Wutr
ug Lu
Sassa
P SorC A
DO HOT MUNE


Maurice's intro
http:/webmail.aol.com/42952/aol/en-us/mail/PrintMessage.aspx
system (Oxygenesis) which he practiced in California. In the last years of his varied career he and his wife lived between
London and France.
50 WORD COVER BLURB
Maurice Rowdon (1922-2009) eared degrees in History and Philosophy at Oxford University and published twelve books
on animal/human intelligence and war. A novelist and prolific play write as well as a non-fiction author he also developed his
own hermetic breathing system which he practiced in Califomia. He and his wife lived between London and France during
his last years.


NOTE.
Bleitneu, Schlossburg al nd Eiglenz
are fictitious nemes for towns in
Austria. All the other place-
names in this book are actual.




It was extra ordinary to him that he should
be in what was once the Enemy's country, that he was
to live behind the Enemy's lines.
He looked again amd
again at a notice before him, at the edge of the firwood:
DURCHGANG VERBOTEN.
He had looked secretly at the tiny
warning in the train-compartment, Nicht Hinauslehnen,
and he had been excited.
He listened closely when
other people spoke.
The day was May 3, 1951.
It was hot and the
last part of his climb was very steep, by the side of a
long ravine.
He went ahead of the boy and turned to
see whether the town of Bleitnau would be visible from
the farm-house. But it was hidden behind trees, al nd
he was happier. He waited for the boy to reach him,
then told him to go into the kitchen and warn them of
his arrival.


In front of the : farmhouse there was a sloping
lawn, a cherry tree in blossom and a wooden Christ,
utterly still in the afternoon sunlight.
The moment he
had turned the corner of the deep ravine, with the child
going in front of him, he had recognised this slope.
had stopped suddenly on the narrow path a nd looked up in
breathless relief and wonder, just as if he were coming
back to a plce he had once known very well. Bleitnau,
in the valley, had disappointed him.
In the long, desolate
main street, treeless_and silent, he had wanted to turn
back, to find a better place nearer Salzburg. But here
a field went steeply up before him and at the top were the
black wooden fence, the broken farm-gate, the cherry tree,
and then, shining behind the leaves, a white and yellow
farmhouse with its woodén balcony.
It was familiar to
him, and just what he had hoped for. Everything was warm
and enclosed on this freak summer's day.
The long kitchen was rather dark, stifling and
untidy, with flies everywhere.
He went straight across
to the oldest woman, Frau Glassner, and shook hands with
her.
She was a tiny woman dressed in black, with a dry,
wrinkled face and long hands stiffened and swollen at the
knuckles with rheuma tism.
She watched him carefully as
he sat down, and whenever he looked at her she smiled
quickly, her eyes sharp and small. All the time she was
trying to divine him, not as the others were doing, by


looking at his clothes, but by looking into his eyes.
There was a scrubbed wooden table at the side of
his bench, and here she put down a jug of milk and a glass
for him.
He took off his shoes and stretched out his
legs, still sweating from the climb, and behind him, through
a window just by his shoulder, he could see the bright
at nd enchanted slope.
Beyond it was a fir-wood.
He remembered climbing a green slope so steep
that he had to lean flat against the horse's back, with
his head down so as to avoid its neck as it jerked back
furiously in the effort of the climb.
He had loved these
quick movements of the horse's head.
Sometimes, when he
was feeding it sugar from his hand, the horse would suddenly
push its nose against his chest in.affection and almost
send him flying.
It was a heavy, rather lazy crea ture
with a fine black coat, and had belonged, not mâny weeks
before, to a Cossack soldier.
At the top, among the trees, where the frost was
still visible in the.grass of the sloping lawn, he had
jumped down and tied the reins to a post.
It was a last
slope to just such a farmhouse, with just such and enchanted
lawn, and black, still fences a nd wooden gates..
He had looked in at one of the windows a nd seen no
one. He had gone round to the back, across the mud near the
barn which was frozen hard, and looked in at the dark entran-
ces of the out-houses.
But there was no one. He looked


further up the slope al nd saw one of the workers in a
ploughed field wave down to him.
He waved back, then
decided to return to his horse.
He was hungry, and the
tips of his fingers were stiff with the cold. It was an
hour after dawn, with a very yellow, clear sun, on one of
the first cold days of autumn.
This farmhouse had been
in Carinthia, near the Yugoslav border.
He remembered coming up to it across a great valley
of fir-trees, with the sun just risen.
It had been quite
dark in the woods, and when he was out of the valley he
could see grey snow here al nd there along the hard, black
path and among the leaves on either side.
At the top he
had looked back across the valley of gold and reddening
leaves, sprayed out in a great gush of colour as far as he
could see.
He used to take this ride each morning soon after
dawn, a nd he would be back in time for breakfast.
He had
always been looking for a house where he might 8o secretly
sometimes, perhaps with a girl from the village.
He had
intended to take two rooms in this enchanted house, one
where he would eat at nd drink wine, the other where he would
sleep. The farm-people would stable his horse and cook for
him, and at dawn the following day he would be back in the
camp before anyone had noticed his absence.
This was a
dream he never realised.
Yet he was powerful enough to realise it.
It was


the autumn of 1945, and he was a victor.
In these first few weeks of peace he used to sit
in a field by the camp and watch the girls talking to their
father or turning the hay. For time was now his, and the
future. The War was over.
He had listened carefully when one of the captains
told him, in a low voice, sitting in one of the bivouacs
after dusk, how he had taken a pa trol to one of the houses
in the hills, and how two women had been there, how one of
them had taken him down to the dark cellar and told him
breathlessly that she had hardly seen a man for two years,
that she was like other women, that she could no longer bear
this life, at nd how he had promised to go back with another
officer one evening a nd, stay the whole night.
Brandon hoped
that he and the Captain would go together, but no mention
was made of the women agai in.
Always, during these first days of at utumn, he had
looked forward to having a room of his own quite separate
from the others, where there would be great banked-up log
fires and a shelf for his books,and his own coverlet brought
from Jerusalem across the bed.
But meanwhile he went on
with his photography.
He would turn the camera with its
tiny silver levers over ar nd over in his hand.
He would
take photograph after photograph of the yellow meadows
skirted by trees, the wooden farmhouses a nd the pebbly stream
in the village nearby.
He would develop these photographs


in a dark-room behind ohe of the village shops. The
shop-keeper had instantly agreed to his using it.
Brandon
used to go there regularly twice a week, and a young girl,
hardly mature, brought him the paper and developing solution.
Then she would stand ar nd watch him at work, in the darkness
outside the glow of.his red lamp. One afternoon he turned
suddenly and threw himself on her in the closed darkness,
and she drew nearer to him with a girl's furtive wonder as
he opened her blouse at nd bit her lips a nd cheeks.
They
swayed together in the forbidden quarters of this black
room, as if far underground from the autumn sun.
So many
touches had been denied him all these years.
He thanked Frau Glassner for the milk and walked
outside to the muddy cobbled, yard of the cattle-house.
He came to a dark passage-way where there was a cart with
its shafts up and a he-goat wat tching him in the shadows,
and inside the cattle-house he saw three mother-goats
and their young leaping up to suckle, their talls wagging
fast.
It was a heavy, warm, wet smell.
Hesaw the
cobwebs over the windows and.in the darkness two horses.
One of the chains harnessing the COWS clinked, a horse
stamped and shifted with a sigh, a COW turned slowly to
look at him.


It was the smell of terror. A man had groaned
one whole day and a night.
He lay in the stall of a
cattle-house near Faenza. He had cried out again a nd
again to be taken further into the house, again and again
he cried out, but it was not the time for wounded men,
it was not their time of blessing.
And near him two dead men had lain with their
arms held stiffly up towards the ceiling in dumb eternal
supplication.
Soldiers had dragged them out of the house
by the hands, and their arms had not fallen back.
He had first joined his regiment at the beaches
of Salerno, south of Naples, during the evening of the night
when the English a nd American forces were almost driven
back into the sea. The ceptlen who welco med him was a
modest, pleasant man, but at that time a victim of battle-
snobbery.
That t is to say, he merely shook hands with Edward
Brar ndon and turned away, as if to say, We are not here to
ma ke polite exchal nges; you must realise that while you
hai ve been idling in a North African port or kicking your
heels in a home station, we here have been risking our
lives, working day a nd night, and suffering the cries of
wounded men.
When he looked X* Brandon in the eyes he
passed him a sident message: Put away your childhood.


In the groves of Salerno Brandon learned that
war was a highly serious matter.
These men were as serious
as monks.
They listened to the yells of wounded men like
novitiates walking in cloisters, with heads bowed.
They
were rather haughty with the youngster.
They tola him not
to be foolhardy when he remai ined standing during a bombard-
ment (not knowing the significance of the songs in the sky
and the black fountains of earth), and they laughed at him
for. cowardice when, to oblige them, he went to ground at t
the slightest noise.
Even the grimy gunners looked like
chosen men who had seen Visions a nd heard Voices.
In. this
holy war there seemed to be no sharpening of knives in the
darkness, no dirty licence, no sudden murderous rush
forward, no leader who jumped to his feet and persuaded
his.men to certain death.
Only in the very forward lines, when darkness
surround ed everything, when men were alone and terrible
again, when their democracy slipped from them like a.
ghostly mantle, was there sometimes a cry for blood, a nd
then, two hours later, surprise at Staff. But back at
the guns, everything was clean, ordered and thoroughly
intellectual.
We live at the beck a nd call of scholars.
Even in war the hegemony is not shaken off.
Brandon would hear them talking after night-fall,
promising to wipe that smile off his face with a really
serious assignment up in front.
As seon as there was a


ticklish river to cross, and a lot of blood to be mingled
with it, his name would be the first on the list.
This
was how the scholars planned to make him "battle-wortay".
On the whole, they succeeded, and he too learned how to
go into battle like a scholar.
A peg of rum for courage,
or a Benzedrine tablet, would have been fatal to him: they
would have destroyed that clarity of mind necessary for
activéties like writing a thesis or planning abstra ct
murder. And after abstract murder there came that feeling
of purity, of having done a sound work of scholership.
During his early training as a Novice at Salerno,
Brandon witnessed his first artillery barrage.
When the
Germa an wedge was broken; the English infantry moved north
along the Naples road, towards Cava di Terreni, and Brandon's
regiment moved away from the beach into the hilly meadows,
fresh and green, with secret clumps of trees and pebbly
streams, above Salerno, out of sight fron the sea except
at the crest of each hill.
lryheod
This was like the scene of his/truen noy in Hampshire,
but betterg because there were no long, downy vistas, which
he did not like, just as he did not like the sea.
Everythirg
was close-packed, bursting, plump and very green.
On the
first day, when all the front was quiet, he went down to one
of the streams, twisting and falling through a little wood,
ve: ry cool and an age away from theguns, though they were only
a few yards higher up, a nd washed gimself all over, sta nding


naked in the middle.
In these first few days, ha ving
not yet been chosen for a forward assignnent, he had come
to the conelusion that the War was an easy matter, a matter
for the mind alone.
He had seen many photogra phs of brown-faced soldiers
in North Africa and deduced from them a safer war in which
machines would do most of the work, abstractly.
He put
away the nightmares of his childhood about muddy trenches
and the endless decimation of men.
He felt easy in these
meadows.
So he bathed, strolled through the woods, read a
book from his little library, lay on his camp-bed, slept,
joked with the bombardiers, a nd chewed grass outsde the
comma nd post very complacently.
Several times during the
day he walked down to the barn where a headquarters had
side
been established. He simply stood out it watching the
pigeons on the roof, the COWS near the entrance and the
Italian family coming and going.
He loved barnsg the
slush at their entrances, the smells onside, their warmth,
the tumbled-in roofs, the piles of hay, the sighing of animals
and the occasional resigned stamping of a hoof on the barn-
floor, and the quiet shifting of great flanks.
But it was a silence before the attack, a silence
with which he was not yet familiar.
He knew that there
were plans for a barrage that same evening, but he did not
know the extent of this barrage.
He. only knew about it


in so far as it affected the twenty-four guns of his
regiment.
When evening came he wandered back to the commai nd
post, and the captain told him sharply to stand by for any
emergency task that might fall to him during the barrage.
Brandon nodded, with his hands in his pockets, and the
signallers in the command post were sitent as the captain
spoke, solemn like judges, as if they themselves had just
been vindicated.
Everything was ready.
The shells and
osrtridge-cases lay in great piles behind the gun-emplace-
ments, and the first shift of men was going on.
It was utterly dark ar nd silent outside when the
caj pta in gave the order to the guns, "Take post!" five minutes
before the barrage was due to begin, Brandon was still
bored and complacenti, expecting little.
A runner came in
with a written message, to say that the infar ntry were on
their start-line.
They would be waiting in the dark,
crouched in the ditches, listening for the first shells to
Emake.


make protective arcs above their heads.
The Captain
turned in the dim light of the command post and looked
at Brandon:
"Go outside and stand behind the guns. Be ready
to transmit my orders if the loudspeakers break down."
He lifted the flap of the tent and walked through
the argkness a few yards in the direction of the guns.
He had brought a little megaphone with him, to help his
voice should he have to shout, al nd he had noticed that one
of the signallers had smiled secretly at this, as if it were
only another sign of his being a Novice.
He heard the first faint order, "FIRE!" from another
field far to a flank, then the order was instantly taken
up again and again until it came from the loudspeakers
of the command post behind him; and in one swift movement
the dark, starlit night moved and a great booming ar nd crash-
ing sounded long into space, swelling like a slow, fathom-
slarfed
less burst along the entire front, and Brandon jumpetd, his
mouth open, amazed at the great blue and yellow flashes
meeting across the sky, a nd the earth in front of him
leaping and rumbling with the detonations. All the night
was rocking and flashing and booming, and he stood before
the illuminated tent. paralysed with horror at what had
been let loose, for this was the whole great harbour
drenched in a dome of deafening sound, gone mad in a last
thunder of the universe.
But then his horror gave place to a strange,


willing exultation, a nd he joined the madness, he became
wild with it and let himself go. He stood in the shaking,
flashing dome, his eyes blazing, inspired by this last
hour of the universe, for it must be the last. : God must
take notice.
Yes, there must even be, a t this elevnth
hour, a God to take notice.
The men in front of him were pushing the shells
home with their ram-rods, thrusting closed the steel doors
of the breech, standing back for the mighty spout to recoil
and give forth its burst, and the flash lit up the shy
meadow and the tent behind. And Brandon wanted now to join
in. His novitiate's first complacency had fallen through,
and he was itching to be at one of the guns, pulling the
hot lever with a lanyard after the sérgeant's order, "FIRE!",
running back to get at mmunition, pushing the thin-nosed
missiles home in the breech with a ram-rod. The War had
now won him. It had done its work of inspiration, and
happy
he was now its gheering child, his chin pushed forward,
out to do a man's job, at last knowing that this dome of
fire would stomach no children.
He knew his place at
last, and the first catechism had been said and leanned.
He was puffed up with War. His mind was huge with it.
He was now its cunning SC holar, doing all the right
genuflections a nd signs of the cross and prfound homages.
The others were solemn like monks, all the men at the guns
and the signallers in the comma nd post, ar nd now he had


joined them, bursting with metaphysics.
He stood staring
beyond the guns into the sky above Naples, chosen at last,
and alone with his Vision.
This was his first lesson:
the pomp and thunder of war, promising glory.
But at Cava di Terreni, a few miles to the north
and three days later, he was to receive his true baptism,
by no means a baptism of fire.


After a few days Brandon began to visit the
dark kitchen more often, and to stay there talking to
Frau Glassner and her daughter.
The first brilliant
freak summer's day did not repeat itself.
They talked about the price of food and clothing
in Austria, about Frau Glassner's five cows, about the
age of the dog, kept for her son's return from eternity,
about the costliness of her two new piglets, about the
excellence of goat-nilk for babies, about the neighbouring
town of Schhossburg where she was born, about town-girls
who painted their cheeks beforea dance, about the War,
about murder by night in fir-woods, about the snow in. the
mountains, about her long illness, about the taste of
duck-eggs, about the Presidential elections at nd about
church-going people.
They sat leaning on the table,
tal lking quietly to each other.
They eye ed each other with
suspicion, then they smiled when they caught the other's
glance.
Both of them knew that something wa S withheld.
They understood each other like conspirstors.
Ewhen


When she wanted Theresa, her youngest da ughter,
a tom-boy with black, curly hai ir, to do something for her
in the kitchen she spoke harshly, with a quick, gutteral
utterance.
Her eyes were wild a nd black when she shouted,
al nd the child would jump as if E whip had been cracked.
Frau Glassner's face never slept.
It was wrinkled,
grey, al nd her lips were very thin, the tiniest blue thread
across her face.
When she talked about money her mouth cha nged, it
drew down sadly at the edges, and her eyes were smaller.
When he told her that prices were not as high in Salzburg
as they were in Paris her face took on this humble despair,
because she was afraid that her guests from Vienna would 80
to Salzburg, where it was cheap, and not to her farmaouse.
Sometimes she fetched a black scarf and wrapped it round her
head, then huddled herself on the bench, as if she were afra id
of something.
Her husba nd had died after wounds in the
First World War.
He had come mad from the battle-front,
and she had nursed him down to his silly grave.
She ate little, she never left the farmhouse, and
she never touched schnaps. Her desires were dead.
Her
wrists gave her a lot of pain, especially in wet weather,
and she held them in front of a blue rey-treatment lamp
before she went to bed each night.
Brandon came into the
kitchen and saw her sitting on the bench by the wall frowning
ar nd holding her wrist, alone and older thar n the trees.


One morning she stood by the black dresser a nd
told him that her son had been lost on the eastern front.
The military authorities in Germany had written her a note
telling her that there was no trace of her son in any of
the prison-camps.
She wrote letters about him to England,
America, Russia and Poland. Perhaps he was still in Russia.
Perhaps he would come back.
She was keeping his dog, though
it was really too old to be alive. He might one day step
into the doorway. She stood near to Brandon as she spoke,
tiny and watchful, looking into his eyes for signs of her
son's return.
"He never went to Bleitnau drinking," n she sai id.
Brandon saw him upturned on a hand-cart, head close
to the gravel of the path, feet pointing towards the church-
steeple.
He came across him suddenly, under his feet in the
dark, a sudden presence. He saw him swollen by a ditch.
kim
Frau Glassner's words did not move/in the slightest, because
he knew too much.
But he kept noddadg his.head in sympathy, 9
just as he had done on countless occasions in Italy, Greece
and other parts of Austria.
The monologue was always the
same, a terrible rune comingiout of the earth.
It rained and the clouds lay low in the valley
between the branches of the trees.
The movements of
soldiers ai nd vehicles are slower in rain and mud, and
moreover soldier's spirits are lower, so that it is advant-
ageous to shell hea vily. The shells make a splash as they


fall, swinging down suddenly from the sky.
Let me die
by summer! During the crossing of the River Volturno
had
several men/walked. away from the line in horror and dis-
gust.
One of these was a young musician.
He stared at
things and shook his head with a smile, saying, "No, Iam
sorry, I am sorry."
Brandon walked over the hill into the other val lley
Chrough a tAfy wood of fir-trees and past a flat, pink
ski-hotel.
The other valley was silent, dark and very
cold. There was still snow on the peaks and among the
foot-hills below him.
A slight mountain wind blew, and
behind him there was swampy erass where the snow had recently
thawed.
He hat ted these mountains. He wondered what ha d
brought him here.
Everything was deserted, he could hear
no sounds from the town below.
He began the descent.
Just at the moment when the first warehouses of
Bleitnau came in sight, he heard voices behind him.
turned round at once.
There were soldiers, thirty or
forty yards behind.
They were a platoon of American
infantry.
They were coming down the hill in single file
and some of them were talking in low voices.
He stopped
to let them pass.
They passed close at his side without
turning towards him, thinking that he was Austrian. Their
boots thumped heavily on the steps of the path. He looke d
with horror at t their helmets, at the thin daggers sheathed
in t heir belts, sryf at their quick-firing guns, at their


thick, sun-burned necks. He waited until they ha d turned
the corner below him, then went on. He was astonished
to discover that he was trembling violently.
He had noticed one of them in particular.
His
was the face of a man exiled from love.
It was flushed
with shame. Brandon remembered the photograph of himself
taken immed iately after the War.
He remembered the eyes,
appealing for mercy like a dog's.
His baptism took place in September, 1943.
There
were mossy statues among trees, and a terraced garden
above. Also there were green garden-benches, and a
fountain.
Everything was deep green in the great terraced
hollow, dark and enclosed.
This was the fatal edge of
Cava di Terreni, a town of tall villas and cobbled lanes
with curving bridges overhead, a nd the faces of hungry
people.
They came under cover of darkness from the beaches,
and put their bivouacs and packs along the terraces, then
began digging themselvesin.
But by dawn they had dug only
a few inches down.
When the sun was above the horizon there was a
sudden swift breathing in the sky, and the first mortar-
bomb fell in the midst of the trees, its smoke slowly rolling
upx and clinging among the leaves.
Everybody lowered his
head and turned to watch the smoke thoughtfully, knowing
what must come. Eyes become young looked at the branches
below:
Is it I?
is it I?


Most of the first shells fell with great
celebration into the deep, shrouded place of statues,
where a young Italian woman was sitting on one of the
benahes. A piece of shrapnel, very small, grazed past
her temple al nd made a long wound, not at all serious: but
she sat on the bench paralysed with horror, holding her
head and crying out in brief astounded shrieks as the shells
split and cracked and boomed among the trees. The men
scrambled up and down the terraces amid the pungent, drift-
ing smoke as the shellgs drew nearer, then flung themselves
flat on the wet earth, hiding their heads. There was an
endless scrambling to at nd. fro as the shellgs came down in
cruel hal nd-fulls.
One of the soldiers could no longer bear the
Italian woman's appalled shrieking, and he shouted down
to her: "Oh, shut up! for Christ's sake!" Then he
murmured to himself, close to Brandon's ear, complaining:
hurt
"She's not/es bad as all that." The same thing had haj ppened
at Salerno: a man with quite a mild wound in his leg, had
shrieked at the top of his voice continually for ten minutes
or so.
It is the shriek of terrified astonishment, more
than pain: for the first sensation of a shrapnel wound
is usually one of numbness, so that sometimes men do not
know. they have been wound ed until they notice the blood
on their limbs. The badly wound ded seldom shriek out like
this; more often than not they give up faint, pale cries


of "Help. Help." Near Cassino the captain who had
seemed to Brandon a victim of bettle-snobbery and who had
him
very grudgingly grown fond of Imwhon, died inthe dark,
amid only mud, saying quietly that his arm was hurting,
whereas his arm was untouched, a nd the wound was at the
back of his head.
This shriek of terrified astonishment seemed to
say: this cannot happen to me, not to me. That is what
one
made mA impatient, and finally pitiless: for why
could it not happen to them as to anybody else?
Had they
enever divined what it must be like to be a victim?
Had
they seen the wounded and the dying, but only drawn them-
selves apart, as the specially chosen, as the clean people
of ths suburbs, to whom nothing real could happen?
There were two casualties among Brandon's men,
and when the shells lifted they were:taken by stretcher
to the kitchen of a house on the outskirts of the town.
One was taken to hospital with a bad wound in his arm,
and the other died slowly.
This was by no mer ns a spectacular baptism.
Everything was quiet in the room.
There was nothing of
great horror: only the moaning of an old woman; in
sympathy, and the quiet, respectful treading of soldiers.
Only a man died. But Brandon's discovery was such that
he turned away quickly a nd began weeping.
The dying man's last action wa S something he


could not forget, al nd something he would never dare to
describe as long as he lived. To see, with your own
eyes, to see: that is absolutely necessary. The breaking-
in had been accomplished.


There was an iron-welder from the local railway
at the table. He was about Brandon's age, and he had close-
cropped hair and bloodshot eyes.
He and Brandon sat close
together, both in their shirt-sleeves, poring over a dic-
tionary between them on the table, apart from the others.
There were five visitors from Bleitnau, two of them
young women. They were town-people, neat in their dress
huote alert in their
Hau the
and
ways
faorwokors.
wadevawanren
One of the men giggled continually at the efforts
of the iron-welder and Brandon to make themselves understood
to each other, sometimes in English and sometimes in German,
but when Brandon spoke to him he instantly agreed, before
the words were quite out, nodding his head solemnly, as if
Brandon were a professor.
Then he turned back to the women
again and went on telling them his jokes.
The other man in the party was a bafchelor, a plump
and conceited man dressed in the traditional leather trou-
sers. He poured himself glass after glass of schnaps and
tried to fondle the young women, smiling weakly at them,
looking first into their eyes, then at their breasts.
"He is forty", the iron-welder said to Brandon, "and
he is still not married".
The batchelor sang and lolled back in his chair,
laughing and crying out, his lips red and very wet. The
iron-welder turned to the letter R in the German section of
the dictionary.


"You are my redeemer,' #l he said.
Brandon looked at the word in the dictionary to
which the iron-welder was pointing, redeemer.
"You are my redeemer against this man," the iron-
welder whispered to him, pointing to. the bachelor.
"You
are my excuse for not drinking with him."
The bachelor made several references to the dictione
ary on the table between them.
He made jokes to the others
about the intelligence of these two men a nd their beautiful
book. He filled Brandon's glass with schnaps, then said,
"Prost", thus obliging him to raise his glass and return the
toast. He seemed to grow ashamed of his drunkenness, and
Brandon's glances seemed to perplex him.
He kept leaning
over towards him and shaking his head, saying forlornly,
"Nicht immer, na, na, nicht immer," wanting to expla ain that
he was not always drunk.
Suddenly he pashed open the window and was sick on
the lawn outside, then he called for a pint glass of water.
He began to sing with the glass raised in his hand, then he
pitched it high into the air so that the water came down in
a shower over the table, drenching the iron-welder's shirt-
sleeve a nd. the dictionary. He looked solemn and contrite
for a moment, but he was happy to have done this.
He shook
his head, musing quietly:
"They are so intelligent, these men."
He took out his handkerchief and began stroking the
wa ter off the book with exaggerated
delicacy. He leaned over


towards Brandon and sa id:
"I am a small man."
He felt in one of his trouser pockets and fetched
out his identity papers, signed and stamped by each of the
four occupying powers.
He showed it to Brandon, turning
the pages slowly, as if it were an interesting book.
Again and again he said:
"I am a small man.
Everybody should be equal.
I am a small man."
He yawned and rubbed his eyes.
He looked about
him for a moment, then he lay down on one of. the benches
at Brandon's side and fell fast asleep.
"The pig's off," Frau Glassner murmured, gazing
at him.
Brandon went up to bed soon after half-past three
and lay in the dark listening to their voices from below.
He heard the shrill voices of the young women remonstrsting,
Frau Glassner's sudden hal rd shout, the iron-welder's
la ughter and the conceited chuckle of the-b bachelor, now awake
agai in.
He lay with his eyes open until first light, so
strange was it to be behind the Enemp lines, to be in their
very midst and yet be free.
The German soup-kitchen bad been turned on its
side by a shell, he had opened all the covers to have a
look at the strange food, now spilled and cold.
He had
come across it suddenly, near a gravel path, and for a


long time he stared at the covers with fascination.
He remembered the hay-barn where the Germa n
rearguard had been only a few minutes before, how he
had smelt the smoke from their cigarettes, still in the
air, and looked closely at their ration-tins containing
coffee still luke-warm.
The sight of one of the Enemy
strolling on the other side of the line was ecstatic and
terrible to him.
wwwwwsswwawwwwwwwWWWA
mwwwwwwwwwwwwmm
had
He/felt an extra ordinary wonder when he WA
crossed the border from Italy into Austria in 1945.
He sat in the jolting car smiling and, talking at the top
of his voice, excited as he had not been for weeks.
A vast plain stretcher out on either side of the arterial
road, and everything he saw in the norning sunlight -
the irrigation trenches, the inns standing amid quiet
lewns, the ruined houses - had a fabulous and legendary
look.
Frau Glassner's daughters would lie in wait for
each other and jump out from a corner of the dark passage
or from behind the yard-door.
Theresa would see her
mother coming to sit down at nd she would hold a spoon
upright on the seat of her chair.
She would wait for
her mother to lean her elbows. on the table and close her
eyes, exhausted, then she would push one of her elbows
away. Shy A X A1
They would pinch and


punch each other, and they would prick each other in the
legs with the points of carving knives.
One evening a May bug flew in through the window
likea pellet, very fast, then it flew about rashly and
blindly under the light.
One of Frau Glassner's former
lovers, the father of two of her children, ha ppened to be
in the room, al nd he jumped up and caught the insect between
his forefingers.
He had a sharp face and a moustache, a nd
in his eyes there was a quite dead expression.
He showed the insect to Brandon, leaning over the
table.
He was delighted to be able to do this.
watched Brandon for a moment, perhaps hoping that the May
bug in his fingers, waving its vlack furry legs, would
horrify him.
He pointed to these legs and described how
the insect gripped wood with them and how they were strong
like pincers.
"It at ttcks the trees," he said.
ruin
can
The bug had a hard.back and a globe-head with huge
eyes.
It turned its head slowly from side to side, like
a sad god, and at the same time it struggled with its
forelegs.
"A May bug must always be killed," he said. "And
only a hammer will do it.
Look, look."
He tapped it very hard on its back a nd then on its
head with the nail of his index finger, showing Brandon


how hard its protective shell was. He was delighted to
be able to hold it in this way.
He pointed out the bug's
forelegs al nd head and back like a scientist, turning it
upside down each time while it struggled and turned its
huge face from side to side.
That same evening Philip, a worker from one of
the other farms, got very drunk and threatened to fight
with Brandon.
Everybody considered him soft in the head.
He came into the house roaring for schnaps while Brandon
and the miner wefe still talking a t the table.
He looked
like a pirate, with a thick imperial moustache and a stubble
beard, and fine blue eyes and black teeth.
His eyes always
blazed inside.his tiny skull, and when he was drunk he made
sudden, quick, wild gestures like a madman. He tore at his
trousers ar nd banged his great stick on the floor, roaring
and singing, then he leaned his head back and smiled at
everyone like a child.
His light blue eyes were full of
pity and honour.
It was the face of fools and childreh.
Brandon went into the sitting room to eat his
dinner and left the door ajar, while the other two went
on drinking schnaps.
They sang and shouted together,
pulling each other about on the bench with helpless grins,
and embracing.
Soon they began to quarrel. Brandon
could not understand the strange gutteral rushof dialect.
But suddenly Philip stood up, kicked away the bench and the


butter churn before him, and stumbled towards the doorway
leading into the room where Brandon was S eating.
swayed there, frowning at nd smiling. He shouted something,
then began waving his fists at him, his chin thrust forward
and his chest bared.
The miner instantly jumped up and
held onto his arms weal kly from behind, crying out like a
stage-character, clearly intend ing his words for Brandon's
ears alone: "Schwein, Philip! Du Schwein!" while Frau
Glassner continued to sit at the table, resigned to the
fruitless quarelling of men, her hands covering her face.
Brandon stood up, half bent over the table, ready
to ward off Philip's blows if he came into the room.
But
suddenly Philip lowered his arms and began smiling again,
like the happiest child.
The minër let go of his arms,
and Philip looked into Brandon's eyes as if a wonderful
joke had just been secretly shared between them.
In those few moments Brandon had felt like the
Enemy.
Only from fools and children could he expect the
Often in the blind depths of Philip's mind must
the words have sounded again and again: "The English, the
Enemy." It was six years after the cepitulation, but war
is a life-time. Brandon felt a spy in this farmhouse.
Indeed, he must often have looked like a spy, peering into
the cattle-house, standing on the brow of the hill above
the house for hours on end, listening closely to all their
conversat tions, staring into the faces of all the men who


came from the other farms: a spy, rather than an English-
man on holiday.
Later that eveing Frau Glassner locked Philip out
of the house, but all night he stayed out side howling and
singing like a madman.
He ra ttled at all the doors and
tried the windows, hour a: fter hour, aysteriously, fumbling
about in the silence, talking to himself, gasping, a nd
letting out sudden dismayed shrieks.
But when he came the following day Philip was
quiet and tender with everyone.
He sat on the bench very
sedately in his rags, like a prince, his torn shir t buttoned
up, and he never asked Framx@iREEnEr Theresa to fill his
glass as he usually did. He took each glass offered him
very graciously, with a little bow, and sipped it in a prim
ma nner. He would have kissed his murderer on the cheek.
Frau Glassner ta lked bitterly about all the men.
who came to her house, just to drink her schnaps.
"A cock can fart," she told Brandon, "but it can't
lay eggs."
Her eyes were narrow a nd shining when she said this,
and she bent down, pushing out her behind obscenely, making
a long farting noise with her mouth.
When the results of the presidential election were
coming through she stayed close to the wireless-set until
midnight.
In his room Brandon heard her shout something,


than he heard her running up the stairs.
She came
straight to his room and called out: "The socialist is
The socialist is in!" And he jumped off his bed and
shook hands with her.
"So I shall keep my pension," she said.
She was
excited, she clapped her hands at nd laughed, she would not
go to her bedroom though it was after midnight.
In the morning, at breakfast, she sat down near him
and murmured, "I amtoo poor to pay forty-five schillings
a year to the Church.
Perhaps that will change now."
She described how the priests grew fat on her
money.
She puffed out her dry cheeks, imitating their
Lawemaid.


grossness.
She said that when a poor man died there was
only the most perfunctory funeral.
The bell went, "Ding,
dong, ding, dong", very quickly, then it was all over.
But when a rich mat n died, the bell tolled solemnly and
slowly, "dong..dong.. dong...dong", and crowds came to the
churah.
She described this fiercely.
She walked up and
down in the kitchen, slowly pulling the stately bell with
her thin right arm.
The sound of bells from the church would come
winding and clanging up the hill to the housen changing
furiously with each gust of wind, through the moving mists.
Everything in the house was damp.
There was no fire in
his room upsta irs.
If he went down to the hot kitchen he
found he could hardly breathe ar nd was instantly involved in
the slow, shouted conversations about the price of cloth in
England or whether it was healthy to eat meat every day.
So all he could do was to stride about his room, or lie on
his bed with his shoes. off and an eiderdown thrown over kim,
or go for impossible walks in the rain and mud, slipping
ar nd St tumbling across the bouldery mountain stream near the
house, climbing the stiles, and walking up the steep fields
until he reached the sombre firwood where none of the birds
stirred and where the rain dripped down to the forest-floor
through the silence, leaf-surrounded.
Sometimes he would stal nd by his window at dusk
ar nd watch the valley become blueish and misty, like a huge


silent back-street just before total night.
It was like
the coming on of lamps in the street where he was born.
There was a house in Battersea, like a black hut,
with a back-yard where a dog was always leashed up.
rememberêd the noise of one of the men falling downstairs;
it was a kind of terrible catastrophic tumbling.
The men
drank until they were violent, then they went into the
back-yard a bd fought it out.
They wore bowler hats.
remembered their terrifying scuffling in the back-yard, and
the silence among the women, with fools and children a t
their knees.
Everybody was packed into one hot room.
There were long roads of such houses, close together, a
black land, their doors opening straight onto the pavenent,
a corridor into nothing, where nothing breathed.
This was
the Prison Settlement where his childhood had been kept.
From the gutter he Graduated, after a brief truabey,
to war.
Brandon was now twenty-eight years old, and of
these twenty-eight years the War had consumed seven.
played truant to the War during the first two years, from
the time he was seventeen until he was nineteen, and the
time-limit made his hap ppiness the greater.
His truancy was a steep green hill, a dark lower
room underneath this hill, wwwwwwwwmammmn
wwwwwwwwwwwwwww a village with a church hidden
and alone, the crest of a hill called the Shoulder of
Mutton, brea thing grass and trees, and his truancy wa S


a dream he had lived, turning in his country bed with
Joy and pain at dawn, before the town was awake. It was
a truancy made possible by the War alone, and, logically,
it was brought to an end by the War.
He was evacuated
from London to a small town in Hampshire with other school
children a few days before the outbreak of war. When he
arrived he stared at the grey, ruffled lake, at the Bnatt
islands of tall trees, at the gravel path where chestnut
horses were sometimes to beseen, at the cafes in the main
street, at the cobbled square, at the rare green hills to.
the north, he stared at everything with astonishment and
blessed the War for being the instrument of his release,
last
in a place sterekt could breathe, where he was not watched,
where the dawn came up with no ugly contradiction outside
his window, and where at evening there were no dea thly
lamps but, instead, the starting of small animals in the
grass.
He made a last, unsuccessful rebellion against his
fate as a soldier four months after he had landed a t
Salerno.
It took place in December, 1944.
He flew into
sudden rages, he spoke bitterly, he fixed his superior
officers with hard stares, and he showed them that he did
not care how they punished him.
He wa lked about moodily
with his hands in his pockets, and only with his close friends,
in the comma nd post, did he talk sipcerely. Not long


before they had been calling him "the laughing boy".
But the laughter gradually ceased and his brow began to
wear a more thoughtful and scholarly look as the weather
became colder and it was necessary to fight in the mountains
above the River Garigliano.
A few days before Christmas he was sent up to
a mountain range over looking this river from the south.
There he trudged with his signallers from village to
village on the snowy heights, behind the infantry ba ttlaion
towhich he had been assigned. All of them had wireless
sets or batteries afnyain/slung over their backs. They
climbed up the mountain-paths bent forward like slaves.
The loaded donkeys stumbled between the boulders, going
before them. At the top was always a desolate place,
grey from past battles, where there were no houses and few
tees. .


trees.
They were paralysed with cold, against which
their clothes were no protection, and at night they
huddled up together in an airless bivouac among the
rocks.
He did not know which of the infantry commar nde ers
he should be supporting.
He did not know eher the Enemy
was. He did not know what tasks were expected of him.
No one consulted him.
No one, after the tactical
conferences, told him what was happening along the rest
of the front.
They moved from one gloomy farmhouse D
in the snow to another, along frozen paths, apparently
for no purpose, since there was never any fighting, and
there were neither rifle-shots or bombardments.
The
rations they had brought up from the valley behind them
were not sufficient, and the wind came in like a dart
from the sea.
He hardly spoke to his signallers. But
one morning on their way up the side of a moubtain he
turned and saw them all straggling far behind him, so
he's shouted down, "Get a move on!" One of them, the
tallest, stung by Brandon's cry, began leaping up towards
the crest like an animal, running with his body doubled
up, the heavy wireless-set on his back swinging about,
until he had passed Brandon. The other signallers were
encouraged by this and also began running, until Brandon,
weak and panting, was the last of them all.
Now he wanted
to shout at them again, to tell them that they must always
be behind their leader... But he prevented himself from


speaking.
His temper was becoming unmahageable.
At the top he had another fit of embittered
fury when he saw the legs of a GEXXER dead German sticking
out of the earth.
The sight made him furious against
the infantrymen, against these mountains, against the
Germans, against the War, against authority wherever it
was. smorymmwwsemmmmwwwwwwwwwm
MMAMMMwwmwWwM
On Christmas Eve, when the day was particularly
dark and muffled by the soft grey snow-clouds just over-
head, a Protestant service was held in the kitchen of one
of the farahouses, and carols were sung.
He went along
happily, hoping to be reminded of a truancy. But instead
he found the singing coarse and dismal, the padre's sermon
idiotic, a nd the cheering words of the colonel a lot of
empty chit-chat. He left the kitchen frowning al ndstamoing
with his feet, a nd he decided that he would leave these
mutton-heads today, he would go back to the valley, no
matter if it meant fifty courts martial.
Time al nd time
again he had asked over the wireless to be relieved before
Christmas Day. He must be back at. the command post on
Christmas Day, because of the good food and drink which
only came once a year and which might be the last he. could
enjoy before his death.
He was bored, cold, idle and,
worst of all, quitez al lone with his signallers among these
infantrymen, none of whom he knew or cared about.


must have Christmas in the tents with his own people
south of Cassino, with tinned turkey, letters from
England, whisky and port in the evening, and many hours
smoking over the comma nd post fire.
He would no longer
bear this senseless, inconsiderate waste of himself.
For the last three days he had not washed or shaved, just
asan act of rebellion.
He had slipped among the boulders,
torn his clothes, fallen in the black mud,cut himself,
had a piece of shrapnel pierce his trousers, and he
refused, out of hot vindictive anger, to make himself
look ar ny better.
He would go back to the tents like
this, with four days' growth of beard and mud all over his
face, his clothes black al nd torn.
He intended to walk
into one of the comma nd posts and tell them that for the
last week he had been try ing to get some sense out of them
as to what his tasks. were, why he was with the infa ntry at t
all, and where the Enemy were: and they had not troubled
to gnayar give him answers over the wireless.
He ordered his men to pack up their wireless-sets
nd without a word to the infantry comma nd er he left the
mountains.
When he arrived, five hours later, at the tents,
he began to walk in a sbovenly manner, his benet all awry,
his map-case dangling at his side. His men followed all
his moods to a deta il, and most of the way down from the'
been
peaks they bad/emumbling in low voices about the way in


which their regiment had been treating them.
The officer who saw him first was the man
responsible for sending him out in the first place.
The
sight of Brandon, strolling between the tents astonished
him. He stopped in his tracks as Brandon, fixing him
with a defiant stare, came nearer.
"What on earth are you doing here?" he asked.
Then, when he saw Brandon's muddy face and torn
clothes, he began to smile. He had the gift of always
appearing mature and sensible, though he was little older
than Brandon. He looked 313 on Brandon as something of a
joke, a child.
"What's the matter with your face?" he asked.
"Wasn't there any water up there?"
At once Brandon felt a terrible shame, so tha t
a blush quickly suffused his face.
The other officer
added with a shrug, just as he was passing DEE on: "Oh, well,
another party will have to relieve you, I suppose."
It was from this moment that Brandon decided to
become a dependable scholar.


In his work as an officer Brandon combined the
robe of the abstract murderer with that of the victim.
His work fell into two parts: one when he was at the
gun-position a mile or more behind the front line,
C omma nd ing four guns; the other when he went forward
Twith..


with the infa ntry in the attack al nd sent orders for
shell-fire back to the artillery lines by wireless or
telephone.
At the gun-position he gave his orders calmly
from a command post, and here he was usually warm, a nd
the Enemy bombardments were not frequent.
But withthe
infantry he suffered the falling of shells, the guns were
distant mouths full of angnymous grumble, he suffered the
cryang of men, the lodging in flesh of shrapnel a nd bullet,
the slipping in mud, the silliness of men after shock, and
the hurrying of stretchers.
As he shouted his orders to the guns, his feet
dry and his hands clean, God smiled and said, Wait, child.
He would be called out to go with the infantry
every fortnight or so for three, four, six or seven days
at a time.
He would take with him on these expeditions
two or three: signallers and wireless sets.
Thus, he
travelled alone.
He was with the infantry, and separate
from them.
They asked his advice and sought the protection
of his guns. He could be the key to the success of a
battle.
He was a murderer whose survival was of the
greatest importance to them and whom they often admired and
flattered.
With one word addressed to his signaller he
could achieve the murder of countless Enemy in two, three
or four minutes.
He remembered how the door of an Italian farmhouse


had been ajar as he came near: the table was laid
exactly as the family had left it in the middle of a
meal.
Upstairs in the bedroom there were certificates
of birth, marriage and death; crucifixes, letters, rosaries,
Valentine cards, little pieces of lace-work a nd valueless
trinkets; and photographs going yellow of childrencdressed
for their first communnion and of brides and bridesmai ids.
Everything was heaped on the floor where other troops had
searched the drawers.
For Brandon these things were not
certificates, rosaries, trinkets and photographs, they were
rubbish on the floor.
They were dead objects.
He slept
among them, or he pushed then out of the way to make a place
for his map. For him these were eternally empty houses.
In war the past is dead; the future is a lovely daydream
locked in the closed hall of the head.
Only the present
is important and eternal.
In a room overlooking a rising field the signaller
brought himt message from Headquarters.
He wa. lked across
to the graph-board at once and read it.
The message was
a little jocular.
It said that at two o'clock that same afternoon
sixty or seventy Germans would be assembling on a hill
within easy shelling range of the English lines.
They
intended to laurch a surprise attack, but Headquarters
suggested that the initiative be reversed.
There would be an artillery concentration on this


hill beginning at precisely two o'clock.
The guns of the entire division would be laid
on this target.
The distances for each gun would be very
carefully computed so that the closest concentration of
shells would be possible.
If Headquarters were lucky
sixty or seventy Germans would find themselves in the midst
of this concentration.
They would f ind themselves without cover and nownere
to run on the summit of a naked hill.
The guns would be fired off at the very same moment
so that the.shells landed simultaneously, thus ensuring the
maximum casualties.
Brandon and his signallers began computing the
distances immediately.
They were eeeited and flushed.
They moved about briskly a nd they made little jokes to each
other.
The message had changed their day.
The ache was
less.
They were planning myrder, but abstract murder, tha t
is to say, the murder of people they would never see,a
murder that was never any more than an idea to them, the
perpetrators.
Hence, they were for the moment cheerfully at home
in their epoch, they fitted, they were playing the role
for which they had been born.


In the dark entrance -hall of the Salzburg Natural
History Museum there was a great stuffed sea-elephant with
a black, pugnacious, scaly, oily skin. Brandon went up the
narrow staircase to the rooms and on either side of him there
were little skeletons, insects behind glass, stuffed birds,
spears, coloured diagrams and segments of tropical trees.
At the first landing he entered one of the rooms and walked
across the loose boards.
Everything was dead and still, behind glass, staring
out like all dead things. There was a terrible air of death,
the stairs and the long rooms were dark and heavy, the sky
was thick and low outside the windows, everything gaped and
was still. And the men and women he saw trod softly up and
down the stairs and through the rooms, the boards creaking
and creaking as they went, like trespassers.
Sometimes
they peered closely into the lighted cases where the dead
insects, the dead birds, the dead snakes, the dead bones and
the dry flesh were exhibited, and sometimes their faces were
green and howling carnival masks in the light from these cases.
He felt sick with the signs of death, its ghostly attendance
on this tall house with the creaking boards.
There were a
thousand and one silent funerals in this house near the
tunnel in the brown rock.
He went past the human heads shrivelled to a quarter
of their natural size, past the bony dinosaur, past the
transfixed nest of ants and the bees' hive, past the coffins
and the mummy, to the room where he heard a child sobbing.


He walked to the end of this room and saw the child standing
alone by a curtain, and beyond the curtain he could make out
little electric lamps and more glass cases, and also people
moving. He looked at the child, but the boy simply stared
before him, the tears on his cheeks, trying to keep back his
sobs. Men and women walked past without looking down at him,
then Brandon saw a pale, slim man with small eyes come out
from the gallery behind the curtain and look at the child
impatiently, and he heard him whisper, "Mutti kommt gleich!"
But the child could not stop weeping. His sobs were
loud and outrageous in the room of still, dead things. And
Brandon knew that there must be a dirty, enchantéd thing
behind the curtain.
He saw the face of the child's mother
as she peeped round the curtain at him, and she did not
regret his tears.
So Brandon walked on past the curtain, and inside
there was a greater hush than outside, though there were
many more people. With his throat dry and painful he walked
to the lighted cases and stared, aghast. He looked at the
shrivelled creatures of the womb, some of them preserved in
their mother's placenta, and then he lowered his eyes and
saw the two plaster castes, one of a human penis and the
other of a human lip, each painted with a red syphilitic
wound. One of the bottled
eye
embryos was a cyclops with
A / A
Asirgle
eye above the nose, another had two heads on one neck,
another was strangled by its umbilical cord, and another
was natural and whole, at four months, its legs drawn up


and its skin-hand raised to its mouth. He looked at the
sobbing child's mother and father, and they were thoughtful
and heavy like the guilty, watching and watching. And the
glass case was a lighted morturary before him, marrying
syphilis and love.
He walked past the curtain and the sobbing child
again. His cheeks trembled, he could not smile.
wanted to lie down ERE in a silent room a nd wear this
horron out.
He stopped and looked at the white plaster statues.
They represented the four human types, - the digestive, the
athletic, the respirato ory and the cerebral -, and they stood
side by side, naked, white and blind, like pat tients in a
hospital.
They were murdered men, murdered as the sea-
elephant in the dark entrance hall was murdered, so that
there should be embalmed things for the trudging spectators.
Everything was embalmed here, everything was stuck
on pins or stuffed or dessicated, everything was rendered
eternal for the dreaming stares of abstract men.
The
musaum is a biography, he thought, not of beasts, plants,
or past epochs of men, but of ourselves the embalmers.
He walked past funeral after funeral in this House
of the Embalmed, and the dead beasts stared beyond him.
He looked at t the life-size replica of a Red Indian
camp behind glass. He looked at the two tents, their
canvas genuinely weather-besten, at the woman feeding a child


man
X at her breast,almost quick al nd warm,almost moving, and at the/
and woman drinking at t the mouth of their tent.
They were
there for all eternity, the same woman in the tent with her
same outstretched hand, the same old man bowing before her
with cloth to sell over his arm, and the same mother with
her same smile, like the smile of a blind woman. And
outside the glass Brandon and his fellow dreamers stared at t
this camp and dreamed it warm and quick.
He had left Fr& Glassner's farmhouse the previous
week at nd taken a room in.one of the Salzburg inns, but now
he wanted to go back to Bleitnau. He wanted to see the
white stones in the ravine and the mountain water going over
them. He wanted to see the hill behind his balcony. He
wal nted to hear the padded knocking of the mare's hoof on the
lawn outside as she trotted between the trees, the water
shaking in her belly.
His horror and anger made him blind.
He walked through Salzburg to the inn like a man with his eyes
put out.
He rushed up the stone steps to his room and
slammed the door. He wanted to go back.
He wanted to go
back.
An accident could occur in Bleitnau, one of the
men could collagse al nd die at work in the fields, but the
accidents would not be hoarded up for your gaze,, they W ould
take their places in the days a nd years.
On his way back he had wa lked behind an old woman.
She was leaning on the arm of a girl at her side. She


stepped carefully across the cobbles, and she was nodding
and smiling to the girl. They walked close together,
like mother and daughter, and perhaps they were going back
from church, for it was Sunday.
He looked at her long coat and her flat-heeled
shees, and she seemed to change under his eyes, only
because of the museum.
He saw her suddenly as a patient,
like one of the white plaster statues, he saw her as
someone with symtpoms walking into hospital, one of many,
with interesting senile E ifections of the liver, the
stomach or the bones.
She was no longer the Sunday mother
with whom he might talk, no longer a wonan who smiled and
would die in her due time. The museum was behind him: ahd
reached forward its ha nd. He had embalmed her. He had
murdered her.
She looked like one of too many people,
there were too many people in cities, there are too many of
us in the epoch of abstraction.
Science, he thought, is the culture of the mortuary,
it is the evil eye on life. With the doctor's marvellous
cure must come the murder.
He stayed resting on his bed, and in the evening
he went out, his epilepsy spent.
He walked through
the
town, and was sane agai in.
Crossing the Mozartpla atz he came to a narrow lane,
and there he saw the tall Franciscan church where he had
often been before.
He decided to go in.
The alter was
hoarded upoin light at the very end, but he chose to remain


in the darkness of the pews, near one of the
huge pillars,
quite hidden. He sat there for
nearly an hour, wat tching
a priest go to and fro across the chancel
and re-arrange
the flowers and the altar
cloths, in utter silence.
At: Cava di Terreni the
spirit of the boy was
yielded
Lup.


up, because only men are crucified. He walked out of the
house where the dying man lay, at nd wept.
From that time
he tried to allow himself no self-pity, hat ving signed his
name willingly, so to speak, on the bonds of crucifixion.
In the churngyerd of St. Peter's in Salzburg he
saw a young American soldier wandering from place to place
with his silver camera. He watched him as he stopped to
take photographs of the tonbstones and the little chapel,
then of the entrance to the cat tacombs, where there was a
black gate and begind it skulls.
The young man wabked
post the private tombs, and everything he saw he studied
with a view to making a photograph of it. He stood still
and cocked his head to one side, then he held up his elect-
rical exposure meter.
He was a musing, quiet, tender man.
He looked at the chapel and the tombstones and could see
them in their embalmed state, when they would be clipped
into the album and homely people would smile. He emba lmed
everything slowly a nd tenderly, with wonderful care, alone
and unaware of being seen.
He lifted the camera to his
eye and then possessed the moudly, bored stone for all
eternity.
The nature of abstract murder was mavrid to
Bra nd ont
near Castel Poegiolo, several hours before
he ran along the grass verge marked MINEN.
There had been
three sleepless nights in this valley, a nd they arrived at


a country ma nsion soon after dawn, in the flat of the
valley.
Headquerters was established in the mansion,
while Brandon and a platoon of infantry went to one of the
farmhouses nearby.
He walked about the house, the battle
had died, he was restless and unwilling to sleep.
He must
do something, compute a distance, talk over the radio, make
plans for the Enemy attack. For three days and three nights
his head had obeyed and worked and been cunning, now it could
not stop.
He walked about the house, looking out of the window
onto Enemy territory, perring about for some movment and seeing
nothing.
He wahted something to happen, a German demolition
party to blow a bridge in the middle of the valley before
him, or a platoon of German infar ntry to walk out of the two-
storey house on the horizon. But the valley lay in silence
and stillness. He passed unnecessary messages down the
wireless to the artillery lines, he walked from one room to
another nervously on the look-out.
Then he climbed up to the hay-loft. There was a little
spaning.


opening in the apex of the roof from which most of the
valley could be seen. He quietly called his signaller up-
stairs. The signaller clipped on a cable extension to his
wireless set and brought up the earphones.
He sat at
Brandon's side. Brandon continued to watch the two-storey
house on the horizon.
It was yellow and clean-looking, and
still there was no movement whatsoever. He gave his first
orders: "Target. e Fire by order. e .One round gun-fire". They
waited for these orders to be repeated back, and the word was
given from the artillery lines: Ready.
Brandon said calmly,
not raising his voice at all: "Fire".
The first shell fell short of the house in the distance,
a little burst and a puff of pretty white smoke. He added one
hundred yards and again gave the order to fire. He waited for
the shell-bursts in silence, leaning forward and peering through
the window of the hay-loft. He was passing the time, he was
playing an interesting game with these puffs of smoke in the
distance. He achieved a hit on the left side of the roof and
he warmly ordered all four guns to fire on this reference.
The four shells fell immediately around the house, very close
to the walls, so that for a moment they hid the lower floor
from view. He gave the order to record the target for future
use, then finished.
The afternoon grew dull. A winter wind came sideways
across the valley. Brandon was called to the country mansion
nearby.
There he was told to take seven or eight infantrymen
and two of his own signallers into the enemy lines by daylight.


He was shown the house he must occupy, and the house was the
yellow house on the horizon. He was being taken by the hand
to the place of his murder.
The commanding officer told him that he need expect no
opposition, that the Enemy was believed to have fallen back a
little beyond the yellow house and that the plan was for him
to stay in this house and there await the evening attack,
which would draw level. The forward troops would be told of
his presence on the flank.
He could not understand where the Enemy were supposed
to be, nor where the English were going to attack that evening.
He left MMANMoUse with his men a little later. They
followed behind him in single file, through some trees, then
downwards into the open valley. They followed a straight line
yellos
yellas
towards the/house, not troubling to skirt the fields because
there was so little cover. Brandon looked from side to side
at the hills above them, waiting for the Enemy to open fire.
He turned and looked back at his men, and they were walking in
silence behind him, palely, as they did when they walked into
the attack. But they reached the other side of the valley
untroubled.
They came close to the house and saw no movement through
the windows. Brandon went to the door and pushed it open,
and before him, in a clean living-room, there were five or
six Italian people. He nodded to them and they all smiled
carefully.
They were not peasants, they must have been


from one of the big coastal towns. The furniture was
dainty, and there were good carpets on the floor. These
people were all over thirty, three women and two men.
They gave the soldiers chairs in the kitchen, and the
women took the army rations and began cooking a hot meal for
them all, to be eaten on plates, not on mess-tins, and with
knives and forks from the house.
Brandon watched the two
younger people, a man and a woman, probably married. They
were a little excited by the visit, and they bustled about
the kitchen-stove making jokes to each other and marvelling
at the army rations of beef and soup.
The man had fine black
eyes and crisp hair. He answered Brandon's questions intelli-
gently, making everything seem calmer and more orderly than
it was. He and his wife were clearly delighted to be cooking
this meal for eleven mouths, they were excited by this new
company.
They made the soldiers comfortable, brought in more
chairs, laid the table-cloth, poured red wine.
There was a
great noise in the kitchen and everyone was smiling.
Brandon asked the younger couple whether the Germans had
been here, and the woman replied that they had left early that
morning. Brandon looked at her with shame and said, leaning
forward on the table:
"Were you shelled this morning?"
They all raised their hands and looked upwards, with
their baptismal story to tell.


"Where did you shelter?"
They told him under the stai irs just outside the door.
"Was the house hit?"
The young man answered and told him that one shell ha d
hit the roof, but that was all.
"Only one room was damaged, that is 811," he said.
"I did that shelling," Brandon said, then, ta pping
his own chest: "Io,0."
The man was charming with him.
He smiled.
He simply
looked at Brandon as if he were valuable, as if he had been
intelligent and good to throw the shells.
Before the meal was served Brandon asked if he could
go upstairs. He went up alone and closed the door behind him.
On the upsta irs landing he saw the damaged room. He pushed
the door open further al nd saw a long tear in the roof. He
saw where the wall had fallen away into the room, the carpet
covered with brick-dust, the broken dressing table, the pots
and jars lying under the window, the roof-slates over the
double bed.
He was astonished at the force with which the
shell had struck the wall. The puff of smoke had been pretty
and the burst noiseless.
He walked into one of the other rooms and sat on
the bed, unburkling his binocular case.
He looked through
the window a nd saw that he was looking down the mai in street
of a village to a square with a church on its right ha nd
side. Between him and the main street there was only an
orchard.
The street.was quite empty, and from the window he
could have thrown a stone onto its pavement,
so close was he.


He watched it for-some time, then to his astonishment saw
a German soldier come out of one of the doors and stroll
like an evening walker up and down.. He took up his
So close and ferille,
X binoculars ar nd watched this mans/and he was especially
fsacinated by the German's tin hat, curved over the ears.
He wanted to hunt this flesh, to see it capitulate before
him.
It was wrong for the Germa an to be walking freely so
close by.
He felt that he owned the man, like an animal
with its feebly struggling prey. But he withdrew further
into the darkness and went downstairs.
They were still noisy in the room below, but he
shouted to t hem to be quiet.
"This house is ons the edge.ofa village," he
said. "And the Germa ns are still there."
He returned to the upsta irs room with his signaller
and brought down shell-fire on the street before him. He
gave his position in code to Headquarters and instantly
his comma nd ing officer spoke.
He tola Brandon to return
immediat tely at dusk, because he was in the Enemy lines,
that he did not know how this haa happened, that he must
return the moment dusk fell, the very moment, and meanwhile
to be alert with sentrie out, that he did not know how this
had happened.
At dusk Brandon took his men across the valley, and
he felt sick, empty and nervous.


Early one rainy morning he went down to a cafe at the
end of the Stein Gasse for coffee. He sat next to one of the
tall windows looking straight onto the narrow street, and
he watched the people pass, most of them wrapped up under
the rain, their heads down. He sat for a long time over his
coffee, looking into the street, and the rain brought two
memories, and these troubled and excited him.
The first was at Monte Cerasola when five or six men
stopped along the white mountain path and stared at him with
horror.
It was a memory of the horror in their eyes as they
stared at him, refusing to believe it. One of them said, But
we saw you lying dead lower down by the path. They reported
you dead and we saw you. They were shy and nervous, and
leeame
under their inquisitive eyes he wals a ghost.
The second incident was near Castel Poggiolo, a hill with
a grey, round castle at its summit. It was when he had lost
his way in the darkness.
With him he had his own signaller
and also an Italian farm-hand. His signaller was a small,
complete man, with a thin moustache and faithful eyes. Bran-
don had forced the farm-hand to accompany them, to show them
the way back to the English lines.
They stood listening in the middle of a gravel path, and
it was utterly dark. They thought it was an English voice
that had spoken, and they listened for it again. Then a
man shouted from nearby: "Halt!" with the German pronunciation,
and Brandon at once caught hold of the Italian's sleeve in


terror and whispered: "You have brought us to the Bosche
position". For a moment longer they stood together, silent
and staring. Then suddenly the Italian broke free from them
and like a swift quiet deer leapt down off the path into the
shrubbery. Brandon turned panic-stricken, thehe began
running. He ran down the gravel path in the opposite direc-
tion to the voice. He ran along the grass verge so as to make
less noise and as he ran he saw at his feet notices marked
with a skull-and-crossbones and the word MINEN in luminous
paint. Behind him he could hear his signaller appealing to
him, "Help me, help me", but he ran on in a long, panic-
stricken stride, leaping and leaping forward along the grass
verge, and then where the road met another, after two or three
hundred yards, he stopped and waited, and everything was quiet.
The signaller came along the path, panting and ex-
hausted with the heavy wireless set on his back. Brandon
found himself ruthless. The signaller came up to him in the
dark and he said he would never have thought it. He would
never have thought Brandon capable of running away. But
Brandon found himself ruthless and exultant. He tried to
find in himself hot shame, but he was only exultant and without
any pity for the signaller or any afterthought, like one who
has been granted a further reprieve.
He told the signaller
that he could not have afforded to be captured with the maps,
but he said this with a smile in the dark. He told him that
all the English forward positions were marked on his map. But


he wanted to drink something and swear and dance about.
The two of them sat side by side in a barn and
watched the field outside through the spaces between the
now
logs. It was slightly less dark, and between the winds the
night was silent. It was a bad silence, with things that
ogled them from outside the barn in the dark and voices
brought to them by the winds.
They decided to leave the
talkative barn. They walked down the field and then along
another path, listening all the time and stepping very
quietly.
They found the backyard of a farm-house and they
were about to go in when just before them they saw a man.
He was standing by the open door sharpening a long knife.
They drew back into the shadows only a. few feet from him,
and they tried to make out whether he was a German soldier
or not. He simply went on sharpening his knife, and now and
then he looked up into the sky, as if he knew what was going
on. He had a large round face which was white and flat in
the darkness.
They crept carefully back to the path and
were astonished that he did not move. And as they were
walking along the path again the bad silence spoke and the
anonymous mouths grumbled in the distance, hoom hoom-hoom
hoom hoom-hoom-hoom, and the sky sang like boys and all the
swuhg.
A shells sape Idown to the earth and shrieked in the furrows.
They ran into a house, and it was occupied by English
soldiers.
In the quiet aftermath they were given a guide, and
he took them out into the field again and brought them nearer


and nearer the flesh of the battle, up hills, through woods,
along gullies. Rain, black mud, white guiding tapes, farm-
houses, men standing silently in the doorways, each ma n hold-
ing his terror inside his head alone, the mortuary all about,
the quick shells jumping down from their ledges in the sky,
the broken walls, the trees uprooted, flayed and black, the
shouting men and sometimes weeping.
Why must they come again? Why were Cerasola and
Poggiolo listening in his flesh?
When he came back to the guns from Monte Cerasola
he wanted his fatigue to. be noticed.
He came across the
field by the River Garigliano with his straggling signallers,
pale and torn, stai ring before them. All those at the gun-pits
turned to watch them.
The gunners stood back to let them
pass, watching them closely, imagining the battle as it must
have been in.the mountains beyond the wonderful river, and
afraid of these huma n exhibits.
But Brandon had been little use in the mounta ins.
He had merely hung back with his men under the shelter of
boulders, watching the wounded cry out below. He had
withheld himself, kept his men in the background, and only
given help when it.was asked for.. He was not yet a scholar.
He was not yet broken in. He had not yet learned the use
of his nerves. He was still a Novice only accustomed to
the sight of blood.
He drummed : his fingers on his knee outside the
comma nd post, frowning. It was a smiling spring day, and
he could imagine what the river looked like,
grey-still and
skirted by soft lawns, from Cerasola.


There was no work for him in the command-post,
and he sat in the same chair until long after midnight,
smoking at nd talking.
He went unwillingly, at first only
a little terrified, to his bed in the bivouac near the
cookhouse.
It lay between two hillocks, hidden from
the guns.
He was always most careful in choosing a
site for his bivouac wherever they went.
He would
consult his hidden oracle and bide his time, going from
the shelter of trees to the shelter of a hillock, from
high ground to low, until at last the oracle spoke
and gave him the place of safety.
There were no shells from the Enemy, for gun-
emplacements were impossible in the mounta ins. Only
very long-range guns could reach this place, and these
he began to fear.
He began to wait for the faintest
whispering in the sky, quite without warning in this
quiet, and then the black fountain of earth, too near
his tent.
The command-post was in a square brick
building, like a wayside tempte, and it was warm there,
with people.
He was fifty yards from this building,
and much further from the guns.
He could hear nothing.
Most of the gun-crews were asleep.
There was no machine-
gun fire from the mountains, nor the distant falling of
mortar-bombs, nor the sound of vehicles on the road, nor
the low, tranquil talking of men close by.
He took off his clothes and lay down under the


blankets, putting out the small battery-1ight at his
side.
If he raised himself up on his elbows he could
see no glow of cigarettes in the darkness, nor the
sudden flash of a torch, nor the beacon used by the guns
as a point of reference by night.
He was utterly alone,
and doomed as he closed his eyes.
The terror mounted
in him slowly.
He lay in his bed and started at the
slightest sound, sweating, and sometimes the breeze made
the faintest of whisperings inthe sky which quickly died
away. He waited for the fatal shell because he had never
before been so certain of its coming.
Again and again he decided to get up and return
to the command-post, but did nothing.
Still he lay with
his mouth open, absolutely still and tense, under the
frail bivouac.
Once, soon after rithree o'clock, he pushed
the damp bla nkets aside al nd began to dress. But he fell
back again, knowing the folly of his terror and not wishing
to give way. And again he began the agonising rehearsal
for his death, when all his flesh seemed to feel the first
moment of the fatal obliteration.
For he had done wrong.
In the mountains he had
not done enough.
He was unworthy.
Already the Novice
was passing into the Scholar, and every new lesson learned
brought a conscience with it, painfully.
He had done
wrong, and the guilty do not sleep.
The light of the dawn brought solace, a golden


blessing.
He looked up suddenly and saw it through the
exit-flap, shining from beyond the mountains, promising
another spring day.
His mood chal nged. He got up angry. What terrible
fate had put him among the brein-orsatures, with their
courage, the ir self-scrutiny a nd their little premeditations,
their horrible genius for deciding between right and wrong?
He-was infected.
The worm had entered.
He wanted to be
among creatures who killed and could forget, who loved and
could forget, who made a fatal error and could forget; but
not among those whose sleepless minds limped after them in
the shadows, preying on them with ceaselgss questions,
menacing them with phantoms.
He would not be one of those
whose minds were talking all the time, who spewed themselves
out down a sink-hole of words and self-questionings, who
talked love but would not make it, who tal lked crime but would
not with their own hands committ it, who talked prowess and
did not have it, who talked decisions but could not take them.
He had coneknto the War, which d herwise meant nothing
to him, in order to fling off the dread brai in-creatures, only
to find that he was in a very nest of them, that they infested
the darkest places, down even to where a man shed blood, alone
with God. They would not permit God a single glance onto the
earth.


In the corner of the inn there were two
musicians, with a little card on the table on front of them:
"Bitte, fur die Musik." Lis tening to them closely there was
a plump American soldier.
He sat at their table nodding and
smiling as they played His coat was open in the front,
his head was bowed, and he was happy and himself.
When
later two other sodiers looked in, thinner and younger, he
called across to them and asked them to join thim. They
laughed a nd smiled with him, but without pleasure.
They
were brown-faced children, whereas the plump soldier was
father, calm and expansive, flushed.
They were exiles.
That was the abashed horror in their faces. We are exiles.
You glance at us; your eyes say, Soldier, and you turn
away. We are boys.
He have mothers. We have childhoods.
We have names. And under the ammunition belt there is a
photograph.
The eyes are always judging.
They are always
coming to a conclusion. Your name for us is not us as we
tenderly know ourselves to be, all that we have, all that we
can ever be, each of us alone, high and dry with his sins and
stains, a whole world more than your mere idea. You name us
soldier, but you name not us.
The two boys went across to the musicians and asked
for a German song, only to be che rming and to be smiled at
in return.
The musicians could not understand their English,
and the boys could not remember the name of the tune they
wanted. One of them agreed to try and whistle it, and
when he began the silence NEB fell and was terrible.


whistled softly, without conviction, and gradually the
murdering silence entered his flesh: at nd at last he stopped
whistling, paralysed and alone in his exile, the tune dead
and forgotten on his hands.
He said like a broken man:
"Then it goes up to a higher pitch", waving his hand high
in the air to wave away the ghosts. The musicians shook
their heads again, a nd. then the soldiers smiled at them with
the faces of beggars al nd walked across to the door and stumbled
sick a nd hot into the night.
On his last day atthe fram in Bleitnau he had
pointed the camera at Theresa, Frau Glassner's daughter,
andshe ha d changed under his eyes. Her eyes opened wide
and ceased to look a t things.
She became utterly still,
prepared for her embalming, - to be seen'in what foreign
countries by what eyes? All her anxiety, her little frown,
her tom-boy's mouth, went inithat moment, and an epoch stared
through her face.
He lay in bed thinking about the time of his truar ney.
The old world had gone, al nd will there be again the accidental
green world?
Our world isa laboratory, he thought, and
there are no accidents in science.
Each of us in war has his baptism, when the spirit
is yielded
of the boy yowa up a nd we turn our backs on the old green
world.
In war it is easy for people to die, even the wise
and ageless and infallible.
The world is prolific with


dying.
It is easy for buildings to fall to the ground,
even the eternal ones with the important frown. And the
women we loved starve in camps, the churches where we
prayed are canteens, a nd the villages of our truancy are
trivial. By the timeit is over the sacred and eternal
things are no longer there.
Do not say. sacred and eternal.
The words sacred and eternal are ridiculous. They do not
belong to your world.
Your relggion is dead, and as for
eternity, war is the shadow that constantly falls on your
sleeve.
If you still believe in the sacred and eternal
you are only turning the other way; when you look back
you will see the shadow still there on your sleeve.
Each war draws you nearer the void of abstraction,
further from your silly, flushed, busy days. Our childish
grandfathers rang bells at Christmas and prayed, they had
whiskers and gold watch-chains across their waistcoats,
but now their familiar places are empty, we are no longer
allowed the folly of believing.
If Brandon dreamed of impossible women at night, in
his soldier's exile from love, then so did the other, and
the other also, and the other.
Look into yourself and you
find me. That is the lesson of the democratic war.
pmmmrimmomunnnvn
smvwmwonososm
He went to the American library in Salzburg and
took down a book written by an American commander on the
Italian campaign during the Second World War.


leaned against one of-the shelves and read one chapter
after another very quickly, frowning al nd very excited, as
if they carried a special secret for him.
Where "the
Commander brought his Corps close to the river" the library
became. heavy with memory, and there were voices. He raed
the sentence again and again, dreaming the river back. It
was the River Volturno.
When he put the book back in its
place he was stiff from standing so long, there was an ache
in his right hip where he had been leaning hard against the
shelf, and hiseyes watered from having stared so long at
the ppint.
He was awed and troubled, like a child after
sin.
He passed under the playing bells on the other side
of the river. at eleven o'clock that morning and knew how sad
they were.
They were set in a minor key, and they played
to the time of the following words: The green world is almost
sone,-undernesth the hill.


They drew closer to Faenza, and there the Enemy stiffened
and three in counter-attack after counter-attack. The English
pushed far beyond the yellow, newly-baptised house to within
sight of Rimini, under heavy shell-fire and mortar-bombardments,
through woods and across a valley with many shrubs and trees.
The infantry company with whom Brandon was serving stopped at
a house near the brow of a hill, against the very nose of the
Enemy.
The infantry major wanted to leave this house at dusk
the same evening, because Enemy troops could approach to
within a hundred yards of it without being seen or heard. He
disliked being so near the crest of a hill without commanding
But Brandon was against giving up the ground they had
won, that is, he did not want to return across the valley to
their former positions, under heavy shell-fire all the way,
then come forward again on the following day and pass under the
same bombardment for the third time and perhaps have to fight
for ground they had already captured. He and the Major talked
in whispers, away from the other men. And the Major was soon
persuaded.
He was a loud, brisk, tender man, promoted up
from a private soldier. He agreed to stay in this house with
his men provided Brandon shelled the brow of the hill con-
stantly throughout the night, laying down a line of shells
the whole night through to discourage the Enemy patrols.
And on the brow of this hill, hidden in the dark, there
was another house and, scourged by Brandon's shells again
and again, it caught fire and made the bare, treeless brow of


the hill visible from their headquarters, which was a
tactical advantage.
Then it ceased burning and at dawn
only smouldered.
During the night the Major put out patrols and then
an attack to the Enemy post nearby.
He found it strong,
lost one man and two wounded, put sentries outside the house
and decided to attack in daylight when there was some possi-
bility of tank support.
At dawn the Enemy post was taken, the prisoners and
the English wounded were brought in, and the battle stalked
over the hill and a mile away, leaving the ploughed fields
charred, the air bitter with fumes from the shells, the
gates and fences broken,
and the house on
the brow of the hill still smouldering.
Brandon walked out into the little roadway and went
towards the rising smoke behind the trees.
He took a path
through the trees and came upon it suddenly.
The shrubs
round it were black, the upper storey of the house had
tumbled in.
The door of the kitchen was hanging open.
He went to the side of the house and there was a
movement in the bushes.
He stopped and listened. He
watched the bushes, then he turned hastily back to the house.
He looked down and just before he stepped forward he noticed
that part of his right boot was on the leg of a German
His
officer. Thist body was almost buried in the dust from the
Apurchument.
keflat a uch
house, like X flat cagte-/ He stepped wide and went to the


front again.
The house had been shelled, Namaad
He heard the voice of a woman, it was the sound of
moaning, it was from inside the smouldering house, and he
went towards the hanging door.
As he stood in the doorway both of them tried to touch
him. One of them was by the table, her eyes saw nothing, but
she knew he had come, and the terrible flesh was open in her
leg. He could not touch them. He could not bear to be
there. The kitchen smouldered, he could not see the other
wall because of the white smoke. The two old women came
towards him, they had survived, they had survived.
They
prayed with their hands, they held up their hands and cried
to him, they called on his mercy, help us, help us, the
terrible flesh was open, they had suffered the night in flames,
the world had been set alight and the sky had sung and the
world's upper storey had tumbled down, and the officer lay in
the garden in his vestment of dust.
He ran back to headquarters and went straight to the
Major. He said he had been to the smouldering house. He
looked into the Major's eyes and wondered. He did not know
when pity and murder went hand in hand. He spoke shyly. He
told him, watching him closely, that the two old women were
there and that they had been there all
MWW The Major
nighti
jumped up and said: "Take me there". Then he called out to
the stretcher bearers and went up the hill. Brandon followed
him slowly.
He saw him walk straight past the hanging


door into the kitchen.
And when he arrived at the doorway
he saw the Major standing there white and appalled, his arms
round their shoulders, shaking his head a nd saying, No,_no,
Brandon learned terror in the late summer of 1943,
and it was from another man. Battle has music and words
which must beleerned, and its usual noises conveyed no
terror to him on the first, second and third day of his
arrival at the beach-head, even though during these days
the English were nearly pushed back into the water a nd the
Enemy was in some places nearly one hundred yards from the
beach. But on the afternoon of the fourth day he saw terror
in the eyes of another man. He saw the man start, then
throw himself to the ground. And a shell fell only a few
yards from that man.
From that time Brandon knew what songs
to listen for, E nd which were the dangerous songs, al nà which
were the barks without a bite.
Terror is protection. And
he threw himself to the ground with the other men.
The bombardment of a: city from the air has one music,
- battle ar nother. He was often afraid.
Cerasola happened in February, 1944, about five months
after his baptism, but he was still bewildered by battle, he
still did not know how to talk over plans with the infantry: 2
compute figures and register targets and pass messages down
the wireless simultaneouely with feeling terror and keeping


an ear open for the shell with his name on it. Later he
learned how to do this.
His nerves became worse, not
better, but bad nerves made him alert to the slightest noise,
and they were an insurenoemgminst death.
He did not like
it when he caesed to fear.
Fear was his magic.
It made
him 8o to ground at the right moment.
He was aware that
of the shells before he heard them singing through the sky
or saw them explode.
Fear was his hidden oracle.
Accord-
ing to his hidden oracle he waited a little here, ran forward
there, occupied this house instead of that, apparently for
no good reason. And he did not trust the oracles of other
men. He knew men who had no oracles.
Their eyes were
helpless.
The shells loved them and cla imed them. He
would stay and talk with SXEX men in a roadway for just as
long as he felt it bo be safe, but when the hiddèn oracle
spoke he would leave them and take cover. Never herd.
His will to save his own skin slept only once, for
less than twenty seconds, on the southern bank of the River
Volturno, with. the man's elbow grinding and Grinding into his
side.
He suddenly became dull as the Barrel Organ sang its
chord in the sky, he did not care, he lay there with his eyes
closed, dully ready to enter death. But the n the shells
exploded, six of them together, a t the top of the orater
where he was lying, and his fear suddenly quickened again
amid the deafening crashes, a nd he tried like all the men


round him to burrow and burrow his way into the black
earth, scratching at it with his fingerna ils.


He arrived in Greece from Italy during April,
1945, and he established his neadquarters in Ligourion.
His task was to administer an area of two hundred ar nd fifty
square miles between Nea Epida urus, a fishing village on
the Saronic Gulf, and the city of Nauplion.
He took two rooms at the very top of the village,
under a hill covered with boulders and stones, so as to
be near the night sentries, and sometimes he would walk
out onto his wooden balcony at night and peer into the
shadows, startled by rifle-shots.
These would be soldiers
from the national guard shooting at nothing, their faces
grim behind the boulders.
He chose an old man with rags on his back for an
interpreter.
This old man stayed with him always, pushed
little boys out of the way when he walked down the village.
street, secured for him the best wine out of the houses,
spoke about his life in America before the First World War,
exaggerated Brandon's powers to his Greek friends and enemies,
advertised him to the best-looking girls, a nd leaned with him
over a balcony one morning when the sun was high and was sad
and spoke cuietly.
"I want you to come a nd see my daughter, 11 he said.
"She is very sick.
She.is eleven years old,"
When Brandon met her she was lying on a couch in


the corner of their hut. She had very black eyes.
She
smiled at him as he bent down to take her har nd, and her
smile was so fresh and so utterly delightful, like a
sudden coming of dawn, that he stepped back for a moment,
feeling his murders heavy upon him.
The hut was on the
edge of a solemn cypress wood, where the wind listened,
breathing most softty. It stood at the beginning of a path
which led up to a museum and the amphitheatre of Epidaurus,
where the priests of Aesculapius had worked their cures.
He took the child and her mother by car to Nat uplion.
He had been told the name of her sickness several times,
but he spoke no Greek and the old man did not know the
English word for it. The hospital was a white, oblong
building behind trees, clean ar nd hushed. He walked with
the child into the recpetionist's office, then to the
doctor's consulting room. The old man's wife nodded and
smiled at everyone.
She was a thin, pale woman, and she
nervously rubbed her hands together, standing at the edge
of her black abyss.
The doctor was fat a nd tall, with a white coat
and hands covered with black hair. He looked at the girl
and nodded quickly to Brandon without smiling.
"I have seen her before," he said.
Brandon askedx behether she could not have another
medical examination.
The doctor shrugged and answered:


"I can examine her".
He took the child by the shoulder and walked with her
into the corridor.
"But I tell you I know the case", he said.
The child stripped in one of the cubicles and lay
down on the bed. She seemed used to these examinations. The
doctor felt her pulse, listened to her chest and took her
temperature. Brandon saw her flat dark wounds, like bruises,
under her shoulder and across her chest and stomach, and when
the doctor got up he asked him whether the child might not
have a bed in the hospital. The mother could not look after
her properly in a hut with no running water and no indoor
lavatory. The doctor looked at the floor.
"But there are no beds", he said.
"There are no beds. No beds are available. I am
working sixteen hours a day."
Brandon wanted to strike him in the mouth. He
shouted:
"The child is sick!"
"I have no beds".
The doctor watched him quietly, as he might watch a
nervous patient before the anaesthetic. He was tired, he was
wiser by a thousand deaths than Brandon. He suffered Brandon's
command:
"You must find her a bed. Make a bed out of wood and
straw.. I am telling you to find her a bed."


"I have a waiting list of hundreds".
He took Brandon by the sleeve and spoke to him in
French.
"The child will soon be dead", he said. "It is better
that she should die at home."
And he added:
"My job is to cure people, you know. However, let her
stay one night and go back in the morning."
They
the
tthe murderer shook hands, and during
the early evening Brandon returned to his farm-house at
Ligourion, where documents and deputations waited on him.
His office was a wide and bare room. He had ordered
a desk to be put there, with chairs, telephones and a carpet.
On the wall behind the desk he had put up a large-scale map
of the area between Nauplion and Nea Epidaurus, and.on this
map he pinned little red flags to denote which of the villages
he had visited. It was in this office that he received de-
putations from the villagers, took reports from his own
soldiers on their return from missions, listened to disputes
between the mayor of one place and the mayor of another,
arranged for the collection of food and medicines from
Nauplion in lorries, talked over problems with the local
traders and farmers, and gave advice to his sentries from
the national guard. His work altered nothing, and most of
it was invented.
He arranged expeditions across the moun-
tains with donkeys, he patrolled the silent country in the
dead of night with his armed men, he seldom reached his


bed before two o'clock in the morning and he was always up
by six. He used himself every minute. Every day he drove
from village to village, he ate eggs and chops with the
mayors, he drank their wine and agreed to have the mountains
near them patrolled, he compiled reports about the incidence
of tuberculosis, rickets and scabies among the village popula-
tepotla
X tions, knowing that these/were either redundant or unwanted.
And when he returned, tired and whole, to his office under
the mountain with its bustling map he found patient villagers
at his door, caps in hand, their lives waiting for his nod.
It was the same in Udine, during the summer of 1945,
when thousands of troops and civilians of every European
nationality were coming down from the north into Italy by
horseback, cart, tank, car and lorry. He spent the same
happy sleepless nights in the camps, and he felt the same
bite move him to do more, then a little more, and then, with
the second wind, more and yet more.
After abstract murder the abstract conscience begins
- VA
to bite.
In Ligourion he could say to himself, I am whole again,
and he remembered the days of his truancy. But during his
truancy he had touched her black hair, kissed her mouth,
watched her tom-boy's shoulders, and he had turned in his
country bed with joy and pain. Now his wholeness was that
of a child of
that is to say, his love was
abstract,
VV 4
war:
it was towards a little girl he hardly knew, to families he
could never see, to documents and deputations. He marked


off his. love not with kisses, not with kisses in the doorway
2 the
Xin the breathless dawn, Mera-tomatary E vermantstyeersoam
X whisperimg to each other with the leaves behind them, but
with little flags on maps, letters to the mayor of Nea
Epidaurus, with documents and deputations.
And when he
kissed now it was the mouth of a stranger like Helenie, whose
face was a land where he found himself lonely, like the face
of a girl in a brothel, the face whose eyes watch you suffer
your bitter, dumb secretion.
One day he drove to Nea Epidaurus, and the crowd drew
back as he came into the narrow, cobbled street. He switched
the engine off and they were hushed, like the crowd round an
ambulance. The mayor came out of a little doorway and shook
his hand. He was a small muscular man with a brown cropped
head, like a city workman.
He always spoke in a low voice,
never moving his tiny, pale eyes. He made a way for Brandon
through the crowd and they went into the house together, into
a dark room where there were huge flagons of wine, coilsof
rope, fish-nets and, hanging from a hook in the ceiling, a
black pig, shining in the darkness.
The mayor closed the door and pulled the iron bolt
across, and at once the crowd outside pushed towards it and
tried to hear what they were saying inside. They sat down at
a work-table and the Mayor poured out the yellow resin wine
into three glasses.
He introduced Brandon to an old man
with thin light hair, a skin like a child's and eyes clear


and blue. This tall old man remained standing behind them
while they talked, and whenever they sai id something with which
he agreed he talked very fast and did a little dance with his
feet. There was also a soldier from the national guard who
leaned against the dark barred window smoking and wa tching the
excited whispering crowd outside.
Brandon and the mayor made their quiet plans, and
they shook hands before they left each other. The mayor
told him, that e ighty people, some from this village and some
from Arakhna ion, a mountain village in the Arcadian range,
had been massacred by partisan soldiers earlier in the year.
He was disappointed to see that Brandon took this cal lmly.
Brandon looked at him under his eyebrows a nd asked him for
proof. The mayor's lips became tighter, he lifted his head
proudly al nd said:
"You shall see it with your own eyes."
He told Brandon that he would take him Lacross the
gulf to the place of the massacre, and there Brandon would
see the bodies of the victims for himself.
They agreed to
meet aga in.
Brandon returned to the village the following week,
early one clear morning. A long motorboat was at the beach
waiting for them, its decks covered with sacks. On the
other side of the gulf there were blue mountains, impossible
in their early mists.
The waters of the gulf were flat and
blue, and the motor-boat lay by a wooden promontory, chugging.


The villagers were very excited by this excursion and
had broughttheir children down to'the beach, but néither
the mayor nor the tall old man took any notice of them
as they, walked towards the landing stage. They jumped
on board with Brandon, and behind them came a plentiful
bodyguard of Greek soldiers.
The boat went quietly off, and Brandon looked
from one man to another.
They took a straight course close
under a mountain rising brown and night above them, a nd
as they floated past it, the
Loato..


waters hardly stirring, it was rugged and still. The day
was hot and muted, it had not yet broken open.
The mayor stood at Brandon's side peering into the
mountain, while the old man was at the nose of the boat
waiting to jump off, though they were a kilometre from their
landing stage.
The mayor looked at Brandon wisely:
"Did you see that?"
"No, I only heard a whistling."
The mayor pointed high up into the mountain. Brandoin
Hetd/newruvagdAZaASUMAnMIAA
"He was warning the others", the mayor told him.
Brandon watched a deer leap down from one rock to
another, then he saw a man run, a tiny figure, from behind a
boulder to the brow of the mountain and out of sight.
"He may be a shepherd.
He may not be a partisan",
Brandon said.
The mayor smiled and nodded as if this had been a good-
natured joke.
"He is a partisan", he murmured.
They moored the boat at the foot of the mountain and
began their climb. The old man did not keep to the foot-path.
He was light and young, he was dressed in rubber slippers and
he jumped from one round boulder to the next far ahead of
everybody else, until he was at the top.
Brandon saw him
stop for a rest only once. He was proud and wild, he felt
himself to be their leader, because this was the place where
he had been taken to be murdered, but he had escaped, and he


was the only one to survive. He knew every inch of the way
up to the place of his baptism. He leaped from one boulder
to the next with long, young strides, and his hips were spare
like a boy's.
The well was wide and deep, and before he reached it
Brandon could smell dead people. He put a handkerchief up
to his nose and looked over the lip of the well into the
massacre, then at the gauntlet thrown in the centre of these
unburied people.
"What is the glove?" he asked.
The mayor told him that it belonged to the right hand
of the man who had done the murder. He had stood the old
people on the lip of the well and plunged a long knife into
their necks, then pushed them.
"Who saw him do it, then?" Brandon asked.
The mayor pointed to the old man.
"It is so dark down there", Brandon said, "one cannot
see how many there are."
The mayor looked at him quickly:
"There are eighty bodies here",
"But it is so dark. I can make out five, or perhaps
this
"The two villages lost eighty people by/massacre."
He took Brandon to a shrub nearby and bent down and
lifted one of its branches.
He showed him locks of human
hair on the ground, and a high-heeled shoe. He said that
the murderers had shaved the heads. of two girls from


Arakhnaion, then sat tisfied themselves with them.
Brandon stared at the hair.
It was other than
what people comb, touch, kiss.
"Did they kill these girls?"
"No. They sent them back to the village."
Brandon was happier.
The mayor said nothing more to him until they
were in the boat, going back across the Gulf.
"These men are still in the mountains," he said.
"I think they must be captured.
Now you have seen it for
"It is going to be difficultto find anybody in
these mountains, even if we knew they were the murderers."
"Could you send out patrols? My soldiers would
act as guides."
The old man a nd the soldiers were standing near
them, wat tching Brandon and listening.
"I can manage a patrol," Brandon said. "I can
ma nage seven or eight men."
The mayor turned away.
"Seven or eight men..." he murmured. "They
burned down twelve houses in Ara khna ion.' II
"My men are tired," Brar ndon told him.
"They
did their fighting in Italy.
Where would they be gin in
these mountains? Can you tell me? Have you more than
rumours to go on?"


None of them spoke to him.
The mayor was sad.
They had put their faith in him.
The old man looked a t
him and turned away, enacting his private vengeance,
bloody and quick.
Brandon was alone among them on the deck of a motor-
I-toat


boat, and he was afraid.
One of the soldiers said, "Look", and pointed to the
splash of a dolphin on the waters. They took up their rifles
and each of them shot at the great silver fish as it leaped
high out of the waves. They shot again and again, growing
more and more excited, not troubling to take aim, and their
bullets made tiny white momentary flakes on the sides of the
waves. But the dolphin went on unharmed, and they put their
rifles away.
Brandon touched one of the soldiers on the sleeve and
asked him for his rifle. The soldier gave it to him, and they
watched him. He put it up to his shoulder and closed his left
eye. He lined up the sights and when the dolphin leaped
again he pulled the trigger. The fish fell on the arc of its
leap, mmaeA tail-first back into the water, awagiagajartron
trevativenadvahenovileyer
"You have got him", a soldier said.
And they seemed daunted, looking about them. It had
proved something for them.
The following week Brandon took a little expedition with
donkeys across the mountain, along the snowy paths, to Arakh-
naion. He drew the chief of the village and his own inter-
preter aside and asked him about the massacre and the burning
of twelve of his houses. Brandon could see the charred houses
in the flat of the village. But the chief laughed at these
questions and told the interpreter that he wanted to have
Brandon to dinner that evening. A lamb had been killed and


was being prepared.
He was fierce and sudden, with a
sharp little beard.
And at dinner in his wooden house the village
chief lay back on his couch a nd sar ng to them, yelling the
Albanisk song, his voice rising a nd rising a nd breaking
with sorrow al nd manhood, going to the edge of the sky in
a terrible shriek, al nd his wife in black cloth came across
from the hearth and pleaded with him to stop, clinging to
his knees a nd banging him with her white fists as he sang,
enjoging
his head back, his eyes wet and amazed, tmisinyg her pai in.
This was the song of his dead father.
Brandon returned to Ligourion when it was deserted
of troops, al nd he looked back along the pat th to see whether
the group of whispering men were following him.
It was
dark and very cold.
The path was empty, with the mounta in
beyond it.
He knocked quietly on the wooden door, and Helenie's
ma id opened it to him.
He went carefully down two stone
steps into a room with a stove, and as he passed her she
giggled.
She was younger than Helenie, ar nd appeared to
share all her secrets.
She was proud of this secret
meeting.
A week before he had gone to their twon-house
in Nauplion, soon after dusk. On that occasion the ma id
had put her finger up to her lips when she ope ned the door
to him.
He tiptoed past two lighted rooms from which there
came the sound of voices, and she took him by the hand to


lead him up the winding staircase. At the top she pushed
open the sky-light and led him out onto the roof, where
there were great leaves in the darkness, and a tank, and
chimney-pots.
She indicated to him that he must stay
exactly where he was without ma king a sound, and he turned
to look at the dark city beyond him and at the prison-island
in the sea. He waited in the silence until Helenie came.
He smelled her Eau de Cologne as she stood by the dark
leaves.
She took his ha nd in the fashion of a romantic
actress, ar nd for a moment leaned towards him.
He thought
that they would stay on the DE roof and make love, but she
told him she must go immediately.
Her mother and father
must not know about his visit, though he had met them both.
"Will you come to Ligourion?" she asked.
She told him to come to her father's other
Kouse


house, to be there after night-fall and to make sure
that no one saw him.
He had first seen her in the village square of
Ligourion.
When he sent his interpreter"'doma from the
balcony to speak to her, she looked at him with the slightest
of smiles and made him a bow.
It was a yellow, clear day,
and the moment he saw her he loved the village, though it
was a mute a nd sulky place, full of partisans lying low,
hating the presence of English troops.
Every day his men
made a search for arms al nd ammunition.
Every day a man
would betray his neighbour, whispering with quick eyes,
but nothing would ever be found.
Stal nding in.the square he had dreamed the future.
He had dreamed taking a lover in this village,, and also
WC orking ceaselessly to assuage the bite of his conscience.
Without these dreams he would have grown ill with a disease
that is sometimes seen in the faces of men, the disease of
chronic despair, and he would finally have EMRXX capitulated.
Now he saw Helenie near the stove in the dark room.
She smiled at him when he entered and showed him a chair,
then she began preparing him coffee. They spoke in French,
and the mai id watche d them in great awe from the other side,
dreaming more love than there could be.
Helenie was less lonely, proud at nd calm tha n before.
She was more like the other Greeks now, nervous, too
quick, with strained eyes. After a time they said


nathing to each other and began listening for footsteps
outside, in growing fear.
The village was silent, and
he continually thought of the mountain above them, with
great boulders, where people lurked at night.
But he broke the menacing silence, in order to
serve his idea, locked in the closed hall of his head,
He whispered to her, Was it not time for her maid to
sleep? Were they to be watched all evening?
She turned
to her maid with a smile and repeated his words in Greek,
almost mocking him, al nd after a brief conversation the
ma: id rose politely.
She shook him by the hand as Helenie
told her, and with a last glance at her mistress, a coniving
look, left the room. Brandon was certain now that outside
the window there were men, waiting and listening, close
to the pane, their feet slippered.
He drew Helenie onto the divan a nd they kissed.
Her kiss was hard and une ncha nted, and they stared into
each other's eyes, finding only what was foreign.
Only
their bodies were to be offered up.
He touched her golden ha ir a nd lay a t her side.
That sàe was beautiful was a matter of no account, for
they had shared nothing. He touched her blouse, but
her hand gripped his wrist as he tried to open it.
He found in himself no whisper of desire.
He pressed
himself against her very hard, pushing her undernea th
him, and suddenly, as he began to kiss her neck, she
struck
pulled back his head and MAMNIAG him across both cheeks.


He drew back, ashamed and furious, and he saw that her
eyes were shining.
He was about to strike her when the
need died.
They were both lonely.
He asked her, "Why did you do that?" but she
made no reply.
She only smiled at him very slightly,
with her girl's half-deliberate mystery.
The coffee was steaming on the black stove, and
a marble clock ticked slowly.
The table-cloth was heavy,
ma uve and rough.
The room was soft, warm, enclosed, a
very perfect place for lovers,
Teoentoseraoran
hadvonsereevviovon/thervarvatamadion the house lay in a hole
among rocks. Midnight had passed, al nd Brandon bega n to
fear driving back to Nau uplion alone, in a country where
there were brigands.
He had brought no revolver.
thought of this while he lay at Helenie's side.
Sometimes she was tender with him,for a moment.
She drew her fingers down the side of his face, she kissed
him briefly a nd gently on the brow, but always she seemed
to perform her movements.
It was as if a watching public
existed close by. He sought a message for himself alone.
He had often become excited during the previous
few days, thinking about this visit.
His stomach had
given a strange little start, and he had wanted to do
something boisterous, to celebrate.
Now he was lonely,
he wanted to leave this house among the rocks, al nd he
wanted to finish his journey across the mountains to
Na uplion quickly, driving fast.
He wanted to see his


own bed, to turn the pages of his own books, to smoke
a little before sleeping, star ing up at the ceiling, and
to remember his truancy again and again, stirring up each
gesture and each gaze, finding again the impossible fir-
wood and the memorial stone at the top of the hill.
Only
dreams were his friénds.
He could not understand this loneliness a nd fear.
So he moved towards Helenie aga in and again, kissing her
neck al nd cheeks, putting his fingers in the midst of her
hair, and speaking to her softly.
Her face rema ined
unknown to him.
Next week he might be gone. His regiment moved
incessantly.
There was neither leisure nor choice for
love.
Only a local need was granted him, a spasmodic
burning lust, the shifty need of a slave.
She watched his
novements very inquisitively, from a distance.
He was her
first spectacle. But he filled the room with no dream of
his own.
He deserted it every second, aching to be away,
and at the end he could hardly find words to spea k to her.
He jumped up from the divan.
She was astonished
by this and looked at him with hatred, her lips pursed.
He smiled at her and asked her to see him to the door.
She did not address another word to him, but simply shook
hands with him in the darkness and turned back into the
darkz room.


When he had closed the door he waited for a moment,
then walked up the stone steps to the path. The air was
very cold, there was a slight breeze, and moonlight. At
the top he turned round again to look at the faint orange
light behind Helenie's curtain, wondering whetler he should
80 back. But he began walking swiftly along the path
towards the centre of the village, with the great white
boulders gleaming at his side.
The stillness al nd silence were like a great
paralysis.
He might be cut off here, nameless like any
stone, eternally deserted, in a place dark and still, with
the terrible nountain behind, might surrender in dumb terror
with no possible solace issuing out.of the huge domed sky
or stony land. All the phar ntoms of the night loomed up
and harried him along the narrow road, paying him back for
his act of sex. His loneliness welled up at him from the
valley below in great cold gusts, gushing back in fuller
volume now, after his doomed and broken journey into love,
where he must not go.
He was beaten a nd cowed on his way,
like a slave who has dared to raise his voice.
At last he fell back into the seat of his car al nd
closed his eyes, worn out, his head bowed over the wheel.
Then slowly, fumbling with his fingers in the darkness,
he switched on the heed-lights, and they spreada wide
yellow light over the pebbles of the square a nd along the


white road back to Nauplion.
He started up the engine
and in breathless relief, all surrounded by the cuiet
throb, he drove smoothly across the pebbles and out onto
the White, curving road.


Brandon went up to the castle in Salzburg a t
dusk and looked down across the valley from one of the
towers. Behind him there was a parapet and a huge wooden
door with a postern in it. The dusk grew as he etood
there.
Lights came up in the valley, there was the sound
from below of someone practising the bugle, and the last
illuminsted thing was a mountain peak opposite him, high
and red, quite alone in the sky.
If the Enemy had been
there he would have seen no lights, there would have been
no. people riding bicycles along the lanes, no carts carry-
ing hay, no bugle.
It would have been the impossible,
and also lovely, this valley, because somewnere in it
there would have been a line, and beyond this line would
have lain the Enemy in their strange dream-territories,
impenetrable like the sky. The battlefiaad is an animal
kingdom; the question of happiness does not interest us
there. He looked across the valley and saw that the
Enemy wa S gone. The valley gaped, and the notionless
river below was shining in the last light.
Some days before the assault on the River Volturno
Brandon sat with five officers in a room of a barracks on
the outskirts of Naples, during the evening. They were
sitting at sable and the senior of them, a major, SE id,
"We have to decide who is going out with the attack", and


during the silence that followed his words Brandon held
his breath, his heart-beats were faster, he gazed at the
wall before him, he held the leg of the table.
It was
late autumn, and this evening was a brief return to summer.
The barracks were on the edge of Naples, high up, a nd the
sea was silver in the distance.
The windows of this room
were open, but no sounds came from outside.
One of the
captains, he who had welcomed Brandon on the beaches of
Salerno, said he thought Brandon outht togo, being the
freshest. The senior officer was a kindly man and he looked
Lar Brandon.n


At the southern bank of the river they waited for
the boats to take them across.
The wa ter was dark and calm,
with high rushes on either side.
They lay down in the shell-
holes near the bank while the German gun wailed a nd wa iled,
movking them. A long flame issued from the six barrels of
this gun when it fired, and its six shells made a long
harmonious chord across the sky before they fell, close
together and simultaneously.
This was called the Barrel
Organ, because of its strange preliminary wa il, which seemed
to come straight out of the sky and compass the whole of the
world.
Brandon lay in one of the craters and the man at his
side pushed his elbow against him, erinding and grinding it
round in his self-communion as the eun wailed again and the
shells made their lovely chord, a cry like the last coitus
in the world. Brandon heard the quick S hout of the Major
who had looked at him with a woman's smile, ard he heard
stretch-bearers come to the edge of the carter and call down
for volunteers to help with the wounded.
And neither he
nor any man there stirred.
He could hear the Major cursing
and sighing.
Later he stood d t the edge of the wai ter wai iting for
the boat. A young captain was at his side. He told Brandon
that their major had lost his leg but was still alive.
his hand he carried the manor's map-case, covered with thick


blood not yet dry. Brandon watched him in the dark.
He saw him bend down a nd quietly smell the blood.
bent down and smelt it secretly, as if Brandon would not be
able to see him in the dark.
ERBXIIEI XXI Nf
He walked in the woods at
Hellbrunn, a nd everything was still and waiting, the air was
dumb a nd heavy before a storm. He walked through the leaves,


and the trees made a hot, closed dome round him, and the
twigs and bracken stirred and bent under his feet. He had
walked in other Austrian woods during the autumn of 1945, after
rain, when he had been released from the bonds of his cruci-
fixion, though not released unconditionally. (Did the War,
fabulous country of memories, end in the middle of 1945? Or
is it wherever you are, and alive as long as you are alive?)
During 1946 and 1947 he would blush and his heart would
beat faster at the mention in conversation of the word battle,
or at the questions : Were you in the army? Where did you
serve during the War?
He was a mute wanting to make his
ghostly revelation, and he went down into the pit, and the
sky sang again. What did you do during the War?
Show me
the place, take me by the hand and lead me there, and, tinker,
tailor, soldier, sailor and clever shirker, take off the ban-
dages and let me see what they did to you. You are alone in
this, but you are all of us.
The legend grew up among his signallers that wherever
he went the battle became worse. They said to each other,
He has got a magnet in his pocket. And the day before he
chose the men who would go out to the infantry with him they
turned their heads away, unable to meet his Veyranta eyes.
He stood at the edge of an orchard in Salerno on the
8th of September, 1943, at dusk, and be listened to a senior
officer talking quietly with four or five of his men. They
were standing in the next field, a few yards in front of
him, and Brandon was hidden in the shadow under one of the


trees.
He heard the officer tell them that, though they
were headquarters troops, the time had come for them to
fight, that t the infantry positions had been overrun and
that the Enemy were less 'than two hundred yards away.
He told them to dig themselves in just short of the road
and to shoot at anything they saw during the night.
None
of them must sleep.
The entire beang-head could depend
on their alertness.
But Brandon did not believe it.
He did not believe that the officer was in earnest, or that
the battle was real.
He had not come prepared for the dying
of actual men, and he thought this must be an exercise
behind the lines.
He did not believe tha t by walking one
hundred and fifty yards away from the sea he could get him-
self captured.
The Enemy could not be so close, he was too
young.
This was three days before he learned terror and
two weeks before his baptism at Cava di Terreni.
He stood
at the edge of the orchard in the dusk, unseen, with the
sea breathing close by, and already preparations were going
forward for the death of the child.


He left Salzburg by train during the third week
of June, travelling eastwards on one of the local lines.
It was a hot, calm evening, and he remembered the bitter
and grudging spring in Bleitnau.
The fields were like
England when he tdoked out of the window of the train.
There were meadows, shaded and flat, with trees by fences,
and the grass harvest was beginning.
He had hated the
iron mountains at Bleitnau, but here he was drawing near
to the country where had ridden through the firwoods each
morning at dawn.
The train stopped at a railway station
near the lake, which was tiny and silent, with a lat wn, trees
and an inn close by.
He saw that he was close to the edge of the water,
among rushes. And on the other side of the water he saw
lights.
His skin was now used to the sun at nd the following
day he took a rowing boat across the lake ar nd rubbed oil
into his back.
The sun burned quickly because there was a
light wind down from the mountains and one did not sweat.
He rowed close to the edge of the lake al nd looked at the
huts, at the boating yards, the lawns and flowers in front
of the farmhouses, a nd the steep corn-fields behind them.
He heard laughter from the shore, a nd a few minutes lat ter,


after floating past one of the wooden piers, he saw people
bathing. He watched the strong young men at the edge of
the lake turning this way and that to catch the sun in the
proper places, then staring down at their skins, loving
their own darkness.
There were algo those on the shore
whose skins were white and new to the sun, and they were a
little ashamed, biding their time quietly on the outer
verges.
One of the dark young men had very black ha ir,
and Brandon. noticed that he had a touch of henna on each
side, a touch of it.D3AEE xxaexr This young man moved
slowly, his head high, celebrating himself as he moved
and easy in all his limbs. He loved himself, he cherished
his own footsteps a nd nothing of his grace was lost to him.
Brandon lay along the bottom of the boat and heard
the slight waves quietly hitting the sides. He lay with
his eyes closed ar nd be came browner.
At Cerasola he brought his signallers away from
the path and they found a tall boulder behind which they
could sleep, protected against the shells.
It had been
raining since morning, a nd it was winter.
They were frozen,
sodden ro the skin, guile
their clothes were/useless, so they stripped nak ked in the
ice-wind ar nd hud dled close together, five of them, under
two soaking blankets.
They lay with the mountain water
streaming down their shoulders through the bed, but strangely
they became warm, at nd slept. At dawn they saw that they were


ha 1f way up a slope, overlooking a flat ravine. And in
this flat ravine there was a Red Cross tent for the wounded.
They wrung out their clothes and put them on
again bitterly.
They were staring and silly, a nd they
sat down to rest in the sharp, freezing wind.
A bombardment started, but they did not even move
or raise their eyes as the mortar-bombs came swinging down
from the crest behind them.
They simply sat watching the
flat ravine below where most of the explosions were.
They
watched the Red Cross tent.
They heard one of the wounded
inside cry out.
It was the ordinary cry: "Stop, oh, stop,
please, stop!". They saw the shells fall close and then close
again to the tent.
They watched a man run out of the tent
and look quickly about, crouched down.
He must have left
the wounded man. He ran from side of the ravine to the
other like a madman, with the wounded man still calling out
in the tent.
He ran from boulder to boulder, al nd the shells
laughed and splashed and coughed all about him. Brandon and
his men watched this in silence, their eyes half-open. They
were watching the ravine with pleasure.
On the side of a
very steep mountain it was always fairly safe.
They were
safe, and yet at t the same time they were only a short
distance from the tent, not more than fifty yards, which
made their pleasureat being safe all the greater.
They
listened almost warmly to the wounded man's
cry.
Their


teeth chattered and they.stared, and their bodies were
thar nkful f or this bombardment.
Then Brandon beckoned to his ghosts, during the
luil, and they took up their packs and their wireless
apparatus. But one of them stayed.
They saw it.
They
turned and saw him sitting there. He could not put on his
boots.
"I have frost bite," he said.
"I shall go back."
Brandon smiled likea fool, thin and pale in his
wet clothes, and he pleasded:
"Be good and come."
But the child shook his head and walked in his
bare feet down to the ravine, where the path towards the
artillery lines began, and Brandon watched him with the
others, and they were speechless and silly.
Cerasola
was white.
It had legions of white ghosts. This was
because they were starving, and all things real seemed
ghostly, a nd the mountain pebbles shone bliading in the
light.
On Sunday a St. John's fire was lit at the lake-side
Lto celelate


to celebrate the summer solstice. It was lit at dusk, and
other fires burned on the hills on the other side of the
water. These fires were for the burning away of sins and
winter, and for the blessing of the summer harvest. A pro-
cession of boys and girls, led by the town band, came down
the avenue of lime-trees, and the bonfire was ready for
them at the edge of the lake, and also two effigies stuffed
with straw.
There was a little praying and singing, then
the fire was lit. A young man pushed a brand underneat th it
and jumped aside. It blazed right up between the sleeping
trees and the crowd sighed in the evening and they saw the
shooting sparks carry their sins away. Motor-boats floated
in from the lake, their engines shut off, to watch the cere-
mony, and there were also people in row-boats, leaning over
their gars on the dark water.
The boys of the choir lit brands and held them up so
that the musicians could see their music. And now six young
men performed a fighting dance. They formed a circle and
slowly menaced each other with their eyes, then they jumped
towards each other and began slapping each other loudly on
the heads in time to the music. And behind Brandon a man
explained to his wife with a chuckle that they were not
really slapping each other, they do it by clapping their
hands at the right time, and they are so clever, they are
so fast, that you do not notice them do this.
Brandon made his bed of pebbles among the legions of


white ghosts, scooping out the stones to make a place like
the bottom of a bath for his blanket. Then he took his
ground-sheet and laid it down, a thin old man in his folly,
his hands trembling and gaunt as they used the heavy stones
to stop it flapping, an old fool alone in his burrow piling
his silly stones, beyond the serious things of life. And
he watched the shivering old man at his side, a year younger
than himself, who was now twenty-one.
Shells fell, but then they were not German shells,
and someone touched Brandon on the shoulder.
Everywhere
lilanliy
there were pale alerdsmen. "These are your guns", the man
said, and Brandon heard them grumbling behind the wall of his
hand-made house, asking if Jerry was not enough without their
own fellows...
And the splinters hit his wall, and Brandon
took up the dead mouthpiece of his wireless and said, "Stop
firing. Stop.
Stop." And the shells ran their ordained
length because the wireless was dead.
At the gun-position where these shells were fired
it was different. The shells were long, round, coloured
and pointed objects. They did not sing like boys, they did
not lodge in flesh. They were inserted into the muzzle and
pushed home with a rod. Men worked in shifts of three,
unless it was a very busy night, when all six gunners would
be at their posts. The gun fired and shook, then the pointed
shell went whispering off into the night, climbing.
Brandon had a wide double room with two windows, it


had a, couch with scarlet cushions, a double bed with reading
lamps on either side, a dark, locked dresser with lace
covers and blue china bowls, an immense polished stove
reaching to the ceiling, and even during the day it was dark
in this room, and it did not belong to the world. He would
look out of his windows and below was the cobbled yard and
opposite him the dove-cot with the white, modest doves at
whom we dare MWAA look, and in the barns were two brewers'
lorries and a cart painted green and red. Sometimes horses
came into this yard to be shoed, sometimes people with motor-
cycles, and on Sundays the tables were taken out and the guests
ate there, with the lorries locked away.
At Cerasola he passed a German prisoner coming along
one of the mountain paths. He stopped to let him pass, be-
cause the path was narrow. The prisoner was young. He was
wet and exhausted.
Brandon stared rudely into his face as
he passed. He gathered the saliva in his mouth ready to spit
at him, but swallowed it again. He tried to make his eyes as
hard as possible, and he saw the prisoner flinch. He looked
and looked into his eyes, drilling into him, blaming him for
the shells which hit the boulders, for the pebbles near the
peaks which yielded under the feet like beaches, for the
lack of food and fires in the English lines, for the decima-
tion of English troops day after day in a battle for ground
it was useless to win, and for the absence of cover from the
sky. Brandon wished to lay this at his door, and he told him
this in his stare. He hated with his gaze. It was the first


time he had looked at a man in this way, and he now knew
that the, child had been raised up and that he could not turn
back.
And he was conscious of having committed a foulness,
because the boy had flinched and turned away.
You cannot make an abstraction real. Brandon could
not realise the Enemy in this fair-haired boy, nor could he
get an answer back from the fine, round, frightened eyes.


He drove into Cassino during the summer of 1944, two
months after the battle had passed beyond it. At the end of
the road from the south lay a huge white grotto, open to the
sky on the side of a mountain.
This was Cassino, and he saw
it as he turned the corner, a mile away. He was alone, and
the evening was hot and still.
These baptismal places belonged to other men. He
should not have come.
He drove the car into the white open light of the
grotto, and he became a member of its silence the moment he
shut the engine off. He climbed down from his seat, and the
only other being in the town was an Italian girl filling her
hand-cart with belongings, throwing them down bitterly and
coldly. She glanced at him once, very quickly, out of dumb,
black curiosity. And she did not forgive him.
He stood in the midst. of this winding sheet, and no
tree was in sight, no bird sang, there was only white stone,
and green pools, and the eyes of the dead in every corner.
He looked ahead at the Monastery Hill, then he turned
and saw the brown Monte Cairo watching him. And all things
watched him there in the evening, watched his mocking visit.
He turned and nothing was there. But he walked on and their
silent eyes followed him, and he turned again, and again there
was nothing there.
He looked in at the dark entrances to the cellars under
the rubble, and the chairs were stili there, and bayonet-
scabbards. Aeroplanes had bombed this town into ruins and


then had bombed the ruins al nd repeated this again. And
soldiers from both sides had patrolled along the lanes of
rubble by night from cellar to cellar, al nd they had touched
each other in the dark.
Hle saw two wooden crosses in a green pool, then
a chalked notice hanging from a broken column, Hotel
Continental.
He smelled the quicklime sprinkled every-
where, rendering dust to dust.
Alone in the grotto he was a child, nal ked and
frightened.
There were things here he could not grasp,
because he was alive.
His fingers were warm a nd he could
walk, so that he was a foreigner in this silent ruin.
looked about him, at this masterpiece of the embalmers,
their perfect grotto, the lovely end of men.
On his way back he saw torn blankets in the fields,
among pebbles, and ammunition crates, and also little stone
homes which gat unt and trembling old men had made.
Cassino looks so clean a nd shining, he thought.
Our murders, like our private habits, are nowadays cleaher
than they used to be.
We fly aeroplanes, we pull levers,
we compute figures.
It is good to have tea on our night-
shifts.
The ruin that is done is a mere abstract consequ-
ence, not seen.
Brutality is a mere attendant evil of the
abstract war, it is not necessary to it.
The murder cane
be done by compassionate poeple, even by'ladies.
It is
clean. Or rather, it is hygienic, and when it is over there
is an air of the hospital or the laboratory about theworld,
a. slight smell of ether. We are not brutalised
by our


abstract wars.
They breed in us more mercy and more
pity. Only those who have not suffered thege wars
continue to pull martial faces at the world.


He walked across the lighted square of Leoben,
happy to be in a place wnere people stood about in groups
outside the warm cafes and where no war seemed ever to have
come. It was a town in her truancy.
His windows overlooked the river, and he listened
to its washing. Below him under the wall lay a cobbled
alley-way, and sometimes a man or dog went by, and the
clock-bell tapped the arches.
There were pink curtains in his room, and a pink
coverlet over the bed, laid with truant fingers. Hanging
on the black beams downstairs in the dining room he saw
cutlasses, swords, helmets, pistols, shields, daggers
and cracked black ammunition-belts.
He looked at the
thick, embroidered cloth on the tables a nd at the great
curtains over the doors hanging from wooden hoops, at the
potted plants.
No ruins. A ruin is a presence in a town. There
need only be one, and the. trua ncy is over.
The bad
suggestion has been made.
A week before he had decided not to go back to
Eiglenz, forty miles to the south, or beyond it to the
Yugoslav border where he had taken his rides at dawn.
He jumped up at dawn the next morning and prepared to
leave for Vienna instead.
He was happy.
The dawn
hummed, the river below him rolled and leapt across its
pebbly bottom, ar nd at last a hot sun came from behind the
mists.


He and the girl sat in the hot room together during
the last days of September, 1945.
This was in a village
on the outskirts of Eiglenz, and they used to talk until
midnight, with the heavy and long curtains drawn across
the window. There. would be no noise from the rest of the
house. The room was soft and dark, and most of it was taken
up by a grand piano, and they sat at the table together in
the hot half-darkness talking in whispers.
He had a room on the second floor, with a lonely window
and a tree breathing against it at night and the gravel path
close by where footsteps were never heard.
He had come north from Udine into Austria, and he had
come to Eiglenz tired from suffering the bite and the bite
again, quiet and continual, not seen, of the abstract con-
science. In Udine he had been hot, wakeful and noisy. Now
it was late summer, and in the afternoons he rode in the
woods above the village and in the evenings he sometimes
talked with her. She was tall and dark-haired, a girl who
dreamed and watched and smiled to herself. In love she was
always the sufferer, and she bore this with a bowed head,
smiling a little to herself, her face blunt and heavy.
He had chosen this house himself. The Red Army had
moved north out of Eiglenz only the day before, and the main
body of English troops had not arrived. He found the narrow
gravel path with humble railings and trees on either side,


and at once he went to the house and asked for a room.
The owner was a small, clean woman with ginger hair, and
she told him that it would be impossible, there were too
ma ny people aleeadyx there. He frowned at her in the door-
way, the conqueror by three months, and hetold her that if
this were the case he would take two rooms, not one.
walked past her into the house and went up the stai irs,
stamping on them with his big boots, happy in his freedom
from the bonds, and threw his pack down on the divan. She
bustled about him, and secretly she was quite excited to
have him in the house.
She told her child to 80 and play
in the gravel path, then she whowed him photographs of her
husband in an officer's uniform, and as she did so she
giggled al nd blushed like a young girl, because no man had
entered her house for eighteen months.
He sat at the table in the shaded room with the
girl and asked her suddenly: "Would you have been my lover
in peacetime? I mean, are you just my lover because we
happen to be in the same house a nd my side happens to have
won the War?" He asked this calmly, but really it was a
most urgent question.
He stared into her eyes, leaning
forward, waiting for the reply.
Her words made him wonder-
fully happy, for she said: "No, I think we would have been
lovers any wayra" He leaned back in his chair, nodding and


Jot
X helplessly smiling,/he wassafely out of the War again, safe
X and free, mMrenomadwwwwn She had acquitted him of his
uniform.
Always when he was alone he tried to eliminate his uni-
form. Now he had a yellow silk shirt on, with riding breeches
and leather boots he had bought in Eiglenz. The curtains were
drawn against abstraction, and he never went out after dark.
In this room he was an excited child daring to speak.
She behaved in an older way, watchful, silent and always pre-
ke tret
he saw cifmt
pared for the worst, and she it was who oue evening/ got up
7 A
from her chair and took his head in her hands and kissed him
full on the mouth, with her eyes open. He spent a spring-
night, hardly sleeping, the first since his spring-nights
in Hampshire, full of leaves and the moon. An imitation.
An Indian summer.
The autumn became colder. Once or twice each week they
went walking in the woods above the village. Sometimes they
sat on the logs in a clearing between the trees where men had
been working, and sometimes they walked to the top of a hill
to watch the sunset. It was a season with-blood-on the grass,
it-wasfull of rain, and all along the gravel path there
were leaves.
One Sunday they drove together to a wide, black valley
twenty or thirty kilometres beyond the village. It was
very cold, and there was a slight sleet. They wrapped
scarves round their heads and laid two blankets across their


knees. The road was bare of traffic and horses all the
way, and soon after noon they turned onto a narrow, diffi-
cult path which led to an inn. They left the car in one of
the fields and went into the hot beer-room.
The only other people there were four youths, two
boys and two girls, sitting by the stove.
Brandon and the
girl sat down near the window overlooking the valley. The
youths sang and laughed, and one of them played an accordion.
They kept looking across at them as they sat drinking their
beer, and they smiled in mockery to each other.
They asked
each other ostentatious questions in colloquial German, such
as, "Do you love me?" "Do you think I look nice in my
English uniform?" "Where shall we spend the night together?"
Brandon and the girl sat in, silence, eating their sandwiches
and drinking their beer. The girl looked sad. Her head was
bowed. She looked at her fingers and ate slowly, brooding,
listening to the laughter from the other side of the room.
And Brandon ceased to be free again, pertem/tndentherend
eyelagaing he frowned and lowered his head, shorn of his
singleness, chained and bound again, a miserable inmate of
the world again, perfectly and wholly known in the words An
English Artillery-man, a ghost in a khaki jacket. And the
youths were unclassified and free in their sweaters, they
sang and mimicked and roared.
Brandon and the girl left very soon, dizzy and burn-
ing from the persecution, and they walked in silence across
the little field to their car, huddled together in the cold.


His own voice joined theirs in mockery. He mocked himself,
a ghost in a khaki jacket.
They drove across the black valley and stopped at one
of the farms.
The girl had the blanket round her shoulders
and her teeth were chattering. He wanted to ask the farm-
people for hot milk. He knocked at the door, a dog began
barking, and a middle-aged woman, small and very suspicious,
came to the door. She seemed a little intimidated by Brandon's
height and broken German, and she stepped back without saying
a word and let them pass into her kitchen. The girl sat down,
bowing diffidently to the woman, who stared at her closely.
Brandon was cheerful. He warmed his hands at the fire and
began singing to himself.
He told the woman that they had
come a long way simply to visit her farm and they would like
some hot milk, for which he would pay her. She answered him
politely and fetched a saucepan but she still looked up at
him strangely. The girl remained silent, not wanting her to
know that she was Austrian.
The woman turned suddenly from the hearth and asked
him whether the young lady was English, and he nodded. She
seemed happier with this news and kindled the fire. Brandon
did a little dance, accompanied by hideous faces, as he had
done during his truancy. He talked and laughed, taking no
notice whatever of the girl's embarrassment.
They left the farm just before dusk and drove back
through heavy sleet. He sang all the way and drove very
fast round the sharp, hilly corners.


In his room he pulled back her hair with his right
hand, holding it in a bunch behind her neck, so that her
ears were bare, and he was astonished when he saw her flat
nose and high cheek-bones, a face so different from what it
appeared under long hair.
He watched her face for a moment
and said with a laugh:
"You have a Mongolian face."
He kissed her on the forehead and he knew that she was
not of his animal kind.
But there had been a month in this village without her,
when he had first come.
In his misery one day he had walked
up the steep hill to an inn by the church where his own
soldiers were drinking. He sat at a table by the window look-
ing out into the darkness, alone. The inn-keeper's wife came
and sat at his side and looked at him sideways, sadly. She
apd
was a fair-haired, middle-aged woman, her lips were moist, a
little abandoned. She told him that her husband had con-
tracted gonorrhea, that he was always with other women, that
he was perverted and cruel, that she refused to have anything
to do with him since he became ill. She leaned against
Brandon.
"I like your face", she said. "I shall come with
you one night if you like."
The other soldiers were singing and banging the
tables. Brandon affected not to hear what she had said.
But she repeated the sentence slowly in his ear. She leaned
her elbows on the table and watched her hands, then asked:


"When?" He told her quietly to meet him outside the
nex f day.
church-door at seven o'clock the Pélkowingv6ventng4 She
nodded and got up without a word more.
AAVA The following evening he walked along the narrow-
gauge railway above the village with her, trembling. They
met no one on their way, and the night was black.
His trem-
bling was such that he could hardly speak. He was forced to
throw his voice out like an actor in order to speak properly.
Once or twice he stumbled against her on the pebbles of the
railway track and she caught him to her, laughing. He took
her to the little house at the edge of the humble gravel path,
and they went quietly up to his room.
There, sitting in his chair, he composed himself a
little better and smiled at her. She sat on the pretty divan
bed and drank the red wine he had given her. He gazed at her
for a moment with his mouth open. He was not paying for her,
she had not asked for money, and he was stupefied.
They lay in bed together, and he looked down at her
pale, soft, pink, silk night-dress. He was limp and frail.
She was unknown to him. HEr cemnOt cnow her She was an
idea he had pursued. She asked him: "What is the matter?
Do you think I caught his disease?" She took him by the
shoulders and looked up at him. "I never went with him after
he caught it", she said. But he shook his head. He was
limp at her side. He took his hands away and tried to sleep.
His bed was more lonely now than last night, when. he had been
alone. He lay awake at her side until five o'clock, and a


little before dawn she dressed, and he saw her down to the
door. He watched her in her clothes again, he saw her aga in
as the idea he had had-the evening before.
He looked into
her eyes for signs of recognition in the early dusk, but
she was unknown to him.
His murderer's hands were limp at
his side.
For his nurse had not yet come, she who would give
him his freedom.
In November of that year, 1945, he returned to:
England.
He said good-bye to the girl on the edge of
Eiglenz.
It was raining and close on midnight.
She stood
a little away from him and looked at him for a long time, in
silence. And it seemed to him that she was half smiling.
They agreed to meet in Eiglenz after his leave,
in twenty-nine days time.
They would meet in the same place,
and they arranged an exact time in the evening."I shall see
you," he said. "I shall certainly be back."
He had never returned.
Now, at Leoben, he had
decided he would not go south, to Eiglenz, but to Vienna.
sfill fe trelieued rhe had loued
as a
For tasainsa Warmn S 3 bi hin nanmmmm sredier.
In 1945 he returned to Englai nd nervous a nd sick.
He lived like a monk, fearing people's visits, and he
nervously fumbled towards freedom again, putting out his
ha nd first to see if it would be whipped.




He climbed upthe hill with the forward platoon
between the sunlit trees, through the long, sun-flecked
grasses, in the very cradle of sleepy summer, when he did
not fear to die. They went crouching from tree to tree,
stooping when one of the rifles or the ma chine-guns spoke
from out of the Enemy at the top.
They climbed sideways,
and at last they saw the shell-proof monster with a pout,
Castel Poggiolo.
Once across the open grasses, they began running
for the farmhouse through the orchard, in the last, foolish
heat of summer. Everything was swelling and rich, in
bounty and bright, I the fruit stored in the loft, the gra in
over the floor downstairs, the sacks of barley, the ma ize,
the huge onions, the gaudy aubergines, the donkey-pa nniers
of potatoes, the shrivelled grapes, the stained prod 13 igal
wooden wine-press, and the neglected urns of milk.
They
crowded through the door, through the hot, thick autumn
smells, unseen by the Enemy, and they took up positions in
the dark places behind the windows, treading quietly.
Brandon went up the narrow wooden steps to the
loft with the Major.
A man with a machine-gun came behind
them.
They stood together in the shadows behind the window,
excited and waiting for a sign.
The ma n laid the mac chine-
gun on the table in front of them, and placed it. on its
tripod.
He then fixed on the magazine of ammunition.


The Major went to the. other side of the window
and crouched down.
Very slowly, as the other men watched
him in silence, he moved his hand along the ledge until
it touched
te woodeu..


the wooden frame of the wind OW. He then began pulling
the window open, but very slowly, a half-inch at a time.
Brandon pushed the mauzzle of the machine-gun forward
and sighted it onto the farmhouse further up.
He and the Major stood leaning on the table
in the darkness, anxious for their fleshy victims.
front of them there rose a field of thick, tall grass,
and at the crest of the hill lay the farmhouse, quiet
among trees, with the 3x38 pouting castle behind it, on
a separate, higher hill.
The Majortola the corporalh behind him to take
out a small partol.
"We will give you. covering fire from here," he
sa id.
The men assembled downstairs.
They left the
house by the back, throughthe orchard. Brandon heard them
step swiftly across the gravel path, then come round to
the front, intending to take the Enemy in one rush straight
uphill.
At once the Enemy spoke. There was machine-gun
fire from above. The Maxor jumped towards.the gun on the
table. The Enemy's bullets were tracer bullets, like
swift, straight, floating red flames.
Brandon shouted at
the Major through the din. The red flames were coming
from a trench at the top of the hill.
It would be sand-
bagged and difficult to winkle out. The Major crouched
down behindthe gun, trembling with joy and excitement, and
pulled the trigger, spraying his bullets wildly over the
rising field in front of them.


Brandon danced up and down.
He was passionate to
have hold of the trigger, tp pull it over.to the right spot.
"No, no, no!" he cried.
"Use tracer."
Rhe disadvantage of tracer bullets was that their
point of origin could be seen; but the advantage was that
their point of arrival could be seen.)
SAl1 they could see from the Major's ordinary bullets
was a brief ar nd tiny apurs fountain of earth, now ar nd then.
The Major nodded and kept his finger firm on the trigger,
shaking with the rhythms of his gun, staring before him,
hardly following the direction of his bullets, for his eyes
were so glazed.
"Yes!" he shoyted.
"Get me the tracer!
going to have this bastard."
But the trench continued to fire back.
The bullets
hit the front of the farmhouse and smashed the glass of the
window at Brandon's side. They were all jumping up and
down with excitement, crying out to the Major like merry
children.
"No, more to the left!
Down a bit! That's where
they are.
Give them a nice burst now."
Men rushed up the steps pf to the loft with the new
magazines of tracer bullets.
The Major tore out the old
magazine and threw it to the floor, but he took several
seconds to fix the new one in because his hands were shaking,
and the more he pushed it down the harder it wedged.
When it was home he crouched down to his work
again.
This time there came from his muzzle a long dotted
line of red flames.
Brandon tried to push him aside when


he saw how wide of the target these bullets were going.
The red bullets swerved and pulled back a nd then rushed
forward absurdly as the Major lurched over the table in
his excitement, swearing and heaving, the sweat pouring
down his face.
"Let me have it!" Brandon cried.
The Ma jor flung his foot out backwards to get
Brandon in the shins, ar nd grasped another magazine to feed
his gun.
They all saw a man's hand, then an arm, briefly,
at the edge of the trench, proably taking more ammunition
from the side.
It was now quite clear where the trench lay,
and the Major sighted his barrel preceiely on the spot
and fired again. MAG/AANANAVVAAAAVVAWANNAA AGAMSOTWYWA
wWANOMAMAMOLOVIONIewwwwwwwwoomwwwnon
Brandon wanted to send line after line of red bullet over
the field in a great beneficent shower.
The Major threw down the last magazine that could
be spared and shrugged his shoulders with a smile, moving
away from the window.
"I can't get him," he said.
They went downstairs and smoked, waiting for the
tank to'come up from the road below and with only two or
three canon shells dispose of the trench.
When it came it fired only one cannon shell into
the field, shooting up the earth in a great blck fountain,


and instantly two men jumped out, covered with soil, their
hands up, alive and surrendering. The Major shrugged and
told hid men to get ready to occupy the farnhouse a t the
top of the hill, now that the Germa n rearguard had been
taken.
They went up to this housea section at a time,
running swiftly from.tree to tree, knowing that they were
now being observed from the huge, grey castle on the crest.
This was built on a crest so fine that it appeared to be
surrounded by a deep, impregnable moat. Behind the black
slits in the castle's side would be men watching.
The
farmhouse at the top was easy game for them.
The tank-commander insisted on bringing up his
tar nk as well, which would probably xxtaast draw a bombard-
ment of very heavy she lls onto them. People argued with
him, telling him to keep the thing further back, down the
hill, but he was a swaggering, facile young man, try: ing to
cut a fine figure.
He smiled and kept his jaw square,
flaunting his calm.
Until now no heavy shells had fallen,
at nd this farmhouse had lain in its quiet garden undisturbed.
Inside it was very da rk, the wind OWS being sma. 11.
The entire compal any crowded into this house. Every room was
full of men, and also the stairs al nd cellars.
The Major walked from room to room, worried.
"We are going to pay forthis," he said.


For it was one of the rules of defence in battle
that men should not be allowed to crowd together under one
small roof, but disperse into sections, ai igging their trenches
outside at intervals from each other so that ifa shell did
X fall on the house it would involve casualties. But men
loved to crowd together under a farmhouse roof, however
illusory its saftely, ar nd the Major did not have the heart
to stop them. Also, if one had to die, it was easier to
await it in a room than outside under the fathomless sky.
So the Major put his headquarters in the dark
kitchen and stationed bis machine-gunner behind the narrow
window with iron bars, pointing his muzzle towards the
castle.
He did not even have the heart to put out sentries.
They would have no time to dig deep trenches, and without
these they would not stand a chance against the shells. All
the men knew that this house was easy game, and they were
wai iting in the shadows, pale a nd silent, cal ught together
like beasts, wa tching the Major and hoping for their reprieve,
for a withdrawal to the a utmnnal XEEEE farmhouse with the
kind smells.
The tank comma nd er was leaning


out of the window at the top of the stairs, staring
at the castle-wall saucily.
The men on the stairs were
grumbling at him, but he took this for a sort of slovenly
cowardice.
He would bring in the more courageous
machine-spirit, and his tank would al nswer for everything.
The men in the upper rooms had laid out their
beds.
Brandon stepped across their silent bodies a nd
told his signaller to put his wireless by the window.
It was astonishing how quite the men in the room were,
tired, no doubt, but also waiting for the battle to begin,
dully.
They could have np part in this battle, only
receive it.
Brandon heard them brelething, they were so
X quiet.
It was as if they grown cynical, with one single
thought: as if they now believed in nothing but the
coming of accurate shells.
They watched everything dimly
from the ir beds, taking no notice of the excited voices
below.
Bra ndon sat down at the radio and, once the
tuning signals were over, passed a message through giving
his position on the map. He had the great ruyber ea rphones
clasped over his ears, so that he could not hear the
Elombadrat..


bombardment when it began. The men lying to one side
of him did not stir.
Suddenly he was thrown from his
chair by a swift oven-blast from butside the window,
from below.
He fell to the floor, still attached to
the saxpr radio by the earphones.
He quickly tore
them off and looked out of the window. He saw that
the shell had landed just to one side of the tuasata
tar nk immediately below.
"This is the first of many," he said.
None of themen on the floor answered him.
began to hate their passive cynicism, so certain in
their knowledge of death, like cautious old ladies.
He pushed across their bodies roughly a nd kicked one of
them who did not move fast enough. They all knew that
this first shell was a registration-shell: it would be
observed, another would probably follow, perhaps another,
then, the target having been fixed, the bombardment would
begin in earnest.
Brandon ran into the dark kitchen, where the men
were grumbling round the windows, waiting with their rifles
cocked, in case the Enemy suddenly popped over the crest
in frotn of them.
There was a yellow hay-stack in front of the house,
and at its side a great barn, which meant that any patrol
coming from the Enemy lines would be well hidden, especially
as there were no sentries outside to give warning.
Just


as Brandon looked at the Major the shells began to fall.
The men in the corridor above came scrambling down the
stairs, making a great, blind clatter, crowding into the
dark kitchen.
But the Major shouted: "Get out, y ou
bastards!"
Two shells fell in terrible crashes behind them,
and the men in the other rooms began shouting.
They
wanted to get out.
They wanéed to know why they were
being cooped up here.
They wanted to get at the bastards
with their hands.
"Where's that tank commai nd er?" asked Brandon.
"I just want to see his face."
The fatal, pungent smell of cordite came through
the open windows. He began running, papweos up the stairs,
into the other room, and down again, asking everybody where
the tank commander was.
The men at the window of the kitchen wanted to use
their rifles, vasopvayres to shoot at anything.
They
X were jumping up and down, itching to pull their triggers. But
they would have to wait until night-fall before they could
attack the castle.
Brnadon found the young man near one of the wireless
sets downstairs, and it gave him great relief to see yia
his
X yougisavly face now subdued and very pale, and the
thoughtful look of the war-scholar on it at last.
Had his


own face been like his at first, when he had ar rrived at
Salerno?
Had he swaggered in this city-fashion, al nd
squared his coddled jaw?
It was a house crawling with resentful men,
like a thing black at nd vital with maggots.
They pushed
past each other on the stairs ar nd jostled about in the
rooms, as if continually moving round would save them
from the evil eye.
The Major kept coming to the door
of the kitchen amid the deafening bursts a nd shrieking
out: "What the bloody hell's going on here? What's
the matter?" The men took no notice of him, but
went on with their frantic agaran and sightless peregrin-
ations, stumbling away from the great phar ntom of death
which loomed closer over the house. During the pa uses
between the shells it was possible to hear a heavy, creaking
noise from the stairs ar nd the wooden floor above as they
moved about.
The tall haystack in front of the house caught
fire. Brandon had turned to look at the men who were
crowding together at the foot of the stairs, and just at
that moment the room became lit up with a great yellow
light, and a sharp crackling noise sounded from outside.
He fell back against the wall, pushed by the men who were
drawing back from- the blinding heat at the window.
"Shoot, for Christ's sake! Go on, fire into
the flames!"


"Jerry's there! Shoot!"
The Bren gunner suddenly fired a burst into the
flames.
The Major ran forward from the back of the
room, pushing the othernen aside.
"What's there?" he cried.
"What have you seen?
What are you shooting at?"
maarenguwvewvawnnssmssnaangveamanavont
toatyshanyogmmssvaeehamMMMAIMMayPWwMobolalnvhyvolevena
enavasneangassamywavavevoandednnl
One of the riflemen pointed, ar nd at once the Bren
gunner, fierce with the trigger under his hand, lowered
his back and fired al nother quick burst.
There had been
movement, so somebody said.
Then a figure ran out of
the very midst of the flames.
The gunner was just about
to fire again when everybody saw that this was a girl
with long black hair.
She came from out of the flames
screaming, a nd stood between the house al nd the haystack,
unable to go forward or back for terror.
"Come in! Come in!" the men shouted at her,
at nd licence began to mingle a little with death.
But she stood near the haystack, holding her
head with her hands, aghast and shrieking. When the
centre of the haystack began slowly to tumble in two
more figures dashed out from beneath, and old mand and
a small boy, then came the rest of the family, frantic,


dancing about in the same spot, hearing the queer English
cries from inside the house, like cries for blood, "Eome
in, you fools!
Come in:
Venite qui, venite qui!"
And at last the old man took the lead and ran like a swift
beast down the hill to the left and out of sight, further
into the English lines, and, as the shells began to fall
again, with the same quick screech, for probably the German
observor could see this confused movement amid the flames
was playing his game of
the rest of the
S/and
smoke-puffa, v >
family followed, the children calling out for their parents
as they ran.
Everybody was talking about it nervously while
the flames continued to burn.
The word went roung upstairs,
and no one could keep still.
One or two tried to lai ugh.
The Major was trembling, while he examined his mapo
The Bren gunner had left the muzzle of his weapon a t an
ar ngle, pointing up at the sky, waroaamnaravniveved
ot the window
X wwewhd/om
It was almost dark outside now, and faces A
were lighted by the flames.
Two hours later the main pa trol went out stealthily,
in slippers, with their faces blacked and scarves wound
round their heads.
They said nothing to each other at the
foot of the stairs.
They skirted the smouldering haystack
moat
X and went down into the Apmpna-valley under the castle. - Then
they crept through the grass to the vast wooden door, which
was the only way out of the castle.
They crawled up from


moat
the wwe and lay down, witha few yards between each
man, at the edge of the gravel clearing in front of
the door.
They formed a rough semi-circle.
They
waited in the hush.
The door was tight closed.
remained closed for the next three hours, until almost
midnight.
Then one of the Germa ns came out a nd strolled
towards the bushes, to pass water. He had left the
great door a jar behind him.
Five men of the section
rose and crept towards this door. They stood up close
together under the shdow of the wall, the first one with
his hand on the door-chain, so that it could not be pulled
back. Two other men, nearer the bushes, went silently
up behind the German, one in front of him a nd the other
behind. They waited until he finished passing water
and began buttoning himself up.
Just as he turned they
leapt forward.
One of them struck him a blow over the
back of the head. He gasped with astonishment a nd stood
for a moment erect, his eyes S taring before him, appearing
to turn as if he were looking for someone, then he
collapsed onto the gravel path.
The five men behind the
door went into the the drak, cavenous entrance.
They
tiptoed along the stone corridor until they reached the
first lighted room.
Therewere several of the Enemy
playing cards.
Two of the Englishmen ran forward and
pointed the muzzles of their Tommy guns into their faces,


and after ten minutes the great castle was taken.
One or
two more Germans were surprised in the upper rooms, but
otherwise the castle was empty.
The prisoners were put
into .one of the dungeon-like rooms near the gate, robbed
of their money and valuables, then left to await the depart-
ure of the ration party, who would take them to the XEEE
rear.


Opposite his hotel window in Vienna there were
yellow warehouses.
It was very hot. A Sunday morning.
When he woke up he heard music.
It was jazz from below,
from the cinema under the hotel.
He woke up suddenly.
There had been hot Sundays in the London street where he
was born.
There had'been the long, bare street, silent
and empty, a corridor into nothing.
It had been a treeless
world.
On Sunday mornings they would get up later ar nd
breakfast would be bigger than usual.
There would be men
in the street with silver scarves tucked into their shirts,
and sometimes cloth caps.
They would close their little
doors and walk down the street for a drink of beer, a nd
sometimes they would knock at another door to bring out a
friend.
The pub at the bottom of the long street gathered
and gathered people until at one o'clock it clamoured and
the garden was full.
In summer the windows of this prison were open at
the bottom.
It was part of the meaning of summer, tha t
the windows overlooking the back gardens should be open at
the bottom. The ice-cream man would pass ai nd call out,
pedalling slowly, alone in the street.
How did one so much
as breathe? Brandon looked and saw bricks, slate and iron
ra ilings, and all about him there would be these things,
and beyond this corridor into nothing there were only other
corridors into nothing. Half a mile from his childhood bed


there was the dark railway station, then a cemetery, a huge
white grotto under a hill stretching as far as a child could
see.
The station was nick-named The Boneyard for this
reason.
Voices echoed in the street.
Shoes tapped as they
passed. A piano would play out of tune from across the
road, an idiot's jangle.
The sparrows played along the
gables. A motor cycle would start up two streets away.
A train would slow down at the nearby station, train after
train throughout the day. The loudspeakers would, echo
across the back gardens. And on Sunday a fternoon, when the
street slept, there was a silence which could not be borne,
and a heavy sense of desertion and loneliness came slowly
upon him, like a madness. And he waited for it alone, and
suffered it.
Nothing grew. Therewas no peace, only the quiet
of the burial-ground. He would never go back to England,
he would never go back.
If he went close to the wind OW of his bedroom he
would see evergreen hedges below, daunted and covered with
dust, and the reilings.
On the other side of the street
there were the same houses, a long line of them under the
same roof, endlessly repeated.
When it was hot and the sun
shone and. there were no clouds the street was like a corridor
under glass, something indoors and made by men, smaller than
life, a heavy, brute monument in
memory. of nothing.
Once


when he was ten or eleven he looked out of his wandow on
sucha day al nd had a moment of ridiculous love for it,
because it was like an enclosed and luxuriant hot-house,
though nothing could grow there.
In the back gardens trees grew and had leaves,
byt they were dead, and the growing of the plants was a
folly.
He would hear the front door close ar nd the footsteps
of his mother and father die away, then he would be alone,
and would wait for his doom.
He would read a book, trying
to become lost in it, or he would potter about the room.
But all the time he waited for the loneliness to work under
his skin a nd into his veins, he waited in terror for the
giddy fit to begin.
The clock on the mantelpiece in the
back room ticked, and the gardens were silent. The child
would wait for it to come down on him. He would go up the
passageto one of the other rooms a nd look out into the street,
and then there would be this slipping within him a nd he
would stand still, white, bodiless, with nothing familiar
left in his world, par nic-stricken and trembling.
He could
not get back to the world, he could not get back.
He did not lose the eense of touch or sight, and
he could have spoken sanely to anyone. It was simply that
he seemed to float, he was no longer part of the world,
everything had disowned him and he must get back. He closed


his eyes and struck his forehead quickly with the palm
of his hand, he hanged on the floor of the back room with
his fists, crying out to the woman underneath, "Mrs Jacob!
Mrs Jacob!" He ran out into the street just to grasp
someone, white and panting.
He W ould run up to them and
take them by the coat, and slowly he would eome back to
the world, tugged back by their watching eyes, he would stand
there and slowly return, happy to be able to get back XXEX
again. And people took the child's arm and shouted at him:
"Whati is the matter?
What is the matter?"
These little seizures continued until his fifteenth
or sixteenth year, when he achieved his freedom from this
prison world.
Sometimes, on Sat turday evenings, he was taken to
the fun-fair at Battergea, but all the warm gas-Jets, the
deafening music as the roundabouts turned, the perilous
swings, the masks, ha rdly brought a smile to his face.
He would star nd between his mother and father gaping, like
a child who pressed his face against the steaming cafe
wind OW but was destined never to go inside.
He visited the Prater in Vienna and walked across
the chipped roa dway to the fai irground, The lanes between
the stalls were empty. A few people were sitting in one of
the cafes. The music from the loutspeakers was ruthless and
sad, it went in and out of the lonely stalls across the dying
air. There were great flat spaces from which the ruins
had


been cleared. away, for here and there had been ba ttle
after battle between the Red Army and the last SS troops.
The ghost-train was empty, there were no children crying
out inside.
He saw a solitary child on the dipper,
and above the fairground the Big Wheël turned slowly
again and again.
Each time Brandon passed one of the shooting
galleries the owner tried to attract his attention.
called over to Brandon intimately, like a man with some-
thing dirty to sell, offering him the rifle. He smiled
and called out to him quietly, singling him out from the
other strolling people: "Bitte, bitte, mein Herr."
Brandon went to the aniteabpard switch-back and
pa id his money. The plump woman in the office leaned
forward and asked him whether he would 80 round once or
twice, at nd he told her once.
There was no one else
nearby.
The cars were ina little siding, one behind the
other. They were silver cars on a track which looped
and turned sharply, and there was a rail Brandon could hold
on by. He glanced a t the entrance and there were three
young men wat tching him in the lane. An attendant wheeled
one of the cars out of the siding and politely took his
ticket.
Brandon clung to the rail in front of him a nd the
car went slowly up the steep track. At the top it would
suddenly be flung Hazk forward, and he waited.
It went


slowly up, rattling a nd swaying.
It seemed to stay for
a moment at the'top, Brandon waited, his knuckles were
white with clinging to the rai il, then it felland fell
sheer into the dip, he was pushed back, he uttered a cry,
he laughed, his mouth was wide open, he clung and clung to
the rai il, the world yielded beneath him, he fell and fell
without foothold, and the car rose again, grinding cruelly,
mad and owning him, his will was dead, he was flung back and
forth, the car ripped and flew along the track round and
round, he cried out again and agai in, a kidd of happy appeal,
and the world ceased and there was nothing in all the world
save Brandon in his falling sky. And he stepped out of
the car, walked quickly to the exit at nd Jumped down the
steps to the lane. He looked about him a nd walked fast,
all his body light, so that he was HEX new and able, he
was hungry and hurried towards the frankfurter stall near
the tram stop, he was brisk and light and all the. world
had tumbled off his shoulders in the silver car, and no
longer did he feel alone.
He flew over Damascus on a sunlit morning, and
the pilot in the front cock-pit had talked back to him over
the radio apparatus.
Brandon ha d taken over the control
of the joy-stick from the pilot and X18 heard the voice in
the earphones telling him to tip the wings gradually over
to the left as they lost height, not to touch the pedals with
his feet.


He had held on to the sides of the cock-pit,
not believing in the security of the streps, he had
gripped the sides as the silver brittle giant rushed across
the sky and dived and turned over and over, the earth
falling under his head. He was rocked and pushed and
swung about in the cock-pit-and he held the sides until
his knuckles were white. The machine fell and fell towards
the earth, then it leapt upwerds again and the voice in the
earphones told him to take the joy-stick.
Now it was different.
He ceased holding the sides
of the cock-pit. He put away his earth-self, and he was
no longer cautious or afraid.
He ceased to care, sitting
easily in his seat; it became his arnchair, and he ceased
to nake any effort, he became cold and at once he was
hai rmonious with the silver brittle giant.
He took the
joy-stick and gently tipped the wings down to the left,
very gnadi dua. lly, as the 'plane lost height.
The lightest
of his touches he could see in the gentle fall of the wing
on his left, and the pilot said, "Very professional."
It was a light gradual floating movement, a nd he waS no
longer afraid of this monster with its eyes put out.
was only technicelly concerned with the falling movement
of the wing, only his brain and fingers were working: he
was like a man at his desk dreaming power.
When they had taken off he had watched an Arab
ploughing his field near the air port.
He looked down
RBXXKE


as the 'plane rose higher a nd the field lost its furrows,
the Arab at his plough became an interesting mark, the
field became a yellow. square, at nd the earth no longer had
any meaning for him except as an interesting target, quite
abstract now.
The machine was an ideal instrument for abstract
murder, for he was cold, and he remembered the white grotto
under the mountain, the ancient monastery of which they
had bombed again and again.
When they landed the pilot jumped down from his
cock-pit and came across to him.
"I could teach you to fly in a week, no, really
I could," he said with a lsughfprendon turned away a nd
began unstrapping his parachute harness, for quite uneccount-
ably he had begun to feel ashamed.
Many of his nightmares as a child were about silver
mechanical monsters which moved slowly across the sky. The
stars frightened him. At night he kept his eyes on the
ground. Once he ran out into the street to look at the
airship R 101.
People had called him out but when he was
there in the street he dared hardly look up into the sky.
Then he saw it, silver and slow, like his dreams.


At the endi of the street where he was born one
could see, far away, the trees of Wimbledon Common. His
eyes were often turned towards this green opening a t the
end of the corridor, towards the one place in all his
world which breathed, breathing grass a nd trees.
It was
the free ground outside the prison.
But inside the prison black hearses came every
now and then to take away the new dead.
He watched them
breathlessly from behind the curtain upsta irs. Or some-
times cream ambulances came and a little crowd gathered
near the open door. The children would ga ther there first,
then the women, with bare arms folded.
And rumours would be whispered in the street. "Nrs
Thompson has been taken bad sgain..." (malignant car noer).
"I see young Sid took a turn for the worse..." (tuberculosis
of_the lung). "Boor little chap, he is only nine, they
wheel him about in a chair, his head is the size of a foot-
ball..." (cerebral meningitis).
"Victor came off his bike
again round the Bend last night. Isaid to his mother, do
you think it is right when he shakes like that?" (congenital
paralysis of the right legand arm). "It happens every
month, she brings everything up." (neglected apsis of the
"I don't know how she got him to hospital, he
was sick all the way..." (burst duodenal ulcer).
His father left the house each week day morning at
five o'clock and returned home at eight o'clock in the


evening.
Each day he travelled for five or six hours,
to and from his work.
This he did for twenty-seven years,
between 1913 and 1940, when the warehouses at the London
docks were destroyed by German bombs.
The pavements were flat and dead, there were no
messages for Brandon alone.
Hel was anybody, any child
in this prison of streets.
He was one of too many people,
abstract, in a world of ghosts. - They lived in the same
rooms in the same houses, they worked the same hours and
travelled the same routes, they walked the streets under
somebody else's orders, and the whip of the invisible
warders was behind them, and nothing was warm in this world,
nothing grew, it was somebody else's idea.
So he became
giddy, being detached from everything about, him, like a
pure brain; for his world consisted of huge, empty, mute
objects, and nothing answered his touch.
He lived in the
lap of sterility. He became quite used to these "giddy
fits" and thought of them simply as one of his own private
would
abnormalities, little knowing that they/disppear when he
had been released from the prison of streets.
Once he almost gave in, almost bared his back to
be whipped.
This was when he told his mother:
"I think I want to work in a factory."
He was eleven years old at this time, an age of
choice, for a man had to choose now whether he wanted to


spend most of his youth at a school, by winning a scholar-
Ituee
laler
ship, or g01 hoptinesfinto a factory.
If he delayed his
choice he would become a prisoner for life, al nd despa ir
would grow on him, slowly, over the years.
His mother seemed pleased when he told her t his.
She smiled at him from the other side of the table in the
back room, but she watched him closely, and silently she
began to will him out of the prison, seeing in him the
truant chald.
Silently she dreamed him. out, divining the
future in her chair, like the animal-mother who sends her
young out of danger, away from the place where they can be
hurt and degraded.
The wind did not speak in the trees at night, there
were no witches in the black sky, nothing was small enough
for fools andchildren.
What do slaves tell their children?
There were no processions in the street.
EXEXI
The old were not wise, for the past was dead in this world;
it could not be seen in people's faces. But there were men
whose small eyes turned carefully in their heads, and of
these Brandon was afraid. They always advised his family
to send him into a factory when he was fourteen, for they
were on the side of the warders, bending down and baring their
backs in order to be whipped.
The streets whispered into the ears of children,
and this was their only teaching, that there was nothing in


all the world but ugliness, in all the stars.but a sickness
increasing.
There was not even God to open the door into
the sky.
One must not look up into the sky.
The fools and children knew this to be the truth
because it was proved by everything that happened before
their eyes, by the trams scraping in the street, the trudging
slaves, the inglorious shop-fronts a nd the smell from the
cal nal where no man walked.
It was a truth very adequate
to their world.
Music first showed him the way out of the gates,
and when he was alone in the house he went to the little
dead box and switched it on to one of the London stations.
And he was taken by music beyond words a nd stars, and he
knew what there was in the beginning, ar nd in the beginning
there was music putting forth out of the silence, and it
was with God, and he defied the warders wherever they were,
as he alwayt sufpesed tem tole,
in their counting houses or superb apartmente,/and they were
his first enemy, and he feared their condescending voices
and also, like a slave, he secretly loved them.
They were
always disdai ining to come near, disdaining to touch,
withdrawing their white nakedness from the ha iry fingers,
never allowing themselves wa rmth, lest it-betray a heart...
During his prison-service as a child he was listless,
his body was only a kind of moving vehicle for his terror and
dreams. But the War made him'run, climb mountains al nd stay
out in the cold, and gradually he watched his body
grow,


saw himself grow out of the death-kingd om. Only after
he was twanty-one did he learn to swim, to ride horseback,
to bear the hot sun on his skin a nd to dance. That is to
say, only after he was twenty-one did he truly recover from
the conspiracy to sterilise him.
The sound of the noon-hooter brought a chill into
him.
There were white-faced men hurrying home, a dry,
hot smell of fish-and-chips in the streets, people scuttling
out of the factory yards, for there was only an hour to
spare, and the trams stopped to draw them in and stopped
to spill them out. As for him, he was alone, helpless in
his room.
The clever dark young mai n said to him when he wa S
fifteen:
"You are choosing to go'to the opera instead of
dining out with me? But who are you to choose?
You are
a Butter-snipe. And therefore everywhere you go you are
on sufferance."
The young man looked at Brandon fiercely, but it
was only a mock fierceness a nd the unbaptised child worshipped
him.
The apartment was furnished in the modern style,
at the top if a block of flats. Brandon was a kind of
whore to these men.
He lay on the bed and learned like a
woman how to simulate passion.
It was a price that must
be paid (he loved their talk a nd the carpetted restau urants
he was la lecoue
Xwhere they met) if snintcciotininr


Some people are frightened by the poor. They
pass quickly on the other side.
The poor seem. so real to
them, al nd tougher than themselves. But it is not true.
The poor are dreamers.
They are all dreamers.
It is a
wonder they are fit for any practical work at all.
Brandon's mother had - a great money-dreem.
She would
sit and dream in her chair. Heaven is money. If onlywe
had the money.
Life in the prison of streets was simply a
da ily quest for money.
There would be endless, bitter
quarrels about a shilling, sounding out across the back
gardens.
He would lie on his bed in the tiny room, reading
hour by hour three or four sentences from a solemn book,
sentences which were meaningless to him. He forced himself
to read the same dry, ghostly sentences, about Xenophon,
about the foreign policy of Castlereagh, about oil deposits
in a foreign country, hour by hour, trying to divine the
secret of the world outside the prison, trying to become
educated, believing that these ghostly words might lead him
bf the har nd into the fabulous places beyond.
He would yawn, he would look out of the window, he
would g0 down the dark, narrow corridor to the kitchen to
make tea, he would drink cup after cup in the starting
silence, then he would go back to his ghostly.book, learning
the ways and motions of ghosts so that examinations might


be passed. For examinations had to be passed, otherwise
they would get you, they would even keep you in this room
all your life, looking out of the window at the street of
the dead, listening to the trains stopping every. few.minutes
atthe Boneyard, with nothing real to do a nd nowhere real to
go. Perha ps he should have taken a job as an apprentice,
just to avoid these wasted, sick hours over books; perhaps
he should have beeged in the streets; perhaps he should
have stolen money; perhaps he should have made more ruthless
use of his good looks as a child.
But he chose the way
with most money attached to it, the way of education.
He was rarely interested in any book he wa S told
to read.
He did not touch a subject at his school or
university which was not a cruel'boredom for him.
Whenever
he showed a warm interest to one of his teachers that warmth
was always simulated.
These teachers really held the purse-
strings, because they had the power of recommending him for
grants and bursaries. For years he played the role of the
devoted scholar, purely for the money it would bring, and
without a moment of remorse. He had no gift for learning,
and no respect for it in others.
He passed examinat tions by
deciding to write in a certain insincere style.
The gan clever, dark young man asked him suddenly:


"And your mother and father?"
"They are well."
The Wayhnarsssn young man would begin a formal
kind of speech.
He would not hesitate in his choice of
W ords, and he would pace the room with his head bowed.
XHe would be furious, driving himself. And the child would
listengn, silent, hurt and amazed.
The words were whips
he almost loved.
The young man looked at him closely, under his
fine brows, and said:
"Where.do they begin to figure?
In all this
talk about what you are going to do with your life, and
the places you are going, and the people you are going
to befriend, where do they begin to figure?r
Reyougun waited. his 28
kris pocksts,
slenders
he 11 I L
id not Nove - reply
S"They have stomached your lofty devotion to
thought, they have stomached all your middle-class friends
with their dirty habits and their dirty sex-lives, they
have accepted the idea that perhaps you might never earn
a man's wage because you are useless for everything except
making love and reading books and talking your head off
and lolling all over the furnitare like a pig, they have
resigned themselves to the sneers of their own friends
and relatives who have been pointing out since you were
ten years old that you would.never be any good to them
for all your book-learning and your talk, they hat ve


refused V to treat you like a marketable commodity as
most working people treat their sons: and for all this
they do not even begin to figure in your calculations
for the future.
Your father works on the docks from
eight in the morning until six at night to keep you in
artistic attitudes, your mother goes round the house
clearing up your messes after you and cooking you huge
meals, only to be treated to your indifference ahd
cont empt. And all this time you have been moving furte r
away.from them, further from their understanding, into
a new world towards which they feel only fear and humiliated
horror: namely, the world made by people of middle-class
birth.
They see you enter places where their accents
and manners do not fit, where they are treated with the
pai ined condescension that only middle-class people can
give to those whom they consider their social inferiors.
And they suffer all this because of their combined will
that you should not inherit the ignominy of their own
lives.
Your mother went out to service at the age of
twelve: she worked twelve hours a day for a couple of
flatulent nobodies who pa id her two shillings and sixpence
D. a week. And naturally she pa would nxx*2ix not will that
fate on any. child of her own. But the point really is
not that they were determined to protect you against the
refined tortures your social superiors had in store for
you, but that they saw the light: they saw the future


shining before them; they are two people of remarkable
imegination, and they are seeking their freedom through
their child, they are noble enough to let your life become
greater than theirs, they are dreamers like you, and they
alone of all the tamed, miserable people around them, are
not slaves.
In the prison of stfeets dreaming was peoper,
for it was safe.
Only the deed must be denied. To
everything it said, 'Impossible', and advised a further
dream.
Only in war did he find at last a use for his hands.
And a million others made their Odyssey into the splendid
provinces of murder, from just such a place. The first
time he raised his voice, it was to shout "Fire!"
One day in Italy when he was undressing he noticed
long bulging varicose veins along his legs. He was twenty-
two at this time. They were the marks of his education.
For at seventeen he had led the life of a sick old man in
order to pass his examinations.
Between the ages of twenty-two al nd twenty-eight be
stripped himself one by one of these senile marks of education.
He heard that one could have a surgical operation in the area
of one's groin to apausai XaEE cure these varicose veins,
so he went to his doctor and had the operation arranged.


As he sat at his hotel window in Vienna something
sar nk inside him, uneccountably.
Suddenly he was spirit-
less and trapped.
Then he realised the cause: it was a
wireless set which had been switched on in the distance,
and its ghost-voice was now echoing down the long, narrow,
deserted road under his window. He remembered how the
same ghosts had gone across the back-gardens in the prison
of strests by night, especially in summer, coming from the
lighted windows still open at the bottom.
Like all things
spoken to the prisoners in.these st treets, it was spoken to
no one in particular.
Every day the great embelming agents
of our world, the films, the newspapers, the radio, sent
their consoling messages, and each innate of the prison
possessed his little dead box, his daily newspapers, telling
him of the places from which he would always be barred.
Each inmate of the prison could be multiplied aga: in and
again, for he in himself was all the inmates, they whistled
the same tunes, they could be talked to with one voice,
they could be expected to answer with one voice, like an
abstract unit of humanity.
The sound of church bells from St. Rupprecht's
came to his hotel window as the radio died away. Is this
the absence in your world, that God is no longer looking
In Salzburg he had dipped his fingers in the holy
font and made the sign of the cross and knelt before the


altar when he had entered the Benedictine church.
These
actions were sincere, but only as acting on a stage is
called sincere.
There is no longer anyone to punish us, but also
there is no one to forgive us.
Later that day he went to one of the ba thin ne.places
on the other side of the Bridge of the Red Army. The)
obanging-rooms were long, flat-roofed buildings of concrete
standing amid trees, at nd beyond them were lawns a nd still,
shaded woods where people in their ba hing costumes wa lked.
He took a blanket down to the'e ge of the Danube and lay
down with his feet near the water, with the lawns at nd trees
behind him.
The water made him quicker a nd lighter. He wanted
to throw himself about, so muc h better did he feel after the
dirt and sweat of te city. He swam a ridiculous breast-
stroke, splashing about a great deal, al nd he was still not
safe out of his depth.
He had learned this awkward stroke
during 1945, that is to say, when he was twenty-tiree. He
did. it by going.to a silent pool amid trees every day,
behind one of the valleys near the Yugoslav border.
When
at last he had learned to float it was as if he had achieved
a further ma nhood, another freedom from the prison of
streets.
The:wat ter was dark, and children laughed in the


distance.
He remembered how he had stood quite alonf a t this
silent pool when four people on horseback had ridden by.
It was summer and very warm.
The pool had wooden sides,
with a few black huts nearby, a nd it could only be reached
by a long rough path leading up from the vallage.
He had
climeed
been swimming for some time a nà had just Em put to dry
himself when they came galloping along the path from the
hills, two of them women. He wa S standing on the damp
lawn.
The moment they saw him they stopped and drew in
their horses, which were sweating badly.
They were Austrians,
and Brandon nodded to them.
One ofthe young men was flushed
and had very quick eyes: he kept shouting at his horse,
which was jerking its head fiercely up and down, trying to
get more slack on the rein, and shifting about in a kind of
light dance.
The woman whose horse was nearest to Brandon gazed
down at him: first she looked into his eyes, verspalaly,
with the trace of a smile, then at his chest.
He explain-
ed that he was an Englishman, and at once she began talking
Englishg which the others did not appear to understood.
They nodded and smiled to each other, hearing her use a
strange tongue.
She told him that they were all from a nearby schloss.


She had long, narrow eyes and a face that was both pretty
and yet, in a masculine way, atermined. The young men were
anxious to be getting on, but in deference to her they
stayed a few yards away, while she continued to talk in a
quie voice with Brandon.
Her calm gaze made him feel
shyand his words did not come at all easily.
He was not
used to women, after two years of exile, and he barked his
replies, his eyes starting out of his head.
Suddenly she
turned to her friend as her horse shifted a little a nd
murmured in German, "He looks fine, doesn't he?" Brandon
heard her remark and knew, as he caught her gaze once more,
that she had meant him to hear.
But he did not move or
halg-
speak.
He stood there like a child,/neked, staring up at
her, dripping with water, while they were all above him on
the most beautifully groomed horses, sitting them elegantly,
powerful and sophisticated people.
He seemed quite abashed
by their presence.
The flushed young.man was smiling
ironically, his eyes fixed on the sky, as if he thought
Brandon a poor idiot for not at once taking advanta ge of
the woman's suggestions.
They all had faces Which were
accustomed to govern, and at last they pulled their horses
round and with "Auf wiedersehen" trotted off towards the
shaded path. He stood alone again, watching them disappear
in the valley of trees.
Yet he was the ir conqueror.


Brandon sat by a top window of the house listening
to the shouts in the darkness outside.
The cries broke
through the silence.
There was no firing.
"Come out, you bastards!"
An English platoon lay under the window, among the
furrows, waiting behind their rifles, and on the other side
of the field sat the Germans, in another house, behind
machine guns, also waiting.
The night was cold and very
dark. The shouting of the Englishmen was drawn out long
in the silence, high-pitched, wild, a weird cry for warm
blood.
"Come out!
Come out!"
It was a terrible, half dejected shriek, ar nd the
silence followed it, with nothing stirring from the house
on the other side.
Now there was a quicker shriek, a hoarse rush of
words, less heavy at nd sad with desire than the other cries:
"Let's have you, Jerry, I want a knife in you
tonight!"
The man who shouted this was small, thin and a little
bent; he had a sharp nose and quick,,rest less eyes behind
spectacles, and a flushed face. He was a Londoner, from
the back streets. Not long before he had ta ken six prisoners
single-handed.
It was said that he had lined them up


against the wall and told them to lay out their watches,
bank-notes and fountain-pens on the floor. And when
they had finished he fixed his Tommy gun in his arm and
shot them all dead, in a single burst. For five days
blood was in his nostrils.
The others said he was now
a rich man, he.had taken so much money al nd mercha ndise
from those he captured. There were many legends about
him.
Suddenly he jumped up, daring the Enemy to fire
at him as he stood in the darkness among the furrows.
Andat last there was a sharp, clattering burst of fire
from the house, and a scuffle, and a groan. The platoon
began running towards the other house, but the machine gun
bided its time again. It waited, then once more the great
metal. clatter sounded out across the night, long and contin-
uous, only pausing briefly, a metal monster pausing to
swallow.
Their blood-mad evening ended an hour later.
The
Londoner led them back, with a red bullet-wound in the calf
of his right leg.
He was:excited and resentful, with
bright eyes.
It was as if the other soldiers in the hot
room were also the Enemy, whose blood-he needed, for they
were human, soft and killable. Heetfirst refused to
have his leg dressed.
He kept saying:
"No, f- the dressing."


Brandon and the Major arranged an attack for
early neat morning, to smother the machine gun. Brandon
would lay down a small concentration, and then a tank
would be sent forward. The Londoner was ashamed of this.
He was ashamed to invoke the abstract laws: to call up
a tar nk by radio, to rely on distant guns.
He shook his
head and swore that he would go out agai in that night.
It could all be done with a knife, quietly.
He could do
it in slippers, stealing up behind the house, his face
blackened.
He spent all night moar ning in his aleep,
robbed of his blood.


It was all chaos under the sunlight, and the
hill-side was marked and cut with trenches a nd men.
From
the black shell-holes smoke wa S drifting away, and the
noise wars deafening.
Brandon stood in the leaf-surround ed
pathway like a prisoner, longing to run back.
For into
this metal clashing world he had to penetrate further.
Men were throwing har nd-grenades over the crest.
They would tear out the pin, run crouched to within a few
yards of the crest, then throw. Sometimes a grenade would
come from the other side and make a tiny explosion among the
furrows, a muffled thud. All over the hill-side there were
men, staring about them apathetically amid the explosions
and the sudden rifle shots.
He had come forward in an armoured carrier.
This
he hated, because he feared that its loud grating tracks
and whining engine would make them conspicuous,
La laudmark...


a landmark for enemy shells, like a tank.
With him were
his driver a nd two signaliers. He told them to go to the
cover of a church nearby and climbed further up the broken
hill-side to the place where he saw a group of officers.
These officers had cheerful, begrimed faces.
For they were so much in the company of death on this
last golden autumnal day that they no longer cared.
They chatted to each other among the bodies, and only
for Brandon, arriving suddenly from the rear, were these
bodies not normal and accepted furniture.
He ducked
whenever a whisper came through the sky, but the others
knew by now the language of this battle al nd stood about
in their shirt-sleeves smoking, in a kind of cheerful
lecheryof death. He told them that he had lost his'
infa ntry-compal ny.
"Where are they?" he asked, unable to keep his
cheeks from trembling.
One of them described to him
the route he should take.tke He would ha ve to be quick,
for they were just going into the attack.
Their task.
was to cross the river.
Brandon was alone.
His terror was for this
reason the greater.
He wished to prove that he was
a sound a nd dependable scholar by now, and he was determined
to get forward into the thick of the battle and to lay
down mostexciting coneentrations of shells amid the
Enemy positions; but at the same time he read his death


in all the craters, the drifting clouds of smoke, and
the stripped black branches. Moreover, there was the
terrible opportunity before him of failing to find the
Company.
He turned away and ran down towards the path again.
His face was screwed up against the sunlight, and also with
pain anxiety, for the longer he was without his Company the
more anxious he became, fearing rebuke later on, lest he
should be found an unworthy scholar.
Constantly his
signaller had looked up from the wireless and said, "They
want to know our position, sir"; "They want to know how
the ba ttle is going"; "They want to know whether you wish
to register any targets".
He turned the corner, round a hillock of burnt brown
tufts of grass, and, bending his head forward to avoid the
splinters, almost toppled over. a grinning boy who lay dead
across the path, his arms outstretched and his eyes fixed on
Brandon.
He ran past the body, his head turned away, past
the German on an upturned cart with his head near the gravel
path, to the shelter of the front porch of a broken church,
without a blessing to give. Reprieve after reprieve, - but
how many could he survive? He panted, and smiled at his men.
They were waiting for him under the porch, with the armoured
carrier. close by. They followed his. calmness.
This was the


trg source of their tenacity, his calmness.
He held
their terror in check with his counterfeit exterior.
He told them that "A" Company was about to cross
the river, and that they must join up with the ma in
column.
They got back into the carrier, crouching down
behind the armoured sides, and swung out from the gravel
path of the church, skirting the staring boy.
The
carrier whined and grated, then began screaming fast along
the path between trees, rising a nd falling like a
speedboat, hurting the knees a nd elbows as it swung a nd
bounced and jerked towards the river.
At the top of the hill they.suddenly saw before
them, horribly naked ar nd open to the sky, the long uncap-
tured valley, and the great dried-up, pebbly river-bed.
The first ta nks were beginning to cross this river-bed,
and it appeared that no shells were yet falling.
Brandon knew that behind these ta nks were the
vehicles of "A" Compa any, and he could see the men of "A"
Compa any walking in two single files.
They were walking
on either side of the great tanks, whicl h crawled very
slowly, ma king a deep thunder in the dista nce.
turned to:his driver, pa nic-stricken, a nd shouted to
him to pull in at one of the farmhouses on the side of
the road.
It had occurred to him that the Enemy migit
at any moment begin shelling the river-bed, that they
might bring out their bazookas ar nd anti-tank weapons,
and swarm down from the silent hills on the other side.


He was certain that these hills were full of Enemy.
"I want to do some observing from here," he said.
His driver nodded, joining gladly in the deception.
They left the carrier out of sight behind the farm-
house and Brandon went through the empty ritual of bringing
out his binoculars, his map-case and his compass.
wanted to delay things until he had lost the Company aga in,
but this desire wa S known to him only very vaguely.
for - the Enemy positions which he was trying to observe:
even if they had existed he could have seen nothing of them
at this distance. The sun was beginning to grow misty,
andxa in a last, spent sutumnal fury, making everything
glow, and the smell of death, going straight to the stomach,
lay in the air of the valley. He could not imagine, as
he calmly prevented his hands from trembling over the bino-
culars, how he would ever be able to cross this doomed
yellow riverbed alive.
Soon all the tanks and vehicales had crossed to
the other side, and the riverbed was once more deserted
and silent.
There had been no: shells.
He had lost his
chance.
The road onto which the tanks had disappeared could
not be seen.
There were too many trees and bushes,
enchanted in the dying sun, for the roads to be seen.
He focussed and unfocussed his binoculars on these motion-
less trees and bushes.
Suddenly he jumped up and tola
his men to-get back into the carrier.
He simply pointed
to the riverbed below as the driver started the engine,


and shouted: "Drive as fast as you can.
Don't stop
for a second."
The driver was expert with the carrier a nd he
flung it, bouncing and screaming, down the hill towards
the pebbles, with the other signallers mute and wa tchful
in the back, sitting amid the wireless-equipment, slaves
to Brandon's wayward oracle.
The snout of the carrier
plunged towards the pebbles from the steep bank and they
began their journey across the river-bottom, withthe stones
flying goanky * RA away from the tracks underneath them
and hitting against the undercerriage with sharp, dry
cracks. Half way across Brandon's fear eased, al nd he
looked from one side to the other, down the most bountiful
river between trees, with the water only in slight, still
pools, and ete rything specially hallowed in'the quiet close
between these banks.
On the other side the bushes were torn away,
ar nd he did not know which of the track-marked pat ths to
take. He shouted to his driver to go straight at head.
The driver put the carrier into low gear a nd accelerated
hard to take the Reep bank and hill beyond. At the top,
when they had cleared the bank, all the silence and
desletion of the leaf-muffled wood closed over them at nd
they entered into the mystery, with the tracks quieter
now that there was only soft earth, not pebbles, under
them.
Brnadon had not the faintest notion where to go.


He could see no vehicles, no white guiding tape, no
discarded equipment, and even the great wide tank-tracks
in the soil of the path had died-away. All his pai nic
was renewed as he realised that they might be pushing
f orward into silent and waiting Enemy lines.
They came to a tall brown barn under trees,
an island in the wood, where the earth was soft and very
black, under piles of straw. Iolsudden appearance was
a shock, ar nd the driver instantly put his foot down-on
the brake and switched the engine off. The vehicle
rocked perilously forwards and back with the violence of
his braking.
They looked at t the tall barn in silence,
and no sound issued from within. Brandon whispered to
them to oock their Tomny-guns, then, as he pulled open his
revolver-holster, he tola the driver to start his engine
again and drive forward into the bar.
Slowly they
AAAAANMA dying 'jar
Xwhined and' trembled into the yellowmam
PARAA/
silent
the WWM barn, and no one was there.
They put their
guns away and climbed down, in happy reprieve.
"We'll try out the radio," he said," and I'll
pass down a map reference."
But nothing could be seen from this barn except
trees, and it was impossible to do any map-reading.
Neverthless he took out his compass and tried to discover
by which paths they had come from the river, though his
pa nic had been too great for him to notice.
The dusk
was growing.
There was no longer any firing. The


hour of dumb, stealthy pa trols was about to begin.
The signaller had no sooner taken the hood off
the wireless-set and fixed up the aerial than Brandon
turned round quickly a nd said: "Pack up again.
We're
going." The men looked at him for a moment, but like
slaves they always believed that he had made some import-
ant, if silent, discovery.
The noise of the carrier was even more terrible
in the dead of the autumnrevening, and they peered
forward in the growing darkness, feeling forward slowly
in the whining car.
They were now hungry and tired,
their eyes were strained.
Three weeks before, every man had been told
quietly that a hole was to be broken into the Enemy line,
that it was to be a surprise attack, that an immense
amount of armour would then be pushed through this hole,
that the remaining gprgas Enemy forces in Italy would be
surrounded, that the Alps would then be crossed and that
those responsible for the surprise break-through would
spend the rest of the War in peacefullx occupation of
Austria.
Everything had gone forward very quietly and
secretly, behind Tuscan hills, in orchards ar nd vineyards,
held
under camouflage nets.
Staff officers had/whispered
conferences inoeravane, There were mock-concentrations
on fronts to the west.
Young officers walked out of
Headquarters with their eyes shining, and with a more
important a: ir.


The hole had been pushed deeper.ai nd more quickly
than anyone had expected, with few casualties. After
three weeks the objective had been reached.
It was, a
line not far beyond the dried-up river-bed, along the
crest close to Brandon's armoured carrier.
Beyond this
crest lay a great valley, and plains.
Tomorrow, or at
the latest the day after, a division of armour would be
poured into this valley, and the campaign in Italy would
be over.
The hole in the Enemy's line was long a nd narrow,
and a battalion could hold its front line.
It was thus
possible for Brandon' to fear that by his absence from "A"
Compa ny he could render entirely fruitless a three-weeks
campaign, and perhaps protract the fighting in Italy for
another year.
He did not believe in this possibility,
but he accused himself.of it. As a dependable scholar,
he should be in at the kill.
Staring before him in the
growing darkness, he sweated with his panic, seeing him-
self as the criminal of this campai ign.
At last they came to a dark,stone house where
there were lights.
Here there were English trpops.
In the yard there were long, heavy belts of Germa n
ammunition, and Schmeizers in perfect condition, immense
binoculars, discarded wireless-sets and tripods for the
machine-guns.
He stood turning over these strange
articles, aware that he had missed the battle. There


were no signs of fighting.
The walls were not crumbled,
the fields were flat a nd green, the trees were intact,
with gold ar nd reddening leaves, the sky was entirely
quiet.
In an hour the last remaining Enemy must have
fled and lodged themselves on the other side of the valley
beyond.
The path to "A" Compa ny was described to him, and
the armoured carrier moved down from the crest.
When Brandon walked into the long room where "A"
Company were, the commander simply looked up at him for
a moment, drowsily, and smiled.
It was a smile full of
uneasiness.
It said: "For God's sake do not judge me."
Brandon was astonished.
"I've been looking for you everywhere, I1 he sa: id,
standing over him in the growing darkness. ir The comma nder
made his excuse in a tired, anxious, tender way: "We were
dog-tired, so I decided to kip down here.
But it's all
clear further up. And I shall be sending out a patrol."
The other men in the room seemed to be nodding,
watching Brandon, as if to say: "Excuse our commander.
He was once brave. We adore him."
"Did you need me?" Brandon asked.
The comma nder
shook his head.
There had been no battle.
They had
simply crossed the river behind the tanks, a nd the Enemy
had fled.
Brandon ceased to look pugnacious now that
criminality had slipped from his shoulders.
He smiled,


with his hands in his pockets: "You look as though you
need a long sleep." He added professionally, with a
calmness which the commander may have envied: "I've only
one thing to worry you. with: the SOS targets. What do
you suggest?"
The commander did not understand. He shook his
head, blinking up at Brandon.
He looked pale, frozen,
but above all suspicious, as if nothing could any more be
trusted in this metal clashing world: antthing might carry
in it the deadly sting. He was a ha nd some, robust man in
his middle age, and his hair was greyingaat the sides.
He had been awarded honours for heroism three times. He
was a legend: if he took a Gompany forward it would always
get there; he never withdrew.
But his past grey battles
had mounted up, he had been granted too ma ny reprieves, and
now he went into battle glancing about him secretly, trembling,
his face white and marked, his shoulders bent forward ready
to suffer the last bombardment of all, wrapped in the silence
of his island of grief. He rarely issued an order now. His
men moved with him by instinct, like adoring animals.
MAAMAAAADM Brandon bent down and laid his map on the commander's
knees, then shone his torch, prolonging the pain of this
(- older man.
The commander stared at the map, but emptily.
Brandon pointed out to him several places near. the house
which would serve as SOS targets for the night, and the
commander nodded each time he spoke, though he understood


nothing.
His relief was extraordinary when Brandon rose
and left the room.
Brandon stood at the door looking out at the cobbled
yard and the trees beyond, aware of his vactory.
His. driver and signallers had found a sma. 11 hollow
in.the outside wall, probably an oven for bread-baking, and
here they were making dinner over a spirit-fire. He sat
down with them, quite happy al nd unafraid, for the crest had
been achieved, the armour would tomorrow pass over the hills,
at nd his worth as a scholar had been questioned by no one.
He sat inside the oven, curling himself up, and ate ravenously.
When Brandon had entered the dark room he had seen
the commander's pleading eyes, and had instantly felt too
young. They were eyes wiser by a thousand deaths. Having
seen too much, they were broken from within. All day this
man walked in utter silence, and at night, when the battle
was over, he sat alone, aj isbelieving his survival.
Once he had entered the competition for gallantry
and always had won it, he had been wild and alert, but now
it no longer interested him, he was stiff a nd old, believing
in nothing.
His eyes. seemed to tell
Cbanda.


Brandon: Oh, yes, you are one of the others, t he unbroken
ones for whom it is a game.
The next day it was cold and sunny, with a long
white frost spread over the hills to the south. Soon
after dawn Brandon crawled out of the oven and looked at
the road leading to the valley behind him, at the hundreds
upon hundreds of tanks and vehicles, nose to tail.
watched them for a long time, then sat with his men and
ate breakfast. For the next three hours these tanks add
vehicles hai raly moved a
Behind him, across the echoing
valley, there was incessant firing.
He was light, healthy,
yearning to move about, to leave this house.
He suddenly realised that he was free to go.
He wanted to see the battle of the tanks.
His heroism
welled up, after a day becalmed.
He shouted to his
driver.
Then he asked the comma nder, stan nding at his side
in the doorway, whether he also would like to come.
would mean going to one of the forward posts.
The command-
er gave him a quick, unwilling, dark look, and shook his
head.
But
when, later on, Brandon asked for a lighter car
to replace his own noisy, unwieldy carrier, the comma nder
said he would be coming after a 11.
He walked quickly
back into the long room.and fetched his cap, then went
with Brandon to the car under trees nearby. He wore
heavy fur gloves, and constantly made a hissing noise


through his teeth, as if he were frozen.
He sat in utter silence a t Brandon's side as
they drove between the trees.
The ruts in the path were
frozen hard, and in a day it had become winter.
Brandon
him,
was always about to turn his head and say something to wba
Yis
aavindtn but WwwW silence was so terrible, he
was so wise and alone in his jolting seat, that he did not
dare.
They drove swiftly uphill through the woods, then
they.came out into the open where a great doomed silence
and stillness began to fall, denoting, with no signs that
could be seen or touched, the presence of battle.
The
now
car slowed down and/above its slight throbbing they 4
fly
heardma cannon-shells
across the valley with a quick,
awful whirring, then the satisfying thud of something finding
its home.
At the top of the yapst hill, on the edge of a
maize-field, lay a cottage, and they went towards this.
On either side of them were rising fields, their furrows
dry and cracked, already harvested.
Over them all lay
this silent desolation.
The chilla morning sunlight made
no difference.annaoNston But Brandon was
hilarious.
He was hitting the steering-wheel with the
palms of his gloved hands as he drove, and humming.
He was muffled up to his chin, and he felt an immeasurable
prowess, in which he could achieve anything.
They arrived at the back-entrance of the cottage


and jumped a own quickly, out of sight to the Enemy in the
valley beyond. They went into the dark rooms, and at
every window there was a cluster of infantrymen wai tching.
the battle of the tanks.
spread
This valley was huge a nd pale-green.
It epread
out long and flat before the windows, at nd from its centre
Brandon saw black smoke gushing up, 9 then, on the flat of
the frosty lawn, several English tanks, one of them quite
black and gutted, the others broken at nd awry. Near them
was a German tank, S till punching them to death, like a
great proud staring beetle shooting its bandom stings.
what he saw.
He did not understahd waatewu
In battle
everybody plunged about blindly, a nd only in the quiet,
moaning afterma th did they begin tb know the meaning.
He talked a great dealat the window, stamping
his feet with the cold, and once or twice the commar nder
glanced. up at him as if he thought he was mad. Brandon
wanted to risk everything. He wanted to make this house
part of the battle.
He saw the padre near him, a small,
fat-cheeked man with an utterly idiotic look of bonhomie
in his eyes, and he began talking to him in a false, nather
mocking way. He began to impress everybody as a reckless
young buck.
It was the first time he had openly played
this role in battle.
A few. hours later his warmth died.
Only the
commander, alone on his terribley island, knew the truth


from the beginning.
The valley had the look of an
aftermath. No further tanks came out into this valley
from the English lines.
When the darkness orew like a
whisper under the huge red clamouring sky, stretching out
and out from the low hills, only these burning tar nks
remained, glowing quietly on the darkened lawns.
Tothe south clouds gathered, threatening the first
of the long winter-reins.
The tanks and vehicles which
Brandon had seen at dawn still lay choking the roads,
motionless and nose-to-teil.
The "peeceful occupation of
Austria" became SC omething to smile at, before one spat.
The rai in came, and the tanks slipped and roared in the mud
on their way back from the forward lines.
Men in high places
had made certain last-minute errors, 1 to it was said.
When the news had slowly taken hold, everyone fell
into a kind of tired, sneering misery.
When, a few weeks
la - terg amid rai in, they fended off one German counter-attack
after another, they did so with a bitter spite, casually and
slothfully.
It was during these counter-attacks north of
Rimini that Brandon decided to attempt the role of hero.
There was an officer in his regiment who had received
several honours for heroism; he was well-known as something
of an idiot who needed at any cost to make an exhibition of
himself.
He was big and muscle-bound, with a thick neck
and the ma nners of a pleasant child.
Bra ndon decided to 'try
Exxixin


at nd join the ranks of such prize bulls, with their pieces
of ribbon.
Had his regiment not been sent to Greece less
than a month later he might have done something very rash
and spectacular, and gone almost deliberstely to his death.
Slowly the War was claiming him.
His only CO ncern now was
to prove himself one of its worthy scholars.


The streets of Vienna were empty and still under
the hot sun.
He avoided a pile of rubble at the end of
the Rotenturmetresse, and instantly he remembered the
woman who had stood under a ruined stairway.
They had climbed the hill and captured the great
Castel Polggiolo.
This operation bad taken six days, and
of these the last three had been more or less sleepless.
He was now over-tired, his brain was numb with ByEraworking
over the maps, and he rested in the quiet farmhouse, feeling
a blessed relief to know that he was alive, for the battle
had stalked on, leaving charred fields, broken fences and
the smell of newly-exploded shells.
It was that feeling
of papadide which followed so often a stiff operation.
He knew that his regiment could not ask him to
do more now: he knew that he would be allowed to remain
here, in the dark farm-room where twigs were burning in the
hearth, behind the lines.
There would be no doubt of thet.
He sat by the table a nd smoked, a nd occasionally
he ordered up a glass of Marsala from the cellar, where
the family still kept themselves, sceptical ofthe silence.
The order had been given t hat "B" Company would pass through
this place: "B" Compa ny wa S fash fresh ar nd would occupy
positions well forward, to prepare for Enemy counter-attacks.
Brandon nodded. He was cheerful at the prospect


of "B".Compeny passing through. He would continue to
rest in the house, he would read, he would
sleep a great
deal in a kind of cot upstairs, and after
two days he would
be recalled to his own lines.
LYet.


Yet a doubt did begin in him.
He could not
quiet it.
The fields were in silence.
The Lond oner
who had cried out for blood in the night had been taken
to the First A id post.
The Enemy were using their shells
for more important targets further forward, in the next
valley, where people said everything was grey and still,
bristling with Enemy, who were waiting behind machine-guns,
bazookas and Schmeizers, waiting in camouflaged tanks al nd
lying low in the houses.
The Major did not envy "B"
compal any .
slab
"They are taking over a house/in the middle of
Jerry," he sa id.
wwwwmnomsnasmnsMr
MowammisitwmwwmMONAN
They talked together until their lunch came in
mess-tins.
"B" compa ny would be passed through the
lines in an hour's time, and Brandon became stiffer in
his chair, more and more doubtful as the minutes went by,
dreading each movement his wireless signaller made, lest
he should be about to deliver the fatal news. Nothing
occurred for fifty minutes.
There was not a sound from
outside, a nd even the infantry headquarters did not call
the Major by telephone.
Outaide, all the trees were charred and broken.
The breeze sttrred nothing, and the sky wagdismal, heavy
and low.
The fences were all crushed down, and the
hill rose to a long bleak crest.
Everywhere there was
black mud, a nd the two farmhouses nearby were in ruins,


smoking.
A voice spoke in the earphones, at nd the signaller
started.
He answered the call and turned his eyes towards
Brandon, knowing wha t this must be:
"Officer to speak, sir," he said.
Brandon went shaking to the mouth-piece a nd spoke,
looking calm and ready.
The officer at Headquarters told
him to join "B" company when they passed through "A 1I
company lines, and to learn all tactical information from
"B" compa ny commander.
He must prepare to move now.
"Any questions?"
"No questions."
He would die.
He must die.
He moved away from
the mouth-piece, throwing it down into the signaller's
lap. The hidden oracle could not possibly last another
hour.
It had been awake too long.
The surrender would
have to'come soon.
He was not more than human. He C ould
not depend on this divine help for much longer.
He was
tired and numb, he was no use for battle, and he knew now
that he must die.
He had played away all his chances.
He had got away with a reptieve, against heavily loaded
dice, too many times.
He threw ti he mouth-piece into the
signaller's lap ar nd told him calmly, rat ther ironically,
as if this was a joke they had once shared:
"Elose the wireless down. We are moving up with
"B" company.
Tell the others.
Prepare to move now."


He went to the door of the. kitchen, his eyes
blind with the certainty that t now he must die. The
future had suddenly ended. While he had been sitting
at the table an hour before, smoking and drinking wine,
he had dreamed the future, the future had been feeding
his flesh.
But now the dark curtain fell, cutting the
future off.
He was stifled.
He could not get forward.
There was no movement into the open.
He must run
somewhere.
He must get out of it, He could not go
to his death so helplessly.
He should get back on the
wireless to infantry headquarters, and he sould explain
frim
to his senior officer that the hidden oracle was failingk /
that his divine powers were for the moment at an end,
that he must, but must, must, be excused this once, just
for two or three days, until he had rested and collected
himself and his hidden oracle was at work again and he
could see things clearly again and get himself into trim
for another battle.
But he moved towards the door, blind
and hot, and he heard the Major call out behind him:
"Christ, are you off again?"
his
There was a horrible, rolling sickness in Beandonis
stomach. He could already feel his body as a corpse. He
could already feel it lying in the open, and gradually
people deserting it, and night falling.
He would give
anything for warmth, between himself and another human
beast, a touch,a glance; it need only be a momer ntary


thing. But he yearned for this simple touch before
he must die.
He closed the door and saw the woman
standing before him.
It was a small corridor full of
rubble, and behind her were the stairs and the great hole
in the wall which had been torn by an Enemy tank.
She was standing still, as if she had been waiting
for him.
The ruined corridor was empty save for her.
She stood with her strong denied body in the corner,
facing him, She was pale, with having been too long in
the cellar.
They stared at each other.
Their eyes
went deep into each other, losing themselves.
Wewwwh
AariovaeAML
He swayed, his legs were weak und er
him. He walked slowly towards the steps, al nd she drew
against the wall.
He came level with her, and she stood
flat against the wall, open to him, her eyes still lost
in his.
He almost clasped her.
He almost fell towards
her. She seemed to utter a gasp. The ruined corridor
was vague, it seemed to move, the rubble under their feet
and the chipped wall.
Her mouth was open. They were
helpless, reeling in the corridor.
It must be, before
he died. It must be, behind thestairs, at the entrance
to the cellar, dark and hidden.
It would be so quick
and full as to be one beast.
"Mr. Brandon!"
He turned
und
violently, and slipped in the
saw
where
dusti
looked upp to the top of the ruined stairs, ZHis most
faithful signaller wastnere) the EMa4A man parpryhe


whom he had once betrayed so gladly along the path
marked. MINEN. The woman was now behind him, wa tching
him from behind. He stared up a1 t the signaller, pa nting
end hollow.
He went up to the sixth or seventh step.
"What do yourwant?" he asked.
"Do you want your bed put dpwa up here, or will
you stay in the kitchen for tonight?"
"We are moving. Prepare to move. Prepare to
move now. Tell the others. Go back and prepare to
He went to the top of the stairs, to hear the
moans and growls of the signallers, then rushed back towards
the great hole in the wall, helpless and slipping.
must, he must, before he died. He pulled himself round
the corner and looked, hoping a nd hoping, praying in a
single second of time that it would be so, but nothing
was there now save the rubble and the chipped wall.
He ran towards the cellar door and pushed it open, but
here also there was nothing in the deep well of shadows.
He could KBEE only hear the sound of whispering voices
far below.
He went from corner to corner searching, almost
calling out.
But verything was as before. For the
last time he slipped down the loose rubble and pushed open
the cellar door, but now he knew, more fatally, that it


was at an end.
There was the sound of raised voices
from the room where the Major sat.
He went out to meet'the commander of "B" Company
shattered and frail.
There was now only a sharp, gripping
pain at the base of his stomach.
His sex had died, in
a ghastly, dumb surrender. He stood watching the new
company come in single file through the gate of the field
towards the house.
He stood with his shouldersbowed,
not troubling to conceal his pain. The sky was full of
low, grey clouds, al nd there was no avenue of escape for
him.
Sohe beeame calmer, a helpless prisoner walking to
his sentence.
If only he could have been granted that
moment of blood. So many touches had been denied him in
all these months.
It did not matter which beast gave him warmth.
Any beast ân all the world.
Such refinements belong to
those who have, a future, living in cities.
But to one
who belonged to the earth, who might soon be elaimed by
the desiring earth, this beast with the pale face and the
open mouth, and her body in supplication, was any and all
beasts, the last in all the world, his ma ker and receiver.


The tall signaller sa id to him, "I can't go
along that path." In the early afternoon it had begun
to rain, and the Guardsmen stood about in the white hollow
under the mountain buckling on their belts a nd ammunition
pouches.
When they all moved forward in single file shells
began to fall.
Brandon stood with his four signa llers, then
joined the crouching men along the narrow path, a long
file of silent Guardsmen stretching as far into the ra in-
mist as they could see. Two shells fell close by, lower
down the slope, the Guardsmen drew back, crouching and
hunched together, and the tall signaller at Brandon's side
suadenly ran off. the path to a. tree nearby al nd lay there,
terrified.
Brandon went down to him and shook his shoulders.
The signa llerz looked at him and said, "I can't go along
that path." He was pale, the skin of his face was loose,
and his terror was an astonishing discovery to him.
Brandon stood under the tree and pulled the man to
his feet brutally. He was frowning, frightened by the
shells falling closer and closer. He pulled the man up
and took him by the belt, drawing him nearer.
The signall-
er's head was bent forward. His body was without will,


and Brandon could pull it about as he wished. He
unbuttoned his revolver-case and took out his charged
revolver and showed it to him at the end of the white
lanyard, with his chin up, looking as though he despised
the man.
He laid it in the palm of his hai nd and looked
into the signaller's eyes, showing him the revolver very
privately, his back turned aga inst the other soldiers on
the path.
He kept hold of him and murmured at last,
"You're going to follow me. Do you understand tha t?"
The Guardsmen went on in single file along the
path and crouched down whenever the shells fell nearerx.
Brandon was terrified and he calmly looked his sighaller
in the eye, his chin up, and told him to.come away from the
tree.
The hiddenloracle was failing to speak to him,
giving him no signs, and he wanted to delay joining the
silent Guardsmen in their slow walk towards the peak called
Cerasola for as long as possible.
He wanted the signaller
to refuse, he wanted to stay under the tree, pale and
trembling, because he himself was useless without the
signaller: it gave him an excuse to stay behind.
could point to this man a nd say, "He is my. wireless signaller.
I am no use without him.
His cowardice held me up."
When the shelling stopped.the man moved away from
the tree and they went up on to the path again. As.they
walked in single file among the Guardsmen the signaller
marvelled at Brandon's calmness.
He kept turning round


and looking him in the eyes, wondering at him.
It was a year later, at Faenza, that Brandon
adopted the role of the hero. All the men ofthe infantry
Gompany were lying about the floor, the sentries at
the windows would not fire


on the Enemy, the spirit had gone out of them and the
dusk was growing all round the ploughed field where the
Germans would put in their attack.
There were forty
or more men in this room, lying on their backs ar nd
huddled together in silence.
During the afternoon there had been a sarat
sudden shout from the cow-shed, the windows of which gave
out over Enemy territory. Brandon ran to the machine-
gunner's side ar nd looked through the window. At the
edge of the field before them he saw a terrifying
spectacle.
It was the realisation of nameless fears.
The other men were looking at him helplessly, as if only
he would know how to rescue them. For at the edge of the
ploughed field there was a Germa n tank, not more than a
hundred yards away, and slowly its gun-turret was turning,
in the direction of this house.
It was too late to order
gun-firel They were without trenches.
If they ran out
of the house they would be machine-gunned. And the cannon
of this ta nk could pierce two thick walls.
The slow
turning of the gun-tunret was their sentence of death,
and they. all wat tched it in brea thless silence, 1*XE wide-
eyed like children.
To their left there was another farm-house, also
occupied by English troops.
It was close by. Only a
small valley with bushes divided them.
The tank was now. quite still.
Just to the right


of it, at the end of the field among the furrows, Bra nd on
sawa section of German infantry. They threw themselves
down. One of them was carrying a boazooka, which also
fired wall-piercing shells.
The gun-turret continued to turn slowly, then
stopped.
Its muzzle was. trained onto the other farm-
house.
They waited, to make sure. It did not move.
It remained fixed on the house to their left, undergoing
final adjustments for range.
Brandon asked quietly, "Can you see the Germal ans?"
and the machine-gunner nodded. One of the infantry-
officers said, "I don't think we ought to fire. They
don't know we're here.
Why should we give the game away?"
He and Brandon discussed this, then agreed to keep the
machine-guns silent, though it would have been easy to
kill every German in the field.
They were lying in the
furrows quite conspicuously, making signs to each other,
waiting for the - tank to send out its first deadly sting.
It fired once, then there was a pause.
sent forth a great puff of white smoke, while the long
barrel recoiled.
It fired aga: in.
Both shells hit the
farm-house, smashing the front wall and bringing down a
great yellow shower of rubble.
The Germans in the field
ran forward, leaping over the furrows.
Then, quite
suddenly, the back door of the farm-house burst open and
the Englishmen there came running out, towards the cover


of the trees and bushes further uphill.
Some of them
were hatless.
There were some covered with the yellow
dust from the debris.
Everything was left behind them:
their armoured carrier in the back yard, the maps, and the
wireless-equipment.
All this could be clearly seen from
where Brandon stood in the cow-shed.
The Germa ns ran to within a few yards of the house.
Grad ua. lly, man by man, the one giving covering fire to the
other, they surrounded it and found it empty.
The attack
was swift and expert.
One or two of them began examining
the armoured carrier in the back yard, turningover all its
equipment with rapt curiosity.
They seemed to have forgotten
this other farm-gouse, so close and silent.
Brandon and the others kept their eyes on the tai nk.
They waited for its gun-turret to tun a few inches further,
onto themselves.
From this farm-house, built on a hillock,
there was no avenue of escape to the rear.
One of the men
murmured, "Now it's our turn." But to their astonishment
the gun-turret began to move slowly in the other direction.
Then the tank's great motor started up al nd it began to move
slowly along the path agai in, away from the field, and finally
was out of sight.
No one had any explanation for this.
It seemed so
easy for the Germans to capture hoth farm-houses.
They
would come again, after dusk.
This was the terrible
possibility which occurred to every ma. no So, as the dusk


grew, every man waited, cowed down for the final blow.
There was no worse monster to the infantryman than the
Enemy tank, with its huge grinding tracks and relentless
gun.
Evryone spoke in a low voice, lest the Germans in
the other house should hear them.
When the farmer went
out to draw water a machine-gun instantly spoke from the
other side, and he lostsome flesh off a finger.
Then the
blue tracer bullets came spraying all over the side-wall,
shattering the windows. So they would come after dusk.
Again it was silent.
The men were quiet at nd still, sunk in a fathomless
gloom, their eyes dull.
The captain in charge of them
had capitualata to his terror.
He no longer knew wha t he
was doing.
His orders were absurd, at nd he delivered them
in a trembling voice which hid nothing from the others.
He had long since ceased to be obeyed.
He sat with a
swollen, wan face under the.chimney, his eyes moving about,
while the sergeent-major, hitherto legendary for his courage,
lay straight, out under the stairs, everything in him sunk
down toa doomed torpor. Brandon stepped over his body
and said something to him.
The sergeant-major hardly
opened his eyes to reply. Brandon felt a quick flame of
an nger, but he prevented himself from ma king a scene: he
wished to bide his time.
As the dusk geew RETB3REMBX the the sound of tanks,
grating a nd whining, came wéardly from the German
lines, so


loud a nd ominous.
A machine-gunner was crouching down
underneath the window, holding communion with his fear,
while the muzzle of his gun pointed uselessly to the sky.
Kia In the barn a wounded man lay grieving, and people tried
to quiet his persistent moans, lest the Enemy should hear.
Men sat with their heads bowed, or lay on the stone floor,
or watched with quiet, unimpassioned curiosity the face of
their captain in the hour of his capitu@ltion. They wa tched
the haunted shifting of his eyes as they might watch an
experiment, with their syi mpa thy disengaged, a nd their hatred
also.
It was now that Brandon decided to become an actor.
He chose for his role the hero.
For in this room heroism
had become an eccentricity.
His cue was given to him quite unexpectedly.
came from one ofhis own men, who entered the room from the
barn, where he had been nursing his fear all afternoon.
He came nurmuring to Brandon in the dusk, trying to hide his
voice from the others.
It was as if he were deliberately
Gooperating with Brandon's wish. Brandon was sitting on
a great black sofa next to the wireless-set, wai iting to
speak to his hesdquarters, at nd the man knelt down at his
side, gripping his leg. He was trying to hold back his
tears, and Brandon heard him say:
"Please let me go back.
It's no use.
I can't
go on."
The man said this in quite a matter-of-fact way,


as if he were asking Brandon to be sensible. At first
Brandon did not understand, because it happened so suddenly.
He kept asking, "What? What?" Then he saw how the mai n
was kneeling, half-cringing at the edge of the sofa, speaking
with his head bowed, as the tanks grated and whined outside
and the wounded man in the barn made a cry. The other men
in the room were all aware of what was going on.
They were
waiting for Brandon's verdict, to discover how far it was
permissible to capitulate.
Brandon saw his opportunity.
He spoke to the man loudly, no longer caring for the cautious
silence everyone was preserving.
His feelings were quite cold, but he answered the
man warmly, in the manner of one who feels an unbearable
contempt.
He shouted, "Look at you grovelling and snivelling
on the floor! You're less than a worm.
Do you dare to
talk to me in that condition?
You're disgusting to me.
I don't want you near me. You're not human any more,
you're something low..." He spoke in a terrible castig-
ating tone, like the most fearful of fathers, he shouted
in the silence of the room, with all the other capitulaters
listening, ar nd undergoing the same rebuke. As he turned
back to the wireless his other men dook the signaller by
the shoulders and drew him away, whispering to him.
For
now. everybody knew that it was not permissible.
His last
words to the man were: "Come back when you're human again."
The recovery was quick. When it was almost dark


the man came back to him and said in a very clear voice,
"I'm sorry, sir.
I'M all right now." And Brandon looked
up at him grudgingly a nd replied; wwwwwwwwww "Very
well. You may go back to your post."
Then Brandon jumped up and walked among the infa ntry-
men.
He began pointing at them and rddiculing them,
laughing at the way they were all lying down. He mimicked
their terrified faces.
He made little prancing steps across
the room between their bodies.
He did a mock trembling.
All his body shook, and they turned away because he made them
ashamed, they had ceased to be men.
Then he began to behave
more seriously.
He told them, "I can save you.
I can save this
position.
I can do it by bringing dozens of shells down so
near this house that you will all be in danger.
so20 of you
may even be killed by my shells.
But it is your only chance.
Do you agree to that?
I must have every man's agreement
before I will do it.
Are you willing to take the risk?
You are good men, you are worth saving, for God's sake don't
give up yet. I know I can save this position." He walked
euen
among them and/chucked one of them under the chin.
They
were.suddenly children before him, men of forty looked back
at him like embarrassed sons, and he stirred them to go back
to their posts at the windows and to fight again. He was
utterly taken aback at the thought of his power over them.
He had acted his speech al nd his antics with no effort what-


-soever.
He had used his words to master even his own
terror, and he was humbly grateful for the spirit that
had entered him.
They became heroes under his eyes, and they
answered him, "Tes",greeing to be bonbarded; he had
given them the chance to make an heroic decision, he had
renewed their characters for them. As for his plan, he
would have followed his plan in any case.
They believed that only he did not feel terror.
But he had become a hero for one reason a lone:
that te
wished to come outof this battle alive.
He looked about the room and saw that they were all
resolved and calm. But he himself did not believe in his
success.
He knew that the bazookas. would blow holes in
the walls, that the Germans out side, lying among the furrows,
would brave his shells and throw grenades in at the windows
and surround the house and ta ke them prisoner or shoot them
in the dark. He. was terrified as the night fell and the
silence outside in the ploughed field pointed forward to
the attack, it was always the same silence before an attack;
but he knew that the menat the windows would fight.
He gave his orders quickly over the wireless, and
the voice in the earphone s asked him whether he would take
responsibility for such a close target.
He said, "Yes,
Iwill take responsibility for the closeness of this
target," II ar nnouncing it not only to the rubber mouth-piece
- EX de XE


of the radio but to the infantrymen in the room, as they
elected themselves heroes in the dusky silence.
There
would be hundreds upon hundreds of shells falling, a nd
Brandon hoped that they would catch the Enemy in the
furrows.
He waited for the guns of the Division to report
Ready, then he gave the order, Fire; it was almost night-
fall.
The men stood about the dark room, and the sentries
at the windows waited.
They passed the word to each other,
speaking in whispers, The shells are coming over now,then
listened in silence.
There was a first whipper, then another whisper,
a light singing in the sky, then suddenly the first shell
dived down and crashed close to the house.
The second
shell fell, and then they flew over in choirs, the noise
immense now, the house shaking, the men all shouting at
each other, and thick pungent shell-smoke drifting through
the windows and the open barn-door.
The sentries were lying
low to avoid the splinters which came whirring in.
BraXdeA A shell exploded near the mouth of the
barn, then another inside the door, and the wounded man lying
out there with the dead Germans for company cried out again
to le lakeu dunter iulo te houpe,
X and againk but there was so much noise ar nd so much moving
about that his'was only the faintest of cries, buried in
thunder.
Brandon was still sitting on the black
sofa,


crouched down so that he would have as much protection as
possible from the window behind him.
The shells hit the
wall but being light did not break them down. The dust
a.ad.shell-smoke was making everybody cough, and there was
the sound of rubble falling down from the walls outside and
the slated roof.
CAmactine-puanat.


A machine-gunner at one of the windows suddenly
shouted:
"They're outside!"
Brandon heard another mai n shout:
"Fire, you silly bastard!"
At once the machine-guns sounded out, filling the
room with a deafening metal clatter as they sprayed the
black field from side to side.
In answer to them, only
a second or two later, came a long jet of blue tracer bullets
from the Enemy house, lighting up the room.
Someone called out for the artillery officer, and
Brandon jumped up, feeling his way across the floor.
"Who wants me?" he shouted.
A man caught hold of him in the derkness and told
him that a German had just looked in at the window, ha a
stared right down the muzzle of one of the machine-guns.
There was at least a section of German infantry just out-
side.
The shell-fire was beinning to abate. The moment
wards
Brandon realised this he rushed back to his wireless, pushing
over the men who stood in his way, al nd felt for the black
sofa, then snatched the mouth-piece of the radio away from
his signaller's lap and shouted into it: "Repest. Repeat."
The machine-guns paused, there was almost silence
for a space, then gradually the sky began to fill again with


the whirring of hand-fulls of shells, and again the
explosions echoed across the field: one, two, three
fell together, then a pause, then a rain of dozens upon
dozens.
Splinters were hitting the ceiling and dropping
to the stone floor, as the machine-guns began to fight
out another long clattering battle.
At last, during one of the pauses, they heard
the muffled cry from the field outside, quite close to the
window:
"Kamarad! Kamarad!"
A sentry called out:
"They've got their hands up."
Somebody else shouted back: "Keep them covered.
Make them stay there", F as Brandon took up the mouth-piece
of the radio again.
Witha feeling of most blessed ease
he spoke to the artillery lines: "Stop firing. Stop.
Gun-fire successful."
When the field was silent again, the last spasmodic
shells finished, one of the English sentries called to the
men outside: "Kummen zee here!" Eight Germans got up out
of the furrows, probably the first section of an attacking
company, and walked round the house to the door of the barn.
They came into the room in single file, still murmuring,
"Kamarad, Kamarad," while the wounded man in the barn
seemed to weep now bather than moan, in an aftermath of


the deepest, most horrible misery.


Brandon walked up the narrow sta ircase into th he
lending library near his hotel in Vienna, al nd sat down by
one of the shelves.
He leaned forward and put out his hand
absently, taking down a book without looking at its title.
He. opened it near the middle and began reading at once.
It was a report written by one of the prisoners
at the concentration camp in Dachau. He raed about the
cells which sere so confined that the prisoner could not
sit down or even turn more than his head.
There were cells
where one had to bark for one's food like a dog. Men were
frozen almost to the point of death in experiments and it
was found that they were most likely to survive if they were
laid down with na. ked women who had coitus with them.
Jews
were segregated from Christians and the two parties set
facing each other; they were them each given a shovel and
ordered to strike the man opposite him, and those who d id
not strike hard enough would be hung.
He had picked the book out at random and sat over
it for an hour, reading very fast.
He had wanted to put
it back, he had promised himself every minute that he would
put it back.
But he could not stop.
*Then he began to feel the customary abstract anger.


He remembered an SS man on a train with whom he had
once talked.
He flushed with shame instantly, he could
feel the sweat on his upper lip, because he had smiled
at the man and shaken hands with him.
He regretted this,
but he no longer regretted wanting to spit at the fair-
ha ired boy along the white mountain path.
Ina moment
of angry spite, he felt that every German should have been
wiped out.
But his abstract anger was a further XEXXEX XX X i by XL
instrument of fate by means of which these murders might
continue, fulfilling our destiny.
That is to say, even
his compassion was a further instrument of murder because
it was abstract. To avenge Dachau he yearned to do away
with an entire people, and from such an abstract passion
Dachau itself came.
He looked up from his book suddenly,
and a thought occurred to him: Hitler was the greatest
perpetrator of democracy in our epoch, for together with
mass benefits.he gave them mass graves.
We are always being asked to imagine something,
there is always some suffering in another part of the
world for which we could make atonement.
There is always
a fashioneble abstraction for whichwe could lay down our
lives. We yearn for privacy aga in, to go alone. Beware
of compassion, It fore-runs insentience.
In the summer of 1945 Brandon drove through Ud ine


with his interpreter to the southern edge of the city.
When they came to the first Zugoslav sentry he stopped
and asked the way to Headquarters. Then he drove on
through the strange, deserted back streets, where there
were small houses among trees, all of them identical,
and yellow rubble in the gutters.
His interpreter was a student from one of the SS
battalions.
He wore spectacles ar nd had clever, watchful
eyes. He spoke English perfectly, and was most obsequious
in his manner to Brandon. At once he divined a kind of
credulity in Brandon, and perhaps thought to advance hinself
by means of it. He took long strides at Brandon's side,
and almost took his arm, though the War had not been over more
thana week.
They went into one of the small houses, al nd the
Yugoslav officer there showed his anger the moment he saw
that Brandon had brought an SS man with him. He did not
invite him to sit down; this task fell to the interpreter,
who politely pulled out one of the wooden seats for him.
The officer was short and plump, very quick, with small,
grey, shining eyes.
He moved his legs about restlessly
as the interpreter put his first question.
"Ask him," Brandon said, "whether he will deliver
back to us the battalion of Germans prisoners which his
troops diverted from the ma in road yesterday.
His troops
have taken prisoners which belong to us."


The Yugoslav could not bear having this German
in the room on equal terms with himself, especially an SS
man. He snapped out his reply, star ing at Brandon rudely,
and told the interpreter that he had no intention of giving
up any prisoners, and that his country had every right to
take them, since they also had fought against the German
armies.
His lips were thin, almost invisible, and his
fury made him white in the.face.
The interpreter turned back to Brandon and sai id:
"The officer is rude in his reply.
These are
uncivilised people, sir."
But Brandon was no longer interested, despite the
orders he had received from his headquarters. He realised
his own idiocy in bringing an SS man to this post and expect-
ing it to be taken as anything other than a most studied
insult.
He did not.care about the prisoners, and he could
see that the Yugoslav officer W ould in any case never give
Brandon had fought the same War as this Yugoslav
officer, but he was only a scholar of war. He only d id a
job of murder thoroughly, and afterwards his thoughts were
free. He had only lost his temper once, when the fai ir-
ha ired boy had passed him on the white mounta in-path, but
later he looked on this as unscholarly conduct, and shameful.
He stared at the Yugoslav, then at the SS man, and he realised


that between them there wasa kind of blood-quarrel to
which he was only a calm spectator.
The Yugoslav was deliberately fingering his
revolver-holster, making a show of it, as he asked the
interpreter with great sarcasm whether or not Hitler had
won the War.
Then he walked straight across to the door,
trembling wibh fury, ar nd waited to show them out.
Brandon got up slowly a nd gave him a friendly
smile as he passed him.
Smiles were easy, because he did
not care.
On the way back across Udine, while he drote fast
and recklessly, the German told him: "I am ashamed that
you shoudd be treated like this by such people, sir. We
understand each other. We have been university students.
They do not understand polite requests." Brandon was
affable,


as.to a fellow-undergraduate.
The barracks were four sombre buildings round a
huge, dusty quadrangle.
SS battalions arrived from
Austria continuously, during both day a nd night.
The
capitulating troops drove quickly, hoping to get to a
British camp before Russians or Yugoslavs waylaid them.
Uaually the officers arrived at the head of the columns
in open Mercedes-Benz cars, and often they were dressed
in black shining macintoshes.
The nights were full of rumour.
Thousa nd S of
Germans asked each other questions in the long, dark,
stone corridors.
They were to be sent to Canada.
They
were to be released quickly.
They were to be imprisoned
on an island for twelve years.
The worst of them were to
be shot.
They came into the camp like conspirators.
Only the boys of the Hitler Youth were frightened, with
wide eyes, watching the English soldiers cautiously. WWA
AWANG
Brandon's room had tall windows a nd bare, cold
Suchas
walls. Yet he achieved here a murderer's happiness WM
where he had wotead A
he had known only in Greece, whan he
Sotard.
Recursarvieim
userdagt
vonomnssossoswowesosvowessnos. For here in the camp. by
summer there were long, wonderful, hot, sleepless nights,
with the flashing of lights against his window, and the
barking of a wild, leashed-up blood-hound, and a constant
murmuring from outside, and the starting of motors.
His
task was to search the officers as they came in, and he


was constantly called out of his bed.
There were endless
messages for him to come immediately, on account of a
quarrel over food, or a suieide from one of the barrack
windows, or the arrival of fresh booty.
He would sit
in his room with other officers ti urning over the watches
and cameras ar nd potrable radio-sets, in a summer-glut of
victory.
An open car came through the gates after midnight,
and a thick-set officer with dangerous, truculent eyes
stpped down as Brandon approached.
In the back of the
car were womenn.
"What about the women?" Brandon asked.
Lights were shining onto the courtyard from a
great shed behind them, where two ranks of prisoners were
being searched.
"What about them?" the thick-set officer asked.
"Are they to stay with you?"
The German smiled, mocking Brandon: "What use
are women now?
Shall we need them where we are going?"
He turned to the other officers at nd laughed,
translating for them what he had just said.
One of the girls.stood near the shed weeping,
lyte taltalion with which yle had havelled.
X abandoned nowk She was an Hunggrian, with black ha: ir
and a pale, child's face. A young soldier who was with
her smiled when he saw her tears. Brandon left the
officers and went up to him."
"Who is she?" he asked.


"Who is she?"
The boy tugged a t her skirt and
giggled. "She is a whore."
Brandon decided to take her away. He led her
into the guardroom and opened the door of one of the
private rooms.
He shoed her a mattress on the floor
and indicated that she should sleep there.
He looked
back at his own soldiers and told them sternly that
no one was to go itno this room during the night:
this
closed the door, fascinated by the presence of/woman,
WWAWMWANMWWAVwwWwaavitanaMAVMSwwwwn4
At dawn one morning he met the colonel of one
of the SS battalions in the quadrangle.
He was a tall,
elderly, ha nd S ome ma nd, with white ha: ir.
He bowed with
great elega ance when Brar ndon asked him about the troops
under his commar nd.
Brandon suddenly looked into his
eyes, at nd they were blue, still a nd frightening. They
remained absolutely still, and shy ness had never visited
them.
The sun had just come up, and it was a. clear,
layme,
biting, yellow dawn, vwusang
"May I invite you to breakfast in my quarters?"
the colonel asked him, with an impeccable pronunication.
Brandon was young and helpless under this light-
blue gaze, a nd he nodded with a smile.
Together they
went into one of the dark corridors, past the saluting
prisoners, to a small room which had been fitted with
old boxesand chairs to make an imitation
drawing-room.


The colonel showed him to a chai ir with solemn, aristocratic
grace.
His back was very. straight, and he moved his
neck stiffly when he turned his head.
They waited while
his servant, treading softly on the stone floor, brought
them coffee and biscuits.
"I have an English wife," the colonel sa id.
spoke about his visits to England before the War, and told
Brandon how unwilling the Germans had been to fight the
English.
"The Germa ns and the English should ha ve come
together against Russia.
We are similar peoples."
Brandon consulted his conscience: why did I
fight the Germa ns? Because of the concentration camps.
He never chose any reason but this, when he saught a reason.
He mentioned the concentration camps to the colonel.
"Ah, there were mistakes," the colonel replied.
"I am a soldier of the old type.
Hitler made many mistakes.
He should not have gone to war. with England."
He eyed Brandon calmly. Brandon sought for
words, but the task of murd er was done, there was no longer
any formula, and he knew nothing about right or wrong.
He had chosen for himself alone.
Should he speak, in
the brisk air of this lovely dawn, sipping coffee in a
quiet room, of a crucifixion, of a signing of thfan bonds,
of a truant time?
It took him five years after this
very dawn to learn how to answer such a man, and how to
Such
answer Ww calm eyes with calm eyes.
He left the


colonel after the sec.ond cup of coffee, and no doubt the
colonel believed that hehad just entertained a young man
of few words.
On a calm, very black night a soldier ran into
the guardroom and told him to come. Brandon walked
swiftly into the dark, stone corridor and up the atairs,
until he heard a woman screaming.
He pushed open the
door and saw before him a long hall with pillars.
Just
to the left of the door were a German officer al nd a
middle-aged WC oman, sitting quietly over a table, with an
oil-lamp between them.
The screaming had ceased, at nd
there was only gentle sobbing now, in the darkness far
beyond the table.
"What is the matter with her?" Brandon asked
Chen - - :


them.
The SS officer shrugged, a nd Brandon turned to
the middle-aged woman: "Are you German?" She nodded and
told him that the other woman was frightened.
"Why frightened?"
He was suspicious.
He glanced about the grea t
empty hall al nd stood still, listening for the voices of
other men who might be there.
"She is Italian," the woman at the table told
him.
"She is very excitable, a nd she has been calling
out for her husba nd "
Brandon walked towards the darkness and spoke
to the woman in Italian.
She was lying on a camp-bed.
He told her to get up and bring her blankets. He
went back to the table and looked sternyl from the officer
to the German woman while he waited.
He was aware of
being mocked, but of this he could not be sure.
"I believe some one has been trying to interfere
with her, #l he - said.
But the officer at the table shook
his head, pouting with too much solemnity.
Then the
Italian woman came out of the darkness towards the table,
shaking and sobbing, her hair falling in shingng, wet
strands about her cheeks.
She whimpered that she was
all alone, that she was not one of the enemy, that she
was Italian and therefore free, that she was frightened
by so many soldiers.
"My husband is a doctor," she told him.


"Where is he?"
"In the south, I believe."
"Then why are you here?"
"I was in Austria."
Brandon looked into her eyes and at her wet,
rather sallow face, and he thought: An officer's whore.
But this may not have been the case.
It may have been
that her husband was a military doctor attached to one
of the SS battalions, a nd that he had managed to escape
during the first days of the capituaation.
The Germa n couple watched them go out of the
door in silence.
They simply leaned on the table,
wa tching them, and it seemed to Brandon that there was
a slight smile on the officer's face.
He took her to the guardroom and showed her the
closet which had been occupied the week before by the
Hungarian girl.
He turned back to his own soldiers,
unable to smile, and told them that they were not to touch
her, that they were not to go near the room.
He was
aware of conspiracies in the dark places of this prison-
camp, of murder in the promiscuous silence.
His eyes
accused his soldiers: rapists.
But only he stood wrapt
in doubt.
They were simply sentries on night-duty at a
prison-camp, and that was how they returned his accusing gaze
He left the guardroom heavy with suspicion.
The
War had fallen apart.
He was meaningless.
There must
be logs to float by.
Everything was lost.
In this


camp he realised his freedom.
He was under no further
obligation.
Everything was.before him to choose freely.
Have you honour? But nothing is encumbent upon you.
Do you talk of duty, honour, obligation?
Do you dress
yourselves with these elegant fancies from the past?
only
Nurse y our honour, if you will.
But/ if vot you a will. 1 a
He went stumbling from the guardroom with the
quiet eyes of his men upon him, and he knew now that he
was alone.
It came like the word of God. The War
was over.
I am virtuous, if I will it.
I am clean, if
I will it.
So much confusion thrust upon him a will.
All around the search-shed the ground was
covered with bank-notes. A small quadrar ngle was
covered from end to end with them, in some places a
foot deep.
There were millions upon millions of Mark
notes, and sometimes a wind caught them a nd whirled them
One kicked one's way through them as through profuse
autumn leaves.
The first news was that these Germa an
notes were KEN valueless, and all prisoners were stripped
of them.
There were packs of new notes which amounted
to fortunes, still in their rubber bands.
Late one morning Brandon passed this quatrangle
and saw a German soldier bending down and turning the notes
over, alone, dreaming the fortunes he might have had.
Brandon shouted at him furiously. But the soldier only
turned and growled something back at him.
He could not
leave these notes, a nd he continued to bend down, with


an extraord linary determined look. Brandon ran up to
him and brought his stick down over his shoulders, a nd
only then did the man begin to move away. Brandon was
exhausted a nd sick.
Every gesture he made was empty
of meaning.
He was not fit to be a creature of peace.
He would stand before the SS officers in the
gaard-room a nd again a nd again, as each new battalion
came in, he would turn to the interpreter at his side
and say: "Tell them I am about to address them as
gentlemen.
We do not wish to search them personally,
but they are bound by their honour to give up their
binoculars, their fire-arms, their ammunition, their
maj ps, their compasses, and any military documents they
may have.
Any ommission will be discovered sooner or
later." They would look at him with agreeing smiles.
Soem of them were tall, flushed, healthy, blonde young
men, like keen animals. Brandon spoke his speech with
a. fathomless apathy, knowing that they recognised in him
a fellow-Aryan. He listened to his own word 'honour'
as if he were a foreigner to it, mocking himself gladly.
One or two of the officers came into the camp
bleeding and bandaged.
They complained to him like
outraged gentlemen that they had been stoned by members
of the Jewish Brigade on the way down from Austria, and
feared for their fellow-officers.
They claimed that
this was illegal conduct.
Brandon gazed at their
wounds with sympathy, than changed, withdrawing his


sympathy by an intellectual decision.
Standing in front
of them, he underwent a kind of hot giddiness. He
turned to the interpreter and said: "Tell them I hope
it won't happen again, but that t they are lucky not to
be massacred for what they have meted out spats to the
Jews." But these were only the words of a scholar, al nd
he turned his back, disgusted that he should be robbed
of his freedom.
He called aside one of the y ounger officers,
and took him to the table, out of earshot to the rest.
He looked about him to see whether his own soldiers
were listening.
The German had blue eyes, and he looked
into Brandon's face closely, with an intimacy which was
almost sexual.
"You have a good camera there," Brandon told him.
It was hanging round the German's neck in a leather case.
"I am going to be honest with you.
I could take that
camera from you by force, and it would be confiscated like
all the others. But first I do not like to take things
by force, a nd secondly I would like to have that camera
myself.
Therefore I am going to ask you to make me a
gift of it.
If you refuse, I shall see that it remains
in your possession."
The officer smiled.
The look he gave Brandon
was full of encouragement.
Slowly he lifted the camera-
strap over his head and then, making of it a little
ceremony of blessing, hung it round Brandon's neck.
"This is because I like your ma inner," he sa id.


"Have you given up everything else?"
"Of course," 1I the German replied, then walked
back to where the others stood.
Yes, honour appealed to Brandon.
The word
itself had an infallible music for him.
He wished
always to be honourable.
For himself, alone. There
could be no other honour. Honour of your country, of
your church, of your family, of your class, I these are
5 for the weak.
Mpmmamaweayanentorammpwnsarapnssn
Even God is for one man alone. We are all ina great
solitude.
The following day, sta nding near the table where
all the surrendered articles were laid, he heard some
one click his heels behind him.
He turned and saw a
private of one of the SS battalions standing to attention,
hatless.
He had a thick map-case under his arm. Brandon
raised his eyebrows at him, truculently, a nd the soldier
told him in broken English tha t he was the officer's
servant.
"Which officer?"
The soldier mentioned the word 'camera', and
Brandon realised at once.
He watched the soldier open
the map-case and take out a pile of intelligence-naps
for Italy and Austria.
"He forgets these."
Brandon looked into the boy's eyes, pouting:
"Borgets them?"


Then he smiled and said, "Thank you." He laid
the maps down with the others. Perhaps it was true:
that the officer had found these ma ps by accident, in
a trunk which had not been opened in the huryy of the
first search.
Brandon was restless with suspicions.
Only in battle, unshaven, his boots muddy a nd
his clothes soiled, did he find in himself a soldier.
Only then was he at ease.
Only then were his orders
direct, like a sudden irresistible prohphesy. For only
then was the brain laid asleep.
During one of the hot afternoons a crowd
gathered round two women in a corner of the huge
quadrangle.
These women were Russian, and had been
screaming hysterically.
Brandon stood wat tching them
from a distance, at the back of the crowd.
He looked
about him and then. rec ognised one of the German women
standing close by.
He called her over.
She was the
middle-aged woman who had been sitting over a table with
the SS officer, when he had come to fetch the Italian.
There.was a lechery in her eyes which appealed to him.
She seemed calm, and quite unafraid of him.
"What is the matter with these women?" he
asked.
He suspected her of doing quiet mischéef in
this area of the prison-camp, for no reason that he
knew.
She told him that the. women had been told they
would be sent back to Russia.
They had come away
from Russia with German troops, and they were terrified


because they were traitors and might be shot. Brandon
looked a t the woman as she spoke, at her hard and lined
skin, and cracked lips.
He listened to ner words
suspiciously, for this was the second time he had found
her close to hysterical women.
The camp was strange.
There was dust everywhere.
They were standing in the
hot S unlight.
Troops were jumping out of the lorries
behind them, in hundreds.
There were cries of anger,
orders and whistling.
The Russian women were looking
about them, still in tears, talking very quickly to al ny
one, though not a person there understood them.
Brandon
saw mockery al nd conspiracy in everything.
"What was your work?" he asked her.
She replied to him clearly a nd slowly, staring
into his eyes and yet beyond them. Brandon caught most
of the German words and understood her to say that she had
been a secretary of the Gestapo.
But he was not sure
about this.
He thought of her as a cruel person al nd
liked to look into her face, though she was not ha ndsome.
She leaned against the wall with her hands in the pockets
of her jacket, very much at ease.
It was he who prolonged
the conversation, while she was calm a nd negligent, lookig
about her.
Suddenly she would break off and shout some-
thing to one of the passing soldiers OD officers.
It was
as if Brandon was a visitor among them, a polite visitor
on sufferance. He felt his good manners to be rdiculous
here.
Brandon never saw her after this.
She must hage


left the camp the following day. Rarely a id the prisoners
stay more than two days.
Sometimes people seemed to dis-
appear, swallowed up in the out-going convoys. He had
told both the Hungarian girl al nd the Italian woman not to
leave the camp, but both of them had gone by dawn the
following day. Brandon. would have taken them away to the
civilian camp on theoother side of the cittiod Perhaps they
Xcould notbear to leave the soldiers.
He / umped up quickly
one. morning, soon after five o'clock, happy to be taking the
Hungarian girl to the other' camp, but when he pushed open the
door in the gaurd-room he found only the mattress and folded
blankets.
He turned to his own soldiers to ask them where
she had gone, but they were the new day-guard and so would
know nothing.
He searched the women's quarters, but they
were empty.
Perhaps she had walked into the city during the
night, and become Italian.
One day he drove to a civilian camp on the north
side of the city where there were people of everypace, both
middle-class people and peasants.
In one of the rooms
there were great piles of clothing which had been sent from
England at nd kustria America. An idea had occurred to him.
He decided to give some of the clothing to the Russian
children in his own camp; these children had arrived in
the baggage trains of the SS battalions. Brandon drove them
civilian
to the WWAM camp a nd chose several pairs of shoes for them.
He did this in order to see the look of gratitude in the eyes
of the mothers.


The children stared at him in terror as he
went through the antics of compassion.
They stood close
together, never daring to open their mouths, watching
Brandon's smiled as if they were a performance. Their
faces made no reply; they were wrapt in contempla ation.
They knew the truth.
Children go quickly to the truth because they
are without possessions.
They discard everything in
the fullness of time.
The girls standing before him
suidy were in rags, and. they were pale.
They were desTpiute.
But yet they were bereft of nothing.
He went into one of the offices to consult the
Canadian in charge of the clothing.
This man was short,
plump al nd jovial. He greeted Brandon as if he were an
old friend, and his ideal was clearly to be a personality.
Brandon asked him whether some of the clothing could not
be sent to the prison-camp, since there were so. many
women and children arriving in the baggage-trains.
"Take just what you like," the Canadian said,
a nd Brandon agreed to send a lorry the. following day.
The Canadian advised him to take something for himself.
He told him that some of the clothing was too good for
displaced people, and that t he had already sent his own
wife a beautiful pair of shoes and a har ndbag. Brandon
at once became furious, but said nothing.
The plan
formed itself in his mind of betray ing this jovial
fellow.


He drove back to the prison-camp very fast, so
that the children behind him gasped.
The next day they
had disappeared from the camp, and Brandon forgot about the
clothing.
Instead, he went to a shop in Udine a nd bought
some film, and began to interest himself in photography.
He would sit on his bed in the camp opening and shutting
his camera, and touching its tiny silver levers.
He remembered the drive leading up toa house
with broken steps which stood dead and still amid long
grass.
It had been a kind of lovely home-coming after
the terrible desertion of the arterial road where all the
houses had stood empty and silent, and where they had lain
in a ditch under a heavy bombardment.
The house was behind trees, stately and tall.
It received them gracefully, like an ancient house.
was mutilated but it put out an old gentleman's hand to
the brown-faced murderers. The mosaic floor was cracked,
there were chipped urns on either side of the stone steps,
there was a torn garden and ha nging shutters.
He went up to one of the top attic rooms and looked
carefully out of the small window, keeping to the shadows.
There was a white cottage - only about one hundred yards
forward where the Enemy were still thought to be. It was
at theend of wonderful soft green parkland.


Downstairs he saw the Major with a young soldier,
a boy of nineteen or so. They were standing by one of the
shuttered windows. Brandon remained in the doorway and
he saw that the boy was weeping.
His head was bowed and
he was crying to the Major that he could not. 80 up in this
attack.
The Major told him that it was a simple attack.
He laughed and asked him what he was afraid of. The boy
said, "I am not used to it, sir," for the other fighting
earlier that t morning had frightened him.
The Major put his arm round his neck, chucked him
under the chin, hugged him close and sai id, "Come on, son,
come on." But the child wept in the Major's arms, and
replied that he would be killed, he knew he would. He
looked up and asked quietly: "Can I stay behind with
Company Headquerters until I feel better?" But the Major
shook his head.
Suppose all my hoys asked to stay behind
with Headquarters, he said, who would there be to do the
fighting for me? Look at the corporal there, I is he
afraid?
The child reluctantly glanced sideways at t the
corporal through his tears. The corporal was all the time
standing close by him, a Londoner, holding himself stiffly
as he watched the child with calm eyes, seeming to congra at-
ulate himself.


The Major talked into the boy's ear like a man
with his wife, and told him that the corporal would stay
with him.
"Won't you, corporal l?" I
The corporal nodded.
You'll be all right when
you are out there with the others, the Major told him.
My boys never let me down. Iam not going to let them
say that anybody in "A" Company let them.down.
And at last, wiping his eyes, the child went out
with the corporal into the naked open air, a nd the white
cottage was waiting.
The child was killed.
Someone told Brandon that
he had been found by a hedge without a mark on his body.
It was said that two patrolling Germans had suddenly looked
over this hedge, they had shouted and run away, and then the
child was found dead.
They believed he died/of terror.
The vision was too great for this child.