Lord of the Nutcracker Men

by Iain Lawrence

  She swept the curtains shut, then pulled me from the window. “I don't like it,” she said. “All your army games, you and your chums running around with sticks for guns, everyone getting shot and killed.”

  “We don't really get killed,” I told her.

  “It's a wonder,” said Mum. “It's a miracle you haven't taken out somebody's eye.” She wrung her hands together. “It's too much, Johnny.”

  She ran into the kitchen. I heard a splash of water, and when she came back, her face was wet and bright from scrubbing. Her eyes were very red. “Johnny,” she said. “Do you remember your Auntie Ivy?”

  “Prickly Ivy?” I asked.

  A little twitch started at her mouth, but she was too serious to smile. “She's your father's sister,” she said. “I don't think he'd be happy to hear that from you.”

  She took my hands and sat again, holding me in front of her. “Your auntie lives in Cliffe. Out in the country. You could go and stay with her for a while. Just until Christmas, of course. Just until the war is over.” She stared into my eyes. “How would you like that, Johnny?”

  “Not much,” I said.

  But it didn't matter what I thought. Mum sent off some letters and a telegram, and before I knew it I was on my way to Cliffe. I spent a sad day going around the streets and through the park, saying goodbye to my friends and the soldiers at the guns. I said goodbye to the animals in the zoo, to the squirrels and the rabbits that came and gathered around me, as they'd always done. I patted Black Charlie, the ragman's huge horse, and fed him one last piece of barley sugar.

  Then my mum packed my clothes, and I packed my soldiers, my beautiful nutcracker men, all my Pierres, and my little army of metal Tommies. We walked through the city, over London Bridge to Victoria Station. It was the same route that Siegfried had taken, and I was frightened that people would think we were German, that they would shout at us and drive us along.

  “Should we sing ‘God Save the King’?” I asked.

  “I don't feel like singing,” said Mum.

  We walked very slowly, stopping to watch a dustman empty the bins, and again to see a chimney sweep's brush poke up from somebody's flue in a cloud of black soot. Mum talked about Cliffe, and how she and my dad had met on the train.

  “I was working at Woolwich,” she said. “At the arsenal. One day I got on the train to go into London, and I sat beside a handsome man. The nicest man.”

  “My dad?” I asked.

  “That's right.”

  I switched hands on my suitcase. “How did you know that he was my dad?”

  “Well, he wasn't then. Not yet,” she said. “I was certain he was a barrister or something. He looked so important, with his little briefcase on his lap. What a shock I got when he opened it. There were puppets in there, and he made them sit up and talk to me.”

  We were both laughing when we came to the station. I had forgotten how sad I was, until Mum left me at the platform gates and went to buy my ticket. She had to push through a crowd to get there, then push her way back. She knelt in front of me. “You look so grown up,” she said. “Such a little man.”

  She straightened my tie, smiling and crying at the same time. People were passing us, queuing up at the gate where the man punched their tickets. I could hear steam hissing from the train on the platform.

  “Now, listen,” said Mum. “You'll pass Beckley Hill and Buckland Farm, and the next stop will be Cliffe. Your Auntie Ivy will meet you at the station.”

  The train whistled. I heard the clicking of the man's ticket puncher. Someone cried, “All aboard!”

  “Go,” said Mum. She hugged me and kissed me. “You'd better go.”

  I picked up my suitcase and dragged the other one. The man took my ticket. “Hurry, son,” he said.

  Mum was standing on her toes, her arm reaching. “Johnny, I love you,” she shouted, and the crowd closed between us. Compartment doors were slamming shut up and down the train. A fat man all in black crashed against me. A lady knocked a suitcase from my hand. “Mum!” I said.

  A Highlander in his kilt and green stockings picked up my suitcase. He took the other one from me—both in one arm—and clamped a huge fist on my shoulder. “You poor laddie,” he shouted. “Don't you fret. I'll see you settled, all right.”

  The train shrieked and puffed. It jerked forward with a bang of couplers. The Highlander pulled me with him, in through the door of the nearest compartment. The train jolted again, and we fell together onto the seat. Someone reached past me and closed the door, and the train steamed out of the station.

  The compartment was barely half full. Only six people sat on the benches that stretched across the width of the train. The Highlander bent down and lifted my suitcases onto the seat. He pretended to groan at their weight. “Och, what have you got in there?” he asked in his great, loud voice.

  I showed him all my soldiers. When he saw the Pierres he winked. “Their feet are on backwards,” he said.

  “They're not,” I told him.

  “But the Frenchies never go frontwards,” he roared, winking furiously.

  There was something odd about him. He sat for a while, glowering through the window, then suddenly shouted again. “Where did you get the wee soldiers?”

  “From my father,” I said.

  “Eh? Your father?” His face pulsed with a violent twitch. “You're on your way to see him?”

  “No,” I said. “He's in the army. He's going to France.”

  “Eh?”

  He was deaf as a post. I shouted back, “He's going to the front!”

  “Is he?” shouted the Highlander.

  “Yes. I won't see him until Christmas.

  ” “Don't you believe it,” the Highlander bellowed. “You won't see him for years to come.”

  The other people in the compartment were tilted toward us, frowning as they listened. The Highlander kept winking in his ghastly way. I didn't think he even knew he was doing it.

  “We'll never win this war,” he said. “It can't be done.

  ” An angry man, the fat one all in black, told him not to talk such rubbish. The Highlander whirled toward him, twitching horribly. “I was there,” he said, even more loudly. “I watched the Frenchies streaming past and saw the Huns come thick as eels, squirming over the mud and the ground, all their guns ablazing.” He winked and shouted. “I was there at Loos, in a field of corpses. We marched shoulder to shoulder against the Germans, until they got so sick of killing us that they turned their guns aside.”

  “You're off your head,” said the man in black. And a woman beside him said, “He's daft.”

  The Highlander laughed. “Aye, there's some that call it daft. I call it common sense.” He winked and twitched at the faces. “Well, I'm no going back,” he roared. “Och, I'll never go back to there.”

  “You're a coward, then,” said the angry man.

  Again the Highlander laughed. “Why aren't you at the front?”

  The angry man blushed. The whole compartment was suddenly staring at him, and he seemed to shake in his seat as the train swayed along the tracks. “I've got a family,” he said. “A wife and children.”

  “Och, so do I,” said the Highlander. “I've got a laddie just like this one here.” He touched my back. “He'll be an old man before this war is done. An old, gray man he'll be.”

  There was a woman sitting beside him, and she got up then and moved away. A man slid out from the opposite seat; another woman followed him. Suddenly there was a big, empty space around the Highlander and me. And someone came and plucked me out, until only the Highlander was left, like a little island.

  “I was there.” He sat winking and twitching, staring ahead. “I tell you, I was there.”

  CHAPTER 3

  October 30, 1914

  Dearest Johnny,

  I am writing in a great rush. We are packing our kits. It's off to France!

  I can't help but marvel how lucky I was to join the regular army instead of Kitchener's bunc
h. All those men who signed up before me are parading around in the streets and the parks. Most of them are still in their civilian clothes, and many are drilling with sticks instead of rifles. Poor chaps; for all their eagerness they'll get to France long after me. I shouldn't be surprised if we have the job finished before the first of them crosses the Channel.

  This is the last you will hear from me until I am up at the front.

  I hope you are happy in Cliffe.

  Enclosed, one drill sergeant to boss us about. Also enclosed, one general to boss the sergeant about.

  Love,

  Dad

  The letter was waiting at Auntie's when I came in from my first day at school. There was another from Mum, and Auntie Ivy had opened them both.

  “Will you read them?” I asked.

  “Aloud?” said Auntie. “Can't you read for yourself?”

  “Not these,” I said.

  Dad wrote in slanted letters full of little curls and loops. They looked like rows of fancy birds perched on invisible wires. Mum's were even worse; they didn't even look like letters at all. They were more like bits of string tangled into coils and tiny knots.

  “Well, honestly,” said Auntie. She put on the daintiest spectacles I'd ever seen, just circles of glass joined by a wire. They pinched across her sharp little nose, fitting perfectly into little red dents that seemed to be there just to hold her specs. “Which one first?”

  “Mum's,” I said.

  Auntie started reading. I closed my eyes.

  “‘The place seems empty without you,’” read Auntie. “‘I miss seeing you and hearing you, and I even miss your little soldiers being scattered all about. But I'm so glad you're in Cliffe, Johnny, because London isn't a place for a boy anymore. At night it's blacked out, and it feels scary and wild. Every time I hear a motorcar go by I look up, sure that it's a zeppelin.’”

  Auntie Ivy shook her head. “Imagine,” she said, and started reading again.

  “Men are still signing up in hordes,” wrote Mum. “But no one is hiring women to fill their posts. It's very maddening, as there is so much that I could do to help. Unless something changes, I may have to go back to my old job at the arsenal in Woolwich. It's a dreadful place, but at least I would be closer to you.”

  I sat in my school clothes—or most of them—still sodden from the rain. Auntie Ivy folded up my mother's letter and read the one from my father. I waited until she finished before I unwrapped my soldiers.

  “Oh, look!” I cried.

  The general was stiff and proper, with a little swagger stick clamped under his arm. The drill sergeant was nearly his opposite, short and stout, his chest barreling like a strongman's. He wore a tiny cap atop a huge head that was nearly entirely an open, bellowing mouth. I could look right down his throat at little tonsils painted like pink hearts.

  Auntie laughed, and that took me by surprise. I knew she could shout, and I knew she could look daggers with her little dark eyes, but I didn't know that she could laugh.

  “I'll call the general Cedric,” I said.

  “That's lovely,” she said. “He looks like a Cedric. Now take them outside.”

  “It's raining,” I said.

  “A little rain never hurt a boy.” She took off her specs and rubbed her nose. “You're not made of sugar, are you?”

  “No, Auntie,” I said.

  “Then don't be so silly. You know the rules.”

  She didn't let me play soldiers in the house. It wasn't right, she said—it wasn't “fitting”—to bring war inside a house. But there were a lot of things that Auntie Ivy didn't like: sudden noises, elbows on the table, the banging of doors, and mindless chatter. “I can't abide mindless chatter,” she'd told me.

  Now she stood up. “Well, off you go,” she said. “I've got Christmas socks to knit for the boys at the front.”

  She wore big black shoes that thunked when she walked, and purple dresses that touched the floor. Forever after, I would think of Auntie Ivy as a sound, as the thunk of her shoes and the swish of her legs in the heavy cloth.

  “Go on now,” she said as she passed.

  “Yes, Auntie,” I said.

  I hated her rules—and her house that was drafty and cold. I hated the school, and I hated the teacher, and I hated the boys most of all. They had teased me because I'd carried my things in a satchel, because I'd worn my blazer and flannel shorts. They'd called me Johnny Pigs instead of Briggs, and they'd pushed me down and sat on my head. The teacher—ugly old Mr. Tuttle—had only looked toward us, then looked away. The only person who was nice to me was a girl, and that was almost as bad as not having a friend at all.

  Well, I wasn't going back. Auntie Ivy didn't know it, but I'd never go back. “Oh, there's some that call it daft,” I muttered to myself. “But I call it common sense.”

  I hated almost everything about Cliffe: the mile-long walk to the village; the flatness without any buildings. I felt lonely without my mother and my father. I missed my pals from London: even the soldiers at their guns.

  But then there was Auntie Ivy's garden, nearly the size of our whole London home. It sloped up at the back, toward a stone wall and a huge beech tree that poked its roots right through the stones. All the leaves had fallen long ago, but the bare branches were enough to stop most of the rain. And in the mud below them, I scraped out trenches in the sloping ground. I put the British in one, the Frenchmen on their right, and in the other I put the Germans. I crowded them together, all my lovely nut-cracker men. I still had many more Germans than anything else.

  I arranged them carefully. And when the ground was covered with soldiers I heard a voice behind me. “Hello, Johnny.”

  It was Sarah, the girl from school. She was carrying my satchel, and beside her stood a tall lieutenant in a Burberry coat. “This is my father,” she said. “He's on his way to the station. He's leaving for France.”

  “My dad's already left for France,” I said.

  “Well, mine's been there and back,” said Sarah, gloating. “He's home on leave, that's all.”

  The lieutenant said, “Hello. Johnny, is it?” He smiled at me, then looked down at my soldiers.

  “I brought you this,” said Sarah, holding out my satchel. “You forgot it at school.”

  I hadn't forgotten it. I had stuffed it down behind the steps, too embarrassed to ever use it again. “I don't want it,” I said.

  “Can I have it?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “All right.”

  The lieutenant was crouched over my nutcracker men. “Look at these, Sarah,” he said. “They're beautiful soldiers.”

  “They look so fierce,” she said.

  “That's because they're Huns,” I told her.

  The lieutenant's coat was unbuttoned, spreading behind him across the mud. “Your trenches are too far apart, Johnny,” he said. “You've got the Germans running across a mile of ground.” He waved his hand above the soldiers. “It should be less than a hundred yards; perhaps just twenty-five.”

  I looked down at my trenches, already filling with rain. One of the wooden Pierres was floating on his side.

  “Move them closer,” said Sarah's dad. “Move your Tommies forward.”

  “They'll be right on top of my Germans,” I said.

  “Yes. That's the idea. They should be close enough that they can sometimes hear the Germans talking.” He sketched a line through the mud of my no-man's-land. “Dig a new trench here, and leave the old one behind it, so your Tommies have somewhere to hide when they're driven back.”

  “They won't be driven back,” I said.

  “Oh, yes they will,” he told me.

  I scraped out a new trench, and Sarah helped me move the soldiers. With her left hand holding her dress, she bent down and lifted the men one at a time, like flowers she was picking. No girl had ever touched my soldiers, and it didn't seem right. A boy would have made them fight, but Sarah only moved them around like so many dolls. Then her father joined us, and we worked together below t
he great umbrella of the beech tree.

  When all the soldiers were in their places, the lieutenant studied my battlefield. “You'll have to build communication trenches so your men can move up to the front,” he said. “Otherwise your Germans will pick them off as they cross the top. You want your Tommies to live in the earth.”

  “Like moles?” I asked.

  “Exactly.” He squinted at the trenches. “Your general, now. That won't do where you've got him.”

  I stared down at little Cedric standing with the rest of the Tommies. “He's right at the front,” I said.

  “That's what I mean. He's in the wrong place altogether.” The lieutenant stood up. “You should move him back. That's where he'd really be.”

  I picked up the little man and set him in the rear trench.

  “Farther,” said the lieutenant. “You have to move him back so far that he can't see the battles. Then move him a little more, so he can think he's winning them when he's not.”

  Sarah giggled. “That's silly,” she said.

  “It's the way it is,” said her father with a shrug. “Well, I've got a train to catch. Sarah, would you like to stay here with your chum?”

  I looked at Sarah, to see that she was looking at me. I didn't mind her being in the garden; I didn't even mind her touching my soldiers. But I didn't ask her to stay, and both of us looked down at the ground.

  The lieutenant laughed. “Perhaps you'd rather see me off at the station.”

  Sarah went with him, into the mist of rain. I felt a pang of jealousy to see her walking at his side, with my satchel on her shoulder. She called back from the house: “I'll see you at school.”

  I didn't tell her I was finished with school.

  In the morning Auntie Ivy sent me off in my boots and macintosh. I trudged up the road to Cliffe, past an orchard and a farm, past a cottage and a field. When I saw the big, square steeple of the village church I turned off the road, skirting the houses and the school to reach the marshes by the Thames.

  I spent all morning there. I watched a Bristol aero-plane and an Albatros in British colors flying down the river to Grain. I ran through the long grass, scaring up herons that squawked into the air like clumsy old Bleriots. And I pretended to dogfight with them, running across the humps of ground with my arms stretched out like wings.