Jack Firebrace's War Read Online Free PDF Page A

racket and movement of an army regrouping, resting, and trying to restore itself. Jack went among the snorting horses, the shouting NCOs, and the little groups of smoking, laughing soldiers like a boy in a dream. What happened a few miles away was kept secret. None of these men would admit that what they saw and what they did were beyond the boundaries of human behaviour. You would not believe, Jack thought, that the fellow with his cap pushed back, joking with his friend at the window of the butchers shop, had seen his other mate dying in a shellhole, gas frothing in his lungs. No one told; and Jack too joined the unspoken conspiracy that all was well, that no natural order had been violated. He blamed the NCOs, who blamed the officers; they swore at the staff officers, who blamed the generals.
    The company cooker disgorged hot stew, coffee, and a second helping, for the keenest, of fat and water mixed to an imitation gravy. With a piece of fresh bread in his other hand, Jack spooned it all down hungrily. Wheeler complained that the food was disgusting, nothing like the teas his wife cooked for him, or the fish and chips he sometimes ate for supper on his way back from the pub. O’Lone had memories of meat pies and new potatoes, followed by sponge pudding. Tyson and Shaw were not given to complaining, though neither had much relish for the food. Jack finished what Tyson didn’t want. He was too ashamed to admit that the army food, though irregular and sometimes contaminated when it arrived at the front, was generally better than what they could afford at home.
    Shaw had revived. His strong back helped shift fresh bales of straw in the barn; his bass voice once more joined in the repetitive sentimental songs that broke out after feeding. Jack was glad to see it; he depended on the resilience of certain men to nerve himself to his unnatural life, and Arthur Shaw with his handsome, heavy head and calm manner was his greatest inspiration.
    In good humour, braving the barely understood jeers of the washerwomen who stood by to take their clothes, the men queued naked for the baths that had been set up in a long barn. Jack stood behind Shaw, admiring his huge back, with the muscles slabbed and spread out across his shoulder blades, so that his waist, though in fact substantial enough, looked like a nipped-in funnel by comparison, above the dimple of the coccyx and the fatty swell of his hair-covered buttocks. Inside the barn the men roared out in song or in shouted abuse, throwing cakes of soap and splashing water from the baths of variable temperature that had been improvised from wine barrels and animal feeding troughs. By the doorway stood Sergeant Adams with a cold hose over the end of which he placed his finger to intensify the pressure and drive the men into the air where they would recover clothes which, though clean, still contained the immovable lice.
    They collected their pay in five-franc notes in the evening and looked for ways of spending it. Since he had been cast as the joker in their section, Jack Firebrace was also regarded as the man who should be in charge of entertainments. Newly shaved, with combed hair and cap badges polished, Tyson, Shaw, Evans, and O’Lone presented themselves to him. “I want you back by nine o’clock, and sober,” said Sergeant Adams as they swung out through the gates of the farm. “Will you settle for half-past?” called out Evans.
    “Half-past and half-pissed,” said Jack. “That’ll do me.” The men laughed all the way to the village.
    Queues were drifting and forming outside a shop where an improvised bar, which they called an estaminet, had been set up. Using his gifts as master of revels, Jack lighted on a cottage with a bright kitchen and a small queue. The men followed him and waited outside until there was space for them to crowd round a table where an elderly woman produced plates full of fried potatoes from a pan of seething oil. There were litre bottles of