Sergeant Nelson of the Guards (23 page)

A heavy old voice says: “Well said, my boy.”

It is Old Charlie.

Although he is neatly dressed in a blue tunic and trousers; although his boots have upon them a dye, or shine, such as only years can
impart
; and although he has an air of smartness, a dapper alertness, a prim elegance such as only Guardsmen acquire—turned out, though he is, with a calculated neatness, he somehow looks as ragged as a
battle-tattered
banner. There is that about him which suggests that he is
deathless
. He looks as if he might be some trophy over which nations have fought. Perhaps he is. He is one of the oldest of all the Coldstream Guards.

His forehead is something against which Time has sharpened its scythe: it is scored and creased and wrinkled beyond the aspect of flesh. Some strange fatality has saved him, throughout incalculable years, for some unknown destiny. He was born in 1860. Charles Dickens was a man-about-town when he was a boy. Once upon a time he was a child, and then he was devoted body and soul to an elder brother whose name—what a pig this Time is, that snuffles up everything!—he has almost
forgotten. This brother, with the Foot Guards, went to a place called Russia on some fool’s errand and came back with one leg and a
thousand
tales. Where is this brother? The worms know. But it was out of hero worship for him that this old man joined the Guards, the
Coldstream
Guards. There was, in his mind, some bluish picture of smoke—some strange blurred scene—a haze, in the midst of which men in red struggled hand-to-hand with men in grey: some adolescent fantasy of Inkerman, where the Guards fought tooth and nail and, turning their muskets round, banged down the soldiers of the Czar with the butt of Brown Bess. He should be dead. He belongs to another day and age. His father remembered Waterloo. He can tell awful stories. Geordie has seen him looking at a short Lee Enfield rifle and shaking his head—it seemed to him such a small thing, with such a small hole in it. How could so petty a weapon stop a man? In spite of everything, years or no years, he stands erect. Nothing but putrefaction will bend that back. He is rigid with the uprightness of sixty years of service. The last time a sergeant told him to hold his head up was in 1881. He was an old soldier before the Boer War. His age had reached two figure—about ten years—when his mother, with a look of vexation, said: “This
Napoleon
.” She was referring to Napoleon the Third.

They call him Old Charlie. It is impossible for him to appear without some outbreak of badinage. Even Geordie says: “Where’s your bow and arrow?” There is a legend that he was put In The Book for having a dirty powder horn at the Hougoumont Farmhouse. Apart from the fact of his long service, his antecedents are wrapped in darkness. He never had a home. If he ever had a wife or children, nobody ever heard about them. He is a legendary figure, like the old horse that still survives in the depot at Caterham—the slow, stately regimental horse, which represents nothing but a half-forgotten sentiment. He says little. The oldest have borne most. He knows it. He carries the weight of years and memory. None of us will ever live so long. Age has worn his cheeks into little pits and nodules: he is a monolith. Geordie is an old soldier, but Old Charlie might have had a son older than Geordie. “You may
be young,” he seems to say, “but you never saw 1860. Live as long as you like, you never will have seen 1860.”

Sometimes he comes into the little bar; says nothing, drinks nothing, does nothing—simply looks about him with an expression curiously compounded of bewilderment and ineffable dignity. It is then that the nonsense starts; not that there’s any man in the place who would not defend Old Charlie with his life.

There is only one person to whom he talks. This is a little girl whom men call Star. She is the daughter of some old sergeant who lives beyond the camp. They call her Star because her mother, drenched in
regimental
matters, has embroidered the eight-pointed star of the Brigade upon the grubby yellow jersey which she invariably wears. She is a naughty little girl, sullen and intractable. Her face is fixed in a
forbidding
scowl. She got that from her father, a savage old N.C.O. She is not like other little girls. She is not interested in childish things; nor has she any of that budding womanliness which is common and proper to little girls. I believe that her real name is Jess, or Tess—anyway, it ends in “ess.” She likes soldiers, but in no flippant or flirtatious way. She likes to contemplate them. When the long brown lines go out in column of route, she may always be seen standing still as a graven image by the roadside; not cheering, giving no sign of recognition—merely gravely watching. Her lower lip protrudes; her upper lip is compressed. Her brow is corrugated; there is a ferocious look in her small dark eyes. This is a peculiar little girl. Nothing can melt her. If you offer her coins or sweets she takes them gloomily and thanklessly. She seems to be full of trouble. She plays only one game, and that seems to have no meaning. She walks up and down dragging after her a peeled branch of silver birch—saying nothing, and never smiling; simply dragging the branch. Her mother says that she is eight years old, and will grow out of it. It is alleged that she takes after her father—a man whom nobody loved, nobody understood, and nobody wanted to understand.

She has one boy-friend. This is Old Charlie.

They have assignations. They meet, by a kind of instinctive
arrangement
. At about a quarter past one every afternoon the little girl Tess, or Jess, walks gravely past the Guardroom and walks, as it were
accidentally
, up and down the road outside the Sergeants’ Mess. She is self-possessed, preoccupied and rather sombre. She never ceases to frown—in fact the habit of this facial contortion has already cut two tiny lines between her eyes. She walks swinging her arms, her small fists clenched. At other times she might drag her branch; but never at
one-fifteen
. She walks up and down. In due course, out of the Officers’ Mess where he is employed in some not to laborious capacity, Old Charlie comes striding, dressed all in blue. The mystery of it is, that in all those years—all those years—awful, monotonous years of military service—he has never managed to acquire even two stripes. Lance-Corporals of the Coldstream Guards always wear two stripes: (it looks, somehow, better) old as the hills, he is less than a Lance-Jack. Was he stupid? It seems hardly likely. Was he a bad man? A bad soldier? One would say not. The fact remains that he is ending as he began, having got nothing in the service but age, which any man can get anywhere if he lives long enough. He walks solemnly and pauses just by the Catholic Church—a cold old man with moustachios like icicles, disciplined and aged beyond ordinary humanity. The little girl walks to within four or five paces of him, and then she stops, boring the toe of her right shoe into the gravel. She has all the appearance of one upon whose shoulders rests the weight of the universe. She looks almost as old and almost as responsible as Old Charlie. She pretends not to have seen him. He pretends not to have seen her. His huge right hand, which resembles a bunch of red West Indian bananas, slowly opens: he always carries his pipe in his hand, for fear that the bulk of it may spoil the outline of his skin-tight blue mess suit. From a trousers pocket he produces a match; strikes it, lights the pipe, spits once and lets a big blue cloud crawl up to heaven while he contemplates, with God knows what strange sad thoughts, the bare and hideous Guardroom, the White Huts, and the hidden distance which ends in the trees beyond the cricket field.
This never varies. His forefinger, indestructible as asbestos, tamps down the glowing ash in his pipe. Holding this pipe in his right hand, while his left arm hangs straight down; slightly inclining his head in deep thought, he walks up to the Guardroom and stands still.

The little girl watches him out of the corners of her eyes. Then she follows him, walking exactly as he walks—in long, stiff strides. They pass each other three or four times. The ancient one pauses and his tangled white eyebrows come down in a savage and forbidding scowl. His poor old washed-out eyes, which might be blue or grey or green, fix themselves upon the little girl in a glare which is meant to be terrifying, but which, alas, is nearly vacant. She in her turn, glares back at him and in her glance there is something oddly lonely. They confront each other: the child, dark with the clouds of sorrows which nobody will ever understand; and the old man, inarticulate and encumbered with an awful weight of half-remembered things.

He clamps the teeth the Army gave him down upon the yellowish stem of his burned-out pipe and holds it unsteadily between his
wavering
jaws. Then he shoots out his right fist clenched tight, and slowly peels away from it one finger—the fourth. The little girl looks at it, frowning, and then grabs this extended finger in her left hand. No word is spoken. They walk off together. It is believed that neither of them has another friend in the world. Old Charlie has outlived
everything
and everybody; and Jess (?) or Tess (?) seems to feel that she is going to have much to live through.

A meeting of the currents of Life and Time. They walk away, past the Officers’ Mess, past the Pioneers’ Yard, to the Y.M.C.A., and then back.

And it happens that only I have heard what they say to each other.

Near the nice new huts of the Scots Guards, between the road and the canal, lies a strip of woodland, mostly silver birch. From here they cut twigs to make revetting hurdles. Men go in with slash hooks, and come out with great armfuls of slender and elegant budding branches; yet, the woodland remains dense and almost primæval. We come here
sometimes in field training: there are dents and gashes in this strip of earth which present all the varying features of potential cover. From the road it looks like … merely trees, but if you go in among these trees, you lose sight of the road … the dark grey dreary road … and find yourself under a pattern of foliage which waves gently and
mysteriously
, and among slim, straight, speckled silver trees which stand between you and the world. Men come here sometimes on Sundays or on Saturday afternoons, when they want to be alone. There is a time when every man wants to be alone, for a little while, among trees.

It was Saturday afternoon. I was lying there and looking up. In the distance rubber tyres purred over tarmac; and some bird, some
high-flying
bird with a voice of ineffable sweetness sang a song in four notes. The branches moved. In that moment I forgot all the grandeur and misery of the war and the world, and almost fell asleep. I heard them coming, but the sound of their feet seemed to come from far away and hardly penetrated the gentle coma into which I had fallen. I saw them—the very old man and the very young child, both scowling, she
clasping
the little finger of his right hand in a determined left fist. This must have been a place to which they often came. They walked straight to it and sat down upon a patch of grass between two banks of bracken. I could not see the little girl: she was too small, and the fronds hid her. But the stiff blue back of that impenetrable old soldier stood up sturdily, conspicuous against its background of green. He took off his cap. I don’t know why I was surprised to see that he had no hair.

He spoke:

“Woman. Look. Trees. Do you like trees, woman?”

No doubt the child nodded; she said nothing.

“Listen.”

The birds still sang.

“Do you like birds?”

Silence. She must have nodded again, for he went on:

“I like birds too. Birds are nice things. Wherever you go you find birds. Anywhere you like, there is always birds. Go to Africa—right
out into the desert, where there is nothing at all; and there are still birds. Out on the veldt: you look, and you see nothing. But fall down, just you fall down. And what will you see then? Why, woman, right up, right up in the sky, as it might be a speck, a tiny little speck, you’ll see something coming down. What is it, what is it coming down out of that empty sky right down on to that empty land?”

The little girl said “God.”

The old man said: “Vultures. A kind of a bird. They wait, hanging up in the sky so high that you can’t see them, but all the time they’re watching you, watching you all the time. And when they see you fall, or if they see you die, they drop. They don’t fly down. They wrap themselves up in their wings and fall like stones, and then, two or three hundred yards off the ground they spread their wings out all of a sudden as it might be, great big flowers opening, and you hear them go slap! Yes, slap! And they slide down, and they stand round you, wrapped up in them wings of theirs, like cloaks, and they wait.”

“What for?” she asked.

“They wait for you to die.”

“Why?”

“So as to eat you.”

“Not till you’re dead?”

“No.”

“Ah.”

Silence again. Then the little girl said: “What are they for?”

The old man replied: “To clean up. You can’t have things lying around all over the place. They clean things up. They are …” he paused and then said, “on fatigue. They get a wilderness dug out. If it wasn’t for them horrible birds the desert would stink. Because
everything
is dying all the time. Yes, in them hot places it is easy to live. If you put your walking stick into the ground, roses would come out of it. And if it is easy for one thing to live, it is easy for another thing to live; and it is easy for you to get along, and also for your enemy likewise. Yes, woman, the easier it is to live, the easier it is
to die. But woman, you look at me. I’m ten times older than you are, and I’m alive. I’m eighty.”

“Eighty’s not much,” she said.

He went on rather dreamily: “I see every day fellas fretting—fretting like prisoners behind bars—at being in this Army. But woman, do I say to them: ‘Young fella, I have been in this Army over sixty year’? No I don’t. I don’t say nothing. Woman, I don’t talk to ’em. I ain’t got nothing to say, woman. Why? Because talking makes no difference. Talking makes no difference. Talking never helped anybody nor never will. There is nothing to be said woman, nothing. Sometimes I think that in the Army the first thirty years is the worst but woman, when I think again I don’t know. Everything is rotten while you’re going through it, and everything is lovely when you look back on it. I don’t know woman, and I don’t care. I’m old. But I will see ’em damned before I die. I ain’t going to die.”