Sergeant Nelson of the Guards

by Gerald Kersh

  “And the joke of it is this: This dago, Gomez, is dead scared. It’s on the up-and-up, dead scared. Do you know why he’s scared? He says he thinks his life is being spared for something really bad to happen to him.

  “Now what would you make of a geezer like that?

  “The odds are, he’ll get knocked down by a kid on a fairy-cycle, and snuff it that way.”

  *

  “I knew a rent collector that fell down in a pub, and stabbed himself to the heart with his own pencil,” says Dagwood.

  Butcher the Butcher says: “Yet it’s a fact that some geezers do get killed in battles in the proper way. Not all old soldiers die natural deaths like getting run over by fairy-cycles.”

  “Who wants to get killed in a battle?” says Bearsbreath. “I don’t want to get killed in a battle.”

  The new lance-corporal speaks again:

  “All the same, it’s nice to see your friends die sudden. I mean——”

  A dreadful doom is hanging over this young man.

  Hands says: “Yes? You mean? Your grampa that fought in the Zulu War?”

  “Oh yes,” says Dagwood, “the Zulu War.”

  “Who was your grampa?” asks Butcher. “Prince Monolulu?”

  “His grampa was a cannibal king,” says Hands.

  “Well?” says Bearsbreath. “Come on. What about your grampa that fought in the Zulu War? I thought you was a bit of a Kaffir.”

  “That ain’t coloured blood,” says Crowne, “that’s dirt.”

  “My grandfather was as white as you or me,” says the new lance-corporal.

  “I bet he was white when he saw them Zulus coming,” says Hands.

  “There is such a thing as a white black man,” says Dagwood. “I saw one, once, in a side show at Blackpool. They called him Walla-Baloo.”

  “That was his grampa,” says Hands. “Hiya, Walla-Baloo.”

  “My grandfather was a Sergeant-Major in the Glorious Ninth,” says the new lance-corporal, with heat.

  “Maybe he was a sort of a Gurker,” says Crowne.

  “There was loyal Zulus,” says Butcher.

  “My grandfather——”

  “All right, Walla-Baloo,” says Hands, “we know all about your grampa.”

  “Walla-Baloo …” says Dagwood, with appreciation. “Walla-Baloo.”

  The Doom has fallen.

  The new lance-corporal will become an old lance-corporal, and a full corporal, and a lance-sergeant, and a full sergeant, and a company quartermaster-sergeant, and a sergeant-major, and a drill-sergeant. He will achieve the dignity of a regimental sergeant-major. He may become Captain and Quartermaster.

  But to his dying day and beyond, he will be known to all men as Walla-Baloo the Zulu.

  “You shouldn’t chime into the conversation of your seniors,” says Dagwood, with pitying condescension.

  The boy who will be called Walla-Baloo the Zulu—a nice, rosey-cheeked, serious boy, with straw-coloured hair and white eyelashes—gets up, fumbles in the pockets of his brain for verbal missiles, but finds nothing but adjectival fluff. He goes out, slamming the door.

  “Young corporals,” says Hands. “Why, in my time, if I’d shoved my oar into a conversation like he just did, I’d have been shot up into the air like a skyrocket.”

  “You’ve got to start somewhere,” says Bearsbreath.

  “And where do you end?” asks Crowne, sourly. “If you’re not careful, you end up like them old skivers that mooch about the Naffy Library. The minute the place opens, in they dash. Blind O’Reilly, it’s like a Gold Rush. They go for them four armchairs like pigs for swill. And there they sit, reading books all day long.”

  “And listening to the wireless,” says Hands. “Not that that wireless ever works. It squeaks, it goes quack, it screams like a baby; but much they care. They sit and listen just the same.”

  “I believe Fatty Teedale’s librarian now,” says Dagwood.

  “Fatty?” says Hands. “The only man in the Brigade of Guards that used to bite his toenails. Years ago he used to be in the next bed to mine, and it made my blood run cold to hear him. When he’d used up all his fingernails, he’d start on his toes. Then he got too fat to reach them. He was the worst nail-biter I ever saw in my life. You know what he used to do? He used to save up the little fingernail on his left hand for Sunday afternoon. He’d store up that nail like another man would store a cigar. And first thing after Church Parade, he’d sit down and have a long bite at it. It shook me.”

  “So he’s librarian,” says Butcher. “Him. What, can he read?”

  “Read what?” asks Bearsbreath. “There’s nothing in that library to read. One of the cupboards has got books in it, I don’t know what’s in the other. It’s been kept locked since before my time.”

  “There was a rumour,” says Dagwood, “that when Pig Guinness—the Drill Pig, not the other Pig—when Pig Guinness died, he left instructions in his will that he was to be locked in that cupboard. I don’t believe it. Muddy Waters says that back in 1920, a librarian murdered a Guardsman and put his body in that cupboard. Then he threw the key away. Nobody ever had instructions to break the lock. There was only one key issued. So the cupboard stayed locked.”

  “There’s everything in that library except books,” says Cattle. “I remember, once, Geordie Minor took a fancy to read something, and went and asked the librarian for a reading-book. The librarian gave Geordie Mother Goose’s Nursery Rhymes. Geordie read it from cover to cover. And when I asked him how he liked it he said: ‘It’s nobbut a pack o’ lies.’”

  “Geordie Minor,” says Dagwood. “Wasn’t it him that called the Adjutant——?”

  “No, you’re thinking of Geordie Binns,” says Hands. “It was in private when he called the Adjutant a——. And the Adjutant (it was Pongo; old Pongo, a decent sort, but I once saw him go into Adjutant’s Orders fifteen minutes late), Pongo says to Geordie Binns: ‘Speak up, man. I didn’t hear what you said just then.’ Geordie had the presence of mind to say ‘Nothing, sir.’ And the Adjutant said: ‘I’m glad to hear it, Binns; but don’t say it again.’ My God, but Geordie Binns could blind when he got annoyed!”

  “Binns was nothing to Swearing Simmonds,” says Dagwood.

  “The worst swearer of them all was Atkin, the one we used to call Blinding Atkin,” says Butcher.

  “Yet,” says Dagwood, “it’s hard not to swear, and handle a squad at the same time. They can bust you for using language. But how can you train men with an ‘Oh-Dear-Me,’ or a few ‘My Goodnesses’?”

  “You have to invent new swearing,” says Hands. “Look at old Spurgeon. He swears like a bargee, but he swears in a legitimate way. He swears in front of the C.O. himself, and gets away with it because he uses only clean language. He can let out a string of swearing, and nobody could object. ‘Blind my grandmother’s guts!’ he says. ‘Card stuff me gently! God’s Buttercups and Daisies and Blazing Daffodils! Sweet Burning Splintering Flagpoles! Cord Spotted Cuckoo!’ And he invents new names to call people. ‘Twillip!’ he says. ‘Snurge! Twitter-bug! Bugscratcher! Spittoon!’ and so on.”

  The Budgerigar comes out of a kind of coma to say: “The best thing is, to swear in a foreign language.”

  “Remember when Geordie Binns learnt French?” asks Crowne.

  “That wasn’t Geordie Binns. That was Geordie Twistle,” says Dagwood. “He got hold of some Frenchman, one night, in a pub near Kensington, and he asks this Frenchman what … well, he …”

  “He asked the Frenchman,” says Cattle, “what beer was in French. The Frenchman said bière. Then he asked him what cigarette was, and the Frenchman said cigarette. ‘Ah,’ says Geordie, ‘and what’s whisky?’ The Frenchman says: ‘Whisky.’ ‘And football?’ ‘Football,’ says the Frenchman. And then Geordie says: ‘Ha. There’s nowt to ’t. It’s nowt different fra’ King’s English.’”

  “I was talking to a Free Frenchman,” says Dagwood. “He wasn’t so bad. It’s not their fault they were born that side
of the Channel. Some of them seem nice fellers.”

  “You talk of Free Frenchmen,” says Cattle, suddenly, “and that reminds me of a thing. Sort of connected with what we were saying before about death, and so on. I was talking to a Free Frenchman too, an officer. I know French pretty well. And like other people do, he got around to talking of dying, and retreating, and all that. I mentioned dying of old age, and I said something about most people saying they preferred to die before they got too old to care…. You know the kind of tripe; the kind of tripe we were talking just before that young corporal went out….

  “He was a queer little egg with one leg, and he looked as if he’d taken a bit of hammering, quite a bit of hard hammering. It was when I was on leave. I was in civvies. He could stand plenty of liquor. He was homesick for the taste of French wine. He talked a lot about wine. And so he got around to talking about France, and fighting, and Germany, and the war, and everything else. He was a good little fellow. I quite liked him. He had as much fight in him as a terrier. Men like that come back and fight some more if they’re alive. I wouldn’t mind fighting with—of course, I mean fighting by the side of—this little Captain Ix.

  “He told me a wonderful story …”

  XII

  Ten Old Tigers

  “YOU WANT to think of this,” said Cattle, “whenever people get round to talking about the way people die, and what people die for—in general, when people begin to talk about things like Bill Nelson’s death. Because there are times when there really does seem to be a Destiny that saves us like cards to be played at the end part of a game. We talked about France, about the fall of France, and the nice rough wines of this part of France, and the smooth wines of another part; and the way wine is made.

  “Then Captain Ix said this”:

  *

  “You may crush men like grapes in a wine press. You can trample all the sweetness out of them—stamp them down until they look like a flat, downtrodden mass of rubbish. Do that. But don’t forget one thing: out of the smashed remains of the grape harvest, my friend, brandy is distilled. Not much of it, but potent. And one whiff of good brandy carries with it the character and quality of the whole ravaged vineyard. Do you understand that? So with men. Squeeze a nation! Smash it and flatten it and twist out of it the last drop of its blood. But listen: out of the trodden-out débris of the people there comes a strong and vital spirit. It is there, fermenting, growing strong. And out of the agony of the crushed grapes, remember, comes the glory of the wine. Out of the agony of the people comes the glory of the nation.

  “You can squash out the external appearance of a grape: but in doing this, you give it an ultimate magnificence. It is like that with a man. A man on his own is a soft thing that spoils easily—like a grape! The press and the dark cellar bring out the undying spirit of the grape—as of a man!

  “I am a Frenchman. I am one of the trampled grapes. But it is I who am telling you that even at this moment, in the dark, there is going on a stir, a ferment. And drip … drip … drip … drop by drop, there is gathering the rare, biting, imprisoned spirit of my people.

  “Look here. I have been beaten like washing in a stream. I have been chewed up like grass. But it was I who went out to die with the Ten Old Tigers.”

  And Captain Victor Ix raised a glass of English bitter, and said, in a deep and resonant voice: “The Ten Old Tigers and the greater glory of France!” He gulped the beer; pulled a face. “Listen,” he said:

  *

  I do not need to tell you much about our retreat. It was a débâcle and a crash. To my dying moment I shall carry in my nostrils the smell of that defeat—a smell, my friend, of doom: of high-explosive smoke mixed with petrol and burnt oil and dust and ashes. That was the smell of the Boche advance. They came on like driver ants in a jungle, over heaps of their own dead. The tanks roared like devils. It was like seeing a city on the move—tanks which looked greater than cathedrals, spitting shot and shell. And above them, aeroplanes as numerous and awful as the horde of Satan falling into hell—coming down howling, my friend; that is the only word. Their noise alone stunned us. But we held. My company did what was possible. I went mad. I raved. I swore like a maniac. But my little men went down; and my good old friend Xavier, the Lieutenant, he went down in a fine spray. The French Army was cut to slices like a ham—torn to bits like a pineapple. A bridge which should have been blown up was not blown up. The tanks came over in a black cloud. France was rolling over in her last convulsion. Germany was at her throat. The great thumbs of the tank and aeroplane offensive had a stranglehold, right behind the great artery. We could only gurgle and kick. And our kicks grew weaker. Our head swam. Delirium! Blackness! Of my company, seventeen men were left.

  I took them away. Then I was ashamed and wanted to go back: but then they took me away, for I was slightly wounded and not quite myself.

  Yes, the man you see before you now, Victor Ix, retreated with the washed-out remains of his company.

  I thought that although we had been pressed back, the rest of our forces were holding out; that I could come back soon with a new company and beat the Boche back to Berlin, as before. I did not know that the way had been cleared for the Boches, and that France was sold. It did not enter my mind, because I thought such things were impossible.

  To the downfall of all traitors I will drink even another glass of this execrable beer: and one more still to the Ten Old Tigers…. To the ten grey and magnificent Old Tigers of Tolly.

  We reached a tiny town called Tolly. Now I knew Tolly, for I had lived there for a little while when I was young. It is a little town like other little towns. Nothing happens there. Nobody does anything beyond a certain dead-alive routine of living. Tolly had only one thing to distinguish it from a thousand other such towns: a kind of Soldiers’ Home.

  Many years ago, after the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte, a certain military-minded wine merchant endowed a small row of cottages. He gave them to ten old soldiers: veterans of the wars, who had permission to live there in their old age rent-free. The will of the merchant provided, also, some small weekly sum for the purchase of tobacco and wine. The town provided a few francs’ worth of lighting and heating. Thus, with their pensions, the old soldiers who lived in those cottages and waited for death were able to rest in some little comfort.

  These poor old men were pathetic.

  They had spent their lives in camps and barracks. They knew nothing but soldiering. A clause in the will that provided for them insisted that only men without families could enjoy those poor little amenities. So the ten veterans of Tolly, who are now in Heaven, were men alone in the world: men who had devoted their entire lives to the Army of France.

  When I was young and was at Tolly, I often saw them. They drew their pensions and spent the money on necessities. They were regimental, however, those poor old men. They received, every Saturday, a sum of three francs apiece for wine and tobacco; and so they went out to spend those few pence on wine and tobacco alone. And every Saturday morning, punctually at eleven forty-five, the ten old soldiers would march out to the Café Roche on the corner, and sit, each with his glass of red or white wine, smoking and talking. They amused people. It was funny to hear them discussing battles and skirmishes that everybody had forgotten, in places nobody had ever heard of.

  Now and again, some person, slightly drunk and jolly, would say, “What about Indo-China?” And one of them, who had fought some shocking encounters out there, would square his thin old shoulders and begin to explain…. “We were here … they were there…. And then the Commandant said to me … and then I said to the Commandant …” Real old soldiers’ talk. And then somebody would buy them drinks. Once in a while one of them would get rather drunk. The townspeople enjoyed this very much—the spectacle of a seventy-year-old soldier singing forgotten songs in the ghost of a voice and reeling, supported by a comrade of seventy-two, back to the alms-houses.

  They were old and shabby. They had just enough to eat, but never quite enough to d
rink and smoke. They cadged a little. They sometimes attached themselves to total strangers and, talking of the weather, complained of thirst. Sometimes they were a bit of a nuisance. They tried to get small jobs of cleaning, or gardening, for the price of a litre of white wine and a packet of the worst tobacco. They used bad language when they forgot themselves … and as they grew older they forgot themselves quite often.

  They talked mostly of battles; and when they talked, their skinny old hands lashed the air in savage gestures. One veteran of North Africa, a Sergeant-Major of more than eighty, whose elder brother had fallen at Sedan, used to demonstrate, with a decanter, how he had killed an Arab with a rock, and so saved the life of his commanding officer. The breasts of all of them tinkled with medals. They all cultivated fierce moustaches. Most of them shaved every day, and walked upright.

  The people of Tolly called them the Ten Old Tigers.

  We got into Tolly, as I was telling you—used-up, finished, dead on our feet. The town was almost empty. The people had fled. There was an echoing silence. “What is this?” I wondered. We passed the Café Roche. There was a sound of merrymaking inside … a sort of crackle of senile laughter.

  I staggered to the door. The café was empty. Only ten familiar figures occupied the centre of the place. They had bottles of the best wine before them. Eight of them were smoking cigars. Yes, they were the Ten Old Tigers. I was nearly dead of exhaustion. I heard myself saying: “What, Sergeant Bonenfant—is it you?”

  And a very old man said: “Vi l’capitaine,” and sprang to his feet. He said: “It is fifteen years since I saw your face last. Let us see—only four of us have died since then. There are four new ones. For the rest, we are still here …” He was happy with wine. “Listen, mon capitaine, they have all run away. The café is ours. Drinks are on the house.” This Sergeant Bonenfant was a wicked old man, who was disrespectful to officers and feared neither God nor man. He laughed, and said: “They think the Boches have beaten France!”