Hornet’s Sting (54 page)

Some wore bandages, and moved slowly; a few were cheerful. They were all back from the fighting.

Paxton put his hands in his greatcoat pockets and let his marching degenerate into a slouch. He drifted through the camp, one survivor in a thousand survivors. Ahead he could see a dirt track leading to a bridge. Behind, he heard voices, not excited, nothing to do with him. He plodded on. One voice, crisp and curt, was persistent. Men turned and looked at Paxton. Obviously, this had everything to do with him. He wet himself: one brief, hot spurt down the left leg. He stopped and looked back. An officer beckoned, using that arrogant, economical flick of the fingers which Paxton himself had often used, and added him to a squad of twenty.

They marched to the bridge, singing. Paxton
dum-de-dummed
. Nobody noticed.

A railway track crossed the bridge. They sat by the line and waited. The soldier next to Paxton kept grumbling, and kept looking at him. Paxton shrugged. The man began to sound annoyed. Paxton lay back and shut his eyes.

If he got caught now he'd be shot. That's what the British Army would do to a Hun found walking about in khaki behind the Lines. Shot on the spot. Six rifles, and the officer's pistol to polish you off. “Awfully squalid,” he whispered, and winced at his idiocy. After that he kept his jaws tightly shut.

It was dusk when a train arrived and came to a halt with much squealing of wheels and clanking of trucks. Unloading began: drums of fuel, crates of food, boxes of ammunition. Paxton dared not take his greatcoat off and soon he was streaming sweat. He was shocked to discover that heavy labour was such damned hard work. The others made it look easy. He had no choice but to toil on.

They stacked the boxes, making a dump six feet high. By now it was night. Paxton picked his moment when the officer and an N.C.O. were checking paperwork by the light of a hurricane lamp. He took his rifle and sneaked behind the dump.

The train left. The squad marched away.

An hour later he was a mile further up the track and wondering what to do next. He had been very lucky, but now he was lost, physically weary and mentally exhausted. Too many life-or-death decisions; too much sudden death. Holland was neutral, and quite near. Holland would be good. But which way? If he stayed in one place he'd die. Suddenly he had the odd sensation of looking down on himself, as if from a tall building. “This is no time to go potty,” he said. But the experience was pleasant, and it lingered. He had to make a decision about something, so he ate some cheese.

It must have been about midnight when a train stopped a quarter of a mile away, and there was much activity. Lights bobbed about, men shouted. Paxton made another big decision. He went to see what was going on.

Hundreds of troops were lining up for food. It was a troop train made of cattle trucks. Two of the trucks were mobile kitchens. Paxton smelled soup.

He stood just outside the crowd and watched the lines shuffle past the kitchens. “Might as well be shot on a full stomach,” he muttered.
His head still felt occupied by strange pressures.

Nobody stopped him joining a line. Nobody told him he needed mess-tins or a bowl or tin mug or
something
, until it was too late and he was looking up at the cook, who called him a name which made everyone laugh. The cook stooped and lifted Paxton's helmet from his head and ladled soup into it. Everyone laughed at that, too.

Still, it was good hot soup, and the helmet didn't smell too bad if he didn't breathe as he dipped his nose. Two men watched him drink it down and they slapped him on the back and said presumably encouraging things. He nodded and grinned. The locomotive hooted. Everyone moved towards the cattle trucks. Paxton went too. Why not?

* * *

“What on earth is
that?”
Edith Reynolds asked softly.

McWatters ceased moving. He lay as a gentleman should, taking his weight on his elbows, and sighed. “It's me,” he mumbled.

“No, it's not.” She felt with her fingers. He found the touch quite thrilling. “It might be yours, but it's not you.”

“Oh, well ...” He kissed her, and got no response. “Look here: aren't we playing with words?”

“No, we're not. I'm playing with a length of bicycle tube, by the feel of it.”

“Blast. I thought you wouldn't notice.” He rolled onto his back. “I put it on when I was in the bathroom.”

“Not notice?” She laughed. “My dear Jack, you know nothing about women.”

“I only did it for your sake.”

“Very gallant of you. But I don't find galoshes very romantic, so please go away and take off your galosh.” She giggled, which annoyed him.

“There's no such word as galosh. So phooey to you.” Nevertheless, he got out of bed and went to the bathroom.

When he came back, she said, “That's better.”

He lay and sulked. After five minutes, she said gently, “This isn't fair, Jack. We haven't got for ever. I'm on duty at six o'clock.”

“Why is it always the man who has to make the running? Anyway,
you never waited for an invitation when Charlie Dash was at your nunnery, at Beauquesne. You just...helped yourself.” He sniffed. “Not that Charlie complained. Lucky devil.”

She was silent for a moment. “This happened at Sainte Croix nunnery?”

“Twice nightly, so Dash said.”

“Well, it wasn't me. Not that it never passed through my mind, but. . . somebody else must have found him irresistible.”

“Not you? Then who?”

“Does it matter?”

“Of
course
it matters.”

“Why?”

“Because ...” But he had no answer. “God speed the plough!” he cried. “Why can't something be simple, for once?”

“Once you get started,” she said, “I think you'll find it's extremely simple.”

McWatters thought of making a sneering remark, perhaps pointing out that you couldn't trust F.A.N.Y. nurses, they were all hopeless liars; but he was tired of talking. “Nonsense,” he said, and set about proving her wrong. In the event, she turned out to be absolutely right.

“Golly,” he said, wheezing a little.

“Don't die on me,” she said. “I see enough of that as it is.”

* * *

After the rumours of mutinies in the French Army, there had been some talk in the mess of battle police. The adjutant had been happy to confirm that they existed, certainly in the British Army and probably in all armies. Their task, he explained, was to ensure that when the balloon went up and the infantry went over the top, nobody was left behind. “Some men need to have their bravery stimulated,” he said. “I've known some very effective shots to be fired in our own trenches.”

Paxton recognised German battle police as soon as he saw them, even in the dim light of the railhead. They were well armed and vigilant. When the train unloaded, they made very sure the trucks were empty. When the troops fell in and were marched away, battle police escorted the column. There was no singing, no talking. In the small
hours of the morning, with the crack and shudder of gunfire and shell-bursts all too near, men had plenty to think of. Paxton was bitterly regretting the impulse that had ot him on the train. He'd only done it because he was tired of making decisions and so he had trusted to luck, had gambled that the train would go eastward. He had no idea which way the tracks pointed, so it was a fifty-fifty chance. Now the bloody silly train had gone westward and he was marching into the battlefield. He could smell the drifting chemical stink of explosives. The bitch of a westerly wind was at work again.

They marched on a cobbled road until the cobbles became so smashed that marching was impossible. At some point they must have turned onto a track. The mud had been made liquid by rain and feet. Paxton listened to the suck and slop of hundreds of boots and found it most discouraging.

The track ended in a field. They sat in the lee of a slope and saw star-shells soar and droop and illuminate the night sky ahead. The glow was enough to show stretcher-bearers coming over the slope, stooping and hurrying, sometimes stumbling and spilling their loads. The odd bullet fizzed overhead and droned away.

Paxton chewed on his lump of sausage and tried to ignore the way the ground shuddered. After a while he found that he himself was shuddering, long after the vibrations stopped. He was glad nobody could see him. The next man nudged him, and offered a small flat bottle. “Schnapps,” he whispered. Paxton gave him the remains of the sausage. The schnapps made him gasp, but it had a fiery charge that drove out the cold and some of the fear. He returned the bottle. They shook hands. Paxton wanted to embrace him. That drink was the first kind act in an age.

Much later, a sergeant came along the line and each man got two stick grenades.

The man with the schnapps took out his rosary beads and began a rhythmic murmuring.

Another sergeant came along. Everyone got a swig of liquor. It followed the schnapps like a rioting mob.

Then they were on their feet.

Paxton followed the others. If he kept walking he was bound to reach Wipers, and then Gazeran, then England.

They went around the side of the slope and waded through a
stream. The enemy was firing shrapnel as well as high-explosive. He found them equally frightening: high-explosive blew you up, shrapnel cut you down. It was time to get into a trench, surely. They shuffled past a row of craters, all flooded. Paxton knew then that there would be no trenches. Anything deep enough to hide in would be deep enough to drown in. He was going to die. Hatred for his killers rose like bile.

They stopped. An order rippled down the line, and a metallic clicking followed. Bayonets were being fixed. Paxton had no bayonet. Serious offence, that. Fourteen days confined to camp. Paxton chuckled. The next man looked up and said something. It sounded friendly.
“Gesundheit!”
Paxton told him. It was nonsense, but nothing mattered any more. The schnapps bottle appeared. They emptied it.

After that, everything happened very quickly.

First, there was a charge. Paxton's boots were thickly caked with mud, so he lumbered rather than charged. There was a lot of firing and a hell of a lot of smoke. Paxton thrust his rifle, even though he had no bayonet, because everyone else thrust theirs, and he shouted because everyone was shouting.
“Gesundheit!”
he roared. Not much of a battlecry. He stretched it, made it last. Better!

But this bloody mud was a bastard. His legs were tiring, and he lagged behind, which was how he came to see his pal with the schnapps killed by a grenade. It blew him off his feet. Paxton went forward and looked at the pile of rags. This was all wrong, this was bad, this was just plain rotten ... He was coughing and spitting from breathing these foul fumes, so he lumbered on.

Something had to be done. That was clear to him. Your pal gives you a drink, you can't just let him die. He was shouting, “Bastards! Bastards!” A wall of searing hot air hit him from the side and flung him far away. Then a roar deafened him. He lay on his face in the mud and knew that he would never breathe again. His lungs had quit.

That was only the beginning. Next he spent a long lifetime wandering about the battlefield. Or maybe it was five minutes. His lungs wheezed painfully, treacherous bloody things. First they quit, then they un-quit. Bastards. Something familiar stuttered, away to his right. It must be a Vickers. Good old Vickers! Never lets you down. Well, not often.

Paxton found a rifle with a bayonet and walked around behind
the Vickers. Two-man crew, one feeding, one firing. He stabbed the feeder in the back and pulled the trigger. Enormous bang, and the recoil jerked the bayonet out. The gunner jumped up and Paxton bayoneted him too, several times. “Bastard!” he shouted.
“Gesundheit!
Bastard!” The man lost his tin hat. Paxton sat down and took off his coal-scuttle helmet, sticky with old soup, and put on the tin hat. Better. More dashing.

War is easy, he thought. You just kill people. Someone was trying to kill him. Bullets were fizzing past his head. He sat behind the Vickers and blasted off a long, scything burst. Now
this
was fun. He was still enjoying himself when three men in khaki kilts dived into the gun-pit. “Where the devil have you been?” Paxton said. “It's been frightfully lonely here.”

“Thank God you held out,” a lieutenant said.

“Gesundheit,”
Paxton said. He fired off the last of the belt.

Railway lines greatly bent. Underground pipelines severed
.

“Smuggler's Boy,” Paxton whispered. “Did Smuggler's Boy make it?”

He was in Dando's two-bed sick bay, washed, shaved, hair brushed, dressed in fresh pyjamas, crisp white sheets drawn up to his chin, looking like a man who'd gone fifteen rounds with Gentleman Jim Corbett.

“Don't know,” O'Neill said. “Never heard of him.”

Paxton's eyelids came down very slowly. He seemed to lack the strength to lift them.

“You look knackered,” O'Neill said. “I've got to write a report. There's a chance of a medal. Frankly, I wouldn't give you the skin off my rice pudding, but...”

Paxton licked his lips, once.

“Some Royal Scots Fusiliers found you. With a Vickers. Winning the war. At Wipers.”

Paxton coughed suddenly, and dribbled a little. O'Neill wiped it away with a handkerchief. “Dando says you got somewhat knockedabout. When you crashed. I need to know all that.”

Occasionally the eyelids trembled; nothing else moved. After a while O'Neill went away.

* * *

Third Wipers went on and the losses were heavier than ever. The rain also went on. August was like winter. The drainage system of those Flanders fields had been wrecked and the rain had nowhere to go but down. Soon it was trapped by flat layers of clay and rock. The top-soil became saturated and then liquid. Even height gave no escape. A geological curiosity of this area was the fact that water collected on the ridges too, and stayed there. The soldiers didn't find it curious.
Knee-deep in muck, sometimes thigh-deep, permanently soaked, at risk from slow death in a swamp as well as sudden death from high-explosive, the infantry had other words for Flanders.