THERE WERE HORRORS enough, but it was the unexpected detail that threw him and afterward would not let him go. When they reached the level crossing, after a three-mile walk along a narrow road, he saw the path he was looking for meandering off to the right, then dipping and rising toward a copse that covered a low hill to the northwest. They stopped so that he could consult the map. But it wasn’t where he thought it should be. It wasn’t in his pocket, or tucked into his belt. Had he dropped it, or put it down at the last stop? He let his greatcoat fall on the ground and was reaching inside his jacket when he realized. The map was in his left hand and must have been there for over an hour. He glanced across at the other two but they were facing away from him, standing apart, smoking silently. It was still in his hand. He had prized it from the fingers of a captain in the West Kents lying in a ditch outside—outside where? These rear-area maps were rare. He also took the dead captain’s revolver. He wasn’t trying to impersonate an officer. He had lost his rifle and simply intended to survive.
The path he was interested in started down the side of a bombed house, fairly new, perhaps a railwayman’s cottage rebuilt after the last time. There were animal tracks in the mud surrounding a puddle in a tire rut. Probably goats. Scattered around were shreds of striped cloth with blackened edges, remains of curtains or clothing, and a smashed-in window frame draped across a bush, and everywhere, the smell of damp soot. This was their path, their shortcut. He folded the map away, and as he straightened from picking up the coat and was slinging it around his shoulders, he saw it. The others, sensing his movement, turned round, and followed his gaze. It was a leg in a tree. A mature plane tree, only just in leaf. The leg was twenty feet up, wedged in the first forking of the trunk, bare, severed cleanly above the knee. From where they stood there was no sign of blood or torn flesh. It was a perfect leg, pale, smooth, small enough to be a child’s. The way it was angled in the fork, it seemed to be on display, for their benefit or enlightenment: this is a leg.
The two corporals made a dismissive sound of disgust and picked up their stuff. They refused to be drawn in. In the past few days they had seen enough.
Nettle, the lorry driver, took out another cigarette and said, “So, which way, guv’nor?”
They called him that to settle the difficult matter of rank. He set off down the path in a hurry, almost at a half run. He wanted to get ahead, out of sight, so that he could throw up, or crap, he didn’t know which. Behind a barn, by a pile of broken slates, his body chose the first option for him. He was so thirsty, he couldn’t afford to lose the fluid. He drank from his canteen, and walked around the barn. He made use of this moment alone to look at his wound. It was on his right side, just below his rib cage, about the size of a half crown. It wasn’t looking so bad after he washed away the dried blood yesterday. Though the skin around it was red, there wasn’t much swelling. But there was something in there. He could feel it move when he walked. A piece of shrapnel perhaps.
By the time the corporals caught up, he had tucked his shirt back in and was pretending to study the map. In their company the map was his only privacy.
“What’s the hurry?”
“He’s seen some crumpet.”
“It’s the map. He’s having his fucking doubts again.”
“No doubts, gentlemen. This is our path.”
He took out a cigarette and Corporal Mace lit it for him. Then, to conceal the trembling in his hands, Robbie Turner walked on, and they followed him, as they had followed him for two days now. Or was it three? He was lower in rank, but they followed and did everything he suggested, and to preserve their dignity, they teased him. When they tramped the roads or cut across the fields and he was silent for too long, Mace would say, “Guv’nor, are you thinking about crumpet again?” And Nettle would chant, “He fucking is, he fucking is.” They were townies who disliked the countryside and were lost in it. The compass points meant nothing to them. That part of basic training had passed them by. They had decided that to reach the coast, they needed him. It was difficult for them. He acted like an officer, but he didn’t even have a single stripe. On the first night, when they were sheltering in the bike shed of a burned-out school, Corporal Nettle said, “What’s a private soldier like you doing talking like a toff?”
He didn’t owe them explanations. He intended to survive, he had one good reason to survive, and he didn’t care whether they tagged along or not. Both men had hung on to their rifles. That was something at least, and Mace was a big man, strong across the shoulders, and with hands that could have spanned one and a half octaves of the pub piano he said he played. Nor did Turner mind about the taunts. All he wanted now as they followed the path away from the road was to forget about the leg. Their path joined a track which ran between two stone walls and dropped down into a valley that had not been visible from the road. At the bottom was a brown stream which they crossed on stepping-stones set deep in a carpet of what looked like miniature water parsley.
Their route swung to the west as they rose out of the valley, still between the ancient walls. Ahead of them the sky was beginning to clear a little and glowed like a promise. Everywhere else was gray. As they approached the top through a copse of chestnut trees, the lowering sun dropped below the cloud cover and caught the scene, dazzling the three soldiers as they rose into it. How fine it might have been, to end a day’s ramble in the French countryside, walking into the setting sun. Always a hopeful act.
As they came out of the copse they heard bombers, so they went back in and smoked while they waited under the trees. From where they were they could not see the planes, but the view was fine. These were hardly hills that spread so expansively before them. They were ripples in the landscape, faint echoes of vast upheavals elsewhere. Each successive ridge was paler than the one before. He saw a receding wash of gray and blue fading in a haze toward the setting sun, like something oriental on a dinner plate.
Half an hour later they were making a long traverse across a deeper slope that edged further to the north and delivered them at last to another valley, another little stream. This one had a more confident flow and they crossed it by a stone bridge thick with cow dung. The corporals, who were not as tired as he was, had a lark, pretending to be revolted. One of them threw a dried lump of dung at his back. Turner did not look round. The scraps of cloth, he was beginning to think, may have been a child’s pajamas. A boy’s. The dive-bombers sometimes came over not long after dawn. He was trying to push it away, but it would not let him go. A French boy asleep in his bed. Turner wanted to put more distance between himself and that bombed cottage. It was not only the German army and air force pursuing him now. If there had been a moon he would have been happy walking all night. The corporals wouldn’t like it. Perhaps it was time to shake them off.
Downstream of the bridge was a line of poplars whose tops fluttered brilliantly in the last of the light. The soldiers turned in the other direction and soon the track was a path again and was leaving the stream. They wound and squeezed their way through bushes with fat shiny leaves. There were also stunted oaks, barely in leaf. The vegetation underfoot smelled sweet and damp, and he thought there must be something wrong with the place to make it so different from anything they had seen.
Ahead of them was the hum of machinery. It grew louder, angrier, and suggested the high-velocity spin of flywheels or electric turbines turning at impossible speed. They were entering a great hall of sound and power.
“Bees!” he called out. He had to turn and say it again before they heard him. The air was already darker. He knew the lore well enough. If one stuck in your hair and stung you, it sent out a chemical message as it died and all who received it were compelled to come and sting and die at the same place. General conscription! After all the danger, this was a kind of insult. They lifted their greatcoats over their heads and ran on through the swarm. Still among the bees, they reached a stinking ditch of slurry which they crossed by a wobbling plank. They came up behind a barn where it was suddenly peaceful. Beyond it was a farmyard. As soon as they were in it, dogs were barking and an old woman was running toward them flapping her hands at them, as though they were hens she could shoo away. The corporals depended on Turner’s French. He went forward and waited for her to reach him. There were stories of civilians selling bottles of water for ten francs, but he had never seen it. The French he had met were generous, or otherwise lost to their own miseries. The woman was frail and energetic. She had a gnarled, man-in-the-moon face and a wild look. Her voice was sharp.
“C’est impossible, M’sieur. Vous ne pouvez pas rester ici.”
“We’ll be staying in the barn. We need water, wine, bread, cheese and anything else you can spare.”
“Impossible!”
He said to her softly, “We’ve been fighting for France.”
“You can’t stay here.”
“We’ll be gone at dawn. The Germans are still . . .”
“It’s not the Germans, M’sieur. It’s my sons. They are animals. And they’ll be back soon.”
Turner pushed past the woman and went to the pump which was in the corner of the yard, near the kitchen. Nettle and Mace followed him. While he drank, a girl of about ten and an infant brother holding her hand watched him from the doorway. When he finished and had filled his canteen he smiled at them and they fled. The corporals were under the pump together, drinking simultaneously. The woman was suddenly behind him, clutching at his elbow. Before she could start again he said, “Please bring us what I asked for or we’ll come in and get it for ourselves.”
“My sons are brutes. They’ll kill me.”
He would have preferred to say, So be it, but instead he walked away and called over his shoulder, “I’ll talk to them.”
“And then, M’sieur, they will kill you. They will tear you to shreds.”
