The First of July(73)

He shook his head. Put his thumbs together and turned his hands into a bird, flapping them down across his body and making, although quietly, the noise of a screaming aeroplane.

“Pilote,” says his chum. Which meaning I grasped. And it is obvious what happened to Lapize. Tried to master the air as well as he had the mountains, it seems. For a while, anyway.

It sickened me.



I’d been that glad to see Isaac again. Went back to billets one spring day and there he was. We’d been split up on arriving in France in late ’15. He’d been kept at base in Étaples, I’d gone on attachment to the 30th. He sent a battalion Christmas card with Father Christmas riding on a gun carriage to say he was well and had done no fighting. He put in a cutting about striking factory workers back home. Connie had been arrested for “agitating workers.” He’d written “Nothing new then!” on the top. So when I walked in, saw him and his pack sitting on a bunk like two orphans, I could have thrown my arms around him.

“Where’s your hat?” I asked straight off.

“It’s a ushanka,” said he. “That’s its Russian name. I could have sold it ten times over last winter. Including officers. But I didn’t. If anything happens to me, it’s yours.”

He looked more sickly than ever. He’d been in the hospital for a while with a bronchial infection. Even the doctor had tried to buy the ushanka, he said.

For all that we were both glad being together, we found ourselves squabbling much of the time. He’d liked the training all right, and was good at it, but the active service didn’t seem to suit him. The area was all countryside for a start, and what villages there were were half deserted or being turned into rubble, and Isaac had never been happy outside a town. But I couldn’t cope with all the dramatics. When I called him on it, he’d give me this doleful look as if it wasn’t even odds whether either of us could come to grief. But I’d soon had it with him carrying on like he was already done for every time he went out. It was bad luck.

For example, one evening, when things were starting to heat up, Mr. Pierce came along and took two cyclists to go forward to run messages for the Lancashires. One was Isaac. He put his stuff together on his bed, coughing a bit as he did. The tracts, his Book of Thoughts, his Esperanto dictionary, his clippings and pamphlets, and his creased photograph of his father and mother, taken in the last century by the look of it. He suddenly got very formal and insisted on shaking my hand.

“Please write to my brother if I don’t come back,” he said.

“Don’t be an ass,” said I. “You’ll get a grandstand view, see a bit of proper action but not be part of it, and you’ll be back swanking and able to live off it for days.” He would, too, in his pessimistic way. That was Isaac all over.

“His address is in my tin,” he said. “But it’s easy. It’s the same as my name. Meyer Street. Number 14, Meyer Street. Stepney. If you remember fourteen, that’s all you need. Samuel will get it. When he gets out of prison.”

But I wasn’t listening, because to hear would be bad luck.

Five hours later, Isaac came back in, pushing his machine. He nodded, in a sort of exhausted, sort of relieved, sort of proud way.

“All right?” I said.

He nodded again, breathless. “Sticky,” he said. “It was, I mean. Out there. Very bad.”

But as he put his photograph and his book and his dictionary away, something about him said Now I’ve seen it all and I didn’t shirk it. That night he didn’t cough at all. Very quiet, he was.

So, his luck held and my luck held for ten months or so from when we’d signed our papers right through to the next summer. But then as June unfolded, stuff started to go wrong. One of our best officers caught it just standing there lighting his pipe, one patrol went out and didn’t return, and our colonel collapsed with a burst ulcer. Sent back to Blighty.

I went out with a message one foul night, thinking that if Nora and I fell in a shell hole, she’d drown us both, and when I got there—a trench overlooking Mametz—there was nobody wanting my message, just three dead men, sitting tidy, all with their throats cut. Even after everything I’d seen, it gave me the heebie-jeebies. I was looking behind me; someone had crept up on these three, unexpected; two hadn’t even lifted their rifles. On the way back, I heard shouting and passed a wagon train with two soldiers, and they had slipped half into a crater of mud and they’d shot one of their mules, as it had broken its leg. They’d cut the remaining mule free, and it had pulled away and charged off to fall in the next foxhole. As I came past, one of the soldiers jumped on the other lad, knocked him backward, and looked fit to drown him too.