Sergeant Nelson of the Guards Read Online Free PDF Page B

school, was an Old Contemptible, who spent about a third of his Army life in the Glasshouse, but got a D.C.M. for some crazy impossibility with a bayonet against a machine gun. That same old man Barker, having, in his cups, bored ten thousand listeners with ten thousand bitter curses on the Army and all concerned with it for the last quarter of a century, now makes everybody’s life a misery with his savage denunciations of the corrupt authorities who, just because he has only one arm, turned him down in 1939. He says he hopes Hitler wins. If he hears anybody else say that you have to admit that Jerry hasn’t done too badly, he has to be held down while he brandishes his solitary fist and yells that Jerry doesn’t stand a chance and asks everybody to wait till he gets hold of Goering.
    Bob Barker is much the same, only he is young and humorous. If he goes out under heavy fire and saves somebody’s life, he will say he did it because the man had some cigarettes. When he is decorated, he will curl his lip at his medal and call it a bit of tin … and secretly polish it for hours.
    He says he volunteered out of spite, because of the shortage of bananas.
    *
    He admires above all things the quality of toughness. I don’t mean toughness in the current sense of the term—not the toughness one associates with naughty little hats, tight lips, scowls, criminality, and offensive manners. I mean the quality of resistance: the quality that makes man survive. Galileo would have been a Tough Guy to Barker because he couldn’t find it in himself to deny that the earth revolved round the sun. He would regard as tough the gangster who never squealed: also, Scott at the Antarctic or Sir Richard Grenville sailing into the guns of the armada of fifty-three, or Tom Sayres fighting with bare knuckles against Heenan, or Van Tromp hoisting at his masthead the broom with which he was going to sweep England off the seas, or Blake battering Van Tromp; or Ney fighting Wellington, or Wellington fighting Ney. Barker loves cold courage—in effect, the triumph of the soul over the nerves.
    Thus, it is safe to prophesy a friendship between Bob Barker the Cockney and Harry Bullock of Bedfordshire.
    Barker flips Bullock a Woodbine. Bullock gives Barker a light. He is a dark man, with a dour expression, a knotted forehead, a sombre glow in his eyes, and a swollen upper lip. Bullock is a bruiser. He is one of those boxers of whom nobody ever heard. His greatest fight was against one Nippy Oliver. Nobody ever heard of Nippy Oliver, either. Neither of those two fighters will ever get more than a five-pound note for an evening’s mauling. Yet Bullock thinks he could beat Farr. Maybe he could. If he couldn’t, Bullock would never know it. He has no idea of the meaning of defeat. If he lost his hands hewould fight on with the stumps of his wrists, and feel that the advantage was somehow with him. He augmented what he earned in a boot factory by fighting in booths: shattering battles, murderous combats in which the ring ran red; for a few shillings a time. It began when the kid wanted a fairy-cycle for her birthday. He has never been knocked out. Something in Bullock holds on to consciousness and makes him always fight. He is big enough and heavy enough to fight anything on legs; gloomy, good-natured, taking all things seriously.
    One of his front teeth is missing. This imparts something oddly wicked to his smile … to say nothing of the formidable look of his swollen lip, bridgeless nose, and left ear which resembles half a walnut.
    Barker says: “Scrapper?”
    “Yum.”
    “Fourteen stone?”
    “Thirteen-ten.”
    “Ever meet Pinky Stallybrass?”
    “Nump.”
    “’E couldn’t ’arf go.”
    “Yum?”
    “A sof’-paw boxer. But stone me, wot a left!”
    “Um …”
    “’Oo you met?”
    “Nippy Oliver.”
    “Zat so?”
    A Trained Soldier, with a pale, patient face fixed in an expression of permanent disgust says:
    “Well, my chickerdees, come