Alistair could not watch Duggan’s face, urgent with expectation, falling when nothing came back from the other men. There was only a soft scraping of boots on the wooden floor of the truck as positions were adjusted.
“Duggan,” said the sergeant major, “I can understand that you may not wish to do this alone, so let me give you a choice. If you are not out of this vehicle in thirty seconds, then everyone will get out and the whole company will march back to barracks with you. Is that what you want, Mr. Duggan?”
Duggan was brittle in the torchlight. “I . . . I . . .”
There was silence for five seconds, then ten. Then, somewhere outside the cold disc of torchlight, a man coughed, and stretched it into a muttering. The hard guttural of the cough disguised the initial consonant: “*et out!”
A pause, then more coughing from the men in their darkness. “*et out! et the hell out of here! et the bloody hell out Duggan you useless *astard!” The men coughed their judgment into the dark, each damnation blent with a paroxysm of the diaphragm so that the men spoke not only with their tongues but also with their tired bodies that were scourged and sleepy and did not want to go back out into the storm.
Alistair did not join in, but though he wished they would stop he did nothing. Duggan turned to him—or almost to him. Blinded in his small circle of light, he addressed a place slightly to Alistair’s right. In a small voice on the edge of cracking he said, “Huh . . . Heath?” And then, when no answer came, “Alistair?”
Alistair clutched his arms tight around himself. He heard the roaring of the gale and felt the fragile warmth within him. He would be so quickly struck back to numbness if he went out into it all again.
He made himself look at Duggan. The man had a strangely flat face in the torchlight, almost concave. It was a weak face—Alistair saw this now, and wondered why he hadn’t noticed before. It would not be a difficult one to take aversion to. If I had a face like that, Alistair thought, I should probably have learned by his age to be more careful whom I was rude to.
Alistair looked at the weak, beseeching face and felt a surge of anger. This was a man he had spoken with for only a few minutes, and who therefore had no claim to fraternity. They had exchanged a few witticisms, that was all. They had sat out of the wind for a moment, enjoying a solidarity that, now he came to think of it, had been rather smug and based on the understanding that they were cut from finer cloth than the other men. And now here he was, warmed by those other men’s whisky.
“Alistair?”
The wind whipped at the canvas. The men waited on his word. But Alistair did not want to go back out into the storm, and so in the darkness he said nothing.
In the spotlight of the torch, Duggan’s pleading look softened into misery and then dissolved entirely. Finally, as he took his pack and rifle and clambered toward the tailgate, Duggan, the actor, was expressionless.
The truck lifted on its springs and settled again as Duggan’s weight dropped over the back. The sergeant major extinguished his torch and slammed the tailgate shut. Alistair felt the truck rock again as the sergeant major climbed into the cab, then the door slammed and the truck lurched as the driver set it in motion over the tussocks of grass. In the back, all of them sat in silence as the truck picked up a lurching, jolting speed over the trackless plain.
No one joked now, or swore, or passed whisky. Now each man alone in his sodden clothes weighed the warmth of the things he had gained against the cost of them, and since the price had been paid by all of them acting together, it was best if they all sat alone. Rain roared against the canvas and entered in chill streams wherever it found ingress. The wind blew knives.
“Damn it,” said Alistair.
He took up his rifle and pack, gripped the steel hoops of the canvas top to keep his balance, and stumbled over the legs and packs of the men to reach the back of the truck bed. He braced, then launched himself over the tailgate.
The fall winded him. He lost his equipment. He rolled over in the sodden grass, coming to rest jackknifed and gasping. Twenty minutes of warmth had been enough to make him forget the nature of cold completely. Straight away, he doubted whether he could survive. He picked himself up and stumbled in a half crouch with his back to the gale as he retrieved first his pack and then his gun. The rain beat on his bare head—his helmet was gone. His rifle was slick with rain. He shouldered the awful thing.
The truck did not slow or change its note, and he did not expect it to. In the back they would all be feeling the lifting of a burden. The remaining men would be talking again promising to stand pints for the man who had gone over. They would not all be certain of his name.