The Penguin Book of First World War Stories Read Free Page B

ruddy excuse; said ’e was a-reading Kipling, or some such rot – when ’e ought to have been ’elping the cook’s mate.’
    â€˜What did he give him?’ asked the Pay Corporal, interested.
    â€˜Nothing. His blessing and dismissed the case. As if I had nothing better to do than listen to ’im talking ’ot air to a perisher like that there Meyrick. ’Ere, pass over them musketry returns.’ 5
    Which conversation, had Seymour overheard it, he would have understood and fully sympathized with. For CSM Hayton, though a prince of sergeant-majors, was no student of psychology. To him a spade was a spade only as long as it shovelled earth.
    Now, before I go on to the day when the subject of all this trouble and talk was called on to make good, and how he did it, a few words on the man himself might not be amiss. War, the great forcing house of character, admits no lies. Sooner or later it finds out a man, and he stands in the pitiless glare of truth for what he is. And it is not by any means the cheery hail-fellow-well-met type, or the thruster, or the sportsman, who always pools the most votes when the judging starts…
    John Meyrick, before he began to train for the great adventure, had been something in a warehouse down near Tilbury. And ‘something’ is about the best description of what he was that you could give. Moreover there wasn’t a dog’s chance of his ever being ‘anything’. He used to help the young man – I should say young gentleman – who checked weigh-bills at one of the dock entrances. More than that I cannot say, and incidentally the subject is not of surpassing importance. His chief interests in life were contemplating the young gentleman, listening open-mouthed to his views on life, and dreaming. Especially the latter. Sometimes he would go after the day’s work, and, sitting down on a bollard, his eyes would wander over the lines of some dirty tramp, with her dark-skinned crew. Visions of wonderful seas and tropic islands, of leafy palms with the blue-green surf thundering in towards them, of coral reefs and glorious-coloured flowers, would run riot in his brain. Not that he particularly wanted to go and see these figments of his imagination for himself; it was enough for him to dream of them – to conjure them up for a space in his mind by the helpof an actual concrete ship – and then to go back to his work of assisting his loquacious companion. He did not find the work uncongenial; he had no hankerings after other modes of life – in fact the thought of any change never even entered into his calculations. What the future might hold he neither knew nor cared; the expressions of his companion on the rottenness of life in general and their firm in particular awoke no answering chord in his breast. He had enough to live on in his little room at the top of a tenement house – he had enough over for an occasional picture show – and he had his dreams. He was content.
    Then came the war. For a long while it passed him by; it was no concern of his, and it didn’t enter his head that it was ever likely to be until one night, as he was going in to see
Jumping Jess, or the Champion Girl Cowpuncher
at the local movies, a recruiting sergeant touched him on the arm.
    He was not a promising specimen for a would-be soldier, but that recruiting sergeant was not new to the game, and he’d seen worse.
    â€˜Why aren’t you in khaki, young fellow me lad?’ he remarked genially.
    The idea, as I say, was quite new to our friend. Even though that very morning his colleague in the weigh-bill pastime had chucked it and joined, even though he’d heard a foreman discussing who they were to put in his place as ‘that young Meyrick was habsolutely ’opeless’, it still hadn’t dawned on him that he might go too. But the recruiting sergeant was a man of some knowledge; in his daily round he