Swordpoint (2011) Read Online Free PDF

his virility, but in fact it was nothing of the sort and was a joke that probably only Fletcher-Smith and a few others appreciated.
    ‘Poker Hunters,’ he explained. ‘Pocahontas. Get it?’
    ‘No,’ Private Hunters said.
    Private Puddephatt was not only large, heavy-featured and ugly but also lazy, sloppy, indifferent, irresponsible and utterly untrustworthy. On the other hand Corporal Gask, who looked about sixteen and innocent as a shorn lamb, was one of the toughest men in the battalion. Tall as a telegraph pole and thin asa willow-wand, he had once marched fifty miles without water when he’d been cut off in the desert and had reported for duty the day after his return, apparently not much the worse for wear. Barry Lloyd Evans, who came from Aberystwyth but had somehow managed to be a milkman in Bradford, was known as ‘Evans the Bomb’ because he was a mortar expert. As Private Rich, not very happily married to a Welsh girl he’d met during training in Cardigan, liked to say, Evans was like all bloody Welshmen and could not only sing like an angel but also argue the hind leg off a donkey.
    Finally there was Private Syzling from Cleckheaton. Syzling was supposed to be a Piat man, the operator of a Projector Infantry Anti-Tank, that spring-loaded ‘Heath Robinson’ device which gave no flash but had one or two disconcerting habits which Syzling never seemed able to master. When firing on a trajectory below horizontal, for instance, the bomb had an embarrassing habit of sliding out of the tube to fall at the firer’s feet. This was something which Syzling never seemed able to grasp, and it regularly threw his platoon commander, Lieutenant Deacon, into a screeching fury. In the end, in fact, he had accepted that Syzling would never make a Piat man, given the weapon to someone else and banished Syzling to outer darkness with more menial tasks.
    Known inevitably to his associates – not friends, because he didn’t have any, and hardly comrades, because he spent all his time stealing from them what items of equipment he lost – as ‘Frying Tonight’, Private Syzling was one of the King’s Hard Bargains, always in trouble, always scruffy, always minus half his kit, and always unreliable. Along with Puddephatt – almost as bad but not quite, because nobody could ever be as bad as Syzling – he made life a permanent misery for Lieutenant Deacon.
    Lieutenant Deacon, smooth-faced and fair-haired as a girl, was the product of a happy home and a good school; an only son who had everything he wanted, a doting mother, a sober father, two adoring sisters and a place in the family firm when he was free of the army. Private Syzling couldn’t have been more different. His school had been a street-corner slum school, black and depressing, and before he had been swept up into the army he had been unemployed. When the army had finished with him, he would without doubt be unemployed again because he was virtually unemployable.
    Deacon found Syzling’s personality about as endearing as a bloated vulture’s; to Syzling, Deacon was as exciting as a pile of sand. But together they were better crowd drawers than Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. When Deacon started on Syzling, everybody’s head was cocked so as not to miss the gems that fell from his lips. Syzling on Deacon was never less than quotable.
    ‘Hitler’s secret weapon,’ Deacon liked to call Syzling.
    ‘That bloody Deacon,’ Syzling would retaliate. ‘He’s as mean as cat shit and I wish he’d stick his head up his arse and get ’isself sold as a jug ’andle.’
    ‘They’re as good as Laurel and Hardy,’ Fletcher-Smith observed.
    In fact, that was very much what they were – Deacon, too clever by a mile, pompous and careful of his dignity; Syzling, dim as a Toc H Lamp, blank-faced, perpetually puzzled, but possessing an animal instinct for comfort that always managed to acquire for him those things like food, warmth, drink, girls, that all Deacon’s