The Opened Cage

by S. C. Howe

  ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that,’ he said, dazed.

  ‘I’m glad you did,’ Joss said. There was a long silence. ‘Did you hear me – I’m glad you did.’

  ‘Did I make you jump?’

  ‘In the very best way.’

  Tom flipped the blanket up. Sat gazing out, his expression worried. He felt a boot nudging his heel.

  ‘It’s all right, Tom.’

  He looked back. Joss was looking at him, a wry smile playing on his lips.

  ‘I’ve never done that before.’

  Joss grinned. ‘Yes, I could tell.’

  Tom frowned.

  ‘Not so rough next time, eh?’

  In spite of himself Tom laughed. Went to speak, but laughed again.

  ‘Perhaps, no spooning in broad daylight next time?’ Joss ventured later.

  Tom coloured. ‘We could get thrown in jail for that,’ he said.

  ‘I think you have to be found doing rather more than that, ‘Joss said. ‘But discretion is always better.’ He smiled up at Tom broadly. He had such a sunny, open smile – it blew away any anxiety.

  It was evening now, all the duties done. They drank illicit rum and were soon slumped in the shelter, grinning idiotically. No-one noticed. Later on, no-one also noticed, or if they did notice, didn’t care, when they walked past the two men lying curled up together, fast asleep, with the dog snoring loudly, draped over Joss’s back.

  The next few days were quiet. Joss had brought the sign with him and hung it over the hole in the side of the trench wall. They shared the same blanket as a matter of course, wrapped around them like an enormous cape, laughed as Tom wore the ‘If All Else Fails’. In the evenings, they sat in companionable warmth, talking of all sorts of things, having good-natured debates with the others or quiet conversations huddled together under the improvised tent. Tom found himself aching for the time when fatigues were over and he could be next to Joss, longed for the physical pleasure of sitting up against him. It was physical hunger, a need, like drinking from a forbidden cup of pleasure and needing more.

  CHAPTER TWO

  It was after breakfast one morning when the sergeant came up to their group.

  ‘Sorry lads, it’s a burying party,’ he said. ‘Take your respirator nose and mouth bits.’

  Tom stared at him, perplexed. To be given such a warning, when there had been no others, unnerved him, but he stayed quiet as they walked along the communication trenches. Partially frozen ridges gave way with a gentle tearing sound. They reached a hut and grouped around with spades. Their expressions were of disconcerting resignation. Tom felt a horror creeping up on him as they came across a partially dug square pit.

  ‘Finish it off then start moving the bodies in. You’ll find the first lot over there,’ the sergeant said, pointing to a place screened by a mound of excavated soil.

  Tom started digging, tried to close off his mind to thought, but memories of horror stories about shallow graves and the wronged quickly disposed of crept through his mind.

  ‘Put on your respirators, lads!’ the sergeant shouted. They did so and put sandbags over their hands.

  The corpses were piled several deep and were rotting.

  ‘You two take the bodies on top,’ the sergeant said, looking at Tom and Joss.

  Between them, they carried a lad of no more than sixteen who had not been able to dump his kit, although it had been picked over, so the pouches and pockets flapped open. There was no mark on his body other than dried blood around his ears and nose. The boy’s dark hair flapped over his eyes, as though caught in a summer’s breeze. They laid him out, turned away.

  One stretcher-bearer was already being sick. The cloying stench was like nothing Tom had ever experienced – you could taste it. Looking around desperately he wanted clean, cold air. Turning back he stared, and immediately retched. The corpses were greyish-yellow and reddish-black, bloated on the top, squashed at the bottom of the pile. There came the sound of the heavy, dull dislocations and the thud of limbs separating from torsos as the bearers tried to pick them up. As something blackish oozed out from the pile, Tom felt his stomach clench, then a white stuttering overtook him. Joss steadied him but he slumped, as though shot, a dead weight. Taking off the respirators from both of them and catching his breath, Joss looked for signs of consciousness.

  ‘Take him up to the hut!’ shouted the sergeant.

  Joss hauled Tom over his back and stumbled across the compacted snow, which was as smooth as vitreous china and perfectly clean. Ice splinted underfoot. The ground sparkled. There was silence. Somehow he reached the hut and, gently, laid Tom down on his side, making him a pillow from sacking, taking off his own coat and covering him. He looked back at the door, saw the rise and fall of Tom’s chest, closed the door and went back to hell.

  Tom came to later. Joss was slumped against him, asleep. Tom tried to move to relieve the stiffness in his legs and neck but Joss stirred, then opened his eyes. They stared at each other through the dark of the hut.

  ‘Are you all right now?’ Joss whispered, sitting up.

  ‘I’m sorry. I let you down.’

  ‘You didn’t.’

  ‘I wasn’t helpful, was I?’

  ‘It’s completely understandable.’ Joss was trying to revive his stiff shoulders and arms. ‘Everyone passes out the first time they see something like that. I know I did. Anyway, you weren’t the only one,’ he added, pointing into the gloom to another heap on the other side of the shed. ‘I said I’d watch over you both.’

  There was a silence, then, ‘Do you ever get used to it?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘How long does it take?’

  Joss hesitated, knew if he gave a length of time, Tom would try to conform to it and probably fail; there was no useful answer.

  ‘As long as it takes,’ he said, and realised how ridiculous that sounded.

  ‘I bet the others think I’m soft.’

  ‘I very much doubt it.’ More silence. ‘When we start getting used to this, then we might as well give up being human,’ Joss added in an unusually clipped tone. ‘It’s only revulsion that might draw this bloody war to an end.’

  Another longer silence.

  Thanks,’ said Tom, his voice coming through the darkness like a bridge.

  The next few days on the line were relatively quiet and their company was sent back in to support. This meant another round of finding holes in the trench walls in which to sleep, one blanket hanging at the opening, improvised by any bit of wood they could find, the other over their shoulders. Joss hung his sign over the door, and somehow it was theirs, and only theirs. Tom wore ‘If All else Fails’ at night to the mirth of the other bearers. Barratt had tried not to smile as he saw this. From the tense, uncommunicative youth, there were bits of personality showing through. Barratt only hoped Fielder lived long enough to be aware of the change. The bearers sat in their own group after chores were done, playing cards, talking, joking; a gallows-humour which only they could invent. They seemed to accept that Fielder and Deerman’s friendship was something more and no-one seemed to care. When death was so all pervading, why should anyone care how its reverse was expressed?

  The routines started to get busier. From morning until evening the company fetched ammunition, food supplies, wire, sandbags … the lists seemed endless. It was blustery and cold, and sudden hailstorms rained down, soaking them all in minutes. But the men bore it, cold and too tired to talk. Their section, with several others, was ordered to repair the broken-down trench walls of the company sector; there had been heavy mortar fire the week before. Sandbags were stacked along the trench neatly at first but, as the mud oozed like thick blood behind the newly forced-on bags and pushed them onto the trench floor, it became a hopeless morass. Tom leaned against the bags, dragging on a cigarette and realised he was playing the numbers game again. He had first been aware of it after his grandfather died, this urge to barter with whatever force may be in control of his des
tiny, to regain some control over his life. Some might call it madness; to him it was a survival tactic, which broke out like a recurring infection in his mind. Thus, if he avoided the numbers one, three and five, nothing awful would happen; in fact if he concentrated on the evens: 2 and 4, for example, which were always safe, it would be far better. He blinked, enunciated what was swirling round in his head and realised how insane it sounded. ‘Forget it Fielder,’ he said to himself. ‘Forget numbers. Don’t get lulled into that game again. You need your wits about you out here, like antennae on your head. Abstracts won’t help you – only your wits will.’ He drew himself up, started forcing the bags back in, but the numbers and these thoughts stealthily crept back through his mind and he found he was actively avoiding odd numbers again. It was like playing a terrifying version of Russian roulette with the stakes ever higher up after a previous dilemma was solved. Beads of sweat broke out on his forehead. Leaning against the collapsing line of sandbags, he felt a rush of panic that he had inadvertently entered into yet another deadly pact. Sitting on the fire step, he physically stopped himself. Then the bags heaved into his face with a splat of mud, like a boil bursting. The posts heaved and several snapped, and the bags spat back. Picking up a claw hammer he attacked the nearest bags, gouged them so the covers shredded, as if sprayed with bullets.

  ‘Stop that at once!’ came a sharp command. A sallow-faced second lieutenant was staring at him. Joss appeared, tried to manoeuvre himself in front of the shredded sandbags. The three of them stood still, apparently lost for words. Joss watched the new second-lieutenant – Briggs – as sweat silvered his forehead and upper lip, visualised him desperately trying to memorise the Procedures Manual. The too-new leather on his Sam Browne creaked, as if trying to fill the silence.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Tom muttered, staring down at his boots, which were disappearing into the mud.

  ‘You could be court-martialled for this, do you know that?’ Briggs said.

  Joss watched uneasily. Briggs swallowed. Sitting down on the fire step he drew out a packet of cigarettes, went to offer them one, suddenly remembered his shouldn’t, and withdrew the packet. Then, sitting forward with his shoulders hunched, he lit one for himself, remembering to cup his hand, and smoked in silence.

  ‘Sir?’ Tom ventured.

  Briggs peered up. There were smudges under his eyes, the colour of blackberry stains. His face was pinched, yet his light blue eyes were unusually clear.

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Thomas Fielder.’

  ‘Rank?’ Briggs asked robotically.

  ‘Private. Stretcher-bearer.’

  ‘It is my duty to give you a verbal warning, Private Fielder,’ Briggs said, getting up. ‘Therefore, if I see you repeating any such actions, you will be put on a charge. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes Sir.’

  Briggs glanced over them. They saluted. Briggs walked away.

  Joss sat down by Tom, offered him a cigarette. They smoked in silence.

  ‘What’s going on? Apart from the obvious.’ Joss waved his hand to the world above the trench.

  Tom slumped. ‘Is it that obvious?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Tom explained the numbers thing. How he always got caught up with it when he was under pressure. How it was infecting him again, like a disease. Joss sat patiently and listened. When Tom came to a halt, Joss put an arm around his shoulders, said nothing.

  ‘I shouldn’t have done that in front of an officer,’ Tom muttered.

  ‘Is there anything I can do?’

  ‘Just keep reminding me what a looney I’m being, will you?

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes.’ The word was said with assurance.

  ‘How long has it been going on?’ Joss asked.

  Tom blew out his cheeks. ‘On and off since I was about 15.’

  Joss’s eyes widened.

  ‘It only flares up when I’m under a lot of strain. The first time I noticed it was after my grandfather died.’

  ‘That’s understandable.’

  ‘Is it? So why is no-one else doing the same?’ There was bitterness in Tom’s voice.

  ‘How would you know?’ Joss asked. ‘You hide it very well.’

  Over the next few days, when Joss saw the strained looked in Tom’s face and his eyes starting wander along lines, he would nudge him.

  ‘Drop it,’ he’d whisper, and Tom would jump, look around and nod at him with gratitude. But he knew it was only a temporary solution. In the thick of the night, on waking, Tom would start one of his convoluted bartering schemes in his head until he became so paralysed with possibilities and threats that he could feel the sweat trickling down his back, down his temples. Then a sharp nudge in the ribs would make him stop, and Joss would say from the dark. ‘Forget it, we need to sleep’, and he would pull him closer and Nico would shuffle into them, and, in this warm cocoon, Tom would drift back to sleep, trying to build confidence in this new defiance.

  Further along the trench, Briggs looked at the movement under the blanket and turned away. Unable to sleep in the close fug of the dugout, he had come up into the open air. He leaned back against the dugout door. He knew he had handled Fielder badly – had threatened a court-martial without knowing whether this would have applied. In the few weeks he had been out here, the confidence he had shakily acquired in training camp had deserted him, and now he was surprised when the ranks saluted him and called him ‘Sir’. It had seemed odd in training giving men orders, some of whom were twice his age; now in the lines it seemed almost impossible, but he had to do it. There was no option. Yet he couldn’t talk to them easily either. He watched the other officers to get tips and tried to emulate them, but they hardly seemed to notice him. Before leaving England his stepfather had looked him in the eye in a rare moment of confidence and said, ‘Act like a gentleman, instil respect and you should succeed’. It was said in his usual pinched monotone. What would the old man think of him now? It was as though this was his last chance of gaining respect from this cold replacement of a father. If only he could achieve that, the rest would fall into place. Life would be as easy as it had been for the popular boys he’d watched at school, who walked around with easy acquaintance, or for the officers who stood around in groups at training camp and laughed loudly at shared jokes. They seemed to have the answers to everything; he did not. So he would try to fit in, laugh at worn-out jokes, try and copy the other officers – ‘For goodness sake, just relax, will you!’ he muttered, unclenching his hands. Footsteps made him look up.

  Joss stood a few feet away, looked as though he was forming what to say. The day before, Briggs had been giving orders and his voice had become so croaky, Miller had passed him a mug of water. Briggs had turned aside, gulped it down and turned back to them with some of the water running down his chin; he’d realised too late and stared at the group with the expression of a beaten dog.

  ‘It’s Private Deerman, Sir,’ Joss called when Briggs asked who it was.

  Briggs peered down into the amber interior of the dugout, listening for any movement. Only the smell of aromatic tobacco smoke and old cooking wafted up the steps – no sounds.

  Briggs sat down on the nearest fire step, fiddled with the top flap of his breast pocket. As Joss sat by him, he looked up; his thin face showing only expected blankness.

  ‘What is it Deerman?’

  Joss frowned.

  ‘Yes, what is it?’ repeated Briggs. He knew about Deerman, who had been termed the ‘blasted misfit’ by the general at H.Q.

  ‘I can’t sleep either... May I join you?’

  Briggs waved his hand loosely to a space by him. To his horror, he felt his throat contract. It was as though he was being baited in the worst way now, with sympathy, by someone to whom he could not confide. It was against all the rules.

  ‘Would you care for some tea, Sir?’ Joss asked. ‘I know I could.’ It was the only thing he could think of to say.

  It sounded so ordinary, so every day, so like th
e common room at school, that Briggs managed to look round. ‘Yes, Deerman, go and make me a mug and bring one back for yourself.’

  Joss disappeared round a corner in the trench – a fire bay – thought Briggs remembering the manual – almost in spite of himself. His mother’s worried face came back to him. His father had died when he was twelve and his mother had made another marriage to a man of efficient manner and precise economy, and who always seemed to be on the edge of anger, a denizen of the land of the aggressively comfortable. From the start he had always addressed Briggs as ‘Sir.’ His mother’s clouded, anxious eyes had watched Briggs carefully, willing him to just do a little better to please this new stepfather in a contest in which Briggs did not know the rules or, indeed, what was expected of him. Once, his mother had said that her son was keen on cricket, to which his stepfather had looked at him in surprise, and Briggs had gazed at her, bewildered. She had ignored him, and carried on smiling.

  Joss reappeared with the mugs. ‘I’m afraid it may a little savoury, on account of last night’s stew,’ he said, sitting beside Briggs.

  Briggs gave a ghost of a smile. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘About earlier,’ said Joss. ‘That wasn’t usual for Fielder.’

  Briggs waved his hand dismissively. ‘Not bad for savoury tea, is it?’ he said.

  Joss smiled. ‘What do you think it is? Liver or bacon?’

  ‘A dash of both, I think.’

  ‘Cuisine a la trench-du-support, peut-etre?’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘Briggs!’ A voice bawled from within the dugout.

  Briggs jumped to his feet. ‘Better be off,’ he said and, as he hesitated on the top step, looked back and said. ‘Thanks, Deerman.’

  The next few days were the same; seemingly pointless activities, including jamming sandbags into the bulging walls of support trenches. The ditty ‘We’re here, because we’re, because we’re here!’ swirled around in Tom’s head as, with wet, gloved hands, he punched another bag into a gap. He and Joss were working in an obvious silence. Even Nico had stopped scratching and looked at them, his head cocked to one side.