“You never said you were a cycling man,” I said first thing.
“You never asked,” said Isaac. “And you never said you were either.” But ours had been a friendship of minds and of aspirations, so perhaps it wasn’t so surprising.
“You went away pretty fast,” I said. “Nobody knew where you’d been sent.”
He looked a bit shame-faced. “I couldn’t face those women,” he said. “That Connie was the most belligerent pacifist I’d ever heard.” And, unexpectedly, he smiled at me. The first I’d ever seen on him, I think.
“And my brother was carrying on night and day,” he continued. “Saying our parents were Russian and if I had to fight, it should be for Russia. Despite the fact that I’m sending my pay back home.”
“Blimey,” I said. “Do you speak Russian?”
“No. My brother does, but he’s against the officer class on principle and he won’t fight—not in any army. He’d go to prison first. I could have coped with the Russians, having Esperanto, but I don’t like the cold.”
“I’m glad to see you,” I said. “I feel a bit useless, to be honest.”
“You’ll feel better in uniform,” he said. “Though they’re a bit short; you may only get a cap and a badge. And they’ll swap your rig for a standard machine. BSA, folding bike. New regulations.”
I felt a bit funny about that, seeing as Hercules had been Dick’s, and I hoped they’d keep him safe, but I was curious to see a folding bicycle, although to the end I was worried that Nora would suddenly fold at a crucial moment.
Nora was a bit of miracle, I thought when I first put my hands on her handlebars (unfolded), but Captain Porson, the adjutant, thought folding bicycles were a liability and a handicap. He’d been a semi-professional when he was young. Now he’d point with his stick to the pivots, which allowed you to fold them on the order “Machine, FOLD!” and he’d say “Weakness at the crucial point, d’ye see? We need cycles that are robust: to cope with all terrain from the tundra to the veldt, from Dar es Salaam to the pyramids of Egypt, from the plateau of Troy to the clays of Flanders or the rivers of Picardy.”
Captain P was very keen on geography, and also on what he called “machine versatility.” He was forty-five if he was a day, had been injured in the war against the Boers, and would never leave England to fight again.
“And here some genius,” he’d say, in full flow, “has devised some toy engineered to be light, undoubtedly at the cost of strength, and to collapse under stress.”
It didn’t seem likely to me. It was more of a problem getting them to fold at all if any grit had gotten in the pivot. Once they were folded and hoisted on your back, it helped to have a chum to get them off again. The first time I stood up with Nora hanging on to me, I very nearly fell over backward with her unexpected weight. But it was all a matter of getting to know her. In the end, she was part of me.
Captain P was always writing letters about “design iniquity” to the higher-ups and to magazines like The Gentleman’s Tourer until he got told to stop. Though what advantage Jerry could ever have had from knowing we had folding cycles beats me.
The weeks of basic training were a surprise. The things I thought I might be good at, if I thought at all, which I soon learned was not encouraged, had me struggling, and the ones I thought I’d struggle with, I could do pretty well.
I had learned to shoot as a boy, my appearance was always praised, and I was punctual to a fault. The British Army was much of a mind with Mr. Nugent on punctuality. I was fitter than a lot of Kitchener’s lads and even some of the Terriers. We did this run, lie prone, fire position, jump up, run down routine. Isaac trailed behind. He’d run, lie down, cough as he did when he was anxious. Find his handkerchief, struggle to his feet, blow his nose, and stand there rolling his eyes.
“Fritz has just blown your head off, Meyer,” Mr. Pierce, the most junior of officers, would shout, trying to sound tough. He had a slight lisp, bad luck for him.
Isaac never remembered about firing positions, didn’t really want to believe in them, seeing as how he was going to be riding a bicycle to war and just pass on messages, but he was a tremendous map reader. I liked maps, but nothing like him. Isaac could also look at any map and see how the terrain, as we now called it, lay.
“You’d need low gear and a lot of puff there,” he’d say, stabbing at the paper with a finger. Or: “It would probably be easier to take the longer road, given the valley.”