Gerald Seymour - Battle Sight Zero

Near to the conscript, a soldier broke ranks and started to run, and was shot by his officer. No warning, no cry for him to stop and retake his place. A raised and aimed pistol, a single shot, and a figure going down and then prone. The conscript had known this boy since their basic training. Had messed together, survived the sergeant together, and joked and drank and been punished together, and the boy was dead, shot by their own officer. A roar of voices broke from a side street on the right of the main boulevard… Not élite enemy troops from America or Great Britain, and not from the Nazis in Germany, but men and women in casual clothes, and some were too old to run fast, and the women had their skirts hitched high on their thighs so they could sprint quicker. Their faces were contorted with hatred. They carried firearms, more bottles, and some had butchers’ knives, and they came and screamed for blood.

The conscript wavered. To go back he would have to step over or jump across the body of his friend. Going forward, he’d be under the smoke pall from the burning tank. Already the mob was climbing over them. To stay still would be to put himself in the way of the crowd surging towards him. He would go back.

The pistol was aimed at him.

He fired.

It was 248 days since that weapon had moved down a production line, had fallen from the belt and suffered a chipped stock, had been stamped with a serial number, had been shipped out. It had fired 7.62 × 39 grain bullets on target ranges and on exercise, but never been aimed at a man to maim or kill. There would have been a moment when the officer’s face flared with astonishment as he realised the intention of the conscript a few metres in front of him. The rifle was at the shoulder of the young man, tight against his shoulder and collar-bone. The sights were set for close range, best for street fighting at 100 metres, the instructor had said, and had called the setting Battle Sight Zero. Beyond the V and the needle was the dun-coloured mass of the officer’s tunic, and the pistol aim wobbled then settled, and it was beaten to the punch. The conscript had fired first, and the officer’s look of astonishment changed to one of bewilderment, and the body slid as if hit across the upper chest with a pickaxe handle. Bright in the sunlight of that autumn morning, the cartridge case was ejected and it flew in a little arc and then bounced, and rolled among the cobbles. The rifle, the newest version of the AK-47, dropped from the conscript’s limp fingers and fell on to the street. The gesture of the conscript who had shot dead his own officer was not recognised by the crowd descending on him. He was to be shot, and stabbed and beaten with clubs and his body would be stripped bare of every item of possible value, and when the army retreated in poor order his body would be left in full view. The rifle, of course, was scooped up, a prize of value.

A small issue. When the rifle landed on the cobble-stones, the stock’s weight came down on to the hardened rim of the ejected cartridge case. No rhyme, no reason, just chance. The impact, close to where the splinter had detached, dug out a slight chip in the wooden stock: it might have looked like a gouged tick where the rifle’s owner had marked the first kill that the weapon had achieved. A youth had it now.

The youth was an apprentice in a tractor-building factory on the northern outskirts of the Hungarian capital. He fired half a dozen shots at the retreating military, was pleased with himself for taking the necessary moment to go though the trooper’s backpack. He’d found three more filled magazines, which he pocketed. He felt glowing pride.

Farther back along the street, near to the Corvin cinema, the youth, with his new trophy of war and a swagger in his step, came across a furious shoving and heaving knot of men and women, and was drawn to it. Intelligent? Perhaps not. Understandable? Definitely. Some in the crowd had old Sten guns, and others had target rifles, and a few more were equipped with shotguns suitable for killing vermin on the farms ringing Buda-Pest. Because he carried a new weapon of war, the youth was pushed to the front. When the crowd closed around him, behind him, the youth saw hard up against a wall the cowering figure of a man who wore the uniform of the AVH, the security police. The man cringed. The man expected no mercy. The mob ruled. The man uttered no words as if he had realised that to speak was pointless, wasted breath. The youth knew the basics of weapons; everyone who had been to Pioneer camps as a teenager had seen rifles stripped down and reassembled and had been told of the need for vigilance in defence of a Socialist society. The youth was edged forward by the press of the crowd. He could see a notch cut on the stock of the rifle, as if a killing had already been claimed. He shot the security policeman. The crowd around him cheered, and the man was looted before the last shake of his body and the last cough of his breath.

He was photographed. Holding a small Leica camera was a bearded middle-aged man, and on his jacket was a ‘Press’ sticker and an accreditation for one of the prestigious New York magazines. The youth was not intelligent and struck a pose; behind him, propped against the wall, was the body of the security policeman, violated. And the photographer slipped away. The youth walked proudly towards the cinema, the makeshift command point, anxious to show what he had acquired, and borrowed a pocket knife and made another gouge in the stock, a second tick. And he was confident and held his enemy’s weapon as a symbol of his power, and thought himself invincible.

Zeinab toyed with the research needed for an essay, took notes, was far away, and barely noticed the quiet of the library. She had no friends there, none of the other girls slipped alongside her for a quick conversation, or to share a problem.

She was involved at a depth where the sun no longer shone but did not regard herself as ensnared. The two boys had been cousins. Not close cousins, but the blood link had existed. She was a teenager, sixteen years old, and thought herself too tall, too long-legged and awkward, and pained with shyness when she had first met them. They had come with their family from Batley, had moved into Savile Town across the Calder river, and she had been hurrying back from school, lugging her bag full of books, and the car had pulled up alongside her. That was the first time… They must have known who she was, or come looking for her, and they had laughed and joked with her, had put her at ease: it had seemed a liberty with the disciplines of life that she had lingered on a pavement and talked with two boys. They had driven away. That was the first time… The blood link for her family and theirs came from the Pakistan city of Quetta.

The atmosphere in the library, supposedly where study and learning flourished, seemed of little importance to her. A tutor might recognise that she had struggled with the workload during the last two semesters but was hardly going to risk playing the ‘race card’, and threaten her with the big boot. She did what she had to, the minimum… Other matters concerned her, but failed to frighten her.

Not often, and not regularly, it could have been once a month, or every six weeks, she would be walking back from school, a bright pupil and from whom great things were expected, and a clucking approval from her parents, and the car would ease up beside her, and the window would come down. How was she? How was she doing? Bold talk that rubbished Dewsbury; they laughed at the humbleness of the area that was Savile Town, and how nothing ever happened there… The last time she had seen them, these vague cousins, it had been raining and the wind was whipping at the hem of her ankle-length clothing, and the car had stopped and the back door was opened. From behind her veil she had watched their faces, and most of the laughter was lost, and nervousness had played on their faces. She had thought then that she might have been one of the very few who knew that they would be gone within a week, taking a rucksack, and going out from Leeds/Bradford, changing flights anywhere in Europe, then the leg into Turkish territory, and the scramble over the frontier. The older of them, only for a moment, had held her hand, blinked, had done a sort of sheepish goodbye, and the younger had taken the same hand and had brushed his lips across it. Incredible… and she was out of the car, and running down the street, through the rain, buffeted by the wind, and had shut herself in her bedroom.