The red row houses flashing by, their brick a contrasting blur against autumn-stripped trees and fields of England’s farmland, combined with the rolling rhythm of the Glasgow-London express, lulled Robert Brentwood to sleep.
After the tension-filled months of war, he found it a joy to simply sit back and watch the countryside and the towns of England passing by. There was the ever-present danger of a Russian fighter/bomber surge trying to break through the British and American circle, but their main targets were the big ports down on the Channel coast. If the Russians did break through, the Royal Air Force’s inner defenses were augmented, like the U.S. Marine Corps, with the Harrier, originally built as a close-support and reconnaissance aircraft, but which, since the first few weeks of war, had played such a vital role as defender and ground support in Europe that its status had now gone beyond its post-Falklands reputation as a good all-around aircraft. Its very name now elicited near-awed response, from pilots and civilians alike, a status that had been accorded only the Spitfire and Hurricane in World War II and, in the 1950s, the American Sabre in Korea.
But while the success of the Harrier against the Russian-Warsaw Pact air forces was now being discovered and talked about by the British public during a period in which both sides were digging in and resupplying, the plane’s success had long been predicted by a “difficult,” by which the English mean “eccentric,” fifty-year-old classics teacher. Guy Knowlton, Ph.D., of Balliol College, Oxford, had also predicted, after his excavations during the summer “hols” before the war, that the probability of a modern war going on longer than anyone had predicted was indeed very high. Masses of men, their psyches savaged by the speed and devastation of high-tech mobile war, said Dr. Knowlton, would simply be unable to sustain the momentum. As they dug in, waiting for overextended supply lines to catch up with them, the trenches, said Knowlton, would become “a coveted place.” The soldiers, as soldiers had done since the beginning of time, would discover anew that a trench, quite apart from being far more preferable than open-ground warfare, was a place where the hitherto unobtainable luxury of a hot meal, instead of C rations on the move, settled into a predictable routine. It was something the generals abhorred, for wherever men began putting up signs such as “No Vacancy,” “Pete’s Place,” and mile markers to their homes, from Scotland to New York, troops became increasingly reluctant to get up and leave.
No NATO commander was foolish enough to think the war would remain static very long — that there could be any return to the kind of massive, wasteful trench warfare of the First World War. But the longer the trenches remained lived-in, the more difficult it would be to move men quickly when the present falloff in hostilities heated up again. It was rumored, as Robert Brentwood had heard in Holy Loch, that a “deal” had been struck through Swiss mediators between the USSR and NATO to the effect that no nuclear weapons would be used. Whether this was true or wishful thinking, no one was sure. If it was true, then given the enormous gain in territory by the Russians at NATO’s expense — almost all of Germany, northern Holland, and the low countries — it was inconceivable that NATO would now simply return to a cease-fire if the Russians did not agree to give the captured territories back.