Above them, the drying stone was turning a pale grey in the weak sunlight.
It was almost white twenty minutes later when they began their advance across the meadow. Fifty yards from the bank a murderous fire had greeted them from the Americans concealed among the trees along the opposite shore. Pearson saw Tulloch shot down into the waterlogged grass. He shouted to Corporal Benson to take cover. As he lay in a shallow crater the white rectangle of the memorial was visible through the trees behind him, clear now as it would not have been that morning. In his last moments he wondered if the cleaning of the memorial had been a signal, which the watching Americans had rightly interpreted, and if the captain had deliberately taken advantage of him.
Mortar shells fell in the damp grass around him. Pearson stood up, beckoning to the young lieutenant to follow him, and ran forward to the wreck of the personnel carrier. Ten steps later he was shot down into the oil-stained water.
A Place and a Time to Die
Shotguns levelled, the two men waited on the river bank. From the shore facing them, four hundred yards across the bright spring water, the beating of gongs and drums sounded through the empty air, echoing off the metal roofs of the abandoned town. Fire-crackers burst over the trees along the shore, the mushy pink explosions lighting up the gun-barrels of tanks and armoured cars.
All morning the ill-matched couple making this last stand together — Mannock, the retired and now slightly eccentric police chief, and his reluctant deputy, Forbis, a thyroidal used-car salesman — had watched the mounting activity on the opposite shore. Soon after eight o’clock when Mannock drove through the deserted town, the first arrivals had already appeared on the scene. Four scout-cars carrying a platoon of soldiers in padded brown uniforms were parked on the bank. The officer scanned Mannock through his binoculars for a few seconds and then began to inspect the town. An hour later an advance battalion of field engineers took up their position by the dynamited railway bridge. By noon an entire division had arrived. A dusty caravan of self-propelled guns, tanks on trailers, and mobile fieldkitchens in commandeered buses rolled across the farmland and pulled to a halt by the bank. After them came an army of infantry and camp-followers, pulling wooden carts and beating gongs.
Earlier that morning Mannock had climbed the water-tower at his brother’s farm. The landscape below the mountains ten miles away was criss-crossed with dozens of motorized columns. Most of them were moving in an apparently random way, half the time blinded by their own dust. Like an advancing horde of ants, they spilled across the abandoned farmland, completely ignoring an intact town and then homing on an empty grain silo.
By now, though, in the early afternoon, all sections of this huge field army had reached the river. Any hopes Mannock had kept alive that they might turn and disappear towards the horizon finally faded. When exactly they would choose to make their crossing was hard to gauge. As he and Forbis watched, a series of enormous camps was being set up. Lines of collapsible huts marked out barrack squares, squads of soldiers marched up and down in the dust, rival groups of civilians presumably political cadres — drilled and shouted slogans. The smoke from hundreds of mess fires rose into the air, blocking off Mannock’s view of the blue-chipped mountains that had formed the backdrop to the river valley during the twenty years he had spent there. Rows of camouflaged trucks and amphibious vehicles waited along the shore, but there was still no sign of any crossing. Tank-crews wandered about like bored gangs on a boardwalk, letting off fire-crackers and flying paper kites with slogans painted on their tails. Everywhere the beating of gongs and drums went on without pause.
‘There must be a million of them there — for God’s sake, they’ll never get over!’ Almost disappointed, Forbis lowered his shotgun on to the sandbag emplacement.
‘Nothing’s stopped them yet,’ Mannock commented. He pointed to a convoy of trucks dragging a flotilla of wooden landing-craft across a crowded parade ground. ‘Sampans — they look crazy, don’t they?’
While Forbis glared across the river Mannock looked down at him, with difficulty controlling the distaste he felt whenever he realized exactly whom he had chosen as his last companion. A thin, bitter-mouthed man with over-large eyes, Forbis was one of that small group of people Mannock had instinctively disliked throughout his entire life. The past few days in the empty town had confirmed all his prejudices. The previous afternoon, after an hour spent driving around the town and shooting at the stray dogs, Forbis had taken Mannock back to his house. There he had proudly shown off his huge home arsenal. Bored by this display of weapons, Mannock wandered into the dining room, only to find the table laid out like an altar with dozens of far-right magazines, pathological hate-sheets and heaven knew what other nonsense printed on crude home presses.
What had made Forbis stay behind in the deserted town after everyone else had gone? What made him want to defend these few streets where he had never been particularly liked or successful? Some wild gene or strange streak of patriotism — perhaps not all that far removed from his own brand of cantankerousness. Mannock looked across the water as a huge catherine-wheel revolved into the air above a line of tanks parked along the shore, its puffy pink smoke turning the encampment into an enormous carnival. For a moment a surge of hope went through Mannock that this vast army might be driven by wholly peaceful motives, that it might suddenly decide to withdraw, load its tanks on to their trailers and move off to the western horizon.
As the light faded he knew all too well that there was no chance of this happening. Generations of hate and resentment had driven these people in their unbroken advance across the world, and here in this town in a river valley they would take a small part of their revenge.
Why had he himself decided to stay behind, waiting here behind these few useless sandbags with a shotgun in his hands? Mannock glanced back at the water-tower that marked the north-west perimeter of his brother’s farm, for years the chief landmark of the town. Until the last moment he had planned to leave with the rest of the family, helping to gas up the cars and turn loose what was left of the livestock. Closing his own house down for the last time, he decided to wait until the dust subsided when the great exodus began. He drove down to the river, and stood under the broken span of the bridge which the army engineers had dynamited before they retreated.
Walking southwards along the shore, he had nearly been shot by Forbis. The salesman had dug himself into a homemade roadblock above the bank, and was waiting there all alone for his first sight of the enemy. Mannock tried to persuade him to leave with the others, but as he remonstrated with Forbis he realized that he was talking to himself, and why he sounded so unconvincing.
For the next days, as the distant dust-clouds moved towards them from the horizon, turning the small valley into an apocalyptic landscape, the two men formed an uneasy alliance. Forbis looked on impatiently as Mannock moved through the empty streets, closing the doors of the abandoned cars and parking them along the kerb, shutting the windows of the houses and putting lids on the rubbish bins. With his crazy logic Forbis really believed that the two of them could hold up the advance of this immense army.
‘Maybe for only a few hours,’ he assured Mannock with quiet pride. ‘But that’ll be enough.’
A few seconds, more likely, Mannock reflected. There would be a brief bloody flurry somewhere; one burst from a machine-pistol and quietus in the dust ‘Mannock—!’ Forbis pointed to the shore fifty yards from the bridge embankment. A heavy metal skiff was being manhandled into the water by a labour-platoon. A tank backed along the shore behind it, test-rotating its turret. Exhaust belched from its diesel.