Read Online Everyone Brave Is Forgiven by Chris Cleave - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Chris Cleave
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spoon.) It was a struggle, with one’s body shivering right down into the deep muscle, to concentrate on staying as dry as one could and not simply bursting into tears.
Dusk came, and with it the rumble of an engine. A canvas-backed truck, its slotted lights throwing a demure downward glance in the mist. It drew up, engine running. An orange glow from the cab, the driver smoking. The sergeant major jumped up on the hood to address them.
“RIGHT, YOU LUCKY LADS! THIS WEATHER ISN’T LOOKING TOO CLEVER AND SINCE I AM A BENEVOLENT GOD, I AM TREATING YOU ALL TO A NICE WARM NIGHT IN BARRACKS! PACKS ON, HOP IN NOW, AND DON’T SAY DADDY ISN’T GOOD TO YOU!”
The men cheered. Alistair wrestled his stiff limbs over the tailgate and collapsed into the laughing crush of men on the benches in the back of the truck. The man to his left slapped him on the back and offered him a dry cigarette. Alistair smoked it wolfishly. With an ache so terrible that it was funny, the feeling returned to his hands and feet.
All around him now the company bent to the task of complaining. Their faces lit erratically in the drawing glow of cigarettes, the men named the plain an evil place and enumerated the bodily modifications and inventive sodomies they would vest upon the person of Adolf Hitler, at war’s end, for causing them to have spent winter weeks on Salisbury, when after all they were handsome young men with important peacetime work to do, such as drinking and philandering and sleeping both of those things off.
They called the Army an arse hat and its brass hats brass arseholes. They denounced the ice wind blowing through the canvas canopy, and they cursed the hardness of the truck’s metal benches. They articulated the opinion that the optimal stowage location for those benches would be up the arse of the truck driver, to whom it was pointed out that the small effort of bringing seat cushions with him from barracks might have been a nice touch.
Next they insulted the boot-makers who had made the boots they all wore, which were constructed entirely of hate and which kept the freezing water in but not out. These boots were to be shoved up the boot-makers’ arses.
Now the men expressed the hope that the designers of the Lee-Enfield MkIII rifle might experience, when urinating, defecating, or ejaculating, a blockage of the same unshiftable cussedness that the men had experienced when prone in the frozen mud of the firing range and trying with numb fingers to persuade the magazine to surrender a bullet to the breech. It was decided that all of the boot-makers (with the boots already in situ up their arses) should be put up Lee and Enfield’s arses: the left-boot-makers up Mr. Lee’s and the right-boot-makers up Mr. Enfield’s. Finally Lee and Enfield should be inserted headfirst up each other’s arses, since they were so very keen on breech loading.
There was nothing the military had that the men did not believe would be more properly stowed within the concavities of other personages, animals or objects. There in the budding warmth in the back of the truck, while their wet clothes steamed and a canteen of spirits was passed from hand to hand, the men squared away the whole Army, calibrating every one of its tyrannies and stowing it like a Russian doll up the arse of the next-smallest tyranny, until the whole great apparatus of war seemed certain to find its inevitable resting place, deep within the German Führer’s fundament.
In short, the men were happy. From the litany of their grievances only the sergeant major was absent, since it was his intervention that had gifted this sudden warmth and this freeing of tongues. Alistair had to hand it to the magnificent bastard: he was not without genius. Over two frightful weeks he had driven the company to the brink and then, sensing desertion or mutiny, he had sidestepped like a matador. Now, as the wind outside rose to gale force, the sergeant major sat aloof in the cab with the driver,
Dusk came, and with it the rumble of an engine. A canvas-backed truck, its slotted lights throwing a demure downward glance in the mist. It drew up, engine running. An orange glow from the cab, the driver smoking. The sergeant major jumped up on the hood to address them.
“RIGHT, YOU LUCKY LADS! THIS WEATHER ISN’T LOOKING TOO CLEVER AND SINCE I AM A BENEVOLENT GOD, I AM TREATING YOU ALL TO A NICE WARM NIGHT IN BARRACKS! PACKS ON, HOP IN NOW, AND DON’T SAY DADDY ISN’T GOOD TO YOU!”
The men cheered. Alistair wrestled his stiff limbs over the tailgate and collapsed into the laughing crush of men on the benches in the back of the truck. The man to his left slapped him on the back and offered him a dry cigarette. Alistair smoked it wolfishly. With an ache so terrible that it was funny, the feeling returned to his hands and feet.
All around him now the company bent to the task of complaining. Their faces lit erratically in the drawing glow of cigarettes, the men named the plain an evil place and enumerated the bodily modifications and inventive sodomies they would vest upon the person of Adolf Hitler, at war’s end, for causing them to have spent winter weeks on Salisbury, when after all they were handsome young men with important peacetime work to do, such as drinking and philandering and sleeping both of those things off.
They called the Army an arse hat and its brass hats brass arseholes. They denounced the ice wind blowing through the canvas canopy, and they cursed the hardness of the truck’s metal benches. They articulated the opinion that the optimal stowage location for those benches would be up the arse of the truck driver, to whom it was pointed out that the small effort of bringing seat cushions with him from barracks might have been a nice touch.
Next they insulted the boot-makers who had made the boots they all wore, which were constructed entirely of hate and which kept the freezing water in but not out. These boots were to be shoved up the boot-makers’ arses.
Now the men expressed the hope that the designers of the Lee-Enfield MkIII rifle might experience, when urinating, defecating, or ejaculating, a blockage of the same unshiftable cussedness that the men had experienced when prone in the frozen mud of the firing range and trying with numb fingers to persuade the magazine to surrender a bullet to the breech. It was decided that all of the boot-makers (with the boots already in situ up their arses) should be put up Lee and Enfield’s arses: the left-boot-makers up Mr. Lee’s and the right-boot-makers up Mr. Enfield’s. Finally Lee and Enfield should be inserted headfirst up each other’s arses, since they were so very keen on breech loading.
There was nothing the military had that the men did not believe would be more properly stowed within the concavities of other personages, animals or objects. There in the budding warmth in the back of the truck, while their wet clothes steamed and a canteen of spirits was passed from hand to hand, the men squared away the whole Army, calibrating every one of its tyrannies and stowing it like a Russian doll up the arse of the next-smallest tyranny, until the whole great apparatus of war seemed certain to find its inevitable resting place, deep within the German Führer’s fundament.
In short, the men were happy. From the litany of their grievances only the sergeant major was absent, since it was his intervention that had gifted this sudden warmth and this freeing of tongues. Alistair had to hand it to the magnificent bastard: he was not without genius. Over two frightful weeks he had driven the company to the brink and then, sensing desertion or mutiny, he had sidestepped like a matador. Now, as the wind outside rose to gale force, the sergeant major sat aloof in the cab with the driver,
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