Gerald Seymour - Battle Sight Zero

School kids were streaming across roads and waving down buses, and a crowd of mostly women was spilling in front of him to get into a bread-making factory before their shifts started and, farther back, the works that made privacy blinds was sucking in its employees, and farther along there would be delays in front of the place that turned out garden furniture. He was Andy Knight. He had been Andy Knight last week, last month and most of last year. It was the name he was currently locked into. He was Andy Knight to his landlord and to the management at the depot, and he was Andy Knight to the girl he’d be meeting at the finish of the working day: later than expected. That had been the text message: Hi A, looking forward to tonite, but am delayed, Make it 9 at the Hall, Zed xx . He’d be there. A name was always a problem, the present one and the past one and the one before that. Each name had a history that had to be kept behind a necessary firewall. With anyone he met, he took as much care, exercised the same concentration, as when he was propelling the lorry down the road towards the site.

She was a pleasant girl, and almost pretty. She did not hold his hand when they walked together, but she’d tuck her wrist in his elbow, rather formal, and walked well, with a natural swing. But too often, she wore a frown on her forehead, just below where her hair was dragged back over her scalp. He had known her for three months. She was young and seemed immature, innocent and intelligent, and he was – so the ticked boxes said – older than her, and drove a lorry for a living and wafted building supplies round the city. Chalk and cheese, he thought he might have been the first boyfriend she’d had – if that’s what he was, her boyfriend.

He flashed his headlights. A couple of guys in high visibility vests, and with plastic helmets askew on their skulls, were manhandling a makeshift gate aside and then waving him in. A big building site was taking shape in a sea of mud. This was Andy’s first load of the day, and there would be three more before he ran short of hours.

‘Hi, Andy, how you doing?’

‘Doing fine, doing good.’

‘Hold-ups getting over here?’

‘Piece of cake – thanks, guys.’

It was what people wanted, a bit of cheerfulness; that way he was noticed but quickly forgotten, and the compartments stayed in place and he could remember more easily who he was. And in the evening he would be with the girl. A pretty normal sort of day was ahead, as normal as any.

Most of the night they had taken it in turns to yell at him.

Sometimes they’d started up the chain-saw and revved the engine and brought it close to his face so that he would have seen the power of the racing chain and smelled the stale two-stroke going through its engine – and they’d yelled some more.

The boy on the chair would have seen all the kit they had collected for the session, anything that might be of use in interrogation. Apart from the chain-saw there were pliers with which his nails could have been extracted, a Stanley knife that was not there to slice linoleum, and lengths of wire with clips on them that would have been marketed to jump-start power into any flat battery, and there was a baseball bat. They would have imagined that the boy, faced with such an array of weapons, would have quickly given every indication he wished to speak, tell what truths he knew. The boy was attached with masking tape to a heavy wooden chair. More tape was wound tightly across his mouth, and he was nominally blindfolded but the material had slipped enough for him to see the implements they had. The place where they held the boy was carefully erected. He was inside a tent of transparent heavy-duty plastic which also covered the flooring. He could not speak so could not have answered any of the yelled questions but he had been told at the start of the questioning that all he had to do was nod, and then the tape covering his lips would have been torn clear.

They had yelled at him, they had started up the chain-saw, had thrust the plug of the cables into a socket, and had smacked the baseball bat into the flooring, but the boy’s head had stayed obstinately down, his chin on his chest.

Now, the three of them were uncertain how to go forward. It was past dawn. The traffic beyond the old warehouse was heavy. Rain dripped through a long broken skylight… One of them frequently checked his watch as if the passing of time were a lame enough excuse for the failure of his night’s work… They were certain of his guilt but did not know what target he was launched against nor to whom he reported. The boy was an informer, sent to infiltrate them. They should have handed him over to older men, who’d have claimed greater practical experience, then stood aside and seen their fledgling independence snatched. The boy stank because his bowels had burst and dark stains marked his groin, and earlier in the night steam had risen from his trousers, and they had thought that amusing. But now day had arrived and they were unsure what to do… They had a microphone ready, plugged into a tape recorder, and if there was a full confession then the salient parts would be held.

What did he know?

The three stood away from the wall of plastic sheeting and tried rationally to go back over the brief history of the boy as they knew it: where he had come from in Savile Town, who he would have known at school at the big mosque, who his parents would have been friendly with or related to. Since he had pushed himself close to them, where had he been and what opportunity to overhear a call, and who he might have noticed them with, and what did he know of the girl? They argued, were confused, tired enough for logic to fail them, and increasingly frustrated that the boy had failed to submit to the questions.

Perhaps, all three concluded, they had shown too great a degree of squeamishness. Should have taken off limbs with the chain-saw, sliced off fingers with the Stanley knife, and made the clips live on the charger. Of course, once they had what they wished for – the boy’s confession – they would kill him. Not a point of debate. Maybe hang him, maybe drown him.

All three were hungry, and all three wanted coffee, and all three knew they needed to sanitise the interrogation area. Too much time already wasted.

One had the knife and another had the pliers and a third dragged at the firing cord on the chain-saw… He probably did not know the name of the girl, nor her use, probably did know their names and the broad-brush strokes of the conspiracy, probably did know that each of them faced – on the informer’s word – a minimum sentence of twenty years.

All three were advancing on the plastic sheeting, and all were yelling their questions and the chain-saw’s engine rumbled to life, coughed, then ran smooth. They expected to see him flinch, as he had done previously, and try to flail with his legs and to writhe in the chair, but he did not. His face had achieved the quality of an old candle, without lustre, and the eyes above the drooping blindfold were wide but did not blink, and the head lolled unmoving on the chest where no breath stirred.

One of them called out, ‘Fuck… fuck, he’s dead.’

August 1956

The closed fist of the sergeant’s hand, from a short swing, belted the conscript’s ear.

It was not a slap, but it was intended to create fear, and humiliation, and pain.

The senior non-commissioned officers of that unit of mechanised infantry rarely failed in their prioritised aims. They needed, constantly, to dominate the youths who were shipped into the ranks – no understanding of discipline – if they were to build companies and battalions and brigades capable of advancing in support of the tanks and through a chaos of smoke and explosions, and the screams of the wounded, and incoming fire. This particular sergeant who had been at the Leningrad battle and also on the final push down the length of the Unter den Linden and the approach to the Reichstag in Berlin, was regarded as a martinet for inflicting hurt.