by Colin Smith
He nodded to Mace who said by way of greeting, ‘Don’t forget your kit’s being inspected tomorrow,’ and walked out.
Mace was basically a friendly soul but Calderwell was too new for a man who’d got his knees brown to spend too much time with. The sergeants were looking at all the new men’s kit which meant an awful lot of work because, unlike the infantry, it was not just two pairs of boots that had to be polished. There was also a saddle, bridle, head-collar, rifle-bucket and the cases which the spare horseshoes were carried in, one fore and one hind. There were no irons available for pressing, but clothing had to be clean and folded in the regimental manner. And some sergeants took a delight in opening up every piece of kit, however small, including that item known to the War Office as the ‘housewife’, a cloth pouch which was supposed to contain a specific number of needles, spare buttons, cottons and bootlaces.
As it happened Calderwell was already well ahead with his kit. He had always derived a certain satisfaction from the application of polish and saddlesoap. So once he had placed his sword behind the chain around the tent pole which ran through the trigger guards of their rifles, he went to his haversack and extracted the only book it contained. He flicked through its pages until he came to letter number 186, entitled ‘From a gentleman to his sweetheart.’ It was quite promising.
‘. . . for if you anticipate pleasure in the company of your husband,’ the private read, ‘I assure you I sincerely return you the compliment. I expect much in your society – much that will dispel one’s troubles.’
He paused to savour the words ‘if you anticipate pleasure in the company of your husband’. Now that could only mean one thing. It was amazing what you could find in The Complete Letter-Writer for Ladies and Gentlemen if you knew where to look – which was even more amazing when he considered that the book had been a parting gift from his chapel-going Ma, who had obviously not vetted its contents.
Calderwell’s greatest disappointment since arriving in Egypt had been to find himself confined to barracks during the three days the reinforcements spent in Alexandria. All the way out on the troop ship there had been sailors and old sweats among the infantry reinforcements on board who had told them of the whores’ parlours to be found there and in Cairo, where a man would think he was in paradise for the price of a packet of Woodbines. Sweet-smelling olive-skinned bints, dressed in yashmaks and baggy silk trousers, who would let you do anything with them.
The regulars’ tales had been confirmed by an unlikely source – a colonel from the Indian Army Medical Corps, a stout man with thin mutton-chop whiskers and the flushed nose and cheeks of a drinker. The colonel had had them paraded on the boat deck to hear about what he called, ‘the full price of nights of shame’. The younger Yeomen had been enthralled, hanging on every word.
‘Those of you who are even contemplating indulging in sins of the flesh,’ this learned physician had begun, ‘should remember that syphilis contracted by Europeans from Asiatic women is much more severe than the sort you get in England. It is a long, lingering death of which the sufferer is only too aware.
‘First great handfuls of his hair fall out. Then his flesh begins to rot, eaten away by slow cancerous and stinking ulcerations. Afterwards, his nose falls in at the bridge and then rots and falls off; his sight gradually fails and he eventually becomes blind; his voice first becomes husky, and then fades to a hoarse whisper as his throat is eaten away by ulcerations as big as shillings which cause his breath to stink.
‘I have met these people,’ the MO had thundered, his cheeks bursting into flame. ‘I have met them on morning sick parades, I have met them in the pox wards and I have met them on the mortician’s slab after they had slashed their wrists because they could no longer live with the pain and infamy. Your last days are spent in agony and often as an outcast. And all for what? A few minutes’ pleasure. Ask a man without a nose if he thought it was worth it?’
When they had been dismissed a lanky, jug-eared boy in the Worcesters, who parted his hair down the middle, said that he knew for a fact that most of the regulars stuck their main members where he wouldn’t put the point of his sword. Almost all the reinforcements draft on board had been brought up to believe that the ranks of the regular peacetime army were filled by the sweepings of the gutter. Yet Calderwell was not the only one present who had never met a man without a nose, and in any case he believed he was just as immune to syphilis as he was to bullets. In the right circumstances he might confront the chance of disease with the same recklessness that he intended to face the powder.
When they got to the transit camp the reinforcements discovered men there from other units who swore that all the regulars’ tales of olive-skinned bints who would do it for the price of a beer were true. Apparently there was an Armenian refugee camp nearby where the women were red-hot. But to their fury the draft were not allowed out of the camp and were hardly off the ship before they moved to Cairo, where the wogs were getting stroppy and the authorities wanted a show of force. Calderwell had been one of those Yeomanry whom Ponting had spotted from his window at the Savoy.
Private Calderwell was bitterly disappointed. He told himself not to think about it but he thought of little else. Furtive assignations with what the old sweats called the ‘five-fingered widow’ – difficult when you were sharing a tent with seven others – were followed by shame and remorse. Sometimes he wondered what was worse – going blind, or risking your nose and your hair? Here he was, nineteen years of age and a trained soldier, and he might as well be a monk for all he knew of women.
‘Look at this,’ said Private Isaiah Mace. ‘Bare arse bare back.’
Calderwell was still too unsure of himself to risk appearing standoffish with an old hand. Reluctantly, he put aside his copy of The Complete Letter-Writer, and went to the entrance of the tent which was flapping gently in the sea breeze.
The farrier corporal and two of his men were fooling around in the surf with one of Captain Valintine’s hunters they had just shoed in readiness for the next day’s race meeting with the Australians. The horse was a big grey mare and the men were as naked as she was. Two of them were on her back while the farrier, stripped to the waist with his trousers rolled tight above his knees, led the animal by its bridle through the foam. Suddenly, he gave the mare a great slap on her rump and she cantered off down the beach, her riders cheering wildly until the rear man contrived to fall off onto the wet sand.
‘Strewth,’ said Calderwell. ‘On the ship out here they used to put you on a charge if you went up on deck without your hat on.’
‘Oh ah, they used to ‘ere,’ said Mace. ‘Now they don’t bother – not off duty any road. It was the colonials what started it. One of the first things we noticed was how they were always running around their bivouacs without their ‘ats or shirts on most of the time and nobody was dying of sunstroke. At first they said it was because they were brought up to it like, but then after a while people began to realise that half them bloody Diggers were born and raised in England or Ireland and the other half only a grandad away.’
They watched the man who had fallen off knock the sand from his body. Calderwell had already recognised him from the crop of angry red spots on his back – which for the first time he saw extended to his buttocks – as a former blacksmith’s apprentice called Perkins. Almost everybody who had been in the country for more than a month was continually scratching flea and mosquito bites, but Perkins had one of those fair, greasy skins that was particularly prone to erupt into the pus-filled bumps some time after adolescence had given way to young manhood. Even more so when it had been denied the benefits of a wash and a clean shirt for weeks at a stretch. Now all the men were being encouraged to take a daily dip while they were in the rest area. There were even classes organised for the non-swimmers like Calderwell. There were plenty of these, for most of these Midlands men had got their first glimpse of the sea when the troop train rolled into Portsmouth.
‘That sea water might be all right for
Perkins’ spotty botty,’ said Mace, ‘but you can bet me it ain’t going to be much good for the bloody ‘orse. They’ll be combing the salt out of her coat for days.’
‘It’ll be good for any cuts she’s got,’ said Calderwell, who pretended to know more about horses than he did, though he happened to be right on this occasion. At least half the regiment had never felt a horse between their legs until they enlisted. Calderwell had distinguished himself during basic training by keeping his seat when his nag bolted on him in the grounds of Warwick Castle, the regimental depot. He counted himself lucky to have been given a sweet-natured chestnut mare from among the latest batch of Waler remounts. He called her Villa after Aston Villa, the Birmingham team which had won the Football Association Cup more times than any other.
Both he and Mace spoke with the flat Midlands’ nasal whine most of the rest of the country simply regarded as Brummy. They said ‘dowin’ for ‘doing’; ‘yow’ for ‘you’ and pronounced ‘combing’ as ‘cowmin’ and ‘going’ as ‘gooin’ and like as ‘loike’. The Fifth Mounted Brigade was one of the most English units in the entire Egyptian Expeditionary Force. It was made up of three territorial regiments whose rank and file were mainly recruited from the land’s most central, most Saxon shires. Calderwell and Mace wore the black diamond flash of the Warwicks on their solar topees. Brigaded alongside them were the Worcestershire and Gloucestershire Yeomanry. The brigade was part of Major-General Sir Harry Hodgson’s Australian Mounted Division and was its only genuine cavalry arm because the Australians were not equipped with swords. The colonials were merely mounted infantry intended for fast deployment and then dismounting and peppering the enemy with rapid rifle fire.
The farrier section led the mare back to their piled uniforms. Now they were all out of water Calderwell found their nakedness made him feel uncomfortable: those marble loins with the indistinct meat in the bush. It brought back memories of a picture that had terrified him as a child. It showed stern-looking angels rousing the unclothed dead from their graves on the Day of Judgment, and it had hung in the home of a Methodist minister he had visited with his mother when he was enrolled for Sunday School. To hide his embarrassment he asked Mace, ‘What do you think her chances are tomorrow?’
‘Good. And I’ll tell you why they’re good. It’s because our Val ‘as decided he still ain’t fit enough to race ‘er.’
‘Is he no good then – at riding, I mean?’ asked Calderwell. In his short time in the Yeomanry Calderwell had never met an officer who had not been hunting since he was a child and rode like a demon.
‘Oh ‘e’s got a good enough seat,’ said Mace. ‘But she’ll do better with somebody lighter up. Our Val ain’t built for speed. He’s ‘ad too much bloody puddin’, ‘e ‘as. That’s always been ‘is trouble.’
‘Did you know him before the war, then?’ asked Calderwell. Although he lacked any stripes on his arm Mace had quickly established his position as a pre-war territorial among the new men, one of the original ‘Saturday afternoon butterfly shooters.’
‘Oh ‘ar, I knew him all right,’ said Mace, sucking on his pipe. ‘Val’s from Snittersfield and I’m from ‘enley-in-Arden.’
‘You’re almost neighbours, then,’ said Calderwell who was from Coventry and knew both places as part of a rural playground entered down narrow lanes which meandered through oak woods and miles of rolling fields divided by ancient hedges. He and his pals from the Humber car works had cycled much further afield than Henley in search of girls and good ale before Lord Derby’s recruiting drive had made them feel awkward to be almost nineteen years old and still out of uniform. It was even worse if you stumbled onto a place where several of the young married men had already been persuaded to go – not that some of them needed much persuading.
Until then they would think nothing of taking a spin down through Kenilworth and Warwick – where the Yeomanry had its headquarters in the Norman castle – to Stratford for bread and cheese and beer somewhere on the river, with a little of their bread cast on the limpid waters so they could watch the perch play. Then it might be back through the Roman fortress town of Alcester, where in the spring they would linger in Oversley Woods in the hope of meeting factory girls picking bluebells, although nothing much ever came of it even if they did. After that they would take the winding short cut that led through places named by the people who burned the Roman Britons out and didn’t know how to live in towns: Great Alne and Little Alne and Wootton Wawen. Then into Henley by the main Solihull road before they turned off into the green tunnels again, crossing the Avon at Lawsonford and the Grand Union Canal just before Shrewsley, and home with the light fading via Yew Green and Leek Wootton. Or perhaps they would only go as far as Stratford and then follow the river along a bit to, say, Hampton Lucy before turning round and going back through the Welcombe Hills, which they all thought were spelt ‘welcome’. Once they made the top they would freewheel down into Snittersfield before they pushed up to Norton Lindsey with legs like lead.
‘Neighbours?’ said Mace. ‘Well, in a manner of speakin’ I suppose we were. ‘E was magistrate was Val and a church warden, dare say ‘e still is. Between that and is ‘untin’ and shootin’ and ‘is polo and the Yeomanry I’m buggered if I know how he ever found the time to farm.’
‘A magistrate!’ said Calderwell, who was genuinely surprised that anybody so venerable should do something so banal as go to war.
‘Yes,’ said Mace. ‘A good ‘un too. A very fair man is our Val. That’s how I ended up in the Yeomanry. Me and a couple of mates used to go poachin’ pheasants. Nestin’ hens mostly. We used to try and lure them into a quiet spot with an aniseed trail and then use Daisy air guns so the gamekeepers wouldn’t hear us. It was pure devilment really. We didn’t need to do it although I suppose we made a couple of bob from those that fancy a bite from the gentry’s larder and didn’t ask no questions. Of course, in a place as small as ours we were bound to get caught sooner or later. So there we were up before the Bench when old Val was on and he gave us a choice. Being as we were first offenders loike he said we could either have a birchin’ from the police sergeant – big bugger ‘e was, built like the fuckin’ pyramids – or be bound over to keep the peace and join the Yeomanry. Well, I think all of us had already had a right laruppin’ from our fathers and we didn’t fancy any more of it so we signed up. Of course, the captain knew our families. I had an uncle who was with him in the Yeomanry in South Africa and my mate’s father was there.’
‘Are your mates over here now?’
‘No. One’s a bloody sergeant instructor at Warwick now so he’s no mate of mine. Nice cushy number. ‘E was always full of bullshit, talk the leg off an iron pot. The other one never really could get on with ‘orses. When he weren’t fallin’ off ‘em they were bitin’ him, poor bastard. He just seemed to have a talent for rilin’ them one way or the other. When the war started he saw ‘is chance and transferred to the infantry. South Staffs. Last I ‘eard he was in France.’
‘Well, rather him than me,’ said Calderwell. ‘Too much bloody mud in France. This must be a much better pitch for cavalry work.’
‘You think so? You should have been with us at Katia,’ said Mace in his flat, matter-of-fact way.
‘Why? What happened?’
‘We got beat, that’s what ‘appened. We got our arses kicked. The officers didn’t know whether they were comin’ or goin’. They didn’t know whether it was April or December.’
‘Including Valintine?’
‘Everybody.’
‘Really? I thought about the only thing that frightens our officers is that they might let off a fart in the parlour, sorry drawin’-room.’ said Calderwell.
‘Oh they’re brave enough all right. Too bloody brave some of the younger ones, about as much sense as their bloody horses half the time. That’s the trouble. You get the impression that old Kress and the other Fritzes they’ve got in charge over there take it more seriously. Professionals versus amateurs. Sometimes, our l
ot seem to be playing at it. They think it’s just another bloody ‘unt. There’s Johnny Turk. Tally-ho! After ‘im! Do you know there’s a captain in the Worcesters, Toby Albright his name is, who goes into action with a bloody huntin’ ‘orn? I ‘eard ‘im blowin’ the fuckin’ thing at Katia.’
Calderwell was shocked by this. Here was someone, whom he had to accept as a more or less reliable source, suggesting that British officers were in some ways inferior to their German counterparts. Yet for three years now the newspapers had told him that the war would have been won long ago had it not been for the unreliability of one’s allies, the terrain, the weather – somehow it had rained more in France and Belgium since the start of the war – and, above all, the downright beastliness and treachery of the Hun. For although it was generally acknowledged that the enemy were a bunch of posturing militarists who had been playing war games since they first strutted around their kindergartens, it must in no way be concluded that such dedication produced better soldiers. Maeltzer would have found Calderwell a touching product of the British genius for self-deception. But, pressed, he might have conceded that myths could be useful if people believed in them enough.
3
Athlit, Northern Palestine, and Cairo: July, 1917
***
‘I’ve got some good news for you,’ she said, ‘You’ll be going home soon.’
Sarah Aaronsohn held the pigeon to her chest while she stroked it and made little cooing noises. After a few seconds the bird started cooing back in the way that a cat will sometimes answer a non-feline miaow. She held it tighter and could feel the bird’s heart throbbing madly, so much faster than her own. It seemed so vulnerable, she thought, almost as if the pulsating life it contained was in danger of exploding its fragile frame. How could such endurance belong to anything so delicate!
