Swordpoint (2011) Read Online Free PDF Page A

they’d been rifled off a corpse. He was sober, hard-working, frowned on bad language, tended to keep himself to himself, smoking and staring into space because he didn’t read, and never received letters and never wrote any. Nobody knew where he came from because he never mentioned his home or his childhood, but he had an old soldier’s knack for making himself comfortable and for finding women – what he called his ‘parties’ – like himself usually past their youth and usually with families, as if he gained something from being with them that he’d missed in his lifetime in uniform. In England they’d come across him occasionally sitting in a pub with one of them, both staring silently into space as if they’d been married for thirty years. Private Parkin liked to suggest that Henry had worn a red coat and carried a musket at Waterloo.
    Mind you, Private Parkin – known like all Parkins as ‘Pedlar’ – himself was no slouch when it came to being odd. He had once done a season as a busker in Bradford, and knew every song that had ever been sung on the music halls and quite a few that hadn’t. He had a mop of greasy black hair that hung permanently over his eyes, a mouth like a post-office slit and, like Henry White, a set of false teeth – ‘’Ad ’em all out when I was sixteen! Saved all that brushin’.’
    Another butt for Parkin’s humour was Dickie Duff, all five foot three of him, with tiny fists and tiny boots like the Gurkhas. In the desert Duff had seemed to be all shorts, but he was good-humoured enough not to mind the chaffing he suffered and, because he was always willing to do what the big men did, never considered himself small. Inevitably he was known as ‘Lofty’. Matching him in equanimity, but for a very different reason, was Lance-Corporal Fletcher-Smith. Built like a small ox, Fletcher-Smith had once aspired to swim the Channel, and, considering himself a cut above the rest, liked to prove it with his knowledge of books. Known as ‘Brains Trust’ to the rest of the Company, he was a serious young man regarded with a measure of wonder by his less educated comrades, yet possessed of a curious naivety that made ridicule difficult and sometimes caused him to be a hell of a bind.
    His complete opposite was Private Martindale – once a ploughman – who cared about nothing so much as his pipe. He smoked it awake and asleep, standing up and lying down. The front of his battledress was so scarred by the showers of sparks his pipe shed, it looked as if it had suffered from some sort of fiery scarlet fever. On one memorable occasion he had even appeared, all unaware, on parade with the pipe sticking from his face like the muzzle of a gun. The more ribald of his friends claimed he even smoked it when he went to bed with his wife.
    There were two Bawdens, each identified by the last three figures of his number – 766 Bawden and 000 Bawden. 766 Bawden was known as ‘Clickety-Click’ Bawden and 000 Bawden as ‘Bugger-All’ Bawden. Though they came from the same town they were from opposite ends of the social scale but, perhaps because of having the same surname, they were the greatest of friends.
    Known as ‘Dracula’, Private Rich had a voice that appeared to have been rubbed up with a file so that everything he said seemed full of menace. Similarly full of menace but also largely unintelligible were the utterings of Private McWatters, a Glasgow Irishman who had no time for any other breed. Most of what McWatters said – when he bothered to say anything at all – had to be guessed at, and there was an apocryphal story that the only time he’d got on the walkie-talkie, his ‘Cam’ awa’ forrit, Wullie, ye greit gleekit gowk, an’ gi’e ’un a wee bitty burrust wi’ y’ Bren’ had been mistaken by Lieutenant Deacon for German.
    The ladies’ man of the company was Private Hunters, christened ‘Poker’ by the erudite Fletcher-Smith. Most of them thought it was a tribute to