How I Won the War (7 page)

“Damned sprucer!” snorted Captain Tablet who was
accustomed
to his courts-martial finishing before lunch. “
Malingering
, that’s what it is. Wasting everybody’s time with a
cock-and
-bull story. Ought to have him medically examined.”

“Which,” I said, “the defence has already done. My first witness is the medical officer.”

Captain Truffle didn’t help the adjutant’s composure by refusing to take the oath.

“What’s your objection?” asked the president. “Are you Mohammedan or something?”

“Give him a plate to break,” muttered the prosecutor.

“I am here to offer medical opinion, not to state facts. Such expert evidence is normally given without oath.”

“Never heard anything like it in my life,” fumed Tablet. “Everybody has to take the oath.”

“If you’re an adjutant,” said Truffle, “you should read the
Manual.”

Their animosity sparked back and forth until Major
Cutts-Bodlin
asserted his authority and sent them to their corners. He riffled wearily through his books and finally pronounced that the doctor was perfectly right.

Pompous in victory, Truffle settled down to read a five thousand word paper on porcyliocosis, his letter to the
Lancet,
his case notes on Private Juniper, and the second draft of his report to the Director General. After two and a half hours of medical droning he closed with his opinion “that the court should not rule out the possibility that the prisoner has contracted porcyliocosis and that his absences were committed during mental blackouts resulting from that disease.”

This ended the first day and I felt pardonable satisfaction with the progress of the defence. My client was somewhat put out, however, because Truffle and I had taken all the verbal limelight.

“When am I going to get my chance,” he demanded. “I’m getting browned off just sitting there like a stone-deaf
Buddha
.”

He got his chance next day and took it with both hands.
After a morning of Tablet-Truffle bickering, in which the adjutant kept throwing up his hands and demanding of the heavens, “But why Runcorn every time? Just tell me that. Why always Runcorn?” and the doctor kept doggedly
repeating
his expert opinion in reply, I sent Juniper into
action
.

“Now tell the court,” I said, “in your own words, the details of your service.”

He was superb. Irving and his Bells, Chaliapin and his Flea, Olivier and Crookback, all paled to parish hall charades against Juniper and the deadly pork. He leaned forward, lowered his crouch and held out his arms to gather the court’s attention. He took them sadly through his childhood as the ninth infant of a bibulous glassblower in Stalybridge whose working life was mainly unemployed because the drink affected his puff and his intended jeroboams kept turning out gills. Driven to the Colours by equal portions of hunger and patriotism, he took service as a drummer boy and shifted uneasily on his seat as he recalled the impact on his young mind of his friendship with a corporal trombonist of oriental tastes.

“… when I was nineteen the battalion sailed for India and went into action up on the Northwest Frontier. Up against the wily Pathan, we was, sir, dead cruel, no mercy and the sun beating down all the time on the rocks and the back of your head and them vast, stony wastes …” He gasped for water, dry-mouthed as an Afghan beggar, and held up pitiful hands to protect his head from the brazen sun.

“All over the mountains we marched, Quetta to Peshawar, Kashmir to Jellybad, fighting and camping, camping and fighting, all the time eating that horrible pork … day in, day out…. Pork … pork … pork … nothing else but pork. All that heat and flies and nowhere for the cooks to wash their hands and pigs everywhere going down like ninepins with the infectious Indian swine-plague. A-crawling with grubs, a loin of pork could move off while you watched it. You could smell your way to the cook house by day and at night you could pick it out by the pigmeat’s luminous glow…. Ugh! It was horrible … but it was all we had…. It was eat that
diseased pork or starve…. I can taste it now, like cannibal’s gorgonzola.”

Lieutenant Comb turned a delicate green and dusted a handkerchief over his mouth.

“And after a while it began to affect me up here.” Juniper knocked his head with his knuckles and cast up the whites of his eyes like a corpse. “I began to get them wandering blackouts. I’d be sitting there in the camp and the night’d just be coming down and getting all misty and shadowy. And then everything would start closing in on me. The hills would come marching down, the tents’d start moving in …” He crouched deep into his shoulders for protection and his
hypnotized
audience crouched with him. “The canvas’d come flapping closer and closer … nearer and nearer …
everything
crowding down on me … squeezing me tighter and tighter…. Them drums’d start beating inside me head … boom, boom, boom, boom …”

His fist thudded tom-toms on the arm of his chair and every head jerked in obedience to the rhythm. His breathing grew heavy as a medium, his voice a-tremble with tension.

“Everything trying to smother me … choking me … suffocating me. Drums getting louder and louder … busting out the bones of me skull…. I got to escape … I got to get away before it’s too late … before I go mad! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! And then just when flesh and blood can’t stand no more there’s that great yellow and red explosion behind me eyes … ker-ploish! … And then everything goes silent and black and I’d wake up hours later, days later, weeks later, sitting in some Wog village miles and miles away and me feet cut to ribbons …”

He caressed the soles of his boots tenderly and held them out for sympathetic inspection.

“And it kept on happening to me. Every now and then I’d have a blackout and wake up somewhere in the jungle. And all the time nothing to eat but that mouldy pork … pork chops, salt pork, leg of pork, sausages and all the lot dead crawling and rotten. When we went into cantonments it got worse. All the huts’d come marching in on me … then there’d be the old rainbow explosion and they’d find me Gawd knows how long later sitting in a trance in some
distant bazaar. And back in England it’s been just the same…. I’d be sitting there in the barrack room of an evening doing domestic economy when suddenly the barrack blocks started marching in on me … the walls start closing down … the beds come round and pen me up … I can’t move … I can’t breathe …” He screwed himself up like a hedgehog and clawed despairingly at his throat. “I can’t hear … I can’t see…. And then everything bursts up in the air again…. Me legs work but I can’t control them … I have to wander. I can’t stop. I’m driven on and on, this way, that way, walking, walking, walking, until at last I wake up again … deadbeat … done up … in Runcorn.” At the name of the fateful town he collapsed in a dead faint, lifeless but for his shuddering twitch, an artist to the end, limp, exhausted, and streaming with thespian sweat.

Lieutenant Comb tottered from the room, handkerchief tight to his lips. Captain Pebble rapidly drank three glasses of water. Major Cutts-Bodlin fanned himself with the summary of evidence and ordered another adjournment while the prisoner was taken out into the fresh air.

“Chuck a bucket of water over him,” said Captain Tablet. “Scrim-shanker!”

“Get a stretcher,” retorted Captain Truffle, “and take him to the M.I. room.”

Four of the idle prosecution witnesses were pressed into service as stretcher-bearers, and Juniper was borne
unconscious
from the scene of his triumph. An hour later, he raised a tremulous head, gazed wild-eyed around and asked, “Where am I? Is it Runcorn again?” The doctor insisted that he rest before returning to trial and it was after four when we all got settled in the courtroom again.

“During the adjournment,” said the president, “the court has considered the evidence so far and has decided that specialist opinion on the prisoner’s condition is required. Arrangements have, therefore, been made for him to be examined by a psychiatrist at Porthley Hospital tomorrow morning. The court will be adjourned until the specialist’s opinion is available.”

I was delighted. We were clearly winning. It had been two long days but the court now accepted the porcyliocosis
possi
bility
.
Once you got the head-shrinker in for the defence, you were as good as home and dried. I travelled with Juniper to the hospital next morning.

“I copped the film show last night,” he said. “You can see it from the guard room windows. Smashing it was.
The
Hunchback
of
Notre
Dame.
That Charles Laughton fair brought tears to your eyes as Quasimodo.”

He beguiled the journey by reenacting scenes from the
Hunchback
,
twisting up one shoulder and leering hideously over it with his black-bagged eyes. I left him at Major Spragworthy’s door.

“Tell the psychiatrist your story the way you told it to the court, Juniper, and you’ll be a free man.”

He gave me the big thumbs-up.

“Don’t you worry, sir. I’ll slay him. I’ve learnt a new trick or two from Charles Laughton.”

And he hobbled over the threshold, adding a Quasimodo lurch to the horror of his Groucho-Fagin gait. I sat in the waiting room till he came out an hour later.

“How did it go?”

“Marvellous. Laid him properly in the aisle. I’m really getting into the part now, if you know what I mean.”

“You were a long time.”

“That was him. I got my story over in twenty minutes. The rest of the time he spent trying to get me to fix square pegs into round holes and do kids’ jigsaws and all that stuff.”

“And how did you get on?”

He laid a cagey finger alongside his nose.

“He wasn’t catching me that way. I was on to his game all right. I did all his tests wrong.”

The court resumed next day and Major Spragworthy gave his report. He had a nervous tic worse than Juniper’s. I supposed he caught it from a patient. His specialist rank demanded he be even more long-winded than Truffle and he ambled patronizingly through his theory of porcyliocosis, described his examination in detail and remarked on the interesting features he had found in the Juniper case. He was obviously coming our way and I relaxed happily as he came at last to his peroration.

“… and after consideration of all the available medical
evidence I would first advise the court that there are clear indications that the prisoner may be suffering from
porcyliocosis
.”

We’d made it! Juniper came out of his zombiecrouch and gave the V-sign all round. I smiled sympathetically at the defeated adjutant.

“… and furthermore,” went on the specialist, “in the light of his reactions during my examination and his abnormal performance of standard psychiatric tests, there are grounds for suspecting a background of hereditary insanity. While mental degeneration may not yet have reduced him to a state in which he is clearly certifiable, I feel that he should be transferred to a mental hospital for special observation over a long period to ascertain whether certification may not, at this stage, be in his own best interests….”

And he went on to make it painfully clear that he thought my client should be put away. The moment the last deadly syllable left his lips I asked for an adjournment. As Major Spragworthy left he gave me an old-fashioned look. If he hadn’t had that tic, I would have sworn he winked our way. Juniper and I retired for consultation.

“Strike a bloody light, sir,” he said, “but you’ve done me proud as defending officer. If we’d pleaded guilty four days ago I’d likely have got fifty-six days. Now they want to put me in the looney-bin for life.”

“It’s your own fault, Juniper. You overplayed your part. It was all that Quasimodo stuff that did it. You should never have put in that hunchback business.”

“What are we going to do now? You’re going to get me certified bleeding insane. I’d sooner do a stretch in the glasshouse than the madhouse, any day.”

“Now easy up, Juniper. Don’t despair. I’ll see you through.”

“You’ll see me out of that courtroom in a ruddy
straitjacket
, that’s what you’ll do. This time tomorrow they’ll have me in the rubber room with no belt, braces, nor bootlaces.”

“They will not,” I said decisively. “We still have a line of retreat.”

The court reassembled wearily. The tribunal was fraying badly at the edges. I rose to my feet.

“The defence now wishes to withdraw its plea in bar of trial and accepts that the prisoner was responsible for his actions during his repeated visits to Runcorn…. We now plead Guilty.”

Major Cutts-Bodlin groaned and covered his face with his hands. On emerging he gestured at the pile of foolscap on which he had recorded the proceedings. His mouth opened and shut four times before he could raise a sounding word.

“Four days,” he grated. “Four days you keep this court sitting here while you try to make out that the prisoner has some form of human swine-fever. Six witnesses you keep kicking their heels in the corridor for four days and not one of them has yet spoken a single word. The prosecuting officer has been kept all this time from his official duties, the court warrant officer and escorts have been uselessly confined between these four walls, Captain Pebble has missed his
regimental
point-to-point, and Lieutenant Comb, who was hoping to be married yesterday, has had to postpone the ceremony…. Four days! Eighteen men! I calculate, Lieutenant Goodbody, that you have deprived your country in time of war of no less than seventy-two man-days, you have forced me to compile thirty-seven pages of useless proceedings, you have kept this court in purgatory for ninety-six hours listening to a rigmarole of medical poppycock, and at the end of that time you have the damned brass-necked temerity to stand there and say you now plead Guilty!” His voice rose to a frenzied yell and he hammered his fist on the table sending his thirty-seven pages to the four winds. “Do you know what you are?”

“No, sir.”

“You’re a damned Fifth Columnist, that’s what you are! A blasted saboteur! If you can plead guilty now why couldn’t you do so at ten o’clock last Monday and save everybody four days of their lives?”