New and Collected Stories (90 page)

In the space between one minute and the next he expected to see a party of men coming to get him for the hangman's yard whose walls would smell like cold pumice and rotting planks. He was ready for it to happen from any direction he could name, so that even in the débris of the trenches there was no one smarter at spotting misdemeanours in his own men, or fatal miscalculations on the enemy parapet.

A machine gun half a mile away stitched thoughts back into his brain, eyes turning, head in a motion that scanned the faint humps of the broken line. He didn't want to give up his perfected system of counting the minutes which kept him going in a job that held little prospect of a long life. All snipers went west sooner or later. He was glad that whole days passed without thinking of Amy, because she took his mind off things.

A smudge of grey by a sandbag, and then a face, and he lined up the sights instantly and pressed the trigger. The crack travelled left and right as he reloaded almost without movement, the bolt sliding comfortably in. The bullet took half a second to reach the face that had sprung back. He heard the word for stretcher bearer –
krankenträger
and he wanted to laugh because, as in a game of darts or cribbage, he had
scored.
The more he killed, the less chance there'd be of getting called to account. He didn't want to know more than that. It was dangerous to think. You're not here to think but to do as you're effing-well told – and never you forget it or by God I'll have your guts for garters and strangle you to death with 'em. But they didn't need to roar such rules at him.

A retaliating machine gun opened from three hundred yards left. He saw the gunner. Chalk that jumped along was nowhere close enough. An itching started on his cheek, and an impulse to scratch was fought down. When it came back he turned his body cold. It was an almost pleasurable irritation that couldn't be ignored, but he resisted it, minute by minute. You had only to be at the Front for an hour and you were as lousy as if you'd been there ten years.

Last week he'd had a fever, and hadn't been able to do his work. No sniper was allowed out with a fever or a cold. With a fever you shook, and with a cold you dozed – though a true sniper would forget such things in his moment of action. Yet an experienced sniper was too valuable to waste. He sensed as much when he moved along the communication trenches at dawn or dusk, and observed how the officers looked at him – after their first curiosity at seeing such an unusual specimen – as if he were a man singled out for a life even worse than death, cooped up like a rat that only waited its turn to kill without fair fight. He knew quite plainly that many didn't like him because sniping was a dirty weapon like poison gas or liquid fire.

The trench was disturbed. Every eye fixed his stretch of land. They looked but did not see. He let his body into complete respose so as to make no move. The range card was etched on to his brain, and his eyes caught all activity, had even sharper vision because of the body's helplessness. The whole view was exposed to his basic cunning. His itching leg was forgotten when he pressed the trigger and killed the machine gunner.

Out of the opposite trench, a few fingers to the right, came a man who stood on the sandbags and beckoned. He wore a dark suit. A tie was unfastened around his neck. He bent down to brush chalk-grit from his trousers. When he straightened himself, he smiled.

Nevill lay in the water of his sweat, his teeth grinding as if to take a bite out of his own mouth. His body wasn't dead, after all. The man was afraid to come closer. Grey clouds formed behind his head, till he became part of them, when Nevill took a long shot almost in enfilade, and brought down a man who looked up from the second line of trenches.

If the man had still been alive Nevill would have shouted at him for his foolishness. Mistakes were as common as Woodbines. Even the old hands made them occasionally, as if tired of a caution which wouldn't let them be themselves. Something inside decided, against their will, that they'd had enough. In an unguarded moment their previous carefree nature took over – and they died. He smiled at the thought that no such fecklessness could kill him, no matter how deep down it lay.

He couldn't get out of his place till darkness. Danger time was near. If he chanced one more round they'd get a bearing and smother his place with shot shell and shit. Papier mâché heads painted to look real were put up so that when the sniper's bullet went clean through back and front, a pinpoint bearing could be made between the two holes which would lead with fatal accuracy to him. So when he saw a head tilted slightly forward and wearing no helmet he didn't shoot. If he kept as still as dead they would never see him, and he'd known all his life how to do that. When he played dead he was most alive. He felt like laughing but, knowing how not to, was hard to kill. As if in agreement the earth rumbled for half a minute under another nearby burst of shell. It grew in intensity till it sounded like a train going through Lenton station. He wanted to piss, but would have to keep it in.

Tomorrow he would be in a different position and, corked face invisible, could start all over again. He lay by the minute, sun burning through clouds as if intent on illuminating only him. A shot at dusk might succeed, when the setting sun behind sharpened their line of trenches, but only one, because they would be waiting, and he was too old a hand to get killed just before knocking off time.

Raindrops pestered a tin can, and caused an itch at his wrist. There was better visibility after a shower, though gas from his rifle in the dampened atmosphere might give him away if he fired. Their eyes were as good as his when they decided to look. He felt like a rabbit watching from its burrow, and counted the minutes more carefully. If they found him, he'd die. He craved to smoke his pipe. No sniper was taken prisoner. Nor their machine gunners. He felt cramp in his right foot, but tightened himself till it went.

The minute he woke in the morning, either at rest or on the march, or in the line, his first thought was not to decipher where he was but to realize that he hadn't yet been taken up for the man he had killed. He kissed his own wrist for luck. Other soldiers round about wondered why he smiled, while they only scowled or cursed.

Lying in his cramped hole sometimes brought on a faintness from which the only way out was to spread arms and legs as far as they would go, then get into the open and run. He would certainly be killed, so when blood packed at the extremities of hands and feet, thereby thinning at the heart, he called the minutes through and counted them. Sixty minutes made a platoon called an hour. Twenty-four hours formed as near as dammit two battalions of a day. He deployed his platoons and battalions of time and sent them into the soil. A shell once burst too near and he pissed into his rags – but kept his place and his life. When a machine gun peppered around no-man's-land in the hope of catching him, a man from his own trenches stopped the racket with a burst from a Lewis gun.

The minutes he hewed out of life, from the air or his own backbone, or plucked even from the din of the guns, saved him time and time again. In pushing aside the image of the hangman coming to get him across no-man's-land (or waiting in the form of a Provost Marshal's red cap when he went back through the communication trench and up towards the broad light of the day that was to be his last) he had only to punctuate his counting of the minutes by a careful shot at some flicker on the opposite sandbags. Away from the trenches, he could not wait to get back, even if on frontline duty as one of a back-breaking carrying party, or as an enfilading sharp-shooter during a trench raid. But mostly he belonged in a sniper's position that needed only eyes, brain and a steady finger at the trigger while he lay there all day and counted the minutes.

A week in the trenches was as long as a month or a year. He counted the minutes while others marked off the days. But all of them were finally without time and covered in mud, one in ten lost through shellfire, raids, frostbite and bullets.

They drudged to the rear and one night, wet from head to foot, Nevill joined his company in a rush across the churned turf of a field towards the bath-house. Everyone stripped to let the sanitary men get at their underclothes. Lice were everywhere. Scabies was common, and spread like chalkdust on a windy day. Some scratched themselves till bloody all over, and were treated with lavish doses of sulphur – which might give them dermatitis if they got too much of it. Nevill endured the terrible itching, even in his sniper's post, but on normal duty he woke himself after a few hours' sleep by a wild clawing at his clothes.

Water gushed from the taps only one point off freezing. They had expected it to be hot, so sounded as if a pack of ravening lions had got loose. The captain, transfixed by their mutinous swearing, hoped the sergeant-major would be along to get them moving into the water no matter how cold it was. Hard to understand their rage when they endured so much agony of life and limb on duty in the trenches. One man slipped on the slatted planks, and cursed the army.

‘This is the last straw!' he shouted.

No one laughed, even when he was advised: ‘Well, eat it then.'

Nevill, the icy chute spraying at him, let out a cry that stopped everyone's riotous catcalls: ‘Fucking hell, it's too hot! It's scalding me to death. Turn it off! I'm broiled alive. Put some cold in, for Christ's sake!'

They began laughing at the tall thin chap fooling around with knees and knackers jumping up and down, a look of mock terror in the fiery stillness of his eyes and the falling line of his lips.

Once fastened into the separate world of his own outlandish shouts, Nevill went on calling loud and clear: ‘My back's on fire! I'm broiling in
hell
! Turn that effing water off, or put some cold in,
please!
This steam's blinding my eyes. Turn it off!'

Others joined in and shouted the magic phrases like a chorus line at the music hall. They no longer hung back, but took to the water without further complaint.

Nevill stopped, and gripped the soap to wash. The muddy grime swilled off, and his face turned red as if steam had really worked the colour-change, not shame. Then he laughed again with the others while they blundered around fighting for the soap.

They collected warm and fumigated underwear. After breakfast came pay parade and later, with francs in their pockets and a few hours' kip behind their eyes, they were away to the estaminet for omelette, chips and wine, where they went on singing Nevill's catch-line: ‘Turn that effing water off, or put some cold in please!'

What made him shout those words he didn't know, but the captain marked him for his sergeant's stripe, seeing a priceless NCO who could control his men by firmness – and displays of wit, however crude. Apart from which, there was no better off-hand shot in the battalion, though as a sergeant his sniping days were over.

After a hard week's training for ‘the battalion in attack' they went back to the line with buckles, boots and buttons shining. The noise of guns took up every square inch of air around the face, kept a trembling under the feet for days. They said the gunfire brought rain. Cordite gathered full-bellied clouds that emptied on trenches to make all lives a misery. At the best of times a trench was muddy. The common enemy was rain, and the guns that shook soil down.

The few shells from the other side blew the earth walls in, no matter how well-revetted. When Nevill was buried he thought the hangman had come and gone already. He smelled quick-lime. In his tomb, yet knowing where he was, made him wonder if the man had been alive when he had buried him in Robins Wood. But he hadn't gone back till next day and he'd been dead by then right enough.

Nevill was earthed-in with bullet pouches, water bottle and rifle. In other words – as Private Clifford said, who found him more alive than two others whose names he couldn't remember as soon as they were dead – he was buried with full military honours, and you couldn't want more than that, now could you, sarge?

The pattacake soil-smell was everywhere, and the only thing that saved Nevill was his tin hat which, being strapped firmly on, had enough all-round rim to trap sufficient air for him to breathe till he was pulled free.

Every fibre of skin bone and gristle vibrated to the pounding. Could anything live under it? He drew himself into his private world and remembered how Amy had answered that she had nothing to forgive him for. She was never to realize he'd known about her love affair, though no doubt she wondered still where the chap had hopped it to. Maybe to the Western Front, like the rest of us. And if he hadn't sent a letter, what was funny in that? Nevill felt almost sorry she'd been ditched by two instead of one, though perhaps it wasn't all that rare when so many men had gone away at once.

Yet he needn't have worried about her wellbeing, for she sent him a parcel of tinned jam and biscuits and salmon, and a note saying she was working at Chilwell Depot till as close as she could get to her confinement which, he surmised, couldn't by any stretch of counted minutes be his kid. By earning her own money she could do as she liked, and in any case he had bigger things on his plate than to care what she got up to. ‘I expect my missis is having a little bit on the side while I'm away,' he heard Private Jackson say. ‘Suppose I would if I was her, damn her eyes!'

Being in a webbing harness of cross-straps and belt, with all appurtenances hanging therefrom, made him feel he no longer belonged to himself, since a devil's hook in any part of his garb would swing him from here to eternity without a by-your-leave. He had a date with some kind of hangman and that was a fact. The unavoidable settled his gloom, and was only lifted when his duties as platoon sergeant made him forget.

Under the hangings of equipment he was almost skeletal. The other sergeants – when he shared Amy's food parcel – chaffed that a bullet wouldn't find him. But he ate like a wolf, and no flesh grew. He worried, they said. He worked too hard. He was never still. You needn't let a third stripe kill you. The men didn't like him, yet under his eternal fussing felt that he would never let them down.