The First Casualty

by Ben Elton

  They passed a small Pierrot theatrical troupe who were drumming up business for their afternoon show by performing a truncated version of it on the Prom. Shannon stopped to watch, forcing Kingsley to do likewise.

  ‘I say, woof woof!’ Shannon exclaimed, referring to a tall, willowy creature who was doing some solo high kicks in a tiny white skirt with jolly multicoloured pompom buttons down the front. ‘Splendid, eh? Very splendid indeed. That’s the stuff to give the troops, eh? Not half! And then some. I do love a showgirl, don’t you? I absolutely love a showgirl. Well, they know the score, don’t they? Of course they do. Little teases. Oh, they know the score all right.’

  The girl finished her dance. Shannon clapped loudly and was rewarded with a demure smile all to himself.

  ‘See, told you.’ Shannon grinned. ‘She knows the score.’

  The girl retired to join the others at the side and the men tumbled on in their white Pierrot suits to perform an execrably unfunny, mimed sketch about a platoon of soldiers falling in and shouldering arms, in which the only joke (such as it was) seemed to be the inability of the soldiers to place their rifles on the same shoulder at the same time.

  ‘Shame!’ cried Shannon, showing none himself. ‘Bring back the girls!’

  There were no young men in the troupe, of course. A young man cavorting about on the Folkestone Prom in a baggy white Pierrot suit with coloured pompoms would have been given short shrift by the crowd that season. There were just old men with horribly dyed hair and too much pancake make-up and eyeliner performing with the young girls.

  ‘That’s the job to have,’ Shannon observed. ‘Male Pierrot in the age of industrial war. Not a dashing young chap left standing and all the gorgeous ingénues in their smart little skirts and tights left to granddad’s toothless drooling. I don’t know why we don’t send the old fellas over the top and give the young lads a decent shot at the bints. After all, it doesn’t take a lot of youth and vigour to stroll ten yards then get shot to bits by the Boche, does it? You could do it with a walking frame. I really think I might write to the newspapers about it.’

  Then the whole troupe assembled for a musical finale, ending, inevitably, with ‘Forever England’. Shannon joined in lustily with the crowd.

  Afterwards, as Shannon and Kingsley were about to continue their walk, the leader of the troupe approached them, his face furious beneath its thick cake of dark yellow Five and Nine make-up.

  ‘I would have hoped,’ he blustered, ‘that a gentleman who holds the King’s Commission might have behaved with more decorum, particularly in front of enlisted men.’

  ‘Well, you would have hoped wrong then, wouldn’t you?’ Shannon replied. ‘Now push off, you sad old queer, before I pull off your pompoms and stamp on ‘em.’

  The old man was clearly horrified but he attempted to bluster it out.

  ‘I see your regimental badge, sir. I shall write to your commanding officer.’

  ‘Do you know, old chum, so many of them are dead I think I may even be my commanding officer by now. That would be a lark, wouldn’t it, putting myself on a charge?’

  Shannon took Kingsley’s arm and turned away. ‘That ‘Forever England’ ditty they sang,’ he said as they resumed their walk. ‘You are perhaps aware that the fellow Abercrombie, who wrote the words, is dead?’

  ‘No, I was not aware. I have not been in a position to follow the news over the last few weeks.’

  ‘Try not to dwell on the past, old boy. Look at you now, sunning yourself on the Prom at Folkestone and watching jolly little Pierrettes jump through hoops.’

  ‘You were pretty unpleasant with that old man. Do you enjoy bullying people?’

  ‘Oh yes, absolutely,’ Shannon replied. ‘Capital sport. As for him, well, to tell you the truth I’d kill him for thruppence and enjoy the job. No, honestly, I really would. The only Englishmen worth a damn these days are in France, in fact most of them are buried in France. This trash back home, putting on patriotic airs and singing bloody stupid songs, should be digging latrine ditches for the comfort of the boys who fight. If they can lark about on the Prom they can dig bogs.’

  The two men continued along the pavement in silence.

  Kingsley turned to Shannon, who was happily winking and waving at the girls on the beach.

  ‘All right, Captain,’ he snapped. ‘I’m a patient man but my patience is wearing damned thin. What the hell do you want with me? I demand that you tell me or I tell you I shall walk away from you right now.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ Shannon enquired with casual sarcasm.

  ‘Oh very much yes, Captain. I know something about disappearing, you know, and I swear I could lose you in five minutes, bruised ribs, bashed head and all. Then you’d be stuck, wouldn’t you, my supercilious friend? Because I am officially dead and once I’m gone there will be no one to look for, will there? A dead man leaves no tracks and I know every bolt-hole in London, aye, and the means to get a passage on a neutral ship from Tilbury if I need to. So if you don’t want to find yourself getting a postcard from a corpse that has relocated its cold dead bones to South America, stop playing your bloody silly spy games and tell me what the hell it is you want.’

  ‘Yes,’ Shannon mused, suddenly thoughtful. ‘They all say you’re a useful sort of a chap. You’d better be…Ah! Here we are.’ Shannon’s cheerful demeanour returned instantly as he stopped outside a smart-looking hotel. ‘The Majestic. Excellent brunch, I’m told, highly recommended by our code-breakers and, let me tell you, code-breakers are absolute sticklers for having things just so. Boring bunch of blighters but they know their tucker. Eggs, bacon, bubble, devilled kidneys, very fine black pudding and, I’m assured, some of the prettiest skivvies on the Prom.’

  ‘Damn your brunch, Captain, and damn your fatuous gawping at the girls. Say what you have to say and let’s be done with it.’

  Shannon made a face of mock disappointment.

  ‘Surely you don’t object to us conversing in comfort and on full stomachs, Inspector? I confess I have a pecuniary motive for bringing you here. If I eat with you I may keep the receipt and the War Office will reimburse me the expense. If I eat alone then I fear I must stump up the cash myself, and I do hate laying out my own coin if I can be making free with John Bull’s.’

  Reluctantly Kingsley allowed himself to be led into the hotel, again reflecting that there was no advantage to him in alienating Shannon, and remembering also that he had not eaten since his last revolting supper in the prison hospital.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  A rushed funeral

  Agnes Kingsley raised her veil to stare down at the coffin. Her beauty was once more in stark contrast to the grim surroundings of a prison, just as it had been on her visit to Brixton when she had told Kingsley she was to divorce him.

  Shannon had lied to Kingsley about Agnes. She had in fact elected to attend his funeral and would never have dreamed of doing otherwise.

  They had given her scandalously short notice, forcing her to rush no Regent Street with barely an hour to assemble the appropriate widow’s weeds. She had had to change at the shop and walk out wearing her new black gown with the hem all done up with pins, and with the clothes she had arrived in wrapped in paper by the shopgirl and put in a bag. In was uncomfortable and unseemly but Agnes Kingsley had no intention of allowing the prison authorities to see her as anything other than a proud, upstanding English widow. Her life might have collapsed utterly but that was no excuse for lowering her standards.

  She had arrived almost exactly at the appointed hour and as she passed through the huge front door of the prison had demanded that a warder run on ahead to the little courtyard and tell them to pause for a moment, till she arrived.

  ‘I will not run to my husband’s funeral,’ she said. ‘They must wait or, mark my words, they will never hear the end of in.’

  They did wait, and Agnes was able to stand before the grave and bid her final farewells during a brief service, in which the funeral rites from the Book of
Common Prayer were read out an breakneck speed by a prison chaplain who would clearly rather have been elsewhere.

  ‘Manthatisbornofwoman…’ the chaplain jabbered. ‘Webringnothingintothisworld…Ashestoashes…TheFather theSonandtheHolyGhost…Amen.’

  There were no added readings, no poetry or music.

  After the service, such as in was, had ended, the chaplain stepped back and bid the gravedigger begin immediately to fill the grave. Agnes raised a hand to stop them.

  ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘I wish to read.’

  The governor, who had attended the funeral in deference to the rank of Agnes’s father, took Mrs Kingsley’s arm.

  ‘I am afraid, Mrs Kingsley, that we are a busy prison and do non have time for — ’

  ‘Unhand me, sir! I wish to read,’ Agnes said firmly, pulling her arm away. The governor bowed reluctantly and Agnes took a paper from her bag.

  ‘This poem my husband read often to my son, who is only four years old. It is ‘If’ by Rudyard Kipling.’

  The chaplain, the governor, two wanders and the gravediggers sighed audibly, but Agnes Kingsley did not read for them.

  When she paused at the end of the first verse, in was clear that the governor was itching to intervene and stop the recital but had not quite the courage to do so. In was now obvious to everybody than Agnes intended to read the entire poem, all thirty-two lines of it, and, what is more, to read it slowly, with firm and plodding meter. The governor could only stare up at the sky and count the syllables as she read the third verse and then the fourth. Finally she finished and having done so she dropped the poem into the grave, then she lowered her veil once more in order to hide her tears.

  ‘Thank you for your patience, Governor,’ she said.

  ‘You are welcome, Mrs Kingsley.’

  ‘I must say,’ she added as he escorted her out of the prison, ‘it seems that you were in quite a hurry to dispose of my husband’s remains.’

  The governor denied it but Agnes insisted.

  ‘Is it customary then to bury a man the very next day after he dies? In certainly is not so in Leicestershire.’

  The governor explained that this was always the way when bodies were buried within the confines of the prison, since sadly they had no mortuary facilities available to them.

  ‘And why is he buried in a prison at all? He was not a murderer.’

  ‘Those were the instructions that the Home Office gave us, Mrs Kingsley.’

  Agnes had thought about protesting; she was a proud woman and was certain that the authorities had gone far beyond their rights in disposing of her husband’s remains in this unseemly and underhand manner. In was clear to her that they wished to be rid of the whole ghastly scandal as quickly as possible. But what would have been the point of making a fuss? Douglas was dead and were she to have insisted on arranging for a proper funeral who would have attended?

  Perhaps, after all, this was the best way. Kingsley himself had always maintained that when a man is dead, he is dead and that she might chuck him in the Thames for all he cared. Agnes returned to her car and was driven away from Wormwood Scrubs.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Brunch at the Hotel Majestic

  ‘I say, what ho! Proper little piece, eh? That’s the stuff to give the troops, don’t ye know!’

  Shannon and Kingsley had entered the dining room of the Majestic and been ushered to a table in the window by a young waitress who was indeed, as Shannon observed, a delightful-looking girl.

  The table was the most secluded one available, partly separated from the body of the room by a cluster of rather large potted palms. A string quartet was situated close by, which, although not loud enough to inhibit their conversation, would serve to mask it from the other tables.

  Like most string quartets in hotel dining rooms, they were playing a selection from Gilbert and Sullivan and had arrived at a rather mournful piece from The Yeomen of the Guard. Shannon sang along under his breath for a moment as he stared out through the salt-stained window.

  ‘Heigh-dy! Heigh-dy!

  Misery me, lackaday dee

  He sipped no sup and he craved no crumb

  As he sighed for the love of a la-dye.’

  Perhaps it was the music but he seemed suddenly to have fallen into a reflective mood. ‘Nannies with babies,’ he mused, ‘old bastards with sticks, fat old bags of matrons and their lapdogs, brats rolling hoops, Jack tars with their girls or more likely strutting about hoping to find one. God’s bones, it’s a peaceful sight, what?’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘How far is it from here to Passchendaele, I wonder? Fifty miles? Rather less than that, I think. Less than fifty miles and a billion too. Here and there could be on opposite sides of the universe, couldn’t they? Rather bizarre, don’t you think? A fellow might take tea here in the morning and if he gets a move on he can have it blown out of his guts in Belgium before he’s had a chance to digest it. If that’s not bloody bizarre then quite frankly I don’t know what is.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right.’

  ‘Do you think any of the people strolling along out there so damned pleased with themselves could possibly have any concept, even in the wildest parts of their tiny imaginations, of the scale of carnage taking place at this very minute just fifty miles away?’

  ‘The casualty lists are public information. Those people out there who you seem to despise are mothers and fathers, sisters, brothers, husbands, friends. They know what’s going on and I doubt many of them are feeling very smug or pleased about it.

  Shannon stared at Kingsley for a moment in silence, his face filled with contempt.

  ‘But of course. You haven’t been there either, have you? I was forgetting.’

  ‘No. I haven’t been there.’

  ‘Ha. You’re like them. Oh yes, you know that men are dying, dying in their thousands day after day. Everybody knows that. But you don’t know what it’s like. You could spend the rest of your life trying to imagine it but you’d never get even close. Nobody could who hasn’t been there. You’ll never join our club.’

  ‘I do not wish to join your club. I wish your club had never been formed.’

  ‘A mincing machine. That’s what they all say. And it is a mincing machine. But that’s not what it’s like. All a mincing machine does is mince things up. Let me tell you, Kingsley, nothing, no words in the English language or any other bloody language for that matter, could ever describe what it’s like.’

  The string quartet were taking a short break and in their place Shannon began to sing, softly, under his breath. He sang to the tune of an old hymn. Kingsley knew the tune well but the lyric he had heard only once before. It was a soldiers’ lyric and he had heard it late one night at Victoria Station, sung quietly by a group of walking wounded awaiting dispersal.

  ‘And when they ask us

  How dangerous it was,

  Oh we’ll never tell them

  No we’ll never tell them. ’

  ‘And they won’t tell you now,’ Shannon concluded. ‘For they haven’t the wit to do so, nobody has. That’s why everybody’s a bloody poet these days. Everybody wants to tell, everybody’s scribbling away, but it’s no good. Nobody will ever find a way to bridge the gap between those who were there and those who weren’t.’

  Now it was Kingsley’s turn to quote.

  ‘Leprous earth, scattered with the swollen and blackened corpses of hundreds of young men. The appalling stench of rotten carrion.’

  ‘What’s that bilge?’

  ‘Part of a letter which T. S. Eliot sent to the Nation.’

  ‘Bloody poets again, eh? What the hell would he know anyway?’

  ‘It’s not his, it’s a quote from a letter he received from an officer at the front. I learned it off by heart to quote at my trial…Mud like porridge, trenches like shallow and sloping cracks in the porridge — porridge that stinks in the sun. Swarms of flies and bluebottles clustering on pits of offal. Wounded men lying in the shell holes amon
g the decaying corpses: helpless under the scorching sun and bitter nights, under repeated shelling. Men with bowels dropping out, limbs blown into space. Men screaming and gibbering. Wounded men hanging in agony on the barbed wire, until a friendly spout of liquid fire shrivels them up like a fly in a candle…But these are only words and probably convey only a fraction of their meaning to the hearers. They shudder and it is forgotten. Like you say,’ Kingsley concluded, ‘he was trying to describe it but knew he never could.’

  ‘Yes. And like I also said, everyone thinks they’re a bloody poet.’

  ‘It seems to be a common theme, this frustration that nobody will ever understand,’ Kingsley observed. ‘Sassoon made the same point, didn’t he? In his letter?’

  ‘Ah yes, Sassoon. What a despicable fucking bastard.’

  Kingsley was shocked at the venom.

  ‘You disapprove of what he did?’

  ‘That whining little shit. That windy turd. And him an MC too! They should tear it off him. Sneaking home with a bit of shell shock and letting the side down. We can do without war heroes turning conchie on us. Bad enough when famous detectives do it but Sassoon was one of us.’

  Everyone knew of Siegfried Sassoon and his protest. A bona fide hero, he had become utterly disillusioned and whilst invalided home had written to the newspapers resigning from the army and denouncing the war as wicked and pointless. As he was something of a celebrity, his letter had caused a sensation. He had very nearly been court-martialled, but after a number of strings were pulled and attention drawn to his numerous battle credits he was sent to a hospital to be treated for shell shock.

  ‘They should have shot him,’ Shannon said.

  ‘For stating the obvious after eighteen months in the line? That seems a little harsh, Captain.’

  ‘Oh, don’t get me wrong, Inspector. We all know that he’s right, the war’s gone mad, nothing could possibly be worth the price we’re paying, but they should have shot him all the same because, you see, we have to win this war. We just have to. And I can assure you, whatever a revolting conchie like you might think, most of the fellows agree. We’re the British Empire, for God’s sake, we can’t go through all this and lose.’