Captain Read online

  I slept the rest of that day and into the early evening, then went to Dolly, as I was feeling kindly to her after her bringing me home asleep in the saddle, and parts of her being so maggoty.

  Hey-Ho wasn’t in his proper place but in line with the camels, and I was irritated by that, being still so tired and sore.

  Captain was there beside them both, and he was lifting one of Dolly’s feet, tending to the delicate pad of it. He looked up.

  “She comes from the coast where the sand is soft and white,” he said. “Look, the pad is cracked and blistered.”

  I was cross perhaps because Captain didn’t ask what had happened to me after I’d been sent off alone into the dark, or perhaps because I should have tended to Dolly myself, but either way, I am ashamed to say, I snatched up Hey-Ho’s rope and yanked it.

  “Get him back to his proper place with the pack animals,” I said. “And you to yours.”

  Then I went to the mess tent, and when Ballard called out to me, I joined the group around him, and took the drink held out for me. But there was no pleasure in it, for I kept seeing Captain’s starting eyes. He’d looked up like a wounded animal when I’d snatched up Hey-Ho’s headrope.

  I didn’t sleep that night for thinking of what I’d said to Captain. For an hour or two I tossed and turned, then started to my feet at a terrible roaring and bellowing and commotion. There was a great palaver going on in the darkness somewhere, and from the roaring I knew it was in the camel lines. When I got there, all of them were slathering and foaming and mightily perturbed because of Hey-Ho, who was pattering up and down the camel line and braying, the remains of his rope trailing behind.

  He’d eaten through it, and was going up and down, while all the camels were roaring and bellowing at him from one end of the line to the other, but he took no notice at all and never stopped till he found Dolly.

  Captain and I came face-to-face there in the moonlight beside Dolly.

  “Billy…,” he said.

  I bent to tighten the hobble around Dolly’s ankles.

  “Billy…”

  I rose, and tightened her headstall too. Then we caught each other’s gaze for an instant, and still I said nothing.

  “Are you all right, Billy?”

  I tightened Dolly’s headrope with another vicious twist.

  “Corporal,” I said. “Corporal, to you.”

  “Corporal? You are not all right…”

  “I can look after myself. Now get that wretched animal back to his place.”

  Captain paused, picked up the tattered end of rope, and whispered, “Come, Hey-Ho, come.”

  His eyes were welling with tears as he walked towards the mess lines.

  MOAB (AND OTHER TERRIBLE PLACES)

  1917–1918

  I’d survived Gallipoli and Gaza, I was sunburned and strong, I was a Camelier and, after Khuweilfe, a Sergeant. It meant nothing really, being made a Sergeant. Promotions came easily when there were so few of us who’d been there any time at all, but I was mighty proud of my stripes and crown and of the small difference that rank could bring; and, I am ashamed to say, it all went a little to my head and did no good at all.

  When there was water and I could shave, I saw a face I didn’t recognize. I’d been away from home now for over two years, and Bredicot was grown as misty as a dream. I didn’t think Liza or Mother would recognize me if they saw me now, and I never stopped to think that maybe I wouldn’t recognize Liza either, that she might have grown up too. I told Liza about being in the land of Herod and Pharaoh, but I never told her I was on a camel, for I still didn’t like to think of Rudge’s laughing, even then.

  Later that same year there were a series of operations somewhere around Khuweilfe, or maybe it was some other place. Either way, we had Jacko on the run. Exactly six weeks since Beersheba, we’d driven Jacko from Jerusalem.

  We were so far apart, Captain and I at this time, and farther apart every day. We Cavalry pushed on so fast that the baggage animals often took days to catch up. I’d never apologized for my behavior to Captain in the camel lines that night.

  Settlement after settlement fell to us, each time the water sour with the dead camel flesh Jacko had left in the well. The Medical Officers would add chlorine and we’d fall to our knees and scoop up the filthy mix with our bare hands. Day after day, it was the same oscillating ripples of heat in the air, the same ripples of sand on the ground, the same furnace scorch of the sun, the same snakes and sinister saltwater wadis, the same throbbing and swimming in the head, sweat running down the forehead into our eyes, the same flies, hunger, and thirst.

  Jaw to tail, we Cameliers made a column like an ancient frieze, eight miles long, ten thousand of us, stretching over the white and scorching sand that hurled the glassy waves of heat back at our eyes till we were all panicky and babbling like fools. Dolly’s hump grew smaller on that long march and the sides of her were visibly falling away, her ribs showing.

  I never saw Captain at Jericho, but at Jaffa I was in a bad way and needed a friend. I asked around for him, and when I saw him, he was standing, still and unmoving, where Chips told me he would be, on the edge of the city, just standing and watching the road to the north, little Hey-Ho at his side.

  “Captain,” I said.

  He neither answered nor turned.

  “We’ve got him on the run,” I said, laughing, eyeing the sad caravan of carts and wagons and tin-pot things, all piled high, that crawled sadly out along that road.

  He swung round to me, his eyes glimmering.

  “We know,” he said steadily. “Hey-Ho and I, we know what it is to leave like that, with all our things…”

  “Oh, Captain,” I began—and he was looking at me, searchingly and with alarm in his eyes, but there are no words to make up for being so swinish, and I bowed my head and was suddenly crying, God help me, like a baby.

  “Come,” he said. “You are not all right, Billy.”

  I was in a bad way. I woke that night, screaming and sweating because of the Turkish bayonets about to thrust and twist in the soft parts of my belly, and me not able to pick up my own. Captain gave me water and after a while I slept, but the Turks were creeping up on me, their bayonets glinting in the moonlight, and my own bayonet was in my hand but it was heavy as lead and I could not use it.

  Captain put an arm beneath mine and led me to the medics.

  “Poor food. Battle fatigue. Rest for a day and he’ll be all right.”

  Men medically and mentally unfit were returned every day to service, and I was just one more.

  “Two days. Rest two days,” Captain said sternly to me.

  I slept two nights in the first-aid area, in a blanket slung between two naked palms. The mail caught up with us there at Jaffa, and Captain brought me my mail, a birthday card from Liza with a drawing of Trumpet’s field, the apple tree thick with red fruit. Liza had drawn an arrow to the apples saying she wished she could send them to the horses in the desert, who surely had none. Mother had written a wry note at the bottom too: “Happy birthday, Billy. Still seventeen?”

  I’d forgotten my birthday, the days and the weeks running as they did into one another. I took Captain’s rifle, leaned out of my hammock and with the barrel end of it, wrote in the sand:

  17

  The numbers were a little wobbly, but clear enough. I held the rifle out to Captain. My hands shook as they held it out and my fingers jittered uncontrollably on the butt of it. That fluttering in my fingers, I told myself, was just because of the lack of sleep, because of the flies and the snakes and wretched whispering, buzzing things that kept me awake. Captain saw the rattling of my fingers on the wood. He paused, then took the rifle and wrote:

  16

  “Over two years,” he said, looking up and smiling. “Two years since we were in Egypt.”

  “Hey-Ho?” I asked. “How is Hey-Ho?”

  “He is tired. This is a long journey for Hey-Ho, too long.”

  He looked at Liza’s card.

/>   “How is your horse? How is your home?”

  “I only think of home,” I answered. “When you ask me about it, it seems far away and dreamlike, sort of misty and shady…”

  “Do you miss it?”

  “I miss the shade and the rain and the oak trees, and I miss Mother’s cooking…” And then all of a sudden I was missing it all very much, and was hollowed out with longing for it all, and it was only when Captain rose sadly, and turned to leave, that I pulled him by the arm and asked him, tentatively, what I should have asked long ago.

  “Do you … do you ever think of your home?”

  Captain was silent awhile.

  “I remember so little—except the pancakes”—he smiled—“but sometimes, sometimes when I see Hey-Ho, and his legs look like little sticks and his pack is three times the size of his body, and he looks sort of like a lollipop”—Captain spread his arms wide to denote the bulk the little donkey carried—“then I remember it all…”

  Captain came back to my hammock next morning, leading Dolly and Hey-Ho. The sight of Dolly and her great teeth right there on the edge of the medical station caused a certain amount of consternation and suddenly orderlies emerged from all corners stepping forward in alarm, but Captain said something to the orderlies and somehow in the end they allowed him to tether Dolly and Hey-Ho round a tree that was near, but not too near.

  “She has a secret,” Captain said to me, and I remembered he’d said that once before, and wondered what sort of a secret a vociferous, voluble creature like Dolly could possibly keep to herself.

  “Tell,” I said.

  “She will tell you herself.”

  Captain came and went a bit, but he left Hey-Ho there with us, and I assumed it was because he thought it would keep my spirits up to have them there for company. Dolly was quiet, though, and didn’t go about any of her usual skullduggery, and after a few hours even the orderlies grew used to the strange pair standing there on the margins of the First-Aid Post.

  From where I lay, I could see some of Captain’s comings and goings as he went about his work. Everywhere he went, men called to him and waved and beckoned. Each time, he’d turn and wave and smile his quiet smile, and walk straight on. There were many new recruits then—young ones, that seemed to us like boys, arriving freshly every month, all spic- and-span and wet behind the ears—but we were neither of us drawn to them, the distance being too great if you’d been at places like Gallipoli and Gaza.

  Captain spent the afternoon with me, playing cards and getting up and down to check Dolly had water and hard food, until it wasn’t at all clear that it was me who was ill and not her.

  * * *

  I thought about the time I spent with Ballard and the others, and wondered that Captain, though so liked by all the men, had made no other friend than me. I asked him about that, as I lay there on my hammock, and he answered, “Father told me to trust no one … I have you and I have Hey-Ho. That is enough.”

  * * *

  That evening Dolly calved, suddenly and briefly, and in the way that she did everything: looking about herself with general displeasure, with her nose high and affecting a great indifference to what was going on at the other end of herself. It was a wonder really, how she’d managed the begetting of a calf, her having so little affection for any other camel. So this was the secret that Captain had guessed long before I ever would have. The syces had told Captain that Dolly was ready, that it would be now when the moon was full.

  Then suddenly, there was the calf, casually dropped behind her on the sand, as though she did such things every day without noticing: a silky scruffian, a delicious furry thing, who tried to scramble to his feet and stand just as soon as he was born. The calf already had the legs of a giraffe and the ears of a kangaroo and the soft coat of a newborn lamb, but he had a smooth and rounded back, which gave the orderlies such surprise that they wondered amongst themselves if Dolly had not managed to conceive some other species entirely. We called him Pirate, and he was a camel calf to melt the oldest, stoniest of hearts. The hard-riding hard-living men of the Worcestershire Yeomanry came to coo at him, and even Dolly herself showed some interest from time to time; but it might have been Hey-Ho, in the end, who loved Pirate most. He thought himself a father to the little calf, they being almost eye to eye when Pirate was born, and Hey-Ho never ceased his fatherly vigilance over Pirate, even when Pirate towered over him.

  * * *

  Then came the biting cold of December 1917. We lost 3,000 camels that winter. We were operating in the trackless, crooked hills of Moab—a dreadful place, where the winds bit like knives, and the stone was all broken up into pointy shards. You couldn’t get any wheeled transport up there, so the ammunition was loaded onto the camels and packhorses. They were all heavily laden and Captain was anxious for Hey-Ho. Dolly had never known the like, and she bared her yellow teeth at the rain and stones, and lifted her head to tell me that she was born for better things and should not be taken to such a place. We advanced in single file in continuous, miserable rain, me dragging Dolly and shoving her over the shifting boulders. Captain and I folded little Pirate up, in the same way Mother used to fold a picnic chair, soft pads skywards, into a string bag slung over Dolly’s neck, and he was happy enough there and warm.

  One day the slope was so steep that we climbed only a couple of hundred yards in eight hours, slipping and sliding. Along the dizzying brink of a crumbling cliff—to my left a drop to make the stomach turn over—I coaxed Dolly on, my breath held, fingers shaking on her headrope. On the brow of it, she teetered and swayed. Pirate swung to and fro in his bag and my own stomach swung and sloshed sickeningly inside me. Archie Pimm gasped, and Firkins cried out, but Dolly caught her balance, raised her head and took another teetering step. Those precipices would give even a cat the collywobbles and I never again want to be on the brink of one of them on Dolly: Dolly being an inconvenient, vertiginous sort of shape for going up cliffs on.

  * * *

  In the pitch dark and thundering rain we slithered down the steep and stony banks of the River Jordan. It was a great race, you see, to cross that bridge and get onwards, and thousands of us converged on the banks in a colossal muddle—Infantry, Artillery, demolition parties, Engineers, Camelry, and Cavalry, and somewhere, too, Captain and Hey-Ho. Dolly lost her footing on that bridge and bolted, and we crossed the boiling torrent on a makeshift pontoon at breakneck speed, her pin legs slipping on the wet boards and the captive Pirate swinging to and fro, wide-eyed with horror, and all the while from the cliffs ahead the Turkish watch fires rose and fell and colored the swirling water red.

  On the marshy far side, we pulled Dolly up with ropes around her hindquarters while she managed to look about herself in a fed-up sort of way, as if, for all the world, she’d no idea what we were about at all. It took us cavalry so long to cross the Jordan that Jacko had time to rush away and defend Amman. We had no chance really and he defeated us there, our first defeat since Gaza. We stumbled and blundered back in the dark and the mud, every man so hungry he’d cut another’s throat for a tin of bully.

  Then, for a long while, and well into the summer, we were stuck there in the Jordan Valley, feeling foolish, tail between our legs, while Jacko laughed at us from the other bank. It is an unholy place, the Jordan Valley, a good thousand feet below sea level, and I never want to be in such a pit again, for in the summer there it is all choking dust, scorpions, mosquitoes, centipedes, and spiders big as your hand. They gave us quinine every morning, but men sickened and fell like flies with malaria, and the heat grew to more than a hundred degrees. We had food, plenty of it, though, now that the Engineers had made a railroad, and we got things like tea from Ceylon and flour and frozen meat.

  Captain, Hey-Ho, and Pirate were there, and watching little Pirate grow was the only good thing about those days in the Jordan. Otherwise all we did in those tedious months was patrol and reconnaissance, reconnaissance and patrol.

  I had a shelter then, a blanket rigged betwee
n two thorns. From the shade of that I watched Pirate frolic and cavort, wondering how the cantankerous colossus that was his mother had ever produced so exuberant and playful a calf, with a coat fuzzy, fleecy, and white almost as a Worcestershire lamb, and his eyes soft and liquid, and with nothing stinking about his spit and drivel. Then Pirate somehow tangled up his legs, tripped and fell. He put his neat little ears back and tilted his head and looked about over the patrician hook of his nose as if to ask who could have played such a trick on him and done that to his legs. He adjusted his position so his legs were all out, and loose, and sprawling, and careless, and elegant as a whippet’s.

  I was sitting there under that shelter watching all this sweetness going on when Captain came up.

  “Sir.” He saluted.

  He’d been saluting me since I became a Second Lieutenant and I’d never told him not to because I’d told myself that that was the correct thing in the Army, and rather liked the sound of it.

  For a minute or two we both watched together the sweet daftness of the camel calf and the donkey there together. Hey-Ho brayed, and Pirate, taking this as a call to play, tried several times to rise, then hop-skipped and skittered to Hey-Ho and nuzzled his head round and took to licking his muzzle. I think Pirate really took that grey and whiskery donkey to be his mother. Hey-Ho seemed to sigh and his eyes closed as he dropped his grey and whiskery head. I held out a hand to beckon Pirate but lowered it again when I saw the shaking in it and put it on my lap, where it wouldn’t rattle, and Captain’s eyes flickered towards my hand.

  “Billy…?” he began.

  Captain knew that I cried in my sleep, that my nights were racked with memories of Gallipoli and Gaza and every other hole I’d been in, that I saw men bend and separate as if cut in half, bodies blown apart, shallow graves and jackals and that I woke screaming and gibbering. In the daytime my temper could flare at no provocation at all back then, and I’d snarl and bite as though I were Dolly herself. I was jumpy too then—very jumpy—and the smallest thing could turn my legs to water.