Lord of the Nutcracker Men (8 page)

Below the beech tree, she had started a second pile of muddy ammunition. “Johnny, let's have our barrage,” she said.

I placed my new soldier in the line. He didn't look right hunched in the bottom of the trench, so I moved
him forward until he was crawling up the parapet. His strange, animal face peered over the edge, and I ducked down to see what he would see.

My no-man's-land looked enormous then, sloping up toward the German lines. My nutcracker men were hidden, but the tips of their silver bayonets poked up from the mud like the pickets of a ragged fence. I wished I could make myself tiny and go charging toward them.

“Johnny, come on,” said Sarah.

I stood beside her near the tree, the pile of stones and mud between us. We filled our hands with shells.

“You fire the big guns,” said Sarah. “I'll be the mortars and the Moaning Minnies.”

I didn't even know what those were. But as soon as Sarah started shooting, I wished that
I
had the Moaning Minnies.

These guns fired whole handfuls of dirt and pebbles, with a bloodcurdling shriek that reminded me of the sounds I'd heard from the farmhouse. “Shhreeeeee!” Sarah yelled, and threw the dirt. “Bam! Bam-bam!”

I took the biggest clumps of mud and tossed them high in the air. “Whizz. Bang!” They exploded behind the British trenches, sending bits of shrapnel skittering over the ground.

“Blast those Tommies!” shouted Sarah in a German accent. “God punish England!” Her mortars popped and boomed, her Moaning Minnies sent lumps of mud screaming past me. She bent down, grabbed more dirt and threw more bombs.
“Aarrgh!”
cried the Tommies. And the Germans said, “Again! Punish them again.”

My big guns kept firing, slowly and methodically. I
hurled the stones—“Whizzz!”—tossed up my hands— “Bang!”

We rained the Tommies with dirt and stones. We worked our way through our pile of ammunition, until only the largest shells were left. Then Sarah, too, started firing the big guns. She bobbed down, popped up again, hurling the stones like a shot-putter. Then she hit the British trench. And she crushed the first Pierre.

“Don't!” I shouted.

I threw myself down by the trench and rolled the stone aside. Frantically, I scrabbled through the mud. I dug and dug, but all I found were the Frenchman's feet. The rest of him was gone.

“Look what you did!” I cried. “You broke him, you clot.” I clawed at the mud, searching for Pierre's body. “My dad made that for me and you've gone and broken him, you clumsy oaf.”

“I'm sorry, Johnny.” Sarah panted. Her face was red, her hair in tangles. “I didn't mean to do it.”

I was digging like a dog. “At least help me look,” I said.

“Not if you're going to talk like that.” She stomped away. “I'm not going to help someone who shouts,” she said, and climbed the wall and left me there.

I kept searching for the rest of my Frenchman. I looked until supper, and again until dark, but he seemed to have vanished, as though the shell had blown him into smithereens. I hated Sarah then; I would never play with her again, I said.

At school I avoided her. When classes ended I dashed home on the footpaths to play by myself in the garden. I
cleaned up the rubble and rock, then scraped out my trenches where the barrage had caved them in. I shifted my Tommies out of the way, standing them up on the mud above the trenches. But the metal soldiers couldn't balance on the broken ground, and they toppled over on their sides and their backs. I said that snipers had got them. “Watch out, lads,” I said.

Nearly the entire front line was in order when I heard footsteps coming up to the wall. “You can't come in here,” I said, thinking it was Sarah. “Go home.”

But a man's voice answered. “I have nowhere to go.”

I looked up from the trenches. Behind the wall stood a sergeant, his legs and waist hidden behind it, his elbows on the stone. In his teeth was a pipe that wasn't lit, and his cap was pushed so far to the back of his head that it seemed it might fall off.

“What's your name?” I asked.

He took the pipe from his mouth. “What's yours? You tell me first.”

“Johnny Briggs,” I said.

“Ah. James must be your father.” The sergeant stiffened, glancing up at the house. “He's not here, is he?”

“No,” I said. “He's in France.”

“Oh. Poor James.”

“Do you know him?” I asked.

“I used to. When I was a boy I played in this garden.” He pointed at me with his pipe. “Right where you are. I played there with James.”

“Did he have his little gun?” I asked.

“Why, so he did.” The sergeant stroked his cheeks. They were covered with thin white hairs that made his skin look oily.“Yes, I'd forgotten that, his little gun.”

“That's him,” I said, pointing down at my trenches, at the figure my dad had made.

“That wooden-headed chap? Yes, that would be James.”

“He's holding his little gun,” I said.

“He was never without it,” said the sergeant. “He used to lie there, or kneel there, and tell me to come over the wall.”

“Why?”

“So he could pick me off.” The sergeant chuckled. “He was the British and I was the Boer. Sometimes I was a Zulu, not that it mattered in the end. I always came over the wall screaming like a lunatic, and he always picked me off.”

It made me giggle, the thought of my father being a boy.

“Where is he, in France?” the sergeant asked.

“Well, look,” I said, pointing again. “In the trenches, see? Right at the front.”

“It's a very long front,” said the sergeant. “In parts of it, there's no fighting at all. The Germans stay in their trenches, and the British stay in ours, and between them there's grass and trees, there's rabbits and birds. But in other places …” His eyes darkened. “They go at it tooth and claw. Go at it night and day, across a waste of slime and mud. You sleep with your rifle in your hands, your bayonet fixed. You hurl your shells at Fritz, and he hurls his shells at you, and the noise can drive you mad.”

“
That's
where my dad is,” I said.

“Then ‘poor James' he is,” said the sergeant.

“Is that where you were?

” “Somewhere like that.”

“Are you going back?”

He shook his head.

“Why not?”

“I fought, I lost, and that's the end of it,” he said.

“Why did you lose?” “

Because they beat us.”

“Won't the army make you go back?”

“I don't see how they can.” He tapped his pipe on the wall, then slipped it into his pocket. “Even the worst of butchers runs his meat only once through a mincer.”

He lifted his hand again, and there was something else in it. He pitched it over the wall, into the garden, and I scrambled to fetch it as it tumbled over the mud.

I scooped it up from the trench. “Oh, golly!” I said. It was a brass cartridge, a bullet casing.

I turned to thank the sergeant, but he was gone. Even when I stood up I couldn't see him, as though he had vanished into the forest.

I held the cartridge up to my lips and blew across the opening. It made a lovely high whistle that echoed back from the house and the wall, from the trees of the forests and orchards. It filled all of Kent with a wonderful tingle, the same sound as a lieutenant's tin whistle, the sound that would send soldiers over the top.

Auntie Ivy folded the letter. She saved all of them in a little wooden box that she kept on a shelf above the stove, between her tea and her peppermint drops. She took her chair from the table and carried it there.

“Do you think Dad knew my Pierre got hurt?” I asked.

“How could he?” she said.

“Then why do you think he sent an ambulance?”

She stepped up on the seat. “I imagine he thought you might like it.”

I tore the package open, and I smiled at first; the ambulance was beautiful. On its sides, Dad had painted the advertisements it would have carried as a bus. He'd put seats on the open roof, then smeared it all with mud and smoke.

But when I turned it over, I saw that one of the wheels was oddly twisted and smaller than the others. I blinked at it, suddenly sad. For the first time ever, my dad had made a toy that wasn't perfect, and I was glad that Auntie Ivy hadn't asked to see it.

“You'll be visiting Mr. Tuttle tonight,” she said, taking the box from the shelf. She put the new letter inside. “Why don't you ask him to come and see your soldiers?”

“I'm not sure he'd want to,” I said.

“Would it hurt you to ask?”

“No, Auntie.” I took the ambulance out to the garden. I put it down in the mud, behind the British lines, and drove it toward the wall. It tilted over the ground, up and down through the shell craters that Sarah and I had made with our stones. I wondered if the bus conductor would still be standing at the door.

The ambulance stopped at the trench. “Any wounded?” the conductor shouted. “All wounded aboard.” Then he pressed his little bell—“Ding, ding!”— and the driver started up.

I heard a laugh, and Sarah was there at the wall. “That's silly,” she said. “They don't do it like that.”

“They might,” I said.

“They
carry
the wounded,” she said. “How can you
climb on a bus if your arms are shot away? How can you walk if you haven't any legs?”

“Maybe they were only a little bit wounded,” I said.

“You're
funny,
Johnny.” She shook her head, just like my mum might have done. “No one's a
little
bit wounded. When the shells explode it's like the air's full of razors. Just the sound can kill you, if it's close enough. My dad says he's seen people blasted into so many pieces that he had to pick up the bits with a dustpan.”

“Stop it,” I said. I didn't want to hear about that.

“You can even die from a scratch,” she said. “If a rat bites you, it might—”

“Stop!” I shouted. “I told you not to come here.”

“I brought you something.”

I still hated her, but I didn't mind looking at her present. I parked the ambulance and stood up.

Like the sergeant, she kept her hand behind the wall. “It's a present,” she said. “Because I'm sorry your soldier broke. It's an aeroplane, Johnny.”

She lifted her arm, the aeroplane zooming up as high as she could reach. It banked and swooped down, did a loop-the-loop in her hand, then landed on the wall. “It's yours to keep,” she said.

It was hardly more than a block of wood, the sort of thing my dad would have mocked as “utter rubbish” and wouldn't have been caught dead even selling in his shop. I couldn't tell what type it was, or even which side it was on. But it was better than no aeroplane at all, and I said, “You can bring it into the garden.”

She clambered over the wall and stood straddling the German trench, towering like a giant above my nut-cracker men. The aeroplane swooped in her hand,
straight at the soldiers, then twisted along right on top of the trench.

“It wouldn't do that,” I said, pleased to know more about something than Sarah. “It should stay up high. It's on reconnaissance.”

“Why?”

“Because the Germans are going to attack.” I looked her straight in the eye. “I don't care what you say. They're going to attack. You be the British, and you have to fight them off.”

“If that's what you want,” she said. “I suppose it
might
happen sometimes.”

As we changed positions, the aeroplane became a German. It flew lazily over the battlefield until my nut-cracker men were lined up and ready. Then I took out my brass cartridge and whistled. “Over the top!”

“I thought they were Germans,” said Sarah.

“Over ze top!” I screamed, and whistled again.

Up swarmed the nutcracker men. They rose in a flood from the trench, pouring onto no-man's-land like the river of gray that my father had written about. They charged across in a rippling line as I pushed them along, two and three at once.