A lot of people who had lived in Market Harborough had fled. A good many others, no doubt, were casualties. That did not mean the place was empty. Far from it: it bulged with refugees from the fighting farther south in the Midlands. Their tents and blankets filled the grassy square around the old grammar school-the place where, before the Lizards invaded England, Fred Stanegate had bought his butter.
Goldfarb had seen his share of refugees the past few weeks. These seemed at first glance no different from the men and women who’d streamed north before them: tired, pale, thin, filthy, many with blank faces and haunted eyes. But some of them were different. Nurses in white (and some ununiformed but for a Red Cross armband on a sleeve) tended to patients with burns like Goldfarb’s but worse, spreading over great stretches of their bodies. Others did what they could for people who wheezed and coughed and tried desperately to get air down into lungs too blistered and burned to receive it.
“Filthy stuff, gas,” Goldfarb said.
“Aye, that it is.” Stanegate nodded vigorously. “My father, he was in France the last war, and he said it were the worst of anything there.”
“Looking at this, I’d say he was right.” That England had resorted to poison gas in the fight against the Lizards bothered Goldfarb, and not just because he’d had the bad luck to get hurt by it. His cousin Moishe Russie had talked about the camps the Nazis had built in Poland for gassing Jews. How anyone could reckon gas a legitimate weapon of war after that was beyond Goldfarb.
But Fred Stanegate said, “If it shifts the bloody Lizards, Ah don’t care how filthy it is. Manure’s filthy, too, but you need it for your garden.”
“That’s so,” Goldfarb admitted. And itwas so. If you were invaded, you did whatever you could to beat back the invaders, and worried about consequences later. If you lost to the Lizards now, you lost forever and you never had the chance to worry about being moral again. Wouldn’t that make gas legitimate? Churchill had thought so. Goldfarb sighed. “Like you said, it’s a rum world.”
Fred Stanegate pointed. “Isna that the Three Swans there?”
“That used to be the Three Swans, looks more like to me,” Goldfarb answered. The inn had boasted a splendid eighteenth-century wrought-iron sign. Now a couple of finger-length chunks of twisted iron lay in the gutter. A shell hit had enlarged the doorway and blown glass out of the windows. “Bloody shame.”
“They’re not dead yet, seems to me,” Stanegate said. Maybe he was right, too. The building hadn’t been abandoned; somebody’d hung blankets over the doorway. And, as Goldfarb watched, a man in a publican’s leather apron slipped out between two of those blankets and looked around in wonder at what Market Harborough had become.
Spying Goldfarb’s and Stanegate’s draggled uniforms, he waved to the two military men. “Come in and have a pint on me, lads.”
They looked at each other. They were on duty, but a pint was a pint. “Let me buy you one, then, for your kindness,” Goldfarb answered. The innkeeper did not say no, but beckoned them into the Three Swans.
The fire crackling in the hearth was welcome. The innkeeper drew three pints with professional artistry. “Half a crown for mine,” he said. Given what England was enduring, it was a mild price. Goldfarb dug in his pockets, found two shillings. He was still rummaging for a sixpence when Fred slapped one on the bar.
Goldfarb leered at him. “Pitching in on the cheap, are you?”
“That Ah am.” Stanegate sipped his beer. One blond eyebrow rose. So did his mug, in salute to the publican. “Better nor I looked for. Your own brewing?”
“Has to be,” the fellow said with a nod. “Couldn’t get delivery even before the bloody Lizards crashed in on us, and now-Well, you’ll know more about now than I do.”
A good number of tavern keepers were brewing their own beer these days, for just the reasons this one had named. Goldfarb had sampled several of their efforts. Some were ambrosial; some were horse piss. This one… He thoughtfully smacked his lips. Fred Stanegate’s “Better nor I looked for” seemed fair.
Someone pushed his way between the blankets that curtained off the Three Swans. Goldfarb’s gulp had nothing to do with beer: it was Major Smithers, the officer who’d let him embark on his infantry career.
Smithers was a short, chunky man who probably would have run to fat had he been better fed. He ran a hand through thinning sandy hair. His forward-thrusting, beaky face was usually red. Goldfarb looked for it to get redder on his discovering two of his troopers in a public house.
But Smithers had adaptability. Without it, he would have taken Goldfarb’s RAF uniform more seriously. Now he just said, “One for me as well, my good man,” to the innkeeper. To Goldfarb and Stanegate, he added, “Drink up quick, lads. We’re moving forward.”
David Goldfarb downed his pint in three long swallows and set it on the cigarette-scarred wood of the bar, relieved not to be placed on report. Stanegate finished his at a more leisurely pace, but emptied it ahead of Major Smithers even so. He said, “Moving forward. By gaw, Ah like the sound o’ that.”
“On to Northampton,” Smithers said in tones of satisfaction. He sucked foam from his mustache. “That won’t be an easy push; the Lizards are there in force, protecting their perimeter, and they have outposts north of town-their line runs through Spratton and Brixworth and Scaldwell.” He swallowed the last of his pint, did that foam-sucking trick again, and shook his head. “Just a pack of bloody little villages nobody’d ever heard of except the people who lived in ’em. Well, they’re on the map now, by God.”
He meant that literally; he drew from a pocket of his battledress an Ordnance Survey map of the area and spread it on the bar so Goldfarb and Stanegate could see. Goldfarb peered at the map with interest; Ordnance Survey cartography, so clear and detailed, always put him in mind of a radar portrait of the ground it pictured. The map seemed to show everything this side of cow tracks in the fields. Brixworth lay along the main road from Market Harborough down to Northampton; Spratton and Scaldwell flanked that road to either side.
Major Smithers said, “We’ll feint at Spratton. The main attack will go in between Brixworth and Scaldwell. If we can roll them out of Northampton, their whole position north of London unravels.” He glanced at the gas masks hanging from the soldiers’ belts. “Canisters in there fresh?”
“Yes, sir,” Goldfarb and Stanegate said together. Goldfarb clicked his tongue between his teeth. The question probably meant another mustard gas bombardment was laid on as part of the attack. After a moment, he asked, “Sir, how do things stand south of London?”
“Not as well, by what I’ve heard.” Smithers made a sour face, as if the admission tasted bad to him. “They put more men-er, more Lizards-into that one, and seized a broader stretch of territory. In spite of the gas, it’s still very much touch and go in the southeast and the south. I’ve heard reports that they’re trying to push round west of London, by way of Maidenhead and such, to link their two forces. Don’t know whether it’s so, but it would be bad for us if it is.”
“Just on account of you’re goin’ good one place, you think it’s the same all around,” Fred Stanegate said. He sighed. “Wish it were so, Ah do.”
Major Smithers folded the map and returned it to the pocket whence it had emerged. “Let’s be off,” he said. Reluctantly, Goldfarb followed him out of the Three Swans.