‘You’re hungry,’ said Bill. ‘Come on.’
Everett helped himself to an empty mess tin and spoon and approached the cooking pot, inhaling deeply. The aroma felt rich and heavy enough to fill him on its own – something meaty, with pepper and rosemary that conjured up images of Sunday roasts and tablecloths and creamy white plates at a table with roses at the window, but the roaring noise at the back of his head overwhelmed that unbidden memory, and when he shook himself he saw that the cook, introduced only as Potch, had ladled his mess tin full of stew. Large lumps of meat and dumplings were drowning in a thick brown gravy. Bodies in mud. There was a space next to where Bill was unwinding the puttees from his calves, so he sat there.
His first mouthful stunned him. He’d been expecting some creative use of bully beef, salty and formless mush, but his tongue encountered flesh and gristle, and he chewed and chewed and finally swallowed. ‘My God!’ he grinned at Bill. ‘Is this actual pork?’
Bill paused in unwinding the strips of cloth from his legs and eyed him. ‘What do you care?’ he asked.
The deserter became aware that the room had become very quiet, and that everyone was looking at him. In their eyes he saw the same flat appraisal that the rats had given him. Plenty to go around, chum. What did he care? The answer, he found, as he devoured his meal and then licked the mess tin clean, was that he didn’t.
2
BILL
EVERETT’S TIME WITH THE GREY BRIGADE WAS IN many respects much the same as life in the regular army. There were long periods of intense boredom alleviated only by finding creative ways to gamble and the ongoing war of attrition against lice and damp, interrupted by outbreaks of nerve-shredding noise and terror when one side or the other made another futile attempt to break the stalemate and claim another few yards of No Man’s Land. There were rifles to be maintained and latrines to be dug and the cellar ceiling was forever threatening to collapse and needed shoring up with pieces of timber.
In other respects it was a different world.
There was no command structure and hence no one to order that these duties be done, and so they were only ever completed haphazardly, or at the cost of sometimes brutally violent arguments about who should take responsibility for what. There was no stand-to at dawn, and no inspections. But there was no relief either. Before, he could have expected six days at the front before being rotated back to the reserve trenches and possibly even some home leave, but with the Grey Brigade there was nowhere to rotate to. And, because of the exposure to snipers during daylight, they led an almost entirely nocturnal and silent existence. Light and noise were shunned. He had hoped that the relative warmth and better diet might help his fever, but if anything it worsened, developing into a persistent cough. Long bouts would leave him with blood on his lips and unable to stand, and he felt something heavy swilling at the bottom of his lungs, like water in a shell crater. Almost certainly it was tuberculosis, fatal in the long term, but given that his life expectancy was likely to be a matter of days he tried not to let it bother him too much.
At times, sitting in his alcove in the cellar either mending a sock or cleaning a gun, he wondered if this was how medieval monks had lived. Before, it was not unknown for some of the men to comfort each other physically, but with the threat of court-martial and imprisonment such acts were scrupulously clandestine; amongst the Wild Deserters there were no such inhibitions and he quickly ceased to be shocked by the sight of men fucking.
Sometimes, regulars from one army or the other would try to use the farm as a staging point for a raid or recce, and then the Grey Brigade would hide, deep and silent. Taking the wounded, who were as good as dead anyway, was one thing, but to attack a fully armed squad of fighting men would attract reprisals. And the caution was felt on both sides. On one occasion a private discovered the cellar door and excitedly called to his sergeant while in the dark on the other side Everett and the others gripped their rifles tighter and readied themselves. The deserter tried to take slow and even breaths, as a coughing fit at this moment was the last thing they needed.
‘Leave it, private,’ they heard the sergeant grunt.
‘But, sir!’ complained the private. ‘There could be all sorts down there! Bottles of wine! Brandy, even!’ There came a murmur of interest from the other men in the squad at that.
The sarge’s reply carried the low and intense anger of a man who was deeply scared. ‘Now you listen to me, boy. The only thing on the other side of that door for you is death. You can go in and look for it if you like, but you’re going on your own, and you ain’t coming back.’
That seemed to do the trick for the curious private, and the squad moved off, but not before the sarge hawked and spat heavily at the door.
‘Why didn’t they come in after us?’ asked the deserter afterwards.
‘They don’t know for sure that we exist,’ said Bill. ‘Or if we do, what our numbers are, how we are armed, what we are capable of. Hard enough to carry out your orders as they stand without going looking for trouble. They try not to believe that we exist for the simple reason that they can’t comprehend our motives as being anything other than cowardice and the desire to save our skins. They think, why would a man who cares only for his own survival willingly put himself in the middle of conflict? For men such as they are, who are moulded by and perpetuate a system of fear and unthinking obedience, the notion that a man might flee them out of a refusal to have his spirit so enslaved and that the safety of his flesh and blood means nothing in comparison – it’s beyond the scope of their imaginations. Easier for them to imagine ghouls and monsters than men with a sense of their own dignity.’
I am what the elders teach the young ones to fear, Everett thought proudly. I am the thing in the cellar. ‘I’d like to get a full, proper Grey Brigade together out here,’ he said. ‘We could invade the world from No Man’s Land. Imagine their faces!’
‘Imagine their faces as they mowed us down with Lewis guns, perhaps.’
‘So why did you join up, then? You don’t seem very much the unthinking obedient type.’
But all Bill would offer him by way of reply was a wry smile and the response, ‘Who says I joined up?’
* * *
It occurred to him that he should have felt sickened by the act of cannibalism, or at least guilty. But he found that after seeing so much of how human flesh and bone and viscera could be mangled and mutilated, the sacred vessel of the human spirit torn open and spilled into the mud with no revelation, it lost any sanctity it might have once held for him, and the taboo became as meaningless as trying to stay a virgin in a brothel.
This was not to say that he didn’t retain some principles – he made it a point of pride to only ever eat from men he had killed as a mercy. The problem was that any kind of meat perished rapidly in such damp and unsanitary conditions, and when even the living suffered from gangrene the freshness of a carcass could not be relied upon. The balance, then, lay in finding a man so wounded that he had no hope of survival.
Everett’s first kill was a young German Gemeiner that he and Bill found in a shell crater, semi-conscious and raving with infection.
His left leg hung in tatters, though he’d done a passable job of using his belt as tourniquet above the knee. Since bone was always awkward to cut through, and the explosion had already done that work for them, Everett decided to take advantage of this and moved in with a knife to cut through the remaining tissue and sinews; however, the sensation of being sawn at roused the private to such fresh pleading and screaming that the deserter felt something like pity and drew his pistol to put the boy out of his misery.
Bill pushed his gun down, miming Noise. As if the boy were not already making enough. But Bill was right; screaming was just background noise, easily ignored, whereas a gunshot in No Man’s Land might draw the attention of snipers. So the deserter replaced the gun and used his knife. It whispered across the boy’s throat and as his screams became gurgles and then finally stopped, Everett wa
s aware that Bill was murmuring some litany and turning a bracelet that hung on his right wrist.
Later in the cellar, eating what the boy had provided, he remarked to Bill, ‘If it’s forgiveness you’re after, I think you’re looking in the wrong place.’
‘Not forgiveness,’ replied Bill in his hoarse choke of a voice. ‘Blessing.’
Everett laughed. ‘Even worse!’
Bill removed the bracelet with which he had been fiddling and passed it to him. It was a simple loop of something whitish-yellow that felt like ivory, with open metal-capped ends.
‘What’s this?’ Everett asked.
‘It’s a boar’s tusk, the symbol of my faith. I belong to the Farrow, the followers of Moccus.’
‘Huh. Sounds Greek.’
‘He’s older than the Greeks. Moccus is the Great Boar, He Who Eats the Moon, much older even than your Christ.’
‘He’s not my Christ.’ Although given the roaring blankness of his memory even that might not have been true.
‘All the same. Moccus protects warriors and hunters, as well as bringing life and fertility to the land. Think of him as the patron saint of soldiers, if it helps.’
‘Naw, that’s Saint George,’ said Geordie, one of the other Tommies.
‘Khuinya,’ growled Nikolai, the small Russian sapper. ‘Bullshit. Saint George is patron of Moscow.’
Bill overrode them both before an argument could brew. ‘Moccus was old when your city was a village of mud huts,’ he said. ‘He defended the people of the deep forests against the Romans. He’s there still, for those who know how to look for him.’
‘Then why hasn’t anybody heard of him?’ asked the deserter, passing the bracelet back.
‘Why haven’t you heard of him, you mean? As if the world will simply open its secrets to you like a whore because you’re in it?’ Bill shrugged. ‘You’re hearing about him now. That boy, the German with the leg, he was a soldier, and his death gave us something, so I hoped that Moccus might bless him for that.’
The deserter chewed slowly, wondering if he should be grateful, and if so to whom. The corpse he had left in the mud with its throat cut, indistinguishable from all the others? God? If He was there, surely He could regard such acts only with abhorrence. ‘It seems to me,’ he said, ‘that if this Moccus of yours is a protector of warriors and hunters then he’s doing a bloody awful job of it hereabouts.’ This earned him some chuckles from the other Wild Deserters.
Bill simply nodded; if he’d taken offence he kept it to himself, but he raised his chin to expose the pink ruin of his throat. ‘Do you think I would have survived this otherwise?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know,’ the deserter admitted. ‘I’ve seen men survive some pretty horrible things.’
‘I’ve survived a lot more than most. I was at Mafeking, where we were so hungry we ate our own horses. I was with the 90th Light Infantry at Ulundi when we broke the Zulus. Got this.’ He pushed up his trouser leg to reveal a long, shining scar that curved down his calf and disappeared into his sock.
‘But that was over thirty years ago!’ Everett protested. ‘You’re nowhere near that old.’
‘He’s full of bullshit,’ said Nikolai.
‘The sound of their spears drumming on shields was like thunder rolling across the plain out of a clear blue sky,’ Bill continued, as he stirred the stew in his mess tin.
‘Next you’ll be trying to tell me that you rode with bloody Wellington himself.’
Bill smiled at that. ‘A bit before my time,’ he admitted, and was quickly sober again. ‘The favour of Moccus is not some deferred celestial reward if you say enough Hail Marys and eat fish on Fridays every week until you die. It is writ in the flesh and blood and muscle and bone of his worshippers, gifted from that of himself. He makes his followers strong.’ He was still stirring his food, not eating, and the deserter caught the unspoken word hiding in his tone.
‘But?’
‘Strength doesn’t count for much when a man is all scar.’ Bill grunted a dry little laugh and put his meal to one side.
‘Ah yes, the sword of righteousness and the shield of faith. Forgive me if those don’t sound much help against a trench mortar and Jerry coming at you with a bayonet. No offence, Hans,’ he added. The German lad picking lice out of his beard with the use of a candle and a mirror waved the insult away. ‘Are there songs? Does your Moccus offer virgins in heaven?’
There was more laughter at this. Only Potch, the cook, who had known Bill longer than any of them, didn’t join in. ‘Don’t provoke him,’ he warned the deserter.
Bill drew out his knife.
Everett jumped to his feet and stepped back. ‘Now hold on there a moment, chum…’
‘I told you,’ Potch murmured, watching with interest. Activity in the cellar had stopped; white eyes in the gloom turned their way, wary. It wouldn’t be the first fight – or death – this room had witnessed.
But it seemed that fighting to defend his faith was not what Bill had in mind. ‘There’s this,’ he said, pulling up his sleeve, and then drawing the blade across the underside of his forearm. The cut was shallow but bled in a quick, red flood. He winced a little, put the knife down, gripped the cut with his other hand and then wiped the blood away. Where it should have bled afresh, there was the shining pink line of a new scar.
Everett gaped while the other men, evidently familiar with such small miracles and uninterested in the conversation now that it seemed unlikely to become violent, went back to their business. He felt his lungs go into spasm and sat back down heavily as coughing wracked him. ‘Well,’ he wheezed, wiping blood from his lips with the back of one hand. ‘You’ve convinced me. I could do with a bit of whatever you’re selling. Consider me a convert. Where do I sign up?’
‘It’s not as simple as that. If this ever ends,’ Bill said, with an upward nod that meant not just the outside but the whole war, ‘and you’re alive to see what comes next, find a village called Swinley, on the Welsh Marches in Shropshire. That’s where you’ll find us: the Farrow. It’s where our god walks – you can make your case directly to him.’
3
SWINLEY
THE DESERTER WASN’T CONVINCED THAT THE WAR would end. With his past lost behind that wall of thunder, and along with it any clear recollection of a time of peace, it seemed entirely possible that no such state had existed, that slaughter and mud and mangled flesh had been the condition of mankind forever and would continue forever, war without end, amen. He wasn’t persuaded by the way other men claimed to recall such a time and told stories about it. The members of the Grey Brigade rarely offered insights about their pasts, presumably fearing betrayal to the authorities and a firing squad, and it was easy to dismiss those that did talk about their lives before as madmen. There were plenty of men in the trenches who were shell-shocked and suffering from all manner of absurd fantasies – what more absurd than a world of green grass, trees, and birdsong? Then the Loos offensive was launched, and in the botched attempts to cut the German wire an artillery barrage brought down the cellar roof, killing half of the Brigade along with Bill, and his particular absurdity died with him. Apparently his unnatural healing couldn’t do much in the face of several tons of stone and earth. The Allied offensive rolled over their position in a wave of steel and thunder, and while the surviving Wild Deserters tried to flee before it Everett let himself literally sink beneath it as it passed, reasoning that the world would have its way with him and there was little he could do about it.
When British arms pulled him out of the mud they found a man dressed in the rags of a British uniform but who, despite speaking English with an accent which sounded vaguely Midlands, claimed to have no memory of where he was from or what had happened to him. This in itself was not unusual, but the lack of any insignia, tags, or documents to give a clue as to his identity caused more suspicious voices to suggest that he was simply shamming and really a deserter. Nonsense, it was countered, who in their right mind would desert forwa
rd, into No Man’s Land? And so he was declared to be suffering from shell-shock and sent to an army hospital at Langres, where the surgeons confirmed that diagnosis and added tuberculosis to the list, and he was invalided out to an asylum for enlisted men called Scholes Farm on the outskirts of Birmingham.
Here, for the first time, he felt truly afraid.
He saw strong men reduced to stammering and twitching puppets, jerked by invisible strings that tied them inescapably to the horrors that they had experienced – weeping, vomiting, pissing themselves like infants. Still, for them there was some hope, however thin, that their minds might be healed. Worse were the ones who retained their clarity of mind within mutilated bodies – who had lost faces, limbs, genitalia, and who knew that nothing would ever make them whole again – but even for them the damage was done, and as bad as it was, wouldn’t get any worse. For himself, the consumption that ate away at his lungs was a death sentence by slow and insidious degrees. The best that he could hope for was a massive haemorrhage and a swift bleeding-out. At worst, the disease would spread into his bones and brain, causing meningitis and warping his spine, trapping him in the rotting corpse of his own body.
Through the winter of 1915, a cheerless Christmas and the hollow promise of the New Year he got used to being awoken in the night by the sound of running footsteps and screams, often his own, and so the first time that Bill came to visit him was peculiar in its absolute silence.
He could not recall the process of waking up; one moment he was asleep and the next awake with the stark clarity of a gunshot. At first he couldn’t work out why. There was no noise from anywhere else in the building, just the ticking of his wristwatch on the bedside table, and then he became aware of the human silhouette watching him from the corner of the room. Something about the figure gleamed. He could make out no features and yet he knew instinctively that it was Bill, an understanding confirmed by the lighter shine of a boar-tusk bracelet around his wrist. The deserter waited for his visitor to say something. Then either he moved, or the thin light through the curtains changed fractionally because the deserter could now see the condition in which Bill had chosen to visit him: he was naked and slicked with blood from huge wounds where his flesh appeared to have been gouged – no, not cut, the deserter realised, but eaten. Then he was gone as suddenly as he’d appeared.
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