by Gerald Kersh
“You’re off,” he says.
“Yes,” says Bates, “we are, yow know, Sergeant!”
“Yump,” says Dagwood. “It’s a long time since I was at the Holding Battalion. I’ll never forget my first Buckingham Palace Guard. As soon as we were took off, I was run into the cooler. I’d lowered my butt an inch in turning. I didn’t know. What was it I got? I forget. I think it was seven days. I can’t remember. It’s nice to be going to the Holding Battalion for the first time. It’s nice to be young. Look: do your best on guard at Buck or Jimmy. It’s not nice to let the mob down. So do the best you can.
“You can be good to look at, and a good soldier at the same time. No, honest to God: the better you are, the better you look. It’s true. It’s a fact. There’s no argument. Do your best: be good pals and do your best, eh? All the old regulars, all the old sweats, tough guys, were particular about putting on a good show when they just had to be show-soldiers. Harry Wyatt of the Third Battalion—Number 5854—he did a good guard, and he got the V.C. That goes for the Lance-Jack, Bill Dobson, too. And Brooks, and Tom Whitman, and Norman Jackson: V.C.s too, all Last War. It’s not all bull and boloney. I tell you it’s not.
“Last War. People used to say: ‘We can sleep tonight: the Guards are in front of us.’ Well, keep that up. As a personal favour to me, keep that up. The Last War was only a war, a sort of ordinary war, compared to this one. It starts slow, but it doesn’t finish, you know, till one or other of us goes down. There’s going to be rough stuff. There’s going to be hell. Well, that’s all right. You know me. I’m a Sergeant. It’s been my duty to tell you what to do. You know that if I’ve opened my mouth and bit your heads off on parade I was always one of you, and your pal, off parade. Man to man—keep it up, for Christ’s sake keep it up. After all these hundreds of years … no, it’d look bad, bad!
“Anybody got a light …?
“The proper fighting hasn’t come yet. It’s coming. Now, in Civvy Street, old geezers of eighty are heroes. You can’t do less than them. You won’t. It’s not possible. This isn’t a lecture. I’m not demonstrating something out of the book. Just talking to you. You’re Guardsmen now. You know the whole story. Well, fight good! Keep it up! It might be that any one of you finds himself alone, right in a ditch. Still keep it up! And keep it up in proper order. Go to heaven or go to hell, but wherever you go, go clean!
“But what am I talking about? You’re all right. Good luck to you. The best of luck. In this mob your best pal never writes to you. It doesn’t matter. He’s still your pal: you know him and he knows you. I’ll never hear of any of you again, unless you get a V.C., or something. That’s all right, quite all right. Only: keep it up! Do you get me? Keep it up!”
At this point there comes into the hut a razor-lipped man with immense shoulders and the icy eyes of a killer, no less a person than Ack-Ack Ackerman. He looks down his beaked nose at Bullock, and says:
“Fair is fair. Wanna tell you. The worst smack I ever had in my life Was that right you landed on me. My head rung like a bell. I could never wish for a better fight.”
“Nor me, neither,” says Bullock. “And thank you very much.”
“Thank you‚” says Ack-Ack Ackerman. “Well … good hunting. And watch that left. Adieu, but not good-bye….”
And so we march away.
IV
The Finished Product
EVERY MIDDAY the Old Sweats foregather at the Naffy. There is a company clerk, a crumpled man, who has seen more years in service than he cares to remember. He is the leader of the little group of elderly soldiers. They meet at twelve and drink a species of watered bitter. He always buys the first round. He says one word, “four,” and the barman puts out four pints of mild ale. Then, the crumpled company clerk hands out the beer. An ancient warrior, medal-ribboned in all the colours of the rainbow, the withered man who waters the cricket pitch, snatches the first pint. This man is called Geordie, because he comes from somewhere far north. He snatches his drink, says “uh” then sips it; puts it down, and then invariably explores his right ear with a matchstick. He is a very old soldier; a sombre man of twenty years’ service; but he was old when he joined. There is another man, also from the far north: they call him Jimmy, and it is said that in thirty-five years of Army life he has never quite escaped trouble. Jimmy has an outrageous, an uproarious cheerfulness. No press in any civilised land could reprint his language. His imprecations are horrible. His blasphemies are unbelievable. He invokes impossible diseases, strange gods, and non-existent physical organs of unmentionable saints. Thirty years ago he was a corporal. Now, in the twilight of his life he is a Guardsman; a wicked, old Guardsman, still huge, still terrible and still riotous. It is odd to hear the somehow youthful flamboyance of his language tumbling out of that ancient, sunken mouth. And there he sits, invariably to the left of Geordie; both drinking acidulous weak beer. With them, always, sits a little tubby tailor. Rumour has it that this tailor owns thirty houses‚ and is a man of landed property. Everybody applies to this tailor on questions of real estate. Tradition has grown up about him. If he died with nothing in the bank, the Guards would feel that they had been cheated.
He has a greyhound.
He calls it a greyhound. It is a long dog. He calls it Bartholomew. Between Bartholomew and the enigmatic little man there is a dark understanding. The tailor, though a warrior, I mean an old soldier, is a man of peace: yet one kind of talk with him is fighting talk—talk against the dog Bartholomew. If you cast any aspersion upon the heredity of that dog you have Tubby, the tailor, to contend with. It is a greyhound, a greyhound of greyhounds, compared with which Mick the Miller is as stationary as a bedstead and a mere thing on four legs.
If you give him half a chance he will not fail to tell you the legend of the dog Bartholomew.
“Listen,” he says, “look. Just look. Look at that back. Look at that chest. That dog is all lungs. So help me God, if he took a deep breath he’d raise up into the air, so help me God, like a balloon. So help me God. And this dog, this here mortal dog, Bartholomew, you may believe me or you may believe me not, was the fastest thing that ever walked. The fastest thing, so help me God. And he was owned by a toff. Are you listening? Do you hear me talk? By a gentleman, so help me God, a gentleman. But this gentleman—it can happen to any of us—so he was down on his luck. And you know how, good God, there can be all of a sudden a sort of a stroke of sort of luck? Well, this here gentleman, so it seems he has a sister who has a dog (excuse me) a bitch, a greyhound bitch. It’s all right! A bitch, for a dog, isn’t swearing. Well, this sister of this gentleman, so she goes so help me God, to Southdown and this here bitch sort of goes out and then she sort of comes back and then she sort of has pups. Five. Five pups. Well, this gentleman’s sister is a judge of dogs.
“These five pups.
“Two, so help me God, she drowns. Three she gives away, but one she keeps.
“Did I say five? I said six.
“Now, this gentleman’s sister, so the pup she keeps is this here pup. And no sooner can this here pup walk than—so help me God it runs. Listen, I am telling you something. I suppose you know that every living thing when the sun shines upon it casts a shadow. There is a law about it. Look. This here dog, this lovely dog Bartholomew, if he took off—and so help me God he did take off pretty frequent—you could see, just for a second, a sort of black patch on the ground. Not for more than a second, mind you, he left his bloody shadow behind him. But of course, only for a second.
“Well, the gentleman, this here gentleman, he was down on his luck. So he says to his sister: ‘Irene, lend me a monkey.’
“‘Monkey‚’ she says, ‘I ain’t got no monkey. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll give you this here dog Bartholomew.’
“‘What do you mean you will give me this here dog Bartholomew‚’ this gentleman says. But they take him out on the Sussex Downs, and they say ‘Run!’ and so help me God this here dog runs so that this gentleman who is a judge of
dogs swears that he has never seen anything like it in all his life.
“So this gentleman says ‘Thank you very much‚’ and takes the dog to Brighton, and trains it up and down the Palace Pier. And so help me God it is a fact that nothing that ever ran was one millionth as fast as this here dog Bartholomew.
“And so, this here gentleman he goes here, and he goes there, and he borrows a fiver from this one, and from that one, and he raises two hundred and fifty nicker, and he enters this dog, this dog Bartholomew, for a race, and he shoves this here two hundred and fifty nicker on this here dog Bartholomew.
“O.K. O.K.? All right, O.K. Comes one day before the race. All this here gentleman has to do is to take this lovely dog to the White City for the race he has entered in. But this takes train fare. And this gentleman —mind you, a proper toff—has not got the price of the fare. He asks his sister. No go. He has sort of tapped his sister sort of heavyish in the past, and she will not stand for any more of it, no, not even for tosheroons. Well, so this gentleman finds some mug, and this mug has a motor-bike, and what does this gentleman do?
“No, no, that’s all right, not a drop. Well, half a pint. All right, a pint.
“This gentleman borrows the motor-bike and a couple of leather straps. He straps this here dog Bartholomew on to the back of the motor-bike and, so help me God, he burns up the distance between Brighton and London, and then when he comes to unstrap this dog Bartholomew, the wha’d-you-call-it—dumpity-dump—vibration of this motor-bike has imparted itself, as they call it, to this dog Bartholomew. And he trembles, poor thing, like a leaf. He bobs like a recruit. I am telling you that this here dog Bartholomew has a nervous breakdown on account of the vibration of the motor-bike, and when he is let out of the trap at the beginning of the race, instead of running after the rabbit, he runs the wrong way. He bites three stewards, he does a sort of a death howl, but nevertheless he does something like half a mile in something like fifteen seconds. But, so help me God, in the wrong direction. And so, the gentleman sells him to me for a dollar to get his fare back to Brighton where he hopes to tap this here sister of his.
“And even to this day this here dog Bartholomew, whenever he hears a motor-bike, has hysterics. Otherwise this dog would make Mick the Miller look like something that crawls on a whatsiname. You may laugh.”
And the dog Bartholomew crouches at his feet. It may be a greyhound, but a purist would call it simply a long dog, with too much chest and too much ears and too much tail and not enough legs. But the tailor’s faith in that dog is something beautiful and profound, and nothing in the world could shake it.
To this group there also attaches himself a military policeman, a member of the dreaded Gestapo. He is the weather expert whom I have had the honour of mentioning once before: a man with a mild face and a West of England burr—a man whom, at one glance, anybody might recognise as the father of a family. He upholds the law, but with apologies. He joined the military police because he felt that this, somehow, would keep him closer to his wife and five sons. They call him Himmler. He resents this. He is a mine of misinformation upon every subject under the sun. If you wish to know the opposite of the truth about anything, ask Himmler. It is Himmler who knows that to have your ears pierced is good for the eyes. He knows that a cancer is either male or female, and, when removed by a surgeon, cries out of its own accord. If you want to know all that the moon can do, ask Himmler; for it is he who can tell you that the moon, and nothing but the moon, turns hair white, breeds fleas and is responsible for dust.
The group sits. Between the library and the main body of the restaurant, there is a kind of a closet containing a bar scarcely more than three feet long. This dog-end of space belongs to the group. The Old Sweats. They sit here from precisely noon until the stroke of two, after which they go about their unknown business.
*
The Old Sweats sit, full of small beer and big talk, puffing pungent Woodbine smoke. They are mostly Camp Staff. This was a Summer Camp before the War: they used practically to hibernate in that canteen throughout long winters, spinning endless tales of which nine-tenths were lies. Sometimes they are joined by a dried-out old Scots Guardsman and a fifty-year-old Grenadier nearly seven feet tall.
The Grenadier, whose origins are in Cumberland, has a gift of dramatic diction. He can make a story out of anything—nearly always a tragedy, an epic of martyrdom and injustice.
“Ah!” he says. “I knew Harry Nicholls.”
“And who’s Harry Nicholls?” asks Geordie, scornfully.
“What? You don’t know Harry Nicholls? Why, he got the first V.C. in this war!”
“It’s a dirty lie,” says Geordie. “A dirty, filthy, rotten, stinking lie. The very first V.C. in this war was won by one of our kids, a Coalie, d’ye hear?”
“I know this for a fact,” says the Grenadier, with a tremendous gesture. “The first V.C. since 1935. Number 2614910, Lance-Jack Harry Nicholls. He boxed for the Battalion. Heavy Weight Imperial Service Champion. May 1940, he was wounded in the arm by shrapnel. But he led his section on. Over the ridge they go, the whole company. Do you hear this? And then, biffity-bif! The Jerries open up with heavy machine guns, at pea-shooter range. So what does old Harry do? He gets hold of a buckshee Bren, he does, and he rushes forward firing from the hip. From the hip he fires. He gives one machine gun a burst, and he wipes it out. Then he gives another one a burst, and silences it. They filled Harry full of lead. But he went up to a higher bit of ground so he could get a good look at practically the whole of the Nazi infantry. And he shoves in another magazine, and lets the Jerries have it. He killed about a hundred of ’em. But he didn’t stop firing till he had no more rounds left. It is the truth, as sure as there’s a God in heaven, kids—my old pal Harry Nicholls held back the whole German army single-handed, and got his company safe across the River Scheldt, though he was filled so full of bullets that there wasn’t room in him for any more and he was walking in a great splashing pool of red blood. What happened to him then? He was dead. He must have been dead for half an hour. But the soul of that man was such that he couldn’t stop firing until he hadn’t a round left to fire with. So the company gets over the Scheldt, by crackey, and poor old Harry was left behind. Dead, says you. Dead, says they. Dead says all of us, and the King gives his widder a V.C. on his behalf. And then what news comes through? Why, Harry Nicholls wasn’t dead at all. You can’t kill a Grenadier. I’m telling you, you can’t. Nicholls is alive, in a German hospital, getting over all them wounds. And God help Jerry when Harry Nicholls gets better again! He’ll come smashing out, he will, he’ll come crashing out of that heap like a fire engine out of a shed, and he’ll be back. My old pal Harry.”
“Your old pal nothing!” says Geordie. “You never met him.”
“Say that again!” cries the Grenadier.
“You ’eard,” says Geordie. “How could you of met him?”
“Never you mind how I could or could not have met my old pal Nicholls,” says the Grenadier. “My old pal Harry was the first V.C. of this war, and that’s all there is to be said about it.”
Geordie says a naughty word, laughs heartily, and says: “A Coldstreamer was the first V.C. of all. A chap called Strong. Crimea. Shell comes over and drops in among a mob of our boys. All right, laugh. A shell, I tell you. A sort of holler iron ball, crammed with gunpowder, and fizzling with a fuse. Like a firework. Only dangerous. This thing comes plonk at their feet. It’s due to go off in a split second. It’s too big to run away from, and too heavy to lob back over the parapet. So Strong, a Coldstreamer, picks up this shell, and hugs it to him, and runs and runs and runs, gets to the parapet and tosses the shell over, just as it bursts.”
“He wasn’t the first V.C.,” says the Scot, and the argument that follows may be heard a hundred yards away through all the noises of the Camp.
Then somebody says: “What d’you mean, ‘first V.C. since 1935?’ There wasn’t a war on in 1935.”
“Get out of it,” says th
e long Grenadier. “There’s always a war on There’s always something, anyway. Up on the Indian frontier, there’s raids, and there’s all manner of skirmishes all the time. Nobody hears anything about ’em. But there are. And I tell you that medals get won every day, war or no war.”
“You’re a liar,” says Geordie. “I don’t believe a word you say. You and your Harry Nicholls. Don’t make me laugh.”
“I tell you it’s true.”
“Was you there?”
“No, I admit that I wasn’t exactly there.”
“Then how d’you know?”
“Why, you ignorant ——‚ you, it’s history! Do you think they give V.C.’s away for nothing?”
“I don’t know! Why, you lousy Billy Brown, I’ve earned the V.C. a thousand times.”
Roars of laughter.
Geordie shouts: “I have! Thousands of times. And what did I ever get? Damn all is what I got. I don’t believe anything about anything. If you ain’t seen it with your own eyes, you don’t know it’s true.”
“Dinnot talk rubbish,” says the Scot, sourly; and says no more.
“Ever see a conjuring trick?” asks the Grenadier. “I once saw a man cutting a woman in half. All right. I saw it. So was it real? Was that man really sawing that woman in two?”
“Well, not properly, not thoroughly,” says Geordie, evasively.
“Then how can you believe what you see?”
“I don’t believe nothing!” cries Geordie.
“Look,” says the Grenadier. “You can be mistaken. But if a thing actually happens to a lot of people at once, it’s true.”
Geordie replies: “A lot of people all at once see that man sawing a woman in half.”
“That didn’t actually happen. They was made to think it was happening.”
“Same thing,” says Geordie.
