CASTLES
I had spent the bulk of my teen years in Shropshire. The old Marcher county, bordering Wales, had mediaeval castles scattered like a careless handful of pebbles across the countryside. As a child, my father would put me on the back of his bike, and we would explore the ruins at Moreton Corbet. The towers of Shrewsbury Castle dominated the train station forecourt; a happy welcome home after every time I went away. Ludlow Castle, with its romantic battlements, haunted by the footsteps of archaic bowmen and the ghostly hoofprints of mounted knights. The ruins of soldiery long-past; my professional forebears. Castles were made for soldiers.
I.
Weighed down with our fighting gear, weighing twice as much without the adrenaline of combat to fuel us, we undulated along Helmandi by-ways. The infantry company snake is as old as time. Staggered file, with one man on the left of the road, followed with a suitable gap by the next man on the right, and so on.
A “suitable gap” is one that will stop the platoon or company being enfiladed by enemy ambush: enough distance between soldiers that one sweep of machine gun fire cannot hit them all at once. The route zigzagged us between poppy fields shorn of their opium harvest, the poppy stems dried and stacked in the corners of the farmland, the fields bisected by manually dug irrigation ditches and lines of trees. The light filtered through dust created a sepia haze. Everything absorbed and radiated the heat; every structure was mud walled and gave off a basking glow of warmth from daily baking.
We turned a final corner and shook ourselves out into a fighting formation. We could see the top of the battlements of Qader Kalay castle; hauntingly familiar yet alien. It was ageless; the same mud walls of the surrounding compounds, but the walls were chipped with the impact of small arms fire and looked aged, weathered. It could have been centuries old or a Helmandi new-build. The arched gateway and looming turrets dominated the land like a mediaeval Marcher castle; yet this was mud, not stone, with a square acre of cannabis growing in the adjoining field, filling the air with pungent scent. Another company had achieved the break in to the castle; our job was to finish off.