A motorcycle snarls up behind him and stops. Fuck. Orders, I’m sure.
“Captain McFarlane?” asks a voice from behind.
“Yes?” Jim answers vacantly as he is propelled back into the world of action and decision.
“Lieutenant Colonel Hobson wants to see you at Battalion HQ.” Jim turns around to see a young lance corporal, a despatch rider sitting on his motorbike.
“Yes. Thank you, Lance Corporal,” Jim says as he collects himself with a smile. “I don’t suppose you can give me a lift there, could you?” His mouth is dry and an awful flavour of previously drunken whiskey wells up from deep within, the beginning of a painful purging, a late afternoon hangover.
“I can, sir. Hop on.”
“Hold on a moment.” He walks over to the drivers and hands the wiry Scotsman the tin cup they have lent him. “Thanks for the tea, boys,” he says. “I must be off.”
“No problem, sir, take care sir!” With a collective salute, they go back to their game.
Jim turns to the rider and says, “Let’s be off.”
“Yes, sir.” Jim hops onto the bike behind the lance corporal and clasps his arms to the younger man’s waist. The lance corporal spins the bike around and it roars up the rutted road from which it came. They bounce over a hilltop and veer around a tight corner. It’s exciting, liberating, fun, though his guts slosh a little and he has to choke back a light wave of nausea. In the distance, between trees and houses, Jim sees a convoy of trucks, either Canadian or British, pulling artillery pieces. A bearded, incensed-looking billy goat bleats at them from the upper branches of an unattended olive tree in an abandoned grove. They pass a whiskered and shoeless and muttering old woman with a deeply wrinkled face, skin hanging like waddles off her chin, pushing a handcart full of broken sewing machines, and she yells something at them in Italian as they roar by, and Jim looks back and sees her go back to her palsied muttering. They swerve to avoid a family of white farm geese waddling on the road; the mother, too, cranes her arched neck and hisses at them as they pass. They are overcome by the rotten, gassy stench of decay as they whisk by the bloated, flyblown carcass of an ox lying just off the road in the weeds of a cratered field. Perhaps five minutes after the ride commenced, the lance corporal slows down, putt-putting through the winding streets of San Giovanni, up to the mustard-yellow stone house with red-shuttered box windows that serves as the battalion headquarters. Beside, on the grass, are parked several jeeps and Colonel Hobson’s tracked carrier, all under camouflaged netting and a canopy of poplar and oak trees.
“Thank you for the ride. You ought to race these things for a living when all is said and done!”
“There’s no better practice than being shot at, sir. See you later!” They salute one another and the rider races off to another destination, further behind the lines. Hope he didn’t realize I’m drunk. Oh boy, I’m drunk and I’m about to be addressed by the colonel, oh damn you idiot your wife left you and you’re about to get an earful of winnowing words from Colonel Hobson for something, you’re getting a reprimand I’m sure of it wandering off like that in a daze … Stuck to the door is a wooden sign plate with Bn HQ, 1st Irish, stencilled on it. A sentry stands alert outside at the doorway, rifle at the ready. They nod at one another as Jim enters the house, heart thudding, feeling suddenly six years old and glumly awaiting a spanking from his father for harassing his mother, legs crossed Indian-style on the rug in the upstairs hall, driving a toy locomotive back and forth in repetitive, listless arcs, as his mother whispers to his father downstairs at the front door as he comes in from work, bringing into the house with him a frosty breath of winter air that adds to the foreboding—
“Uh huh, okay, I’ll go talk to him.” That calm voice, and then the tramping steps and extending shadow up the stairs, the weight of inevitability, pangs of fear ranging up from his behind in bodily expectance of being hit, an antsy tightening of scrotum and loosening of bowels … Inside the headquarters is a bustle of activity. The intelligence officer, Lieutenant McGann, is marking features on a map spread out on the kitchen table, corresponding the map to the features recorded in a group of black and white aerial reconnaissance photos. A couple of clerks type orders and reports. The colonel’s radio set, a large bulky monstrosity of wires and hoses and dials, chatters staticky transmissions from all over the Eighth Army’s front. A signaller, a corporal he does not recognize, turns a knob and there is an accompanying screech, as though he picked up the signal of a banshee foretelling and announcing on its supernal frequency the deaths of distant soldiers. The sound makes Jim wince. Jesus Christ, those bloody radios and their awful racket.
“Is Colonel Hobson around?” he asks.
McGann looks up from his task. “He’s up at Brigade, should be back any time.” McGann has dark, almost black hair, a pencil-thin moustache, and intense brown eyes that together make him look older than his twenty-odd years. “There’s tea ready if you want some.”
If I want some. If I need some, you mean, if only to mask the stench of alcohol. “Sounds great.” He helps himself to a cup from a pot on the kitchen stove, feeling nervous, unable to sit down, feeling he has to urinate and urinate desperately; out the back door he goes and into the enclosed backyard canopied with willow trees, to the outhouse against the stone wall veined and fringed with wisteria at the very back of the yard, next to an outdoor stone oven for summer cooking. He steps inside and realizes he has to relieve himself in every way, and he feels a sudden nervous buildup, an uncomfortable stewing, brewing pressure in his bowels, an urgent weight on his rectum; and he bumbles around in the dusty reeking dark, a sweetish meaty stench of shit and a heavy yellow ammoniac rot of old piss hanging in the air, and he yanks at his pants, desperately pulling them to his ankles, and he sits on the rough and grainy wooden bench, cheeks bracketed by the round wooden hole. He releases the pressure he has accumulated, and it empties in a sputtery, wet, gaseous outgoing tide, and he exhales along with it in profound relief, face dewed in sweat. A moist, bacterial reek of shit follows, rising upward from the bucket below, swampy, and he pisses all over the stinking mess he has made, a torrential tide of urine like rainwater through an overworked eavestrough, relief continuing as he empties his bladder of whiskey and tea and anxiety. Hoo Hoo! he thinks, like the horn of a tugboat, like Steamboat Willie, saluting the late afternoon. At least no one tried shelling me while I did this, as has been experienced by so many others, squatting over hastily assembled bench latrines in the midst of a barrage … He wipes the muck from his behind with tissues from his pocket from his pants heaped at his ankles, and drops them into the stinking, pestilential abyss one by one. His hands shake as he stands, and a wave of nausea overtakes him, a woozy lurching of his stomach, Steamboat Willie is caught in an ocean swell; and he turns around, overcome by revulsion, by fear, by drink, and seasick with this combined experience, he buttresses himself against the bench with his hands, pants still twisted around his ankles, and he sees outlined in darkness the swampy mess below, a shine of sunlight through the hole in the door trapped and reflected in urine, a hanging haze of attendant flies; and he retches and he belches and he throws up, sour whiskey and tea and coffee and mashed sandwich and soup and bacon and eggs and bile. One more gurgly belch and it is over—the world stops turning, the ocean swells subside, and Steamboat Willie once again steams upon a sea of calm, ready to face the great liners and tankers all round in the harbour peering down at him from mighty stacks, haughty superstructures and leering bows, Hoo Hoo!
He wipes his mouth and pulls up his pants and does up his belt, and he dumps his tea into the hole, one final act, a coup de grace, and he emerges from the outhouse into the yard on rubbery legs, and he makes his way along the stone path set in tall grass to the well around which the yard is centred. Gotta rinse, he thinks, gotta rinse, I taste and smell like puke. He is about to hoist up a bucket of water when a skinny young private in a borsalino hat tells him, “Don’t
drink that water, sir. The owner dropped a couple dead chickens, and Lord knows what else, in there to poison it on the way out.” Jim peers down the well and sees the dirty white fluff of chicken feathers, hanging just under the water’s surface. A few stray ones, along with a used wad of tissue dropped in by a soldier, lily the surface. There is a damp whiff of spoiled meat. Jesus Christ. What a fucking waste. The private snickers and imparts, “Don’t worry. He was found hanging from a tree in the neighbouring orchard. Partisans got ‘im before we got here. Serves that bastard right, eh, Captain?” Yeah, serves them right. C’mon, Canada! Lick ‘Em Over There!
“I suppose.” Jim steps away from the well and enters the house again. All thoughts of poisoned water and a poisoned world exit his mind as he makes his way back through the house, back to the dining room and kitchen, to his appointment with the colonel; back to the clickety clatter of typewriters and staticky radio chatter of Battalion HQ, cigarette in hand, in mouth, masking the smells of alcohol and vomit and fear.
The dry, rattling engine of a jeep, a perfunctory skid of tires. Moving the locomotive back and forth in listless arcs. Waiting, waiting. Into the kitchen comes Lieutenant Colonel Hobson, face firm, the wheels of his mind turning with plans and worries.
“McFarlane, hello,” he says upon his brisk entrance, out of the side of his mouth, taking off his cobeen and stowing it smartly underarm, the pom-pom bobbing with each step, “Come along with me, please.”
“Yes, sir.” They walk through the dining room with its grandfather clock, its long mahogany table marred with a spike-tipped bayonet protruding upward from it, clerks typing away in mahogany chairs, one of the chairs with a broken back, a smashed china cabinet and shards of broken chinaware in the corner, and through the dining room, gutted and graffittied with German insults and expletives, into a hall and through a door into what serves as the colonel’s office, his bedroom with a four-poster bed and a small writing desk. The colonel shuts the door.
“Sit down, please.”
“Yes, sir.” Jim takes a seat in a wooden chair in front of Colonel Hobson’s desk, pulled out to face the chair in which Jim sits. He butts his cigarette into a metal ashtray on the bureau.
“Do you have any idea why I called you here, Jim?”
A light and tickly queasiness in the pit of his stomach. “I might, sir.”
“Do you know what time it is?”
“Yes, sir.” A quick look at his watch. “It is 1705 hours.”
“You missed your company inspection. You have ten new guys in your company, and you missed your company inspection. In turn, and more importantly, you missed the battalion inspection and parade afterward. I had to send a goddamn despatch rider to find you, as the last you were seen you were wandering through the streets. You didn’t tell anyone where you were going. That is just unacceptable, do you understand?” His voice is curt and sharp and stabs Jim right in the conscience.
“Yes, sir.” Waves of shame.
Hobson pulls out his pouch of tobacco, and when he unfolds it open, it releases a rich, moist, sweet aroma of cherry-tinged tobacco. He stuffs an earthy plug of it into his pipe, lights it, and continues: “Lieutenant Doyle covered for you. Gordon was livid, absolutely livid about the whole thing, broke his swagger stick over his knee and tossed the pieces into the street. The Italian street cleaner picked them up right after him on his rounds, to much laughter, and not a little embarrassment, from the spectators.”
At the suggestion of this image, Jim suppresses with all his might a smirk. “I’m sorry, sir.”
“Embarrassing is what this is. Downright unacceptable is what this is. I promoted you to captain last spring, now what the hell is the matter with you?” He puffs angrily on his pipe, the glowing coal lighting up an angry, intense orange at each drawing of his breath. “What on earth made you miss this parade? It was clearly outlined in the morning orders in the mess according to Gordon, for Christ’s sake. What do you have to say for yourself? Hmm?” Before Jim can answer, Hobson picks up on his rant, standing up and pacing about, gesturing with his pipe. “Drill, parades, inspections, these prepare everyone for the real thing. If you can’t show up for a dress rehearsal, then are you fit to go in when it’s real? Are you? You know what I could do to you? I can revoke your commission, bust you back down to the ranks. How about becoming an infantry private? Or I can have you transferred to some lighter duty, something less important. How would that be for your pride?” He shoots a steely glance at Jim for emphasis and says, slowly and thoughtfully, revealing each syllable with slow deliberation, “Or, I can have you court-martialled. How about breaking rocks in a quarry? Would military prison suit you?” He pauses and stands behind his chair, holding the wooden back with his hands. He leans in a little: “Before I dispense any judgements, I want to hear what excuse you possibly have for this dereliction of duty. This had better be good.”
Jim finds himself tongue-tied for a moment. He exhales slowly, and says simply and honestly, “Sir, I’m sorry. Nothing can excuse what I did. It was conduct unbefitting an officer, I know.”
“Mm hmm, on with it.” Hobson is now back in his chair, eyeing Jim angrily, yet with a certain patience and concern, a willingness to hear the other side of the story.
Jim runs his fingers through his hair. He feels that he is in the headmaster’s office, about to be strapped or expelled from a prestigious boarding school for which his parents saved up for years to send him. “Sir, I’m sorry, when I went to get mail today I got a letter from my wife. She’s leaving me.” He throws his hands into the air and shrugs at the injustice, or the justice, of it all. “I’m sorry ... When I read that I kind of left the planet ... I just lost all track of time, sir, found myself up by the church on the hill outside of town. That’s where the despatch rider found me on his bike, having tea with some British truck drivers.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. But it’s hardly a first around here. Father Maitland has his hands full talking with men whose wives and girlfriends flew the coop. That does not excuse your missing two inspections and a parade.”
“No sir, it doesn’t.” Jim looks Colonel Hobson in the eye to demonstrate a manly willingness to confess and face the consequences. “It doesn’t, I know. I submit to whatever punishment you feel fit to give me.” Stand me in front of a wall and shoot me without ceremony for all I care.
“It’s just not like you to do something like this. I promoted you for God’s sake. I promoted you and put you in as 2IC of Able. We took a hell of a shaking in the spring, and I promoted you because I thought you could handle company command, and I didn’t have to look outside for some greenhorn. And until this moment, I feel that you’ve done a fine job. These last weeks haven’t been easy, but this is what we do. This is our job. It is a very public duty. And nothing from your private life can get in the way of it.”
“Yes, sir.” But sir, he thinks, it is my private life that got me into this in the first place.
“I ought to have you busted down or court-martialled. I really ought to. To have such concerns springing up the eve before battle creates undue stress when I have more than enough concerns to keep me occupied, have you considered that?”
“Yes, I can imagine, sir.”
“What’s private is private, and it has to remain thus. You are commissioned to be an officer, and as such, your job is to follow orders given to you by your superiors, and to give orders to those under you, so that together we can win this war. That means that you must never disregard or disobey any order. Your private life cannot get in the way of your commission, do you hear me?”
“Yes, Colonel.”
“I am sending an understrength battalion into action again after only two days’ rest. You’re lucky in that regard; I can’t afford to sack you right now.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“The new captain we’ve picked up, Riley, is too green to take a rifle company into actio
n yet I think, I’m putting him in charge of Support for now to learn the ropes. Goldberg won’t be fit to return for some time yet, so I have little choice but to let you stay right where you are. You will keep your appointment, as your field record has been exemplary up to this point. You will, however, have all leave revoked for two months. And you will have a black mark on your file, and this will seriously impinge on any future considerations for promotion. Am I understood?”
Relief washes over him. “Yes, I understand you, Colonel. Thank you for your leniency.” Embarrassed, head aching, he resumes: “I guarantee that this will not happen again, and I am ashamed to have done it ... and I will do my best to bring out the honour of myself and this regiment from this point forward, sir.”
“You are dismissed. Now get out of my face.”
“Yes, sir.” He stands at attention, salutes, and leaves the office.
23
It is announced by Colonel Hobson that for the final dinner before marching into battle, the battalion officers will be hosting the officers of the nearby-stationed British London Irish Rifles at the mess, and to this end men arrive and file into the hotel dining room, extra chairs, tables and benches having been dragged in; some even dine in the small lobby at the low table, in the winged chairs and on the sofa. The officers eat together and share stories and laughter and offer words of encouragement to one another, and after dinner, after plates and mess tins have been cleared away, the pipe majors of both regiments stand and play their pipes, blowing into the pipe-stems, cheeks red and puffing, elbows pumping the baggy bellows, skirling boldly airs and ballads to much hearty and merry approval.
Riley and Jim and a Captain Gibson from the London Irish, a droll, mustachioed young man with lively green eyes and a habit of hitting the table with his hands to punctuate every point, listen to the music and clap along, carried away for the moment by the moment’s escape. Jim sips just enough wine to get rid of his mounting headache and clarify his dull and hungover mind for a time.
Beckoning War Page 19