The Long Day's Dying: An unputdownable war novel

By Alan White

Three commandos. Cut off. Surrounded. Desperate.

A classic of war fiction and a major film. 

They were three soldiers, on watch in the French countryside, their base a disused barn. Three ordinary men seconded into the horrors of World War II, each with his own ideals, his own feelings, his own fears.

Their task was a nightmare of waiting. German forces were stationed over the brow of a hill, and every moment of every day passed in nerve-shattering anticipation of their first clash. When the clash finally came, it was not merely a battle of force and brutality but a complex and murderous struggle between the cunning and ruthlessness of both sides...

The Long Day's Dying is a novel that portrays the horror of war. Once taken up, it cannot be put down; once read, it will never be forgotten.

Praise for The Long Day's Dying

'Extraordinarily powerful ... at times harrowing but always gripping. Its authenticity and credibility is rooted in the experience of the author, who led a commando unit in Occupied Europe during the Second World War. The story draws on his experiences in an unflinching manner, turning the fields, hills and hedgerows of the front line into the stage for a drama of the most compelling kind' Alex Gerlis, author of Prince of Spies

‘A war novel that invokes the classical unities of time and action… A gripping read’ Sunday Times

‘I think it’s the best thing of its kind I’ve ever read. I literally couldn’t put it down’ Leslie Charteris, author of The Saint novels

‘A tense and convincing fragment of war’ Observer

'Fiercely authentic... a short, concentrated bark of a story’ Sunday Telegraph

• Language: English
• Publisher: Canelo Action
• Release date: Jan 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9781800321922

Alan White

Alan White’s brilliant war novels have the authenticity born of personal experience. As leader of a commando unit in World War II, he made more than a dozen operational jumps into Occupied Europe. He also fought in North Africa. After the war he joined the BBC and enjoyed a wide-ranging media career including the role of White House correspondent in the US. He has written over forty novels.

Book preview

The Long Day’s Dying by Alan White

Chapter One

We were four. Tom Cooper, Cliff, Robin Farquhar and me. We belonged, somewhat loosely, to Number Nine Commando Brigade, a group of bank clerks and bank robbers, strong men and weak, heroes and cowards, burglars, fire-raisers, bombers, poachers and just plain vagabonds. Our commanding officer, a noble Scot at birth, who’d inherited a title and a distillery together, should have been a pirate. He started the war a whisky tycoon; ended it a corpse of no intrinsic value.

Our Robin Farquhar was killed, too, crossing a river.

Our own unit consisted of seventy-four men when we landed in France shortly before the start of the second front. That first week they counted our dead in tens.

We were known as a Special Group, one of several, used by all and sundry to winkle out trouble wherever it might be encountered. We worked mostly by night, often behind the enemy lines when we could distinguish them. We were often cold, always lonely, usually hungry, and for the whole of the summer, autumn and winter of 1944 I used a bed only for hasty, unsatisfying and totally immoral purposes.

Now I tell my youngest daughter stories that always have to start ‘One day…’ This one I will never tell her.

One day we were taken by a sergeant, and we walked and crawled to where a barn was half concealed by a fold of the ground. The sergeant said, ‘Watch it,’ and crawled away and left us.

He came back the following morning about ten o’clock, and then again the morning after that.

One day…

I’ve read in the official histories of the last war, and in the official and unofficial novels, that armies were locked in combat, that an entire wing of the RAF flew overhead, tanks dotted the plains, hid in the woods, and forged across streams to look for hull-down firing positions. A couple of regiments of artillery, they say, came as close as was feasible, and a couple of thousand tons of bombs were fired or dropped during that one day. For me, it was the day, one of the days, Tom Cooper, Cliff and I spent in the barn. I don’t remember the name of the village nearest to the barn, and I never knew why we spent our days in it.

Generals and field marshals met in headquarters, and films of plays or books have been made, showing them looking gravely at Ordnance Survey maps, listening to them debate the fate of their mortal souls and careers should they decide to take again that ultimate decision, to send another stick of men forward into the holocaust of battle. That’s a mean load of responsibility, a mean way to have to send another man to his death, from across the top of an Ordnance Survey map of ground you’ll never see. Or so the films, my own research sources, have told me.

It wasn’t like that, you know. At least, not for Tom Cooper, for Cliff, nor for me. We fought a little war against boredom, tiredness and the unquenchable desire to be somewhere else, with someone else, doing something else. Lacking the knowledge of what the hell was going on, our chief fight was to preserve the essential seriousness of it all, the sense of being a small but vital part of the grander scheme of things.

Our chief difficulty was to accept, always, that a ‘grander scheme of things’ even existed. I had always been a simple man, not over-bright, this much I knew quite clearly. I had always lived under my father, had worked for an identifiable boss, had prayed to a superior Being I called (and thought of as) God. But significantly, I believed the portraits of Jesus Christ and of God that I had grown up with in my Bible, and all other drawings and portraits of him, were sacrilegious to me.

I had also seen photographs of war leaders, and could usually accept them as they were, but I needed a more positive outcome for their efforts than the mere movement over ground they called conquest.

And so, I think I’ll tell the story of that day the three of us had, out there on what I imagine is still marked on an official death kit Ordnance Survey map, locked away in a dusty cupboard in a labyrinthine office of the War Department, as being the left flank.

Chapter Two

It was a day that started just as any other day.

Getting up early is an insidious habit that gets right inside you – you act like a civilian for just so long, luxuriating between the blankets after waking each morning, and then suddenly, to be awake and not to be up and about seems wasteful. Bed becomes a setting for only one thing – for rest-giving sleep. The sybaritic side of resting horizontal in the warmth, with only a bird’s eye aspect of the realities of the day, becomes a weakening civilian habit. In bed you’re vulnerable, you’re a bad soldier – sergeants come upon you and bellow in your ear, grown men twitch the blankets from you and jeer at the hands you have tucked for comfort into your crotch.

As first light stole into the barn, I awoke, and immediately jumped out of the ‘bed’ in the hay bale. The straw had worked its way into my shirt and my trousers, and the dust it carried covered my body with an itching prickling powder.

I took off all my clothing, shook it, and laid it out in the sunlight to air. Then I took out the clothing I had worn the previous day, and had folded neatly into my rucksack. It didn’t smell unpleasantly yet, but I could quickly identify it as my own. It had my sweet-sour odour I had once been told was most attractive, but which I knew could quickly go stale. I put on underpants, trousers, socks, boots, gaiters, and with my braces hanging, took a bucket of water behind the hedge behind the orchard on the far side of the barn.

Behind us, or so we were told, was the entire British Army. With them, so rumour had it, was the entire American Army.

Beneath us, south on the maps, was a unit of Frenchmen. At least, Frenchmen had marched the night before the previous one through what the military historians would call ‘our positions’, and I supposed they still had to be down there somewhere. Up above us, the reconstituted Dutch Army, leftovers from the Dutch Underground, or so I’d been told by Tom Cooper. He seemed to know everything that went on, though we had no contact with the world outside for three days, other than a daily visit from the sergeant whose name I cannot remember.

In front of us, somewhere, the German Army. The finest bunch of soldiers ever fashioned by the cunning of men. That’s what we had been told by each of our bloodletting training officers at Catterick Camp – this message had been used by every single sergeant and officer who held sway, for however brief an episode, over our lives and destinies. I couldn’t carry accurate testimony to the fineness of the German Army. I had never seen a German fire a shot in anger, had never fired a shot at one in anger, and had begun to think the whole war was a foolishly conceived exercise in futility.

Trained as taut as a fiddle string by the most brutal methods the Army could devise, I had been flung into mortal combat again and again. I had been dropped by parachute into localities in France, Belgium, Holland, known only to me by a code name.

Operation Thunder. We had blown up a bridge across a river rumoured to be the Loire. Four of us had done that job. Our training had been such that we were in and out of Thunder in three hours flat. We’d been received by a rain-drenched Frenchman who came no nearer to us than twenty yards, and then seemed afraid of the explosives we carried. We had landed in the rain. There had been an exciting moment when a German lorry, or so we guessed, went down a road half a mile away. We moved across the ground already made familiar to us by models studied at leisure in the ground floor front of a boarding-house in Hurstpierpoint. We had no need of the Frenchman.

My part in the proceedings had been to lash my share or the explosive round the base of the second plinth of the bridge. I had dumped at least a half a hundredweight of grease-proof-paper wrapped packets into a hole I was told I would find there. It had been there all right. Half full of rain. I remember thinking, ‘Good job they wrapped this lot in grease-proof paper.’ Then I retired by a planned route, to the corner of a field. I waited there about ten minutes, and my three companions came back one by one. There was no talking. Five minutes later a plane landed, and we hopped on board. Only when we were in the air with the thin ribbon of the river stretching below us did we relax. By then, we were feeling the delayed action of the tension we had lived under since our first briefing.

I never found out if that bridge was ever blown. No one told me if that grease-proof paper had kept out the rain. We landed in that plane in an unnamed aerodrome, from which we were driven one by one, separately. We had not talked in the plane. There had been nothing to talk about. ‘What mob you with, then?’

‘Fifth Special Group. What mob you with?’

‘Fourth Special Group.’

‘Know a guy called Chalky?’

‘Chalky what?’

‘Dunno – we always called him Chalky. I did a power station with him up in Belgium somewhere.’ Long pause.

‘You ever done a power station?’

‘Never.’

‘They’re all right.’

‘I’d be scared of getting a shock!’

‘Yes, you’ve got to watch it.’

Conversations such as this one don’t go on for ever. I never saw any of the four again. I was driven in a small army truck and deposited in an assembly centre in a hotel somewhere along the Marylebone Road. After two days I was sent up to Wrexham, then to Achnacarry in Scotland to learn how to make a fire with the oil in the oil bottle in the butt of a rifle.

I was washing. In a bucket. Behind the hedge behind the orchard beside the barn. I’d made a bit of a fire with pellets of smokeless fuel, and had stuck the bucket on them to try to get the water warm enough for a shave. I’ve never forgotten that story about Somerset Maugham wearing a dinner jacket in the jungle in Burma, and saving The Times to open it fresh each morning.

The sun was up, and it was warm. It was a pruning morning. I was daydreaming again – the orchards of Kent. Blossom time – Schubert-song blossom time, Ivor Novello’s ‘We’ll Gather Lilacs’ time. I remember thinking that neither Schubert nor Ivor Novello can ever have pruned an orchard, to smell the spring, when the bark of the trees gives off a sweet odour as pungent as the sweat on the skin of a desirous woman.

Which led me into another rich vein of daydreams.

Cliff and Tom Cooper came out of the barn and started to walk across the beaten earth yard to where I was washing by the hedge. Both were stripped to the waist. Tom Cooper was carrying what had once been a lilac-coloured towel over his shoulder. We’d pulled his leg about that towel for the two weeks he’d had it. My towel had gone long ago, too soiled even to wash. Oddly enough, it was his only possession apart from his rifle that no one would ever borrow from him. I suppose that was one of the things that set Tom Cooper apart from the rest of us, even from Cliff and me and Robin Farquhar. That towel. We always called Robin Robin, Cliff Cliff, but we never called Tom Cooper Tom.

I was cleaning my teeth with the last of the salt and the end of my index finger. I would infinitely prefer to stink of sweat than bad breath.

Suddenly, I suppose – though the action that followed can still cross my night dreams in slow motion – the whole wall that jutted out from the side of that barn just took off, into the air, and came crashing to the ground, brick upon brick upon brick, between Cliff, Tom Cooper and me. The bucket of water was pushed upwards and crushed almost flat against my belly by the sudden pressure. A little of the water in it shot up past my face, and then the rumble began, the rumble of rubble and the clatter of tiles and the whiplash of the branches of trees. Tom Cooper was flung sideways into a trough of pigmeal long since rancid, but Cliff just crumpled and fell, boneless, to the ground. Then the post-explosive suction began, and bricks,