How I Won the War (6 page)

I cleared the crest in safety and staggered, at last gasp, up to Major Arkdust. He was sitting on his shooting stick
studying
the
Child
’
s
Wonder
Book.
I dropped the sheepskin in at his feet and collapsed beside it.

“Mission completed, sir,” I panted. “Jason reporting with the Golden Fleece.”

“Don’t lie down, Jason,” he said. “I haven’t told you you can stand at ease yet…. And where’s Medea? She’s
supposed
to be fleeing with you according to the book.”

“Hotly pursued, too, by her father, the king of Colchis,” I said rising to my dead feet, “and here he comes now, roaring up the hill.”

General Trugg had appeared from the wood and was plodding fast across the plough.

“Then we’d better beat it back to the
Argo
.”

Major Arkdust blew his whistle, the fifty-three heroes broke off combat and went hotfoot back over the downs. I picked up my greasy, yellow pelt and set my broken bones rolling after them.

I
TOOK MY NEXT STEP
up the Army ladder in January 1942, when after only eighteen months’ commissioned service I was made a full lieutenant. On the day my appointment was published the adjutant sent for me and I marched into his office with the maturity of a second pip shining on either shoulder.

“Your services have been requested as defending officer,” said Captain Tablet, “by Private Juniper of B Company who is at present in the cells awaiting court-martial for being absent without leave for sixty-seven days. Have you any reason to advance why you should not accept?”

“No, sir.”

“Then here is a copy of the summary of evidence and the rest of the papers. The court sits in a fortnight’s time. And with Goodbody for the defence may the Lord have mercy on Juniper’s misguided soul.”

I was very pleased with my assignment. There had been no
opportunity for me to practise in Military Law since I left the O. C. T. U. Fortunately my legal studies were recorded in the second volume of my notebook which had been saved from Major Arkdust and the deep, blue sea. Armed with my notes, the
Manual
of
Military
Law
and
King’s
Regulations,
I went to see my client in the cells.

He was a little, world-worn nut of a man, a recalled reservist who had seen fifteen years’ service and possessed five sheets to his conduct record.

“Tell me, Juniper,” I opened, “how did you come to choose me?”

“With a pin, sir. It don’t make no difference who I have for prisoner’s friend. With that summary and my record, Norman Birkett couldn’t get me off the hook.”

I had hoped that he had heard of the forensic skill I had shown in dealing with such Twelve Platoon problems as Clapper’s insurance difficulty, but resolved not to allow the manner of my selection to deflect me from my duty.

“That’s no way to look at it, Juniper. Must keep our pecker up, you know. All prisoners are innocent until proven guilty.”

“Not in the Army, they ain’t.”

“Indeed they are, I assure you. It says so right here in the
Manual
of
Military
Law.
Now what would be our best line of defence?”

“What about suicide?”

“I see you are charged with being absent without leave in Runcorn for sixty-seven days. Why did you go there?”

“I don’t know.”

“Your record shows you’ve been guilty of absence without leave on eleven other occasions in the last two and a half years, and always in Runcorn. Why do you keep going back to Runcorn?”

“I don’t know.”

“You must know. Does your wife live there?”

“I’m not married.”

“Your girl friend?”

“Haven’t got one.”

“Then what on earth keeps calling you back to Runcorn? Is there something wrong with you?”

Juniper peered apprehensively at me like a man being followed, gazed up at the whitewashed ceiling, then down at his own reflection in the bottom of the bucket he was burnishing.

“It’s me head, sir!”

“Your head?”

“Yes, sir. Inside the skull, like. Blackouts, that’s what I get, blackouts.” He banged his temples with a tortured palm. “Horrible…. I’m sitting down somewhere, just like I’m sitting down here with you, sir, when suddenly all the inside of me head goes black. I get this feeling that I got to get out of the barrack room. I got to roam, if you know what I mean. I feel all sort of … sort of …”

“Nomadic?” I suggested.

“That’s it, sir. I come all over sort of nomadic.” The traumatic barrier having been broken, he opened his heart to me. “Plop! Something goes plop between me ears and I’m all blacked-out and nomadic. Everything seems to close in around me. The barrack blocks, the cookhouse, the windows and the walls, they all come marching in on me and I just got to get out in the fresh air …” His black button eyes popped hysterically and his arms flailed about like a man locked in a submarine. “I just got to go off travelling…. I don’t know what I’m doing…. I don’t know where I’m going…. I just wander in a trance, helpless as a sleepwalker, maybe for hours, maybe for days, until the attack wears off and I wake up in Runcorn.”

“Always in Runcorn?”

“Yes.” He spread his hands in resignation. “Always in Runcorn.”

“And how often do you have these nomadic blackouts?”

“All the time, sir. I never know when I’m going to be took.”

He buried his face in his hands.

“Oh! Gawd! Will it never end!”

Fortunately, I knew a little about psychiatry as well as insurance. Not, mark you, any of that Freudian stuff about sex and all that, but enough for me to recognize that I might well have before me a case of obsessive nomadism.

“Now, bear up, Juniper,” I said, inclining one shoulder
towards him so that he might take confidence from the seniority of my second pip. “I’m here to defend you. Never fear but that the truth shall out. I will study the papers and see you again tomorrow.”

A brilliant idea was brewing at the back of my mind, just a glimpse of the foundation upon which the edifice of defence might be built. I’ve no doubt Perry Mason often had the same sensation. I had, of course, filed with my War Memoirs material a copy of the battalion orders in which my
promotion
had been published. Down at the bottom of the second page was a reminder to all medical officers about the
importance
of the latest Army Council Instruction which bade them keep an eye out for any cases of porcyliocosis. Any cases found had to be reported immediately to the Director General. I had read up the A. C. I., just in case there might be an outbreak of the disease in Twelve Platoon.
Porcyliocosis
afflicted people who had eaten diseased pork over a long period and was therefore occasionally to be found among soldiers who had served in India where the pigmeat tends towards the putrid. The symptoms visited on the
sufferer
, many years after he had digested the pork and forgotten it, consisted of unheralded mental blackouts, loss of memory and wandering somnambulism.

I took the A. C. I. to the guard room and explained it to Juniper.

“This may be the cause of all this Runcorn trouble,” I said. “You may be a porcyliocosis sufferer. Tell me, now, did you ever eat diseased pork during your service in India?”

His face lit up. I had clearly struck chords in his
memory
.

“All the time, sir. The cook sergeant in India was a dead villian. Never served us nothing but diseased pork every day. I remember it well, now you come to remind me. It was the midday sun as curdled it. All greenlooking and crawling with maggots, it was. Done up nauseating day after day with gravy thick and sweet potatoes. Fair turns me up to think of it…. Ugh! … Quetta, Peshawar, Jellybad … everywhere we soldiered, never nothing for dinner but diseased pork.”

Captain Truffle, M.B., Medical Officer to the Fourth
Mus
keteers
was young, tubby, and bursting with surgical
ambition
. His eyes glistened as I described my client’s service, symptoms, and Indian pork consumption.

“By George!” he said, “but it all checks with the A.C.I. Special report to be made to the Director General, too. Very rare, you know, cases of porcyliocosis. Wonderful thing if we had one in the regiment.”

On the way to the cells I told him that Captain Tablet would be prosecuting the case. Truffle and the adjutant were daggers drawn, a relationship which had its base in the doctor’s belief that the excessive stamping softened the brain and overexposure to whitewash hardened the arteries.

“Tablet is it?” he said. “Just the sort of thing he’d enjoy doing—hounding a chap who’s not medically responsible for his actions.”

He questioned Juniper for an hour or so and jabbed him in all sorts of unusual places in search of reflexes. Juniper had asked me the previous day for a copy of the A.C.I. so that he could check his symptoms against the official description and all his answers seemed sadly satisfying to Captain Truffle. He finally closed his notebook, gave the elastic a triumphant snap and took me with him into the corridor for specialist
consultation
.

“That man certainly fits the bill. On all the counts given in the instruction he’s a porcyliocosis suspect. I’ll start on my report right away. I’ll write a letter to the
Lancet,
too. Maybe to
The
Times
as well. A paper on porcyliocosis could really put the Musketeers on the medical map.”

I broke the news of his plight to Juniper and he took it very bravely. There were four days left before the
court-martial
and I spent many hours with him going over the details of our defence, which claimed that his absences were due to mental blackouts and nomadic somnambulism caused by pig poisoning.

He was a natural actor and a perfectionist at rehearsal. I don’t know what line of business Juniper went into after the war but the Method school of acting could well have had its genesis behind the guard room of the Fourth Musketeers. Since neither of us had yet seen another case of
porcylio
cosis
,
he was uninhibited in his display of outward
symptoms
.

“I’ll wear my Army glasses on the day, sir,” he decided. “They always seem to give people a dodgy look.” He put on his flat-sided aluminium spectacles and the pebble lenses focused his beady, black eyeballs as eerily as any vulture. I supposed it was the strain of waiting for the trial which developed the nervous tic in his neck muscles. Every fifteen seconds his left eye would wink, the sinister side of his mouth twitch, and his head jerk sideways like an ageing importuner pressed for time.

On the morning of the court-martial he loped in between his escorts with the leg action of Groucho Marx and the head roll of Fagin. He had put on his makeup for the occasion, whitening his face with scouring powder and darkening his eye pouches with laundry bluing. He sat down on the
extreme
edge of his chair, his knees tightly closed as a
desperate
virgin, arms folded Sioux fashion across his chest, withdrawn and silent as a zombie in battle dress, his brooding immobility broken only by the regular grimace of his
quarter
-minute tic.

Even I, who had watched him in rehearsal, was shaken by the quality of his first-night performance. And the three members of the court were visibly affected. The president, Major Cutts-Bodlin, surveyed his defendant through a
startled
monocle and the down turning of his moustache
indicated
his conviction that he had caught a right one here. Captain Pebble from the Lancers came bolt upright in his chair and set to nodding like a slack-jawed metronome in time to the twitch. Lieutenant Comb, the junior member, opposite whom the spectre was seated, edged nervously back from the table and when Juniper looked up at him and groaned miserably, I thought he was going to run away.

“Well,” said the major, turning his gaze steadfastly away from the prisoner, “we’d better get started.”

It was his first court-martial presidency and he was a long time working through the formal preliminaries.

“Now,” he said. “Private Juniper, you’ve heard the charge made against you. How do you plead? Guilty or not guilty?”

I stood up.

“The defence wishes, sir, to put forward a plea in bar of trial.”

“Oh! You do, do you? … Plea in bar of trial, eh?”

He had clearly not met such an opening gambit before and went scurrying through the pages of his little green book, the
Child’s
Guide
to
Court-Martial
Procedure.
After a whispered conference with Captain Pebble he found the right
paragraph
.

“Ah … yes … In bar of trial…. And on what grounds does the defence raise such a plea?”

“On the grounds, sir, that due to infirmities occasioned while on active service the prisoner was not responsible for the actions leading to the charges made against him and is medically unfit for trial.”

“Medically unfit? What’s wrong with him?”

“He has, sir, the dreaded porcyliocosis.”

“Porcyliocosis?” He looked at his fellow members, at
Captain
Tablet, at the escort; but no one could help him.

“What’s porcylio-what’s-its-name?”

“As you will recall, sir, it is the disease described in Army Council Instruction 903 of 1942 which causes mental blackouts and nomadic somnambulism.”

“Is it? And how’d he get it?”

I drew myself to my full height.

“By eating diseased pork in India.”

“Eating what?” His monocle clattered to the table from his unsprung face.

“Diseased pork.” I breathed on my fingernails and polished them nonchalantly on my lapel. “It’s all in the A.C.I., sir.”

That had him right over the legal barrel. To have the Army Council backing the defence with an edict they’d never even read put the court in a rare tizzy. Finally, after much puffing and blowing, the major adjourned the proceedings while Captain Tablet, swearing sibilantly, went off to get him a copy of A.C.I. 903/42. And by the time he’d found it, the court had read it, and I had dilated upon its relevance, it was time for lunch.

Opening the afternoon session, the president announced that the court noted the content of the A.C.I. and desired to
know what evidence there was to prove that the prisoner suffered from the relevant disease.