Free The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies

stripe.
    "Maybe so," Schiller growled. He was slumped in his bunk, drunk again, though no one knew where he got his booze, and he never offered to share. "It was the Fuhrer's rank, for all that."
    To his surprise, Karsten has become wary friends with the older man. Contemptuous of them as he was in training, Schiller has always grudgingly admired Karsten's soldiering, even using him as an example to the others, and Karsten, for his part, secretly envies the older man's experience. He's the only one in the squad, after all, to have seen action, though Karsten has never been able to push him for the details--has he killed, and if so, how many? He'd tried to bring it up once, in a bar on leave, and Schiller had raised his glass in a mock
    toast: "To innocence!" And yet the older man has quietly taken it upon himself to complete Karsten's training these past weeks--teaching him 'all the things they don't tell you in basic', how to handle officers, the men's dodges.
    And I listened , Karsten thinks now, crossing his arms and fingering the stitches on his sleeve, and never said anything about his drinking .

    It had begun before dawn with the naval bombardment, the shells flung from somewhere over the grey horizon, missing them mercifully but spitting gouts of sand through their firing slits with enough force to sting their faces. They'd crouched down, cradling the guns, emptying their canteens over their faces to clear their eyes while the explosions walked overhead, white cement dust jumping out of the low ceiling, sifting down on them until they looked like bakers. Then came the planes, tearing by so loud Karsten thought the noise alone might kill them, rip them to shreds. Finally the landing craft, a long line of them pressing through the surf, throwing themselves on to the beach like spent swimmers at the end of a race.
    It wasn't hard to kill the men in them, he found. He'd been so hungry for action, desperate for it after all the weeks of training. He'd actually hoped for an invasion, worried he'd missed his chance. And now here it was, and he felt, more than anything, relieved as he gunned down the distant figures, relieved and vindicated, jerking his sights from target to target, clutching at the trigger. Beside him Heino, feeding him the ammunition, was frowning with concentration, his fingers dancing over the belt as if over piano keys. Karsten felt a sudden uproarious pity for him, wanted to yell at him to look-
    - look! -- out the firing slit. You 're missing it!
    At least Schiller was getting into the spirit of things, roaring with excitement. Willi, the other gunner's mate, was screaming
    right along with him, even though he detested Schiller, had been begging Karsten for a new assignment. But now it felt as if they were all coming together, their petty differences burnt off. He could see Willi sheltering behind Schiller's fury, taking comfort in it. Why, Schiller looked as if he might drive the British off the beach with his contempt alone.
    But they'd kept coming, of course. Wave after wave, too many for them to keep up with. Karsten's arms had begun to ache, a dull pain spreading from his hands, gripping the juddering gun, to his wrists, his forearms, all the way to his back, a hard pinch between his shoulder blades. It was heavy work, this slaughter. He began to feel an odd sympathy for the exhausted men slogging through the sand, envied them as they lay themselves down before his fire.
    And then Willi had been hit, his slack face suddenly looking like a child's. Heino knelt beside him, and in quick glances Karsten watched him apply a tourniquet to Willi's arm, stab him with an ampoule of morphine. It was a neat job, Karsten thought, Schiller would have approved, and only when Heino looked up, proud of his first field dressing, did Karsten lift his feet from the oily pool spreading behind Willi's head.
    The end had come quickly then, the hitch in their fire when Willi went down, enough to let the British close to