Sergeant Nelson of the Guards (31 page)

“So he’s librarian,” says Butcher. “Him. What, can he read?”

“Read what?” asks Bearsbreath. “There’s nothing in that library
to
read. One of the cupboards has got books in it, I don’t know what’s in the other. It’s been kept locked since before my time.”

“There was a rumour,” says Dagwood, “that when Pig Guinness—the Drill Pig, not the other Pig—when Pig Guinness died, he left
instructions
in his will that he was to be locked in that cupboard. I don’t believe it. Muddy Waters says that back in 1920, a librarian murdered a Guardsman and put his body in that cupboard. Then he threw the key away. Nobody ever had instructions to break the lock. There was only one key issued. So the cupboard stayed locked.”

“There’s everything in that library except books,” says Cattle. “I remember, once, Geordie Minor took a fancy to read something, and went and asked the librarian for a reading-book. The librarian gave Geordie
Mother
Goose’s
Nursery
Rhymes.
Geordie read it from cover to cover. And when I asked him how he liked it he said: ‘It’s nobbut a pack o’ lies.’”

“Geordie Minor,” says Dagwood. “Wasn’t it him that called the
Adjutant
——?”

“No, you’re thinking of Geordie Binns,” says Hands. “It was in
private when he called the Adjutant a——. And the Adjutant (it was Pongo; old Pongo, a decent sort, but I once saw him go into Adjutant’s Orders fifteen minutes late), Pongo says to Geordie Binns: ‘Speak up, man. I didn’t hear what you said just then.’ Geordie had the presence of mind to say ‘Nothing, sir.’ And the Adjutant said: ‘I’m glad to hear it, Binns; but don’t say it again.’ My God, but Geordie Binns could blind when he got annoyed!”

“Binns was nothing to Swearing Simmonds,” says Dagwood.

“The worst swearer of them all was Atkin, the one we used to call Blinding Atkin,” says Butcher.

“Yet,” says Dagwood, “it’s hard not to swear, and handle a squad at the same time. They can bust you for using language. But how can you train men with an ‘Oh-Dear-Me,’ or a few ‘My Goodnesses’?”

“You have to invent new swearing,” says Hands. “Look at old Spurgeon. He swears like a bargee, but he swears in a legitimate way. He swears in front of the C.O. himself, and gets away with it because he uses only clean language. He can let out a string of swearing, and nobody could object. ‘Blind my grandmother’s guts!’ he says. ‘Card stuff me gently! God’s Buttercups and Daisies and Blazing Daffodils! Sweet Burning Splintering Flagpoles! Cord Spotted Cuckoo!’ And he invents new names to call people. ‘Twillip!’ he says. ‘Snurge!
Twitter-bug
! Bugscratcher! Spittoon!’ and so on.”

The Budgerigar comes out of a kind of coma to say: “The best thing is, to swear in a foreign language.”

“Remember when Geordie Binns learnt French?” asks Crowne.

“That wasn’t Geordie Binns. That was Geordie Twistle,” says
Dagwood
. “He got hold of some Frenchman, one night, in a pub near Kensington, and he asks this Frenchman what … well, he …”

“He asked the Frenchman,” says Cattle, “what
beer
was in French. The Frenchman said
bière.
Then he asked him what
cigarette
was, and the Frenchman said
cigarette.
‘Ah,’ says Geordie, ‘and what’s
whisky?
’ The Frenchman says:
‘Whisky.’
‘And
football?’
‘Football,’
says the
Frenchman. And then Geordie says: ‘Ha. There’s nowt to ’t. It’s nowt different fra’ King’s English.’”

“I was talking to a Free Frenchman,” says Dagwood. “He wasn’t so bad. It’s not their fault they were born that side of the Channel. Some of them seem nice fellers.”

“You talk of Free Frenchmen,” says Cattle, suddenly, “and that reminds me of a thing. Sort of connected with what we were saying before about death, and so on. I was talking to a Free Frenchman too, an officer. I know French pretty well. And like other people do, he got around to talking of dying, and retreating, and all that. I mentioned dying of old age, and I said something about most people saying they preferred to die before they got too old to care…. You know the kind of tripe; the kind of tripe we were talking just before that young corporal went out….

“He was a queer little egg with one leg, and he looked as if he’d taken a bit of hammering, quite a bit of hard hammering. It was when I was on leave. I was in civvies. He could stand plenty of liquor. He was homesick for the taste of French wine. He talked a lot about wine. And so he got around to talking about France, and fighting, and Germany, and the war, and everything else. He was a good little fellow. I quite liked him. He had as much fight in him as a terrier. Men like that come back and fight some more if they’re alive. I wouldn’t mind fighting with—of course, I mean fighting by the side of—this little Captain Ix.

“He told me a wonderful story …”

“Y
OU WANT
to think of this,” said Cattle, “whenever people get round to talking about the way people die, and what people die for—in general, when people begin to talk about things like Bill Nelson’s death. Because there are times when there really does seem to be a Destiny that saves us like cards to be played at the end part of a game. We talked about France, about the fall of France, and the nice rough wines of this part of France, and the smooth wines of another part; and the way wine is made.

“Then Captain Ix said this”:

*

“You may crush men like grapes in a wine press. You can trample all the sweetness out of them—stamp them down until they look like a flat, downtrodden mass of rubbish. Do that. But don’t forget one thing: out of the smashed remains of the grape harvest, my friend, brandy is distilled. Not much of it, but potent. And one whiff of good brandy carries with it the character and quality of the whole ravaged vineyard. Do you understand that? So with men. Squeeze a nation! Smash it and flatten it and twist out of it the last drop of its blood. But listen: out of the trodden-out débris of the people there comes a strong and vital spirit. It is there, fermenting, growing strong. And out of the agony of the crushed grapes, remember, comes the glory of the wine. Out of the agony of the people comes the glory of the nation.

“You can squash out the external appearance of a grape: but in doing this, you give it an ultimate magnificence. It is like that with a man. A man on his own is a soft thing that spoils easily—like a grape! The
press and the dark cellar bring out the undying spirit of the grape—as of a man!

“I am a Frenchman. I am one of the trampled grapes. But it is I who am telling you that even at this moment, in the dark, there is going on a stir, a ferment. And drip … drip … drip … drop by drop, there is gathering the rare, biting, imprisoned spirit of my people.

“Look here. I have been beaten like washing in a stream. I have been chewed up like grass. But it was I who went out to die with the Ten Old Tigers.”

And Captain Victor Ix raised a glass of English bitter, and said, in a deep and resonant voice: “The Ten Old Tigers and the greater glory of France!” He gulped the beer; pulled a face. “Listen,” he said:

*

I do not need to tell you much about our retreat. It was a débâcle and a crash. To my dying moment I shall carry in my nostrils the smell of that defeat—a smell, my friend, of doom: of high-explosive smoke mixed with petrol and burnt oil and dust and ashes. That was the smell of the Boche advance. They came on like driver ants in a jungle, over heaps of their own dead. The tanks roared like devils. It was like seeing a city on the move—tanks which looked greater than cathedrals,
spitting
shot and shell. And above them, aeroplanes as numerous and awful as the horde of Satan falling into hell—coming down howling, my friend; that is the only word. Their noise alone stunned us. But we held. My company did what was possible. I went mad. I raved. I swore like a maniac. But my little men went down; and my good old friend Xavier, the Lieutenant, he went down in a fine spray. The French Army was cut to slices like a ham—torn to bits like a pineapple. A bridge which should have been blown up was not blown up. The tanks came over in a black cloud. France was rolling over in her last
convulsion
. Germany was at her throat. The great thumbs of the tank and aeroplane offensive had a stranglehold, right behind the great artery. We could only gurgle and kick. And our kicks grew weaker. Our head swam. Delirium! Blackness! Of my company, seventeen men were left.

I took them away. Then I was ashamed and wanted to go back: but then they took me away, for I was slightly wounded and not quite
myself
.

Yes, the man you see before you now, Victor Ix, retreated with the washed-out remains of his company.

I thought that although we had been pressed back, the rest of our forces were holding out; that I could come back soon with a new
company
and beat the Boche back to Berlin, as before. I did not know that the way had been cleared for the Boches, and that France was sold. It did not enter my mind, because I thought such things were impossible.

To the downfall of all traitors I will drink even another glass of this execrable beer: and one more still to the Ten Old Tigers…. To the ten grey and magnificent Old Tigers of Tolly.

We reached a tiny town called Tolly. Now I knew Tolly, for I had lived there for a little while when I was young. It is a little town like other little towns. Nothing happens there. Nobody does anything beyond a certain dead-alive routine of living. Tolly had only one thing to distinguish it from a thousand other such towns: a kind of Soldiers’ Home.

Many years ago, after the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte, a certain
military
-minded wine merchant endowed a small row of cottages. He gave them to ten old soldiers: veterans of the wars, who had permission to live there in their old age rent-free. The will of the merchant provided, also, some small weekly sum for the purchase of tobacco and wine. The town provided a few francs’ worth of lighting and heating. Thus, with their pensions, the old soldiers who lived in those cottages and waited for death were able to rest in some little comfort.

These poor old men were pathetic.

They had spent their lives in camps and barracks. They knew nothing but soldiering. A clause in the will that provided for them insisted that only men without families could enjoy those poor little amenities. So the ten veterans of Tolly, who are now in Heaven, were men alone in
the world: men who had devoted their entire lives to the Army of France.

When I was young and was at Tolly, I often saw them. They drew their pensions and spent the money on necessities. They were
regimental
, however, those poor old men. They received, every Saturday, a sum of three francs apiece for wine and tobacco; and so they went out to spend those few pence on wine and tobacco alone. And every Saturday morning, punctually at eleven forty-five, the ten old soldiers would march out to the Café Roche on the corner, and sit, each with his glass of red or white wine, smoking and talking. They amused people. It was funny to hear them discussing battles and skirmishes that everybody had forgotten, in places nobody had ever heard of.

Now and again, some person, slightly drunk and jolly, would say, “What about Indo-China?” And one of them, who had fought some shocking encounters out there, would square his thin old shoulders and begin to explain…. “We were here … they were there…. And then the Commandant said to me … and then I said to the Commandant …” Real old soldiers’ talk. And then somebody would buy them drinks. Once in a while one of them would get rather drunk. The townspeople enjoyed this very much—the spectacle of a
seventy-yea
r
-old soldier singing forgotten songs in the ghost of a voice and reeling, supported by a comrade of seventy-two, back to the
alms-houses
.

They were old and shabby. They had just enough to eat, but never quite enough to drink and smoke. They cadged a little. They
sometimes
attached themselves to total strangers and, talking of the weather, complained of thirst. Sometimes they were a bit of a nuisance. They tried to get small jobs of cleaning, or gardening, for the price of a litre of white wine and a packet of the worst tobacco. They used bad language when they forgot themselves … and as they grew older they forgot themselves quite often.

They talked mostly of battles; and when they talked, their skinny old hands lashed the air in savage gestures. One veteran of North
Africa, a Sergeant-Major of more than eighty, whose elder brother had fallen at Sedan, used to demonstrate, with a decanter, how he had killed an Arab with a rock, and so saved the life of his commanding officer. The breasts of all of them tinkled with medals. They all cultivated fierce moustaches. Most of them shaved every day, and walked upright.

The people of Tolly called them the Ten Old Tigers.

We got into Tolly, as I was telling you—used-up, finished, dead on our feet. The town was almost empty. The people had fled. There was an echoing silence. “What is this?” I wondered. We passed the Café Roche. There was a sound of merrymaking inside … a sort of crackle of senile laughter.

I staggered to the door. The café was empty. Only ten familiar figures occupied the centre of the place. They had bottles of the best wine before them. Eight of them were smoking cigars. Yes, they were the Ten Old Tigers. I was nearly dead of exhaustion. I heard myself saying: “What, Sergeant Bonenfant—is it you?”

And a very old man said:
“Vi
l’capitaine,”
and sprang to his feet. He said: “It is fifteen years since I saw your face last. Let us see—only four of us have died since then. There are four new ones. For the rest, we are still here …” He was happy with wine. “Listen,
mon
capitaine,
they have all run away. The café is ours. Drinks are on the house.” This Sergeant Bonenfant was a wicked old man, who was disrespectful to officers and feared neither God nor man. He laughed, and said: “They think the Boches have beaten France!”

All the rest roared with laughter.

I said: “They are coming in tanks.” Then I felt my legs giving way. I said to my men: “Find yourself to eat and drink.” And I sat down. And then the place whirled round me like a wheel, and there was a redness, and a purple, and a darkness…. And I came to myself on the floor. One of the old men had propped my battered head on his bony knee. Another was pouring most of a bottle of brandy down my throat. A third was saying: “Bite his ears: that brings them to” …
and another was replying: “I have no teeth.” A fifth was slapping me in the face: an old soldier’s remedy for unconsciousness, it appears.

“My men?” I said.

There was a mutter of horrible oaths and curses. The old sergeant, Bonenfant, said:

“The ——s have run away. There is some fairy tale. There is some legend. The Boches are almost here, one says. Then why not go and stop them, I say. But no. The seventeen of them, your men, throw down their equipment and run off. They say, ‘Against tanks, what use are rifles? Besides,’ they say, ‘we are betrayed and sold.’ It is a question of morale. They run. As for me, I say:
Bah!”

I sat up. “There is something here that I do not like,” I said. “We were retreating, yes … but …”

There was a crash. There was a smash of glass. A very old man, the oldest of all the Tigers, none other than the old Sergeant-Major whose brother had perished at Sedan, had thrown a water carafe through the window into the street. It was not drunkenness. It was rage. Yes, rage. That old, old man was bristling like a grey wolf. He stood up. His time-worn throat jangled like a broken piano. He shouted:

“Silence!”

There was authority in that voice, my friend. We all listened, out of force of habit.

He let out a string of old Army endearments:

“Silence, you dirty maggots! Silence every one of you, you this-
and-that
offspring of so-and-so! You drunken, noisy dummy-headed blank spawn of little frogs! Shuttup! You in the rear—put down that pipe while I’m talking to you! Are you attending to me? Right. You’d better. You imbecile idiot scum of puddles! … Stop shuffling those feet!

“The Boches are coming. This is serious. Do you understand? They say that France is sold. I don’t know. I know that there is something strange here. I know that in time the Boches would have come here only through a thin paste and that thin paste would have been me—and it would have been you, too, if I’d been your Sergeant-Major! I’d
have blown myself to dust to get in their eyes! And so? What has happened? Everybody runs. Civilians, yes: they are only jokes. They ran. But when soldiers run, my comrades, there is something funny. Soldiers are paid to fight, not run. It is a career: to fight, not run.

“Then what? We are old men. But we are men. We are ancient soldiers. But we are soldiers. In Africa we stood alone against thousands, and we did not run. What have we fought for all our lives, if people run away now when we are nearly dead? What have we lived for, to see everything we made go away like tobacco ash in the wind?”

A growl of rage from the other nine Tigers. They were sober now, and they growled. And I felt myself growling with them. He went on:

“For myself, I have only about twenty years more to live. But—name of a name of a dog of a dog of a pig!—I have spat in the eye of death twenty thousand times ever since I was born, and got away with it! So have you all, you young pups! So have you all, you whippersnappers; for you’re soldiers like me! Good. At Sidi-Faouzi the raw recruits broke like string. The veterans, the old ones, it was they who saved the day with pig stickers, with naked steel. Good. It is the veterans who will save France now. Look! They have thrown down their rifles and their pouches. Good! Here are rifles, ammunition, and bayonets. What more do you want? A regimental band? Bah! Get on that equipment! It is an order! To Arms! Long live France, and down with the Boches!”

And my friend, my friend, as if in a dream I saw those ten old soldiers, those aged, superannuated, worn-out, battered, broken-down veterans of all the wars of the Empire—I saw them stuff their pipes into their pockets (incidentally, like good old soldiers, helping themselves to packets of tobacco) and struggle into the belts and pouches my men had left. They put the stuff on wrong. It didn’t matter. They had their bayonets on their shrunken left hips. They loaded their rifles. The youngest of them—a man of sixty-four whom they called Bobo, who had been in the cavalry in the last war—showed the old Sergeant-Major how to load his rifle. The present pattern was quite new to him: in his day he had handled the ancient
chassepot,
and the forgotten Lebel.

The Sergeant-Major addressed them again:

“Now, come on, you sons of dogs! Do you want to live for ever?” It was the greatest warcry I had ever heard. I tore a strip off the
tablecloth
nearest my hand. I tied it round my head where I was wounded. I rose. I stood as on parade. I bellowed at them: