The silver wolf, p.41
The Silver Wolf, page 41
Jag is silent for a while. Then – ‘He’s a bit of a cunt, your captain, isn’t he?’ he says, thoughtfully.
‘He’s yours too, now,’ says Matz.
Three days later, when they are camped beside a wood, a dog-fox finds its way into Heinrich’s tent. Having sprayed the tent with essence of Reynard – the tent and everything in it – the animal departs, as mysteriously as it had arrived.
Bronheim, at a halt on that day’s march, is consulting with his captains, map spread out upon the road. There is a rendezvous approaching, a great camp, a leaguer – or there should be, if the map can be believed. Military cartography is a rough science at best, decisions over route, direction, require considerable concentration, and Bronheim’s is not being helped by the stink coming from somewhere in the crowd of waiting troops. ‘What is that unholy stench?’
‘Begging your pardon, sir,’ comes the cheery reply, ‘I reckon that it’s us.’
Bronheim looks about, and spies at the edge of the crowd a crew of boys, dismounted. One of them, the tallest, is beaming a sunny smile. His horse has the most unhandy, swaying bundle on its back. ‘Apologies, Colonel,’ the boy says. ‘Fox got into our captain’s tent. We tried to wash it, but the stink won’t budge.’
Heinrich is glowering at the boy. So this is the one, is it? And the lad has a black eye – one half his face in mourning, as they say. Has Bertholdt been trying to even the score? Good God, thinks Bronheim, isn’t there enough conflict in the world already? A moment’s irritation, but it adds to all the rest: the sweat tickling his back, the untrustworthiness of their maps, the imperative of reaching the great camp… ‘Heinrich, what’s this?’
‘It’s like the boy says,’ Heinrich replies. ‘Nothing I can do.’ Heinrich isn’t feeling at his best, he’s woken with a nasty case of fizzing guts, and though he’s been dosing himself with nips from his flask all day, even that doesn’t seem to be helping. The brandy has a spiky after-taste, and his tongue feels coated and dry.
Something Bronheim can do, however. ‘Burn it.’
‘My Colonel!’ Heinrich is aghast. ‘But that’s the finest tent I’ve had!’
‘Burn it. Get a chit from the quartermaster-general when we’ve made the rendezvous. God’s nails, you think I’m leading my company in, stinking like a brewer’s fart? Burn it. That’s an order.’
The regiment moves on. The crew of boys is left beside the road, with Milano and the tent.
Combusting a thick canvas tent isn’t easy, but they use their knives to rip it into strips and, under Jag’s instructions, start the blaze with bracken and handfuls of dry moss. No tent, no lair. ‘Stuzzi,’ orders Jag, ‘say Wiedersehn to the tent.’
‘Bye-bye, tent,’ says Stuzzi, almost the only words he’s spoken in three days. Then he glances anxiously from one face to the next, trying to work out if this was indeed meant seriously, or was it just another joke at his expense?
‘Man,’ says Matz, admiringly. ‘If Heinrich could see this, he’d make salmagundi out of you.’
‘Yeah?’ answers Jag. ‘You want to know what I think of that?’
Milano is a very puzzled horse. He’d been carrying that thing all this time, now they unload it off him and set it on fire. Then his boy had pissed on its remains. Then they’d all made water on it, standing round it, cackling like cockerels. Then off they’d set again. They’ve been walking now for the best part of two hours. Dusk is darkening the fields to either side; there are shadows stretching out across the road. He gives an anxious whicker. Friends, it’s late.
Milano is not the only one to have noticed the shadows creeping in. ‘Shouldn’t we have caught up with ’em by now?’ Gunter is asking, nervously.
‘We’ll find ’em,’ says Jag. ‘Look at the road.’
Pocked with hoofmarks. A lot more than a single regiment has been this way.
Stuzzi, aloft on Milano, is nodding off to sleep. Eyelids heavy, closing, closing… what’s that? He shakes his eyes open and squints. Someone’s laid a patchwork counterpane across a hill out there. He remembers a counterpane like that upon his bed when he was little… Hang on there – a counterpane?
Gunter has gone running forward. ‘Hey!’ he calls. ‘Christ a’mighty! Come and look!’
They stand there, staring out at it. Matz is the first to speak. He gives a low whistle. ‘Jesus,’ he says. ‘I never dreamed the war had got as big as this.’
CHAPTER FIVE
The Venus
‘Come, sweetheart, wilt thou do a little? The fitt’s come on me now. I will show thee a pure pair of naked breasts, smooth buttocks, lovely and ivory thighs whiter than untrod snow…’
John Garfield, The Wand’ring Whore
THE GREAT CAMP. The lines of tents, radiating further than they can see, the pennants for each regiment flapping in the breeze. The bald acre of the parade ground.
The bugle calls. The barking dogs. The roundelay of horsetalk, flickering back and forth across the camp like summer lightning. And the continual muted noise of thousands upon thousands of men.
It takes them till almost dark to find their regiment within it. Even when they do, even when amongst this colossal ant-heap they are again surrounded by faces they recognize, there’s still no sign of Heinrich. Hans, politely quizzing the muster-sergeant, comes back with the news that Heinrich’s in the cranken-house, signed off sick. ‘Yeah, I don’t reckon we’ll see him for a while,’ comments Jag.
Heinrich had seemed indestructible. ‘What makes you think that?’ Hans asks, puzzled.
‘Just a feeling.’ That and the knife-tip of saltpetre he’d shaken up in Heinrich’s flask; saltpetre that not only puts the bang into black powder, but will very handily tie your guts up into knots as well. He had considered making it more, settle the old sod’s hash for good and all, but any bigger dose and the taste would have been unmistakable. Besides, that would have meant the crew being broken up, any number of complications, none of which would have served his ends at all.
It has to be this regiment. All the months of travelling and looking, there was not one other with the Virgin on its flag. It’s this one; he’s sure of that.
So why is the sodding colonel’s blasted name Bronheim, and not Maduna?
Patience. Watchfulness.
Right.
The camp is like a city – greater than Münster, unimaginably vast compared to the tiny dorps where Gunter and Stuzzi grew up. Brewhouses, bakehouses, guardrooms big as barns. Field kitchens the size of altars. A tent so huge it has a whole bed inside it. ‘Four posts and all, and a proper table laid out with silver and plate,’ Hans reports back, marvelling.
‘Why didn’t you nick something from it?’ Matz wants to know.
‘I didn’t like to,’ Hans replies, blushing. ‘Would’a spoiled it.’
Jag discovers a horse. Not just any horse, mind, but a coal-black giantess, seventeen hands high, seven hundred thalers’ worth, according to her groom. Most soldiers’ horses are geldings or mares, only the entirely mad (Bethlen Gabor) or those experimenting with shock tactics almost entirely unknown (the King of Sweden) take stallions onto the field. With Jag close-questioning the man – what does she eat? What bit does he use? – the others lounge about them, arguing in a lackadaisical fashion if even a horse made of gold could be worth as much as that. ‘She got Arab blood?’ asks Jag, squinting at the horse with his head on one side.
The groom is impressed. ‘You’ve got an eye, ain’t you? What makes you think that?’
‘She’s got them little flicky ears.’
Unusual that the boy should even have seen a horse with Arab blood before, let alone made note of it. ‘Where you from, lad?’ asks the groom. Hans sits up, starts to pay attention.
And is left as disappointed as before. Jag gives the man one of his beaming smiles. ‘Over there,’ he answers, jerking a thumb in the direction of their tent.
They walk back to the tent together as the sun goes down. ‘I’m going to have a horse like that one day,’ says Jag, unguardedly, with a last glance at Her Seven-Hundred-Thaler Highness, peacefully cropping the grass.
‘Yeah, right,’ says Matz.
Yeah, right, thinks Milano, when his lad turns up with his nosebag – late, and laden with some other horse’s scent – and nips him on the arm.
Gunter, Stuzzi, Hans and Matz inspect the wound. A visit to the surgeon’s tent, the cranken-house? ‘I don’t think so,’ says Jag, with a laugh, binding it up. ‘You ever been in one of them places?’
It’s the smell that’s the worst, thinks Heinrich. Once you get used to the smell – a fair portion of which he’s contributed himself, in the last couple of weeks – it’s almost homely. And once he’d stopped casting up his guts, and was no longer convinced he was about to become a victim of typhus, dysentery, the plague, the bloody flux, any of the enteric disasters that lie in wait in every cooking pot, on every spoon and bowl – he’d quite begun to enjoy himself. Regular meals, orderlies to wait upon your every whim, no little tykes to keep in line (no Stuzzi, he thinks mournfully – oh, he is feeling better by the day), no ice-eyed little bastard drilling ice-holes into Heinrich’s back.
Meantime, plenty to occupy him. Amongst the otherwise motionless, sweating, raving, dying or dead inhabitants of the surgeon’s tent, there’s a gunnery sergeant with a hernia (occupational hazard); a quartermaster recovering from a dose of the French pox; a messenger with a strange complaint diagnosed as wandering ague; and a sentry who had the bad luck to discharge his weapon into his own foot. The bullet went straight through, but the wound refuses to heal. It’s sloughing now, the remaining skin a moist, unhealthy grey. ‘You got a stinker there, mate,’ says Heinrich, settling on the man’s bed. ‘Who’s for a hand of piquet?’
The quartermaster has a sideline in purloined booze. He has one of his lads tap a barrel, fill a couple of jugs, and make up the loss with anything to hand – what, even Heinrich quails to think, but the stuff that comes into the ward is excellent, liquor that can knock any but the hardened drinker out cold, and is purchased by the surgeons to act as antisepsis, anaesthetic, what you will. They make quite a party of it, most days. ‘You joining us, mate?’ Heinrich calls out genially to the latest newcomer – a groom who was kicked by his charge and is now nursing a broken shoulder. Some general or other is paying for his care; as a result the man seems to think he is too good to play with them. This annoys Heinrich, but with a couple of glasses inside him he’s a friend to anyone.
‘No, no,’ the fellow says, as always. ‘You’re too sharp for me. I’ll watch.’
As the cards slap down upon the sheets, the usual litany of complaints comes into shape above them. The sentry still has three months’ pay outstanding from last year, the gunnery sergeant’s wife ran off last spring, the quartermaster, congratulated upon the quality of his latest batch of booze, gives it as his opinion that if his lad is bringing two jugs in to them, he’ll be selling off three on his own account. ‘Yeah, I got a lad in my crew, giving me grief,’ says Heinrich.
‘Stealing from you, is he?’
‘No, but I got another one does that and all.’ Halfway down the jug and Heinrich has reached the stage of intoxication where all the sunlight vanishes from the world, he is the man of sorrows, did ever gallant soldier have as many cares as he? ‘This lad,’ he begins, ‘I pick him up along the road, and first thing he does is start a fight with my colonel’s crew. I get him out of that, he starts on my old mare. Has her come when he whistles, like some performing dog.’ He shakes his head. Treachery, betrayal – a man can’t even call his horse his own.
‘You ought to sort him out,’ says the sergeant.
‘Oh, I’ve tried,’ says Heinrich. ‘Oh-ho, I’ve tried, don’t think I ain’t. Him and that fish-stare of his, giving me the evil eye—’
‘I think I know this lad of yours,’ says the groom, leaning forward. ‘Bronheim’s cavalry, ain’t you?’
‘That’s us,’ says Heinrich, gloomily.
‘Good tall lad. Got a scar,’ says the man, touching a hand to his cheek.
‘That’s him. I’ll even up with him, when I get out of here.’
‘That so?’ says the groom, sitting back. ‘You don’t want him, I’ll take him off your hands. He’s as good an eye for horse-flesh as I’ve seen in a long while. Where’d he come from?’
‘Fuck knows,’ Heinrich replies, irritated. ‘But I know where he’s headed. Hell in a handcart, that one.’
‘You reckon, do you?’ says the groom.
And there it is again. Heinrich doesn’t get it: he looks at the boy and sees the usual no-name, no-account little cur; the rest of the world looks at him, and warns Heinrich off.
‘Blank-oh,’ says the quartermaster. ‘Ten points,’ he adds, to the messenger, who’s keeping score. They draw again.
It’s just that you can never tell what the little bastard’s thinking, Heinrich decides. Those eyes of his. They ought to be as easy to see through as glass, but trying to work out what’s going on behind ’em is like trying to look into the sun. He glances at the new cards in his hand. ‘I got five diamonds,’ says the quartermaster. ‘Ten points to me.’
The sentry sighs, and shifts his rotting foot to a more comfortable position. Foul smells spread diseases, everyone knows that, so the surgeon’s tent is situated well away from the rest of the camp, down by a stand of trees, where a slow-moving river daydreams its way along. Rafts of mosquito larvae pimple the smooth skin of its shallows. Mosquitoes also spread diseases; unfortunately nobody knows this. There’s one whining now over Heinrich’s head.
Heinrich thumbs his cards into a fan. The mosquito settles on the sheet. Heinrich eyes it, stealthily.
What is he thinking of? He’s their captain, they’re his crew, his power over them is that of life or death. He holds all the aces in his hand. He slaps them down. The mosquito is a blot, a smear. ‘There,’ he says, triumphantly. ‘Beat that.’
The river may trail with weed and hum with insect life, but if you can’t afford to have it done for you, it’s the only place in camp to tackle your laundry. It’s hot; so hot the horizon is quivering, and there’s a deal of splashy tomfoolery as well as laundry going on. Hans, lying on the bank, shirt drying on a bush above his head, has his ease suddenly disturbed by a louder yelp from Matz, out in mid-stream, peering round the river’s lazy bend: ‘Fuck me!’ He lifts his head. Jag, also hauled out on the bank, has turned to look as well. Matz, waist-deep in the water, is wading away from them, fast as the weed will let him, waving his arms above his head: ‘Ladies! Ladies!’
Ladies? ‘What’s going on?’ Gunter asks, uneasily.
‘Damned if I know,’ says Jag, and raises his voice in a roar that in a year or so, thinks Hans, is going to rival one of Heinrich’s. ‘MATZ!’
A furious splashing. Matz reappears, forcing his way back downstream. ‘There’s women!’
‘What?’
‘I said, there’s women! On the other bank! There’s a whole other camp!’
‘Matz, I can’t believe you’ve never seen a leaguer bitch before,’ says Jag, subsiding back onto his elbows.
‘You don’t understand!’ says Matz. He’s come to a halt, is gesturing frantically behind him. ‘These ain’t like ours –’ (meaning the regimental wives and sweethearts) ‘– these here’s the real deal! They’re huge great –’ (his arms describe impossible proportions in the air) ‘– huge great things! Wild-looking! And some of ’em ain’t even dressed!’
‘Not dressed?’ repeats Hans, mouth agape.
‘No! Naked as friggin’ Venus, half of ’em! Oh, come on, lads, you got to see!’ And Matz starts wading out for the opposite bank.
Jag hasn’t moved. ‘Trust me,’ he says, lying back, grass-stalk in his mouth. ‘They ain’t none of ’em going to be interested in you.’
‘I ain’t going, nohow,’ says Stuzzi, mid-stream, sat astride a rock. Stuzzi has recently astounded them by coming up with some decided opinions of his own. ‘I’ve seen them camps before. They all come out and pull my hair. Call me a molly. Tell me I ought to be wearing a dress.’
The response Matz had been anticipating would have been something along the lines of a quick the hell, well spotted, mate! and where? He turns about, a thick green wake of churned-up muck stretching between him and them. The river is unexpectedly cold, its bed unpleasantly soft, weed keeps wrapping round his calves like bandages. He’s fed up with Jag, always taking charge, and as for Stuzzi, he’s a fucken joke. ‘You are a molly,’ he shouts back, furious, and Stuzzi’s face acquires its soft, lost, beaten look of old. ‘God, you’re all heart you are, Matz, ain’t you?’ comments Jag, then, soothingly, ‘It’s all right, Stuzzi, you don’t want to go, no-one’s going to make you.’
‘Yah!’ shouts Matz, striking the water with his hand. ‘You’re scared, you are. A yellow dog!’
‘Shall we go, then?’ Gunter asks, clearing his throat. He sounds, thinks Hans, completely terrified, but then Hans’s own pulses have set up a pretty hard hammering too. Naked women! Hans has never seen a naked woman before. So why, now, does he want to see one so badly? He has no idea.
Jag stretches out, arms behind his head. He’s sunk so deep in the grass of the riverbank that Hans can hardly see him. ‘I ain’t stopping you.’
Matz strikes out at once for the opposite bank. Gunter follows, with a shriek – ‘Christ! It’s freezing!’ After a moment, Hans follows too.
In the silence, once they’ve gone, a bird begins to sing in the trees above Jag’s head. Stuzzi hears him give a sigh. Jag, scared? thinks Stuzzi. Why, that’s just Matz being a— (Once upon another life ago, Stuzzi was taught that bad words made the angels weep, and he still tries very hard not to use, even in his thoughts, the robust shorthand with which his mates – indeed every soldier in the entire God-damned, God-rot-it fucken army – litter their conversation, as casually as they salt their meat, but thinking the blanks gives him a satisfying frisson nonetheless.) All the same, he can’t help feeling something here has gone a bit awry. ‘Don’t you think you ought to go with ’em?’
