Collected Stories (53 page)

But there isn't any escape. I saw that even in the camp itself. I became friendly with two prisoners, Matt Deignan and Mick Stewart, both from Cork. They were nice lads; Mick sombre, reserved, and a bit lazy; Matt noisy, emotional, and energetic. They messed together and Matt came in for most of the work. That wasn't all he came in for. When Mick was in one of his violent moods and had to have someone to wrestle with, Matt was the victim. Mick wrestled with him, ground his arms behind his back, made him yelp with pain and plead for mercy. Sometimes he reduced Matt to tears, and for hours Matt wouldn't speak to him. It never went farther than that though. Matt was Caliban to Mick's Prospero and had to obey. He would come to me, a graceless gawk with a moony face, and moan to me about Mick's cruelty and insolence, but this was only because he knew Mick liked me, and he hoped to squelch Mick out of my mouth. If anyone else dared to say a word against Mick he mocked at them. They were jealous!

Matt had a job in the Quartermaster's store, the Quartermaster, one Clancy, being some sort of eminent, distant cousin of whom Matt was enormously proud. Mick and he both dossed in J Hut in the North Camp. Now J was always a rather tony hut, quite different from Q, where I hung out, which was nothing but a municipal slaughterhouse. The tone of J was kept up by about a dozen senior officers and politicians, businessmen and the like. The hut leader, Jim Brennan, a tough little Dublin mason whom I admired, though not class himself, liked class: he liked businessmen and fellows who wore silk pajamas and university students who could tell him all about God, V.D., and the next world. It broadened a man's mind a lot. These got off lightly; either they had doctor's certificates to prove they couldn't do fatigues or they had nominal jobs, which meant they didn't have to do them. You couldn't blame Jim; it was his hut, and he kept it like a battleship, and to get into it at all was considered a bit of luck. Nor did the other men in the hut object; they might be only poor country lads, but, like Jim, they enjoyed mixing with fellows of a different class and listening to arguments about religion over the stove at night. It might be the only opportunity most of them would ever have of hearing anything except about drains and diseases of cattle, and they were storing it up. It was a thoroughly happy hut, and it rather surprised me that two attempts at tunnelling had begun from it; if it wasn't that the occupants wanted to show off their intelligence, you wouldn't know what they wanted to escape for.

But Mick Stewart rather resented the undemocratic tone of the hut and was careful to keep the camp aristocracy at a distance. When someone like Jack Costello, the draper, addressed Mick with what he thought undue familiarity, Mick pretended not to hear. Costello was surprised and Brennan was seriously displeased. He thought it disrespectful. He never noticed Mick except to give him an order. A couple of times he made him go over a job twice, partly to see it was properly done, partly to put Mick in his place.

Now, Mick was one of those blokes who never know they have a place. One day he just struck. While the others continued scrubbing he threw himself on his bed with his hands under his head and told the hut leader to do it himself. He did it with an icy calm which anyone who knew Mick would have known meant danger.

“You mean you call that clean?” Brennan asked, standing at the end of Mick's bed with his hands in his trouser pockets and his old cap over one eye.

“It's not a matter of opinion,” Mick said in his rather high-pitched, piping voice.

“Oh, isn't it?” asked Brennan and then called over Jack Costello. “Jack,” he continued mildly, “is that what you'd call clean?”

“Ah, come on, Stewart, come on!” Costello said in his best “Arise, Ye Sons of Erin” manner. “Don't be a blooming passenger!”

“I didn't know I asked your advice, Costello,” Mick said frostily, “but as you seem to be looking for a job as a deckhand, fire ahead!”

“I certainly will,” Costello said gamely. “Just to show I'm not too proud to be a deckhand.”

“No, you won't, Jack,” Brennan said heavily. “There's going to be no passengers on this boat. Are you going to obey orders, Stewart?”

“If you mean am I going to do every job twice, I'm not,” replied Mick with a glare.

“Good enough,” Brennan said moodily as he turned away. “We'll see about that.”

Now, I should perhaps have explained that the camp duplicated the whole British organization. Each morning we stood to attention at the foot of our beds to be counted, but one of our own officers always accompanied the counting party and ostensibly it was for him and not for the British officer that we paraded. It was the same with everything else; we recognized only our own officers. The Quartermaster drew the stores from the British and we received them from him and signed for them to him. The mail was sorted and delivered by our own post-office staff. We had our cooks, our doctors, our teachers and actors—even our police. Because, if one of our fellows was caught pinching another man's stuff, we had our own police to arrest him and our own military court to try him. In this way, we of the rank and file never came into contact at all with our jailers.

That morning two of the camp police, wearing tricolor armlets, came to march Mick down to the hut where his case was to be tried. One of them was a great galumphing lout called Kenefick, a bit of a simpleton, who cracked heavy jokes with Mick because he felt so self-conscious with his armlet. The case was heard in the camp office. When I passed I saw Matt Deignan outside, looking nervous and lonely. I stopped to talk with him and Brennan passed in, sulky and stubborn, without as much as a glance at either of us. Matt burst into a long invective against him, and I tried to shut him up, because in spite of his boorishness I respected Brennan.

“Ah, well,” I said, “you can't put all the blame on Brennan. You know quite well that Mick is headstrong too.”

“Headstrong?” yelped Matt, ready to eat me. “And wouldn't he want to be with a dirty lout like that?”

“Brennan is no lout,” I said. “He's a fine soldier.”

“He is,” Matt said bitterly. “He'd want to walk on you.”

“That's what soldiers are for,” I said, but Matt wasn't in a mood for facetiousness.

The court seemed to be a long time sitting, and it struck me that it might have been indiscreet enough to start an argument with Mick. This would have been a long operation. But at last he came out, a bit red but quite pleased with himself, and I decided that if there had been an argument he had got the better of it. We set off for a brisk walk round the camp. Mick would talk of everything except the case. Mick all out! He knew poor Matt was broken down with anxiety and was determined on toughening him.

“Well,” I said at last, “what's the verdict?”

“Oh, that business!” he said contemptuously. “Just what you'd expect.”

“And what's the sentence? Death or a five-year dip?”

“A week's fatigues.”

“That's not so bad,” I said.

“Not so bad?” cried Matt, almost in tears. “And for what? Pure spite because Mick wouldn't kowtow to them. 'Tis all that fellow Costello, Mick boy,” he went on with a tragic air. “I never liked him. He's the fellow that's poisoning them against you.”

“He's welcome,” Mick said frostily, deprecating all this vulgar emotionalism of Matt's. “I'm not doing extra fatigues for them.”

“And you're right, Mick,” exclaimed Matt, halting. “You're right. I'd see them in hell first.”

“You don't mean you're going to refuse to obey the staff?” I asked doubtfully.

“What else can I do?” Mick asked in a shrill complaining voice. “Don't you realize what will happen if I let Brennan get away with this? He'll make my life a misery.”

“Starting a row with the camp command isn't going to make it exactly a honeymoon,” I said.

It didn't, but even I was astonished at the feeling roused by Mick's rebellion. Men who knew that he and I were friendly attacked him to me. No one said a word in his favor. And it wasn't that they were worried by the thing that worried me—that right or wrong, the camp command was the only elected authority in the camp—oh, no. Mick was disloyal to the cause, disloyal to the camp; worst of all, he was putting on airs. You would think that men who were rebels themselves and suffering for their views would have some sympathy for him.

“But the man is only sticking out for what he thinks are his rights,” I protested.

“Rights?” one man echoed wonderingly. “What rights has he? Haven't we all to work?”

After a while I gave up arguing. It left me with the feeling that liberty wasn't quite such a clear-cut issue as I had believed it. Clancy, the Quartermaster, though himself one of the staff, was the most reasonable man on the other side. No doubt he felt he had to be because Mick was his cousin's friend. He was a gallant little man, small, fiery, and conscientious, and never really himself till he began to blaspheme. This wasn't yet a subject for blasphemy so he wasn't quite himself. He grasped me firmly by the shoulder, stared at me closely with his bright blue eyes and then looked away into an infinite distance.

“Jack,” he said in a low voice, “between friends, tell that boy, Stewart, to have sense. The Commandant is very vexed. He's a severe man. I wouldn't like to be in Stewart's shoes if he crosses him again.”

“I suppose ye'd never use your brains and send Stewart and Matt to Q Hut?” I asked. “It's only the way Mick and Brennan don't get on, and two human beings would improve Q Hut enormously.”

“Done!” he exclaimed, holding out his hand in a magnificent gesture. “The minute he has his fatigues done. I'll tell the Commandant.”

I put that solution up to Mick and he turned it down in the most reasonable way in the world. That was one thing I was learning: your true rebel is nothing if not reasonable; it is only his premises that are dotty. Mick explained patiently that he couldn't agree to a compromise which would still leave him with a stain on his character because if ever we resurrected the army again and the army got down to keeping records it would count as a black mark against him.

“You mean for a pension?” I said, turning nasty, but Mick didn't realize that. He only thought it was rather crude of me to be so materialistic about a matter of principle. I was beginning to wonder if my own premises were quite sound.

Next morning I went over to J Hut to see how things were panning out. They looked pretty bad to me. It was a large, light, airy hut like a theatre with a low wooden partition down the middle and the beds ranged at either side of the partition and along the walls. It was unusually full for that hour of the morning, and there was a peculiar feeling you only get from a mob which is just on the point of getting out of hand. Mick was lying on his own bed, and Matt sitting on the edge of his, talking to him. No one seemed interested in them. The rest were sitting round the stove or fooling with macramé bags, waiting to see what happened. Three beds down from Mick was a handsome young Wexford fellow called Howard, also lying on his bed and ostensibly talking to his buddy. He saw me come in and raised his voice.

“The trouble is,” he was saying, “people who won't pull their weight would be better at the other side of the wire.”

“Are you referring to me, Howard?” Mick asked harshly.

Howard sat up and turned a beaming adolescent face on him.

“As a matter of fact I am, Stewart,” he said.

“We were on the right side before ever ye were heard of, Howard,” bawled Matt. “What the hell did ye ever do in Wexford beyond shooting a couple of misfortunate policemen?”

I started talking feverishly to avert the row, but fortunately just then Kenefick and another policeman of the right sort came in. This time they showed no embarrassment and there was nothing in the least matey about their attitude. It gave their tricolor armlets a certain significance. As we followed them out the whole hut began to hiss. Matt turned as though something had struck him but I pushed him out. It was all much worse than I expected.

Again Matt and I had to wait outside the office while the trial went on, but this time I wasn't feeling quite so lighthearted, and as for Matt, I could see it was the most tragic moment of his life. Never before had he thought of himself as a traitor, an enemy of society, but that was what they were trying to make of him.

This time when Mick emerged he had the two policemen with him. He tried to maintain a defiant air, but even he looked depressed.

“What happened, Mick?” bawled Matt, hurling himself on him like a distracted mother of nine.

“You're not supposed to talk to the prisoner,” said Kenefick.

“Ah, shut up you, Kenefick!” I snapped. “What's the result, Mick?”

“Oh, I believe I'm going to jail,” said Mick, laughing without amusement.

“Going where?” I asked incredulously.

“So I'm told,” he replied with a shrug.

“But what jail?”

“Damned if I know,” he said, and suddenly began to laugh with genuine amusement.

“You'll know soon enough,” growled Kenefick, who seemed to resent the laughter as a slight on his office.

“Cripes, Kenefick,” I said, “you missed your vocation.”

It really was extraordinary, how everything in that camp became a sort of crazy duplicate of something in the outside world. Nothing but an armlet had turned a good-natured halfwit like Kenefick into a real policeman, exactly like the ones who had terrified me as a kid when I'd been playing football on the road. I had noticed it before; how the post-office clerks became sulky and uncommunicative; how the fellows who played girls in the Sunday-evening shows made scenes and threw up their parts exactly like film stars, and some of the teachers started sending them notes. But now the whole crazy pattern seemed to be falling into place. At any moment I expected to find myself skulking away from Kenefick.