Gerald Seymour - Holding the Zero

Meda, with the map spread in front of her, talked, and the men listened.

He could not escape from his search for the face. In the morning the man would be waiting for him. He had come north to take one life. Gus heard not a word that Meda said. Nothing he had been told, had read, that he had experienced, had prepared him for the bleak certainty that a master sniper was at that moment making his preparations for the morning.

‘Gus?’

All through the day he had been able to shut out the thought of the man, but no longer.

He was drawn, a lemming to a cliff, towards Tarjil, where a fate of sorts awaited him.

The chill was on his body.

‘Gus, is that all right?’

Who would tell his grandfather, his father and mother? Who would tell Meg? Who would clear his desk? Who would tell Jenkins? And would they pause on Stickledown Range to remember him?

Meda snapped, ‘Gus, are you listening? Do you agree?’

He pinched his nails into the palm of his hand. He asked quietly that she should run through it once more, so that he was certain he understood.

‘It is a battle against a regiment. There is more to interest me than what you have to do.’

Haquim glanced sourly at him. ‘I will explain it to him afterwards.’

When the meeting finished and the commanders fanned out into the darkness to brief their own small cabals of men, Haquim walked with him. He was told of a town of three thousand souls on flat ground just below the lip of a hill. In the heart of the town was the largest mosque, and beside the mosque was the police station, which was the headquarters of a regiment of mechanized infantry.

‘The regiment has not been reinforced, she says. She does not tell me how she knows.

If she is right then there will be a garrison of four hundred men, if she is right.’

Gus told him of the man without a face. Gus told Haquim, stampeded through the interruption, what the Israeli had said to him, and he saw the fury boil in the mustashar.

‘We go in a line, because she says so. We do not feint to the left, avoid the predictable, then attack from the right. Our route is a straight line, and across the line is Tarjil, where a regiment is placed. They have defended positions. Tomorrow you will lie on your stomach. You are permitted to hang back. What of the men who have to cross open ground? What of them? How many will be killed? How many will live without arms, legs, eyes, testicles? Think of her, think of me, think of the men going against defended positions. Do not, Mr Peake, dare to think of yourself.’

Gus hung his head.

A column of men was coming through the gate of the village, loaded with weapons. He saw their tired, serious faces and wondered how many would survive the next day.

He found Omar beside the wire amongst a small mountain of old newspapers, kneading the sheets of paper together in a metal bathtub by the light of a hurricane lamp.

The boy grinned happily at him.

‘Show me,’ Gus ordered.

Cheerfully, Omar lifted the pulped paper from the bathtub. Gus doubted the boy, in his cut-short life as a kid, had ever played with papier-mache. Childhood had been denied him. The water splashed down the boy’s arms and over his battledress and he held up the shape of a man’s head… The face was without features.

‘The cat, Mr Gus – while it dries, before we paint it – tell me about the observer and the cat.’

‘Major Hesketh-Prichard wanted to write about the importance of the observer. He thought too much emphasis was given to the sniper, and not enough credit to the observer.’

‘I am the observer, so I am important.’

‘Don’t interrupt. I thought you wanted to hear it. This young lieutenant of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment was watching a German trench that was thought to be disused and he saw this big cat. It was a tortoiseshell, orange and black and white, a fine well-fed animal, and it was sitting on some sandbags sunning itself. Many others had studied that section of trench, but the lieutenant was the first to see the cat and realize its importance.

Rats plagued the British trenches as well as the German ones. The lieutenant decided that this fine cat could only belong to a senior officer, at least a major, and had been brought to the trench to kill the rats. If the cat belonged to a major then the bunker over which the cat was sunning itself must be a command post. The lieutenant spoke to the artillery and the next morning there was a barrage of howitzers, the bunker was blown up and all the officers in it were killed. That shows the importance of a good observer, Omar… Oh, Major Hesketh-Prichard said the cat survived, it wasn’t killed.’

‘I think tomorrow, Mr Gus, many will be killed.’

He looked at the drying features of the shape, which by the morning would have been given a painted face.

By the hurricane lamp’s light, Omar daubed the dried face with paints liberated from the wrecked school building: grey, red and white for the flesh on the face, brown for the moustache and the eyebrows, a pink mix for the lips, grey and blue for the eyes.

When the paint set, Gus sent him to find a scarf in khaki or olive green, a good strong stick and a combat shirt. The boy disappeared into the darkness. Gus should have been sleeping, resting and regaining the strength he would need in the morning. He wondered if Meda slept, or Haquim. Beyond the wire, in front of him, the night held its silence.

While the boy had made a face and while he had told him how to paint it, he thought that a great game was played out, but that he was only a small part of it. The painted face was not that of his enemy, it was his own.

‘So, I find the sniper…’ a voice boomed, then a cascade of laughter. Gus peered back, and saw the Russian.

‘I am told you are English. I bow to an English gentleman.’

‘What do you want?’

‘To pass the night hours in the company of civilization.’

Gus growled, ‘Find it somewhere else.’

‘Are you frightened?’

‘I am not frightened.’

‘Let me tell you, Mr Gentleman, about myself. Then when you have heard me with English politeness, I will ask the question of you again. I am from Volgograd, but then it had the name of our great leader, Stalin. I was two years old when the Germans came to Stalingrad. My father and my uncle fought there, my mother was in the cellars and basements with her baby son. It was a battle without etiquette or regulation, a fight for survival… Perhaps you believe, if this battle goes badly, you can still go back to the green pleasant land of England. There was no retreat for my father, my uncle and my mother from Stalingrad. Across the river were fifteen thousand troops whose military task was to prevent retreat – they shot those who fell back.’

‘I have no interest in the battle for Stalingrad.’

‘Listen to me. The battlefield bred the great snipers of history, and great sport for those who watched. Which would you prefer to see: a boxing fight, a race around a stadium, a football game, or two men with rifles hunting for each other? The sport at Stalingrad was to watch the duels of the snipers, and to bet on them – half a loaf on the Russian, a quarter of a chocolate bar on the German. The best of them were known throughout their armies. As soon as a sniper became famous he was tracked by an enemy who was also a celebrity… And you tell me you are not frightened. You are, Mr English Gentleman, already famous. The word spreads here, as in Stalingrad. Half a million men, in the third month of the battle, watched the fight to the death between the two master snipers.’

‘Your story is not relevant to me.’

‘You are famous. A man will have come because he has heard of your fame. The great duel was between Major Konings and Vasili Zaitsev. Zaitsev was a hunter from the Ural mountains, who had killed three hundred German soldiers in the battle for Stalingrad.