Sergeant Nelson of the Guards Read Free Page A

children starving; nothing left of them but bloated bellies and staring eyes … trenches full of dead heroes rotting to high heaven … long files of men with bandaged eyes, hand-on-shoulder like convicts, blind with gas … civilians cursing God and dying in the muck-heaps of blasted towns….
    Oh yes. We saw all the pictures and heard all the gruesome stories, which we know were true. We were the rich culture-grounds of the peace propaganda that said: If war was like this then, what will it be like next time, with all the sharpened wits of the death-chemists working on new poison gas and explosives, and the greatest engineers of all time devoting themselves to aeroplanes that can come down screaming like bats out of hell?
    When we heard that first siren on the Sunday of the Declaration of War, things like damp spiders ran up and down our backs. We expected the worst.
    And then came a flow of something hot and strong. We went out and begged to be allowed to fight Jerry. We insisted on our right to do so, and to hell with the age groups. Men of sixty, who had seen the things at the pictures of which we had lost our breakfasts, and who had spenttwenty post-war and pre-war years saying: “Never again,” declared on oath that they were forty and beseeched the authorities to give them rifles. There was a rush and a heave. Because it wouldn’t take us all at once, we cursed the War Office from hell to breakfast.
    Men like Shorrocks, who had argued the futility of all war in his grocery shop in Rockbottom (cotton and coal; pop., 21,369; near Black-burn; finest town on earth), did a volte-face like the pirouette of a ballet-dancer. (I say nothing of his mulish insistence that Britain, being an island, had no concern in the affairs of Europe; nor of the imbecile satisfaction he seemed to suck out of the statement that there had always been an England and always would be. That Shorrocks, in his fossil-ivory tower!) He left the business to his wife, clapped on his durable bowler hat, and, arguing about nothing for fifteen minutes with an old sweat in the Recruiting Station, passed A1 and got his fifteen stone of maddening self-assertion into the Coldstream Guards.
    It is what they call “Being there when the bugle blows.” He sits by the window on a little collapsible iron bed, filling a pipe with Sidebotham’s Unscented Cut Plug which, in the tone of a man who stands by some ultimate and glorious truth, he declares to be the finest tobacco on earth. Let his neighbour, Whitaker of the West Riding, swear that Sidebotham’s is manure and there is nothing in the universe to touch Cooper’s Fragrant Twist at one-and-five an ounce. Shorrocks stands firm. Jut Sidebotham’s label on old bootlaces, and Shorrocks will smoke them and die in defence of them.
    He is a big man. Assume that three of his fifteen stone are so much fat, food for worms. They will get that off him here, it is grimly hinted.
    Meanwhile it fills his waistcoat, the good waistcoat of his everyday suit, which still has a year of wear in it. (The best suit—five pounds; no guineas; worth fifteen; made by Joe Hindle of Rockbottom, greatest tailor in Great Britain, one-time cutter to Jim Leach, finest tailor in the world, also of Rockbottom—hangs full of moth balls, ready for his homecoming. He will be back in one year. Germany will capitulate next spring. Who says so? He says so. Why? Because.)
    All right. He will admit he has a few ounces of weight to lose. The Shorrockses eat well. You could not get Jack Shorrocks’ Agatha’s potato pie for ten shillings a portion at the Savoy Hotel, London—no, nor even at the Rockbottom Commercial Hotel. And he will say that, though careful with the brass, he begrudges nothing when it comes to food.
    He knows what it is to go without. He doesn’t mind admitting that he worked in the Mill. He saw Boom and Slump; knew Cotton as King and as Beggar. A man must not be ashamed of anything in the way of honest work. When