by Gerald Kersh
“But ole Bullock. I can size a bloke up. I’ve ’ad a few scraps in my time. I—”
Bates snatches this opportunity of saying: “Did Oi ever tell yow about Brummy Joe?”
“Shut up, you an’ your Brummy Joe. I’ve ’ad a few scraps, and I can tell who to scrap wiv and ’oo not. I wouldn’t start anyfink wiv old Bullock.”
“To me,” says Dagwood, “he looks a bit slow.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” says Barker. “But ’e’d be a swine to try and stop.”
“Ah … that, yes,” says Dagwood. “I don’t say no to that.”
Bullock comes back. He has a black eye, and a general air of calm satisfaction.
“Well?” asks Barker. “’Ow dit go?”
“All right,” says Bullock.
“Who d’you work out with?” asks Dagwood.
“Chap called Ackerman,” says Bullock.
“What, a Corporal? A big feller? Jack Ackerman, of Y Company?” asks Dagwood, with interest.
“That’s it.”
“Now Ackerman is good, son. How d’you do?”
“Oh, I did all right.”
“He got you in the eye, I notice.”
“Oh, that? That’s nothing.”
“Give him a pasting?”
“No, we didn’t go on long enough. We just played about.”
“Think you could give Ackerman a coating, son?”
“Oh yes, I could give Ackerman a coating, Sergeant,” says the serious-minded Bullock. “I went a bit easy with him. He hit me a bit. I didn’t hit him much. But if I had to meet Ackerman, why, I’d get him all right.”
“You’ll have to be pretty good to get Ackerman.”
“I’ve never been knocked off my feet,” says Bullock. “Except once. It was a foul punch. I think it was an accident. A Jamaica nigger called Rube did it, at the Pilfold Stadium. He swung and got me in the groin. I don’t think it was the nigger’s fault. His foot slipped, or something. Even then I was only down for five seconds. They wanted to give me the fight, but I went on with it.”
“But you got that blackie!” says Barker.
“In the last round,” says Bullock.
Between Barker and Bullock a firm friendship has come into being. I see Barker’s eyes gleam with triumph. “There now,” he says. “Ole Bullock could smash ’em all. Couldn’t yer, eh?”
Bullock says: “I can’t think of anybody I couldn’t beat.” He is not bragging. He really cannot think of anybody he couldn’t beat. He contemplates his knuckles; screws up his face, and spits a little blood from a cut on the inside of his lip, his permanently swollen upper lip. “I think I could get most of ’em. I’ve seen Joe Louis on the pictures. Given time, I could get him, even.”
Sergeant Crowne says: “What d’you mean, given time? You mean, if you could wait sixty or seventy years till ’e’s nice and old, and slosh ’im when ’e’s too blind to see yer?”
“Oh no,” says Bullock, very earnest, “I mean, given enough rounds. I’d wear him down and then I’d get him. Give me twenty rounds, and I’d get Louis.”
We look at one another, not knowing what to say. The boy from Widnes says: “Don’t——” and then pauses; but he sees no aggression in the dour, battered face of the indomitable Bullock, and so goes on: “Don’t be such a silly Git, Bullock!”
“Why am I a silly Git?”
“Joe Louis’d knock you silly in one round.”
“Oh no he wouldn’t,” says Bullock.
The boy from Widnes protests: “I saw the picture of that thur Louis fighting Max Bur. He hit that thur Bur whurever he liked. And so he would you, Bullock.”
“That’s all right,” says Bullock, amiably.
“Come ’n get a tea ’n’ a wad,” says Barker.
“All right,” says Bullock, and they go out.
When the door has closed behind them, a stranger, a guardsman with a sagging, humorous face, not unlike Walt Disney’s Pluto, laughs a peculiar quacking laugh.
“Joke?” says Sergeant Dagwood. “What’s the joke, Hacket?”
The guardsman called Hacket says: “I’ve seen Bullock fight twice. I saw him fight that nigger, Rube, at the Pilfold Stadium. And I saw him fight a kid called Francis in Bedford.”
“Well, what’s funny?”
“Well, nothing. Only he’s duff. He’s terrible.”
“In what way terrible? Did he win like he said?”
“Yes, he won all right, just like he said. That nigger Rube was pretty lousy too; he must of weighed seventeen stone, and he was as slow as a dray horse—but even then, he was about ten times quicker than Bullock. He hit Bullock with everything he had. It sounded like hammering nails into a packing case. Biffity-biffity-biffity-bif! But poor old Bullock kept on coming back for more. Bullock kept swinging. He might as well have sent the nigger a postcard to tell him a punch was on the way. It was as easy as dodging a steam roller, I tell you! And that foul punch: it made me sick to see it. I thought it would have killed old Bullock. But up he got, bent double, and insisted on carrying on with it. Game! Game as they make ’em. But my God, what a lousy boxer! In the end, the nigger got discouraged: there wasn’t anything he could do about Bullock. He was tired of hitting him. Then Bullock sort of crowded him into a corner and let him have a sort of a right hook. It sounded like snooker balls. The nigger just went flat. The same sort of thing happened with this kid called Francis, in Bedford. The crowd used to like poor old Bullock: they always got a laugh out of him. To see him sort of diving about after this kid … sort of doing the breast stroke, and missing every punch. He’s a swinger, old Bullock. He can’t box any more than a windmill. He just kept rushing this kid Francis, and in the tenth round, again, he managed to get in just one swing. It was like a buck navvy with a sledge hammer—just about as slow, and just about as hard. Hit this kid Francis on the shoulder and pushed him over. The kid was too exhausted to get up. But the funny thing is, he thinks he’s as good as Jack Dempsey. He’d fight anything. Poor old Bullock. He doesn’t know what it means to be licked. He just can’t see it. The expression on his face after he beat that nigger—you’d think he’d just won the Irish Sweep. Not that you could see much of his face. It’s hard to understand why a man keeps on at a mug’s game like that.”
“A fighter, born and bred,” says Dagwood, thoughtfully.
“Yes. But a man ought to have the sense to see he’s no good at the game, when he pays more than he gets at it.”
“’E wins, don’t ’e?” says Sergeant Crowne, stiffly.
“Yes, but—”
“There ain’t no ‘but’ about it. A man ’as a fight. ’E wants to win. ’E wins. That’s all there is to it.”
“But he doesn’t win in the end; not in the long run,” says Hacket. “Bullock’ll be punch-drunk in another two years.”
“In the end, in the end!” snarls Sergeant Crowne. “In the long run! ’Oo cares about the Long Run? If you’re ’aving a fight, go in and win, and to ’ell with the long run! Let Gawd worry about the Long Run! If it’s boxing, shake ’ands and come aht fighting! ’It ’ard and often, and the end ’ll take care of itself. In twenty million-billion years’ time, the world ’ll come to an end. But it ain’t my business to worry over that.”
“In how many years did you say?” asks Sergeant Hands.
“Twenty million-billion.”
“What a fright you gave me,” says Hands.
“How?”
“For the moment I thought you said only twenty thousand billion.”
“I like a man that doesn’t know when ’e’s beaten,” says Crowne.
“But it can be carried too far,” says Hacket. “Moderation in all things, as Voltaire said.”
“Who’s Voltur?” asks the boy from Widnes.
“Oh, some clergyman,” says Sergeant Crowne. “What was you in Civvy Street, Hacket?”
“A book salesman.”
“You know a bit about printing and paper and all that?”
“A bit.”
“Then your swabbing job will be tidying up the area round the hut. You’ll find plenty of paper there.”
*
The man we call The Schoolmaster rolls up the sock he has been darning, and says: “How do we know what happens in the long run? It’s not for us to consider. Why, even if some very wise man manages to calculate where things will lead in just a little while, he’s lucky and clever. Sergeant Crowne is right.”
The Schoolmaster is a long, calm, fair man with receding hair, and a concentrated, studious expression which makes him look at least seven years older than thirty, which is his age. He wears glasses, and is a Bachelor of Arts; speaks in a slow, carefully modulated voice, and even on a cookhouse fatigue manages to keep his large, thin-fingered hands in a condition of elegance. He has come into the ranks in order to get out of them—after his training here he will go to an O.C.T.U., from which he will emerge as a subaltern. Suspect, at first, on account of his accent, he won our hearts by plain good nature and unconditional mucking-in. It was Barker who said, one day, when the boy from Widnes muttered that the Schoolmaster made him sick: “’E can’t ’elp the way ’e talks. It’s the way they’re brought up, son; they can’t ’elp it. Frinstance, you say ‘Fur ur’ instead of ‘Fair ’air.’ The ole Schoolmaster says ‘Faiah haiah.’ ’E’s not smackin’ it on. A certain class o’ people talks like that. I know a Covent Garden flar merchant that made a packet and sent ’is boy to be a doctor. Well, the ole man—we call ’im Gutsache, because ’e suffers wiv ’is inside when ’e goes on the wallop—’e talks the thickest cockney even I ever ’eard: ole-fashioned slang, real market stuff that nobody can make ’ead or tail of nowdays. Ole Gutsache’ll send a boy for ’is tea like this: ’e’ll say: “Gemme a you ’n’ a strike,’ meaning a Cup of You-and-Me and a Slice of Strike-Me-Dead, or bread ’n’ butter. Well, some time ago I run into ole Gutsache in the Salisbury, and there was ole Gutsache, runnin’ on sixteen to the dozen wivaht openin’ ’is mouf, talkin’ to a youngster dressed up like a toff. Les jum’ in the jam ’n’ gerra pig’s ’t Ella’s, ’e was sayin’. In plain English: ‘Let’s jump in the jam-jar (car), and get a pig’s-ear (beer) at Ella’s club.’ And the youngster says: “Whay, certainleh, Fathah.’ They’d taught Gutsache’s kid to speak Oxford. But the kid wasn’t puttin’ on no airs: ’e just talked that way. Same wiv the Schoolmaster. Give ’im a fair chancet: ’e can’t ’elp it, talkin’ like that, any more ’n’ ’e could ’elp it if ’e stuttered.”
The Schoolmaster goes on:
“We all hope to live through all this, don’t we? Yet every one of us is prepared to die if necessary.”
We say that we suppose so.
“Yet,” says the Schoolmaster, “I don’t suppose that many of us here care much whether there’s an afterlife.”
Hodge says: “There is an afterlife. I know it.”
For fifteen minutes, twenty men talk all at the same time, at the top of their voice. Afterlife: there is one, there isn’t one, there must be one, there can’t be one, there might be one, there is no proof of one, there are a thousand proofs of one, it says so in the Bible….
“No,” says the Schoolmaster. “We don’t know where anything will lead to. We are all, so to speak, under Sealed Orders. We all pretend to live merely for our own ends, but it doesn’t quite work out that way. If it did, we’d run away from the first threat of danger. We should live and die like animals, like rabbits. Nobody would ever go away from the safety of his own little place. No new things would ever be discovered. No new ground would be broken. Men would still be living in caves. No, there is something in men that makes them go beyond themselves. That is what makes us men. Right back in the beginnings, men had a queer instinct to leave something, to make something that should stay when they were gone. Some time ago a cave was discovered in which men had lived tens of thousands of years ago. On the walls of this cave there were pictures, very carefully dawn, of animals. Now why do you think those dead-and-forgotten savages, struggling naked in the very dawn of things, wanted to leave pictures?”
“It is a fact,” says Barker, “that if you give a feller a wall ’e’ll ’ave to draw something on it, or write something. Step across the way and you’ll see for yourself. You don’t ’ave to go back no ten thousand years.”
When the laughter subsides, the Schoolmaster says: “Men are always struggling against something. But the end must remain unknown.”
“Mug’s game,” says John Johnson.
“I daresay that is what the Guards said in Nieppe Forest,” says the Schoolmaster. “But in their hearts I don’t think they believed it.”
“What ’appened in Nieppe Forest?” asks Barker.
“Oh … last war,” says Sergeant Crowne.
“I heard the story,” says the Schoolmaster, “from a Captain of Engineers…. It was one of the things that made me join the Guards, as a matter of fact. I could never tell the story half as well as he did, because he was there, and saw it happen, and felt awfully deeply about it. He was one of the first men to become an expert in chemical warfare, after the Germans started to go all out in 1918. He had been working at something for three days and three nights, and at last, he, a Corporal, and a runner paused to rest on the fringe of Nieppe Forest.
“It was a Summer night. The officer and the Corporal took their turn to sleep. The runner kept watch. The night passed …” The Schoolmaster becomes a little dreamy…. “I suppose it passed in a timeless flash. They lay there, between a deserted village and a dark forest. And so dawn broke.
“The Engineer says that he awoke, instinctively almost, just before dawn. So did the Corporal. They listened. There was silence. Birds began to sing—first of all one little bird perched on the wreckage of something a few yards away. They watched it. Then, they realised that the enormous German push was coming. They blinked themselves thoroughly awake. And then, in the distance, they heard a gentle shup-shup, shup-shup, shup-shup. Men marching. They looked at each other. The noise came nearer. The men were marching into the village. They heard a terrific voice shout: March to Attention! Only one sort of soldier will march to attention through a deserted village. The Corporal said, in a hushed whisper: ‘The Guards!’ And so it was. My friend watched them as they passed, dusty with a tremendous journey along those terrible roads; but marching as if it were a Saturday morning on the Square under the eye of the C.O…. left, right; left, right; left … left … left…. They marched into the forest, took up firing positions, and settled down, that mere handful of Guardsmen, to hold back the entire German advance.
“What they did in that forest has gone down in history. But much later my friend had occasion to pass that way again. He found them still lying there. There hadn’t been time to bury them. They had been wiped out to the last man. Even in death they still held their positions. Even their dead bones remained obedient to their will to stay unbroken.”
A silence.
“Grouse about regimental bull-and-baloney,” says Sergeant Crowne. “Go on, grouse!”
“All those lovely fellers,” says Barker. “It sort of seems a kind of waste …”
“No,” says the Schoolmaster. “An example of that sort has got to be lived up to. Look at Captain Scott, dying horribly, all alone in an awful desolation. He didn’t achieve what he set out to do. And he died. He said: ‘Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale …’ They did. I don’t suppose anything could have been more eloquent. No man’s gallantry is wasted. In the last war, for instance, hundreds of letters came to Scott’s widow, saying that they could never have borne what they had had to bear without the strength that had come to them through Scott. Other examples can be futile. An example of pure courage never is. A true hero gives new power to all mankind. And if he comes of your own blood, it becomes impossible for you to let him down. And if he has worn your
badge…. No. The traditions of the British Army may sometimes have given it a narrow mind, but they have never failed to make its heart very great.”
“Did Oi ever tell you about Brummy Joe?” says Bates.
“Brummy Joe. Them Guards would a been frit o’ Brummy Joe. They wouldn’t o’ held no positions if Brummy Joe’d been advancing again ’em. Eighteen stun seven and six foot three in his stocking feet. Mind yow, Joe’s got a belly as stuck out like a basin. They said: ‘One punch in the belly and Joe’s finished.’ Ah. But get there! I defy yow! Get near enough Brummy Joe to ’it ’im there. Joe Louis couldn’t with a telegraph pole. When Brummy was on the beer the coppers went about armed. Once, when they pinched old Brummy, they broke seven cruncheons on ’is pore head. One night when Brummy went into a ’am-an-beef shop for a samwidge, the man didn’t give Brummy enough ’am. Well, so old Brummy Joe picks up the ’am knife and cuts a slice off the man behind the counter. As true as I am sitting on this form, a lovely thin slice. Once, Brummy laid out nineteen Leicester boys in Chilliam’s Dance Palace with a guitar. Talk about Captain Scott!
“Do yow know Chilliam’s Dance Palace? Oi lived ten minutes’ walk away, in Parrot Close, when Oi was married the first toime, properly married. Oi ’ad a noice ’ouse there. Moi woife was noice. She didn’t loike me-ee. She fell in loov wi’ moi best friend. It was loike going to the pictures. Moi friend came to me and said: “Oi loov Teena.’ Oi says: ‘Yow do, do yow? And does Teena loov yow?’ ‘Yes,’ ’e says. So Oi says: ‘All roight, Jim. Yow are my best friend, and so Oi give ’er to yow.’ And so Oi pommelled ’im till ’e was black and blue, and Oi tells Jim straight: ‘Oi don’t loike to beat yow, Jim, but Oi don’t want the neighbours to talk.’ And so moi woife run off wi’ moi best friend, just like the pictures. Ah. She was a foine woman, but she didn’t loike me. Oi loiked ’er, but Oi didn’t loike ’er cooking, so Oi used to ’ave my meals at my mum’s ’ouse. And moi woife didn’t loike that.
