Lord of the Nutcracker Men

by Iain Lawrence

  CHAPTER 12

  For three days there were no letters from my father. I sat and wrote to him instead, even though it wasn't Friday.

  Dear Dad, I wrote. How are you? I am not fine. Auntie Ivy hit me yesterday just because I said the picture on Mrs. Sims's mantel was a picture of my friend who's a soldier. She hit me so hard that I might have chipped a tooth. The marks of her fingers were still on my cheek when I went to bed and that was a long time later. She called me a monster and

  Auntie Ivy came thumping up behind me. I tried to hide the letter, but she saw it and snatched it away.

  “That's mine!” I cried.

  She turned aside. It took her only a moment to read the letter, and a moment after that she was stuffing it into the firebox. “You're not going to worry your father with petty things like this,” she said. “Chipped a tooth, indeed.”

  “I might have,” I said.

  “You got just what you deserved.” She put the lid on the firebox. “You might have stopped her heart; did you think of that? The state she's in, you could have killed her, Johnny.”

  “But it was true,” I said. “That was my soldier in the picture.”

  “A dead man?” she asked.

  “Maybe Murdoch isn't dead.”

  “Oh, Johnny,” she said, heaving a great sigh. “I'll tell you what happened, and then maybe you'll admit you were wrong.”

  She sat and told me all about Murdoch. It was a cracking good story, but she made it sound as dull as a grammar lesson. “Murdoch's regiment attacked the Germans. They went out and came straggling back. There was no sign of Murdoch for three days, until he was found in a shell crater with a bullet in his leg. He was just four yards from his trench, but he lay there for three days. Then he was carried back to a dressing station, and his parents were sent a telegram saying that he was coming home. They were hanging streamers of bunting in the doorway—to welcome him back—when the postman brought the second telegram, saying that Murdoch had died of his wounds.”

  “Was he a sergeant?” I asked.

  “Yes, he was.”

  “So was mine,” I said. “And I think mine was wounded in the leg, too. He couldn't walk very well.”

  Auntie Ivy scowled. “Why won't you listen to reason?” she asked. “The next day an officer showed up at Storey's farm, carrying a little package. Murdoch's wallet and identification tag were in it.” Auntie Ivy put her fingers round her wrist to show me where Murdoch would have worn his bracelet. “There were a few letters that he had written but had never got around to sending. It was so sad. Such a little parcel, but everything the poor boy owned.”

  “Everything?”

  “Yes.” Auntie leaned forward, and a look of kindness came to her face for the first time since she had slapped me. “Now don't you see that you have to be wrong? There's no way on God's earth that Murdoch could have come to the garden, is there?”

  “No, Auntie,” I said.

  “Are you sorry?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, it's a little late for sorries.” She stood up, her chair squeaking. “You've put it into poor old Storey's head that his son is still alive. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

  She didn't speak to me for the rest of that day. She ate supper in silence, then sent me to bed by pointing her finger.

  The night was crisp and clear. By morning, I thought, there might be frost on the ground. I lay in bed and watched the moon come up through the branches of the beech tree. I heard the guns in France.

  They were faint but furious, a steady drumming of low-pitched pops and puffs. It was strange to think that such a harmless sound meant that the ground was shaking where my father was, that all the earth around him would be churning like a stormy sea, and the air would be full of razors. I didn't know if the guns were German or British. For all I knew they might have been both, firing together, hurling shells back and forth in the darkness, like giants playing at pitch-and-toss.

  The moon was bright enough to cast shadows on my wall. The branches of the beech tree made patterns there, of loops and crosses, like the writing on my father's letters. I saw them, and thought again how long it had been since he had sent anything to me. I wondered if it was true what Auntie had said, if he was already rotting away on the inside, if he had already forgotten about me.

  I got up and stood at the window. I looked toward France, or where I thought France was. The guns popped and puffed, but I couldn't see any flashes of light, or any sign that they were really there.

  Below me were my wooden soldiers. The nutcracker men were hidden in the dark shadows of the tree and the wall, but the moonlight gleamed on my Frenchmen and my Tommies, as ghastly as the star shells my father had written about. I could see him in the garden, his model. It was tipped back in the trench, staring up at the sky, paler than ever in the white of the moon. The guns in France pounded away with their faint little thunder, and I thought that my real dad would be just like my model, wide awake, watching the sky.

  I went down to the garden in my grandfather's robe. The mud had a thin, cold crust that shattered as I walked across it. My boots echoed the sounds of the guns.

  All that night I shelled the German trenches. I bombarded the nutcracker men with pebbles and dirt and mud until my hands were black and stiff. The moon went down and I kept at it. The nutcracker men became real in my mind. They became the Hun, and I blasted away with my shells, angry at all the things they had caused. They had driven me from London; they had taken my dad away and were rotting him inside; they had killed Sarah's dad and Murdoch Sims. And I punished them for all of that.

  The eastern sky turned a dismal gray. Dawn was coming, and I launched my attack.

  I whistled my Tommies over the top. I whistled again for my Frenchmen. My father and the dog-faced man, the sergeant and my messman, all my Pierres and all my Tommies rose from the mud two at a time. They gathered on the edge of no-man's-land, then marched forward in little bunches as I pushed them along.

  It was hard in the darkness, all by myself. The battles had been fast and furious when Sarah had helped me. My army had stormed along then, but now it just plodded.

  When the men reached the wire I stepped across them to the German line. Fatty Dienst peered over the parapet. “Mein Gott!” he said. “The Tommies are coming!”

  The nutcracker men stood up to their guns. I hurled some dirt across them, moved the British forward, and let the machine guns open fire.

  “Ratta-tatta-tat!” I swiveled the little Germans in my fingers, spraying the British with bullets. I knocked down the dog-faced soldier.

  General Cedric stood on a bump of mud that covered a stone. “I can't see what's happening,” he said. “Are we winning?”

  The British moved forward. My father slid down to a crater and up the other side. “Follow me!” he shouted.

  The mud was frozen in clusters, in little honeycombs of white and gray. It crackled under my boots as I moved back and forth from the Germans to the British.

  “Whizz. Bang!” A bit of German trench collapsed. “Ratta-tatta-tatta!” The messman with his silly pots spun around and fell.

  My father reached the wire. He hopped over it, then reeled in my fingers. “Come on, lads!”

  The others stumbled up behind him, and past him, tangling in my bits of string. A few shells came down, shattering among the men. I whistled again, and the Tommies carried on, the sergeant at the front. They straggled across all of no-man's-land.

  “Fall back!” shouted Fatty Dienst.

  But the Germans held the line, because Auntie Ivy came and saved them. She rushed from the house in her nightgown, with a broom in her hand. “Who's there?” she cried. “Who's out there?”

  It wasn't light enough that she could see me in the shadows near the wall. She shouted again—“Who's there?”—then came down the steps with her broom held up like a lance, ready to chase off whatever person or thing that she found.

  I stood up. I felt like a soldier surrendering. “I
t's me,” I said.

  “Johnny?” She didn't stop until she stood right in front of me. “Are you out of your mind? Have you lost your senses?”

  “I was only playing,” I said.

  “In the dead of night? In your pajamas no less?” She was even angrier than she'd been at Storey's farm. She swatted at me with her broom. “Shoo!”

  I stood away, staggering over the battlefield. The broom swished past behind me, swished again, and mowed down a dozen soldiers. Auntie swept them away like bits of dirt, like rubbish. She sent them scattering left and right, then chased me back to the house.

  I was shivering from the cold. Auntie Ivy stoked the fire until the stovepipe hummed. She heated a kettle and washed the mud from my shaking hands, from my face and my arms. She pulled off my boots and plunged my feet into a basin of steaming hot water. Then she wrapped me up in a tent of blankets, muttering all the time about the stupidity of boys.

  “Thank goodness your mother can't see you now,” she said.

  The steam and the blasting heat of the stove made me tired. I could have slept the day away, but it seemed that I had barely closed my eyes when Auntie shook me awake again. She pulled the blankets away, and sunlight hurt my eyes.

  “You'd better get dressed, Johnny,” she said. “You'll be late for school if you don't get a move on.”

  Her anger had left her. She hummed as she worked, bending over the stove. The oven door clanked open, and I saw a sheet of browned scones that might have appeared there by magic. She plucked one out, split it and smeared it with butter, then thrust it into my hands. I had to juggle it from one to another, and nearly burnt my tongue when I took the first bite.

  I walked to school through a land that was white with frost. Everything sparkled and glittered, and the air was as crisply cool as peppermints. It was the first wintery day, and the thought of that gave me a little thrill of pleasure. In a few weeks Christmas would come, the war would end and my dad would be home.

  For the first time in days I saw Sarah at school. I came into class a few minutes late to see her sitting at her desk. I sat down, reached forward, and tapped her on the shoulder.

  “Hello,” I said when she turned around.

  That look came back to her eyes, that same dark and terrible stare that she'd given me the last time I'd seen her. “Don't touch me,” she said, too loudly. Everyone looked at us; even Mr. Tuttle stopped pacing and stared toward us.

  Sarah glared at me. “It was that game,” she said. “That stupid game.”

  I didn't understand her then. But I knew exactly what she meant as soon as I went home in the afternoon.

  Auntie Ivy was knitting her socks. “You look miserable,” she said.

  I sat down and watched the wool twisting through her needles, knotting itself into rows of stitches.

  “Was Sarah at school?” asked Auntie.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “The poor thing.” Auntie shook her head, but didn't stop knitting. “If it's any consolation, Johnny, her father wouldn't have felt a thing. It was sudden.” She glanced up as she tugged at her wool. “He was hit by a shell.”

  Into my mind flew a picture of my wooden lieutenant, the mud from Sarah's boots spraying against him, flinging him sideways. It was that game. That stupid game.

  Goose bumps came up on my arm. I rubbed them, but couldn't take the coldness away. “Auntie,” I said. “Do you think my soldiers might have killed him?”

  She put her knitting down. “Your wooden soldiers?”

  “Yes,” I said. “If we pretended one was him? If it fell and—”

  “No!” she said. “Oh, Johnny, that's silly; that's nonsense.”

  “Even if it looked like him?”

  “Oh, goodness, no.” She sounded sad. “You can't take the world on your shoulders. Dear Johnny. You're so sweet, and so stupid as well.”

  She dropped her wool on the floor and made me stand beside her. She touched my back with a cold, hard hand. “If you could wish someone dead, if you could really do that, I would have gone to my grave the first day you saw me.”

  “But I didn't wish him dead,” I told her.

  “Did you kill all those soldiers in the Honor Roll? Did you kill all the ones from yesterday, and the ones from the day before?”

  “No, Auntie,” I said.

  “Did you kill Murdoch Sims?”

  “I don't even know him,” I said.

  “You see?” Her eyes were nearly level with mine. They looked like old glass, all cloudy inside. “It had nothing to do with you.”

  I went outside and sat under the beech tree. I looked at my soldiers strewn about, the wounded from my battle, the ones that Auntie's broom had scattered far and wide. Only the nutcracker men, deep in their trenches, were still where I'd left them. They had their backs toward me, their bayonets raised. Those are very special soldiers, those, my father had said. Mr. Tuttle had told me that they were almost alive. And who had said they had souls?

  I found an old beechnut, softened by rain, and threw it at the little Germans. They were only wood, I told myself. That was all they were, just wood.

  I threw another nut. It bounced over no-man's-land. I thought of the broken Pierre, shattered by a shell. I could see the pebble that marked his grave, and beyond it the ambulance that had come in the post as though to fetch him from the battlefield. I remembered my sleeping man, and the terrible shelter that my real dad had found during a trench raid that was so much like mine. A prickly feeling shot through me.

  Suddenly the garden seemed haunted by all the things that I'd done, by the battles that I'd fought. I heard the patter of machine guns and the boom of muddy shells, the clear call of my little brass whistle. I heard Sarah shouting, her father laughing. Then I saw him in France. I saw him raising his hands as he heard the shell coming down. He must have known, for an instant, that it would land right beside him. He must have known that it would splatter him into pieces.

  The prickly feeling got worse. I closed my eyes, but I couldn't shut out that picture of Sarah's dad as the shell came screaming down.

  “They're only wood!” I shouted.

  I crawled across the battlefield, searching for the little man with his tiny rifle. I picked up the soldiers one by one, pulling them from craters, from the roots of the tree. One was half buried, another head down in a puddle. My dad was wrapped up in the wire, a big coil of the string twisted around him, like a thing that a spider had caught.

  Nearly all his paint was gone, and the little knothole in his chest looked bigger and darker. The split was a tiny bit wider, a tiny bit longer. The dugout I'd made him was ruined, destroyed by the shelling or by Auntie's broom. So I put him into the trench with the others.

  “He's all right,” said the bellowing sergeant.

  But deep in my heart I was afraid for my dad.

  CHAPTER 13

  December 13, 1914

  Dearest Johnny,

  Just a very quick note to let you know that I'm thinking about you always. If anything should happen to me, and for some reason I don't get back to see you for a long, long time, then I want you to remember that I think the whole world of you, son.

  Of course you don't know this, but many nights when you were young I stood in your doorway and watched you sleep. I tried to imagine what you would be like as a man. I tried to think what you would look like and where you would live and what sort of fellow you would be. But try as I might, I could never see you as anything more than a boy.

  Well, last night I dreamed of you as a man. You were standing above me, looking down at the spot where I was lying. I had been lying there for a long time, and I understood that you had come to visit several times. I knew that you were successful and happy, that you had a wife and children of your own. I ached to reach up and touch your hand, to tell you not to cry at the thought of me lying there under the ground.

  Oh, Johnny, I just want to tell you how terribly proud I am to be your father. I love you more than words can say.
/>   Enclosed is a soldier with a shovel. It's his job to see that we're comfortable in the end.

  Bless you, Johnny. Don't ever forget how much I love you.

  Dad

  The letter came in a special green envelope covered with postage marks. There was a note on the front that Dad had signed, saying it contained nothing but private matters.

  Auntie tore it open. Right away the soldier tumbled out, the shovel in his hands. We thought he was digging trenches. We thought it was maybe my father, working through his period of rest. Then Auntie read the letter, and her voice grew fainter and fainter, until I barely heard the ending.

  I stared at the soldier, at the shovel in his hands. He wasn't digging, but the blade was in the ground, and he was leaning on the handle. His head was bent down, and he looked terribly sad, all hunched at the shoulders.

  Auntie Ivy looked at him, then burst into tears.

  I went out to a garden that was still covered with soldiers. They lay on their sides and their backs and their bellies, a scene of slaughter that I would have loved at one time, but that now only shocked me.

  I tried to pretend that my new man was just digging out trenches. He went to work with my other shoveling man, clearing the rubble from my battle. “Give us room,” he shouted. “Fritz has made a proper mess of everything here.”

  But he leaned on his shovel, and I couldn't forget that he was really a grave digger. I moved him to the rear trenches, then farther back again. I moved him so far from the battle that he might have been in England.

  Then I brought up the ambulance. It drove through the scattered men, stopping here and there as I piled the soldiers on top. I drove by mistake right over the messman, who tipped on his side, his arm reaching up. Again the ambulance stopped, but there was no more room on the roof.

  “Never mind him,” said the driver. “That one's a goner.”

  He started off; the motor puttered. He was nearly at Charing Cross when I heard the ring of a bicycle bell. It brought my head up with a start, that sound like the telegraph machine. My ambulance tipped over, spilling my soldiers.