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.