A bad beginning. Thallus kept his lead of three lengths, and completed the first lap with so sharp a turn that I’d swear his wheel shaved the gilt off both sides of the bronze! After him shot Scorpus, now far enough away from White not to be worried by him; though plainly worried by the Green tunic in front. Later we heard that our near team-horse had not been in top condition.
Three very fast laps, no change in position, and towards the end of the fourth lap Scorpus challenged; he ran neck to neck with Green for a while, but failed to make that inner berth at the turn.
Four eggs down! Five eggs down!
Scorpus didn’t challenge again; he waited, despite jeers, protests, whistles and encouraging yells. He waited patiently, until Red had lost a whole lap and was hugging the embankment, some lengths in the rear of White, with Green threatening to pass him at the post. ‘Ag’ut primä debebas!’ Scorpus shouted – he lay a little behind and beyond Green – ‘Do what you should have done at the first post!’
Red understood; he flogged blood and sweat out of his nags, and this time rounded the turn wide enough to carry Green with him. Scorpus, wheeling almost at right angles, nipped in behind so neatly that his off-tracer’s shoulder grazed the Red chariot-tail: he’d beaten Green to the inner berth and won three lengths.
‘Success t t et vicet!’ the Blues roared – ‘He’s gained the lead, and he’ll keep it!’
Six eggs down!
Now White, just ahead of Scorpus, though still in the fifth lap, was weaving in and out to hamper him; Green ran a close third. Caught between his two rivals, Scorpus made a bold decision. He forced his tracers to take the last turn wide; whereupon White lost his whip, as well as his head. Mistaking Thallus’s team for Scorpus’s – the Green tracers being also bays – he baulked him at the critical moment. Thallus’s wheel struck the post, square, the chariot broke up. In the nick of time he used his dagger to cut himself free from the reins. On rushed the horses, hauling the wreckage after them.
A thunderstorm of cheers and curses. It was Blue’s race all right – Scorpus could have finished at a walk. But as he walloped his triumphant Thessalians at high speed down the stretch, a small, ragged-shirted figure leaped the barrier and ran across the sand, shaking his puny fists. There he stood – directly in the chariot’s path! Expecting him to lose his nerve and dart back, Scorpus neither reined in nor swerved. The intruder sprang at the duns’ heads, then fell with a scream under their iron hooves. The tracers, meanwhile, had shied and plunged, slewing the chariot around. Scorpus was thrown, and his helmet struck sickeningly against the marble embankment. He was dragged past the winning-post – one lap and five lengths ahead of White.
An indescribable hubbub. I heard the chariot-master’s gasp of horror. In a nightmare, I heard my own groans, as if heaved from some other man’s guts. Scorpus, our great Scorpus! Down at last with a smashed skull and broken neck! The long play had ended. We wept like orphan children.
Bufotilla fainted; the veterinary took charge of her. I was glad she’d fainted. We all thought the world of her. She and Scorpus were to have married in the New Year. One can find no words of comfort on such occasions…
Further hubbub. The judges were signalling a Blue victory. Someone tugged at my sleeve. ‘You’ve won your ninety-six gold pieces!’ said the philosopher. ‘I renounce my share. It would be disgraceful to profit from a man’s death.’
He was being illogical. Dead men don’t win races, and the judges’ decision clearly showed that Scorpus had been dragged alive past the mark. But why argue?
‘What pain! What misery!’ I mourned. ‘Scorpus is gone! Those murderous Greens must have been counting on Ragged Shirt to save their bets. A suicidal wretch, who’d bet against Scorpus once too often? But I won’t believe a man could have scrambled over that barrier without help!’
Just then the Imperial catapults opened up: a volley of metal vouchers scattering in showers among the seats. Some were for money, anything from a single gold piece to a hundred; some had even higher value, gifts of farms, houses, shops – properties confiscated by the Emperor from banished noblemen, or left him in wills.
‘I can stand no more!’ the philosopher exclaimed shrilly. ‘Tomorrow I shall return to Myconos, if the kind Gods will arrange my passage.’ And that the Gods were kind, and very kind, a most curious coincidence proved. A voucher struck the head of some woman sitting behind us and bounced into the philosopher’s lap. It entitled him to ‘a fifty-ton merchant vessel, the Good Fortune, at present lying off Naples; warranted sound and well found.’ How’s that for maiden luck? And only five days later an Imperial Edict banished all philosophers from Rome!
Not since the Emperor Titus died have I seen a better attended funeral. The Spanish poet Martial wrote a graceful dirge: ‘Let Victory sadly break her palm, etcetera, etcetera…’ Also an epitaph: to the effect that an envious Fate having counted Scorpus’s victories, decided that at twenty-seven years he’d won enough for a lifetime; then took up her shears and snipped his vital thread. I’m no judge of verse, but I admired the sentiment.
Thallus has succeeded to Scorpus’s throne; and we Blues seldom win these days. Besides, racing isn’t what it was: the Emperor, for inscrutable reasons of State, has formed two new factions – Purple and Gold. Our harassed bookmakers never know how to figure the odds.
And I’m sick of the Colosseum as well. Hermes, my favourite gladiator, left hospital too soon and got chopped in his first show. Talk of the Good Life! If things don’t improve soon, and if I get any balder from worry, I’m half inclined to sail for Myconos myself and open a quiet little cockpit there.
Christmas Truce
YOUNG STAN COMES around yesterday about tea-time – you know my grandson Stan? He’s a Polytechnic student, just turned twenty, as smart as his dad was at the same age. Stan’s all out to be a commercial artist and do them big coloured posters for the hoardings. Doesn’t answer to ‘Stan’, though – says it’s ‘common’; says he’s either ‘Stanley’ or he’s nothing.
Stan’s got a bagful of big, noble ideas; all schemed out carefully, with what he calls ‘captions’ attached.
Well, I can’t say nothing against big, noble ideas. I was a red-hot Labour-man myself for a time, forty years ago now, when the Kayser’s war ended and the war-profiteers began treading us ex-heroes into the mud. But that’s all over long ago – in fact, Labour’s got a damn sight too respectable for my taste! Worse than Tories, most of their leaders is now – especially them that used to be the loudest in rendering ‘We’ll Keep the Red Flag Flying Still’. They’re all Churchwardens now, or country gents, if they’re not in the House of Lords.
Anyhow, yesterday Stan came around, about a big Ban-the-Bomb march all the way across England to Trafalgar Square. And couldn’t I persuade a few of my old comrades to form a special squad with a banner marked ‘First World War Veterans Protest Against the Bomb’? He wanted us to head the parade, ribbons, crutches, wheel-chairs and all.
I put my foot down pretty hard. ‘No, Mr Stanley,’ I said politely, ‘I regret as I can’t accept your kind invitation.’
‘But why?’ says he. ‘You don’t want another war, Grandfather, do you? You don’t want mankind to be annihilated? This time it won’t be just a few unlucky chaps killed, like Uncle Arthur in the First War, and Dad in the Second… It will be all mankind.’
‘Listen, young ’un,’ I said. ‘I don’t trust nobody who talks about mankind – not parsons, not politicians, nor anyone else. There ain’t no such thing as “mankind”, not practically speaking there ain’t.’
‘Practically speaking, Grandfather,’ says young Stan, ‘there is. Mankind means all the different nations lumped together – us, the Russians, the Americans, the Germans, the French, and all the rest of them. If the bomb goes off, everyone’s finished.’
‘It’s not going off,’ I says.
‘But it’s gone off twice already – at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,’ he argues, ‘so why not again? The damage will be defi
nitely final when it does go off.’
I wouldn’t let Stan have the last word. ‘In the crazy, old-fashioned war in which I lost my foot,’ I said, a bit sternly, ‘the Fritzes used poison gas. They thought it would help ’em to break through at Wipers. But somehow the line held, and soon our factories were churning out the same stinking stuff for us to use on them. All right, and now what about Hitler’s war?’
‘What about it?’ Stan asks.
‘Well,’ I says, ‘everyone in England was issued an expensive mask in a smart-looking case against poison-gas bombs dropped from the air – me, your Dad, your Ma, and yourself as a tiny tot. But how many poison-gas bombs were dropped on London, or on Berlin? Not a damned one! Both sides were scared stiff. Poison-gas had got too deadly. No mask in the market could keep the new sorts out. So there’s not going to be no atom bombs dropped neither, I tell you, Stanley my lad; not this side of the Hereafter! Everyone’s scared stiff again.’
‘Then why do both sides manufacture quantities of atom bombs and pile them up?’ he asks.
‘Search me,’ I said, ‘unless it’s a clever way of keeping up full employment by making believe there’s a war on. What with bombs and fall-out shelters, and radar equipment, and unsinkable aircraft-carriers, and satellites, and shooting rockets at the moon, and keeping up big armies – takes two thousand quid nowadays to maintain a soldier in the field, I read the other day – what with all that play-acting, there’s full employment assured for everyone, and businessmen are rubbing their hands.’
‘Your argument has a bad flaw, Grandfather. The Russians don’t need to worry about full employment.’
‘No,’ said I, ‘perhaps they don’t. But their politicians and commissars have to keep up the notion of a wicked Capitalist plot to wipe out the poor workers. And they have to show that they’re well ahead in the Arms Race. Forget it, lad, forget it! Mankind, which is a term used by maiden ladies and bun-punchers, ain’t going to be annihilated by no atom bomb.’
Stan changed his tactics. ‘Nevertheless, Grandfather,’ he says, ‘we British want to show the Russians that we’re not engaged in any such Capitalist plot. All men are brothers, and I for one have nothing against my opposite number in Moscow, Ivan Whoever-he-may-be… This protest march is the only logical way I can show him my dislike of organized propaganda.’
‘But Ivan Orfalitch ain’t here to watch you march; nor the Russian telly ain’t going to show him no picture of it. If Ivan thinks you’re a bleeding Capitalist, then he’ll go on thinking you’re a bleeding Capitalist; and he won’t be so far out, neither, in my opinion. No, Stan, you can’t fight organized propaganda with amachoor propaganda.’
‘Oh, can it, Grandfather!’ says Stan. ‘You’re a professional pessimist. And you didn’t hate the Germans even when you were fighting them – in spite of the newspapers. What about that Christmas Truce?’
Well, I’d mentioned it to him one day, I own; but it seems he’d drawn the wrong conclusions and didn’t want to be put straight. However, I’m a lucky bloke – always being saved by what other blokes call ‘coincidences’, but which I don’t; because they always happen when I need ’em most. In the trenches we used to call that ‘being in God’s pocket’. So, of course, we hear a knock at the door and a shout, and in steps my old mucking-in chum Dodger Green, formerly 301691, Pte. Edward Green of the 1st Batt., North Wessex Regiment – come to town by bus for a Saturday night booze with me, every bit of twenty miles.
‘You’re here in the exact nick, Dodger,’ says I, ‘as once before.’ He’d nappooed a Fritz officer one day when I was lying with one foot missing outside Delville Wood, and the Fritz was kindly putting us wounded out of our misery with an automatic pistol.
‘What’s new, Fiddler?’ he asks.
‘Tell this lad about the two Christmas truces,’ I said. ‘He’s trying to enlist us for a march to Moscow, or somewhere.’
‘Well,’ says Dodger, ‘I don’t see no connection, not yet. And marching to Moscow ain’t no worse nor marching to Berlin, same as you and me did – and never got more nor a few hundred yards forward in the three years we were at it. But, all right, I’ll give him the facts, since you particularly ask me.’
Stan listened quietly while Dodger told his tale. I’d heard it often enough before, but Dodger’s yarns improve with the telling. You see, I missed most of that first Christmas Truce, as I’ll explain later. But I came in for the second; and saw a part of it what Dodger didn’t. And the moral I wanted to impress on young Stan depended on there being two truces, not one: them two were a lot different from one another.
I brings a quart bottle of wallop from the kitchen, along with a couple of glasses – not three, because young Stan don’t drink anything so ‘common’ as beer – and Dodger held forth. Got a golden tongue, has Dodger – I’ve seen him hold an audience spellbound at ‘The Three Feathers’ from opening-time to stop-tap, and his glass filled every ten minutes, free.
‘Well,’ he says, ‘the first truce was in 1914, about four months after the Kayser’s war began. They say that the old Pope suggested it, and that the Kayser agreed, but that Joffre, the French C.-in-C. wouldn’t allow it. However, the Bavarians were sweating on a short spell of peace and good will, being Catholics, and sent word around that the Pope was going to get his way. Consequently, though we didn’t have the Bavarians in front of us, there at Boy Greneer, not a shot was fired on our sector all Christmas Eve. In those days we hadn’t been issued with Mills bombs, or trench-mortars, or Verey pistols, or steel helmets, or sand bags, or any of them later luxuries; and only two machine-guns to a battalion. The trenches were shallow and knee-deep in water, so that most of the time we had to crouch on the fire-step. God knows how we kept alive and smiling… It wasn’t no picnic, was it, Fiddler? – and the ground half-frozen, too!
‘Christmas Eve, at 7.30 p.m., the enemy trenches suddenly lit up with a row of coloured Chinese lanterns, and a bonfire started in the village behind. We stood to arms, prepared for whatever happened. Ten minutes later the Fritzes began singing a Christmas carol called “Stilly Nucked”. Our boys answered with “Good King Wencelas”, which they’d learned the first verse of as Waits, collecting coppers from door to door. Unfortunately no one knew more than two verses, because Waits always either get a curse or a copper before they reach the third verse.
‘Then a Fritz with a megaphone shouts “Merry Christmas, Wessex!”
‘Captain Pomeroy was commanding us. Colonel Baggie had gone sick, second-in-command still on leave, and most of the other officers were young second-lieutenants straight from Sandhurst – we’d taken such a knock, end of October. The Captain was a real gentleman: father, grandfather, and great-grandfather all served in the Wessex. He shouts back: “Who are you?” And they say that they’re Saxons, same as us, from a town called Hully in West Saxony.
‘“Will your commanding officer meet me in No-man’s land to arrange a Christmas truce?” the Captain shouts again. “We’ll respect a white flag,” he says.
‘That was arranged, so Captain Pomeroy and the Fritz officer, whose name was Lieutenant Coburg, climbed out from their trenches and met half-way. They didn’t shake hands, but they saluted, and each gave the other word of honour that his troops wouldn’t fire a shot for another twenty-four hours. Lieutenant Coburg explained that his Colonel and all the senior officers were back taking it easy at Regimental H.Q. It seems they liked to keep their boots clean, and their hands warm: not like our officers.
‘Captain Pomeroy came back pleased as Punch, and said: “The truce starts at dawn, Wessex; but meanwhile we stay in trenches. And if any man of you dares break the truce tomorrow,” he says, “I’ll shoot him myself, because I’ve given that German officer my word. All the same, watch out, and don’t let go of your bundooks.”
‘That suited us; we’d be glad to get up from them damned fire-steps and stretch our legs. So that night we serenaded the Fritzes with all manner of songs, such as “I want to go Home!” and “The Top of the
Dixie Lid”, and the one about “Old Von Kluck, He Had a Lot of Men”; and they serenaded us with Deutschland Uber Alles, and songs to the concertina.
‘We scraped the mud off our puttees and shined our brasses, to look a bit more regimental next morning. Captain Pomeroy, meanwhile, goes out again with a flashlight and arranges a Christmas football match – kickoff at 10.30 – to be followed at two o’clock by a burial service for all the corpses what hadn’t been taken in because of lying too close to the other side’s trenches.
‘“Over the top with the best of luck!” shouts the Captain at 8 a.m., the same as if he was leading an attack. And over we went, a bit shy of course, and stood there waiting for the Fritzes. They advanced to meet us, shouting, and five minutes later, there we were…
‘Christmas was a peculiar sort of day, if ever I spent one. Hobnobbing with the Hun, so to speak: swapping fags and rum and buttons and badges for brandy, cigars and souvenirs. Lieutenant Coburg and several of the Fritzes talked English, but none of our blokes could sling a word of their bat.
‘No-man’s land had seemed ten miles across when we were crawling out on a night patrol; but now we found it no wider than the width of two football pitches. We provided the football, and set up stretchers as goal posts; and the Rev. Jolly, our Padre, acted as ref. They beat us 3-2, but the Padre had showed a bit too much Christian charity – their outside-left shot the deciding goal, but he was miles offside and admitted it soon as the whistle went. And we spectators were spread nearly two deep along the touch-lines with loaded rifles slung on our shoulders.