Rosamunde Pilcher - September

Conrad hesitated. The two men had spent most of the day in each other's company, but Conrad, not wishing to appear curious or impertinent, had deliberately not brought up the subject of Archie's obvious disability. Now, however, it seemed a sensible opportunity. "How did you lose your leg?" he asked casually.

Archie watched the buzzard. "It was shot off."

"An accident?"

"No. Not an accident." The buzzard hovered, dived, swept back up into the sky, its prey, a small rabbit, dangling from its beak. "An incident in Northern Ireland."

"What were you doing there?"

"I was a regular soldier. I was there with my Regiment."

"When was this?"

"Seven, eight years ago." The buzzard had gone. Archie turned his head to look at Conrad. "The Army has been in Northern Ireland now for twenty years. Sometimes I think the rest of the world forgets how long that bloody conflict has been going on."

"Twenty years is a long time."

"We went to stop the violence, to keep the peace. But we haven't stopped the violence, and peace still seems a long way off." He shifted his position, laid down his glasses, leaned on his elbow. He said, "During the summers, we have Americans to stay, as paying guests. We give them beds, arrange diversions for them, wine them and dine them, and make conversation. During these conversations, the subject of Northern Ireland is frequently raised, and inevitably, some joker comes out with the opinion that Northern Ireland is Great Britain's Vietnam. I have learned swiftly to change the subject and talk about something else."

"I wasn't going to say that. About Vietnam, I mean. I wouldn't be so presumptuous."

"And I didn't mean to sound aggressive." He eyed Conrad. "Were you in Vietnam?"

"No. I've worn glasses since I was eight years old, so I was labelled medically unfit."

"Would you have fought, without that legitimate let-out?"

Conrad shook his head. "I don't know. But my brother went. He joined the Marines. He flew a gunship. He was killed."

"What a flaming, bloody, useless war. But then, all war is flaming and bloody and useless. And Northern Ireland most useless of all because the troubles have their roots in the past, and nobody is willing to pull those roots up and throw them away, and start planting something decent and new."

"By the past, you mean Cromwell?"

"I mean Cromwell, and William of Orange, and the Battle of the Boyne, and the Black-and-Tans, and the young men who went on hunger strike and died of starvation. And I mean long and bitter memories, and unemployment, and segregation and no-go areas and religious intolerance. And worst of all, the impossibility of being able to apply logic to the situation."

"How long were you there?"

"Three months. It should have been four, but I was in hospital when the Battalion came home."

"What happened?"

"To me, or to the Battalion?"

"To you."

Archie's response to this was a deep and reluctant telling silence. Looking at him, Conrad saw that once again his attention had been caught by some distant movement, far away out on the opposite hill. His profile was gaunt, seemingly frozen in concentration. Conrad sensed the other man's reluctance to talk, and swiftly retracted from his question.

"I'm sorry."

"Why sorry?"

"I sound curious. I don't mean to be."

"That's all right. It was an incident. That's the euphemistic term for bombings, murders, ambushes, general mayhem. You hear the word every other day over the evening news. An incident in Northern Ireland. And I was involved."

"You were operational?"

"Everybody was operational, but my actual job was Officer Commanding H.Q. company."

"One reads of such incidents, but, still, it's hard to imagine how it must be out there… I hear it's a very pretty country." Conrad was on the point of saying, "I didn't mean that," and then thought better of it, and let Archie continue.

"Parts of Northern Ireland are very beautiful. Sometimes my job took me out of H.Q. for the best part of the day, visiting units in their posts all over the countryside. Some of those on the border were in beleaguered forts made from old police stations which one could only get to by helicopter for fear of ambush on the roads. It was great, flying over that country. Some of it I saw in spring and early summer. Fermanagh with all its lakes, and the Mountains of Mourne." He stopped, and grinned wryly, shaking his head. "Although one had to realize that they not only swept down to the sea, but to the badlands as well. The border."

"Is that where you were?"

"Yes. Right in the thick of it. And different country again. Very green, small fields, winding country roads, lachans and streams. Sparsely populated. Tiny farms dotted about the place, grotty little homesteads surrounded by dead and broken machinery; old cars and tractors left to rot. But all quite pastoral. Peaceful. I found it impossible, sometimes, to relate such surroundings with what was going on."

"It must have been rough." *

"It was all right. We were all in it together. Being with your own Regiment is a little like being with your own family. You can cope with most things if you have your family around you."

Archie fell silent again. The granite boulder made a painful resting place, and he had become uncomfortable. He shifted his position slightly, easing the strain on his leg. The younger dog, alert, moved in beside him, and Archie fondled her head with a gentle hand.

"Did you have your own barracks?" Conrad asked.

"Yes. If you can call a requisitioned clothing factory a barracks. It was all fairly rough and ready. We lived behind barbed wire, corrugated iron and sandbags, seldom saw daylight, and had little chance of exercise. We worked on one floor, went downstairs to eat, and upstairs to sleep. Scarcely the Ritz. I had a batman cum bodyguard who went everywhere with me, and even in plain clothes, we were never unarmed.

"One existed in a state of seige. We were never actually attacked, but there was always the threat of some sort of ambush or assault, so one was prepared for any of the various ploys for blowing a police or military establishment off the face of the earth. One of these was to hijack an armed Land Rover, load it with high explosives and then get the poor bugger at the wheel to drive it through the open gates of the barracks, park it and set it off from a distance. This actually happened once or twice, whereupon a device was conceived to deal with such a contingency. A solid concrete pit with a steep ramp. The idea was to drive the vehicle into the pit, and then run, shit-for-ginger and screaming warning like a maniac, before the whole caboodle blew up. The resultant devastation was still pretty formidable, but by and large, lives were saved."

"Did that happen to you?"

"No, that didn't happen to me. I have nightmares about those bloody bomb pits, and yet it was never an experience that I had to endure. Strange, isn't it? But then there can be no explanation for the workings of one's own subconscious."

By now Conrad had abandoned his inhibitions about curiosity. "So what did happen?"

Archie put his arm around his young dog, and she settled, to lie with her head on her master's tweeded knee.

"It was June. Early summer. Sunshine and blossom everywhere. Then an incident on the border at the crossroads near Keady. A bomb buried beneath the road, in a culvert. Two armoured vehicles- we call them Pigs-were out on border patrol, four men in each Pig. The bomb was detonated by remote control from over the border. One Pig was blown to smithereens and all four men with it. The other was badly damaged. Two men dead and two wounded. One of the wounded was the Sergeant in charge, and it was he who radioed back to H.Q. to report. I was in the Operations Room when the message and the details came through. On such occasions, for security reasons, no names are ever mentioned over the radio, but every man in the Battalion has his own Zap code, a number for identification purposes. So, as the Sergeant gave us the numbers, I knew exactly who had been killed and who was still alive. And they were all my men."