Patrol

by MacDonald, Philip;

  The Sergeant ignored this small outburst. “There’s four of us now, leaving out Sanders, who seems to want to stay on the nurse’s job. To-night we’ll take two-hour reliefs of two, right through. One man this side, one the other. Patrol and meet at the north and south ends every now and then if you want to. Abelson’ll stay on with you. Hale and I take over in two hours.” He nodded and walked off across the clearing and gave again his directions.

  Hale walked back at his side, towards the hut. He said, in a sudden little burst of words:

  “Jock an’ the Matlow’s orf, then… wot jer reckon, Sarge? Think as ’ow they’ll pull it off? Eh, Sarge? Think as they’ll find the Brigyde… or some of our blokes? ’Ow far you say it was? Sixty-seventy mile? Kerist! Wot a toddle… But them’s a coupla good ’uns… Looka, Sarge, you ever see such a coupla wallops ’s Cookie slipped ole Circumcision… Phe-ew! … S’pose they does get froo, Sarge… oughta be back…”

  The Sergeant cut deliberately across this spate of words. He said:

  “Tell you what I think: they’ve got a good chance. Now chubbarow and help me build a fire. We’ve got to make more soup for Bell.”

  Hale, still talking, disappeared among the trees where the slight undergrowth was thickest. The Sergeant looked after him, a frown creasing his forehead. The man’s voice had been high and jerky and excited; the blithe and sardonic and caustic humour had been absent; the legs had been… or was it a trick of his tired eyes? … wavering ever so slightly; the stream of talk had been feverish and disconnected and quite unlike the…

  “Nerves!” thought the Sergeant. “Or p’r’aps not. Possibly my own.”

  Hale came back with kindling of a sort and some larger pieces. He was quiet now, and slow and lethargic. They built a fire: its smoke rose straight in the leaden air. Hale crouched dejected beside it, feeding to it, every now and then, pieces of fuel. The Sergeant entered the hut.

  A wave of air, hotter even than the oven breath without, hit him in the face like a heavy, soft blow. There were sounds, too, in the darkness. Bell twisted weakly, uneasy in his sleep, and mumbled and muttered words and fragments of words emerged once in a while startlingly, boldly clear from the soft and fevered incoherences surrounding them. By his blankets, a dim, squat shape in the darkness, crouched Sanders. He too was speaking; rapidly, softly.

  The Sergeant stood a moment silent in the doorway.

  “… the bitch…” came clear in the hoarse, creaking voice of the wounded man. Mumble… mumble… “God rot her eyes…” The mumble rose in volume; became a thick, dark stream of inarticulate vehemence. It died away quite suddenly.

  Then the murmured words of Sanders: “… this troubled soul, O God! Grant that it may find solace in…”

  The Sergeant went on and into the hut. “Sanders!” he said softly.

  The shape rose to meet him. “Yes?” it whispered.

  “Get outside,” said the Sergeant. He went to the pack-saddle in the far corner and from it took a tin of beef, leaving only three. With the tin in his hand he groped his way to the door and went out again into the moonlight.

  Beside the hut, over the now blazing little fire, Hale still crouched. At the other side stood Sanders. The Sergeant went to them. “Get that mess-tin, Sanders,” he said.

  The man held it out. “I imagined that you would want it. Is there anything else you wish. Or shall I go back… in there?” He motioned with his head towards the doorway behind him.

  The Sergeant took the mess-tin and laid it upon the ground. He sat himself down beside it and took his jack-knife from his pocket. He began opening the tin of beef. He said:

  “No. I want to speak to you. He’s worse… isn’t he?”

  “He seems feverish. He has been… delirious,” Sanders said slowly. A sudden spurt of flame from the little fire showed his face, bleak and thin and fanatic, to the Sergeant’s upward-peering eyes.

  “I heard him, Sanders… And you.” The voice of Authority was cloaked in velvet, but not disguised. “I want to tell you… if you want to pray, do it quietly. Understand? Don’t make any noise near that poor devil… Now you have an easy… You’ve had a bad day. I’ll look after him for an hour or so, until I go on guard… How’s your jaw? Hurt much?”

  Sanders’ body, thin and meagre and ill-befitting its militant clothes, drew sharply erect. His bare, narrow head was striped with silver bars and black from the palm-filtered moon; a red glow from the fire bathed his arms and torso. He said, in a voice tight and strained and so low that barely was it audible:

  “I have no discomfort.” But his hand crept up to his cheek, the fingers feeling tenderly at the side of the jaw between chin and ear.

  The Sergeant became brusque. “Right,” he said. “Now do what you like. Have an easy, man! Go and wash or sleep or smoke… Let yourself out a bit.” He watched covertly while Sanders, stiffly erect, wheeled and marched off, with the uncouth gait of a raw recruit endeavouring vainly to emulate the seasoned soldier. He followed with his eyes until the awkward figure was lost in the shadows; then turned to the opening of the tin. He said:

  “Feelin’ O.K., Hale?”

  “So-so.” The Cockney’s voice was flat and limp and dreary. “It’s so bleeding ’ot… Wot I want’s a woman! … A nicet little brown ’un, I’d like…”

  The Sergeant smiled. “Supply and demand don’t always work out. Demand like hell; but the supply of bibis wouldn’t come off… not in this hole.” He scooped out half of the limp mass of meat, pouring on to the ground the melted grease. He placed the meat in the mess-tin. “Get a drop o’ water, will you?” he said. “Bottleful.”

  Hale got up stiffly to his feet. He stretched slowly, his hands pressed to the small of his back, which ached. He bent and rubbed at his thighs, for they ached too. He went off, heavily, in search of the spring and his water-bottle.

  The Sergeant put down, carefully, the mess-tin. He got to his feet and tiptoed to the hut’s doorway and listened. He heard the heavy, quick breathing of the sick man; then a mutter of thick sounds: then, quite clearly:

  “… please… for God’s sake…” The coherence went and there came again the wild, half-whispered, half-shouted babble. The Sergeant waited while his eyes might become accustomed to the darkness… He knelt at last beside the huddled figure on the blankets. He put a hand upon the sick man’s forehead: the skin was parched and dry and burning. He groped and found a water-bottle, half full. He slipped his left arm under the man’s neck and uncorked the bottle with his teeth.

  “… you bleedin’ sow! …” The words burst from the head upon his arm. “You whore… standin’ there… Gimme that glass… jildi… It’s not you I want…”

  The Sergeant brought the neck of the bottle gently to the burning, babbling lips. Against his forearm the stiff hairs of the unshaven shin rasped and scratched…

  By the spring Hale painfully stooped and trapped water in the narrow neck of his bottle. Three yards from him, unheeding, lay Sanders. He was prone, his head buried in his arms.

  Hale straightened from his task with a groan. That ache in his back grew intense. He became aware that he was not sweating. He looked at Sanders, lying. “Oy!” he called, and again: “Oy!”

  Sanders raised his head. He said wearily, “Yes? What is it?”

  Hale went slowly across and stood looking down at him. “Wot’s the matter?” he said. “Fer the love o’ Mike, cheer up… Fice ’urt w’ere old Ishkabibble pushed it?”

  Sanders shook his head.

  “’Specs it does,” said Hale judicially. “I know. An’ ’e may be a Buckle, but ’e ’its like ’ell… Never mind, ’Oly, pull yerself tergevver! You gets all wet, that’s wot’s up wi’ you. If we on’y had some rum I’d make yer blind. Do yer an ’elluva lot of good. Cheer yer up no end…”

  Sanders looked up at him wearily. “Do you mind?” he said. “I would like to be alone.”

  Hale drove the cork into his water-bottle with an angry slap of his palm. His smile went, and a frown cam
e to his forehead. “All right!” he said. “An’ I ’opes a bloody great wolf’ll come in the night an’ slip it acrosst all yer rabbits… Surly sod! ’F yer thought more abaht yer measly self an’ not so much abaht J. C., you’d be better off… An’ so would ’E…” He turned and trudged off, the water-bottle dangling by its strap from his right hand.

  He found the Sergeant sitting cross-legged away from the fire, now dying to a small heap of red embers.

  “No need for this to-night, Hale.” He looked up at the Cockney. “No broth for him… He’s bad. Touch o’ fever; probably sandfly.”

  “Ah.” Hale dropped the bottle and sat, heavily. “Sandfly fever’s a —!” He nodded towards the hut. “’E goin’ to pull through?”

  The Sergeant shrugged. “Hope so. But God alone knows, and He won’t split… What can we do for him? … I had a little quinine, luckily… But that’ll be gone in another dose…”

  Hale looked into the ashes of the little fire. He said, without raising his head:

  “Would it ’a been better ’f we’d of all gorn… not jest Jock an’ the Matlow?”

  The Sergeant dried the sweat from his palm against his breeches. He groped in his pocket and brought away a vast cigarette-case of leather; opened this and peered inside it. He counted twenty-three cigarettes. “Fag?” he said.

  “Thank ’ee, Sarge.” Hale put out a hand and caught the cigarette which was tossed to him. He plucked a glowing stick from the fire and in a moment was puffing.

  The Sergeant took a deep breath of smoke and let it trickle, slow and voluptuous, from his nostrils. He said:

  “We discussed all that, Hale. It wouldn’t ’ve been possible for us all to go. There’s Bell, for one thing… And another’s the water… It’s not mathematics, but though two men can come near to carrying enough water for two for say four days, eight can’t take enough for eight for what’d be nearer a week… Anyway, I’m damn sure… an’ I’ve been thinking… that what we’ve done’s best.”

  Hale nodded. “Yes, Sawgint,” he said. “’Course that’s O.K… I was jest talkin’, as per U… Sarge, are yer married?”

  The Sergeant shook his head. “No. You?”

  “Yeah… Been thinkin’, I ’ave, as I wisht as ’ow I wasn’t.” He was talking now with his eyes turned groundwards. His hands rubbed gently at that aching back. “No grumbles, mindjer… nary one. We ’its off proper… But it’s this war biz, that’s wot gets me… They says: ‘Fight, me boys! Fight for yer wife an’ Chee-hildren!’ That’s all pukka; ’ot air, but some guts to it… But wot I wanta know now: wot the stinkin’ ’ell’s the good of gettin’ pipped an’ leavin’ the old Trouble to fend for ’erself an’ the boy? Eh?”

  “But if everybody said that an’ didn’t go…” said the Sergeant.

  Hale twisted uneasily. “I know… but it’s all so ruddy queer, ain’t it now? ’Chever line a bloke takes ’e’s in the gyppo…” He broke off, leaving his sentence hung, as it were, on the still heavy air and the steady spiral column of the smoke from his cigarette, like mist in the moonlight.

  “I was right jest now…” he said suddenly. “W’en I says I wan’ed a woman. Not ’arf I ruddy wasn’t! ’Arf hour wi’ that first bit I ’ad up Grant Road; that’d fix me… she was a classt A line… Ever get along Grant Road, Sarge, w’en we was over?”

  “I know it,” said the Sergeant. “But too much traffic to my mind… except the Jap houses, an’ somehow you never got that feeling about them.”

  “I know wot yer mean,” said Hale slowly. “Matter o’ what a bloke likes… I’m not ejucated… wouldn’t see things like you do… But that first one, she was Kelly’s Eye… All the time I kep’ thinkin’: bloody queer to find ’er there… didn’t seem to fit like… Funny colour she was, too: sorta cross atween coffee and lemon. Young, too! in Blighty you’d of put ’er down as eighteen… s’pose she was on’y abaht fourteen reely…” He broke off, to sit rapt a moment. The Sergeant smoked.

  “Tell yer ’nother thing allus strikes me…” Hale looked up now, the memories fading from his eyes. “Queer ’ow folks looks at this goin’ on the side… I wouldn’t do it at ’ome, o’ course… leastways not ’less driven to it… But right awye from Blighty… Gawd save us! does they think as ’ow a bloke c’n stay like a ruddy monk or wot? … My ole girl don’t spect it, that’s one thing… she knows me … But there are some as do. Not ’arf they don’t an’ all…”

  He stopped suddenly. His head turned towards the hut beside him. Sounds came from the hut; muffled shoutings, murmurs, cries. The Sergeant leapt to his feet and disappeared within the doorway. The sounds continued a while; grew less; died away.

  Hale, alone, changed his position. He lay flat on his back, hands locked behind his head. The pain in his back was worse; it spread now up to his shoulders and down to the sides of his knees… His head, too, was feeling strange; swollen and painful and light. His skin was burning and parched. He was not sweating tor the first time in many months.

  The silence, utter and implacable and like a great weight on a man’s chest, oppressed him and seemed actually to give him pain. He talked softly to himself through dry lips. “… — sandfly!” he said. “Little bahstuds gets under yer skin… fever… — it! … can’t go sick now! … Stick it…” He groped for and found the water-bottle he had filled at the spring. He lay there, whispering to himself and at intervals taking draughts of the cool water. His head misbehaved itself.

  The Sergeant came out of the hut. He opened the watch upon his wrist and peered at the faint, phosphorescent glowing of the hands and figures. He said:

  “Hale! Time you an’ I took over.” He walked away from the hut and called: “Sanders! Sanders!” Through the trees the man came to him. “Take over again,” said the Sergeant. “And watch out. He’s bad. Very high temperature. I’ve given him quinine. There’s a wet bandage on his head. Keep it wet; he seems to be quieter with it. Don’t let him toss about ’case he opens that wound. Any difficulty wake Abelson or Morelli; they’re comin’ off guard now. ’F you must, send one o’ them to fetch me. And, Sanders: no noise! Get me? Pray to yourself if you want to pray.”

  Sanders, rigidly at a travesty of attention, nodded his head. At a sign he turned and disappeared within the hut. The Sergeant went to the tree against which leaned his rifle. He said:

  “Come on, Hale. Jildi. Got y’r rifle? I’ll take the east side first. You go west and relieve Abelson. Patrol every now and then; not all the time.”

  Hale struggled to his feet. His rifle leaned against the wall of the hut; somewhere. A glint from a spear of moonlight piercing the tracery of the palm fronds showed him the barrel. He went to it and picked up the gun. It seemed of a weight almost unmanageable. His legs were unsteady. His head seemed vast and light, like a football. He said, in a thick squeak:

  “Sawgint! I…” But he saw that the Sergeant had gone.

  “Qui’ ri’,…” he muttered. “Can’t go sick now…” He levered the rifle to his shoulder and walked, on legs momentarily steadier, through the trees.

  Abelson came towards him, his neck held stiffly at that awkward angle. “’Bout time!” he muttered. “Nothin’ doin’ out there… Sweet Fanny! — hot, ain’t it?” He walked away in the direction of the hut.

  Hale drew deep breaths. He put a hand out and clutched for support at a palm trunk. He stood a moment, setting his teeth, then walked slowly and with leaden feet through the trees and to the edge of the knoll. He lay there, his rifle beside him. He propped that heavy head, that head which no longer felt like a football, but a pumpkin, on his hands and stared out across the moon-splashed waste with hot eyes, eyes which seemed fiery dents deep back in his skull.

  Time passed him by. He lay there, now burning with a fire which seemed to be shrivelling the skin of his body as paper shrivels in flame, now shivering so that his lips trembled with sudden gusts of cold. But all the time he kept those fiery-feeling, aching eyes in a wide stare, looking out before him over the boundless se
micircle of silver, black-dappled sand. At times his body seemed pressed hard against the hard, loose earth; at times it felt as though it had left that earth and was floating, ridiculously, in a bath of cold flame. At times his eyes would blur and specks of blue and red and green fire would dance about before them. But he rubbed at them, with a vicious hand which felt fat and flabby and ineffective, until the specks faded and went and once again he saw that black-splashed, shining sheet unroll itself in infinity. He spoke to himself, every now and then, sometimes from a mouth which seemed a cavern of flame, sometimes between teeth clenched firmly to prevent their chattering. He said:

  “Can’t go… can’t go sick… Sick… Can’t go sick! Gawd, if I c’d on’y sweat!”

  It was immediately after one of those bouts when the specks danced before his eyes that he thought he saw something… a flicker of movement… away out there in the desert, straight in front of him… maybe four hundred yards, maybe a mile.

  He rubbed at his eyes again, though they were clear. He thought: Mustn’t get the willies! He waited.

  Then he saw, again, just that same flicker of movement. How far away it might be he could not tell. It was as if the corner of one of those jagged shadows had uncoiled itself.

  He waited… There! there it was again. Cautiously he got to his knees; his hand upon his rifle. The knees played him false. And his head. He fell over, limply, weakly. The world span about him. He lay upon his back and gritted his teeth. With an effort which left him shaking he got somehow to his feet. He leaned, clutching in both hands his rifle, against the tree-trunk.

  He saw the movement again, quite definite this time. He tried to raise the rifle to his shoulder, but failed. Now, striving to focus his eyes, he stared and saw more than movement. He saw a figure… or something black and upright where nothing black and upright had been. He giggled suddenly… like an excited girl. Strength in a measure returned to him.

  “Can’t see!” he muttered. “Can’t see… get nearer… quite close… shoot ther…”