Jack Ludlow - A Bitter Field

Peter’s blazer was marked from where he had rolled across the road into the ditch, but apart from that he was more or less all right and a bit of hand brushing removed most of the dried muck. Cal was more scratched and bruised and his shoulder ached, while his shirt, quite apart from the stains, was ripped both at the elbows and the front, which left his companion unhappily lending him one of his spares.

‘Jermyn Street for you, old chum,’ Peter insisted, ‘the minute we get back to Blighty. I’ll be having a few items in replacement on your Turnbull amp; Asser account.’

Cal was not listening; he was crouched down breaking up the ZB26, laying the parts on the shirt he had just removed. ‘This will have to go in your case, Peter, I’m afraid.’

‘What!’ Peter demanded, looking over his shoulder from the tree against which he was pissing away the last of his two beers.

‘You don’t expect me to just leave it.’

‘Might I point out to you, old chum, that it is somewhat oily, and that shirt of yours is not going to stop it damaging the rest of my kit, not least my cream linen suit.’

‘Still got that knife of yours?’

‘I have.’

Passed over, Cal used it to cut out the upholstery from the back seat of the car, wrapping his broken-up weapon in that before closing the case and handing it over.

‘There you are, Peter, satisfied? Best I carry it, given what it contains. Now let’s get back onto the road and get walking till we find a bus stop.’

‘I’m curious as to how you are going to reconnect with your barge.’

‘So am I.’

The walk was not far, though in still-flat open country at once fraught with the fear that some of their recent opponents might appear. Once in a built-up area it became easier, and having found a stop, they took a hot and crowded bus marked Centre Ville into town.

There was a definite frisson in the air when they got there, people talking and gesticulating, a lot of gendarmes around and the ringing of the traffic-clearing bells of police cars, which forced them into the backstreets and a welcome drink in the dark recesses of a small, dingy and far-from-clean workers’ bar.

‘And to think I always equated you with luxurious living.’

‘We don’t know what connections these sods have, Peter, or yet how they got onto us.’

‘On to you, Cal,’ he replied, pedantically.

‘And I thought you wanted to be part of my gang.’ Cal joked, even if, deep down, he felt Peter to have been the cause of the problem.

‘Can’t afford the laundry bill, old chap, or the seamstress to repair the kit, and that says nothing for the catering.’

‘HMG doesn’t pay you enough.’

‘Understatement, Cal, they pay a pittance.’

At Cal’s insistence, they took another bus to Le Port on the grounds that a taxi was potentially traceable, buying their own billets and sitting apart, with both keeping an eye out for anyone official seeking to board and examine papers.

Once in the port and seeing no sign of anything that posed a threat, they walked up the canal towpath, thankfully with the sun going down and the heat of the day dissipating. His fear of not finding the barge proved to be an unnecessary worry; the men crewing it had stopped outside the basin on the edge of the industrial zone where it joined the canal coming in from the south, before a branch that went through to the commercial port.

His two Basques and the French owner were sitting on the deck, quietly smoking and looking innocent. After a quick look to ensure no one was watching, they approached the barge, jumped aboard and immediately disappeared below into the cramped and stuffy cabin.

‘And now what happens?’ Peter enquired.

‘We wait until the right people have come on shift.’

‘Are you not a little light on muscle for what you have to do?’

‘I am, but thankfully we have you along.’

‘It’s at times like these,’ Peter sighed, pulling out his packet of French cigarettes, ‘that I wish I’d paid more attention at school.’

With nothing much to do till the sun went down, and neither willing to indulge in much more useless speculation as to how the Jeunesses Patriotes had got on to Cal’s cargo, they turned to talking about old times, which tended to sound rosy in retrospect and had been bloody awful in fact.

As subalterns, they had first met in the dying weeks of the Great War at a time when everyone thought the retreating Hun were beaten, but they were not; their retreat was orderly and designed to inflict maximum casualties when, as they often did, they made a stand. Jerry was always forced to fall back but no position or trench was surrendered without a hard and costly fight.

When those times were reprised there was no mention of any deep friendship between the two, more a degree of natural mutual respect, given that first quality had been absent. It was more than just an inability to connect, it being a bad idea to get close to anyone at such a time.

No two men who had lived through those days could discuss them without recalling, even if they avoided mention of it, the losses they had witnessed, both in fellow officers and the men they led; anyone being killed was bad, but a close friend dying could break those who survived, men who lived on the very edge of what could be tolerated by the human spirit.

Both had stayed in the army, Cal for personal reasons, Peter for the lack of a real alternative and, meeting again in the part of Mesopotamia destined to become Iraq, there had been no flowering of friendship at all — Captains Callum Jardine and Peter Lanchester had been on two sides of an argument about the tactics being employed to contain the Arab insurgency.

Peter, like most of his contemporaries, saw nothing untoward in bombing villages or pounding the insurgents and their families with artillery — the end justified the means. Cal disagreed so vehemently he had eventually resigned his commission, though, unable to settle, he had become, almost by accident, a gunrunner and advisor to various freedom movements on guerrilla warfare, much of the art of which he had learnt from his Arab opponents.

The Peter Lanchester he had known before Hamburg, as an acquaintance not a friend, seemed typical of a type that saw England as the centre of the universe, though they would nod to the useful contributions of the Celtic fringe in the making of Great Britain and the Empire. But they saw the unemployed as work-shy, Jews as devious Yids, Arabs were wogs and not to be trusted, while anyone Latin, especially South Americans, could be dismissed as a slimy dago.

In that, Peter had seemed typical of his class and the company he kept, the denizens of ex-military officers’ clubs and the golf course bores who saw anyone not Anglo-Saxon as somehow incomplete. Yet he had proved to have another side; he hated Fascism as much as did Cal and had the brains to also, like him, see leaving it to grow unchecked as a threat to everything he valued.

It was Hamburg and after that had got them closer, though both, if asked, would probably have plumped for being semi-chums rather than deep pals. Yet Cal, who knew he was the one who harboured the resentments, had come to respect Peter more.

The shared experience of acquiring and illegally shipping guns had created a sort of bond, which he would have struggled to define, given the disparity of many of their views; the only thing of which he was sure was that in a crisis, Peter was utterly reliable.

When the time came to start the donkey engine and move it was dark, the only light the faint glow coming from the city spill, until they were in the well-illuminated dock area. Peter was not allowed to see but only to hear the exchange between Cal and the douaniers, noting that it lacked for nothing in the sound of formality, down to the thud of stamps being banged on the false cargo manifests; if money changed hands, that was carried out in silence.