The Long Watch by Alan White

Author:Alan White
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canelo
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

Sleep and work, work and sleep, that’s what it means to be on a job. Still, it’s better than being stuck in barracks, polishing brasses, learning the correct way to salute, painting white lines going nowhere for people with nothing better to do than follow them. War could have meant going to stand in a long line, lifting an insufficient weapon to an inadequate eye and firing an inconsequential bullet at an almost invisible target. For me it had meant seeing men scamper from Dunkirk with half their stomachs hanging out; suddenly realising, as the man next to you catches a whacking great lump of shrapnel, that there’s not much difference between a human being and what you can find hanging on a Saturday morning in a butcher’s shop. Human death is usually clean; when God, or whoever is responsible, ends a man’s life he usually leaves the visible body intact, corrodes the inside with bacilli that remove the vital spark as silently as sleep. Only man, like the animal he became in war, mangles the cadaver; only man creates jagged iron machines of death, bombs, shells, flying fragments that tear flesh, scatter blood, splinter bone. Even jungle animals eat the remains, after a kill, even the vulture strips the carcase clean.

My wound was bleeding again, causing these thoughts. I cleaned it as best I could, dusted it again with sulpha powder. It would get better if I could avoid infection. I ought to sleep in a clean bed, between clean sheets, the holes in me covered with cool gauze, healing unguents. Orange juice to drink from a sterilised glass, my temperature taken every four hours, and the long thin cool hand of a nurse pressed compassionately to my brow. I was in an itchy sleeping bag, with a khaki cotton wool pad held by a twisted sweat-raddled bandage around the top of my leg.

‘Is it bad?’ Tom asked as he tied the knot.

‘Yes, it is, but I’ll manage.’ Stiff upper lip. There’s a lot to be said for avoiding self-pity, and nothing is as infectious as courage.

‘I’ve made up my mind,’ Tom said.

Academic interest? There was no time to care.

‘I don’t think you’re going to succeed… I’m sorry, but I know you’d want me to be blunt about it. I think if anybody could do it, you could, but I don’t think anybody can do it.’

‘We got up to that window tonight, and there were six of the buggers on patrol.’

‘But it wasn’t a hundred per cent… you had to have luck. I mean, you couldn’t guarantee the patrols would stay to that pattern, and what would you have done if they’d changed the pattern, or if the moon had come out, or if somebody had been near the professor’s window on the inside, or if one of you had fallen, missed his footing, broken a leg?’

‘Ifs, Tom, ifs… always a million when you’ve time to listen.’

‘They gave me up for dead once. When I came round again, I honestly thought I was dead.

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