Читать книгу Quarrel with the Foe - Mel Bradshaw - Страница 5

Yeah, I was at the battery that May afternoon when Horny Ingersoll had everything between his legs cut away by a piece of exploding field gun. When he hooked on the lanyard and gave it a pull, the breech block just flew apart. Even the gunners were stunned by the noise. The officer had telephoned for high explosive shells, and it was beyond miraculous none of the rest of us was hurt.

I was just a tourist, come over to see what Horny and his pals thought they were doing for us foot soldiers. Horny and I had been back and forth all the summer before as to which service we’d enlist in. Horny’s dad was all for the guns, thought they were more manly, and he bullied us both hard. He was a rough-tongued, angry man, who kept harking back to something he’d read about “C” Battery and the Relief of Mafeking. In the end, Horny saw things his way, and I—for reasons no better and now forgotten—was stubborn enough to choose a highland regiment of infantry.

I’d have felt the breeze if I’d been wearing my kilt that day.

I was out of the line, but I’d just been through a hot time in the Salient, and my nerves were still pretty taut. Almost before the 18-pounder exploded, I’d dived into the gunners’ dug-out and was looking for a stretcher. Nothing doing—but the table was an old door lying unsecured on top of various crates. Sending ration tins flying, I hauled this door up and out to where the bombardier was trying to make the small first aid dressing we all carried stop the bleeding from a very big wound. I passed him the dressing from my kit as well. Unwinding Horny’s puttees from around his shins, I handed one to the other fellow and together we tied the dressings on as best we could. Then we lifted Horny onto the door and tied him to that.

It was a long two thousand yards back to the wagon lines. I was short of breath and still coughing quite a bit from the gassing I’d got. The combined weight of Horny and those planks must have been considerable, but what you noticed most was the difficulty of keeping the door level. I was carrying the back, so that responsibility fell mostly to me. A big gunner, six foot four if an inch, was on the front, where he didn’t have to look. Whatever thoughts I could spare from the balancing act, as I watched Horny’s blood soak through the khaki cloth bindings, were for how I’d known Horny since before he’d debauched his first maiden and how we’d now have to find him another nickname.

We didn’t though. He had lost too much blood. We buried him at the dressing station, and Horner C. Ingersoll is what the War Graves Commission eventually carved on his headstone beneath the maple leaf. He was holding my hand when he died. I think I’d meant just to shake hands, but he didn’t want to let go, and when I felt the pressure—panicky hard at first, but weakening with every passing second, damned if I wanted to let go either. In less than another minute, it was all over.

I hadn’t much stomach for going back up to the gun pits after that, but it seemed unfriendly to let the big gunner go alone. So off we trudged. Horny’s crew no longer had a gun to fire, and we found them cleaning up as best they could before some brass hat put them to work elsewhere.

I didn’t know their surnames, then. They’d been introduced to me as Sam, the bombardier, Ivan, and Tinker, also called Bobbie—my fellow stretcher-bearer. There should have been one more private, but he had been decapitated by a German whizz-bang the night before and hadn’t yet been replaced. When Tinker and I got back, Ivan was reading out what was stamped on one of the H. E. shell casings—Peerless Armaments, Hamilton.

“Let me see that round,” said Sam. “Hamilton, no guff. Whosoever’s company that is, I bet he’s making a fortune sending us these darlings.”

“Think I’ll look him up,” said Ivan, “if I get out of this alive.”

“If the Boche win the war,” said Tinker, “they’ll be giving him a sodding medal.”

“I’ll give him something to pin on his chest,” said Ivan. He had his clasp knife out and was flicking it open and closed.

“On his chest or a little lower down,” said Sam. “Look at this, would you?” He was poking a needle or straight pin into the casing of the eighteen-pound shell. “This metal is full of holes. The bastards just filled them in with paint so the rounds would pass inspection.”

“That’s a new one.” Ivan caught one of the crumbs of pigment on the end of a finger and studied it closely. “Christ,” he said, pressing down on every word, “are all the circles of hell taken?”

I felt a cough coming, which I tried to squelch so as not to draw any questions my way.

“Ha—ah—hack! hack!”

“What about you, Paul?” asked Tinker. “You knew Horny longer than any of us. Bet you wouldn’t mind getting Mr. Peerless in a dark alley.”

“No,” I said, “I wouldn’t.”

I could hear my voice sounded strained. And to be frank, I felt put in a false position. Yes, I had been to school with Horny, and to his home for that matter, but we hadn’t been truly close. As I say, I came to see him mainly to watch the guns at work. Length of acquaintance didn’t seem to matter that much compared to what Horny and these men had been through together. To face death beside another for as little as a week means more than sitting in the same schoolroom for five years.

I liked Horny well enough, and we’d roughhoused together, but I hadn’t kept up with him once girls entered the picture. I had been a late developer, not one of the fast set.

Still, I didn’t want to tell the gunners any of this. It would have been disloyal. Horny had been a good soldier, as far as I knew, and had met a rotten fate at the hands of his own country’s arms-makers. At the time, I didn’t even know if there was a single owner behind Peerless Armaments. One thing for sure: if there was one, he had not deliberately blown Horny apart. He might not even have given the order to paint over the holes in the metal. On the other hand, he was employing and letting himself be enriched by fraud artists of the most despicable stripe. On that spring day in 1915 outside Ypres, while I listened to Sam, Tinker and Ivan bragging about settling scores, there was one word I couldn’t get out of my head—manslaughter. The slaughter of men as if they were cattle, with no malice—without even the limited malice combatants reserved for opposing armies—but carelessly, wantonly.

I knew that the peacetime criminal code did not prescribe capital punishment for that offence—but since coming to Europe, I’d seen too many soldiers let down by Canadian suppliers, cheated by compatriots who risked nothing. Under the circumstances, I thought executing the bosses—a quick and merciful execution by firing squad—sounded pretty reasonable.