New Model Army

by Adam Roberts

  Not all these new giants are strong, or well-coordinated. A couple aren’t even democratic - are, rather, wifi smart-connected militias run on traditional-authoritarian lines. But they are still distressingly good at smashing shit up, all across the continent. Some are doing so on the commission of various aggrieved ethnic or religious groups. A couple are doing so by way of extorting money by menaces. We have made it much easier than it had formerly been. The man in that Kwai movie - I always thought he was David Niven, but you say he was Alec Guinness - who is granted the sudden realization at the moment of his death, and asks God, or perhaps uses God’s name as an expletive before asking himself: what have I done? - and then falls forward to strike the plunger of the detonator with his chest, such that the downward thrust of the pole spins the charge wheels inside the box, and this in turn sends rapid electricity down the wires all the way along the riverside and under the miso-coloured river water to the bridge’s wooden columns, struts and spars, which in turn initiates the rapid chemical chain-reaction in the explosives taped there; and almost at once there is the blinding, deafening, scorching, near-instantaneous expansion of hot gases in every direction, a thousand miles an hour and hotter than an oven, shattering the structure in heat and flames and (I hate the British! You are defeated but have no shame! You are stubborn, but have no pride! You endure, but have no courage!) doing so at exactly the moment that the massive metal train is crossing - because, because here comes the train! - throwing white parcels of smoke over its shoulder and moving its piston-elbows so fast they’re a blur - and now, the ticking is all done and it’s boom! - the traintracks are sagging away beneath the locomotive into the valley and down we go, bridge and train and everything, squealing and crashing.

  That man: me. I don’t need to tell you what the bridge is, or what the train.

  You want me to help you. I can do that.

  PART 2

  SCHÄFERHUND

  But one thing is beyond his reach

  The giant cannot master speech

  Auden

  Of course we need to be honest with ourselves if we are ever going to be at peace with ourselves. On the other hand, we need to be absolutely sure that peace is what we’re after. The metaphor from international relations is, perhaps, a little misleading. Put it this way: what, for a nation, are the benefits of peace? Trade and prosperity, perhaps, and the removal of the threat of being explosively disaggregated. Setting this last (of course, significant) merit aside, and translating into the idiom of the personal: in what ways would a prosperity of the self differ from a mere bourgeois smugness? And how are we to benefit from trading with ourselves?

  We need a different metaphor. I am still, not, the hero of this story. Things have changed; but that has not. I’m not the man I was, but he is.

  I got off the plane and made my way through into the arrivals lounge. They took me round the hooped security gate, because the metal plate in my head would have set it off bleeping. Instead they frisked me, thoroughly, and rather painfully. They were looking for weapons, which would have made me smile if I had been capable of smiling, for I was a weapon and they didn’t recognize me. A sword not made of iron, a gun that does not fire bullets.

  Martin was waiting for me there, in a spotless uniform. He was tall, well-built, good posture; the only thing spoiling the Caucasian-handsome regularity of his features was his properly goofy grin. He strode over, arm out, ready to shake my hand. ‘Mr Block? I’m Martin.’

  ‘I can’t shake, I’m afraid,’ I said. ‘My hands are funny.’ I put up my birdclaws to show him.

  ‘Your file details some degree of injury,’ he said, his smile as wide as ever. ‘Did we do that to you?’

  ‘The English.’

  ‘That’s OK then! Don’t want to get off on the wrong foot.’ I was cranky, I suppose, after all the nonsense entailed by flying nowadays, and by the physical discomforts of moving my scorched body anywhere, so I said: ‘You sometimes meet people with two wrong feet.’

  The smile didn’t go away. ‘That’s funny!’

  I didn’t think so. ‘You’re in uniform,’ I pointed out. ‘Very obviously so. I thought the point of flying me in at the civilian ’port rather than just bringing me straight into a military base, was,’ I almost choked over the polysyllables, ‘circumspection.’ My scorched little lungs. ‘Wouldn’t it have made sense for you to dress down a little?’

  The smile perked up again. I was to learn, as the day went on, the irrepressibility of that smile. ‘Mr Block, look around. Half the people here are in uniform! I’d stick out more if I weren’t in these togs.’ His weren’t was two distinct syllables. ‘The continent’s at war, sir. And besides, we’re not going to the military base. That’s not what Colonel Philpott told me. That’s not my brief.’

  I made an effort to be mollified. ‘Where are we going, then?’

  ‘To Strasbourg, sir. To a hotel, sir.’

  He walked me over to the car park, and put my luggage in the boot - the trunk, he called it. ‘Do you need any help getting in the passenger seat?’ I declined this offer, inflecting the words thank you no in as fuck off manner as I could manage. Then I puffed and huffed and awkwardly inserted myself into the auto. He sat facing front smiling benignly as I fiddled for an unconscionable time with the ridiculous clasp on the seatbelt. Eventually, despite the uselessness of my digits, it all fitted together.

  ‘OK?’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘All right then!’ very brightly spoken.

  As we drove away from the airport he hummed something to himself. I couldn’t place the tune, though some part of my brain recognized it. That niggled.

  ‘I forgot to ask,’ he asked. ‘How was your flight?’

  ‘Have you ever flown on a plane?’

  At this he chortled. ‘You want me to say yes of course, so you can say, it-was-just-like-that. Set-up, pay-off, b-bam. Very good.’

  I directed my gaze through the window. We passed through a built-up area, and crossed a bridge over a railway line. Martin was humming something. I thought it was ‘I Can See For Miles’, but the chorus was different. Something charty presumably. There was a snow-coloured layer of cloud almost all the way across the sky. The light was bright enough, despite this coverage, to cast distinct shadows. We crossed the river; a strip of platinum running west-east. ‘The river Al,’ said Martin. ‘It used to be called the Ill. They changed the name last year.’

  I was finding it an effort maintaining my grumpiness in the climate of his enormous positivity. ‘Why did they change it?’ I asked.

  ‘The name?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I guess they didn’t like that their river was called Ill. Everyone speaks English, nowadays, do they not? It’s all over Europe, English. Which is good for me, since I’m no master linguist. So they speak English here, sure they do. Or, when they’re not speaking English, they speak a sort of abomination that’s neither French nor German.’ He flashed a glance at me, with a grin like a crescent moon on its side. ‘Ill sounds like a bad name for a river, don’t you think. So now the river says, you can call me Al.’ He looked at me slyly. ‘You like old music, right?’

  ‘Not that particular piece of old music.’

  ‘Isn’t it all the same? No, don’t answer that. Instead, imagine two languages. OK? You’re playing along? Imagine one rather strait-laced and scientific language and one all suave and romantic-like. Imagine those two languages step into the matter transporter together, and emerge at the other end monstrously fused. That’s what they speak here.’

  ‘You’re quite a gabbler,’ I observed, removing my attention back out the window again.

  ‘Is that, like, English slang? I love English slang. Is it rhyming slang? Gabbler. You’ll have to teach me some proper, London, rhyming slang. The Colonel said you were a sharp-tongued fellow, said you were a smart conversationalist. All those sessions you had with him! You might be honoured, you know: he’s an important man, the Colonel, and doesn’t wast
e his time. I guess you were worth it. I’m pretty much stoked to see what you can do, Tony. Keen to see the new weapon. Ill, Al. Some people opposed the change, but I don’t see why. Alsace is named after the river, so calling the river Al is only reconnecting it to its roots.’

  There were several EU military checkpoints as we passed into Strasbourg old town, but their gates were open and traffic was moving pretty freely. Sentries glommed about, holding their rifles awkwardly, and looking not only bored but resentful at being bored. That’s a way of saying that they weren’t true soldiers. The true one would know that soldiery is two-thirds boredom. You might not like it, but you don’t resent it. Rotating my neck was uncomfortable, but from force of habit I scoped the locale, turned my head left and right, set up notional advances, saw immediately a couple of perfectly decent attack possibilities. The regular army people ought to have plugged those.

  If they’d asked me, I would have told them. They didn’t ask me.

  Martin was chattering. ‘Fought over and over, this ground - thousands of years - it’s fertile, see, and right in the middle of Europe, so it’s no surprise. But look how much of the old town has survived! You ever read Zola?’

  ‘The footballer? No.’

  He took his attention from driving to look directly at me. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘you’re delightful.’

  We drove through insanely narrow streets and into the bustle of a living polis. Strasbourg old-town itself looked untroubled by the imminence of war; shops open, cafés full; civilians and tourists filling both pavements. The medieval street plan, with the upper floors of building frontages straining to kiss across narrow streets. And, looming over it all, the ICBM-shaped spire of the Gothic cathedral. ‘That’s some godbox, no?’ said Martin.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘You might be religious,’ he returned. When I didn’t say anything to this, he added. ‘Of course you might. I mean, I’ve read your file, but the varieties of religious experience - they can’t easily be categorized according to the rubric of a, you know. A questionnaire. A file.’ When this didn’t provoke a response either, he added: ‘I don’t mean to be disrespectful, you know, in calling it a godbox.’

  ‘OK.’

  He beamed at me: ‘Wouldn’t want to narkle our Jack,’ he said.

  Jack pulled me up short. ‘Our what?’ It hurt my face to scowl, but I couldn’t stop myself. And, as incomprehension piled on: ‘And what do you mean, narkle?’

  ‘Pissy off,’ he said. ‘You know, get up the tits of.’

  ‘You’re trying to use English slang?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Somebody told you those phrases were idiomatic English slang?’

  ‘Sure.’

  I looked at him. Then I asked: ‘But why Jack?’

  He glanced at me, and said, with a childlike ingenuity: ‘You know. Jack’, in exactly the tone of voice of that guy from the film about the 1930s corporation that makes hula hoops, the guy who says ‘You know, for kids’ I can’t remember the name of the film.

  ‘I,’ I said, slowly, in an exploratory manner, ‘am your Jack,’ trying to imagine what this could possibly mean. ‘Is that - a bowling term? Or, do you mean, like, poker? Card games?’

  ‘Oh you’re a card,’ he said. ‘And don’t try and tell me that’s not cockney, because I heard Terry Shilling use it on last night’s Cable Street. We love it, that show. We being myself and my fellow US army officer, the two of us, we’re billeted together. You’ll meet him in a little - a lovely guy. Three kids, and he’s still not done.’

  I was losing the thread of this. One possibility is that the metal splinter inside my forebrain made it harder to stack hanging concepts than it had previously been. ‘I’m sorry.Not done what?’

  ‘Not done, having kids. His wife is pregnant again. Four children! In this day and age, I know, I know. You’ll meet him later. You’ll like him, I think. Very polite man.’ This last, I suppose, was a piece of conversational deference to my Englishness.

  He had read my file; but he didn’t know me very well. It is certainly true that my brain has been more bashed about by my injuries than I tend to realize; and certainly my thought processes work more slowly than they used to. But it was not until this moment that I understood which Jack Martin had meant to call me. The Giantkiller, of course.

  Of course the Giantkiller.

  He pulled the car on to the pavement to permit an articulated lorry, in military livery, to come up the narrow street. Around us the buildings were a mixture of up-to-date glass-weave and half-timbered antique - black and white inter-layered in that cakelike medieval fashion. Martin ticked a finger up to indicate Strasbourg cathedral tower, standing proud. ‘That’s one nice piece of stonework. It was the tallest building in Europe from 1647 to 1874, you know. Either that, or it was the tallest building in Europe from 1674 to 1847, I can’t really remember.’ He peered at the car’s dash screen, but vaguely. ‘I could google it,’ he said. ‘Get the precise date.’ For a moment it seemed he was actually going to do this; but then: ‘I guess it doesn’t matter that much.’

  ‘You have a lot of experience in liaison?’ I asked, in a cool voice.

  He looked at me. ‘You want to talk the turkey. I can tell, you’re in a turkey talking mode.’

  ‘As opposed to a rubbernecker’s town-tour mood, yes.’

  He looked at me, and then abruptly showed me thirty-two white teeth. ‘Let’s do that then. You’re the superweapon, after all.’ The lorry had passed. He pulled the car away, turned a corner, and tucked the vehicle through a narrow gateway on to a down ramp. We corkscrewed down several levels and came out into a broad, low-ceilinged parking hanger. All this time Martin was chatting on.‘What I don’t understand about this Christian urge to build bigger and bigger churches, hey, I guess I mean taller and taller, churches. It’s as if they haven’t even read the story of Babel. Or do they read that and think, well that doesn’t apply to us? Why would they even think that? Pick and choose which bits of the Bible to believe.’ The tyres squeaked over the driving surface.

  ‘I guess,’ I said, as he backed the car into a tight space between a pillar and a VW Suncone, ‘they figured they were building the towers to praise God. They figured the intent is not to assault him.’

  ‘You think it’s all in the intent?’

  He shook his head. ‘But if somebody menaces me, you know what? I don’t care about his intention. If he sticks a spear in my face, I don’t care if he thinks he’s praising me in the act.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, absently. ‘You’re not God.’

  Here’s a strange thing: I was finding this process of parking the car - the mix of precision and force with which Martin was sliding his vehicle into a thin slot - oddly arousing. It’s a symbolism not hard to read, of course. I looked again at Martin. It occurred to me that what I had taken initially for blandness was, if you wanted to read it that way, actually a rather appealing regularity of face and body. He gave off none of the little clues that indicate receptivity, but that didn’t mean anything. Since my scorching, I had withdrawn from that aspect of my life. Most men wouldn’t look twice at me, erotically speaking; and any who might could only be motivated by pity. Pity is the acid that dissolves arousal. My relationship to sex had altered.

  ‘So,’ I said, shifting in my seat to make my erection less obvious in amongst the pleats of my trousers. ‘Alsace. Alsatians.’

  ‘Alsace in Wonderland,’ Martin said, his attention on the rear windscreen. ‘Alsace in Hunder-schaf. Lewis Carroll,’ he added, as if I needed the explanation.

  We had parked.

  ‘There’s a pun in the name, in Alsace Schäferhunden,’ he told me. ‘Schäferhund is Shepherd - I mean, like, shepherd dog. Deutsche Schäferhund is German Shepherd, yes? And in England those sorts of dogs are called - well, yeah.’

  ‘You’re labouring the point.’

  ‘I am? I guess I am. I do tend to do that.’ He cracked the driver’s side door and squeezed himself out. Th
en, leaning down, he asked: ‘You going to be able to slink out of that space? There’s not too much room.’

  ‘I can’t really flex my waist very well,’ I said. ‘And I can’t really clasp or grip anything. So I’m afraid not. You’ve crammed us in pretty tight here.’