Soldiers

by Tom Remiger

  ‘I know what you mean. They’d be a distraction from our duties.’ Sinclair had picked up the phrase somewhere. They were in for weeks of it. He would bring out a particular phrase at any vaguely apposite moment until he grew tired of it and it was never heard again.

  Now Breen took the letter out of its envelope, unfolded it, and looked at it. He shrugged and put the letter down on top of the pile of disturbed books. He found a bit of blank paper, folded it in the same way as the letter, and placed it in the envelope. He licked the flap of the envelope and sealed it. He took a new envelope, copied the address of Cousins’ brother onto the front, placed the letter inside it and put it back in its hiding place inside The God of the Labyrinth. Then he took the original envelope and went out of his cabin.

  Sinclair led Breen and Tiger aft. They looked out at the immensities of ocean, the heaving ships as far as they could see.

  ‘I think, in the circumstances,’ said the captain, ‘we can ignore the regulations about leaving litter to trace our passage.’

  He held out his hand. Breen passed him the sealed envelope and Tiger handed over the rough copy. The captain held them both in his open hand for a moment. Then he tore them, still together, into pieces, scrunched their mingled remains into balls, and threw them into the Atlantic.

  ‘That,’ he said, ‘is the end of that.’

  Breen tried to talk about it with Morrie the quartermaster that night. He didn’t say what they had done, but admitted that he was still worried about Cousins’ death; he wanted to understand why.

  ‘It doesn’t seem worth it,’ said Morrie, ‘worrying about one man who was silly enough to get himself killed, accidentally or deliberately, when, you know, there’s a bloody war on. There’s men dying everywhere; some of our lot will be dying soon enough. You’ll only stir up trouble playing detective about something you’ll never sort out, anyhow.’

  ‘There’s nothing to sort out,’ said Bluey, next to them at the table. ‘It’s obvious what happened. He thought it was blanks, and that he’d fuck up the exercise and have a laugh at everyone. That’s what he was like, cocky bastard that he was.’

  In support of this theory, he told a story he thought was much funnier than it was, about the time he had been creeping back to the house the company had been billeted in, well after hours, and found Cousins in front of him doing the same thing.

  ‘Take your bloody boots off, mate,’ Cousins had said. ‘Do you want a bloody officer to hear?’

  ‘And I’m there shitting myself,’ said Bluey, ‘about what I’d say when he saw it was me, until I hear him laughing away to himself in the dark. Once he’d said that, there was no bloody way I could pull him up on it, was there?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s that obvious, and it’s a man’s life,’ said Breen.

  ‘If he was enough of an idiot not to listen to what everyone told him,’ began Bluey.

  Morrie interrupted him. ‘He’s dead already. What you want is the truth about why, right?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Breen. ‘The truth.’

  ‘The truth doesn’t matter,’ said Morrie. ‘Best platoon yet!’

  He was referring to a route march before they left England. They saw a staff car tucked under the trees. General Freyberg was standing beside it to examine each platoon as it passed.

  The platoons had been widely dispersed because of the danger always hanging in the air. Breen’s platoon was tired. His feet were blistered and he was hungover. And then the general looked at him and at them. In his inimitable voice—high-pitched, very English, surprising from such a large and ruddy man—he had announced loudly to his ADC, such that it was obvious that the platoon was meant to hear it, ‘Best platoon yet!’

  Sergeant Gibson, a long-suffering man, maintained that when the general saw Breen’s turnout, he blanched. Breen always struggled with his uniform. But the general recovered. ‘Pugnacious!’ he declared, with obvious relish for the word. The effect was brilliantly done: the platoon went along at a fair old clip for the last mile of the march.

  And then, as the general must have known they would, they compared notes with the other platoons. It turned out that every platoon had heard the same praise, except for the first, which had the distinction of being the finest platoon the general had ever seen in this war.

  Baird, the adjutant, began to develop a party trick in which he gave an imitation of the general’s declarations, his pipe wobbling. He would keep it up for years, through Egypt and Greece and Crete and Libya and Syria and Tunisia and Italy, until he broke both his legs when a car went off the side of the road. Through him, the story became part of the lore of the battalion. Each time it was told, Breen would think himself a little more pugnacious and how considerate the general was to tell a white lie and make the last mile of an unpleasant march that little bit easier.

  Breen would always remain uncertain whether the general knew the effect he would have. But it relied on their bonds together, a community of mocking-tongued men. As his best infantry brigadier said a year or two later, the man was as innocent as a child and as cunning as a Maori dog.

  The same might have been said of the captain. Perhaps even then Breen was beginning to suspect. There had been a needless drama to his gesture in throwing the scraps of paper overboard. Perhaps Breen had already guessed what was driving Sinclair like the wind. You don’t know, but you can’t ever look back and forget.

  8

  The voyage was two months of Sunday afternoons. The men tried to dodge boredom however they could: Breen, Morrie, and Sinclair tried to learn some Italian. Father Emmet was their tutor. He had spent years at one of the pontifical universities.

  ‘It’ll come in handy when we march on Rome,’ said Morrie one actual Sunday afternoon. ‘For fraternising with the contessas.’ They were in a room crowded with officers. Tiger was reading what looked like a lurid detective story; the colonel was drinking tea.

  ‘The only contessa I ever met,’ Father Emmet said, ‘was a nun. Then again, a vow of poverty isn’t that difficult if you’re already poor, and she was. So there you are.’ He leaned back in his chair and drank his beer with evident enjoyment.

  ‘Ah,’ said Morrie, ‘but our uniform might be better for attracting the girls than yours would have been.’ He had shaved off his moustache the day they left; he said this was his chance to remember how he looked without any women to judge him if it turned out badly. Now he was growing it back again.

  ‘Your man Kelly almost put me off the girls for life,’ said Breen.

  Father Kelly, little-glassed and soft-voiced, ran the seminary back in Mosgiel. Every time Breen had walked out with a girl in his university days, Father Kelly’s Vauxhall seemed to be driving down the same street. From behind the back window there would be a flash of glasses. The car would purr to a stop, and the passenger-side window would roll down. Whichever seminarian was driving Father Kelly would look straight ahead. There would be enquiries about mothers and cousins. The girl would giggle nervously by a lamp post, and Breen would begin to sweat.

  ‘He meant well,’ said Father Emmet.

  ‘He was worse than the Gestapo,’ said Breen. ‘There was one ghastly occasion when he turned up at my flat to take me out for a cup of tea. He tried to tell me that socialism and Christianity were not incompatible, and the whole time all I could wonder was who it was had dobbed me in. I’d only been to my first meeting the night before.’

  ‘Meeting?’ asked Morrie.

  ‘The Spanish Medical Aid Committee. MacLure’s lot. He knew everything.’

  ‘He only really bothered me once, when I was at boarding school up there,’ said Sinclair. ‘I was probably a better boy than you. He tried to convince me that I had a vocation.’

  ‘Who did?’ Breen was lost.

  ‘Father Kelly. He knew a cousin of mine quite well. One of his underlings. He must have talked.’ The captain paused. His face was expressive. ‘It was the way he went about it, you see. These delicate hints about a different way to live.
I couldn’t stand it.’

  ‘You can’t blame him for trying,’ said Father Emmet. ‘You must have been at school together, then?’

  ‘I was only in Dunedin for university,’ said Breen.

  There was a silence. The captain seemed to want to say something but was constrained by politeness.

  Breen leapt in. ‘Do you think we have a duty to the dead?’

  Sinclair looked at him.

  ‘To keep fighting?’ asked Morrie. ‘Failing hands and torches and all that?’

  ‘Not exactly. Even if it wouldn’t change anything to know something about them, but whatever it is ought to be discovered.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Father Emmet.

  ‘There was a man in my company who killed himself, or might have done, in England. I think someone was making his life miserable, but I don’t know who it was.’

  ‘There are two reasons for further inquiry,’ said Father Emmet. ‘You might look to find the exact circumstances to prevent their recurrence, and you might want to help the man responsible. He must feel remorse, and it must be lonely. But I don’t think you can say, exactly, that it would benefit the dead man to know more. You have a duty to those around him, but the dead—let the dead bury the dead.’

  ‘I never really understood that,’ Breen said. ‘It doesn’t seem in Jesus’ character.’

  ‘If we knew how to explain everything about Jesus,’ said Father Emmet, ‘we would know everything in the world.’

  ‘If we should love one another—’ said Sinclair, beginning a thought.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Never mind.’

  But Father Emmet had no sense of shame. ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘that love requires forgiveness, because all of us are imperfect. And you might say that knowledge is necessary for forgiveness: a kind of exorcism. Once we know, we can forgive. But I think that must only apply to the sin, not the sinner. If we know that something occurred, we need not know who did it.’

  ‘We’ve possibly moved away a little from irregular verbs,’ said Morrie.

  Breen talked a little more about Cousins with Father Emmet. At first, Emmet seemed willing enough to discuss it. Cousins, like Breen—or, for that matter, Sinclair and Tiger—was Catholic, at least in the way that treats religion as a matter of identity rather than belief.

  Father Emmet was quite obviously worried about someone technically under his spiritual care committing suicide. He wanted to be able to recognise the future signs; and maybe there was something more prurient in his interest. ‘Sin,’ as he said, ‘has a glamour to it.’

  Then, a few days later, Father Emmet raised a hand as Breen began to speak of it again.

  ‘I can’t talk about this anymore.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s becoming an obsession with you, and you haven’t any reason to think it wasn’t an accident. Just let it be. You can’t ever know, or conclude, anything. You have to consider the living and not distract yourself by speculating about the dead.’

  Breen was hurt. ‘That—I’m sorry, but it doesn’t seem the way to think.’

  ‘Not the Christian way, you mean? Let the dead bury the dead, Bosky.’

  ‘I just feel that we’re missing something.’

  ‘You can keep puzzling yourself about it; I won’t discourage you. But I won’t talk about it anymore. It’s not healthy. I distrust your motives.’

  Breen tried to talk about Cousins a bit less. It was best to end it, to wash his hands of the matter.

  He thought of when he was a child. His mother and her sisters gossiping away in the comfortable warmth of the kitchen; the men in the other room with a bottle of something, drifting lines of blue smoke from their cigarettes; and him sitting there disregarded, shelling peas or peeling potatoes.

  ‘But of course, she would say that,’ an aunt would say.

  ‘She never,’ his mother would reply.

  ‘She did.’

  9

  Morrie got promoted. The captain heard he was going to keep his post. The officers of the battalion had themselves a bit of a party.

  Tiger thought more of his ability to handle his liquor than he should have done. One of the doctors aboard—an old boy of Auckland Grammar—gave a funeral oration over his recumbent body. Bluey staggered while he gave a parody of Mark Antony in response, labelling the officers crammed into the cabin all dishonourable men, then tripped over Tiger’s legs as he made for the porthole.

  Sinclair, a little after that unlucky moment, paused while walking past the cabin. ‘Hadn’t you better shut that porthole?’

  ‘She’ll be right. We’ll close it in a minute,’ said Baird. ‘What was Bluey supposed to do?’

  ‘Not drink so much, perhaps,’ said the captain.

  ‘There’s no harm in it.’

  ‘There is if a submarine saw it. Like a bloody lighthouse.’

  ‘That’s not exactly likely, is it?’

  ‘I put a man on a charge for it today, anyway.’

  ‘Sir,’ said Breen, ‘perhaps it’s best to leave this for Baird to sort out, and go on to your cabin.’ He tried to make the man read his thoughts: there’s no need for you to make another enemy.

  Sinclair continued to stand in the doorway, meekly now, but unable to give way, a hulk of a man. The implication of his response was changed, but not the response itself.

  ‘You’d best be going,’ said Baird. ‘I’ll call in on you tomorrow, if I may.’

  ‘I should be very pleased,’ said the captain, retreating.

  Bluey turned the conversation. They talked of other things, lubricated by whisky and made aromatic by tobacco. All the good books were gone out of the library and there were only tales of the sea left. Breen’s memory blurred. He remembered going outside to vomit.

  Tiger, palely recovered, went out with him as he went for the big throw. This is what Breen remembered: the tip of Tiger’s cigarette red up there, his own hair quivering down over his forehead—and the sound of Tiger inhaling with pleasure into salt-cleared lungs. He kept puking his guts out, a stream of gin-flavoured half-digested pie, and Tiger kept sucking on his cigarette in silence, while Breen’s consciousness flashed in and out like a series of slides flicking through a projector, props to a lecture he couldn’t hear. The glowing end of Tiger’s cigarette seemed to move from his lips to his hand without any intervention, a demonstration of some principle Breen couldn’t understand.

  The next day Breen was in the smoking lounge, talking with the padre about Aquinas, his hangover piping away behind his eyes in the place the army didn’t own.

  The captain arrived, and ignored the priest, and the crowded tables about them. ‘So Deep Is the Night’ was going on the record player. ‘Why didn’t I get invited to the bloody party, then?’

  Father Emmet had been at the party as well, drinking beer instead of gin. He had all the jauntiness of a chaplain, and the corresponding anxiety about being dismissed as a god-botherer. So he talked amusingly wherever he found himself, and found himself as a result in unexpected places. Now he sat contemplative and still.

  A year or two later Sinclair would see him at an RAP, waiting for the dying, with the same expression of a pietà. He would go through it longer than most of them, until his truck was blown up by shellfire in Italy and he went home with holes in his legs and the smell of his driver’s blood in his nostrils.

  ‘There weren’t exactly invitations as such,’ said Breen. ‘I suppose it was more that we all just heard about it. You would have been welcome, sir, I know you would.’

  ‘Next time,’ said the captain plaintively, ‘you ought to tell me. Could you, personally, do that?’

  ‘I can do that, sir,’ said Breen. He normally, in the easy atmosphere of the smoking lounge, neglected to append the sir, but perhaps the captain needed it now.

  ‘Watch yourself,’ said Father Emmet to Breen as the captain walked away. They didn’t talk of it again.

  Breen had most of a bottle of gin left o
ver. He took it to Sinclair’s cabin as a peace offering. Somehow they got far drunker than Breen had intended. He woke up to find himself in bed, trousers off and Sinclair pressed up against him.

  There was a vague memory of telling one another it was too risky to walk back; what if he’d gone overboard, eh?

  ‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘Fuck fuck fuck.’

  He slipped away in the night, conscious of his empty bed in the shared cabin.

  He thought to himself: no harm done, at least. Somehow he managed to smile about it.

  ‘Got yourself drunk?’ asked a voice from a warm bed.

  ‘You know it.’

  It took a long time for Breen to make up his mind about what to do with the hidden letter. It still felt wrong to deny Cousins’ family his last piece of communication. And, after all, the accident had been proven to be an accident; no one could argue with that.

  It was Father Emmet who decided him. On 6 February 1941, a few days out from Cape Town, they were celebrating the Treaty of Waitangi. A secret store of muttonbirds had been extracted and there was a special issue of beer. They were talking about a new novel Father Emmet had lent to Breen, about a whisky priest in Mexico. ‘It’s the anniversary of a martyr in Mexico, actually,’ said Emmet. ‘About twenty years ago in Valparaíso. He administered the sacrament of confession to some prisoners and then was shot because he wouldn’t reveal what they had confessed. I try to remember to pray for him.’

  Later he talked about love. He said the word in English was too capacious; it contained too much. ‘When they were training me up in moral theology,’ he said, ‘these are the words they used for love: eros, storge, philia, agape. Eros is romantic. Storge—that one’s a bit fuzzier. It’s the love within families. Philia is what you feel about the boys standing beside you at the wire. Agape is what God feels for you and for the Germans on the other side of the valley, the sort of universal love we try to have and mostly don’t manage.’