Kruger's Alp by Christopher Hope

the knots would not budge. His hands slipped and reddened. With a snort of impatience Joyce came over and seized the mother’s hands. He took her feet and between them they carried the bodies to the stoep. Joyce would have laid the mother out, face down, with the baby above but Blanchaille was revolted by the unnaturalness of this and gently turned the woman on her side so it looked as if mother and child were curled up asleep.
    Perhaps this sign of gentleness softened Joyce, for she took up the next body with a brisk nod at Blanchaille, indicating that from nowon they would clear the field together. Hoping this was the beginning of better relations, Blanchaille set the chair back on its feet, as if it would preside, become a witness, over their business. Joyce seemed to understand and approve of this gesture for there is always some comfort in extreme situations in the restoration of an even temporary normality. In the course of his work Blanchaille learnt something of bullet wounds. Learnt how the entry point may be smooth, how the speeding bullet may draw threads of clothing with it into the wound and the bullet, often encountering no obstacle on its passage through the body, burst out with ugly force from shoulder or neck. Or it might take a wildly eccentric course through the inner organs rebounding off bone to emerge in unexpected places, anything up to a foot above or below the point of entry. Head wounds could be particularly severe, seen from behind.
    He went to Colonel Schlagter. ‘You said that these people had been attacking your men.’
    Schlagter eyed him warily, ‘Well?’
    â€˜A lot of them have been shot in the back.’
    â€˜Christ man, what’s that got to do with it?’
    â€˜Well it looks like they were running away.’
    Schlagter shook his head. He laughed grimly. ‘Front, sides, back – what the hell does it matter? Look, you’ve never been under attack. Let me tell you that when you’re being attacked you don’t stop to ask what direction the people are running in. Anyway, like I told you, they’re a crafty lot. I mean for all you know some of them turned round and were running at us backwards. Have you thought of that?’
    Blanchaille admitted that he had not.
    When at last all the corpses were laid out on the long wooden veranda in front of the police station and an armed guard posted, ‘just in case’, Schlagter came over and thanked them for their work. ‘You have been an indispensable help. You have served your country. All these people you see lying here will now be counted and photographed and their relatives will be brought to identify them, and afterwards they will be allowed to reclaim the members of their families. This is a strict procedure because the enemies of our country like nothing better than to inflate the figures of those killed and to claim that all sorts of people have been killed when they know this is a lie and a slander.’
    The armed police were stood down and relaxed visibly. The Saracens left. Schlagter directed Blanchaille and Joyce to a stand-tap behind the police station building and asked them if they’d liketo wash their hands.
    Joyce washed first, holding her feet under the tap and then scrubbing ferociously at the blood stains on her white dress, folding handfuls of gravel into the material and rubbing it harshly, catching the water in a great scoop of her skirt like a prospector panning for gold and in this way she managed to reduce the vividness of the blood marks, but the stains remained.
    Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, so the story went, Blanchaille reflected. Only it wasn’t like that, not here. It was blood to dust and dust to mud and mud to water and away down the ditch with it. He watched as Joyce scrubbed at the blood which had caught in the cracks of her nails using the wet hem of her dress.
    â€˜I think they’re going to let us go now.’
    â€˜You? Think! This is