She Sells Seashells...

We were calm at first, like we didn't really believe what was going on. We'd never seen any of these mysterious enemies they kept warning us about, and what did we know about war anyway? We were just kids.
They put us in an outpost on the quiet side of the county, where they didn't expect any action.
Tricky tides and rocks and sandbars meant low chances of attack from the sea, or so they told us, and the outpost's flank was toward the city itself. They gave us guns and knives and told us to keep our eyes open, and we were as alert as a group of bored teenagers could be. For a while it was easy. All of us liked being paid to sit around doing nothing. We played countless rounds of cards, used the seemingly endless stores of ammunition in target practise with the local gulls, learned French and German from discarded phrasebooks.
"Il y a une alerte a` la bombe, there is a bomb alert." we would say and laugh uproariously. "How are you? Wie geht es Ihnen?"
Everything was funny in the early days, before the war reached our outpost. The whole thing seemed completely absurd, that we who had only days before been skipping school and work were now to be soldiers against an enemy nobody really believed in.


There was a tiny stretch of sand, sheltered on three sides by seemingly sheer cliffs and on the fourth side open to the sea. The sand was white and soft, with just the right amount of pebbles and seashells scattered around. On sunny days we would go down there - never more than two of us, though. They had impressed severely upon us the dangers of leaving the outpost unmanned.
My favourite person to take there was Sarah. She was quiet around the others but when we were alone the words spilled out of her as if she couldn't help herself. It was nice to listen to her soft voice, complemented by the waves that washed around our toes and underscored with the harsh cries of the gulls. One day she was telling me about her family when the birds arrived, hopping around us and cawing loudly, expecting food.
Sarah was furious - I guess we all had short tempers by this time. We were getting cabin fever, closed up in that little building where the only thing to do was wait and wonder if the war was ever going to come our way. She jumped to hear feet, lifted her gun, and shot them all. The stupid birds didn't even fly away when she started shooting, just cawed and flapped and dropped one by one onto the sand. And then they were all dead, and she sat down hard beside me and started crying. The white sand was stained red in a great circle around us, and dotted with sad little bundles of feathers. We didn't know what to do with them so we just left, and overnight the tide rose up, and when we came back the next day the sand was perfectly white and soft and scattered with just the right number of seashells and pebbles.


It was Clare who saw them first; she was on sentry duty that day, sitting on the roof and staring out to sea. She shouted and we ran to join her, scrambling up the ladder and across the slippery tiles.
"Over there," she pointed, translating automatically into German, "Dort!"
We crouched, staring, wondering what we were seeing. There was just one ship, and how were we to know if they were locals or foreigners? But its shape was different to the boats we'd seen before, and there was an undeniable grimness in its silence that crept under our skin. A sense of self-preservation overcame us all at the same time and we dropped down onto the tiles, flattening ourselves as best we could. Had they seen us?
"Surely we're of no concern to them," Tom said, trying to sound brave. "We're just some kids playing on a roof."
"We're soldiers," I corrected. "We have to remember that, and we have to assume that they know. We can't be complacent."