Derek Robinson - A Good Clean Fight

“Harris!” Lampard called. Harris trotted over. “He’s crippled in one foot and by now he must be half-maimed in the other, so he can’t have got far. Go and kill him, fast. Get back in ten minutes and I’ll make it double egg and chips for a week.” Harris was already on his way. They watched him go. He ran leaning forward, as if into a stiff breeze.

Gibbon the navigator had joined them. “Given a million soldiers like Harris,” he said, “the war would be over in a week.”

“No, you’re wrong,” Lampard said. “Given a million soldiers like Harris the war would never end.” That made no sense to Gibbon, but he didn’t care enough to argue. “Sarnt Davis!” he called. “Just time for a brew-up, I think.”

Schramm had been limping to spare his right foot. Occasional smears of blood showed behind the toe-prints, while the left boot kept stamping its pattern in the dust.

One stride by Harris covered two by Schramm. Harris reckoned the German must be slowing all the time. Schramm was twice as old as Harris, unarmed, slightly disabled and almost certainly not trained in hand-to-hand combat. If Harris had been capable of pity he might have felt sorry for him. As it was he looked forward to the pleasure of a quick knifing and then the reward of Captain Lampard’s praise.

By now the wadi had taken a bend to the left and another to the right. Still the footprints limped ahead. Harris wondered where the hell the German thought he was going: not to a landing strip, that was certain; too many rocks everywhere; the wadi was strewn with them, many as tall as tombstones. Now the smears of blood were getting bigger. Something lay on the ground ahead: a handkerchief, or part of a shirt. Maybe Schramm had tried to bandage his foot and failed. Harris put on speed until he was running hard, chasing his own shadow. That shadow was Schramm’s piece of good luck. Schramm was squatting behind a rock, hearing the running footsteps get louder and watching the shadow magnify until he took the only chance he was ever going to get and he dived at Harris’s legs. A boot smacked Schramm’s mouth and pain flowered through his head, but Harris suffered much more because he was traveling fast when he tripped and his face skidded along the wadi floor. Schramm lurched to his feet, a rock in each hand, missed with the first and cracked Harris’s head with the second. It was a sharp rock and it dented his skull like a badly parked car. Schramm turned to see who was following; who would fire the squirt from the tommy-gun that would cut him down before the rattle could reach his ears. Nobody followed. Bloody fools , he thought. They don’t deserve to win.

Harris’s right boot was too big for Schramm, so he pulled off Harris’s socks as well, both of them, and took his tunic and his revolver and grenades and knife, then he scuttled down the wadi until he was safely around the next bend. His fingers trembled and his lungs heaved as he dragged on the socks and laced up the boot. He heard himself laugh and didn’t like the sound: too shrill, too triumphant. He had never killed a man before. He stamped his right foot. The boot felt good. He grabbed the weapons and ran.

After fifteen minutes, Sergeant Davis and Corporal Pocock went to find out what was keeping Harris. Davis brought back the body, carrying it slung over his shoulder, the head wobbling and the hands flapping at every stride. Behind him came Pocock, carrying the left boot and walking backward in case the German had decided to follow them and fling a grenade.

Lampard went forward and met Davis. “This was all my fault,” he said. The body slipped a little. Davis shrugged it back into place.

The rest of the patrol came to look. All they could see of the back of the head was a thicket of flies. Nobody spoke. Someone got a blanket and spread it on the ground. Davis knelt on the edge of the blanket and let the body fall. The flies rose in fury, and at first everyone thought the strange, high-pitched sound came from them; until they realized that Lampard was weeping.

Some men were surprised, but no one was embarrassed: Captain Lampard commanded the patrol, it was his privilege to weep if he wanted to. They withdrew and left him to it.

“What d’you think happened?” Lieutenant Dunn asked Davis.

“Harris must have took his boots off to kick the Jerry officer to death,” Davis said, “and he got a whiff of his own feet and dropped dead.”

“It’s no joke, sergeant.”

“Course not, sir. It might have happened to any one of us. I shared a tent with him, I should know.”

Captain Gibbon strolled over to them. He nodded at the sky, which was primrose-yellow fading to blue-black. “I hope he gets a move on,” he said softly. “Dark in ten minutes.” They glanced at Lampard, who was standing motionless beside the corpse, his arms folded and his head bowed. “Attitude to be adopted, other ranks, for the mourning of,” Gibbon said. “Brigade of Guards drill book, Appendix “F,” Active Service, Foreign Parts, matinees Wednesdays and Saturdays.” Dunn turned away. He, like Lampard, was a Coldstream Guard, and so he felt a loyalty to him; yet now that Gibbon had pointed it out, Lampard’s attitude did look too formal, too posed. There was a lot of Lampard—he had powerful features, an icebreaker of a nose, wide and determined lips, a thrusting jaw—and merely arranging his hefty limbs, finding places to put those considerable hands and feet, gave him mannerisms and attitudes that might seem posed. Dunn was sure that none of this was for effect; Lampard just behaved naturally and it ended up looking like an act.

Lampard knelt and neatly folded the blanket over Harris. “Right, gather round,” he called.

They gathered round.

“Schramm has gone,” he said. “Question is, how far and how fast? Mike: what would you do if you were Schramm?”

“Beat it for home,” Dunn said. “And hope I ran into a search party on the way.”

“You wouldn’t lie up and wait for daylight?”

“Not bloody likely. Sooner I get back to base, the sooner base can scramble some Stukas to catch us in the desert.”

“So maybe we shouldn’t dash off into the desert.” Lampard shut his eyes so that he could massage the lids. “Sergeant Davis looks unhappy.”

“He’s got Harris’s knife and revolver and grenades, sir,” Davis said. “And he’s got a bloody nerve, too. He might just be daft enough to come back in the night and try to do more damage.”

“He’s made a pretty good start at that,” Gibbon said.

“I’m not going to spend the night here,” Lampard declared. Grunts of satisfaction all round. “Assuming the enemy comes after us, which way will he expect us to go? South or east?”

“South,” Dunn said. “Back to Kufra.”

“Yes? Why? It’s seven hundred miles to Kufra. A thousand from Kufra to Cairo. Why should he expect us to make an enormous detour?”

“Because that’s the way we came,” Corporal Pocock said.

“Does he know that?”

“He seems to know everything else,” Dunn said.

One of the fitters broke wind. “Beg pardon,” he muttered. “Bloody cheese.”

“If he thinks we know he knows, maybe he’ll think we’ll go east instead,” Lampard said. “Run parallel to the coast. Less than half the distance. Refuel at Siwa. By far the best route. Blindingly obvious.”

“There’s only one thing wrong with the east route,” Gibbon said. “It’s lousy with airplanes, so we get shot up.”

“No danger of getting shot up,” Lampard said. “We just destroyed half the Luftwaffe, remember?”

“I’m not worried about the Luftwaffe,” Gibbon said, “I’m worried about those lousy bastard Beaufighters who used the Rhodesian patrol for target practice.”