Sergeant Nelson of the Guards

by Gerald Kersh

  “There’s a sort of a basement, a kind of a cellar. In this kind of cellar there’s an old girl, dead. Heart, or somethink. One old girl dead. Another old girl, cheerful as a cricket, very much alive. A kid of seven or eight, scared stiff, but alive. A gel o’ fifteen in high-sterics. A lil boy less ’n ten year old, smashed dead. And arched over ’em, like a sort of brick kind of arch … guess who?”

  Silence.

  “Well, who?” says Crowne.

  “Guess,” says Butcher the Butcher.

  “I give it up.”

  “Remember Bill Nelson? Lance-Sergeant now. Squadded with us. Old Bill Nelson. Remember him?”

  “Well?”

  “Well, there was Bill Nelson. Been visiting friends. When the house come down, old Bill Nelson sort of kept the roof of the cellar up. He was thin, but he was wiry, old Bill Nelson. He sort of jammed himself up against the bricks and held ’em off the old geezer and the kids. Ribs busted, face busted, head busted. He was smashed up but he stood sore of in one piece. Gord knows how. He was busted everywhere, internal and out. There was a spike in the brickwork, a sort of blunt spike, drove right through him. But he held up. Some men can do it. I don’t know. Some men can. It ain’t strength. Just, somehow, some men sort of can. You knew old Bill Nelson. I knew old Bill Nelson. We fought the Wogs together. We was Guardsmen together. Once I borrowed a dollar off of him what I never give him back. Once he borrowed a dollar off of me what he never give me back. He was my pal.”

  “Was?” says Sergeant Crowne, very quietly.

  “Smashed to hell,” says Butcher the Butcher. “In the Groombridge Central Hospital. Can’t live. So you can say goo’bye to Bill Nelson. I knew old Bill Nelson. We was chinas. Decent when he was a Guardsman; decent when he was a Lance-Jack; decent when he was a Lance-Sergeant; decent when he was a full Sergeant. Quarter-bloke, C.S.M., Drill Pig, R.S.M., or Officer—Bill Nelson would of stayed the same. Decent. One of us. He’d of give away his shirt. He’d of give away his eyesight and his right hand. He chased you; yes. But he’d go first, wherever he chased you. Good old Bill. So now he gives away himself in a cellar, for some old geezers and a couple o’ kids. That’s Bill, all through. Conscientious. He ought to of gone down in a fair fight in the open air, with a couple o’ dozen Jerries spread about and a pound weight o’ lead in his tripes. But no. On a seven-day leave, on a visit, down in a dirty ole cellar … that’s where Bill Nelson gets his. Not that he cared. Old Bill Nelson wasn’t scared o’ anything. But it ain’t proper. It ain’t right. Groombridge. Bill. Groombridge!”

  “Where is Groombridge?” asks Corporal Bearsbreath.

  “Oh … let me rest,” says Butcher the Butcher. “Be quiet and let a man get a bit of rest …”

  “Nelson was born at Groombridge,” says Crowne.

  “So he died at Groombridge,” says Butcher, and covers his face with a blanket.

  *

  I happened to know that at Groombridge Junction twelve tracks run precisely parallel out of the station and under the Iron Bridge. Beyond the bridge these tracks give off other tracks, which, in their turn, bristle like heads of barley with tributary tracks—and the tributaries branch, and the branches fork, and the forks reticulate, and the reticulations swerve, until, two hundred yards farther on, all the steel rails in the world seem to rush together, dreary and bewildering, twisting and converging, doubling and tangling, dully-shining like steel wool.

  There is no peace. There is no quiet. Signals slam and thud perpetually. There is an everlasting smashing noise of shunting, a shouting of steam, a shrilling of little whistles and big whistles, a muttering of tortured iron. Sometimes, men between the tracks blow melancholy notes out of metal horns. When the fogs come down the Junction roars and hoots and bangs and wails, blindly worried in a hideous yellow dusk. Interminable goods trains stagger through. Twenty times a day some great express rushes past shrieking. For forty years, day in, day out, night after night, the Junction has known no complete hour of unbroken rest.

  The smell of the railway—that ponderous, nostalgic smell of hot iron and sulphurous smoke—sticks to the surrounding suburb. Here, countless tons of coal go up in smoke and drift back to earth in a soft snow of soot. It falls, flake by flake, from year to year; gently irresistible, mildly corrosive, persistent and insinuating; quietly eating up brick and stone, suavely blotting out the sun, softly besmirching newly-washed clothes as they flap dankly in the lugubrious, stinking winds.

  Here, dirt must prevail. It devours housewives inevitably as graveyard soil. Sometimes they see, in a flash of awful perception, how they have spent their strength and beauty in the struggle against it; but they scrub on, soap-drunk, embittered and preoccupied, sore-eyed, raw-knuckled, enraged and engrossed, winnowed of hope. And still the smuts drift and the soot seeps in and coats everything, so that Groombridge is a black suburb, a chafed and miserable suburb, uncomfortable with dirt where it is not uneasy with scouring.

  The dark, flat houses cling under the railway-bridges like ticks on the belly of a rhinoceros. The Railway owns them: railwaymen inhabit them. The mainstay of Groombridge Junction is the steady job-holder on the Railway—mechanic, porter, guard, or clerk. If you want slaves, offer men some kind of secure income, no matter how meagre—they will fight for the chance to fetter themselves head and heart, hand and foot, body and soul. Young men conspire to punch tickets in the Station. Expectant mothers, feeling the kick of unborn generations, think: Please God, if it is a boy, his father will get him On The Railway, and so his future will be assured.

  The suburb and the people in it belong to the Railway, because its payday has the awful, the tremendous inevitability of an act of God. The well-behaved man on the Railway may look forward to a certain income, some promotion, and a little pension, with the calm assurance of a sectarian pietist contemplating a corrugated-iron-chapel paradise. He may buy things on the instalment plan, and firmly establish his mode of life. The railwaymen of Groombridge Junction are steady. Salesmen of endowment policies do well thereabout. Burial Societies flourish. Groombridge looks ahead: before the end of July it has already put down a deposit on its Christmas turkey; by the middle of September it has already laid the foundation of its next summer holiday. Here today, here tomorrow. Once you settle in Groombridge, you stay. You live in the shadow of the Railway until that great occasion when you ride in state up the High Street, and strangers raise their hats to you, and mournful smuts float down to fleck the wreathed lilies that are dying with you.

  Good. You are buried in Groombridge Cemetery. The suburb, having swallowed you, then proceeds to digest you.

  The Comprachicos sealed babies in jars. The baby grew: the jar stayed rigid. The child was curiously misshapen: its market value increased in proportion to its freakishness.

  Groombridge, similarly, swelling to maturity within its narrow boundaries, has squeezed itself into queer shapes—and this is a sign of its enhanced value as real estate.

  The Railway grew bloated. Warehouses rose … clearing-houses, new stations, wider lines, more stations, offices, more warehouses. Householders near the Junction were elbowed away. The Railway built them new villas. Old leases were bought in; old streets were demolished. Children cheered as walls tumbled down in swirling dust clouds, and old familiar wallpapers stared out. Rubble carts rolled away. The Railway sprawled over. The baby had outgrown the jar. Flesh and blood was squashed into odd holes and corners. Dumping grounds of empty tins, questionable paper parcels and dead cats—lifeless areas behind blackened hoardings or under thunderous arches—bits of bad land soaked in sour water and deader than salty Sodom—became housing estates constructed with the geometrical economy of honeycombs. The flimsy houses rushed up: the coaly air rushed down; in six months the most blatant biscuit-coloured brick was one with the dirty face of the Junction. And still the Railway spread, swelling, muscling out, nudging people into unheard-of crevices.

  Oh, stench! Oh, darkness! Oh, black and melancholy birthplace under a fog-hazed sun!r />
  “Better a bloke like Bill should be born in a place like that, than not at all,” snaps Crowne. “And what’s the odds where you die, so long as you die game? It’s dead cushy to die in a fight in the sunlight. But in a cellar, in the dark, with a ’ouse on top of you … no, if you die game like that, you’re all right. And I lay any odds you like Bill died game.”

  “Cracking a joke,” says Bearsbreath.

  “He gave ’em the old Hi-de-Hi!” cries Hands.

  “With ’is mouth full o’ sand, I’ve heard Bill Nelson ’and out the old Hi-de-Hi,” says Crowne.

  “And the spirit of the bastard was such,” says Bearsbreath, “that if you were dying in the desert with him, you’d shout back the old Ho-de-Ho!”

  “But why should Bill die?” asks Butcher the Butcher.

  Hands, who has a good, potent baritone voice, sings a verse of the song he likes so much….

  “You made the rivers that flow,

  The breezes that blow—

  You made the weak and the strong.

  But Lord, you made the night too long!”

  This plucks some string in the Butcher’s heart. He turns his face to the blank wall and weeps.

  II

  Bearsbreath on the Nature of Man

  CORPORAL BEARSBREATH, that tense, twanging man of iron frame and piano wire, plunges an arm into his kitbag and hauls up a chipped enamel mug. “One of you kids do me a favour,” he says, in an undertone. “Go to the Y.M.C.A. and get this filled with tea. Here’s twopence. Just put down the twopence and say ‘Fill it’—you stand to get a buckshee penn’orth that way. And give it to Butcher….

  “Come on, Butch, out of it! Have a fag, Butcher. Was you the only man that was Bill’s china? He was my pal, too. I’m browned off as much as you are, about it. So is Crowney. So’s a lot of us. Me … I could spit blood. A feller like Nelson, he’s entitled to live donkey’s years. For ever! Never ought to die. You rookies, you don’t know. You couldn’t know what a feller like Bill Nelson is. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying you’re not all right. But … Christ, the years we’ve known Nelson! It takes time to make a feller like Nelson. They got to be brewed: they got to mature.

  “Bill Nelson. Argh—Death! All these years I’ve seen good men go, and go! The best goes first. It’s a fact. The better they are, the less they want to save themselves. And a yeller dog’ll live when a white man goes down. Right. I’d rather be Bill Nelson dead than a lot of other men alive.

  “Nelson was a man, a proper man. I was squadded with him. Don’t I know? I only saw him act unreasonable once. It looked unreasonable. It was when he was a rookie, less than a week squadded. Somebody called him a bastard. Nelson went mad. He was thin, but wiry; a lanky kid. This was nearly twenty years ago. He went for this bloke and knocked him cold. I said to him, afterwards: ‘What made you sort of go crazy like that?’ Bill said: ‘He called me a bastard.’ I said: ‘What of it? It’s a sort of name. Everybody calls everybody else a bastard.’ Bill said: ‘I know. But between ourselves, I am a bastard.’ He kind of was one. Not legally illegitimate, but almost. I believe he was fond of his mum, and she’d had a sort of rough time on account of him. But he controlled it, after that. And soon he took things in the same spirit as people said them.

  “We went around together a bit. Bill didn’t have any home, and no more did I. We got miserable together, and we cheered each other up. Two people, both cheesed off, are better than one. You feel low, you don’t want a clown to brighten you up. You want somebody to be jarred off with … you grouse it out of your system.

  “We went up for the tapes together. We were Young Corporals together. We got into trouble together. We were lousy soldiers, according to the rules. I’ve been busted four times. After twenty years of it, Bill ended up as only a Lance-Sergeant, which is the same as a Full Corporal. After twenty years! Bill’s conduct sheet looked black as pitch, on paper. He was even in the Glass House, twice. And do you know what? Each time Nelson got Detention, he was innocent. On my dying oath.

  “That kind of thing happens. Talk about the Army making a man of you. It can do. But it ain’t the exercise, the drill, and all that bull-and-boloney. No; it’s what you learn to bear. That’s what makes a proper man of a feller, if he’s okay to start with. It spoils some, I don’t say it doesn’t. But they’re softish to begin with—they’d spoil anywhere, anyway. You want to see what a feller’s made of, give him what Bill Nelson got. Nobody got more injustice than Nelson, and he was the fairest man in the Army. You try staying just when they keep making you carry the can back.

  “Bill Nelson was the honestest man on God’s earth. He could lie like a newspaper … but only for a good cause. I’ve heard him swear black was white, but never for his own sake. Bill was busted three days after he got his tapes for the first time. You heard about that, Crowney.

  “You other fellers: that is the kind of mug Nelson was:

  “There was a kid that was always getting into trouble. Unlucky. He’d got a sort of manner that got up the nose of the Sarnt-Major. So everything he done was dead wrong. That can happen to you in the Army, too. So this kid’s life was a sort of misery. Once you start getting into a kind of routine of being punished, God knows where you can end. You’re marked. You carry the can. You can’t do anything right. Well, one day this kid comes out of Company Orders with a three-days’ C.B. for standing idle on parade … right or wrong, he’d got it. Well, where we were … you know, the peacetime Guards’ turnout took big mirrors. We had a longish sort of mirror in the room. This kid comes in and sort of lets off steam. He means no harm. There’s a scrubbing brush lying about: he takes a flying kick at it. This hand scrubber flies up and goes bong through the mirror, and smashes it to bits. The kid goes white as the ash on this cigarette. Here’s another offence for him to be dragged in on, and he looks sick.

  “As luck will have it, the Sarnt-Major looks in just then. It was bad luck: he’d heard the crash.

  “‘Who done that?’

  “And Bill Nelson ups, quick as lightning, and says: ‘Sorry, sir, I did.’

  “‘How?’

  “‘I chucked that hand scrubber across the room, sir.’

  “‘What for?’

  “‘Just for a bit o’ fun, sir.’

  “Bill takes the rap for this mirror, out of pity for the kid. They took away his tapes, that he’d only had three days. Less than that has poisoned more fellers than one: broke their spirits. Not Bill. He never complained, and actually argued the other kid out of owning up … ‘Give ’em a chance to forget you a bit … I’m glad to get rid of them tapes, anyway.’ That kid’s an R.S.M. in a line mob now. But Bill? I nearly said ‘Poor old Bill,’ but there never was anything Poor about Nelson!

  “That was one thing. There were millions more like it. He was made up again in time. He got to be a Lance-Sarnt. Then one day a Guardsman comes to Bill with some Fanny about needing some cash, and Bill lent this Guardsman two quid. It’s against the rules. No financial dealings between N.C.O.’s and men, ever. Still, it happens sometimes that men and N.C.O.’s can be pals, and between pals what’s a quid? Bill lends this man two quid. Due course, this man gives Bill the two quid back. But like the mug that he is, he does it where the Drill Pig happens to be looking on.

  “Bill goes inside. Taking money off a Guardsman. They can practically hang, draw, and quarter you for that. Bill knows it’s no use talking. He’s busted the rules by lending this geezer the two quid in the first place. He relies on the other man to speak up and tell the exact truth. A mug, Bill; but there you are. The other feller was a rat. He let himself out by blaming it on Bill: said Bill’d asked for the money and he didn’t like to refuse. Bill went sort of white. In all his life I never knew that fool of a Nelson explain himself or make an excuse. If you’re in the soup, you’re in it: right or wrong, pay the punishment off and forget it; that was Bill. ‘What’s the use of talking?’ he used to say. ‘Who’ll believe you? To go and lay the blame for this and that on Tom
, Dick, and Harry,’ he said, ‘is not worth lowering yourself to do.’ So he was not only busted again; he went to the Glass House for twenty-eight days.

  “I would of murdered that Guardsman, only I didn’t get to know about it till later. But Nelson simply shrugged his shoulders. He said: ‘Justice?’ he said, ‘Justice is a thing that you deal out if you can. But only mugs cry if they don’t get it. Justice is a sort of a kindness,’ he said, ‘a kind of a charity; a sort of a good turn. It’s very nice to have it, but it’s as well not to count on it. Like Christmas boxes.’

  “Yet—God Almighty!—let any one of Bill Nelson’s squad get so much as one drill that he hadn’t ought to have got, and Bill was like a roaring lion. He’d thrash it out with the C.O. himself, and he’d get that man his proper rights. He never had a farthing. Every penny he ever drew his pals had for the asking. Ask any squad that ever passed through Nelson’s hands if Bill ever punished a man. In twenty years he never put a man inside. And I’ve seen him with some of the lousiest showers of rooks you ever saw in your life. There was an idiot, actually a sort of idiot. Bill worked on that kid and made him a right bloke where everybody else’d given up. Because there’s some fellers that are shy, or scared, or that have been pushed about too much all their lives; and these fellers sort of smack on a kind of mental look so as to protect ’emselves. It takes patience and it takes kindness. Bill could do all that. He had a brain. He could make a thing clear where I beat about the bush. He could put things into words. He had personality. He wasn’t afraid of anything or anybody. His heart was too big for his body. He’d go up a tree for a cat, or down a well for a sparrer. He was as strong as a bull. He was as soft as a woman. He liked kids. He liked pretty nearly everybody. Right up to the last minute, he’d try and reason a thing out. Then when it come to the fight he was a wildcat. He could of been Prime Minister. He could of been a General. He could of been anything. Only he come out of a dump without a chance on God’s earth. Okay. Better for him to be just Bill Nelson, maybe. I don’t know. It’s a funny thing he had to go back to Groombridge to die. What for, I wonder? God knows. I don’t. I don’t know anything. I don’t believe there is a God, anyway. I don’t believe anything. I can’t believe Bill’s dead…. It’s all wrong…. Dead wrong, somewhere. The idea of Bill getting his in a cellar with old women is…. But like Crowne said: any mug can go over with a bay net and a ration of rum, with other mugs charging. It takes a proper man to wait for it in a broken-down old cellar and still give the good old Hi-de-Hi!