Captain

by Sam Angus

  The crowd was cheering and yelling, but I was nauseous still with guilt. Major Straker had defended Captain and I hadn’t. What sort of friend was I? Major Straker had seen my cowardly performance there, in front of the QM. He knew I hadn’t been truthful and that I’d let poor Captain take the rap.

  I tucked my heels in, feeling another spurt of speed and enjoying it, the extravagance of it fitting the recklessness I felt, the anger at myself.

  “Tom Thumb’s heading for Cairo, for Constantinople, Aleppo, he might go anywhere—he’s going everywhere but straight down the line … but Lance-Corporal Bayliss and Dolly are catching up the head of the race, and that’s from a sitting start, gentlemen … Tom Thumb’s proving erratic in all the excitement … but he’s back on track, and Dolly—she could even be bred for the track!—It’ll be the Fourth Battalion taking home the pennant if she can overtake Strychnine … Oh, there’s nothing like a camel scurry! Well, Tom Thumb there, we don’t know what he’s going to do next—hold on to your hats, everyone—Look! Dolly is on the final straight, she was only warming up until now and listen to the crowd—how it loves a plucky rider—The Lance-Corporal was at Gallipoli—at Gaza, at Beersheba, at Huj—Lance-Corporal Bayliss of the Worcestershire Yeomanry, of the Queen’s Own Hussars—here on Dolly for the Promised Land Stakes—a race open to all ranks of the Desert Column—she’s opening up like a winner—she’s taken on another lease of life!—She’s over the finish!—Dolly it is!—Dolly and Lance-Corporal Bayliss—over five furlongs, they’ve beaten the competition hands down—winners of the Promised Land Stakes!”

  * * *

  I was carried shoulder-high through the crowd, born overhead by a thousand hands, but they were never Captain’s and it was never his face I saw when I looked for it.

  Somewhere there was bareback wrestling on camels. Somewhere else an egg-and-spoon race was going on, riders’ faces comical with concentration, the camels greatly indifferent to it all. I led Dolly from place to place in search of Captain, and everywhere she was given grapes and cream cakes, and she slathered and slobbered in her customary way and indicated that she knew nothing about cheering crowds or any such thing as a race at all.

  There was a concert and dancing and a prize giving. I stepped forward to receive the Cup and the pennant. The Worcestershire Yeomanry give the loudest hurrahs, so Ballard and all of them took the roof off the tent at that moment, but Major Straker never clapped for me at all.

  I left the tent and went out alone to where I was certain Captain would be. I would have given him the regimental silver if I could; would have said what I wanted to if I could find the words for it. But instead, when I found him there in the mule lines beside Hey-Ho, all I said was: “This is for you. We brought this back, Dolly and I, we brought it back for you.” I showed him the rosette.

  “Dolly won,” he said, and he broke into a wide smile and he hugged me.

  As I pinned the gaudy rosette to Hey-Ho’s halter, I said, “It’s for you and for Hey-Ho.”

  Hey-Ho tossed his head in protest at the fluttering tails of it on his cheek.

  “He says he is very proud of you,” said Captain.

  The rosette looked brash on Hey-Ho’s wise, grave head. I looked down.

  “I am not very proud of me,” I said.

  Captain was silent, waiting.

  “I’m sorry,” I said finally.

  He smiled then, in a way that said that punishments and such things meant nothing to him, that our friendship meant something to him, that I and Hey-Ho were all that mattered.

  “Anyway…,” he said. “You were right to want hard food for her.”

  I looked up, puzzled, but all he would say in explanation was: “Dolly has a secret.”

  “What’s that?”

  You don’t really want to be atop a camel that has any kind of secret: they are dangerous enough, just as they are.

  “She is not yet ready to share it with you,” Captain answered, and we were both laughing then at the notion of a camel having a secret that it has not yet decided to publicize.

  You get all sorts of punishments if you’re in the regular Army, even for silly offenses. For almost nothing at all you can get tied to a wheel for an hour a day for fourteen days. Captain had done two hours’ extra grooming, which was just a token punishment because the Major knew Captain had taken the rap for me.

  I have the pennant here. I carried it with me all the way to Damascus. Nurse has ironed and hung it by my bed, unaware how pinching are the memories it brings.

  SOMEWHERE IN THE DESERT

  NOVEMBER 1917

  Sometime around then, just after the races, I was sent out with sixteen men, all of us under the command of Lieutenant Sparrow, from one sand hole to some other sand hole, the idea being to act as a guard to the flanks of the main artery of the Army and to reconnoiter, to find out if the Turks were preparing to attack from the east. Captain was to come too, with Hey-Ho, there being little work at the camp just then.

  I wasn’t amused by the way Dolly was jigging and jogging like a show pony, and looking about herself in a hoity-toity, displeased sort of way. She stopped suddenly, abruptly snatched her head to the ground to pull out, roots and all, some spiky stubble grass, and pitched me headlong down her serpentine neck. I scrabbled back up and more or less into position, then caught Captain grinning at us both with amusement. Dolly belched, and green slime poured over her yellow teeth and in and out of every fold of her several chins, and I was irked by the indignity of it, me being a Lance-Corporal and all.

  We awoke, the second morning of that trek, to the scent of the sun-warmed wormwood, and my first thought was what sort of state of mind I might find Dolly in. You see, you never know which side of a bed a camel will choose to wake up on, and to be anywhere near a camel, especially Dolly, at breakfast time when she was always in a hump, can be a risky sort of business. She woke that particular morning snarling and roaring with astonishment and dismay at the sleeping conditions offered to her by the British Army. Firkins came out of his tent and didn’t peg the opening down, so it was there, flapping in the wind, while Firkins set about lighting his pipe. Dolly took a great exception to the flapping of that tent. Tearing the rope from my hands, she went roaring and bellowing off in her unfathomable way towards some random point that she’d hit upon, which was no different than any other point in that blank empty country we were in.

  “More human than a horse,” said Captain, grinning fondly as my mount disappeared.

  “Inconsistent. Unpredictable. Like my wife,” said Firkins, laughing.

  I wasn’t laughing, though, because it is no joke, losing a camel in a desert, and it was annoying that Firkins was laughing because it was his tent flap that sent Dolly running. She was daft as a brush, Dolly, really … She showed a proud indifference to all sorts of fire, but just the first squeak of a bagpipe, or the merest flap of a flag, and she’d fly off the handle and career away to the back end of beyond. On top of that, I was a bit surprised by Firkins having a wife at all, seeing as he’d never mentioned her and seeing as she’d have to live at close hand with his pipe and that history spouting at all hours …

  Dolly came to an abrupt halt, having taken a fancy to some spiny twig or other. I was relieved, because if she was scared she could outrun any horse, and sometimes I had to wait a good many hours till she decided to return. Hey-Ho, on the other hand, was always allowed to graze loose.

  That morning I watched, sulking, as the little donkey wandered away, nibbling at the prickles he so loved and turning from time to time to see if Captain were coming or if he could hear his voice. When he turned to look for Captain, his good ear would be up, his eyes round and deep, and there was something so sincere in his searching for Captain that made me wish for some other animal than Dolly—some tender creature who’d search for me in the same way. At the end of the day, if we were in camp, when Hey-Ho heard the blowing of the Last Post, he’d lift his head from the thistles and plod straightaway home, and park hims
elf in his section of the line, bang in the right place. Hey-Ho submitted himself to the general good, took his master’s goal to his own heart, while Dolly could only be persuaded into doing a thing for me if it served her own purposes too.

  “Here. Take these.” Captain slipped some dates into my pocket. “Copy me,” he said, then patted his pocket and turned his back and whistled.

  We walked on a few steps, whistling and patting our pockets. After a bit I sneaked a backwards glance.

  “She’s coming, Captain, she’s coming,” I said, and I was mighty relieved, and amused too, because Dolly was heading our way while still managing to pretend that we and our dates were entirely beneath her consideration.

  “Keep walking,” he said, grinning.

  Then suddenly Dolly was there, right behind me, and lowering her great nose to my pocket. She found the dates, and slobbered and drooled from her lips while her eyes looked at the horizon, as if she could take or leave the dates and they were nothing to her at all. Captain tickled her behind the ears, and so did I, and then her lids were dropping, and almost closing, and she started up a sort of purring sound like a cat, and Captain and I were grinning over her ears at the preposterousness of a camel.

  On the morning of the third day, we stopped to breakfast on small portions of salt bacon, hard biscuits, and tea, each of us carrying four days’ rations. The sandhills were steep and deep, like cliffs almost, and far higher than any hill in Worcestershire. The sun turned the sand red-hot and made the air shimmer. In the height of the day, our mouths turned raw from thirst, the sun hammering down on our heads with all the heat of a furnace and turning everything to mirage and illusion.

  Hey-Ho was slow and floundering. He suffered more than the camels in the deep sand and on the sharp rocks. His eyes turned red from the sun and the flying sand. Dolly’s head dropped too. The rocks cracked the soft pads of her feet and she flinched at every pebble as though it were a hot coal.

  We struggled on without water, on and on, over the white-hot sand, under the white-hot sun, the waves of heat sinking and rising, eddying around and around, our lips growing cracked and shrunken, our rifles too hot to touch.

  The deadliest enemy wasn’t Jacko, you see: Out there, it was always the desert sun.

  The following day we headed homewards: back down the mountains, then on along the bed of a dry wadi. The night was bitter. We found some or other inhospitable crook or cranny to rest in, and drew lots for the order of sentry. We rolled up in our blankets in hollows of sand, rifles loaded in our hands, each of us facing out in a different direction.

  Despite the general malevolence of Dolly, and her evil smell, I had taken to using her forelegs as a pillow, and they were serviceable enough for that. But the thing that really puts a wrench in the plan when you’re trying to kip beside a camel is the mountainous gurgling and bubbling that goes on all night in all four of its stomachs. On top of that, I was nervous of doing sentry duty. When the temperature dropped and I was soaked to the bone by dew, I gave up and paced up and down until it was time to relieve the Lieutenant. I was very serious just then about my duty there, as the nerve end of the right flank of the British Army. Overtired and fraught, every sound was making me jump and start. The mesh of tangled thorn against the sky grew sinister. Soon, in my imagining, the whole of the night was menacing and every thorn and bush seemed thick with Jacko’s men.

  Some nightbird, or other thing, squawked. Then there was silence. I thought that the silence was strange, because no other bird had squawked back, and one bird always answers another. I wished someone were awake to keep me company. The scrub shadow moved again on the white sand, and I thought I caught the murmuring of a human voice, and perhaps the sound of metal on stone; and then I thought I was just going mad with imaginings till I heard what I was sure was a voice. I woke the Lieutenant, and he woke Firkins and sent him off to the main wadi to warn the next outpost. Archie Pimm and I were told to cover the ground in front and on the flank. The Lieutenant himself took up position at the point where the track crossed the bed of the tributary.

  The silence was split with a crackle of fire from somewhere—spurts of red in the dark—and all of us answered with fire of our own. Jacko stopped his fire. There was silence for a while, and we all in our separate positions waited tensely. After a while, Lieutenant Sparrow crept up behind me and whispered, “Bayliss, find out where they’ve gone. Follow if you can … and take care.”

  I collected Dolly, who wasn’t keen on this new project, nor on being taken away from Hey-Ho and the others. Truth be told, neither was I, but I mounted and set off fearfully into the moonless night, wishing Dolly’s digestion were not quite so loud, because it was loud enough for every Jacko in every wadi of all Arabia to hear. I approached the point the Turkish fire had been coming from, and saw blankets and implements abandoned and, amongst them, with a sickening turn of the stomach, two bodies tangled in some undergrowth.

  The rest had escaped, and it was my job to track them down. I steeled myself on. Dolly herself was going happily along the sand and pebble of that riverbed, it being the old path home. It grew foggy. The stars were blotted out, and the dark felt thick and haunted, and you couldn’t see very far ahead, not only because of the creeping fog, but also because of the rocks and boulders that lay tumbled about everywhere. We turned a crooked leg of the wadi and the footprints we’d been following disappeared.

  I urged Dolly up the bank. I tapped her. She grunted and groaned and stood firm, and we had a fight to see which of us would get their own way. She belched, and then, in her own good time, took one picky, mincing step up, and then waited, and so on, and all the while she was curling her neck and stretching it out and developing a great longing to be with Hey-Ho and her fellow camels; and I realized that all this shilly-shallying was about her objection to this new direction not being homewards. Somehow or other, I got her to the top of the bank, and there, where the breeze felt fresh and cooling, I let her rest, and looked about with all my senses on edge.

  There was a whistling, or some sound other than the wind. I saw something black ahead, a little way below, but in the fog I couldn’t tell how far it was, nor what. I dismounted, my heart beating against my ribs like a moth trapped in a palm, and looped Dolly’s headstall round a tamarind tree.

  The thing was moving softly, but had most definitely moved. I thought of the others asleep somewhere, or peacefully homeward bound, while I was here alone with Dolly, and Jacko right there in front of me, creeping like a mongoose straight towards the British camp.

  I crept down, rifle in hand and loaded, inch by inch, so as to see around a rock that obstructed my view—to see how many men were down there. I prayed Dolly was happily eating that tamarind and that she wouldn’t belch or bellow or roar. I crouched and waited and shivered and peered, but my eyes were tired and streaming.

  There—twelve, sixteen, twenty Turks—farther away, more still—a hundred or more—all of them huddled darkly like carrion birds.

  I thought for a second about Dolly’s leisurely barak routine, and decided I would mount her standing and race back to HQ to report what I’d seen. Inch by inch, tearing my skin on the prickles of the spiny things that grow in those places, and worrying how Dolly would take to being jumped on unexpectedly from above, I crept up. I untangled her rope and climbed froglike onto the rock above her, and prepared to hurl myself onto the saddle. She was deeply shocked at this unexpected style of mounting, and took it into her head right then to throw a tantrum. She spun around and sent a rock rolling over the edge of the path. That rock caught at others, and unsettled them, and then a whole landslide was crashing down, and suddenly the path was falling beneath Dolly’s feet and all the Turks were wide awake.

  Dolly squealed and sprang away, plunging and teetering willy-nilly along the track. Bullets whizzed past my ears, the breath of them hot across my arms. It wasn’t me tapping her on, nor the Turks that were after me, nor their gunshots, that sent her off like that, like a bullet from a
pistol, head lowered and racing towards home; it was just some random snake or other small thing to which she’d taken an objection.

  In any case, Dolly had decided to head for home, and on and on we went, at her finest coffee-drinking pace, until we were well out of reach of the Turks, and until my heart finally stopped pounding and we reached someplace where the ground was soft and whispering with grasses, and she slowed.

  I grew careless and tired. Dolly’s forelock was rising gently, falling gently in the breeze, and I let my head nod, trusting her to lead us home—only because she knew there was more corn in the camp of the British Army than anywhere else in all Arabia. From time to time I would start at some whirring bird or other, and clutch at the saddle, then slowly slump back while Dolly trotted on, as indifferent to me and to the night’s events as if she’d forever carried a thousand men over a thousand such miles under a thousand such stars.

  * * *

  We were greeted when we arrived by the smell of the frying bacon of a Tommy breakfast and all its twisting curls of smoke. Tattered and dirty and with septic sores on my skin from the sun, I found the Major, and reported to him what I’d seen of the hundred Turks that were creeping up the wadi. The Major sent off a unit to dispatch the Jackos, said I’d averted a major disaster, and that, from the look of me, I should have a sleep, and a wash.

  I staggered along the camel lines and lifted the saddle off Dolly for the first time in four days. A maggoty hunk of flesh the size of a grapefruit came away with it and I gagged with horror for her. Dolly herself was above minding various parts of her body coming off with the rigging—her head, as ever, pretending to have no connection to any other part of herself. She’d grown thin on that patrol, poor Dolly. All camels lose weight on a march and every morning I’d tightened the webbing girth, but she was in poor shape now, having eaten, for the most part, only blankets and thistle and headropes.