Sergeant Nelson of the Guards (35 page)

“W
ELL
,” said Purcell, “if you ask me, we dreamt it all. We couldn’t of done it. Walking corpses? We was dead six weeks and falling to bits. Dead? We looked like it, we felt like it, we smelt like it…. That road, eh, Bitt? That rotten road! You tell ’em, Bitt.”

So Bittern proceeds:

*

I don’t mind saying that I have felt fresher in my time. And as for the road … I’ve been along nicer roads.

We’d helped to cover the Stra-bloody-tegic Withdrawal, and now we were trying to get out ourselves. And I told you, and Purcell told you, we were whacked. I know I was walking along not feeling my legs any more. Then I felt myself running. Then I was flying. Then I was on the ground unconscious. I’d just dropped. Dropped like a poleaxed ox, and Bill was waking me up with the point of a bayonet. I got up and we slogged on, and on, and on. We’d hoped there might be some sort of a chance of a lift on a lorry. No. John Shanks’ pony. Our boots were finished. We were walking on bare feet. Purcell’s boots gave out first. He tied rags round his feet, and kept going. Then the rags gave out.

We weren’t the only people on that road. There were others. There were some soldiers and a lot of civilians, all making for the coast;
desperate
. The civilians were the worst. They’d just run away in a blind panic. There was no holding ’em. The Jerries were coming. Bet your life the Jerries ’d spread the news beforehand, and started scares; poked the wind up the civilian population … got them to run, got them
to choke up the roads and stop troop movement. It’s a Jerry trick, that, a typical one.

There were millions of ’em, all mad with fright. They’d tried to get their furniture away, too. That was madness. I saw somebody with his old mum and a big clock on a little wheelbarrow. I dare say they were what he most wanted to save. His mother and a clock. He’d harnessed himself to the shafts of this barrow and was pulling for his life. And the old girl was screaming at him and shouting. All along the way there were bundles and bits of furniture scattered about. The mugs. They’d tried to get pianos and sideboards away. I saw one woman standing by a great big harp. A harp, with a gold frame. I was light-headed, and wanted to laugh, but I couldn’t get it out. As we got along the people got thicker. Right in the middle of the road there was a busted
two-wheel
cart and a dead horse, and an old man tearing his own hair and beard out and hitting himself on the chest and face. He’d gone mad I don’t blame him. I saw a woman squatting on her backside with a great bundle of crockery, nearly all smashed. She was sorting it out. But it was terrible to see some of the real old ’uns lying there by the roadside, dead beat, sort of waving to you as you passed, as if they wanted you to pick ’em up and carry ’em.

And the mob of refugees got thicker and thicker, and then, all of a sudden, while we were trying to get through, somebody yelled “Gas!” It was a Jerry trick, again: Fifth Column stuff. And you should have seen the stampede. People screamed and tried to run away. Men were trampling on women. Women were treading down children. And right in the midst of it all—Zing!—right down out of the clouds they came, Jerry dive-machine-gunners firing right into the middle of the crowd and cutting down dozens of them like nettles. God Almighty, you should have seen those Jerries come down on them evacuees! Some of us didn’t dare to duck or fall down, because in the first place we’d have been too tired to get up again, and in the second place there was more danger of getting trampled to death than shot, because the people were mad with fright. It’s argued that you’re safer standing than lying when
they dive-machine-gun you, anyway. Bill tried to do something with the few rounds he had left, but he couldn’t do anything that I could see. Then the bloody nightmare ’d start all over again…. “GAAAAAAS!” And stampede. So we moved very slowly, and every step was agony.

I don’t know how far we went before the thing I’m telling you
happened
. It was miles, millions of rotten miles. There was another bit of Jerry-diving. Then somehow the mob thinned off a bit. A lot of them got the idea of keeping off the road, I dare say. And then, under a tree, we saw a woman. I forget whether fair or dark. She was sitting there with a kid in her arms, and she was giving this kid the breast. There was another kid standing next to her and sucking his thumb and
looking
down: a boy in a black beret, maybe four or five years old. Bill gives her the “Hi-de-Hi,” but only the kid standing up looks round. Then Bill said: “So help me, she’s copped it.” It was just like he said. She’d got under this tree to feed the poor little baby, and Jerry’d come down and machine-gunned around the place. And the kid was killed while he was sucking, and she was killed too. She must have had a dozen rounds in her, chest and neck. She’d had some things with her, and they were all scattered about … kid’s clothes, mostly, and a little tiny baby’s pot no bigger than a teacup with a picture of Mickey Mouse on it, and stuff like that. And there stood this poor feller sucking his thumb and just staring. Not crying, mind you, but staring, staring and sucking his thumb.
He
didn’t know what it was all about. Maybe he thought it was all a great big joke. It might have been fun to him, only I doubt it very much; because he looked shocked and dead-white.

Bill says: “By God! Look, look at that!” His face was so white it made the dirt on it look blacker, and he looked terrible. “By God! Look at that!” And he says: “Halt!”—like a lion at feeding-time, and out of sheer force of habit everybody sort of stopped on the right foot. “Look at that!” says Bill, “look!” He couldn’t think of anything more to say for a second, and then he said: “Are you going to march, you bastards? Are you going to get yourselves ready to come back? Or are you going
to stay here and die and let them get away with that down there? Look! Or do I have to rub your noses in it?”

One of the fellers fell down, asleep, exhausted. Bill picked him up, and dragged open his eyes with his fingers, and stuck his face close, and said: “Look!”

I was a bit scared of Bill then. I was scared he’d gone mad. He started to take off his big pack. He kicked it across the road. His feet were bleeding a bit and there were reddish patches where he put them down. He spat into the air. He was trying to hit the sky where the Jerries ’d come from. “You wait!” he said. “I’m coming back for
you!
But now I’ll take this.”

The kid was just staring at him. Bill’s ammo was gone. He picked his rifle up by the nose-piece and slammed it down and broke off the butt. Then he picked up the kid, and said: “March or die.”

Then a few minutes later, he said: “I’m sorry I lost my temper with you.
Hi-de-Hi!”

Three of us managed to say “Ho-de-Ho,” and the rest moved their lips.

And we slogged on, and we thought that road would never end,
Nelson
carrying the kid and talking to it in English, which the kid couldn’t understand. The kid didn’t cry. It sneezed once, and Bill wiped his nose for it with his cuff, having no handkerchief. Once we got to a bit of road that looked exactly like the place we’d come from first, and one of us had hysterics. But we were moving, Nelson talking to us and the kid about this and that, but I don’t remember what he said very much, because my brain was beginning to go dead on me and I only heard things in bits, like you hear noise coming through the doors of a pub when somebody’s just gone out and they’re swinging backwards and forwards. One man died on the way.

There was another raid before long. The kid began to cry as soon as he heard the planes. It woke him up, you see: he’d been stunned with shock or something before. It was then that I got that bullet in the
shoulder
. We took cover, standing. Bill had his tin hat over the kid’s head,
and I was standing close by, swaying a bit. And then they started to spray us with bursts. I saw a woman about sixty years old jump into the air like a greyhound and come down sprawling. I sort of blinked, and said to Bill:

“Who’re you pushing?”

Then I felt my arm wet, and knew it had been a bullet that pushed me, not Bill. It must have gone through a narrow part of the tree, straight through the soft part of my shoulder, and into Bill’s eye. It was just about spent when it hit him, what with me and the tree being there first. He was holding one fist over his left eye. When he took it away, I saw the round about two-thirds buried in his eyeball. About another ten pounds of force behind that bullet and it would have been inside his head. I said: “For Christ’s sake, Bill!” He said: “Pull it out, quick. It’ll frighten the kid.”

I remember reaching out two fingers and giving the bullet a hard pull. It came free at once. The next thing, I was on my knees, trying to get up and singing something to myself. It was
Coconuts.
I’d just passed out for a moment, and woke up again as soon as I’d hit the ground. I managed to get up, but I knew that if I went down once more, I’d lie there till I died or the Jerries found me. Bill had got hold of a bit of somebody’s blue dress. He tied his eye up as he walked, and the feller we called Bullhorn—it was his real name—held the kid while he did it.

And he went on. That was a road. By Jesus that was a road. I don’t know how long it took us. We had no feet left. I’ve got the scars on the soles of my feet still, and one toe gone where I cut the muscle of it on some glass.

The kid cried and cried, and then stopped crying. “He’s asleep,” said Bill, and managed to walk on without joggling it very much. But some miles later, he lifted up the kid’s face with a finger under the chin, and said: “He’s dead.”

So he was. I don’t know what he’d died of. It must have been shock.
His heart had just stopped beating when he stopped crying. Bill laid him down in a ditch, and said nothing at all, absolutely nothing.

We were on the bones of our feet, nearly.

And then we got to the beach.

*

It is Purcell who continues:

W
HAT BITT
says is dead right. Straight up, what Bitt says is a hundred per cent. We got there. When we got to the beach, Bitt keeled over and went spark out. So did nearly everybody else. I didn’t. I was sort of stunned, but kind of awake. You know when you’re just dropping down dead of needing sleep—and then all of a sudden you come spark awake for a second or two, or maybe an hour? The way I look at it, you’ve got a reserve of liveliness tucked away and you kind of rub down to it. Bitt was wounded, you see. It was only a flesh wound, but he was a bit tired, like the rest of us. I saw men lying down and crying like babies. It was all sorts of things. We’d got that far. But we could foot-slog on raw plates-of-meat … but not across the bloody Channel, not even we couldn’t. I said to Sarnt Nelson: “Well?”

He said to me: “What d’you mean, well? Now we get an issue of divers’ helmets and lead boots and bleeding well march to attention across to the other side.”

I was light-headed, see? I said: “I don’t get that, Bill. Divers’
helmets
?”

He said: “Listen.”

I listened, but I couldn’t hear nothing. “Listen to what?” I said.

And Sarnt Nelson said: “Deaf?”

I said no, I wasn’t deaf, and he said I must be.

“Guns,” he said. “Things what go off bang.”

“Oh,” I said, “them! I thought they’d been going on all the time.”

Because guns was going from the sea. Only I’d had my head so full of ’em, I didn’t notice. It’s a fact.

“Well, Bill,” I said, “I can’t go much farther than this.”

“Boats,” he said. “Can’t you see?”

I saw it all then. I blinked a bit and rubbed the gum put of my eyes, and it was like a fog lifting. The sea was like iron, dead flat. There was ships, bags of ’em, and bags of boats, all sorts of boats. They were
coming
ashore, you see, and taking bags of us off. And I’ll tell you
something
. I don’t listen to no bull-and-boloney about discipline being bad, not now I don’t. I’m all for it. After that mob on the road, after all I’d seen, I could have cried my eyes out at the sight of them geezers lined up like a pay parade on that bloody beach, waiting for the boats.

Bill got our mugs on their feet and we joined the queue. I said: “Hadn’t you better let me take over a bit, Bill? Your eye …”

He said: “That’s right, Purcy, I did get something in my eye. But that’s all right.”

There was stuff coming out of it, and it looked horrible. I said: “It was a shame about that kid, Bill.”

He said: “Never mind about the kid, Purcy. Keep these mugs on their feet, if you can.” Then he gives ’em the old
“Hi-de-Hi!”
and back comes the old “Ho-de-Ho” with something like the good old spirit in it.

“Sing!” he bellows. “Sing! It’s an order!”

And so we struck up
Coconuts,
and by the time we come to

that bloody silly song was running up the line like a heath fire. And we stood there singing our hearts out while we kept an eye on the sea for boats. No stampede here, my cockos! Go on, laugh at discipline! Slouch about bolo and do as you bleeding like, and feel free-and-easy!—The time’ll come when you’ll go down on your bended knees and thank your lucky stars for a bit of the good old Guards order, bags and bags of it, and the more the better!

They were lining up for them boats like people waiting for the
eight-penny
seats outside a picture palace. And you can believe me or believe me not, but some of our mob was putting themselves straight, as far as possible. Those that had any boots left was cleaning them up a bit. They were trying to look decent. It may be crazy, but there it is. And the sight of it cheered Bill up. He said to me: “Purcy, this is what I like to see. In a way it was worth while coming this far to see it. In a way it was. This was a mistake, Purcy. They dropped us a —— But you wait. I know we’ll be back and wipe ’em up. I know it, Purcy, I know it! The whole of bloody England ’ll be up and at it by five o’clock tomorrow morning, making stuff. Aeroplanes? Millions of ’em. Tanks? Bags o’ tanks. Shells? I’ll tell you something—shells so big it’s going to take a day to walk round one of ’em …”

You see, he was a bit delirious after all he’d been through, what with that eye, which I could almost see the throbbing of; and the strain. Because he’d always kept in front, and carried more, and kept up a line of bull-and-boloney to keep everybody going.

He was delirious, you understand, and not in his right sort of mind just for a few minutes.

He said: “No profits, Purcy. No profiteers. Nothing of that kind! Every geezer with twopence ’ll rush out and say: ‘Buy a round of ammo for the Nazis.’ Every geezer with one good hand left ’ll rush out and say: ‘Lemme do a spot of hard graft.’ I got it now, Purcy. I got it. I grasp it. They will. They will, Purcy. I tell you they will. After that kid…. You saw the way that kid died, Purcy? Cried himself to death with a kind of misery? Everybody in England, from top to bottom, ’ll come out in a mob to pay that off. I bet you everything I got. I bet you
everything
I ever had. I lay my head on it. Nobody ’ll strike a light if it takes a drop o’ petrol out of a plane to pay off that kid. Fat old women ’ll sell their rings to pay off that kid. Did you see that kid’s mother? And the little ’un, Purcy? Was it a girl or a boy? It was too young to have any sex, wasn’t it? Why, they gave that woman a burst while the baby was sucking milk! D’you think anybody back home ’ll take that lying
down? I saw the milk still running down. Old millionaires ’ll give everything they’ve got and go to work in factories shovelling coal, to pay that off. I know it, Purcy, I know it! Tomorrow morning, five o’clock, all England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales ’ll be up working to pay it off!”

And when Bill said that I
knew
he was delirious.

Then he let out a
“Hi-de-Hi”
like a wolf-howl; and hundreds of the kids heard it and gave him back the old
“Ho-de-Ho!”
It run up and down. And out at sea it was like shaking a sheet of tin … and the boats were coming up.

Bill went spark out then. I thought he was dead. I listened for his heart. It was going all right. I propped his head up, and he came to. I said: “I thought you’d snuffed it then, Bill.”

And he said: “Oh no, Purcy, my little snowdrop, oh bloody no, Purcy my cocko. Some other time, perhaps.”

And he got up on his feet and waited.

We were scared in case there wouldn’t be enough boats and we might get left behind. But there was a boat. We got Bittern into it. Nelson wouldn’t set foot on it till we was all in. Then me and Bullhorn dragged him in and we pushed off. There was others waiting. You could see by their faces they was scared of being left. It was a lousy few minutes for them. We had it ourselves when it was our turn and we waited on that beach. Some of ’em swum out. But the rest kept their proper order … as well as could be expected.

We got on a ship. We got back. We got some fags and chocolates and stuff. Bill’s eye had to come out.

Later on we got some proper breakfast.

A titled woman give me an orange. It’s not every day you can say a titled woman give you an orange.

*

“We’ll never see the like of Bill again,” says Hands. “You could go on talking about him all night and not get tired.”