by Gerald Kersh
“Give me 55X,” he says. “Here is CBH/888. Take this down. Crowne. Got it. 76, Goering Boulevard. Got it? Yes. Seditious talk. Subversive activities. Spreading discontent. Treasonable propaganda. An enemy of the Reich. Go get him. He will be home at six.”
*
A pause. A horrified silence. “What?” says Hands. “What? Do you mean to tell me that I’d do that? Me? Me, Hands? Why, you…. What, me? Turn nark? Turn informer? Rat? Me? On my pal? On my pal Crowne? Or on any man, let alone Crowne? You …”
Old Silence replies: “Listen a moment, Sergeant Hands. We were imagining a case. Still imagine that the Nazis came to power here.”
“Well?”
“You’ve got a daughter.”
“Two.”
“And a son?”
“Two.”
“In ten years’ time, your daughters will be young women, and your sons young men. You love them, Sergeant?”
“Better ’n anything.”
“And if a Nazi official threatened to send your girls to a House, for the entertainment of German soldiers, or workers? And to do some terrible things to your sons? You’d do anything on earth to stop that, wouldn’t you? You’d consider your daughters and sons more important than your old pal, wouldn’t you?”
With a strange touch of tenderness, the savage Sergeant Crowne says: “Hands. I wouldn’t bear you any grudge if you turned me in to save your kids. I’d see your point, and we’d still be pals.”
“By Christ,” says Hands, quietly, “I wouldn’t be alive to see that day, Old Silence. Not while I had even a tooth left to fight with.”
“That is how Dictatorships are kept going, though,” says the Schoolmaster.
“Over my dead body,” says Hands.
“And mine,” says Crowne.
*
Sunday. We rise thirty minutes later. This being a day of rest, we only have to scrub the hut. The Catholics go out early, for Communion. There is a United Board service; a spiritual coalition of Baptists and Congregationalists, held in the place called the U.B., in which there is a tea-bar … a good tea-bar, at which there presides an old soldier with one finger missing, and an Alsatian dog with a nonconformist air. Almost everybody else is marched off to Church Parade. The Camp is silent. In our hut only four or five men remain—three Catholics, a Jew called Shaw, and Old Silence, who is down as an Agnostic.
Shaw is the four letters in the middle of Warshawsky. The name was sawn down to fit English tongues, when Guardsman Shaw’s father came West from Czestochowa, where the Black Virgin is, in Southwest Poland. There had been rumour of a pogrom. In Kishinev, unborn children of Jews had been delivered prematurely and posthumously with bayonets. Warshawsky got out. Guardsman Shaw was born on British soil; but only just. He is a tallish, slender, pensive man, to whom are attributed strange rites and outlandish ceremonies. During eight days every year, he eats no bread, because the bread of the ancient Israelites, delivered from the Land of Egypt and the House of Bondage, had not time to rise before they packed it. There is a period of twenty-four hours in which no food and drink passes his lips, and he keeps the Great White Fast in a synagogue, to the accompaniment of ardent prayers and strange, nostalgic songs. Here, he eats what he gets; but at home nobody would dream of cooking meat which did not come from a beast that chewed the cud and also had cloven hoofs, and had not been killed according to a certain ritual. His father has never shaved, in obedience to Mosaic law, and would die sooner than eat a milk pudding after a dash of meat, and wouldn’t eat at all if he couldn’t wash his hands first. Shaw has never tasted pork, oysters, lobsters, eels, rabbits, or anything that creeps or crawls, or any fish that has not both fins and scales. He gives away his breakfast bacon, and will not smoke after sunset on Friday until after sunset Saturday, on account of the law which forbids the kindling of a flame on the Sabbath. There is money in his family: his father made a good deal out of gowns. Guardsman Shaw, in civilian life, is an accountant. He went to a good school. A studious and on the whole unworldly person, he abandoned his office and volunteered for the Guards because he felt that in this manner he stood a good chance of getting at some Nazis hand-to-hand. Beneath his bookish exterior, something simmers. He is the type of the fighting student that held the walls of Jerusalem against Titus, and argued over the split hairs of the Law as the catapults quivered and the javelins hissed past. He smokes interminably, never drinks, and possesses a kipper-coloured violin upon which he plays melancholy music. He needs to be watched: otherwise, he will switch the radio on to a quartette in Something Minor or a Concerto in D before you know where you are.
A young Catholic named Dooley says, rather severely:
“You know what, Shaw? I bet they wouldn’t let you do things like this in Germany. Believing what you like, and all that.”
Shaw, who tends to sententiousness in argument, says: “They couldn’t stop me believing. They could stop my expressing my beliefs,” and he picks a phrase of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D, pizzicato, out of the violin on his knee.
“You ought to think yourself lucky,” says Dooley.
“I do,” says Shaw; and tries to get the viola parts of Beethoven’s Quartet in C Molle, but fails. “I am lucky. This is the best place in the world to live in. My father came from Poland, when Poland was part of the Russian Empire. He was astonished when he found that the English police were polite to him, and that they didn’t expect bribes. He couldn’t believe that I, his son, would have equal rights with any other British-born man. Jews had no rights worth mentioning where he came from.
“He came here just before I was born, with my mother and a sister of mine, two years old. Well, it happened that he did fairly well after a good deal of hard work, and after a year or so was actually able to afford a holiday at the seaside for us all. I was a very little baby. My sister could walk: she was a beautiful child. One morning, my father took my sister and me for a walk along the front. He was pushing me in a pram, very slowly, while my sister toddled along by his side, holding on to him. I believe he was just about to cross the road, when a great big man—my father must have told me this story a hundred times—a great big man in a check suit, with a beard and a fine swaggering air, stopped and looked at me, and gently pinched my cheek; and looked at my little sister, and patted her on the head, and said: ‘Fine children.’ ‘Thank God,’ said my father. The gentleman in the check suit then asked him how old we were, and my father told him: ‘The boy is eleven months old, and the girl is four, bless them, Mister.’ Then the gentleman put a hand in his waistcoat, and took out a golden sovereign, and gave it to my sister; said: ‘Good morning to you,’ and walked on. My father, looking after him, saw men who were passing raising their hats to him. He asked somebody who it was. It was King Edward the Seventh.
“My father was overwhelmed. There was a country for you! A King, an Emperor! And he walked along without a bodyguard, and stopped a poor Jewish tradesman, and was civil to him and kind to his children, in the open street! And my poor old father, who had some very bad times still fresh in his memory, burst into tears. My sister cried too. I, catching the infection, howled at the top of my voice. After that my father walked with his head held high. He felt he was part of a wonderful country, and he would have died for England after that. So would I. Sometimes I feel that even the English don’t realise what they’ve got, in England. That wireless…. The other night somebody got Hamburg, and we listened to Lord Haw-Haw: listened, and laughed, and of our own accord cut him off. Does it occur to you how marvellous it is that we can do that? Fascists and Nazis are sent to prison for listening to English broadcasts. And in the library, there’s a copy of Mein Kampf, though nobody bothers to read it. Think myself lucky? I am lucky. So are you.”
“And you, Silence,” says Dooley. “I bet you wouldn’t be allowed not to believe in anything anywhere else.”
“And you, Dooley,” says Old Silence. “The Catholics have been persecuted in their time, too. But who says I believe in nothing?”
<
br /> “You’ve got no religion,” says Dooley.
“Well?”
“Then what can you believe in?”
The man called Old Silence sits still and looks out at the bright morning, while Shaw, caressing the strings of his violin with the white bow, produces a gentle melody.
“The other night,” says Old Silence, almost to himself, “I couldn’t sleep. I was thinking. I was thinking of gods, and men, and prayers; and there came into my mind something …”
“What?” asks Dooley, for Old Silence has paused.
“… something that might be a prayer.”
“To who? To what?” asks Dooley.
“For what?” asks Shaw.
“It went something like this,” says Old Silence. Half-closing his eyes, and looking at a beam of sunlight in which the tiny dust-motes dance, he gravely declaims:
“I can’t believe in the God of my Fathers. If there is one Mind which understands all things, it will comprehend me in my unbelief.
“I don’t know whose hand hung Hesperus in the sky, and fixed the Dog Star, and scattered the shining dust of Heaven, and fired the sun, and froze the darkness between the lonely worlds that spin in space.
“The world flies through the night towards the morning.
“Oh Universe, so far beyond human understanding! I know that a thousand worlds may grow cold and die between two of your unending heart-beats. I know that all the sciences and philosophies of man—all his findings and seekings—all his discoveries and inspirations—are like flashes of a mighty, misty panorama seen through a chink in a rushing train.
“I know that man, in his little space of time, may catch only a glimpse of Truth, like the last desperate glance at Heaven of a lost wayfarer falling into an abyss.
“I know that suns wane and earths perish. But I also know that I can see the light of dead and forgotten stars.
“I am lost in awe at your beauty, immeasurable Universe! Yet I am not afraid of you, and so I know that between the handful of grey slime in my head, with which I think and plan, and the threads of my nerves which miraculously tie my thoughts to my eyes and lips and fingers, there is something more. It is something that is Man’s. It is a Soul.
“About this I cannot reason. I do not know. I believe that the soul of Man cannot die. I do not know what it is, or why it is, or how it comes, or where it may go. It made the beast-shaped dawn-man conquer his instinctive terror of the elements. It looks out of me with calm love for the greatness of things, with joy in its power to praise noble things and wonder at eternal things, and with hope in its yearning to cleanse from life the squalor of unclean things.
“Oh Life! Light! Universe! Let me have strength to struggle always and keep unsoiled my pride in the presence of Fear! Give me the power to bear with a straight back all the burdens that Life can heap upon me! Give me the will to find new horizons and build new things! I am a poor creature; a shadow. But since I stand on a mountain of dead men and breathe the dust of a million years of man’s broken endeavours, let me be no less than the first speechless man who with fine faith and blind courage crossed the first river! Give me strength to live and work, knowing that every movement of the finger of the clock beckons me towards a hole in the ground!
“I know that this life, and the death that goes with it, are only phases. Let me keep out of my heart the ancient, terrified ape that clutches, howling, at the breaking branch! Give valour to this dust and dignity to this clay! Give me kindness, patience, understanding and endurance, so that I, who love poor lonely Man, may help him to find some happiness on his way upwards to his unknown end!”
“Dust of a million years,” says Barker, who has come in meanwhile. “Let’s get this swabbing over ’n’ done with.”
Beds crash back. Buckets clank down. Brooms clatter. Corporal Bearsbreath begins to shout: “C’mon! Thirty of you! This hut ought to be dug out and finished in thirty minutes! Get a rift on! Get a jazz on those scrubbers! Johnson, don’t let me catch you skiving!”
The lad from the Elephant, in mad enthusiasm, hurls down a bucket of water and runs amok with a long scrubber.
In forty-five minutes, the hut is damply clean. Later it will rain. Tomorrow the hut will be dirty again. For the next seven days we will conduct a sort of Lucknow against the detritus of the earth which the rain will turn to mud, and the warmth of the hut will turn back to dust … against the dust and ashes which always lie in wait.
“In the East,” says Sergeant Hands, “there’s whole cities buried under yards and yards of muck. That’s what comes of not getting the place properly dug out. So be warned! Dirt buries you alive if you let it. Furthermore, as senior N.C.O. in this hut, I get the blame if the place is in tripe. And that,” Sergeant Hands mutters, “is worst of all.”
Barker says: “My mum’s been digging aht our ’ouse for forty-two years and a quarter. It’s still as dirty as it was when she started …”
“You’ll find,” says Crowne, “that even this little bit o’ dampness will get into your rifle barrels. Watch out for your barrels. They’re sensitive as a young girl’s cheeks. And you’re going to fire your course. So nurse them barrels.”
*
And so the course is fired. Those of us who flinched a little at first (when, on the thirty-yard range at the Depot, the noise of a .303 rifle shot seemed to smash and reverberate like a cannon) find a strange exhilaration in the clear, crisp bang of rifles in the open air. A nice sound, accompanied by a pleasant nudge which hints of huge power, and a clean, keen antiseptic smell of burnt explosive. Those good, noisy, bleak-looking ranges, muttering with echoes! We fire gravely, and with concentration. We lie down with bucko sergeants and fire our Bren-gun course, and see the sand splashing brown on the butts, and the black or white discs hovering, oscillating and coming to rest where our bursts have punctured the targets.
We are becoming soldiers. The first strange excitement wears off; and so does the first uneasiness. The Depot seems very far away. We swore we’d never forget Sergeant Nelson, and yet we have already begun to forget him. He, at this moment, is hammering the crude stuff of brand new recruits … working, as on us, with frenzy and patience; pleading, roaring, urging, damning, dropping rare hints of praise; manufacturing more of us. But we, seeing new squads coming into the Training Battalion, stand, in our baggy canvas suits, and comment upon the manner of their marching. “Not bad,” we say; and “Likely-looking rookies”; and “They’re not getting too bad a mob of kids at Caterham these days.”
A C.O.’s Parade has no terrors for us. In the ancient days, seven or eight weeks ago, we dressed for our last inspection with the tremulous, dewy-eyed anxiety of brides on the last dawn of virginity. Now, rushing back five minutes late from P.T., and having fifteen minutes in which to change before the Quarter blows, we curse hideously but are not in the least dismayed, and turn out smarter than we ever turned out at the Depot, to march with something resembling the proper swing, the subtle swagger … “As if you owned this ground you march on! And if you owned the ea-hearth!” the R.S.M. roars, in his voice which shakes a little from its decades of thunder.
We are acquiring experience in field training. We begin to get the diagnostic intuition of the soldier looking for cover. We can keep an Arrowhead Formation without looking. Night and the open heath have rustled to our crawling, when we started to pick up the secrets of prowling on patrol. Any one of us can clean a Mills grenade, and put the fuse in it, and screw it tight, and throw it so that it bursts in a mean spray of jagged iron at thirty or forty yards. They have given us Bren until we are slightly sick of Bren; but we can handle that invaluable light machine gun with the slightly bored accuracy of mechanics with familiar tools. Night, dark midnight, has seen us marching away to the shadow-lands behind the golf course, where, in black invisibility, we have dug weapon pits. And we know all about trenches, because we have dug them: buck navvies in uniform have sighed with a strange joy at the feel of picks and shovels; and sedentary men among us, puff
ing and grunting, have learned the technique of making holes and paid for their learning with little coin-shaped bits of skin.
Some of us, who would have shrunk like tickled oysters at a hint of punishment, have committed crimes and paid them off with carefree laughter. Yes, the serious Dale, the good clerk whom a rough word depressed, got three days C.B. for missing a parade. He said he didn’t know: the Company Commander said he ought to have known, and so Dale had to answer Defaulters three days running, and did some drill that would have reduced him to a gibbering heap six months before. And he said: “What the hell, anyway”; to which Sergeant Dagwood said: “That’s the spirit.”
There is no getting away from the fact that we are changing. Shorrocks is down to eleven stone ten, and there is, so to speak, meat-juice in the dumpling of his face. What is more, he argues less frequently, and lays down less law. He is the same Shorrocks. But he has seen something of the world; of the wide and varied world that is England. He’d never spoken to a Devon man before, for example. To him, Rockbottom still represents all that is brightest and best in England, but his contempt for the rest of the world is tempered a little. He has had to listen to people telling him things, for the first time since he left Rockbottom Wesleyan School. He has mixed with new men. He despises the Cockney, but concedes to him certain virtues; which he didn’t before the war. He has acquired patience. He has lost flesh and gained outlook; narrowed physically, and broadened mentally. “There is no Rockbottom but Rockbottom, and Shorrocks is its Prophet.” This will hold good until the Pennine Chain is down to its last link; but the dogma has softened, admitting the moderation of inter-county tolerance. Shorrocks, meanwhile, having decided that he has a genius for driving, and being attracted by the sturdy little caterpillar-wheeled Bren Carrier (which somehow resembles himself) has gone into a Carrier Platoon.
Hodge, the giant, the man impregnable; Hodge, of huge thews and rock-founded faith, never changed. There was never anything in Hodge that needed to change. Hodge is an elemental force. If ever Hodge struck down an enemy, he would be striking not a man but a wickedness: not that the man, as representative of wickedness, could hope to be spared! He has gone into a Suicide Squad. A man in a Suicide Squad does not want to commit suicide: his career in it is a denial of the possibility of death. The Suicide Squad man is a man with a mission. He, personally, discounts death as a possibility while his mission is unfulfilled. In the canal, Hodge swam like a fish and dived like a seal. On land, he was indefatigable. He was immense, but proportionate; could run like a hare, perform unheard-of leaps, and hurl things to uncalculated distances. To Unarmed Combat he applied a certain grave, sober concentration. Imagine a statue of the Farnese Hercules endowed with a will. Even Corporal Ball was clay in his stupendous clutch. Yet Hodge is gentle. His fingers, large as a baby’s arms, have a strange delicacy of touch. The lad from the Elephant and Castle will tell you how Hodge took a splinter out of his finger, which no tweezers could reach. Hodge yearned to come to handgrips with the Devil. It was natural that he should go into a training-place for parachute troops. By now, his training completed and his vast arm embellished with a pale blue winged parachute badge, he will have been called back to get in the harvest; and that being done with, he will return to fight the good fight with all his terrible might—the old, elemental Anglo-Saxon.