His first mouthful stunned him. He’d been expecting some creative use of bully beef, salty and formless mush, but his tongue encountered flesh and gristle, and he chewed and chewed and finally swallowed. ‘My God!’ he grinned at Bill. ‘Is this actual pork?’
Bill paused in unwinding the strips of cloth from his legs and eyed him. ‘What do you care?’ he asked.
The deserter became aware that the room had become very quiet, and that everyone was looking at him. In their eyes he saw the same flat appraisal that the rats had given him. Plenty to go around, chum. What did he care? The answer, he found, as he devoured his meal and then licked the mess tin clean, was that he didn’t.
2
BILL
EVERETT’S TIME WITH THE GREY BRIGADE WAS IN many respects much the same as life in the regular army. There were long periods of intense boredom alleviated only by finding creative ways to gamble and the ongoing war of attrition against lice and damp, interrupted by outbreaks of nerve-shredding noise and terror when one side or the other made another futile attempt to break the stalemate and claim another few yards of No Man’s Land. There were rifles to be maintained and latrines to be dug and the cellar ceiling was forever threatening to collapse and needed shoring up with pieces of timber.
In other respects it was a different world.
There was no command structure and hence no one to order that these duties be done, and so they were only ever completed haphazardly, or at the cost of sometimes brutally violent arguments about who should take responsibility for what. There was no stand-to at dawn, and no inspections. But there was no relief either. Before, he could have expected six days at the front before being rotated back to the reserve trenches and possibly even some home leave, but with the Grey Brigade there was nowhere to rotate to. And, because of the exposure to snipers during daylight, they led an almost entirely nocturnal and silent existence. Light and noise were shunned. He had hoped that the relative warmth and better diet might help his fever, but if anything it worsened, developing into a persistent cough. Long bouts would leave him with blood on his lips and unable to stand, and he felt something heavy swilling at the bottom of his lungs, like water in a shell crater. Almost certainly it was tuberculosis, fatal in the long term, but given that his life expectancy was likely to be a matter of days he tried not to let it bother him too much.
At times, sitting in his alcove in the cellar either mending a sock or cleaning a gun, he wondered if this was how medieval monks had lived. Before, it was not unknown for some of the men to comfort each other physically, but with the threat of court-martial and imprisonment such acts were scrupulously clandestine; amongst the Wild Deserters there were no such inhibitions and he quickly ceased to be shocked by the sight of men fucking.
Sometimes, regulars from one army or the other would try to use the farm as a staging point for a raid or recce, and then the Grey Brigade would hide, deep and silent. Taking the wounded, who were as good as dead anyway, was one thing, but to attack a fully armed squad of fighting men would attract reprisals. And the caution was felt on both sides. On one occasion a private discovered the cellar door and excitedly called to his sergeant while in the dark on the other side Everett and the others gripped their rifles tighter and readied themselves. The deserter tried to take slow and even breaths, as a coughing fit at this moment was the last thing they needed.
‘Leave it, private,’ they heard the sergeant grunt.
‘But, sir!’ complained the private. ‘There could be all sorts down there! Bottles of wine! Brandy, even!’ There came a murmur of interest from the other men in the squad at that.
The sarge’s reply carried the low and intense anger of a man who was deeply scared. ‘Now you listen to me, boy. The only thing on the other side of that door for you is death. You can go in and look for it if you like, but you’re going on your own, and you ain’t coming back.’
That seemed to do the trick for the curious private, and the squad moved off, but not before the sarge hawked and spat heavily at the door.
‘Why didn’t they come in after us?’ asked the deserter afterwards.
‘They don’t know for sure that we exist,’ said Bill. ‘Or if we do, what our numbers are, how we are armed, what we are capable of. Hard enough to carry out your orders as they stand without going looking for trouble. They try not to believe that we exist for the simple reason that they can’t comprehend our motives as being anything other than cowardice and the desire to save our skins. They think, why would a man who cares only for his own survival willingly put himself in the middle of conflict? For men such as they are, who are moulded by and perpetuate a system of fear and unthinking obedience, the notion that a man might flee them out of a refusal to have his spirit so enslaved and that the safety of his flesh and blood means nothing in comparison
