Slapton Sands Read Online Free PDF

alternative was the Red Cross Club or a Totnes pub serving weak cider drunk among farm hands until they were forced to leave at halfpast ten when the place was obliged to close. They went for sex and hard liquor and bustle and anonymity; for the chance to sing and brawl and misbehave and do it all in therelative safety of a metropolis under an imposed and absolute darkness.
    â€˜Most of us thought we were going to die,’ the Colorado veteran told Alice Bourne, rolling a cigarette, deliberately, between steady fingers. ‘The Germans had been in France a long time. They were a battle-hardened army of occupation. We didn’t know where we’d be landing, but we assumed the coast of France. The beaches had been mined. Tank traps had been constructed, pillboxes built, all the machine-gun emplacements would have unimpeded fields of fire. Field Marshal Rommel had masterminded those coastal defences. They would be thorough, formidable. We thought we were going to die, all right. Most of us.’ Years of mountain sun and tobacco had seamed his face. His features had not altered since the taking of the picture at the wheel of a Jeep on the wall. But time and the habit had drained all the youth out of him and lined him in those places in his face where youth had once been deposited. He looked like he had been mined for his youth. ‘Course,’ he said, ‘we assumed we were going to die fighting.’ He smiled. ‘All of us assumed we’d be dying at least in battle, for a cause.’
    So making the most of life in the face of death he’d gone to London and painted the town on a two-day pass and returned late in the evening to a changed atmosphere of silence and empty billets and armed sentries strung along the shore as though they were expecting to repulse invasion rather than practising carrying out an invasion of their own. A field hospital had been hauled together out of canvas andwood behind Slapton Leys. He’d heard the stifled cries of casualties under sedation and seen the yellow lights they used in makeshift operating theatres creeping like glowworms along seams of canvas through the blackout.
    â€˜I couldn’t get any information,’ he told Alice Bourne. ‘I didn’t see many guys I recognized, which was curious, but those I did recognize weren’t talking. Then a captain told me to shut up and sit tight or I’d be doing plenty of talking of my own to our MPs. I must have looked pretty upset. I didn’t know it then, but I’d lost a lot of friends. Anyway, this captain, he relented a little bit. Sit tight until morning, soldier, he said. Things’ll be a lot clearer tomorrow than they are tonight.’
    Alice nodded. Behind her, she could hear her skiing friends becoming louder in their laughter and talk with warmth and alcohol.
    â€˜He was lying. I don’t know, maybe he was just trying to be sympathetic. Either way, he wasn’t telling the truth.’
    At first light, the Colorado infantryman had gone down to the shore. A thin, persistent rain was dimpling the sand and the still water, and the grey horizon rested no greater distance than what seemed a pebble’s throw away. The sentries were still there, strung along the shore, slick in watery light in their green rain capes. But the gulls had gone, which was unusual. And the shallow sky was grey and seemed absorbed with a roof-like silence. Start Bay extended to either side of where he stood, a shallow curve stretching as far as it was possible to see in the wet,diminished light. Water in salt droplets gathered and dripped from the brim of his field cap. The bay, the featureless sea and dimpled sand, looked like a place harbouring secrets.
    â€˜But the sea gives up its secrets,’ he told Alice Bourne, thirty-odd years later in the warmth and comfort of his little bar. ‘An infantryman in full kit will sink, weighed down by his boots and his ammunition. But corpses bloat on the