The Blasphemer: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

over the sides. For the benefit of a newsreel cameraman whosehand is turning a crank at an unvarying pace, they cheer and raise their helmets. In the fields beyond them are row upon row of white, well-guyed bell-tents, arranged as symmetrically as gravestones in a military cemetery.
    There are some tents waiting for the battalion, but not enough. Around a hundred men have to lie in the open, finding space wherever they can. Andrew and a few others from his platoon opt for a ruined barn. Despite their exhaustion from the march, sleep does not come easily. The pockmarked walls dance with faint colours: red and green flares being fired on the horizon. Also, they are sharing the barn with rats. Andrew feels, or imagines he feels, the straw moving beneath him.
    Some members of the platoon regard the ubiquitous rats as companions in adversity, others as mere targets for bayonet practice. One private amused himself by baiting the end of his bayonet with a piece of bacon and shooting the first rat that came to eat it. But only one. He found himself on a charge for wasting ammunition. And bacon.
    Andrew’s attitude is different. He is not so complacent. In the three weeks he has been away from England, he has developed a morbid loathing of rats. It is to do with the bluntness of their muzzles and the glassy lifelessness of their eyes. It is also to do with the way they move, either trotting with purpose in a straight line, their hindquarters and long tails raised, or scurrying for cover – fat shadows in his peripheral vision.
    But in moments of self-awareness, the soldier recognizes his hatred is varnished with cold, premonitory fear. He has heard how the rats at the Front are quite unlike the beach rats at the Étaples ‘Bull Ring’. Here they grow to the size of footballs, bloated on the flesh of dead men. They usually go for the eyes first and then burrow their way right inside the corpse. When Andrew closes his eyes to sleep he can imagine the rank of rats heading with a steady, determined trot towards him, their coarse fur matted in the rain, their dark eyes fixing him, sizing him up.
    He has encountered rats before. As a plumber in Market Drayton before the war he was sometimes obliged to inspect sewage pipes.But the rats he had seen then never bothered him. They were more frightened than he was, apart from anything else. And now, as he lies awake gazing at the stars through the rafters of the barn, the Market Drayton rats are a world away. When was he last in his home town? Five months? Five years? A lifetime ago. He recalls the day he and another young man from his firm, William Macintyre, answered Kitchener’s call for volunteers. As they cycled together to the recruiting office, a room in the town hall, they teased each other: about how one wouldn’t be able to shoot straight; about how the other wouldn’t know the difference between a stopcock and a Mills bomb. They were staggered to find a long queue of straw boaters and cloth caps snaking out of the hall and into the street. They parked their cycles and joined the end of it, playfully pushing each other out of the way.
    Andrew allows himself a smile at this memory and turns his head to see Macintyre has managed to fall asleep. They have known each other since school. Took up their apprenticeships together, having both turned fourteen in the same week. The money wasn’t bad but they knew that plumbing was a temporary calling, a means to an end. Their joint aspiration was to form a music-hall double act. In their tea breaks at work, they had experimented with vaudeville songs and comedy turns.
    In the semi-darkness, Andrew tries to remember some of their routines but they remain out of reach, his mind too numb to summon them. Instead he reaches across to find his friend’s hand. Macintyre grips it as a reflex without waking up. They had both found it funny when the medical officer had tapped their knees at the recruiting office. The memory prompts another smile.