Men at Arms Read online

  Guy and Apthorpe set off across the five hundred yards of sedge and took their places in the brick-lined trench below the targets. A corporal and two details from the Ordnance Corps joined. After much telephoning red flags were hoisted and eventually firing began. Guy looked at his watch before marking the first shot. It was now ten minutes, to eleven. At half past twelve fourteen targets had been shot and the message came to stand easy. Two of the Depot Branch arrived to relieve Guy and Apthorpe.

  ‘They’re getting pretty fed up at the firing point,’ one of them said. ‘They say you’re marking too slow. And I’d like to see my target. I’m certain my, third was on it. It must have gone through the same hole as the second. I was dead on aim.’

  ‘It’s patched out, anyway.’

  Guy stumped away and emerged from the side of the trench to be greeted with distant yells and arm waving. He hobbled on, disregarding, until he was within talking distance. Then he heard from the major: ‘For Christ’s sake, man, d’you want to be killed? Can’t you see the red flag’s up?’

  Guy looked and saw that it was. No one was at the firing point. All were crowded in the lee of the hut eating sandwiches. He continued his walk among the hummocks.

  ‘Get down, for Christ’s sake. Now, look for the flag.’

  He lay, looked and presently saw the flag lowered. ‘All right, come on now.’

  When he came up with the major he said: ‘I’m sorry, sir. Those other people had just come up and we’d been told to stand easy.’

  ‘Exactly. That’s how fatal accidents happen. The flag and only the flag is the signal to go by. Pay attention, everyone. You’ve just seen a typical example of bad range discipline. Remember it.’

  Apthorpe meanwhile had just started out and was making heavy going. When he arrived, Guy said: ‘Did you see the bloody flag?’

  ‘Of course. One always looks out for it. It’s the first rule. Besides the corporal up there tipped me off. They often play that trick the first day on the range, running up the red flag when everyone knows it ought to be down. It’s simply done to impress the need of range discipline.’

  ‘Well, you might have passed the tip on to me.’

  ‘Hardly the thing, old man. It would defeat the whole object of the exercise. There’d be no lessons learned if everyone tipped everyone else off, if you see what I mean.’

  They ate their sandwiches. The cold was intense. ‘Couldn’t we carry on firing, sir? Everyone’s ready.’

  ‘I daresay, but we’ve got to think of the men. They expect their stand-easy.’

  At last firing began again.

  ‘We shan’t get through on time,’ said the major. ‘Cut down to five rounds a man.’

  But it was not the firing which took the time; it was the falling in of details, the drill on the firing point, the inspection of arms. Light was failing when it came to Guy’s turn. He and Apthorpe joined the last detail, hobbling up independently. As he lay and sighted his rifle before loading, Guy made the disconcerting discovery that the target entirely disappeared when he covered it. He lowered his rifle and looked with two eyes. There was a discernible white square. He closed one eye; the square became dimmed, flickered. He raised the rifle and at once there was a total black at the end of his foresight.

  He loaded and quickly fired his five observed shots. After the first, the disc rose and covered the bull.

  ‘Nice work, Crouchback, keep it up.’

  After the second, the flag signalled a miss. After the third, the flag again.

  ‘Hullo, Crouchback, what’s gone wrong?’

  The fourth was a high outer. After the fifth, the flag.

  Then a telephone message: ‘Correction on target two. The first shot was wrongly marked a bull. A patch had blown off. The first shot on target two was a miss.’

  Apthorpe, next to him, had done very nicely.

  The major led Guy aside and said gravely: ‘That was a very poor show, Crouchback. What on earth went wrong?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir. The visibility was rather poor.’

  ‘It was the same for everyone. You’ll have to work hard at elementary aiming. You put up a very poor show today.'

  Then began the ritual of counting the ammunition and collecting shell cases. ‘Pull through now. Boil out as soon as you’re dismissed.’

  Then the snow began. It was dark before they took their seats in the bus and began slowly nosing a way home.

  ‘I reckon that lion was unlucky, Uncle,’ said Trimmer. But no one in his numbed audience laughed.

  Even Kut-al-Imara House seemed warm and welcoming. Guy pressed himself to the hot pipes in the hall while the rush on the stairs cleared. A mess waiter passed and Guy ordered a glass of rum. Slowly he began to feel the blood move and irrigate his hands and feet.

  ‘Hullo, Crouchback, boiled out already?’

  It was the major.

  ‘Not yet, sir. I was just waiting till the crowd had finished!’

  ‘Well, you’ve no business to wait. What were the orders? Boil out immediately you dismiss. Nothing was said about waiting till you’d had a couple of drinks.’

  The major was cold too he, also, had had a beastly day. Moreover he had nearly a mile to walk through the snow to his billet and when he got there, he remembered now, the cook would be out and he had promised to take his wife to dinner at one of the hotels.

  ‘Not one of your better days, Crouchback. You may not be much of a marksman but might at least keep your rifle clean for someone who is,’ he said; he went off into the snow and entirely forgot the matter before he had gone a hundred yards.

  Trimmer was on the stairs during this conversation. ‘Hullo, Uncle, did I hear you getting a rocket?’

  ‘You did.’

  ‘Quite a change for our blue-eyed boy.’

  A spark was struck in Guy’s darkened mind; a fuse took fire. ‘Go to hell,’ he said.

  ‘Tut, tut, Uncle. Aren’t we a little crusty this evening?’

  Bang.

  ‘You bloody, half-baked pipsqueak, pipe down,’ he said. ‘One more piece of impudence out of you and I’ll hit you.’

  The words were not well chosen; lame or sound, Guy was not built to inspire great physical fear but sudden wrath is always alarming, recalling as it does the awful unpredictable dooms of childhood; moreover Guy was armed with a strong stick which he now involuntarily raised a little. A court martial might or might not have construed this gesture as a serious threat against the life of brother officer. Trimmer did.

  ‘Here, I say, steady on. No offence meant.’

  Anger carries its own propulsive mechanism and soars far from the point of ignition. It carried Guy now into a red incandescent stratum where he was a stranger.

  ‘God rot your revolting little soul, I told you to pipe down, didn’t I?’

  He gave the stick a definite, deliberate flourish and advanced a halting step. Trimmer fled. Two swift chassés and he was round the corner, muttering inaudibly about ‘… taking a joke without flying off the handle…’

  Quite slowly Guy’s rage subsided and touched ground; self-satisfaction sank with it, rather more slowly but at last that too was on the common level.

  Just such a drama, he reflected, must have been enacted term by term at Kut-al-Imara House, when worms turned and suddenly revealed themselves as pythons; when nasty teasing little boys were put to flight. But the champions of the upper fourth needed no rum to embolden them.

  Was it for this that the bugles’ sounded across the barrack square and the strings sang over the hushed dinner table of the Copper Heels? Was this the triumph for which Roger de Waybroke took the cross that he should exult in putting down Trimmer?

  In shame and sorrow Guy stood last in the queue for boiling water, leaning on his fouled weapon.

  8

  THE week that followed brought consolation.

  Health returned to Guy’s knee. It had grown stronger every day while he was acquiring a habitual limp; the pain, lately, had come from the elast
ic bandage. Now, haunted by Apthorpe in the role of doppel-gänger, he abandoned stick and strapping and found he could move normally, and he fell in with his squad as proudly as on his second day in barracks.

  At the same time the moustache which he had let grow for some weeks suddenly took shape, as suddenly as a child learns to swim one morning it was a straggle of hair, the next a firm and formal growth. He took it to a barber in the town who trimmed it and brushed it and curled it with a hot iron. He rose from the chair transmogrified. As he left the shop he noticed an optician’s over the street in whose window lay a single enormous china eyeball and a notice proclaiming: FREE TESTS. EYE-GLASSES OF ALL KINDS FITTED WHILE YOU WAIT. The solitary organ, the idiosyncratic choice of word ‘eyeglasses’ in preference to ‘spectacles’, the memory of the strange face which had just looked at him over the barber’s basin, the memory of countless German Uhlans in countless American films, drew him across.

  ‘I was thinking of a monocle,’ he said quite accurately.

  ‘Yes, Sir. Merely the plain lens for smart appearance, or do you suffer from faulty vision?’

  ‘It’s for shooting. I can’t see the target.’

  ‘Dear, dear, that won’t do, will it, sir?’

  ‘Can you cure it?’

  ‘We must, mustn’t we sir?’

  Quarter of an hour later Guy emerged, having purchased for fifteen shillings a strong lens in a ‘rolled-gold’ double rim. He removed it from its false-leather purse, stopped before a window and stuck the glass in his right eye. It stayed there. Slowly he relaxed the muscles of his face; he stopped squinting. The monocle remained firmly in place. The man reflected to him had a cynical leer; he was every inch a junker. Guy returned to the optician. ‘I think I’d better have two or three more of these, in case I break one.’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s the only one I have, in stock of that particular strength.’

  ‘Never mind. Give me the nearest you have.’

  ‘Really, sir, the eye is a most delicate instrument. You shouldn’t play ducks and drakes with it. That is the lens for which you have been tested. It is the only one I can recommend professionally.’

  ‘Never mind!’

  ‘Well, sir, I have made my protest. The man of science demurs. The man of business submits.’

  The monocle combined with the moustaches, set him up with his young companions, none of whom could have transformed himself so quickly. It also improved his shooting.

  A few days after he bought it, they went to Mudshore to fire the Bren. Through his eye-glass Guy saw, distinct from the patchy snow, a plain white blob and hit it every time, not with notable marksmanship but as accurately as anyone else in his detail.

  He did not attempt to keep the monocle permanently in his eye but he used it rather often and regained much of his lost prestige by discomforting the sergeant-instructor with it.

  His prestige rose also with the renewed incidence of poverty. Palm lounges and dance halls cost dear and the first flood-tide of ready cash ebbed fast. Young officers began counting the days until the end of the month and speculating whether, now that their existence had once been recognized by the pay-office, they could depend on regular funds. One by one all Guy’s former clients returned to him; one or two others diffidently joined; and all, save Sarum-Smith, he helped (Sarum-Smith got a cold stare through the monocle), and although you could not say that the Halberdiers sold ‘the deference which youth owed to age’ for three or four pounds down, it was a fact that his debtors were more polite to him and often remarked to one another in extenuation of their small acts of civility: ‘Old Uncle Crouchback is an awfully generous good-natured fellow really.’

  His life was further mitigated by his discovery of two agreeable retreats. The first was a small restaurant on the front called ‘the Garibaldi’ where Guy found Genoese cooking and a warm welcome. The proprietor was a part-time spy. This Giuseppe Pelecci, fat and philoprogenitive, welcomed Guy on his first visit as a possible source of variety in the rather monotonous and meagre lists of shipping which hitherto had been his sole contribution to his country’s knowledge, but when he found Guy spoke Italian, patriotism gave place to simple home-sickness. He had been born not far from Santa Dulcina and knew the Castello Crouchback. The two became more than patron and patron, more than agent and dupe. For the first time in his life Guy felt himself simpatico and he took to dining at the Garibaldi most evenings.

  The second was the Southsand and Mudshore Yacht Squadron.

  Guy found this particularly congenial resort in a way which was itself a joy, for it added some hard facts to the incomplete history of Apthorpe’s youth.

  It would be a travesty to say that Guy suspected Apthorpe of lying. His claims to distinction – porpoise-skin boots, a High Church aunt in Tunbridge Wells, a friend who was on good terms with gorillas – were not what an impostor would invent in order to impress. Yet there was about Apthorpe a sort of fundamental implausibility. Unlike the typical figure of the J.D. lesson, Apthorpe tended to become faceless and tapering the closer he approached. Guy treasured every nugget of Apthorpe but under assay he found them liable to fade like faery gold. Only so far as Apthorpe was himself true, could his enchantment work its spell. Any firm passage between Apthorpe’s seemingly dreamlike universe and the world of common experience was a thing to cherish, and just such a way Guy found on the Sunday following his fiasco on Mudshore range; the start of the week which ended triumphantly with his curled moustaches and his single eye-glass.

  Guy went alone to mass. There were no Halberdiers to march there and the only other Catholic officer was Hemp, the Trimmer of the Depot. Hemp was not over scrupulous in his religious duties, from which (he claimed to have read somewhere) all servicemen were categorically dispensed.

  The church was as old as most buildings in Southsand and sombrely embellished by the legacies of many widows. In the porch, as he left, Guy was accosted by the neat old man who had earlier carried the collection plate.

  ‘I think I saw you here last week, didn’t I? My name is Goodall, Ambrose Goodall. I didn’t speak to you last Sunday as I didn’t know if you were here for long. Now I hear you are at Kut-al-Imara for some time, so may I welcome you to St Augustine’s?’

  ‘My name is Crouchback.’

  ‘A great name, if I may say so. One of the Crouchbacks of Broome perhaps?’

  ‘My father left Broome some years ago.’

  ‘Of course, yes, I know. Very sad. I make a study, in a modest way, of English Catholicism in penal times so of course Broome means a lot to me. I’m a convert myself. Still I daresay I’ve been a Catholic nearly as long as you have. I usually take a little turn along the front after mass. If you are walking back may I accompany you a short way?’

  ‘I’m afraid I ordered a taxi.’

  ‘Oh dear. I couldn’t induce you to stop at the Yacht Club? It’s on your way.’

  ‘I don’t think I can stop, but let me drop you there.’

  ‘That’s very kind. It is rather sharp this morning.’

  As they drove away, Mr Goodall continued. ‘I’d like to do anything I can for you while you are here. I’d like to talk about Broome. I went there last summer. The sisters keep it very well all things considered.’

  ‘I might be able to show you round Southsand. There are some very interesting old bits. I know it very well. I was a master at Staplehurst House once, you see, and I stayed on all my life.’

  ‘You were at Staplehurst House?’

  ‘Not for very long. You see when I became a Catholic I had to leave. It wouldn’t have mattered at any other school but Staplehurst was so very High Church that of course they minded particularly.’

  ‘I long to hear about Staplehurst.’

  ‘Do you, Mr Crouchback? Do you? There’s not very much to tell. It came to an end nearly ten years ago. There were said to be abuses of the Confessional. I never believed it myself. You must be descended from the Grylls, too, I think. I have always had a particular veneration f
or the Blessed John Gryll. And, of course, for the Blessed Gervase Crouchback. Sooner or later they’ll be canonized, I’m quite sure of it.’

  ‘Do you by any chance remember a boy at Staplehurst called Apthorpe?’

  ‘Apthorpe? Oh dear, here we are at the Club. Are you sure I can’t induce you to come in?’

  ‘May I, after all? It’s earlier than I thought.’

  The Southsand and Mudshore Yacht Squadron occupied a solid villa on the front. A flag and burgee flew from a pole on the front lawn. Two brass cannon stood on the steps. Mr Goodall led Guy to a chair in the plate-glass windows and rang the bell.

  ‘Some sherry, please, steward.’

  ‘It must be more than twenty years since Apthorpe left.’

  ‘That would he just the time I was there. The name seems familiar. I could look him up if you’re really interested. I keep all the old Mags.’

  ‘He’s with us at Kut-al-Imara

  ‘Then I will certainly look him up. He’s not a Catholic?’

  ‘No, but he has a High Church aunt.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. Most of our boys did, but quite a number came into the church later. I try to keep touch with them but parish affairs take up so much time, particularly now that Canon Geoghan can’t get about as he did. And then I have my work. I had rather a hard time of it at first but I get along. Private tutoring, lectures at convents. You may have seen some of my reviews in the Tablet. They generally send me anything connected with heraldry.’

  ‘I’m sure Apthorpe would like to meet you again.’

  ‘Do you think he would? After all this time? But I must look him up first. Why don’t you bring him here to tea? My rooms aren’t very suitable for entertaining, but I’d be very pleased to see him here. You also stem from Wrottman of Speke, do you not?’