Kersh Sergeant Nelson of the Guards

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ISBN: 978-0-571-30455-4
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 328 Seiten

Night and the City (1938) made Gerald Kersh's reputation, but it was as a war novelist that he reached a wide readership in 1942, via a pair of books about British army recruits, led by Sergeant Bill Nelson, preparing to see service in France. This Faber Finds edition collects both books. '[They Die With Their Boots Clean] is a picture of life in the raw in the Coldstream Guards, with all its rigorous discipline, its humour and comradeship.' TLS [In The Nine Lives Of Bill Nelson] the conversations are terse, ferociously slangy, full of hyperbole and outrageous wit, often irresistibly funny.' TLS

Gerald Kersh was born in Teddington on August 26 1911. He quit schooling early, and took a succession of jobs while developing his ambition to write. In 1934 he published a roman a clef, Jews without Jehovah, immediately suppressed by members of his family who took exception to its contents. Following the outbreak of war Kersh joined the Coldstream Guards in 1940. The following year he drew on his Guardsman experience to write the bestselling They Die with their Boots Clean, a classic fictional account of basic training. A sequel followed, The Nine Lives of Bill Nelson, and the pair would be re-published together as Sergeant Nelson of the Guards. Thereafter Kersh was hugely productive: a writer not merely of novels(such as The Song Of The Flea in 1948 and The Thousand Deaths Of Mr Small in 1950) but also stories, journalism, sketches and columns, radio and documentary film scripts. His stories are collected in volumes including The Horrible Dummy and Other Stories and The Best of Gerald Kersh. His success was tempered by troubles over money, health and personal affairs, but through this turmoil he wrote some of his best novels: Fowler's End (1958), The Implacable Hunter (1961) and The Angel and the Cuckoo (1966). He died in New York on 5th November 1968, aged 57.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kersh, Gerald

Leseproben

I

The Raw Materials

IT WAS a big, dim, grim, high, wide, unhandsome room, smelling unpleasantly of too much cleanliness. Discipline has an odour of its own—a smell of scrubbing soap and floor polish mixed with just a little too much fresh air. You sniff it in prisons, workhouses, and other places where men abandon hope: the smell of organised scouring; the smell to end smells.

Men were talking; not loud. A beardless boy with a pink face and a queer mop of hair like a copper-wire pot scourer had been smoking a cigarette. He was holding the butt of it between finger and thumb, looking anxiously from side to side. A crisis was approaching: soon, he wouldn’t be able to hold it; but how could he dare to throw it down and put his foot on it? A large plump man with a deep, round voice said: “Chuck it out t’ winder, lad.” The wire-haired boy said: “Ah, but say there’s a rule agin it …” He pinched out the glow, rolled the remaining crumbs of tobacco into a little pill which he poised in his hand like some undisposable, incriminating mass. At last he put it into the huge cold stove, slammed the door, and walked hastily to the other side of the room.

“Scared, lad?” asked the plump man, and the wire-haired boy replied: “What, scared? Who, me? Me scared? Not me.”

“Homesick, like?”

The wire-haired boy scowled. “No.”

Two men were trying to play billiards with a sawn-down cue and three odd balls on a table not much bigger than a tea tray. The boy watched them. One of the players, a long, saturnine man, addressed the spot ball with elaborate care, and miscued. I heard the woody scrape, and saw the ball roll slowly away. The saturnine man swore briefly and bitterly, handing the cue to the other player, who took it, held it, stared blankly at it, and then said: “Ah dinna wanna play na more.”

“No more do I. Let’s turn it up.”

“Play draughts?”

“No.”

Somebody else asked the company in general what was going to happen to them now.

A glum blond man who had been turning over the pages of a bound volume of Punch, 1893–1894, said: “We get another medical examination. First of all we get our hair cut off. Then, if we’re okay, we get injected.”

“Injected what with?” asked the wire-haired boy.

“Germs.”

“Oh, blimey.”

“Germs,” said the glum man. “Your arm swells up like a thigh. You throb like a damn great aeroplane. Your head aches fit to bust. A scab comes. Then it drops off. Then there’s a scar.”

“What’s that done for?”

“Because it’s healthy.”

“And what happens then?”

“A trained sweat is put in charge of you. You go and draw your kit.”

“Do we get rifles right away?”

“Yes. Then you’re put in a hut.”

“What kind of a hut?”

“A hut. Then you’re squadded. Then …”

“Ah?”

“God help you,” said the glum man.

“What d’you mean, God help you?”

“What I say. God help you. You’re here. You’re in the Guards. It’s like being in jail, only there’s one difference.”

“What’s that?”

“In jail you sometimes get a bit of time to yourself.”

“Oh, blimey. Do they give you hell?”

“Hell,” said the glum man, “hell. If they gave you hell, it wouldn’t be so bad. Hell is Paradise to what they give you here.”

“Can you go out?”

“After a few weeks they let you out maybe once, for an evening, every eight or ten days.”

“And where can you go?”

“Nowhere.”

“What’s the food like?”

“Horrible.”

“What are the officers like?”

“Terrible.”

“What beds do you get?”

“Planks.”

“What are the sergeants like?” asked the wire-haired boy.

“Son,” said the glum man, “did you ever see a picture called Beau Geste?”

“Um.”

“Remember the sergeant that put them dead men on the wall, and sent them blokes that was dying of thirst out into the desert without a drink o’ water?”

“Oh, ah!”

“He chased ’em in the sun till they fell down dead, didn’t ’e?”

“Ah!”

“Would you say he was tough, just a bit?”

“Not half he wasn’t tough!”

“Well,” said the glum man. “He was a Godfrey Winn compared to the sergeants here.”

“Oh, blimey,” said the wire-haired boy.

There is a silence; then a little outbreak of uneasy laughter.

“Join the Army to see the world,” says the glum man. “Join the Guards and scrub it.”

We look about us.

Each of us sees twenty or thirty other recruits, raw and inconsolable as new-born babies. The man with the volume of Punch is riffling the leaves, blackened at the edges by the fidgeting of countless uneasy thumbs.

This is one of those awful gaps of silence. You know such moments. Talk limps to the edge of a chasm and falls in. Ten thousand pounds couldn’t buy a spontaneous word. Men become suddenly engrossed in silly trivialities. A big Nottingham man sits scrutinising a razor-blade wrapper with the intentness of a merchant poring over a rare vase.

The purr of the pages is the only sound we can hear … prrrut … prrrut … prrrut….

The weather has got into us, also. The day has blown hot and cold, wet and dry, light and dark; and now, settling into a uniform dirty whiteness, threatens rain. The sky sags like a wet sheet.

From the asphalt below comes a ka-rup, ka-rup of disciplined iron heels, and a great, strained voice shouts: “Get a hold of the step! Get a hold of it! Eff—ite! Eff—ite! Eff…. Eff…. Eff…. EFF…. EFF!” It is a squad of Grenadiers being marched to their baths. In this place no man walks. A recruit represents two feet on a brown caterpillar: his paces are measured; his movements are predestined; his day is divided into equal squares. “Eff…. Eff!” The voice and the footsteps fade … walking en masse; a community-singing of boots….

From an unknown distance, a flat, sore-sounding bugle blows a melancholy call of unknown significance. From different distances other bugles pick it up. The notes blend. They combine in a strange, sad discord … a rich weeping of vibrant brass. Then, right under the window, a little grim boy puts a bugle to his lips, puffs his cheeks, and blows. The red, yellow, and blue tassels on his coppery bugle hardly stir. A gathered flush empties out of his neck and face, into the mouthpiece, round the coil, and out in a great trembling note. He sounds the call again. Two scared swallows flutter from the roof. Simultaneously, a flat loud-mouthed bell in the clock tower clangs an hour; and sliding down a slanting wind comes a rattling volley of raindrops.

Somebody sighs. The man with Punch throws down the volume and yawns.

The bugle is our masters’ voice … and the swallows will go where the sun goes, and we shall be here under the treacherous English rain, kicking the soil into mud for our feet to slip in.

But all England is here.

*

We men in this Reception Station are unreserved, inessential.

Individually, we are necessary only to the tiny nooks and crannies of England into which life, like a wind carrying seed, has dropped us. We have our roots, of course, like all men. Pluck us up, and an empty space is left. But not for long. Without us things do not change. Only the appearance of things changes. Life moves differently, but still goes steadily on.

We lived our peacetime lives; worked, enjoyed things a little, suffered a little; built what we could, struggling, more often than not, for just enough bread and rest to give us strength to struggle with; made homes and supported them, turning sweat into milk for the babies. We were part of the mass of the British.

We are here. The things we lived for are behind us. All the personal importance of our own lives has been washed down in the gulf of the national emergency. Other hands were there to take up the tools we laid down. The machines still drone. The fires still roar. The potatoes still grow, and will be plucked when their time is ripe. Our work is behind us, still being done.

And we wait here, to be made into soldiers.

There is scarcely a man among us who did not volunteer.

How does this happen?

We come out of the period between 1904 and 1922—that wild waste of years, strewn with the rubble of smashed régimes. The oldest of us is thirty-six, Shorrocks of Rockbottom. The youngest is Bray, eighteen, of London. Those of us who are not old enough to remember the war-weariness of the century in its ’teens, are children of the reaction of the nineteen-twenties—when “No More War” was the war cry; and the League of Nations seemed more solid than the pipe-of-peace-dream that it was; and the younger generation—our own generation—was sworn to eternal non-belligerence in the face of the futility of war. We haven’t forgotten that. If only our own propagandists took a little of the blood and thunder that the peace propagandists so effectively used to move us!

From page after laid-out page, the horrors of war gibbered at us … stripped men, dead in attitudes of horrible abandon … people (were they men or women?) spoiled like fruit, indescribably torn up … shattered walls that had enclosed...