Lord of the Nutcracker Men Read online

  The sound is tremendous. It shakes the air.

  As you might suppose, I haven't had much sleep. I've spent the night carving a little officer, enclosed. It will be up to him to lead us over the top when we march against old Fritz.

  The lads think I have nerves of steel to sit here carving and painting. But I find it rather relaxing.

  I have to hurry now, as in just a few minutes we'll get the order to stand to. I don't know yet what the day will bring, but it can't be worse than the darkness.

  I miss you very much.

  All my love,

  Dad

  It was like a story cut off at the wrong place, with the ending not quite there. I was left feeling funny inside, proud and worried and sad all at once. I held the wad of crumpled paper that had come in the parcel, feeling the shape of the little man inside. I didn't want to open it.

  “Read the letter again,” I said.

  “You just heard it,” said Auntie.

  “Please?” I said. “

  No, Johnny. Even if I wanted to, you don't deserve it. Not after the lies you've just told me.” She read the one from my mother. It talked about soldiers drilling in Hyde Park, and the suffragettes' battle to find work for women. But I barely listened.

  I heard the guns in my mind. I saw the earth flying up, and my dad whittling away, his wood chips scattering. He might have been talking about the same battle I'd had in the garden as I'd moved the wooden man with his tiny gun right up to the front.

  I worked at the crumpled paper until the new soldier fell out. It was a lieutenant, just like Sarah's father, wrapped in a trench coat spotted with painted mud. At his neck hung a whistle, a little tube of silver.

  Auntie Ivy finished Mum's letter. “Now off you go, Johnny,” she said. “And I don't want to see you until supper.”

  “Can I take my guy to Cliffe?” I asked.

  “If you're back in an hour. If you stay away from the farm.”

  I didn't even want to go there. “I heard someone screaming,” I said. “I tried to tell you, but you wouldn't listen.”

  “Then you shouldn't have come in telling lies.”

  “What happened, Auntie?” I asked. “I saw the postman there.”

  “He brought a telegram to Mr. and Mrs. Sims, Johnny. Murdoch, their son, just died in France.” She got up from the table, and gathered her knitting. “Mr. Tuttle met the postman, who told him all about it. The Simses thought their boy was coming home. They'd been told as much. Murdoch had been wounded in the leg, and he was coming home. That was the last his parents heard, until the wire came today.”

  She was holding the wool and her needles, but she put them down again. “Screaming, was she? Oh, it's dreadful. Johnny, I'll walk with you as far as the farm.”

  I didn't have a cart or a wagon. I had to drag my guy along the road, through dirt and patches of mud. His little cloth cap fell off as he tumbled behind me. Then a leg dropped away, and Auntie Ivy carried the pieces until we reached the gates of Storey's farm.

  “Don't dally,” she told me. “And be sure you stop at the next house. That's where Mr. Tuttle lives.”

  Auntie Ivy went up to the farm, and I lugged my guy to Mr. Tuttle's house. I propped him against the hedge, put his cap in place, and chanted my little song:

  “Remember remember the fifth of November,

  Gunpowder treason and plot

  We see no reason why this merry season

  Should ever be forgot.”

  Mr. Tuttle appeared from the back of his house, and I shouted out, “A penny for the guy!”

  He didn't come any closer. “Johnny?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “Come to the garden.”

  He led me there, round the side of his house. “Look at this,” he said. “Look at my roses.”

  I felt an awful thump in my heart to see his garden again, the same one I had found from the footpaths. It was Mr. Tuttle's roses that had stuffed my monstrous guy.

  “I'm trying to save what I can,” he said, going straight to the bushes. He pulled the branches apart. “See how they're splintered? The frost will get in there, and the mulch that might have kept them warm is gone.”

  Mr. Tuttle let the bushes snap together. He stood up. “I'm livid,” he said. “I've never been more angry. These roses are all I have; they're like children to me.”

  I hung my head.

  “Do you know who did this?”

  My heart, which had sunk, fluttered again to think he didn't suspect me. “No, sir,” I mumbled.

  “Well, it's no concern of yours. You only came to get a penny for your guy.”

  I couldn't let him see it. The thorns of his roses stuck out from every part of the guy. “You don't have to give me a penny,” I said.

  “Nonsense,” said Mr. Tuttle. He groped through his pockets and pulled out a florin. It was riches to me, twenty-four times what I'd asked for. “I'll give you this if you can tell me why I should.”

  I thought it was obvious. “Because I have to buy fire-works,” I said.

  He smiled, and I felt sorry for him. “But why, Johnny? What's the story behind the fireworks and guys?”

  “Treason and plot?” I guessed.

  He could tell I didn't know, but pretended that I might. “Indeed,” he said. “Guy Fawkes was a Catholic, wasn't he? He hated James the First, the Protestant King, and tried to blow up the Parliament buildings on the day that all the Lords and all the Commons and the King himself would be there. But he was caught, wasn't he? He was arrested in the coal cellar with his barrels full of powder, ready to set them off on November fifth. He was hanged for treason, as you say.” Mr. Tuttle held out his hand. “There you go.”

  I stared at the silver coin pinched in his fingers. I'd rarely owned a shilling, let alone a florin. But something inside me wouldn't let me take it. “I didn't really know,” I admitted.

  “You do now.” He pressed the coin in my palm. “I wish all the boys were as honest as you, Johnny.”

  I felt miserable.

  “Now, don't fret about my roses. Perhaps I can still save something.”

  I went on to the village, though not as cheerily as before. I sat by the Victoria Inn, with the gangly guy leaning against the wall like an old boozer, and the men smiled and the ladies giggled as they passed. I looked up at them all, shouting, “Pennies for the guy!”

  All I got was a grubby old farthing, one penny and a ha'penny. Then I dragged my guy to the hardware store and went in to buy my fireworks. I asked for rockets.

  “Rockets?” said the old geezer inside. “Are you mad, boy? Don't you know there's a war going on?”

  “But it's Guy Fawkes Day,” I said.

  “No rockets. No Catherine wheels. It's only what's left over from last year, and the best of it's gone already.”

  I went away with two whizz-bangs and an old, bent tube of Crimson Rain, feeling as though all my joy in the day ahead had vanished in Mr. Tuttle's garden.

  In the morning I started school again. I walked through the village, kicking at stones, and Sarah caught me up at the post office. She came too suddenly for me to go a different way, and though I tried to keep ahead of her, she could walk very fast for a girl. She skipped along at my side with my satchel on her shoulder, and the boys teased me in all new ways to see us arrive together at the school.

  They shouted, “Sarah's got a boyfriend!” And, “Johnny's going to get maaaa-ried!”

  In class, Mr. Tuttle singled me out for his questions about history and geography. He glowed when I knew the answers and coached me when I didn't, but I wished he would just leave me alone. I didn't want the boys to think that he liked me or, worse, to think I was smart.

  When school finally ended, I was first out the door. I ran all the way home, frightened the boys would chase me.

  CHAPTER 6

  November 3, 1914

  Dearest Johnny,

  I have to admit that the front is not quite what I'd expected. To call the line
a trench is rather kind. It's really just a ditch scraped through the mud, filled to my ankles with foul, brown water. All the dirt is piled behind us and before us, at the edge of a no-man's-land that's even worse in daylight than it is in darkness. Flat, black, broken by shells, it is divided by coils of barbed wire that glisten in the sun, going on and on as far as I can see.

  Scattered across this no-man's-land lie men who seem to be sleeping, all flung about in the mud. A leg pokes up from here, a head from there. Yet not one of them moves, not from hour to hour or day to day, until the wind breathes across them, and their tattered clothes flap mournfully. In a funny way, I think of them as survivors, the last of the great armies that battled back and forth in the days and weeks before I came. The Huns attacked repeatedly all along this sector, and twice they captured the trench where I sit, only to be driven back within an hour or two. So the ground has been churned and churned again, until all sorts of things are buried in it now.

  The smell, I have to tell you, is atrocious. And the rats can give you shivers. We have to share the trench with an army of them, a gruesome brown army that spends the days huddled in our hiding holes, in our kits and blankets. When darkness comes, they go swarming over the top to forage through the night across that dreadful no-man's-land that haunts my every dream.

  The blessing is that I seldom see it. I'd rather thought that we would be fighting one long battle. That when we weren't fighting we might be playing billiards in the dugouts, or singing songs by firesides. But we stand with our guns in the morning, and again in the evening, waiting for the Huns that are bound to come again. And the rest of the time we live like moles, almost blindly in the mud. From dawn to dusk we see nothing but mud, and the strip of sky above us.

  Old Fritz is always ready to pick off any man who shows his head, and he'll sometimes blast away at nothing at all with his rifles and machine guns. We learn rather quickly to listen for the shells from his big guns and judge—by the sound they make—whether we should duck our heads or get up and try to dodge them. Some days he fairly keeps us hopping.

  But other days are rather peaceful. We spend hours talking about our families and our homes. Some of the lads are forever writing letters, and others play endless games of cards. There's always a little crowd that comes to watch me whittle.

  Here's a pair of funny fellows, enclosed, to add to your army. One is catching a bit of rest while he can. In a moment, someone will kick him awake and send him to work with a shovel. The other is a different sort. Every morning this chap brings up our breakfast in big tin pots. Others come with him to carry our mail, and they take away the letters that we've just written. It's the high point of the day, hot food and letters straight from England. Right now, the chap beside me is reading yesterday's Times!

  It's a funny thing, but the war stops at breakfast. Fritz doesn't shoot at us, and we don't shoot at him. If the wind is right, we can even smell his bacon cooking. This morning I tried to pitch a biscuit to him. But I don't think it reached the wire.

  All my love, forever,

  Dad

  I was disappointed by the first figure that I found inside the package, the man who brought the breakfast. It made me smile to see his arms stretched so long by the weight he carried that his hands reached nearly to his ankles. But I wanted soldiers, not messmen, and he would look rather silly, I thought, running over no-man's-land with kettles in his hands. I stood him on the table and took the wrappings from the second man.

  “Oh, he's a darling,” said Auntie Ivy.

  He lay on his side, curled into a ball like a khaki-colored kitten. He had an old Burberry pulled over his shoulders, his forearm for a pillow. His cap was twisted sideways and his face smiling, as though his dreams were happy.

  “I'll make him a dead man,” I said.

  “Oh, Johnny,” said Auntie Ivy. “Do you have to think of things like that?”

  “But I don't have any dead men,” I told her.

  “You should count yourself lucky.” She turned her chair sideways and read my other letter, from my mum this time.

  I always closed my eyes to hear my mother's letters. She wrote just the way she talked, and Auntie's voice was a lot like hers, so it seemed that Mum was there beside me.

  “There is great pressure on all the men to do their bit and enlist. Today Mr. Brown joined Kitchener's army, and you know very well how little like a soldier he looks. But it must be nice to feel wanted by someone. I think that every man in London could be off to France and there still!! would be no work for women. If you're not a nurse or a seamstress there's precious little you can do, except stay home and knit wretched socks!”

  Auntie Ivy tsked.

  “I got a scare last night, when the guns started shooting in Regent's Park. I looked out and saw the searchlights sweeping across the sky. Back and forth they went, making circles on the clouds. The shells burst above them, with flashes like lightning. I didn't see a zeppelin. Maybe there wasn't even one there. But I thanked my lucky stars that you're safe and well looked after.”

  I took my new soldiers out to the garden, and stood the messman in the Tommies' trench. I put the other down in no-man's-land, then covered his foot with a bit of mud, to make it look as though he had been there for a long time. He made my battlefield look proper and gory.

  I hurled some shells about, but didn't have time for a battle. The potting shed and the ground around it were littered with the remains of Mr. Tuttle's roses. I felt like a killer, with Scotland Yard closing in; I had to get rid of the evidence. I hid the branches deep in the forest. I carried away the leftover mulch and scattered it among the bushes. Then I built my bonfire with the bits that were left, disguising them below a layer of twigs and moldy leaves. It was the saddest little fire I'd ever seen, no bigger than a pudding.

  As soon as darkness came, Auntie Ivy touched a match to the shreds of rotten leaves. They fizzled but wouldn't burn. They filled the garden with a thick smudge of smoke.

  Auntie Ivy said “Ooooh!” as the Crimson Rain squirted up in a crackly spurt. She said “Gracious!” when my first whizz-bang sputtered and popped. Then the second one went off with a tiny yellow flame, and Auntie Ivy said, “Are you finished now? It's getting rather cold.”

  “I have to burn the guy,” I said.

  “Well, hurry up,” she told me.

  I dragged him from his corner, his poor head lolling on its strings. He was more than twice my size, but I heaved him up to my shoulders and staggered with him round my little fire.

  “Guy, guy, guy,” I sang. “Stick 'im in the eye.”

  “Watch your shoes,” cried Auntie Ivy. “You'll scorch your good shoes.”

  I looked down and saw that the fire was right between my feet. It had dwindled already to ashes and embers.

  “Get away from there,” snapped Auntie.

  I stepped back, and tripped over the guy's dangling leg. I fell in a heap on top of him, and the prickly thorns of Mr. Tuttle's roses stabbed me through the burlap body.

  Auntie Ivy laughed. I heard her voice rising shrill and cackly, and I stared between my feet at my sick little fire, at the tattered pink remains of my precious whizz-bangs. Beyond them, over the black bulk of the stone wall, a fizz of sparks gleamed from a distant bonfire. A rocket shot up and exploded, and a flower of red light opened in the sky. A faint howl of voices came over the fields from Cliffe.

  I thought of all the wonderful Guy Fawkes Days I'd spent in London, the shrieking and the laughter as a dozen boys danced our guys around fires so high that they towered above us. I remembered the heat and the roar of the flames. Far away, another rocket blossomed into orange.

  “Auntie?” I said. “Can we go to Cliffe? Can I take my guy to the fire?”

  “Certainly not,” she said. “I'm not walking all the way to Cliffe to see a lot of hooligans.”

  “Please?” I said.

  “You can go yourself,” she told me.

  I stamped out my little fire, the worst I'd ever seen, and went
off alone to Cliffe. I carried my guy for half a mile, dragged him a bit, then carried him again. The night was very black, and the fireworks flared in red and yellow and silver. Whizz-bangs exploded, and jumping-crackers rattled like gunshots, and I thought of myself trudging up to the front. The sound of the crackers, the faint smell of powder, made me think of my father, and how he'd seen the guns blazing in the distance.

  I had left the farm behind me, and was passing the woods. In the flashes of the rockets I could see the bare branches of the trees tangled against the sky. Across my shoulders, the guy lay like a wounded man. And I carried him all the way to the village, to the old stone church at its center.

  There the bonfire raged. Its flames soared up from an enormous pile of wood and branches, licking with yellow tongues at a great cloud of shimmering sparks. Around it ran the boys, their guys leaping and tumbling like gangly creatures that chased them through the heat and roar. The adults and the girls stood in a ring facing the fire, and the light made their cheeks a dazzling red, their eyes as black as voids. In their dark clothes, standing absolutely still, they looked a village of dead people, their faces only skulls.

  “Guy, guy, guy,” the boys chanted. “Stick 'im in the eye.”

  They circled the fire as embers exploded into bursts of sparks. The roar and the popping, the sharp cracks of whizz-bangs, made me think again of the war. The boys were like soldiers running through shell bursts.

  “Guy, guy, guy. Stick 'im in the eye.”

  They shrieked and laughed. The fire raged.

  “Hang him on a lamppost. And there let 'im die.