A TIME TO CELEBRATE: THE ELEVENTH HOUR OF THE ELEVENTH DAY
by J.R. Armstrong-Gregson
There were just ten minutes left before the world was to end, the world that he knew; and he was frightened. Not of the end, but of the beginning.
It was not the sudden and passing fear, to which he was accustomed: the fear of going over the top and facing the guns. It was not even the fear produced by days of shelling, with the sustained threat of being buried under a hill of foul mud or struck fatally by unexpected flying bones. It was instead a fear which was not physical and could not be put aside as soon as the moment had passed; it was the unrelenting fear of the ineluctable unknown and unimaginable.
Bill could barely remember what it had been like before all this had started – what little he could recall seemed now like a fantastical dream of a golden summer – let alone imagine what the future might be like; crucially, how he would fit into it. This world around him and about to pass away was all he had known since leaving his family as a boy, this place of sodden clay walls and a grey sky overhead which had been his home, if moveable, for years.
Instinct and upbringing both told him that he should already have started a career, have courted, have established his own home, perhaps even have founded a dynasty. Things to be celebrated, not things just to be endured, in the manner of the rats eking out their survival amongst the corpses and the slime.
He had been home, childhood home, just once since it had all started. He could have gone a couple more times had he wanted, but he had preferred to spend his leaves sleeping in comforting barns a few miles behind the lines, rather than travelling the dispiriting miles back and forth; he spent the time walking along lonely country lanes as a change from slippery duckboards, but avoiding people who were still living the life of the living.
He had indeed been home once – and yet he had not: he had been a spectre looking on, not one who belonged. “This is sommat to celebrate!” his father had said, inspiring Bill with hope and anticipation; then his aunts had come to tea, asking him if he liked France and whether he had received the socks, while his mother, seemingly unaware of him, fussed between the kitchen and the best room with teapots and plates of undersized cakes with which to mark the great occasion. The best room, where he sat uncomfortably, unused to chairs; the best room, smelling of furniture polish and normally reserved for the vicar and the special visitors who had never actually called; the best room, the mystery from which he had been barred as a child and which now failed to match expectations when finally attained.
His father – not completely insensitive, give him his due – had then insisted on taking him to the club, “to celebrate proper” in the realm of adults; he had wanted him to wear the uniform, for “th’ ’ero’s return”, but he had refused. His friends were not there: some were mourned; some were missing; some were forgotten. There were only old men in the club, his father’s friends, congratulating him in peremptory fashion before returning to their dominos and cribbage; one, who wore the South Africa Medal and had only one arm, looked him in the eyes in silence and nodded almost imperceptibly. Bill was visibly moved, not by the men’s words but by the thought that this might be his future: being shown off as long as the novelty lasted – at best a nine days’ wonder – and then fading away, year by year.
Even before this interruption to his life which had become his life, his father had said to him many more times than once, “Tha’ll never amount to owt”. What chance now to achieve something to celebrate, half a decade of crucial years behind where he should be? And how could he ever celebrate anything cleanly and sincerely, with a mind full of images which no-one should ever have seen and which would never leave him, the knowledge of the imminence of hell?
Then whistles were being blown along the line, and he tensed instinctively, tightening his grip on his Lee-Enfield; but this time the hollow and melancholy sound was not to start an attack or to warn of coming gas. There was ragged shouting, fading into the distance on either side of him, but it sounded less like cheering than like the groaning of pained and weary men trying desperately to catch the passer-by’s attention, for help.
For a moment, there came into Bill’s mind an image of the autumnal park and bunting-hung marketplace at home, thronging with old people proudly in their Sunday-best, young women smiling radiantly, children skipping and dancing, and here and there fellows on crutches or in wheelchairs, missing eyes or legs, wondering what on earth there could be to celebrate. Apart from the mutilated men, it had been like that when he had signed his youth away one day amidst cheering and excitement, as those who were not going celebrated the sacrifice of those who were.
“’Ere!” He flinched from the loud and unaccustomedly jolly voice. The corporal was at his side, grinning broadly and pushing towards him one of several enamel mugs he was carrying awkwardly in his great fists. Bill peered into it as he took it, recognising in the splash of murky liquid at the bottom the potent raw spirit which the man distilled from rotten potatoes, naively imagining that the lieutenant was unaware of his activities. It burnt like tracer as it passed to his throat, and he screwed up his face as it hit his gullet. “Cheer tha sen up a bit, lad! It’s time to celebrate! War’s over, tha knows.”
