by Weldon, Fay
Harry opened his eyes and stared at Agnes. Agnes sat down in her normal crouching position and stared back. Harry was tired and he had been fed. He shuffled and snuffled, decided Agnes was a non-enemy and went back to sleep. His body seemed warm, soft and indifferent, so Agnes moved over and lay against him and went to sleep too. The room was not particularly warm: the central heating system at the Academy (oil-fired) did magnificently for the upper floors, but here down below was only just adequate. But then, why should it not be so? Servants cannot expect to live so well as masters.
Presently the door opened and Yew entered. Yew came from the Bombay Police Force, from which he had been dismissed for putting out the eyes of suspects with bicycle spokes. In one hand Yew carried an open can of dog food: in the other he carried a long, curving, sharp dagger.
I don’t know why it seems worse to put out eyes with bicycle spokes than by any other means, but it does. Which is why, of course, that kind of thing’s done. Terror is an excellent means of crowd control, as the Assyrians discovered long ago. Of course civilisation has come a long way since then. It is greatly to the credit of the Indian authorities that Yew was dismissed from his post (the Assyrians would merely have promoted him), and less, how shall we put it, vivid ways of crime prevention re-introduced. His ways, of course, were more effective. They do, incidentally, say that after ten years of chopping off the hands of Iranian thieves, it is now possible for a vendor of gold bracelets in that country to set them out on the ground in a crowded market, go away, and find them all there, untouched, when he returns hours later. I offer this to you only as a piece of interesting information: I don’t expect you to come to any conclusions. I suspect there are none to come to. None at least satisfactory to the humane spirit.
Well, Harry, Agnes and Yew. This is how the scene goes. Harry opens his eyes. Harry is no fool. He knows a defensive weapon when he sees one. He’ll have to beware. It practically has ‘Peace’ written all over it. That is to say, Harry’s eternal peace. Harry stands, throwing off Agnes, effortlessly. He’s a really big, sinewy dog, who grew from a puppy into, with a little help on the way, a war machine. Harry snarls, growls. Yew wishes he had something longer than the dagger, such as a bicycle spoke. But bicycle spokes are too flexible: good for eyes; not right for piercing hair and skin. Harry takes no notice at all of the dog food. Yew tosses the can away and stands crouching, wary, arms akimbo, the dagger poised, waiting for Harry to spring. Harry doesn’t: Harry circles.
Agnes slips out of the door. Yew, distracted, looks after her briefly: Harry chooses the moment to spring from the back; Yew has grossly underestimated his victim. Harry, unlike the citizens of Bombay, is simply not scared of Yew. It is easier to frighten a human being than a dog. A healthy-minded dog attacks to preserve his master, or his territory. That his master may be Hitler makes no difference to him: that the territory is disputed, how can he know? (Up go the bristles, off goes the dog, and there’s the postman refusing to deliver the letters, the milkman to leave the milk!) But a human being is all doubts as to the rights and wrongs of anything and everything: guilt paralyses him. The inquisitor advances; he scarcely needs the thumb-screws: the soul shrinks, resolve weakens. But Harry, being a dog and guiltless, and what’s more the kind of dog who reckons he’s man’s equal, sprang at Yew’s shoulders without hesitation, bore him to the ground and, had not Yew instantly crouched in that position children are taught to assume under desks in case of nuclear or terrorist attack, would have had his throat torn out. As it is, from this position, while Harry noses and nuzzles towards available flesh, Yew manages to manoeuvre his dagger so that the dog’s soft and almost hairless belly is first lightly pierced: then, as the animal twists to see what the matter is, Yew turns on his side, gets his elbow free, jabs harder and rips. The dog’s entrails fall out: it is all perfectly disgusting. Yew is on his back now, and the dog is moaning and groaning and falling all over him, but hasn’t quite forgotten about enemies and so forth, because he dies self-righteously growling his antagonism, not moaning his own pain, his fate. When it is over Yew is in a very nasty, bloody state indeed and goes to have a shower, and to calm his mind by meditating for five minutes before Kali’s shrine (set up in one of the pantries) before returning to skin the dog, which he does with the ease born of practice. He carves the carcass into pieces, and places the haunches here, rump there, in mimicry of the living animal, in a long wicker basket which he brings in for the purpose. The poor dull-eyed handsome head he places at one end. He carves out the tongue: this is a delicacy he will reserve for Acorn. He carries the basket, and its still warm contents, into the kitchen and sends for Matilda the Mexican girl to wash out the laundry room. Matilda is used to death, and does what Yew says. Most people do.
Barnyard the Chinese chef prepares a simple bouillon in which the chunks of dog are immersed and simmered. There is no time to waste if the meat is to be properly tenderised and reduced to pâté in time for the late-night sandwiches. These are to be served with cocoa at around midnight. The meat ought of course to be properly marinated before being cooked. Hilda, who has briefly left her post at the bedsides of Serena, Piers and Nell to have a whiff of marijuana – the smell would be noticeable and unnatural upstairs, though ordinary enough down here – and look at poor Miriam’s new baby, which is being suckled by Olive, whose own baby is nine months old and ready for weaning, protests at this lack of decorum. What way of cooking meat is this? It is an insult to the animal concerned, and the palate of those who eat it. A marinade of soya sauce, chilli and fresh ginger would sanctify the death. Why can’t the guests have the pâté tomorrow, served on toast, if necessary, for breakfast? Why does it have to be in the sandwiches served with the late-night cocoa? Why, in other words, is Acorn in such a hurry? What are his plans?
No one knows. They will simply do as Acorn says. The dog is dead, the deed is done: too late now not to go on. Harry simmers.
Hilda weeps a little; big tears welling slowly in her lovely eyes. She fears that Acorn’s project is ill-omened. No plan can go properly if started in such an improper way. But what can she do? The blizzard now howls round the Shrapnel Academy as if there were not just one but a hundred demons outside clamouring to get in. She’s frightened. She throws a handful of cumin and some fresh ginger into the pot and says a brief prayer over it and goes back upstairs, into enemy territory, to sit by the sleeping white children. She walks slowly and calmly, into terror, not away from it. She is accustomed to hardship: it is more natural to her to endure, than to be comfortable.
21
Over the turkey pie Baf gave the General a brief rundown on the contents of his Victorian knife box, and the General said he’d like to have a look at it, later, but Baf should be aware that purchasing decisions were in much loftier hands than his. ‘But you can recommend,’ said Baf.
‘Oh, I can recommend,’ said the General. ‘But who takes note of old soldiers these days? It’s politicians who rule the roost, not to mention accountants. No one’s in charge any more who’s actually seen battle.’
Well, it’s a common enough complaint, these days. The money men run everything, and they know nothing about the world, only about money.
Baf made the General the little speech he made to generals and War Departments everywhere, but preferably where English was either a first or second language. It tended to lose in the translation: or else it was that the non-English speaking nations were less interested in theory than in eliminating their enemies – or obliging them to talk. As well as his range of miniaturised weapons, Baf had a second line of torture instruments. He hadn’t told Muffin this: he felt vaguely ashamed of being in the business, although rationally there was nothing against it. If men chose to be enemies of the state, the state had a right to protect itself. Anyone, anywhere, who wanted a quiet life only had to choose it, by keeping their noses out of trouble and refraining from comment. And the export of these instruments made quite a useful bump in the national balance of payments. All the same Baf t
hought that Muffin, who, if out of doors, would stop in mid-lovemaking to rescue a woodlice which got in the way, would not be in sympathy with his new range of sensory deprivation hoods, electric vagina probes, and so on. Yet there was nothing brutal or brutish about them, Baf felt. The days of the rack and bottle dungeons were over: a good contemporary inquisitor leaves no mark on the body for soft-hearted and impractical liberals to complain about. And this was, after all, the age of information. Information, as people kept saying, was money, power. Those who chose to keep it inside their heads in defiance of the national interest had to expect to have it wrested from them, by hood, or probe, or whatever, as quickly and efficiently as possible. Baf’s speech went, in essence, like this:
‘Well now, General, look at it like this. New weapons get invented, leaving armies out of step and battles bloody and unfair. It happened when gunpowder came on the scene – one army had it, another didn’t – the same with the rifled musket, then with automatic weapons, high explosives and nuclear weapons – and presently there will be chemical weapons and coming up fast on the outside, miniaturised weapons. Those who get these latter first will have the advantage. The great thing about them is that they’re individual. Now the individual soldier has become increasingly independent in combat, he already has to be a technician: sheer muscle power, brawn, courage are no longer needed. A good modern soldier runs away when danger faces – he knows he’s too expensive to lose! Now since time began – or armies began, much the same thing, ha-ha! – there have always been new weapons just on the horizon, and a lot of money spent by the forward-looking on R and D – it’s been getting them accepted – the doctrinal assimilation of new weapons into tactical systems – has been the trouble. By the time any new weapon – whether a cannonball or a nuclear blast – gets assimilated, word’s got round and the enemy have learned how to disperse, run for cover, burrow underground. So the impact of that weapon, its destructive power, is lessened. In other words, General, move fast! Or you’ll miss out.
‘Now fortunately, the pace of military invention more or less keeps pace with what’s being developed in the outside world; though that’s certainly been hotting up lately. Look at those Russian probes burrowing into Venus in a temperature of 700°F! And the gap between invention and adoption of a new weapon gets shorter all the time.’
‘Wait a moment,’ said the General, who was no fool, though only listening with half an ear. With the other half he was listening to Shirley; he liked her voice. She was, he thought, rather pretty and gentle. There was something so sacred and unsmiling about Bella, so profane about his sexual relations with her, that the General felt quite restive and longed for something just somehow more ordinary and domestic. Fortunately he could keep his mind on two things at once. It’s a capacity generals have. They share it with mothers. ‘New weapons don’t normally appear in operations until twenty years or so after a major war,’ said the General to Baf. ‘It’s inevitable because of budgetary and stockpile considerations. The old ones have to be utilised, if only for face-saving reasons. Also because men like me, who made their name in a big war, see nothing wrong with simply going on using the old weapons, since they did them well enough in the past. You have to wait for me to grow old and the bright young men to come along. Try one of them. Leave me to eat my dinner in peace.’
‘Sir,’ said Baf, ‘if we take the criteria of judging a new weapon to be its consistently effective, flexible use in defensive warfare, permitting full exploitation of the advantages of superior leadership; if a decline in casualties for those who use it, combined with a capacity for inflicting disproportionately heavy losses on the enemy is what you’re after, then this new range of miniaturised weapons splendidly fits the bill! All that is lacking, until now, is the imaginative component, knowledgeable leadership, that you, sir, will provide, to your country’s eternal gratitude!’
‘Humph!’ said the General. ‘What’s missing, if you ask me, is any opportunity for evaluation and analysis on the battleground.’
‘If you don’t try it,’ said Baf, ‘you’ll never know.’
‘Young man,’ said the General, ‘there’s a time and place for this kind of thing, and it isn’t the dinner table.’
‘Don’t tell Joan Lumb,’ said Baf disarmingly, ‘that I’ve been pestering you, or she’ll never ask me here again. And I have to come here, to see Muffin.’
He smiled at the General, his soft brown eyes crinkling, and the General smiled back.
‘Is Muffin the one with the legs and the hair?’ he asked.
‘That’s her, sir.’
‘Wouldn’t want to stand between a man and his muffin,’ said the General. ‘Mum’s the word. We’ll talk after breakfast tomorrow. I’ll give you a name or two at the War Office which should help. You may be on to something here.’
Most deals are done at dinner. Would you oblige me by trying to envisage the Délice? It was in the form of a cannon. The muzzle was made of ice-cream wound round a chocolate stick and frozen hard. The hump of the Délice itself was made of whipped cream, blueberry puree and gelatine frozen hard. The words, THE SHRAPNEL ACADEMY, were written around its girth in icing sugar. It wasn’t very nice. Rosencrantz the pastry chef, a Mexican Indian, had added rather too much gelatine, in his fear of not sustaining the cannon’s shape and the result was, though spectacular to the eye, rubbery to the taste. Joan Lumb, actually, had very little palate, or she would never have devised anything so absurd as a Délice shaped like a cannon. It was impossible to serve fairly, and collapsed at the first spooned inroad. The plain fact of the matter is that army people are not really connoisseurs of life’s pleasures. Put them in an institution and the fault intensifies. Put them in an educational establishment and things are even worse. Wake me up in front of a plate, rather too small for its contents, on which are a dried-out baked chicken leg, a pool of grey gravy, an ice-cream scoop of mashed potato barely holding its shape, and a tumble of frozen peas and carrots mixed without favour of butter or seasoning, and I can tell at once I am in an educational institution and what is worse they are doing their very best and what is worst, is that this for them is a treat. A treat. This lack of reverence for the pleasures of the palate, this inability to discriminate between good and bad, helps no one, not the starving millions either, for the food is simply spoiled, not passed on to those who could use it for nourishment rather than ceremony – and is symptomatic, I suspect, of those who care little for life, their own or anyone else’s. This is why I go on about it, in what to you may seem a rather vulgar way. In my grandmother’s day, I know, it was bad form to talk about, discuss or mention food – the food was appalling, and the poor stumbled shoeless and starving in the gutters outside and nobody cared. I am just making a connection. If you wish to conclude anything, feel free.
With the coffee came the toast. Glasses were refilled. Joan Lumb responded to the toast ‘The Shrapnel Academy’. She said she was moved and inspired by the occasion. That she was honoured and gratified by the presence here that night of General Leo Makeshift. That from what he had been saying to her it was clear his annual lecture was going to be historic. All 200 of tomorrow’s tickets had been sold: there was a growing interest in the military ethos amongst young and old. The civil government was in disarray: strife and subversion were rampant in the world today: the traditions of the past were enshrined here in the Shrapnel Academy. Mew yawned. Joan Lumb noticed.
Joan Lumb said she wanted to take this opportunity to clear up a misconception. It was unfortunate that over the years all shell-fragment wounds had come to be called ‘shrapnel wounds’. This was in fact incorrect terminology. She explained. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century grapeshot was the principal anti-personnel ammunition. Grapeshot consisted of a packet of small iron balls held together by cloth, or netting, placed in a wooden case. This would then be fired from a cannon. But it had shortcomings – as all weapons do: hence the eternal search for improvement – it had a very short range and the advancing en
emy could take advantage of undulating territory and take cover. It was Shrapnel’s stroke of genius to make the balls smaller than was usual for grapeshot, to make them of lead, not iron, and encase them in a long-fused cannonball shell. This completely overcame the disadvantages of grapeshot. It could be fired over a considerable distance, would explode in the air, and troops could not hide from pellets raining from the sky.
Still there were difficulties. A new set of problems had to be overcome. It required a highly trained gunner to combine range, direction and height of burst over the enemy formation. Sometimes the fuse didn’t work perfectly, and the cannonball exploded too early or too late to maximise the lethality index. So shrapnel was not at first recognised as the great discovery it was until the trench warfare of World War I. Then it really came into its own, as shrapnel pellets rained down so effectively on trenches and troops in the open. And fuses by then were more reliable. There was still trouble with the height of burst – too high and the pellets scattered over too wide an area – too low and the pellets were less lethal. But during the 1914–17 stalemate there was lots of time for gunners on both sides to perfect their skills, and unlimited ammunition, and shrapnel began to reach its proper projected lethality index.
Now, said Joan Lumb, and this was the point she had been reaching, later in that war, a high explosive shell was developed which also exploded in the air with a timed fuse. It was the pieces of shell which wounded, not the contents of the shell. It was terminologically inexact to refer to wounds made from the shell itself as ‘shrapnel wounds’, and an insult to Henry Shrapnel. This incorrect usage continued through World War II, and Joan Lumb wished to set the record straight. The press was there tonight, and she hoped it would stand up to its reputation as fair and unbiased, and make this very important point clear to the public.
