Five

Causton marched to the sound of the guns

He sweated in the hot sun as he stepped out brisky in response to the lashing voice
of the sergeant and wondered how he
was goiing to get out of this pickle If he could get out of the ranks for a few
minutes, all he had to do was to rip off the
tunic, drop the rifle and he would be a civilian again, but there did not seem much
chance of that The erstwhile deserters
were watched carefully by troopers armed with submachine-guns and the officer,
driven in a jeep, passed continously from
one end of the column to the other
He stumbled a little, then picked up the step again, and the man next to him turned
and addressed him in the island
potoi's obviously asking a question Causton played dumb--quite literally; he made
some complicated gestures with his
fingers, hoping to God that the soldier would not know he was faking The man let
out a shrill cackle of laughter and
poked the soldier in front in the small of the back He evidently thought it a good
joke that they should have a dumb
soldier in their midst and curious eyes were turned on Causton He hoped the sweat
was not making the boot-polish run
Not far ahead he could hear the sound of small-arms firing--the tac-a-tac of
machine-guns and the more unco-ordinated
and sporadic rattle of rifles--much closer than he had expected Favel had pushed
the firing Line far into a side street and the
column halted Causton looked with interest at the army trucks which were parked
nose to tail the street, noting that
most of them were empty He also now saw that men were siphoning petrol from the
tanks of some of the trucks and refilling the
tanks of others
The officer stepped forward and harangued them again At what was apparently a
question several of the men in the ranks
lifted rifles and waved them, so Causton did the same At a curt command from the
officer, those men broke ranks and
lined up on the other side of the street, Causton with them The officer was
evidently sorting out the armed men from theose
who had thrown away their rifles
A sergent passed along the thin line of armed men To every man he put a question
and doted out ammunition from a box
carried by two men who followed along behind When he came to Causton and snapped
out his question Causton merely
snapped open the breech of his rifle to show that the magazine was empty The
sergent thrust two clips of ammunition
into his hands and passed on
Causton looked across at the trucks Rifles were unloaded from one of them and
issued to the unarmed men There
were not nearly enough to go round He tossed the two clips of ammunition in his
hand thoughtfully and looked at one
Lorru as it pulled away, replenished with petrol at the sacrifice of the others
Serrurier was running short of petrol, guns
and ammunition, or, more probably, he had plenty but in the wrong place at the
wrong time It was very likely that his
supply corps was in a hell of a mess, disrupted by Pavel's unexpectedly successful
thurst
He loaded the rifle and put the other clip in his pocket Serrurier's logistic
difficuties were likely to be the death of a good
foreign correspondent, this was definitely not a good place to be Despite his
aversion to guns, he thought it would be as
well to be prepared He looked about and weighed his chances of getting away and
decided dismally that they were nil But
who knew what a change in the fortunes of war would bring?
More orders were barked and the men tramped off again, this time at right angles to
their original march from the center
of the town, and Causton judged that they were moving parallel to the firing line
They entered one of the poorest areas of
St Pierre, a shanty town of huts built from kerosene cans beaten flat and corrupted
iron There no civilians visible;
either they were cowering in the ramshackle dwellings or they had hurriedly
departed
The line of march changed again towards the noise of battle and they emerged on to
an open place, an incursive tongue of
the countryside licking into the suburbs Here they were halted and spread out into
a long line, and Causton judged that
this was where they would make their stand The men started to dig in, using no
tools but their boyonets, and Causton
with alacrity followed suit
He found that a malodorous spot had been picked for him to die in This open ground,
so near to the shanty town, was a
rubbish dump in which the unhygienic citizens deposited anything for which they had
no further use Incautiously he
stabbed a borrowed bayonet into the bloated corpse of a dead dog which lay-buried
under a pile of ashes--the gases
burst from it with a soft sigh and a terrible strnch and Causton gagged He moved
away slightly and attacked the ground
again, this time with better results, and found that digging in a rubbish dump did
have advantages--it was very easy to
excavate a man-sized hote
Having got dug-in, he looked around, first to the rear in search of an avenue of
escape Directly behind him was the
sergeant, tough-looking and implacable, the muzzle of whose rifle pocked forward,
perhaps intentionally, right at Causton
Behind the sergeant and just in front of the first of the first line of shacks were
the captain's bully-boy spread in a thin line, their
submachine-guns ready to cut down any man who attempted to runs and behind the
troopers was the captain himself,
Leading from the rear and sheltering in the Lee of a shack Beside the shack the
jeep stood with idling engine and Causton
judged that the captain was ready to take off if the line broke No joy there
He turned his attention to the front The strip of open ground stretched as far as
he could see on either side, and was about
prosperous citizens of St Pierre whose exclusiveness was accentuated and protected
from the shanties by this strip of no-
man's-land A battle seemed to be going on acroos there; shells and mortar bombs
were exploding with frightful regularity
tossing pieces of desirable residence about with abandony the fusillade of small-
arms fire was continous, and once a
badly aimed projectile landed only fifty yards to Causton's front and he drew in
his head and felt the patter of earth
fragments all about him
He judged that this was the front line and that the Government forces were losing
Why else would the army have whipped
together a hasty second line of ill-equipped deserters? still, the position was not
badly chosens if the front line broke then
Pavel's men would have to advance across four hundred yards of open ground But then
he thought of the meagre two clips
of ammunition with which he had been issued--perhaps Pavel's men would not find it
too difficult, after all it depended
on whether the Government troops over there could retreat in good order
Nothing happened for a long time and Causton, lying there in the hot sun, actually
began to feel sleepy He had been
informed by soldiers that war is a period during which long stretches of boredom
are punctuated by brief moments of
fright, and he was quite prepared to bilieve this, although he had not encounted it
in his own experience But then, his