by Gerald Kersh
From an unknown distance, a flat, sore-sounding bugle blows a melancholy call of unknown significance. From different distances other bugles pick it up. The notes blend. They combine in a strange, sad discord … a rich weeping of vibrant brass. Then, right under the window, a little grim boy puts a bugle to his lips, puffs his cheeks, and blows. The red, yellow, and blue tassels on his coppery bugle hardly stir. A gathered flush empties out of his neck and face, into the mouthpiece, round the coil, and out in a great trembling note. He sounds the call again. Two scared swallows flutter from the roof. Simultaneously, a flat loud-mouthed bell in the clock tower clangs an hour; and sliding down a slanting wind comes a rattling volley of raindrops.
Somebody sighs. The man with Punch throws down the volume and yawns.
The bugle is our masters’ voice … and the swallows will go where the sun goes, and we shall be here under the treacherous English rain, kicking the soil into mud for our feet to slip in.
But all England is here.
*
We men in this Reception Station are unreserved, inessential.
Individually, we are necessary only to the tiny nooks and crannies of England into which life, like a wind carrying seed, has dropped us. We have our roots, of course, like all men. Pluck us up, and an empty space is left. But not for long. Without us things do not change. Only the appearance of things changes. Life moves differently, but still goes steadily on.
We lived our peacetime lives; worked, enjoyed things a little, suffered a little; built what we could, struggling, more often than not, for just enough bread and rest to give us strength to struggle with; made homes and supported them, turning sweat into milk for the babies. We were part of the mass of the British.
We are here. The things we lived for are behind us. All the personal importance of our own lives has been washed down in the gulf of the national emergency. Other hands were there to take up the tools we laid down. The machines still drone. The fires still roar. The potatoes still grow, and will be plucked when their time is ripe. Our work is behind us, still being done.
And we wait here, to be made into soldiers.
There is scarcely a man among us who did not volunteer.
How does this happen?
We come out of the period between 1904 and 1922—that wild waste of years, strewn with the rubble of smashed régimes. The oldest of us is thirty-six, Shorrocks of Rockbottom. The youngest is Bray, eighteen, of London. Those of us who are not old enough to remember the war-weariness of the century in its ’teens, are children of the reaction of the nineteen-twenties—when “No More War” was the war cry; and the League of Nations seemed more solid than the pipe-of-peace-dream that it was; and the younger generation—our own generation—was sworn to eternal non-belligerence in the face of the futility of war. We haven’t forgotten that. If only our own propagandists took a little of the blood and thunder that the peace propagandists so effectively used to move us!
From page after laid-out page, the horrors of war gibbered at us … stripped men, dead in attitudes of horrible abandon … people (were they men or women?) spoiled like fruit, indescribably torn up … shattered walls that had enclosed homes, homes like ours, homes of men, men like us … cathedrals shattered; the loving work of generations of craftsmen demolished like condemned slum tenements … children starving; nothing left of them but bloated bellies and staring eyes … trenches full of dead heroes rotting to high heaven … long files of men with bandaged eyes, hand-on-shoulder like convicts, blind with gas … civilians cursing God and dying in the muck-heaps of blasted towns….
Oh yes. We saw all the pictures and heard all the gruesome stories, which we know were true. We were the rich culture-grounds of the peace propaganda that said: If war was like this then, what will it be like next time, with all the sharpened wits of the death-chemists working on new poison gas and explosives, and the greatest engineers of all time devoting themselves to aeroplanes that can come down screaming like bats out of hell?
When we heard that first siren on the Sunday of the Declaration of War, things like damp spiders ran up and down our backs. We expected the worst.
And then came a flow of something hot and strong. We went out and begged to be allowed to fight Jerry. We insisted on our right to do so, and to hell with the age groups. Men of sixty, who had seen the things at the pictures of which we had lost our breakfasts, and who had spent twenty post-war and pre-war years saying: “Never again,” declared on oath that they were forty and beseeched the authorities to give them rifles. There was a rush and a heave. Because it wouldn’t take us all at once, we cursed the War Office from hell to breakfast.
Men like Shorrocks, who had argued the futility of all war in his grocery shop in Rockbottom (cotton and coal; pop., 21,369; near Black-burn; finest town on earth), did a volte-face like the pirouette of a ballet-dancer. (I say nothing of his mulish insistence that Britain, being an island, had no concern in the affairs of Europe; nor of the imbecile satisfaction he seemed to suck out of the statement that there had always been an England and always would be. That Shorrocks, in his fossil-ivory tower!) He left the business to his wife, clapped on his durable bowler hat, and, arguing about nothing for fifteen minutes with an old sweat in the Recruiting Station, passed A1 and got his fifteen stone of maddening self-assertion into the Coldstream Guards.
It is what they call “Being there when the bugle blows.” He sits by the window on a little collapsible iron bed, filling a pipe with Sidebotham’s Unscented Cut Plug which, in the tone of a man who stands by some ultimate and glorious truth, he declares to be the finest tobacco on earth. Let his neighbour, Whitaker of the West Riding, swear that Sidebotham’s is manure and there is nothing in the universe to touch Cooper’s Fragrant Twist at one-and-five an ounce. Shorrocks stands firm. Jut Sidebotham’s label on old bootlaces, and Shorrocks will smoke them and die in defence of them.
He is a big man. Assume that three of his fifteen stone are so much fat, food for worms. They will get that off him here, it is grimly hinted.
Meanwhile it fills his waistcoat, the good waistcoat of his everyday suit, which still has a year of wear in it. (The best suit—five pounds; no guineas; worth fifteen; made by Joe Hindle of Rockbottom, greatest tailor in Great Britain, one-time cutter to Jim Leach, finest tailor in the world, also of Rockbottom—hangs full of moth balls, ready for his homecoming. He will be back in one year. Germany will capitulate next spring. Who says so? He says so. Why? Because.)
All right. He will admit he has a few ounces of weight to lose. The Shorrockses eat well. You could not get Jack Shorrocks’ Agatha’s potato pie for ten shillings a portion at the Savoy Hotel, London—no, nor even at the Rockbottom Commercial Hotel. And he will say that, though careful with the brass, he begrudges nothing when it comes to food.
He knows what it is to go without. He doesn’t mind admitting that he worked in the Mill. He saw Boom and Slump; knew Cotton as King and as Beggar. A man must not be ashamed of anything in the way of honest work. When circumstances demanded it, he got a job labouring, and happy to get it. The whole point is, the children ate, had shoes, and never had a day’s illness. That’s little enough to brag about, but at the same time it’s something, he reckons. Well, gentlemen, he got together a pound here and a pound there, by going without everything except potatoes and sleep. He likes his grub but can go without it. He took a little shop, starting with a few packets of stuff on tick. Now he owes no man a farthing. It is a good business. It took him five years to make it what it is. He had a vast scheme for a mail-order business, a fair and square one on new lines, which, in another five years, might make Shorrocks as big as Sainsbury. He hasn’t the slightest doubt that Agatha, though the finest lass in the world, will ruin everything. Well … happen she will, happen she won’t. He’ll still have his own two hands—
—that is to say, given reasonable luck. He reckons that very few men lose both hands….
He sits, pink and stubborn, like a skinned bulldog. His expressi
on does not change. He has got his left-hand dog-teeth into the hole they have bitten through the stem of his pipe; pincers could not wrest it from his mouth before he chose to lay it down. Somebody asks him why he volunteered so soon. A year or two might pass before the thirty-sixes are called; and in that time a lot might happen….
“If we’ve to fight,” says Shorrocks, “let’s get it over and done wi’. Let’s get on wi’ it. I look at it lak this: it takes months to train a man. Ah. A year, eh? Ah. I reckon that year between now and t’ call-up o’ t’ thirty-sixes as eighteen months. Ah. Any’ow I don’t like foreigners gettin’ cheeky. So let’s get on wi’ it, and quick, too.”
His little blue eyes glitter as he talks, and he spits rather than puffs the smoke of his pipe. You agree with Shorrocks or you quarrel with him. He is a man of unyielding spirit. He loves England for one smoky dent in her wind-blasted northern moors—the unlovely valley of Rockbottom which reeks to the rainy sky.
The wars of all the world never moved a hair of his scanty eyebrows. He never gave a damn for all the Japs in China. He wanted only to be left alone.
In this he gets his way, in the end.
There were other Shorrockses, just like this one. They were the dawn-men of Britain. There is little doubt that they looked much the same; had the same stubborn, rosy, primeval English face; the same stalwart carriage; and talked something like the same language. If Shorrocks on the bed wants to “talk broad,” or lapse into Lancashire dialect, up pops the old Angle. He never yielded a thing—not even a phrase—to foreign influence!
The ancient Shorrocks went about his business in the same way and the same place when there was a bit of a Roman villa standing where the Jubilee Memorial Tower stands today. The Romans had come and gone. Shorrocks ploughed his land, and rose at dawn, and lay down at dark, and owed no man a farthing; kept a cautious eye on what came in and what went out, and cared not a rap for the heaving world. Yorkshire was a foreign land. Leicester was a traveller’s story. London was a legend. Soldiers were a pain; they ate and drank but grew no barley for bread and beer. Shorrocks was unimpressible. He wanted nothing. He had Rockbottom. He had a world.
And when they said that the wild men were coming from the north—giants with winged helmets, swordsmen in long boats—Shorrocks snorted and sniffed and called the panting newsmonger a Silly Fewel, and told him to be damned.
But when he smelt the smoke of something burning, and heard that the long boats were up the Ribble, Shorrocks put down his scythe and put on a steel cap—not unlike his best black bowler—and got down a buckler and honed up an axe, and told Gurth to look after the swine, and kissed his wife, and went out to do battle with the raiders. He fought like the pig-headed yeoman that he was, and is. In due course he came back; or didn’t come back. But he got what he gave himself for.
Rockbottom remained with the Shorrockses.
Snatch the cubs from under the she-wolf. Filch the kittens from the wildcat. Then try to take something that Shorrocks lay claim to—his wife, his child, his living, his prejudices; or England.
*
What is this strange stuff that runs in English veins? God knows, who shakes the cocktail of human blood. The English mixture is smooth and dangerous, always well iced, yet full of an insidious fire. Many elements go to make it. The English lay no claim to racial purity.
Racial purity! If blood were pure, man would still have no chin and walk on all fours. Even if there were unadulterated primeval blood, who would boast of it? A liquor might as well boast of being crude from the still. Rotgut might as reasonably vaunt its mad harshness over the gentle strength of a tempered liqueur.
The predominant English flavour is potent but bland, like good old blended whisky. You blend a whisky by balancing proportions of many different crude whiskies of various ages and qualities, until you happen upon something individual and of its kind perfect. In a blend, you mix the rough with the smooth, and so achieve a happy medium; power and sweetness.
Blood is like that, especially English blood, which of all the blood in the world is the most widely and subtly mixed.
Sometimes some ingredient predominates. Thurstan, for instance, although he has the national flavour, is a little too fiery. He is knockout drops, taken in immoderate quantities; best left alone. Shorrocks has the heavy, strong, fundamental stuff predominant in him—the Blend would be lost without it, but on its own it can become a shade monotonous.
Dale is one representative sample of the balanced whole—the decent Dale, who sits next to Shorrocks on the bed.
*
Dale is the Man In The Street if ever I saw one.
Abiding by all written and unwritten laws, right or wrong; adhering to all established beliefs, wise or foolish; patient as an ox, unopinionated as a spring lamb; moderate of appetite, diffident of manner—he looks at you with the clear, anxiously trusting eye of a child who has once or twice been unjustly punished. He is: he has: he is the English Man In The Street.
Dale is a Londoner. He was born in the black heart of that monstrous jungle of soot-eroded brick round Battle Bridge. Now, he has a home in Ilford, which, to him, is deep countryside; practically agricultural. He is a good, steady boy, married to his female counterpart who loves him and whom he loves. Their home is their own. They were saving up for a baby as for a piano when the War broke out. When they had so much put away, then they were going to have a family—for Dale loves to pay his way, and feels easy in his mind only as long as no man calls him debtor. He was happy on his wedding day; but even happier, in a deep and strange kind of way, when he posted the last instalment on the furniture.
Once he was an office boy. Now he is a fairly highly-placed clerk in the offices of a firm that has sold wine since 1755. Dale is proud of this date. If you take him to a pub, he will ask for a small glass of Sheraton Port, which is the produce of his employer. Not that he likes port very much: he is simply loyal in all matters, and feels that in supporting the Company he is also doing right by himself. If he worked for a brewer, then he would drink beer; though never more than a little of it, since any expenditure beyond his budget would take milk out of the bottle of his unborn son—or, as his wife insists, daughter. He knows his job and does exactly what is required of him. He can tell you that a hogshead of Claret holds forty-six gallons, while a hogshead of Hock holds thirty, and one of Brandy fifty-seven. Don’t ask him why: it doesn’t concern him. Dale will accept all the discrepancies of life without a murmur.
His face seems familiar to you. You feel you’ve seen it before. So you have. Where? Everywhere. Agencies pick that face for the type of Mister Everyman. The streets are full of it. At Cup Finals myriads of it make a great pink bank in the rain. It has straight, ordinary features; eyes neither grey nor blue; complexion neither fresh nor pale; hair neither light nor dark … everything about him is ish—greyish, bluish, brownish; in size tallish; in dress darkish—the whole noticeably unconspicuous and unmistakably English.
The coming night will be the first he will ever have spent away from his wife. He has started to write a letter, already, but having written the words: Dear Mavis, I have arrived safely, chews his pencil disconsolately, not knowing what more to say; or rather, having so many things he knows he wants to say, that he does not know where or how to begin. He won’t sleep a wink. At home he couldn’t shut an eye unless he was lying on the outside of the bed and could hear his watch ticking. Dale is a man of habit. His habits are chains which he has forged about himself in the thirty years of his peaceful and uneventful life.
Then why is he here, now, when others of his age group still await the call-up?
Ask Time. Ask History. A lamb to lead, a ram to oppose: such is Dale. He heard the trumpet and smelt the smoke. Somewhere in Dale’s veins something craned up crowing like a fighting cock. He screwed the cap on his fountain pen and asked what they would kindly let him volunteer for. Vacancies in the Guards. Guards? Since Dunkirk, good God yes, alas! Dale is here for examination by the Guards M.O. (Yo
u need two A1’s to get in here … but these townsmen, under their serge and shirtings, have good strong hearts and straight bones.)
He is thinking: Tomorrow’s Saturday. Mavis will spend her first week end without me, in six years. He is depressed to the verge of tears.
There was another occasion, when another Dale spoiled his good wife’s week end. Sunday was his only day off, too. He was a George Dale, exactly like this one. He ruined the family Sunday on June 18th, 1815, when he put in a bit of overtime from ten in the morning to five in the afternoon. He, also, worked in a counting house. But that Sabbath he put paid to the account of a Dictator called Napoleon, and the day of reckoning goes down in history as Waterloo.
*
Greyish-white as the paper on which Dale is trying to write; threatening as the sky; sullen as a thundercloud, Thurstan sits behind him, rolling a cigarette and staring at the floor.
He has the habit of staring at a thing as if he hated it. His eyes are holes full of shadows, in which dim, menacing things wait, slightly stirring. There is a rumour that he has been in jail. Who knows? Or perhaps his pallor is natural to him; some men are born pale. It may be that Thurstan has done time: lots of people have. If he did, it was for some outburst of violence, rather than petty larceny or sneak-thievery, for there is a savage recklessness in every line and curve of the man.
His lean hand with its bitten nails holds the tobacco against the paper. Blue veins like whipcord writhe over and around tendons that jump and snap taut like wires in a musical instrument. That would be a bad hand to have on your windpipe. The knuckles are dented and scarred. From one angle the hand looks like pincers: from another it resembles an old mallet. Thurstan is not a big man: he just touches the minimum five-foot-nine-and-a-half. And he is fleshless. His cheeks are sunken: he has had bad times. He can’t possibly weigh more than nine stone. Yet there is about him an air of appalling force; a nervous power that could drive him through an iron plate. Was he a boxer? He won’t talk. His nose is smashed to the four points of the compass … but boxers don’t have such knuckles. You do not often see scars such as Thurstan has on his face. It is not that they are very terrible scars: simply that they are queer. High up on his right cheekbones there is a rough oval of white indentations. Tooth marks! Where he comes from, men fight with fangs and claws and hoofs. His forehead is marked with two depressions, circular in outline, equal in depth and size. You may make scars like that by hitting soft wood with a carpenter’s hammer—and that is what somebody did to Thurstan, only there is nothing soft about his ferocious little skull. You would hate to receive such blows. You would hate, still more, to be the man who dealt them, if Thurstan lay under your hammer.