Sergeant Nelson of the Guards

by Gerald Kersh

  All the rest roared with laughter.

  I said: “They are coming in tanks.” Then I felt my legs giving way. I said to my men: “Find yourself to eat and drink.” And I sat down. And then the place whirled round me like a wheel, and there was a redness, and a purple, and a darkness…. And I came to myself on the floor. One of the old men had propped my battered head on his bony knee. Another was pouring most of a bottle of brandy down my throat. A third was saying: “Bite his ears: that brings them to” … and another was replying: “I have no teeth.” A fifth was slapping me in the face: an old soldier’s remedy for unconsciousness, it appears.

  “My men?” I said.

  There was a mutter of horrible oaths and curses. The old sergeant, Bonenfant, said:

  “The ——s have run away. There is some fairy tale. There is some legend. The Boches are almost here, one says. Then why not go and stop them, I say. But no. The seventeen of them, your men, throw down their equipment and run off. They say, ‘Against tanks, what use are rifles? Besides,’ they say, ‘we are betrayed and sold.’ It is a question of morale. They run. As for me, I say: Bah!”

  I sat up. “There is something here that I do not like,” I said. “We were retreating, yes … but …”

  There was a crash. There was a smash of glass. A very old man, the oldest of all the Tigers, none other than the old Sergeant-Major whose brother had perished at Sedan, had thrown a water carafe through the window into the street. It was not drunkenness. It was rage. Yes, rage. That old, old man was bristling like a grey wolf. He stood up. His time-worn throat jangled like a broken piano. He shouted:

  “Silence!”

  There was authority in that voice, my friend. We all listened, out of force of habit.

  He let out a string of old Army endearments:

  “Silence, you dirty maggots! Silence every one of you, you this-and-that offspring of so-and-so! You drunken, noisy dummy-headed blank spawn of little frogs! Shuttup! You in the rear—put down that pipe while I’m talking to you! Are you attending to me? Right. You’d better. You imbecile idiot scum of puddles! … Stop shuffling those feet!

  “The Boches are coming. This is serious. Do you understand? They say that France is sold. I don’t know. I know that there is something strange here. I know that in time the Boches would have come here only through a thin paste and that thin paste would have been me—and it would have been you, too, if I’d been your Sergeant-Major! I’d have blown myself to dust to get in their eyes! And so? What has happened? Everybody runs. Civilians, yes: they are only jokes. They ran. But when soldiers run, my comrades, there is something funny. Soldiers are paid to fight, not run. It is a career: to fight, not run.

  “Then what? We are old men. But we are men. We are ancient soldiers. But we are soldiers. In Africa we stood alone against thousands, and we did not run. What have we fought for all our lives, if people run away now when we are nearly dead? What have we lived for, to see everything we made go away like tobacco ash in the wind?”

  A growl of rage from the other nine Tigers. They were sober now, and they growled. And I felt myself growling with them. He went on:

  “For myself, I have only about twenty years more to live. But—name of a name of a dog of a dog of a pig!—I have spat in the eye of death twenty thousand times ever since I was born, and got away with it! So have you all, you young pups! So have you all, you whippersnappers; for you’re soldiers like me! Good. At Sidi-Faouzi the raw recruits broke like string. The veterans, the old ones, it was they who saved the day with pig stickers, with naked steel. Good. It is the veterans who will save France now. Look! They have thrown down their rifles and their pouches. Good! Here are rifles, ammunition, and bayonets. What more do you want? A regimental band? Bah! Get on that equipment! It is an order! To Arms! Long live France, and down with the Boches!”

  And my friend, my friend, as if in a dream I saw those ten old soldiers, those aged, superannuated, worn-out, battered, broken-down veterans of all the wars of the Empire—I saw them stuff their pipes into their pockets (incidentally, like good old soldiers, helping themselves to packets of tobacco) and struggle into the belts and pouches my men had left. They put the stuff on wrong. It didn’t matter. They had their bayonets on their shrunken left hips. They loaded their rifles. The youngest of them—a man of sixty-four whom they called Bobo, who had been in the cavalry in the last war—showed the old Sergeant-Major how to load his rifle. The present pattern was quite new to him: in his day he had handled the ancient chassepot, and the forgotten Lebel.

  The Sergeant-Major addressed them again:

  “Now, come on, you sons of dogs! Do you want to live for ever?” It was the greatest warcry I had ever heard. I tore a strip off the tablecloth nearest my hand. I tied it round my head where I was wounded. I rose. I stood as on parade. I bellowed at them:

  “What the devil is this? Sergeant-Major, are you forgetting yourself? Why, confound and blast you, man, I’ll break you for this if you don’t watch out! Who’s commanding this company? Did you ask permission to speak? Now then! Get into line, there! Why, you ratty mongrels—are you sons of men? Or are you rookies? As you were! ’Shun! As you were! Company … slooooope arms! By your le-eft … quick … march!”

  It was a dream. It was a fantasy. At the head of ten men, the youngest of whom was over sixty—whose combined ages added up to something like seven hundred years—seven hundred years!—I marched out to hold back the shattering advance of the German tanks.

  There went, up that ruined road littered with the debris of an army that had fled, seven hundred and forty-odd years of French glory.

  I was the odd forty years.

  *

  The tanks had passed. The mass of infantry was following. I found a position in the face of the advance. It was a good position. There was natural cover. I hardly cared. To me, this was not a battle, so much as a gesture. It was my duty to die with France, I thought. And I was going out to die. Those wonderful old men had shamed me into it, and they were right.

  We saw the Boches coming. We had only our rifles, and about forty rounds of ammunition for each man. I was lying next to Sergeant Bonenfant. He was crooning over the butt of his rifle, caressing it with his cheek, and crying heavy old tears of joy. His poor aged hands were clutching his weapon. I could see the blue veins like cords, and the dried old fingernails dead-white under the pressure of his grip. The Germans came in sight. “Hold it,” I said. The word went along. At a hundred yards I said: “Ready.” At seventy-five yards I said: “Fire!” I roared it, and picked off an officer. The ten other rifles went off in a ragged little volley, but nine more Germans went down.

  They must have thought that there was some huge counter-attack brought up to surprise them. They stopped. They took cover. We fired at will, picking our men. Ah, my poor old Tigers of Tolly … their muscles could no longer work together with their eyes and their nerves and their memories! Only one bullet in five hit anything, although the Boche was horribly exposed. Oh, for a section armed with light machine guns! I could have inflicted astronomical casualties. But it was better as it happened. Yes, it was greater. They were great, those men dying of old age and feebleness, who had exhausted themselves in the quarrels of France.

  We went on firing until our ammunition was exhausted.

  Meanwhile, the Boches had let loose machine guns.

  Bonenfant went down first. I saw one drop of blood, like a jewel, on his white moustache. No more. He died smiling. He thought he had hit the man he aimed at. But the man got up afterwards: he had simply ducked. I fired my last cartridge. “That for you, Bonenfant,” I said. Then I got up. My head was beating like a heart. I yelled: “Charge!” In one hand I held a bayonet: in the other my revolver. “Charge!” I shouted … and even as I shouted, I felt a kind of hammer hit my knee. A ricocheting bullet had smashed it to pieces, and I went down like a skittle, sobbing with rage and disappointment. I wanted to die with my grandfathers-in-arms.

  I lay, helpless. And I saw the
last of my Old Tigers advancing with fixed bayonets upon the enemy. Four very old men, carrying their bayonets at the high port, ran as fast as their rheumatical legs would carry them—against twenty thousand German soldiers.

  A machine gun went at-at-at-at-at. The old Sergeant-Major and one other tripped and rolled over. The last two kept advancing. I believe that even the Germans were touched. They held their fire. An officer stood up, and waved his hands, and shouted something. The last two Old Tigers ran faster, with the little, jogging steps of exhaustion. The officer fired his pistol. One of them fell. With his last ounce of strength he tried to throw his rifle at the Germans. But his arm was too weak.

  And so the last of them all came down on the great German army.

  Ten yards away from the officer, he stopped. I could see his chest and shoulders heaving. He was exhausted. Not even his will could take him a step farther. I was mad with pain and misery, and the shame of having fallen. I screamed: “Vive la France!” The last Old Tiger found breath enough to cry back—such a poor, pitiful, quavering cry; and yet so stupendous and so noble that the earth seemed to stop in its orbit and the sky seemed to stand still … “Vive la France!” Then he simply fell dead, because his heart had stopped.

  That was the end of the Ten Old Tigers of Tolly.

  I lay there, nearly dead. I lay for three days. I was found, then. I lost my leg. I am glad I lost my leg. All of me could not be buried with those great old men: but at least a part of me is honoured by their presence in a grave.

  A nation is great only as its finest sons are great. France is as great as the Ten Old Tigers. They are planted in the earth like seeds. Out of them there will grow something stronger and more beautiful than trees. Such men do not die. God send me such an end.

  XIII

  The Escape of Bill Nelson

  “I WOULDN’T have give those old geezers no bursts,” says Hands. “Would you, Crowne?”

  “I’d give my own grandmother a burst if I was ordered,” says Crowne, sourly.

  “That’s what you say. I bet you a million pounds you wouldn’t have let loose the old Bren on those old geezers, if you was ordered or not.”

  “Only a Jerry’d give such an order,” says Crowne.

  “Only a Jerry’d take such an order. Only a Jerry’d obey it,” says Bearsbreath. “They could shoot me for mutiny. I wouldn’t. I’d rather die, the same as I’d rather die than have cancer.”

  “I can’t see anybody giving you or me such an order,” says The Budgerigar. “We’d most likely be told to go and bring those old gentlemen in and give ’em tea and wads.”

  “Bill would have give ’em the old Hi-de-Hi,” says Hands.

  “I never see anybody more polite to old age than Bill Nelson,” says Butcher the Butcher. “He’d ‘Sir’ or ‘Madam’ the lousiest beggar in the street, if it happened to be old. If a horrible old bag sold him a box o’ matches, he’d give her a salute and say, ‘Much obliged to you, marm.’”

  “That was on account of his mother,” says Bearsbreath. “He used to idolize his old woman.”

  “Alive?” asks Crowne.

  “Dead as a doornail,” says Crowne. “I was around when he got the news. She dropped down dead of a stroke, it must be … when Bill ’d been in the Guards about eighteen months. The year Bunny-Rabbit Bunney got busted for trying to nail Sarnt-Major Glint to the Company Office door with a baynet.”

  “I dare say she treated him all right,” says The Budgerigar.

  “She treated him like——,” says Hands.

  “If she was a mother, God strike me blind and deaf and dumb and paralysed,” says Butcher the Butcher.

  Cattle asks: “What happened?”

  “She was a right cow,” says Hands. “But I don’t know the ins and outs of it.”

  “She never wanted him,” says Bearsbreath. “She tried to get rid of him dozens of times. When he was born she didn’t like him. He was born about a week, or something, after she got married to his dad. That’s why he was touchy about being called a bastard. That much I know.”

  “I heard he nearly won a scholarship,” says Hands.

  “I don’t know much about him before he joined this mob,” says the Butcher, “but I do know he was glad to get away from whatever it was.”

  “Unemployment?” says Crowne.

  “One thing and another,” says Bearsbreath.

  *

  Now it happens that I know something about Bill Nelson in the old days, when he was a boy in Groombridge. I learned what I know from an old woman who used to live next door to his mother’s house. I met her, by sheer accident, in “The Bricklayers Arms”—the new, big Tudor pub at the back of the Junction. She looked older than the world. Out of a big straw shopping basket she was pulling a mysterious bundle, which proved to be a stout bottle wrapped in a bit of some faded curtain. “A drop of stout,” she said, “does me the world of good. But I wouldn’t be seen carrying bottles through the streets like some of them round about ’ere. I name no names, but a Certain Party …”

  And she was off. A Certain Party, not a hundred miles from there, had been seen carrying eleven quarts of pale ale in one day. A quart or two, she wouldn’t mind. Far be it from her. She was neither a nun nor a saint to object to a quart or two of beer. But eleven quarts was carrying a good thing too far…. She went on to define the characters and private lives of several people in her street. Then, looking up at me, she said: “Why, you’re a Coldstream.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She fumbled in a handbag and took out a polished cap star. “That was give me by one of your boys.”

  “So?”

  “William George Nelson, ’is name is. Billy Nelson. You don’t know Billy Nelson, I dessay?”

  “I know a sergeant of that name. Tall thin man with one eye.”

  “Oo no, not one eye, not my Billy.”

  I took out a photograph of my squad. Some local photographer took it when I was at the Depot, according to the invariable Caterham procedure. Guards recruits had to be photographed: there was no way out of it, when I was there. I hid in the latrine for fifteen minutes, but somebody got me out in the end, and lined me up. My face, unlovely at the best of times, scowls over Nelson’s shoulder. Twenty-nine other recruits hurl their most martial expressions into the picture. They simply look stupid, as the finished print turned out. Bates looks exactly as if he had just had an Unfortunate Accident. I look as if I had just stabbed Johnson in the back, and so does Johnson. But Nelson, who is what they call “photogenic,” comes out of it well. He looks good-humoured, tough, battered, fine-drawn, and ugly; indescribably dapper, although he is wearing his oldest suit. Nelson seems to sit among us like an old boiling fowl among fluffy chicks. Looking at that little photograph, you say: “God help those fellows, if that’s the man who’s handling them.” Then, on more careful consideration, you say: “God help this sergeant if that’s the squad he’s got to lick into shape.”

  Of this photograph the Trained Soldier said: “You will keep that there pitcher. You will keep it, and in your old age you will look at it. Follow? It’ll bring back memories; if you want my personal opinion. Keep it for your old age. It’ll be something for you to look at.”

  So I was keeping it, meaning to look at it forty or fifty years later; but not before. And, seeing that photograph and all those faces that had managed to look so much more absurd than God had made them, I experienced a kind of nostalgic twinge, a pleasurable pain.

  “Good God,” I said. “Good Blind O’Reilly!”

  The old woman was silent for a moment, and then she said: “Why, yes, that’s my Billy!”

  “Your son, ma’am?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, “no relation. But isn’t my Billy aged? And slim? What ’ve they done to poor Billy? My Billy used to ’ave a face like a little apricot. My goodness gracious me, Billy’s an old man there! Oh dear, oh dear…. Time flies right away …”

  “You know him well?” I asked. “Won’t you have a dr
ink?”

  “Well, young man. I should hope so. I changed his napkins for ’im. A little drop of port, if you can afford it. If not, a little drop of stout. It does me the world of good. Dear me, dear me, poor Billy! So thin! I’m not a drinker, sir; I get myself a drop of stout now and agen because it does me good. I takes it like medicine, sonny; it don’t appeal to me as a drink. Doctor’s orders, you see. Why, you’ve bin and got me a port as well! Fancy you knowing Billy, now! Billy give me that badge. I’d wear it, too, only I don’t want the Milintry Police after me. I saw Billy born, you know. O’ course I saw Billy born! As pretty a baby as you ever saw—just like a little doll, or a kitten. Eight pounds two ounces. Why, I remember …”

  Her name was Mrs. Fish. She was a good-hearted old lady, with a certain birdlike charm and—concerning drinks—a delightful hypocrisy.

  “I knew Billy’s mother when she was a girl,” she said. “I used to call ’er Etta. ’Enrietta was ’er real name, and ’er maiden name was Wright. She got into trouble with a feller on the railways, Fred Nelson. ’E didn’t want to marry ’er, but ’e ’ad to, you see. Oh dear … oh lor…. Fred was a good-looking boy, for ’is size. Only a little tiny feller, but all the girls liked ’im, you know. It was a near thing with Etta: young Billy was born only about a month after the wedding. She ’ad a bad time with Billy. She couldn’t feed ’im, you know. Oh no, she couldn’t make milk, you see. She was narrer, no ’ips, no muscles. Me, I ’ad seven with less trouble than she ’ad that one. She couldn’t ’ave any more after Billy; she wasn’t cut out for it. These youngsters ain’t breeders like we was, young man. I ’ad my first on the Thursday, and on the Saturday I was out shoppin’. I was, you know!

  “Fred Nelson ’ad ’is own ’ouse. It was ’is dad’s. Well, when they ’stended the Junction, they bought Fred’s ’ouse and give Fred two thousand pounds for it. ’E ’eld out, you see, and they wanted the premises, so as to pull it down, you know. Well, as soon as Fred got ’old of that bit of money, ’e threw up ’is job and left Etta and run orf. ’E went to America, you see. Fred left Etta and poor little Billy without a penny. That was when they come to live next door to me. Etta thought ’erself a cut above me, you know. ’Er father ’d been in the groshery trade, with a shop of ’is own. But she was glad enough of my ’elp. She come next door just on a week before ’er time, you know. Billy was a job to get born. Poor Billy was knocked about as if ’e’d been in a fight. It’s true. ’E was born with a black eye and a cut face.