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COLLATERAL DAMAGE by David Gardiner
He didn't know whether he should run, or crawl on all fours. He had no idea where the rest of the squad were now. Mickey Levitt had obviously bought it, he had felt the blood splatter his own face when the side of Mickey's head had exploded. At least it had been quick for him. The sergeant had shouted something but his voice had been lost in the explosion of a shell somewhere behind them. By the light of its bursting, he had seen them veer off to the right, maybe towards a bunker that he hadn't spotted himself, there was no way to know. If there was a bunker he hadn't been able to find it. As he tried to push his way forward, over the uneven surface, in the near-darkness he trod on something soft and yielding and instinctively stopped. It was a human arm inside the sleeve of a uniform. It might still be connected to its owner's body, there was so much mud and rubble, and so little light, it was difficult to tell, and in any case it made no real difference. He paused and looked furtively, from side to side, into the darkness, every inch of him trembling as he tried feverishly to come up with a sensible course of action. Two enormous flashes lit up the horizon ahead of him, momentarily throwing into silhouette the shapes of running soldiers, and illuminating the pitted brown earth strewn with the scattered bodies of countless others. As the image vanished, the sound of the two explosions reached his ears; a crushing double thunder-clap that left him in a momentary world of isolation, his ears suddenly filled with imaginary cotton-wool, aching and sending to his brain the familiar phantom high-pitched whistle. It was as though a huge goldfish-bowl had suddenly descended from the black sky, to cover him up. He could still see, in so far as anyone can, in the depths of a misty and starless night, but the sounds of the battlefield had been diminished to the distant clatter of marbles falling into a biscuit tin. As he dropped down into a crouching position, some of the stones and debris thrown-up by the massive explosions began to rain down on him. He felt them sting his back through his uniform, and his head shook to the vibrations of the particles hitting his tin hat. Now he had a purpose: a destination. Where those two large-calibre shells had just fallen there would be a crater of some kind, and a crater meant cover. Almost as good as a trench and, even if it had been part of the German front-line five seconds ago, there, sure as hell, weren't any living Germans near it now. The heavy guns behind him had put two shells there, they weren't going to waste a third on the same spot. It was the safest possible place that he could head for. Pleased with his own logic, he straightened up and started to jog clumsily in the direction of the flashes, rifle at the ready, left hand circling the handle of the bayonet in his belt-sheath. He was headed straight towards the German defences now. There was a good chance that if he met anybody out here only one of them would be walking away from the encounter - o 0 o - He woke trembling and feverish to darkness and the sound of distant gunfire. Voices were shouting too, some of them sounded female, and the explosions were punctuated by strange whizzing and whirring noises that he could not identify. The voices sounded oddly happy, celebratory even. What could this be? French liberation? VE Day? Soldiers returning? It didn't make any sense. He pulled himself up into a sitting position and rubbed some sweat from his forehead with the palms of his hands. Familiar objects in his bedroom began to fade into view. The wardrobe and the dressing-table with its big oval mirror. The door with his jacket hanging on the hook, and the window with the thick, lined, velvet curtains that his daughter had made for him to let him sleep through the early summer dawns but the sounds were still there, the gunfire and the voices-- Getting to his feet with more than a little difficulty he walked shakily to the curtains and opened them enough to see out. It was the middle of the night, cold and starless, and yet lights were on everywhere in the houses across the road and every few seconds an eerie flash of coloured light would turn the whole scene into daylight, but red or green or blue daylight: like the bursting of mult- coloured artillery shells. People seemed to be out in their front gardens, laughing and drinking and - yes - kissing each other!. He distinctly saw two men kissing the same girl, one after the other! Must be what they called "swingers", he thought. Wife-swappers! Imagine doing it right in the front garden, in the middle of the night, with glasses of booze in their hands. My God, what was this street coming to? Is that what he had fought the Germans for? Well, yes, he smiled to himself, in a way it was. If young people wanted to live a different kind of life it wasn't really anything to do with him. In a way that was exactly what it was all about. As he looked for his dressing gown in the wardrobe he remembered a radio programme that he had once heard, narrated by Richard Dimbleby. How many years had Richard Dimbleby been dead, he wondered. It had been a sort of reverse news-cast, a long list of all the things that hadn't happened that day. "This morning," Richard had begun in his fruity, pompous old voice, "No British citizens were arrested for failure to produce their identity cards. No workers were dispatched from any British town to the factories of Essen or the mines of Northern Germany." And so it went on. No Jews had been transported to the gas chambers of Auschwitz or Bergen Belsen .There had been no Hitler Youth rally in Regents Park. No bodies had been found on the streets of British cities with bullets in the backs of their heads This that and the other abomination had not taken place. And why not? For one reason and one reason only, Richard had told them. Because about thirty-five years ago countless tens of thousands of the finest and most idealistic men and women of this nation had laid down their lives to insure that they wouldn't. It had been a very powerful broadcast. The memory of it still stirred him to pride, straightened his back a little. The source of the coloured lights was obviously somewhere behind his own house. He went to the back of the lounge and pulled open the big curtain that covered the French windows. Yes, pretty much as he had supposed, a fireworks display in the park. The mighty waving columns of shimmering multi-coloured dots, almost too bright to look at directly, snaked and cascaded from somewhere behind the distant line of low yew trees, soaring all the way to the cloud-base, lighting up the clouds with emerald, orange and blood-red incandescence. Rockets like tracer-bullets sped in great arcs to the very interior of the low clouds and exploded noisily, turning the clouds for an instant at a time into great bulbous multi-coloured mini-suns. For a few seconds the landscape of his dream replaced the clutter of little streets in the dip between his garden and the rear perimeter of the park. A sea of corpses, craters, mud, discarded rifles, crumpled uniforms, disembodied bits and pieces of human beings, the stench of sulphur and of the exposed contents of human intestines--- then it was gone. Just a fireworks display. A harmless, pretty display of fire-crackers in a public park. He slid open the moving panel of the French windows and felt a cold fresh breeze on his face. He rather liked its coldness, and he could detect on it that ever so faint but oh so familiar odour of freshly detonated gunpowder. With the window open the sounds were much louder, not overpowering, but sharp and crisp, full of the drama of battles long ago. He walked out into the garden and stood on the path lost in his thoughts, the fresh breeze ruffling his hair, the sky in front of him alive with cascading lights. "My goodness, Mr. Dempsey," came a patronising female voice with an affected upper-class accent, "what on earth are you doing out in your slippers and robe, on this of all nights?" It was Doris Nugent from next door. An interfering busybody who was friendly with his daughter Karen and did her spying for her. She had spotted him from her own back garden, where she had been sitting on a white plastic garden chair with a glass of what looked like sherry in her hand and a thick imitation fur overcoat buttoned up tight under her chin. A grey woollen scarf was tied tight around her head to keep the cold from her ears. "You'll catch your death of cold outdoors in December dressed like that. Well, January actually, come to think of it. I thought I was the only person in the whole of England seeing-in the new millennium on my own. Happy New year, Mr. Dempsey. Happy new millennium!" "Thank you, Mrs. Nugent," he returned with forced politeness. "And-- happy--- millennium to you too." So that's what it was all about, he thought to himself. New Year's night. A lot of poppycock. When you had seen in as many new years as he had you didn't make as big a fuss about it. "You aren't going to leave me here on my own are you?" she coaxed with that false superior smile that irritated him so much. "I mean, I had lots of party invitations, but I'm just not a party person. Ever since Sid died, I've kept myself to myself. He was the outgoing one. I don't like parties on my own. Never have done. But you will help me celebrate, won't you? You'll have a glass of sherry with me?" |