Sergeant Nelson of the Guards

by Gerald Kersh

  *

  “Death.

  “People die.

  “Good job. They’re not fit to live. When they’re fit to die they live. When they’re fit to live they die. Me father lived. He was fit to die. Me mother too.

  “I wish death was a man. Then some would be alive that is dead and some would be dead that’s alive. Nelson is dead.

  “Everything good dies. Nelson’s dead.

  “I knew him. No one else knew him. I knew him. No one else knew me. He knew me. He knew me fine. No other man knocked me off my feet but he did. Ah, he did! The second time I went absent he caught me. No, he didn’t. Nobody caught me. I gave myself up.

  “The first time I went absent I gave myself up. It was because….

  “I don’t know why it was. I did. I just came back. It was rotten in here. It was rotten out there. It was rotten everywhere. But there was a thing. I came back.

  “I can’t be in one place. Time comes I’ve got to go. Go away. Away. Anywhere away. So long as it’s a long way. What do I care where? It came again. When it means fighting I’ll not go away. I’ll stay. I’ll stay for the fighting. Hah. They know me. For the fighting I’ll stay. But … maybe soon I’ll go away again. If I must they can’t hold me. I’ll go, if I got to go.

  “I went. I went quiet. Pass till midnight. I get a bus. I go. Midnight? Hah. Midnight in hell! Back? Me? Hah. No. I got to go away. I got to go a long way away. Where? Hah. Where … I got to go. Got to get out. I got. Where? Pound. I go home. There isn’t a place. Old lass? God knows. Where? Hah. Get a civvie suit. Pinch one. Get out. Go away. Go away again. Anywhere away. They feed a lost dog. Or they kill a lost dog. Hah. Two weeks. Three weeks. Hah. You need grub. You want to eat. You can’t work. You want papers. You’re military age. They got you.

  “You go down. You turn left. You turn right. You go deep. Deeper. Find a hole. Crawl in. Then rock. Nothing. Stay and die. Or crawl back. Absent. This regiment. That camp. No papers. Gimme a cup of tea. All right son. Cup of tea. Escort. Go back.

  “He was my squad instructor. Nelson. No copper. No nark. A fool.

  “Mad. Crazy. Him and another. He talks…. Still hungry, Thurstan? Ah. All me life. Fancy tea? Ah. There’s caff. There’s no food. Tinned salmon sandwich. Fancy that? Ah. Another tea? Ah. Another sandwich? Ah. Thurstan, you’re hungry. You mug. You horrible man, Thurstan, but you’re hungry, brother. Ah. What did you go and run away for, Thurstan? What did you go and do it for? You mug. Are you yeller? Na. Na. Not yeller. I know you’re not yeller, Thurstan. I can see you’re not yeller, Thurstan. I know what it is. Ah? Ah. Just nuts. Want to get away. Run out. Get away from everything. Go up in the air, and hide yourself, you horrible man, or go down right into the guts of the earth and bury yourself there. Anything to get away, isn’t that it, you mug? Ah. Have another sandwich. We’ve got to be getting back. It means a steady twenty-eight days for you, Thurstan. The Glass House this time. You thought you had a tough break before, but you never had anything like the Glass House. I’m sorry for you.

  “Give him one of those cakes. With that sort of coconut stuff on the top. And give the mug a lump of that stuff with dates in it. Eat it while you can, you poor mug. Anything on your mind, Thurstan? Na. You ain’t got no mind. Na. I don’t know what to do with you, Thurstan.

  “Nor me with myself.

  “Why d’you give yourself up, Thurstan? Want to go back? Na. Then why? To eat. You’ve ate, Thurstan. Ah. I’ve ate. Are you a man or an animal, Thurstan? Whatever you like. Neither. Eating? What’s eating? Cats eat their kittens, Thurstan. Ain’t you a man? Na. Then be-Jesus I’ll make you one. They done something to you. Thurstan, you poor louse. You got something, but it’s lost, lost in you like a needle in a haystack. Okey doke—I’m a magnet, see, cock?

  “Nelson. Crazy.

  “It’s a bit of waste ground and a dark lane and the station. Do you want to bust loose, Thurstan? Bust loose and run?

  “You go to the police. Deserter. I’m absent. Hear? Run and be hunted down? I’ll leave it to you. Go on. Run away if you want to. Run away. You yeller dog.

  “I smack him.

  “He smacks me. He’s light. But good. I’m stronger. But you can’t hold him. We fight. I fight good. I fight mad. I can hit. Anybody want to see how I can hit? You know I can hit. Ask Mac. Ask anybody. I can smash a door. A wall. I can smash. But Nelson I can’t. No. He’s good. Come on, Thurstan. Or do you want to run away?

  “There’s something. I never run away from any man, in any fight. But the heart goes out of me and I run. I run in the dark. He doesn’t follow. All over the tin cans and dirty dead cats and rubbish and muck on the waste ground and up the street and round the back doubles and over a court and the night as black as bloody pitch. Stop.

  “Night. A bit of the coconut off that cake mixed up with some blood in me teeth.

  “Hit the wall. Smash me hand. What for? For nothing. Think. Run away? Yes. Ah. But from a proper man? Run away from the Army, run away from the coppers. But Nelson? Drop him a——? I should be a mug. I should take meself back for him? A sergeant? Hah. I’m not a fool.

  “And then I walk, I walk back, I walk right back. I walk right back to the station. Train. Not in. A bit of a light. A bit of a light on a bit of a brass star. Nelson and the other one. I say Got a fag? Not a word from that man. Not a word. He gives me a Woodbine. Hi-de-hi, Thurstan … made up yer mind to give me the honour of your company back to camp? Ah. Light? Light. Like I said, Thurstan, there can be a needle in a great big haystack … but there is a needle in the haystack, somewhere in that haystack. Wash. What we want is a good wash. Stick it out, Thurstan. Stick it out like a pal. Be a pal, Thurstan, and stick it out. It’s lousy. It’s dull. Monotonous. Unjust. Uncomfortable. Anything you like. But it ain’t being done for you. Nor me. Nor the C.O. Not for anybody in particular. It’s a thing. You got to stick. Because you’re a man and not an animal. You got to stick it out on your own, day by day, night by night of your own free will. After the war’s all over go to hell your own way. Till then, come to hell our way.

  “Ah.

  “Hi-de-hi, Thurstan!

  “Ho-de-ho, Sergeant!

  “By the Christ, he was a man.

  “A man.”

  *

  And a silence comes upon the hut.

  V

  Jack Cattle

  THIS SILENCE lasts for about two seconds. Then Thurstan breaks it by throwing down his boots and going out of the hut. As the big, loose door rattles shut behind him Bearsbreath says:

  “I think that feller is going properly mad. I don’t feel safe sleeping next to him. One of these days he’s going to run amok. Could you make head or tail of that rigmarole, Crowne?”

  “Well,” says Sergeant Crowne, “in a general sort of way I could, sort of. I think I fluff what that geezer is driving at. Bill Nelson kind of won his respect. Though I can’t say that Geordie makes himself clear. Blimey, I’ve known Arabs and Jews that talked almost better English than that kid.”

  At this a Guardsman whose name is Jack Cattle says:

  “Thurstan talks as you or I talk in our sleep. You’ve got to piece what he says together like a jigsaw puzzle. He doesn’t hand you a line of talk, but clues, like a crossword puzzle. Of course Thurstan’s nuts, and dangerous. But what he was trying to say was something like this…. You or I would say it like this…. I’ve never known where to go. Civvie Street was hell, because I couldn’t muck in there. The Army was hell because I couldn’t muck in there either. All my life I haven’t known whether I’ve been going or coming. All my life I’ve been short of grub and everything. I gave myself up because I needed to eat. I didn’t come back of my own free will. It was hunger that dragged me back like a dog that’s been on the loose. Nelson saw that. Nelson wanted me to be a man with a will of his own, and not some kind of a dog nosing round the dustbins. So he gave me a chance to break away, after he’d fed me some grub. Nelson took that chance. He gambled his tapes on a feeling he had about me. And
then I really came back of my own free will and took whatever punishment was coming to me.

  “Get it? That’s what Thurstan would have said if he could have said it; only he can’t say it … he fiddles about and fumbles trying to get it out; shy, not knowing what to do or say, not certain of himself, like a kid of sixteen trying to undo a girl’s dress for the first time.”

  This man Cattle is one of the oddest characters in the Brigade of Guards. He is a regular Guardsman of more than twelve years’ service. It is said that he comes of what they call a Good Family, and has been to good schools. Sergeant Hands says Oxford, and Cambridge, and Harrow, and Eton. When newcomers ask Cattle what on earth made him join the Army, he replies, quite truthfully, that he joined the Army because he liked it; that he doesn’t want a commission or a stripe because he is really perfectly happy as an ordinary soldier. Cattle went into the Army as another man might have gone to a South Sea island. Here, he feels untrammelled. He has no responsibilities. To him, the routine is gentle, almost soporific. He enjoys cleaning his equipment as some men enjoy gardening: it gives him time to think, it leaves his mind in a state of pleasant detachment. He loves the simple rhythm of a route march, and finds relaxation in a drill parade. Musketry revision gives him infinite pleasure, because he knows it all already: it leaves him with nothing to do except think. To him, the assembling of a Bren gun is an enjoyable little fidget…. He puts together the groups pretty much as you or I would tinker with a familiar wire puzzle that leaves our souls free to contemplate the infinite. He likes to be left alone. It seems to him that the Army leaves a man alone. The general opinion is that Cattle is a little insane. He is imperturbable as a stone buddha. No man ever heard him raise his voice or saw him raise his eyebrows. He lives in a state of bliss, of sublime mediocrity. He is beyond good and evil; beyond hope and fear; beyond astonishment and anger. He is detached, unhooked, gently floating in a more than earthly serenity. His great limbs swing loosely on his powerful torso. His huge-boned face wears a sweet, rippling smile. Every month he receives one letter, registered and sealed with the seal of a bank, and this letter simply begs to inform Mr. Jack Cattle that he will find enclosed the sum of four pounds. This represents all that is left of some little income he used to have. When the money comes, he puts it in his pocket and seems to forget it until somebody wonders if he could oblige with a small loan. Then he pulls out his money like a little handful of crushed leaves, and says: “Help yourself.” He makes notes in a twopenny book. It appears that once in a while he has a thought, which he writes down. Sometimes he attempts to draw somebody’s profile on the back of an old envelope. He will talk about anything, always with academic calm. The nearest he got to intimacy with any man was when he discussed life and books with The Schoolmaster, who left to be an officer.

  He talks on, now, in his strange lazy way, idly shovelling into his sentences whatever words happen to get on to his tongue:

  “You know, people do talk an awful lot of nonsense about what men are, and what they might have been. I heard somebody say Sergeant Nelson might have been … I forget what, but something or other that was very learned and professional, because Nelson had a clear mind and a good brain, and a way of expressing himself that made everything clear and exact. He had a fine understanding of men. But I think that Nelson found his real vocation in the Army, as a sergeant. What would he have done with another kind of job? In any other capacity, well, he would have been something not very much out of the ordinary. But as a sergeant he was great.

  “Do you remember Old Silence? Poor Old Silence that got blown to hell when he left on leave to get married? Oh yes, yes, yes, Old Silence was a nice fellow and I liked him very much indeed. And he was an intelligent man with plenty of imagination and plenty of guts, and I think the world is so much the poorer since Old Silence got killed. Well, one day Old Silence and The Schoolmaster and I were talking about one thing and another and we got around to people we knew and so we came to Sergeant Nelson. He was their first Squad Instructor, you know. I knew Nelson quite well. We were out East together, and I got to see a good deal of him. Well … The Schoolmaster and Old Silence were saying the most fantastic things you ever heard in your life about Nelson. Old Silence said that in a country like America, way back in the eighteen-fifties, a man like Nelson could have been President, like Abraham Lincoln. Don’t you believe it. Nelson’s genius was just rightly placed. He was cut out to be great, if you understand what I mean, only as a man and not as some professional with a career.”

  Sergeant Crowne asks: “And what did The Schoolmaster say Bill ought to have been?”

  “It sounded funny when The Schoolmaster said it, Sergeant. I don’t suppose you’d guess what he said in a thousand years. He said Bill Nelson ought to have been a poet.”

  “A poet?”

  “I’ll tell you how it came about. One evening, it seems that Nelson was talking to the fellows about active service, and fighting, and living and dying, and all that, and while he was talking it seems that The Schoolmaster, who was a literary kind of a mug … you know, he couldn’t think of a sunset or anything like that except in terms of rosebuds, or poached eggs, or anything else that was red except the sun…. The Schoolmaster took down what Nelson was saying almost word for word on a lump of paper. Then, you see, when he came to read it over, it seemed to him that Bill Nelson (poor old Bill Nelson! I can imagine what he would have said if he could have heard about this), Bill Nelson was talking pure poetry. This is a lot of poppycock, of course. But The Schoolmaster gave me what he’d written down. And this is how it sounded.”

  Guardsman Cattle fishes out a tin box, and selects from a bundle of mixed documents a couple of sheets of Y.M.C.A. notepaper. He looks at these sheets, grins with indescribable languor and reads:

  Me,

  I

  see

  men

  die!

  When

  men

  snuff

  out,

  day

  or night,

  they

  might

  cut

  up rough—

  shout

  about

  lying

  dying.

  Some

  come

  out

  wiv: “I

  can’t

  die,

  Sarnt!

  Sarnt!

  Shan’t

  I live?”

  And a few say “Ooo,

  why should I die

  by night?”

  They pray:

  “Lord Gawd let me see the day!”

  When men falls,

  one

  way or another,

  they’re done.

  Some calls “Mother.”

  Some,

  for rum…. And then agen,

  men passing out round about

  dawn start arsing about

  trying to stop dying

  till night; and still fight

  for breath to hold back death

  till dark. Definitely.

  Many stay dumb and die dumb.

  Most ’ve lived that way; dumb.

  Some lark.

  Bright light, or deep night, or dirty dawa,

  I say a guy’ll die as he was born—

  on his Derby-and-Joan.

  So why moan?

  Try to satisfy

  some geezers! Jesus

  couldn’t please us all.

  You bawl

  for what

  you ain’t got.

  If hell is hot, you yell

  for ice.

  If it’s cold, you want a fire.

  Fat lot o’ good, that.

  Touch wood, I’m alive.

  Time and time agen

  I’ve

  seen men live and die.

  And me! Blimey—here I am.

  Theories

  apart,

  Gawd knows fear is

  a worse curse than death.

  Right inside />
  you, your heart hammers

  and beats. You sweats. You burn,

  you lie and try to hide….

  Oh well, and then

  in your turn—

  being proper men—

  you learn to be what they say

  is brave. You behave right

  and stand tight, and put a bold

  face on it, and hold fast to

  the last with as good a grace

  as possible.

  And so you see fear go.

  Yeah, the line stands

  ready, and your hands

  are steady as steel, and you feel

  fine. All right. Say you die

  there and then? Why,

  you horrible men, if you

  survive for ever, you’ll never

  have been so definitely clean

  alive!

  “When you come to think of it,” says Hands, “that really was something like how Bill used to talk, though I can’t say I ever noticed him making things rhyme. It only goes to show—you can talk bloody poetry all your life and not know it.”

  “We—ell,” dragged out Jack Cattle, “any man who knows what he wants to say and says what he’s got to say without wasting words talks better than poetry, you mark my words. But old Nelson was dead hot on what you might call philosophy. He knew how to live, that man.”