An Honourable Death Read online

  The ‘sah’ seemed to echo back from the stony parade-ground.

  ‘Good, good,’ said the lieutenant. ‘Carry on, corporal.’

  Idiot, thought the corporal. Ignorant long drink of water. He thought of himself as the ardent worker while the officer dummy looked on. The languid man had gazed only for a moment at the bristly, uncouth straw man.

  When the lieutenant had drifted away the corporal turned back to his uniformed lunatics who were still screaming, and shouted, ‘Come on, you little men! Get it in! GET IT IN!’ His voice too was a high scream, as if he was a seagull screaming over a waste of water, as if he himself was a woman being raped.

  After dinner there was a game of football in which Hector, who was a good footballer, took part.

  ‘Holy Jesus, you’re a big fella,’ said a little Irishman to him. ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘The Black Isle,’ said Hector.

  ‘And where is that when it’s at home?’

  Hector told him.

  ‘I’m from the West of Ireland myself, and I wish to Jesus I was back there. Why did you join up?’

  Hector told him.

  ‘You mean you had a job and left it?’ said the Irishman in amazement. ‘You must have a potato for a head.’

  Hector smiled and joined in the game. The seemingly casual yet tactical patterns of football enchanted him.

  ‘Goal!’ someone shouted.

  ‘Jesus, would you believe it, we’ve scored,’ said the Irishman.

  They were ready to go out. They were polishing their boots, their belt-buckles, they were sleeking back their hair. Hector listened vaguely to their talk. All they talked about was women and drink: they were entirely physical. At first this had amazed him but now he had grown used to it. Among the Gaelic voices he could hear English ones, Irish ones.

  ‘I’ll give her a touch of the bayonet tonight,’ he heard someone saying. There was a laugh from men who had worked and suffered together and who knew the real meaning of the joke, for whom it was not just a simile. Already in their conversations they were beginning to become a unit, a company, though they themselves perhaps did not realise it.

  Out of the air around them they were gathering the material for story, badinage, legend. They lived off the random leavings of the day and created their heroes and demons from them. Mornings rose and made them what they would become: they collected like cows under rain. Witticisms rose from the bare square: myths were made by men such as these from the scatterings they found about them. They inspected the plans that had been laid out for them, chewed at them endlessly, tasted them, confronted the straw man in the raw air of morning.

  They talked a lot about their corporal. At times they hated him, at other times they might say, ‘Well, he’s got a job to do, hasn’t he?’ They pretended they didn’t like the army but secretly delighted in their new skills. They talked contemptuously of civilians.

  And laughing and joking they set off, picking up what they could, surviving.

  ‘Not coming, Hector?’

  No, he would stay and read and maybe have a beer. There was no whisky on the camp but there was beer. There was so much to learn and this was his destiny. For themselves they had no destinies, they lived from minute to minute, from hour to hour. They weren’t abstract people, large words like ‘destiny’ were not part of their vocabulary.

  Sometimes they would talk about God, though. Their arguments were naive, without rigour.

  ‘There must be something,’ they would say. ‘Where did we come from, then?’ Then someone would say, ‘Christ knows where the “Hammer” [this was the RSM] comes from,’ and then they would laugh. Their observations about God were like bits of straw that came from the straw man. Logic was alien to them.

  Then after talking about religion they might start talking about ghosts.

  ‘Ghosts have no bodies, of course,’ someone would say sagely, drawing at his pipe. ‘They’re supposed to be spirits.’

  ‘How can you see them, then?’ someone else would ask, and there would be a long pause.

  ‘Well, it’s like gas, you see,’ and smoke would pour from the pipe.

  One day after a long march they trooped in to hear the languid lieutenant talk to them about regimental history. He took off his cap and pointed with a stick to the blackboard on which he had written ‘The Gordon Highlanders’.

  ‘The Gordon Highlanders,’ he told them, ‘were raised in 1794 by the fourth Duke of Gordon. There is a story that the Duchess would offer a personal kiss to every man who joined up. In the Peninsula War they fought in every battle and after the death of Sir John Moore at Corunna they adopted the use of black buttons on their spats as a form of mourning. They fought at Quatre Bras and at Waterloo. At Waterloo the heavy cavalry charged the French lines and as the Royal Scots Greys advanced into the attack, the men of the Gordons clung on to the troopers’ stirrups, so eager were they to fight.’

  There was a snore from the back of the room. The lieutenant hesitated, his pointing stick paralysed in his hand. Then he turned and his face was red and swollen with rage. His eyes protruded from his head and he screamed like a woman.

  ‘Sergeant, there’s a man there sleeping. I can SEE him. Put him on a charge. Immediately. This instant.’

  ‘SAH!’ said the sergeant, standing up and marching over to where the man was twitching out of sleep and entering the room again in his raw naked wakefulness.

  The rest sat up straighter in their seats … Quatre Bras, Waterloo, black buttons, cavalry, and watched, themselves trembling, the lieutenant trembling with rage.

  Hector loved drill and was good at it, as he was at all the tasks he had to do, including shooting and PT. But it was drill that attracted him most and most moved him. There was about it a mystique, a definiteness, an accuracy that enchanted him. The barked commands evoked exact responses from him. He could see as he looked around him shapelessness becoming form, a pure, severe order emerging. Thus geometry created perfection, as if the men were being played like a strange instrument. The best would withdraw from the worst, the inadequate, the wounded ones, who were often made to run round the square with their rifles held above their heads. A pride stirred in the successful man. Perhaps this was the first thing he had succeeded at. To be successful was to become part of the harmony, success in itself was not an individual thing. The pride swelled to the music of bagpipes, to parades: it became swagger, laughter. The men and the marching became a mystical music. To see civilians was to see untidiness, variousness.

  As they became fitter and better at drill and their other work, they became more high-spirited. The successful ones played tricks on the wounded and the vulnerable and the inefficient. They turfed them out of their beds, made fun of them. There was cruelty as well as high-spiritedness. Only it wasn’t seen as cruelty, it was seen as sport, soon forgotten.

  And they talked continuously about women, about their exploits with prostitutes and others. Some of them had escaped into the army because they had no money, or because they had been felons and had got into trouble with the police. They also drank a great deal.

  They were purely physical beings, quite close to the animal. Hector sensed a pathos about them, felt himself separate from them. Their talk about women disgusted him.

  One of the English recruits told Hector, ‘What we used to do was this. We used to make up to maids in fancy houses, a couple of us. Then when they told us the mistress was out we used to take the maids upstairs and leave the door on the latch. Then the third man would come in and take the stuff. Other times we might come into a house through the roof. We used to have dolly mops to pick the pockets of drunk people. Another prank we had, two of us would pick on a gent and quarrel with him, then a third one would come along and pretend he was helping him. He would lead him to a quiet place and fleece him. We had neddies to hit people with. Then we used to rob children, ones who had been sent on errands. That’s what we called skinning, even taking their clothes. The dolly mops were good at that, some of them looked like angels but wicked as hell underneath. It was a great time while it lasted, lived off the fat of the land. But the peelers nearly had us one day, so I joined the army. I’m not all that keen on it, but what else is there to do?’

  This was a whole new world to Hector and he listened with wonder. In his own area no one stole anything, though people were not rich. Doors were never locked. The Bible told them not to steal and that commandment was adhered to. To steal was to be ostracised: it was utter disgrace. But there, in that English world, were men who knew little about the Bible and who, if they had, would have ignored its laws. They scrambled for life in seething warrens, where there were rats as well as people. They preyed on the young and innocent, and women were as bad as men. Stealing was in fact their profession as his had been to work in a shop.

  They had deceived, cheated, maimed and perhaps killed.

  There came a time when they grew almost friendly with the corporals and sergeants, who would borrow money from them and never pay it back. Or the men would buy them drinks, for the corporals and sergeants never paid for anything. Why, they were human after all and would joke with them. It must be hard to make people like themselves into soldiers; it must be boring starting all over again with every new intake. And then all this hard training was necessary to prepare them for battle, it was in their own interests. And you couldn’t say that they didn’t know their jobs. No, in general they all fitted into this new scheme, they and the sergeant and the corporal, they had come through a difficult time together and they had triumphed. They now had a certain security.

  They were endlessly fascinating to Hector with their fecklessness, their flashes of pride, their cruelty, their generosity. They never had any money for as soon as they got it they spent it. They neve
r read books because many of them were illiterate. Yet they could never be cheated of a penny on pay day. The Highlanders themselves were among the most educated, and Hector would speak to them in Gaelic.

  Some of the soldiers lived in a fantasy world. They made up stories about their previous lives, their families. One of them, a small fellow with a pale, pinched face, insisted that his father was a doctor. He described his father’s practice in great detail. They lived in a big house in the middle of parkland. When he was a boy he hunted for rabbits and hare and fished for salmon in a stream. His fantasies were well researched and not believed by anyone. However, some of them lived off their fantasies as off some exotic food, unlike the food that they actually ate.

  At one stage when they hated their endless drill and the sadism of the corporal, one of them said that he knew of a man in the town who would beat him up. He would come up to him when he was in the pub, pick a quarrel and break his arms, and then they would be free of him. But nothing ever happened of course, although for a while they waited hopefully for the big fight. The corporal, however, continued to rule the square as he had always done.

  There was also a man who read books all the time. He had big round glasses and his books were either about the Church or about history. His life was one sustained torture: he was always on charges, he couldn’t march in step, but his books kept him going until one day someone tore them up. He would wander about the camp in a dazed state until he was dismissed from the army since he couldn’t get through his training successfully.

  There was another man who told them that there were mysterious higher-ups they could complain to. These higher-ups would overrule the corporals and sergeants and even put them on charges and dismiss them. These higher-ups might be political, they would have the interests of the men at heart: actually the sergeants and corporals were terrified of them. The men would listen to this barrack-room lawyer like little children looking for help in the dark.

  Although they could be cruel the men had sudden flashes of generosity. And they were especially fond of children whom they regarded as symbols of purity. When they heard that a child belonging to one of the men had to go into hospital, they clubbed together so that toys could be bought for him.

  At one stage one of them said, ‘That corporal had to become friendly. It was to save his own life. Else we would have put a bullet into his back first time we were in action.’ He told a story of a bullying sergeant who had disappeared from a troop-ship: his body had never been found. Obviously he had been thrown over the side by the men.

  Some nights, because of his guilt at running away to the army without telling his parents, Hector would have nightmares. In one in particular he was standing trial in the Free Church school he had attended. He was barefoot and he felt cramped inside his desk where somehow or other he stood at attention. His interrogator was wearing a black minister’s robe.

  ‘Tell me the story of the Prodigal Son,’ the voice ordered. Hector stuttered but not a word came from his mouth.

  Suddenly his father was in the classroom as well: he was in fact building one side of the classroom like the mason he was. His raw red hands fumbled at the bricks and his head hung down. Hector felt sorry for him. But the inflexible voice went on, ‘You have sinned. And you will be sent to hell.’ There was a fire in the room with a pail of peats beside it.

  Nevertheless, instead of the fires of hell, Hector felt the most intense cold. He was standing on an icy hill looking down into a field where people were moving about in clothes as brown as the earth. There was a high wind: he tried to shout to them but they weren’t hearing him. Either they were deaf or they were ignoring him. They carried on with whatever tasks they were doing, some smoking, some eating, some simply walking about.

  ‘What is the chief end of man?’ a voice asked him.

  He thought and thought. The answer was on the tip of his tongue but he couldn’t find it.

  He looked down at his legs. He was standing in the most intense cold and he was barefoot. There was snow round his feet.

  The scene changed again according to the logic of dreams. This time he was standing in a shop serving a customer. He was swathed in tartan which covered him from head to toe.

  ‘There you are, sir,’ he said to the man who had a red angry face. ‘That suit is far too big for me,’ the man said. ‘You should know that. I should send for the manager; you are totally incompetent. Anyone would see at a glance that this suit is too big. And look at it. It’s got holes in it. What sort of shop is this? What do you think I am? Do you think I am a fool?’ And he thrust his large red angry face at Hector, who actually felt a rain of spittle on his cheeks. ‘I’ll send for the manager!’ the man shouted.

  ‘I am the manager,’ said Hector.

  ‘You the manager! You’re far too young and in any case you don’t know your Bible. Look at that suit. It’s moth-eaten, and it is falling apart.’

  Hector held out his hand for the suit and, true enough, it disintegrated like a spider’s web in his hands. He stood staring down at it in amazement.

  ‘And you advertise yourselves as the best shop in Inverness too,’ said the man furiously. ‘You will have to be reported.’

  ‘I could have sworn,’ said Hector, still puzzled.

  ‘You think that because you are wearing a coat of many colours yourself,’ said the man, ‘you can sell your customers anything. I am going to send for the police. I will make sure that you will be prosecuted. And what’s that you have been reading? That’s not a Bible. I don’t know what book that is.’

  Suddenly Hector felt the most intense and passionate anger.

  ‘Stand at attention when you’re speaking to me!’ he shouted in a rage. ‘And pick your feet up! Who do you think you are, coming into this shop in such a slovenly manner? Look at all this, it’s clean, do you understand, and you come in here with your dirty boots and order me about. And look at these buttons. They’re not even polished. I may be poor but this is my shop. It’s the best stuff there is.’

  And the customer began marching up and down, entangled and blinded by tweeds and tartans, while Hector poked at him with a ruler, barking orders at him.

  Hector woke up to find himself entangled in the blankets. He was sweating and trembling. He forced his mind to watch the men moving in mystical manoeuvres on the square. Slowly he was calmed by the complex configurations. The personae of his dream receded one by one, and he was at peace.

  3

  THE sea boiled around them. The ship butted into the water and rose again: sometimes it seemed as if it would never rise. There was an ancient creaking from it. In the depths of the ship as in the depths of hell, sick, frightened, green-faced, wishing they were dead, were hundreds of soldiers. The water drummed and raced along beside them. Many of them had never been on a ship before. The water was white, lead-coloured, grey. Sickness was everywhere, like a green sticky fungus which clung to the decks. You stepped into it, slithered and almost fell, while, at the same time, the ship itself suddenly plunged or veered. The wind howled, the ship reeled. But the worst of it was when it descended into the waves and you waited, praying for it to rise. Perhaps this time it wouldn’t, perhaps this time the ancient arthritic wood would refuse. Perhaps this time you would drown in a salty grave.

  What would it be like? thought Hector, who, with another recruit called Robertson, was a salt-water corporal – not a substantive rank, indeed as transitory as the sea-water itself. This waste of waters, threatening, indifferent, with such enormous, frightening power, what would it be like to be sucked into it? Once, as he stood beside a recruit who was being sick, his face greenish in the stormy light, he stared out, almost hypnotised by the waves. The soldier gagged, was sick on Hector’s polished boots, then poured the rest into the plentiful sea. God dammit, you’ve spoiled my boots, thought Hector, and for a moment he was angry, but his anger seemed so tiny in the middle of that maelstrom that it subsided quickly. In any case, what did these waters care about shiny boots, ceremonies, passing-out parades, regulations? The power of the sea was immense, unimaginable. You wouldn’t last a minute in it. The water was like an infinitude of roofs collapsing.