The Broken Chariot Read Free Page B

with cloth gaiters fastened, belt pulled tight, and cap angled on, he found it a glamorous transformation from school uniform. Maybe soon he would get into proper kit, because the war was bound to be on when he was old enough.
    At times of despair he imagined a gaggle of Heinkels skimming like the blackest of black crows low over woods and fields on a deadly track to the sheds and towers of the school. His childhood nightmare of a world exploding in two and falling to crush life and soul out of him was overpainted by a smoking ruin in which everyone was dead or half-buried except himself and a few cadets coming from cover at the end of a tactical scheme. They would work tirelessly to rescue the living, especially those he saw reason to hate, so that he could go on hating them; or they would nobly clear up the mess and scorn all praise for their cool bravery among the as yet unexploded bombs. But the only sound of war in this backwater of England was the occasional wailing alert due to German bombers straying from the main path further south, or the dream-like ripple of ack-ack in the Gloucester direction.
    He and Dominic Jones were enthused by yarns of conflict and exploration in King Solomon’s Mines, Treasure Island and Sanders of the River but, above all, by Kim . Herbert saw himself as a district commissioner in some remote province of Africa, the ruler of an area as big as any country in Europe, sitting by the tent door at dusk while his native bearer set out supper on a camp table. Puffing at his pipe, he would see a range of purple-coloured mountains to be trekked through the following week, into an equally extensive territory administered by Dominic, a social and courtesy visit before coming back to his own zone for another six months, no doubt fighting through an ambush of rebellious tribesmen on the way.
    They talked of enlisting into the army, as an easy escape route into a wider world. The war would be on for years, and give them time to take part in an almost abortive and bloody but finally glorious attack on the mainland of Europe as members of a do-or-dare commando unit. On their return as heroes they would be cheered. Dominic pictured them with caps at a jaunty angle, toting walking sticks, and each with an arm in a sling. ‘Let’s chuck in a black eye-patch for good measure,’ Herbert laughed, at comforting fantasies which, by their nobility of unreality, fed his spirit and made life easier to endure.
    The first sentence of Ovid’s Metamorphoses – his favourite reading – stayed in his mind for a long time: ‘My task is to tell of bodies which have been changed into forms of a different kind.’
    And into different minds, he supposed, because if you altered one the other must change as well. But what body, and what mind? Who gave them to us? And who the hell was it fixed me up with mine, I would like to know? Whoever it was had made a different job of him compared to the others. For example, he didn’t know, for much of the time anyway, what mind and what body had been given him, because the relationship they had to each other didn’t always correspond to how he felt. Even so, he could handle them all right because his outer casing of memory and experience was strong enough to let him control them, and would protect him until such time as he didn’t need either any more. Nevertheless, it was difficult, one might almost say a fight, but since everything to do with the world was fighting, and since he enjoyed fighting, he kept bleak misery away.
    Such uncertainties were no bother when, loaded like a hiker and clutching his single-shot Boer War rifle, he set out on the five-mile obstacle course, eager for cold air after the rigid stuffiness of class room or dormitory. He changed in a few minutes from a more or less clean schoolboy into the roughest of filthy-dirty ragamuffins as he went over a wall with rifle and kit, hands quick at the nets for speed, a