The Moth and the Candle

The artillery bombardment had stopped. Now the tank crews and the infantry waited for the bombers to being their runs on the enemy positions. At the sound of approaching aero engines they all ducked for cover, the infantry into foxholes the crews into their tanks. All too often the Allied pilots mistook their own positions for enemy ones and bombed their own troops. Forward positions were always in the most danger from their own side and from the Germans. Michael crouched down in his hurriedly dug foxhole, waiting for the earth to be churned by the high explosives that fell from above. He grimaced at the thought of the next few moments. Sitting still and waiting. The best way to survive was counter-intuitive or as he put it to his mate Arthur ‘Grubby’ Briggs earlier ‘it goes against all common fucking sense’. But he, and Grubby, did it because that’s what the infantry did. Those who didn’t wait didn’t survive for very long.

Grubby was from Liverpool. He had worked on the docks as a stevedore not that there had been much work in the years leading up to the war. He frequently joked that the war has saved him from doing something nasty to a stranger in a bar fight which he would trawl the pubs around the docks looking for to stave off the boredom, to work off the aggression, to put something like excitement into his life. Or what he understood as excitement. Now he got to do nasty things to strangers all the time and he got paid for it too. He loved the war, Grubby did. It made him fresh each and every time they engaged with the enemy. He loved the sourness of the sweat on the uniforms, the blood of all others filling the fields in front of him, every battle ever fought stretching out in Grubby’s mind was being fought and rep-fought each day of Grubby’s life. There was that side of him of course. Michael hadn’t liked him at first. He was too eager for killing, so eager Michael has marked him down as not being right in the head. But Grubby wasn’t deranged or psychotic. He knew exactly what his job was and he did it perfectly each time. It wasn’t even that he enjoyed killing, it was that he enjoyed fighting. Killing was just the necessary end result of the process he was born for.

After the initial landings at Sword beach, their unit has pressed on into the Arvanches along with the other. They had come across a Waffen-SS patrol unit which had just finished executing an entire family because their neighbour had informed the local SS commander that they had assisted an injured US paratrooper. The SS unit’s commander, a Leutenant Hans Dietrich, had ordered that the whole family be hung from a tree in their front garden, including the youngest, a five year old girl. The patrol had been preparing to leave when they had caught them. Grubby and Michael had volunteered to escort them back to the holding areas in the rear. As soon as their captain had been out of earshot Grubby had casually flipped the safety off his M1 and shot all twelve of them. Not all had been killed by his first bursts so Grubby walked over to Leutentant Dietrich and pulled his service Luger from its holster. As Dietrich had tried to turn himself over Grubby had shot him twice in the face. He went to each living SS man and shot them one by one. Michael had not moved once during the entire episode. As Grubby killed the last German Michael had let out a breath. He and Grubby stared at one another. For several moments neither spoke. Michael thought of speaking up, of reporting Grubby. He knew what he had done was both against regulations and morally wrong. He thought of the family dangling in the morning breeze from the old oak tree in their front garden, their bloated purple faces turned towards the skies, their legs and feet stained with urine and faeces. He thought of all this and simply nodded at Grubby. Grubby inclined his head. They pulled the bodies into a ditch and left them there. He and Michael had become Shakespeare’s blood brothers and there was no one else in the entire army that Michael would rather at his side going into battle. Michael occasionally wondered what Grubby would do when the war was over. He couldn’t see him settling down to life on Civvy street....

CRUMP...blank noise...swirls of bursting purples and reds...the world whipping from left to right and back again in vicious time...one eye...only one eye...claw claw crawl...don’t move!!...each finger...hurt...looking down...where were the two in the middle? What two? Where?...taste of...sharp...sharp taste in the mouth...stinging....blood and earth....crawl up up up up...where? crawl where? Hurt...blood...bone...nevermore...is this hell?

The last bomb had fallen less than twenty feet from their position. The Typhoon pilot that had dropped it mistook their identification flares. It was a mistake. One of many in this war, like, perhaps, the war itself. The bomb had landed on an old abandoned plough the metal from which had been turned into pieces of shrapnel. Many of the unit had been injured with several dead. One of the dead was Grubby Briggs. A piece of the plough had decapitated him. His corpse had lain in his foxhole for hours after the blast because the opposing German panzer units had used the obvious confusion to launch a counterattack to recover the positions they had lost the previous day. In the fierce fighting the casualties from the bombing had been ignored. Michael had been another casualty. He had suffered a fractured skull and a severe concussion which gave him amnesia for several months afterwards. In the battle hospital afterwards he had had to be sedated when the neither the orderlies nor the doctors could tell him who he was or where he came from beyond what was on his dog tags.