Before leaving the heights, they gathered fuel and crushed it almost solid, making a high mound of it. Then rocks were piled on top till the wood was covered in the shape of a huge beehive. They left a small space at the bottom in which to place a slip of paper and so ignite the inside bracken. Frank struck the match; it would burn all night and much of the next day, smoke escaping through the interstices of the loosely joined stones, a smouldering beacon to draw French troops to a vacated area.
They went down unobserved. In the valley there was no moon. They heard the first explosions of the night, saw humps of blue light opening and closing further down the range, several kilometres away. ‘They’re approaching this cutting so as to close it by morning,’ Mokhtar said. But unfortunately for them as an army the hob-nailed boots of their guns and mortars were heard from far away, giving the moonstruck phantoms or false reports time to disappear. An idle stone rolling by chance down the slope and gathering a few more on the way was enough to establish an ambush or night attack for which the FLN irregulars were both dreaded and famous. Frank couldn’t understand why the French conscripts put up with this sort of war, though there’d been plenty of desertions in the Kabylie to have the army worried. Men and sometimes officers had come over to the FLN with arms, information, and even a will to help in the fight. Mokhtar had boasted about it one night in a rare mood of speech. ‘As it is,’ he speculated, ‘they’ll waste enough bombs on that smoke we left behind to raise Paris, and send at least a company to clear the emptiness around it.’
They climbed up another flank of a thousand metres. When the sky was blue but the sun had not yet risen, a great shadow lay to the north, as if from clouds when the sun was overhead. It was the sparsely-treed area covering the hills near Aflou which, in the dim light, seemed cooler and more thickly forested than it was, a good place of refuge.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Shelley said.
‘You’re wrong. It’s so ideal it’s a death-trap.’
‘You say and do the right things. What does it feel like, coming from the purest bastard race on earth?’
‘It’ll be light soon,’ Frank said. ‘A big fat sun scorching our noses and elbows for the next fifteen hours.’
‘It’s not that,’ Shelley said, ‘but it’s this pain I don’t like. Thirty-six hours I’ve felt it, which feels like all my life. I reckon we’re all full of pain ready to be tapped. Just needs a bullet or a knife to spark it off.’
Frank spat out a mouthful of goatwater. ‘What have you got against pure bastard races like the English? Sometimes, I think you’re just one of those white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans fighting for the freedom of subject races — as long as they’re reasonably pure. I don’t understand it, you White Anglo-Saxon Freedom Fighter. You’re a WASFF — a WASP with no roof to his mouth. I’ve read all that Jack London-Hemingway crap, and spewed over it.’
‘So have I. Leave me to it and let’s get on.’ He looked back at him, but could find no confirmation in Frank’s straight-looking eyes that he was dying. Frank knew he couldn’t, would not give him this leap of satisfaction, found it better to control the outward expressions of his heart when he did not want what his eyes saw to overwhelm it.
A track ran along the dry, flat bed of the valley. While holes were dug among the rocks on either side, the newspaper-seller pulled down a bush and smoothed all trace of them out of the dust, then put the finishing touches to their burials. They lay under the rocks, loopholes opening towards the track, sweating, choking, killing scorpions that came in dozens to disturb their agony. The youth found a hiding-place, and by full daylight this part of the valley seemed as deserted and empty as the rest.
His mind reached its limits. They had nailed up the coffin but he stayed alive. Childhood and adolescent horrors came back, as they should at a time like this, otherwise how could you trust them? And how could they be of any use to you? They can’t all have been for nothing, meaningless, those parts you suffered and those you loved. Every man was a coffin until his rifle or machine-gun joined the chorus of others, the new gunchurch of the revolution spitting out their cleansing hymns. He counted six helicopters, man-made tin-plated dragonflies spluttering a hundred feet up, prayed for one to land before their guns so that they could kill the dozen troops on board before they began to disembark, run out like spiders and pull it to pieces. Mokhtar had drawn diagrams showing petrol-tanks and vital parts, and Frank was as familiar with ways of destroying helicopters as he had one time known how to preserve and lengthen the life of his own motor-car when he worked in the factory. He also found it necessary to believe and ponder on the fact that the art of camouflage meant not only to melt against the sheltering land, but equally to withdraw your consciousness out of the atmosphere. If an approaching patrol has no visual hope of seeing you, some member of it will, nevertheless, sense that you are there. Your psyche is as tangible as your body, your ego as plain as iron, and unless you can master these, then the most skilful disguise can betray you. Perfect camouflage is an exercise in self-negation, an utter wiping-out of yourself, a withdrawl into non-existence, so that you can’t in any way be alive to others. The only light to be kept alert is that of the eyes, so that when the ring of your ambush is perfect, the united trigger can be drawn with unexpected and shattering effect. From a state of sublime withdrawal you must leap to a state of active egotism, which means death to all who face the ray of it. Thus the span of spiritual experience is in this way wider, before the final limit chops you off in death.
They waited five hours. Shelley did not know how long he was groaning. Frank was awake, staring at the road and willing a car, lorry, tank to come along, anything with engine and wheels on which they could take Shelley to a doctor. He’d seen it before, his grandfather die, and a man at work die after being struck by falling girders, remembered the look of utter and painful consciousness on both before the breathing diminished and stopped. He’d imagined that people died quickly, or went slowly but surely under the sleep of drugs, but this state of know-all consciousness both of the world they loved and the blackness they were going to was the most disturbing thing he’d seen, and signs of it were already in Shelley’s eyes. Mokhtar knew it too, and for once the demands of war and survival coincided with the need for mercy towards one of their wounded. Frank had under-estimated Mokhtar, had kept his eyes open and gun ready in case he should think to make a quick finish of Shelley if he dragged too much on their progress. But Shelley had shown such great and undeniable courage by keeping up with their race, that the Lion of Judah had decided on the way of compassion.
They felt a signal, and heard the engine. The young man would make no sign if more than one vehicle appeared, for they could not take on a convoy. Handbills still flapping from his pocket, he ran into the middle of the track, waving his arms. It was a desert jeep, with three soldiers in it. The driver dropped gear, its noise change roaring along the flanks of the valley, shouting at him to get out of the way. He stood firm, flapping his papers with an idiot grin of welcome. The driver braked and skidded, and the man was knocked slightly as he stepped aside and fell flat into the dust to save his life, which was immediately extinguished by the only burst of bullets that one soldier of the jeep had time and inclination to fire. Mokhtar, Idris, Mohamed and Frank, two on either side, pressed their triggers at the same time.
They dragged the bodies behind the rocks, and swept dust over the tracks and pools of blood. Frank put on a soldier’s jacket and cap, and did the same for Shelley. He turned from the dead young men, his heart bursting. He was familiar with the dead, but the more he saw, the more depressed he was. He supposed the war would go on until one side or another lost heart, felt the shadow only of so much useless death, instead of pure energy-giving rage at the stony manifestation of another row of corpses. Slogans, ideals and beliefs weakened when you pulled the warm bodies towards the holes you had lain in while waiting to kill them, with their tortured human faces and limbs still jumping. He took all field-dressings from their packs before heaping on the stones.