Liquidate Paris (10 page)

'I doubt that,' I murmured.

I took her in my arms and for a long while we stood there, straining against each other, kissing greedily and blindly as if we were starving. Which perhaps, in a sense, we were. It was so long since a woman of this quality had wanted me; so long, indeed, since an opportunity of any kind had offered itself. I found her encouragement as heady as a bottle of wine on an empty stomach.

The earth trembled beneath the weight of a column of tanks moving into the village below. We felt the breath of their exhaust hot on our cheeks, and hand in hand we wandered towards the house for the promised cups of coffee. Real coffee! I had forgotten how it tasted. I sipped it slowly, eager for the pleasures still to come yet loath to waste a drop of the precious stuff without savouring it to its fullest.

'What sort of man are you?' she said. 'I mean, really?'

'Just an ordinary soldier,' I said. 'Does it matter-- really?'

She laughed and shook her head. Slowly she embraced me. Slowly, luxuriously, she began shedding her clothes, emerging slim and lovely as from a chrysalis.

'Look at me,' I said, ruefully. 'Look at my clothes-- sodden heaps of oil and mud! I tell you, I'm just an ordinary soldier. Trained to kill and nothing else. At times I disgust even myself.'

'If you could choose, what should you care to be?'

I shrugged my shoulders. The question of choice had never arisen, probably never would arise.

'Difficult to say. I've been a soldier too long to think for myself any more. I'm so used to carrying out orders, so used to a strict discipline and to other people running my life for me, I doubt if I could live any other way.'

'I'm sure you could if you really wanted to,' she said, pulling me down on to the bed.

And so, for a while, I did. The war went on without me and we never missed each other. Tanks rumbled past beneath the windows and I never even noticed them. My companions down in the village drunk and swore and gambled, and I never even thought about them. The coffee cooled down in its pot, until finally it was cold.

How many hours, I wonder, did we manage to snatch from the dreary round of death and destruction? One, perhaps; or two. Certainly no more. But enough to give me a taste of a different life from the one that I was forced to live; enough to make me resentful when we were roused from a sweet semi-sleep by the sound of fists and boots hammering at the door. I became aware that the road leading out of the village was full of sound, whereas before it had been calm and silent. I heard shouts and curses, the squealing of brakes and the grinding chains of the tanks, heavy boots crashing on the gravel, harsh voices shouting orders.

We sat up, the two of us, and she threw me my shirt and herself pulled the sheet to her chin. Whoever was at the door grew tired of knocking. There was a sound of splintering, then heavy steps in the hallway. It was Porta who burst in upon us, red faced and indignant.

'So this is where you've been! What the bleeding hell are you up to? I've been looking everywhere for you, you stupid sod!'

'Piss off,' I said. 'Get out. scram. shove off! We don't want you. Go and find someone else to play games with.'

Porta stepped forward, picked my clothes off the floor and hurled them at me.

'Get yourself inside of that lot, and better make it snappy! I'm not here to play games, chum--not when the Yanks are on their way!'

I fought my way through a heap of pants and shirt and battledress and stared up at him.

'Where are they coming from?'

'Christ knows! And who the bleeding hell cares, anyway? They're just coming, ain't that good enough? They're coming, and we're going..."

He turned to the girl and gave her his grotesque parody of a charming smile, his lips drawn back over his gums, his tooth gleaming like the fang of a uni-dentoid vampire.

'You'll have to excuse me, darling. I hate to spoil anyone's fun, but like I said, the Yanks are coming. If you play your cards right you'll be able to find a replacement for him soon enough.'

He turned to the table, picked up the coffee pot and stuck his large nose deep inside. It came out again with nostrils flared in excitement.

'Coffee!' he said, in strangulated tones.

He poured it down his throat, cold as it was, and snapped his fingers at me.

'If you don't get a move on, mate, they'll be after you for desertion. Almost everyone else has cleared out already. We're just about the last lot to go... Little John's pissed as a newt, by the way, I left him roaring and ranging down the village... Lt. Schmidt was dragged out of his sick bed and told he'd be court-martialed if he didn't make an immediate recovery, and Feldwebel Mann --you know Feldwebel Mann?--first thing he did when he got settled in was lock the-bog door behind him and shoot himself... Oh yeah, and Obergefreiter Gert's done a bunk. Not surprising. He always was a stupid cunt. They're out looking for him, they're bound to pick him up in a couple of hours--well, not as long as that, I don't suppose----'

During Porta's seemingly inexhaustible torrent of words I had been hastily dragging on my clothes. The girl now suddenly flung herself across the bed at me and burst sobbing into the midst of Porta's latest piece of vital information.

'Sven! Don't go! It's madness to keep on fighting. We all know you've lost the war... Stay here and I'll hide you! Please, Sven! '

'I can't,' I said. 'I've explained to you once. It doesn't hurt indulging in dreams now and again, but don't ever get them mixed up with reality.'

'Reality? What is reality?' she demanded, the tears streaming down her cheeks. 'Blood and dirt and cruelty, and dying for a cause you don't believe in?'

'I guess so,' I said.

Porta, who had been digging out the wax from his ears with the wrong end of a teaspoon, now flung the spoon on to the table and gave me a look of genuine bewilderment.

'What's she blarting her eyeballs out for? She's still got a house that's in one piece, ain't she? And enough food to fill her belly, and enough money to get black market coffee?' He spat, contemptuously. 'Makes me sick,' he said.

'Think she'd be content with what she'd got, wouldn't you?'

'Shut up or get out!' I told him, curtly.

I turned to the girl, but she refused to say goodbye. I left without a backward glance, wishing that dreams could sometimes have a sweeter ending, yet not prepared to s
hed
any tears about it.

The Company was already formed up in the town square and it was impossible for me to slip unnoticed into my place. Major Mercedes caught sight of me immediately.

'Where the blazes have you been? You think we're all going to hold up the war just on account of you?'

'Don't go on at him too much,' begged Porta. 'If you'd been up to what he's been up to----'

A loud and ribald cheer burst from the ranks of assembled men. I assumed a Don Juan smile and the Major turned in a fury upon everyone in general.

'Stop that bloody racket! What d'you think this is, a bloody pantomime? A bloody magic lantern show?'

You----' He swung back to me again. 'You're under arrest! Get back in the ranks and don't let me catch sight of your stupid face again until I call for it... Oberleutnant! Get them out of here, at the double!'

The Major ducked into his car, the door slammed, and he disappeared in a whirling cloud of dust. Oberleutnant Lowe pushed his helmet back and nodded to me.

'Get fell in, you filthy whoring son of a bitch... Company! 'Ten shun! Company... right... turn!'

For a moment he stood critically surveying us as we stood stiff and correct in our ranks. Next second he was hard put to keep his feet as one hundred and eighty men in wild disorder threw themselves towards the waiting tanks. We had quite a fight luring the drunken Little John inside with us. He showed a sportive inclination to climb up the side of the tank and crawl about the top of it shouting, and it took three of us to cram him head-first down the hatch. Once inside, he fortunately passed out and we were able to kick him into a corner and forget about him.

With a roar as of approaching thunder, twenty-five Tigers moved out of the village.

'Straight ahead,' said the Old Man. 'Just keep going till we pick up the main road. Get the cannons loaded. Check all systems.'

With startling suddenness, I found myself overcome with a sharp pang of nostalgia for that dream world I had been so rudely dragged away from. Apathetically, I began, carrying out the Old Man's orders, pressing buttons, checking' equipment. My thoughts were full of civilization. Of women and houses and hot baths and real coffee. Bed and gardens and bath salts and; sugar. Soft pink flesh and the scent of roses----

'That's my eye, you stupid sodding bastard!'

'Sorry,' I said, and I removed my finger from Porta's eye and placed it firmly on the button it had been searching for.

I stared down at the dark interior of the tank. It stank of oil, of hot metal, of human sweat and bad breath. This was reality. Like it or not, this
was
reality. Sweet dreams of any other way of life would surely drive you mad.

Little John opened an inflamed eye, caught sight of me and leaned confidentially towards me. He belched, and fumes of stale drink rose up and stifled me.

'Hey, Sven! ' He grinned and poked a lewd finger into my groin. 'I heard what you were up to! What's she like, eh?'

I stuck my face close to his.

'Fuck off!' I said.

When we reached the point where the village street went straight on and the slope leading to the house branched off to the left, I made no attempt to stop myself looking out of the observation slit. I was glad I took that last glance. Jacqueline was there, standing by the hedge, waving as we went by.

The village was still in sight when an enemy tank was reported as being 700 metres away at two o'clock. We swept into action and I was jerked back with a sickening thud into the midst of reality. It was, as it happened, a false alarm--a burnt-out wreckage at the side of the road, with two charred bodies beneath it--but once and for all it put a stop to my day-dreams.

Soon it was night, the sky lighted fitfully by a pale phantom moon. The tanks ploughed onwards, shaking houses to their very foundations. All along the route people were woken by the noise, curtains were twitched back, nervous eyes appeared, glinting in the moonlight, to watch our passage, find out who we were--because from this stage on, who knew? It could be friend or foe; American or German.

Three battalions of heavy tanks ploughing through the darkness to take the British by surprise. The lumbering Tigers stretched across the whole width of the road. Bright flames, a metre long, flickered from the exhausts. The reverberations of the engines crashed and boomed through the stillness of the night, and more than one house had its windows blasted out as we passed by. Some buildings were even more unfortunate: they stood directly in our path and we simply demolished and left behind as heaps of rubble.

'Come, sweet death,' intoned the Legionnaire, cheerfully, behind his periscope.

Little John shuddered and turned to Porta.

'Gives me the perishing willies,' he complained. 'Got any booze on you?'

Porta obligingly handed over a bottle of the best Schnapps, which he had nicked from a supplies depot a short while back. The Schnapps had been originally requisitioned for a divisional commander, but unluckily for him Porta had arrived there first. According to Porta, he had smelt alcohol several miles off and had followed his nose along the trail.

Little John, attacking the Schnapps as he did everything else, with full verve and gusto, poured half the bottle down his throat. He then belched, spat through the observation slit against the wind and received the whole lot back in his face, whereupon he swore hideously, and wiped himself on a piece of oily rag. By such little excitements were our journeys habitually enlivened.

We went on, hour after hour, towards the enemy lines. The road was more congested, now, with the debris of war. Burnt-out-cars, the wreckage of other tanks, English and German, the charred remains of human beings sprawled over, under and beneath them. An entire column of infantry lay scattered at the side of the road in the grotesque attitudes of death.

'Jabos,' said Porta, unemotionally.

You couldn't get too worked up about the slaughter: we'd seen it all before, so many times.

'Remember the old tank song they used to put out on the radio?' said Barcelona, suddenly and for no very apparent reason.

He turned to the rest of us and began softly chanting the song that we'd all heard so often, back in 1940. The words no longer seemed very appropriate :

'Way beyond the Maas, the Scheide and the Rhein,

Advancing upon Frankfurt, a hundred tanks in line!

A hundred German tanks and the Fuhrer's Black Hussars

Gone to conquer France, cheered on by loud huzzahs!

With a hundred throbbing motors, a hundred grinding chains,

A hundred German tanks are rolling o'er the plains!'

A banal song at the best of times, it now seemed utterly absurd. There was a burst of scornful laughter, both from our own tank and from others in the column: we had left the radio switched on and the whole company had enjoyed Barcelona's moment of nostalgia.

'Belt up!' came Heide's raucous voice, over the radio. 'What's wrong with you stupid buggers back there? It's not the time for that sort of thing! '

Poor Heide! He was taking it very hard, the way the war was going. The rest of us merely laughed until we felt sick. The hundred German tanks and the Fuhrer's Black Hussars were no longer rolling triumphant o'er any plains but desperately fighting a rearguard battle against the advancing enemy.

Our laughter was cut short by the sight of a strange, straggling group along the roadside. I couldn't at first make them out. Prisoners, perhaps? No, prisoners would not be guarded by nuns, and I suddenly saw that the weird, batlike figures running hither and thither were members of a nursing order trying in vain to restore order to their group of--what? I screwed my eyes up behind my dark glasses.