The screech of an overhead jet cut through the cabin, disorienting the bat, which flew upward and knocked itself blindly against the ceiling, then fell down onto the soft mattress where it lay like a crumpled rag.
“You poor thing.” Reginald Smithers, twenty-six and on his first commission as a ship’s chaplain, and in the middle of his first war, stared down at the disheveled animal. Then he gingerly picked it up with one hand. The furry creature stirred into life, one questioning eye cocked up at the clean-shaven cleric.
“He’s dead is old Father Murphy. Killed in action administering the last rites. Rotten bad luck,” the priest told the bat as he carried it to the perch. Carefully stretching out a claw, the bat grasped the wood and swung itself back into position. It swayed slightly, as if rocking itself in mourning, all the while staring at the empty bunk.
“No need to grieve too hard—he lived a full life and went down like a soldier. He’s bound to get a DCM posthumously,” the chaplain continued with forced cheerfulness while filling the food dish with pieces of chopped apple and orange from the ship’s cook.
“So it’s just me and you from now on,” he finished, wondering what kind of affection he would get from a bat. Still, it was better than no companionship and Father Smithers, afflicted with acne and an unfortunate effeminate manner, had been having trouble developing any camaraderie at all with the seasoned paratroopers eager for combat.
Resolutely he swung his kit onto the bunk and sniffed. They had removed Father Murphy’s clothes several days before but had left a rusting chest of possessions beneath the bed, assuming that the church would claim responsibility for them. The bed had been stripped but still held the musky smell of the dead cleric: mothballs and an old-fashioned sweetish aftershave.
Reginald knew that the night air was freezing but he also knew it was icy fresh and full of sea salt. He wrenched the porthole open and retired to the en suite bathroom—a luxury afforded only to the clergy. Stooping to step through the low metal doorway, Reginald sighed deeply then shut the door.
The bat cocked its head and gazed at the porthole. Beyond, the black sky was alight with the dramatic phosphorus trails of missiles and the smoldering lights of the starlight shells as they floated toward the ground with a deceptively benign beauty. The spectacle stirred something in the very depths of the bat’s primordial psyche. This was its domain, the kaleidoscopic burning landscape a trigger that ignited all of its instincts.
The creature edged its way to the far end of the perch then opened its wings fully. Flapping wildly it made a straight path for the open porthole and, after hovering for a second, was swallowed by the night.
The paratrooper hunkered in a ditch contemplating the vividness of everything around him. Fear had heightened his senses; he had seen action in Northern Ireland and knew the difference between the exhilaration of adrenaline and the nauseating sweep of fear—the feeling that your eyelids were pinned to your head, all senses pulled tense, as open as they could be, drinking in every second, every slight flutter in the gray panorama as you waited for death to spring out at you. The deadly jack-in-the-box, the one second element you hadn’t calculated on that got you every time. This was war, the butting up of the pig’s head of Life and its convulsing end, the pounding minute in which all your memories collided violently into a dangerous clarity where limbs moved before thought or morality.
A fighter jet screamed overhead. Five seconds later a nearby explosion turned the sky a bright white-yellow and they were showered with dirt. Crouching, Lieutenant Clive Scarsgard checked himself. Fine, all in one piece, amazing. The luck of the Irish, you might say, except he wasn’t Irish.
As his ears stopped ringing he realized his feet were starting to freeze. The icy water that filled the bottom of the trench was seeping into the shitty puttees he had been forced to wrap around his ankles because the second-rate DM boots they’d been issued were too short. Fucking crappy English design, Clive thought for the hundredth time in the last twenty-four hours, wondering whether the Argies crouching in their tents on the other side of no-man’s-land had better boots. Probably. Next kill he made he was going to take the boots he promised himself.
Bullets whistled overhead and the dull thud of distant explosions peppered the air. He leaned back against the frozen mud and stared up at the sky. It was fucking amazing, he reflected, marveling at the iridescent streaks of phosphorus hanging like rips in a canvas, seeming to promise a luminous heaven behind the velvet skin of the night. The absurd thought that the army might include in their recruitment campaigns the idea of war as scenic occurred to him. He wanted to laugh out loud. Gallows humor; the hysteria of the man awaiting execution.
Since arriving by landing craft near Port San Carlos a day ago his life had veered between the strange tedium of waiting in very uncomfortable places and rushing into combat—a flurry of flying bullets, screaming commands, and plunging bayonets. It had been nothing like they had described at training camp; then again, what was the point of trying to convey a realistic picture, he thought dreamily, it would be like recounting the loss of virginity—an entirely different experience for each individual.
He had discovered several interesting things when pushed to extremes: firstly, that he found killing exhilarating; and secondly, it was far more difficult to shoot a man dead than he had assumed. Even riddled with bullets they still kept running at you stupidly, as if they hadn’t yet realized it was all over. The third thing was the indescribable stench of hand-to-hand combat. The smell of terror mixed in with shit, piss, blood, and steaming entrails combined with the smell of damp, dirty clothing. It was so foul Clive was forced to breathe through his mouth to exorcise the taste that clung to his nostrils.
He touched the kukri—the eighteen-inch curved Gurkha fighting knife—on his belt. He’d had to use it to finish off a soldier at the last Argentine bunker after plunging his bayonet into the sleeping teenager. He touched the blade for good luck. It was a bad habit he’d got into. His officer in command—an irritating public schoolboy who was barely older than himself and already a proven coward in combat—glared at him for making a noise. The enemy—an Argentine machine-gun post—was barely a hundred meters away. But despite radioed commands to advance, the platoon had done nothing but crouch in the ditch for the last two hours.
It is not death
Without hereafter
To one in dearth
Of life and its laughter,
Nor the sweet murder
Dealt slow and even
Unto the martyr
Smiling at heaven:
It is the smile
Faint as a (waning) myth,
Faint, and exceeding small
On a boy’s murdered mouth.
Wilfred Owen’s poem rattled around Clive’s brain. He had remembered it suddenly on coming across his first corpse—a young guardsman, not more than nineteen, stretched out as if in sleep, his face wax-white, his lips pulled back as if in dream. Only the open mouth of his wound, obscene against the stained snow, gave him away—the back half of his head was missing. Clive had stared at the body, marveling at how empty it looked. Was that death—the skin discarded by the soul? The squadron had pushed on before he had time to think about it. But the kid’s face kept floating back to him at odd moments. He looked like someone Clive might have picked up if they had met in civvies at some bar in a back street of Soho. In another time, in another kind of struggle.
The boy might have been a younger version of himself: closet poetry reader, overt narcissist, likes to live a little dangerously, fucks men but falls in love with women. Would that be his epitaph? Don’t think too much, Clive, don’t. Too much thought and you’re a goner.