Small Wars by Sadie Jones

before. The terrain was good for it – scrubby and plenty of low cover – and there were caves, too, and not all of the island was mapped thoroughly.
    The threat of ambush takes everyone differently. Some spend all their time imagining what may happen: in the front of a truck at night they sit to one side to avoid a bullet from a sniper who might use the headlights to gauge the position of their head. They get superstitious and try to second guess the mind of the man who may have hidden a mine or tripwire in this place or that place. Then there’s the other kind, who don’t think about it imaginatively. They limit their thoughts; they aren’t interested in chance and they don’t give any choice power over another choice because they know they’d spend their whole lives doing it and dying a different way each time. Hal was one of those.
    He knew it was a decision to be like that, and understood how you could lose your nerve and start imagining things and he didn’t know if he would be as cool in combat. He hadn’t had the chance to find out yet. Perhaps he would now.
    He could smell the damp pines, the mineral rocky ground, goats and, faintly, diesel. He felt his body quicken in readiness for what lay ahead and he was thinking about that, not worrying about imaginary mines, as the trucks made the climb towards the tree-line.

    The farmhouse was deep at the bottom of a very steep valley. A river ran along it with a bridge, and the main house and outhouses were along the river and hidden beneath trees. There was one road in, and one road out, and each of the narrow roads made several hairpin bends, doubling back and forth deeper and deeper into the invisible valley or higher and higher to the top of the black hills that met a black sky almost no different.
    They left the trucks and blocked the roads at their dividing. Then there was a long wait while half of Two Platoon went the long way around the valley to block the second road before they went forward on foot.
    The soldiers spread out across the hillside, making the best of poor cover, creeping down into the dark crack in the earth that was the valley.
    When dawn came, it would reach this place last; a more acute and crevice-like hiding place would be hard to find. It was a sharp sudden valley and it wasn’t fanciful to consider it sinister, with the slithering hard stones and earth that went steeply downwards. For most of the day it would be in shadow. Hal had seen the gradients on the map, but was still surprised by the extremity of the land and that anyone would choose to build a farm there, so deep.
    The soldiers moved slowly downwards.
    Hal’s platoon had the interpreter and Andreas at their rear. Andreas was jittery, flanked by soldiers, and the interpreter, Davis, was hanging back and wishing himself home. Mark Innes and Two Platoon, coming down the other hillside, had the better time of it because they were in trees.
    Hal could hear each sound very clearly. He was concentrating intensely, except for the small part of him that felt the eagerness to be getting on with it. He couldn’t see the ground in front of him, or the house, and could only sense the men to his left and right and the mountainside opposite him, but as they went down, and dawn approached, the high line of the mountain showed him where the sky was.
    A dog began to bark, then more dogs, and the sound was very loud, breaking the stillness. They all stopped, but no lights showed where the house must be. They continued their approach, holding their Stens close to their bodies. The hill was almost vertical, and they had to cross the flat road every fifty yards. The approach took a long time and their legs shook with the effort of the slope and with crouching so low to the earth.
    At the banks of the narrow river the soldiers stopped. The bridge was wooden, and Hal was very near it. The water, where it broke slowly over big boulders, and around the supports of the bridge, gleamed white.
    The dogs