Pearson knelt by the Negro sergeant. With the barrel of his Sten gun he nudged the young soldier clutching his knapsack. ‘Can’t you do anything for him? Where’s your morphine?’
The soldier looked up at Pearson, and then let his head drop, staring at the fuel oil that formed rainbows on his boots. Pearson raised his hand, about to hit him with the back of his fist. Then the sounds of gunfire on the motorbridge were lost in the overhead whoom of a shell. Coming across the river, the heavy 120 mm soared over the meadow and plunged into the woods below the hill-crest. Pearson crouched behind the memorial, hoping the shell was a stray. Then Sergeant Tulloch signalled that two more had started on their way. The next fell without exploding into the water-meadow. The third landed fifty feet below the memorial, spattering its surface with broken earth.
When it was quiet again Pearson waited as Corporal Benson pulled the knapsack away from the young soldier and emptied its contents. He slit the captain’s pockets with his bayonet and jerked off his ID tag.
There was little to be gained from any formal interrogation. American weapons technology had advanced to the point where it made almost no sense at all to the rebel commanders. Artillery fire, battle dispositions and helicopter raids were now computer-directed, patrols and sorties programmed ahead. The American equipment was so sophisticated that even the wristwatches stripped off dead prisoners were too complicated to read.
Pearson reached down to the clutter of coins and keys beside the private. He opened a leather-bound diary. Inside was a series of illegible entries, and a folded letter from a friend, evidently a draft-dodger, about the anti-war movement at home. Pearson tossed them into the pool of water leaking below the plinth of the memorial. He picked up an oilstained book, one of a paperback educational series, Charles Olsen’s Call Me Ishmael.
As he held the book in his hands, Pearson glanced back to where Sergeant Tulloch stood over the field radio, well aware that the sergeant would disapprove of this unfading strand of literacy in his own character. He wiped the oil off the American eagle. What an army, whose privates were no longer encouraged to carry field-marshals’ batons in their knapsacks but books like this.
To the captain he said: ‘The US Army must be the most literate since Xenophon’s.’ Pearson slipped the book into his pocket. The captain was looking down over his shoulder at the river. ‘Do you know where we are?’ Pearson asked him.
The captain turned himself round, trying to ease the wounds on his wrists. He looked up at Pearson with his sharp eyes. ‘I guess so. Runnymede, on the Thames River.’
Surprised, Pearson said ungrudgingly: ‘You’re better informed than my own men. I used to live about ten miles from here. Near one of the pacified villages.’
‘Maybe you’ll go back one day.’
‘I dare say, Captain. And maybe we’ll sign a new Magna Carta into the bargain. How long have you been out here?’
The captain hesitated, sizing up Pearson’s interest. ‘Just over a month.’
‘And you’re in combat already? I thought you had a three-month acclimatization period. You must be as badly off as we are.’
‘I’m not a combat soldier, Major. I’m an architect, with US Army Graves Commission. Looking after memorials all over the world.’
‘That’s quite a job., The way things are going, it has almost unlimited prospects.’
‘I hate to have to agree with you, Major.’ The American’s manner had become noticeably more ingratiating, but Pearson was too preoccupied to care. ‘Believe me, a lot of us back home feel the war’s achieved absolutely nothing.’
‘Nothing…?’ Pearson repeated. ‘It’s achieved everything.’ An armoured helicopter soared across the hill-crest, its heavy fans beating at the foliage over their heads. For one thing, the war had turned the entire population of Europe into an armed peasantry, the first intelligent agrarian community since the eighteenth century. That peasantry had produced the Industrial Revolution. This one, literally burrowing like some advanced species of termite into the sub-soil of the twentieth century, might in time produce something greater. Fortunately, the Americans were protected from any hope of success by their own good intentions, their refusal, whatever the cost in their own casualties, to use nuclear weapons.
Two tanks had moved on to the parapet of the bridge, firing their machine-guns along the roadway. A scout helicopter shot down into the fields across the river was burning fiercely, the flames twisting the metal blades.
‘Major!’ Corporal Benson ran to the tunnel mouth. Tulloch was crouched over the radio, headphones on, beckoning towards Pearson. ‘They’re through to Command, sir.’
