laughter, other companionship. It had an edge to it, a nervous zest, profoundly experienced.

‘I'm frightened most of the time,' said Anthony to himself. ‘I'm soaking wet, I'm hellish uncomfortable, and I'm not even convinced that we're winning this little bit of the war. But there's nowhere – absolutely nowhere – that I want to be except here.'

On their second day he had to go back to attend for orders at Battalion Headquarters. When he returned to the scratches in the rock – half dug-out, half-cave fortified by piled earth and heaped stones – which constituted Company Headquarters, Anthony found an extraordinary sense of homecoming. Away from the little world of B Company he had felt a stranger. The Company Sergeant-Major, Phillips, held out a mug of tea to him when he returned.

‘Tea, sir?'

Anthony looked at him and thought he had never known friendship until that hour.

It was hard to decide whether wind or rain was worse, although often, of course, they came together. The rain filled such trenches as could be dug. The wind struck with an icy, penetrative power which none of them had experienced before. German shelling was alarming but sporadic, rather than insistent: until the fourth day there had only been six casualties from shelling in B Company. Men were encouraged to leave the trenches and stretch their limbs, to show by this small act of defiance that their spirits were unaffected by the enemy's guns, to warm themselves in the occasional sun. Some might then be too slow or too unlucky to take cover again before a German salvo arrived: but it had not happened yet and the hazard, Anthony reckoned, was well worth it.

The worse aspect of their life was the sense that they could do nothing to hit back. They heard with enthusiasm the sound of British artillery, pounding positions the far side of that menacing crest line above and beyond them, answering the
German guns which harried themselves. But although it was at first hourly and then daily expected, there was no German attack. The men of B Company had no chance to use their own weapons. Their fate had been to advance in darkness, to halt, to dig, to find themselves overlooked, cut off, vulnerable: and then, simply, to endure. There was, they supposed, no thought of withdrawing them. It did not seem that the high command contemplated, just yet, a further attack. And the Germans appeared content to wait, to drop shells among B Company with intermittent ferocity, and to bide their time.

Supply had to be entirely by night. By day, German binoculars could focus on every route that led to them, from any direction. Their supply vehicles were well to the rear, in some woods near the foot of the hill. Movement of any kind was laborious. Getting wounded men back off the hill had been particularly hard, and in this, as in most things, Sergeant-Major Phillips had played an heroic part. An abrupt, high-principled Tynesider, with a rough tongue, he had shown himself careless of personal safety and tireless where the life or health of a single man in his Company might be at risk. By now every man in B Company, from the best to the worst, would have lain down with an appropriate oath and gladly have suffered Phillips to walk over him had the Sergeant-Major, improbably, so desired.

Now it was mid-morning on the fourth day. Anthony's Commander, Major Richard Wright, was at a conference at Battalion Headquarters, near the base of the hill, close to the track which wound through woods in the valley behind them, connected to something like the outside world. It was generally expected that he would return with news, plans, orders. Perhaps they would be relieved. The day had started well. Supplies had come forward in the hours of darkness. Anthony had been at Company Headquarters.

‘Mail, Captain Marvell, sir.'

Everybody devoured letters, letters able to transport them in imagination to another, safer, drier world, a world filled with regular sleep, predictable activity, a world sweetened by the bodies of women, the gentle, the soft, the personal. Sometimes there was no time to read a letter: it had to be stuffed into a pocket, eagerly anticipated, treasured. But whatever the
pressure, a man would instantly and hungrily tear open a letter if he possibly could. Men shielded the precious paper from the rain with the improvised cover afforded by their groundsheets, buried their faces in their letters, eyes moving up and down the lines, lips moving.

For Anthony it was a good moment for the arrival of letters. Things seemed extraordinarily quiet. A mug of tea and some tinned sausage and beans had made a delicious breakfast. He settled into a corner of B Company's headquarter cave. The letter was from his mother. Hilda was an excellent correspondent. She gave enough – but not too much – detail of their quiet doings at Bargate, enough to bring its gentle peace instantly before Anthony's eyes. Hilda knew how to do this without the appearance of design. She knew how casual reference to some paintwork in dilapidation, to some village eccentricity, would evoke home vividly, catch at Anthony's heart. She never overdid it. Then she wrote of serious things, of books, of thoughts. Whenever possible, she sent books to her son, and he delighted in writing to her his views on them, responding, arguing. Their minds were not unlike. They had always been able to talk to each other. As he read her letter Anthony could smell smoke from the fire in the inner hall of Bargate, hear birds outside the windows, see a print hanging slightly askew against the dark panelling.

‘Of course,' Hilda Marvell's letter ran, towards its end, ‘the Americans now being in the war does mean one feels a
total
gulf between us and Marcia. Before, when the USA had diplomatic relations with Germany, one always had the feeling, however far-fetched, that something, somehow, might be done. Now there's a great, grim wall across the whole world and reaching to the sky. We're on one side of it, and our darling Marcia is on the other. She must feel like that too. I'm afraid I hope so.'

Hilda was Anthony's chief correspondent. His father wrote briefly and prosaically. Other men grunted with pleasure at letters from wives, sweethearts. There were the domesticated types who read silently, thinking of home, firelight, peace. There were the lechers, the boasters, who used letters as evidence of amorous triumphs, to be savoured in recollection, sometimes quoted aloud. There were a few who never received
letters at all, for whom the cry ‘Mail' generally induced a determined concentration on cleaning a rifle, attention to some small personal task, an averting of the eyes, shamed by neglect. ‘And I,' thought Anthony, ‘I have no lover to write letters to me.' His lover, too, was on the other side of what Hilda called that great grim wall across the whole world. And could she even think of him now? Was she alive? And where? But although he thought of Anna with a longing entirely undimmed by more than three years apart he thought of her with a certain inner contentment. This woman had loved him, borne his child (if Bob O'Reilly were to be believed – and why not?) and was a woman of such quality as few of his luckier, more satisfied comrades could ever dream of. And he, at least, could dream.

There was a whistle and a distant crump. Shells falling on C Company away to the north, on their left.

Letter stuffed into his pack and left at Company Headquarters, Anthony walked across to B Company's right-hand platoon, putting much effort into demonstrating a nonchalance he seldom felt. Shelling in the Company area, the right-hand forward company of the battalion, had been light since the previous evening.

The platoon – the right-hand forward platoon of the entire battalion front – was commanded by Sergeant Brinson, a lugubrious, reliable man. The Platoon Commander, Lieutenant Peter Worldham, a cheerful, impertinent, irrepressible youth had been one of B Company's casualties on the second day. They'd heard nothing about him since. As Sergeant-Major Phillips had briskly organized the stretcher party which took him down the hill Anthony had had a word –

‘You'll be all right, Peter.'

Worldham had smiled. Anthony saw the pain behind the smile and feared that the shell splinter had found the stomach. Now Sergeant Brinson managed the platoon, in an austere sort of way. ‘Everybody does things in his own fashion,' thought Anthony, ‘and there's no doubt Brinson gives them confidence. They feel that even the Germans wouldn't take liberties with him.'

Sergeant Brinson, for once, seemed less than alert. He gave
no sign of registering Anthony's arrival. He was leaning against the end face of his slit trench, his head apparently in his right hand, very still. Private Wilcox, who shared the trench with him, grinned at Anthony and saluted. He turned half-apologetically to Sergeant Brinson. It was beginning to rain again.