Lord of the Nutcracker Men Read online

  In my hurry to leave, I nearly gave myself away by slipping through the tunnel in his hedge. But I stopped in time, and circled around his wall to reach the footpaths that would take me home.

  The sun was setting, the autumn days already short. Darkness settled in the hollows of the path, in the bushes along its sides. An owl hooted at me, then fluttered away like a shadow.

  I passed the ruined cottage and came to the cemetery. The barren old trees bowed over the graves like mourners, their tops nodding in a breeze that came from the river, over the marshes. Behind them, on the farmhouse balcony, stood a figure all in black, veils and shawls fluttering in the wind that smelled of mud.

  It was Mrs. Sims, in her mourning clothes, and she was looking down at the little graveyard between us. The mounds of leaves banked against the tombstones looked like freshly dug graves. In the shadows and the growing darkness, I thought I saw them moving.

  I stood behind a scrag of bushes. Mrs. Sims turned on the balcony, leaning forward with her hands on the railing. It was me she was looking at, trying to pick me out among the branches and bushes.

  Then I heard a slithering sound, and the leaves moved again. I gasped with a sudden fright, then laughed when a cat appeared among them, a white-and-orange tabby that stretched and shook itself.

  I started walking again, and Mrs. Sims lifted her head. The black clothes swirled around her, and she looked like cold Mr. Death standing up there.

  CHAPTER 8

  November 18, 1914

  Dearest Johnny,

  I went over the top last night, and I'm quivering in my boots this morning to think what a narrow escape I had. A lieutenant chose your old dad and two other chaps to launch a little raid against the Hun, the sort of nuisance thing that keeps him on his toes. We smeared our faces with blacking and set off at midnight. Over the parapet we went, one by one, armed with wire cutters and little bombs.

  It was the strangest feeling to come out of the trench and start across no-man's-land. What a sense of freedom and of horror! To leave all the lads behind and go alone through the mud—Johnny, I don't know how to tell you. To feel a breeze on my face for the first time in nearly a week—it was indescribably lovely. But the place was dreadful, and so utterly black that it filled me with fear. I think I knew how a bird must feel to leave the nest for the first time, to flutter through air that can't seem to hold him.

  All the men that I'd glimpsed each day at dawn and at dusk, those poor souls who seemed to be sleeping, still lay exactly where they'd been when I first arrived at the front. I slithered past them, on toward the wire, and—it's strange to say—they seemed a bit like friends of mine. In their sightless eyes, I felt a comradeship with them. There they lay, with no purpose, it seemed, but to shelter me with their bodies.

  A star shell burst. Its white light flared brighter than the sun, I thought. Not thirty yards away, there were Germans swinging their machine guns from shadow to shadow, just waiting to see a movement. I pressed myself down behind one of those sleeping men.

  Well, something must have drawn the Germans' attention, for a gun swung toward me. I heard the sound of it, that awful mechanical chatter. Then the mud started to bubble close at my side. A second gun found me, and a third. They crossed to meet me like spotlights on an actor. And I did my best—believe me—to act very still.

  I pressed myself against that sleeping man. I had my hand on his ankle, my head on his thigh. And I saw his uniform—or the tatters of it—and knew the man was German. In life, he'd done his best to kill me. But now, in death, he hid me and he sheltered me. I don't know if you'll understand this, but I felt a kinship with him, Johnny. It seemed to me, hunkered down there—frozen with fright— that he had gone beyond the battle, somehow. That he was content to lie there in a land that belonged to no man, and offer protection to anyone who needed it.

  The flare fizzled out. But another burst behind it. The Germans kept shooting, and our own guns opened up, the bullets whistling past above my head. But the sleeping man kept me safe, until the darkness came and I carried on. I rolled away from him and wormed my way toward the wire.

  We reached the German trench that night. We bombed it, and even brought back a Hun for a prisoner. There was an extra tot of rum for all of us when we dragged him in from no-man's-land.

  This morning, when I stood at the parapet, I looked for my sleeping friend. And the funny thing is that he wasn't there. It's possible that the bullets shifted him about, or the ground collapsed around him. But I like to think that he had done his job and moved along. To where, I can't imagine.

  You will find, enclosed, a new soldier for your army. I'm sorry, but I didn't have time to paint him.

  All my love,

  Dad

  Of all the letters that Dad had sent, this one was my favorite. I listened to it smiling, my eyes open but seeing my own little battlefield, my trench full of nutcracker men. I felt as though I was fighting the battle side by side with my dad, that we were going together across noman's-land. His raid was so close to the one that I had imagined that the letter might have been sent by my wooden soldier.

  “Well, open your parcel,” said Auntie Ivy.

  I had almost forgotten that I held a new man in his wrappings. “It was just like that in the garden,” I said.

  “Like what?” she asked.

  “The raid.” I tore the paper. “I was playing with Sarah, and we had a raid just like that, just like Dad's.”

  “I'm sure it's all the same,” she said. “Your trenches, your bombs.”

  The package fell open and the soldier slid out.

  “Oh, my,” said Auntie. “I don't care for that.”

  The figure crawled on all fours, one hand reaching forward, one leg dragging behind. Carved from pale wood, unpainted, he seemed utterly weary, as though he could hardly move another inch. But there was a feeling of strength in him too, so I could look at him and know he'd keep going.

  “Oh, my,” said Auntie again.

  Then I saw what shocked her. It was the soldier's face. Below his carved hat, there was no face. Instead, the soldier had the broad and flattened muzzle of a bulldog.

  “Poor James,” said Auntie. “Oh, your poor father. What did he see out there in the trenches?”

  The little dog-faced soldier wasn't ugly. He looked rather brave to me. “I think he's going forward against the Huns,” I said. “I think he's going to carry on no matter what goes wrong.”

  “Well, I don't want to look at him,” she said.

  I picked up the figure. “I'll put him in the line.” “Just take it away.” She shook her hands, as though it was a spider that I held. “Just take it away.”

  “Yes, Auntie.”

  I went out the back and found Sarah waiting by the wall. I ran toward her. “A raid!” I cried. “My dad went over the top; he went out on a raid.”

  “Well, didn't I tell you?” she said. “My dad's been on a dozen raids, on twenty raids, maybe. They always have raids.”

  “It was just the same,” I said. But she didn't care.

  Below the beech tree, she had started a second pile of muddy ammunition. “Johnny, let's have our barrage,” she said.

  I placed my new soldier in the line. He didn't look right hunched in the bottom of the trench, so I moved him forward until he was crawling up the parapet. His strange, animal face peered over the edge, and I ducked down to see what he would see.

  My no-man's-land looked enormous then, sloping up toward the German lines. My nutcracker men were hidden, but the tips of their silver bayonets poked up from the mud like the pickets of a ragged fence. I wished I could make myself tiny and go charging toward them.

  “Johnny, come on,” said Sarah.

  I stood beside her near the tree, the pile of stones and mud between us. We filled our hands with shells.

  “You fire the big guns,” said Sarah. “I'll be the mortars and the Moaning Minnies.”

  I didn't even know what those were. But as soon as Sarah start
ed shooting, I wished that I had the Moaning Minnies.

  These guns fired whole handfuls of dirt and pebbles, with a bloodcurdling shriek that reminded me of the sounds I'd heard from the farmhouse. “Shhreeeeee!” Sarah yelled, and threw the dirt. “Bam! Bam-bam!”

  I took the biggest clumps of mud and tossed them high in the air. “Whizz. Bang!” They exploded behind the British trenches, sending bits of shrapnel skittering over the ground.

  “Blast those Tommies!” shouted Sarah in a German accent. “God punish England!” Her mortars popped and boomed, her Moaning Minnies sent lumps of mud screaming past me. She bent down, grabbed more dirt and threw more bombs. “Aarrgh!” cried the Tommies. And the Germans said, “Again! Punish them again.”

  My big guns kept firing, slowly and methodically. I hurled the stones—“Whizzz!”—tossed up my hands— “Bang!”

  We rained the Tommies with dirt and stones. We worked our way through our pile of ammunition, until only the largest shells were left. Then Sarah, too, started firing the big guns. She bobbed down, popped up again, hurling the stones like a shot-putter. Then she hit the British trench. And she crushed the first Pierre.

  “Don't!” I shouted.

  I threw myself down by the trench and rolled the stone aside. Frantically, I scrabbled through the mud. I dug and dug, but all I found were the Frenchman's feet. The rest of him was gone.

  “Look what you did!” I cried. “You broke him, you clot.” I clawed at the mud, searching for Pierre's body. “My dad made that for me and you've gone and broken him, you clumsy oaf.”

  “I'm sorry, Johnny.” Sarah panted. Her face was red, her hair in tangles. “I didn't mean to do it.”

  I was digging like a dog. “At least help me look,” I said.

  “Not if you're going to talk like that.” She stomped away. “I'm not going to help someone who shouts,” she said, and climbed the wall and left me there.

  I kept searching for the rest of my Frenchman. I looked until supper, and again until dark, but he seemed to have vanished, as though the shell had blown him into smithereens. I hated Sarah then; I would never play with her again, I said.

  At school I avoided her. When classes ended I dashed home on the footpaths to play by myself in the garden. I cleaned up the rubble and rock, then scraped out my trenches where the barrage had caved them in. I shifted my Tommies out of the way, standing them up on the mud above the trenches. But the metal soldiers couldn't balance on the broken ground, and they toppled over on their sides and their backs. I said that snipers had got them. “Watch out, lads,” I said.

  Nearly the entire front line was in order when I heard footsteps coming up to the wall. “You can't come in here,” I said, thinking it was Sarah. “Go home.”

  But a man's voice answered. “I have nowhere to go.”

  I looked up from the trenches. Behind the wall stood a sergeant, his legs and waist hidden behind it, his elbows on the stone. In his teeth was a pipe that wasn't lit, and his cap was pushed so far to the back of his head that it seemed it might fall off.

  “What's your name?” I asked.

  He took the pipe from his mouth. “What's yours? You tell me first.”

  “Johnny Briggs,” I said.

  “Ah. James must be your father.” The sergeant stiffened, glancing up at the house. “He's not here, is he?”

  “No,” I said. “He's in France.”

  “Oh. Poor James.”

  “Do you know him?” I asked.

  “I used to. When I was a boy I played in this garden.” He pointed at me with his pipe. “Right where you are. I played there with James.”

  “Did he have his little gun?” I asked.

  “Why, so he did.” The sergeant stroked his cheeks. They were covered with thin white hairs that made his skin look oily.“Yes, I'd forgotten that, his little gun.”

  “That's him,” I said, pointing down at my trenches, at the figure my dad had made.

  “That wooden-headed chap? Yes, that would be James.”

  “He's holding his little gun,” I said.

  “He was never without it,” said the sergeant. “He used to lie there, or kneel there, and tell me to come over the wall.”

  “Why?”

  “So he could pick me off.” The sergeant chuckled. “He was the British and I was the Boer. Sometimes I was a Zulu, not that it mattered in the end. I always came over the wall screaming like a lunatic, and he always picked me off.”

  It made me giggle, the thought of my father being a boy.

  “Where is he, in France?” the sergeant asked.

  “Well, look,” I said, pointing again. “In the trenches, see? Right at the front.”

  “It's a very long front,” said the sergeant. “In parts of it, there's no fighting at all. The Germans stay in their trenches, and the British stay in ours, and between them there's grass and trees, there's rabbits and birds. But in other places …” His eyes darkened. “They go at it tooth and claw. Go at it night and day, across a waste of slime and mud. You sleep with your rifle in your hands, your bayonet fixed. You hurl your shells at Fritz, and he hurls his shells at you, and the noise can drive you mad.”

  “That's where my dad is,” I said.

  “Then ‘poor James' he is,” said the sergeant.

  “Is that where you were?

  ” “Somewhere like that.”

  “Are you going back?”

  He shook his head.

  “Why not?”

  “I fought, I lost, and that's the end of it,” he said.

  “Why did you lose?” “

  Because they beat us.”

  “Won't the army make you go back?”

  “I don't see how they can.” He tapped his pipe on the wall, then slipped it into his pocket. “Even the worst of butchers runs his meat only once through a mincer.”

  He lifted his hand again, and there was something else in it. He pitched it over the wall, into the garden, and I scrambled to fetch it as it tumbled over the mud.

  I scooped it up from the trench. “Oh, golly!” I said. It was a brass cartridge, a bullet casing.

  I turned to thank the sergeant, but he was gone. Even when I stood up I couldn't see him, as though he had vanished into the forest.

  I held the cartridge up to my lips and blew across the opening. It made a lovely high whistle that echoed back from the house and the wall, from the trees of the forests and orchards. It filled all of Kent with a wonderful tingle, the same sound as a lieutenant's tin whistle, the sound that would send soldiers over the top.

  CHAPTER 9

  November 25, 1914

  Dearest Johnny,

  There is a great lot of fighting to the north of us. We can hear the shelling, and feel the blasts of the big Jack Johnsons. When the wind is right we smell the smoke and powder. The night sky sparkles with gun bursts.

  On our right, the French took a pounding. Yet here the old hands say it's quiet. (Personally, I think they must be deaf! There's not an hour when a Moaning Minnie doesn't shriek overhead, or a bullet whistle past.) But the word is that the fighting will soon spread to our sector.

  The other night, just after sunset, we heard Fritz marching. Thousands of boots marked thousands of steps along the duckboards of his trenches. It was a sound more terrible than the shells or the bullets, and it lasted all night long. At dawn we stood to, sure that the Boche would come up with the sun, pouring over no-man's-land like a river of gray.

  But he didn't come then, and he didn't come this morning. Our only company are the rats and the lice. Frankly, I'd rather have those than Huns.

  Sooner or later, though, they're bound to come. And the waiting is very hard. It's driving some men nearly mad. You can see it in their eyes, the strain of always waiting—for the next bullet, the next shell, the battle still ahead. They clean their rifles over and over, and volunteer for any duty at all from digging latrines to raiding trenches.

  I'm glad I can sit here and whittle. I've spent the entire night, wh
en I should have been sleeping, making an ambulance that you will find enclosed. You might find it rather familiar, son. At least I've solved the mystery of where all the buses have gone from London. Your little men will have to ride on top, but I don't suppose they'll mind.

  Well, it's raining now, but it might change to snow very soon. I hope it does. I'd put up with a blizzard if it meant an end to this terrible mud.

  Another shell just exploded on my right. A rush of men are going by with shovels and picks. A great deal of the trench gave way, but no surprises this time. The most astonishing things sometimes turn up when the parapet collapses.

  I miss you dreadfully and wish I was there.

  All my love,

  Dad

  Auntie Ivy folded the letter. She saved all of them in a little wooden box that she kept on a shelf above the stove, between her tea and her peppermint drops. She took her chair from the table and carried it there.

  “Do you think Dad knew my Pierre got hurt?” I asked.

  “How could he?” she said.

  “Then why do you think he sent an ambulance?”

  She stepped up on the seat. “I imagine he thought you might like it.”

  I tore the package open, and I smiled at first; the ambulance was beautiful. On its sides, Dad had painted the advertisements it would have carried as a bus. He'd put seats on the open roof, then smeared it all with mud and smoke.

  But when I turned it over, I saw that one of the wheels was oddly twisted and smaller than the others. I blinked at it, suddenly sad. For the first time ever, my dad had made a toy that wasn't perfect, and I was glad that Auntie Ivy hadn't asked to see it.

  “You'll be visiting Mr. Tuttle tonight,” she said, taking the box from the shelf. She put the new letter inside. “Why don't you ask him to come and see your soldiers?”

  “I'm not sure he'd want to,” I said.

  “Would it hurt you to ask?”

  “No, Auntie.” I took the ambulance out to the garden. I put it down in the mud, behind the British lines, and drove it toward the wall. It tilted over the ground, up and down through the shell craters that Sarah and I had made with our stones. I wondered if the bus conductor would still be standing at the door.