Machine-guns were set among the houses in case the plane came back. ‘They ain’t got an unofficial treaty any-more,’ Shelley said. ‘On jobs like this they send one plane, saying he unloaded his bombs because he didn’t have enough gas to carry him home. It was an accident. Two planes would be a deliberate raid, but there aren’t any accidents in a war like this. We’ll get them, though.’
Beyond the houses falling dust was turning the water grey. People lined it, dipping pots to bring comfort to the wounded. A child was led by with a crushed arm. They put up with this, he thought, didn’t lynch us for it, didn’t choke the lot of us. They tore with hands at a heap of bricks, and a young woman crawled out, naked to the waist, holding a baby. She slapped the face and its eyes opened. He expected her to smile, but she laid it on the ground and clawed at the rubble, pulling out an elaborate, dented teapot. Holding that and the baby, she ran screaming towards the water. ‘If that plane comes back,’ Shelley said, ‘we’ll be finished off, no matter how many machine-guns go at him.’
He opened the breach of his rifle and a cartridge jumped out. ‘I know why I’m here. I was asking questions a couple of hours ago, but I know one big answer to keep me going. I knew then, but I know more now. They can’t do this all the time and get away with it.’ He wiped the cartridge on his shirt, and slid it back, setting the safety-catch.
‘When a patrol is ambushed,’ Shelley said, ‘and somebody killed, they do this as a sort of punishment. It’s normal. Everything’s normal.’
‘I know,’ Frank said, but he felt responsible and melancholy. The trap closed around your neck, the bag over your head, and you had to battle a way out of it, get free by more skill and fighting, fire your gun at the crucial moment when all patience is eaten out of you in order to avenge this, and then the need for vengeance comes again on one side or the other, except that you, yourself, must keep on calling it war, war of liberation, for the victory of socialism, for justice, for freedom of the people. You worked with those at the bottom in order to be reborn, Bill Posters coming secretly into their country (Bill Posters who’d never allow himself to be prosecuted or persecuted), to fight for them and help them, but making them suffer the more he fought so that they would be with him and you right from whatever depths of themselves they had been able to keep a hold on. You put self-respect on their shoulders, and they staggered bloody and shattered under it, but did not throw it off.
A pall of dust and flies lifted above the rubble when bricks from the street were thrown on to it. To know is to love, he told himself. You don’t love until you know everybody, everything. It was cool, but they would bury the dead in the morning. The people had been persuaded to stay in the village in the belief that they would not be stricken again. The wounded were hidden in the cool of the houses, away from preparations for burial and the shrillness of the mourners. A man had been trained in France as a doctor, and with two women as nurses, he saved what he could. A few small planes in the public service could make this village fit to live in, but at the moment, there was nothing. He felt helpless, and would be glad to get out of it. Disinfectant, fertilisers, medicines, radio-sets, ropes, ladders, spades — to want this was nothing. Concealed in a camouflaged shelter, on the edge of the village and untouched in the raid, was a Peugeot station-wagon, fully primed and ready to go, in which a receiver-transmitter set was installed, loaded with food, water, medicines, Very pistols, guns and ammunition, in case the secret headquarters should need to move quickly, a possession that they tapped and looked on with pride, so that even in their terrible destitution, they were not without hope.
They walked north, close together, a quarter-moon giving out light. The riverbed was dry stones, loose and slippy under weights that seemed heavier and more onerous than yesterday, after the meal and daytime rest. He opened and closed: his hand, splitting burned flesh under the bandages, swinging his arm when the pain was too great to bear. Where do you come from, Dawley? I don’t know. Where do you? Nottingham, the same as you. But that’s the past, and the only good thing about the past is that it’s finished with. Why did you ask? Just to make sure. Where do you think we’re going? North. That’s down, or is it up? My hand’s giving me gippo. Forget it. The only way to do that is for you to shut your claptrap desert mouth. I can’t. I like talking. Where else in the wide world would you like to be now? On my own two feet, which means just here. I’d be a real two-timing split personality if I wanted to be other than where I was. That’s a fair Way of putting it. You’re going to get your head shot off. It’ll cure this hand then, like nothing else will. There are more important things to think about than death. That moon up there — will tell you that. Or ought to. It was never my idea to come all this way to let death worry me. You won’t say that when God puts in the boot. Drop dead, He wears sandals. Don’t get excited. I’m not. It’s always possible, isn’t it, that you are? So was being born. Just get back to your gammy hand. The same to you.
The oued ran roughly north, and Mokhtar had a large-scale map as well as the guide — which meant that serious planning had taken place. He picked out the Pole Star, almost overhead. The rattle of feet and gun-slings seemed to fill every crevice of the hills. The ululations of a hyena had followed them from the village. Its voice was of a deliberate luring melancholy, crying out for them to stop and wait, to take it with them wherever they were going instead of heartlessly leaving it to spend a Lifetime pitching its voice in competition with that of the continual wind which was bound to outlive it. They climbed a slope, zigzagging so as not to slip back, a groaning of collective heavy breath as they crawled to the crescent-shaped skyline of the col.
Across the plain, they saw an orange pinhead of fire. The horizon beyond was in darkness. He lay on the stones, plans winding like cold rivulets through his head. At such time, while waiting to move, expose oneself to bullets and flame, he lay as still as if already killed by them, except for the intense eyes trying to drag detail closer from the darkness or distance, flat and quiet and nevertheless expecting the world to open its arms in welcoming approval, lay as if all his senses were coming firmly and surely back at last after a long illness, the malady of the trek draining away and leaving him a clear smile at the cunning ideas of action pitted into the common ring. Fire would combust on the hillside and attract the patrol. Then, in utter stealth, making a half-circle towards the camp from which it had departed, they would attack those remaining there. When they had been finished off, they would meet the returning other half of the patrol coming back in haste to see what was the matter — and finish that off, also.
It seemed infallible and classic. Afterwards, they would retreat the way they had come, but veer south-east to avoid the village bombed over them in the afternoon. ‘They won’t spill out,’ said Shelley, ‘not for night fighting.’