Free Swordpoint (2011) by John Harris Page B

spoke, showers of sparks threatened to set light to the straw on which they were lying and Private Rich, having beaten out the threat of fire in his immediate vicinity, moved away a little to avoid being blinded. ‘They’ll ’ave to clear t’ near bank,’ he grated in his Dracula voice. ‘They’ll ’ave to ave a ’olding force to stop t’ Teds puttin’ us off as we go forward.’
    ‘There’s a fat lot of good a holding force will be,’ Evans the Bomb said. ‘With the whole bloody area open to observers on the hills.’
    ‘Under the circumstances–’ Hunters looked up from where he was scraping mud off his greatcoat – ‘I’m going out tonight to find myself a dame.’
    ‘They say there’s a concert,’ 766 Bawden said. ‘An ENSA job.’
    ‘They never ’ad concerts when I joined up,’ Henry White observed.
    ‘Gi’e o’er, ’Enry,’ Parkin said. ‘Look what fun it was when they turned the lions loose on the Christians.’
    ‘Did you know’ – this time the voice was Fletcher-Smith’s – ‘that a squad of Yellowjackets got down to the river a week ago to lift the mines the Teds laid? The next night they went again and lost five men from mines.’
    ‘Obviously didn’t do a very good job of it,’ 000 Bawden said.
    ‘That’s just the point,’ Fletcher-Smith insisted. ‘They did. They were new mines. The Teds had crossed the river again and laid some more.’
    Private Syzling summed up the prevailing feeling better than anybody. He could see ahead of him days of cold, wet misery with the Germans shooting at him and probably even killing him. At the very least going without food and having that stupid nit, Deacon, nagging at him to stand up straight or keep his head down, to clean his rifle and find his kit, and above all to behave like a man with some pride in himself and his company. All in all the future outlook – and Syzling’s future outlook rarely went beyond the next week – was sheer unadulterated gloom.
    ‘A battle!’ he said indignantly as he pinched out his fag-end and stuck it in his pocket. ‘You’d think they was tryin’ to get us killed.’

Seven
    Curiously enough, the thoughts that Syzling was thinking were much the same as those running through Captain Reis’ mind on the other side of the river.
    To Reis it stuck out a mile that Germany had already lost the war, but the lunatics in Berlin seemed to want to see the German army – the whole German nation – go down in some sort of fiery Götterdämmerung. No wonder Wagner, with his love of gods and gloom and Valhalla, appealed to the feverish and twisted intellects that were running the country.
    Reis had lost a dozen good friends since he’d become a soldier and he couldn’t help thinking uneasily, and not for the first time, that there must be something wrong with the popular conception of the Almighty, with His mercy and His justice, when He could allow such things to happen while the monsters in Berlin continued to wax and grow fat. Though Nemesis was clearly approaching, they were still alive and still enjoying the fleshpots while far finer men had long since gone to their graves – German and enemy alike. The idea that it was sweet and fitting to die for one’s country seemed to have become just a tired old platitude. As a good Catholic and a good German, it worried Reis.

    Standing by the sandbagged window of the cellar of the farmhouse in San Eusebio which he had made his headquarters, his elbows resting on the sill, his eyes glued to his binoculars, he tried to push the bitter thoughts from his mind and concentrate on the job in hand. But it wasn’t easy. He had a wife he hadn’t seen for over a year and a child he had never seen at all and, though the Rhineland where he lived was safer than Hamburg, Berlin or the Ruhr, these days nowhere in Germany could be called secure. Enemy bombers ranged over the country twenty-four hours a day.
    They had been promised airy sunlit homes: Well, thanks to the