“AND NOW?”
Duggan looked down at the muddy tea towel and the shattered biscuits dissolving in the rain. He raised his eyes to the sergeant major’s.
“Now your wuh . . . wife will have to bake me some muh . . . more buh . . . biscuits, Sergeant Major. I can pick them up next time I’m wuh . . . with her.”
The company sucked in its breath. The sergeant major rocked back on his heels and smiled, slowly, in a leer that exposed the teeth to their roots. The wind whipped at the men’s rain jackets.
“Very good, Duggan,” said the sergeant major finally. It was the first time any of the company had heard him use a normal speaking voice. He retreated and crouched beside his own pack, downwind, to communicate with parties unknown over the field radio.
Now the company clustered around Duggan. Once they were sure the episode was over and the sergeant major’s attention otherwise engaged, a few of them shook his hand. A cigarette was offered, and lit for him when it was clear that his own hands were shaking too badly to do it.
Alistair watched how the men acted with Duggan: chummily, though ready to disperse if the sergeant major should return in wrath. They did not yet know the ways of the Army—whether a besting once acknowledged was forgotten, or whether grudges were held over things like this. There were nervous laughs. No one attempted a reenactment of the incident. They waited nervously in the fog: a chance agglomeration of greengrocers and machinists and accounting clerks, rifles slung.
From a little way off, Alistair watched them with a tired apprehension. His pipe was far beyond relighting now, his fingers stiff and unfeeling. He retrieved Tom’s jam from the mud, wiped the jar off and replaced it in his pack. (He should be at the garret now, eating the damned jam with a spoon.) It was a struggle, with one’s body shivering right down into the deep muscle, to concentrate on staying as dry as one could and not simply bursting into tears.
Dusk came, and with it the rumble of an engine. A canvas-backed truck, its slotted lights throwing a demure downward glance in the mist. It drew up, engine running. An orange glow from the cab, the driver smoking. The sergeant major jumped up on the hood to address them.
“RIGHT, YOU LUCKY LADS! THIS WEATHER ISN’T LOOKING TOO CLEVER AND SINCE I AM A BENEVOLENT GOD, I AM TREATING YOU ALL TO A NICE WARM NIGHT IN BARRACKS! PACKS ON, HOP IN NOW, AND DON’T SAY DADDY ISN’T GOOD TO YOU!”
The men cheered. Alistair wrestled his stiff limbs over the tailgate and collapsed into the laughing crush of men on the benches in the back of the truck. The man to his left slapped him on the back and offered him a dry cigarette. Alistair smoked it wolfishly. With an ache so terrible that it was funny, the feeling returned to his hands and feet.
All around him now the company bent to the task of complaining. Their faces lit erratically in the drawing glow of cigarettes, the men named the plain an evil place and enumerated the bodily modifications and inventive sodomies they would vest upon the person of Adolf Hitler, at war’s end, for causing them to have spent winter weeks on Salisbury, when after all they were handsome young men with important peacetime work to do, such as drinking and philandering and sleeping both of those things off.
They called the Army an arse hat and its brass hats brass arseholes. They denounced the ice wind blowing through the canvas canopy, and they cursed the hardness of the truck’s metal benches. They articulated the opinion that the optimal stowage location for those benches would be up the arse of the truck driver, to whom it was pointed out that the small effort of bringing seat cushions with him from barracks might have been a nice touch.
Next they insulted the boot-makers who had made the boots they all wore, which were constructed entirely of hate and which kept the freezing water in but not out. These boots were to be shoved up the boot-makers’ arses.