Chris Cleave - Everyone Brave is Forgiven

Simonson smiled in a way that did not entirely release the tension. Four 109s barreled overhead in an asymmetric V, uncontested and exultant in the blue. Simonson swung the van off the road and they jumped from the cab and threw themselves into the ditch. They lay with their hands over their heads for a minute while the aircraft noise diminished. The Germans had either not noticed them or not considered them worth the ammunition, and flown on into the west.

Simonson and Alistair climbed out of the ditch and sat in the shade of a yellow stone wall, dusting themselves off. Black bees droned in the thyme beside the road. Dogs barked from farm to farm. Birds gave monosyllabic cries, harsh and unlovely, as if describing the landscape. The wind worried up twists of dust from the road. Fat-tailed lizards plowed the dirt, and from far away came the boom of the coastal batteries.

Simonson looked out over the ruined country. “You know who’d miss me if those planes had shot us up? No one.”

Alistair shrugged. “I might miss you.”

Simonson seemed not to hear him. “It would keep one going, to have someone who gave a damn.”

“What about your three nice girlfriends?”

“If I died they might wear the grief like a brooch for a while, if it pleased them to go with the fashion.”

“I thought you were fond of those girls.”

“The clue is in the plural, isn’t it?”

“Then perhaps you ought to pick one.”

“But there’s nothing to choose between them, don’t you see? They spend their mornings in bed and their afternoons at Claridge’s. They are indistinguishable among thousands. They are fireflies.”

“Whereas you want the actual fire.”

“Must you mock me? You know me less well than you imagine.”

“I wasn’t mocking. Well, only a little.”

“It is too easy for you.”

Alistair held up his hands. “I’m sorry.”

They remounted in silence and drove on, while Alistair drafted the letter to Mary in his head.

— commands us to convey to you his fulsome apologies for his libelous comments, which arose merely from our client’s state of happy distraction, brought about by the many utopian delights afforded by his present location.

Cresting a rise they saw a pillar of smoke a mile ahead, thickening as they approached. Slow from the hunger, Alistair hardly noticed it.

The food and the drink on this island are enough to render a man dizzy with delight. The foie gras has only one fault, which is its superabundance. The caviar is so consistently good that one gets a little weary of it.

The smoke was half a mile high now, directly ahead on their route.

There is a host of charming local rituals, many of them involving fire.

“I think we had better pull over here,” said Simonson.

“Mm?”

“It’s just that we are carrying three thousand pounds of artillery shells and it seems prudent not to drive them through flames.”

Simonson stopped the Bedford a safe distance from the fire, and upwind of it. They got out to see what was going on. In a village of two or three hundred houses, the church was ablaze. The wreckage of a bomber and the bodies of its crew were strewn around. Flames blew across the road and the air stank of burning aviation spirit. People ran in and out of the church, bringing out artefacts to save.

Next there are the art treasures, which the locals are quick to display.

It seemed the fire was burning itself out. The buildings were all of stone, of course — there was little wood to catch light — and now that the aviation fuel was burning off, there was only an angry soot being lifted in the shimmering, superheated air. In the little stone square before the church, a crowd was gathering. Alistair and Simonson pushed through it.

It is an al fresco culture and one is never bored as there is always something going on in the town square.

A German airman was on the ground and the Maltese had encircled him, kicking and spitting. A blade of bone protruded through one trouser leg. The side of his mouth was torn, the wall of the cheek hanging in a flap and revealing a row of bloodied molars. He was pleading with his tormentors in good English, accented only by his wounds.

“Damn it,” said Simonson.

The locals are hospitable to the British, though less well disposed to other foreign tourists.

Alistair shook his head savagely, forcing himself to concentrate on the present moment. His mind changed focus so sluggishly now, after the months of starvation. The enemy airman looked up at him, beseeching. Alistair felt a tightness in his throat. It was a scene he had come across during the long retreat through France. If an aviator had to bail out, it might be better to shoot himself on the way down than to parachute into the hands of people he had been bombing.

“Leave that man alone!” Alistair’s voice was lost in the din. “Leave him!”

The people looked through him. Some grinned. There were no women or infants in the crowd. It was a bad sign. Evil made warning ripples.

A boy of eleven or twelve in a clean white shirt, black trousers and a black cloth cap, laughing, kicked the German in the crotch. The airman drew into a fetal tuck, which caused his smashed leg bone to dig in the dirt. He screamed, and as he did so another man kicked him.

“Please! I did not want to fight you! God save the King!”

A man took a handful of dirt and tilted the airman’s head back and packed the bloodied and protesting mouth. The man gave a choking moan. A purple mud of dust and blood escaped in clots through the rent in his cheek. There was laughter in the crowd, since the joke was now on the enemy. How pleasing it was that the whole great logistic of armies and states, of countless millions of fighting men and their associated materiel, could deliver a punch line to any grid coordinates at any time.

The fire from the downed aircraft had spent all its fuel now. The haze caught at the back of the throat. More villagers closed in on the broken man.

“I am a British Army officer!” Alistair shouted. “Leave that man alone!”

He put himself between the German and the people, but they got the better of him. He took an elbow to the neck and another to the solar plexus and he found himself winded, at the back of the crowd. He could no longer see the German.

Simonson took his arm. “Come on. One mustn’t expect more.”

“You aren’t serious?”

“They’ve been bombed for months. What would you have us do?”

“I’d like you to help me,” said Alistair, taking his.38 from its holster and turning the cylinder to check the load.

“For pity’s sake! We have a ton and a half of HE in the truck, and the enemy is already airborne. You know how many men died to convey that ammunition, and you want us to leave it sitting in the open while you play white man’s justice? The man is dying in any case — you saw him.”

“Yes, but I will shoot these people before I let them torment him.”

“Then I will leave you to it, Alistair, because I am not going to lose a truck full of shells for the sake of your pristine conscience.”

The two officers stared at each other for a moment.

“Fine,” said Alistair.

He stepped around Simonson and cocked the hammer of his revolver. He fired five rounds into the air and the jeering stopped. The locals spun around, startled at first, then with faces turning sullen.

“It’s quite all right,” said Alistair. “I might do the same in your shoes. But you may go to your homes now. I haven’t seen your faces and I shan’t be taking names.”

He stood with the Enfield pointed at the ground. He looked at his shoes. The wind piled dust up against his toes and scooped out hollows to the leeward. As he watched he became aware of a slow movement in his periphery, a receding and a lightening. When he looked up, the square was empty except for the squirming body of the airman.