Lord of the Nutcracker Men Read online

  The bell rang again, a little louder and closer. I thought of the postman pedaling along, carrying his message from cold Mr. Death.

  I stood up. No one lived farther from Cliffe than Auntie Ivy. There was only empty road to the south, all the way to the railway station.

  The bell jangled.

  “Go past,” I said to myself. “Oh, please, make him go past. Don't let him stop here.”

  But he did. The postman shouted out, “Hello!” and the bell jangled again. “Ivy! Hello.”

  I got up from the mud, staggered and fell. My barbed wire snagged on my boot, and I kicked it off. I stomped over the battlefield, over the trenches; I ran from the garden, around to the front as Auntie Ivy came thumping down the steps.

  In the middle of the road stood the old postman, holding his bicycle at a slant. In his hand was a sheet of paper the color of biscuits.

  “Go away!” shrieked Auntie Ivy. She raced through the gate and battered against the postman. His bicycle crashed to the ground. “Keep going,” she screamed. “Go on!”

  He caught her in his arms, the paper crumpling. “It's news,” he said. “It's great news.”

  Auntie Ivy held on to his shoulder. She was crying.

  “I'm telling everyone,” said the postman. “I'm making the rounds, and now I'm going to have the church bells rung.”

  “For mercy's sake, why?” asked Auntie Ivy.

  “A victory!” The old postman danced her in a jig. “There's been a great victory in France.”

  I felt almost a shock. “Is it over?” I asked.

  “No. Lord, no,” said the postman. “But we pushed the Germans back. All along the line.” He picked up his bicycle and rang the bell. Then he leaned across it and kissed my auntie on the cheek.

  “Gracious,” she said.

  “Must be off.” He swung his leg over the bar and went weaving down the road, giving his bell one last jingle.

  Auntie Ivy looked at me. “You're white as a sheet,” she said. “It's all right, Johnny. It was only news.”

  My knees were trembling. “Auntie,” I said. “I think I might have done it.”

  “Done what?” she asked.

  “The victory,” I told her. “I had a battle with my soldiers. I pushed the Germans back, and now it's really happened. I think it's—”

  “What rubbish!” she said.

  “But, Auntie,” I said. “It happened before. When Dad went over the top my soldier did too.”

  “This is nonsense,” she said. “This is utter nonsense.”

  She started off toward the house, and I grabbed her purple dress. “Just listen,” I said.

  “I don't listen to rubbish.” She knocked my hand away and kept on going.

  “Auntie!” I cried.

  “Those are wooden soldiers you've got in the garden,” she said. “Just little wooden soldiers.”

  I ran in front of her, but she swept on by. Her shoes went thunk and thunk beside me. Again I grabbed her dress, and dragged her to a stop.

  “Let me go,” she said.

  “What if it's true?” I asked.

  “Johnny Briggs, I thought you had some sense,” she said. “I thought you were smarter than that.” She wrenched her dress from my hands and thumped up the steps to the house.

  I went back to the garden. My barbed wire was pulled away, a bit of trench ruined where I'd fallen. And there, smashed into the ground, was the little model of my father. As gray as the frost, his face stared up from the dirt.

  “Oh, no,” I said. “No!” He looked like a corpse.

  Far away, the church bell tolled. It was a single deep “bong” of a sound, softened by the distance. It tolled again, and then a third time, and I pictured that enormous bell swinging faster in its great stone steeple. I saw, in my mind, the postman clinging to the rope, using all his weight to drag it down, letting it lift him up, clear from the floor. The bell tolled and tolled.

  I dropped to my knees. I plucked the wooden man from the ground, but only half his body came away. The crack that had opened down his middle now split him into two.

  I felt such a rush of dread that it made me almost dizzy. I snatched up the pieces and rushed to the house, shouting for my auntie. She came lumbering into the kitchen, and found me weeping at the door.

  She stared at my hands and scowled. “Here I thought you'd gone and broken your arm,” she said. “And it's only a toy. What a fuss to make over a wooden toy.”

  I held it out in my cupped hands. They were shaking, and the halves of the figure knocked together. “It's my dad,” I sobbed. “He's broken in two and I'm afraid he's dead.”

  “Oh, Johnny,” she said. She put her hands around mine, her fingers like icicles. She squeezed very gently. “It doesn't mean anything. Really it doesn't.”

  I sniffed and cried. “What if he's dead?” I asked. “What if I killed him?”

  “You haven't.” She stooped down until our eyes were level. “Do you hear me? It's just a piece of wood. Nothing more than that.”

  “I have to fix him,” I said. “Auntie, I've got to.”

  “Then I'll get the glue pot.”

  “Hurry!” I shouted.

  It might have been the first time in her life that my Auntie Ivy sat down on the floor. With her dress all puddled around her, her legs tucked underneath, she looked as though she had no legs, or as though she'd sunken through the floor. She put on her tiny spectacles and took the soldier from me.

  “We'll fix him up,” she said. “Then we'll put a bandage on him so the glue will set.”

  Her hands trembled. Her eyes squinted behind her tiny specs, and her mouth squashed in until I saw her teeth and gums.

  I leaned forward, watching Auntie smear the wood with glue. She pressed the pieces together.

  “They're crooked!” I cried.

  She straightened them out. Beads of glue squirted from the wood, bubbling along the crack like pus from a wound. In the distance, a second bell joined in with the first, and then a third as the ringers arrived at the church. The halves of my wooden man came together perfectly, just as the bells rang a wonderful chime, a beautiful chorus.

  Auntie Ivy wrapped the man in gauze, slipped a pin through the bandage, then passed him to me. He felt fragile and light, as though weak from the wounds.

  “Thank you,” I said. The bells went on and on, their sounds flowing on top of each other, cascading down like musical rivers.

  “We should have a celebration.” Auntie stood up, all her bones popping. “In honor of the victory. I'll make a cake and we'll have a splendid supper.”

  “But I have to go to Mr. Tuttle's house,” I told her. “You know it's Saturday.”

  “Invite him!” She fiddled with the glue pot, pressing the lid into place. “We'll have chicken, I think.”

  “Really? A chicken?” My mouth watered at the thought of that rare treat. “It's not even Christmas yet.”

  “But we have to celebrate,” said Auntie Ivy. “And poor Mr. Tuttle will have to fend for himself if you don't want him to come.”

  “I suppose I can ask him,” I said.

  She smiled. “All right. If that's what you want.”

  I took the wooden man back to the garden. As the bells chimed, I stood him in the trench. The other soldiers cheered to see him back, and Dad laughed and said, “No fear, lads. I'm right as rain. I wasn't hurt at all.”

  But I worried about him—about my real father. I could see the spot in the old German line where his wooden figure had raided the trenches. I went over the top last night, and I'm quivering in my boots this morning to think what a narrow escape I had. Farther down the garden was the place where Pierre had been smashed by a stone, the spot where his body had appeared in the mud. The most astonishing things sometimes turn up when the parapet collapses.

  The bells stopped, their last chime a tingling echo. It seemed that the whole war had gone like that. I remembered marching my nutcracker soldiers across the floor when they had no army to fight. Then
Dad had given me a Tommy, and Britain had joined the war. He'd given me more Tommies, and Frenchmen, and soon the real Germans had fallen back at the Marne.

  That feeling of goose bumps came back to me. It seemed that whatever I did with my nutcracker men would happen soon after in France. And I looked at my father, split down the middle, and felt sick all over again.

  But I had meant to raid the trenches. I had meant to push the Germans back. And breaking the figure was only an accident. Maybe accidents didn't count.

  I wondered if I should take the little soldier to Mr. Tuttle's house. It might keep my real dad safe if I took the model from the trenches. It might even bring him home, I thought, if I took that wooden soldier far enough away. The distance to Mr. Tuttle's house would be a hundred miles or more to him. Then I smiled and picked up the wooden man. And I stopped again.

  What if I took the toy away and my father disappeared? What if he went “missing in action” like all the others in the paper? So I put him back in the trenches, and went off to see Mr. Tuttle.

  I found him behind his house, staring at the roses. He heard me coming and turned around. “Oh, Johnny,” he said. He sounded disappointed.

  “Are you waiting for someone?” I asked.

  “Always,” he said. “Every day I think a boy will surely come and make his confession. But I'm afraid my die is cast.” He stepped up to his roses, and his hand went out and took the tips of their branches. “In just a few weeks I'll be done with the classroom, and perhaps with Cliffe as well.”

  “Why?”

  “They're not pulling through.” He squeezed the branches, then his hand fell away. “But enough of that. You've come for your lesson, of course.”

  “And something else,” I said. “Auntie's cooking chicken. To celebrate the victory. She'd like you to come.”

  “She would?”

  “Yes, sir. You could see my soldiers, too.” “The crowning glory. Well, thank you, Johnny.” He bowed like a lord. “I accept your invitation.”

  He was happier than I'd ever seen him, so happy that he canceled our lesson. He was still smiling that evening, when he came to the door in his overcoat and old gray suit.

  Our supper was cooking, and Auntie Ivy was setting the table with her best china. Mr. Tuttle sniffed at the wonderful odors that came from the kitchen. “It smells like ambrosia,” he said.

  “Oh, mercy no,” said Auntie Ivy, blushing. “It's only chicken.”

  Mr. Tuttle was nearly half again her height. Beside her, he looked tall and nearly handsome.

  “It will be another half hour,” she told me. “You'll have to entertain your visitor.”

  I took him outside, and he gazed down—grinning— at the little soldiers. “What an army,” he said. “It makes me feel like Zeus to stand above them like this.”

  “They had a fierce battle,” I said. “The Germans were pushed back all along the front.”

  I was hoping he would say, “That's just what happened in France.” But he only peered at the men. “Why is that fellow bandaged?” he asked. “Are you pretending that there's something wrong with him?”

  He made me feel small. To him, I was only playing with toy soldiers. He didn't know there was so much more than that.

  “Is your little man wounded?” he asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Is he sick?”

  “There's nothing wrong with him.”

  Mr. Tuttle looked puzzled, and I knew he could never understand. Sarah had already guessed what my wooden men could do, but Mr. Tuttle never would. It was the sort of thing that adults wouldn't believe.

  An hour later, we were sitting down to a supper that was the nicest I'd had in Cliffe.

  Mr. Tuttle and Auntie Ivy talked about the school and the church and the minister. They made me think of my parents, and our suppers before the war. Auntie Ivy kept looking at Mr. Tuttle in the same way that my mother would look at my father. She passed him potatoes and peas and more and more chicken. And we never once talked about the victory in France. It was as though there wasn't a war at all.

  CHAPTER 14

  December 15, 1914

  Dearest Johnny,

  You may have heard by now that we launched a huge attack against the Huns. Well, the funniest thing happened to me.

  It started with the usual barrage, that whine and thump of shells that sets my nerves tingling. I was in the rear when the first round went off, and the air seemed torn in two. All that day I listened to it, and watched the earth heave and churn. At night I moved up to the front, into a trench that was so packed with men that we stood shoulder to shoulder, with nothing to do but wait for the appointed hour to arrive. The bit of sky that we could see pulsed with dim flashes of light.

  As dawn approached, the sky grew lighter. I saw the faces of the men beside me, and then of those beside them, and then of more and more and more. Each man seemed utterly alone, looking up at the sky or down at the ground. Some of them prayed. Some exchanged letters and little packets of pictures. And the time for our attack, that appointed hour, crept closer and closer.

  We got our tot of rum. We knocked it back. The lieutenants stood up on the raised platform. In their neat brown uniforms, their darker hats, they looked like sparrows hopping there. Each wore a silver whistle at his neck, a pistol at his belt. And the time came closer, just moments away.

  The guns stopped, and the silence was dreadful. We fixed our bayonets with a clack of metal, a sound that rippled through a mile of trenches, from thousands and thousands of rifles. Just seconds to wait.

  Wooden ladders lifted up and fell in place. The lieutenants hopped up on the rungs. Their whistles blew like shrill, clear chirps. And up we went in a horde of men, in a roar of cheers and shouts.

  I was one of the first. I clambered from the trench, slipped, and rose again. Then I found my feet, and for as far as I could see on either side there were others rising from the trench, surging forward. It seemed that they came from the earth, that the mud was shaping itself into men. And we went forward, shoulder to shoulder across the no-man's-land.

  The rising sun glittered on our bayonets. It shone along the coils of wire. And it was a glorious thing to be there, to be marching against the Hun with twenty thousand comrades. I plodded along, full of this sense of power, of being part of a huge and glorious thing. We'd been told not to run, but it was all I could do to keep my step with the others, to hold myself back. I cheered and shouted.

  And then the shelling started. The shelling and machine guns. Great holes opened in the air, to be filled with whumps and shrieks and howls of the most unearthly sort. Our line wavered and carried on, like a row of grass that the wind had torn across. Gaps appeared and closed again. The men that had come from the earth settled back to the earth. They just laid themselves down and didn't get up.

  I reached the wire. It was meant to be shattered by the barrage, but there it stood, in coils and thickets as strong as ever. It grabbed my ankles and pulled me down. It grabbed my hands as I struggled to free myself.

  Men went stepping past me. Bullets whistled all around. There were smoke and thumps and mud splashed up across me. And I rolled and twisted in the wire. Then someone pulled me free, and someone took my other arm, and they swept me up. It seemed they pulled me through the wire, that they shredded me in two and joined me on the other side.

  No one was marching anymore. Everyone was running, some without rifles, some without boots. We raced along, through craters, over mud. I saw the lip of the trench ahead, fire bursting from machine gun mouths. We stepped up to the parapet and hurled ourselves over the edge, tumbling down to the platform, down to the ooze of mud and water. I looked up and saw soldiers all around me, men in British khaki.

  I marveled that we'd taken the trench and driven the Germans off. I cheered for the great victory. I was amazed at first how much old Fritz's trench looked just like ours. And then I realized that it was ours. I'd only been turned around in the smoke and the madness, and I was back
where I'd started, in the same old ditch I'd left.

  It's rather a grand joke, don't you think?

  A few men crossed the wire. Even fewer reached the German line. But I got farther than most, and the whole thing was a miserable failure, a lash-up of the worst sort.

  Oh, Johnny. My dear Johnny. It's plain to me now that I won't be home for Christmas this year. Perhaps not for the next, but we shan't worry about that right now. I'm sorry to let you down, but I hope you'll understand.

  Enclosed is a small figure. If he looks a bit odd, it's because my hands were shaking rather badly.

  All my love, forever and ever,

  Dad

  Auntie Ivy put the letter down. She didn't move for a long time; then she trembled once, and wiped her eyes. “You see?” she said, and tried to smile. “Your father's fine, Johnny. You worried over nothing.”

  “But is he still all right?” I asked.

  She frowned.

  “Is he?” I pulled at the paper that was wrapped round and round the newest soldier. “He didn't write that letter this morning. Yesterday they had the victory. Maybe yesterday he was—”

  “Don't say it,” she said. “Don't even think it, Johnny.”

  “But, Auntie. This wasn't a victory. It was just a big mess.” I tore off a layer of wrapping. “And the newspaper said it was a great victory.”

  “Maybe the newspapers got it wrong,” said Auntie. “It wouldn't be the first time, would it?”

  “I think the letters haven't caughten up,” I said.

  “Caughten up,” she scoffed. “Don't let Mr. Tuttle hear you say that.”

  “But how can I know?” I said. “How can I know he's all right?”

  “Because he is,” she said. “Because he always is and always will be. I just won't stand for you thinking anything else.”

  “But—”

  I shredded the paper, and the man tumbled out.

  “Auntie!” I cried.

  It was horrid and twisted, a tortured little man. Auntie Ivy gasped as it rolled across the table.

  “Dear mercy,” she breathed.

  It seemed to twitch on the table, its arms groping out, its legs all disarrayed. It looked awful, barely human, like something from a nightmare.