“Which he did savagely and bravely. I wouldn’t take Braddis on with a bayonet.”
“Nor I, sir. He was a brave lad all right, but I think it was a matter of pride for him, that he take him on from the front, and not shoot him from behind.”
“But I don’t quite see why the degree of his passion. Why, to put it baldly, was he so for Dodds and so against Braddis?”
“It was personal on both fronts, sir. Braddis used to persecute Callum—Tim was a very skilled artist, and would keep to himself and draw things, and for some reason Braddis hated that, and would take his drawings, and we once saw him tear one up in front of all of us; whereas Mr. Dodds recognized Tim’s talent and encouraged him, and he was always grateful to him for it. I think Mr. Dodds may also have rebuked Braddis about it.”
Leslie saw that the tired man had thought through this mess far straighter than he could, and that the conclusions he arrived at would be the right ones; instinctively, he began to feel that if he was to emerge with any self-esteem from the matter himself, he should take his own stand with Alston and should campaign with him honorably, against Erskine and any others, in Alston’s straightforward manner. “Where do we go from here?” he said.
“Well, sir,” said Alston, “I have the luxury of being able to say what I think, without being held responsible for it. So there are three points I would like to mention. The first is that I think you know if there was ever an inquiry, and I was called to it, I would not lie under oath on any point. I am hoping very much there will be no inquiry, because I think we would all emerge looking bad and learning nothing from it. If I was the major, which we’re all happy I’m not, the official status of the three deaths would be ‘killed in action’ for both Dodds and Braddis, and ‘missing in action, presumed dead’ for Callum. As I see it, this is a case where we leave the Almighty to assign the blame.
“The second point comes out of this. It’s important that Callum have an honorable ‘missing in action, presumed dead’ title, so the pension will be paid to his father, who is a very poor fisherman with three young children to support. That would be bringing some good out of the evil. We all know Mr. Dodds is entirely innocent and a very good officer, and he should have every honor. But I would leave Braddis and Callum equally unblemished, as it were, in their eye-for-an-eye furies—at least on the official record.”
“And the third point?”
“Yes. The third point concerns Mr. Dodds’s watch. You remember, we were all confident that the watch was in Sergeant Braddis’s pocket, and it was there when he was killed. I have it here.” And he put it on Leslie’s desk. “Tim Callum, ever since he saw Braddis look at it in the trench, was very strong for the notion that the watch should go back to Mr. Dodds’s grandfather, Augustus Dodds, who gave it to him. I think he lives in Norfolk, if he’s still alive, somewhere on the Bure River. Tim thought that you, sir, would be the best one to handle that. It’s clearly a valuable old thing, and he was sure you would be the one to see that it got to old Mr. Dodds and no one else.”
Captain Leslie felt surprised and oddly proud to have been considered an honorable man for such a mission. “I certainly will see to it,” he said formally. And in a more relaxed style added, “You’ve been enormously helpful to me, Alston. You should go and get some sleep.”
“Thank you, sir.”
At the door, the adjutant could not help asking one more question: “Do you ever wonder how we all get into these horrible predicaments?”
“Ah, that’s the big one, sir, isn’t it?” said Private Alston. “There’ll be no sleep for either of us, if we talk that one out. But I would hazard it has to do something with the war, of course, and behind that, the angers that give wars their status, and stoke us all up to behave awry. Otherwise, I can’t help you.”
So Charles Alston went out, not to bed, but to visit young Tim Callum, as he had promised. He took a trenching tool, and told the sentry on watch to keep alert and not to shoot him going or coming. As he had expected, the boy had died while he was away. His rifle was still beside him, and he had not had to use it. Alston dug a grave for his friend, as deep as he could, and laid him in it with his rifle and water bottle, covered it up, smoothed the soil, and said a short prayer over it. As always, a quiet, methodical man. Then he went home to sleep.
CHAPTER 13
His Own Quietus
MacIver did not now know how many days had gone into the writing of the last day of Dodds, Braddis, and Callum, how many suppers left uncooked, or cooked and left uneaten, how many fires laid, lit, and left to die untended. Tiny images swam in and out of his ken, like the magnolia buds in their cocoons of ice tap-tapping on the window beside his bed as he lay there. In full dress in the spring, the motion would be a sustained swaying of their waxy torches brushing the glass soundlessly. But now everything edgy, as it were nervously short-measured. He had a faint memory, as from the distant past, of being on the floor trying to cut up the board of a bookshelf to make kindling. For some reason he was using his folding Opinel country knife, rather than the more serviceable hatchet—he must have mislaid it. The knife was not equal to the job, but in his forcing of it, he nicked the skin between thumb and forefinger quite deep; it was not painful, but blood was demonstratively cascading onto the wood and the floor. Suddenly he was wracked with sobs, and starting stabbing the board in a frenzy, on and on, as the blood and chips of wood flew everywhere. But afterwards when he looked down at the wound, he saw it as a clean little hole in the loose skin, a small fish-mouth of a wound, which opened and shut when he moved his thumb. Who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him? It happened quite spontaneously, and was certainly embarrassing to him as he thought about it afterwards; he decided the outburst, or tantrum rather, was both his last display of grief for Margaret gone, and David gone, and the loss of all good people, things, and times; and it was also his last spasm of self-pity at the actual moment of his own life giving way to impotence. It would not be long now.
He did not intend to write another line, but he could still take an interest in the characters he had created; there was some pleasure in projecting their lives further out, or going forwards and backwards over them, as memory does with our own, or pondering their contradictions. So in the evening of the day on which he finished his story, he sat on in the rocking chair with the rug across his knees, and tied up the little fraying threads of his ending. The public television station was making a civilized drone at low volume across the room. Now that he was not laying words on the page, to his surprise he found he rather liked the human voice in its quietest mode.
But his thoughts were all back in the trenches, in April 1917. What might happen next? Simon Dodds’s platoon was so decimated and seemingly cursed by now that MacIver saw it being withdrawn to reserves, and the men redistributed after leaves to other companies. Captain Leslie played a large part in getting Private Alston both decorated and swiftly advanced to sergeant. Both of them had the temperament and marks of men who would survive the war: they would have their nostos.
MacIver watched Leslie return Simon Dodds’s watch to his grandfather Augustus on his next leave. He imagined that the exchange would be over tea on the porch, because that was the setting for the gift to Simon in the first place, and Augustus would have a strong sense of occasion. Leslie would be pleased to see the old man spring the case open, check the time, close it, and slip it into the little pocket of his waistcoat, in the familiar moves of all old men with a pocket watch. The ancient rhythms restored with simplicity. Then they sat on, and Leslie told Augustus about his friend Simon as an officer, sparing him the harshness of his end; and afterwards the gravity gave way to more relaxed conversation and good talk about sailing. Leslie might even stay to supper, and spend the night in the guest room, with the river finding its way below the window; and then take the morning train back to Whitby.
MacIver, rocking quietly over his Lagavulin, also attended Alston’s sweet, sad visit to Callum’s family; he had bro
ught presents for all of them, and the children brought him drawings that Tim had done of each of them, and of lively animals pictured on rainy days. And again, in an easier setting, he looked over Ann Houghton’s shoulder as she leafed through the sketchbook, and was delighted when Alston, sitting opposite her, insisted that she explain to him what was finely wrought in each of the drawings—what made Tim a real artist. He was older than all her students, she thought, but there weren’t many more motivated to learn.
This was pleasant enough, but sentiment for MacIver the Scot was always prone to a critical aftertaste. He wanted to ponder the parables he had made for himself in the character of the adversaries Braddis and Callum. Alston had talked to Leslie of “anger giving war status,” but he was a gentle man, and anger was too mild a word.
Rage was the necessary word, perhaps the first word onto the page in Western literature with Achilles’ menis in the Iliad. The warriors sitting in the halls listening to the stories Homer told would understand it—the unconsidered savagery that made soldiers and hunters kill on reflex, implacable, with no hesitant thought of the circumstances, bloodlust without concern for propriety or question of right timing. And the license seems given to rage to stay rampant, even when the killing has stopped. The gods themselves understand that Achilles is entitled to drag the body of Hector around his city’s walls in front of his grieving family, for his own honor’s sake, his kleos; at least, they allow it for three days, and then they call a halt to it. Achilles must show his graciousness before the end—it is only right. Cúchulain must be boiled in the huge vat of a bath to drain the rage out of him and make him fit for society again. But how absurd to imagine that the public causes of war stoke the rage to their highest point, rather than the private grievances. Achilles himself makes it clear he has no part in and no particular feeling about Agamemnon’s and Menelaus’s little embarrassment; he has nothing against the Trojans. Let his honor be affronted, and let him lose his soulmate Patroclus, and you will find out what anger really is.
MacIver had given rage to both Braddis and Callum. On a first look, Callum might be saved from the worst aspects of it by his art, his “grim and hard pictures,” as they would be, as long as he painted for himself. But Braddis was certainly a performance artist of a kind, and a rare one too, with the rituals of his nails and his bayonet, and especially his athletic sureness on the killing fields. MacIver knew these men, and he had given them qualities that were in himself, and he believed they survived dangerously even in societies that count themselves civilized.
A good scholar had once told MacIver that she believed that every great epic has planted within it the seeds of a critique of the ideology that drives the narrative. So in the case of the Iliad, poor Hector knows that glory demands that he go out on the battlefield to meet Achilles, mano a mano, while his gentle wife Andromache urges him that if he really wants to save his family, why doesn’t he simply defend them from the unassailable walls of Troy? And at the end, when Hector is dead and all is lost, she cries in her lament: why could you not have died in bed next to me, holding out your arms and telling me some personal thing, which I would remember all the days of my grieving? Now there, thought MacIver, is a radical counterideology: what is wrong with dying in bed?
It is the real women who gentle our condition, finding their pleasures close to them, as they go about their work, like everyone else, getting through the day. Without them, we are all rampaging in Braddis Land. In his own life, he knew it was Margaret who pulled him back from the blood-and-guts, slash-and-burn pillage party he had been mentally shaping for himself in his dry little corner of academe. She was the Muse who tamed the wild boar on Parnassus, the unicorn in the gardens of Aquitaine.
“MacIver wondered if Callum, in the short time he lay waiting for his end in no-man’s-land on that soft spring night in Flanders, reached an end of his rage, and saw beyond it. He knew that Callum had taken up Simon Dodds’s suggestion that he should one evening join the artists in their noisy bar in Armentières. It had taken courage, of which Callum had plenty, to do it. Paul Nash had been there, still just on the point of hammering himself into an artist who saw things differently. On that level, he and Callum were quite well matched, with Callum the better draughtsman of the two. But Nash was an officer, and capable of being a snotty and neurotic one, and besides, he had connections already in the art world, though not necessarily better than Callum’s Miss Houghton. All of this, though, quite intimidating, one would have thought, to a boy, a mere private, out of school since sixteen, who had never set foot in an art school and may not have known there were such things. But not intimidating to Callum; he would not have to make conversation. He shouldered to the bar, got himself a beer, squeezed into the last chair in a noisy, crowded corner, and went to work, doing what came naturally, sketching the faces around him, some with big names already shaped, or to be attached to them in the near future, though he would know nothing of that. Soon they were crowding around him like bees to the honeypot, the gentle David Jones, Private John Ball himself, and indeed Paul Nash, thick jet-black hair brushed straight back clear of the forehead to emphasize the pale blue eyes and the strong aquiline nose; and also his brother, the landscapist John Nash.”
“They asked to see the sketchbook, and passed it around as he sat watching them, quietly sipping his beer. They admired the sure strength of line, sometimes the effortless ferocity of three or four telling strokes, bringing a man past falling to a tortured collapse. And Paul Nash made a confession that he had always wanted to draw like that, but that he had no confidence that he could do it and keep it spare; he had started with little pastoral pictures of silent gardens, full of weeping trees with fussy, thin lines, and nobody around them. “But when I came to the trenches, I had to tell myself, ‘Unthink pretty. Where do you think you are? Rub your eyes, boy. Now look again!’ And yet, you know, Tim”—whose name he had just learnt—“when you grow familiar with these trenches, God help me, I find there’s a kind of beauty of their own—even what happens to the smoke of artillery at sunset, after the big guns have defoliated another copse or wood. The smoke adds another shape and another color mass to catch the fading light. So there’s nature, and then there’s what we have done to nature, the reverse of it, as it were, and I find myself doubly enthralled.” So Callum had a good evening, and when he was leaving, they urged him to come again, and he said he would, and there was a moment, as he was walking away, when he imagined that peace might come one day, and they would all be back in England working at their art without patrols or wire parties. But then, almost at once, he realized that he would not go back. He had things he had to do, and they would bring it all to an end.”
But what about now, my hard, fierce boy? urged MacIver. How do you feel, as you lie waiting to die from your fatal wound? Do you see a nobler chance beyond the grim and hard? What would Callum say right now, lying still so as not to hurt under his quarter moon?
The question pulled MacIver up short for a bit, but in the end he imagined that Callum would say, not hard, but firm: You want a happy ending, MacIver, you want it all to add up to one big thing, the good and the bad, the plus and the minus, the nature and the violence to nature. Well, good luck, I suppose, but I can’t do it. Listen to this, MacIver, you big dumb Scot: the hardest thing anyone can do is to tell other people, or anyone else, by whatever means, exactly what he sees. Not his own version of what he sees shaded according to little bits of what someone else sees; just what he sees himself. That’s all I’ve tried to do, and all I wanted to do. So if you don’t like it, as Ben Winterbourne would say, Fuck off, MacIver.
Certainly, thought MacIver politely, because the boy was some kind of genius. The most distilled, frightening form of single-mindedness. And yet. The fact is that we do learn from each other, especially those we admire or love. That is perhaps why we have schools. We can come, if we are blessed, to see things differently, because we’ve been shown a better look. Captain Leslie was going to chase after young Tim
Callum and throw the book at him, which is what army regulations and the law specified should be done. But then Private Alston sits next to him, and in a quiet tidy way shows him the whole matter can stop right here, and everyone better for it. And Leslie takes the view as his own, because it’s better. And also perhaps because, quite apart from this particular judgment, there was a larger one: the fact is that Leslie knows Alston is a better man than he is, and he wants to be like him.
MacIver was fairly sure that he did not understand how the alchemy of changing a spirit works. The odd thing was that his gentle, spirited Margaret liked him angry, as long as he didn’t demean or consume people. She liked the way he exploded through the jammed door, as though there were nothing there; there was no conspicuous adjustment of his person, no visible lowering of the shoulder or anything. He just went through the door, and the door, as though it knew what was coming, had to efface itself, and flattened itself against the adjacent wall.
Rules for Old Men Waiting Page 18
