Captain

by Sam Angus

  Dolly! With Pirate trotting at her side, pressing against his mother, she gazing into the middle distance in her customary way. I flung myself into the press of the crowd, thrusting Caesar’s reins into the nearest hands. I looked up at the boy, then took Dolly’s nose rope, rubbed her bearded chin, opened my palm to her slavery lips and blew into her nostrils. She bowed her head a little to my palm, and took the bunch of grapes in one slobbery go. The young Arab boy smiled at me.

  “Good camel, very good, very fast she-camel,” he said.

  “She was mine,” I answered, and there was a pleading in my voice. “Dates,” I said. “She likes dates…”

  His face opened into a broad white smile as he fished inside his tunic, pulling out a fistful of sticky dates wrapped in newspaper.

  “I know,” he said. “Camel love dates.”

  I fed the dates and newspaper to Dolly, tears on my cheeks as I felt the rasp of her tongue on my palm and saw her great yellow teeth. The boy smiled once more, popped a date into his own mouth, and grinning fired a thundering feu de joie up between the narrow walls, then tapped Dolly onwards with his stick.

  I was alone, hollowed out, a chasm between me and the shrieking, clinging mob. After a long while, I retrieved Caesar, his muzzle gluey with peach juice and cake.

  Weightless as a shadow, I threaded my way through the ancient dreamlike streets, a lonely figure made of dust moving silently through a crowd. I was better suited to the desert, the bustle and the chanting and the singing was too vulgar, too vivid, too sharp and strident.

  The fever had been in me for a while, but that night in Damascus it got me fully in its grip, flooding my veins and squeezing the strength from me. After six hundred miles of dirt and thirst and hunger, of snakes and scorpions and shrapnel, I was too dead-tired to fight the poison—either that or it was all the vigor and the life of the living that twisted a blade in me: their crying and singing, and all the fact of so many living, when gentle Captain, gentle Hey-Ho were not.

  * * *

  In my left arm was a splinter of metal, a sliver too slender to do much harm, only the sepsis of the wound was troublesome. They put me between crisp sheets, where breezes flitted across my damp face. I’d start and clutch with fear at the throbbing in my arm as if I might find it gone, blown off. I was sick in body and spirit, my dreams jagged, my memories twisting and whipping, screaming, scraping things, unbearable as the constant scratch of metal against a raw nerve.

  At some point the splinter and septic flesh were cut out, but the fever still raged and I stayed between the whitewashed walls and the wafting breeze.

  One day Straker was there in the corridor talking to Nurse. He came in to me.

  “The fever’s gone,” he said. “Nurse says it’s gone.”

  I turned aside.

  “I need you to attend a ceremony. Nurse says you can go.”

  I didn’t answer, not wanting to go to ceremonies or anywhere.

  “You and I,” he said. “We’re all that’s left.” I felt the hesitation in his friendly hand and convivial tone, saw the wariness in his eyes as he studied me.

  “Why not Firkins?” I asked.

  “The dysentery got him.” Straker turned to the acacia tree outside the window. “And Sparrow,” he said.

  “Captain?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  “Look, Bayliss, I don’t think there’s any hope. You must forget what happened out there in the desert. For your own sake, please forget.”

  Later, when he led me through the scented streets of the bazaar, with its endless hawking and selling of things, he explained my duties: I was to stand behind his chair and take notes. New boundaries would be discussed, new empires drawn up, a new world established. I stood like a shadow amidst all the toing and froing of carts and vendors, the noise of the street crowding me till I felt I might scream at the horror of so much life all still going on. The Major’s arm tightened round my shoulder as he steered me through the crowd, described the format for the evening, ran through my duties once more.

  “It’s right you should be with me, Billy,” he said again. “We were both there from the start…”

  Somewhere, someone shouted. There was the lash of a whip.

  “They have their ancient city back, and their ancient ways,” he said, and the lines of his mouth were grim and firm. The whip cracked again, and his eyes flickered towards the sound, then flickered back to me. No horseman likes the sound of a whip. I thought of Liza and Mother and what they thought of the Arabs and their ways. The whip was lashed again. This time we both turned. Caked with dirt and dung, the crisscross lacerations on his skin thick with flies, the animal limped on two aching paces, then stopped and hung his nose to the ground. I turned away. Straker’s eyes stayed there, then shot back to me.

  “Come, Bayliss,” he said quickly, taking me and turning me.

  At the door of the town hall, I heard the Syrian driver crack his whip again, and I winced, as if it were meant for me, as if the skin of my own back were slashed at the stroke of it. The donkey squealed. Straker didn’t turn. He looked instead, pointlessly, at the watch on his wrist.

  “Come on.”

  His hand reached out to mine.

  “Bayliss, we’ll be late.” His voice was strung taut as wire. Steering me round, he adjusted the collar of my tunic as though I were a child. He led me through a palmy courtyard where the breeze played through the fronds and through the white high-ceilinged rooms. Coffee and grapes and sweetmeats lay on silver platters.

  Later, we soldier servants stood around a glittering table; seated at it were the masterminds of the most perfect campaign in cavalry history. Crystal clinked, the chandeliers glittered on candlelit faces, and rich wine flowed. They talked of boundaries being drawn, of the creation of Palestine, of armistice, ranks and honors, politics, diplomacy, and promotions. Troops would be moved from here to there, provisions from here to there, camels from here to there, munitions from here to … somewhere. I stood in the candle shadows, behind Straker, hearing the smooth talk as thick and distorted as if through fog or water.

  Firkins. Tandy. Merriman. Robins. Spade. Beasley. Merrick. Farmer. Skerret. Hadley. Carter. Sparrow.

  All the men who lie under a packing-crate cross in the stone of Gallipoli, the Yeomen of Worcestershire whose rich blood will forever water the dry sand of Sinai—they weren’t there.

  Captain.

  The gap where Captain should be beckoned and gaped, dark and vacant as an abyss into which I might fall and sink.

  Sixty thousand camels must be dealt with. They’d be sent to India. All troops would be transported home, but there’d be no transport for horses, each and every one to be sold to the Egyptians. The horses who’d carried us as we slept in our saddles, whose gait had been the rhythm of our days and nights.

  When we stepped out into the great square, the Major was silent. We headed through the narrow streets, and the selling and all the business of the Arab world that is never ending, walking side by side in silence. A horse, closely hobbled, stood at a corner, eyes clustered with flies, panniers laden with brushwood. We remained there a while beside that horse till the Major said, “We’ve orders to move on to Cairo.”

  “No,” I said. “No more, I’m through…”

  “Bayliss,” he said, catching my shoulder. “Billy…”

  I turned away.

  “There are ghosts.” I was wild and pleading. “Everywhere I look, I see Captain. I see him in the streets, at every corner, then I see him again in—in the night…”

  Straker tried to take my hand.

  “Billy, it wasn’t your fault, what happened.”

  I shook him off.

  “Tell me where he is. Where did they take him?”

  “I don’t know…” He shook his head sadly. “No one seems to know. There’re no records…”

  * * *

  After that, the fever in me blew up once again, frantic and billowing. Weak already, I fell ill with the dysent
ery that had taken so many others. I was moved to a different hospital, sent by train to Cairo.

  A new nurse read from the paper of a treaty signed at Lemnos, an armistice between Britain and Turkey. She said Bulgaria was out of the game, Austria was begging for peace, Germany disintegrating. Thirteen days later Aleppo was taken, and hostilities with Germany had ceased.

  “Three years,” Nurse said. “It’s three years since Gallipoli and now you’ve taken Jerusalem, Damascus, Aleppo, Baghdad…”

  Somewhere a barrel organ and pianola played. The jacaranda outside my window was in bloom. Another voice answered her, an orderly perhaps.

  “He’s so young.”

  “We both were,” I whispered, looking away. “He was only fourteen at Gallipoli.”

  They ignored me, spoke over me as they tucked in the fresh sheet.

  “So many,” said Nurse, “but none so young.”

  I turned my hot cheek to the cool pillow. We’d been just boys …

  “He screams in his sleep and covers his eyes,” she said. “I can’t make any sense of him.”

  * * *

  Later Nurse read to me from an English newspaper. There was a new mayor in London, a race meeting at Newmarket, trouble for the coal masters. All the tiny things of England, and all its dappled light, were paraded before me, till I could see Mother at the breakfast table, the green-and-white crockery, Liza by the apple tree with Trumpet. Nurse read a new report too, on Gallipoli, but I wasn’t listening.

  Probably Liza was a grown woman now, perhaps she never went anymore to see Trumpet in his field.

  Tears streamed down my cheeks.

  “You’ll soon be going home,” Nurse said brightly. “First to arrive will be first to leave. A shipload of you, battalion strength, and a brass band playing you home to Dover.”

  “He had no home,” I said. “Captain had no home to go to.”

  She put the paper down as a visitor entered the room.

  Major Straker.

  “Visitors have five minutes only, please. He’s still delicate and mustn’t be excited.”

  “What I have to tell him won’t help, then.” Straker’s voice was hard and grim.

  “Captain? Captain? What’s happened? Tell me…”

  He shook his head.

  “The horses. It’s been confirmed,” he said, and his head was bowed. “About the horses. They all go, twenty thousand of them, all sold to the Gyppies…” He raised his head. “I can’t do that, Billy, we can’t—we can’t leave them here.”

  He put a light coat over my shoulders and drove me out to the horse lines.

  “We have no choice, we can’t leave them here to be ill-treated,” he said to me in the motor.

  “Captain?” I asked again. “Do you not know anything at all? Tell me. Tell me what you know.”

  “I don’t know any more than you do. No record of him in the wounded, no record of him in the dead. I tried to trace the name ‘Captain’—tried to trace the name ‘Benjamin’—but the hospitals are bursting—there’re men on the floor, in the gardens, the corridors, and not enough staff to cope, and a boy—underage”—and with that he looked at me sharply—“with no surname that we know, not in the regular Army—he’s just not a priority…” Straker smiled then sadly, and looked at me, and said, “Billy—Bayliss—if he is alive, I promise, God forgive me, I promise there will always be a place for him on any boat that takes the Yeomen home.” And we were both thinking of that last night at Suvla, and remembering.

  “Help me find him, sir,” I said. “If he’s here … help me find him.”

  He shook his head.

  “Later, Bayliss, first this…”

  We drew up. The Major turned the engine off, bowed his head a minute or two, then lifted it slowly.

  I followed him, blind and numb, to the horse lines. He untethered his mare, while I stood there, blank, doing nothing. He looked at me, then untethered Caesar, too, and led them to the water. While they dipped their noble heads and drank a long draft of cool, sweet water, Straker handed me a pistol and some lumps of sugar from his pocket.

  I held the pistol in my hands, staring at it. I looked out across the acres of sand and down again at the pistol.

  Caesar lifted his head from the trough. We didn’t ride them, nor did we even bridle them. They walked at our sides towards the palms. The Major-General turned his head as we passed and nodded gently. On the edge of the palm grove, Straker nodded to me to wait, while he took his mare on ahead a little way. I waited, head bowed, unresolved and numb, weightless and tenuous as a shadow.

  Caesar started at the shot that killed Straker’s mare. He’d never flinched at fire before and I was shaken, almost, from the insensible, bodiless torpor I was in by his rearing and squealing; but I saw the Major’s harrowed face, I saw too that he was waiting for me. I tied Caesar’s old headrope to a palm and stepped away.

  I thought of Liza and her letters. Could I go home and tell Liza I’d left a good Worcestershire horse here? There was no grass, not a single primrose in the whole of Arabia. “I will do this for Liza and this will be the last shot I ever fire. I will never again hold a gun,” I said to myself.

  I raised my right arm and levelled it and tried to find some shard of ice within myself.

  “Billy—sir!”

  My hand stayed there, arm levelled, my finger on the trigger.

  “No! Sir, no!”

  I heard those words and I thought they were Pimm’s. I thought it was Pimm again, calling out to me in a dark and teeming desert night, where branches moved and leaves flickered and there were sharpened blades in every bush. My trigger finger began to tremble, my arm was shaking violently, the whole of me quaking.

  “Sir! No!”

  The voice wasn’t Pimm’s. It was the madness in my brain that made me think it was Pimm, that and the poison in my veins, and the ghosts that were around me at all hours. I kept that pistol raised, kept my arm level, but I crumpled and cowered and covered my eyes and wept.

  “Sir…”

  My fingers were uncurled one by one, gently, from the handle of that pistol, then my forefinger from the trigger, and the pistol fell to the sand.

  “You are not all right, sir.”

  I opened my eyes. A pair of bare feet stood in the fine white Egyptian sand. And that sand—every grain of it glistened and glittered and refracted the rosy apple of the setting sun. I lifted my eyes slowly upward.

  Captain.

  “Sir…,” he said.

  The sky was as soft and warm as the sky over Bredicot at sundown.

  “Billy,” I answered. “Just Billy.”

  Almost in the very spot where I’d first seen him, stood Captain. The palm fronds rustled above him.

  “Billy,” he said, smiling. In his hand was a fistful of grapes and his arm was extended to Caesar, who whinnied for joy at the scent of them. Captain no longer wore British service dress, but on the collar of his shirt was a military medal, and beside it a tattered and faded rosette.

  “I have been waiting a long time,” he said. “I have been waiting here because I knew, sooner or later, you would come to the horses. You always go to the horses when you are sad, Billy, and I knew you would come.”

  “Thank God,” I said. “Thank God.”

  He put a hand to his chest. “I am all right. It is all right. The English doctors are good.”

  “Hey-Ho…,” I began, but I could not go on, and I dropped my head in shame.

  “Hey-Ho was old, Billy, old and tired. He had come a long way, he had a long life and he was with you, he was walking beside a friend.”

  AFTERWORD

  THE MORNING ROOM AT BREDICOT, 1919

  I found a bundle of letters, neatly ribboned, at the back of a drawer of Mother’s desk, the paper torn from a notebook, and covered in Straker’s precise hand. Mother and Liza knew all along, you see, that I had a friendly eye on me.

  Reggie Straker came by today with a gift from the Yeomen of Worcestershire. Mother told
him that having four boys—four men—she’d smiled at me—in the house was no worse than three. Geordie looked frightfully puffed up at being called a man. When Liza nagged at Straker for leaving good Worcestershire horses alone in Egypt, he bowed his head. Mother changed the subject and said it was at least a relief we hadn’t brought the camels back, as it might be a trouble to have a camel about the place, and I smiled to think what short work Dolly would make of her roses and her tapestries.

  Liza is making pancakes. Captain is in the field outside the window with the cow parsley and the primroses all about. In a corner of the field, Trumpet and Caesar stand together. Mother, you see, took a dim view of the way the Army treated those horses after the war, and she sent Liza to Cairo to fetch Caesar back. Captain is amazed there are so few donkeys in Worcestershire. But when Straker came today, he brought one donkey with him to Bredicot. The donkey stands quietly on lollipop legs, a burden three times his bulk on his back. His cans do not clank and rattle. His gusty, smiling bark is silent. With Straker too came a camel, which stands beside the donkey. She doesn’t slaver and spit or go about any of her customary skullduggery in the mule lines.

  There they will be forever, side by side on the mantel, looking east, each as ancient and biblical as the other: the stout-hearted donkey and the crabby, crotchety camel.

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Sam Angus grew up in Spain. She studied literature at Trinity College in Cambridge and taught English before becoming a ski wear designer. She’s also the author of Soldier Dog and A Horse Called Hero. She divides her time between London and Exmoor with her children, horses, and dogs. You can sign up for email updates here.

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