Fergus Lamont Read online

  ‘Christ Almighty,’ cried the colonel. His subordinates, from major down to newest private, echoed the cry, as if he was a bishop and they his acolytes. They would have fallen on their faces in the mud, in the devoutest of obeisances, if there had been room.

  While my comrades pressed back and blasphemed fervently, I made for the bomb. If it had gone off it would have blown me, and fifty others, to bloody bits, for, though ludicrous and unusual, it was no doubt powerful: ludicrous indeed, for it reminded me of the anarchists in the comics of my childhood, with hats over their eyes and bombs like this, only smaller, in their pockets, with the fuses hanging out.

  I had no idea if it would instantly go off, or be made harmless, when the fuse, or what I took to be the fuse, was pulled out. Others, peeping in horror, were equally doubtful, for when I seized the part and began to tug at it, with the delicate force of a dentist pulling a tooth, there were groans of horrified anticipation, and warning cries. Out it came. For a few moments I waited, and everybody waited with me. All about us was the hellish din of war: we had a perfect silence.

  Then the whistle was heard. At once, uttering my battlecry, I climbed quickly out of the trench. Still distrustful of the bomb, my men followed, not gladly, but with some relief. Thanks to me, they were still alive, they still had that blessed chance to come through. They thought of me then with a greater gratitude than they had ever felt for their mothers or fathers or wives. So, fortunately, did the colonel, back in the trench, though in a different part.

  In his report he recommended me for the MC, and promotion to captain.

  FOUR

  It might have been expected that I, born in a room-and-kitchen in a tenement, would have been more popular with the men, most of them also born in similar proletarian places, than Archie Dungavel, born in a castle. I had played the same street games as they. Until I was thirteen I had gone to the same kind of board school. Like them, I had spent my Saturday pennies on comics and sherbet dabs, and had paid for admission to the cinema with jelly-jars. My childhood, the most formative part of our lives and the one where the strongest loyalties are forged, sometimes against our wills, must have been very like theirs. No doubt they had relatives living up closes, and uncles that kept pigeons or played quoits. It was true that after I had learned who my true father was, and had gone from Kidd Street school to the Academy, I had drawn apart from working-class ways, except for my ceremonial visits to Lomond Street, and my ‘winching’—a word quite unknown to Archie—of lovely Meg Jeffries. But, though I had then consorted with the sons and daughters of bourgeois bankers and lawyers, I had never forgotten the ways of that other, more primitive, more exuberant, and earthier tribe.

  Archie, on the other hand, had spent his childhood at Gilbertfield Castle, in the nursery with his sister Grizel, being educated by governesses and tutors. He had come into contact with members of the working-class only in the shape of servants, invisible except when needed. Then he had gone to Eton, where among the subjects he had studied had certainly not been the habits of close-dwellers. It would have been fair to say of him that he knew as much about the Fiji Islanders as he did about the Scottish working-class: probably more, for in some book or other he might have come across something about the former.

  Yet his men liked and cherished him more than mine did me. They were proud that he was the son of an earl, and cut out of a magazine a picture of his elder sister, Hetty, a society beauty, married to Lord Knapdale.

  To please him, they moderated their profanity and restricted their grumbles. Blasphemously contemptuous of chaplains, they even tolerated his saying a silent prayer before they went into action. They did, though, draw the line at letting him tend their blistered feet. They did everything they could to protect him, but were gloomily convinced he would be killed: only swaggering bastards like me were allowed to live.

  It was true I swaggered. It was partly deliberate. Unlike Archie’s, my social superiority was still to be confirmed. Therefore I had to assert it brashly. My fellow officers attributed my aggressive pride to my Highland blood, and were amused. I let it be known I had spent much of my childhood among Hebridean bogs. The private soldiers, however, and the ncos, according to Hector McNaught, my batman, suspected there was something, not spurious exactly, but ‘a wee shade odd’ about my patrician airs.

  Since Gantock was a fairly large town with its share of young men of military age, and the Perthshires were a fighting regiment that often needed replacements, it was always on the cards that there would be sent to my company some native of the East End acquainted with my history. I did not bite my nails in anxiety, waiting for that to happen. I was no snivelling impostor. I had killed Germans who had done me no harm, except of course that they were trying to kill me: I was certainly not going to cringe before malicious Scots seeking to lower my pride.

  In the meantime my well-directed barrage of arrogance kept would-be exposers and detractors under cover.

  In a lull during what the soldiers called the battle of Paschendaele, in autumn, our battalion rested and, among other things, incorporated drafts of new recruits. These were conscripts who had never been in the line before. They arrived with their caps stiff and their buttons shining. Among the batch assigned to my company I noticed the name Samuel Jackson; his address was given as Cowglen Street, Gantock. I remembered it as the street where the woman with the rotted nose lived. He must be the Sammy Jackson who, thirteen years ago, in Limpy’s classroom, had kept watch at the door, to make sure old Oh-ho Maybole didn’t come crouching in and catch us unawares.

  Sammy’s father was a railway porter. He himself, after leaving school, had worked at the pier. I had heard that his mates there gave him all the heavy ends to hold. His muscles had developed more than his brain. I remembered him as the kind of boy always given the role of goalkeeper, especially if the goal area was muddy, and at ‘hunch-cuddy-hunch’ that of pillow or cushion, where no honour or glory could be won, but much pummelling of one’s stomach had to be endured.

  I saw him first along with the others in the batch, when as company commander I welcomed them with my customary brusqueness. It was my belief that men did not think much of an officer who despatched them to the trenches or chose them for suicidal missions, with compassion in his voice. Hell was bearable only if everything in it was hellish.

  I gave Sammy the same attention that I did the others. Though he hadn’t yet been in action, he had been a soldier long enough to know that when a private was addressing an officer he had to offer no sign at all of human complicity. Therefore he neither grinned nor winked. He did give me one or two peculiar glances, but then all his mates did too. This was usual. In welcoming new recruits I always made it clear what was expected of them: that was, to obey orders and uphold the honour of the regiment. Other company commanders made the mistake of indulging in friendly chats, as if instructing beaters in a deer drive. The business of war was to kill the enemy. The more Germans that were killed the sooner the war would be over. That was my message, brusquely stated.

  Archie, one of my platoon commanders, was, as usual, saddened by my harshness.

  ‘I don’t understand you, Fergus. Surely you could have shown them a little kindness?’

  ‘What has kindness to do with war?’

  ‘Oh, a great deal. Everything. How could we stand it, if we didn’t show kindness to one another?’

  It seemed to me kindness was far too poor a word to describe what soldiers in battle felt for their comrades. In any case, I now found it difficult to have sympathy with Archie. About six months previously he had been wounded in the arm. It was the kind of wound many soldiers longed for, unlikely to cause permanent damage, justifying a return to UK, and entitling the sufferer to wear a stripe of gold braid. Archie, with his influential connections, could easily have used the spell at home to get transferred, honourably enough, to some non-combatant post. I had advised him to do that. No doubt his mother had pleaded with him. Perhaps Grizel, with a sneer, had joined in. He had
defied us all and returned to active service as soon as his arm was better. In a man who recognised that Germans had to be killed if the war was to be won, his attitude would have been praiseworthy; but not in a man who thought it nobler to die for one’s country than to kill for it.

  I did not assign Sammy Jackson to his platoon. Under Lieutenant McSween Sammy would be made to work harder to keep himself and his rifle clean, but he would also have a better chance of surviving.

  I soon found an opportunity of having a private chat with Sammy.

  ‘Well, how’s it going?’ I asked.

  Still careful to be properly respectful, he couldn’t help a congratulatory grin. Evidently it delighted him that an old schoolmate was getting away with a clever and daring masquerade.

  ‘We heard you’d won a medal, sir. In Gantock, I mean, sir.’

  He would break heads to prevent my fraud, as he clearly thought it, being discovered; but the head I had most to fear from was his own. Nearest to the door, I reflected, had been bottom of the class.

  ‘I see Mary Holmscroft’s goin’ her duster tae, sir.’

  He meant that she had been in jail for making seditious speeches to munition workers on strike. She had been abused in every newspaper. Lloyd George himself had called her an irresponsible and foolish young woman. I would have expected Sammy to share in the general disgust, but no, here he was grinning, and trying hard, without winking, to let me know that in his opinion her defiance of the government and the army was, like my impersonation of an officer and gentleman, a ploy worthy of admiration, and a credit to Kidd Street school.

  ‘Her comin’ frae the Vennel, sir. Some cheek, eh?’

  ‘What are they saying about her in Gantock?’

  ‘Och, sir, maist say she ought to hae sterved to daith in jile. Things like that, sir. I heard her making a speech in Auchmountain Square, frae the steps o’ the Auld Kirk.’

  ‘And what had she to say?’

  ‘Weel, sir, yin thing she said was that efter the war there’ll be thoosands like Donald o’ Sutherland. Mind Donald o’ Sutherland, sir? In Limpy Calderwood’s class? He came back frae the wars and found his hame burnt to the ground and his folk evicted to Canada. He was a good teacher, Mr Calderwood. But he got the sack. Did you ken that, sir?’

  I knew it. Mary had mentioned it in one of her brief notes.

  ‘Seems he was telling the weans the war’s juist a waste o’ lives and money.’

  Sammy grinned, listening to the thump of shells in the distance. Even a dunce like me, his grin as good as said, knows old Limpy was right.

  ‘His life’s safe enough,’ I said, sharply.

  ‘That’s so, sir. My mither said she wished I was a cripple. They say his sister’s no’ weel: Miss Cathie. Aff her heid, they say.’

  It was time to shut him up and send him back to his duties.

  He was killed ten days later.

  Archie Dungavel died too, in that same attack. It was the kind of death he wanted.

  In a dreary landscape of mud, craters, broken walls, splintered trees, and stinking bodies of mules and men, he found himself confronted by a German sprawled on the ground, weeping with pain. Seeing the danger as I rushed up, I shouted to Archie for Christ’s sake to shoot the bastard. He held out his revolver but did not pull the trigger. He looked as if he wanted to plead with the German, as one Christian to another. I fired several times, but too late: the Boche had his rifle under his body; he fired two bullets into Archie’s face, shattering his skull and splattering his blood and brains. They must have died almost at the same moment.

  In the German’s pocket was found a bible, inside which was a letter from his wife, full of pious phrases. While burying Archie, I wondered if, in his instantaneous heaven, he and his Christian killer had entered hand-in-hand. What compromise uniform had they worn? When confronted by their new Commanding Officer had they saluted in the British or German fashion? Or, as in terrestrial armies, had they, as newcomers of lowly rank, been received by intermediaries?

  No one expected me to shed tears because my friend had been killed, and half my company with him. Some, though, may have looked for a small sign of special grief in me, and because they could not see it were confirmed in their belief that I was ruthless.

  I let Lieutenant McSween write to Sammy’s parents. I myself wrote to Archie’s.

  About a week after Archie’s death came the note from Mary with the news that Cathie Calderwood had been moved to an asylum. I read it by candlelight in a dug-out that shook with the explosion of shells. Captain Sinclair was cutting his toe-nails. Lieutenant McSween was trying to shave. Lieutenant Johnstone was simpering over a novel. In the men’s quarters they were singing ‘Loch Lomond’ lugubriously. There was a stink of mud, shit, candle grease, and cold sweat.

  Hardly a hundred yards away the Germans were similarly occupied. In a few hours they would be trying again to slaughter us, and we them.

  Yet poor Cathie had been certified mad for playing with dolls.

  ‘Bad news, Fergus?’ asked Sinclair. ‘Has she chucked you for another chap?’

  They all waited with grins for my answer. They knew I seldom got letters or sent any. (My correspondents were Mary, once a month, Cathie, once every three months, and Sammy Lamont, still a pupil at the Academy, who sent me occasionally what he said was a report, requiring no reply.)

  It was also known I had no sweetheart, and disliked strange women making up to me, especially whores.

  I went out and stood in the rain, smoking and thinking.

  If, among the thoughts that came into my mind, was surmise about Cathie’s money, who will blame me? After the war I had a campaign of my own to wage, for which money would be needed. It would be futile to approach the Corses as a journalist or clerk: to have any hope at all I would have to do it as a leisured gentleman. The money I was saving up, from my pay and Cathie’s cheques, would keep me in that style for no more than a year.

  There was another possibility: I could marry a wealthy woman.

  I often assessed myself as an inspirer of love in a woman with money. The result was always disquieting. I had no difficulty in finding in me a number of attractive qualities: I was tall and handsome; my eyes were bold and blue, my moustache red and soldierly; I had the reputation of being a hardened, experienced, and able officer; I had aristocratic blood in me; I had won the Military Cross. This was a good deal, but it did not seem enough. Nowhere in me could I find a magical core, an irreducible lump of lovableness. In some dismay, I wondered if every man, if he was equally truthful about himself, would have to make the same alarming admission. On the other hand, perhaps I was being naive in looking for some rare angelic quality. Could not lovableness be merely a combination of excellent but mundane attributes? It would certainly seem so, judging by the happily married men among my fellow officers. If it were so, it would be a relief, and yet a disappointment too. Even if I did not have it myself, I wanted there to be that magical magnetic core.

  (Among my assets I did not include my potential greatness. This, if it was ever realised, would be the business of all humanity, not of any one woman, even if she was my wife.)

  Having, more or less, satisfied myself that I was as eligible for love as any man, I then had to consider whether or not I wanted to be loved. My brief experience with Lady Grizel had shown me how little I understood, and indeed was captivated by, aristocratic young women. I remembered how working-class Meg Jeffries had once interrupted my far-reaching and satirical disquisition on the hypocrisies of bourgeois Scotland, by asking me to admire her new hat, and once my passionate annunciation that I might be the champion Scotland so badly needed, by plucking a buttercup and holding it under my chin. Fiona Cargill, Marion Kirkhope, and other girls who lived in West End villas had been trivially minded too, but in a more petulant way. As for Mary Holmscroft, she had professed to understand and profit intellectually from long sociological tomes that I found incomprehensible and repellent. My fervent discourses and aspirations,
which had bored but impressed Meg, Fiona, and Marion, Mary had, with a few sharp words, revealed as puerile.

  In any case, I was not recklessly keen to bind myself, body and soul, for life, to a female creature that left hair in combs, face-powder in wash-hand basins, and stockings everywhere. While I was lusty enough to enjoy the prospect of being in bed every night with a body as soft as marshmallow, I was apprehensive about the mind as hard as steel that might well inhabit that body, if I was not careful in my choice. Moreover, I did not want to have taken from me certain small freedoms, not of great importance perhaps but nevertheless necessary if a man was to live at ease: freedom to belch, fart, scratch, drop ash, and eat with a view to enjoyment and not to elegance. Above all, I could not look forward without horror to having sticky-fingered, damp-bottomed brats climbing on to my lap and calling me da.

  Perhaps, I kept warning myself, my aversion was simply that of a soldier at war, whose life for the past three years had been a mess of mud, blood, guts, and shit.

  It had not escaped me how men with wives and sweethearts returned from home strangely relieved. Their women, they said or rather hinted, had become curious creatures, hard to recognise, far less love. They were too obsessed with cleanliness, too preoccupied with ordinary things, too politely unwilling to listen to tales of carnage, and above all too readily reconciled to their hero’s having to return to the slaughter, once his leave was over.

  ‘I tell you, Fergus,’ said one officer, ‘if I’d wanted to take to the hills or hide in a cellar, they wouldn’t have let me, my wife, my mother, my sisters, my mother-in-law, my aunts. There they were at the station, the whole coven of them, seeing me off. They were sad I admit, but if I shouted, “Bugger it, I’m not going, I’m staying at home. I’ve had enough, I’ve done my bit,” they’d have looked a whole lot sadder, they’d have outdone one another in reminding me of my duty, to my king, to my country, to my regiment, to my class, and to them. You’re a wise fellow, Fergus, keeping well clear of women.’