Free A Bitter Field by Jack Ludlow

the dying weeks of the Great War at a time when everyone thought the retreating Hun were beaten, but they were not; their retreat was orderly and designed to inflict maximum casualties when, as they often did, they made a stand. Jerry was always forced to fall back but no position or trench was surrendered without a hard and costly fight.
    When those times were reprised there was no mention of any deepfriendship between the two, more a degree of natural mutual respect, given that first quality had been absent. It was more than just an inability to connect, it being a bad idea to get close to anyone at such a time.
    No two men who had lived through those days could discuss them without recalling, even if they avoided mention of it, the losses they had witnessed, both in fellow officers and the men they led; anyone being killed was bad, but a close friend dying could break those who survived, men who lived on the very edge of what could be tolerated by the human spirit.
    Both had stayed in the army, Cal for personal reasons, Peter for the lack of a real alternative and, meeting again in the part of Mesopotamia destined to become Iraq, there had been no flowering of friendship at all – Captains Callum Jardine and Peter Lanchester had been on two sides of an argument about the tactics being employed to contain the Arab insurgency.
    Peter, like most of his contemporaries, saw nothing untoward in bombing villages or pounding the insurgents and their families with artillery – the end justified the means. Cal disagreed so vehemently he had eventually resigned his commission, though, unable to settle, he had become, almost by accident, a gunrunner and advisor to various freedom movements on guerrilla warfare, much of the art of which he had learnt from his Arab opponents.
    The Peter Lanchester he had known before Hamburg, as an acquaintance not a friend, seemed typical of a type that saw England as the centre of the universe, though they would nod to the useful contributions of the Celtic fringe in the making of Great Britain and the Empire. But they saw the unemployed as work-shy, Jews as devious Yids, Arabs were wogs and not to be trusted, while anyoneLatin, especially South Americans, could be dismissed as a slimy dago.
    In that, Peter had seemed typical of his class and the company he kept, the denizens of ex-military officers’ clubs and the golf course bores who saw anyone not Anglo-Saxon as somehow incomplete. Yet he had proved to have another side; he hated Fascism as much as did Cal and had the brains to also, like him, see leaving it to grow unchecked as a threat to everything he valued.
    It was Hamburg and after that had got them closer, though both, if asked, would probably have plumped for being semi-chums rather than deep pals. Yet Cal, who knew he was the one who harboured the resentments, had come to respect Peter more.
    The shared experience of acquiring and illegally shipping guns had created a sort of bond, which he would have struggled to define, given the disparity of many of their views; the only thing of which he was sure was that in a crisis, Peter was utterly reliable.

CHAPTER SIX
    W hen the time came to start the donkey engine and move it was dark, the only light the faint glow coming from the city spill, until they were in the well-illuminated dock area. Peter was not allowed to see but only to hear the exchange between Cal and the douaniers , noting that it lacked for nothing in the sound of formality, down to the thud of stamps being banged on the false cargo manifests; if money changed hands, that was carried out in silence.
    He was allowed out of the stuffy cabin only when the barge was out in the harbour, with Cal pointing to the set of lights – three horizontal white and one red – that identified his freighter, which they edged alongside, throwing up heavy cables so they could be lashed, metal to metal.
    The ship had a derrick which did the actual lifting aboard and a crew to do the stowing;