The Opened Cage

by S. C. Howe

  ‘Go on, spit it out,’ said Joss.

  Tom thudded another bag in. ‘What the hell’s the point of doing all this?’

  ‘So what do you suggest?’

  ‘Why don’t we all just refuse to do it – it’s so bloody pointless,’ Tom replied, waving over to a section where the newly forced-in bags were already bulging.

  ‘You have to learn to stay calm around here, Tom.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You know why.’ There was a weariness in Joss’s voice.

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  ‘Because if we all started ‘throwing tantrums’ the whole war might collapse?’

  ‘You’d need a rebellion for that.’

  ‘The Russians rebelled.’

  ‘We’re not the Russians.’

  Tom snorted and carried on forcing the bags in.

  ‘And I wouldn’t talk so openly. You’re courting big trouble,’ Joss advised.

  Tom hesitated. ‘Isn’t it the case of the longer we just put up and shut up about all this, the longer it’ll go on?’

  ‘Wars aren’t decided by the likes of you and me.’

  Tom stared at him. ‘The likes of you or the likes of me?’ As soon as he said it, he regretted it.

  Joss turned away from him.

  ‘I’m sorry. That was cheap,’ Tom said.

  Joss cleared his throat.

  ‘But are we all just going to keep carrying on clearing up the mess?’ Tom asked. ‘Keep going back in for another bout?’

  Joss looked at him steadily. ‘As I asked earlier, what else do you suppose we can do?’

  Tom sat down on the muddy fire step and lit a cigarette; his shoulders slumped. The truth was he didn’t know. That was the worst of it, this painful sense of powerlessness, this helplessness against some faceless, enormous organisation which viewed them as pre-eminently dispensable. A court martial and certain death were the two realities out here if anyone rebelled.

  They worked on way after stand-to that evening, with only desultory talk. It seemed as long as they carried on packing the sandbags in, then the inevitable discussion could be averted. Why was he baiting Joss? Joss, who of all of the people he’d ever met, had taken him for who he was. As dusk turned to night, a miserable numbness pervaded Tom and the pull of numbers began to soak away the anger, the fear even.

  ‘I’m sorry Joss,’ he said.

  Joss peered at him then a smirk broke through. ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘I’m sorry about ‘the likes of’ comment.’

  ‘You may find it hard to believe,’ Joss said. ‘But I understand what you’re saying, even me, the little toff from the shires.’

  ‘Big toff. Be fair.’

  Joss pulled a face and they sat down in companionable silence.

  ‘Be a good chap, Briggs, and take this down to Miller,’ Barratt said, holding out a note he had finished writing by hurricane lamp in the gloom of the dugout. The runners were already out.

  ‘Where’s Miller, Sir?’

  ‘The usual place, Briggs – he’s on duty with the sergeant. When you’ve done that, you can turn in.’

  ‘It’s all right Sir, I’ll stay up and help out.’

  ‘There’s no need. There are two officers on duty already.’

  ‘Really Sir, I don’t mind.’

  ‘For goodness sake, Briggs!’ Barratt snapped. ‘Stop trying to be the bloody hero all the time, will you?’

  ‘I’m sorry Sir.’

  Barratt sighed. ‘Don’t you see Briggs, how your over-conscientiousness might be interpreted as a sign of no confidence in your fellow officers?’

  Briggs stared at him, appalled. ‘No... No, I didn’t mean it like that.’

  ‘I know you didn’t, but others might not see it that way. We work in a team, Briggs, no one man trying to out-do the other.’

  ‘I really wasn’t trying to do that, Sir.’

  ‘I’m sure you weren’t, but it could be seen like that. Don’t you see?’

  Briggs nodded, looked down. The old misery pervaded him, the same urge to help, being twisted in front of him, with the name ‘prig’ ringing in his head.

  ‘Anything else, Briggs?’ Barratt was looking at him more kindly now.

  ‘No thank you, Sir. No, I’m all right. Thank you.’ Briggs made his way up the steps into the cold air of the trench. He could feel the sweat from his hand soaking into the envelope and moved it around so it would not be too obvious when he handed it over to Miller. But then he dropped it in the mud, bent forward to retrieve it, looked at the muddied paper and sank onto the fire step. Why couldn’t he just get this right? Why did he have to mess everything up?

  A man shifted close by, his eyes catching the moonlight. ‘Are you all right, Sir?’ The voice was Deerman’s. Briggs immediately got to his feet and walked off, wondering how much Deerman had seen. Miller thanked Briggs when he finally reached him and tore the envelope, not even noticing its muddied state.

  ‘You get some shut-eye now, Sir,’ Miller said, noticing the young man’s exhausted air. Briggs nodded and walked off.

  ‘Night Sir.’

  ‘Deerman?’ Briggs went to sit down but immediately turned away as he saw Joss’s arm hanging around Fielder’s shoulder.

  ‘Cramp Sir,’ Joss remarked. ‘Fielder’s spark out – makes a useful post.’

  Tom was sleeping heavily, his chin on his chest. Briggs sat down, uncertain of Deerman’s meaning. Joss offered him a Player’s; Briggs took it, saw the look of concern in his face. Felt a confession straining to the surface, but knew he couldn’t; Deerman was a private, even though they seemed to be from a similar background. He shook his head. The truth was he couldn’t talk to anyone. Joss saw the gesture and was not surprised when Briggs stood up and walked away into the night.

  There had been several small attritions by the Germans and their answering counter-attacks, where men died pointlessly and in agony. Joss had once used the word ‘devastating’ when he had spoken of Passchendaele, unusual Tom realised because he rarely used adjectives – and after that, he did not talk of it again. It was as though there was a before time, which Tom felt he had almost no right to inhabit.

  ‘There’s no overtime, you know,’ said Miller cheerily as he appeared around a traverse. Tom and Joss were filling sandbags. Some of them had rotted and poured their sour contents onto the trench floor between the slats, and had disappeared within seconds into the glutinous mud. The duckboards were sagging.

  ‘Anything been brewing down here?’ asked Miller.

  ‘No, it’s been surprisingly still,’ Tom replied. ‘How about you?’

  ‘One or two shells, falling short. Anyway, come on down the line or you’ll get no grub,’ Miller said, gesturing towards the inhabited section, which glowed faint orange.

  For nearly a week very little had happened, yet the fatigues had been the same: the work on repairs, the resupplying from men who came laden at night, elusive as ghosts, as efficient as ants; the un-mitigating, galling routines. Even the old pleasure of reading by a guttering candle in a tin or escaping into daydreams seemed impossible for Joss as his mind now careered over the appalling possibilities of what might happen. Before Tom had arrived, he had learnt not to think ahead. But these new feelings had banished that old calm and made him aware of every danger.

  At night, when Tom had finally drifted off to sleep, huddled under their blanket against him, or when they had been working at some mindless task, Joss’s mind had begun cartwheeling and the fear had stopped him mid-breath. But with a strength that seemed at times almost beyond him, he quelled the thought of Tom dying with a secondary thought, If he dies, so do I, which gave him an odd peace. An end out here would be quick; somehow that had calmed his mind, not realising that beside him, under the pretence of sleep, Tom was bartering with himself, so that Joss would be spared. Take me, not him. Please. Sometimes Tom pretended to wake up because the bartering had become so fraught. And then, at those moments, they w
ould instinctively draw together, like abandoned young in a den, and something in their shared breathing calmed them. Then quite often, and unknown to Tom, after he had found sleep, Joss would stare into the night and wonder how they were going to get through this. Somewhere between this and being roused at daybreak for stand-to, he realised he must have slept as he emerged, uncurling, stiff-boned and aching with damp, into another unknown morning.

  It was during these days that the idea of a farm took shape in Joss’s mind.

  Since boyhood, he had wanted a simple life. Memories of the polluted metropolitan streets of London drifted back into his thoughts, like an exhaust over his dreams. In London he had worked in a landholdings’ company and earned a good salary and saved the money, not really knowing what he was going to do with it. In London he found, and then lost, himself. Found his true sexual identity and became lonely within it. Finding sex in London had been surprisingly easy and he had acquaintances that were as keen as he, but he shrank from anything more than the physicality of the act. At the moment of release he would cry out for the man he had not yet found, and the loneliness afterwards made him ambivalent about his fate. Surrounded by friends and able to buy whatever he wanted in that city, he had become rootless, and the war had only deepened this desperation with a new horror. It was only when he had looked up that evening in the trenches and saw Fielder that his life had started to make sense.

  So sitting awake, as the rest of the trench appeared to sleep, his hands would start shaking and the only way to stop them was to jam them under his armpits. At these times he would concentrate on visualising the Malvern Hills in mid-August, the panoramic hilltops with the skylark singing high up in summer-blue skies. The hot sun would be on ferns, giving them a muzzy, musky scent, and the seeds of gorse would pop in the heat, like miniature barrages. Up there he would be able to stretch to his full six foot two inches – and there would be no sniper’s bullet to finish him off. On and on he would walk with Tom, and the only sounds would be the sheep in the lowland pastures and that skylark high in the air. Then one night he knew what he was going to do, which the thick acrid smog of London, with its racket of horns, of shouts and wheels and the airless rooms of lodgings, had helped form: he was going to buy a farm, a small farm, and live a simple life, be with Tom. Turning to speak to him, he saw that Tom was sleeping on his side, his face looking painfully handsome and, for once, peaceful in repose. Let him sleep, Joss thought, let him sleep.

  ‘How about if we ran a farm together?’ Joss asked the next morning. They were cleaning their kit.

  ‘I could certainly manage a farm for you,’ Tom said.

  ‘I meant run it together.’

  ‘I can’t afford to buy half a farm.’

  Joss scratched the back of his head. ‘I didn’t mean that... I meant getting a farm and running it together, living together...you know.’

  Tom’s eyes widened. ‘Are you sure?’

  Joss felt a twitch of a smile. ‘I am.’

  Tom considered. ‘I can sell the cottage my grandfather left me. It’s where I lived, so I could sell it but it won’t cover anywhere near half the cost of a farm.’

  ‘Tom, I wasn’t angling at that... I have enough saved, but I need your expertise, your know-how.’ ‘And you’, he had wanted to add.

  ‘Well, it could work,’ Tom said carefully. ‘I know what I’m doing around a farm…but I do want to put in as much as I can so I’ll sell the cottage in Durnley.’

  Joss shrugged. ‘If you want to but you don’t have to. It’s you I want, not your money.’

  Now it really was crunch time thought Joss – this could be the beginning, or it could be the end. He held his breath. A race of emotions worked in Tom’s expression, then he looked up at Joss and grinned.

  ‘You’re on!’ he said.

  They spent all that day and the next discussing the farm: the type, the size, the location. They talked excitedly, like boys arranging a midnight feast, of dreams, laughing, then serious, oblivious it seemed to the fact that they were moving on into an area of yellowed grass and poisoned scrub, which unexpectedly came into view as they emerged from the communication trenches. Tom tried to visualise the farm but the thought of intact fields of green, of undamaged trees seemed unreal now, of another era. Indeed, would the miles of green shock him as much as the miles of mud and splintered tree wrecks had done? Or would it be like returning to the everyday after a nightmare? Like seeing the countryside after a sudden thaw when snow had lain around for weeks, with the shock of browns and greens? Soon the world would be edging towards the season when the bright green he had always longed to see through the bleached, cold months would mist the starved hedges and hungry trees. But out here – what? Some of the craters were so insanely big they must have altered the lie of the land for good, creating sterile, gouged landscapes where there had once been rolling pastures and level, arable fields. It was as if nothing would grow again, because there was nothing left to regenerate. What would happen if the war ended and the land never recovered? Tom dug his fingers into his palms. If he was going to survive, he would have to stop thinking like this... Unwanted, the thought slipped into his mind – there had been stories of warmer weather at base cap, and the worsening stench out on the front line, the fouled water and the diseases that lurked with microbes and rats, with lice and fleas. Out here renewed activity in nature meant only further danger.

  ‘We need to stop all this,’ Tom said suddenly, as they marched.

  Joss stared at him surprised; he looked tired. Worried too at Tom’s returning to the subject. ‘How exactly? We’re all powerless out here’. There was an uncharacteristic bitterness in his voice.

  ‘I’m surprised you feel like that. With the sort of background you had I wouldn’t think you’d know much about being powerless.’

  ‘Oh, we’re back on this, are we?’ Joss said and glanced over to see if Tom looked angry or exhausted, but he looked neither. ‘I think you’re a bit mistaken about that,’ he added. How could he tell Tom that even in a family where materially there was nothing to want for, he’d felt isolated. Too uncompetitive to be one of the school hearties and too unambitious for his family, he had withdrawn into himself. From an early age he had found solace on the estate-farm but, as he had grown out of being the adorable toddler and into a boy, little John Deerman – the squire’s youngest – the farm hands had grown distant with him, or treated him with suspicion. As he grew into teens his he had distanced himself for the others’ benefit he believed, and wandered around the pink, ploughed fields in the winter when home from school, or walked through the ripe fields of summer or in the cool bottle-green woods, becoming adept at riding so he could press out further during the longer holidays. On seeing his riding prowess, his uncles and cousins had tried to interest him in the hunt or in military matters – the first he loathed; the second bewildered him, and soon they left him alone. Thus he became known as the Family Eccentric, to be easily ignored at family gatherings and in social groups. But when he thought of what Tom had intimated about his upbringing, he asked himself, what had he to complain about? Leaning sideways, he nudged Tom playfully in the arm. Tom thumped his elbow into his arm.

  ‘Oi! Stop messing around!’ came the sergeant’s voice whistling from up the rear of the column.

  They stopped for a night at a shelled farmhouse off the road. Men packed into the stables and onto the ground floor of a building which had had its first floor and roof blown off. They had been walking for hours, and, after a scratch meal, they went to an area strewn with new straw. Using his rolled-up greatcoat as a pillow, Joss dropped face-down, fully-clothed and booted, arms and legs straddled, the scent of straw his last sense before he span heavily into sleep. Within minutes he was snoring softly. Tom sat up next to him, gazed at his friend. Looked more carefully at the way the material of his tunic was pulled taut across his big shoulders, how his fair, unruly hair reflected the light of a nearby oil lamp, and he was almost unbearably moved by him. Shutting his
eyes, he wept silently into the night.

  Waking later he found himself curled up on his side, his greatcoat over him. Joss was lying on his back, still snoring, but loudly now, Nico sprawled over his chest. Tom could sense the relentless, distant booming of heavy artillery. It was so usual to hear it now that it had become part of the everyday sounds of the line, like the tramp of boots and the clank of mess tins. He could barely muster in his mind what these weapons signified. Yet he knew if the guns turned round now, they would be dead. As easy and final as that. Death was so commonplace it horrified him. Hadn’t he witnessed several soldiers topple down in front of him as they climbed the ladders out of the trench on an attack, shot in the forehead, stone-dead, and hadn’t he stared at them, uncomprehending that anyone’s death could be so unremarked? How could you explain that to anyone who hadn’t seen it?

  Briggs gazed over to where Deerman and the others were flopped out on straw. In the moonlight he saw that Fielder’s eyes were open, that he was sitting with his knees drawn up with his arms hugging his shins.

  ‘All right Sir?’ Fielder whispered.

  Briggs nodded, went to wave, just stopped himself in time; felt his hand was cramped and unnatural. ‘Good night,’ he answered and left the barn.

  As he walked Briggs thought the scene over. Maybe the men were starting to respect him, to feel he was actually all right. Quickening his pace he went to find the other officers. Perhaps he was making headway.

  They were up at dawn. Even in the sulphurous, pearl-grey light, the plain stretching away from the barn looked bleak. The splintered, blackened trees dotted the mud landscape; they had no branches, were merely trunks, which were probably devoid of bark too. The lowering moon glinted on a few last pools of water in shell holes before disappearing. As Tom walked over the cobbles to the latrines, his boot ground over the tips of wild daffodils which were showing in the earth between the sets. The sap stained the rocks like green blood. Stooping, he stared at them and felt an absurd sense of disappointment; it was likely that this place would be obliterated too. But surely these ground-up tips might regenerate. Something had to. It couldn’t all die.