Alan Judd - A Breed of Heroes

‘We’re taking him to hospital, what do you think?’ snapped the CO.

‘You’re not takin’ him nowhere, you’re not takin’ him from me.’ The little man stared in wide-eyed appeal at the crowd. ‘Holy Mother, they’re taking me dying child!’ There was uproar at this and renewed struggling. Henry Sandy and his team arrived in the ambulance Pig and forced their way through the crowd with a stretcher. Henry looked very quickly at the boy, feeling the wound, eyes and heart. It was the first time Charles had seen him without any facetiousness. He spoke and moved simply and directly, treating all alike. ‘Help me get him on the stretcher,’ he said.

Charles helped with the feet. The boy was very light. Then the stretcher-bearers lifted him and made back towards the Pig. The crowd had gathered round that now and tried to stop the boy being loaded into it. They fought and shouted as though to stop him being dragged off to prison. A couple of them had chalked slogans about the Queen, including the abbreviation ‘FTQ’ — the Republican answer to the Protestant ‘FTP’ — on the side of the Pig. For one moment they succeeded in bringing the stretcher party to a standstill and it looked as though they were going to snatch the boy back. Charles grappled with a yelling woman who had grabbed hold of the stretcher. He pulled her off it but she then turned her attentions to him, pulling his hair and hitting. She fought with a ferocity which for a moment shocked him but even so he could not bring himself to hit her with his fist. He kept trying to catch her arms and, due to some deeply-instilled sense of military propriety, let go of her with one hand in order to catch his beret and prevent it falling to the ground. Then the awareness of lost dignity took over and, still holding and being held by her, he kicked her hard on the shins, twice. She let go with a howling scream and was immediately surrounded by sympathetic companions.

By this time the Pig was moving off with the boy and his father, whom the CO had allowed on board. Even so, a couple of other men tried to climb on to it before being roughly repelled. Charles saw one of the CO’s bodyguards lay his baton across the front of one man’s face with a calculated precision that a few months, or even weeks, before would have seemed shocking. The man dropped to his knees and bent right over, clutching his face. Van Horne appeared at Charles’s side, unruffled and apparently untouched by the struggle. ‘I can’t help noticing you have a way with women, sir.’

Once the Pig was gone they pulled out. Charles got back into the CO’s Land-Rover with Nigel Beale, who had a bloody nose. They were still surrounded by clamouring people claiming to represent citizens’ action committees and various residents’ associations. The word ‘kidnap’ was being thrown around a lot. ‘Accelerate forward and don’t stop or swerve for anyone,’ the CO told his driver. ‘If we run over one or two of the bastards so much the better.’ However, the protesters showed a nimble concern for their own safety and the Land-Rovers left the estate without further incident. It was said that the boy had been injured by a pipe bomb; he had been playing with some other boys and had picked up a piece of pipe about a foot long which had exploded as he threw it.

The CO spoke to no one on the way back except to order the driver to stop off at C company’s headquarters in the Factory. Edward and the others were all there. An unease had developed between Charles and them since he had gone to battalion HQ, almost as though he had changed sides. Their greetings now were rather formal, except for the company sergeant major who was as friendly and jokey as ever. But the CO did not want to listen to anyone else’s words. He wanted to unburden himself. ‘Those bloody people down there are not people,’ he announced to everyone in the ops room. ‘No animal would do what they did. Animals look after their own. These people are not fit to have children. They’re not fit to be people. First of all they make a lethal gelignite bomb, then they leave it lying around where kids can find it. Then when some poor little sod loses his hand and half his arm as well as very nearly his leg they just stand around like a lot of stuffed dummies and stare at him. That’s what they were doing when we arrived, wasn’t it, eh? Just standing and staring watching him bleed to death on the pavement. And not one of them lifted a finger, not one little finger. I didn’t see them do anything. Did you? Eh? Did anyone see them do anything?’ He looked at everyone in turn. People nodded or lowered their eyes as though they themselves were guilty. The CO so often launched into tirades that Charles had not realised at first how moved and upset he was now. His teeth were clenched and his eyes hard. ‘And as though that’s not enough, watching him die, they actually tried to stop us helping, didn’t they? Tried quite hard too. If they’d tried a little harder I’d have happily left one or two more in the gutter for good. What kind of people are they, for God’s sake? Psychopaths? Ghouls? And they won’t thank us, you know. It won’t do us any good. I know we’re not in a place where we can do any good. I know that. But I don’t care what they think of me, or what they think of my men, or what they think about anything. I am going to make them behave like human beings even if they are ghouls. From now on it’s war as far as I’m concerned.’ His cheeks were taut with emotion and he stared at everyone for a few moments as though they were all his enemies. Then he suddenly relaxed and rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. ‘All right, let’s be off,’ he said quietly.

Out in the yard they were getting back into the vehicles when the CO paused with his hand on the iron grille over the windscreen. He turned to Charles and said, ‘You’re leaving us, are you?’

Caught off guard, it was a moment before Charles could reply. ‘Yes, sir.’

The CO looked at him and then got into the vehicle without saying anything. Charles climbed in the back, sandwiched between the signals sergeant and Van Horne. He felt as though he had been caught out at something and was angry with himself for feeling like that. After all, he knew he needed no convincing that he would be glad to leave the Army.

On the way back the CO said to Nigel Beale that if the boy’s father turned out to have a sense of gratitude after all he might be prepared to talk about the local Provisional IRA men. It was a very long shot, but worth trying.

The deal with Beazely worked well. There were a few teething troubles, due mainly to busy telephones and inflexible deadlines, but after a while a system of information-gathering and transmission was established that worked at least as well as those of the Army and the press. This was a source of pride for Charles and Van Horne, though it should not have been because their system was no more than a combination of the resources of the other two. Beazely was given no more than he could have got for himself, and did not ask for more, while they accepted without question whatever price he paid. The extra five hundred pounds that Charles needed to get himself out of the Army did not include living expenses for any time thereafter. It did not even include his post-resignation train fare from Aldershot to London, though as he was entitled to a number of concessionary leave warrants a year he might not have to pay that anyway. In which case, he reasoned, he might just as well go from Aldershot to Edinburgh, a city he had long wanted to see. He did not think very much about what he might do after leaving the Army, but carefully nursed an inner conviction that he would not know until he had left. This was, perhaps, yet another symptom of his growing tendency not to think about whatever might be problematic or unpleasant.