Sergeant Nelson of the Guards Read Online Free PDF Page A

raises his arms and yawns. Chest rises, belly flattens, things like ropes run taut under the bronzed skin of his throat. The Cockney called Barker says: “Blimey, it’d take a hell of a drop to ’ang that geezer.” John Hodge is muscled like a Percheron stallion: his hands are hard and shiny like hoofs. A horse of a man; a work horse; patient, powerful, docile, and simple.
    This is the story of John Hodge:
    He was born to a farm labourer in Gloucestershire twenty-seven years ago. Fourteen years later he went to work on a farm. Week in, week out, for six hundred and seventy-six weeks, he worked stolidly. Then War came. John Hodge told the first lie of his life. He said he was a casual labourer, fearing that farming men might be reserved: The gentlemen gave him a railway warrant and four-and-six. He gave the four-and-six to his mother, who said nothing much, but privately wept. And he came here in a train.
    Complete history of the main events of twenty-seven years in the life of a giant.
    His father did the same in 1914. Back and back, generation upon generation , the seventeen-stone Hodge men, mild and unshakeable as the hills, went to the wars. There is something in their blood that makes them do it. You can slap a Hodge in the face without necessarily stirring him to fight; and in the event of an inescapable private quarrel he will go into action apologetically, uncomfortably. Ordinary insults arouse in him only a sad surprise. What does anybody want with him, Hodge who wants to hurt nobody? You could harness him to a plough, like a gelding; or to a millstone like Samson in Gaza. He asks only a little food and a bed, first for his mother and then for himself. He belongs to the earth; can tell you, intuitively, the productive potentiality of a field by the feel of a handful of its dirt; knows stock, and all the permutations and combinations of time and rain.
    He wants nothing. He has got it. He is happy.
    Yet he is here, a little worried about the subterfuge. Do you see?—he wasn’t a casual labourer, so now he’s a liar. He reckons that it was not a very bad lie … not like lying to avoid something, or to get something. Still, a lie is a lie….
    Once upon a time another of the Hodge men, also tearing himself up by the roots on a point of conscience, similarly told a lie. He was walking with a limp. Somebody asked him why, and he said he had a bad leg. Well, he didn’t have a bad leg: far from it; he had a very good leg. But he couldn’t very well say he had a sword hidden in hisbreeches because he was going to join a band of good Protestants farther west in a species of uprising under a certain Duke of Monmouth . God approved: the Law didn’t. God, thought the ancient Hodge, would overlook the lie.
    The Monmouth affair turned out badly. Monmouth ran; that pretty, gutless gentleman. It was a nasty business. The good peasants went down like wheat under hail, calling upon Heaven for gunpowder. Powder, for Christ’s sake, powder! It must have been one of the most piteous cries ever heard on a battlefield. The King’s troops poured over, and the good Hodge, laying about him like a stag at bay, died singing a Puritan hymn, leaving an orphan son.
    It was bad, for Hodge to leave an orphan son; but it would have been worse if he hadn’t—for here is John Hodge! May I be with him at the last ditch!
    In one of our fitful bursts of talk we had discussed the retreat from Dunkirk.
    The Cockney, Bob Barker said: “But it was a bit o’ luck the sea was smooth, anyway.”
    Hodge, opening astonished blue eyes, said: “Why, don’t ’ee see? The Lord God stretched out his hand over that water. He said: ‘Now you hold still, and let my children come away.’”
    *
    To that, Bob Barker said nothing. He knows when to laugh and when not to laugh. He is sardonic as a general rule, and believes in nothing much. If he laughs at Hodge, it will be in his sleeve. In his odd way he draws his own kind of power from his faculty for