Lord of the Nutcracker Men

by Iain Lawrence

  ” “Rather good?” he said loudly. “It's brilliant. It's wonderful.”

  We sat down and started our lesson. He picked up the story as the great armies of the Trojans and the Greeks were entrenched on the plains.

  “They have clashed again and again,” he said. “They have each taken terrible beatings. And now, in the tenth year of this war, the soldiers of both sides—the Greeks and Trojans alike—pray for the same thing. For what?”

  “Peace,” I said.

  “Good, Johnny. And what happens? What miracle occurs?”

  “A truce,” I said.

  “What sort of truce?”

  “They agree to stop fighting if one man from each army comes out to fight a duel. And whoever wins will win the war.”

  Mr. Tuttle nodded. “And who fights this duel?”

  “The men who started the war,” I said.

  “Yes!” cried Mr. Tuttle. He joggled the table in his excitement, sending biscuits flying. “Paris and Menelaus. The very two princes whose petty quarrel started all these years of war now walk out to settle it. They toss spears at each other. They go at it hand to hand. Then one of them captures the other, and the war is over, isn't it?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “I think the gods start it up again,” I said.

  “Those meddling gods,” said Mr. Tuttle. “The soldiers are homesick, scared and hungry. They want nothing else but the chance to go home. Yet the gods won't let them; they see to it that the fellow escapes, and they stir up the armies like hives of bees. Suddenly the war's back on, more savage than ever.”

  He took a biscuit, and his eyes jiggled as he chewed. “So,” he said. “What do you think would happen in France if the British soldiers and the German soldiers agreed to end the war?”

  “I don't know,” I said.

  “Well, think.” He dribbled crumbs onto his lap. “If the Germans got so sick of fighting one day that they shouted across to your father—‘Hello, there! Let's have a truce!'—what do you think would happen?”

  “He would tell them where to get off,” I said.

  Mr. Tuttle smiled. “Would he? There he is, living in mud, worried about the bombs and the bullets, battling the rats and the lice and thinking always of you, and someone is telling him that he can go home if he wants. Don't you think he'd do that?”

  “I'm not sure,” I said.

  “Well, I think he would,” said Mr. Tuttle. “I think every soldier would. On both sides, to a man, they would put down their guns and go home.”

  “But they wouldn't be allowed to,” I said.

  “Who would stop them?”

  “The Kaiser. The King.”

  “Ahh,” said Mr. Tuttle. “The gods would intervene.” He stood up, shedding the crumbs from his clothes. “You're quite right, Johnny. The Kaiser would never allow it. He loves his game of war, his men in their toy-soldier clothes.”

  “Maybe the King and the Kaiser will fight it out in no-man's-land,” I said, and smiled to show I didn't really mean it.

  “The King would give him a thrashing,” said Mr. Tuttle.

  I laughed, and that pleased him very much.

  “But you've come to the heart of it, Johnny. What Homer is saying is that all the world is a game for the gods. Whatever you do, whether you're sitting here now or playing with your soldiers, it's because the gods want you to do it. But in the end they'll trick you, for you can never win if you fight against gods.”

  When our lesson ended that day I didn't feel in any hurry to go home. I sat in Mr. Tuttle's chair and told him how my dad was digging trenches for a rest, and how my mum had moved to Woolwich. Then he told me things about himself: that he'd taught in Cambridge at Trinity College and married a professor's daughter; that they'd moved to Cliffe because the weather suited roses; that the coming winter would be his seventh in the village. I became very fond of him that day. When it started to rain, first in drops and then in buckets, he grew worried for me.

  “I wish you could stay,” he said. “But you'd better be on your way before this gets any worse.” He found an umbrella in his cupboard, and insisted that I take it.

  The rain pelted down on the road, filling the ditches. It hammered on the umbrella until I could barely hold it upright. I felt like a Trojan being pelted by arrows, my shield above my head. I marched along through enormous puddles, the black clouds swirling close to the ground, stroking the trees with watery fingers.

  I went straight to my garden. My little dad, paler than ever, lay up to his waist in water. I built a dugout that would keep him dry, then went to work on my trenches. The nutcracker men, on higher ground, were out of the rain, protected by the beech tree. But my British trenches were crumbling, so full of water that the wooden soldiers swam and the metal ones were close to drowning. Crouched under Mr. Tuttle's umbrella, I put it all in order. I dug channels to drain the trenches, then scraped away the ooze of mud that the water left behind.

  I uncovered tiny snails and short, pink worms that wriggled in my fingers. And halfway down the line, I unearthed poor Pierre One, or the top half of him at least. His little wooden head jutted out from the wall of the trench, and I thought at first it was a snail's shell. But when I pulled him out, the mud tried to hold him in place. And he came free with a squelch and a pop: his head and arms, his shattered waist where Sarah's stone had snapped him into two. A worm wriggled away in the back of the hole, as though it had eaten the little man's legs.

  I popped him on top of the ambulance, and the medic said, “I think he's a goner.” But I gave him a ride to the back, tipped him off, and pretended that doctors were fussing over him. “Where's his legs?” they asked. “If we had his legs we could patch him up.”

  I couldn't remember where I'd put his legs. So the doctors said, “Died of his wounds. There's nothing we can do,” and I buried him there at the back. I stood up a white pebble for his gravestone, and the doctors said, “He was a good soldier. He was a brave lad.”

  CHAPTER 11

  December 8, 1914

  Dearest Johnny,

  My bit of rest ended quickly last night.

  We were rushed back to the line very early this morning, well before daybreak and too suddenly to take anything but our rifles and our ammunition. We raced through the communication trench as the guns opened up. There was such an urgency and a haste that some of the lads went right over the open ground. I saw them above me, black shadowy men lit by the gun bursts.

  At the front, all the soldiers were already standing to, though it wasn't yet dawn. We joined them, our rifles held up to the parapet, our faces pressed to the mud.

  At the first crack of daylight I poked my head over the top for a look. It was a damned silly thing to do, but I couldn't help it. I will never forget what I saw.

  The frost made a smoke on the ground. Thick and white, it flowed like a half-frozen river, like slow-moving water. It oozed through the wire, through the craters and pits. Then out of that smoke came the Huns. Such an endless line of men that it didn't seem possible that we could ever stop them. The smoke swirled round their waists, and it turned red in the rising sun. It turned yellow and red like a river of fire. The Huns came marching toward us.

  A whistle blew. Up popped the British. The air filled with the crack of rifles. The rattle of machine guns.

  The Germans started running. They started running and shouting, all of them together. A terrible moaning and wailing. Their bayonets rose up, sparkling like stars.

  I won't say much about the battle. It was fast and brutal, full of screams and flashing silver and redness everywhere. But once it was over, I was sent back to the rear, and I scarcely remember even making the journey. All I recall is the smell of Maconochie's stew warming up on someone's tin-can stove, and the feeling that it had all been only a dream, only a nightmare.

  I am a bit weary and rather friendless now. It was a blessing that I could spend the day working on the little man, enclosed, whom I carved fr
om a piece of a shattered gun carriage. He seemed to emerge from the wood just as you see him, as though he'd been buried in there and was waiting for his freedom.

  My heart aches to see you again. I fear it might break if I don't get home very soon.

  All my love,

  Dad

  The new man was screaming.

  His eyes were huge holes, his mouth like a wound. He seemed to be stretching his hands toward the sky, but the way he stood—twisted at the waist—made him even more out of balance than Harry Black had been.

  I remembered how the little blacksmith had looked more comfortable when Mr. Tuttle laid him down. So I put the new man on his back, on the tabletop, and I saw it was just the way he was meant to be. He lay in an arch, on his hands and his bottom.

  “He's laughing,” said Auntie. But she didn't sound as though she believed it. The man was screaming as he writhed on the ground.

  “Johnny, he's laughing,” she said, more sternly.

  I stared at the figure, the most troubling man of them all.

  “Do you see what it's like now?” asked Auntie. “Do you see what it's really like?”

  “Why are you angry?” I said.

  “I'm not,” she told me. “Not at you.” She reached across the table and patted my wrist. “Johnny, there are men who can go to a war and come home just the same as they were. But not your father. He's a toy maker, Johnny. He spends his life bringing pleasure to people, to children. The war will kill him.”

  “Don't say that!” I said.

  “Oh, on the inside,” she cried, and tightened her fingers around my wrist. “Johnny, I just meant on the inside. It will rot him away if it doesn't end soon. He'll be changed; he'll be different. He'll be hollow.”

  She hadn't met the Highlander, but she might have been talking about him. He'd had no wounds, but something had torn him apart.

  Auntie Ivy's thumb rubbed the backs of my fingers.

  “Johnny, I'm sorry,” she said. “There's nothing wrong with your games if they make you remember your father. When James was a boy he did the same thing when his own father went to the war.”

  “He played with his little gun,” I said, staring at my soldier. “He played Zulus sometimes.”

  She laughed. “Yes, I was a Zulu once. Who told you about that?”

  “The soldier,” I said.

  “What soldier?”

  I shrugged. “He came to the garden. He used to know Dad.”

  “Everyone did,” said Auntie Ivy. “And everyone loved him.” She took her hand away. “Now go and play, Johnny.”

  I didn't feel like fighting my soldiers. But I cleaned up the trenches and put the men in order. Then I made barbed wire from the twine that was left over from my Guy Fawkes guy, laying it out in coils across my noman's-land. I staked it down with twigs from the beech tree, going back and forth from the trenches to collect them by the wall.

  On my third trip there I saw the sergeant watching me. He stood among the trees, in his khaki clothes, and all I saw at first was his face. “Hello,” I shouted, but he didn't answer.

  I stepped closer, and his arms appeared among the branches. His uniform was tattered now, the collars frayed, the cuffs unraveled. He looked as though he'd walked a hundred miles, through mud and thorns, since I'd seen him last. “Are you all right?” I asked.

  He still didn't answer. His mouth opened and closed, and he moved backward, slinking into the forest. Then he turned and started to run, if you could call it that. He went away in a hobbling gait, with one leg stiff, until I couldn't see him anymore.

  That night I dreamed about him. I saw him crossing a battlefield in that same hobbling way. I shouted at him, and he turned around. And his face was my father's.

  It was snowing when I woke. I lay in my bed watching the flakes spiral past the window. I thought of it snowing in France, all of no-man's-land turning to white. I wanted to see my own battlefield looking like that, but by morning the snow had changed to rain, and there was only a bit of slush on the ground. I went off to school in my Wellingtons, the rubber soles squeaking with every step.

  At the post office I met Sarah. She was slogging along, her feet dragging troughs in the slush. When I caught up to her she looked at me, and her face was different too. It was like Auntie Ivy's, wrinkled with worry.

  “He died,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “My dad.” She sniffed, and started sobbing.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  Her lips quivered. Her breath hissed through her teeth. Every time she tried to speak she started crying instead.

  I thought of her father. I remembered how tall he was, how heroic he was in his big coat and his polished buttons. I could hear his voice and see his smile, how happy he'd been in the garden. It seemed so real just then that I could remember the smell of the rain on his woolen clothes. It wasn't possible that he was dead, that he was gone—just like that—forever.

  “Sarah,” I said.

  “Yesterday,” she said. She sobbed and took a breath. “We got a letter from him yesterday.”

  She clamped a hand across her face, across her eyes and nose. “He said he was happy. He said he'd been scared but he wasn't anymore. He told us not to worry.”

  Sarah rubbed her eyes, then took her hand away. She blinked, spilling tears on her cheeks. “He was dead when we got it.” Suddenly, she smiled. “Johnny, it was like he wrote it from heaven.”

  She walked with me for a while, but very slowly. She was like a flower that was wilting; her shoulders slumped, her head drooped down. Then she stopped altogether. “I don't even know how he died,” she said. “I don't know what happened to him yet.”

  Children rushed past us. A ball of slush plopped on the ground at my feet. A boy shouted, laughing, “Johnny's going to get maa-aaried!”

  Sarah put her hand on my arm. “You don't think a shell hit him, do you?”

  “Maybe.” I didn't know what to say. “Do you want to come to Auntie's after school? Do you want to play with my—”

  “No,” she said. “I won't.” She backed away. “I wish I'd never gone there.”

  “Why?”

  She gave me a terrible look. Then she started crying again, harder than before.

  “What's wrong?” I said.

  She turned and ran. She fled down her trail of ragged footprints, past buildings that were shedding snow from their steep roofs, then round the bend at the edge of the village. I could see the marshes beyond her, white and flat, and imagined her running across them, all the way to the Thames and on to London, on and on for as far as she could go.

  I went on to school and sat behind her empty desk. Mr. Tuttle stood at the front of the room in his long black gown. “Children,” he said. “We should pray.” We bowed our heads and prayed for Sarah's father, for his soul. We prayed for Sarah, for her mother, for all of our fathers who were fighting in France. It was the first time I had done that in school, but it wouldn't be nearly the last.

  That same day, in the evening, the lieutenant's name was in the paper. It was listed in the Honor Roll, in the section for the officers, in a little box shaped like a grave. Auntie Ivy pointed it out. “Killed in action,” it said beside his name.

  “I met him,” I said. “I liked him.”

  “I know you did,” said Auntie. There wasn't a bit of news or a single secret in all of Cliffe that Auntie didn't know.

  “Then why did he die?”

  “Who can say why?” She shook her head. “Not me, not you.”

  Auntie Ivy made an enormous supper that night, a rabbit stew that she cooked in two pots. I didn't know why until we finished and she put on her coat and her boots.

  “I'm taking some food to Mrs. Sims,” she said. “Would you like to come?”

  “I was going to play with my soldiers,” I said.

  But Auntie had already made up my mind. “No, I think you'd rather come with me.”

  It was dark when we got to the farm. In the lane besid
e the house a lantern was burning, and in its yellowish glow a man was loading wood into a wagon bed. He stood on a pile of split rounds, pitching them up one-handed. His arm seemed to go round and round in circles, catching the wood and hurling it up. The lantern light shone on a hook that he held.

  “That's Storey,” said Auntie, her voice dropping to a whisper. “He sells firewood around the village.” We passed him at a distance as we walked toward the farmhouse. I fancied his hook; it would be a splendid thing for climbing trees or plucking trout from rivers. But Auntie told me: “He lost his hand, you see. It was shot away in the Burma war, and all he's got is a claw.”

  She walked away and I hurried up behind her. We climbed to the porch, but Auntie didn't knock on the door. She pushed it open and called, “Yoo-hoo!”

  Shreds of paper hung above us, tiny scraps of blue and white and red. Warm air, tart with smoke, wafted out through the door, and the bits of paper rustled and coiled. The house felt empty, the air like its breath.

  I could hear Mrs. Sims walking across the floor above us. Her voice quavered down: “I'll be right there.”

  “It's only me,” said Auntie.

  We walked right in, to a warm and smoky parlor. We stood on the hearth, warming our hands and our fronts at the fire.

  “Those are the sons,” said Auntie, tipping her head toward a pair of portraits on the mantel. “There's just the two of them, no daughters.”

  Mrs. Sims was coming down the stairs. Auntie bent her head and whispered, soft as feathers, “Both the boys went to war. It was Murdoch who was killed.”

  “Who's the other one?” I asked.

  “Hush.”

  “I know him,” I said. But Auntie Ivy had turned away to greet her neighbor.

  I took the picture down. I held it out to Mrs. Sims who stopped in midstep. She stared at me from her black veils and her shawls. “Look. He's my friend,” I said, smiling. “He comes to the garden. I saw him just the other night.”

  Mrs. Sims gasped. She touched her forehead, then crumpled to the floor.

  “Johnny!” Auntie slapped me on the head. She went running to hold Mrs. Sims. “You wicked boy. That's Murdoch.”