Read Online The Absolutist by John Boyne - Free Book Online

all a terrific lark. “All of it. These idiots. This place. We shouldn’t be here, none of us should.”
    “I’ve wanted to be here since it started.”
    He glances at me, thinks he has the measure of me already, and snorts contemptuously as he shakes his head and looks away. Crushing the spent tab beneath his heel, he opens a silver cigarette case and sighs when it reveals itself to be empty.
    “Tristan Sadler,” I say, extending a hand now, not wanting to get my military career off on a sour note. He stares at it for five seconds or more and I wonder whether I will have to draw it back in humiliation, but finally he shakes it and nods abruptly.
    “Arthur Wolf,” he says.
    “Are you from London?” I ask him.
    “Essex,” he replies. “Well, Chelmsford. You?”
    “Chiswick.”
    “Nice there,” he says. “I have an aunt who lives in Chiswick. Elsie Tyler. You don’t know her, I suppose?”
    “No,” I reply, shaking my head.
    “She runs a florist on Turnham Green.”
    “I’m from Sadler & Son, the butcher on the high street.”
    “Presumably you’re the son.”
    “I used to be,” I say.
    “I bet you volunteered, didn’t you?” he asks, more contempt seeping into his voice now. “Just turned eighteen?”
    “Yes,” I lie. In fact my eighteenth birthday is still five months away but I have no intention of admitting this here in case I find myself back with a hod in my hand before the week is out.
    “I bet you couldn’t wait, am I right? I bet it was your present to yourself, marching down to the sergeant major, yes, sir, no, sir, anything you say, sir, and offering yourself up on a crucifix.”
    “I would have joined earlier,” I tell him. “Only they wouldn’t let me in on account of my age.”
    He laughs but doesn’t pursue it any further, simply shaking his head as if I’m not worth wasting his time on. He is a man apart, this Wolf.
    A moment later and I sense a commotion in the ranks. I turn to watch as three men in heavy, starched uniforms emerge from a nearby barrack and stride towards us. Everything about them stinks of authority and I feel a rush of something unexpected. Apprehension, certainly. Desire, perhaps.
    “Good afternoon, gentlemen,” says the man in the centre, the eldest of the three, the shortest, the fattest, the one in charge. His tone is friendly, which surprises me. “Follow me, won’t you? We’re not quite where we ought to be.”
    We gather in a pack and shuffle along behind him and I take the opportunity to look around at the other men, most of whom are smoking cigarettes and continuing low conversations. I pull my own tin from my pocket and offer one to Wolf, who doesn’t hesitate.
    “Thanks,” he says, before, to my annoyance, asking for a second for later on. I shrug, irritated, but say all right, and he slips another from under the holding cord and perches it above his ear. “Looks like he’s the one in charge,” he says, nodding in the direction of the sergeant. “I need a word with him. Not thathe’s likely to listen to me, of course. But I’ll have my say, I promise you that.”
    “Your say about what?” I ask.
    “Take a look around you, Sadler,” he replies. “Only a handful of these people will still be alive six months from now. What do you think of that?”
    I don’t think anything of it. What am I supposed to think? I know that men die—their numbers are reported in the newspapers every day. But they’re just names, strings of letters printed together as news type. I don’t know any of them. They don’t mean much to me yet.
    “Take my advice,” he says. “Follow my lead and get the hell out of here if you can.”
    We stop now in the centre of the parade ground and the sergeant and his two corporals turn to face us. We stand in no particular order but he stares and remains silent until, without a word to each other, we find ourselves separating into a rectangle, ten men long and four men deep, each distanced from the next man by