The Broken Sword

by R. Mingo Sweeney

  Sergeant Browne, with the exception of roll call, treated him as a non-person, and Sergeant Cyples avoided even a glance, for which he was grateful. The English ex-major, now the sergeant of Number Three Platoon, lectured animatedly on their lack of march discipline and stated that they could have been ambushed at least three times in twenty miles. The company commander lectured on alertness against strafing attacks from the air and queried them on topographical details. Most of them could remember only the view of the man’s packsack ahead of him, or the heels of his marching boots. They donned respirators and then took them off in a room full of tear gas, which left them coughing and weeping. They practised with the bayonet and learned about the Lewis gun. They attended first aid lectures and were graphically warned against the menace of venereal disease. In their spare time, they polished and ironed and swept…and then they slept.

  Payday was Saturday morning, and the parade was conducted in the canteen. MacQueen saluted, collected his pay, and headed for the only telephone booth in camp. He dialed the number to Barbara’s father’s pharmacy, where she worked on weekends. He asked, as a patriotic duty, if her auntie would invite him and another soldier to supper. He felt an urgent need to talk to Sergeant Bill Cyples and could think of no other way to contact him without alerting the entire camp. Barbara was delighted and promised to call Sergeant Cyples at noon in the sergeants’ mess. Her daddy would be working at the store, and her sister had a date.

  Private Patrick MacQueen was a free man until midnight. He bought a package of cigarettes and headed for his hut. He was expected by Barbara at five o’clock, so he didn’t have to hurry.

  After a quick lunch and a freezing shower, MacQueen donned his undress blues. “You look great, Pat!” exclaimed Tony. “I would like a suit like that too.”

  The corporal gazed at him calmly and shook his head. “That’s a pretty outfit, MacQueen,” he said. “Are you allowed to wear that?”

  “I’m an old soldier, Corporal,” answered MacQueen. “This is my old uniform.”

  “Man!” said the corporal, returning to his cubicle. “What’s this army comin’ to? Privates dressed like generals. Doesn’t seem right.” He laid down on his bunk, quite content to enjoy his solitude.

  Most of his platoon had departed to the canteen, or gone to the matinee in Kentville featuring Robert Taylor in “Waterloo Bridge”. Except those on duty, no one stepped onto the parade square. MacQueen joined a straggling group of other soldiers heading for the gate. Within the camp they marched, of course, but for the moment everyone marched to his own drummer. MacQueen was striding past the sergeants’ mess when his prized peripheral vision saw Sergeant Browne emerging. He had obviously enjoyed a liquid lunch.

  “Private MacQueen!” called the sergeant. He stood on the wooden duckboards, which gave him the advantage of height, in addition to rank. MacQueen froze in his tracks and turned to face his sergeant.

  “Sergeant?” asked MacQueen, looking out from under the shiny peak of his cap.

  “That’s not an infantryman’s uniform,” said the sergeant. He swayed slightly then steadied himself. His hat was tucked into the epaulette of his left shoulder, and his pale blue eyes were bloodshot. “Where are you going in that rig?”

  “I am going to Kentville, Sergeant,” said MacQueen. He began to sweat and hated himself for it. “This is my old uniform. The King’s Regulations and Orders for the Army state in Section—”

  “Cut the crap, MacQueen,” said the sergeant. “Go ahead in your pansy outfit, but it doesn’t impress me.”

  MacQueen gritted his teeth, turned, and resumed his march past the headquarters building. Some people certainly know how to take the fun out of life, he thought bitterly. Barbara wasn’t exactly Princess Flavia, but he focused his thoughts on her.

  15

  When Sergeant William Cyples rose to his feet he looked like a crenellated tower. Auntie, whose judgment of people had been formed from extensive reading, was delighted with this new visitor; she held a half glass of wine in her hands. Barbara helped MacQueen with his coat, gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, and whispered, “He’s terrific.”

  “Sergeant Cyples,” said MacQueen with a wide grin.

  “Hello, Pat,” answered the sergeant.

  MacQueen bent for his obligatory kiss and Auntie whispered, “Don’t be jealous. I still like you best.”

  The sergeant had brought a bottle of sherry, and MacQueen accepted a glass and sat opposite the sergeant, angled towards Auntie, who sat in the bay window.

  “I must check the dinner,” said Barbara, and she ran through the dining room and the swinging door into the kitchen. She had two pots bubbling on the stove and a roast in the oven. She had been a cheerleader in grade eleven and was vice president of her class at high school, where she also edited a section of the yearbook. The start of the school year had coincided with the invasion of Poland, so her interest in current affairs had been kindled in a romantic sort of way. She had thought the Princess Flavia boring and a prude. She turned everything to simmer and rejoined her guests.

  “Sergeant Cyples was telling us about the Panama Canal,” said Auntie. “He sailed right through it.”

  “Please call me Bill,” said the sergeant. “It would certainly make a target! The Americans have to divide their fleet in two, which would mean a trip around the Horn if there was trouble in either ocean.”

  “Everyone’s always talking about the war,” said Barbara. “It hasn’t been very exciting yet.”

  “The Germans have captured Norway, which cuts off Finland from our help,” said MacQueen. “That must have been exciting?”

  “Another democracy down the drain,” laughed the sergeant. “Now they can hit south, right to the Pyrenees.”

  “Never, never, never,” said Auntie. “The British army will stop them. And all of those French fortifications—they are the most modern in the world. I have seen photographs of them.”

  “What does your father think of it all?” asked MacQueen. “The sergeant’s father is in the CCF,” he explained. Auntie had that confused with the Social Credit “funny money” people. Barbara, for an alarmed moment, thought he was talking about the KKK.

  “Socialists were caught with their pants down—pardon me, ma’am—were caught unawares by the Communist-Nazi pact,” said Cyples. “As long as those two are allies, the United States can’t enter the war and Britain will probably pull out of it. France will go the way of Poland.”

  “Good heavens!” said Barbara. “That almost sounds like dangerous talk from a soldier!”

  There was no doubt that the sergeant exuded an atmosphere of danger, which clung to him at all times. His last statement had verged on the unpatriotic, and Auntie frowned for a moment as she concentrated. The sergeant laughed.

  “Warriors and soldiers can be two different things,” he answered, with a quick wink at MacQueen. “Every soldier isn’t a warrior—and sometimes they get in one another’s way.”

  “I’ll have to get you to speak to my current affairs class,” said Barbara. “It would be like dropping a bomb!” She refilled the small glasses, although Auntie refused, then announced that dinner was ready. She sat the sergeant in her father’s chair at the head. Auntie wheeled to the foot and sat opposite MacQueen to be near the kitchen. Little glasses of tomato juice stood on saucers and cloth napkins under the side plates. Barbara rose to serve the meal in the kitchen and carry the plates in.

  “What was all of that with Browne?” asked MacQueen softly. “He won’t even look at me now.”

  The sergeant glanced at Auntie and smiled. “I wanted him to strike me,” answered Sergeant Cyples in a low voice. “Then we could have broken him to bits. He was too yellow. Or too smart?”

  Barbara pushed the door with her shoulders and backed into the room holding two steaming plates with a dishcloth. “Hot, hot!” she exclaimed and served her two guests. “Auntie couldn’t eat half of that. I’ll be right back.”

  “Do you come from around h
ere, Bill?” asked Auntie.

  “I’m a westerner, ma’am,” said the sergeant. “From way out in Winnipeg. I happened to be in Halifax when I joined up, so they gave me a few weeks’ training, pinned three stripes on me, and here I am.”

  “How do you like Nova Scotia?” asked Auntie.

  Barbara burst through the door again with two more hot plates and set one in front of her aunt. “Daddy is sorry to miss the little party,” she said. “But Saturday night is the busiest time in town. Everybody comes in from the country to shop and go to the movies or a dance or something. My sister Gale is at a dance at Wolfville.”

  “We were there last weekend,” said MacQueen, then regretted it.

  “Oh?” said Barbara. “That’s a long walk.” She demurely commenced cutting her roast beef—which, she thought, seemed tough.

  “If what you said is true, then who is going to win the war?” asked Auntie. She vigorously cut her meat into small sections so that she could get it past her dentures.

  “I don’t know,” answered the sergeant. “If the soldiers become really indispensable then maybe they can win it.”

  “I have a new recording of ‘Isle of Capri’,” said Barbara. “Keep on talking, I’ll play it low.” She started to wind the Victrola in the drawing room, and placed the needle. “It’s an old song but I like it. I’ll sing it for you later.”

  “Which soldiers?” asked MacQueen.

  The sergeant chewed his food with relish and held the knife and fork like weapons. “What difference does it make?” he asked. “Soldiers are soldiers. They took over the Roman world when the empire collapsed. Down in Latin America they are doing it all the time.”

  “Christ!” muttered MacQueen, then apologized and wiped his lips with a napkin.

  Auntie frowned again.

  Barbara was gently singing, “T’was on the Isle of Capri that I found her…” as she rejoined them.

  “What about beliefs?” asked the incredulous MacQueen.

  “Where are we?” asked Barbara. “How do you like it?”

  “Just perfect,” said the sergeant.

  Barbara whisked his empty plate to the kitchen for a refill.

  “Don’t be a dull clod, MacQueen,” answered the sergeant. “Beliefs have nothing to do with it, the only factor is power. And the basis of power is who controls the guns.” He grinned across the table as though he had just told a joke. Barbara placed another plate of meat and vegetables in front of him.

  MacQueen had lost his appetite as he tried to assess the contours of the strange world that his friend kept intimating. He knew that world existed, if only in theory, because to a degree he actually lived in it. It had never occurred to him to use that as a pattern for the universe. Maybe it was the pattern, and all the rest just trimming?

  “You are a dangerous man to have around,” said MacQueen only half-jokingly.

  “I knew that right away,” said Auntie. “I said to myself, ‘This man is a buccaneer’—and, Bill, you certainly talk like one. Heavens, my brother used to talk about marching for King Edward, but you want to treat it all as a merry game!”

  Barbara felt that Bill Cyples had an edge of gentle violence…and it fascinated her. She was a practical young lady on the surface, but dreamed of romance with a lord of the Atlas and the cry to Allah rising above the mountains. In Kentville, one had to compromise one’s dreams. The sergeant certainly had the profile.

  Sergeant Cyples leaned back in the chair and waved a hand at MacQueen’s uniform. “I have told you that you are a romantic, Pat,” he said. “That is good—the troops will follow ideals and symbols, and even die for them. That might change the face of things now and again, but I am talking about power. It doesn’t have any ‘good’ or ‘bad’ to it. It’s like electricity. It can burn down your house or light the room without any question of ideals. It’s the raw stuff—soldiers and gold.”

  “You are a monster!” said Auntie, pretending to be horrified. “I never heard such talk! People laugh and people cry, surely that is important?”

  “He’s just teasing you, Auntie,” said Barbara. “Bill is as much a soldier of the king as any of them. He won’t let the Germans land in Nova Scotia, and neither will Pat.”

  MacQueen was glad that he had been included, even as an afterthought.

  “Which is more important,” asked Auntie as they left the table. “Gold or soldiers?”

  The sergeant smiled directly at her, disarming her completely. “Give me good soldiers,” he replied, “and I will give you all the gold you want.”

  “You spent too long on the Spanish main,” said Barbara, starting to clear the table. MacQueen turned the record over and put the needle into the grooves of “Blue Moon”. “How about beauty?” he asked. “What about music and painting and stuff like that?”

  The sergeant wheeled Auntie to the bay window and gave her shoulder a light squeeze. “That’s your department, MacQueen,” he said. “You tell me what’s beautiful and I will believe you. You once said that guns are beautiful, which I had never even thought of.”

  “Beautiful guns?” asked Auntie in surprise. “Why in the name of God would anyone want to make a gun beautiful?”

  “Why not, I suppose,” answered MacQueen. “But I can’t figure Bill’s interest in anything else if power is so important.”

  “Lord, but you people are serious,” said Barbara, coming from the kitchen. “What is so important on a Saturday night?”

  “I’ll take you to the dance,” said Sergeant Cyples. “Then Pat can accidently join us. No one can object if he runs into his old girlfriend with me, and it would do my prestige good to be seen with a beautiful blonde!” They all laughed, and Auntie agreed to keep house, alone with her memories. Barbara served the last of the sherry.

  “Just one thing before we leave, Pat,” said Sergeant Cyples. “We are born into a time and a place and a family. My family were uprooted, and I ended up in a dust bowl during a depression. I don’t have any safety net at all. Just look at it from that angle when you are admiring yourself in that uniform.”

  “That’s not fair,” said Auntie. “Why shouldn’t soldiers dress up?”

  “Browne called it a pansy outfit,” said MacQueen.

  The sergeant was startled then smiled grimly. “Soldiers should dress up,” he replied, “and I will kill that bastard one of these days.”

  “Bill!” exclaimed Auntie in shock. “You are going to a dance! Don’t talk about killing people, it isn’t nice.”

  16

  MacQueen volunteered to wash the dishes, citing his experience in the sergeants’ mess as qualification. Sergeant Bill Cyples escorted Barbara on her first taxi drive in Kentville, and, inspired by Sergeant Browne’s remark, they headed directly downtown, to the local men’s haberdashery store. There Sergeant Cyples bought a blue and buff dress hat for himself, along with a shiny broach of the regimental crest for Barbara. He tucked the khaki cap into his blouse pocket and angled the blue one over his right eye.

  “Pat will appreciate that,” said Barbara. He pinned the broach onto her dress and gave her a kiss like a French general. She reddened and laughed and glanced at the clerk, who was a classmate in high school and stood beside them in an anguish of jealousy.

  Barbara then led the sergeant into her father’s pharmacy and introduced them. Her father was an honest merchant who suffered nightmares from raising two attractive daughters alone in a town full of soldiers.

  “It is only a trick,” explained Barbara to her harassed father. “We are going to meet Pat at the dance but they can’t go together so Bill is taking me and we will join up there.” Barbara was in a state of mild exultation, and her father was by nature a worrier. Nonetheless, he presented the sergeant with a package of American Lucky Strike cigarettes and told them to have a good time.

  It was eight thirty, and the streets were crowded with soldiers and farmers and youths promenading. Most of the A Company seemed on the loose, and they greeted their popular sergeant and
admired his slim, blonde girlfriend. The sergeant smiled and waved as he guided Barbara with a hand on her arm. Barbara felt like Lana Turner, and her schoolmates suddenly seemed both shallow and hollow. “Hi, Barbara,” they said nervously as they passed, glancing at the craggy sergeant holding her arm, the blue cap cocked over his eye. No one would have been surprised if he had thrown her over one shoulder and mounted a horse. He looked the type.

  Sergeant Bill Cyples was not at any time unaware of the effect he produced. His theatricality was all a part of the process of edging along the abyss and constantly courting disaster. He trusted his own instincts, which told him just how far he could push things before they became counterproductive. He enjoyed teetering on that line and how it alerted everyone around him. He constantly juggled his fate like six eggs in the air, and he had become quite expert at the art. It was a modest accomplishment in his circles, but he wasn’t ready for the big stage just yet, and he knew it.

  The fact remained that the performers on that stage weren’t interested in jugglers, and they opened their doors to very few. The price of admission was what the sergeant was trying to learn from MacQueen. He knew that his rapacious talk of pure power would get him nowhere with the real power brokers. Shouting and bullying were fine for sergeants, but he had seen a miniature navy run efficiently without one officer raising his voice. They were obeyed because there was absolutely no question of their authority. It was to that laconic landscape that the sergeant was drawn—that was the promised land of power, disguised as beauty. That’s where the gentlemen were, and it didn’t matter what colour or creed or nationality. They all sat at the same table.

  The sergeant escorted Barbara up the stairs and into the dance hall. It was close to the railway station and open until midnight—no one danced on the Sabbath in Kentville. It was only half full, brightly lit, and the eager orchestra was blaring “Tuxedo Junction”. Groups of shy soldiers awkwardly clustered in corners and in the hall; to most of them, this was high sophistication. They all had bony heads and skinny necks, and wore enormous boots. A few from the camp staff wore blues and sat at tables with women. Only a half dozen couples were dancing, but the crowd would increase when the early movie was over at nine o’clock. Bill Cyples was the only sergeant. He selected a table—and everyone avoided it as though he were royalty. Barbara loved the distinction and tried hard not to seem condescending to any of her schoolmates who passed in awe.