The Year's Best Science Fiction 11

SOMEWHERE NOT FAR FROM HERE GERALD KERSH

When i say that where I come from is neither here nor there, I mean exactly that, for my family’s place is dust and ashes. And there are thirty-two winds. As the Dumb Ox once said, “Neither here nor there is everywhere. You are a citizen of the world, young Martin. Cheer up!”

I have nothing but my name, Martin, and I do not rate. I never had a woman. My ambition was to grow a mustache. I never shall. In another month I should be fifteen years old, but that month is not for me. Tomorrow or the day after even my name will be lost. Why should anybody remember me?

Perhaps one of my friends will manage to live until there is peace and quiet. I have never known such a time. But it may come, and somebody might say, “Those, children, were the days when we learned to throw a bomb as you learn to throw a ball. The boy Martin was there at that time, and he played the man among us men . . .”

It may be. I hope so. You are, actually, only as you are remembered. I did my best and I fought with the rest. I have to go now where most of my friends must be. But who will recognize poor Martin in the dark?

That night I was with the guerrillas—I was one of the free men—and Mike was leading us; a good man. There were thirty of us with him that night. We had to raid an enemy dump for dynamite, fuses, detonators. When we went through the woods the rain beat on the leaves so that nobody could hear us. It was late when we got out of the trees and crawled up the slope. Mike cut the wire and stabbed a sentry in the throat with a broad-bladed butcher’s knife. Do this right and a man’s lungs fill up with blood. He dies with nothing more than a cough.

The sentry’s number two came by, and the Dumb Ox killed him with a handkerchief. It is an old trick. You tie something heavy into the corner of your piece of cloth and swing it backhand about your man’s neck; catch the swung end and get your knuckles into the base of his skull. I have done it myself. The principle is that if you use a noose, even of thin wire, it must go over the other man’s head and he, being on the alert, will see that wire pass his eyes, and turn or duck. The Ox weighed three hundred pounds. The sentry died in silence. So we crept through the gap.

Mike had figured that with any kind of luck fifteen of the thirty of us might get away. “It could be a lot worse,” he said. So it could. But now the enemy seemed to be fast asleep. We were quiet, God knows; we knew how to be quiet because we had been living like worms underground. But within only a little distance of the dump somebody sensed us. He could not have seen us. He could not have heard us. Whatever it was, he let loose a burst of machine gun fire in our general direction.

At a sign we lay still. Nobody knew where we were, or whether we were ten or a thousand strong, until they fired a flare, a white flare, which went off in the sky with a shaky light. Under that light we must have been as easy to see as cutout silhouettes. A violet flare went up then and—believe me!—it was a dream, every man with half-a-dozen shadows, all dancing, as Mike threw out his hand in the sign that means Forward. Then we charged, muddy-bellied as wild pigs, every one of us with his machine pistol and his grenades.

You would have thought that all the guns in the world had gone off at once. As the white flare died, another went up; only some fool of an enemy fired a green one. Shooting at shadows? So they were; only they filled the air with lead in a double enfilade. Mike went forward all the time and I was the first behind him. I said it was like a dream. But it was not a bad dream. Everything was so quick and bright, you wanted it not to end. And if this is child’s talk, let it be.

We cut our way into the dump. Mike threw me a case of dynamite. The Ox took it from me and put it under his arm. He was as calm as if all this had been arranged in an office. Pulling the pins with his teeth, he threw four grenades. A machine gun stopped suddenly and I heard a man screaming, “Mother! Mother!”

Mike gave me four tins of fuses and two of detonators which I could get inside my jacket. Then he caught hold of another box of those round bombs you can crack a tank with, and we ran.

I was at his elbow. All of a sudden he went down on one knee. When I saw him fall I stood over him. He was wounded, horribly wounded, split open; a terrible sight to see. What kind of strength is it that is put into a man? Torn to pieces, how does he still go on? The rain was a kind of curtain. The next flare made a double rainbow. “Back to the bridge!” Mike said. I hesitated: I was bound to obey, but it was my duty to die with him. Then he ran— not back to where we had come from, but straight into the enemy dump. He was hit a dozen times. My head was cut by a bullet, which knocked me down but brought me to my senses. I remembered that I was carrying detonators and fuses.

So I caught up with the few who were left of us at the foot of the slope. You may say without lying that young Martin was the last out.

I was blind with blood. A green flare and a white one went off, and it was just as if the night had turned to lead. Then something cracked. I recognized the thundery noise of dynamite and the snapping of Mike’s box of bombs. He had got to some of the heavy stuff, because after that the dump burst in a red and white flash. A long time later (as it seemed) there was a burning wind which sucked the breath out of our bodies, and a shower of branches, leaves and bits of metal; and the rain was mud and blood.

This is the way Mike died.

We caught our breath. There were only nine of us left now, and one of us wounded—the best of us all. His name was John. The Ox said to him, “Well, friend, you’ve got it good. One of you lend a hand with this box of stuff. Don’t take it to heart, John—I can carry you twenty miles.”

So he could have. At first sight you might have thought the Ox to be nothing but a silly-faced fat man, as broad as he was tall. You would never have made a bigger mistake in your life. He was the strongest man any of us ever saw, and he seemed to be made of a sort of tough, resilient rubber. Heavy as he was, he could move like a cat. It was impossible to tire him or wear him out. I have seen him fell a tree with a double-bitted ax, using only his left hand. His last stroke was as powerful as his first. It seemed to me there was no weight the Ox could not move. He picked John up as easily as a woman picks up a baby, and in much the same way, although John was not a little man. He kept saying, “Leave me, leave me,” but the Ox took no notice of this, but cradled him in his enormous arms and carried him ahead swiftly but ever so gently. I heard him say, “Leave him, he says! Christ Jesus, for all I know we might be the last free men left in the world!”

So we might have been. There was no way of knowing otherwise.

That great downpour of rain which had curtained us when we came out had stopped. It was not going to cover our, retreat. The night was clearing and there was a little new moon no bigger than a clipping from your thumbnail. After that awful bang with which Mike went out of the world, everything seemed strange and quiet, almost peaceful. You felt that your troubles were over. It was peace, as I have heard old men talk of it. In a few minutes I would find myself walking home.

But when I saw John gritting his teeth in his pain, I knew there was no such thing as home, and peace was an old man’s story. It did not take much to remind me of ashes and dust and the thirty-two winds.

I was in the forest when the enemy came through our place. When I came back there was nothing but dirt and darkness where the village had been. The enemy were punishing us for something somebody had done—I don’t know who and I don’t know what. My family had lived there a long time. Where our little house had been there was only half a wall, smoldering. Among the burnt stuff I recognized part of the table we had eaten at all our lives. We were clean people. The table had been scrubbed and scoured until the soft parts of the grain were worn away and there was a pattern in the wood I could have recognized anywhere, blindfold, just by feeling it. They left the bodies unburied. I buried my father and mother, first covering my mother with my shirt, she being stripped naked. I put my brother between them. They had picked him up by the heels and beaten his brains out against the floor. He was three years old.

Yes, there was plenty to remember.

I said, “Ox, I’ve got fuses and detonators under my jacket. I would have stayed with Mike if it hadn’t been for that, honest to God!”

He said, “Keep the stuff dry, then. This is no time for heroics. For all I know we are the last of the free men.”

This made me feel better. I said, “Mike ran into that dump with a dozen bullets in him.”

The Ox said, “He might have done worse. He might have run away from the dump with a dozen bullets in him.”

Mike’s brother Thomas spat and said, “Shut up, you goddamn Ox.”

He was a strong man too, and a brave man, but he would never make a leader. This, as I once heard John say, was because he did not know how to take an order. He liked to argue. Leaders don’t argue. He could give a command, but if he did so, you had the feeling that he didn’t really expect to be obeyed. With Mike an order was a law; where he went, you followed.

Thomas was a good man, though. So were they all; everyone had been through fire and water and knew what it was to bed down in hell. John used to say that all the best men have been to hell. As the storm proves the boat, trouble proves the man, he would say.

John was a man. He was thirty years old, well educated; a man without fear, and in battle a wildcat. When John spoke, even Mike listened. The enemy captured him once and (being short of guards) broke his leg with an iron bar so that he could not run away. They tortured him for weeks. He let them concentrate on his fingernails and all that while the bone knitted. All the time he never spoke. One dark night he crawled away and escaped.

He had suffered his share—yes, indeed—and now he was dying. He said, “Ox, Ox, put me down. I am leaving a trail of blood for anybody to follow.”

We had reached a little clearing in the forest, so disguised with brush that it would take a woodsman to find it. At that, a woodsman who knew that particular part of the woods. The Ox sighed. He felt the life going out of John. He set him down on a bed of moss so that his back was supported by a tree, and said, “Better let me ease that belt a bit.”

“Take it off, Ox, and keep it. Keep the knife, too. It is a good bit of steel. Keep it. I won’t need it now.”

The Ox took the belt and the knife in silence. Then John looked at me and took out a little leather book, and gave it to me. He said, “For you, Martin.” I took it. It was, I think, some book of poetry, but it was all gummed together with blood. I said, “I will learn to read.”

He smiled at this. “Now go on and leave me, friends. I am a dead man. The dead weigh heavy. Go.”

We said nothing. Then the Ox said one word, “No!”

We stared at him. Nobody ever heard his voice sound like that, hard as iron. He said, “While there’s life there’s hope. I carry you as long as you breathe. The free men don’t leave their kind to die.”

Thomas said, “Hold it, Ox. I assume command, Mike being dead.”

“By all means,” the Ox said, “you are general officer in command, you are anything you like. Command. First of all, though, let me tell you what we’ve got to do.”

He had the case of dynamite open and was handing out the sticks in bundles. “First and foremost we’ve got to get as much of this stuff home as we can, so we divide it equally and each carry a few pounds. Fuses and detonators —they’re precious. Divide them up likewise. Stow the stuff away and we’ll get going. Once we get across the footbridge we’re all right. But by now the enemy is over its little shock and after us in force. Let’s go.”

“I’m in command here,” said Thomas.

“Sure, sure.” The Ox lifted John up again. He climbed out of the hollow, light and fast, and we all followed him as if we had been in the habit of doing so all our lives. Then we were deep in the woods again. We followed him because we could see that he knew exactly what he wanted to do. Although he moved so fast, I think that if John had been a bowl filled with water to the brim he would not have spilled a drop, he carried him so gently and steadily.

He reached the stream ahead of us. There he stopped dead. I knew that something bad had happened. Catching up with him, I saw that where we had left a swift but shallow brook the day before, there was a rushing torrent. There must have been a great cloudburst high up in the hills.

We were at the narrowest part where the little wooden bridge was. Only now there was no bridge. The flood had torn it down and tossed it away.

Between us and the other side lay twenty feet of foaming water driven by a current strong enough to whisk you away like a twig. Only a few of the piles of the bridge were standing a foot or so above the surface.

This was bad. Then, as we looked at one another, a little boy came running. He was too young for fighting, but he carried messages. He shouted above the noise of the water, “The enemy is coming. A strong force. Hide yourselves. They are no more than three miles away.” Then he was gone.

Thomas said, “We must scatter and hide.”

The Ox said, “Got to get this stuff across the water, friend.”

“But there’s no bridge!”

“Then we must build one,” said the Ox.

We looked at him. We thought he had gone crazy. He said, “The enemy can’t get through three miles of these woods in under an hour.”

I said, not knowing what I was saying, “That’s right, we must build one.”

Something in my heart told me that if the Ox said we had to build a bridge, he knew how to do it, and I was ready to follow him. He winked at me.

Just then I saw two people appear on the opposite bank, an old man and a girl.

We all knew them well. The old man was the girl’s grandfather, and his name was Martin, the same as mine— Grandpa Martin. He had been a farmer, once, but had lost everything. Now he was one of us. He lost his farm, he lost his son, worst of all, he lost his granddaughter Beatrice. She was about fourteen, and the prettiest girl for miles around, blue-eyed and with chestnut hair, when the enemy carried her off. I am not ashamed to say that I was in love with her, the way little boys are—I being only eleven at that time. Everybody loved Bea, as she was called. But she had no eyes for anybody except John. The men laughed at her for this, in a good-natured way. Once, when he was out on a raid, I heard her saying under her breath, “Let him be wounded—but not badly—and then perhaps he will let me nurse him.” For John never looked at her; for all he cared, she might have been a thousand miles away.

The Ox said of her, “She is a well-developed girl. In the old days she would marry well and have ten strong sons.”

“You are an Ox,” Thomas told him. He, too, had a weakness for old Martin’s granddaughter.

But the enemy was short of pretty girls. They made her one of their women, kept her in a tent. By one means and another she got all kinds of useful information out to the free men of the woods. She had learned the Patheran, the sign writing with twigs, stones and movements of the fingers that the tramps and the gypsies used in olden times. We got her out after two years. It cost us four good men. She was worth it. But she was no longer the same Beatrice. Tall, yes, and with a shape to take your breath away. But her voice was hoarse and her eyes hard.

She said to Mike, “Let nobody touch me. Let nobody drink out of my cup or use my spoon. I am sick. And where you boys have killed your hundreds, in one month I have killed three hundred generations of the enemy—them, their wives, their sweethearts and their children. Understand?”

Thomas said, “We have no doctor and no drugs. Can’t we perhaps snatch one of their doctors with his black bag?”

She laughed and said, “They haven’t any drugs either, much. As for their medical officer, I fancy he will be wondering how to cure himself.”

Still, seeing her on the other side of the water, I felt strong as three men, and I shouted to the Ox, “What are we waiting for?”

Thomas said, “Talk is cheap, Ox. The enemy will be here in an hour. I vote we scatter and hide.”

The Ox said, “They know we’ll have come here. There wasn’t any other place we could come to. The woods are too thin hereabout. We’ve got to get across.”

Big Steve said, “Ambush ‘em—fight it out!”

The Ox said, “And the dynamite, the detonators, the fuses? I am going to blow up the transportation bridge.”

All the time his eyes were darting here and there. He was getting everything into one simple picture in his mind—the river, the distance, the piles, the trees and the scattered timbers of the old footbridge on the bank. The clouds were gathering. More heavy weather would break again soon.

“Axes,” the Ox said. “Axes and machetes.” We each carried one or the other. “And rope, rope!” Every one of us had a length of strong cord tied around his waist— generally, that is. But on this fast raid most of us had traveled light. Among us we had no more than thirty feet or so of tough cord.

“Now,” the Ox said, “we want a few long light logs. Martin, take my ax. There’s something I’ve got to do.”

He picked up John and carried him up the bank. There he put him down again. It took only a second. Then he ran back, snatched away Big Steve’s automatic rifle and took it to John, and said, “Have you strength enough left to watch the woods?”

“Yes.”

But John was dying, his back against a tree and his knees bent up to support his wounded body. His eyes were in black hollows, as if they had burnt their way in.

Then I forgot about him. There was wood on the bank. I picked out a young spruce that the water had carried down from the mountain. The ax was a good one. I took off the top of the tree, and it cut like cheese. Then the lower part above the roots. I may be young, but I was bred hard. Still, when I tried to lift the trunk it was too heavy for me, although I was working the way some men pray. But then the Ox was with me. He picked up the log all alone and carried it to where one of the piles of the bridge stuck out of the mud on the bank.

“The water is rising,” Steve said.

Thomas said, “And the enemy is coming.”

The Ox simply said, “Oh, shut up!”

I wish he were here to tell you what happened then. I know, I saw; but I was working with all my heart and soul. A man is made to work only at one thing at a time. The only people who look left and right are those who weren’t there. John told me once that all the world loves a bridge. In ancient times “Bridge-builder” was one of the highest titles the Romans could offer a man. He told me that there have been steel bridges that spanned oceans. But I shall always believe that the most wonderful bridge ever built or even attempted was the bridge we started to build across that flooding stream with a few bits of line and some fallen trees, with less than an hour to spare and the enemy on our heels.

The Dumb Ox said to me, once, “Actually, son, my name is Clem, but I don’t mind if you call me Ox.”

“I suppose they call you that because you are strong and patient,” I said.

“And dumb, and slow. Also, because I am always chewing on a bit of grass or a straw. I can’t see the things smart people see. I’m not sensitive—a goad in the ass is about as much as I can feel. I am brainless. I know what is right and I know what is wrong, but the whys and the wherefores are not for my thick skull.”

And so it seemed until there was this problem. The cleverest among us couldn’t foresee a cloudburst up on the mountain. But it had happened, and nobody knew what to do about it except the Ox. Later, when there was time to talk, he said to me, “Well, we had to get across and keep the stuff dry. What must be done must be done, with whatever comes to hand. If you have years of time and millions of money and thousands of workmen, build with steel and concrete, and good luck to you. If you have only got a bit of rope, a few sticks and sixty minutes—do what you can with them, boy, and be thankful. There is always a way to deal with things. Despair is for the enemy. To hope on and manage yourself, that is to be one of the free men.”

He seemed to have room for only one thought in his head at a time. Now it was to find a way across the water before the enemy came up. “It was all very well for Thomas to say scatter and hide,” the Ox said. But, as he pointed out, there was no place to hide. Downstream were the rapids, gone wild in the flood. Upstream, water that was dangerous even on a quiet day. We had counted on going back the way we had come. But there was no more footbridge. “To stay and fight it out would have been all very well,” the Ox said; we might have killed a few dozen of the enemy and then died ourselves. But we had a responsibility. Dead men carry no fuses. “The enemy would have started out with a rush,” the Ox said, “but they couldn’t know our woods the way we do, with all their maps and their spies. We could move fast over the trail we took. They would go slower and slower, suspecting an ambush ...”

He stood there scratching his head and looking about him like a workman who is being paid by the hour. “Ambush, ambush,” he said, and went up the bank again to where John was watching the woods. What he did there was like this: He tied two machine pistols to two trees about thirty yards apart. He fastened a length of twine to the trigger of each, and lashed the loose ends to John’s elbows, saying, all in a breath, “If you see or hear them, John, bring your elbows together. Those guns are cocked. There will be a burst in their direction from two sides.”

John whispered, “And hit what?”

The Ox said, “Nobody. But they’ll think the woods are full of us on two sides. When they come forward, you use your own gun.”

“Yes,” John said.

Then the Ox came running and showed us what we had to do. First of all we had to make fast a log to the pile at our bank. This had to be done quickly, because the pile would be under water any minute now. This log had to lie from the pile on the bank to the first pile in the stream; one of us had to crawl out and lash it down. The man who lashed down the end of the first log to the second pile would have to stand there, balancing himself like a tightrope walker and catch one end of a second tree trunk. Holding this, he would have to drag it toward him so that the farther end of the log rested on the second pile in the stream.

There is a game we used to play with tiny slivers of wood—spilikins. You pick your spilikins one by one out of a jumbled pile. Make one false move and you lost the game. Now we were playing with logs, and the game was a matter of life and death.

Let me make it clear. Here is twenty feet of white water. You must lay three tree trunks across it, supporting them on balks of rotten wood, one on each bank, sticking out of the mud, and two in mid-current. At any moment there will come a wind strong enough to blow you off the earth and a downpour of rain to swell the stream. You have three-quarters of an hour, a bit of rope, and nobody to work with you on the other side but an old cripple and a girl.

As the Ox said later, “Actually, you know, you can take an interest in a problem like that. Thank God I am an odd-jobman! . . . Make no hero of me, my boy. There is nothing heroic in doing a job in an emergency.”

I said, “Ah, but what if you hadn’t?”

He said, “I should have been a bungler, don’t you see, a failure. I won’t be made a hero of. I don’t believe in heroes —I’ve met too many of them. You must do what you can as well as you can. That’s your duty as a free man. Son, there is only black or white—meaning, there is only one alternative to bravery, and that is cowardice. If you do less than your utmost you are a coward. You must put into your work all God gave you. The only alternative to crossing the water would have been to stay on the wrong side of it. Which would have been wrong.”

I said, “Clem, you gave us the strength to do it.”

“No. You made yourselves strong. You know how you can reach into yourself and take yourself in both hands and squeeze the water out of yourself until you are nice and firm. That is what we did, kid, because we had to.”

“And now it seems impossible,” I said.

Clem the Ox answered, “From the impossible to the impossible—that is the road of us free men.”

Now the first thing we had to do was lay the tree I had trimmed so that its narrow end overlapped the first pile in midstream by about a foot.

This seemed simple enough in itself.

We tied a rope around the thin end and stood the log up on its butt, which we jammed hard against the pile on our side of the bank.

Four of us held the rope, keeping the log upright. Clem guided the log with his hands, saying, “Easy does it... Good . . . Good, lower away.”

But then, just as the end of the log touched the other pile, there was a gust of wind and a shrieking of the water. The bank was slippery clay. One of us slid down, caught off balance by the wind, and caught at the rope to save himself.

The far end of the log to which the rope was tied fell off the pile. The current caught the free end. The log and rope were like a tremendous whip with all of us clinging with might and main to the lash. The log spun. We felt ourselves going, and let go. As the water tore the log away, Clem the Ox caught the end of the rope. He braced himself. The force of that jolt as the tree trunk tried to get away drove him into the clay almost to his knees.

I took my place behind him, gripped him about the waist and held on. The rest took the rope and hauled. We played the log, and we landed it.

Clem, pursing up his lips, said, “All right. Once again.”

Thomas said, “This is madness.”

“All together, now,” said the Ox.

We tried again. This time the thin end of the log fell obediently into position. I said, “Now it wants lashing down. I am the lightest weight here. I can walk a log and make a fast knot.”

Clem said, “Good. But hold tight to the rope as you go.” He had the loose end wound about his fist. I balanced myself and walked out. Once I slipped, but recovered myself. I lashed the log fast. A third part of the bridge was built; but a third part of our time was gone, and the water was swelling, and on the other side Grandpa Martin and Beatrice were in trouble.

They, weak as they were, were trying to do from their side what we were doing from ours. The old man was a strange one. Since he had lost his land he had been like the walking dead. Now he looked almost young again, plastered with mud from head to foot like Adam when God made him out of red clay. His log was trimmed, and he had cut notches in it so that the rope would not slip. I saw him yelling, but could not hear him. A knuckle of rock had made a kind of breakwater where he and Beatrice were, so that the water was shallower and the current less dangerous on their side. A special strength seemed to pour into them. She took the thin end. And he the middle. Inch by inch they urged it forward. As luck would have it, they got the log to rest upon their two piles. True, there were some great iron spikes left sticking out to help them there. Still, it was a thing to wonder at. But they had not enough rope. “Your belt! Your belt!” Grandpa Martin shouted; and she unbuckled her belt and strapped it tight where the logs met.

Clem called to me in his great lowing voice, “Stay where you are and lend a hand”—for he had another log prepared, long enough to reach from the second pile to the third and so link everything together.

Clem sat down upon the log we had already laid, straddling it with his legs; using his hands he climbed a little way out. Halfway along he made a sign. The others pushed out the new log. He gripped it tightly and slid it toward me. I dragged it in my direction, caught the end, steadied it, and pushed it toward Beatrice. She and the old man got it into place.

I went back to join Clem and the others.

Then something heartbreaking happened: A rotten old miserable weeping willow tree came drifting down. It touched a swirl in the current so that the water closed about it like a hand, swung it like a club—a very heavy club, slow to lift, quick to drop—and struck the second log at the thin end. So the middle span of our bridge snapped like a match, and the two pieces of it went bobbing away with the willow.

From the distance came a popping of shots. I looked from face to face. Now the strength was going out of us. Our last hope had gone with that log, it seemed. We all looked at Clem. Thomas said—and he sounded almost cheerful, “So it’s to be scatter and sauve qui peut.”

Clem’s face set like stone. He said, “Easy does it. I don’t scatter. Somebody give me an ax.”

He wanted another tree. The tree nearest to the bank was nearly two feet thick. Clem went for it at hip level. I ran to help him, but he ordered me back. We knew why. He had won prizes felling timber in contests, using a double-headed ax in competition with champions. In less time than it takes me to tell you this, the tree was down. He had dropped it just where he wanted it to lie. Then he and the rest of us were on that fallen tree like madmen, taking off the top branches.

“She’s too heavy,” Thomas said, panting for breath, “those other two logs will be off the piles any moment. And we are out of rope-”

Some stray bullets were whistling high overhead now. Clem said, “So take off your belts, take off your pants . . .” He seemed to change all in a second. I have never seen such a face or heard such a voice as he said, “What? Be beat by this puddle?” We were more afraid of him at that moment than of any kind of death or disaster. He screamed like a horse in a fire. His eyes were red. He lifted the heavy end of the tree in his bare hands, alone. The seams of his leather jacket burst. Black veins swelled in his neck and arms. It was as much as the rest of us could do, working together, to lift the lighter end of the tree.

Then Clem, his legs wide apart, walked backward into the water. He said, later, that it was only the great weight he was carrying that anchored him against the current while his feet found firm places to stand upon. He was in the stream up to his waist. Then the water was up to his chin. His knees bent. The water was over his head. He was putting all he had—much more than he had dreamed he ever had—into one last awful effort. His legs straightened and he held the log above his head for just a second. Then the butt end of it was on the third pile, our end was in place, and Clem was back among us with blood running from his nose and mouth.

He told me later, “I put into one minute the strength of five years of life.”

Now Beatrice was across. She had lost her boots and her trousers. “Where is John?” she asked.

Clem gave her a parcel of fuses and detonators and said, “Take these across.”

“But John?”

“Take these across.”

She nodded, took the parcel and stepped on the first log. She walked like somebody in a dream; crossed the middle log and then the third. She was over.

Then Clem gave me a parcel and told me to go. I went. One by one the others followed. The firing was close now. I heard John’s fixed machine pistols firing wildly into the bushes. Then his own weapon, in little careful bursts. There were four or five wet thuds as some grenades exploded. Clem stood, wiping his bloody mouth on the back of his hand. I saw him sigh. Then he crossed our poor little bridge and was with us, just as the enemy appeared on the bank we had just left. It was broad daylight now.

We opened fire. Only Clem the Ox did not take cover. He took out the knife John had given him and stooped, and slashed at the cord holding the log the girl and the old man had got into position. It rolled away as the water pushed and sucked at it. With it went the other two logs. They seemed to wave us goodbye and danced away. I think I know what was in his heart just then. Fastening those three sticks together was great work.

Beatrice said to me, “John is dead?”

I said, “Yes, but he thought of you, and he told me to give you this.” I took from round my neck where I had hung it the little bloodstained book with the bullet hole, and although it was the most precious thing I had—or because it was—I gave it to her. And although the free people never lie except to the enemy, I said, “He sent it to you with love.”

She said, taking the book, “And this is his blood?”

“That hole is where the bullet went through. He had only two things, his knife and that book. He gave Clem his knife, but, the book is for Beatrice with my love.’”

She asked, “And nothing for you, Martin?”

“He smiled at me,” was all I could say.

Then I had to turn away. Clem, who had sharp ears and had heard what I said, patted my shoulder with his torn right hand and said, “Well done, kid. Spoken like a free man!” Then he unbuckled John’s knife and gave it to me, saying, “This is for you. I’ve got a knife of my own.”

Thomas said, “Well, let’s get going.”

“Quite right,” said Clem, “you’re in command.”

So we got the fuses and stuff to wreck Bridge K16. There five of us died and I got the wound I am going to die of pretty soon. This is the end of my story.