Sergeant Nelson of the Guards

by Gerald Kersh

  Then one of them got up, and it was the one without the beard. He rocked a bit on his knees, and then fell flat, and crawled out of sight.

  About midnight the reinforcements come up. Bill Nelson wasn’t with ’em. He was in dock. That shot of mine had passed so close to him—his face and the Wog’s face were close together—that I’d cut a crease in his jaw. But that shot had got the Wog a quarter of an inch above his right eye … and that, believe me or not, was exactly where I knew it was going to hit him.

  I told Bill about it, and he said, calling me all the names he could lay his tongue to, “So it was you that fired the first shot, was it?” And he showed me a mark on his backside, a wale, like a whiplash, where my first round had gone past.

  I said to him: “Well, Bill, that makes our score even again, since I got the Wog at a thousand yards.”

  He said: “Strictly speaking, that was not a shot but an act of God, a miracle. But seeing it’s you, Dagwood, I’ll allow it. Now Dag, I’ll tell you what I’ll do to decide this once and for all. We’ll go to the thirty-yards range and fix up a red-tipped match at thirty yards, and the first one to light the match with a .22 round, light it without breaking it, wins a dollar.”

  We both missed fifteen times clean. So the matter was never decided.

  X

  A Few Words About Deserts

  “AND,” SAYS Jack Cattle, “there you are again. The scar was a part of his face, and it went unnoticed. Well, well, well. Isn’t it an odd thing? As far as the whole world is concerned, you, you as you, are what they see. And what do people see? They see something that looks like a silly little picture a kid might draw in chalk on a pavement … something with a couple of ears, and a couple of eyes, and a nose, and a hole that you put food into or take words out of. They see a body, and some kind of a limb at each corner of it. If you happen to have a hump or a horrible skin disease they notice that all right, the silly mugs. Their eyes! ‘Radiant jellies, shooting stars!’ And what good are their eyes to them? No good at all. As Sergeant Dagwood was saying, we have been mourning for Bill Nelson with all kinds of Goddamned maudlin sentiment, and we can’t tell each other what the man looked like. There was a real Bill Nelson, a real and vital Bill Nelson, of which we only saw a little part. I suppose it’s the same in all of us … though some men have more to be seen than other men.

  “The best and the worst in a man is never seen.

  “Sergeant Dagwood was talking about shooting, and musketry in general. Musketry was one of the things that interested Sergeant Nelson more than anything else. He liked the feel of a firearm. And he was right, he was damned right, because any bit of machinery that is made to do its work cleanly and well is a pleasant thing to handle. And among the most efficient jobs of work in general circulation is a common short Lee-Enfield rifle … the good old bundhook that gives any Tom, Dick or Harry the power to throw a crumb of lead with enough force and accuracy to smash a man’s skull a mile away. Bill Nelson was right. He liked the feel of a rifle when it fires. I’ve watched his face. I could see how he felt he had absolute control over a power. He liked that, and so does nearly anybody. In a good kind of way, Bill Nelson liked power. He liked to have the power to punish a man or push a man around, just in order to refrain from punishing or pushing. I suppose it could be argued that in point of actual fact all Bill Nelson got out of everything was a purely selfish pleasure … that if he gave away his week’s pay he did so to get the personal satisfaction of doing a good deed … that doesn’t really matter. It’s a nice way of giving yourself pleasure. There are plenty of sods in this battalion that get their pleasure by exercising their two-penny-ha’penny authority. You will find lots of Guardsmen who have only one real ambition, and that is to be Trained Soldiers at the Depot, where they are about as terrible as Gods to a squad of recruits for the first sixteen weeks…. If being a decent fellow gives a fellow a selfish pleasure, well, damn well let it! Whether you like it or not, you get something back for whatever you lay out in this life … just as you have to pay for whatever you take.

  “Poor old Bill Nelson went in for a sort of … I don’t know what you’d call it … a sort of philosophy. What I mean to say is, he tried to build up little parables, and make one thing give a new meaning to another thing.

  “Sergeant Dagwood talks about musketry. Well, I told you how The Schoolmaster, who, when all was said and done, was a bit of a bloody fool, used to take down some of the things Nelson said and rearrange the words to make a kind of rhyme. I remember once how Nelson was talking about the elementary rules of shooting, and The Schoolmaster managed to boil out of a few casual remarks a whole song and dance.

  “Here’s a copy of it …

  Foresight

  without

  backsight

  is nowt,

  like Wednesday

  without

  Tuesday.

  Result?

  No score.

  You’re

  ahead on pay,

  but you

  draw

  for

  the week that went before.

  It’s on your pass,

  blast it,

  that the Q

  cuts you

  in the future.

  You get away

  with S.F.A.

  you can borrer

  on to-morrer

  like I did …

  provided

  there’s a Yesterday.

  I mean to say….

  Too much

  foresight,

  and the flight

  of your shot

  will not

  be right

  or true.

  It’ll fly

  too high.

  Too much backsight

  makes it go

  too low,

  nowhere near

  the mark.

  Keep level,

  and you

  aim true

  and shame

  the devil

  even in the dark.

  It’s funny.

  Revally

  is your past

  by Cookhouse.

  Time can fly

  fast.

  So mind your eye.

  “That,” says Cattle, “is the sort of a thing Nelson used to say and the way he used to think in general. To Bill Nelson, everything had to have a hidden reason and a secret moral. Everything was a story. Whatever he said to you, Sergeant Dagwood, I’m pretty sure that to him, that bullet which slid in between him and the Arab and saved his life was … well, the razor-edge of Fate, which can save you but might destroy you. It was always good to hear Bill Nelson talking about the desert.

  “Some men like the desert because it makes them think of so many things. Really, what Bill Nelson said about that lousy, dry, murderous waste of sand, was worth hearing. People like me, and people like The Schoolmaster, and Old Silence, we think in terms of nonsense, in mere words. That is why we are always quoting other people’s bits of rubbish just because they happen to have words in them that we like the sound of.

  “Oh … all the nice dramatic poetic Sweet Fanny Adams one can say about the desert! How night comes down like a lid over an eye; and how, looking up, you see points of pure light that make you feel like a beetle imprisoned in a box in the lid of which somebody has pricked pinholes for you to breathe through … how this is the land, the rotting wilderness that God gave to Ishmael … and how there are rocks that the sun and the frost between them have cracked as a hyena cracks thighbones…. Bloody nonsense! Talk! Literature!

  “One night Bill Nelson, talking to me about die desert, really said something.

  “He said: ‘Isn’t it funny, Cattle, when you come to think that every grain of that sand was once a part of a great big stone? And bit by bit it rubbed away. And all the time, Cattle, those grains of sand are rubbing together and rubbing themselves away to dust. It only goes to show, Cattle, it only goes to show. Leave that dirty muck-heap alone and given time it’ll rub itsel
f out. So why worry?”

  Dagwood says: “Well, yes, Cattle. That’s very nice; but what I liked about Bill was, that whatever he might have said, he was the sort of mug who’d go and try and clear up the desert with a bass broom if he felt it was right and proper to go and do so. That’s what I liked about old Bill Nelson.”

  XI

  Concerning Truth and Life

  “IT MIGHT be true,” says Butcher the Butcher, “that there’s all sorts of things a man keeps hid underneath. Maybe you never do get the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about a geezer even if he’s your best friend and you know him from the cradle to the grave. Near where I used to live when I was a kid at home, there was a dear old girl that had a daughter of about forty. This here daughter of the old girl died one night of blood poisoning. The poor old woman couldn’t make head nor tail of it, because that daughter had devoted all her life to her mum ever since she’d been eighteen years old—twenty-odd years she’d hardly set foot outside the house. And yet it turned out that every night for the last fifteen years there’d been a chap she used to let in, and he used to sleep with the daughter till daybreak. In the room next door to the old woman’s. And the old woman never had any idea of it. I forget whether the daughter died of having a kid or not having a kid. One of the two, or both. But then and only then the thing came out—after fifteen solid years. What do you know about that?”

  “Well, I admit we all do funny things from time to time,” says Bearsbreath. “So what? Speak of Nelson as you found him.”

  “So I do,” says the Butcher.

  “So do I,” says Oxley.

  “There’s different ways of looking at things,” says Hands. “I remember once seeing a house on fire. It looked smashing, with all the smoke and what not coming out. I says to some feller standing next to me: ‘Better than a firework display, chum.’ And he says to me: ‘I hope the poor people are insured.’ I look at the fire and I think of fireworks. He looks at the same fire and he thinks of the furniture and what not. Well … as far as I’m concerned, a fire is a fire. And a man is as I know him. Do you know what you can do with the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? Do you know where you can shove it?”

  Dagwood grunts: “I knew Bill Nelson well. I never knew what he thought about when I wasn’t looking. I knew he was all right, and I didn’t want to know any more. I’m no magistrate. Call me ‘Pal’ and I’m your pal. Call me ‘Swine,’ and I’m swine to the backbone. I’m a decent feller to most people. But I’m a rotten dog to a few. It depends what part of me you want to go and pick. But both parts are true …”

  “The whole truth, though?” asks Butcher.

  “Nark it,” says Crowne. “Have you been in the Army twenty years, to start talking about the Whole Truth at your time of life? Tell the whole, plain, honest truth and you’ll end up in one of two places: Colney Hatch or the Glass House. You just can’t do it.”

  “That’s true. You’ve got to lie,” says Dagwood. “If only out of politeness. A man shows you a pitcher of some wall-eyed tart and says: ‘Ain’t she an angel in human form?’ What do you say? You say: ‘Sure she is, sure she is.’ It’s all right as long as you know what’s right and what’s wrong. And as long as you don’t let anybody down. It’s life. I’ve known Bill Nelson to lie many a time. Though I will say I never knew him try to wriggle out of anything … except in moderation.”

  “Bill?” says the Butcher. “Bill could swear that black was white, or green was sky-blue-pink; especially for somebody else. Lying’s nothing; as long as a bloke don’t kid himself along at the same time. Bill Nelson was a bit of a liar like anybody else. But he was the honestest man I ever knew.”

  “Lawyers are the biggest liars alive,” says Crowne. “And they get to be Judges, and they sit down and sentence you to death, or let you off.”

  “Same as advertisements,” says Hands. “Do you believe all they tell you in the advertisements, about pills, and draughts, and disinfectants, and all that muck? But the geezers that sell that stuff get to be Lords and Ladies.”

  “Politicians,” says Crowne. “They promise you the earth. And they run the bloody country.”

  “Actually,” says Bearsbreath, “if you’re in a bit of a corner, and you kid the blokes along a bit…. ‘We’re nearly there…. Our reinforcements are due any minute…. One more mile …’ you’re lying.”

  “Newspapers,” says Butcher the Butcher. “They don’t dare to tell the truth.”

  “Doctors,” says Bearsbreath. “Nor do they.”

  “Well then,” says Dagwood. “Why begrudge a good pal like Bill Nelson a bit of a lie once in a while? The whole world is full of lies like a corpse is full of maggots. Once you get wise to that, you’re grown-up. You’ve got to learn to sort it all out. You don’t believe all you hear or all you read: you learn to judge for yourself as far as you can.”

  “All you read!” says Bearsbreath. “Go into any graveyard. Christ! You feel they ought to bury all the live bastards, and dig up all the dead.”

  “Ah,” says Oxley. “Soon as a man dies, he’s a saint.”

  Bearsbreath laughs.

  “’Sa joke, Bearsbreath?”

  “All this Fanny Adams. You know bloody well what kind of a bloke Bill was. Dozens and dozens of geezers are supposed to’ve known Bill since he was first squadded. Everybody says something a tiny little bit different. But doesn’t it all come back to He was all right?” says Bearsbreath. “Well, that’s it. That’s your truth. Bill was all right.”

  “I never started all this bull about Truth,” says Dagwood.

  “Truth! Ppphut! A feller tells lies like a cat eats fish: specially a soldier. If a man’s okay, he’s okay. Bill was okay,” says Hands.

  “But after all, Bill went through,” says Butcher, “and after all the times he scraped out of getting killed, one way and another …” His voice bends and melts…. “To go and finish up in that lousy cellar…”

  Cattle says: “For what it’s worth, here’s a story that I know to be absolutely true.

  “Just at the beginning of the war, a man who was Managing Director of a big shoe-making concern decided to get out of London, away from any chance of getting bombed, you understand. He was a very wealthy kind of man, and liked to get about with a few nice squidgy blonds, and all that kind of thing. And he wanted to be safe, you see, because he liked to have a nice time.

  “Well, he had a house in the country, well away from London, in as safe an area as you could wish to hide out in. And as if this wasn’t enough, he built a shelter. This shelter he built was something pretty damned tremendous. Do you understand? He wasn’t taking a single chance. He had it dug God only knows how many feet deep in the ground, and built in with absolutely tremendous thicknesses of reinforced concrete, yards and yards of it. It’s an actual fact, Sergeant Dagwood, that he had it tested to be sure it would stand up to a direct hit from a thousand-pound bomb. See? He dug himself a hole that a thunderbolt couldn’t have touched.

  “And this shelter of his was made like a luxury flat. I’m not telling you a word of a lie: just like a luxury flat. There was one huge room, a kind of lounge, beautifully decorated, with concealed lighting made to look like windows overlooking the Mediterranean. It sounds crazy, but it’s God’s truth. Windows overlooking the Mediterranean! There was a bedroom, a kitchenette, a hoard of tinned and potted grub of every kind, a bathroom, a W.C., and an air-conditioning plant. That shelter was better than most West-End apartments, I can assure you, Sergeant Hands.

  “It cost thousands. He didn’t care, so long as he could feel dead certain of being safe and sound when the bombs began to drop. And when it was done, he threw a party. Yes, it’s a fact, Sergeant Crowne, a party in a shelter, with champagne, and oysters, and a few selected boy friends and girl friends, and they made a very lively night of it.

  “Well, look. This is how things work. I suppose the party must have eaten something like three or four hundred of the very best selected Whit
stable oysters that night, and all those oysters were perfectly all right except just one. And that one had something wrong with it. And this man got that oyster. And in forty-eight hours he was as dead as Judas Iscariot.

  “That is a fact. You don’t escape from dying by going here or there, Butcher; and when the time comes, it seems, you just die.”

  A brand-new lance-corporal, who has been itching to say something, suddenly says:

  “My grandfather fought in the Zulu War—”

  “On which side?” asks Dagwood, and the lance-corporal is silent.

  “I know a man,” says Hands, “that knows a man who pretty well died about a hundred times. It’s very peculiar. This geezer’s name was something like Gomez, and it seems he’s pretty well known in a place called Mexico City, in Mexico, as a man that nothing and nobody could ever kill.

  “This dago used to be a bit of a rough handful in his younger days, it seems, and before he was twenty he got shot about a dozen times in one revolution after another—because they always have revolutions out there—and at last he was caught by some Government troops, and sentenced to death. They shove him up against a wall, and six men in a firing squad give him six rounds, and down he goes, and they leave him where he falls. See? Well, some farmer finds him, and he’s still alive. All them bullets, at point-blank range, almost, had missed a vital spot; and he got better.

  “Later on he joined the police. He was shot up three times more by some bandits. He was shot right through the forehead, but your brain goes in two halves like a walnut, and the bullet just went right through without touching his brain at all. Once, they thought he was dead and shoved his corpse in a sort of refrigerator that they have in the mortuaries over there. His wife comes to identify him, and then he opens his eyes. The cold had froze the blood in his wounds, and stopped him bleeding to death: he was alive all the time. He got better again. Since then he’s been shot twice more, and knifed ever so many times. But he’s still alive.