J. G. Ballard - One Afternoon at Utah Beach

'Do you realize that we're looking down at Utah Beach?'

As he took off his boots and weather cape, David Ogden pointed through the window at the sea wall. Fifty yards from the villa the flat sand ran along the Normandy coast like an abandoned highway, its right shoulder washed by the sea. Every half-mile a blockhouse of black concrete presented its shell-pocked profile to the calm Channel.

Small waves flicked at the empty beach, as if waiting for something to happen.

'I walked down to the war memorial,' Ogden explained. 'There's a Sherman there - an American tank - some field guns and a commemorative plaque. This is where the US First Army came ashore on D-Day.

Angela... Ogden turned from the window, expecting his wife to comment on his discovery. She and Richard Foster, the pilot who had flown them over to Cherbourg for a week at this rented villa, sat at either end of the velvet settee, watching Ogden with a curious absence of expression. Dressed in their immaculate holiday wear, brandy glasses motionless in their hands as they listened politely, they reminded him of two mannequins in a department store tableau.

'Utah Beach...' Angela gazed in a critical way at the deserted sand, as if expecting a military exercise to materialize for her and fill it with landing craft and assault troops. 'I'd forgotten about the war. Dick, do you remember D-Day?'

'I was two.' Foster stood up and strolled to the window, partly blocking Ogden's view. 'My military career began a little later than yours, David.' Glancing down at Ogden, who was now staring at a blockhouse six hundred yards away, he said, 'Utah Beach - well, you wanted some good shooting. Are you sure this isn't Omaha, or one of the others Juno, Gold, what were they called?'

Without any intended rudeness, Ogden ignored the younger man. His face was still numb from the sea air, and he was intent on his communion with the empty sand and the blockhouses. Walking along the beach, he had been surprised by the size of these concrete monsters. He had expected a chain of subterranean pill-boxes hiding within the sea wall, but many of them were massive fortresses three storeys high, larger than the parish churches in the nearby towns. The presence of the blockhouses, like the shells of the steel pontoons embedded in the wet sand, had pulled an unsuspected trigger in his mind. Like all examples of cryptic architecture, in which form no longer revealed function - Mayan palaces, catacombs, Viet Cong sanctuaries, the bauxite mines at Les Baux where Cocteau had filmed Le Testament d'Orphe - these World War II blockhouses seemed to transcend time, complex ciphers with a powerful latent identity.

'Omaha is further east along the coast,' he told Foster matter-of-factly. 'Utah Beach was the closest of the landing grounds to Sainte-Mere-Eglise, where the 82nd Airborne came down. The marshes we shoot across held them up for a while.'

Foster nodded sagely, his eyes running up and down Ogden's slim but hyperactive figure for what seemed the hundredth time that day. Throughout their visit Foster appeared to be sympathetically itemizing a catalogue of his defects, without in any way being insolent. Staring back at him, Ogden reflected in turn that for all the hours Foster had logged as a salesman of executive jets his sallow face remained remarkably pallid as if he were plagued by some deep malaise, some unresolvable contradiction. By noon a dark stain seemed to leak from his mouth on to his heavy chin, a shadow that Foster had once described to Angela as a blue tan from spending too much time in bars.

As if separating the two men like a referee, Angela came to the window. 'For someone who's newer been in the army or heard a shot fired in anger, David's remarkably well-informed about military matters.'

'Isn't he - for a non-combatant,' Foster agreed. 'And I don't mean that in any critical spirit, David. I spent five years in the army and no one ever told me who won the battle of Waterloo.'

'Weren't you a helicopter pilot?' Ogden asked. 'Actually, I'm not all that interested in military history..

Strictly speaking, this wasn't true, Ogden admitted to himself during lunch, though in fact he had not thought of the D-Day beaches when Angela first suggested the week in Normandy. Under the pretext of a demonstration flight in the twin Comanche, Foster had offered to fly them gratis, though his real reasons were hard to define. The whole trip was surrounded by ambiguities, motives hidden inside each other like puzzle boxes.

This curious threesome - the aircraft salesman, the provincial film critic in his late forties, and the young wife ten years his junior, a moderately successful painter of miniatures - sat in this well-appointed villa beside a longforgotten battleground as if unsure what had brought them here. Curious, not because of any confrontation that might occur, any crime of passion, but because three people so ill-assorted had formed such a stable relationship. At no time during the six months since their meeting at the San Sebastian festival had there been the slightest hint of tension, though Ogden was sure everyone took for granted that his wife and Richard Foster were well into an affair. However, for various reasons Ogden doubted this. For her own security Angela needed someone around her who had achieved a modest degree of failure.

His young wife... Ogden repeated the phrase to himself, realizing as he watched Angela's sharper chin and more prominent jaw muscles, the angular shoulders inside the chiffon blouse, that she was not all that young any more. Soon she would be older than he had been when they first met.

'I'm taking Angela into Sainte-Mere,' Foster told him after lunch. 'Do you want to come along, David? We can try the calvados.'

As usual, Ogden declined. The walk that morning had exhausted him. He stretched out in an armchair and watched the slack sea shrug itself against the beach. He was aware of the complex timetable of apparently arbitrary journeys that Foster and his wife embarked upon each day, but for the moment his attention was held by the blockhouse six hundred yards away. Despite the continuous sunlight the concrete was drenched in spray, gleaming like wet anthracite as if generating its own weather around itself.

An hour after his wife and Foster had gone, Ogden pulled on his boots. He had recovered from the lunch, and the silent villa with its formal furniture felt like the stage-set of a claustrophobic drama. The strong afternoon light had turned the beach into a brilliant mirror, a flare-path beckoning him to some unseen destination.

As he neared the blockhouse Ogden visualized himself defending this battered redoubt against the invading sea. An immense calm presided over the cool beach, as if nothing had happened in the intervening thirty years. The violence here, the scale of the conflict between the German armies and the allied armada, had pre-empted any further confrontation, assuaging his own unease about Foster and his wife.

Fifty yards from the blockhouse he climbed the scrub-covered dune that rose to its seaward flank. The sand was scattered with worn-out shoes, cycle tyres and fragments of wine bottles and vegetable crates. Generations of tramps had used these old forts as staging-posts on their journeys up and down the coast. The remains of small fires lay on the steps of the concrete staircase at the rear of the blockhouse, and pats of dried excrement covered the floor of the munitions store.

Ogden walked across the central gunnery platform of the blockhouse, a rectilinear vault large enough to house a railway locomotive. From here a heavy-calibre naval gun had lobbed its shells at the invasion fleet. A narrow stairway set into the solid wall climbed to the observation deck, and gave access to the barbette of a small-arms weapons platform below the roof. Ogden climbed the stairway, tripping twice in the darkness. The worn concrete was slick with moisture sweating from its black surface.

As he stood on the roof, lungs pumping in the cold air, the sea already seemed far below, the villa hidden behind its high privet hedges. Looking around, though, he immediately noticed the white Pallas parked behind the sea wall two hundred yards along the beach. The car was the same colour as the Citro'n they had hired in Cherbourg, and Ogden took for granted that it was their own vehicle. A tall man in a hunting jacket was steering a woman companion along the broken ground behind the wall. They approached a wooden boathouse at the end of a slipway above the beach, and Ogden could see clearly the patterns of the woman's musquash fur and recognize her gesture as she reached a gloved hand to the man's elbow.

Ogden stepped down into the stairwell. Watching them calmly, his shoulders hidden by the parapet, he knew that he had deliberately encouraged Angela and Richard Foster to come together. His own solitary walks, the private excursions he had made to the D-Day museum at Arromanches, had been part of a confused and half-conscious attempt to bring matters to a head and force a decision on himself.

Yet when he saw them unlocking the door of the boathouse together, briefly embracing in the sunlight as if openly trying to provoke him, Ogden felt a profound sense of loss. He knew too that the months of self-control had been wasted, and that from the beginning he had deluded himself that all was well.

Without thinking, he turned quickly from the parapet. With luck he could pack, call a taxi and have caught the ferry from Cherbourg before they returned to the villa. He started to run down the concrete steps, lost his footing on the damp diagonal sills, and fell backwards down the stairway on to the floor of the barbette ten feet below.

Sitting in the half-light against the wet concrete wall, Ogden massaged his bruised hands. By luck he had been able to protect his head, but he could feel the raw skin of his arms and shoulders. Some sort of viscous oil stained his fawn trousers, and a leather button torn from his jacket lay like a burst chestnut at the foot of the stairway. Immediately to his left was the embrasure of the fire-sill, the quiet beach below. There was no movement from the boathouse, and the white Pallas was still parked behind the sea wall.

At this moment Ogden realized that he was not the only person keeping a close watch on the beach. Six feet away from him, almost hidden by his grey uniform in the shadows behind the parapet, a man lay against the concrete wall. He was resting on one elbow, face turned towards the open sea, and at first Ogden assumed that he was dead. His blond hair had been bleached to an almost arctic pallor. He appeared to be no more than nineteen or twenty years old, his pale skin stretched across the bony points of his face like wet parchment around a skull.

His thin legs, encased in a pair of heavy boots and ragged serge trousers, stuck out in front of him like poles strung with rags. Lying diagonally across them, its long barrel supported by a bipod, was a light machine-gun, stock pressed against the young man's right shoulder. Around him, arranged like the decor of a shabby military display, were an empty mess tin, a spent ammunition belt, the half-rotted remains of a field pack and webbing, and a greasestained ground sheet.

A few feet from Ogden, lying on the fire-sill within his reach, was a spring-action flare-pistol of a type he had seen only the previous afternoon in the D-Day museum at Arromanches. He recognized it immediately, like the uniform and equipment of this young Wehrmacht soldier whose corpse he had stumbled upon, in some way preserved by the freezing air, or perhaps by the lime leaking from the hastily mixed concrete. Curiously, the machine-gun still appeared to be in working order, a spiked bayonet fitted under the barrel, the butt-stock and receiver greased and polished.

Confused by this macabre discovery, Ogden had already forgotten his wife's infidelity. He was about to pick up the flarepistol and fire it over the parapet in the direction of the boathouse. But as his bruised hand touched the frozen butt Ogden became aware that the young soldier's eyes were watching him. Of a blanched blue from which almost all pigment had been washed away, they had turned from the beach and were examining Ogden with a tired but steady gaze. Although the soldier's white hands still lay passively at his sides, his right shoulder had moved against the wall, swinging the machine-gun fractionally towards Ogden.

Too frightened to speak, Ogden sat back, taking in every detail of the German's equipment, every ammunition round and piece of webbing, every pore in the cold skin of this young soldier still defending his blockhouse on Utah Beach as he had done in 1944.

After a moment, to Ogden's relief, the machine-gun barrel turned towards the sea. The German had shifted his position slightly, and was once again scanning the beach. His left hand moved to his face, as if he were hoping to transfer a morsel of food to his mouth, and then fell to the floor. A ragged bandage circled his chest, covering a blackened wound partly hidden by his tunic. He took no notice of Ogden as the latter climbed to his feet, both hands pressed to the wall as if frightened that it might collapse on him at any time.

But as Ogden stepped over the machine-gun a white claw moved across the floor, about to seize his ankle.

'Horen Sie...' The voice was flat, as if coming off an almost erased recording tape. 'Wieviel Ulir ist es?' He looked up with a kind of exhausted impatience. 'Verstehen Sie? Queue heure...? Aujourd'hui? Hier?' Dismissing Ogden with a wave, he murmured, 'Zu viel Larm zu viel Larm...'

Pulling the stock of the machine-gun into his shoulder, he stared along its barrel at the beach below.

Ogden was about to leave, when a movement on the beach caught his eye. The boathouse door had opened. Richard Foster stepped into the sunlight, and swung his arms lazily in the cool air as he waited until Angela appeared thirty seconds later. Together they walked across the dunes to the parked Pallas, climbed into the car and drove off.

Ogden paused by the staircase, watching the young soldier with the machine gun. He realized that the German had seen neither Foster nor his wife. The boathouse and sea wall were hidden from him by the parapet of the barbette. But if he recovered from his wounds, and moved forward to the edge of the fire-sill By the time he reached the villa ten minutes later Ogden had already decided on both the tactics and strategy of what he knew would be the last military action of World War II.

'Have you seen the blankets from the children's room?' Angela flicked through the inventory, her sharp eyes watching her husband as he played chess with himself by the sitting-room window. 'I didn't bother to check them when we arrived, but Mme Saunier insists they're missing.'

Ogden looked up from the chessboard. As he shook his head he glanced at the blockhouse. For the three days since his discovery the suspense had become exhausting; at any moment he expected a wounded Wehrmacht soldier to appear on the roof among the wheeling gulls, a pink blanket around his shoulders. At lunch he had changed his place, sitting by himself further down one side of the table so that he could keep the blockhouse under observation.

'Perhaps they were never there,' he said. 'We can replace them.'

'They were here all right. Mme Saunier is scrupulous about this sort of thing. She also said something about one of the decanters. David, are you in a trance?'

Irritably, Angela pushed her blonde hair from her forehead, then gave up and picked up her coat. Richard Foster was waiting by the car in the drive, one of the two shotguns they had hired cradled under his arm. Ogden noticed that he had taken to carrying the weapon everywhere with him, almost as if he detected a change of atmosphere in the villa. In fact, Ogden had gone to strenuous lengths to maintain the good humour of the first days of their holiday.

He waited patiently for them to leave. Half an hour later Mme Saunier set off in her Simca. When the sounds of the car had faded Ogden stood up and moved swiftly across the villa to the conservatory at the rear of the dining room. He removed the pots of bright winter plants standing on the wooden dais, eased back the platform from the wall and pulled out the cheap suitcase he had bought in Sainte-Mere that morning while Angela and Foster were lounging over the breakfast table. Taking the blankets from the empty bedroom had been a mistake, but at the time he had been concerned only to keep the young soldier alive.

Inside the suitcase were adhesive tape, sterile lint and antiseptic cream, one bottle of Vichy water and a second of schnapps, a primus stove, six cans of assorted soup, and a pull-through he had purchased from the town's gunsmith. However carefully the German had oiled the machine-gun, its barrel would need a thorough reaming-out.

After checking the contents, Ogden replaced the dais and let himself through the conservatory doors. Protected by the high privets, the garden was warm, and the air coming off the beach had an almost carnival sparkle. As usual, though, by the time he reached the blockhouse the temperature had dropped by almost ten degrees, as if this black concrete redoubt existed within a climatic zone of its own.

Ogden paused by the staircase, listening for the sounds of any intruders. On the first afternoon, when he had snatched the children's blankets, flung together an emergency meal of bread, milk and salami, and raced back along the beach to the blockhouse, the German had relapsed into one of the intermittent comas into which he would sink without warning. Although still staring at the tide-line, right hand clasped around the trigger butt of the machine-gun, his face was so cold and pallid that Ogden at first thought he had died. But he revived at the sound of the milk pouring into his mess tin, sat up and allowed Ogden to drape the blankets around his shoulders. Unable to stay more than an hour for fear of alerting his wife, Ogden had spent the evening in a state of hyper-excitability, for some reason terrified that the local police and members of a German military mission might arrive at any moment.

By the next morning, after Ogden had taken the car to Sainte-Mere on the pretext of visiting the war cemeteries there, the German had visibly improved. Although barely aware of Ogden, he leaned more comfortably against the damp wall. He held the mess tin against his bandaged chest, picking at the remains of the sausage. His face had more colour, and the skin was less tightly stretched against the jaw and cheekbones.

The German was often irritated by Ogden's fumbling, and there was something strangely vulnerable about his extreme youth. Ogden visited him twice each day, bringing water, food and cigarettes, whatever he could smuggle out of the villa under the suspicious eyes of Mme Saunier. He would have liked to light a fire for the soldier, but the primus stove he had brought with him on this fourth morning would generate a little warmth. However, the German had survived in this cold - the thought of living through all those winters made Ogden shudder - and at least the summer was coming.

When he climbed the stairway to the barbette the German was sitting up, blankets around his shoulders, quietly cleaning the machine-gun. He nodded to Ogden, who sat panting on the cold floor, and continued to strip the breech, apparently uninterested in the primus stove. When Ogden handed over the pull-through the German glanced at him with a flicker of appreciation. He ate only when he had reassembled the weapon.

Ogden watched him approvingly, relieved to see the young soldier's total dedication to his defence of this lonely strongpoint. It was this kind of courage that Ogden most admired. Earlier he had feared that once the German had recovered his strength he might decide to leave, or fall back to a more defensible position. Clearly he had missed the actual landings on Utah Beach and had no idea that he alone was keeping the war going. Ogden had no intention of telling him the truth, and the German's resolve never wavered.

Despite his overall improvement, the German's legs still seemed useless, and he had not moved forward sufficiently to see the boathouse two hundred yards away. Each afternoon Angela and Richard Foster climbed the dunes to this wooden shack on its miniature wheels, and disappeared into it for an hour. At times, as he waited for them to emerge, Ogden was tempted to wrest the machine-gun from the wounded German and empty its ammunition belt through the flaking weatherboard. But the young soldier's aim was probably sharper and more steady. The flare-pistol lay on the fire-sill, the shell in its barrel. When the German had cleaned it they would be ready.

Two days later, soon after one o'clock in the afternoon, began the last military engagement to take place on Utah Beach.

At eleven o'clock that morning, as Angela sat at the breakfast table reading the local French newspaper, Richard Foster returned from the telephone in the hall.

'We'll have to leave this afternoon. The weather's closing in.'

'What?' Ogden left his chess table and joined them in the dining room. He pointed to the brilliant sunlight falling on the wet satin of the beach. 'It doesn't look like it.'

'I've just talked to the met. people at Cherbourg Airport. There's a front coming in from the Scillies. The barometer's going up like a lift.'

Ogden clasped his hands, trying to control them. 'Well, let's put it off for a day. The plane's fully instrumented.'

'Not a chance. By this time tomorrow the Channel will be packed with cumulo-nimbus. It'll be like trying to fly through a maze of active volcanoes.'

'Dick knows what he's doing,' Angela confirmed. 'I'll read the inventory with Mme Saunier after lunch. She can take the keys to the agents when we've gone.' To Ogden, who was still staring uncertainly at Richard Foster, she said, 'A day won't matter, David. You've done nothing all week but play about on the beach by yourself.'

For the next half an hour Ogden tried to find some excuse for them to stay, pacing up and down the sitting room as suitcases were dragged around upstairs. He tried to shut the two women's voices out of his mind, realizing that his entire scheme was about to fall to pieces. Already he had made his morning visit to the blockhouse, taking coffee, soup and cigarettes. The young German had almost recovered, and had moved the machine-gun closer to the parapet. Now Ogden would have to leave him there. Within days he would realize that the war was over and hand himself in to the French authorities.

Behind him the front door closed. Ogden heard Foster's voice in the drive, Angela calling to him about something. He watched them from the window, in a flat way admiring their nerve. They were setting off for their last walk together, Foster holding Angela's elbow in one hand, the shotgun in the other.

Still surprised by the blatant way in which they were advertising their affair - during the past two days they had done everything but get into Angela's bed together - Ogden pressed his hands against the window. A faint chance still remained. He remembered the almost provocative way in which Angela had watched him across the dining table the previous evening, confident that he would do absolutely nothing Fifteen minutes later Ogden had left the house and an exasperated Mme Saunier, and was running head down, shotgun in hand, through the pools of water which the stiffening sea had swilled across Utah Beach.

'Langsamer! Zu schnell. Langsam...'

Trying to calm Ogden, the young German raised a white hand and gestured him away from the parapet. He reached forward and shifted the bipod, swinging the machine-gun to take in the section of beach containing the boathouse, at which Ogden had been gesticulating since his arrival.

Ogden crouched against the wall, only too ready to let the German take command. The young soldier's recovery in the space of a few days had been remarkable. Though his hands and face retained their albino-like whiteness, he seemed almost to have put on weight. He moved easily around the fire-sill, in complete control of his heavy weapon. The bolt was cocked back, trigger set for automatic fire. A kind of wan smile, an ironic grimace, hung about his cold mouth, as if he too knew that his long wait was about to come to an end.

Ogden nodded encouragingly, holding his shotgun in as military a grip as he could muster. Its fire-power was nothing by comparison with the German's machine-gun, but it was all he could offer. In some obscure way he felt obligated to this young soldier, and guilty at implicating him in what would in a sense be the last war crime committed during World War II.

'They're - Look!' Ogden ducked behind the parapet, gesturing frantically. The boathouse door had opened, a cracked glass pane throwing a blade of sunlight at them. Ogden lifted himself on to his knees, the flare-pistol in both hands. The German had come to life, moving with professional command, all trace of his injuries forgotten. He adjusted his rear sight, his bandaged shoulder traversing the heavy weapon. Angela and Richard Foster stepped through the door of the boathouse. They paused in the sunlight, Foster casually inspecting the nearby dunes. The shotgun rested on his shoulder, trigger guard clasped around two fingers.

Unnerved for a moment by this aggressive stance, Ogden raised the flare-pistol, cocked the trigger and fired the fat shell into the air over Foster's head. The pilot looked up at its weak parabola, then ran forward, shouting to Angela as the shell lost height and fell like a dead bird into the calm sea. 'A dud Angry with himself, Ogden stood up in the embrasure, his head and chest exposed. Raising the shotgun, he fired the left barrel at Foster, who was darting through the dunes little more than a hundred yards from the blockhouse. Beside Ogden the young German was taking aim. The long barrel of the machine-gun followed the running figure. At last he opened fire, the violent noise jarring the parapet. Ogden was standing in the embrasure, happily listening to the roar of the machine-gun, when Richard Foster stood up in the long grass ten yards from the blockhouse and shot him through the chest.

'Is he...?'

Angela waited in the dim light by the stairway, the collar of her fur coat pressed against her cheeks. Avoiding the body on the floor of the barbette, she watched Foster rest his shotgun against the wall and kneel on the floor.

'Stand back as far as you can.' Foster waved her back. He examined the body, then touched the flare-pistol with a blood-stained shoe. He was still shaking, both from fear and from the exhaustion of the past week. By contrast, Angela was completely calm. He noticed that with characteristic thoroughness she had insisted on climbing the stairway.

'It's a damn lucky thing he fired that first, I might not have had time otherwise... But where the hell did he find it? And all this other equipment?'

'Let's leave and call the police.' Angela waited, but Foster was still searching the floor. 'Dick! An hour from now I may not sound very convincing.'

'Look at this gear - World War II webbing, machine-gun ammunition, primus stove, German phrase-book and all these cans of soup...'

'He was camping here. I told you it would take a lot to provoke him.'

'Angela!' Foster stepped back and beckoned her towards him. 'Look at him... For God's sake, he's wearing a German uniform. Boots, tunic, the whole thing.'

'Dick!'

As they made their way from the blockhouse, the alarmed figure of Mme Saunier was hurrying along the beach towards them. Foster held Angela's arm.

'Now. Are you all right?'

'Of course.' With a grimace, Angela picked her way down the grimy concrete steps. 'You know, he must have thought we were coming ashore. He was always talking about Utah Beach.'