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?”