I could see Grenade’s small black eyeballs and long greasy hair, and a dour smileless face which lit up once per year. Before the war he was a radio ham and ran a little radio repair shop in Joigny, a Michelinstarred town a hundred kilometres south of Paris.
Grenade was a resistance worker in 1940 when to work actively against the Germans was unfashionable enough to make being turned in to them by a dazed patriot a real risk. Grenade was a de Gaullist when everyone else in France was rooting for Marshal Pétain. He was a Gaullist when even the Allied Governments were doing deals with Darlan and Giroud helping them persecute anti-Axis agents and leaving de Gaulle to find out about the North African invasion from his newspaper. Grenade never faltered and never altered.
He organized a train-wrecking group until it was penetrated and the survivors fled. Grenade drifted north to Paris without friends, work or papers. In Paris he met a couple of unemployed printers. By lavish promises of money he got access to a printing machine, and they began printing false passes and papers.
To run counter to law and order was patriotic and their patriotism was in no way muted by the fact that they made a great deal of money. Some of it went into political and anti-German organizations, and without Grenade’s profits from printing food, clothes and petrol coupons, one of the escape chains to the Pyrenees would have collapsed before it finally did. Over thirty Allied airmen passed through Grenade’s flat and that was only an overflow accommodation. After the war such groups tended to hang on to each other and adapt to the new circumstances. They made papers and passports for ‘displaced persons’ who were rich enough to buy, and at one time even forged Camel cigarette packets.
In June, 1947 Grenade had been mixed up with the Perrier gang who worked from the Acceuil Café on the Left Bank, and had completed a lucrative line in hundred-dollar American Express travellers’ cheques. Apart from the red serial numbers being a little dark, and the watermarks being printed instead of impressed, they were pretty good. They fetched about a third of their value on the blackmarket, and eagerly at that. Some were detected going across the border in diplomatic bags. Grenade got into the story because he had found a method of microfilming certain diplomatic mail. When under pressure from American Express the French police staked out the courier routes, they found Grenade with 50,000 dollars of forged signed travellers’ cheques. French Intelligence for whom Grenade had worked off and on since the first radio contacts in September, 1940 were now unable to extricate him since there were political involvements. I’d known Grenade about two years and liked him. With little or no risk to me I decided he could be of use as a close friend. I knew that a contact of mine with access to US Army documents had a brother who’d come through the Paris escape route in 1944. I let him think it was Grenade’s. Although there was no way of telling for sure, I like to think that it was, too. He wrote up a document, one showing Grenade as a US Army agent investigating forgeries of US military scrip money and inserted it into the files. I then leaked the information to one of the American Express detectives, and to the 2nd secretary of a senator. At the first opportunity after charges against Grenade were dropped, the forged papers were destroyed. Now Grenade was returning the favour.
Scene III. The Same. A street near the Capitol. Enter ARTEMIDORUS reading a paper.
Caesar, beware of Brutus; take heed of Cassius; come not near Casca; have an eye to Cinna; trust not Trebonius; mark well Metellus Cimber; Decius Brutus loves thee not; thou hast wronged Caius Ligarius. There is but one mind in all these men, and it is bent against Caesar. If thou beest not immortal, look about you: security gives way to conspiracy. The mighty gods defend thee! Thy lover, ARTEMIDORUS.
Even from a normal-style H-bomb there is a bombardment of neutrons, but the fireball generally eats them up before they get anywhere. Now a neutron bomb uses a pure-fission type of reaction, and has no fission-trigger. It gets its ‘bounce’ from a temperature of 1,000,000 degrees centigrade, generated externally. The explosion releases neutrons which don’t have an electrical charge (therefore atoms don’t repel them) and which travel far and fast until the air absorbs them.
These neutrons penetrate buildings, water, etc., but destroy only living matter, leaving machinery in perfect working order. The Tokwe explosion was of a small tactical-size neutron weapon, although, for security reasons, it was isolated within the pretence of a huge H-explosion. Neutron bombs do not use expensive or rare ingredients and therefore information about them is as eagerly sought by the smaller powers as by the larger.
I looked at the sepia photo of Reg Cavendish — Charlie’s son — who looked down from the top of the writing cabinet in one of those boat-shaped forage caps that we had all looked so silly in. I remember the day Reg got that hat. He was a tall gangling boy with ginger hair that he held lowered in sympathy with the more stunted members of the human race. He was the brightest pupil in the sixth form but was never made a prefect because, ‘…there’s such a thing as being too gentle Cavendish and it’s called slackness.’ Reg just smiled a small smile, he wasn’t a great talker. That’s why we were such inseparable friends I suppose — I was the most vociferous boy there — when Reg was with me he wasn’t required to say much.
Reg was most at home in the country, he knew about cumulonimbus and isobars and could tell a Song Thrush from a Fieldfare at fifty yards, which is pretty impressive if you can’t tell a Barn-Owl from a Buzzard. Reg knew about moles and foxes and Latin names of wild flowers. Reg came to terms with life in the army, he quietly did everything better than anyone else. Reg’s style of leadership was to be out in front where things were hardest and most dangerous and he used firepower with the same economy that he used words. Reg didn’t have to convert to the idea of airborne warfare, he’d never known any other kind. Dropping out of an aeroplane as an overture to battle was as natural as pipeclayed breeches, burnished firelocks and heel-balled cartridge boxes had been to other soldiers in other times.
He became Regimental Sergeant Major Cavendish; one of the youngest RSMs in the British Army during the Tunisian campaign when the parachute brigade was used as infantry. It was here he got the nickname ‘Springer’.
In the fighting around ‘Longstop’—the most costly of the whole campaign — Reg was in a 15-cwt lorry that lost its way while in convoy, went off the road and struck a mine. The German engineers had sown s-mines around the big ones. As the soldiers jumped down these leapt high in the air and exploded metal ball-bearings. The Afrika Korps put mortar fire amongst the flashes and screams as dawn came.
It’s hot in Tunisia even in May and the heights of Longstop Hill housed a thousand keen German eyes. The bangs and smack of grenade and mortar rolled across the slopes and so did the sweet smell of hot dead flesh. Big black sated flies hovered and waited for Von Arnim’s mortars to search them out and convert them to carrion. Men died all day. Some died very quickly, some took an infinite time and some slipped into impercipient dolour and came to a very private arrangement with death. Wince, writhe or ease a cramped foot, reach for a hard-tack biscuit, stifle blood, swat a dozen flies on your eyelid, touch the hot metal of your gun, these were things men did a finger-squeeze before they died. ‘We went to ground like mouldwarps,’ Reg said.
Slowly inch by inch it became night. A man moved but did not die. The shattered group dragged their desiccated bodies out of the moulds they had formed in the dirty sand and shuffled off, without saliva enough to spit. All the survivors had to do was walk back to their lines through a minefield. Only Reg and two lance-corporals made it. They got promotion and a 48-hour pass.