At the Break of Day (27 page)

‘It was a hard slog, don’t think it wasn’t. The harbour was mined, the roads were mined. There are still mines. That took a toll of tanks and men. The casualties have been heavy, but General MacArthur has turned down an order from Washington cancelling their issue of one can of beer a day.’

He stopped for laughter. There was some but the reservist Tom, on Jack’s left, was quiet. He had served in the Far East. He had been a POW at Changi. His war should have been over, he told Jack as they went for food. His wife thought so too.

‘It’s worse for the girl you’ve left behind,’ he said.

Jack didn’t reply. He hadn’t left anyone behind, had he? But he didn’t want to think about it. He couldn’t get past the anger, the hate, to the love. He didn’t want to any more. Not now, not yet. It was easier this way.

They sat through another lecture that afternoon and the sea was calm, there was only the vibration of the engines, the smell of diesel, and the Captain’s voice again as he told them that the biggest fear was that Communist China would become involved.

But then he swept on quickly, telling them of the country and its people, but all Jack could think about was whether the Chinks would come in, because if they did, it would be tough. Very tough. Tom’s hands were shaking and Jack wondered how the Government could send people back into the ring who had already been through so much.

Would the Americans send Ed over here? He had done a lot, hadn’t he? They should send him. He should be killed. But he was too old.

‘Old enough to be my father,’ he said that night as he leaned on the rail and spat into the waves and wondered when the ache inside his head and chest would fade.

The days wore on. They listened, they trained, they wrote to their families, their lovers, their friends, but Jack only wrote to Ollie. He had no lover. But in the darkness of the night, when the only sounds were the grunts of men and the throb of the engines, he felt her warmth, her passion, and turned away from the memory of his own savagery. He wanted to feel love again, as it had once been. But he could not. And so he didn’t write.

They arrived in Korea at the beginning of November. It was cold. They could see their breath on the air as they stood at ship’s muster. They could see the buildings, the jeeps. They could see the hospital ship too, moored alongside. At Pusan they heard that the Chinese had come in, fiercely, briefly, but everyone knew they would come again. It was only the UN Command who refused to believe it, a Sergeant said as he passed them, grey and tired.

They entrained for Seoul but not before the Red Cross hospital train drew in from the forward battle areas. Tom watched and so did Jack. The red was sharp against the white of the bandages. The orderlies carried the drips beside the stretchers, the nurses checked labels, soothed, gave drinks, listened to a man shout that he could still hear the bugles.

A GI hobbled past. ‘Yes, it’s the bugles. You know it’s them then. It’s the bloody Chinese, they attacked us near the Manchurian border. Your turn next, buddies.’ He was smiling but it didn’t reach his eyes.

‘Bloody Yanks,’ said Jack. The GI had been big like Ed.

He pushed Tom on. ‘Come on, let’s go.’ But he didn’t want to. The Chinese were involved now, up on the border, but they wouldn’t stay there. He wanted to go home. This wasn’t drilling, exercising, smoking, drinking. This wasn’t a scarred hand. This was vivid, stark, shocking. The fear made his voice rough.

‘Come on, Tom, get on.’

The wooden seats were slatted, dusty. But he didn’t want to go forward. He wanted to go home. This was real. God, Rosie, this is real. He slung his kit on to the floor. The dust caught in his throat. More were heaped on top. Tom was close. He could smell his sweat. But what was there at home any more? Who was there?

Seoul was damaged, bombed like London had been. But Jack wouldn’t think of London, only of Korea and the tents they lived in, the mobile Naafi, the mist which changed to sharp cold almost overnight. It was all right, they were told, they weren’t moving forward.

They stayed, smoked, bulled, smoked, trained. Felt nothing but boredom. Filled days which went too slowly, watched American troops lurch by in jeeps and Jack felt nothing but hate. In Seoul the hotels were functioning. There were drinks at night, Korean bar-girls who sat on stools with slits up their skirts, but he didn’t want them. He didn’t want anyone’s lips against his. He didn’t want anyone near him ever again.

Tom didn’t want them either. These girls were Koreans. Koreans had guarded his camp. Their cruelty had been worse than the Japanese and so they bought drinks only for themselves. They sat sipping the beer, watching the flares in the sky. Watching the refugees pulling carts piled high, their faces numb.

The men wore white robes, baggy trousers and straw hats similar to the women who dragged their long hair back into buns. They drank another beer. There had been no more talk of the Chinese and it was 20 November. MacArthur had said they would be home for Christmas. He had to sort himself out before then. He had to write. But he didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know what he felt.

On the 22nd ten of them were sent north to the forward position as Infantry replacements, along roads girded by frozen paddy fields, and on either side were snow-dusted mountains and hills; shrub-covered, desolate.

Troops were dug in. Smoke rose from the fires. There was a wind. Always a wind and as they travelled the squad talked, but of nothing because they all remembered the boys on the hospital train.

‘But the Chinese haven’t come and MacArthur said we’d be home by Christmas, didn’t he?’ Jack repeated.

He shifted on the seat, peering out of the canvas-covered truck, listening but hearing only the wind. He laughed, they all laughed because they had all been listening too. For bugles.

They smoked, looked out at the cottages made of wood and mud and thatched with straw. Three were scorched and ruined. Even in this cold they could smell the human excrement used to feed the soil.

They passed peasants who carried loads on A-shaped frames, women who carried loads on their heads and babies on their backs. The roads were dirt tracks with pot holes which were frozen over. The truck cracked the ice, splintering it, frosting it. Jack threw out his cigarette stub. It arced away, bright in the cold air.

Tom sat, his hands loosely between his knees, his rifle leaning into the crook of his arm.

‘I wish I wasn’t here,’ he said.

‘No good saying that when you’re sitting on top of a bleeding hill.’ The Sergeant opposite nudged his leg. ‘You just remember to keep your head down, your eyes open, and pray you get home. You’ve been in it before. You should know. Help this lot of nigs. Anyway, we’re here. Home sweet home.’

The truck stopped at the base of Hill 12. They hauled their kit up on foot, catching on to shrubs, pulling themselves along, slipping, their rifles clattering. A stream ran from the top to the river below and ice crusted the overhang.

The unit they were to join catcalled them at the top. A Lieutenant met them. They saluted. He was grey and lined too, although, they learned, he was only twenty-two. The Sergeant led them to the field kitchen. Others were there before them, warming their hands around their mess tins, moving from foot to foot, nodding as they dug out their tins. At least the beans and stew were warm.

‘More shit-diggers. Just what the Chinks want for tea,’ a Lance-Jack grinned.

Jack nodded, laughed, and when they had eaten they were shown the hoochies they would sleep in, fight in, shit in. They were shown the machine guns, the mines, the booby traps. That night he and Tom slept in sleeping bags. Dave, John and Simon didn’t.

‘We’ve been here too long,’ they said. ‘You might need to run. Those buggers are like a bloody avalanche.’

The hoochie was heated by an ammunition box into which petrol dripped from a copper tube fed from a can fixed high on the outside. The chimney was made from shell cases, and prodded up through the roof made of branches. It was still too cold for Jack and Tom but there was no firing. There had been none for many days.

But there was the cold and it ate into him. He zipped up his sleeping bag, pulling it over his head, but the cold eased through the ground, the air. It kept the sleep from him and he thought of the ice on the inside of Rosie’s boxroom, the damp of the ground when he had held her, driven harshly into her, felt her warmth, her love, and he felt ashamed.

But she had left Maisie, she had gone when Joe had written. Joe had kissed her breasts. Ed had taken Maisie and Rosie had let him and he turned again and again but he couldn’t find warmth, he couldn’t find sleep and neither could Tom because the Chinese might come. But they didn’t. Not then, and not the next day or the next.

‘And they probably won’t,’ Jack said, digging another perimeter fox-hole, cursing the frost-hard earth, the ice-cold pickaxe.

‘Get your bleeding weight behind it,’ the Sergeant growled. ‘A Chink would shoot your backside off in that pathetic little hole.’

So he dug further and so did Tom, hearing the clatter of stones, looking out across the valley, the river, the hills. Seeing nothing. No Chinese, no birds, just the cold which stabbed into your lungs but didn’t stop you thinking. He dug again. He wouldn’t think of her. He wouldn’t write. He wouldn’t write to Maisie either.

On 24 November it was Thanksgiving Day and they watched as trucks brought out turkeys, and planes dropped the trimmings to US troops, and he wondered if Maisie was eating turkey too. He pushed the thought of her from him, but for a moment he stopped and leaned on the barricade he was building from the rocks, not seeing the planes, not seeing the trucks or the snow-frosted world. Just remembering Lee’s laugh, the feel of the little boy’s arms around his legs in the back alley on his first leave.

Still the Chinese didn’t come but there was no sense of ease. Only of waiting. He had spent his life waiting. Should he write? No, he couldn’t.

They went on patrol that night as the snow started to fall, heavily, silently. Five of them, the Sergeant leading, Tom second. He knew so much about survival. He had fought the Japs, he had survived the camps. He was quiet, calm, except when his hands shook.

They slid down the slope, digging in their heels, not speaking, not clinking, looking, listening, and Jack’s hands were wet inside his gloves and his breathing was rapid.

He was frightened out here, beneath the sky, away from the holes, the others. And no, he wasn’t thinking, he was breathing with his mouth open, tasting the snow, straining to hear the enemy, if they came. He was looking, always looking, but what could you see through all this snow which drove in and around him? Christ, he was frightened. These weren’t manoeuvres. This was real. And what the hell was he doing here?

He put his feet where Tom’s had been, he slipped, recovered. His feet hurt with the cold but that was all right. It was when they didn’t hurt that you had frostbite, it was then that you lost your feet.

He looked and listened. His throat hurt from the cold air. There was nothing, just the sound of breathing, and soon the hill had flattened and the going was easier as they crept to the shore of the river.

They set up a listening post behind scrub and rocks where they could sometimes see the river as the snow hurled itself in a different direction and the curtain lifted. Tom linked up a field telephone. They spent three hours watching, listening, feeling the cold bite through their clothes, their balaclavas, their gloves, feeling it stab into their lungs with each breath. It had been minus thirty-five when they left. They could hear the snow cracking the branches of the shrubs and the Sergeant’s breath froze on his moustache.

The next patrol came down to relieve them at 2300 hours. They edged up the hill again. Watching, scrambling. Christ, be quiet. Using their hands, shaking the snow which caked their gloves and faces, and always they listened, even as they thawed in the ‘warm tent’. But the enemy didn’t come and no one relaxed, though MacArthur had said they would all be home for Christmas.

The sound of firing woke them the next night, it was down by the river.

‘Thank God, thank God,’ he whispered when he woke. ‘That could have been me.’ Now there were bugles, rattles, whistles and drums, grenades and small arms fire.

But his hands were too cold to unzip his sleeping bag and he wept as John and Dave and Simon ran out, rifles in their hands, ducking and weaving as the Sergeant shouted, ‘Take that side and keep your heads down.’

‘Christ, I can’t get out.’ He was going to die. They were coming for him and he was going to die. But Tom was there, calm, leaning over him, unzipping the bag for him, helping him as Ollie had done when Jones’s man had beaten him at the warehouse, as Rosie had done with the cheeses. Tom gripped his shoulders.

‘It’s OK, Jack. You’re OK. They’re not here yet. Remember what you’ve been taught and stay with me.’ He turned and moved out into the snow. There was firing all round, from the hills ahead and around them.

The fear held Jack still. Dad, where are you? Rosie? He wanted to run. Just run and hide because he could hear screams and shouts and the bugles at the base of the hill and they were getting nearer, the firing was louder. The snow was heavy, and he couldn’t see. He hadn’t been able to see in the fog either. Dad, where are you?

But the barricades were there. They would keep them away. Jack was out in the open. Following Tom, running, the snow in his eyes, his nose, his mouth. The breath was sharp in his chest. He slipped, scrambled up again, ran to where the Sergeant pointed, heaving the Sten gun up on to the wall he had built, firing down at men who fell as the ducks in the fairground had fallen, but more took their place. For God’s sake. More took their place.

His gun was hot. Tom was firing. There were tracers in the air. Flashes from grenades were bright against the snow. Still they came. On up the hill. And he wasn’t killing men, he was killing ducks. Ducks which flipped back up, no matter what he did.

They were closer now, scrambling where he had scrambled, firing, blowing their bugles. The Sergeant was behind them. They were much closer.