Sergeant Nelson of the Guards

by Gerald Kersh

  Sergeant Nelson of the Guards

  GERALD KERSH

  TO THE MEMORY OF THE LATE

  COLONEL MORROW KRUM

  LONDON, 1943

  My Dear Morrow,

  The last time we met we talked about this book. You hoped to see it published in the States, and I told you that it might be regarded as too English, and therefore limited in its appeal. I was quoting readers’ opinions. You said: “Boloney.” With this sentiment I heartily agreed: we had a drink on it in the pub around the corner, and I said to you: “If ever Bill Nelson comes out in America, I’ll dedicate it to you.”

  “Swell,” you said. And then you went away, took the wings of the morning, and died in the region of Iceland; and I was deeply sorry because, in the few weeks between our first meeting and our last, we had become friends. I liked you: you were a man I could work with. I shall always think of you with affection and with a sense of loss.

  You wanted to see this edition: you felt as I felt—that Bill Nelson, as a type, belongs to your country as well as mine. Our Bill Nelsons shorten our wars and lengthen our periods of peace; they are our hard and gentle warriors, our rationed men, our austerity soldiers; our de-hydrated fighters that travel light, shorn of superfluities, living cheaply, surviving economically, and only dying dearly. They are brave souls that will not accept defeat: they are the lights that burn in the windows of History.

  Between good, clean-cut men there should never be any misunderstanding. They must accept one another’s accents and backgrounds, look one another between the eyes, and join forces against the menace of the outer darkness … We discussed all this, deploring the fact that all too often, a language-in-common emphasises points of difference between peoples instead of eliminating them. And we agreed that nothing could be more ridiculous. You and I, for instance, had our little differences about the pronunciation of words, and our misunderstandings concerning their interpretation. Yet we were friends, and we wanted our peoples also to be friends.

  Well, whatever may happen, you won’t be here to celebrate it. However … here is the American edition of Bill Nelson. Your Nelsons and ours are brothers—they have the same things to say: only their accents are different. I am following your advice and putting in a glossary of British soldiers’ slang as used in this book.

  Rest in peace!

  Yours ever,

  GERALD KERSH

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  PART ONE

  They Die With Their Boots Clean

  PROLOGUE

  I: THE RAW MATERIALS

  II: THE FOUNDRY

  III: THE TEMPERING

  IV: THE FINISHED PRODUCT

  EPILOGUE: NELSON ON DEATH

  PART TWO

  The Nine Lives of Bill Nelson

  I: THE STATEMENT OF BUTCHER THE BUTCHER

  II: BEARSBREATH ON THE NATURE OF MAN

  III: THE STATEMENT OF THE BUDGERIGAR

  IV: THE MAN WHO SAVED THURSTAN

  V: JACK CATILE

  VI: THE COWARDICE OF NELSON

  VII: NINE-ELEVEN-THIRTY-SEVEN

  VIII: A KIND OF PINK SNAKE

  IX: DEAD HOT SHOOTING

  X: A FEW WORDS ABOUT DESERTS

  XI: CONCERNING TRUTH AND LIFE

  XII: TEN OLD TIGERS

  XIII: THE ESCAPE OF BILL NELSON

  XIV: CORPORAL BITTERN

  XV: THE RETREAT OF BILL NELSON

  XVI: FEET THAT LEFT RED PATCHES

  XVII: JOURNEY FROM HELL TO BREAKFAST

  EPILOGUE: A WORD FROM DUSTY SMITH

  Glossary

  Copyright

  PART ONE

  They Die With Their Boots Clean

  PROLOGUE

  “A MAN gets knifed. A throat gets slit. A bomb goes off. The Wogs are out for blood!”

  As Sergeant Nelson talks his right eye blinks in the smoke of his cigarette. Pensively pursing his lips, he takes his left eye out, polishes it against the bosom of his battle-blouse, and puts it back again. “Is it in straight, Dusty?”

  Sergeant Smith says, “A bit bolo.”

  Sergeant Nelson blinks hard. The glass eye stares rather angrily through the smoke. “You’ve got to close the left, or disengaged eye, when you fire,” he says. “What’s an eye?”

  We wait, very quiet. We want to hear about the Wogs, the Arabs. Evening is coming. The moon is already out—a pale, thin little moon, no bigger than an eyebrow.

  “Ah,” says Sergeant Smith. “We used to see a bit of fighting in peace-time.”

  “Definitely, Dusty,” says Sergeant Nelson, and his story goes on:

  *

  The Wogs was around us. The desert was alive with Wogs. You couldn’t see ’em. You couldn’t hear ’em. But you knew they was there. They can hide, those Wogs can, behind a grain o’ sand. Ain’t that a fact, Dusty? They wears robes the same colour as the desert. They digs themselves little bits of cover. Puzzle, find ’em. You know they’re there, but they’re invisible. And the Wog can wait. He can wait hours…. Then bomp!—and wheeee!—he’s letting loose atcha. He ain’t a bad shot at three hundred yards.

  What was I saying? The Wogs was around us, quiet as mice, but all you could see was lousy sand. We come to a road block. We takes it down and marches on. Now mind you there’s nothing stirring—nothing in sight, only the lousy great sun and the lousy old desert. I say we marches on. Quarter of a mile on, round a bend, we comes to another barricade. Walk on, and walk into a jolly old deathtrap. We about-turns and goes back. We definitely does.

  Now mind you, nobody’s seen anything. We rounds the bend and Sergeant Tuck says “Blimey.” There lies both scouts with knife holes in their backs and their rifles and ammo gone. And the block we just took down, so help me Gord, it’s up agen. Definitely up.

  The officer says: “Well, it looks as if we’ve got to fight it out here.” He talked like his mouth was full o’ hot potatoes, but he wasn’t a bad sort—I’ve heard that fellow swear something terrible, blinding and bloodying like a bargee, just like you and me. Didn’t ’e, Dusty?

  Then all of a sudden, poppity-pop! Old Charlie, my pore old china, pore old Charlie, he says Gug!—just like that, didn’t he, Dusty?—Gug! and goes down plonkety-plonk on the road. Definitely plonkety-plonk.

  And we see sort of … kind of bits of desert getting up and charging us. So help me Gord they seemed to be right atop of us. And somebody yells: “The Wogs! The Wogs!”—and we’re firing for our lousy old lives, biff!—bosh!—bang!—with the Wogs going down like coconuts. Where one fell, ten seemed to spring up. Didn’t they Dusty? Yelling. It sounded like “Lulu! Lulu!” Remember that, Dusty? That’s their God—Lulu. … Allah? All right, Allah: but it sounded like Lulu to me, Dusty; definitely Lulu. Definitely.

  Well. You rooks can grouse and grumble about discipline, but in a time like that you want it. You horrible little men. You over there—you funny creature, you—stop picking your horrible little nose and pay attention to me when I’m talking to you. Whaddaya mean, you are? In my day, if I’d answered back to a sergeant I’d of been run into the moosh so fast me feet wouldn’t have touched the ground. Why, you miserable twillip!

  Discipline. We was outnumbered about twenty-five to one. I was shivering in my shoes. I was dead scairt. Wasn’t I, Dusty? We didn’t stand the chance of an ice-cream cornet in hell. Definitely not the chance of a penny cornet. But we had to hold out to the last man, if only as a matter of principle. Our mob never say die. Definitely never. Do it, Dusty?

  That was just about twelve, noon, when the fun started. Quarter past, was it? I would of sworn it was just on the hour. Well. The Wogs tried to rush us. But in a time like that, without stopping to think, mind you, you remember the
stuff we knock into your soft little heads when we train you here. Don’t you, Dusty?

  We fired like on a range. The good old Lewis was going thumpity-thump, and the Wogs was going down. At last they got back under cover to snipe. And snipe they did—they snipe all right. And we gave it ’em back. But they had the advantage of cover. Poor old Muddy—you knew Muddy Waters, Dusty? The bloke what threatened the Sarnt-Major? Yeh, back in ’28—poor old Muddy gets one, bip, right in the forehead. The joke of it was, it didn’t kill him: didn’t touch the brain; he never had no brains: he’s in Palestine, now, still keeping the Wogs in order.

  The day wore on. Didn’t it, Dusty? Definitely it wore on. And about a third of our fellows was out. But we held ’em. Discipline. Morale. Es pritty corpse, to put it in Froggie lingo. And at last, towards sunset, we could see that the lousy old Wog was going to make one big, determined rush and scoff us that way. And the devil of it was, we was pretty near out of ammo. We was, wasn’t we, Dusty? Are you listening to me, you, Dopey, over there? Give him a poke in the eye, somebody—he’s going to sleep.

  Near out of ammo. Okay doke. So now it’s going to come down to good old cold steel. We see the Wogs gathering. They fluffed our ammo was out. They gathered in the open, luluing like mad—hundreds of ’em. We was absolutely certain we’d never get away alive. Remember, I shook ’ands with you, Dusty? Funny, wonnit? Then the Wogs charged. We stood firm. We was going to die in proper order, by crummit we was. You don’t get yourself took prisoner by no Wog, not if you use your loaf you don’t. The Wog’s a torturer. Well, over they comes, and we gets ready to snuff it.

  And then, all of a sudden, what do we hear? That lovely old scalded cat of a lousy old bagpipe! Mee-yow … mee-yow … mee-yow …! And I says: “By God Almighty—the Jocks!” And the Jocks it was, screaming like madmen. Firing? Nothing! The pigstickers was out. It was knives, me boys, bayonets! They came pouring over the ridge, they did, and they tore into them Wogs from the rear like lions—and we comes out, we does, yelling red, white, and blue murder—Yaaaah! Yaaaah!—and what we leave of them Wogs is scarcely worth the trouble of picking up. Eh, Dusty? It was a whatsiname, definitely a whatsiname. A triumph. A triumph for training and discipline. Without it we’d of been wiped out in the first half hour.

  And training and discipline is what you’re going to get here. See? And if you don’t like it you can definitely lump it. Because you’re going to beat the pith out of old Herr von Fritz. You’re going to batter the tar out of Old Adolf. You’re going to kick old pigface Gooring from hell to breakfast. Ain’t they, Dusty? Definitely from hell to breakfast. Don’t let me hear no lousy old alarm and despondency about tanks. I’ll spit in the eye of the next man who mentions tanks. England’s an island, see? And while we hold this lousy old island, old Hitler’s blocked. See? And we can make all the tanks we’re going to need, given time. And if we hold out, we’ve got time. Get it? And with trained men we hold out. Men are more important than tanks. You can bust a tank. You can’t bust a proper man. And I’m going to make proper men of you—you horrible creatures, you. You’ll give old Hitler a coating in Africa, and Greece, and hell and all. You will! Won’t they, Dusty?

  Who said “What about Musso?” Musso? I don’t count Musso! I could take on Musso and the whole Wop army singlehanded, five at a time, couldn’t I, Dusty? … All right then, three at a time. Remember the time I laid out three Wogs with a spare Bren barrel? Swords, they had—swords and knives. They was the mob that mutilated poor old Charlie. Ah, it was fun being in the army in peacetime. Definitely, Dusty.

  Now, you mummy’s darlings, get a rift on them boots. Definitely shine ’em, my little curly-headed lambs, for in our mob, war or no war, you die with clean boots on.

  I

  The Raw Materials

  IT WAS a big, dim, grim, high, wide, unhandsome room, smelling unpleasantly of too much cleanliness. Discipline has an odour of its own—a smell of scrubbing soap and floor polish mixed with just a little too much fresh air. You sniff it in prisons, workhouses, and other places where men abandon hope: the smell of organised scouring; the smell to end smells.

  Men were talking; not loud. A beardless boy with a pink face and a queer mop of hair like a copper-wire pot scourer had been smoking a cigarette. He was holding the butt of it between finger and thumb, looking anxiously from side to side. A crisis was approaching: soon, he wouldn’t be able to hold it; but how could he dare to throw it down and put his foot on it? A large plump man with a deep, round voice said: “Chuck it out t’ winder, lad.” The wire-haired boy said: “Ah, but say there’s a rule agin it …” He pinched out the glow, rolled the remaining crumbs of tobacco into a little pill which he poised in his hand like some undisposable, incriminating mass. At last he put it into the huge cold stove, slammed the door, and walked hastily to the other side of the room.

  “Scared, lad?” asked the plump man, and the wire-haired boy replied: “What, scared? Who, me? Me scared? Not me.”

  “Homesick, like?”

  The wire-haired boy scowled. “No.”

  Two men were trying to play billiards with a sawn-down cue and three odd balls on a table not much bigger than a tea tray. The boy watched them. One of the players, a long, saturnine man, addressed the spot ball with elaborate care, and miscued. I heard the woody scrape, and saw the ball roll slowly away. The saturnine man swore briefly and bitterly, handing the cue to the other player, who took it, held it, stared blankly at it, and then said: “Ah dinna wanna play na more.”

  “No more do I. Let’s turn it up.”

  “Play draughts?”

  “No.”

  Somebody else asked the company in general what was going to happen to them now.

  A glum blond man who had been turning over the pages of a bound volume of Punch, 1893–1894, said: “We get another medical examination. First of all we get our hair cut off. Then, if we’re okay, we get injected.”

  “Injected what with?” asked the wire-haired boy.

  “Germs.”

  “Oh, blimey.”

  “Germs,” said the glum man. “Your arm swells up like a thigh. You throb like a damn great aeroplane. Your head aches fit to bust. A scab comes. Then it drops off. Then there’s a scar.”

  “What’s that done for?”

  “Because it’s healthy.”

  “And what happens then?”

  “A trained sweat is put in charge of you. You go and draw your kit.”

  “Do we get rifles right away?”

  “Yes. Then you’re put in a hut.”

  “What kind of a hut?”

  “A hut. Then you’re squadded. Then …”

  “Ah?”

  “God help you,” said the glum man.

  “What d’you mean, God help you?”

  “What I say. God help you. You’re here. You’re in the Guards. It’s like being in jail, only there’s one difference.”

  “What’s that?”

  “In jail you sometimes get a bit of time to yourself.”

  “Oh, blimey. Do they give you hell?”

  “Hell,” said the glum man, “hell. If they gave you hell, it wouldn’t be so bad. Hell is Paradise to what they give you here.”

  “Can you go out?”

  “After a few weeks they let you out maybe once, for an evening, every eight or ten days.”

  “And where can you go?”

  “Nowhere.”

  “What’s the food like?”

  “Horrible.”

  “What are the officers like?”

  “Terrible.”

  “What beds do you get?”

  “Planks.”

  “What are the sergeants like?” asked the wire-haired boy.

  “Son,” said the glum man, “did you ever see a picture called Beau Geste?”

  “Um.”

  “Remember the sergeant that put them dead men on the wall, and sent them blokes that was dying of thirst out into the desert without a drink o’ water?”

  “Oh, a
h!”

  “He chased ’em in the sun till they fell down dead, didn’t ’e?”

  “Ah!”

  “Would you say he was tough, just a bit?”

  “Not half he wasn’t tough!”

  “Well,” said the glum man. “He was a Godfrey Winn compared to the sergeants here.”

  “Oh, blimey,” said the wire-haired boy.

  There is a silence; then a little outbreak of uneasy laughter.

  “Join the Army to see the world,” says the glum man. “Join the Guards and scrub it.”

  We look about us.

  Each of us sees twenty or thirty other recruits, raw and inconsolable as new-born babies. The man with the volume of Punch is riffling the leaves, blackened at the edges by the fidgeting of countless uneasy thumbs.

  This is one of those awful gaps of silence. You know such moments. Talk limps to the edge of a chasm and falls in. Ten thousand pounds couldn’t buy a spontaneous word. Men become suddenly engrossed in silly trivialities. A big Nottingham man sits scrutinising a razor-blade wrapper with the intentness of a merchant poring over a rare vase.

  The purr of the pages is the only sound we can hear … prrrut … prrrut … prrrut….

  The weather has got into us, also. The day has blown hot and cold, wet and dry, light and dark; and now, settling into a uniform dirty whiteness, threatens rain. The sky sags like a wet sheet.

  From the asphalt below comes a ka-rup, ka-rup of disciplined iron heels, and a great, strained voice shouts: “Get a hold of the step! Get a hold of it! Eff—ite! Eff—ite! Eff…. Eff…. Eff…. EFF…. EFF!” It is a squad of Grenadiers being marched to their baths. In this place no man walks. A recruit represents two feet on a brown caterpillar: his paces are measured; his movements are predestined; his day is divided into equal squares. “Eff…. Eff!” The voice and the footsteps fade … walking en masse; a community-singing of boots….