Everyone Brave Is Forgiven(75)
On the fourth day, all was quiet. The missing man was found in a village inland, injured only by drink.
Alistair tried to remember Tom’s face. Already he could hardly remember it differently from Duggan’s. He couldn’t catch a glimpse of their old life together through the low gray ceiling of memory. Instead he saw Mary—her copper hair, her insubordinate grin—and he was sick at himself.
He lay in his cot, staring at his gray metal table with its lit candle. Its small flame shivered beside the jar of Tom’s blackberry jam. It reflected onto the gray writing paper with a bloody glow.
At dawn on the fifth day he went up to take the report of the off-going watch. He smoked his pipe while he looked out over the sea. The breeze was fresh on his face. He watched the red sun edge up into a vast pink sky, but it was a long time before he understood that the cloud was gone. He creased his eyes against the light. Already the horizon was starting to blue. It was a perfect bomber’s sky. He tapped out his pipe on the stone, ran his fingers through his hair, and felt the familiar battle lurch in his stomach.
It was six, and the fresh watch was coming up from the fort. He hurried to get them installed but they were not even halfway ready before the fort’s electric bells started up. A minute later, as men rushed to their stations and the fort erupted into action, the sirens began to wail across Valletta and all around the harbor.
The Germans attacked, so much harder than the Italians. The Germans were inflexible in their fury, deploying it in a prearranged configuration. For the next week there was not one hour when an attack did not come from their dive-bombers or their high-altitude rigs. When it finally ended, on the eighth night, the men who had not been pierced by shrapnel or mutilated by their own guns’ recoil were so deafened by a million bangs that their ears bled through the yellow dust that clogged them. They were so washed through with amphetamines and smoke that they saw visions as they collapsed—officers and men alike—into piles around their guns. Like children kept awake beyond endurance they slept where they fell, mouths agape, faces as still as death. All night the fine yellow dust, which had risen a mile high in the bombing, drifted down on the men in a shroud.
—
When Alistair woke, the only sound was the keening of seagulls. He rubbed dust out of his eyes until he could see. Under a sky that was finally gray again, the harbor was black with oil and foul with sewage. Every pipe in the port must have cracked. The air could have stripped paint from the inside of a man’s chest.
He stumbled up the stone stairs to the signals room, but when he picked up the field telephone, the line was dead. After eight days and nights of dive-bombing, nothing was connected to anything anymore. The garrison was a join-the-dots puzzle, and Alistair was not sure he wanted to know what it looked like when it was completed.
He was the only soul awake. He roused his subaltern—if he’d had to shake him any harder, Alistair would have been doing the enemy’s work. He held the man by the shoulders, gave him a stern look and said, “Coffee.”
Briggs looked back at him from a distance measured in miles.
“Coffee,” said Alistair again. “Koh. Fee.”
“Yes. Please.”
“No, Briggs. You make coffee. For officers.”
His subaltern gave a clumsy salute and stumbled off to bang pots. Alistair went along the guns until he found Simonson. He shook him awake.
“What is it, you contemptible man?”
“I came to see if you were alive.”
“Well I’m not, so clear off.’
Alistair said, “I thought you might want to know that the war is over.”
Simonson sat up in the dust and blinked twice. “God. Jesus. Really?”
“Yes,” said Alistair. “Telegram just in from London. Immediate cessation of hostilities. Troopships home for us within the week.”
Simonson closed his eyes and gave an ecstatic sigh. “Oh, thank Christ.”
Alistair gave him twenty seconds and then said, “No, not really.”
Simonson opened one bloodshot eye. “You vile, vile bastard.”
“Returning the favor for your help with my speech last week. Coffee?”
“I hope it poisons you.”
“My man Briggs is brewing some. Come over to my room. And then we must rouse the men and get ourselves operational again.”
Simonson eyed the clouds. “The Germans won’t come today.”
“They won’t need to, if we let this rot set in. Everyone’s still snoring.”
Simonson pulled his jacket over his head. “It worked for the French.”
Alistair laughed. “I thought you wanted to make major.”
“Yes, so oiks like you can do the drudgery.”
“Did I mention,” said Alistair, “that our friendship means the world to me?”
Simonson only groaned.
“But it does, you know. I’m mildly glad every time you’re not killed.”
Simonson opened half an eye and leered at him. ‘At last. Meet me in the showers at midnight, and for god’s sake not a word to Matron.”
For the rest of the day the two captains saw to the men of their battery. There were the injured to be evacuated to the hospitals farther inland, the badly battle-frayed to be rotated out for R&R, and the battery’s eight guns to be consolidated down to six fully manned units. Everything needed repairing, cleaning and oiling. Each of the 3.7s needed releveling on its jacks, every sight needed recalibrating, and every signal line had to be taken up, checked for breaks and relaid.